Farrelly and Farrelly, Kazan, Levy, Stoller, Wain

The Three Stooges (Bobby Farrelly and Peter Farrelly, 2012). Strangely, this attempt to update the Three Stooges for a modern audience is the most disciplined Farrelly brothers film in years. That doesn’t mean it’s good per se, but the screenplay does have a tightness and care that’s been largely missing from the siblings’ work for at least ten years or so. There’s some genuinely inspired staging to the hyper-violent comic set pieces featuring the trio of orphaned doofuses clumsily beating the hell out of each other which carries over the broader narrative. Not much of it is especially funny or even all that interesting, but it holds together. Similar faint praise can be spread around to the three actors playing the Stooges, especially Chris Diamantopoulos who manages to evoke Moe without just offering an impression.

Real Steel (Shawn Levy, 2011). An unlikely family-friendly hit that’s neither as ludicrous or shameless as a movie about giant boxing robots should be, Real Steel has a shocking dearth of energy. Part of that is attributable to the entirely by-the-numbers screenplay (based on a Richard Matheson short story, but don’t hold that against his legacy), but Shawn Levy’s lackluster direction merits yawns as well. Hugh Jackman gives his best star power glower as the washed up fighter who bonds with his estranged young son while simultaneously managing some unlikely machinery to championship levels. No matter how game he is, though, the film is ultimately too empty. He can only do so much emoting in a void.

Wanderlust (David Wain, 2012). Director David Wain’s follow up to the surprisingly amusing and enjoyable Role Models is another high concept comedy that depends in part of mocking an insular subculture. In this case, a stressed out married couple (Paul Rudd and Jennifer Aniston) wind up trying out life in an off-the-grid commune after they bomb out in the big city. There’s some standard fish out of water shenanigans along with satiric mockery of the freewheeling hippie ethic, but the whole thing is finally too shaggy, full of iffy character development and digressions for the sake of chasing comedy that completely undo the whole endeavor. The best idea in the whole film is the casting of Alan Alda as the aging founder of the commune who struggles with a blazed out memory, but, like everyone else, he’s essentially given a single joke to play. Even his genial presence gets old.

The Five-Year Engagement (Nicholas Stoller, 2012). Jason Segel’s collaboration with writer-director Nicholas Stoller that began with Forgetting Sarah Marshall takes a turn towards greater depth. Even if it doesn’t wholly work, it’s intriguing to watch them try to stretch their capabilities. Segel plays a man whose plans to marry his girlfriend (Emily Blunt, who really did have a nice 2012) are thwarted by the the false starts of a twentysomething life. There’s a clear interest in exploring the complexities of holding together a relationship while two people are on slightly different tracks, especially as necessary compromises start to wear them down, but too much of the script relies on the laziest conventions of modern romantic comedy storytelling.

East of Eden (Elia Kazan, 1955). East of Eden was released just about eight months after On the Waterfront. Though it traffics in some of the same method acting muscularity, in many ways it couldn’t be a more different movie: expansive where Waterfront is tightly contained, florid where its predecessor is lean. Adapted liberally from John Steinbeck’s novel of the same name, the film casts James Dean, in his first major screen role, as a conflicted young man whose fruitless efforts to win the favor of his father (a very fine Raymond Massey) leads to impulsive, often self-destructive actions. Of course Dean has charisma to burn, but he hadn’t really figured out how to properly harness it into an artful performance yet. Kazan sometimes seems to be trying too hard to use the wide Cinemascope screen, favoring canted camera angles that eventually lose their impact, except for one especially disconcerting scene where the camera rocks in conflict with the pendulum path of a swing. Despite those reservations, there’s clear heat in the film, probably a result of a wide array of deeply passionate and committed creators coming together, however imperfectly.

 

Cahill, Dardenne and Dardenne, Linklater, Peretz, Rydell

Our Idiot Brother (Jesse Peretz, 2011). There’s sure an abundance of promising elements to this comedy, but it illustrates the vast divide between lining up the right pieces and assembling them properly. Paul Rudd plays a layabout organic farmer who gets busted for selling pot to a police officer and then cycles through staying with his various siblings, played by Elizabeth Banks, Zooey Deschanel and Emily Mortimer. It’s boilerplate comic uplift with everyone evolving to understand the kind-hearted qualities behind the protagonist’s aggravatingly detached manner. There’s barely a laugh to be had in the film, though, and most of the performers just seem lost. Peretz flounders around with his direction, never grasping the need to properly develop the characters and hone the pacing of the film.

Another Earth (Mike Cahill, 2011). Lead actress Brit Marling was the toast of Sundance a couple of years ago when this premiered alongside {Sound of My Voice}, both films bearing a screenwriting credit from her in what was touted as an example of a performer admirably taking it upon themselves to develop material. That’s true enough, though a fair amount of the commentary seemed disproportionately amazed that it was a pretty actress who could pull this off, especially since Sundance is rife with actors who are intimately connected to the creative process of their passion project films. The sheer amount of buzz around Marling also obscured discussion about the actual quality of her releases. As for Another Earth, the film is an interesting idea that doesn’t quite come to fruition as satisfying drama. It is gravely understated sci-fi, the discovery of a mirror version of Earth coinciding with a ill turn in the life of a damaged woman named Rhoda, played by Marling. The movie has such an unwavering somber tone that it eventually becomes numbing, which is especially problematic since the wispy plotting makes it more of a mood piece. Given the mood is little more the stasis of stalled emotions, it makes for tough going.

The Reivers (Mark Rydell, 1969). Adapted from the last novel published by William Faulkner, The Reivers is set in the first decade of the 20th century and tells the story of a charming troublemaker (Steve McQueen) who absconds with a wealthy man’s new Winton Flyer automobile. Rydell directs with a sunshine-dappled nostalgia, somehow managing to make a simple story seem even simpler. McQueen’s scamp has taken a young boy (Mitch Vogel) along for the ride and discovers a few miles into the journey that the black fellow he occasionally scraps with (Rupert Crosse) has stowed away too. There’s not much to the journey (although there’s a surprise or two in where they head), and the early John Williams score emphasize the banjo romp of it all. It’s got a bounding certainty to its construction, but it’s ultimately forgettable.

The Kid with a Bike (Jean-Pierre Dardenne and Luc Dardenne, 2012). The Dardenne brothers certainly have a way with restrained sorrow. Their latest concerns a boy named Cyril (Thomas Doret) who is stuck in a bad situation, abandoned by his father and clicking through dire foster care scenarios until he connects with a kind woman (Cécile de France) who takes him in and tries to give him a home. The Dardennes are unflinching in portraying exactly how difficult this situation is, giving the boy no easy path to redemption. Instead, a child who’s gone through his tribulations is sure to take any uphill climb with a lot of helpless backsliding. Both Doret and de France are very nice is their respective roles, but its the Dardennes’ perfectly realized naturalistic tone free of emotional manipulation or histrionics that makes the film engrossing.

Bernie (Richard Linklater, 2012). Realistically, we’d all be better off if Jack Black adjusted his work schedule and committed to only working for director Richard Linklater. He’s had other nice moments onscreen, but there have been few better converges of his firmly established persona and material than the surprisingly good 2003 comedy School of Rock. Nearly ten years later, Black delivered the best work of his career–one of the few times he could be said to be acting rather than just performing–in the dark comedy Bernie. Based on true events, the film stars Black as the title character, an odd duck mortician and community theater stalwart in a small Texas town. He becomes the constant companion of a grouchy widow (Shirley MacLaine, embracing her long-established typecasting), which leads to local true crime sensation. Black is quite remarkable, playing the character’s distinctive, almost stereotypical mannerisms without ever resorting to mockery. Instead, he makes Bernie deeply sympathetic, even endearing. Linklater’s approach melds fictionalized storytelling with documentary-style testimony from actual residents of the town, sometimes without making much effort to distinguish between the two. It’s a risky approach that pays off handsomely, giving the whole film a strong sense of place and purpose.

 

Carax, Davies, Godard, Huston, Lord and Miller

21 Jump Street (Phil Lord and Chris Miller, 2012). This adaptation of the ludicrous nineteen-eighties television series about cops undercover in high school (one of the first hits for the Fox network) was met with surprising appreciation by the critical community when it was released last spring. I can certainly understand why its metafictional comedy may have been a welcome surprise, but it’s still more ragged and predictable than it is shrewd and effective. Jonah Hill and Channing Tatum have nice interplay as the requisite mismatched cops working together, and there’s something refreshing about the inversion of stereotypes, with the nerdier of the pair becoming popular and the hunk struggling to find a comfortable social space. Still, it’s haphazardly hammered together with only the slightest discernment between the gags that works and those that get by on nothing but noisiness.

Pierrot le Fou (Jean-Luc Godard, 1965). This loopy masterpiece of the French New Wave is a perfect example of Jean-Luc Godard’s capability to simultaneously master the mechanics of filmmaking and satirically shred all of its storied conventions. Jean-Paul Belmondo plays a man who springs himself from his unhappy life to go on the lam with an ex-girlfriend, playing by Anna Karina, absolutely resplendent with an almost shocking beauty. Godard swirls the film with approaches that are deviously deconstructionist and borderline genius, such as a dinner party lit with primary hues where all the attendees speak in nothing but advertising slogans. It’s a somewhat standard fugitive romance, enlivened by the sort of unpredictability that only an inspired madman like Godard can conjure up.

Wise Blood (John Huston, 1979). John Huston sure directed some oddball stuff in the nineteen-seventies, so maybe it’s only fitting that he capped off the decade with this twisted, slightly skeevy adaptation of Flannery O’Connor’s 1952 novel. The film stars Brad Dourif as Hazel Motes, a veteran who returns to his southern hometown after serving in World War II. He has various travails, which come to a head when he revolts against the huckster religious elements he sees around him by preaching from street corners representing the Holy Church of Christ Without Christ. Given the subject matter, the satire in unavoidably scathing and the film’s sensibility is remarkably dark, but Huston’s directing is shockingly, atypically distracted. The film came out about a year after he was diagnosed with emphysema, so it’s certainly understandably if he were a little preoccupied. Even so, the clumsiness of the construction eventually overcomes the boldness of the material.

Holy Motors (Leos Carax, 2012). Thirteen years after his last full-length feature, 1999′s Pola X, director Leos Carax uncorks a true tour de force, a lunatic nighttime ride through city streets with a character dubbed Mr. Oscar, played by Denis Lavant, adopting multiple guises to act out different scenarios, sometimes comedic, sometimes melodramatic, sometimes delightfully inscrutable. Carax has noted that some of the odd little stories were culled from abandoned projects, and the film’s episodic structure naturally makes some portions better than others, but the discrepancy is mild and not especially damaging. Overall, the experience is raucously entertaining, and no matter how wild it gets, Carax can always find a way to sprinkle in another wholly unexpected and audacious moment, right up to the fearlessly goofy closing shot. Besides the high points are purely ecstatic, none better than Lavant blazing away on an accordion at the head of a ragtag marching band.

The Deep Blue Sea (Terence Davies, 2012). Rachel Weisz surprised many by sneaking her way into the Oscar race with her deeply, tightly controlled performance in Terence Davies’s adaptation of Terence Rattigan’s 1952 play. As a woman in nineteen-fifties England helplessly embroiled in a passionate, doomed-from-the start affair with a World War II veteran, played by Tom Hiddleston, she is indeed quite good. The film around her, however, is a sluggish bore. Davies is a highly respected filmmaker, but I’ve never managed to warm to any of his films, almost entirely because they seem to be entirely devoid of warmth, or even the slightest pulse of life. That’s definitely the case here, as the veneer of refined storytelling snuffs out any sense of energy, which would seem to be an important component to a tale of addictive, illicit lust and love.

 

It was a girl with her face in the shadows so dark

Remarkably, it’s taken Kathryn Bigelow all of two films to transform from an also-ran action director to the most revered and dependable cinematic chronicler of American’s early 21st century of global militaristic angst. Unless there are people out there who actually discerned some sort of Cold War profundities in the doze-inducing K-19: The Widowmaker (or, more ludicrously, any depth whatsoever in the idiotic and strangely celebrated Point Break), Bigelow hadn’t exhibited especially insightful command of the dire doings of geopolitics before connecting with screenwriter Mark Boal, who, like her, won a deserved Academy Award for strong work on The Hurt Locker. Following that film’s narrative extrapolation of the circular misery of the Iraq war, Bigelow and Boal turn their attention to the CIA’s manhunt for Osama bin Laden following the attacks of 9/11, bringing the story all the way up to Seal Team Six’s successful raid on the terrorist leader’s compound in the Pakistan city of Abbottabad. If journalism is the first draft of history, Bigelow delivers the second draft with Zero Dark Thirty.

In the film, Jessica Chastain plays a young CIA officer named Maya. She was drafted by the agency right out of high school, presumably because of some particular brilliance. She’s certainly driven, alert and intense. Maya is reportedly based on a real CIA agent, seemingly the same one that gives the rocket fuel inspiration to the brilliantly jittery performance of Claire Danes in Showtime’s Homeland (there’s already plenty of speculation along those very lines). Chastain is quietly sensational in the role, just as she has been in just about every film appearance she’s made since practically coming out of nowhere just two years ago. The character seems a little wispy in conception, but Chastain expertly tracks her journey from someone initially uncertain about her place on foreign soil, observing the torture of detainees with visible queasiness, to a person with decisive enough command of counter-terrorism efforts that she instinctively, angrily pushes back at the authority figures that aren’t moving fast enough to suit her.

It gets a little spottier when surveying the rest of the cast, which is filled with recognizable faces, often in fairly small roles. As with Maya, many of the parts feel underdrawn, so the film is especially reliant on actors who can add depth to their characters with ingenuity and insight. Someone like Jennifer Ehle thrives in such a situation, while most other performers provide the rough equivalent of keeping a seat warm. There aren’t any major missteps (well, except for Mark Strong, who never met a moment he couldn’t pointlessly overact), but few of the actors make their parts distinctive either, seeming so beholden to serving the procedural narrative of the film that they lose sight of the value of invested personality.

To be fair, that procedural narrative is pretty gripping, largely thanks to the focus and drive of Bigelow, who assembles Zero Dark Thirty with a thrilling equal commitment to accuracy and whatever dramatic devices will deliver the greatest intellectual and emotional punch. This is never more clear than in the depiction of the actual mission which ended in the death of bin Laden. Bigelow skews away from the basic cinematic convention of condensing action and heightening drama, choosing instead to let it play out in what feels roughly like real time, emphasizing that this sort of covert military action is agonizingly slow and methodical, punctuated by violence so sudden that the results of it can’t be sorted out until the aftermath. More than anywhere else in the film, this sequence is clearly where Bigelow feels most at home.

Bigelow and the film have received a great deal of scrutiny and criticism, including from entities that, frankly, should be concentrating their limited time on far more important matters. One of the primary areas of concern is the film’s depiction of CIA operatives using torture on detainees, specifically the implication that useful intelligence was extracted from those methods. I think the fact that torture was used by Americans as matter of policy ratified and celebrated at the highest levels of government is unquestionably reprehensible, but were I writing this before the controversies flared up around film it’s entirely possible I wouldn’t have even thought to mention the scenes in question, except maybe to note that Bigelow makes the practice looks as brutally awful as I would expect. And though I could never view the deplorable methods as justified, I’m also not so naive as to think that they never yielded useful information (information we surely could have acquired through other means, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t useful), no matter what the current official word is from government representatives. After all, it wasn’t that long ago that figures in the same powerful posts were assuring us that this program, under the ugly euphemism “enhance interrogation techniques,” was producing a bounty of invaluable intelligence.

In fact, I might argue that the torture scenes in Zero Dark Thirty demonstrate that Bigelow is doing exactly what a director shepherding such material to the screen is supposed to do. They are free of authorial moralizing, directing the audience to believe one way or another, instead allowing individuals to project their own beliefs onto the action, seeing it as necessary and heroic or immoral and tragic. The film has its issues, but retroactive justification of the darkening of the national soul in the years when George Bush and Dick Cheney were calling the shots isn’t one of them.

 

Hey, babe, what’s in your eyes? I saw them flashing like airplane lights.

In a recent Director Roundtable discussion organized by The Hollywood Reporter, David O. Russell discussion how he came to work on the the 2010 film The Fighter. Russell acknowledged that it was exactly the sort of conventional projected he would have dismissed years earlier, deciding it didn’t have the requisite offbeat components to stir his interest. He was admittedly at a career low point, which may have been what eventually motivated him to ask himself, as he put it, “Why don’t you try to do this really good?” I, for one, think that’s exactly what he accomplished, investing a familiar storyline with just the right amount of edge, veracity and nothing-to-lose creativity to elevate it.

In a way, he seems to be trying for the same thing with his latest effort, Silver Linings Playbook. Adapted from the 2008 novel by Matthew Quick, the film seems built around the question of whether or not a familiar romantic comedy can be spun into something unique. Can Russell “do this really good?” To that end, what if the standard issue rom-com Manic Pixie Dream Girl (and how Nathan Rabin must wish he’d affixed a “TM” next to that four word term when he coined it) is actually dealing with genuine issues that the film tries to take seriously? In fact, what if damn well everyone onscreen is dealing with some sort of embedded psychological problem that helps explain the sort of questionable decision-making required to make a romantic comedy plot purr like an well-lubed engine?

Bradley Cooper stars in Silver Linings Playbook as Pat Solitano, a young man recently released from a mental hospital, where he was sent after a violent altercation upon finding his wife cheating with another man. Diagnosed with bipolar disorder, Pat operates with a fervent intensity–whether angry or effusively positive–as he tries to get resettled in his old Philadelphia neighborhood, living with his parents as he gets his life back in order. He’s also certain he can win back his wife, which drives the film’s conflicts as his family and friends try to gently intervene in that process, and a young widow named Tiffany, played by Jennifer Lawrence, exploits Pat’s desire to make contact with his ex to recruit him into being her partner in a local dance competition in which she’s long wanted to take part.

Present this material with well-scrubbed, sunshiny earnestness and it could be the sort of claptrap that Matthew McConaughey and Kate Hudson yawned their way through a few years back. Russell tries out a mordant, deadpan approach instead, deliberately flattening out the tone in an apparent attempt to make the story’s obvious machinations seem more realistic and honest. There’s no way to disguise, however, that everything in Silver Linings Playbook is hopelessly phony, from large matters such as the uninspired ways that characters come together to the smallest details, exemplified by the local police officer who’s been assigned the Pat Solitano beat, working shifts at all different times of day and night, just so he can be there when our protagonist wavers from the straight line he’s supposed to walk.

Cooper is actually quite good in the film, the first time I’ve ever seen him in a performance that didn’t smack of smug laziness. He realizes that Pat needs to feel dangerous not because of his actions, but strictly because of his unpredictability. It’s not that he could throw a punch, it’s that no one can anticipate when his high emotions will take an ill turn. Lawrence is even better. In her still nascent career, she’s already established a near total inability to be sedate in her craft; she wears the sharp emotions of her characters like a cloak. They deserve better than the muddled mess Russell strands them in. They’re as adrift as their characters. Unfortunately for the performers, the key difference is that there’s no rescue in right.

 

Love like lightning, shaking till it moans

In Rust and Bone, Marion Cotillard plays Stéphanie, a woman who works at an aquatics-based theme park, collaborating with other handlers to guide killer whales through a routine while Katy Perry blares over loudspeakers. After a freak accident, Stéphanie wakes up in the hospital to discover that both her legs needed to be amputated at the knee. For someone whose professional life inexorably depends on physical capability, Stéphanie is understandably thrown into a deep depression. Simultaneously, the film tracks the story of Ali, played by Matthias Schoenaerts. Ali is an apparently directionless young man who arrives at his sister’s with a young son in tow, carried with resigned irritation rather than affection. He engages in a series of fleeting jobs that largely rely on his willingness to be brutish, including stints as a nightclub bouncer and a security guard. Eventually, he comes around to a method of making money that calls for nothing more than toughness and endurance, collecting cash as a combatant in an underground bare-knuckles boxing ring.

Director Jacques Audiard developed the film by combining two different offerings from Craig Davidson’s short story collection Rust and Bone. The storylines of the film start off fairly separate and when they converge, as it always clear they must, its awkward enough that it’s as if the axles of work have just gone over an enormous speed bump. Audiard and credited co-screenwriter Thomas Bidegain (who also collaborated with Audiard on the excellent A Prophet) are more interested in bringing the stories together than making sure they precisely line up. It’s clear Stéphanie is attracted to Ali because he represents a connection to the total physical self that has been robbed from her, but that’s a sound thematic motivation far more than it is a reasonably established part of the narrative. (Presumably, Ali is attracted to Stéphanie because she looks like Marion Cottilard, although a theory could be floated that he finds some appeal in having someone he knows how to take care of.) They come together because Audiard wants them to come together and he can barely be bothered to conceive of a way for that to happen which makes sense.

If the raggedy, frayed ends of the narrative don’t mean much to Audiard, he at least provides a reasonably compelling argument that focusing on the emotion of the piece is just as important as getting the storytelling mechanics to turn cleanly. Despite some clunky portions and several moments that strain credibility, Ruse and Bone has a deep-set, wounding power. Some of this is undoubtedly due to the strong, modest performances of the two leads. Schoenaerts steadfastly plays his character as little more than a collection of flaws, with any glimmers of redemptive qualities little more than an illusion or, maybe more accurately, the projection of an audience hoping for him to slip into the hero groove. Cottilard is even better, deserving all of the buzz her performance has generated since the film debuted at the 2012 Cannes Film Festival. In particular, she demonstrates how freeing oneself from the worst of the past is an agonizing but also energizing process. Her small triumphs have an uncommon potency, moving past the common manipulation of cinema to feel piercingly real.

Rust and Bone often comes across as a work that hasn’t been fully hammered into place, lacking the sort of intellectual focus that was probably required in bringing together two unrelated stories. Conversely, it could have used some of the anti-structure fearlessness employed by Robert Altman when he haphazardly stitched together a batch of Raymond Carver stories into Short Cuts. Audiard is probably too devoted to the seductive pleasures of melodrama to have gone the latter route, though. Where he winds up is a fitfully satisfying middle ground, where Rust and Bone is defined as much by where it falters as it is by the acuity and intensity of its roiling feelings.

 

Spectrum Check

Spectrum Culture eased back into operation after a holiday break this week. Even though we had a very limited amount of content, I still squeezed some of my high-falutin’ words in there. On the film side, I wrote about the new film from director Miguel Gomes, which has been turning up on some of the more esoteric year-end “best of” lists. It’s not quite at that level for me, but I certainly see the appeal.

This week also marked the return of a regular yearly feature in which the writers collectively look back at the albums and films from five years ago to provide a fresh, hindsight-enhanced tally of the finest achievements in each form. We actually wrote these blurbs several months ago, so I’d completely forgotten which works I’d written on. As it happens, I was assigned a film for which I’ve already established some pretty significant admiration. As for the music side, I didn’t get to write about my clear-cut choice for the best album of 2007, but the release that was assigned to me was still a helluva record.

 

What’s a boy in love supposed to do?

My first exposure to director Michael Haneke came via his 1997 film Funny Games, which was probably the entryway for many in that relatively small subset that have dipped into his filmography. I loathed it. Luckily, I think that may have precisely the response he was hoping for. There’s another important aspect to using Funny Games as the start of the cinematic relationship with Haneke: considering the thesis he put forth in that film helps to make sense of the other films that follow, even something as wildly different, in most respects, as the director’s latest, Amour.

There’s a moment in Funny Games which finds the protagonists seemingly poised to turn the tables on the home invaders who have been terrorizing them. Before the heroics progress much, one of the criminals grabs a remote control and backs up the film, giving him the opportunity to thwart the turnaround before it is set into motion. A positive outcome is what the audience wants–by that point, desperately–but it wouldn’t be truthful. Haneke is uninterested in pandering to an audience, giving them what they want, verifying their hopes about human nature. There is no desire to soothe, to approach his storytelling with any inclinations towards benevolence or catharsis. He’s is harsh, but that isn’t necessarily the same thing as sadistic, though I’ll admit that I’ve not always seen it that way. Indeed, “sadistic” could be a word I used in assessing Funny Games all those years ago.

Amour is about a couple, an elderly couple to be exact. Played by Emmanuelle Riva and Jean-Louis Trintignant, they are introduced returning home after attending a classical music concert. In a few deft strokes, Haneke hints at the totality of their shared life: it is mundane, satisfying, sedate, thoroughly interlocked. One morning, he is talking to her in the kitchen, and she suddenly stops. She is awake and stares straight ahead, but she is entirely unresponsive, at least until minutes later when she begins interacting with him as if nothing had happened. They discover this was a stroke, and the deterioration of a human existence begins.

Haneke has noted, somewhat obliquely, that the inspiration for the film comes from a similar situation he experienced in his own family, a loved one laid low by illness, instilling a smothering feeling of helpless in him as he witnessed the suffering progress. According to his cinematic ethos, Haneke relates this scenario with cold, clinical accuracy, and it is acted with heartbreaking rigor by both Riva and Trintignant. There are no reassuring Hollywood tropes here. No nobility to the infirm, no rekindled familial togetherness, no inspiring friendship to be found with a new caretaker. It’s what the audience craves, but it’s not reality, not for most who will experience something like this. Instead, it’s lonely, it’s trying, it’s exhausting, it’s devastating. That’s how Haneke show it to be, though not with pushy emotions or overt manipulations. There is a journalistic detachment that is enhanced by the natural chill of European cinema (Haneke was born in Germany and raised in Austria, and the film is set in France, like his exceptional 2005 effort, Caché). Haneke is a master of the mechanics of filmmaking, especially composing shots, but he doesn’t use his construction skills for exploitative ends in Amour. He is simply taking it all in. If the film is unforgiving, it is only because that’s the proper way to honor the very real dilemmas of aging and the ailments it brings.

Amour is wrenching, but Haneke devoutly avoids calling attention to its sorrows. The vast majority of the film is set in the couple’s apartment, a space that may as well be the entire world once the physical devastation wrought on Riva’s character progresses to the point of incapacitation. It’s obviously everything to her, but it is to Trintignant’s character as well, bound to her as he tends to her ever-growing needs. Again, this comes across as plain fact, not some haunting tragedy. It is a trudge until one finally gives up, out of desperation or mercy. The big monologue about fleeting time on earth, the pageantry and poetry of it all, never arrives. That may be how drama works, with sweeping thematic commentary, but that’s not life, which Haneke is determined to draw accurately. Even when what he’s actually drawing is death.

 

In my life, why do I give valuable time to people who don’t care if I live or die?

Let’s start with this: if Jennifer Hudson could win a Best Actress in a Supporting Role Academy Award, despite showing no apparent capacity for acting beyond a suitable performance of a show-stopping musical number, then it’s somewhat remarkable that Anne Hathaway roaring with anguish through “I Dreamed a Dream” didn’t culminate with the personal delivery of an Oscar to her on the set of Les Misérables as the various crew members surrounded her, applauding. In bringing the blockbuster musical adaptation of Victor Hugo’s classic novel to the screen, director Tom Hooper disregarded convention and had the actors sing live on set instead of lip-synching to prerecorded vocal tracks. The reasoning is clear enough; it’s the same thought process that would discourage any director from wanting actors to mouth dialogue being played back from a tape. Since the vast majority of Les Misérables is presented strictly through song, with barely a word that isn’t sung, he wanted his performers to feel the emotions they were conveying. He wanted them to act and sing at the same time, hardly a revolutionary notion. It serves Hathaway best. She’s a raw nerve for the duration of her role, culminating in the combustion of “I Dreamed a Dream.” Despite my fanciful notion, that Oscar didn’t arrive on the set, but it sure as hell is going to be put in her trembling hands come late February.

Hathaway’s performance is the one unqualified success in Les Misérables. Other than that, it’s as scattershot as a nineteenth century firefight. By now, the storyline should be familiar to most: the noble sufferer Jean Valjean, the obsessive police inspector Javert, the doomed Fantine, the rescued Cosette, the French revolutionaries taking to the streets of Paris. The original novel approaches 2000 pages in its original French, and, even running at nearly three hours, the musical necessarily condenses and contracts. The effort shows, with much of the drama feeling rushed and confused. More problematically, the psychological underpinnings are mere shadows. That puts additional pressure on the performers to make the characters work, which in turn makes Hooper’s less successful casting choices all the more damaging, especially Russell Crowe as Javert. Hooper’s approach to filming may have been intended to show how effectively every member of the ensemble can both act and sing, but, on the evidence here, Crowe can do neither. It’s as dire a piece of uncorrected miscasting as I can recall in any recent film of this size and stature.

Between the triumph of Hathaway and the train wreck of Crowe, performers sit on all points of the Spectrum. Hugh Jackman undoubtedly dreams of this sort of film role every time he retracts his special effect Wolverine claws–he has a chance to flash his musical theater chops in the most masculine manner possible–and he does very well, even if he sometimes succumbs to overplaying the heavy drama built into the role. Amanda Seyfried has a lovely singing voice, but can’t make Cosette anything more than a bland object of romantic desire (it’s especially unconvincing that she would inspire such longing when her ostensible romantic rival, Éponine, is played by gorgeous and charismatic newcomer Samantha Barks). As for Helena Bonham Carter and Sacha Baron Cohen as villainous comic relief the Thénardiers, the clearest way I can communicate my reaction is to note that their scenes seemed to stretch on for a painful eternity. And I realize that expecting anything approaching verisimilitude in regards to the story’s French locale is the height of foolishness, but did the youthful street urchin have to squawk in a Cockneyish accent, as if he’d been shipped over from a Charles Dickens novel in some sort of legendary literature exchange program?

I can’t deny the impressive scope of Les Misérables. The whole thing groans with ambition, and if that sometimes reads as empty bombast, at least there’s a sense of spectacle to it. There’s an earnestness to the project, a fully evident desire to get this thing right for the multitudes who cherish the original musical (or maybe even the novel that provides the story) and will hold onto this for ages as the biggest, boldest record of the piece in question. Maybe that means Hooper and his collaborators occasionally overreach (and Hooper remains that most uncommon of filmmakers: one whose style alternates wildly between utterly pedestrian and garish over-direction), but it’s in the name of clawing their way towards a cinematic work that can live up to the highest of hopes. They don’t reach it. I’d argue they don’t even come all that close to the goal. Still, I admire the sweat that practically flecks the camera lens.

 

Got you in his chains, will he set you free someday?

It’s tempting to say that Quentin Tarantino has too many ideas, but that’s not quite right. Certainly every one of his films has been overstuffed, at least after his comparatively lean debut, 1992′s Reservoir Dogs. Even the one film of his that I think approaches genuine cinematic genius, Pulp Fiction, has elements requiring a certain amount of forgiving patience (if I’ve seen Pulp Fiction a hundred times, then I’ve skipped Bruce Willis philosophizing in the taxi cab with driver Angela Jones about ninety-eight of them). The problem, then, isn’t that he has too many ideas, but that he’s apparently incapable of discerning between the good ones and the bad ones.

For most of the running time of Django Unchained, Tarantino is brimming with good ideas, and he’s executing them well. Jamie Foxx plays the title character, a slave in the American South, in the years immediately preceding the Civil War. He’s liberated by a bounty hunter named King Schultz, played by Christoph Waltz, who needs some information, the visual identification of a trio of brothers with an especially lucrative prices on their heads. When Django proves to have something of an inherent skill at gunning down quarry, King takes him on as a partner, with the eventual goal of tracking down and freeing Django’s wife, nicely played by Kerry Washington in an underconsidered role. The film rapidly turns into another one of those firecracker amalgamations of all the messy movie memories that keep Tarantino’s brain permanently asimmer. It’s a buddy picture, a spaghetti western, a revenge saga, a blaxsploitation barn burner and on and on.

It’s also a little more disciplined than Tarantino’s recent efforts, downplaying the self-conscious signifiers and mockable meanderings that made Inglourious Basterds, for example, a masterwork marred by a crust of blasted snotball indulgences. The floridness of his writing is toned down, or is at least caressed into an amusing, pleasant, surprisingly natural flow by Waltz, who has taken only two films to establish himself as the best interpreter of Tarantino’s words that the filmmaker has ever had. Waltz plays King as a kind soul who has paradoxically found himself in a brutal business, couching his actions in the sanctified logic of the law. Every scene has a hint of discovery, of a man trying to work out a moral code in a landscape pockmarked by ugly inhumanity. Foxx is also quite good early on, especially in the scenes in which Django is trying to register what’s happening as the world shifts beneath his newly unshackled feet. The performance grows progressively less interesting as the film goes on, presumably because Tarantino’s direction amounted to little more than, “Now you’re the baddest motherfucker around,” and Foxx ran with it.

There are other small hitches–the bloat of a nearly three-hour running time sometimes weighs on the film, and Samuel L. Jackson plays his admittedly fascinating character with a wholly predictable mannered menace–but the film doesn’t slip its groove completely until the last reel or so, when Tarantino pointlessly prolongs the mayhem. A colossal shoot-out at the plantation run by a sadistic dandy played by Leonardo DiCaprio (having fun, but it’s ultimately a negligible performance) could have been conclusion enough, with its heavily stylized violence and turmoil of thematic comeuppance. Tarantino drags it out as long as he can, though, with a circuitous route to the actual ending committing the cardinal sin of being dull. (It doesn’t help that this passage also creates room for an abominably bad cameo by the director, who really needs to hire someone whose sole job is to flatly refuse him anytime he expresses an inclination to give acting another whirl.) I expect to go through a lot of sensations while watching a Tarantino movie, but boredom isn’t one of them. For most of its healthy span, Django Unchained is far from that. But it’s hard to let go of the final impression it leaves as it drags painfully to the end.