Cruel Bummer: SALTBURN

After two films, writer-director Emerald Fennell’s signature appears to be staging social satires with only a glancing understanding of society, ending in twists that call into question what in the world the earlier commentary was supposed to be setting up in the first place. Her Promising Young Woman had such a promising premise—a woman vigilante-style shaming male misbehavior—completely sunk by a choppy execution, complete with following up a take-down of systemic prejudice leaning on said system to solve things in its climactic surprises. What? Now here’s Saltburn, a much better movie on the whole, if only because it has more enjoyable surface pleasures of gleaming craftsmanship and gutsy arch performances. But that doesn’t mean it makes the points it thinks It’s making. I’ll get into that later. The movie comes on strong as sensual and prickly, and self-consciously arty with its grainy squared-off images, elliptical cutting, and woozy pop-heavy soundscapes, as it sets up a clear, Brit-focused, dark and dripping class comedy. It grooves on its cruel streak spectacle for a while, as a lower-class university student (Barry Keoghan) is invited to spend vacation at the palatial estate of a rich classmate (Jacob Elordi). A whole host of quirky, pampered, indulgent characters live there—from an icy mother (Rosamund Pike) to a dotty dad (Richard E. Grant), a teasing sister (Alison Oliver), a sassy quip machine family friend (Carey Mulligan), and a butler (Paul Rhys). We see Keoghan’s pathetic character obviously lusting after their privilege as he worms his way into their lives. Usually this sort of class commentary uses the allure of riches to shame the rich for their obliviousness, and/or the poor for coveting such worldly treasures. Here Fennel flips the script, for a movie that ultimately seems to say, gee, the rich sure are eccentric with their hollow parties and conspicuous consumption, but it is the sneaky underclass for which you have to watch out. There’s a reason why that’s not the thrust of these stories. It’s almost a shame, then, that so many seductive shallow thrills are sent in pursuit of such a flawed premise. You can swoon on those surfaces—the shine of the images, the venal bon mots, the performances of charm and charisma, and physical beauty lit like a perfume commercial. Keoghan, especially, finds new fearless ways to put himself on display—never more than his impressively bare final scene that leaves quite an impression. All that can be fun on a moment by moment basis. But it’s all for naught if the foundation on which these enjoyable details are built is so fundamentally cracked.

Wasted Potential: PROMISING YOUNG WOMAN

The more I think about Promising Young Woman, the less I think of it. The picture is a clever, even vital, concept driven straight off a cliff. This debut feature from Killing Eve writer Emerald Fennell is a bubblegum poisoned pill, a movie so surface cutesy that its dark dark dark implications get gnarlier as they grow, and more than it knows. The film stars Carey Mulligan as an isolated, directionless millennial crossing 30 single, living with her patiently worried parents, and working at a coffee shop. Nights she spends in clubs and bars pretending to be drunk until a “nice guy” tries to take her home. Then, when she’s faking passing out on a couch or bed while the guy slobbers and gropes, she’ll sober up real quick and scare the living daylights out of him. This high-risk intimate PSA is her only real passion. Her best friend killed herself after a frat house rape was caught on tape, and went unpunished. This one-woman one-on-one scared-straight program is her way of getting her friend’s justice. Or so she thinks. The movie plunges into edgy territory as it intermingles a heroine’s righteous indignation and her self-destructive impulses, her sympathetic victimhood and queasy nastiness. Even when the picture feints at hope, you get the feeling it’s short-lived. Sure enough, the movie goes darker, driving its tone deeper into despair — foot-on-the-gas Thelma and Louise style — in a climax of spectacularly upsetting hollow catharsis, at best one of pyrrhic satisfactions. The shame, then, is how empty it feels, a film choppy, flat-footed, and scattershot, a shallow provocation chasing empty thrills and cheap twists masquerading as sociopolitical nerve.  

The movie is riven with inner contractions. It flattens Mulligan’s character—denied an inner life—and reduces the ensemble around her (no matter how astute the casting) to stock types. The film even makes Mulligan, a poised and sharp actress, an awkward fit, wobbling unconvincingly in a revenge plot that never quite pops off until it’s too late. It wants to make her the unambiguous hero of the film—those guys have it coming to ‘em, after all, since they’re on the precipice of date rape if she was actually drunk. But it also gives her moments of spectacular cruelty toward other women where they’re allowed to twist in psychological terror until the film, and its lead, pull back the rug and say, ah ha, you were fine all along, you dope. There’s an old college classmate (Alison Brie) set up to believe she’s been raped, when she wasn’t, and a straw-man college administrator (Connie Britton) who is made to think her high school daughter has been kidnapped and dropped into a frat party, when she wasn’t. Into our lead’s single-minded behavior appears a seemingly actual good guy (Bo Burnham) who our hero thinks she might be able to make a future with. Why her single-mindedness drops for him is never clear.  (And why she doesn’t know about a central reveal from the jump is pretty weird, as well.) And by the end, it makes her a fool, too, though it also tries to tell us her ultimate revenge succeeds. It wants it both ways, spending an entire movie telling us the whole system is corrupt and blind to women’s needs (not untrue) and taking that to its logical extreme, and then resting its entire climactic twist on the assumption that, I dunno, maybe the system might do it right for once? It ends up a moral crusade that’s morally bankrupt, an exploration of toxic dynamics (complete with a jabbing use of the Spears song) that's just plain toxic itself.

Strength and Weakness: FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD

Far From the Madding Crowd is a handsome literary adaptation. The surface sheen is impeccable, with gorgeous colors – cinematographer Charlotte Bruus Christensen provides the greenest greens and reddest reds this side of Technicolor – and convincing 19th century detail. Who would’ve thought something so sumptuous could come from Thomas Vinterberg, the Dogme 95 co-founder who has previously given us upsetting dramas of abuse shot in digital smears (The Celebration) or austere pale shudders (The Hunt)? This is a richly textured Great Illustrated Classics sort of film, David Nicholls’ script collapsing the plot details and character motivations from Thomas Hardy’s classic serialized novel, smoothing out the structure to make it fit into a two-hour package. Vinterberg moves through the adaptation, hitting the highlights of the narrative’s emotional beats while wisely keeping the focus on the scenery and cast. He’s content to condense and visualize a story better told in novel form. A bit more interpretive intent could’ve elevated the effort, but what’s here is respectably effective.

What could’ve been a glossy gist of Hardy’s plot is given some depth by the tremendously talented cast. They provide a pivot point from which the audience can turn the thin surface on its side and glimpse the complexity within. (In other words, it won’t lead students too far astray if they misguidedly attempt a book report based on this film alone.) Each performance suggests emotional currents and historical context the condensed motivations don’t enliven in and of themselves. At the center of the proceedings is Carey Mulligan, a performer seemingly built for period pieces. She’s at her best (An Education, Never Let Me Go, The Great Gatsby, and so on) when she can play a woman struggling against the constraints of what a society expects her to be. Here, as Bathsheba Everdene, a young woman in the mid-1800s with only an education to her name who suddenly inherits a farm, she plays a great deal of determination. She’s taking charge, running the farm, willing to ruffle feathers of grumpy men.

But she’s also dealing with a variety of potential suitors, and must decide whether a reliable farmer fallen on bad times (Matthias Schoenaerts), a well-off older fellow (Michael Sheen), or a passionate soldier (Tom Sturridge), is worthy of her time and affections. They represent three very different kinds of men, the strong silent type, the lonely graying bachelor, and the fiery slimeball. Each actor plays the type to strong effect, finding nicely individualized chemistry with Mulligan. One seems a natural pairing, and so becomes a lovely throughline of smoldering unrequited love, a fine underplayed romance and a good way to renew your crushes on the participants. The other two men present a variety of complications. The plot moves along in a structure close to the novel’s original serialized nature, delaying the inevitable for the sake of melodrama. There’s not quite enough psychological underpinning in the script to sell the developments – especially a marriage decision with only a nice swordplay-as-foreplay scene to explain – but the actors make it work anyway.

Vinterberg and crew do a fine job creating the sense of place necessary for their story. It’s a time when women were allowed some agency, and yet still beholden to a society placing propriety and prosperity above personhood. She’s forced to consider economics as much as emotions when contemplating a relationship. Marriages are mergers. Betting on the wrong man can sink her solvency. A dashing man with a good pitch can turn into a lousy husband who would literally bet the farm, leaving them in financial and marital ruin. This recognition simmers in Mulligan’s eyes as she tries to do what’s best for the farm and its employees without shortchanging her own happiness. She and the supporting cast inhabit their characters' dilemmas with appealing conviction. Because the central interpersonal currents run strong, and the production values are high, the CliffsNotes to which they’re deployed doesn't seem so bad.

No Direction Home: INSIDE LLEWYN DAVIS

It feels like it has always existed, just waiting to be brought into being. Inside Llewyn Davis casts a spell of tone and mood like the best folk songs. It’s plaintive melancholy, a sustained sense of a soul laid bare before our eyes, introspective and yearning. Writer/directors Joel and Ethan Coen are masters of films – from Blood Simple and Fargo to Raising Arizona and A Serious Man – that suggest as much as they show, creating convincing worlds much like our own, richly populated with eccentric individuals and a sly determinism. Their characters want better lives and are frustrated when they come up short. It makes notes of triumph all the sweeter, but Llewyn Davis (Oscar Isaac), a struggling folk singer in 1961 New York City, is rubbing up against the end of his rope. Triumph, for him, seems perpetually out of reach. In this film we watch him circle around the city, begging a night’s sleep on a variety of friends’ couches. His music career is going nowhere fast, but his big break is right there, ever so slightly out of his reach.

We know Llewyn Davis is talented, but we also are quickly aware of his difficulties. The opening of the film is a sequence set in a small club, Llewyn softly plucking his guitar as his voice, soft and strong, wafts out over the audience. It’s hushed. They’re rapt. We see a glimmer of satisfaction on his face. After the performance, he heads out to the back alley where he’s promptly confronted by an angry man who punches him in the face a couple times, walking away as Llewyn sits on the ground, hurting. In this opening, we have the film in miniature. It’s a film focused on Llewyn’s quietly ecstatic musical satisfaction, and the pain he’s constantly receiving. He’s a man for whom music and pain are attracted to him and created by him. They’re as self-inflicted as they are God-given. It might not sound like it, but there’s warmth to the Coens’ approach here. Perceptive without judging, the film is a wise and compassionate look inside this man’s emotional states and drives.

He’s capable of great cruelty – a scene in which he heckles an older woman had me wincing – and yet he’s so precisely nuanced a frustrated artistic type that it’s easy to feel for him as he tries to navigate a path to the future that grows murkier the harder to tries to get there. I empathized with him to an almost painful extent; it filled my heart even as it faintly ached. He stubbornly works to get ahead. It’s a frustratingly circular path he’s on – performing in clubs, lucking into some studio work for which he short-sightedly signs away the rights to royalties, and talking to his manager (Jerry Grayson) who looks at him with sad eyes while avoiding the inevitable “no” answer to the question of how much he’s earned from a record well into the process of flopping. Llewyn is struggling and getting seemingly nowhere. And yet he’ll go on. It’s scary to go on, but it’s even scarier not to. In the haunting lyrics of the folk song he sings that bookends the film, “Wouldn’t mind the hanging / But the laying in the grave so long.”

Stubbornness: it’s the very thing keeping him going and a key part of what’s holding him back. He wants to succeed on his own terms, scrambling to come back after being thrown by unforeseen circumstances that have occurred before the film has even begun. Two losses define him: one a girl he loved who has moved to Akron nearly two years prior, the other his music partner who sometime in the recent past forcibly made their duo a solo act. We never meet these people, but we feel their absence acutely. Oscar Isaac, playing Llewyn, ably communicates the resonant emotional wounds that have rattled him, and the combination of talent and arrogance that drives him to continue pursuing folk music success. It’s an interior performance that lets the inner gears turn, expressed outward through wry speech and moving music. Isaac, doing his own singing and guitar playing, represents the Coen’s typical ability to cast the exact right person in each and every role.

This is a fascinating character study, bolstered by a universally strong ensemble. It finds its characters distinct and fully formed, situated wholly and completely in casually perfect costume and production design. Each person who arrives on the scene – there for a moment or two never to return, unless, of course, they do – contributes immeasurably to the richness and depth of the world the Coens create. We meet a musical couple (Carey Mulligan and Justin Timberlake) who are alternately antagonistic and accommodating, as well as Llewyn’s patience-strained sister (Jeanine Serralles). As Llewyn navigates narrow halls to friends’ apartments pinned and pinched in corridors that terminate in tiny corners or heading out into the world that opens up with snowy sidewalks and slippery highways, smoky stages and creaky roadside cafes, he meets all manner of strangers. There’s an eerily polite solider moonlighting as a singer (Stark Sands), a sickly old grump (John Goodman) and his driver (Garrett Hedlund), a kind older couple (Ethan Phillips and Robin Bartlett), a struggling solo act doing backup singing on novelty records (Adam Driver), and an intimidating record executive (F. Murray Abraham).

In typical Coen fashion, the dialogue is so dry it crackles. Consider the following exchange in which Llewyn is told by his manager’s secretary (Sylvia Kauders) that the old man is out of the office attending yet another funeral. Why? “He likes people.” Llewyn replies, “Fewer and fewer.” The film moves from memorable moment to memorable moment, a fascinating period piece odyssey with not a single line or gesture out of place. It manages to view, with Bruno Delbonnel’s exquisite cinematography, the past through almost-hazy mists of time without glorifying or condescending to the context or circumstances. Its imagery is at once soft and sharp, as if emerging from a timeless place with startling immediacy, powerfully direct, as piercing and singular as anything the Coen brothers have brought us. Inside Llewyn Davis is a masterful character study and a wondrous and precise evocation of time, place, and music. As the film’s final sequence unspools, I gasped at its detail as my heart swelled, at once broken and full. The spell the movie casts in the moment lingers, stuck circling in my mind like a great old melody that’s always been there, deep and true, ready to stay.

Borne Back Into the Past: THE GREAT GATSBY

It’s easy to see why over the years some have seen in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel The Great Gatsby a fine idea for a film. The book contains memorable characters and quotable lines contained in a plot of some intrigue and mystery, romance and regret. It’s not hard to see how it can all be pushed into tasteful melodrama of the kind the movies are so good at. (They’re even better at tasteless melodrama, but that’s not my point yet.) What previous adaptations of Gatsby have failed to grasp, however, is that this great novel needs not a cinematic transcription, but a jolt of cinema itself to play on screen. Last seen in theaters in 1974 directed by Jack Clayton from a screenplay by Francis Ford Coppola, the story felt stale, stiff and humorless, despite the best efforts of an all-star cast headlined by Robert Redford. This time around, the director and co-adapter is Baz Luhrmann of Moulin Rouge!, Romeo + Juliet, and Australia, one a musical and two so broad, vibrant, and melodic they might as well be. He makes films in a style that’s a kaleidoscope of the gaudy, the campy, the kitsch, proudly waving the flag of melodrama while shouting from the rooftops his themes and ambitions. He brings the spark of cinema the story needs to really take off on screen.

Glittering and glowing with colorful period detail and wailing a mix of jazzy standards and anachronistic tunes from the likes of Jay-Z and Lana Del Rey (not to mention a great Charleston-style cover of Beyoncé’s “Crazy in Love”), Luhrmann’s film is bursting at the seams with invention of the kind that illuminates Fitzgerald’s text without subsuming it. Now, I’m of the opinion that adaptations have no particular obligation to faithfully reproduce every aspect of their source materials. But this Gatsby is both faithful to the events, characters, themes, and symbols of Fitzgerald’s, while the telling – structure (mostly) aside – is all Luhrmann’s. It has the wild exuberance of a Gatsby party with all the distance to see how hollow it ultimately is. Using generous amounts of Fitzgerald’s original text verbatim in voice over, dialogue, and on-screen titles, the film maintains a sense of wit and social commentary amidst the colorful party atmosphere and melodrama that bursts forth.

The film, like the novel, uses the character of Nick Carraway as narrator and observer. It’s the height of the Roaring Twenties. He’s moved to New York City for a job on Wall Street and finds himself living in fictional West Egg, procuring a cottage next door to the mansion of the mysterious Jay Gatsby. No one knows much of anything about the man; they only know he throws great parties, wild, packed, affluent parties in which the rich and wannabe rich, the influential and the climbers all rub elbows, drink bootleg alcohol, and dance the night away. Luhrmann, in a more restrained version of the carousing Moulin Rouge! hyperactivity, films these elaborate soirées with exuberance, using his mishmash of music choices and Catherine Martin’s impeccable production design to highlight the glamour and excitement of such an event. Gatsby parties seem fun, but they seem just as meaningless. No one knows precisely why they’re there any more than they know a thing about Gatsby beyond wild rumors. The host, for his part, seems spectacularly uninterested in the spectacle of his own making.

The summer setting is the perfect time for these lengthy nights separated by endless languorous days spent whiling away the hours. Carraway (Tobey Maguire) tells us all about the vacuous, energetic people he meets away from Gatsby’s, including his cousin Daisy (Carey Mulligan), her brutish old-money husband Tom (Joel Edgerton), his mistress (Isla Fisher) and her husband (Jason Clarke). Carraway starts a flirtation with a famous golfer (Elizabeth Debicki). Sometimes he goes to work. He’s a busy guy, but he’s not really drawn into this world until he meets Gatsby. Luhrmann films the title character’s entrance in a grand, theatrical way that does not disappoint. Gatsby, played by Leonardo DiCaprio, turns in slow motion, raising a cocktail glass in toasting, smirk on his face, fireworks slowly erupting in the sky behind him while the soundtrack and his eyes are lost sparkling in a dreamy blue rhapsody.

I’ll preserve the mystery of Gatsby, his relationships, and his ambitions for those who haven’t read the book. But I will say that as the film goes along, Luhrmann brings a satisfying bitter romance, full of as much sadness as swooning, that slowly builds to a sequence in a hothouse of a hotel room where a crisply edited small party becomes uncomfortably personal until emotions boil over. It’s a lovely luridness of love and death, affairs and scandal, loss and loneliness. The performances are sharply drawn, from Maguire’s Carraway’s starry-eyed wonder giving way to hindsight skepticism to Mulligan’s Daisy’s flat affect and foolish affectations cracking under the pressure of the possibility of remaking her life. And then there’s Gatsby. DiCaprio brings exactly the right combination of irresistible charm and unknowability. He’s slick and smooth, but what’s he up to? He’s sympathetic, but how much do we really know about him? It’s a slippery performance that never feels unmoored as the audience learns more about who he really is.

What’s best about the film is its consistency of vision, a vibrancy that never forsakes the source material while confidently striding forward as its own postmodern construction. Luhrmann freely mixes and matches artistic inspirations, bringing his swooping 3D camera through digital recreations of Jazz Age architecture, energy, and glamorous coarseness. He’s such a big believer in the power of movie magic to evoke strong emotions through gorgeous fakery that he’d never mention the unutterable fact that it’s not always true. He’s too busy making the story burst to life with every trick he knows. For this, Gatsby feels truly cinematic in ways it never has on screen before. It’s lively, funny, and rewarding without suffocating under its seriousness. Through irresistible, shameless visual frippery and vividly colorful melodramatics Douglas Sirk might have been proud of, Luhrmann finds and takes as his own Fitzgerald’s core laser-sharp, gin-dry social commentary. Consider this exchange between Carraway and Gatsby, concerning complicated decorative plans for a small get-together: “Is it too much?” Gatsby asks. Carraway replies, “I think it’s what you want.” Is this Gatsby too much? It's what I wanted.

He Can't Help Himself: SHAME

It would be a mistake to call Shame’s Brandon Sullivan a hedonist. His life is controlled and partitioned, a place for everything and everything in its place. He’s a fairly successful office worker who goes to work in an anonymous New York City office building and then returns to his spare apartment with a minimum of complications. It’s a life of quiet desperation, for the man has arranged his life so carefully in order to hide his darkest, most shameful addiction. He’s not an alcoholic, though he does like to drink. He’s not a womanizer, though he loves flirtatious pursuit. No, he’s a sex addict. For him, it’s not about relationships. It’s not about the pleasure anymore. It’s not even about meeting new people or finding some small moment of solace from his lonely, meaningless life. It’s about the desperate need to feel something, to constantly seek new sources of stimulus, about clandestine, risky tendencies that drive him to find someone, anyone, to help him get his next fix.

Of course, the film’s not really interested in exploring sex addiction, at least not in any truly meaningful or distressing way. Wouldn’t it be all the more disturbing to be a sex addict who wasn’t as handsome and capable of charm as one Michael Fassbender? The terrific European actor has had something of a Hollywood breakthrough year after first catching eyes with his art house success in the 2008 IRA hunger strike drama Hunger and crossover scene stealing as World War II’s coolest film critic in Quentin Tarantino’s 2009 film Inglourious Basterds. This year alone he was Jane Eyre’s Rochester, Carl Jung, and proto Magneto. His performance in Shame is without a doubt the most fearless of his roles this year. It’s a portrait of a desperate man who hides his basest addictions under a calm, hesitantly charming mask of dignified yuppie tranquility. It’s little wonder why women would be attracted to him and why he wouldn’t let them stick around long enough to figure out who he really is.

Unfortunately, there is one woman in his life in a position to figure it out. That’s his sister Sissy (Carey Mulligan), a fragile and aimless young woman who shows up unexpectedly at his apartment one afternoon. She’s been kicked out of wherever she had been and needs a place to stay. She’s a singer. She says she’s making real money now. She just needs a warm place to pass the time between gigs. She just needs the comfort and care of someone. Brandon’s rattled by her appearance. He tries his best to hide his discomfort and his addiction. She gets enough hints, though. It’s not an easy thing to hide a life given over entirely to basest pursuits, especially in such a furtive, urgent way.

Brandon’s boss (James Badge Dale) is a typical macho womanizer, constantly hitting on waitresses and commenting on women’s bodies. For some reason, that’s behavior that doesn’t fall too far outside the norm. Because Brandon’s desires take a compulsive, secretive, insatiable form, it reads as depressive, as a man trying to cover up ambiguous psychological problems with physical sensation. One of the most thrilling sequences in the film, a string of moments that have extraordinarily simple suspense and humor, involves Brandon going on a date with a co-worker (Nicole Beharie) and trying to have normal conversation, to open up emotionally with another human being. In the process, he has to withhold his urges, resist slipping up and inadvertently revealing how he spends his time. It’s difficult for him to be without a clear view to his next hit.

British artist Steve McQueen, who directed Fassbender in Hunger, has made a tightly controlled film with a detached clinical eye. It’s a film that is extraordinarily well made on every technical level. Harry Escott’s pounding score and the still, smooth compositions that gain a sinuous power with each camera movement from cinematographer Sean Bobbitt contribute to a skillful evocation of a man who’s every waking moment is given over to his addiction, finding more avenues to find what he wants or ways to cover up and otherwise make possible the maintenance of a “normal” life.  This is a powerfully acted film, with Fassbender and Mulligan exuding a kind of neediness and an intimate shared trauma that’s as concerning and strangely symbiotically damaged as any relationship on film in recent memory. These are characters with deeply felt problems from their pasts that are not easily resolved in their present circumstances. They’re aware of the damage. They may even be aware of the consequences. But they’re powerless to fix themselves, let alone help each other.

The only thing holding the film back is its thematic game of Mad Libs. It’s a film not just open to interpretation; it’s open to any interpretation. I love sparse narratives and exercises in style as much as the next guy, but here McQueen pushes the fuzziness of character to a detrimental extreme. The relationship between Brandon and Sissy is ripe for analysis. At one point she tells him, “we came from a bad place, but that doesn’t make us bad people.” So, they have a shared past that is also a troubled past. What does that mean? What are Sissy’s emotional problems? Fill in past trauma here. What is Brandon’s problem? Fill in psychological explanation here. From what kind of “bad place” do they come? Fill in backstory here. You get to pick whatever problems you want to read into them. The ambiguity is at once thrilling and frustrating, as if McQueen had such a killer idea for a film that he didn’t want to risk saying too much thematically for fear of being called on the vacant ideas the end result covers up only too well.

Can't Go On Thinkin' Nothing's Wrong: DRIVE

Like a meticulous Jean-Pierre Melville thriller filtered through the glowing unrequited romance in isolation of Wong Kar-Wai and the dark neon criminality of Michael Mann, Nicolas Winding Refn’s Drive builds its tension slowly by piling simple, stylish scenes upon each other. As you can probably tell by the variety of filmmakers I referenced just to begin to get at a description of the film’s style, Refn is primarily concerned with the look, the feel, and the mood of his film. It’s awash in striking lighting, soaking in a synthy score, marinated in an 80’s genre feel with some 90’s neo-noir baked in. It’s a hollow genre exercise, living on nothing but its trance-like sensation of danger around every corner. But what a sensation! It’s hollow, but exciting and welcome as well.

The film stars Ryan Gosling as a man who drives. He’s a stunt driver for the movies and a getaway driver for hire. Both jobs he procures through his boss (Bryan Cranston, made leaner and more dangerous by the tremendous Breaking Bad), a mechanic who owns a small garage. As the movie begins, we follow Gosling through the process of preparing for a robbery. On a disposable cell phone in a darkened room, he agrees to be parked outside a particular target at a certain time, giving his unseen clients a five-minute window. He arrives. He parks. To the steering wheel, he straps his watch, its ticking ratcheting up the tension and mingling with the sounds of a basketball game on the radio. Finally the clients, armed, wearing black masks, and carrying suspicious duffle bags, rush out and get in the car, fleeing ahead of an alarm. Then, Gosling drives.

After this brilliant, focused introduction to the world of Drive, we settle into a quiet rhythm that establishes with slow-motion lens flares, 80’s aping song choices, and ample silence and solitude the life of the driver. He has few attachments. His boss, though, has connections to a pair of goofily menacing low-level mobsters, a cheapo movie producer (a threatening Albert Brooks) and a pizzeria proprietor (a darkly funny Ron Perlman). The Driver, on the other hand, appears to live simply for the chance to drive. He talks with his boss in shy, boyish tones, and then switches into clipped, matter of fact speaking when he commands his clients, walking them through his rigid rules for helping them escape the law. It’s an empty life, but a simple one. He seems comfortable, never more so than when behind the wheel.

But before too long, there’s a complication. There always is in films of this sort. A comfortable criminal existence can never remain so. The complication in Drive patiently emerges and develops. I had managed to shield myself from the downpour of hype for the film that started in Cannes and continued in a trailer that reportedly gave away the bulk of the plot. I had no idea where this ride would take me and that’s a part of the reason that I found it so successful. (If you want to remain similarly shielded, go ahead and skip the next paragraph).

The Driver grows close to his neighbors, a young mother (a sadly underutilized Carey Mulligan) and her small son (nice, natural Kaden Leos). They spend time together. He helps her out, fixes her car and gives her rides to work. Then her husband (the terrific Oscar Isaac) comes back from prison. Rather than falling into the expected, with a jealous ex-con filled with anger towards this suspiciously helpful neighbor, the husband thanks the Driver for helping out the family during his absence. Later the man asks the Driver to assist him (and a glum beauty played by Mad Men’s Christina Hendricks) with a pawnshop heist, a job that will pay his mob-owed debt and protect his wife and son from certain danger. The Driver agrees to help. But all doesn’t go as planned. Complications pile on complications and, though brief blasts of chaos puncture the best-laid plans, the film’s style never loses its cool.

Characters are observed in action, or more often inaction, vivid embodiments of tightly coiled potential. By the time this exercise in cool and quiet style explodes into gobs of gory violence that are over before you even have time to fully register what you’re nearly retching at, the film has had an undeniable visceral impact. Refn uses his characters as a means to an end, to satisfying his stylistic goals. They’re spare and simple uncommunicative beings, genre types boiled down to their purest embodiments, characterized by the gaps and silences in the storytelling. Gosling’s driver cares for the girl next door and wishes for the safety of her child. He likes to drive – he’s a great driver – and thinks that he can help her by using his talents. But who is this nameless driver? Who is this woman? Who are these criminals? Refn doesn’t seem too terribly interested in answering those questions. (To be fair, the script by Hossein Amini, from a novel by James Sallis, doesn’t provide the answers either). Characters exist only to the extent that they facilitate the action and the mood. This is a film that grooves on its artful tension, its twisting dark plot, and in its focus on style as substance. I was captivated. It’s a sugar rush, a contact high, and an absorbing, disturbing experience.

Rage Against the Dying of the Light: NEVER LET ME GO

Screenwriter Alex Garland’s adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s wonderful novel Never Let Me Go is a literate, moving screenplay that derives as much of its power from the pauses between the lines as it does from what characters say. The story of three young children growing up in an imposing, strict, orderly boarding school tucked away in the British countryside has a great deal of power and mystery. The rules are strict for a very specific reason. The secret behind these circumstances is pure science fiction, but this is not a film of blinking doo-dads, slimy creatures or flurries of jargon. This is a film that considers its subject deeply and seriously. There are great depths of emotion here, hidden just beneath the calm rhythms and hushed tones.

Picking up on the spare, suggestive emotionality of the writing, director Mark Romanek, last seen directing 2002’s One Hour Photo, creates a chilled, artful mood that feels patient and foreboding. This is a film filled with beautiful dread and calm menace. This is a deliberate film with not a single wasted shot. It’s a sort of zen sci-fi, with compositions and words so finely tuned and chosen that it becomes a film of intricate beauty, an exquisitely structured and affecting piece of mood and style.

When we first see the school, Hailsham, it appears as an imposing brick-and-stone structure set in the middle of a clearing. Within its walls are hundreds of seemingly typical children who are eerily composed and disquieting in their poise. They have the bearings of ones who have been carefully trained, skillfully regimented. This is, after all, a prep school prepping the kids for a very specific purpose. Presiding over the school is the regal headmistress (Charlotte Rampling) who knows more than she tells.

Still, when we meet young Cathy (Izzy Meikle-Small) and Ruth (Ella Purnell) they seem to be very normal preteen girls. They discuss horses and gossip about their classmates. Cathy has a crush on Tommy (Charlie Rowe), a misfit who is emotional and creative, but awfully insecure. These are children who, despite their appearance of maturity, are quite naïve and stunted. We don’t entirely comprehend the rules that govern their lives at Hailsham, but then neither do they. But still, this school is all they’ve ever known. Even when a well-meaning new teacher (Sally Hawkins), wrestling with her conscience, tells the students the true nature of their futures, they don’t quite know what to make of it.

When we catch up with the kids some years later, in their late teens, they are still grappling with their fates, struggling to make sense of their place in the world. Ruth and Tommy, having grown up to be Keira Knightley and Andrew Garfield, seem, at first glance, content to live in the moment, covering up their knowledge with their youthful optimism and cautious exploration of the adult world. Cathy (now the luminous Carey Mulligan) finds her future more unsettling. She’s lonelier than her friends, more serious. Though she doesn’t ever really open up to those around her, emotions and urges are powerfully stirring within her. She’s quietly accepting her lot in life, but she’s hardly happy.

Mulligan’s brilliant performance is a quiet one filled with meaningful looks and the smallest of facial expressions. It matches the deliberate tone of the filmmaking in the way the sparest, most economical gesture can suggest so much. This is a film of quiet and solitude, of uncomfortable facts and sad realizations. This is a film that is concerned with matters of life and death. But there are no hysterics. There is little sentimentality. This is a film of grace and beauty that is serenely overwhelming.

Romanek’s work here is gripping, emotional filmmaking. It’s melodrama stripped of embellishment. It’s sci-fi in name only, stripped of its standard accoutrements. It’s a film that’s both a startling, small-scale exploration of scientific ethics and a beautiful story of unrequited love. It’s a study of love and mortality that grows deeper and lovelier with each passing scene. It’s subtle power sneaks up and overpowers. The surface beauty and the finely crafted performances are commanding, but the depths of the feelings beneath them are even more surprising, nuanced and devastating. There’s an awful yearning at the center of the film, a sense of a horrible void in these characters’ lives that can never be filled.

Crime and Punishment: WALL STREET: MONEY NEVER SLEEPS

Oliver Stone’s 1987 financial thriller Wall Street worked because it pinpointed the human tragedies imbedded in the fluctuations of the stock market by placing a young stockbroker (Charlie Sheen) between his union-man father (Martin Sheen) and a slimy potential father-figure mentor, the financial tycoon Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas). The movie thrills with its juicy drama, electric script, and the almost tactile sense of the stock market as one giant game played only by the rich and the power-hungry.

How was Stone to know that Douglas’s Gekko, the film’s villain, would become a hero of sorts to a generation of Wall Street employees? Gekko’s central, memorable speech, where he explains the virtues of unchecked greed (it’s, “for lack of a better term, good”) is chilling in context. Once ripped from the film, the speech entered the business lexicon. Rather than serving as a cautionary tale (Gekko eventually gets in big trouble for his shady dealings), good greed became the name of the game. The film is dated now and not just because of the fashions, the music, and the technology. In 2010, the financial crimes and outrages of 1987 seem quaint.

The time is exactly right for a follow up. Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps is set in 2008 in the moments leading up to the financial meltdown and the subsequent bank bailouts. Though following fictional characters, the basic facts of the crisis are left unchanged. There weren’t competing banks run by Frank Langella and Eli Wallach, but it’s not hard to assume that the nameless bank owners who sit in ominous boardrooms and backrooms stand in for those who really were partly responsible for running our economy into the ground. The milieu in which the film takes place rings more or less true.

It is the build up to this crisis that Gordon Gekko finds himself witnessing after being released from prison seven years before the film’s action begins. In the interim, he’s written a book and become a hit on the lecture circuit. There’s the sense that he’s merely circling his old stomping grounds, waiting for the right moment to get back in the game. He’s been burned before, but he’s learned from his mistakes. He may be older, but he’s no less ruthless. He may appear slightly softer, mildly gentler, but this is a man who still has deep reservoirs of danger and anger with which he can sting his enemies.

And yet, this is a film that will never really live up to the promise of its premise. Scenes involving slimy bankers, especially the suave sleaze of Josh Brolin’s billionaire investor, are often captivating in their rush of jargon and amoral greed. This is where we need to see Gekko. He needs to be going toe-to-toe with the people who make his villainy outdated. Instead, he’s working by proxy through Shia LaBeouf, a young ambitious suit who also happens to be the fiancé of Gekko’s estranged daughter (Carey Mulligan).

LaBeouf and Mulligan are perfectly fine in ill-conceived roles. Their respective struggles with the Wall Street game – LaBeouf wants to get in it while Mulligan is still dealing with the destruction it did to her family – are of some mild interest. But the relationship between LaBeouf and Douglas, though it has its moments, isn’t as deeply felt as the similar relationship between Sheen and Douglas in the first film. And Mulligan, despite all her considerable talent, is given little more to do than tear up from time to time and constantly refuse to have anything to do with her father. At best, the interfamily relationships, including Susan Sarandon in little more than a cameo as LaBeouf’s mother, are perfectly watchable and appealing. At worst, they distract from the real fun.

And there is certainly real fun to be had with Money Never Sleeps. Fueled by a score that includes great songs from Brian Eno and David Byrne, it’s effortlessly enjoyable when it follows its characters manipulating stock prices, schmoozing at galas, and engaging in tense discussions of economic and business policies. The ease with which the stock market can be influenced and the simplicity with which billions can be lost is real-world scariness channeled into rapid-fire thriller-speak. The film watches the fluctuations in stock prices, keeping the audience informed how the shapes of the graphs are being used for revenge, for greed, for the sheer dark pleasures of playing the game.

The script by Allan Loeb and Stephen Schiff is not at all as sparkling as the writing to be found in the first film with its great monologues and memorable exchanges penned by Oliver Stone and Stanley Weiser. In fact, the sequel includes a lengthy speech that is clearly intended to be the new “greed is good” moment. Douglas delivers it well, but it goes on for far too long with no stakes involved and not one memorable line. Stone’s filmmaking picks up some of the script’s slack with its mostly solid craftsmanship. This is a fast, messy 133 minutes, despite occasional symbolic hiccups. It’s filled with genuine interest in the fascinating, infuriating machinations of Wall Street.

Quick Look: An Education (2009)

Carey Mulligan is almost unbelievably cute in the lead role of An Education, but that’s hardly the only good reason that so many critics and Oscar prognosticators have fallen in love with the film. On the one hand, it’s just a fairly routine coming-of-age story about a 16-year-old girl learning about life and love. On the other hand, it’s a very well done version of it. Mulligan, who I was surprised to learn is actually 24, plays the part with grace and charm and, in Jenny, she’s given a great character to play. She’s carefully poised with superficial depth and sophistication masking surprising emotional depth yet childishness. Mulligan’s also blessed with amazing support from an excellent cast that includes Peter Sarsgaard, Alfred Molina, Rosamund Pike, Dominic Cooper, Olivia Williams, and Emma Thompson, who all perform admirably. Sally Hawkins, so good in last year’s Happy-Go-Lucky, turns up for one scene that’s so emotionally involving, and well done, I wished she could have been given more to do. Director Lone Scherfig keeps the film moving at a brisk pace, hitting all the right notes with the help of frequently beautiful cinematography by John de Borman and a charming screenplay by Nick Hornby, capably adapted from Lynn Barber’s memoir. The early-60s time period is evoked with just-so production design which matches the matter-of fact charm that runs through the film. Likewise, the music is a mix of period songs and original songs that blend seamlessly with each other and with the nimble score. With all of this going for it, the movie should be really great, right? I wish. It’s almost there. In the end, the movie is a very enjoyable experience, light and fun with a handful of spiky dramatic moments, but it doesn’t stick. The movie’s impact seemed to be evaporating as I crossed the theater’s lobby, but, in the days since I have seen it, I’ve felt a growing desire to see it again. The movie’s impact might not be long-lasting, but it is still well worth feeling.