Back in Action: NOBODY and WRATH OF MAN

The lizard-brained appeal of the shoot-‘em-up Nobody is a little misjudged. It stars Bob Odenkirk, the great sketch comedian of Mr. Show turned wry and soulful character actor star of Better Call Saul, as a suburban family man in a rut. An early montage shows us his daily routine of coffee and commute and office work filling spreadsheets. His wife won’t sleep with him. His son doesn’t respect him. Day after day. This is interrupted by a pair of semi-bumbling thieves who break into his home and steal just a few trinkets. Feeling emasculated for failing to stop the robbery, he roams the city looking for trouble, eventually beating up some shady characters on a city bus with surprisingly adept combat moves. Turns out he’s a former secret agent retired in protected obscurity. Also turns out he just beat up some guys connected to a Russian mobster, who sends dozens of anonymous goons after him, leaving this humble middle-aged dope no choice but to send his wife and kids away while he goes full John Wick. (That the screenplay is from Wick scripter Derek Kolstad should be no surprise.) The result is a movie in which a mid-life crisis of masculinity is solved by violence—waves and waves of shootings and stabbings and all sorts of things to make a faceless, personless baddie’s body go splat. I’ll admit the action, staged by director Ilya Naishuller (whose previous actioner, the woozy POV-shot Hardcore Henry was repellently violent), takes on a passable jolt, and the dumb retribution logic plays out with some dopey spirit. But I couldn’t shake the fact that the whole amoral shape of the thing was like someone traded American Beauty’s portrait of male-pattern ennui’s sex fantasies for violence, then dropped the clumsy satire for overplayed needle drops and self-satisfied slow-mo. Odenkirk is smartly restrained and underplayed throughout, though. And the shoot outs and explosions and car wrecks have a stupid satisfaction to them. But the whole arc of the picture — better living through mass murder — leaves a nasty aftertaste.

Far better to see a movie that knows how deadly serious its pulp plotting is. I’d be loath to say a thriller as unremittingly dark and unsparing as Wrath of Man is a moral work, but it has a code and a perspective that understands there is no such thing as good violence or a righteous kill. It’s too stark and unflinching, lean and mean, to be anything but impressed by the emptiness with which it leaves every character involved. There’s something ominous to its undertow, crisp crime plotting that will be drug under by its poisonous grasp. Here men’s schemes are what opens that Pandora’s box. They’re pitiless; their crimes run cold; blood oozes and splatters like tar. It stars Jason Statham in one of his chilliest performances, his tight musculature crafted into a stone-faced determination. He’s a new hire at an armored truck company that has recently been targeted by a team of robbers who blocked off a road, blew out the side door, and gunned down the drivers. Statham is silently hyper-confident, keeps to himself, and seems to be way more talented than the job requires as the movie’s introductory passages draws him into his co-worker’s world of jargon and joshing. You can tell he’s up to something. As the movie steadily widens its scope, sidestepping to show us other groups of men, we see this armored truck depot is the hub of criss-crossing plots: two teams of thieves looking for a big score, a man-on-the-inside working to help one of them, some cops who may or may not be onto something. And Statham? He’s on his own, out for revenge. You can tell when he calmly, precisely guns down some potential robbers without breaking a sweat, and then follows it up with the faintest flicker of disappointment. These weren’t the thieves he was looking for. The movie’s unflinching grimness and deliberate forward motion matches Statham’s, as his vengeance works itself into mythical, or perhaps Old Testament, dimensions through the dark rumblings of fatalism, the taciturn brutality of its sparingly deployed concussive violence, the score full of low, slow strings and thunderously rolling drums.

The film untangles its deceptively knotty plot with razor-sharp simplicity and focused tension. Revelations drop into  a sturdy structure that thuds each new variable into place with equal parts inevitability and surprise. Moving backwards and forwards in time, and moving in different groups of dangerous men on a direct collision course with each other, the heat steadily builds to a boiling point, spilling over in a clever and tragic escalating climax. The way there finds in its long set-up and clockwork payoffs a merciless logic and calculated futility. We get the sense all of these guys need to take action in response to their circumstances (they were wronged, or greedy, or bored), but know deep down all this danger won’t get them much of anything in return. It’s a fallen neo-noir world past saving, but something must be done anyway. The big ensemble of enjoyable character actors (Holt McCallany, Josh Hartnett, Jeffrey Donovan, Scott Eastwood, and on and on) keep the personality on a low simmer, the kind of hard-bitten pulp dialogue that curlicues with just enough flair, a mixture of hollow macho posturing and gruff molasses-drip dialogues of heavy seriousness. The film matches this tone with its own self-seriousness: chapter headings, drawings of snakes and devils in the open credits, a well-deployed use of a gravely Johnny Cash lament in a violent montage, restraint in patient wide-shots and smartly withheld reveals. But that seriousness finds a good match in the mood and craft of the picture, which imbues what could be affectations with a level of tightly controlled artfulness that elevates what could in lesser hands devolve to mere shoot-‘em-ups. Here every shot counts, and hurts.

That it comes from writer-director Guy Ritchie marks potentially a new era in his filmmaking. After all, he began in the 90s as part of the post-Tarantino fast-talking genre movie crowd, with jumpy and jumbled crime pictures like Snatch and Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels that rattled chronologically and pictorially. Those early films of his are energetic and youthful, but also empty, callow contraptions. His exercises in style were then well-served as directorial eccentricities in massive Hollywood branded blockbusters — two Sherlock Holmes, a Man from UNCLE, a King Arthur, an Aladdin. He often enlivened what duller hands would’ve turned out perfunctorily, taking his quick-cut flashiness and scrappy chatter to glossy spectacles. With Wrath of Man, he’s come full circle with a sense of an aged master, older and wiser, confident in his narrative chops and control of tone. He entrusts a thick layer of menace to a talented cast and crew of ace craftspeople. Every shot is well-judged and clear. Every sequence is economical and thrilling. He rarely goes out of his way to accomplish in two shots what could be done in one. Thus it becomes an exercise in control, taking his interest in underdogs and rivalries, ambition and deception, fatalism and determination, and drawing them out in a mechanically impressive scrambled chronology told with an atypically heavy pace. It’s a two-hour crescendo of sustained suspense and dread, promising and delivering clever realizations and anyone-goes violence. It builds. It escalates and modulates. It finds new depths to dig as it wrestles with the darkness at the heart of these men’s plans, the way wrath animates yet hollows out everyone around it. Here’s a film that look on the evil men do — in so many forms — and feels sick from the weight it carries, before exploding outward in intense genre thrills.

Now and Then: LITTLE WOMEN

Greta Gerwig’s Little Women faithfully adapts that novel’s cozy qualities, its warm-hearted temperament, closely observed sentiment, and its easy grip on its audience’s sympathies. The story of the four March daughters and their quiet domestic pleasantries and tragedies, relationships and developments, is put across faithfully with great spirited sisterly energy, as loving and honest as the best, closest sibling friendships. Certainly, Louisa May Alcott’s beloved novel of Civil War-era family life has produced plenty faithful adaptations before. Gerwig casts well, keeps a good pace, shepherds expert production design and textured cinematography, dramatizes every memorable scene, and has a keen eye for filmic detail. But what really lifts it off and sets it apart is the structure. She takes the two halves of the book — the early younger days where the young ladies are first flowering into adolescence and figuring out themselves and world; and then as slightly older young women as they mature into the adult lives they’ll live — and places them side by side. There are many other adaptations to reiterate the text in sequential order. Here it’s both familiar and fresh, enlivened by the contrast. Cutting intuitively between these two periods of time, each with their own conflicts and concerns, yet intertwined through the personalities of the women involved, there are echoes and comparisons, connections and collisions. Viewing the events in this way is a freshly productive way of understanding the classic story, of seeing anew how the decisions and personalties of girlhood directly inform and shape the outcomes of womanhood as they grow and change, either fulfilling their early dreams or deciding to go about them in a different way.

There’s great maturity and inquisitiveness here, seeing the grown-up concerns of money and careers and family obligations set against the children’s imagination and fervor and mood. It also serves to stack moments of great emotional peaks on top of each other, weddings atop funerals, recoveries atop deathly sickness, reunions atop separations, loneliness atop togetherness. And yet each scene works splendidly on its own, apart from the brilliant structural conceit, Gerwig imbuing the moments with tender humanity and deep wells of feeling. Saoirse Ronan (Jo), Emma Watson (Meg), Florence Pugh (Amy), and Eliza Scanlen (Beth), deftly balancing between the timelines with depth, energy, and poise, make believable sisters, jostling their differing personalties and divergent paths against each other over a consistent underpinning of love. (The rest of the cast — Laura Dern, Meryl Streep, Chris Cooper, Bob Odenkirk, Louis Garrel — is perfectly assembled out of character actors who bring their decades of good work and reliable screen presences to the overwhelming sense of comfort and compassion, even in hard times, in this telling.) With an enveloping spirit of goodwill, charting the family’s dramas in sweet, sharp episodic detail, Gerwig builds to a climax of such tricky dexterity, an intertwining of plot catharsis with a sweetly considered, effervescently casual metatextuality that pays off with delicate, simple visual flourishes and an overflow of emotion. It sees passionately in Jo a creative spirit, all too aware of the compromises expected of her gender and class, headstrong in pursuit of her ambitions, and heartrendingly perceptive about her strengths and weaknesses, borne aloft in the end by the strength of her own story. What a thrill that Gerwig has not only built a fully satisfying, deeply moving retelling of a classic novel, but also builds into the bones a compelling argument about it.

On the Road: NEBRASKA

In Alexander Payne’s Nebraska, an old man (Bruce Dern) in the early stages of aged confusion gets a piece of junk mail that says he has the chance to win $1 million. He thinks he’s won and needs to get from his Montana home to Lincoln, Nebraska (the mail’s return address) to claim his money. He’s all ready to walk there, seeing as he’s not well enough to drive and still hasn’t fixed up the busted pickup that’s been sitting in his garage for a decade. His younger of two grown sons (Will Forte) agrees to drive him, his older son (Bob Odenkirk) and wife (June Squibb) slowly shaking their heads at all this silliness. Forte calmly hears his mother’s objections as she asks why he won’t take her to see her sister instead of indulging his father’s figment of the imagination.

The dignity of the old man’s nonsense quest comes in simply allowing him a sense of purpose and good fortune, the removal of which would be awfully difficult anyway. Payne’s typical sweet-and-sour comic drama chops, on display in the likes of About Schmidt and The Descendents, serve Bob Nelson’s dryly observant road trip screenplay well as the man and his son stop off to see relatives along the way in domestic scenes so true I found myself thinking, I’ve been in those rooms! Conversation is terse, halting, transactional, loosely organized, understated, half-loving and half-prickly. My favorite exchange comes when Forte’s elderly aunt (Mary Louise Wilson) says his uncle’s foot’s been bothering him again. There’s a long pause before the man (Rance Howard) simply says, “Naw. Just hurts.”

It’s all so sharply moving and funny that by the time it concludes with a fuzzy and generous sense of tough Midwestern sentimentality, it’s very nearly earned. The resolution comes not so much from plot or a change in circumstance, but from a simple act of dignity allowed an old man who appreciates it with as much stoic befuddlement as he can be. Dern’s performance is real and creaky a picture of low-level confusion and unshakable delusion. Forte’s a fine low-key foil, exasperated by his father’s unshakable misunderstanding, but so full of loving affection that he’d rather protect his father from those circling to get a piece of the nonexistent prize and shelter him from those who’d make fun of the truth. That just might be a losing battle.

The ensemble – from Odenkirk and Squibb to the myriad small town relatives and acquaintances, including Stacy Keach with perfectly pitched arrogance – is so fully real and convincing there’s hardly a false note among them. Their dialogue is funny in the way your relatives (mileage with this comparison may vary) are funny, with unexpected detours, sudden surprise revelations presented matter-of-factly, conversational roundabouts, and wondrous colloquialisms. The false notes ring softly in the script as it falls into predictable road trip patterns and there’s scarcely a surprise on a story level. That kept it a tad on the narratively uninvolving side for me. The milieu is presented with such clarity and truth, the plot mechanics feel at times like nothing less than an unwelcome intrusion. But the characters feel so real that when the movie was at its best, I hardly cared. Nebraska is as prickly and unhurried as its characters, filmed in bracing black and white that casts it all in a fading glory. The past, endlessly picked and poked by being in old places with old relatives, may be gone, but there’s still dignity in allowing the old man to believe he’s rich. With a son like that, who is to say he isn’t?

Lush Life: THE SPECTACULAR NOW

The Spectacular Now is filled with fine performances that make big impacts. It’s not just the leads, Miles Teller and Shailene Woodley, as two teens in love or something close to it, who generate an emotional interest. I found even greater emotion in the faces of the character actors playing the adults around them. As a small business owner with fatherly feelings towards his teenage employee, Bob Odenkirk has only a scene or two, but generates an amazingly resonant and memorable presence. Similarly, when Kyle Chandler shows up late in the picture as a deadbeat dad, the sense of strained affection and inescapable personal failings is palpable. There’s a seriousness to the brief scenes with these men that extend to the film’s approach to capturing performances.

Director James Ponsoldt shoots the film with a sense of specificity and atmospherics, using a widescreen frame to grab intimate close-ups and spacious two-shots that register small shifts of emotions across a vast stretch of screen space. When the high school seniors played by Teller and Woodley go on their first date – he, an overconfident life-of-the-party guy; she, an introverted bookish type – the impression of the emotional terrain is vivid and subtly expressed. There are shifting feelings, of testing out the other, of hesitantly pressing forward and retreating, unable to reveal too much without feeling self-conscious about it, but plunging forward anyway. It’s all too real.

And yet, no matter how finely acted and well-crafted a film it is, Spectacular Now is ultimately nothing more than a dreary addiction drama embellished with uncommonly truthful performances, but ending up in the same place, walking over the same well-trod after-school-special plot beats we’ve seen before. Teller’s seemingly carefree kid is a not-so-secret alcoholic, wielding his spiked SuperGulp as a perpetual source of his next sip. Particular attention is paid to the way he’ll grab a red Solo cup at a kegger, pushes beers on his girlfriend, and traces his way back through the mixed signals from his most recent ex (Brie Larson) who is more simpatico with his drinking habits. His romantic prom-night gift to Woodley is an engraved flask. How sweet. It’s like Flight without the sensational plane crash sequence. Instead, we’re watching a slow-motion crash, as a promising young guy can’t even see his promise.

The opening scene shows us a blank page of a college application essay. The hackneyed opening narration promises to fill us in on what he writes, but he quickly discards the endeavor in favor of partying. The frustration of watching this character is as raw as it is affected. Ponsoldt’s been here before, in his previous (and better) film Smashed, the story of an elementary school teacher trying to hide the dangerous drunken lifestyle of her off hours. There as here it’s all too easy for a film to grow repetitive as it glumly traces a character’s long, painful downward spiral. Smashed had a sense of focus that helped keep it on track. It also had a fantastic lead performance by Mary Elizabeth Winstead, who also turns up in Spectacular Now as yet another of its few-scene wonders, playing Teller’s sober older sister. This film keeps alcoholism an ominous subplot, with romance foremost on its mind for a while. That the boy and girl Meet Cute when he wakes up hungover with no idea as to his location is certainly an unpromising start and a key to the film’s real concerns.

Like a Cameron Crowe movie without the killer soundtrack or a John Hughes movie without the cheerfully archetypical yet somehow convincing teenagers, Spectacular Now wears its heart on its sleeve. Unlike those directors’ films, it’s only so convincing, without ever quite finding its own approach. The screenplay by Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber, who brought a clever (some might say too clever, but I digress) approach to young love with (500) Days of Summer, here adapt a novel by Tim Tharp, finding ways to tone down the emotion of love without misplacing heart. It’s certainly an earnest film, shaggy and spirited in a low-key, hangout kind of way. That the film flirts with dullness, occasionally growing drab and slow, is its price to pay. Some of the best scenes are the ones that simply unspool, painfully mundane dialogue exchanged between a boy and a girl eager to impress the other and quickly finding a comfort that allows their energy levels to merge.

They push each other in ways both good and bad. That all feels true. For some time the film gives equal weight to their plights, their single mothers (his Jennifer Jason Leigh, hers Whitney Goin), their dreams, ambitions, and attraction to one another. The interior lives of both boy and girl are balanced nicely. But because he’s the alcoholic, and the film in the end is far more interested in his struggle with that, she’s slowly diminished in importance until she becomes just a plot device. I’d say she’s literally thrown under the bus, but that’s not exactly true. (It’s a truck.) We so rarely get films genuinely interested in the interior lives of girls, let alone a girl like this. To go to so much trouble creating such believable characters in an even-handed way and end up downplaying one of them for the sake of formulaic Lessons Learned, for a character who is far more familiar, is frustrating. This is a film with considerable sensitivity and a fine cast, but which puts it to use on a plot that takes its time getting to much the same places any other less talent-rich after-school-special would go.