INTERSTELLAR (2014)
Let’s face it; the world most of us live
in is too small for Christopher Nolan. Like his obvious influences, Stanley
Kubrick and Steven Spielberg, he’s looking for answers to questions that can’t
be contained in the dimensions of the natural world, which can only be found
out there, far from what we know on Earth.
I wouldn’t compare Nolan to these two
extraordinary directors except that he’s made a film that deserves mention
alongside their sci-fi masterpieces “2001: A Space Odyssey” and “Close
Encounters of a Third Kind.” While in some ways, “Interstellar” is nothing but
an episode of “The Twilight Zone” imbued with all the razzle-dazzle of 21st
Century computer-based filmmaking, it also presents an astonishingly complex,
perfectly constructed great adventure on a scale rarely attempted.
The film opens on a Nebraska farm where
widower Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) is trying to raise his son Tom and
daughter Murph amid a world gone environmentally bad. The human race faces dire
straits as plants die and resources dwindle. Yet 10-year-old Murph (a very
convincing Mackenzie Foy) is concerned about a ghost she says is haunting her
room, warning her of something ominous.
In fact, the apparition ends up leading
the family to discover a research outpost of NASA in the middle of corn country
and, for Cooper, a chance to revive his long-ago career as a test pilot
(there’s a lot of Chuck Yeager in him). Though it’s a difficult decision,
Cooper eventually decides that he must put the future of Earth ahead of his
family and joins a mission with three scientists to the other side of the
galaxy.
Professor Brand (Nolan’s go-to authority
figure Michael Caine) has develop a theory that involves traveling through a
worm-hole—apparently the science of all this is somewhat legit, according to
the film’s tech adviser and respected scientist Kip Thorne—to find a planet
that can sustain human life. Among the other crew members is Brand’s daughter
Amelia (a miscast Anne Hathaway) and a slab-like robot (voiced by Bill Irwin)
that is clearly the most valuable member of the crew.
There’s no need to get into the
astonishing journey they take, except to say that the script (by Nolan and his
brother Jonathan) makes it believably techie while still understandable to
nonscientific types like me. At the same time, the movie keeps its connection
to humanity by following developments on Earth and the life of Copper’s
children. Those connections provide not only heartbreaking moments, but the quietly
developing solution to the salvation of Earthlings.
The images, mostly created by
cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema (“Her,” “The Fighter”) are stunning,
capturing both the beauty and the desolation of worlds beyond ours. While
“Gravity” was a memorable story of the survival of one very resourceful woman,
who desperately seeks to feel gravity again, “Interstellar” unlocks the secrets
of gravity and moves on to the next level of dimensional understanding.
McConaughey gives the film its heroic
humanity, its symbol of integrity and heartland values; connecting back to the
kind of performances—from the likes of Gary Cooper, John Wayne, James Stewart
or Clint Eastwood—movies once were built around.
The film’s other memorable performance comes
from Jessica Chastain as Cooper’s grownup daughter, who holds the key to
everything in the past and in the future. As she was in “Zero Dark Thirty,” she
is superb at depicting the emotions behind being very good at your job.
Though Hans Zimmer’s score (he also did
“The Dark Knight” and “Inception” for Nolan) will probably win an Oscar, it is
so intrusive into the story that it makes John Williams’ work for Spielberg
sound subtle. While I had no problem hearing the dialogue, many theatergoers
around the country have complained that the sound mixing drowned out the
words.
The 44-year-old Nolan has done challenging
work in the past—“Inception” (a cousin of this time-shifting picture), the
“Dark Knight” trilogy and the backward-told gem “Memento”—but “Interstellar”
surpasses all; he has built a (literally) timeless endorsement of the truth of
science and the overriding power of family, all wrap up in a rollercoaster ride
for the ages. How it all comes together is simply breathtaking; it has that “we
have seen the face of God and he is us” moment that makes smart science-fiction
so exhilarating.
THE GRADUATE (1967)
Mike Nichols directed just 18 feature films
in a 40-year movie career—he always had one foot on the Broadway stage—yet he consistently
delivered memorable, popular, often important films throughout those four
decades. It seems crazy to think that the same director who made “Who’s Afraid
of Virginia Woolf,” his debut in 1966, also made “Catch-22,” “Silkwood,”
“Working Girl,” “Birdcage” and “Charlie
Wilson’s War.”
While not displaying a recognizable
filmmaking style that is usually the mark of greatness, as seen in his
contemporaries Martin Scorsese, Francis Coppola, Robert Altman and Woody Allen,
Nichols, who died last month at age 83, understood how to get the most out of
his actors as well as any director in the past half century. He liked to put
the camera right on the face of the actor and let them work, trusting them, as
one does on the stage, to communicate the truths of the drama or comedy.
Like most artists, his most impressive
work came early. He had just one directing credit to his name, the stage play
“Barefoot in the Park,” a huge hit that ran from 1963 to 1967, when he was
tapped to direct the most volatile actors in the business, Elizabeth Taylor and
Richard Burton, in the film version of the most volatile play in the American repertoire,
Edward Albee’s “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf.” The result was an explosive, uncomfortably
frank film, at that time the most devastating look at marriage ever put on
screen, earning Oscar nominations for all four actors.
But it was his second film, starring an
actor no one had ever heard of, which establish him as one of the most
important filmmakers of his time. “The Graduate” officially reintroduced the
disaffected youth, not as the typical 1950s delinquent, but as a college
educated, well-to-do future CEO who just doesn’t care.
Home after graduating from a prestigious
East Coast school, Benjamin Braddock (that unknown, Dustin Hoffman) wants to be
anywhere but at his parents’ welcome-home party. Nichols shoots the scene in
tight close-ups, as friends of the family seem to suffocate Benjamin with their
inane questions and hallow praise. Then, a friend of his father pulls him aside
and offers advice in a single word: “Plastics.” This, Benjamin realizes, is the
world that he studied so hard to prepare for, that he’s now about to step into.
When he’s not at the Taft Hotel having mechanical
sex with Mrs. Robinson, the married friend of his parents, he’s lounging in his
parents’ pool, drifting without a purpose, without a hope. Then hope arrives,
as he falls helplessly in love with Elaine, Mrs. Robinson’s daughter. Few
things in life inspire hope more than a pretty girl, but then what? Benjamin is
headed straight for a life in plastics.
“The Graduate” was instantly acknowledged
as one of the key films of the era, winning Nichols the Oscar for best director
and scoring six other nominations, including best picture. It remains both
hilarious and insightful, a timeless commentary on sex, love and the American
dream.
He followed his first two remarkable
films (maybe the best one-two punch since Orson Welles made “Citizen Kane” and
“The Magnificent Ambersons”) with his take on novelist Joseph Heller’s dark, sarcastic
and disturbingly funny vision of a war that had previously been portrayed
nearly exclusively in noble terms. “Catch-22,” adopted for the screen by Buck
Henry, who had also scripted “The Graduate,” matches the book’s condemnation of
military bureaucracy and the pure absurdity of warfare.
But the real companion to “The Graduate” was
Nichols’ fourth feature, “Carnal Knowledge” (1971), an uncompromisingly brutal
examination of male sexuality as it evolved from the 1940s to the 1970s.
At the film’s center are the biting,
truthful and revealing conversations between Jonathan (a quietly brilliant Jack
Nicholson) and Sandy (Art Garfunkel) starting when they are college roommates
and continuing, off and on, into their 40s. To watch “Carnal Knowledge” today,
a 43-year-old picture, is to be reminded of the shrill clichés that pass for
honest in contemporary films. When I first saw it as a college student, it hit
me like a brick across the back of my head; who would have known the
complications of sexual relations?
I could keep writing all day about Mike
Nichols films, but I’ll finish by saying that his version, for HBO, of Tony
Kushner’s riveting epic about the AIDS crisis in the 1980s, “Angels in America”
is about as good as television gets. The director manages to make the story
both personal (aided by some brilliant performances) and political, filled with
heartbreak and anger. Few filmmakers have been better at getting to the heart
of human relations; digging into both the beautiful and the ugly, revealing the
lies we tell and the desires we hide.
BIRDMAN OR
(THE UNEXPECTED VIRTUE OF
IGNORANCE) (2014)
With blistering sarcasm and outrageous
physical humor, “Birdman” portrays, like few films ever have, the exhilarating
highs and devastating lows of the life of an actor.
There’s a feeling of frantic desperation
that pervades the film, not just for Riggan Thomas (Michael Keaton), an aging
Hollywood star trying to revive his career on Broadway, but for the other
players too; it is as if everyone’s lives depend on the success of Thomas’
play, “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.” And while “Birdman,” a
movie about acting, revels in its dialogue— bitingly hilarious, heartbreaking
and childishly ridiculous—director Alejandro González Iñárritu (“21 Grams,”
“Babel”) brings a visual style that intensifies every aspect of the film.
Essentially, the ever-moving handheld camera
becomes a character in the picture; daringly bringing the audience right into
the story, into the moment, putting us on stage and in the dressing rooms.
Filmed almost entirely inside the legendary St. James Theatre, the movie is
photographed as one continuous shot, without a single edit, until the final few
minutes. The camera winds through the narrow hallways backstage of the St.
James, following the characters as they interact with one another, and, by
smoothly fading from one day to another, prepare for opening night of the play.
Emmanuel Lubezki, one of the great
cameramen of the past 20 years (“The New World,” “Children of Men,” “The Tree
of Life,” and, taking home the Oscar, “Gravity”) takes the kind of camera
movement made famous by Welles and Scorsese to a new level without letting it
become a distraction. Perfectly complimenting the intense camera work is the
score, one long, dynamitic drum solo by composer Antonio Sanchez.
The film’s title refers to the superhero
franchise that made Riggan famous, but, at the same time, turns him into an
easy target as he tries to write, direct and star on the Great White Way, where
“Hollywood” is considered an obscenity. “Birdman” is also the voice in Riggan’s
head (and occasionally in his dressing room) that he battles with as he nears
opening night. If there’s a comparison to be made, it’s to Bob Fosse’s “All
That Jazz” and its unblinking look at a deeply damaged man of the theater.
Riggan shares similar fears and insecurities as Fosse’s alter-ego Joe Gideon.
The production turns absurd when an
acclaimed but unstable stage actor joins the company (played at full throttle
by Edward Norton), increasing both the interest in the play and Riggan’s blood
pressure. At the same time, Riggan is trying to reconnect with his estranged
daughter Sam (Emma Stone, nailing the pseudo toughness of her generation), who
is working as an assistant on the production.
This is the defining performance of
Keaton career, which, in retrospect is pretty interesting. After his early,
star-making comedy roles in “Night Shift,” “Mr. Mom” and “Beetlejuice,” he
added to his box-office clout with solid work as the first “Batman” in that
early franchise and then followed with a smart turn as a frustrated editor in “The
Paper.” Dumb comedies like “Multiplicity” and “Jack Frost” sunk his stardom,
but he continued to do good dramatic work, twice as Ray Nicolette, a federal
agent, in “Jackie Brown” and “Out of Sight.” At 63, even an Oscar win for
“Birdman” (certainly, a possibility) might not bring him more good roles, but
based on what he does here, he seems poised for greater things.
Keaton expresses the angst, aimlessness
and unabated ambition that marks contemporary America, while still being just a
regular guy trying to get his screwed-up life on track. The dark irony of how
he finds salvation shows the utter foolishness of grand gestures; the
pointlessness of turning life into a stage play. “It is a tale told by an
idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing,” a street performer emotes,
reciting “Macbeth.”
Every performance is priceless,
including Zach Galifianakis as Riggan’s devoted manager, Amy Ryan as his
ex-wife, Naomi Watts as the play’s shaky co-star and, in a small but crucial
role, Lindsay Duncan as the arrogant New York Times theater critic who savors
her power to crush a Broadway show.
Iñárritu’s films—from his
Spanish-language debut, “Amores Perros” to “21 Grams” and “Babel”—are all about
how interconnected we all are, even as we fail to hear or understand what each
other are saying. But those earlier films were just warm-ups for this superb
piece of iconoclastic filmmaking that digs into the heart and soul of an actor
(who better to represent us all?), rips into both Hollywood and Broadway and
cuts open the insecurities that are central to what makes us tick.
The cast of “Birdman” takes this wickedly
smart, multi-layered, but also rambling and messy, script, by the director and
Nicolas Giacobone, Alexander Dinelaris and Armando Bo, and turns it into a
deeply felt, painfully honest motion picture that’s not to be missed.
THE HUNGER GAMES: MOCKINGJAY—PART 1
(2014)
For all the ballyhoo leading up to this
third installment, there’s little to really say about it; the film is but an
intro with no climax, no resolution—a war film that ends before the real battle
begins. The reason we’re still watching is for Jennifer Lawrence’s gloomy,
feisty, magnetic Katniss.
Picking up where “Catching Fire” stopped,
the film opens as Katniss awakes following her rescue from the Games by rebels
from District 13, where she, Gale (Liam Hemsworth) and her family have been
taken. Within this impossibly huge militarized bunker, hundreds, if not
thousands, of rebel forces are preparing for a faceoff with Capital forces and
President Snow (the ever sneering Donald Sutherland).
“Part 1” focuses on the propaganda aspect
of the battle, as rebel leader Coin (Julianne Moore) and her right-hand man,
former games maker, Plutarch (Philip Seymour Hoffman) convince Katniss to be
the face of the revolution and star in videos to inspire the other districts to
join the fight. At this point, Katniss remains just a chess piece in this
strategic war being planned and fought by others. (I’m guessing that may change
in “Part 2.”)
Back in the Capitol, her beloved Peeta
(Josh Hutcherson, still looking, and acting, like a middle-school nerd) is
being used in the same way, urging the rebels to lay down their arms in
televised interviews with Caesar (Stanley Tucci).
Effie (Elizabeth Banks) and Haymitch
(Woody Harrelson) are back to keep Katniss on the straight and narrow, but
they’ve been marginalized once “Games” became war. Hoffman, whose final film appearance will
continue in “Part 2,” offers the films only hint of humanity; everyone else is
so downtrodden you wonder how they could possibly win this revolution.
The film, or
should I say, half-film, makes some interesting points about how 21st
Century “wars” are fought, how the spin and manipulation of opinion becomes
just as important as bomb tonnage. But, overall, it’s a rather dreary, plodding
beginning of this franchise’s conclusion. Ask a friend to give you a two-minute
summary right before you see next Fall’s finale and you wouldn’t have missed a
thing.
WHIPLASH (2014)
What’s not to like about a movie about
jazz? Well, I’ll get to that later, but for a fan of this underappreciated
music, currently barely stirring on its death bed, it was invigorating to see
college musicians worshiping at the feet of Charlie Parker and Buddy Rich.
The film, writer-director Damien
Chazelle’s second movie, has a spare, documentary look and narrow viewpoint of
a indie picture, never trying to turn its simple story into something more than
one person’s experience.
That person is Andrew (Miles Teller), a
student at a prestigious New York music school, who desperately wants to
impress the school’s jazz band director, Terence Fletcher (J.K. Simmons) and
become the band’s No. 1 drummer.
A soft-spoken, pleasant young man,
Andrew, somewhat of a loner, is intently determined to be a great drummer.
Fletcher thrives on verbal abuse, leveling multi-adjective profanities—most of
a homophobic nature—to push his young musicians to hit the notes and keep time
to perfection. His young students both hate him and want to please him with the
same intensity.
Simmons, who became one of the cinema’s
most interesting supporting players since establishing himself as the forensic
psychologist on the original “Law and Order,” gives a gut-wrenching,
spit-flying performance as the manipulative, dishonest and despicable Fletcher.
He makes Hannibal Lector seem like a pleasant-enough dinner companion.
From my point of view, Chazelle turns
Fletcher into such a monster that I stopped believing in the story’s reality. I
seriously question whether the continual verbal abuse displayed in the film
could go on in 2014 at a high-regarded academy. He’s a combination of a basic
training drill sergeant and Bobby Knight.
Teller, who was also quite effective in “The
Spectacular Now” and “Rabbit Hole,” is definitely a young actor on the rise; as
Andrew he shows how an unassuming, nearly invisible student can also burn with
ambition. Adding to the authenticity of the film are Paul Reiser as Andrew’s
dad and Melissa Benoist as his sometime girlfriend.
What the film does best is show the
incredible time and energy required to become a top musician and for an
ensemble to master a piece of music. For fans of swinging, up-tempo big band
jazz, the film is heaven sent. I just wish the filmmaker had put a mute on
Fletcher.
UNHOLY PARTNERS (1941)
I thought I had seen or, at least knew about,
every interesting newspaper movie Hollywood ever made, but this Edward G.
Robinson gem caught me by surprise when it popped up on the TCM schedule.
Robinson plays Bruce Corey, a returning GI
from World War I who, rather than continue his newspaper career at one of the
New York dailies, decides to create a new kind of American paper—the
tabloid—already popular in Europe.
Corey, fast talking and full of
confidence, ends up receiving his financial backing from a notorious mobster
(superbly played by veteran character actor Edward Arnold), who has his own
reasons to “own” a newspaper. Not surprisingly, it doesn’t take long before the
owner is tired of seeing his associates’ names in the paper and gives Corey an
ultimatum.
Director Mervyn LeRoy, whose career
spanned from the silents to the 1960s, had made Robinson famous with “Little
Caesar” (1931) before directing such hit films as “I Was a Fugitive from a
Chain Gang” (1932), “They Won’t Forget” (1936), “Random Harvest” (1942),
“Madame Curie” (1943) and “Quo Vadis” (1951).
Though not usually remembered as a
stylist, the director brings some dynamic energy to “Unholy Partners,” with
interesting camera movement and angles—LeRoy’s director of photography was
George Barnes, who shot “Rebecca” and “Spellbound” for Alfred Hitchcock and was
one of the most in-demand cameramen of the 1940s. While watching it I suspected
the film had been strongly influenced by another newspaper movie, “Citizen
Kane,” until I saw that the LeRoy picture was also released in 1941. For both
style and subject matter, the films would make for a good double-bill.
It’s one of Robinson’s best
performances; his character is deeply conflicted even as he presents himself as
a decisive, tough-talking editor. He remains one of the most underrated actors
of his era, too often pigeonholed as “just” an effective bad guy. Sure, he
could chew scenery with the best of them, but his performances as innocents
swept away by lust in both Fritz Lang’s “Scarlet Street” and “The Woman in the
Window” show his impressive range.
MR. PEABODY & SHERMAN (2014)
I know they don’t make animated films for
58 year olds, but this attempt to revive two beloved characters from my
childhood made me cringe.
As part of the company of cartoons that
appeared in Jay Wards’ masterful “Bullwinkle and Friends” (later “Rocky and
Bullwinkle”), “Peabody and Sherman” was a clever, sarcastic and puny gem that
used historical events (which the dog and his human son time-traveled to) as
social criticism.
The new movie fits the characters into
contemporary clichés and uses their Way-Back machine for a lifeless adventure
tale. The puns are still there, but aren’t earned; they lack the eye-rolling
pleasure of 50 years ago.
While not as bad as the live-action “The
Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle” (2000), there is little here for fans of
the TV show. They tried, as Bullwinkle would say, pull a rabbit out of their
hat, but came up empty handed.
VENUS IN FUR (2014)
Like Mike Nichols, Roman Polanski, as a
child, escaped the Nazi regime of the 1930s to become one of the most important
filmmakers of his generation. Also like Nichols, he has consistently produced
first-rate movies since the 1960s; Polanski’s first great film was his 1963
psychological drama “Knife in the Water” made in Poland.
I recently re-watched Polanski’s 1971
take on “Macbeth,” which is a model of how to make Shakespeare vital and
understandable for any audience. Even without a great performance at its center
(Jon Finch plays the disturbed king), the movie is brings 11th
Century Scotland alive along with the Bard’s study of unabated ambition.
The now 81-year-old filmmaker continues to
work at the highest level—his previous two movies, “The Ghost Writer” (2010)
and “Carnage” (2011)—stand just below his masterpieces, “Repulsion” (1965),
“Chinatown” (1975) and “The Pianist” (2002).
Like “Carnage,” his latest is a stage play
adaption (with no attempt to open it up visually) centering on volatile
male-female relationships. I’m not sure what the director could have done to
improve “Venus in Fur,” which, as a stage production, received good reviews on
Broadway, but I found it tiresome, repetitive and sadly dated.
The play presents yet another metaphor
for the ongoing power struggle between men and woman, sexual and otherwise, a
subject that has been given thorough examination by Polanski, Nichols and
dozens of playwrights and filmmakers over the past 40 years. This 2010 play
might have had something original to say if it had been written in the 1960s or
‘70s, but hardly in 2014. Not that the issues don’t still exist, it’s just that
David Ives’ play has little new to add to the debate.
Set on a darkened rehearsal stage, the play
opens with Vanda (Polanski’s real-life wife Emmanuelle Seigner) bursting into
the theater, late for a casting call, and then spending the next 20 minutes
trying to convince the director (Polanski look alike Matthew Amalric) to hear
her read for the part.
The play within the play, much of which is
recited by the two actors, is based on the assignations of Leopold von
Sacher-Masoch, who first wrote about the psychology behind S&M in the
1870s. As it is played out on stage by Vanda and director-playwright Thomas,
their lives and the characters in the play begin to intermingle. Not only does
Vanda know the role and the play, backwards and forward, but she has insight
into Thomas that is otherworldly. Clearly, we are meant to wonder if she might
be the reincarnation of Leopold’s long-ago lover.
This two person dance is well acted by
Seigner and Amalric. It’s probably Seigner’s finest performance, as she manages
to play a mysterious seductress at age 48; previously she did excellent work in
“Bitter Moon” (1992) and, opposite Amalric, in “The Diving Bell and the
Butterfly.”
Amalric is one of the most in-demand French
actors, known in this country for his Bond villain role in “Quantum of Solace”
and as one of the crazies in “The Grand Budapest Hotel.” He was brilliant as
the paralyzed editor in “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.”
In “Venus in Fur,” it becomes a bit of a
distraction that he looks so much like the young Polanski, especially playing
opposite Mrs. Polanski. Something weird is going on here (not a surprise for a
Polanski film), but it’s not weird enough, or interesting enough, to make for a
good film.
