Cruel and Usual: GOAT

Here comes Goat to give us the disgusting flip side of Richard Linklater’s Everybody Wants Some!!! That was a nostalgia-soaked film about the upsides of sunny homosocial bonding and collegiate identity formation. Goat is the grimier underbelly, concerned mostly with a fraternity’s Hell Week hazing, showing in extended, unblinking, and repellent detail the extent to which these ritualized houses of horrors cater to every worst impulse a young man might have. Pledges are humiliated, stripped, attacked, pelted with garbage, caged, beaten, and made to imbibe as much alcohol as possible. And that’s only the first night. They’ll be put through a gauntlet of torture, beaten down emotionally and physically night after night. And for what? To say they belong to a fraternity? To gain access to the sociological benefits that come from such intense relationship forming coupled with a direct historical lineage for this brotherhood? One side character is affronted when his roommate suggests quitting mid-rush. “If the frat goes away, everything goes,” he says.

The lead character is a nice enough young man (Ben Schnetzer) who, in the summer before his freshman year in college, is assaulted. His attackers jump him outside an off-campus party where he was visiting his older brother (Nick Jonas). Bloodied and bruised, he’s clearly still suffering from post-traumatic stress when the fall semester rolls around. This is clearly someone who is psychologically not ready to endure the tortures of rushing a fraternity. But his brother is in the big frat on campus, and he wants to prove to him, and himself, that he’s man enough to become one of the guys. The fragility of his mental state isn’t hammered home, but it certainly amplifies the torture on display. As if seeing the slaps and hearing the shouting, watching the nauseating slurries of food and fluids and seeing the brutal pranks (urinated on while stuck in a large dog cage; blindfolded and marched to a bathroom where a banana is floating in the toilet, made to reach in and grab it; forced to down vast quantities of beer with the threat of a being forced to defile a goat as punishment for failure) weren’t hard enough, we have subtextual knowledge that makes it even harder to take.

What is it that makes the robbery in the film’s opening something worth investigating and punishing – one frat member sneers bileful scorn at “townies” – while the hazing goes on with near total immunity? The fuzzy dichotomy between lawful and unlawful beatings set up by writer-director Andrew Neel and co-writers Mike Roberts and David Gordon Green shows plainly that frats aren’t the root of all evil, but the way they codify and condone systematized toxic masculinity isn’t healthy. It’s societal rot. These aren’t boyish antics excused as japes and capers. These aren’t charming jerks redeemed – even only partially – by their camaraderie. The frat’s leadership is presented as entirely scary, even when feigning care or talking up the good of their unity. They hide behind tradition, proud it’s been this way for a hundred years, and excusing it because what they do is no different, they say, than what other frats do. Emboldened by their perceived immunity, they enact a torturous relationship with their pledges.

It’s enough to make one wonder if frats nationwide are nothing but hundreds of replicas of the Stanford prison experiment, authority inevitably corrupting to and emboldening of every testosterone-drunk freedom of impressionable young men. When they hear another frat has ratted them out for their intense hazing, they flip out. As the movie progresses there are cracks in the frat’s façade, with one member’s slow dismay over the recruits’ extra-nasty treatment leading him to ask, “is it harder this year?” When the dean brings extra scrutiny to bear, investigating charges, they are aggrieved. How dare they face consequences? The performances are committed, wild-eyed, at a fever pitch that approaches frightening intensity. Here are lost young men, radicalized by the pure adrenaline of power, big fish in a small pond allowed to devour anyone they wish.

Neel’s filmmaking is sensitive and restrained, simply recording the specifics in long, uncomfortable, unadorned sequences. Many are harrowing. Some are merely sad, like when an alum (James Franco) storms in for a visit, expressing great disappointment a job, wife, and child are keeping him from partying like the old days. He, too, has bought into the toxicity of the structure, and can’t get it out of his system. It’s poisoned at the root. As the lead character must decide what kind of a man he wants to be, how fully he wants to buy into this cracked situation, the movie gathers a quiet moral force. We see the pain on the pledges’ faces, see it swallowed back with a forced stoicism as they allow abuse to be piled on them even when it stings, even when it hurts, even when it bleeds, even when they should know better, even when their lives could be endangered. The vomit and the blood and the bruises cake the grotesque tableaus. It’s as good a reminder as any that no good frat is good enough to excuse the existence of the worst.

Secrets and Lies: SNOWDEN

Edward Snowden makes perfect sense as an Oliver Stone protagonist. Like JFK’s dogged district attorney Jim Garrison or Born on the Fourth of July’s veteran turned war protestor Ron Kovic, Snowden is a man whose pursuit of what he sees as unambiguous and truthful duty to country causes him to endure outer skepticism and scorn, and inner destabilizing life changes. Like Savages, The Doors, Platoon, and two Wall Streets, it’s about a young person drawn into a career with exciting upsides, but with downsides readily apparent as well. Like Nixon and W. and World Trade Center and Alexander it’s about a man driven by and ultimately fated to be crushed under the weight of history and expectation. But unlike those previous movies, Snowden finds Stone at his most restrained. He views the proceedings from a remove, not digging into the psychology as deeply, or using filmmaking flash as ostentatiously. It’s a movie that sees the spreading web of surveillance with a mournful paranoia. Look at what our government can do and has done, it says, lauding its hero while wondering if what he did will actually matter in the long run.

To best make the case for their protagonist as a misunderstood hero, Stone and co-writer Kieran Fitzgerald (The Homesman) begin by showing us Snowden (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) at the point of his earliest civic duty. In 2004 he’s discharged from boot camp after a painful leg injury, after which his drive to serve his country leads him to transfer to the C.I.A. He’s a smart, unassumingly confident computer nerd who defends George W. Bush, gently teases his liberal girlfriend (Shailene Woodley) about her beliefs, and admits to a fondness for Ayn Rand. (It’s not hard to read this material as Stone inviting conservatives into the story with a “See? He’s one of you?”) The movie then follows Snowden’s gradual disillusionment with the intelligence community as he moves from one contract job to the next, finding increasingly shadier tactics used in gathering and deploying data scooped up from a global dragnet. Each new revelation gives him waves of anxiety that seem to pass, but slowly and steadily accrues in the back of his mind until he has to act.

The movie becomes a portrait of a man whose work anxiety grows so potent his only recourse is to exorcise it by releasing it into the world. There’s something of the terror I remember feeling then to this telling now. (If his revelations about the wide-ranging surveillance tactics at the fingertips of our country (and others) didn’t have you slap a piece of tape over your webcam, I don’t know what would.) Because we know what Snowden did – and what we don’t know remains Top Secret and therefore a ripe target for Stone’s mythologizing speculation – there’s little surprise to the film. It’s even structured as flashbacks around scenes of documentarian Laura Poitras (Melissa Leo) filming Snowden’s secret whistleblower interview with The Guardian’s Glenn Greenwald (Zachary Quinto) and Ewen MacAskill (Tom Wilkinson), footage which would become the Academy Award-winning film Citizenfour. This creates a strangely sedate sense of dutiful reenactment, making the characters mere pawns in historical inevitability. Gone is the volatile conspiratorial frenzy of Stone’s heated political films or the schlocky gusto of his genre fare. Here there’s an almost serene sense of data flowing, history written in bits and clicks, coded to produce this outcome.

This calm befits what is Stone’s fastest turnaround for contemplation on a flashpoint in modern American history, beating WTC (another of his eerie calm films) by two years. Anthony Dod Mantle (frequent Danny Boyle collaborator) makes images of clean simplicity, cut with occasional smeary doubling or reflections through layers of screens and glass. Snowden is trapped in a digital world made tangible, with information glowing and streaming, collected and collated. His personal dramas – simple fights with his girlfriend, a late-breaking health issue – are halfhearted, well-acted but beside the point. The most vivid crisis points are when his work life intrudes with unwelcome force on his home life. He can’t take his medication to prevent seizures because it slows his response time. A woozy snap zoom interrupts a heated love scene as he catches the unblinking cam eye of an open laptop, the extreme close up of the tiny black circle showing their nakedness reflected in it. There are standard thriller elements of people avoiding surveillance, befitting a news story that’s already informed dozens of action movies from Jason Bourne to Captain America 2 and Furious 7. Its tension remains at a constant low-boil, mystery dulled by unavoidable outcomes.

It all adds up to a movie that’s vital and turgid, obvious but with flickers of surprise and life. The known facts of the story are bulked up with lesser-known or fictionalized incidents, inconvenient truths and convenient fictions pumped through with enjoyable personalities. Around even corner is a likable recognizable face bringing fine energy opposite their scene partners. Part of the fun is wondering who’ll show up next: Rhys Ifans, Nicolas Cage, Timothy Olyphant, Scott Eastwood, Keith Stanfield, Logan Marshall-Green, Ben Schnetzer. Each is used by Stone to keep interest and curiosity flowing, never quite sure whether each new co-worker is a sympathetic ear or a reason to raise Snowden’s disillusionment. They create a pattern to the movie’s pulsing compelling/dull, scary/stale info-dumps (the best of which is an abstract swirling animation of social media chatter and secret metadata flowing into a black hole that slowly forms an eye, the sort of image so hypnotizing it doesn’t matter how blatant the symbolism), playing key roles in the process and personifications of various view points.

In the end it’s another Stone movie of weary patriotism. It’s about the burden of being a good American, about loving the country so much it’s worth wishing it were better. Clinging stubbornly to ideals is difficult, especially when calling into question the ratio of security to liberty from within the government can make you a target for, at best, criticism and stress, and at worst jail or exile. Stone makes Snowden a figure unambiguously good, leaking information as a last-ditch effort to improve what he sees as a slippery slope to tyranny. After the deed is done he literally has Snowden walk out of the dark data center into gleaming white sunlight. And yet the unsettled aftermath – stuck in Russia, communicating in warnings from a robotic screen – creates uncertainty, ending on a slightly more ambiguous note. He receives applause and attention, yes, but isolation and confusion, too. He thought it was important we hear what was happening. Now we know. Now what?

Swirl of WARCRAFT

I’m glad Warcraft exists, imperfect as it is, because Hollywood needs to take its mega-budgets into comparatively weird places from time to time. The result in this case is a big galumphing fantasy epic creating an impressively imagined world in which one could easily get lost. In fact, the filmmakers themselves appear to have lost themselves in it to such an extent that they’ve barely figured out a way to invite the rest of us in. This is the sort of fantasy storytelling that’s vividly artificial – taking style cues from Star Wars prequels’ and Hobbit movies’ sleek digital swooping – overflowing with jargon and unusual names, and with a dense and interconnected backstory that’s, at best, merely hinted. I found myself grateful that the film leans on some standard conventions of the genre, like color-coded good and evil and preoccupations with clans, lineages, and honor, because they were a great way to get my bearings. It’s both too much and not enough, a world whose details remain murky no matter the amount of exposition thrown about, but remains nice to look at in the same way a striking illustration on a genre paperback cover can be.

Based on a popular video game, Warcraft is a respectable effort at translating a clearly unwieldy mythos into something even remotely approaching a coherent two-hour feature film. It takes place in a peaceful kingdom of humans suddenly besieged by a new threat: orcs, shown here as hulking motion-capture performances of toothy muscle-bound giants. Mankind’s neighboring dwarves and elves and whatnots aren’t coming to the rescue, so it’s up to them to fight back the invading hordes. That’s typical fantasy material, but where it gets complicated for the better is in its attention to the lives of the orcs. Not just the mindless monsters you’d find in The Lord of the Rings and its imitators, many have nobility and high ideals, so much so that one principled chieftain (Toby Kebbell) starts to suspect the dark wizard (Clancy Brown) leading them into battle might not have their best interests at heart. This good orc is made a funhouse reflection of a warrior man (Travis Fimmel) who is tasked by the King and Queen (Dominic Cooper and Ruth Negga) to help stop this looming warfare before it gets worse.

That seems easy enough to comprehend, but try to keep up as each new scene adds a half-explained wrinkle. There’s a youthful magic man (Ben Schnetzer, looking for all the world like a LARPer lost on set) who quit his mystical training, but still sneaks around trying to solve the mystery of the orcs’ otherworldly power. There’s a small, tough lady orc (Paula Patton covered in green and sporting fetching tusks) who was a slave of the dark orc, but upon her capture by humans decides to help them with inside info. There’s a wizard (Ben Foster) who lives at the top of a gigantic tower and supposedly protects the land with his spells, although he doesn’t seem to be too concerned about the rampaging armies while he spends his time making a golem. I haven’t even mentioned the smooth-faced young soldier (Burkely Duffield) who desperately wants his warrior father’s approval, or the orc baby revived by the spirit of a deer, the pool of good blue magic, the pernicious influence of the bad green spell called The Fell, the giant eagles and wolves, the wall of lightening, the inky black-and-purple cube Glenn Close is hiding inside, and the towering portal to another realm powered by the souls of countless captives.

It is confusion – a mishmash of accents, intentions, ideas, motivations, tones, and haltingly introduced plot threads – but not for lack of trying. Writer-director Duncan Jones’s previous films, Moon and Source Code, were models of sci-fi clarity in the face of twisty high concepts, so I can only image the difficulty he and co-writer Charles Leavitt (In the Heart of the Sea) had wrangling the source material into shape here. The movie is broad and complicated, expensive and chintzy, deeply serious and exuberantly goofy, convincing and fake, exciting and risible. But it comes by its oddball jumble honestly. Besides, you don’t have to consult footnotes or a glossary to get the gist. Jones is effective at communicating the general thrust of the narrative impulses and gestures, even in scenes that might as well be performed in untranslated gibberish. (Maybe they already are.) The emotional stakes are clear enough from scene to scene, even if they’re buried under layers of gobbledygook, and are prone to shift without warning if that’s where the plot needs to go. Maybe devotees of the game would have better luck making heads or tails of it.

Figures travel hither and yon over the fantasy terrain, speaking in negotiations of grave importance and urgently communicating a flood of exposition. More focused on worldbuilding than building characters, the movie ends up telling convolutions in broad strokes, while the narrative plays out as only a slice of story, beginning with problems already in progress and ending without satisfying conclusions. But what I appreciated about Jones’s approach is the consideration he brings to the conflict’s two sides, even at the expense of denying the action sequences requisite bloodlust. This isn’t a standard good versus evil story. There are amongst orcs and humans alike those who ultimately have to fight against the worst of their own to accomplish peace. It’s a movie about our protagonists desperately trying to avoid war, and we watch as chaos erupts in action sequences wherein characters view the act of picking up their weapons as failure. They do what they must for the good of their people, even if their efforts are doomed to collapse for the movie’s waves of obligatory CG combat. There’s admirable effort in all this unfulfilling chaos.