A Late Quartet is a compelling character-driven drama about the individuals that make up an elite and successful classical string quartet. After twenty-five years, the cellist and leader develops Parkinson’s and must consider retirement. This development takes the lid off an array of long-simmering issues and triggers personal and interpersonal crises.
What makes A Late Quartet so gripping is the level of performance – not surprising considering the top shelf cast. Christopher Walken plays a man of uncommon dignity and stateliness, without the creepiness or even the eccentricity that his characters are usually imbued. Philip Seymour Hoffman is superb as a man who unleashes deeply buried resentments and vulnerabilities. Catherine Keener is also striking as a woman who cannot answer the question, “Do you love me?”. Mark Ivanir (who I didn’t remember from Schindler’s List and who often plays Russian gangsters) is excellent as a callous perfectionist brought literally to his knees by something he never expected. Imogen Poots (Solitary Man) also shines as the prodigy daughter who drops her youthful playfulness when it’s time to settle a score with her mother.
One more note: I relished the delightful homage to Dinner with Andre when we suddenly see Wallace Shawn holding forth in a New York restaurant.
We aren’t surprised by any of the plot points, but we are continually surprised by the reactions of the characters, so masterfully delivered by the actors.
At the moment of Abraham Lincoln’s death, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, standing at the foot of Lincoln’s bed, said “Now he belongs to the ages”. Indeed, Lincoln became immortalized as moral icon, martyr and master of language (all of which he was). But, because we didn’t see Lincoln campaign and govern on the nightly television news (or even on newsreels), there has been no popular familiarity with Lincoln in the flesh. With Lincoln, Steven Spielberg has pushed aside the marble statue and re-introduced us Lincoln the man.
The great actor Daniel Day-Lewis becomes the man Lincoln. We see him as the genius of political strategy who is always several moves ahead of the other players. We see him as the pragmatist who will do what is necessary to accomplish his goals. We see him fondly cajoling his wife but gingerly avoiding her outbursts. We see him as a complex father – grieving one son, doting to a second, distant to another. And we see Lincoln as a very funny guy – both a master communicator who tells anecdotes to make his point and a raconteur who enjoys laughing at his own bawdy stories. Day-Lewis brings all of these aspects to life in a great performance.
Besides Day-Lewis, Tommy Lee Jones, as a key Congressional leader, and James Spader, as a political fixer, get the best lines. Sally Field is perfectly cast as Mary Todd Lincoln. Bruce McGill, David Straithern, Hal Holbrook, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Jared Harris (Mad Men) and Jackie Earle Haley (Little Children) are all excellent, too.
Spielberg and screenwriter Tony Kushner chose to focus on the few months at the end of the Civil War when Lincoln was trying to get Congress to pass the 13th Amendment to ban slavery. Lincoln knew that, once the Civil War ended, his earlier Emancipation Proclamation was unlikely to withstand legal and political challenges and act to permanently ban slavery. He also gauged that passage of the 13th Amendment was only viable before the end of the war, which was within sight. His only recourse was to try to rush a successful vote over both the obstructionism of the opposing party and attempted sabotage by the Confederacy while both wings of his own party refused to join in collaboration. It’s a horse race.
So we have a political thriller – one of the best depictions of American legislative politics ever on film. Lincoln retains a team of lobbyists played by Tim Blake Nelson, John Hawkes and Spader. These guys know that appealing to the principles of the targeted Congressmen is not going to get enough votes, so they enthusiastically plunge into less high minded tactics. Spader’s character operates with unmatched gusto and is one of the highlights of the movie. Lincoln’s lawyerly parsing of a note to Congress would put Bill Clinton to shame.
All of this really happened. Lincoln, based on Doris Kearns Goodwin’s absorbing Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, is utterly historically accurate. Lincoln buffs will especially appreciate small touches like Lincoln’s pet name for his wife, Stanton’s aversion to Lincoln’s endless stream of anecdotes, Thaddeus Stevens’ wig, Ben Wade’s scowl, Lincoln’s secretaries (the White House staff) sharing a bed and the never ending flood of favor-seekers outside the door of the President’s White House office. I think that Mary Lincoln is portrayed a bit too sympathetically, but that’s a tiny quibble. One more fun note: the 1860s were to male facial hair what the 1970s were to apparel – a period when everyone could make the most flamboyant fashion choices, mostly for the worse.
Lincoln is one of the year’s best films, and like Lincoln himself, timeless.
Daniel Craig returns as Her Majesty’s Action Hero, James Bond in Skyfall, an updating of the Bond franchise. The core of the franchise is still the Bond character – impossibly suave, sexy and insurmountable. Daniel Craig pulls it off as only Sean Connery could. Craig’s 007 is more shopworn this time, with a drinking problem and a battled scarred (albeit Adonis-like) body. But Craig’s Bond can still jump inside a moving train and then reach inside his jacket sleeve to adjust his cuff.
This episode’s Bond supervillain is played by an especially menacing Javier Bardem plus peroxide. When filmmakers change Bardem’s hairstyle, something just happens to make him extra creepy.
It’s tough to impress an audience these days with cool gizmos, when we have guys sitting in Nevada watching SUVs in Afghanistan on satellite transmission and then blowing them up by remote control. So in Skyfall, Bond goes retro and brings back the Aston Martin with the ejector seat and the machine gun headlights.
Skyfall also sets up the changing of the guard for franchise, retiring Judi Dench and adding Ralph Fiennes, Ben Whishaw and Naomie Harris. Naomie Harris is an especially welcome addition – beautiful, engaging and able to pull off an action scene.
But the real reason to watch Skyfall is for the action. It’s tough to top the first sequence, which features a motorcycle chase on the rooftops of Istanbul’s Grand Bazaar turning into a fight on top of a moving train. Skyfall is one of the better pure action flicks this year.
Chasing Mavericks is the true story of Santa Cruz teen surfing prodigy Jay Moriarty being mentored by a veteran surfer so he can challenge Mavericks, the mythic surf spot near Half Moon Bay, California. Moriarty was a kid left with just one unreliable parent who developed his passion with the help of a surrogate father, himself a damaged soul. It’s a good story and heartwarming, if predictable – but exceptional in two respects.
First, the scenes of Mavericks are awe-inspiring. Michael Apted took over when director Curtis Hanson became ill. Whichever one of them shot the scenes at Mavericks deserves significant recognition. As anyone has taken an amateur snapshot of the Grand Canyon knows, it’s tough to convey colossal scale in a photograph without a person or familiar object for comparison. In Chasing Mavericks, we do see the surfers, tiny against the 30 foot faces of the waves. But we also see the massive swells alone, erasing the coastline as they rise – and it is an unforgettable experience. My one criticism of the surfing scenes is that almost every shot is less than 4 seconds, which doesn’t allow for full appreciation of long rides.
Second, the movie was shot on location at Mavericks and at many Santa Cruz locations, including Lighthouse Point, Steamer Lane and Seacliff. The depiction of the locale and the local surfing culture will especially resonate with anyone familiar with the area.
Surfing is a sport that has inspired superb documentaries (Riding Giants, Step into Liquid, and the Endless Summer films) and generally putrid life action fictional films (Blue Crush and the Beach Party drek). For all of its limitations, Chasing Mavericks may be the best ever non-documentary surfing feature.
Chasing Mavericks is just OK for most movie-goers , but if you’re into surfing and/or have an interest in the Santa Cruz and San Mateo coast, it’s a Must See.
Denzel Washington stars in this top rate thriller about an airline pilot who becomes a hero after saving his passengers in a miraculous crash landing, but then falls into legal jeopardy when alcohol is found in his blood. The plane crash is thrilling, but the high stakes suspense in the final 90 minutes is about whether he can get his drinking under control.
What makes Flight singular is that the hero can take control of a crisis at 35,000 feet and rise to superhuman performance, but is completely out of control when he spots a mini bottle of Ketel One.
And what a hero Denzel Washington makes! The guy is among our very best actors, and here, his edginess and bluster mask the pilot’s achingly vulnerable loneliness and self-loathing. And the charisma and confidence in Denzel’s screen presence makes him totally credible as an action hero.
Director Robert Zemeckis (Back to the Future) delivers a plane crash scene for the ages, and he does an excellent job of keeping up the suspense. Flight is pedal-to-the-metal intensity until the final ten minutes, when the ending didn’t quite work for me. For me, only the ending keeps Flight from being a Must See and one of the year’s best.
The English actress Kelly Reilly is really, really good as a trashy southern heroin addict whose life intersects with the pilot’s, and who must make the same choice between recovery and demise. John Goodman is hilarious as a gonzo enabler right out of Hunter S. Thompson. The rest of the cast shines, too, especially Don Cheadle, Bruce Greenwood and Tamara Tunie.
The filmmakers of Cloud Atlas clearly believe that more is better. They give us not one, not two – but six stories spanning six centuries. They give us lots of movie stars: Tom Hanks, Halle Berry, Jim Broadbent, Hugo Weaving, Jim Sturgess, Susan Sarandon, Hugh Grant and more. The actors each play multiple roles, with Hanks, Berry, Weaving and Sturgess playing at least six each – sometimes playing characters of different genders and different races. There are costume dramas on the high seas of the 1840s and in 1930s England, plus two sci-fi settings – one recalling the high-tech, high-speed Tron and also a post-apocalyptic tribal future. There are even two references to the sci-fi cult classic Soylent Green. Cloud Atlas even had three directors.
Whew.
The six story lines are threaded together so we follow them until all six climax in the final hectic thirty minutes. The six stories are each a series of cliff hangers. As a character in one story falls into peril, the screenplay jumps to another thread, and on and on.
As it manically jumps from story to story, Cloud Atlas touches upon some Big Themes (good and evil, kindness and control, freedom, reincarnation), and we get the brush strokes of a New Agey theology (as if the world needs another theology). This is where Cloud Atlas gets fuzzy. Fortunately, the movie is so rapidly paced, that it never gets pretentious as we jump from story to story.
Is Cloud Atlas fun to watch? Yes, there’s just too much fast-paced action going on, too much eye candy and too many engaging actors for Cloud Atlas to fail the fun test. Is Cloud Atlas a great movie? No, there just isn’t enough coherent substance in there to hook us emotionally. Is it a Must See? No. Would I see it again? No, but I’m glad I saw it once.
In the French film A World Without Women (Un monde sans femmes), Vincent Macaigne plays a lovable loser who manages holiday rentals in a northern French beach town. He is amiable and good-hearted, but lonely and painfully socially inept. A good timing single mom brings her college age daughter for a week on the beach and teases him out of his protective shell and into a position of maximum vulnerability.
Macaigne’s characterization is outstanding. We really care for him and don’t want him to get hurt. But Macaigne brilliantly employs little touches to illustrate his character’s utter lack of savoir-faire. For example, at one point he and the mom are leaning shoulder to shoulder against a fence. She has her arms crossed, and she’s leading him on. He grasps her her nearest hand with his nearest hand. But since he’s now holding her left hand with his left, he has pinned her left arm awkwardly across her body like a pretzel, which drains all of the sexual spark out of the situation. And he can’t put his arm around her because he’s already using that arm to hold her hand. It’s such a simple action, yet so meaningful.
Laure Calamy is also very good as the fortyish gal who dresses too young and flirts with every available man, leaving male carnage in her wake.
Writer-director Guillaume Brac shows a real command of characters and dialogue in this film. I’m looking forward to his first feature. A World Without Women is only 56 minutes long, and plays with Brac’s 24 minute Stranded, which also stars Macaigne as essentially the same character The two films played together in Paris to surprising popularity. Fortunately, Brac decided not to bloat the two screenplays into two bad 90-minute features. Good for him.
I saw both Stranded and A World Without Women at the San Francisco Film Society’s French Cinema Now series. A World Without Women is not available now on any platform (DVD, Stream, VOD) that I can find, but when it is, I’ll make it a Stream of the Week. This trailer is in French without subtitles.
In the Belgian comedy Mobile Home, two underachievers in their late 20s, decide to move away from their parents. They move into a Fiat version of a Winnebago so they can tour the world. But their big move isn’t really that independent because they park the new home on wheels within an easy drive of their parents. The question in Mobile Home is whether either of them will catch even a whiff of adult responsibility or whether they will continue denying that it is time to get a real job.
This Belgian story is smarter than most Hollywood bromances, but nothing we haven’t seen before. A nice little festival film.
I saw Mobile Home at the San Francisco Film Society’s French Cinema Now series. The trailer is in French without subtitles.
All Together (Et si on vivait tous ensemble?) is a poignant French comedy about five septuagenarian friends who decide to eschew the nursing home and live communally. They hire an anthropology grad student as a caregiver, and he changes his thesis topic to study the social and sexual behavior of the European elderly.
The comedy comes as they resist the insults of age. One elderly activist, bullhorn in hand, is dismissed as an impotent, harmless crank when the cops refuse to arrest him at a demonstration even when he hits a cop in the helmet with a bottle.
The excellent cast includes Jane Fonda (acting for the first time in fluent French in thirty years). Geraldine Chaplin, who has acted in French, Spanish, Italian and German films over the years, is impressively spry. The great French comic actor Pierre Richard (The Man with the One Brown Shoe?) is brilliant as a man terrified by his increasing loss of memory.
Although it covers similar territory as this year’s indie hit The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (a slightly better film), they are different movies, with All Together more focused on mortality and the infirmities that come with age.
I saw All Together at the San Francisco Film Society’s French Cinema Now series. All Together is now available in the US on Video On Demand, including Amazon Instant Video.
In this indie drama, a couple navigates life while drunk. Can they stay together and flourish when she sobers up? Smashed is a remarkably realistic portrayal of the drinking life and the challenges of recovery and relapse, informed by the personal experience of co-writer Susan Burke.
The best thing about Smashed is the performance of Mary Elizabeth Winstead as the wife. Winstead realistically takes her character through the carelessness, denial, humiliation and self-degradation of drinking and the fears and determination that co-exist in her recovery. It’s a stellar performance, and I’ll be looking for Winstead in bigger roles.
Also very good are Nick Offerman as the wife’s colleague, Megan Mullally, unrecognizable as the wife’s boss, and the always delightful Octavia Spencer.
As The Wife pointed out, the amount of time that director and co-writer James Ponsoldt spent on the drinking part of the story means that lots of plot points whiz by in the final ten minutes. Still, Smashed is very watchable and benefits from the breakthrough performance by Winstead.
