Great Scott: HOUSE OF GUCCI and THE LAST DUEL

Ridley Scott is a director of contradictions. On the one hand, he’s one of Hollywood’s last great technicians of human epics. On the other, he’s an aged cynical graduate of advertisement who still simmers in the splash and flash—slick surfaces illuminating a sickness underneath. He doesn’t always hit, but when he does he’s top tier. And he’s always admirable for marshaling enormous technical craft and skill to communicate a vision that’s all his own. His latest is House of Gucci, a story of the fall of a once fashionable family. (In that way, it’s of a piece with his recent All the Money in the World, another true story of a wealthy family in conflict.) For Gucci, the chic, fashionable brand may still be strong, but the founding fathers are long gone, driven out by ego, scheming, and a wicked true crime twist. Scott joins them near the end. He surrounds them with tacky opulence and hollow golden accoutrement.

Maybe it’s the fact the movie was shot during the pandemic, which probably cramped the ability to assemble huge crowds or tons of moving pieces, but everything, from discos to villas to storefronts, seems pinched and empty. We see an obscenely rich family who have walled themselves off from the human element, like the nasty industrialists in Visconti’s The Damned if they had a better handle on some of their morals. (But just some.) There are the wrinkled brothers ruling over the stale roost of a company past its prime—an emaciated Jeremy Irons with a hacking cough, and a bloated Al Pacino delighting in his self-satisfaction—and their inadequate sons, a dweeby pushover with a reedy tone (Adam Driver) and a pompous rolly-polly oaf with a honking accent (Jared Leto cocooned in a fat suit and expansive balding forehead). Scott clearly relishes populating the screen with characters who are caricatures at best, gargoyles at worst. He finds the Gucci family in the late 70s and pushes into the 90s, as the glamorous fashion brand has fallen on hard times. The fact it won’t rebound until none of the above are involved, or alive, is treated as a giddy irony.

This stance is double-underlined by the central figure of this wildly uneven picture: a scheming lover played by Lady Gaga. Done up in Italian drag, Gaga serves up a six-course half-camp meal in which each course is ham. She swivels into every scene like a pneumatic refugee from the Ryan Murphy version of the tale, glowering from under heavy makeup, wriggling into tightly-fitted costumes, and chewing over every sentence like she’s prepared to swallow the scenery whole. Her character is constantly working an angle, using romance as a way up the food chain, and then snapping up the weak wealthy marks around her. Up against the likes of Irons and Pacino, she’s pushy and insistent. Playing off Driver, she’s constantly throwing herself against his comparative naturalism in their high melodrama. Her scenes with Leto play like nothing less than stumbling into the theater department’s two most outlandish students egging each other further over the top.

There’s fun to be had in this swanning buffet of performances, bubbling unpredictably between lively and dead-eyed, but Scott’s material loses track of the plot’s pulse. It becomes a string of handsomely realized empty echoes—a dim tour through a melting wax museum of fashion tycoons and true crimes past. The tone, amplified with pounding pop hits and shimmery gowns yet drug down to earth in dim negotiations and disputes, teeters between gloriously fake and dreary disbelief.  That’s why, no matter how fitfully engaging, it’s hard to get into the larger portrait of systemic capitalist excess, squirmy scheming at the heart of its ladder of success, and delirious drops from the heights of inequity. The whole picture is too sad to be funny, and too funny to be sad.

Far better—sharper, perceptive, and complicated—is Scott’s other period-piece epic of the year: The Last Duel. Instead of shiny surface elegance, it has actual elegance in its design despite some bruising subject matter. Set in medieval France, it’s the story of a rape accusation as told from three perspectives: first the victim’s husband’s, then her rapist’s, and, finally, hers. The intelligent construction doesn’t get lost in the subjectivity of the viewpoints—it’s careful not to make the key details up for dispute—but cleverly draws out the ways in which people can convince themselves they’re the wronged party, no matter the cost. Scott summons an army of craftspeople and extras to populate chilly castles, sprawling manors, and muddy fields of combat, with horses tromping up and down, swords clashing, and ladies’ dresses swishing over the cobblestones. It has the same attention to messy historical detail that made his Kingdom of Heaven and Gladiator, not to mention his debut feature, the similarly downbeat view of chivalrous violence, The Duellists. But because the focus remains squarely on the even messier, and evergreen, human failings and foibles driving the drama, the humanity is never dwarfed by the large scale. It’s intimate and uncomfortable despite the occasional flourishes of fluttering banners and clashing blades.

It helps that the performers are uniformly charismatic, and unafraid of looking pathetic, powerless, or petulant. Matt Damon, constantly small in the frame, plays a frustrated mid-level knight who rides off into battle and expects to be rewarded by the feudal system game by which he’s playing. His younger wife is played by Jodie Comer, who is dignified even in defeat, and rather clear about using her marriage as a way of social currency for her father. She loves her husband, but chafes ever so slightly against the ways her husband’s ego structures her life. Adam Driver, tall and intense in an interesting evil twin to his Gucci performance, is a knight who eventually has his eye on Damon’s wife. The two men are friendly on the surface, fighting together and both under the domain of the king’s cousin (Ben Affleck). That bleach-blonde aristocrat has a libertine swagger and fratty attitude—Affleck brings an oozing charm and nasty privileged self-impressed edge to every line. Driver’s in his good graces, and manages to wheedle some land that was to be promised Damon. This sets off a tense relationship that eventually culminates in the central crime, and Damon’s demand for a duel to the death. According to the court, in this case of he-said she-said, it’s the only way to prove his wife’s good word. (The arguments the men in power make to discredit her sound exactly like today’s right-wing talking points on similar matters, right down to the medieval understanding of biology; that it’s plainly presented and allows the audience to draw the connection on its own is a sign of the movie's subtly.)

Written by Damon and Affleck with Nicole Holofcener (that expert dissector of social interactions stewing in money, jealousy, clout, and pettiness with the likes of Please Give and Friends with Money), The Last Duel becomes a wide-angle lens that nonetheless focuses tightly on actions and consequences. It’s a surprisingly lively experience for such dour subject matter, skewering the pathetic squabbles and scrabbling for power amidst the men even as it understands their frustrations, and empathizing with the quiet dignity of the woman who recedes into the background despite being the ostensible focus. The overall Rashomon effect of the separate but complimentary and contradictory tellings, without an interlocutor to guide us, returns to the beginning of the conflict thrice. The build up to the crime is enhanced by the empty spaces that are fleshed out each time through. For the crime itself, at first it is merely recounted, but later seen twice, each intense, tactful and impactful. The first two times, the film pushes right up to the brink of its climactic duel before skipping back to tell the whole thing from next point of view. The screenplay is sharply balanced to bring us deeper into clarity.

When Comer steps into the lead for her section, the one that finally leads into the final fight, we’re explicitly told it’s “the truth,” and the sad thing is that it matters little to the outcome. Here’s a society in which choices are constrained, when people suffer under powerful men who protect their friends and allies at the expense of those deemed lesser than, and the inequalities of class and gender dictate so much about who is believed and whose control is maintained. In the end, the duel is the only thing giving Damon a chance to win some honor back (although, he’s warned, if he fails, he wife will literally be burned as a liar). What no one much seems to care about is the truth, the woman’s perspective, as she’s left to suffer in silence (that’s even the advice she gets from her mother-in-law in a clenched scene of matter-of-fact confession) and hope the right man is killed.

Rise of the Guardians: ZACK SNYDER'S JUSTICE LEAGUE

How appropriate that Zack Snyder’s vision for Justice League ended up being a long, melancholy, mournful, patient, troubled and yet ultimately hesitantly triumphant movie about resurrections. There’s a Superman who died in the climax of 2016’s Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice and will eventually be revived with alien magic. There’s an ancient pact between man and gods due to be restored in order to combat an alien invasion. There are heroes who once had hope who will find their reasons for fighting again. Elsewhere there’s a dying teenage hacker robotically revived by his scientist father, and a speedy young man hoping to restore his father’s good name. There’s even the villain’s plot: to unearth antique terraforming machines long-buried and bring about devastating world-changing power to prepare the way for fiery apocalyptic inter-dimensional conquerors. There’s something curiously moving about all of these images and statements and motifs of death and rebirth, about parents missing children, mentors losing pupils, lovers separated by loss, defenders drained of their will — and at every step the slow work of building coalitions to protect and save. That it was all there, before he left the project due to a family tragedy, before its initial 2017 release buried those ideas under reshoots and reedits by Joss Whedon that made it into something poppier and emptier and deeply confused, makes this restored and completed cut not only a total improvement in every way, but something of a resurrection itself.  

Snyder’s vision of the DC universe, it’s clear to see, is dark and alienating in many ways. His 2013 Man of Steel takes the last son of Krypton not as uncomplicated superhero, but as the alien being he is. (Henry Cavill’s otherworldly handsomeness helps there.) It takes him seriously, and sees that he's a little scary, as it scrambles the usual take in what, after decades of superhero movies' samey bright quips and weightless consequences-free spectacle, stands out as unusually weighty, destructive, calamitous. It has a certain power. Similarly, Snyder’s grim versus followup snapped into clearer focus for me these days. After the year we’ve had, is there any doubt a real Superman would not exactly unite our divisions? I wrote at the time that that film is “intent to imagine a worst-case scenario superhero world, in which they’re…vigilantes viewed with suspicion, fear, and worship, and who nonetheless must muster the energy to save the planet.” I called the movie cynical and heavy and curdled, and I don’t think I’d change my mind about those adjectives, but I would change my mind about that being a bad thing. Maybe it’s just the passage of time, or the tenor of the times, but I found myself, in revisiting the Snyder-verse over the last few weeks, sympathetic to and engaged by his attempt to try something different. After all, we have so many superhero stories that go the same route over and over and over again — hitting the same beats, making the same poses, telling the same moral lessons while ignoring areas of culpability these larger-than-life figures would have in something like the real world. Why not try to spin a new myth out of old symbols? Snyder is a powerful image-maker for good and for ill, but in this new cut of Justice League he puts some of his finest filmmaking to use clarifying and extending his vision for this comic book universe.

His Justice League assembles in a film full of typical Snyder touches: obvious symbolism, thick layers of atmosphere, slow-mo poses and vivid pop art combat, moody music and acrobatic violence, terse exposition and pulp poetry, flashy comic book fashions and rippling physiques. But its very idiosyncrasy is what makes it so compelling, and its excess so watchable. He’s using the language of blockbusters to muscle in his mythmaking, to pour out his heart into these squares of hectic collisions and languidly drawn emotions. It’s outsized — every frame squared off by cinematographer Fabian Wagner in tall boxy IMAX aspect ratio — and sometimes corny — like a robot-man envisioning the economy as an enormous bear and bull fighting — but it’s always clearly springing out of a singular, complicated vision with its inconsistency and eccentricity earnestly displayed. Here’s a boy trying to save a girl in a slow-mo sequence agonizingly stretched until it’s almost romantic. Here’s an army of Amazons fighting against a marauding alien, their queen's voice quaking as she tries to warn her exiled daughter. Here’s a grieving reporter in a soft heart to heart with her dead fiancé’s mother. Here’s a father and a son grappling with catastrophic change, a source of connection that nonetheless drives them further apart. Here’s the heir to Atlantis brushing off his birthright. Here’s the solo vigilante forced to admit he needs some help. It all builds to calamitous action, and that’s satisfying enough as those things go — and probably the best Snyder’s ever done it — but it’s the long build up — nearly three whole hours of it — devoted to characters and their tentative connections forging and accruing that’s most interesting.

That’s not to say it all works. The thing stretches to just past four hours and hits some of the same thinness that structured the first theatrical cut. The gloopy animated villain and his world-ending plot is never quite as sharp as the best of its genre competitors', and some side characters get lost in the shuffle. (I found the fleeting appearance of an unbilled surprise pretty much a whiff, and a newly shot nightmare at the end of the epilogue a bummer of a conclusion that probably should’ve gone post-credits as it spoils the mood of the main story’s resolution.) And it’s still in some way playing grab-bag with the standard tropes. But the superhero genre provides us so little majesty these days, it’s satisfying to watch Snyder get there. It put me in mind of Ang Lee’s Hulk and Guillermo del Toro’s Hellboys and Sam Raimi’s Spider-Mans, movies of this kind that have big CG spectacle and swinging action and popcorn plotting that somehow manage to be personal and eclectic visions, about real human emotions buried under the spandex and shining through the actors’ intimate moments between slam-bang high-speed collisions. He poses his performers iconographically, and they all fit the parts well. Jason Momoa is an ideal charismatic reluctant Aquaman; Gal Gadot is still a fine Wonder Woman; Ezra Miller is good comedic relief Flash; Ray Fisher does swell robo-soul searching as Cyborg; and Ben Affleck’s Batman has never been better. Snyder has them bring out flickers of humanity in the grinding exposition and explosions. The whole long picture is evocative, exciting, exhausting, and always distinctive. Even when it’s silly, or soggy, at least it’s sincere. It’s exactly what it wants to be — a thunderous cracked fantasy of a fallen modern world that maybe, just maybe, can be temporarily solved by restoring something we love.

Rebound: THE WAY BACK

The Way Back is a character study in the structure of a sport’s movie. It's the kind of movie we say they don't make anymore, a terrific work of formula and feeling, and about recognizable people with real problems. In its attentive way, attuned to the addiction suffered by its main character, the film doubles up on underdogs. We find a man drawn to the beer bottle to drown out disappointments, purposefully narrowing his life to his hard work on a construction crew and his drunken nights passing out alone. Years before, he used to be a high school basketball star, and so when his old school calls him to take over as head coach of a team in the midst of a decades long losing streak — the old coach had a heart attack and has to withdraw midseason — he reluctantly agrees. It sets up an easy Hollywood arc, with a ragtag group of underperforming athletes and a middle-aged man gripped by regret and alcoholism have to help each other find a way forward, growing together and teaching each other. But though the film takes on that shape, through the hard-won victories on and off the court, it’s far more interested in the people involved. Though it hardly lacks for basketball action and locker room pep talks and heart to hearts with troubled youths, and builds up the typical compelling head of steam as rivals look down on them and the playoffs loom, the movie holds the coach in focus at the key moment, the scoreboard blurred in the background. In fact, though the ending is rousing and emotionally satisfying, as I sit here typing these words I can’t even remember if we hear the final score. Director Gavin O’Connor is no stranger to the genre, what with his great 2004 based-on-a-true-hockey-game Miracle and fine 2011 brother-versus-brother boxing movie Warrior. Here he and his team bring solid meat-and-potatoes studio craftsmanship to every polished moment of Brad Ingelsby’s sturdy screenplay. And he services the expected beats by underplaying them — scores revealed in a melancholy freeze frame of on-screen text, or a deft cut away from a reaction — while building up an involving emotional experience.

It helps that Ben Affleck, delivering one of his finest performances, is in the lead. He brings sad eyes to the role, unspoken depression burbling under his closeups. There’s a scene where he sits in his truck in the parking lot of a bar, and we can tell he’s debating whether or not to go in based solely on the expression on his face. It’s neither overplayed nor telegraphed; he’s simply being, letting the conflict play out naturally, subtly, a shift of weight, a tipping of emphasis, a silence, a pause. He feels real. So, too, is his physicality, carrying with it the full burden of his own star persona — here’s the champion who was, the box office draw and Oscar winner whose megawatt celebrity has been dimmed through the vagaries of gossip headlines and various personal problems playing out in public. We can see in his role the powerhouse this new coach once was, the sturdy confidence of his frame balancing on unsteady feet, tough and talented, but clearly struggling. When he steps back on the court, he regains some of his command. If only he can stay on the wagon long enough to take similar charge of his life. The cast around him is evocative, painted in broad strokes, enough to get the picture. There’s a kind assistant coach (Al Madrigal), a worried sister (Michaela Watkins), a tentative ex-wife (Janina Gavankar). As painful moments of backstory are revealed, it’s clear the man’s profound pain will not be taken away by drinking another shot at the bar nor by watching his players take a winning shot on the court. There are no simple answers here. No one — not him, not his players, not his family, not his community — is transformed overnight. But they can be set on the right path. It’s not for nothing that his day job finds him helping construct a new highway overpass. It’s slow going, piece by piece. But maybe, if all goes well, in the end, there’ll be a new way back.

Bad Math: THE ACCOUNTANT

The Accountant is a stupid movie dressed up like a smart one. At its core the picture is pure preposterous pulp. Ben Affleck plays a brilliant autistic accountant whose globetrotting financial consulting for black market crime lords and other shady types makes him a man who knew too much. The film follows him into a cat-and-mouse game with hitmen hired to eliminate him and the federal agents hot on his trail. That’s absurd, but the filmmakers have taken it very seriously. Director Gavin O’Connor (Miracle) and screenwriter Bill Dubuque (The Judge) layer in tragic backstory, piling up childhood bullying, stern fathers, absent mothers, jail stints, and more building a picture of the accountant as a sad figure. His autism is treated as both a superpower and an embellishment of his sadness derived from an inability to connect. He lives a lonely lifestyle, moving from identity to identity, dragging his laundered life savings in a pristine Airstream trailer. We’re supposed to see the dim, pale Seamus McGarvey cinematography and the ridiculously overqualified supporting cast and find the whole thing profound. And yet, for whatever glimmers of insight and import it has, the only developments it can think of are loud, tedious exchanges of gunfire.

At least the cast tries its hardest to pull off the silliness with the actors providing their best grave expressions and deadpan exposition tones. Anna Kendrick plays a plucky junior accountant who discovers a problem in the books of a wealthy robotics CEO (John Lithgow). Jon Bernthal leads a team of mercenaries who travel the world looking to take out loose ends for anyone who can afford to pay the bills for what’s clearly a well-funded mini-army. J.K. Simmons and Cynthia Addai-Robinson are agents who sit in offices explaining their research to each other before finally getting out in the field, where Simmons promptly sits down and talks us through a lengthy info-dump. (At least they’ve found a new setting.) These are all talented performers, and sometimes it’s worth admiring how much the greats can do when given so little on the page to play. They – and Jean Smart, and Jeffrey Tambor, and Robert C. Treveiler, and Alison Wright, and the rest – spend their screen time here acting like the premise is believable. Because they’re invested in the reality of a story that begins with an accountant-turned-criminal mastermind and ends with a few wild twists and a shoot-‘em-up like something out of Jack Reacher or John Wick, it almost works.

There are sequences where the movie wears its grim self-importance lightly, allowing little quips and small acknowledgement of its exaggerated qualities – like Affleck’s long-range target practice observed by a shocked farmer – to show it’s in on the joke. A movie about a super-accountant has to know it’s attempting something a little off the beaten path, even if it’s trying to shove it into the usual mid-budget Warner Brothers’ crime picture mold. But the trouble comes when the movie presents its very earnest, hugely clumsy, ideas about autism. It’d be free to be sillier, pulpier, and drastically more satisfying if it weren’t for incongruous message movie aspirations. Its opening scene is a tearful one with concerned parents trying to get help in the wake of a diagnosis. Its final moments are of would-be inspirational autism acceptance sentiment. But, in between, Affleck’s accountant is a collection of ticks and cutesy affectations meant to signify his challenges at every turn. This is all well and good in theory, but it’s sloppily integrated, used for comedy of the haha-he’s-unusual kind and to drive the plot as convenient explanation for his superpowers of cognition.

Part of the problem is the difficulty in believing Affleck as an accountant capable of, say, comprehending and analyzing fifteen years worth of corporate ledgers over night. If he was the type of performer who projected deep reservoirs of unspoken intelligence, maybe the film wouldn’t have to hit his ticks so hard. That wouldn’t solve the fundamental miscalculation of wedging a well-intentioned message into a totally frivolous affair, but would at least make it fit a smidge better. Affleck, despite clear hardworking smarts in interviews and behind the camera, simply isn’t good at looking like the smartest guy in the room on screen. He’s always at his best playing average guys bumping up against the limits of their wits – Gone Girl, To the Wonder, Extract, Shakespeare in Love, Armageddon. Here he’s playing at virtuoso skills, trying hard to make sense of a character written symptoms out instead of inside in attempt to write a person who happens to have a particular perspective. It’s just not playing to his strengths. In that way it’s a mirror of the movie as a whole. It wants to be something it’s not, resisting its most appealing goofiest impulses every step of the way.

Whoever Wins, We Lose: BATMAN V SUPERMAN: DAWN OF JUSTICE

Having seen 2013’s Man of Steel, Zack Snyder’s Superman reboot which was a serviceable origin story retelling until it exploded in monotonous tone-deaf city-smashing, it shouldn’t be too surprising to find the sequel, Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, as punishing as its title is unwieldy. It’s another of Snyder’s dunderheaded epics of missing the point, a gleaming picture of dour comic book tableaus pre-digested with little regard for meaning, stripped of whatever power they once had, and weighed down by the burden of a visually overdetermined and thematically indigestible form. Overstuffed with empty calories, every so often the lumpy mass chokes up ideas so thoughtless and virulently stupid I couldn’t help but wonder if it was subliminally disgorged from the ugliest corners of our national id. After all, this is a movie about a noble extraterrestrial savior and a tortured crimefighter and the best it can think to do is contrive reasons for them to scowl as they go about representing the mindset of anyone whose first response to reasonable disagreement is to punch it in the face.

The story finds Superman (Henry Cavill) a divisive figure. He smashed up Metropolis pretty good in the last movie, ostensibly in the process of saving it, but with the unintended consequence of inflicting a 9/11-scale disaster on every other block. That understandably made a few people mad. Some, like a Senator (Holly Hunter, underutilized) whose logical concern is treated as mildly treacherous, want to constrain his power. Others, like Batman (Ben Affleck, growling with brooding trauma), whose alter-ego’s Wayne Enterprises had a skyscraper caught in the fracas, plot to bring him punishment for his otherworldly strength and its potential bad consequences. Still others, like villain Lex Luthor (played as a squirrely sociopathic tech bro by Jesse Eisenberg), want to contrive a reason to something something Kryptonite. It’s all of a piece with an intent to image a worst-case scenario superhero world, in which they’re lawless self-righteous power-mad vigilantes viewed with suspicion, fear, and worship, and who nonetheless must muster the energy to save the planet.

That’s not necessarily a bad idea. A real Superman would indeed be a scary thing, a man who could not be controlled by any earthly authority if he so chose. We’re lucky he mostly wants to do the right thing. But in Snyder’s vision, this becomes a troublingly muddled mess. It presents a Superman weirdly uncharacterized, and mostly motivated by his desire to save his mother, Ma Kent (Diane Lane), and his girlfriend, Lois Lane (Amy Adams). He’s not much of an altruist, aside from a few token saves, and certainly lives up to the suspicion he’s under. He acts with impunity, and on a whim. As for Batman, here he’s a violent bruiser, killing waves of faceless criminals by gun, by car, by plane, and by hand in bone-crunching rounds of savagery, then branding his logo onto the survivors. Ouch. This is bleak, grim nihilism, a film in which superpowers are real, but the idea of heroes is foreign. At one point Daily Planet editor Perry White (Laurence Fishburne) snaps: “The American conscience died...”

Snyder, with a script by Chris Terrio (Argo) and David S. Goyer (Blade Trinity), is channeling the trend begun in 80’s and 90’s comics that mistook a dim, darkly lit, and violent vision for an interesting, realistic, and meaningful one. Here’s a movie convinced its unremitting cruelty and cheap cynicism adds up to ideas of any import. It’s just deadening and uncomfortable, with pessimism and nastiness so garbled it comes out sounding downright fascist. It makes its heroes monsters to be feared, and then forces us to look up to them anyway. Its world is better off without them – every outlandish conflict is a direct result of their actions – but we’re to root for their demagogic unilateralism, to let them run rampant because only they have the super-strength to strong-arm their way to a victory. And if a certain number of mere mortals have to be obliterated in the name of their idea of justice, so be it.

The film traffics in images of terror. One scene finds a suicide bomber detonating in slow motion, the flames billowing out. The movie is bookended by buildings collapsing and filling the streets of a major east coast city with smoke and debris while citizens flee. An early inciting incident is a chaotic ambush in an African outpost used for political power plays in Congress. Snyder injects these unmistakable real-world associations into the film to goose its power, and to lend borrowed gravity to the story of two superheroes deciding to fight each other to prove…something. It’s borderline irresponsible, especially as he uses these spectacles of terror to excuse their actions, to argue for the justification of these men serving as their own judges, juries, and executioners. And every character who expresses reasonable objections is met with death, usually at the hands of this threat, as if to say they got what was coming to them for daring to want limits on these God-like super-people.

So it’s not much fun for most of the 151-minute runtime. It’s a slog, not just for its heavy (and heavy-handed) mood, but also for its straining and monotonous graveness. It grinds good performers under its demands, sapping Cavill and Affleck of charisma, turning Adams and Lane into damsels in distress, and leaving everyone else, including Jeremy Irons as faithful butler Alfred, trying to coax life into turgid exposition. When not going through its over-extended plodding plot, it’s mostly a cavalcade of seeds for future sequels and spin-offs, bringing in Wonder Woman (Gal Gadot) for a mostly blank glorified cameo, the worst of which finds her in front of a computer essentially watching three teasers for upcoming projects. Or maybe it’s the upskirt flash that’s the nadir of the movie’s insistence on turning every woman into a pawn to be trapped – one maternal figure is gagged and bound in sadistic Polaroid’s – or, failing that, sexualized. It’s dismaying, just another reason I found the whole desensitized thing exhausting and tiresome, from its opening repeat of the Wayne deaths to an ersatz King Kong restaging followed by a hero getting nuked in the face.

This is a technically proficient blockbuster insisting on loudly thundering down the wrong road at every turn, ponderously bringing flights of fancy to overblown heights and down to reductive muck. With the whole history of these iconic larger-than-life characters to play with, there’s nothing more imaginative here than having one of them trying to hit the other over the head with, say, a porcelain sink. Still, it’s best when mind-numbing, in long sequences of concussive fantasy fight night or bonkers nightmare sequences, for at least that’s a break from its maddening point of view. Built from mythic and resonant components made curdled and rotten, its characters are meant to save us, but are indifferent to the suffering in their wake. Neither red-blooded adventure nor sharp auto-critique, it’s content to be ugly and cacophonous, the sights and sounds of this approach to the genre wrung-out and dying before our eyes.

Going...Going...GONE GIRL

Gone Girl is a sick dispatch from the dark center of a poisoned culture. It’s a missing person thriller imbued with the tick-tock urgency of a well-wrought procedural. But for all his precise surface sheen, David Fincher is a director interested in implications far more troubling and upsetting than any given episode of any given crime drama. Just look at how he turned the true crime Zodiac into a masterful investigation of obsession and unknowablity. With Gone Girl, the screenplay by Gillian Flynn, from her novel, obliges his impulses, creating a world that snaps into revealing action when a woman in a small Missouri town vanishes from the home she shares with her husband of five years. In doing so, it exposes a culture that’s selfish, prejudiced, misogynistic, easily misled, and eagerly superficial. And in the middle are characters who exploit these flaws.

At first, we know the drill. And because Fincher is a director who loves process and information, we appear to be on solid genre ground. The front door is open. The glass coffee table is smashed. There’s a bit of blood on the kitchen cabinet. And Amy Dunne (Rosamund Pike) is nowhere to be found. Her husband Nick (Ben Affleck) calls the cops. Officers (Kim Dickens and Patrick Fugit) show up to collect samples and rope off the suspected crime scene. He’s interviewed, then released to stay with his twin sister (Carrie Coon) while his wife’s parents (Lisa Banes and David Clennon) race to town. Search parties are gathered. A tip line is established. The media flocks, from local station vans getting all Ace in the Hole on lawns and sidewalks, to the tabloid media sharks (Missi Pyle and Sela Ward) ripping their teeth into the story’s details from the desks of their cable news channels.

This is how these things always go, whether in Law & Order or in real life. The husband is a source of suspicion. The wife is valorized. Fear and excitement creep through the community, media whips the nation into a frenzy of judgment, and the police chase down clues with professionalism. It's dryly funny, a mixture of unease, bewilderment and practicality. This is the least showily directed of Fincher's work, but he still ably deploys Jeff Cronenweth’s cinematography – clean, simple images, clear shadows and soft colors – to keep the vice grip of tension screwing tighter. Sinister steady shots glide together with propulsive, clever editing – like a cute, creepy cut from a flashback to the couple’s first kiss to his mouth being swabbed by forensics – to bring considerable menace and dread to the procedural beats as the story grows more complex.

As the investigation moves forward, Amy narrates past scenes from their marriage, happy days and growing ominous inklings alike. In the present, clues begin to add up to an unpleasant picture for Nick. The police grow more skeptical of his story. They and we see uglier sides of his personality. What begins as a wrong-man thriller starts to gather a nauseous nagging weight. But that’s not the end of the story, and it doesn’t end up where you’d think from that set up. The film takes loop-de-loops with audience identification, recontextualizing characters, shifting sympathies with each new piece of information.

The cast expands. We meet a high-powered defense attorney (Tyler Perry), a mistress (Emily Ratajkowski), a chatty neighbor (Casey Wilson), a wronged ex (Scoot McNairy), a stalker (Neil Patrick Harris). But, with confident and nuanced performances across the board, none are as they seem. Dangerous people end up victims. The sleazy end up noble. The helpful are dupes. The clueless are shrewd. It’s important to consider not only what we know, but from what perspective we learned it, what we’ve seen and what we’ve only heard. Fincher deftly navigates the script’s developing mysteries and twists with a dread as steady as his eye for accumulating detail, even if some of the plot devices come across as only that.

In the center remain the couple, the husband left behind and the wife who is missing. They’re each playing a role in this case, exposing their lives to the world and leaving it up to the media’s interpretation. They weren’t perfect. They weren’t happy. They left New York crushed by the recession to take root in the Midwest, and found their seemingly perfect lives crack under the pressure. Selfish motives filled the cracks and pulled them apart. And now this. Now what?

Affleck and Pike play complicated roles that develop from stock types into richly complicated contradictions. They are both convincing as normal people trapped in a marriage that’s nearing a turning point, and heightened genre constructs heading towards a startling conclusion. Fincher gets them playing the easily digestible surfaces and the roiling ugliness underneath, hanging everything out for us to see them fully. The better to twist the plot in directions that are as surprising as they are sickening. The resulting gender politics are queasy, either sloppy or too clever and more than a little troubling in the ways it plays into a sexist’s worst nightmare assumptions. But the performances carry the film over anyway. It’s worth puzzling over because of how ice cold complicated the actors manage to be, by steering into the ugliest aspects of their characters.

Our culture values easy surface details and convenient narratives. They let us avoid the need to look further, think more deeply. In Gone Girl, there are those exploiting this for their own benefit. And I’m not just talking about the villain(s). (I’m being purposely vague there.) The cops make assumptions. The media finds easy targets. It’s easy to frame people, mislead the public, and obscure the obvious. Public relations becomes a way to win a case, or at least wriggle out of suspicion. Even Amy’s parents turned her childhood into a series of idealized kids’ books, then enjoyed conflating the character and their daughter for financial gain.

So it’s not merely a story of lurid violence and voyeuristic chills with fear mongering, although that’s certainly exploited here. (The film’s closer to De Palma than Hitchcock, if you catch my drift.) It’s also a movie about psychological damage of many kinds, drawing upsetting conclusions about the lengths people will go to appear good, to appear innocent, to get what they want and look right in others’ eyes. Why else would a do-gooder snap a selfie at a vigil, then get offended when asked to delete? She wants proof of appearances for her own use, no matter how unsettled or difficult it leaves those in her wake. It’s a film full of such troubling details.

Being so detail-oriented, Fincher makes films with impeccable craftsmanship of the highest order. Handsomely photographed and hermetically sealed, Gone Girl looks and moves like hard-edged blockbuster pulp, confident, prurient, and expensive. And yet it’s a wholly pessimistic and scathingly misanthropic Hollywood thriller, an eerily beautiful and darkly funny poison pill swallowed straight into the heart of our chaotic frivolousness. It resolves thematically with a chilling snap, leaving its implications dangling, lingering, and staining. What’s going on inside the minds of others? You can think you know someone, but once you learn the truth, there’s no unknowing.

Wonder, Wander: TO THE WONDER

To the Wonder is the kind of film that’s so evocative and thought provoking that to say it is about nothing says more about you than about the film. It’s the latest from Terrence Malick, the master poet of cinema. He wields the camera and the editing bay like Whitman or Frost used their pens, sketching beautiful imagery and natural detail to evoke in an instant the deepest of reflections. Unlike his last film, the confident spiritual coming-of-age panorama The Tree of Life, this new film is confident in its hesitance. Here is a film that pushes his style even further, more abstraction and more ellipsis, dialogue slipping further away from the images, narration sparser and rarely less than a kind of pure yearning for an elusive something. Where Tree of Life, through an intensely personal montage of childhood experience, managed to examine existence itself from the dawn of time to an abstract timelessness of a conclusion, To the Wonder is an earthy, specific, and wounded picture about characters shyly, strongly trying and failing to connect with each other and with a sense of a bigger picture. What is Truth? What is Love? What is Wonder?

The Wonder of the title refers to a literal place, the island Mont Saint-Michel in Normandy, France, where Neil (Ben Affleck) and Marina (Olga Kurylenko) spend happy hours in the beginning of their romance. We see them nuzzling each other, caressing shoulders, holding hands, relaxed, leaning into each other’s arms. But Wonder can be both awe, a miraculous feeling of surprise and revelation, and pondering, to be filled with curiosity and questioning. These two characters will spend the course of the film wondering towards wonder as the film follows them in and out of love. Neil, in love with this Parisian woman, wishes to move back to the United States with her and so Marina, along with her daughter, follows him there, happy at first, but eventually consumed with a nagging emptiness as their relationship strains.

But we begin in a state of love. The two communicate their love, their infatuation, through touching, through subtle exposures. They chase after each other playfully, entering into a kind of dance with Emmanuel Lubezki’s expressive cinematography that captures landscapes both natural and manmade with a wandering poetic eye, lingering on tall stalks of grass in windswept fields, shallow water on shifting mud as the tide rolls in, tidy lines of colorful packages on aisle after aisle of supermarket shelves, cool fluorescent reflections on a row of laundromat washers. These two people are merely another aspect of these landscapes, their every movement, their very proximity to each other becoming richly evocative of their emotional states.

As they fall out of love, that distance is no longer a dance of playfulness, but rather a hazy mood of stillness and resonant, hesitant serenity. Dissatisfaction sets in with the distance. Proximity often brings argument, muffled dissonance beneath the quietly swirling score. We hear their voices, hers more than his, whispering to us in urgent narration, questioning their place in the world, entering in conversations with their innermost desires and fears, pleading to a God they may or may not find comfort in. Even what Malick captures of their routines gathers metaphoric weight. He tests soil and water near construction sights for underlying problems, trying to keep forward movement from inadvertently destroying those around it. She is often found drifting, twirling, sitting in sparsely furnished rooms (impeccably designed by Jack Fisk) and empty streets, aimless and yearning. There’s a sense that they need more than each other to be happy, but the matter of what that more entails is something with which they wrestle and wonder, together sometimes, but largely alone.

An intriguing comparison to their plight – held in tension between needs both philosophical and physical – is found in an even more sparsely plotted and overtly meditative subplot about a priest (Javier Bardem) who presides over the congregation the characters attend. We follow him as he moves, every step and action controlled, as he moves isolated through a Bressonian collection of visits to the homes and neighborhoods of his most impoverished congregants. We hear his voice on the soundtrack as well, whispering to God for answers even as he’s reaching out to those in pain, which causes him pain. Is this love? It’s a spiritual love and earthly devotion that becomes a burden on the man who takes it as his solemn duty.

To call To the Wonder plotless is only to note how Malick has moved from positioning his poetry of cinema in more conventional containers – his Badlands and Days of Heaven period pieces with genre elements held in place by a mood that was already distinctly his, The Thin Red Line and The New World historical epics, The Tree of Life bildungsromans of both one boy and the world itself – to a film that is ruminative and expressive, finding outward expression of interior feelings its overwhelming feature and intent. I found myself thinking of poet Archibald MacLeish’s line “A poem should not mean / But be.” In its abstraction in pursuit of stronger emotion, To the Wonder does not mean, but is. Detail comes strong and precise – a new flame (Rachel McAdams) during a separation, a child suddenly entering the picture – sitting in focus, then fading, perhaps unexplained, but still felt, into the current of life, in a questioning quest to the purity of awe.

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. 

Take the Money and Run: THE TOWN

The Town, the second directorial effort from Ben Affleck, is more or less a standard cops-and-robbers thriller, albeit one tilted in favor of the robbers. Though it’s nothing revelatory, and riddled with plot holes, it’s the kind of movie that totally works as it unspools. Affleck stages some nice action, the performances are mostly stellar, and the cinematography from the great Robert Elswit is pristinely handsome.

The centerpiece of the film is a broad-daylight armored car robbery that is a crescendo into a symphony of squealing tires and bursts of gunfire. It’s not quite as good as a similar sequence in Michael Mann’s Heat, still the benchmark for modern urban shootouts, but it works well and ends not with a blast of senseless action but a quiet shot of a neighborhood cop, having stumbled upon the robbers just when they thought they were safe. He stares at them, and then, after a beat, slowly turns his head to literally look the other way.

This is a movie set amongst men with strong fraternal and filial loyalty in the Charlestown neighborhood of Boston, an area that the opening text informs us produces more bank robbers per capita than anywhere else in the country. Our antihero is Ben Affleck, the son of a now-imprisoned bank robber (Chris Cooper) who is now a career criminal in his own right. He’s the mastermind of a team of robbers that works for a menacing florist (Pete Postlethwaite).

Affleck’s best friend and partner in crime is Jeremy Renner. They have an intense, long time bond. Renner spent nine years in prison for a murder committed in Affleck’s defense. Affleck has had an on-again-off-again relationship with Renner’s sister (Blake Lively). Renner’s the type of loose cannon criminal who enjoys his work a little too much. When Affleck shows up at his house and asks him for no-questions-asked help beating up some local thugs, Renner responds with one line: “Whose car are we taking?”

This occurs after Affleck returns from his date with a new girl in Charlestown (Rebecca Hall), a pretty assistant bank manager left shaken by a recent robbery in which she was kidnapped and left blindfolded on the beach. This very robbery opens the film and we immediately see how fraught with potential danger this budding romance is, since Affleck’s crew was responsible for the robbery. Because the guys wore creepy Skeletor masks for the duration, Hall doesn’t know how she actually first met her new beau. For all she knows, they met at the Laundromat. A suspicious FBI agent (Jon Hamm, in a slightly underwritten role) will learn more about this relationship, making the danger greater than mere potential for a broken heart.

There are narrative and emotional questions that could be raised, picking away at the film’s slick veneer, but the presentation is so glossily enjoyable it doesn’t quite matter in the moment. It works through the requirements of its genre with style and speed, making the rusty old formulas squeak to life once more. The fine cast works to bring this life, with Renner, especially, imbuing his character with such vibrancy that he nearly becomes the kind of supporting actor who carries the whole picture. He has a scene at an outdoor café where he stops and chats with Affleck and Hall without knowing that Hall could identify the tattoo on the back of his neck and reveal their criminal secret. It’s a scene of great tension, partially because of the way Affleck, as director, blocks the shots, but even more so from the way Renner is so convincingly dangerous, so lively in his menacing unpredictability.

It is scenes like that, along with the fine action and solid performances, which allow the movie to add up to a reasonably enjoyable experience. It doesn’t break new ground, but Affleck’s confident, sturdy craftsmanship and Elswit’s images proving his greatness once again, help make the movie a little bit more than adequate. This is an entertaining two hours that goes by more or less painlessly.

State of Play (2009)

If a thriller is like a pot of water, State of Play is centered on the right burner, simmers satisfactorily for a while, and manages to boil a few times, even if it doesn’t have enough material to ever boil over. The film follows a pair of reporters, one a veteran (Russell Crowe), one a newbie and a blogger (Rachel McAdams). As a routine murder (suicide? accident?) story turns into a sex scandal and then a full blow conspiracy piece, the two of them are drawn into an endless web of intrigue. There’s a wide and diverse supporting cast that really shines. There’s Helen Mirren as the tough and biting editor and Robin Wright Penn as the wife of a senator. There’s also a great collection of shifty slimeballs engaging in the skullduggery the leads must sort out. Ben Affleck is quite good – I’ve never thought him to be as bad an actor as some have made him out to be – as a senator who finds himself in the middle of a scandal. Among the respectable and suavely sinister supporting cast, Jeff Daniels, Jason Bateman, and David Harbour are great in the handful of scenes they each are given.

This is a slick, solid film handled well by director Kevin Macdonald. Three screenwriters are credited, reason enough, I suppose, for the watered-down feel of the vision. Matthew Michael Carnahan (Lions for Lambs, The Kingdom), Tony Gilroy (the Bourne films, Michael Clayton, Duplicity), and Billy Ray (Shattered Glass, Breach) are all adept crafters of thrillers but this, an adaptation of a six-hour BBC miniseries (unseen by me, though now I want to give it a look), feels a little rushed and jumbled, almost exactly like three different yet similar takes on the material cobbled together and sanded down, but not quite a smooth integration. Even so, this is a well drawn film with fine performances from fine performers that results in fine drama that’s consistently engaging. This isn’t exactly innovative or distinctive filmmaking but there’s something oddly comforting about seeing an old reliable genre trotted out done well and done right. The script is filled with fun lines and a deep vein of wit, as well as sharp twists of ratcheting tension and wrenching reversals of information that shine new light on sleaze and thicken the plot to a pleasant pulp (and it only once reminded me of the similarly circular Coen comedy Burn After Reading).

And there’s something engagingly current about this film which is a bit of a simultaneous eulogy and appreciation for the art of the printed newspaper (there’s even a bit of homage to that classic journalist film All the President’s Men in the way the final headline types across the screen). The editor complains about the corporation that took control of the paper. A reporter nervously compares his status to that of the new blogging department; after all, they’re cheaper, faster, and have lower standards, or so he says. It’s a rather touching tribute to what Crowe’s character would call “damn fine reporting.” There is a valiant melancholy to the tone of the film that sends the reporters, those brave investigative journalists, off into an uncertain sunset.

This isn’t a great thriller but it’s a good one, the multiplex equivalent of a well-written airport novel. It’s long – but not too long – complex – but not too complex – and satisfyingly immersive with some genuinely unexpected twists and a compelling mystery. I settled back into my seat, sipped my soda, and thoroughly enjoyed having the world melt away for a little over two hours, even though it was only replaced by a hightened and simplified version of it.