Saturday, December 1, 2012

A Trio of Capsules: Lincoln, Cloud Atlas, and Rust & Bone

Three prominent new releases, in 125 words or less.

  


Lincoln


In which Mr. Spielberg walks through the valley of politics, acknowledging what a cynical, ironic, underhanded game it is, while still emerging with his optimism intact.  The playwright Tony Kushner, who won a Pulitzer for Angels in America and who also wrote Munich, adds an extra dimension to Spielberg's work, a worldliness that doesn't conflict with the director’s trademark faith in humanity but gives it an enthralling context: this isn't (just) a story about an admirable, mythic leader, but about how noble goals are accomplished through dodgy means. This means that while Lincoln has all the virtues/drawbacks you'd expect from a Spielberg historical piece, it also leaves you with much more to think about than its detractors would have you believe.  His best in years.

4 out of 5 stars. 




Cloud Atlas

 

The daftest folly of the year, and well worth appreciating because even its most mind-boggling missteps are so outside convention that there's nothing quite like it. It's kitschy, genre-hopping pop-philosophy on a cosmic scale—admittedly closer to Star Trek: Voyager than 2001—with a fragmented narrative that doesn’t articulate coherent meanings so much as invite us to a fun game of spotting our own.  But as it shuffles its cast in six stories over six eras and six genres (with actors sometimes swapping gender or ethnicity, for weirdness’s sake), its best statement isn’t parallelism but asymmetry, so in some lifetimes Tom Hanks gets to be a lover, in others a villain. But in any era, beware of Hugh Grant.
 
4 out of 5 stars.




Rust & Bone 

Here is a drama of survival, and a movie with everything except a reason.  Marion Cotillard is amazing and the direction from Jacques Audiard, whose A Prophet was one of my favorites of 2010, certainly "hits hard", as they say.  But it errs uncomfortably close to a Francophone version of what I like to call “tragedy porn”: stories in which darkness descends and characters are cold to each other for no other reason than to get a rise out of the audience.  It’s a thin line between this and genuinely effective drama, and the difference here is that the narrative and the meaning waver between obvious and inarticulate.  See it for the craft, but don’t feel surprised if you feel empty leaving the theater.
 
3 out of 5 stars.

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