They will become psychotic, and they won’t make an ideal husband or wife

Before getting down to pros and cons of Sacha Gervasi’s Hitchcock, let’s spare a moment of sympathy for Toby Jones. Pushing ten years ago, the veteran character actor got what seemed like a plum role that also had the benefit of being especially well-suited to him: Truman Capote, in a film depicting the genesis of the classic book In Cold Blood. Unfortunately for Jones, it just so happened to coincide with Philip Seymour Hoffman also being cast as the colorful author in a completely different film recounting that stretch of his life. Hoffman, of course, gave one of his very best performances that earned a gaggle of awards, including the Best Actor Oscar. Jones’s film became an afterthought, released to indifference around a year later. He went back to the trenches, toiling away in supporting roles, finally landing another juicy lead, this time playing Alfred Hitchcock in a HBO film depicting the production of The Birds, with a particular focus on the famed director’s notorious obsession with star Tippi Hedren. The resulting film, The Girl, was middling, but Jones acquitted himself nicely as the Master of Suspense (though he was surprisingly outacted by Sienna Miller as Hedren), only to be entirely overshadowed mere weeks later when an actor who already has an Academy Award on his shelf plays Hitchcock in a big screen offering which also focuses on the production of a single film a key to unlocking the man’s life.

It is Anthony Hopkins taking on the role of Hitchcock in the film that bears the director’s name, and it is the most engaged the actor has been in ages. Though he’s undermined somewhat by makeup work of varying quality, Hopkins effectively burrows into the passion and focus of Hitchcock during the run-to and making of the 1960 classic Psycho. Though Hopkins is a marvelous mimic, he mostly adopts Hitchcock’s droll, drawling cadence rather than attempts a full-on impression, but the pressure of playing a well-known figure still forces the actor to eschew some of his more well-worn habits–a reliance on the contrasts of loud and soft, a tendency to play each character as distracted by the drifting mists of life–which serves the performance well. It forces him to be inventive, to be probing. He properly finds and conveys the mixture of artistic nervousness and seasoned confidence that makes Hitchcock, particularly at this point in his career, so compelling.

Hopkins may also have been spurred on by having to match up against Helen Mirren, his most formidable costar in quite some time. Compounding her authority is the fact that she’s playing Hitchcock’s wife, Alma Reville, in a story that is asserting, as much as anything else, the woman’s often neglected contributions to cinema. She was known (and yet simultaneously often dismissed) as a confidante and guide to Hitchcock, using her own considerable cinematic skill and knowledge (she has screenwriting credits dating back to 1927, just a few years after Hitchcock got his start). Mirren is her usual forceful self, demuring not one bit to the men around her. Just as Hitchcock found strength in his partnership with Reville, Hopkins clearly raises his game in the company of Mirren.

The film around these two actors is imperfect but entertaining, sparking to life most when it is immersed in the mechanics of making a film happen, a miniature miracle every time, even for someone with the clout of Hitchcock. Gervasi is at his best when concocting a clever way to introduce the filming of the renowned shower scene or depicting Hitchcock standing outside an early screening of Psycho, literally conducting the audience as they react to what’s unfolding before them in projections of flickering light (the latter inspired flourish apparently the result on an on-set improvisation by Hopkins). When Gervasi opts for storytelling tactics that hint at less confidence in the base material–most notably recurring scenes that have Hitchcock imagining interactions with Ed Gein, the Wisconsin madman who was the inspiration for Norman Bates–the wheels get a little wobblier. Hitchcock knew the movies were magic. If only Gervasi similarly understood that sometimes a lot of extra distractions aren’t required when delving deeper. Sometimes the sharing of the secrets of the trick can be enough all on its own.

 

Many will see, many will see and fear

The various promotional efforts for Judd Apatow’s new film, This is 40, position it as the “sort-of sequel to Knocked Up.” The reasoning behind this is simple enough, reflecting the fairly unique creative starting point of drawing a couple of supporting characters from that earlier film to now be the leads and largely making no mention of anything else from the 2007 comedy. Ben Stone and Alison Scott have a five-year-old out there somewhere in the movie universe, but that doesn’t mean they’ll be paying a visit to the big, splashy birthday party that takes place here. It may be a novel model for the movies, but this is the sort of thing that used to happen all the time on television. So maybe “sort-of sequel” is less apt than simply calling This is 40 a spin-off, which also works because Apatow’s trademark unwieldy style has never seem quite so misplaced. He may be releasing This is 40 as a movie, but it feels, to its great detriment, like he actually made a ten-episode HBO series and tried to condense and crunch it into a running time suited for the multiplex.

The film transfers over Pete and Debbie (Paul Rudd and Leslie Mann, respectively), the married couple that served as a sort of forecast for what Ben and Alison might expect of their future, good and ill, when they inadvertently become parents-to-be in Knocked Up. It was clear that these were the characters that Apatow was using for the most autobiographical material in the film, a tactic underscored by casting his real-life wife, Mann, and their two daughters, Maude and Iris, as the characters’ offspring. With each successive directorial effort, Apatow has edged further away from invention and towards total self-examination, his already marginal interest in the discipline of story eroding along the way. By this fourth feature, he’s approaching navel-gazing as a pure art, albeit one that’s not especially interesting. There’s barely any plot to the film, just middle-age misery rushing in and receding like the tides.

In Apatow’s most promising moments, his approach makes him into a sort of comedic John Cassavetes, using a cinematic replication of the messiness of life to try and scratch away at truths that sometimes difficult to corral into a tidy three-act structure. The troublesome difference is that comedy requires greater discipline, a precision of language, tone and character. Farce, for example, is clockwork that only looks like clattering wreckage, and improvisational humor needs to be deeply grounded in character, or at least a consistent sensibility, to work properly. Too often, Apatow ignores these guidelines in favor of whatever he finds funny in the moment, throwing it all onscreen whether or not it locks into place and contributes something meaningful to the whole. He doesn’t have subplots. Instead, he has digressions, and entire characters could have been excised without harming a thing, except maybe the egos of the big-name actors (Melissa McCarthy, Jason Segel and Megan Fox come to mind) whom Apatow had the clout to recruit.

There are certainly times when the film is amusing and even smartly telling. It remains true that Apatow has a sharp understanding of how arguments work, especially within a couple. He knows how they escalate and how much the conflicts are built upon degrees of defensiveness. He brings that to the screen with a harsh accuracy, although there are also times in This is 40 when the relentless aggression gets to be too much, starts to feel like it’s slipped out of the category of plausible. Perhaps more damaging is Apatow’s utterly tone-deaf depiction of financial struggle, as the independent record label started by Pete is sinking fast and the family’s finances are dire enough that mortgage payments are being missed, and yet conspicuous consumption is everywhere and almost entirely unremarked upon. It another example–probably the most discomfiting one–of a filmmaker who wants to say something interesting and challenging, but is rapidly losing the conviction and rigor needed to say it well.

 

Spectrum Check

And so we come to the end of another calendar year of reviews for Spectrum Culture. The site is already in the process of downshifting ahead of the holidays, so there was a little less new content going up this week. I still took my turn in the film review rotation, however, with an evaluation of a new drama that got wobbly wheels but is finally made steady by a couple of very fine performances.

Most of my words this week were expended on our various “end of the year” lists. For the Favorite Books feature, I wrote about Richard Ford’s Canada, although I also considered expounding on the continuing astonishment that is Robert Caro’s Lyndon Johnson biography. Matthew McConaughey’s turn as Dallas in Magic Mike was my pick for the Best Performances list, in part because I thought it would be immensely fun to write about. It was. For Best Films, I opted for Wes Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom, being sure to plant my flag on that one early since I figured it might be in high demand among our staff. On our Top 25 Songs list, I was assigned the track that landed at #10 and I got the task of writing on the entries at #6 and #5 on the Top 20 Albums tally. In keeping with a fairly new tradition, I’ll have more on my picks for the best music on the year popping up in this space sometime in the next couple of weeks.

 

Spectrum Check

Like everyone else, my mind is elsewhere today, so I’ll keep this brief. I’m sure you understand.

I reviewed two things for Spectrum Culture this week. On the film side, I reviewed a documentary about the Lovings, the perfectly named couple whose court case against the state of Virginia ended anti-miscegenation laws across the land.

On the music side, I reviewed the new album from a band called Night Moves, which I primarily chose because I was amused by the peripheral Bob Seger connection. Lest I confuse anyone, the band’s music sounds absolutely nothing like anything ever cooked up by the boss of the Silver Bullet Band.

 

Spectrum Check

We are in the middle stages of prepping for end of the year material at Spectrum Culture, which means I worked on a lot of material for the site this week, but little of it has yet yielded words that made it to digital print. There’s a ton of writing on the way, though, which also means I’ve got to devote some time today to listening to 2012 album releases to concoct my personal Top 20 list for the year. With that in mind, I’ll keep the recap somewhat brief.

On the film side, I reviewed a newish documentary about Stephen Fry tracing the history and influence of the composer Richard Wagner while also considering the repugnant, anti-Semitic history of the man, particularly as it greased the flue towards his great music to later be proudly adopted by the Nazis. I actually had high hopes for the documentary, knowing from a fairly unique appearance on Craig Ferguson’s program that Fry is an exceptionally witty, charming and insightful conversationalist. Unfortunately, I also know from various BBC programs that Fry can also be an overly sedate and proper host. Sadly, that’s the version that shows up in the documentary.

On the other hand, the album I reviewed this week was exactly what I hoped it would be. Juno MacGuff might say it’s just noise, but it sounds pretty great to me.

 

I once had a girl, or should I say, she once had me

In 1990, poet and journalist Mark O’Brien wrote a piece entitled “On Seeing a Sex Surrogate.” A damaging bout with polio as a child left O’Brien largely confined to an iron lung and effectively paralyzed from the neck down, but he persisted in pursuing a career as a writer. After getting an assignment centered on sex and the disabled, O’Brien started thinking about his own lack of experience in that area. Nervously, even reluctantly, Mark sought out a surrogate who could therapeutically introduce him to lovemaking. The new film The Sessions tells that story.

Written and directed by Ben Lewin–himself a childhood victim of polio whose motor-functions were impaired, though in far less pronounced fashion–The Sessions is disarmingly frank about its subject, which is, of course, the only way to make this sort of film work. With an admirable level of knowledge and respect for O’Brien’s situation, Lewin carefully guides the film, finding the humor and sadness in the situations the lead character endures. It would be easy for the film to become overly maudlin, and a tilt towards overly cutesy celebration is just as likely. Either route would have proven miserable. If Lewin is sometimes overly pat and staid in his approach, the easy TV production rigor of the work remains preferable to the far riskier alternatives. The Sessions is committed to its story with a reporter’s plainspoken flatness, nicely in line with O’Brien’s original essay.

That prevailing commitment to veracity makes the script’s diversions into melodrama all the more unfortunate. As sympathetically played by John Hawkes (who wisely concentrates as much on the character’s emotional vulnerabilities and his diminished physical stature), O’Brien is undoubtedly a highly charismatic person, but the film still strains credibility when it implies that the sex surrogate, played with a study pragmatism by Helen Hunt, begins to have deeper emotional feelings for him. Certainly anyone involved with any level of social work winds up forging deep connections with different clients, but the welling emotions of Hunt’s character come across as nothing more than a movie contrivance, a way to build additional conflict into the final act.

Sure enough, there’s no indication in O’Brien’s essay of any aspirations towards romance on either side of the transaction (when the sessions end, O’Brien’s primary reaction is relief that he won’t be spending any more money on this), and it winds up as a sort of betrayal of the unique and genuinely important (if particularly intimate) physical therapy taking place. There are other concessions to movie mechanics–a convivial and confiding relationship between O’Brien and a priest played by William H. Macy has amusing moments, but is clearly there to provide an easy way to air out the film’s themes–but drumming up more material out of the supposed emotional connection between O’Brien and his therapist ultimately subverts the mature seriousness of the earlier portions of the film. O’Brien knew his story was interesting enough without too many embellishments. It would have been nice if Lewin had similar confidence.

 

Spectrum Check

As is usually the case, a light week for me at Spectrum Culture begets one that is especially busy.

First, I contributed a review of a new documentary about men who use flight simulators and online multi-player gaming technology to engage in digitized reenactments of World War II battles. There’s plenty of material there for an interesting, even enlightening film, but it’s too jumbled to bring those ideas cogently together, a problem which is evident from very early on. Thankfully, it was also quite short.

On the music side, I reviewed the new release from Black Moth Super Rainbow, which was a little like trying to accurately describe the pattern spied through a kaleidoscope while it’s still spinning. I think I did well enough, but it was certainly one of those instances where I felt somewhat ill-equipped to the matter at hand.

In terms of longer pieces, the last new thing I had go up was the the latest entry in our new Oeuvre series on director Brian De Palma. I hadn’t previously realized that De Palma began his cinematic career as a devoted satirist. To his benefit, it also means I hadn’t previously realized how bad he was at it.

There were a couple lists I also pitched in on, including our year-by-year tally of top comedic performances in film. We’re reached the nineteen-sixties, which has a couple absolutely spectacular performances (I’m primary referring to the selections for 1960 and 1964). And I contributed a few words about a track off of the new Bat for Lashes release in the latest Monthly Mixtape.

Finally, as if my name weren’t flung around enough this week, my springtime take on Joshua Marston’s The Forgiveness of Blood was repackaged under the Rediscovered banner in conjunction with its recent DVD release by Criterion.

 

Everything sticks until it goes away

In Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln, Daniel Day-Lewis moves on from acting to alchemy. The two-time Oscar-winner is hardly prolific (he’s made only ten films since collecting that first Academy Award, for My Left Foot, a film now twenty-three years old), but he seems more and more dedicated to making certain every outing counts. The level of commitment he brings to his performances has the feel of legend about it, which would risk becoming tiresome if the acting wasn’t often purely astounding, tapping into deeper reservoirs of unfathomable talent and craft. Just as his turns as Bill “the Butcher” Cutting in Martin Scorsese’s Gangs of New York and then Daniel Plainview in Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood each seemed to casually but decisively redefine the parameters of what could be achieved in acting, so too does his latest performance offer a head-spinning new peak. As no less iconic a figure as Abraham Lincoln, Day-Lewis utterly disappears into the role, utilizing facets of the man that are so well-established they’re practically tropes, but somehow avoiding cliches altogether to bring his inner humanity to the fore. This is an United States President with no shortage of depictions over the years, but this portrait is so indelible it seems likely to become the cultural stand-in for Lincoln for generations to come. I’m halfway convinced the contents of my household penny jar is filled with mintings of the Irish actor’s profile.

If an issue can arise with a performance as strong as that given by Day-Lewis, it’s the inability of the other actors, even extremely gifted ones, to measure up. Undoubtedly enticed by the prospect of working with Spielberg on a weighty historical epic, the cast list is ridiculously stocked. Concentrating solely on other Oscar winners and nominees, the film features Sally Field, Tommy Lee Jones, David Strathairn, Hal Holbrook, John Hawkes and Jackie Earle Haley, many of them in fairly brief roles, screen time obviously less of a concern than the reflected prestige of the project. With the exception of Jones, who is the beneficiary of perfect casting as powerhouse abolitionist Thaddeus Stevens, almost everyone wilts a little in the scenes with Day-Lewis. That may enhance the imposing nature of the presidency, but it also undercuts, in a dramatic sense, the folksy approachability that is regularly asserted as one of the hallmarks of Lincoln’s appeal to the people.

Maybe the most fascinating thing about the structure of the film is that it is largely concerned with a brief span of Lincoln’s presidency, shortly after his reelection, when he pushed for passage of the Thirteenth Amendment of the Constitution ahead of the completion of the Civil War, convinced it was vitally important to confirm the illegality of slavery within the nation’s most sacred document. Rather than a lengthy (and likely tedious) trudge through Lincoln’s life, Spielberg and screenwriter Tony Kushner reveal the man, and hint at the life that shaped him, through studious examination of all of the conflicts, cajoling and convincing that took place around this single piece of legislation. Lincoln presents the fascinating dueling thesis that politics is relentlessly ugly and also incredibly vital. The members of the House of Representatives go at each other with a level of rhetorical vitriol that proves recent laments about unprecedented corrosiveness in political discourse are short on historical perspective, and yet the outcomes change lives, in this case for the necessary better.

For much of the film, Spielberg shows an admirable restraint, concentrating on the mechanics of the political give-and-take and allowing quiet, telling moments to emerge at a blessedly unhurried pace. Yet, he can’t quite totally shed the inclination towards emotional pushiness that has stirred his detractors throughout his long career. Pleasurable as it is to watch strikingly unfussy scenes in which Day-Lewis’s Lincoln raises his conflicted allies to action with firm moral force or amuses himself in a tense situation with a bawdy anecdote, there are also those moments, thankfully rare, when the movie collapses into manipulative malarkey. Whether first found in the script or on Spielberg’s storyboards, there should have been a mutual decision to excise the scene in which a black White House employee feels strangely, sentimentally compelled to watch Lincoln the whole time he makes the long walk out of the building to join his wife at the theater. Its blatant mawkishness is bad enough, but it looks even worse held up against the lean seriousness of the rest of film.

Overall, though, Spielberg has a sure hand, dropping the pomposity that fatally marred last year’s War Horse. It’s as if the director is as enthralled by his lead actor as anyone else. He’s there to capture the transformation he sees before him, and is sure too much visual or tonal manipulation will obscure the towering achievement on the other end of the lens. Day-Lewis’s performance is so strong it’s conceivable it could even alter the approach of a director as strong and seasoned as Spielberg.

 

Spectrum Check

This was a week strictly about film for me at Spectrum Culture. My main piece of writing was a review of a new documentary about an ongoing photography project intended to relay easily understandable evidence of the effects of climate change. It’s quite good, which also means it’s highly depressing.

I also bookended the latest edition of our ongoing survey of the best comedic performances of each year of each decade. This time getting the privilege of two of the very best acting jobs of the whole decade, comedic or not.

 

Buy the sky and sell the sky and bleed the sky and tell the sky

Three films deep into Daniel Craig’s tenure as James Bond, and the reboot of the character that started with 2006′s Casino Royale is totally complete. In Skyfall there are hints of the character as he was previously conceived–in the brief flirtatious banter between him and a fellow agent named in the credits as Eve (Naomie Harris), in the sturdy ease with global travel, in the proclivity for martinis prepared in a certain way–but this is largely a Bond that is darker, grimmer, grittier. The screenplay credited to Neil Purvis, Robert Wade and John Logan even finds a way to slice off some of his superhero capabilities as a spy, contriving a downtime marked by haunting animosity towards his superiors and a softening of his skills. When he strides into the main adventure of the film, it’s with a little less swagger and a touch of hesitancy, a worry about whether or not he’s fully up to the responsibilities of his license to kill. He’s a master spy for the 21st century, shaped as much by those who could claim other screens in the multiplex (Jason Bourne, maybe, or the gray souls of a John le Carré adaptation) than the fifty years of sensational silver screen adventures that have come before. That’s not necessarily good or bad, but it is that state of things. Pussy Galore’s not coming back any time soon, kids.

Adding to the aspirational prestige of Skyfall is the fact that it’s been handed to Sam Mendes to direct, the first time a helmer with an Oscar on his shelf has been given control of Agent 007. Mendes has a bad habit of letting his films get swamped with stultifying pomposity, but working in pure genre fare, an unabashed action-thriller, is a surprisingly fine match. Just as intentionally loosening up with his previous feature, the raggedy and appealing Away We Go, brought out different, shrewder insight in his filmmaking, so to does tackling a movie that is primarily grounded in pure entertainment make him unlock different skills as a creator. The vaunted (and occasionally derided) precision Mendes brings to constructing his images works marvelously for the action sequences, making them sharp and lucidly delivered, providing clarity as to what’s going on, even when the hand-to-hand combat is largely rendered in silhouette. The intense control Mendes has as a filmmaker has found its ideal place.

I don’t know if Mendes thought he was making the best Bond film ever, but I’m damn sure he knew he was making the prettiest. Working with cinematographer Roger Deakins (who’d previously shot his Jarhead and Revolutionary Road), Mendes makes a film that is absolutely stunning, awash in color and ravishing light that lends each scene its own overwhelming sense of mood. The entire extended last sequence, which gives the film its title, is a particular tour de force for Deakins, delivering a fairly standard progression of action mayhem and stern face-offs in roughly the visual manner that might be employed by Terrence Malick after shotgunning a Red Bull. There was little narrative or emotional tension to the scenes for me, but I adored looking at it.

The divide between visuals and story is present throughout. The plot is fine, I suppose, hinging on a list of undercover agents that is introduced, established as a matter of grave consequence and pretty much ignored after that. The novelty of his humorless grimace completely worn off, Daniel Craig does nothing notable with the role of Bond, and the most overqualified members of the cast–Judi Dench, Ralph Fiennes and Albert Finney–give solid, perfunctory performances. Javier Bardem gets a little more mileage out of his turn as the villain, but that’s largely because he seems engaged by the idea of doing whatever the hell he wants with the role, probably in the knowledge that Mendes is more interested in consulting with Deakins on the best way to capture a beam of light breaking the frame behind him as he smirks and preens.

Skyfall is probably the best of the films since Craig came aboard to help in the process of tuning up the franchise, but it still sometimes feels like it’s comprised of a few too many borrowed parts, notions gently pilfered from other contemporary offerings. Sure, it looks like nothing we’ve quite seen in this genre, but looks can be deceiving. Like some of the “Bond girls” of the past, it’s gorgeous without really being distinctive. Something tells me that most of those involved with Skyfall are satisfied with that trade-off. In this instance, so am I.