Dull Nightlife: CAFÉ SOCIETY

Late period Woody Allen is certainly filmmaking that’ll charm those already predisposed to finding comfort in his rhythms and style – the unwavering font, the American songbook score, the familiar character types, the thematic concerns of a midcentury pop philosopher – and deter those who’ve tired of his tricks (or his personal life). He can still provide a surprise now and then – last year’s Irrational Man was a (probably) self-aware curdling of his tropes; 2011’s Midnight in Paris had lovely French time-travel romanticism – but you mostly know what you’re going to get. Well, you make a new movie a year for over four decades and see how many new topics and techniques you can come up with. So it’s no surprise Café Society, this year’s Allen feature, finds him noodling around with ideas he’s used better before. There are unrequited romantic connections, affairs, insecurities, intellectual posturing, an ambitious and sensitive young Jewish man and his family, and the wistful melancholy of nostalgia. It’s not Allen’s best representation of any of the above, lightly skipping across the surface of places where his writing has other times deepened.

One of his period pieces, it’s told in a brightly artificial simulacrum of New York and Los Angeles of the late 1930s, the better to keep the jazz flowing on the soundtrack and the arch reproduction pseudo-literary stuffiness of the dialogue era-appropriate. Jesse Eisenberg stars as a squirrely young New Yorker who on a whim moves to Hollywood in hopes his uncle (Steve Carell), a high-powered agent, will find him a job in the industry. His mother (Jeannie Berlin) calls ahead and tells her brother to help, but the agent brushes her off. He’s too busy to look after his nephew, but after weeks of waiting relents and puts the eager young man to work running errands. This gets him working closely with a sweet, smart assistant (Kristen Stewart) with whom there’s instant infatuation. Too bad, then, that she has a mysterious unseen boyfriend, a married man whose identity is eventually revealed to be a character we’ve already met. Standard setup, the plot and dialogue are merely going through the motions, but there are some small glimmers of life amidst the artifice.

The early, breezy passages of the movie are a mild warmed-over farce, with characters jostling for attention and obscuring truths. It has low-key charms, but the cast remains posed and situated in the precise, and precisely too-perfect phony, period detail. It looks not like events lived, or situations performed, but games of make-believe staged for our benefit. It’s not a cast; it’s people in costumes. Still, the actors do what they can. Stewart, who unfailingly brings a real sense of grounded presence to the screen, is the highlight. She has a scene where she has to keep feelings hidden while reacting in shock and pain as one lover unknowingly recounts a slight the other shared in secret. The emotion is plain on her face in a twitch of the eyes and a slight shift of the jaw, and yet it is entirely believable that her scene partner wouldn’t notice. A close second for most valuable player is Berlin, grounding a stereotypical Jewish mother role with lived-in conviction. Eisenberg, for his part, plays the Allen-impersonation trap, stammering and twitching, stumbling through wordy lines. And Carell puffs out his chest for a shallow impersonation of an early-Hollywood powerbroker type.

As the film progresses Allen balloons the small, simple, obvious premise into something approaching a sprawling semi-comic family drama. We end up following Eisenberg’s character for several years past the end of the farce, through its fallout and into what’s surely at least a decade of time passing. Threaded throughout are cutaways to Corey Stoll as his two-bit gangster brother who opens a café (and draws in a bunch of high society) while staying a step ahead of the law. (That many of these cutaways are quick gags about gruesome murders is an odd hitch in the otherwise pleasant, even-keel tone.) Other people floating through the supporting cast include a glamorous divorcee (Blake Lively), and a sharply dressed bicoastal power couple (Parker Posey and Paul Schneider). There’s some fun in the mostly intelligent casting, though not every character crackles with the right interest, and not every actor is up to delivering or improving upon what they’re given. Better small pleasures are in the humble glowing cinematography from the legendary Vittorio Storaro (of such beautifully photographed films as The Last Emperor and Apocalypse Now), who captures warm sunny contrasts and, in one striking shot, a luminous, dusky, full-color angle on a bridge that recalls Manhattan’s famous shot.

With a pretty surface exploration of a small variety of relationships, it slowly becomes a melancholy movie about missed connections, about people who’d rather live in denial than face up to the ways they’ve hurt others. And even then the denial slips, leaving them contemplating their choices with regret. That’s a great flicker of life, but embedded in half-thought and underwritten scenes which often seem to grasp for obvious lines and hanging lampshades on thematic points already plainly visible above the subtext. For instance, a character actually trots out the old “an unexamined life…” saying unironically, before putting a spin at the end in a hacking punchline. Like so many of Allen’s lesser works, it’s underwritten. A great performer with a reasonably complicated part like Stewart or Berlin can be lively, dry, funny, and convincing, but smaller roles and lesser actors flounder as the plot and mood slowly peter out. Scene after scene sits flat and tired, jolted occasionally with the sparks of the better movie it could’ve been with another draft or two.

Shark Night: THE SHALLOWS

The Shallows is a survival story of the highest order. Intense and expressive, it deserves mention in the same category as The Grey, Life of Pi, The Revenant, 127 Hours, or certain Jack London stories. It’s a woman versus nature thriller stripped of all but the most necessary components, wasting no time in setting up her terrifying predicament while supplying the exact right amount of character development to help us understand her skill set and her mental state. It’s lean, visceral, and convincing, introducing us to a young woman (Blake Lively) taking a break from med school to go surfing at a remote Mexican beach. Soon tragedy strikes, leaving her stranded 200 yards from shore, clinging to a rock for dear life. A large shark has attacked, leaving one of her legs ripped and punctured, bleeding and infected. The animal’s ominous fin continues to circle between her and the beach as night falls and no one is around to help. It’s a crisis shot through with a palpable sense of weary helplessness. How could she possibly get out of this?

Running a trim 87 minutes, this is a spare, minimalist, and artful mainstream thriller of uncommon focus and intensity. Every second is there for a reason, from early sunny nature photography and surfing stunts that paint a portrait of an idealized getaway, to the sudden cloud of dark red blood in the water as the shark attacks, to the methodical approach Anthony Jaswinski’s screenplay takes to playing fair with the setup and payoff. There’s nothing here to strain credulity overmuch; it simply takes in a smart, capable person’s one-step-at-a-time drive to problem solve and stay alive. It becomes a struggle of wits and persistence. As the woman tries to stop her bleeding and take stock of her surroundings and the shark lurks, often unseen, it’s a tossup as to which being will outlast the other. The film plays out in mostly wordless passages of tense close-ups and medium shots, piecing together its protagonist’s mental process in intuitive edits helped along by occasional moments where she’s muttering or talking to herself. When the camera cuts back wide and long, emphasizing her isolation, it’s abundantly clear how alone she is, and how necessary her self-reliance becomes.

Director Jaume Collet-Serra, one of our finest B-movie practitioners, excels at these expertly contained genre exercises, from wax museum slasher House of Wax to airplane-set thriller Non-Stop. With The Shallows he meticulously creates a relatively small natural space defined by obvious and memorable landmarks clearly and consistently positioned. She’s stuck on a rock, high tide and low tide bringing certain death near and far on a predictable – but hardly comforting – ebb and flow. Collet-Serra’s frequent cinematographer Flavio Martinez Labiano frames the action to always triangulate the geography. There’s the beach, the open ocean, a rock, a buoy, a whale carcass. Every image carries the facts and weight of her situation and location, and how little she has to work with. We know how far she must swim to reach safety, and can see the slowly dawning trial-and-error strategy she deploys to think her way to safety. It helps the movie has so effortlessly and off-handedly introduced her skills. She’s an expert surfer, and therefore knows her way around the water. She’s a world-traveler, and thus able to adapt to foreign situations. She’s a med student, and so naturally can rip a makeshift tourniquet off a sleeve and assess the damage of a bruising and potentially gangrenous leg.

As soon as there’s blood in the water it’s a film of tension, released only in quiet foreboding and contemplation of existential panic. In widescreen framing simmering with a John Carpenter approach to eerie classical discomfort and convincing, restrained effects work, Collet-Serra allows shadows and waves to hide and reveal sources of danger. These, and shots straight out of Jaws staring up at bodies and boards in motion from deep below the water, form a patient escalation as her situation becomes more and more desperate. In one particularly upsetting moment of violence – as a potential source of rescue is devoured – the camera holds on Lively’s face, her reaction the clue to the gore that’s later merely glimpsed. The film is so precise, building thrills bit by bit, emphasizing key details through effective focus pulls, simple shot/reverse shot, and in confident shifts of perspective. Use of a GoPro, for example, transcends potential found-footage wooziness or gimmickry to be an integral puzzle piece, and careful insert shots reveal the tools at her disposal with perfect casual deliberateness.

Because the film so easily brings the audience to an understanding of who and where this woman is, it has believably airtight plotting that allows her to arrive at decisions in understandable ways. This isn’t a thriller that’s ahead or behind its lead; she behaves exactly how you’d think a reasonably smart and prepared individual would when faced with such incredible and harrowing circumstances. Inhabiting these trying moments, Lively does career-best work in a performance of pain and despair, finally arriving at grim resolve. She’s not sure she’ll live. But she’ll fight as long as she can, the best that she can. Lively spends the film in a swimsuit, shivering on a rock, wincing in pain, screaming in agony, talking to herself and a seagull, shouting at distant figures, timing tides and the shark with her waterproof watch, and having one horrifying setback after the next. She holds the movie’s every frame with captivating everywoman appeal, pushing forward despite the odds with raw survival instinct.

Collet-Serra begins the film introducing elegantly simple and essential backstory by superimposing her phone’s screen in the corner over her arrival – perhaps the first movie to quietly, seamlessly integrate exposition via texts and Instagram. Through a quick FaceTime call we glimpse her father and younger sister, and surmise from her insistence on finding the same obscure and mostly pristine beach her mother did many years ago that she’s mourning a death. She’s contemplating dropping out of med school. She’s isolated from everyone she knows, at a loss as to what her life will become, dealing with grief. And so getting attacked by the shark and stuck in the shallows becomes a moving metaphor for depression. She’s close to safety, but for the toothy unstoppable natural force making saving herself a difficult prospect. It seems impossible, and yet she fights on, determined to reunite with her loved ones and return to solid ground. The simplicity of the film’s construction makes the subtext far more moving than a showier approach could manage, and maintains a gripping, exciting, and nerve-wracking focus on her plight.

Danger to Themselves and Others: SAVAGES

In case we needed proof that director Oliver Stone has entered a relaxed late period of his filmmaking career, here comes Savages, a leisurely thriller that’s glancingly topical, set amidst recessionary drug-war politics and Mexican cartel violence, and at once complicated and reductive. He’s not stretching to make a pointed political statement or pumping up the style of what is already a fairly lurid, violent plot. Instead, he’s luxuriating in the nastiness and complexities of the script he co-wrote with Shane Salerno and Don Winslow (from Winslow’s novel). He’s taking his time, letting characters simmer until the time is right to spring them into action, allowing the plot to throw unlikely allies together, reveal its secrets, spin its wheels, come to moments of fiery action and then back down, coast along with a mostly talented ensemble cast until falling into a satisfying shoot-‘em-up climax that throws in a last minute surprise as it rewrites itself as it goes along.

The movie, a pulpy series of noirish events unraveling under the hot Laguna Beach sun, concerns two peaceful pot-growing entrepreneurs (Taylor Kitsch and Aaron Johnson) and the girl (Blake Lively) who loves them both. The steamy opening moments slowly introduce us to this tricky romantic triangle. The arrangement of relationships is open and the three of them are friendly, so it all works out. As the plot kicks into motion, the guys, on the advice of their crooked D.E.A. pal (John Travolta), are considering a substantial offer of money from a lawyer (Demián Bichir) representing a ruthless Mexican cartel that wants to hire them as a north-of-the-border supplier. When the guys make plans to skip town and turn them down, the head of the cartel (Salma Hayek) orders her head henchman (Benicio Del Toro) to kidnap the girl.

What follows is a movie of shifting alliances and jockeying for power on both sides of the border. Everyone involved wants to get out of this nasty entanglement with the best enriching scenario for themselves, but given the violent, ruthless stakes of it all, most of them will be lucky to escape with their lives. In the telling, Stone is much less interested in the specifics of the action – although he stages a thrilling mid-film sequence of literal highway robbery – than in the slow burn of mood and style. This is a thriller that doesn’t feel in a rush to get anywhere in particular. Instead, it serves up long sequences that sit with characters as they try to fight their way through the suffocating moral thicket into which they’ve tumbled headfirst in the pursuit of self-preservation and profit. It’s a movie playing with all sorts of tropes of gangster movies, and neo-noir Westerns, but it’s really all about bloody business negotiations.

The ensemble cast is up to the task with incredible faces on which to watch the negotiations, and all the other scheming and plotting, play out. Kitsch and Johnson are buddies in over their heads with squinty, low-rent Butch and Sundance charm (a duo namedropped in the film itself). Hayek has a calm face of deep anger, sadness and cold calculation, Del Toro, a brutality behind his literal mustache twirling, Travolta, a close-cropped greed that reveals itself in scenes with both sides of this mess. Lively’s character, when she's not reading overwritten narration, is a vexing dilemma, needy and terrified, willful and weak, and hard to read. She’s in a position of very little power in this scenario, but she’s desperate to find a way out nonetheless and works very hard to hide this desperation as she gets close to the one who holds her captive. It’s a tangle of emotional and business connections.

Though Stone spikes the narrative with shots that slowly fade to black and white or flash into various lenses and filters, this isn’t a chaotic stylistic experiment. This is a thriller of straightforward moodiness, a slow-building tension that watches its characters as they twist under pressure, desperate to find simple solutions to their complicated problems. What we have here is the work of a confident director who somehow makes the film feel like a work of mature exploitation. Because it’s a film of characters glowering and calculating, working their way through logic bordering on labyrinthine into triangulations that will hopefully give them the best advantage when on the other side of this bloody mess, moments of incredible violence (one man's whipped so hard his eyeball pops out of its socket) and icky tortures both physical and psychological (especially uncomfortable and unnecessary is a video that Del Toro shows Lively late in the film) feel both shocking and inevitable.

Stone’s always, especially in his more clearly political films, been interested in authority, who has it, who benefits from it, who is hurt by it, whether it be soldiers (Platoon, Born on the Forth of July), presidents (Nixon, W.), politicians (JFK), bankers (Wall Street), conquerors (Alexander), and media forces both institutions (Any Given Sunday) and the infamous (Natural Born Killers). In Savages, the only real authority in the drug trade comes from what can be bought with threats and violence. This is an unstable situation. What makes this a compelling representation of this concept is the way Stone keeps a sharp eye on the characters as they slowly make their moves towards gaining or retaining the upper hand.

Here, after a big violent shootout, one character begs the others to pull to the side of the road and vomits out of the getaway car. This is a vicious movie filled with scared characters desperately trying to find their way back into some kind of comfort zone, an amount of weary realism in aggressive, stylized pulp. Stone may eschew nuance for intensity, but he provides the texture to keep things interesting. It’s telling that, although Stone isn’t out to make any sort of overtly political statement and no character could be considered a moralistic center, at different points in the movie the Americans and the Mexicans each call the other “savages” behind the others’ backs. And then they each get the chance to live down to that description.

Not Easy Being Green: GREEN LANTERN

It’s the summer of Marvel superheroes at the multiplex. So far we’ve had Thor and the X-Men lighting up the screens and Captain America is well on his way. Interrupting Marvel’s monopolistic hold over our superhero-movie dollars is DC’s Green Lantern. They shouldn’t have bothered. It pales in comparison to its recent genre competition, but it also emerges as one of the leading contenders for worst-of-the-year. Not only that, I’d go so far as to say it’s one of the most joyless, eccentrically idiotic superhero movies ever made.

It starts on a wobbly promising note with the soothing voice of Geoffrey Rush playing over a CGI lightshow. He tells us all about the history of the Green Lantern Corps, an intergalactic police force that draws energy from willpower (which is manifested in the color green, in case you didn’t know). It’s all well and good, with green-suited creatures floating around, until a long-vanquished enemy, a nasty brown cloud of roiling evil, returns to feed on fear. He – she? it? – slurps up yellow tendrils of emotion from its victims leaving behind only a brown shell of a cadaver.

I was on board for this sci-fi silliness, no problem. I can handle a bit of cheese with my spectacle. But the instant this movie sets foot on Earth, the whole balance of the tone collapses. Ryan Reynolds plays Hal Jordan, a hotshot ladies’ man test pilot who cavalierly wrecks a fighter jet and twinkles at his love interest (Blake Lively) until he finds a dying alien (Temuera Morrison) who gives him a ring that makes him the newest member of the Green Lantern Corps. Reynolds, who is occasionally quite good in other movies, has a kind of blandly likable presence that crumbles under the demands of this film. His sort-of-sweet, sort-of-smirking persona can’t handle placement within a superheroic context.

Of course, the film itself is of no help whatsoever to him. This is a curiously uncontrolled picture with tone careening all over the place. It’s at once a self-serious story loaded with fake-complex alien rules and regulations and a self-mocking mess with lines like “You think I won’t recognize you because I can’t see your cheekbones?” And it’s all so glum and lifeless, devoid of tension as it blunders from one anti-climax to the next. Once Hal Jordan zooms off to twinkling, goofy Lantern-land, he quickly decides he doesn’t like his powers, or maybe he just doesn’t like being scolded by a pink-skinned alien (Mark Strong). He doesn’t seem to understand that the green ring gives him the power to conjure up whatever he decides to create with his mind. When he finally uses his powers, it’s so horribly dull. He conjures a giant Hot Wheels racetrack to boomerang a crashing helicopter away from a fancy party. He creates swords, giant guns, a catapult. He can create anything, but is predictably Earthbound in his thinking.

He sulks back to Earth and then decides, hey, he may as well use this power now that he has it. It’s such a weirdly uncommitted, half-hearted plot that seems to feature CG spectacle almost by accident while on Earth and then seems to approximate human emotions only by happenstance while roaming the cosmos. For a movie that zips across the entire galaxy there’s a curious lack of stakes. The aforementioned cloud of evil is threatening the entire galaxy – the Earth itself is about to be slurped up before too long – and yet there’s hardly a sense that anyone’s actually in any danger. Ryan Reynolds, especially, just floats around like a face placed on a computerized green body without any sense that he’s actually physically participating in the fantasy.

Also along for this interminable dud is a criminally misused supporting cast. Of Blake Lively, so devastatingly described by The Onion as being at the “top of the lists of names you hear,” the less said the better. Let me just say that to call her acting wooden would be an insult to the block of wood that could have put in a better performance. There are good actors floundering here, too, though. Geoffrey Rush puts in time as the voice of a fish-faced Green Lantern. Peter Sarsgaard shows up as a mad scientist who grows a bulging brain, much to the chagrin of his senator father played by Tim Robbins. They try to chew some scenery, but never get the chance to work up a nice chomping pace. Poor Angela Bassett fares even worse as a fellow scientist who is made to recite expositional lines with a uniformly flat affect. These four performers (three of them Oscar nominated) are such usually excellent thespians that they could probably turn up in an excellent movie together now that they’ve collected these hopefully sizable paychecks.

This is a sad, pitiful, goopy green movie that looks absolutely dismal. It’s uninspired, certainly, but it also has visuals that are dim, murky, and chintzy and I saw it in 2D. I can’t imagine how much worse it is in 3D. To make a bad experience worse, there’s so little of interest happening in this gaudy glop of a movie. It’s a terminally undercooked experience. So little seems to happen on a plot level, an emotional level, a filmmaking level. Director Martin Campbell, who in the past has been know to make a fine action movie (most recently Casino Royale, quite possibly the best James Bond movie ever made), handles the mushy stew of words that four credited writers slapped into a screenplay with uncharacteristic flatness. The whole film just sits on the screen for a while until it finally gasps into its end credits. It has the feel of a franchise nonstarter, which is just as well, since given what I just sat through, I never never never want to see Green Lantern 2.

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.