Got a Feeling There's a Miracle Due: WEST SIDE STORY

Now this is a movie. I’d almost forgotten they could still be like this: thoughtful and heartfelt, big and bold, theatrical and emotional, expertly, sturdily made at every level of craft and soul. In re-adapting the Broadway classic West Side Story, Steven Spielberg has made a widescreen spectacle full to bursting with intelligence, energy, and ideas. Watching it, I couldn’t help but think that Spielberg is one of the very few left working on this level in Hollywood. He knows what to do with the camera at every moment—to express, to surprise, to reveal, to move. Take the opening shot, for instance. Unlike the bird’s-eye view of a skyline that greets audiences in 1961’s Robert Wise take on the material—a classic in its own right, if more proficient than exceptional—Spielberg’s starts on debris. A building has been torn down. It’s 1957, the same year the musical debuted. What was once a tenement building has been leveled for a new complex. Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, a sign announces. Immediately we’ve been given a richer context for this Romeo and Juliet amid the gang clashes on city streets between new immigrant Puerto Ricans and the slightly older immigrant ethnic Whites. The cauldron of racial intolerance has been set to boiling by the encroaching economic and real estate displacement. And how poignant, too, that what will take over this neighborhood will be the same places that would perform projects of the kind we’re watching now.

I found this adaptation almost indescribably moving, even on simply the craft level. How sadly rare to be at a major studio release and find it overflowing with ideas and emotions communicated visually in every moment, to hear a soaring musical score robustly arranged and conducted to swell and underline and develop. Spielberg’s a master craftsman, no doubt. He has his usual crew—cinematographer Janusz Kaminski, editor Michael Kahn, and so on—up to their usual best. So of course it’s an untrammeled success on the technical level. Ah, but then there’s the justice they do to the material. What could be stale or overfamiliar is instead enlivened anew. As it unfolds I suddenly saw it for the first time in all the fullness of style and sentiment that audiences must’ve felt when it first appeared on stage. More than the original adaptation’s robust technical skill, Spielberg draws out the deep wells of emotion, the crisp cleverness of the late, great lyricist Steven Sondheim’s precociously poetic rat-a-tat puns and rhymes standing at pleasing angles from the sumptuous Leonard Bernstein jazz-and-Latin rhythmic symphonic score. Spielberg, with screenwriter Tony Kushner (the Angels in America writer who wrote Munich and Lincoln for him), also does justice to the Shakespearean dimensions, and knows the musical’s book by Arthur Laurents is best played like other pieces of mid-century modern melodramas a la Arthur Miller or Tennessee Williams. The result is a movie that’s in constant fluid motion and boisterous feeling, an effortlessly complex crowd-pleaser that never feels the need to stoop or slow for simplicity’s sake.

It helps, I’m sure, that the story is so strong and clear, and Kushner’s writing is perceptively and sharply adapted. He doesn’t push overmuch on the original, and instead surfaces and shines light anew on ideas and tensions already present in this classic work, as well as restoring some of the grit to the language. With vivid period details in all their glorious colors and textures, the movie has the social conditions of the times through the benefit of hindsight, with a great sense of historical context and cultural space. There’s that opening with the gentrification in progress. It introduces the gangs—the Sharks and the Jets—tussling over signs and paintings and flags—signifiers of shifting demographics amid the construction sites on blocks where fresh Spanish-language signage is side-by-side with rusting, fading Irish clovers. It’s a place where people are feeling muscled out by some Other or another. They’re all dwarfed by and forged in class resentments, but have turned to racial recriminations to feel a sense of futile control. The white gang is a simmering rage machine, puffed up with false superiority and dripping in presumptuous racist and misogynistic impulses. The Puerto Ricans have pride of their place and people, and feel justified outrage at the pushback they’re getting from some of their neighbors. The movie gives them greater voice—lots of colloquial Spanish and Spanglish in the dialogue is left unsubtitled and perfectly legible through powerful performances—and understands without excusing the gang’s sometimes-violent territorialism. The two gangs are on a clear collision course. That opening shot pushes past a wrecking ball on its way to revealing its characters in the midst of the muck. We know something’s coming.

Into this is introduced romance that structures the swooning early sequences and the weeping tragedy of the finale. After all, Tony, a white boy leaving the gang and hoping to make good (Ansel Elgort), is the Romeo to the Juliet who is Maria (Rachel Zegler), a Puerto Rican teenager looking for more in her life. They meet at a community dance, and their desire to dance becomes a flashpoint between the hot-headed Jets (led by Mike Faist) and the Sharks, whose leader (David Alvarez) is Maria’s boxer brother. The performers are universally wonderful, with Alvarez matched well with Ariana DeBose as his strong-willed long-time girlfriend playing fine counterpoint to the main couple. They get the centerpiece number “America,” with its bristling satiric syncopation, a classic back and forth that Spielberg films first through courtyard clotheslines that become clever shifting curtains, then spills out into the street with vibrant colors and sensations.

Tony and Maria’s love is softer, simpler, filmed in longing duets and yearning ballads—from “Maria” and “Tonight” to “One Hand, One Heart”—each given a full flowering of adolescent intensity. Zegler, in her first professional role, has a wide-eyed freshness, a dreamy gentility and innocence behind which sits a backbone of steel. Elgort, for his part, takes the baby-faced pathos that made him sympathetic in The Fault in Our Stars and Baby Driver and gives it the slightest Brando-adjacent edge of softened danger. Their love-at-first-sight is believable, and their desire drives and heightens everything that follows. Their balcony scene uses the bars of a fire escape to keep them separated—so close and yet so far—while other moments find streetlights turn a puddle into a gleaming spotlight of stars from overhead, or a stained-glass window lending a wooing an impromptu sense of something holy and right in the face of so much potential strife. Their friends and families are fighting because of them, and as the stakes grow deadlier, the drama around their potential future tips near bittersweet, and then on toward doomed.

Spielberg knows how to balance and build in interest and mood, with songs and sequences light and dark, characters raw and real in heightened drama bursting forth in snappy and soaring song. The film has a complexity in style and tone that’s so easy and entertainment so pure that it looks effortless. His filmmaking in every single moment—every note, every frame, every shot—communicates and imposes without showing off. He’s in total control, a virtuoso maestro of his collaborators behind and in front of the camera. His style is always like this at his best (and he so often is at his best), a strong hand with a light touch, what Pauline Kael compared to “a boy soprano singing with joy.” At 75, his movies have all the visual wit, sumptuous long takes, briskly blocked movement within the frame, clever cutting, and exuberant energy of a young cinephile enthused by the very prospect of making a movie and playing an audience. And yet he has the grandfatherly storyteller’s beneficence to engage deeply in the feelings and perspectives with subtly and nuance. It can make for one beautiful cohesive piece, so expertly accomplished and modulated. Played loud, there’s music playing. Played softly, it’s almost like praying.

It sings the most tenderly in quiet intimate moments and gruff arguments alike, and it comes alive in the kind of big, bustling group numbers that put any musical since MGM’s Freed Unit to shame. They impress with their energy, velocity, and shape, building in momentum with muscular screen choreography designed in homage to Jerome Robbins’ athletic approach. Showstoppers all, they’re refreshingly photographed to appreciate every step and gesture, to emphasize the skill and expressiveness, to highlight the unencumbered precision and joy. (He’s such a great director of action, from Indiana Jones to Jurassic Park, it’s no surprise.) Spielberg has this studio classicism in his bones—building these sequences with a pulse and an eye, every image somehow both snappy and propulsive and long, loving looks at physicality and movement. They’re so exceptionally involving and delightfully transporting, I almost felt swept up into the dancing myself despite sitting still. As the dancers join together in musical pleasure or collide in eventual despair even the drama—right down to its striking, tearful, symbolic conclusion—gathers the same sense of perfectly timed motion and expression.

Spielberg builds up the dynamics and conflicts and desires as if it was the first time anyone had played it—and somehow makes old new again. By highlighting these characters with even greater specificity in their time and place, and setting them against a backdrop of social upheaval, immigration, and construction equipment, he’s made a movie about America as a work in progress, with a definition up for grabs. A key figure is a reimagined shopkeeper role made into an even stronger conscience of the piece through the presence of Rita Moreno, star of the first film. Here she’s a wise elderly woman, a Puerto Rican who married a white man and  together ran a corner store for decades. She loves her entire neighborhood, and feels deep pain at their divisions. She wishes she could help bridge that divide. And Spielberg’s bridging a divide, too, having made an old school Hollywood musical epic, elegantly shot on film, brimming with talent and passion in emotion and skill in every second. I found myself brought to the edge of ecstatic tears by the sheer aesthetic pleasure—overwhelmed by the attention and care to the original musical brilliance, and to the undeniable vision of one of our last great moviemakers proving, even for just a few hours, that there’s still a place for this.

Car Trouble: BABY DRIVER

Baby Driver is the action movie equivalent of an earworm. Wafting in on the summer breeze full of undeniable, unshakable energy, it is as bright, infectious, zippy, crowd-pleasing, sugary, and satisfying as the best pop songs. That it comes from writer-director Edgar Wright is no surprise. In his filmmaking, every cut counts, every aspect of the production – from design and cinematography to casting and staging and everything between – brilliantly orchestrated into one cohesive blast. By timing when and where to move from frame to frame down to the millisecond, his eye as unexpected as it is intuitive, he builds rhythms, forms jokes, reveals character, emphasizes key plot details, and sets the pace with the rigor and flare of a drum major. It’s show-off style of the most casual sort, reveling in the modulating momentum a rat-a-tat marriage of script and sensation movie magic allows. His latest film pushes his style the farthest yet. In his 2004 horror-comedy Shaun of the Dead one of the most memorable moments involves a jukebox blaring to life as the heroes attack a zombie with pool cues, each strike of their makeshift weapons keeping time with the Queen song suddenly on the soundtrack. Baby Driver is the feature-length version of that instinct, telling the story of an in-over-his-head getaway driver with special emphasis on the music in his earbuds.

Not just a great gimmick, the nonstop diegetic soundtrack serves the character. Baby (Ansel Elgort), orphaned in a car accident years ago which left him with constant lingering tinnitus, is a wunderkind driver under the thumb of a smarmy gangster (Kevin Spacy, oozing confident snappiness). His driving is like Gene Kelly’s dancing: muscular, fluid, graceful, dazzling. He makes it look easy to be so excellent. Forced to chauffeur the man’s bank-robbing teams at a moment’s notice – “They call, I go,” Baby says – he focuses narrowly on the task at hand. He blocks out the ringing in his ears using a cool playlist he keeps handy in one of his may iPod classics (technology already as nostalgic as the records and cassettes that are also key factors in the plot). This allows him not only to alleviate his ailment, but to help distance himself from the real criminals. Though he’s one of the team (the various robbers played with great personality by the likes of Jon Hamm, Jamie Foxx, Eiza Gonzalez, Jon Bernthal, and Flea, an ensemble of scene-stealers), he views his situation as that of a frustrated goodhearted youngster. He loves driving, but hates his job. 

The boss has engaged his services through a mixture of blackmail and intimidation. Baby thinks they’ve just about completed their arrangement – the movie starts with the typical One Last Job formulation – but just when he thought he was out, they pull him back in. Trying to protect his new girlfriend (Lily James) and his ailing foster father (CJ Jones) from danger, he finds he must crank up the tunes to drive or die. Scenes with his loved ones are a tender oasis against the prickly criminals he carts around and the hurtling action that erupts from them. Baby is a nice young man in over his head, and there’s a fine tension between the sense of control his driving skills affords him, and the careening lack of control in his larger situation. It helps that Wright has Elgort to surround with this high-stakes frivolity. The young Fault in our Stars actor’s face can from some angles look placid cool, and from others nothing but unformed sweetness. The soft, subtle malleability sells his intensely sympathetic character, the sublime heightened heist melodrama he’s in, and the smooth skill with which it’s all pulled off.

The rare car chase movie that’s as alive outside the action as in, it’s nothing but good fun visual flourishes and great sudden surprises from beginning to end. Wright approaches his sturdy action movie setup with the grace and skill of an expert plate-spinner. The screenplay flows with funny, syncopated patter and chatter; the plot crackles with unforced setups for payoffs that are always deeply satisfying, even (and especially) when they spin away from the expected. The characters are quickly sketched and consistently engaging, from a cast exuding not only great relish for the fun lines they get to speak, but for the tempo and style with which they swagger. For Wright has choreographed the entire film (the cuts, the words, the angles, the action, and the gestures – from a flick of a wrist to the bat of an eye) to the soundtrack. With a backbeat of only the catchiest songs – an eclectic mix of rock, R&B, hip-hop, and pop that are the sweet spot of not too obvious or too obscure – the production becomes the action film as musical. It takes the assumption both forms are story hooks on which to hang sensational set-pieces to its logical conclusion. There’s never a down moment, only crescendos and fermatas, tension and humor stretched and strung. Like the best song-and-dance, the film does the complicated – thrilling stunt driving, shootouts, and foot chases at a screwball pace – with a big darling grin on its face. It’s a great time at the movies.

Diversion: THE DIVERGENT SERIES: ALLEGIANT

Blandly proficient brand extension, The Divergent Series: Allegiant was presumably made because they’d already made two of them and there was one more book in the YA series by Veronica Roth. The predecessors didn’t flop, so why not? It even splits that final book in two, pushing the back half to another film to be released next year sometime. Hey, Harry Potter, Twilight, and The Hunger Games did it. Since The Divergent Series was already an amalgamated knockoff of every other teen-centric genre franchise, why not copy them right down to the money-grabbing two-part finale? The trouble is it’s not nearly as imaginative or interesting as its inspirations. A calculating lack of passion bleeds into every frame of the film, in which a talented cast and crew are here mostly because they’ve already signed the contracts, enacting a remarkably uneventful story somehow swollen to 121 empty minutes.

As the movie starts, the previous movies’ routine teen dystopia, a crumbling far-future Chicago, once made up of a populace divided into temperament- and talent-based factions, has collapsed. The very special person at the center of the collapse is Tris (Shailene Woodley), who fought off mean Kate Winslet’s efforts to take over the city. Now, though, a new leader (Naomi Watts) is determined to reshape the populace under her control, installing puppet courts and whipping her followers into a frenzy with wild prejudice and violent impulses. “You’ve incited a mob. I hope you can control it,” says her son, who also happens to be Tris’s lover (Theo James). Together the tough lovebirds – along with returning cast members Ansel Elgort, Miles Teller, Zoë Kravitz, and Maggie Q – decide to flee the deteriorating society and jump over the gigantic wall into the wild unknown, leaving poor Octavia Spencer behind to deal with the trouble they started.

Considering that each of these movies so far has ended by intimating that we were going over that wall, it’s about time. Once they get there they find a muddy red desert where in our world is Lake Michigan. They wander around just long enough to give Elgort the chance to stare dumbly at a bubbly puddle and utter the following line: “This hole looks radioactive, or it was some time in the last 200 years.” I wrote that down immediately, relishing its pulpy sci-fi nonsense. Anyway, the teens end up getting taken to a gleaming grey-and-white futurist building which a man in a suit (Jeff Daniels) tells them was once O’Hare International Airport. Why that should be a detail worth telling to these future kids is beyond me. They don’t know what that is. In this future world it’s the home of a militarized band of scientists who confess that Chicago and its factions are really their experiment to see if they can undo humanity’s downfall: customized genes. It’s not exactly the most thrillingly examined idea.

It all turns out to be a nefarious set-up by which genetically perfect people want to keep the damaged dopes locked away in city-sized labs. Obviously Tris won’t have any of this and, after well over an hour spent wandering around this dully-developed new location, finally decides to do something about it. Screenwriters Noah Oppenheim, Adam Cooper, and Bill Collage glumly hit all the expected bits of a film like this in a creakingly mercenary, sparsely developed plot. The arc of each of these Divergents is identical. An evil adult has bland middle-management style and a plan to wipe out her or his inferiors, while Tris slowly learns that she’s not only special and the only one who can save the world, but she’s even more perfect than she’d last been told. This all happens while pretty people stomp around anonymous sets – warehouses, mostly – and interact with flavorless effects, trading clunking dialogue and staring at each other with what I can only assume is a mixture of boredom and brooding.

Director Robert Schwentke returns from the last time, still happy to merely keep things brightly lit and occasionally move the camera in surprising ways. He finds a few interesting images, throwing in some unexpected split focus diopter shots early on, filming a decontamination room in inky silhouettes, and visualizing the effects of a memory-wiping mist by making a man’s recollections float next to him while slowly burning away. But mostly he just dutifully watches what has to be one of the most bored casts I’ve ever seen sleepwalk through endless exposition and fuzzy motivation. During a scene in which the teens catch a ride to future-O’Hare in glowing bubbles, Teller gapes at a CGI spire and gasps the least convincing “gadzooks” you’ll ever hear. (Really.) Later a pro forma dogfight of sorts is accompanied by lackluster shouts and screams from the leads, sounding like completely nonplussed theme park patrons trying to whip up their enthusiasm for an underwhelming roller coaster’s dips and swerves. There’s so little going on here, just charismatic performers resigning themselves to the lifeless nonsense around them.

Chosen Dumb: THE DIVERGENT SERIES: INSURGENT

The Divergent Series: Insurgent is the clumsily titled second entry in one of the more recent attempts to spin a series out of a YA dystopia. Its predecessor introduced us to a crumbling future Chicago, the populace divided into a small set of job-based factions – lawyers, farmers, police, and do-gooders – that seems unworkable practically, theoretically, politically, economically, logically, and grammatically. No matter. These YA worlds aren’t so much real fantasy spaces as extended metaphor. Take Hunger Games, with its impactful allegory stew churning with war, propaganda, and inequality, or Twilight, a monster mash dating game cautionary tale. Divergent, on the other hand, is mainly an overheated high school analogy. No wonder the adult authority figures are universally played like patiently exasperated vice principals.

The hero is a teenager who threatens the status quo by being too awesome for any one clique to claim. Last time, our protagonist Tris (Shailene Woodley) stopped Kate Winslet’s evil plan to take over the city, but as a result had to flee to the wilderness, a hidden hippie commune run by Octavia Spencer. This time, Tris and her Factionless buddies want to get enough resources to fight back. But they don’t know Winslet has found a gold box she thinks will clinch her control over the other factions, if only she could open it. Tris, by virtue of being the single most important very special perfect super talent in all the factions, this time with the bar graph to prove it (“100% Divergent!”), is probably the key to opening it. So there’s some conflict for you. There’s not much there, just a reason to run into some chases and gunfights in between conversations with overqualified cast members.

Maybe we should think of this YA series most of all as a sort of Hollywood finishing school. It puts promising younger performers in scenes opposite great veterans who, in turn, get to be on set for only a day or two each. Woodley, along with stoic Theo James, subservient Ansel Elgort, and charm overdrive Miles Teller, hold their own against effortless screen commanding by Winslet and Spencer, Mekhi Phifer, Naomi Watts, Daniel Dae Kim, and Janet McTeer. The screenplay, cobbled together from Veronica Roth’s book by Brian Duffield, Akiva Goldsman, and Mark Bomback, wisely backs off the flimsy worldbuilding and just lets these talented people do the best they can at selling the nonsense. They lean into the adolescent motivations. It is a story about how it’s totally stressful to be too awesome. They believe it, and that’s half the battle.

Helping out is director Robert Schwentke (Flightplan, R.I.P.D.), who moves the camera and provides proficient crosscutting to gin up routine action suspense in the moments when our heroes are forced to flee armed baddies. Later, he does decent work with the swoopy blinking lights and assorted vaguely familiar sci-fi trappings in the interiors. There are special effects moments involving psychological tests – virtual nightmares the must be conquered to unlock the MacGuffin – creating worlds of dissolving buildings, shattering glass, a rotating floating flaming house, and a man who evaporates into silvery fragments. Those are neat, and are tied to Woodley’s performance in some mostly effective ways. A close connection to a female protagonist is what sets Insurgent’s blandness above crushing masculine banalities of other YA competitors like The Maze Runner.

It’s overall an improvement over Divergent, a far more confident and open film, and far more watchable, too. Not only lifeless formula, it often manages to feel like a real movie hobbled by some deeply inconsequential source material. It’s watchable dreck that starts nowhere and spins its wheels, a narrative with nothing to do. Scene by scene it might work, but moments don’t connect or grow or build. The society it assembles only works as a perfect environment for narrativized teen angst, and is as tedious and impenetrable for an outsider as the real thing. If the crux of adolescent problems is the cognitive dissonance between feeling like the most important person in your world and the nagging knowledge you’re not, then this series finds the least interesting solutions.

Tech-ed Off: MEN, WOMEN & CHILDREN

It’s easy to see Jason Reitman’s ambition for Men, Women & Children to be a big statement about How We Live Now. The film is a Very Serious ensemble drama about a cross-section of characters living intertwined melodramas a la Crash or Babel. In this case they’re a bunch of high schoolers and their parents in suburban Texas – though really a vague Modern Anytown, USA – who live disconnected from their feelings and each other. We see lives of quiet desperation mediated by screens showing digital spaces that alternately soothe and exacerbate their problems. Fair enough, but despite fitfully operating as effective drama, it’s clearly a movie built thesis statement backwards into character and incident, frozen by its own sense of importance. Worse, there’s not much to its thesis, which is as muddled as it is trite, developing its emptiness with a heavy hand.

I suppose muddled moralizing speaks, even accidentally, to our societal ambivalence towards technology. It’d be an interesting idea around which to build a drama, but Reitman, adapting with Erin Cressida Wilson a novel by Chad Kultgen, creates a series of events that reflect bland reprimand, concerned handwringing, or vacuous same-as-it-ever-was resignation, sometimes all at once. Caught halfway between scolding and shrugging, it has a view of the Internet that feels so outdated and incomplete I almost expected to hear a modem dial up on the soundtrack. Plot threads involve infidelities, romances, repression, self-harm, painful yearning, and a variety of questionable decisions. Each is filtered through and aided by the Internet. That’s what gives it a patina of timeliness around which it spins rather empty, cliché stories saved only fitfully by strong acting across the board.

The best plotline, perhaps because it draws best on the small character work Reitman did well in better movies like Juno and Young Adult, involves two high school kids dealing with emotional issues. She (Kaitlyn Dever, of Short Term 12 and ABC’s Last Man Standing) is a loner, bookish, sweet, and under the surveillance of a technophobe mother (Jennifer Garner). He (Ansel Elgort, of The Fault in Our Stars) is a football player who quit the team when his mom left the family, leaving his dad (Dean Norris) inattentive to his son’s depression. The kids forge a connection that feels genuine, and twists around the tech in a reasonably convincing way. Other stories aren’t as successful. A bored married couple (Rosemarie DeWitt and Adam Sandler) each secretly turn to the web to find affairs, a plotline that’s a weird blend of shame and forgiveness and, unfortunately, does not turn into a “Piña Colada Song” situation. Their son (Travis Tope) is addicted to porn. His real-life crush is a fame-hungry cheerleader (Olivia Crocicchia) whose mother (Judy Greer) lets her start a modeling website. Meanwhile, a fellow cheerleader (Elena Kampouris) suffers from body image problems brought about by bullying and egged on by online friends.

With a sprawling Message Movie format, there is unevenness built into the structure. Individual stories or scenes work well, but the big picture is a muddle of good intentions, flawed observations, and bad decisions. It’s all tied together with arch narration (by Emma Thompson, speaking in a voice not too far from her Stranger Than Fiction storyteller) that prattles on against the backdrop of space, speaking about Carl Sagan as NASA hardware floats by. Then she’ll dip down with an edit into quotidian explanations about character thoughts and actions, drolly telling us details we can plainly see before us. Reitman’s repetitive screenplay includes heavy-handed, awkwardly inserted, digressions reflecting on 9/11 and “my, how much the world has changed.” Yes. And? It’s a dash of self-serious muttering.

The film’s worst tendencies are reflected in Garner’s character, who has a keystroke logger on her daughter’s devices and hosts fearmongering info sessions for fellow parents. She starts as a humorless paranoid scold who means well. Over the course of her storyline, she goes from spying on everything her daughter does to stopping cold turkey. In the world of this movie, it’s all or nothing, ignoring both the very real benefits of parental oversight and the virtues of trust and flexibility. It’s too uncomfortable lingering in grey areas, too eager to wrap up conflicts. So much so that for all its overt exploring of the screen-saturated culture’s impact on individuals – I liked a recurring image of crowds, everyone looking at screens, their apps hovering translucently above them like a cloud of distraction – the worst events any characters go through happen entirely (or almost entirely) offline.

The movie seems to want a Big Statement, but isn’t sure what to say. In some ways it’s progressive, acknowledging that sometimes lonely, socially isolated people can find solace online that can improve their real world well being. And it’s certainly true that one can get lost in the muck of the web’s worst tendencies. Our world is complex. But every story in this movie that resolves wraps up neatly with a pat Internet-good-for-this, Internet-bad-for-that judgment. Other storylines drop off without resolution, maybe for the best, since I don’t think the filmmakers, though they bring the subjects up, had meaningful discussion of body image, sexual fantasies, or sex work in them. What’s here is an attempt to pass off well-intentioned fumbling in the shallow end as an important deep dive.

Love, Cancer Style: THE FAULT IN OUR STARS

They’re young. They’re in love. They have cancer. She meets him in a support group for kids with terminal illnesses. She needs an oxygen tank to breathe. He has an artificial leg. They’re in remission, but for God only knows how long. She’s only alive because of an experimental treatment. No one knows if and when it’ll stop working. He’s only alive because he gave up part of his leg. They hit it off right away. Their chemistry is immediate, obvious, and overwhelming. They feel comfortable together. Maybe it’s because for them love means never having to say you have cancer.

That’s the basic premise of The Fault in Our Stars, a teen romance wrapped tightly around a disease-of-the-week weepy. What makes it work is the strength of the performances, which are clear-eyed and emphatic, and the writing, which is sappy and sentimental, but never loses a sense of humor and perspective. This isn’t a blinkered story of doomed true love. It’s a story about two sick kids who make a connection in what just might be their final days. Rather than letting this possibility weigh the film down, it’s simply accepted as a reality. They’ve been living with their diagnoses for years now. They’re used to it.

The girl, Hazel, is our entry point into the story. Played by Shailene Woodley, she’s a bookish, contemplative girl who appreciates the time she’s given, while wondering why she can’t have the freedom to be a little more of a normal teen. She certainly doesn’t want to go to the support group in the bottom of a church basement, where the sweet man with testicular cancer (Mike Birbiglia) makes everyone listen to his acoustic guitar playing. She goes anyway, and meets Augustus (Ansel Elgort). They can’t keep their eyes off of each other. Afterwards, they hang out. Soon, they text back and forth. It’s a typical modern teen flirtation sliding easily into romance. If it weren’t for the cancer, it’d almost not be worth telling. The disease gives their flirtation underlying, unspoken, urgency.

Woodley and Elgort’s performances are appealing and comfortable. Woodley makes even the corniest narration sound like nothing more than what a reasonably intelligent teenager might be thinking. She has an open face and wet eyes that communicate a sadness and wonder, convincing as a person who has been sick since she was a child, and is tentatively forging a new relationship despite her worry about hurting one more person with her death. Elgort’s hugely charming, playing the type of cocky that can only be compensating for fear. And yet he seems totally at ease. He has to be the dreamiest, most Tiger Beat-ready cancer patient I’ve ever seen, confident and glowing with a love of life. They look good together, banter well, and are easy to root for.

The supporting cast is filled with terrific actors as parents and fellow support group members. Laura Dern is especially good in a role of maternal warmth and care as a woman for whom caring for a terminal child has become second nature. She has a devastating flashback scene, weeping while trying to comfort her hospitalized daughter, that’s so good it’s repeated twice. Nat Wolff, who between this and Palo Alto is cornering the market on troubled-best-friend teen roles, plays a kid with cancer of the eyes, nervously awaiting surgery that’ll leave him blind. That he’s good comedic relief should tell you something about the movie’s approach. It’s not morose or death-obsessed. It’s about people living their lives one day at a time complete with tiny triumphs, interesting anecdotes, sad setbacks, and funny jokes.

There’s nothing visually interesting about the movie. It’s simply lit and full of medium and close-up two shots, what we’d more easily call TV-like before TV went and got a smidge more cinematic at its upper edge. Director Josh Boone gets fine performances out of his cast and keeps the style merely functional, stepping out of the material’s way. It’s based on a popular novel by John Green, who wrote a well-oiled melodrama machine. I mean that in a good way. Screenwriters Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber (of (500) Days of Summer and The Spectacular Now) retain its most appealing elements, faithfully flavoring a low-key and sympathetic story about families living with a sick child with fantasy romance elements. The main characters have an idealized perfect teen love that’s all the more intense for the cold reality of cancer potentially growing within them.

The movie has a brisk pace, humanizing detail, and a good-humored snap to the dialogue. It hits metaphors a little too hard – a scene drawing a parallel to Anne Frank is misjudged – but, in its simple scenes of characters interacting, it is often deeply felt. It’s gooey, sappy at times, intent on wringing a tear or two out of the audience. But it’s warm, appealing, and never loses sight of the characters, balancing their youthful vitality and the deadly stakes of their conditions. Most importantly, they’re rarely reduced to their types. They’re presented as people who laugh, dream, plan, hope, think, and love. They try not to let their disease define them. That the movie doesn’t either is to its credit. And that’s what makes this glossy, bright, manipulative Hollywood drama an engaging entertainment that can hit authentic, tearful notes.

Generic Dystopia Blahs: DIVERGENT

So many young adult novels have gotten so lugubrious and solemn about subject matter that’s inherently exciting pulp. They’ve forgotten that fast and fun are not adjectives that preclude serious themes. Stories of teenage vampires and teenage gladiatorial combat and teenage dystopias have become these long, slow, formless blobs of deadening trembling import, eliding any B-movie energy they could potentially kick up. It’s like they feel the need to reassure their teen readership that they’re important by placing protagonists their age in the center of every single thing of importance in any given YA world. The weight of these decisions crushes the fun. The Hunger Games adaptations have just barely managed to escape this fate by working an interesting and enjoyable vein of satire and having actual characters for adults to play. You get why moments matter in those movies.

But Divergent has no such luck. It’s empty and bland, a movie built from the ground up to flatter its protagonist. You see, the world it imagines, a post-apocalyptic Chicago that’s been dried up and cordoned off, is split into five discreet career-based factions: scientists called Erudite, lawyers called Candor, farmers called Amity, soldiers called Dauntless, and philanthropists called Abnegation. The divisions between the groups are intensely policed. Once a teen picks their faction in a choosing ceremony, there’s no going back. Flunking out of the track chosen means a faction-less life of abject poverty and homelessness. Our protagonist’s only problem is that she’s too smart, too talented, and too all-around great to fit in only one faction. She’d be perfect in any and all of the factions. She can do everything. And that’s why she’s a threat. She’s just too good for this world.

She’s Tris, played by Shailene Woodley, who is good enough at suggesting interiority to make something of a character out of nothing at all. Her primary attribute is her boldness, which leads her to drift away from her parents’ selfless charity-based Abnegation towards the law enforcement Dauntless. It’s there that she realizes the problems of being labeled Divergent, what the world of this story calls those who fit more than one category. I guess if they have a name for it, then Tris isn’t the first. How this society operates, I’m not quite sure. They claim to have existed in these five separate but equal factions for 100 years. Yet the overarching plot is about the villainous head of Erudite (Kate Winslet) deciding to overthrow and wipe out one of the other factions. Why hasn’t this happened sooner? The whole system seems unstable to me, partially because it seems calculated to avoid any explicit political messaging while providing a scenario in which the protagonist is the most special of all special people and can see their world’s grand design. Good for her, I guess.

The story follows Tris as she slowly becomes a great Dauntless and ends up involved with every major machination of the plot. The fate of future Chicago is in her hands. She meets a handsome Dauntless guy (Theo James) and has a crush on him. The architecture of his face probably has something to do with that, especially the way the camera lingers on his intense stares. Lucky for her, he eventually reciprocates those feelings. Along the way we get endless training montages and some uncomfortable militaristic hazing between barking about showing no fear from an ensemble of young heroes (Zoe Kravitz, Ansel Elgort), villains (Jai Courtney, Mekhi Phifer), and at least one wisenheimer who is not quite either (Miles Teller). Joining Winslet as the token adults in the cast are Ashley Judd, Tony Goldwyn, Maggie Q, and Ray Stevenson in a collection of helpful or harmful influences on Tris and her friends. They stand around in their awkward costumes and pretend this all makes sense, lending it a modicum of weight by reminding us of the better roles they’ve had.

Director Neil Burger’s approach is generic, impersonal, but sometimes serviceable. One nice scene involves a zip line off the top of a skyscraper and through the abandoned skyline of the city. I liked that. But most of the movie, adapted by Evan Daugherty and Vanessa Taylor from the book by Veronica Roth, involves pretty faces held in close-up. For over two hours they murmur towards each other, worried about who is going to be Dauntless, what the Erudites are up to and who is spreading rumors about Abnegation. They find it far more important than I did. All the intent declarations involving their faction titles only had me wondering why this society would choose such unwieldy adjectives for their groups’ names.

The film feels so claustrophobic and small, spending most of its time in rooms and caves and warehouses. When we finally pull back for wide shots, the sense of CGI space it tries to create feels fake and tiny, utterly inconsequential and entirely arbitrary. Chicago is a husk of its former self, but the “L” is still running and apparently automated? Okay. Maybe it works on the page (somehow I doubt it). But on screen, the whole thing just looks dumb.

Hurt People Hurt People: CARRIE

Stephen King’s novel Carrie and the 1976 Brian De Palma film based on it are not particularly frightening examples of the horror genre.  Emphasis is on something more emotionally upsetting than surface scare. They have blunt force pulp power, bludgeoning and disturbing. What makes them something approaching classic is that truly distressing and upsetting material comes well before an ostracized teenage girl has a nasty prank pulled on her at prom and finally snaps in a frenzy of telekinetic fury. No, what’s upsetting about Carrie is the all-too-real horror of everyday cruelty. She’s a girl who is abused at home by a tyrannically religious mother who preaches a twisted gospel of self-loathing and shame, bullied at school by packs of mean girls and boys who perpetuate a cycle of trauma that is seemingly endless. When one girl snarls that Carrie’s “been asking for it since the sixth grade,” it’s hard not to wonder why this wounded young woman could ever been seen as anything other than psychologically brutalized. Sadly, compassion is something easily lost in adolescence, especially in group dynamics when one’s qualms can get swallowed up in mob mentality.

Where the new version of Carrie, a fresh adaptation scripted by Lawrence D. Cohen (he wrote the 1976 version) and Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa (a writer for Marvel comics as well as TV’s Glee and Big Love), goes right is in its sharp psychological eye in these early sequences of casual real-world cruelty. (Take the writers’ previous works of high school campiness, a focus on religion as familial strain, and a splash of King horror intruding on small town normality, and you have a good start on understanding this film’s approach.) Unlike De Palma’s brash showiness, with its nearly-exploitative eye for bodies on display in all their various states, this adaptation is inspired by the characters’ interiorities. Carrie, who is slowly realizing her telekinesis, is painfully shy, guarded. She’s preemptively defensive and rightfully so. After the opening scene, in which she’s relentlessly mocked in the gym class locker room, her mother picks her up from school. Full of sickly maternal rage, she punishes Carrie, telling her if she hadn’t been sinful that wouldn’t have happened. The poor girl is abused by her peers and then comes home to further punishment. For Carrie, there is no such thing as a safe place. 

Played here by Chloe Grace Moretz, Carrie is a pretty teenage girl who hides it well. She’s restlessly wary, hunched, arms held perpetually in a cautious defensive posture in front of her body that is swimming in formless oversized clothes. Her eyes dart, ready to find the next source of pain. A smile teases across her lips as she comes to realize that she has the ability to move things with her mind, along with a tremble of worry that if anyone found out, she’d only invite more mockery. Her mother (Julianne Moore) has wild hair and tends to hurt herself, pricking her thighs with her sewing needle, clawing at her wrists with her fingernails in religious fervor. It makes sense that she thinks the only reason she has a child is because of spiritual weakness, momentary lapses of sinful behavior. She keeps her daughter in line with threats of violence and confinement. When Carrie gets up the courage to announce that a cute boy (Ansel Elgort) has invited her to prom, her mother responds by telling her not to go. When Carrie pushes back ever so slightly, her mother hits herself repeatedly.

The boy feels sorry for Carrie and has invited her upon the request of his girlfriend (Gabriella Wilde), who regrets the bullying. A far more typical response comes from the ferociously catty mean girl (Portia Doubleday) who blames the victim when bullying gets her banned from prom. “We didn’t even do anything!” she cries, completely missing the point. She, along with her scary boyfriend (Alex Russell) plans to get even, blaming Carrie for missing out on prom. The nasty act they plan – the iconic Carrie prom moment that’s about as spoilable as Psycho’s shower scene, but I’ll avoid mentioning it anyway – is what sets off the more typically horror filled finale. In it, this film, like De Palma’s, becomes bloody. But unlike De Palma’s, this is a tragedy more than a spectacle, a film about a bullied girl who finally gets the strength to lash back at her tormentors and becomes a super-bully in the process, mangling indiscriminately. Even a kindly, well-intentioned teacher (wonderfully played by Judy Greer) gets caught up in the conflagration. This is no mere revenge fantasy. It’s troubling. When the nastiest bullies get taken out in spectacular horror film kills – staged here with freshly inventive jolts and jabs – it’s not only comeuppances. It’s a lament that it has gone this far.

The director here is Kimberly Peirce. Her first two films, 1999’s Boys Don’t Cry and 2008’s Stop-Loss, were haunting dramas that end up as tragedies. They’re about late-adolescent and early-adulthood yearnings, desires, and fluid identities in the process of stabilizing brought up short by intolerance and injustice. Here, in Carrie, those intolerances and injustices do their part in forming Carrie’s identity until the time when she has the empowerment to take control – take full command of her powers, both literal and metaphorical – and seizes it with great violence and only flashes of regret. Peirce handles the interpersonal relationships tenderly and sharply, so that by the time the violence of the finale emerges, almost right out of a comic book adaptation in its splashiness, like an X-Man gone sour, it’s as sad as it is shocking. Peirce makes a sympathetic portrait that’s never a voyeuristic freak show. She looks compassionately and sadly upon the events of the story, finding notes of embarrassment, anger, shame, and pity. Without attacking the material with the same outward bite and sleaze of De Palma, Peirce has made a humane, haunting and affecting adaptation from the inside out.