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.

REVIEW: Looper (2012)

Contrary to what you may hear from critics, writing professors, and my roommate (who's a little of both), plotholes don't matter as much as you think.  Yes, a plothole can be so big the whole damn film falls through it.  But if a film has you on the hook moment by moment—if the film simply works—it can skirt the edges, and you'll be on your way out of the theater before it even hits you.  This goes doubly if the film qualifies as some sort of "noir", and Looper, the third film by the super-cool Rian Johnson (Brick, The Brothers Bloom), is nothing if not a noir offshoot.  There are unanswered questions and lapses of logic in Chinatown, The Third Man, and The Big Heat, only nobody notices because the films are too busy being great.

All of which is to say that, under scrutiny, the basic premise of Looper isn't exactly airtight.  It's a time travel game: we're told that in the future, it's very hard to dispose of a dead body without leaving evidence, so when the mob wants someone to disappear, they send them 30 years into the past to be assassinated by specialized killers called "loopers."  Now, you may ask: why don't they just send them to the stone age?  Or better yet, why don't they just kill them first, which they seem to have no problem doing, and then send the corpse back in time?  Why bother dealing with loopers at all?  But none of that matters, because the first half of the film is some of the very best, most stylish pop filmmaking of the year, with an emphasis on "pop" and built around a diabolically compelling premise: a cat-and-mouse game between a cold yuppie killer and his older, more sensitive future self.

But a premise is only as good as its payoff, and Looper unfortunately loses its way in the second half—you will know it by the presence of Emily Blunt—where it drops much of what made it so distinctive and becomes an amalgam of films we've already seen, like The Terminator, X-Men, The Omen.  The transition is jarring (introducing main characters in the second half is an iffy idea), the momentum goes slack (are we still in Emily Blunt's house?), and the nihilistic atmosphere dissipates.  And that's when plotholes start mattering.

My roommate's alternate title suggestion: "Bruce Willis Hunts Children For Unborn Asian Lover."

3 out of 5 stars.

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Looper may still be in theaters.  If not, wait we must.

REVIEW: Wuthering Heights (2012)

Here we have an act ballsy, joyful revisionism.  Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë has, by my count, been filmed at least a half dozen times, not counting the innumerable TV movies and mini-series that have aired over the past several decades.  This new version from British rising star Andrea Arnold, who recently directed the incredibly accomplished coming-of-age story Fish Tank, exists at odds with tradition, standing primarily to give a sucker punch to genteel awards-season literary adaptations and drag Romanticism back down into the mud.  Nearly all formal decisions strip the story of familiarity and austerity: everything is shot in handheld close-up; there's no musical score (until the end, when the music is anachronistic); the direction is as gritty as possible (has any recent film so potently captured the feeling of dirt and soot?); chronology is compressed in ways that rob you of your bearing; and most of all, the script is whittled to practically a bare outline, with long silences, lots of whispering, and occasional lines of dialogue—like "fuck you, you cunt"—that I'm willing to wager are not in the Brontë original.

All of this may indicate that Arnold's Wuthering Heights is not straight drama, and is more a statement than a story.  It certainly goes out of its way to distance the viewer; like Michael Mann's Public Enemies, it shoots the past in a way we're not used to seeing the past on screen, so the audience that went to see Jane Eyre last year (i.e., my parents) is in for a surprise, and probably a slog.  But if the film is only iconoclasm, that doesn't fully explain the spell it casts.  The essential bare-bones story of a turbulent life and a hollow revenge can still get stuck in your chest, and the lack of operatic flourishes make the ending feel like something more vital and earthy.  If nothing else, and as Fish Tank showed, Arnold is a director who excels at capturing raw desires.  And it's one of the most visually beautiful films of the year, chaotic and controlled, grimy and sublime, constantly moving.

4 out of 5 stars.

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Wuthering Heights played at the Venice Film Festival in 2011 and opens in US theaters this weekend.  Take a chance on it.

Beauvois makes three

I have another new piece up on the MUBI Notebook!  This essay is on the Cannes prize-winning drama Of Gods and Men, by Xavier Beauvois, which we have playing now in the UK.

More pieces for the Perpetual Present coming soon...