Movies

The Place Beyond the Pines: the sins of the fathers visited upon the sons

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Ryan Gosling and Eva Mendes in THE PLACE BEYOND THE PINES

According to the Old Testament, “the iniquity of the fathers shall be visited upon the sons”.  Indeed, the successes and flaws of fathers, and the choices they make, impact their sons.  And sons are often driven to be like or unlike their fathers, to match them or to surpass them.  That is the territory explored in writer-director Derek Cianfrance’s intelligent drama The Place Beyond the Pines.  (The story is set in Schenectady, New York, and the title refers to the Mohawk origin of the town’s name.)

At first, the story follows a familiar path for a crime drama – a motorcycle trick rider (Ryan Gosling) turns to bank robbery and has an encounter with a cop on patrol (Bradley Cooper).  But the screenplay embeds nuggets about how both men feel about their fathers and how those feelings drive their actions. Both men have infant sons, and the father-son theme becomes more apparent as the story resumes fifteen years later with a focus on their own sons as teenagers.

I can’t remember a recent performance by Ryan Gosling that hasn’t been compelling, and he’s outstanding here, too.  But the unexpected gem is Bradley Cooper, who shows us acting depth and range that we haven’t seen in his earlier work.  Especially in scenes with a police psychiatrist and when forced to ask his father for advice, Cooper exposes the naked vulnerability of his character.

The Place Beyond the Pines is replete with excellent performances.  Eva Mendes plays the mother of Gosling’s baby, and her performance stands up to Gosling’s – no small feat.  Harris Yulin is superb as Cooper’s canny father.  The wonderful Australian actor Ben Mendelsohn (Animal Kingdom, Killing Them Softly) plays Gosling’s crime partner.  Ray Liotta, who often plays shady characters, has never been so menacing.

I found the character of Cooper’s son to be very unsympathetic; he is supposed to be a kid messed up by his parents’ divorce and father’s inattention, and I think that the story would have worked better if it were easier to look past his obnoxiousness to appreciate his damaged nature.  Still, it’s a film that I’m still pondering a day later.  Cianfrance made Blue Valentine, the hard-to-watch but starkly authentic story of an unraveled relationship, an acting showcase for Gosling and Michele Williams.  The Place Beyond the Pines is just as thoughtful and more accessible than Blue Valentine. Pines is an ambitious and mostly successful film.

Beyond the Hills: a bleak tragedy by a masterful filmmaker

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The two lead characters in Beyond the Hills grew up together in a Romanian orphanage where they were subjected to privation and worse – and where they became lifelong soulmates.  They aged out of the orphanage, and, now 24, Alina has been working menial jobs in Germany while Voichita has joined a local monastery.  The monastery is a small rural compound with a rigidly dogmatic provincial priest, a compassionate but simple mother superior and a dozen nuns who run the gamut from devout to superstitious.

Alina craves Voichita’s companionship and viisits the monastery to convince Voichita to leave and join her in Germany.  Voichita resists, and tries to get Alina to join the religious order.  They’re both emotionally damaged from childhood experiences.  There’s a strong bond between the two, and each is unable to let the other go.  But each is strong willed and stubborn.

Then Alina suffers a psychotic breakdown.  Now, since the worst place to treat such a condition would be a community of religious fanatics that is intentionally devoid of modernity, bad things happen. The priest and nuns are not monsters, but ill-equipped to avoid making a series of monstrous choices.  We can only watch as the story moves unrelentingly to its awful conclusion. Sadly, the story is based on actual events at a Moldavian monastery a decade ago.

Beyond the Hills is compelling, in an oft excruciating and uncomfortable way.  But those who commit to its 2 1/2 hours will see some remarkable film artistry from its real star – director Christian Mungiu.  Munghiu’s thriller 4 Months, Three Weeks, 2 Days won the top prize at the Cannes Film Festival (and made #3 on my Best Movies of 2007).   Beyond the Hills won Canne’s screenwriting award.

Munghiu fills Beyond the Hills will one dramatic shot after another.  Early in the film, we see Voichita and Alina hike up a hillside in the Romanian countryside (see photo at top); when they reach the top, the camera swings behind them, and we see the monastery on the next rise.  At the climax, the camera stays fixed on a crowd of characters (see photo below); the action and dialogue is between the two men in the foreground, but our attention is on the reactions of Voichita in the background.  The length and patience of the shot allow our attention to settle on Voichita, and her eyes tell us what she has concluded.  It’s an absolutely gripping moment.

Beyond the Hills is a tough movie by a major film artist.

The Sapphires: irresistible

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TTHE SAPPHIRES

The Sapphires is  a triumph of a Feel Good Movie.  Set in the 1960s, a singing group from an Australian Aboriginal family faces racial obstacles at home, but blossoms when the girls learn Motown hits to entertain US troops in Vietnam.  Remarkably, Tony Briggs based the screenplay on his mother’s real experience – make sure you stay for the Where Are They Now end credits.

The ever amiable Chris O’Dowd (one of the best things about Bridesmaids)  is funny and charming as the girls’ dissolute manager.  Jessica Mauboy, who plays the lead singer, has a great voice for soul music.  A surprisingly beautiful song by the girls’ mom, played by veteran actress Kylie Belling, is an especially touching moment.

The Sapphires is not a deep movie, but it is a satisfying one.  It’s predictable and manipulative, but I can’t think of anyone who wouldn’t enjoy it.  I saw it at this year’s Cinequest, and predict that it will become a word-of-mouth hit.   The Sapphires is a guaranteed good time at the movies.

Ginger & Rosa: a friendship faces a fork in the road

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Alice Englert and Elle Fanning in GINGER & ROSA

The title characters in Ginger & Rosa are 17-year-old best friends in 1962 London.  Through each stage of childhood, they have been inseparable companions and are now, as teens, fierce allies against their mothers. But at 17, Ginger’s intellectualism and Rosa’s romanticism are becoming more pronounced.  Ginger is obsessed with the British nuclear disarmament movement and Rosa is boy crazy. Ginger & Rosa is a solid dramatic snapshot of the moment when this friendship plunges into crisis.

Another important character is Ginger’s unreliable dad (Alessandro Nivola), a political pamphleteer once jailed for his pacifism who justifies his anarchic lifestyle as resistance to authority.  This is political statement, conveniently, serves as a rationale for doing whatever he wants to do, whatever the impact upon others.

The truth tellers in the story are the most constant adults in Ginger’s life,  gay couple and their arch friend played by Timothy Spall, Oliver Platt and Annette Bening.  These three actors are always welcome in a movie, and are outstanding in Ginger & Rosa.

The American actress Elle Fanning is excellent as the always-observant Ginger.  Her performance here marks her as someone who could have an extraordinary career.  Remarkably, Fanning played this 17-year-old character when she was only 14.  The less demanding role of Rosa is well-played by director Sally Potter’s daughter Alice Englert.

Potter gets the period exactly right – from the girls’ ironing their hair to their discovery of turtleneck sweaters.  But, along with Fanning’s stellar performance, is that enough for a satisfying movie?  At the end of the day, it’s a well-crafted, character-driven little movie – but not a Must See.

Letters from the Big Man: Sasquatch is her stalker

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Employing magical realism like Electrick Children, Letters from the Big Man is a completely original movie.  A young woman of fierce independence has left a career with the US Forest Service to do art.  Upended by a bad breakup, she takes an assignment from her former employer that conveniently requires her to do what she really needs to do – make a solo backpacking trip deep into the southern Oregon forests.

The opening quarter of the movie establishes two things.  First, the ancient Oregon forest is awesomely beautiful and inspires reflection.  Second, this woman’s wilderness skills are beyond impressive – she hikes, kayaks, chops wood, makes camp and kindles fire with great ease.  It’s clear that she is extremely experienced in the wild, and she exudes confidence.  She recognizes every plant species, snorkels to count the horns on a sturgeon and wades into streams to measure the siltation. And she can handle a handgun, too.  Wow. (Later in the movie, we see her matter-of-factually rig her bike to recharge her laptop battery with pedal power.)  She comes to realize that someone/something is following her, a thought that may terrify the audience (especially at night), but which only annoys and intrigues her.

As the young woman, Lily Rabe carries the film with her physicality and strength of will.  (Rabe is the daughter of the late Jill Clayburgh.)  Her character is also prickly, which keeps us from warming to her right away.  But she attracts the attention of two males.  The first is another backpacker, who turns out to be an environmental activist at odds with the Forest Service and ready for female company.  The second is a Bigfoot, who rages against logging in his forest, but who melts at the sight of our heroine and leaves her piles of twigs as tokens of his affection (this is the magical realism).  The movie turns on her response to her two suitors.

Writer-director Christopher Munch has created a movie of uncommon beauty, and he has the balls to include a lovelorn Bigfoot.  The magical realism works because he presents it absolutely straight, as if having a Sasquatch in the story is as normal as a squirrel.  Most of the rest of the story is extremely realistic, especially the interactions between officials of the Forest Service, environmentalist activists and loggers.  The one exception is an unnecessarily farfetched conspiracy theory about military intelligence.

Letters from the Big Man is one of the best looking and best sounding movies of the year.  Visually, it’s like trekking through wilderness (but without the insects).  And the sound track is exquisite, centered on the natural sounds of rushing water and animal calls, occasionally augmented with an ensemble’s reverential music.

Will Sasquatch get the girl?  It’s worth finding out.  Letters from the Big Man is available on VOD, including on Amazon Instant.

 

Electrick Children: magical Mormon runaways in Vegas

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With Electrick Children, a new filmmaker has created an entirely unique teen coming of age story.  Electrick Children employs an element of magical realism that requires the audience to accept a premise which cannot be real.  The result is a highly original success.

A 15-year-old Utah girl has been raised in a remote fundamentalist Mormon enclave where everyone dresses as 19th century pioneers.  She has been immersed in Bible stories, but hasn’t been exposed to any modern culture or to the facts of life.  She happens upon a hidden cassette tape and finds her first rock and roll song revelatory – so revelatory that she thinks that the song has moved her to pregnancy.  Here comes the magical realism – she really is a virgin, and she really is pregnant.

Because of her faith, she doesn’t find immaculate conception to be the least bit implausible.  Not so with her parents, who wrongly blame her 17-year-old brother.  Their answer is to kick the boy out of the home and to marry off the girl to a neighboring fundamentalist.  Facing the unwanted shotgun wedding, the girl commandeers the family pickup and flees; her brother, seeking a way to prove his innocence, stows away.

The kids surface in Las Vegas, where they fall in with a band of runaway teens.   Of course the Mormon kids are completely unprepared to navigate any modern city, let alone Vegas.  Their guides, the more streetwise kids, are more comfortable with the glitz and sleaze of Vegas, but are just as untethered.  The Mormon kids and the suburban runaways have life-altering adventures on the streets.

The girl embarks on a quest to find the singer who she thinks has fathered her child, not understanding that there is more than one rock band in the world (or that Blondie’s Hanging on the Telephone has not made her pregnant.)  Central to the film’s success is that the girl is naive but never silly.  The young actress Julia Garner shines in a performance that is never ironic and always completely sincere.  The girl is determined and devout, seeking teen independence in ways that are logical for someone with her isolated upbringing.

As good as Garner is, the real talent here is writer-director Rebecca Thomas, a Mormon from Nevada with an MFA from Columbia.  This is her first feature film, and I can’t wait for her next one.

Phil Spector: look at the freak

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Who better to play the explosively wacked-out music genius in Phil Spector than Al Pacino?  Here, Spector is living in self-delusional isolation and still taking way too many drugs, and he’s on trial for his life.  His defense lawyer (Helen Mirren) faces a dilemma – the only way the court will hear her best evidence is if she first calls her very unsympathetic client to the stand.

Phil Spector is written and directed by David Mamet (Glengarry Glen Ross, House of Games), but it’s very minor Mamet.  The only reason to watch Phil Spector is for the inevitable Pacino meltdown.  That meltdown is a doozy, but it exposes Phil Spector as more of a freak show than a complete film.

On the Road: surprisingly little energy from all that Benzedrine

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On the Road is the faithful but ultimately unsuccessful movie adaptation of the seminal Jack Kerouac novel.  The novel is itself primarily remembered as memoir of the Beat Generation’s defining literary voices, for its stream of consciousness narrative and for the unforgettable portrait of Keroauc’s muse Neal Cassady as the character Dean Moriarity.  Director Walter Salles succeeds in creating a wonderful time capsule of the Beats – but that’s not enough.

The story is centered on the famous series of road trips where Keroauc latches on to the the charismatic and erratic Cassady, hoping that their adventures will unclog Kerouac’s writer’s block.  Although he has some independent escapades, Kerouac is essentially the observer, unleashing Cassady on North America.  Cassady had insatiable appetites for sex, Benzedrine, marijuana, nonstop talking and driving long distances at high rates of speed, and he was a pillar of unreliability.  If Cassady is known for anything, it’s for his twitchy freneticism and speedy monologues.  If you’ve read On the Road and especially if you’ve seen film footage of the real Neal Cassady, you’ll find the actor Garret Hedlund’s portrayal too measured.  Except for one jazz party scene, it seems as if Hedlund has never witnessed the effects of amphetamines.  Unfortunately, the Cassady character – the throttle for the novel – is the brakes to the movie.

The narrative is pretty linear.  We are SHOWN stream of consciousness at the end of the movie when Kerouac bangs out On the Road on his single 120-foot roll of typewriter paper.  But the movie has none of the novel’s helter-skelter flavor.

But if anyone knows how to direct a road movie, it’s Walter Salles (The Motorcycle Diaries).  Salles captures the long hauls across the vast continent and vividly depicts settings from gritty NYC to the never ending Nebraska plains. In one particularly nice touch, the characters enter San Francisco on a completely fog-shrouded Golden Gate Bridge, which Bay Area residents know to be a more typical experience than postcard weather on the Bridge.

The Keroauc character is ably played by Sam Riley, who has the less showy role of Kerouac’s cultural sponge.

Kristen Stewart plays Cassady’s 16-year-old bride; since she’s a big movie star, she gets more screen time than she gets pages in the book.  That’s a good thing, because, despite all the grief she gets for the Twilight movies, Stewart can really act.

The surrounding cast is excellent.  Tom Sturridge stands out as the young Allen Ginsburg.   Alice Braga sparkles as the Mexican-American single mom that Keroauc picks cotton with.  We glimpse Viggo Mortensen and Amy Adams as Beat figures William S. Burroughs and June Vollmer.   Steve Buscemi is always welcome in a movie, and here he gets a creepy pencil-thin mustache.  Kirsten Dunst and Elisabeth Moss do what they can with the roles of women scolding their unreliable men.

On the Road, with its fine secondary cast, is a leisurely tour through the Beat period, but without the energy of its pioneers.

Beware of Mr. Baker: please don’t hit me again, Ginger

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The documentary Beware of Mr. Baker traces the life of the extremely volatile legendary rock drummer Ginger Baker (Cream, Blind Faith).  Baker is undeniably a musical genius, and the film highlights the stature of his work in both rock and jazz.  Unfortunately, the nasty combination of his aggressively anti-social personality and his heroin addiction precluded successful professional and familial relationships.  We hear about Baker’s good and bad sides from his former Cream band mates Jack Bruce and Eric Clapton, several of his ex-wives and his son, drummer Kofi Baker.  And we meet Ginger Baker himself, for better and for worse.  At one point, the septuagenarian Baker employs his cane to break the nose of the film’s director, Jay Bulger.

Bulger gets credit for comprehensive research into Baker’s life and times, for his inventive use of animation in depicting stages of Baker’s life and for getting the combustible Baker himself on camera.  Beware of Mr. Baker is the skillfully told story of a fascinating life.  Beware of Mr. Baker is now available on VOD through Amazon and other outlets.

 

The Incredible Burt Wonderstone: Jim Carrey gets to be funny again

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In The Incredible Burt Wonderstone, Steve Carrell plays the title character, a schlub who has lucked into Vegas headliner success as a magician and has developed narcissistic entitlement, along with some destructive spending habits.  Steve Buscemi plays his long suffering partner.  Their prop-driven act, with its Siegfried and Roy schtick, is challenged by an emerging street magician a la David Blaine (Jim Carrey).  Laughs result when the clueless Burt Wonderstone sabotages his own successful act and must come to terms with his own limitations; this being show biz, there’s a lot of unabashed backstabbing.  There’s also a brief but very funny poke at celebrity charity in the Third World.

As we remember from his breakthrough performance in 1994’s The Mask, there are things that Jim Carrey can do that no other performer can.  His movie vehicles since The Mask, however, have tempted him to preen and wink at the audience.   Here, he has a well-written role that is perfect for his rubber face, physicality and sheer force of character, and he takes it to the max. It turns out that, while he can make us wince in a Jim Carrey movie, Carrey can make us belly laugh in a Steve Carrell movie.

The Incredible Burt Wonderstone benefits from a deep cast.  The very game and able Olivia Wilde plays the exploited intern.  James Gandolfini plays a deliciously ruthless and self-interested casino tycoon.  The great Alan Arkin just gets funnier as he ages.  And Jay Mohr is delightful in one his best recent roles, a hopelessly unsuited comedian named Rick the Implausible.

The Incredible Burt Wonderstone is fluff, but it’s fun fluff.  And a showcase for Jim Carrey.