Holiday Schmaltz: LOVE THE COOPERS

The opening scene of Love the Coopers finds the Cooper family matriarch signing the last of her Christmas cards. “Love, The Coopers,” she writes with a flourish. The title of the movie, however, lacks the comma, making it less a warm present to us all, and more a demand to love the family we’ll be spending the next two hours with. This directive would go over easier if we were given sharply drawn characters who come into focus quickly. But we don’t. It’s a sprawling holiday dramedy dripping with sap and spreading its large ensemble amongst several connected plotlines, some far more interesting than others. It’s a sloppy Christmassy mess, but because a cast of likable charmers plays the characters, the movie has its moments anyway.

Opening on the morning of Christmas Eve, the screenplay by Steven Rogers (Stepmom) finds a large extended family all over Pittsburgh in a rush to get last minute holiday shopping and planning out of the way before the night’s big family dinner. It’s a belabored, scattered setup, hoping to gain some interest out of mystery, keeping the family connections murky until they crystallize as the people congregate around the cookbook-photo-spread Christmas supper. Overly expository narration (by Steve Martin, oddly drained of humor, and oozing storybook affect) tells us a lot, but illuminates little as we find a variety of small human dramas played broad. There’s a layer of schmaltz slathered all over an awkward mix of bad sitcom pacing and drooling manipulation.

There’s a divorced dad (Ed Helms) trying to hide his job loss from his ex-wife (Alex Borstein). Their painfully uncomfortable teen son (Timothée Chalamet) wants his first kiss, their youngest son (Maxwell Simkins) wants a bike, and their toddler daughter (Blake Baumgartner) has learned a curse word. There’s a kind old man (Alan Arkin) with a platonic crush on a sweet waitress (Amanda Seyfried). There’s a couple in their sixties (Diane Keaton and John Goodman) happy to host a family holiday for one last time, since they plan to use it to announce their impending divorce. There’s a lonely middle-aged woman (Marisa Tomei) who’s caught shoplifting (by cop Anthony Mackie) and so might be late for dinner. Finally, there’s a cynical liberal playwright (Olivia Wilde) who Meets Cute with a conservative soldier (Jake Lacy) in an airport bar. Between these stories are stock-footage-ready shots of snowy streets, Santas, and more carolers around every corner than I’ve ever seen in real life.

That’s quite a lot of plot to juggle, especially when it’s not all that deftly edited, and written with thin tin-eared stereotypes. (I didn’t even mention the elderly aunt (June Squibb) whose dementia is used exclusively for laughs.) It develops convolutedly, layered with flashing flashbacks to many characters’ pasts. You might think that’d bring extra heft to the emotional stakes, but it often confuses the issue, mistaking whats for whys when it comes to fleshing out the characters. Director Jessie Nelson (with her first directing credit since 2001’s I Am Sam) cross-cuts unevenly, allowing one character’s cross-town car trip to take as long as another’s grocery shopping, caroling, sledding, and cooking combined. This all could’ve benefited from a smoother approach to ensemble storytelling, more Altman-esque, or at least on the level of a Love Actually or The Best Man Holiday.

The movie spends its time lurching from storyline to storyline, haphazardly developed, largely unconvincing, tonally confused, both too calculated and weirdly adrift. And yet, as frazzled as this setup is, some of it works, and the predictable payoffs are rather sweet in their own ways. The talented cast is too good, especially when Nelson allows them real sensitive moments of connection, to let a sloppy script drag them down. When Keaton and Goodman argue, and when they wistfully reminisce about the good times and the bad they’ve shared over forty years of marriage, there’s real emotional weight. And in the airport scenes between Wilde and Lacy there develops a low-key romantic comedy that’s rather lovely in its chemistry and prickly warmth.

There’s almost enough gooey goodness in the moments that work to override the bad, like the final moments, which reveal the narrator is not omniscient, as has seemed to be the case, but instead a character we meet who has no possible way of knowing everything he’s been telling us. So it’s not a particularly good movie overall. It’s clumsy, obvious, full of clunky failed comedy and overtly telegraphed messages. (Could you guess it’ll be about valuing family togetherness and appreciating what you have right in front of you?) But it also has enough earnest sentiment to make it moderately effective on any big softies in the audience. I have to admit, from time to time, I was one of them. There’s no compelling reason to recommend Love the Coopers except the fleeting moments of button-pushing emotion, which might be enough if you’re willing to let yourself give in and be an easy target for that sort of thing. 

Pitch Imperfect: MILLION DOLLAR ARM

In Million Dollar Arm, Jon Hamm plays a sports agent we first see giving a Don Draper-esque pitch to a potential client who turns him down, a rejection that threatens to take down his company. A brainstorm with his business partner (The Daily Show’s Aasif Mandvi) leaves him with one last idea to save his failing firm. He wants to travel to India and run a contest to find an amateur cricket player with a throwing arm powerful enough to be brought to America and converted into a pitcher for Major League Baseball. Easier said than done, and it doesn’t sound easy to me.

The movie is built around two culture shocks. First, Hamm’s agent is sweaty and confused during his time in India, befuddled by the cuisine, the way of doing business, and the local help (Bollywood actors Pitobash and Darshan Jariwala). Secondly, his young recruits (Life of Pi’s Suraj Sharma and Slumdog Millionaire’s Madhur Mittal) go with the agent to Los Angeles where they’re dazzled and lonely. One of those culture shocks is more interesting than the other. Want to guess which one the movie focuses on?

We start in the world of the sports agent, following him through his company’s shaky financial situation and his no-strings-attached romantic life. Soon, though, he and a cranky retired baseball scout (Alan Arkin, who else?) arrive in India. During the time the movie spends there, the country is either exoticized or made a source of humor. Their local assistants are a study in contrasting stereotypes. One is drolly in favor of bribery to make their search move quickly. The other is eager to please and prone to misunderstanding directions. Told they need to find a pitcher with “juice,” he runs off to get them some juice. If the performers on all sides had less charm or energy, it’d feel offensive.

Soon enough, we meet the two young guys on whom the movie pins its rags-to-a-chance-at-riches plotting. They’re immediately sympathetic and engaging. Consideration is given to their lives in small Indian villages, where life is slow-paced and poor. They have close ties to faith, family, and culture. When they arrive in America, they’re sympathetically presented as small-town kids suddenly thrown into entirely unfamiliar surroundings. Given an opportunity to come to America and try out for a chance to earn millions, they’re nonetheless understandably homesick and discouraged. And yet they are still willing to give it a try.

Theirs is a stronger, more compelling culture shock, and yet we see them filtered through their agent’s viewpoint. He follows a predictable arc in which he’s a hard-charging career-oriented guy who sees his new guests as a project more than people. He needs to soften up and learn to love his makeshift family. We’ve seen that story before. No matter how well Hamm plays the plot points, it’s still obviously lacking compared to the more interesting story happening just outside his perspective. It’s a problem of point of view.

I wanted to know more about the interior lives and daily struggles of the kids. Instead, they make friends, learn baseball, and learn English almost entirely off-screen. Why push aside their training?  You’d think that would be a key point of interest. Besides, the coach helping them is played by the always-welcome Bill Paxton, and every time the film heads to the field, the imagery lights up and the thrill of the game is palpable. And yet we spend far more time watching their agent stumble towards the point at which he’ll realize the error of his ways. To do so he’s given a token love interest (the charming Lake Bell in an impoverished role), who exists here only to be a potential romantic partner and to give him pep talks.  

Director Craig Gillespie and screenwriter Tom McCarthy are usually better attuned to specificities in their characters. Gillespie has shown a fine eye for community responses to differences, especially in his Lars and the Real Girl. But I’m surprised McCarthy, in particular, ended up with a script with a perspective so out of whack. His The Visitor is a tender portrayal of clashing cultures that finds a bookish professor surprised and ultimately enriched by his entanglement with a couple of immigrants squatting in his apartment. His Win Win is about a troubled teenager taken in by a warm family willing to help him achieve a better life through sports. In other words, McCarthy has done aspects of the story before, but Million Dollar Arm approaches from an angle that feels wrong.

While the characters are for the most part compassionately drawn, and the visual style is glossy up-tempo Disney feel-good uplift, the movie is stubbornly fuzzy with the details and the balance in perspective remains wobbly. The movie is upbeat and well made, but I found the point of view naggingly askew. About halfway through, I started imagining a better version of this movie that started fully immersed in the villages of India, met Sharma and Mittal, got to know them better, and then saw the Americans and America through their eyes. Their characters go through massive changes, leaving their families behind to move across the world to a country where they don’t speak the language, to be taught to play a sport they’ve never seen, and to live at an income level they’d never imagined. That’s quite a shock. Why in the world are they the supporting characters in this story?

Slight of Bland: THE INCREDIBLE BURT WONDERSTONE

What a difference ten years makes. In 2003, Jim Carrey starred in the comedy Bruce Almighty as an average guy given the chance to borrow God-like powers, but the real scene-stealer, indeed the only person whose contribution I can remember to this day, was Steve Carell in a supporting role. Now here we are in 2013 with the comedy The Incredible Burt Wonderstone. It stars Carell in the title role while the more memorable moments appear courtesy of Carrey in a supporting role. It’s amazing what can happen to a showbiz career in only a decade, an observation worth noting in connection with Wonderstone since it happens to be a point on which the plot hinges. Carell plays a cheesy, theatrical, old school magician who, with his partner Anton Marvelton (Steve Buscemi), has headlined at a Las Vegas hotel performing the same magic act for ten years. They were wildly popular and wealthy, but the act’s gone stale and ticket sales are plummeting. Their hotelier boss (James Gandolfini) says he’ll fire them and hire a flashy new magician (Jim Carrey), a decision that spurs Wonderstone to put together a new show that’ll wow the crowds all over again.

What follows is a movie that’s big, broad and bland. It’s predictable in every beat right up to the rather mean-spirited finale that’s nonetheless played as triumphant victory. Carell’s Wonderstone is nothing more than a pompous and out-of-touch cheeseball, a sort of softer, off-brand Zoolander. In the movie he follows the predictable arc that starts from top of the world before getting knocked down to low lows until he finds it within himself, through the help of the characters around him, to know better how to find his way back to the top. What little that’s interesting here relates to the tension between the older style of magic making, typified by a mail order magic kit hawked by a slick showman (Alan Arkin) that holds a special place in the lives of Carell and Buscemi, and the newer more aggressive and ugly magic as practiced by the flashy, gross magician played by Carrey. Where our protagonists are average guys all dressed up with pompadours and in velvet making a dancing entrance to Steve Miller Band's "Abracadabra," he’s wiry, with long stringy hair, black clothing and pounding heavy metal. He’s obnoxious, at one point cutting open his cheek to pull out a bloody, folded up playing card. “Is this your card?” he asks. It is. (His final trick is super gross, too. I shall not spoil it, except to say it’s horrifying, cringe-worthy, and a little funny.)

The tension between types of magic, though, is ground under by the homogenized mediocrity of it all in a film eager to use that central conflict as set dressing rather than utilizing it as the intriguing idea that it is. Director Don Scardino (a sitcom staple) finds little of visual interest, preferring instead to keep the in medium shots and let the lines land. It’s too bad the lines in the script by Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daley (they of Horrible Bosses) are largely inoffensive clunkers that go down easily and without impact. It’s a comedy that fails on both on a plot level and on a scene-by-scene basis, gathering up few laughs and even less of a reason to care. Why, then, did I not out-and-out hate this movie? It’s the cast and the cast alone. Carell and Buscemi have a funny sort of buddy chemistry that occasionally wrings some laughter out of the neglected premise. A few of Gandolfini’s line readings are just unexpected enough to bring a sort of backwards gravitas to some very silly moments. And Carrey, flailing about with little to do, nonetheless makes a big impact by bringing total commitment to a nutty part that a lesser comic actor would’ve no doubt undersold.  

I haven’t even mentioned Olivia Wilde yet and that’s a shame. She’s playing a nothing character, a token female presence that is only around to provide an anemic romantic subplot. You could take Wilde out of Wonderstone entirely and the movie would lose exactly nothing in terms of coherence and impact. That’s unfortunate, but the movie is a big nothing all around. It has so many promising elements mixed in with a game cast and yet proceeds to make use of none of them. It’s blandly uninvolving and perplexingly dull, aside from the once or twice I snickered or half-smiled at the best efforts of everyone involved. The whole thing was leaving my head even as I walked out of the theater. I barely remember it as I type these words a day after I saw it, so I doubt I’ll remember anything about it in ten years.

Geopolitical Showbiz: ARGO

In early 1980, an unknown producer quietly, but with a modicum of industry press attention, put a next-to-no-budget science fiction movie named Argo into production. This movie was not destined to be a hit. It wasn’t even to be made at all, cancelled before it even got off the ground. It was, however, a movie of some small historical importance. Argo was a C.I.A. cover story for an attempted extraction of six Americans trapped in Tehran during the Iran Hostage Crisis. This unlikely true story is now a movie named Argo, so the whole thing comes full circle. Now a movie about itself, to a certain extent, its new iteration, directed by star Ben Affleck, is a nicely paced period piece thriller.

Though smartly scripted and narrowly focused by Chris Terrio, this film starts messily, with a flurry of heavy-handed exposition and clumsily staged scene setting. Laying out a Cliffs Notes background of 20th century Iranian history right off the bat led me to believe that the film would be far more interested in providing and exploring the political context rather than leaving the setting and situation as mere set-dressing and plot motivators for its primary concerns. Those concerns are nothing more than crisply presented scenes of period detail and men in suits urgently taking care of business, a terrific collection of character actors doing what they do best: lending weight and likability to small, but impactful roles.

In the film’s opening moments, the American embassy in Iran is taken over and six of its employees (Tate Donovan, Clea DuVall, and others) manage to flee, taken in by the Canadian ambassador (Victor Garber). They can’t stay there for long. Soon someone will grow suspicious. The embassy hostage-takers will realize they don’t have all the Americans in their possession. Domestic pressure is mounting as well. The days go by with little news, good or bad, and the populace grows weary and restless. Affleck fills the opening of the film with copious cutaways to news footage both mock and real, filling in information of the political malaise of the times with overeager intrusiveness. Still, the point gets across. What will become of this dangerous situation? The U.S. government needs a plan.

That’s where the fake movie comes in. It’s, in the words of the C.I.A. operative played by Bryan Cranston, “the best bad idea we’ve got.” The agent played by Ben Affleck will fly into Tehran posing as a producer of a Canadian science fiction film, meet up with these hiding Americans and fly away claiming them as Canadians in his film crew. To do so, the movie needs be adequately believable, which is where two Hollywood veterans – a special effects expert (John Goodman) and a weary producer (Alan Arkin) – come in. They’re there to make the whole thing look legitimate. The Hollywood sequences in the film are dryly funny in the tension between the literal life-and-death stakes of the agents’ plans and the been-there-done-that attitudes of the showbiz types.

Focusing on the process of this unlikely, stranger-than-fiction rescue attempt, Argo mixes scenes of tense walks down hallways, conversations around rotary phones and passing manila folders between men in sharp suits and shaggy facial hair. (This is a film that gets a lot of mileage out of its period costuming, a sort of spy game Mad Men in that way.) In sequences set in America, great that-guy actors like Chris Messina, Kyle Chandler, Zeljko Ivanek, and Titus Welliver fill in quickly sketched government roles, spouting jargon, delivering terse one-liners, and getting the plot moving. In Iran-set sequences, threats are presented as vague foreign rage that rumbles outside the home in which the six Americans are nervously hiding, unable to even look out a window for fear of capture and execution. As the hidden Americans’ and their hopeful rescuers’ plotlines slowly merge, the film builds to an extended period of undeniably effective suspense, skillfully made.

Affleck has proven himself a relatively unshowy auteur, creating functional pieces of serious-minded mid-budget genre filmmaking – thrillers of one sort or another, all – without generating much in the way of distinctive filmmaking. In Gone Baby Gone and The Town, as in Argo, he gets good actors solid material and stays out of the way, doing only what’s necessary to get the story on the screen. That’s not an altogether unworthy approach. Even if here it leads to some visual uncertainty – he’ll go for three shots when one would do – he knows when to capture strong popcorn energy and how to build tension out of nervous editing and tense parallelism. The final stretch of Argo is a nearly white-knuckle tightening of dramatic tension that unfolds so crisply and intensely that I could feel the collective exhale in the theater when the pressure eventually released. This is strong work. 

Quick Look: CITY ISLAND

Every member of the family at the center of City Island has a secret. The blue-collar prison guard father (Andy Garcia) wants to be an actor. The mother (Julianna Margulies) smokes. The daughter (Dominik Garcia-Lorido) got kicked out of college and is now saving up money by performing at a strip club. The son (Ezra Miller) secretly sneaks peeks at the neighbor’s webcam peep show. That’d be enough to secrets to fill up a movie even if the father didn’t bring home a recently released prisoner (Steven Strait) who also happens to be his long-lost illegitimate son (which just so happens to be yet another secret in the mix). Writer-director Raymond De Felitta has all the elements in place for a rich farce, but then proceeds to deploy them in befuddling, inadequate ways. Awkwardly paced, the film trudges along with the characters, pushing the secrets along with them. There’s certainly little else of interest. The writing is flat, the performances adequate, and the imagery routine. Finally, as a climax, we get a scene that has all the skeletons come out of the closets at the same moment in a scene that’s embarrassingly contrived. There’s an appealing spirit about the film and the actors are certainly likable enough (they’re even joined by Emily Mortimer and Alan Arkin), but I still spent the entire 104 minutes wondering when it would get good.