October 2010

THE SOCIAL NETWORK (2010)
While this relentlessly clever, hip and surprisingly humorous movie chronicles the creation and formative months of Facebook, it also offers a snapshot of contemporary college life.

It’s more than a comic aside that Harvard computer whiz Mark Zuckerberg (played to perfection by Jesse Eisenberg) creates his first web success---a site that allows students to select the “hotter” of two girls---during a long night of drinking after his girlfriend dumps him. If there is even a modicum of truth in “The Social Network,” the best and the brightest young men at our prestigious universities have less regard for women than ever before; it’s as if the 1960s and ‘70s never happened.

The atmosphere of college life as seen in this film resembles a high-class gentlemen’s club more than a dusty library. I’m hardly trying to preach here---I partied my way through four years of higher learning---but if I didn’t know better I’d think that Harvard was bringing in coeds on alcohol binging and stripping scholarships. At every phase of this film, while the boys are reinventing how the world sees itself and displaying their high-powered, never-at-rest creative instincts, the girls are shamelessly begging to be chosen by one of these future masters of the universe. I can only imagine what a parent of a high school girl headed for the Ivy League would make of this movie.

The smartest aspect of this David Fincher-directed picture is the framing of the story with the two lawsuits filed against Zuckerberg not long after Facebook became a money-making machine. From the testimony and charges made across a law-firm conference table, the movie flashes back to the actual events, revealing how Zuckerberg screwed over the Winklevoss twins (a very funny Armie Hammer playing the pair), jocks who actually came up the germinating idea that led to Facebook, and Eduardo Saverin (Andrew Garfield), Zuckerberg’s original partner and one-time best friend.

Eisenberg, who played the older son in “The Squid and the Whale,” captures the speed-talking, flat affect, dead-eyed, anti-social persona that---whether or not it bears any resemblance to the real person---typifies the nerd geniuses of our time. Zuckerberg isn’t just unlikeable and petty; he’s a psychotic egomaniac who probably would have ended up doing drugs under a freeway overpass if he hadn’t come up with Facebook.

Few films have the nerve to make the lead character so thoroughly unworthy of the rewards he reaps. Yet he’s so hopelessly alone that you can’t help but feel sorry for him. And Fincher and screenwriter Aaron Sorkin (“The West Wing,” “Charlie Wilson’s War”), working from Ben Mazrich’s book, never turn away from the giant irony that the creator of the most popular resource for connecting people struggles to connect with anyone.

The picture loses some of its focus in the second half when Zuckerberg comes under the influence of hotshot party animal and Napster co-founder Sean Parker (Justin Timberlake). There’s nothing interesting about this character; he’s pure ego and hot air and shallow as a Kleenex. Yet he pushes Zuckerberg out of the film’s spotlight for large chucks of the film. Amazingly, I wanted Zuckerberg’s hateful character back on the screen.

The acting is uniformly excellent, with the performers actually looking and sounding like students (at least the boys). The one female student who comes off believably is Erica, Zuckerberg’s straight-shooting girlfriend who breaks up with him in the opening scene. She’s played by Rooney Mara, the offspring of the families that founded NFL teams, the Pittsburgh Steelers (Rooneys) and the New York Giants (Maras), who will portray the title character in Fincher’s remake of “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.” She’s the only coed who doesn’t exhibit the manners of an overpriced hooker.

This is probably Fincher’s best film since his breakthrough film, “Seven” (1995). Fast-paced and thoughtful, impeccably crafted and beautifully photographed (by Jeff Cronenweth), “The Social Network” is unquestionable a film for our times as it attempts to decipher human interaction in the 21th Century. Is it the truth? Who cares? I can’t imagine that the whole truth and nothing but the truth would be nearly as entertaining.


AN UNMARRIED WOMAN (1978)
I’m not sure if this feeling is universal among men, but while I can absolutely adore and admire a performance by an actress, rarely do I connect with it in the way I do with an actor’s role. That bias made the way felt when I first saw Jill Clayburgh’s performance as Erica in “An Unmarried Woman” so memorable.

While she played a thirtysomething married woman living in luxury in Manhattan and I was a recent college grad living along in a small Pennsylvania burg, this singular character had an immediate and lasting effect on me.

It was more than just the independent spirit she displays when her marriage breaks up or her refusal to let another man control her life. Facing her trauma, Erica discovers her inner self, her artistic bent, her personality, all formerly buried in the roles life had assigned her. And she does it all in the incredible vibrant world of New York and the alluring energy the city exudes.

Coming on the heels of “Annie Hall” and a handful of weekend trips I’d made to the city, the film’s atmosphere was like catnip to me. I longed for this exotic world where I could leave my mark as an important writer and reinvent myself into something more glamorous than a reporter on a small-town paper.

Clayburgh, who died last week from complications of chronic lymphocytic leukemia, never came close to matching the fever-pitched gestalt of “An Unmarried Woman,” but who could have? Writer-director Paul Mazursky fashioned for Clayburgh one of the iconic female characters of an era when feminism was being discussed at cocktail parties and at the PTA.

There’s a scene early in the film when, after learning of her husband’s indiscretion, Erica, confused and stunned, walks aimlessly along the sidewalk until she vomits in the street. It’s an incredibly uncensored moment of truth, punctuated by Bill Conti’s energetic theme, signaling that this portrait of a woman wasn’t going to be like anything I’d seen before.

Clayburgh, in part no doubt because of her illness that she dealt with for over 20 years, never had that great late-career role that would have bookend her early successes. It’s easy to forget that in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, she was among the biggest stars in Hollywood: “Silver Streak” (1976), “Semi-Tough” (1977), “Starting Over” (1979) and “First Monday in October” (1981) were among her hit films.

More recently, she displayed her clear understanding of eccentricity as the happily nutty wife of a psychotic therapist in “Running with Scissors” (2006). Later this month, she’ll be seen as Jake Gyllenhaal’s mother in the romantic comedy “Love and Other Drugs.”

But what Clayburgh’s career shows is that if an artist (of any stripe) can achieve something transcendent even once, they have done more than their fair share for the world. Watching Erica struggle through New York carrying an oversized painting at the end of “An Unmarried Woman” all those years ago---on her own, struggling, but moving forward----it was inspiring and liberating and helped me understand myself and what I wanted out of life. And, maybe even more lasting, it kept me going back to the movies, in hopes of being swept away by the kind of uncompromised, emotionally rich performance Jill Clayburgh delivered 32 years ago.


HEREAFTER (2010)
I was a bit apprehensive going into Clint Eastwood’s new move about the connection between the living and the dead. Not only don’t I believe in the concept, but attempts to deal seriously with details of the afterlife have resulted in such misfires as the Robin Williams film “What Dreams May Come” (1998) and last year’s “The Lovely Bones.” Yet this extraordinary filmmaker makes you care about and root for the film’s characters to such a degree that what they believe becomes believable.

It turns out that this Peter Morgan (“The Queen,” “Frost/Nixon”) script isn’t so much about the “Hereafter,” as it is about characters who heal themselves through their belief in “the other side.”

Matt Damon gives his usual, seemingly effortless, convincing performance, here playing George Lonegan, a very ordinary man who was once a world renowned, apparently authentic, psychic. Since a childhood operation, George has been able to connect with the dead just by touching a family members’ hands. But the burden of the gift has made a normal life difficult, so he’s given up doing readings.

On the other side of the world, in an amazing special effects creation, a French TV journalist is nearly killed during the tsunami that struck Indonesia in 2004 and remains haunted by her near-death experience.

Meanwhile, in England, a young boy is left traumatized when his twin brother dies when he’s struck by a car. The boy’s determination to connect with his deceased sibling and the journalist’s insistence on understanding what she has experienced and sharing that with the world, plus a bit of coincidence (supplied by the master of that device, Charles Dickens) bring these three plotlines together.

Cécile De France, a Belgian actress virtually unknown in the U.S., makes the TV reporter a compelling figure as she leaves her job and puts her reputation on the line to pursue evidence that proves the existence of an afterlife. And as the young twins, Frankie and George McLaren are stoic and intense as they deal with an alcoholic mother and then their own separation. In a smaller, but crucial role, Bryce Dallas Howard (Ron’s daughter) deserves Oscar consideration as George’s surprisingly complex cooking partner.

The exception to the film’s spot-on casting is comedian Jay Mohr’s performance as George’s brother; he seems to have walked in from a different, more ordinary movie.

“Hereafter” isn’t a great film---the pacing, at points, is painfully slow and too much of the dialogue is redundant---yet it may be Eastwood’s most tender picture. For all its heady discussions about life after death, the movie is really about how we go about making sense of our lives down here on the terra firma.


NIGHT MOVES (1975)
Arthur Penn, who died last month at the age of 88, was so closely linked with “Bonnie and Clyde” (1967) that you could get the impression that he never directed another memorable film.

While nothing in his career tops the landmark success of the film that, for all intense purposes, launched the second golden age of American cinema, my favorite movie of Penn’s career is the seriously cynical detective tale, “Night Moves.”

Gene Hackman plays private detective Harry Moseby, a former professional football player who hides from his unhappy personal life by taking his cases, at least according to his dissatisfied wife, much too seriously. His latest client is a slutty, washed-up actress (Janet Ward) who hires Moseby to locate her precocious 16-year-old stepdaughter (Melanie Griffith in her film debut) and bring her home. The trail leads the detective to a New Mexico movie shoot where Griffith’s Delly had gone with her mechanic boyfriend (James Wood in an early role) and ended up in the bed of a reckless stunt pilot. She’s since moved on, but Mosby hangs out with the stunt crew, including stunt director Joey (Edward Binns), digging up enough dirt to determine that Lola plans to sleep with all her mother’s ex-lovers.

That clue sends Moseby to the Florida Keys where Lola’s former stepfather Tom (John Crawford) and his coy, mysterious girlfriend Paula (Jennifer Warren) raise dolphins and run boats and drink heavily. And staying with them is Lola, who immediately attempts to seduce Harry.

The film proceeds to pick away at Harry psyche while disillusioned, amoral characters swirl around him. The script by Alan Sharp is one of the smartest and darkest of the ‘70s while Hackman conveys both the off-the-cuff sarcasm and deep-seated demons of Moseby. Griffith is also impressive as she brings out the troubled little girl just beneath the surface of Delly’s flirty confidence.

Hackman delivers the film’s most quoted line when his wife (Susan Clark) asks him if he wants to attend an Eric Rohmer film with her. “I saw a Rohmer film once; kinda like watching paint dry.” Ironically, “Night Moves” is among the most French of the era’s films, marked by ambivalent dialogue, little action and sharp, jolting editing—Penn could have been considered an honorary member of the French New Wave.
Moseby sums up the film when he says near the end, “I didn’t solve anything---it just fell in on top of me.”

Penn, who started directing on stage and TV in the early 1950s, was behind the camera for just 13 features, including the brilliantly acted version of “The Miracle Worker” (1962), which he had also done on TV and Broadway, the offbeat, cult-favorite “Mickey One” (1965) starring Warren Beatty as a comedian in trouble with the mob and “Little Big Man” (1970), an epic Western with Dustin Hoffman as a white man raised by Indians. His later work was solid---“The Missouri Break” (1976), “Four Friends” (1981), “Targets” (1985)---but never achieved the greatness of his best films from the 1960s and ‘70s.

After the acclaim of “Bonnie and Clyde,” there was really nowhere to go but down, yet Penn held his own before his approach to filmmaking went out of style. As Beatty once said of him, “His intelligence is the factor that resonates most strongly, his intelligence and a lack of interest in pandering.”


YOU WILL MEET A TALL
DARK STRANGER (2010)
No director has populated their films with as many fascinating, multi-faceted female characters as Woody Allen has over the past 40 years.

In addition to the many incarnations of flighty females played by Diane Keaton and the vulnerable waifs portrayed by Mia Farrow, the prolific screenwriter has written memorable characters for Geraldine Page and Maureen Stapleton in “Interiors”; Diane Wiest in “Hannah and Her Sisters,” “Radio Days,” “September” and “Bullets Over Broadway”; Barbara Hershey in “Hannah and Her Sisters”; Elaine Stritch in “September”; Gena Rowlands in “Another Woman”; Judy Davis in “Husbands and Wives” and “Celebrity”; Mira Sorvino in “Mighty Aphrodite”; Samantha Morton in “Sweet and Lowdown”; Tracey Ullman in “Small Town Crooks”; and Penelope Cruz in “Vicky Cristina Barcelona.” And that’s just the cream of the crop.

You can add Gemma Jones to this astonishing list. The 68-year-old British actress, best known as the mother in both “Sense and Sensibility” (1985) and “Bridget Jones’s Diary” (2001), plays Helena, a recently discarded wife of the ironically named Alfie (a rather tense Anthony Hopkins), who is determined to deny his mortality.
When Helena falls under the influence of Cristal, a smooth-talking fortune teller (Pauline Collins, in a subtle, funny performance), she finds a new lease on life in the hopeful predictions, even as she becomes a constant irritant to her daughter (Naomi Watts) and son-in-law (Josh Brolin).

As Brolin struggles to finish and peddle his latest novel and his marriage teeters, Helena regular drops in to tell them the latest inane fortunes foretold by Cristal. Meanwhile, while both Watts and Brolin have their eyes on prospective new lovers, they are shocked when their father introduces his fiancée, Charmaine, a high-priced, amusingly dumb call girl.

Needless to say, bad decisions result in disasters as the cruelty of fate looms just beyond the frame. After 40 films, Allen has made it pretty clear that he believes most people, especially when it comes to romance, inevitable make foolish choices.
“You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger” is one of Allen’s better recent efforts as it explores the capricious way we make important life decisions and the lengths many are willing to go for the nebulous idea of success.

I also liked the film’s European style. It resembles the talky, insightful French films of Rohmer and Resnais, in the way it drops into these characters lives at a crucial moment and then ends without a clear resolution to all their problems or new flirtations.

While it seems counterintuitive to say after listing all the exceptional performances above, I think Allen is often hamstrung by having the availability to cast nearly any star-actor in his movies. A fresh face of unknown quality can be an invigorating aspect to a picture and, in this case, the most interesting characters are played by Jones, Lucy Punch as unabashed Charmaine (replacing the originally cast Nicole Kidman) and Freida Pinto (the star of “Slumdog Millionaire”). Pinto portrays a brainy music student, first spotted by Brolin from his office window as she practices in her apartment, who brings a quiet sensibility to a story that tends to ramble.

But it’s Jones’ Helena that you’ll remember. Not unlike Patricia Clarkson’s character in Allen’s “Whatever Works,” Helena, at first, is a basket case as she tries to understand the end of her longtime marriage. But as she accepts the new direction of her life, she embraces it and becomes a quirky, unlikely affirmation of what humans do best: adapt and make the best of what’s given to them.


TO EACH HIS OWN (1946)
and THE SNAKE PIT (1948)
Watching Olivia de Havilland’s performances in these two films back to back during one of TCM’s actor-themed evenings, along with parts of “The Heiress,” offered a mesmerizing lesson in unpretentious, supremely focused acting overflowing with heart-tugging, but truthful emotions.

It’s hard to call de Havilland underrated considering she won two best actress Oscars and was nominated another three times, yet she never reached the level of stardom achieved by Better Davis, Barbara Stanwyck, Katharine Hepburn or Claudette Colbert. At her peak, in the late 1940s, she was as accomplished an actress as any of them and might have had a more distinguished career if Warner Bros. hadn’t kept her in undemanding supporting roles for so long. She finally gained her freedom from the studio in a landmark suit, but it cost her two years in the prime of her career.

Famously discovered while a freshman at San Francisco’s Mills College by theatrical legend Max Reinhardt, she was cast by the German producer as Hermia in a 1934 staging of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” at the Hollywood Bowl and also in his 1935 movie of the comedy.

That same year, at age 19, she played Errol Flynn’s love interest in the romantic adventure “Captain Blood.” In 1938, de Havilland was Maid Marion to Flynn’s Robin Hood, but it took David O. Selznick (casting her on-load from Warner’s) to provide the role that changed her career.

As Melanie, the kind, sensible rival of Scarlett O’Hara in “Gone With the Wind,” de Havilland showed the calm demeanor and emotional range that would mark her best performances.

In the four years after that breakthrough (earning her a supporting actress nomination) she was stuck in more mediocre Warner Bros. fare, while Davis was given all the studio’s plum roles. Post “GWTW,” a time period that overflowed with fascinating female roles, she had one, “Hold Back the Dawn,” playing a wide-eyed schoolteacher visiting Mexico, before she took Jack Warner and his accountants to court. No doubt, she was inspired to seek independence, at least in part, after seeing her younger sister, Joan Fontaine, cast in plumb roles in “Rebecca” (1940) and “Suspicion” (1941), which earned her a best actress Oscar.

From 1946 to 1949, de Havilland made six films, earning nominations for half of them and Oscars for two.

In “To Each His Own,” she’s a small-town girl who finds herself pregnant as her boyfriend heads off to World War I. Though she becomes a successful businesswoman in New York, starting a cosmetic company with her bootlegger friend, she never gets over the loss of her son, who is raised by a high-school boyfriend and his wife.

Though the picture, directed by the underrated Leisen Mitchell (he previously worked with the actress in “Hold Back the Dawn”) and scripted by Charles Brackett (Billy Wilder’s writing partner), is just one stop up from a soap opera, de Havilland’s performance never becomes melodramatic as she deftly shows the intense, all-encompassing devotion she feels toward the son.

Though she won the Oscar for “To Each His Own,” the actress was equally impressive in Robert Siodmak’s mysterious “The Dark Mirror” (1946), playing very different twins.

Her next role was one of the most challenging and ground-breaking of the era, playing a woman institutionalized following a mental breakdown. Her Virginia struggles to understand where she is or who she is as she faces the still-crude methods of mental health practices. “The Snake Pit” doesn’t sugar-coat the realities of mental illness and avoids turning the inmates into cartoon freaks. Director Anatole Litvak and screenwriters Frank Partos and Millen Brand have turned a social-issue picture into a strong drama, in large part because de Havilland creates a real woman whose roller-coaster ride with sanity rings powerfully true.

This memorable run of intense roles peaked with her portrayal of Catherine Sloper, the love starved New York City heiress in William Wyler’s superbly realized, thoughtful adaptation of Henry James’ “Washington Square,” retitled “The Heiress.”

Made up to look plain and severe, de Havilland bring to life this complex character who lives under the oppressive thumb of her cold-hearted father (a brilliant Ralph Richardson) and then is seduced by a smooth-talking fortune seeker (an impossibly young Montgomery Clift). This tragic, stubborn 19th-Century woman is one of the most memorable in modern literature and de Havilland’s performance matches the emotional arc of her heartbreaking story. It earned her a second best actress Oscar, but also was the end of her career as a major film actress.

Maybe freedom from the studio wasn’t as appealing as she imagined, but, whatever the reason, the actress took leave of Hollywood. She appeared on Broadway and then moved to Paris after marrying a French magazine editor. From the mid-50s, she acted in just a few pictures each decade, her most substantial work coming in the lavish soap opera “The Light in the Piazza” (1962) as a overprotective mother and supporting Bette Davis in “Hush Hush….Sweet Charlotte” (1965). In the 1980s, she appeared in a handful of TV movies and the 1986 miniseries “North and South, Book II.”

De Havilland remains one of the few surviving stars from the 1930s; she received the National Medal for the Arts in 2008 and earlier this year, at age 94, she was awarded the Knight of the Legion of Honor by the French government.

September 2010

HOME FROM THE HILL (1960)
I’m still struggling with the concept that 1960 was a half century ago. In film history terms, that means that a movie from 1960 is now as ancient as a silent picture was when I was in college in the ‘70s. That just doesn’t seem possible.

Looking back at that year’s top movies shows a decisive break from the conservative ‘50s and themes that foreshadow the revolution that was to hit Hollywood later in the decade. The Oscar-winning best picture, Billy Wilder’s “The Apartment,” depicts corporate executives borrowing an underling’s downtown digs for sexual rendezvous and both Oscar-winning actresses, Elizabeth Taylor in “Butterfield 8” and Shirley Jones in “Elmer Gantry” portray prostitutes. In the same film, best actor winner Burt Lancaster plays an evangelist who practices all the sins he preaches against.

More shocking than this overt sexuality in mainstream movies was the groundbreaking violence of the shower scene in Alfred Hitchcock’s “Psycho,” the picture that created the template for every horror film since.

These movies was released the same year Jack Kennedy was elected president, teens started dancing “The Twist” and Pittsburgh won its first World Series in 33 years---maybe 1960 is a long time ago…..

More old-fashioned but still centered on illicit sex, is the year’s most underappreciated prestige film, “Home from the Hill.” Impeccably directed by Vincente Minnelli, one of the cinema’s great visionaries of the 1940s and ‘50s (“Meet Me in St. Louis,” “An American in Paris,” “The Bad and the Beautiful,” “Lust for Life,” just for starters), this gorgeous wide-screen, high-class soap opera chronicles the dysfunctional Hunnicutt family, a Southern version of O’Neill’s Tyrone clan.

Dominating the 2 ½ hour film is Robert Mitchum’s commanding, emotionally complex performance as patriarch Captain Wade Hunnicutt, outdoorsman, womanizer and the most feared man in this small Texas town. Though he’s used to having his own way, his wife Hannah (a miscast Eleanor Parker) sleeps in a separate room to punish him for his constant philandering and he’s had little to do with the raising of his son Theron (George Hamilton). While Wade has never acknowledged him as his (bastard) son, Rafe (George Peppard, holding his own with Mitchum) is more like the old man than Theron could ever be.

Even when Theron takes up hunting and chases down a wild boar that is terrorizing the area ranchers he’s a fish out of water; a sensitive soul trying to be a man’s man. The relationship of these half brothers and how they deal with their father and his expectations gives the film a timeless, almost Shakespearean, breadth.

But what really separates Minnelli’s picture from the domestic dramas of Douglas Sirk or “Peyton Place” are its long, exquisitely photographed (Milton Krasner) scenes in the woods outside of town. It’s in the forest, among the wildlife, with their dogs at their sides and their rifles on their shoulders that these men feel most at home. The boar chase may be the most thrilling and frightening hunting sequence ever filmed for a feature, but most of the outdoor sequences create a magical, serene escape for these troubled characters.

Considering that Minnelli’s “Gigi” had won Oscars for best picture and director just two years earlier, it’s odd that “Home from the Hill” didn’t receive a single nomination. Seen a half-century later, with its emotionally searing story---written by the great screenwriting team of Irving Ravetch (who recently passed away) and his wife Harriet Frank Jr. from a novel by William Humphrey---and its stunning, richly colored visuals, the film deserves to be remembered as one of the most insightful movies about family of its time.


THE TOWN (2010)
The plot points of this Boston-set crime film have been used and re-used since moving pictures were invented: neighborhood crime gang led by friends who were “raised as brothers”; the sensitive one wants out of the business; the more violent one sees him as a traitor and blames his new “outsider” girlfriend. Yet all these clichés are made fresh by three superb performances, a thoughtful, reflective script by director Ben Affleck, Peter Craig and Aaron Stockard (from Chuck Hogan’s novel) and the breakneck direction of three audacious heists.

This is Affleck’s second effort behind the camera and, for my money, a vast improvement over his 2007 debut, “Gone Baby Gone.” Less reliant on plot twists and featuring a more interesting lead character, “The Town” shows Affleck to be a confident director capable of handing intense, fast-paced action and eliciting remarkable acting from his entire cast (as he proved in “Gone Baby Gone”).

One of these performances is by Affleck himself, playing Doug MacRay, a one-time local hockey phenom who is the brains behind a quartet of bank robbers working for veteran Charlestown (an Irish neighborhood) crime boss Fergie, played by an intimidating Pete Postlethwaite.

The bulldog of the group is Doug’s boyhood friend Jem (Jeremy Renner), who is becoming increasingly out of control, which leads to his taking a hostage (Rebecca Hall) after their latest bank job. They release her but later worry that she might help the FBI identify them (despite wearing rubber masks during the robbery). Doug, attracted to Claire during the heist, volunteers to keep an eye on her and before you can consult your “How to Write a Screenplay in 21 Days” handbook they are meeting cute in a laundromat.

Hall, who sparkled as the adventurous tourist in Woody Allen’s “Vicki Cristina Barcelona,” plays the one innocent in the picture, the only unarmed character who offers Doug the hope for a normal life. She’s such an unpretentious, naturalistic actress that her presence goes a long way to make the calculated plot believable.

Renner, nominated last year for his similar performance in the Oscar-winning “The Hurt Locker,” exudes Cagney-like zeal as a man in constant turmoil, simmering below the surface while enjoying delivering punishment to those he sees as disrespectful. His small, animated face tells you more about this character than any dialogue. This performance should earn Renner yet another Oscar nod.

Affleck, who has been the poster boy for vacuous acting since he became a star in “Good Will Hunting” (1997), gives his best performance of his career in “The Town.” He finds just the right amount of grit and romantic hopefulness as his character struggles to escape the life of crime.

As a director, he does a great job of casting the smaller roles, including Postlethwaite as the hateful crime boss, TV actors Jon Hamm and Titus Welliver as the determined FBI agents, Blake Lively as Jem’s slutty sister, and, in one memorable scene, Chris Cooper as Doug’s bitter father who is serving time in prison.

Considering his devotion to the Red Sox, it’s not surprising that Affleck stages the final shootout/standoff at Fenway Park, but even as the bullets fly, it’s the small, actorly moments that make this a film worth seeing.


BREAKING THE SOUND BARRIER (1952)
This British version of “The Right Stuff” features astonishing aerial photography along with a compelling story of test pilots obsessed with going faster and faster. While not the kind of picture you’d except to see David Lean’s name on, it’s the great director’s sense of character development and eye for spectacular images that elevate “Sound Barrier” above the standard-issue flyboy movies.

Ralph Richardson, one of England’s most acclaimed stage actors who later portrayed Alexander in Lean’s “Doctor Zhivago,” plays single-minded aeronautics engineer John Ridgefield, whose experimental jet propulsion planes push man closer to the unknown barrier of the speed of sound. Driven by his love of flying, which he expects all who are around him to share, pushes his son (Denholm Elliott) to become a pilot, leading to the young man’s death. But Ridgefield barely blinks and immediately recruits his new son-in-law (Nigel Patrick), a war-hero pilot, to become his top test pilot.

While the film has plenty of thrilling and intense aerial sequences, the heart of the story is back on the ground, where Ridgefield’s daughter (Ann Todd, Lean’s real-life wife) tries to dissuade both her husband and her father from pursuing this dangerous dream of the sound barrier. The script, by playwright Terence Rattigan (“The Browning Version,” “Separate Tables”), is smart and adult as it confronts both the positive and negative aspects of these men’s obsession.

This film represents the finest achievement of Lean’s somewhat undefined middle period, after his brilliant Charles Dickens’ adaptations (“Great Expectations” and “Oliver Twist”) and before his signature epics (“The Bridge Over the River Kwai,” “Lawrence of Arabia,” “Doctor Zhivago”).

Richardson, despite affecting an off-putting accent, dominates the film as this father who struggles to show affection to his children but has unbridled passion for his profession. One-third of the trio of larger-than-life British stage actors (along with Laurence Olivier and John Gielgud), Richardson also had an impressive, underrated film career.

For director Carol Reed, he was simply brilliant as the suspicion butler in “The Fallen Idol” (1949) and then played a savvy South Seas trader in “Outcast of the Islands” (1952). In William Wyler’s “The Heiress,” he has a similar role to “Sound Barrier,” the emotionally vacant father who, in trying to control his daughter’s life, ends up destroying her chance at happiness. It earned Richardson a supporting actor Oscar nomination. In “Richard III” (1955), he upstages his longtime stage rival in their scenes together, playing the Duke of Buckingham to star-director Olivier’s Richard.

But his crowning achievement on film was as the talkative, hammy retired actor James Tyrone who refused to face up to the fate of his crumbling family in Sidney Lumet’s nearly perfect film treatment of Eugene O’Neill’s “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” (1962). It’s simply one of the great performances ever put on film as his Tyrone insists on arguing about everything with everyone all day long. His long scene with Jason Robards, playing his alcoholic son Jamie, ranks as one of the acting high points of the American cinema.

Through the 1960s and ‘70s, on both stage and screen, Richardson embraced experimental, existential drama, with film roles in Richard Lester’s absurd “The Bed Sitting Room” (1969) and Lindsay Andersen’s “O Lucky Man!” (1973) and, with his old pal Gielgud, repeating their stage success in a TV version of Harold Pinter’s “No Man’s Land” (1978). He and Gielgud even showed up in a skit on “SCTV” not long before Richardson’s 1983 death.

Richardson earned a posthumous Oscar nomination (that he was ignored for “Long Days Journey” is a crime) for his role as Tarzan’s wealthy grandfather in the overblown “Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes” (1984).

What made him such a compelling screen presence in a long, varied career was his somewhat off-kilter looks and everyman disposition; he always seemed like a safe, familiar face. Yet he inevitably turned every character he played into the most interesting man in the room.


THE AMERICAN (2010)
The entire script for this chilly, detached character study of a nihilistic professional assassin must have been all of a dozen pages. George Clooney, who stars as Jack, an American hiding out in a small Italian village after an attempt on his life, has had more lines in the opening scene of any of his Coen brothers’ pictures than he does in the entire film of “The American.”

While holed up in this quaint, hillside town, he spends his time pretending to be a photographer, sharing wine with the local priest and getting familiar with a cute prostitute. Meanwhile, his Rome controller sets him up with a female assassin who requires a tailor-made rifle for her assignment. It turns out that Jack is also a master gunsmith. In fact, the most interesting scenes in the film are of him turning out a perfect killing machine out of bits and pieces from a local garage.

Directed by Dutch filmmaker Aton Corbijan, a veteran of music videos, and written by Rowan Joffe, the picture offers few real surprises as it proceeds down an existential trail toward the unattainable; this is Antonioni without anything memorable to say.

Clooney’s Jack isn’t without interest---he’s a darker, more troubled Michael Clayton----but there’s just not much there there. Other than Clooney’s star power and the beautiful Italian scenery, “The American” is so elliptical it nearly disappears.


A PROPHET (2010)
Convict Malik El Djebena barely has time to figure out where his bunk is before he’s recruited by a Corsican mobster to kill a man set to testify against the mob. After much agonizing and hesitation, Malik (an impressive Tahar Rahim) commits the murder, beginning an association with the prison mob and opening the door to all kinds of illegal opportunities.

This French film, one of last year’s best foreign-language nominees, ranks with the best prison films ever made, a violent but reflective study of a relative innocent’s indoctrination into organized crime and a damning examination of the French penal system. A less-glamorous “GoodFellas,” this picture adds into the usual criminal apprenticeship plot line the aspect of ethnic/religious distrust between the Corsican and Islamic inmates. It’s reminiscent of the much chronicled uneasy relationship between Italian and Jewish mobsters in this country or the Latino/African-American prison gang rivalries.

Veteran French actor Niels Arestrup plays the smug, imperious Cesar Luciani, with a stare that can kill, who has the run of the prison but is having a hard time keeping the reins on his criminal enterprise outside the prison. Arranging for day-long furloughs for Malik, Cesar uses him to negotiate deals and take care of outside business, while Malik sets up some money-making operations for himself.

This unusual alliance changes through the years as Malik matures (he’s in for six years) and the Arab inmate population grows. The political dynamics of France, and all of Europe, is reflected in this prison drama.

Director and co-writer Jacques Audiard (with Thomas Bidegain) has created a world so ferociously real that the episodical nature of the film never feels artificial or jarring. The movie manages to be both rich in detail and fast paced as it focuses on the bond between Malik and Cesar. Yet it’s the perfectly measured performances that drive the story.

The 29-year-old Rahim, in his first substantial film role, and Arestrup, best known in this country as the violent, controlling father in Audiard’s “The Beat That My Heart Skipped,” play characters that mostly likely would never glance at one another outside the prison gates, but inside the Big House they end up essential to one another as they evolve from master/slave to something much different.


BRIGHT LEAF (1950)
Sluggishly paced and saddled with two badly miscast stars, this story of the rise of the modern tobacco industry is both fascinating and frustrating. Clearly, veteran filmmaker Michael Curtiz (“Casablanca,” “Yankee Doodle Dandy”) and screenwriter Randal McDougall saw this as better than the typical star-vehicle melodrama and attempt to bring an epic, tragic hero arc to the story. Unfortunately, it falls short of this ambitious vision.

At the heart of the problem is Gary Cooper’s performance as Brant Royle, the son of farmer, who returns to his North Carolina home town years after his family had been run out of town by the dominate tobacco baron Major Singleton (Donald Crisps). From the opening scenes, when Royale comes back to town and encounters his old flame, Singleton’s daughter Margaret (a cool, distant Patricia Neal), Cooper plays the role as if he’s a bitter old man, not an angry young man. At age 49, Cooper had lost his roguish youthfulness that made him so convincing in roles such as “Meet John Doe” (1941), “Ball of Fire” (1941) and “For Whom the Bell Tolls” (1943).

Royle’s chance to take revenge on Singleton comes in the form of an automated cigarette-making machine invented by a nervous, talkative Northern (Jeff Corey). Securing financing from his old gal pal Sonia (Lauren Bacall), who runs the town’s (obvious but never mentioned) house of ill repute, Royle and a traveling show con man (the always energetic Jack Carson) take the industry by storm when their pre-rolled, manufactured cigarettes spread across the nation in the 1890s. Little do they know that they have not only created one of the most successful consumer products ever invented, but started the most lethal habit in human history. (This being 1950, nary a word is mentioned about the possible health hazards of tobacco.)

The story is a fictionalized telling (from a novel by Foster Fitzsimmons) of the rivalry between Washington Duke and George McElwee, scions of the industry. In 2003, documentarian Ross McElwee (“Sherman’s March”) made “Bright Leaves,” which references the 1950 film in connection with his great-grandfather’s battles with the legendary Duke and examined the tarnished legacy of the cigarette industry. In real life, Duke cheated his one-time partner McElwee out of his tobacco fortune, but Cooper’s character seems to be a bit of both men.

Near the start of “Bright Leaf,” this group of upstarts is easy to cheer for as their success surprises the big boys, who had scoffed at pre-made cigarettes as a viable money-maker. But then the true nature of Royle (even as Cooper struggles to portray it) comes out. Not only is he obsessed with destroying Singleton but he’s determined to marry Margaret, an uninteresting, manipulative woman, and begins to ignore the business as he focuses on these goals. He quickly alienates Sonia, who long has held out hope that Royle will come to his senses and marry her, and then turns against his partners. Much like in “Citizen Kane,” an obvious influence on this film, the rebellious innovator turns into a ruthless megalomaniac and loses all sense of what’s important.

Cooper lacks the acting chops to make the changing nature of Royle believable; it’s as if one day he wakes up a different person. His idea of showing the emotional turmoil of the character is to grimace as if he just took a bullet to the stomach. It’s also clear that Cooper’s inability to handle large chunks of dialogue is partially responsible for the sluggishness of the film. Especially in the last half, there are long pauses after either Carson or Bacall spill their guts to Cooper and then he responds with two or three words.

Countless actors of the time (I can imagine James Stewart, Gregory Peck, John Garfield or Kirk Douglas) could have turned this rich role into a career highlight. Equally miscast is Neal, who at the time was having an affair with the married Cooper, which started when they starred together in “The Fountainhead” (1949). Their on-screen chemistry is nonexistent; you’d never guess they were involved. The usually reliable Neal recites her lines as if she’s working in a foreign language.

The supporting crew---Bacall, Carson and Crisp---are all first-rate, but they can’t make up for the vacuum in the center of the picture.


BROOKLYN’S FINEST (2010)
Antoine Fuqua looked to be poised for a major directing career after the success of “Training Day,” his 2001 movie about a brazenly corrupt cop starring Denzel Washington. It earned Washington a best actor Oscar and Fuqua entry into Hollywood’s A team. Since then, Fuqua has made three star-driven films----“Tears of the Sun” with Bruce Willis, “King Arthur” with Clive Owen and “Shooter” with Mark Wahlberg---and all have been box-office duds and his latest didn’t do much better, disappearing quickly after its March release.

There’s plenty to like about “Brooklyn’s Finest,” a thorough condemnation of the ethics of that borough’s police force that follows three very different detectives as their fates’ collide. Richard Gere plays Dugan, a burnt-out case days away from retirement, who seems to have little to live for other than his occasional visits to his favorite prostitute; Don Cheadle is frustrated with his deep-cover role in the midst of drug dealers; while Ethan Hawke, burdened with a young, growing family is continually tempted to make off with some of the cash he handles regularly during drug busts.

Each of their stories is compelling at the start, but the details of their lives become repetitive as the script tries to dig deeper into their characters and then manipulates the plot so that the bloody ending of all three tales culminates at the same housing project.

Supporting the trio of stars is the always efficient Will Patton as Cheadle’s manipulative lieutenant; Ellen Barkin, way over the top as a vile, racist federal agent; Lili Taylor as Hawke’s sympathetic wife; and Wesley Snipes, in his first major role since his tax problems, as the charismatic drug lord Cheadle is trying to protect.

The film is well directed and includes moving scenes for each of the stars, but too much of the guts of “Brooklyn’s Finest” plays out night after night on television in the countless police procedurals. In the era of “Law and Order” and “CSI,” the bar has been raised for cop movies and this one doesn’t make the grade.