Get Low: Robert Duvall is a hermit who decides to put on his own funeral while he is alive. It runs out that his 40 years of isolation is self-imposed house arrest for a mistake in his youth. So what seems like a humorous Appalachian anecdote turns out to be a fable of redemption. Bill Murray and Sissy Spacek are excellent, while Duvall’s performance elevates the movie. It’s a little movie that is entertaining and satisfying, with a dose of greatness from Duvall.
Movies
Farewell (L'affaire Farewell)
Farewell (L’affaire Farewell) is mostly a riveting Cold War espionage film, with an unfortunately off kilter secondary story that doesn’t belong in the same movie. The main story is based on fact: a senior KGB colonel becomes dissatisfied with the stagnant corruption of the Soviet Union and decides to bring about revolutionary change by leaking Soviet secrets to the West. To avoid detection, he chooses to pass the secrets in plain sight to an amateur civilian, a midlevel French corporate manager in Moscow.
The Russian lead is played by Serbian director Emir Kusturica, who gave good acting performances in The Good Thief and The Widow of St. Pierre. Kusturica is outstanding here as the canny and world-weary master spy, and he carries the film when he is on-screen.
The French lead is played by French director Guillaume Canet, who directed one of my recent favorites, Tell No One, and played a villain in that movie. Tell No One is on my list of 10 Great Movies You Missed in the 2000s. Niels Arestrup (from The Prophet, this week’s DVD choice) is excellent as the French security chief.
The spycraft, the complex Francophile character played by Kusturica (code-named “Farewell”), his struggling family life and the attempts by the amateur Frenchman to keep his head bobbing above water combine for a compelling story.
So far, so good. But then the film tries to tell another story – the geopolitical impact of Farewell’s leaks. And the tone of the film switches from the serious spy tale with serious consequences to its main characters to not-so-dark comedy. Suddenly, we see Fred Ward broadly playing Ronald Reagan as if in a Saturday Night Live skit, Philippe Magnan as a somber, one-note Francois Mitterand and Willem Dafoe lacking any kind of gravitas as a CIA chieftain. Fortunately, although this mini-farce distracts from a good film, Kusturica’s character and his performance maintain the movie’s worthiness to see.
The Girl Who Played With Fire
The Girl Who Played With Fire (Flickan Som Lekte Med Elden): This is a highly entertaining follow-up to my personal favorite film of the year so far, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. Again, the story revolves around Lisbeth Salander, the tiny woman with a lethal mix of damage and drive, played by the Swedish actress Noomi Rapace. Rapace’s Lisbeth is a tiny fury of a Goth hacker. At only 88 pounds, so she will lose a fistfight with a man; but she prevails with her smarts, resourcefulness and machine-like relentlessness. Lisbeth is always mad AND always gets even. As I have written before, Lisbeth Salander is the best new crime drama character since Helen Mirren’s Inspector Jane Tennyson.
In The Girl Who Plays With Fire, Lisbeth is framed for a triple murder. She must find The Real Killer while on the run, aided by a mostly independent investigation by her ally, journalist Mikael Blomkvist. Their parallel investigations lead to a villain much closer to Lisbeth than one could imagine. Plays with Fire has the structure of a detective procedural, but has the tone of a thriller.
Although I liked them both, I did prefer The Girl With a Dragon Tattoo to Plays With Fire. The Wife and two friends who had all read the books, strongly preferred Played with Fire to Dragon Tattoo. I don’t know whether this is a gender thing or whether people who know the story react to the movies differently. I generally enjoy major plot twists more when I don’t see them coming, and I have certainly found some big surprises in both Dragon Tattoo and Plays With Fire.
Plays With Fire is the second part of Stieg Larsson’s trilogy, to be followed in October by The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest.
Chloe and Nathalie
Chloe is a 2010 sexual thriller that is recently available on DVD. It’s about an attractive and successful middle aged couple. The wife has reason to believe that the husband is having an affair. To make sure, she hires a beautiful call girl to tempt the husband. In increasingly sexually charged meetings, the call girl reports back to her with explicit details of a torrid affair.
Chloe is a remake of the 2003 French Nathalie, where the couple is played by Fanny Ardent and Gerard Depardieu and the call girl by Emmanuelle Beart. Now you would think that watching the mysteriously sexy Fanny Ardent become sexually obsessed and the smokin’ hot Emmanuelle Beart describing and acting out sex would be pretty darn interesting. But Nathalie is dreary and heavy – even laborious to watch. Despite excellent acting by its three stars, Nathalie is a failure.
Chloe is directed by one of my most admired filmmakers, Atom Egoyan (Exotica, Sweet Hereafter, Adoration) and his movie is paced much more crisply and compellingly than is Nathalie. Julianne Moore and Liam Neeson play the couple and Amanda Seyfried plays the callgirl, and they are every bit as good as the French stars of Nathalie (and I prefer Neeson’s performance to Depardieu’s). But Egoyan tries to spice things up even more with two new plot developments at the very end. Because he had already made a superior version of the story, those developments are unnecessary and instead work to cheese out the film.
The Kids Are All Right
Annette Bening and Julianne Moore play a lesbian couple with teen kids. The kids find their sperm donor sire (Mark Ruffalo), who invites himself into the family. This is not what the moms had in mind. Laughs and tears ensue. It’s a smart dramedy with excellent performances, especially from Bening and Moore. Bening certainly deserves an Oscar nod. Mia Wasikowska is great as the daughter; she starred as Alice in Wonderland earlier this year and looks to have a great career ahead.
Because this was the most anticipated indie of the year. I had been expecting something more profound – and it’s not. It’s a crowd pleaser and a good date movie that’s worth seeing, but not the game changer that I had been expecting.
Inception
Inception is the year’s most successful Hollywood blockbuster. Because it’s written and directed by Christopher Nolan (Memento, The Dark Knight), we expect it to be brilliantly inventive and it exceeds that expectation. The story places the characters in reality and at least three layers of dreams simultaneously. A smart viewer can follow 85% of the story – which is just enough. Then you can go out to dinner and argue over the other 15%. The Wife said it was “like The Wizard of Oz on acid”.
Leonardo DiCaprio leads the cast, but the supporting players give the best performances: Ellen Page, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Michael Caine, Marion Cotillard, Pete Postlethwaite, Cillian Murphy, Ken Watanabe, Tom Berenger and Tom Hardy.
Cyrus
John C. Reilly plays a sad sack who kindles a romance with a woman played by Maris Tomei. So far, so good. But then he learns that she lives with her very smart and very possessive adult son (Jonah Hill). This is a very, very dark comedy and a showcase for Jonah Hill, who plays a very manipulative and creepy character with contained intensity. Reilly, Tomei and Cathrine Keener are excellent as always. But, overall, not the most accessible comedy.
Kisses
I just saw a preview of Kisses, which releases August 6. It’s a sweet Irish indie about two suburban tweens who run away to Dublin for a very exhilarating, then scary night. The first time lead actors are excellent. There is a very inventive chase. Stephen Rea has a brief uncredited cameo as a Bob Dylan impersonator. Writer-director Lance Daly kept the film only 75 minutes long – which is just the right length, and won the Irish Best Director award.
Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work
I am not a Joan Rivers fan, but Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work won me over. Rivers’ compulsion to stay busy at age 77 by accepting every conceivable gig is fascinating, and her raw vulnerability makes you care about her. It also helps that Rivers is very, very funny.
DVD pick of the week: The Girl on the Train
The Girl on the Train (La fille du RER) is an absorbing mother daughter drama set in the Paris suburbs.
The young woman is Emilie Dequenne, the Belgian actress who won the best actress award at Canne when she was only 17 in the Dardenne brothers’ Rosetta. In contrast to Rosetta, she doesn’t play a force of nature, but a slacker bobbing through life on a tide of random influences. She lives with her single mom (Catherine Deneuve), and they get along, despite the mother’s unwelcome tips on job hunting.
The daughter meets a guy, her life takes some resulting turns and then she makes a really bad choice. The mom seeks out an old beau, now a celebrity attorney to help fix the situation.
I missed seeing this in the theater because the trailer emphasizes a faked hate crime (and I wasn’t eager to see a topical movie). But the movie is not about the faked hate crime, which occurs late into the story. The story is character driven. The daughter drifts first part of the movie and is controlled by events until she finds herself in a desperate situation; she panics and sees the most stupid option as a solution. The situation then forces the mother to re-open a chapter in her life that she had chosen to close – how far will she open the old door?
It’s on my list of Best Movies of 2010 So Far.
See the rest of my DVD recommendations.