Spice World: DUNE

An audience first coming to Frank Herbert’s Dune through its latest adaptation will recognize its component parts from sci-fi and fantasy that have followed its original 1965 publication. It has Avatar’s interplanetary extractive industry colonists, Game of Thrones’ feuding feudal families, and Star Wars’ galactic empire, potential rebels, and mysterious psychic sects. Though threads from its tapestry are shared in its genre compatriots, its sense of ponderous impenetrability, a DeMille-by-way-of-Asmiov majestic Old Testament density, is an impressive edifice all its own. Denis Villeneuve is the third filmmaker to attempt a screen translation of this major work in the sci-fi canon. After David Lynch wrestled it down to one film to mixed results in 1984, and a team of television makers did a more faithful miniseries for Sci-Fi Channel in 2000 (with cheap digital effects that were slightly impressive at the time, but now have more in common with Windows 98 screensavers), this 150-minute effort tells the first half of the book. We meet the Atredies, a ruling family (parents Rebecca Ferguson and Oscar Isaac, and son Timothée Chalamet) who have, at the Emperor’s command, taken over the production of spice—a drug that doubles as spaceship fuel—from the evil Harkonnens. That family got rich off the mines on the desert planet of Arrakis, but fought the indigenous Fremen at every turn. The Atredies hope to win wealth with peace instead. Nice idea, but the sturm und drang of galactic unrest churns conspiracies in which nasty, greedy, scrabbling people in dark rooms and ominous shadows scheme to take them down.

Villeneuve sets the stage well. His pivot from the heavy thrillers that brought him to Hollywood (Prisoners, Sicario) to ponderous science fiction (Arrival, Blade Runner 2049) has been a productive one. His eye for cold majesty and ear for terse genre dialogue is the keen balance of cinematic poetry and prose that makes for some fine stunning vistas of imagination. Here we get something like and yet unlike other space operas. There’s a love of grand takes offs and landings, watching the gears turn on enormous dragonfly-winged helicopters and monolithic ships, and the sliding doors on the side of New Age ziggurats rising out of the desert like something in a nouveau-ancient-Egyptian-revival. He knows how to accumulate detail and give it the undertow of inevitable tragedy. He creates a world of awe-filled spectacle, balanced between dread and drama while playing off its sense of having returned from an alien future world with the kind of attentive visual splendor you’d find in a Biblical epic or Shakespearean tragedy. One might think of L.P. Hartley’s famous line claiming “The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.” So, too, the future. Here we are dropped into a tangle of ongoing political machinations, colonial strife, religious prophecies and rituals, and cut-throat capitalist ceremony, and watch as various factions—draped in flowing robes and bedazzled headpieces, skin-tight battle suits and protective gear—intone gravely about all they fear is to come. We learn the various groups’ traditions and values, their rituals and hopes, and then watch them all collide and blow apart.

The result is a grand introduction that may or may not go anywhere. It leaves the sense of feeling incomplete. As it trudges along so seriously and full of grave pronouncements, Chalamet contemplates the heavy crown of his future, while the others strut and pose and fret in cavernous sets. It gets a bit monotonous from time to time. I found myself spending the last thirty minutes or so wondering on what cliffhanger it would end more than I was wrapped up in the narrative. Maybe the whole thing would play better after a second feature, cut together as one five-hour sprawl. Because it has the soul of a Ten Commandments (maybe the best comparison point, if you bled it of its overtly colorful camp qualities) straining to escape and go on and on and on. Instead it finds every thread and arc halted abruptly with a cut to black while somehow still stretching to fill its space. (The last line: “this is only the beginning.”) So it’s half a movie. But it’s an intriguing one, full of striking design and heavy soundscapes. It’s a feast of bit parts for a huge eclectic ensemble of familiar actors crowding around the margins—Josh Brolin, Javier Bardem, Charlotte Rampling, Stephen McKinley Henderson, Jason Momoa, Zendaya—who are prepared to chew around expositional jargon with perfect gravity. It has images that tower with the most literally awesome of any Hollywood epic, and sound that rumbles and quakes with import. Clearly everyone involved cared. It’s an experience, compelling with every wide shot and sonic flourish. But it’s hard to feel too excited when it hits an inciting incident and then peters out.

History of Violence: ASSASSIN'S CREED

The director, cinematographer, and stars of last year’s effectively muddy and bloody production of Macbeth have reunited for another movie about fate, ambition, and violence. Unfortunately, and confusingly, the movie is Assassin’s Creed, a murky, inscrutable video game adaptation that goes heavy on the action and portent but light on sense. How they ended up here, other than an eagerness to collect a paycheck, must have something to do with the material’s stupid clever conceit. A modern-day criminal is hooked up to a sci-fi contraption and sent to eavesdrop in the brain and senses of a violent ancestor living 500 years ago. (It’s a Quantum Leap with less responsibility.) There’s a nugget of a fascinating concept about historical inevitability and genetic determinism in this idea, but it is developed in a scattershot way, draining suspense and intrigue the more it tries to complicate matters. At first glance it may look and sound more important than the usual attempts to make action movies out of video games, but the longer it goes the worse it grows – tin-eared, nonsensical, consequence-free.

But you can’t say director Justin Kurzel isn’t trying. He has cinematographer Adam Arkapaw whip up a textured and dusty look for the past and a gleaming antiseptic blue-grey sheen for the future. Into these dark (dim, really) frames goes Michael Fassbender, bringing far more neck-bulging Macbeth emotion than the writing requires. He plays a man on death row who gets injected with the executioner’s chemicals only to awake in a covert institute in Spain where a mysterious Marion Cotillard (a little less Lady Macbeth-y) hopes to use his DNA to extract the history of a centuries-old assassin (also Fassbender) and his mission to hunt down the apple Eve bit in Eden. Yes, you read that correctly. This movie began pleasingly silly in the way plenty pompous pulp pictures do: with a wall of text. This one is describing an ancient battle over supernatural relics fought between the Knights Templar and Assassin’s Creed. The following confounding opening sequences are preposterous and exciting, cutting ruthlessly between slashing violence in the past and glowing doohickeys in the near future, trying breathlessly to tie two timelines and Fassbenders together into one nutty narrative.

By the time the swirling screenplay (by one writer who has adapted Shakespeare and two who adapted Vernoica Roth, if that indicates what’s going on here) settles into its main groove, the full incomprehensibility comes to the fore. We watch as our modern man gets attached to a giant apparatus that allows him to fully experience the sensations of his ancestor’s battles. Yet he can’t change the past. He’s merely an observer. And the company bankrolling Cotillard – and which also employs other great thespians Jeremy Irons, Charlotte Rampling, Brendan Gleeson, and Michael K. Williams, all asked to speak in hushed monotone – simply wants him to see where the elaborate historical action sequences – galloping horses, jabbing swords, and medieval parkour – take the apple. Why they can’t take him directly to when the apple is dropped off somewhere is beyond me. And what will this apple do once found? Nothing less than give them control of Free Will, though what that looks like or accomplishes is left awfully fuzzy. But if you’re already accepting a technobabble process by which DNA can be decoded into the ultimate VR experience, what are one or two more disbeliefs to suspend?

We’re watching two timelines: one in which unknowable future people stare at monitors, and one in which preordained action plays out without suspense because A.) we know they get the apple, and B.) our protagonist’s only involvement is paying attention to it. As a result, my attention dipped dramatically once I got used to the silliness and saw the stasis of it all. Sure, it looks striking and Kurzel has a tremendous amount of acting talent playing along with the inherently goofy story done up in total straight-faced seriousness. It has the thunderous sound design and huge CGI budget of a big studio production, and the constant drumbeat of flashy spectacle and weightless violence required of its genre. But every second that goes by means less and less as the groaning sturm und drang adds up to hollow, pointless confusion. The pseudo-mystical medieval swashbuckler hidden under layers of contrived convolutions would be a lot more fun if it wasn’t tied to such a ponderous drag about Fate and Conspiracy and Revenge. By the end, with the action finally mattering as it (mild spoiler, if you care) erupts in the other timeline, as the Assassin bloodline has its revenge on the techno-Templar, I found myself wondering why they hadn’t done that an hour earlier and saved us all the trouble of sitting through the hectic nothing. No movie this stupid can afford to be so dull.

Married Life: 45 YEARS

45 Years accumulates its power so slowly and quietly that it reaches an emotional crescendo in its final seconds, the calm of the end credits broken by the trembling reverberations of so much left unsaid, of powerful feelings just beginning to flicker across a character’s face before the last cut to black. The film stars Charlotte Rampling as Kate, a woman busily working on the final preparations for an anniversary party. She’s been married to her husband Geoff (Tom Courtenay) for nearly 45 years (hence the title) and we get the impression that it’s been a largely happy life. Decades of pleasant matrimony are suddenly cast in new light, however, when Geoff receives a letter from German authorities: they’ve found his ex-girlfriend’s body, perfectly preserved in the glacier on which she perished 50 years prior. Kate plunges forward into her daily routines while keeping an eye on the approaching festivities. Geoff loses himself in the past, haunted by the idea of a young woman he loved and lost frozen forever at the point he loved her most.

In telling this story of an elderly couple in slow-motion crisis, writer-director Andrew Haigh, whose previous feature, 2011’s Weekend, was a humbly observational modern gay sort-of-Brief Encounter, and who created the short-lived HBO series Looking, a casually precise view of fumbling relationships among young city dwellers, brings his hands-off compassionate eye to a very different demographic. Adapting a short story by David Constantine (titled “In Another Country”), Haigh allows rich interiority to be provided through subtle cues and two tremendous performances of the sort older actors are rarely called upon to deliver in mainstream movies that’d rather view them as talismanic wise elders or cutesy anachronisms. Without a deluge of exposition about their long marriage, Rampling (one of our finest performers for over five decades now) and Courtenay (ditto) are able to suggest a relaxed ease and cautious sadness. They know each other so well, and yet are still capable of surprise as they learn new aspects of the other’s inner life.

What better time than an anniversary to reflect upon mortality and the passing of time, especially when given such a shocking report? The recovery of a literal long-lost love’s remains is the impetus for both Kate and Geoff to contemplate their decisions. Would he have married this other woman? Would she, then, have found a different path if she’d never had the opportunity to meet him? Does the death of this other woman, the reminder of which so vividly shakes Geoff up even now, mean she’d been haunting their marriage all this time without Kate’s awareness? When they first broach the topic, Geoff is sure he’d told his wife all this before. Kate thinks not. Haigh ratchets up some of the sound design in the house, emphasizing, together with Lol Crawley’s cinematography’s icy refinement, closed off corners and wide windows’ airless soundscapes, or the dull thudding footsteps of a husband rummaging in the attic for old photographs of the young dead woman he loved, loves, and can’t quite forget. It’s like four-plus happy decades have been greeted with the ghosts of doubt. How happy were they? Are they?

All this is treated so delicately and tenderly, with great compassion in its chilly, unshowy quiet. Haigh doesn’t ramp up the melodrama or bring on the waterworks, steering deftly away from any overt explosions of emotional conflict. Instead, 45 Years lingers evocatively in its silences, in small gestures – a hand on a chest, an impulsive viewing of old slides, a comfortable cuddle, a sudden flash of tears on an unreadable face. It’s a deliberate movie, closely observed and yet generously spacious, allowing its performers to conjure a whole relationship’s ecosystem in the unspoken closeness and spaces between them. When Kate goes to check on the hall they’re renting for the party, the proprietor tells her it’s “full of history, like a good marriage.” But what makes a marriage good? Is it merely longevity, or something else entirely?

This movie, circling big questions without finding easy answers, becomes a restrained picture about the stories couples tell themselves about their lives and the decisions that made them the people they now are, and how one new piece of information can either create or revive old confusions and doubts. Then, like a finely crafted short story, it snaps shut with ambiguous finality, moving in its resistance of conventional closure. This is a relationship movie, intelligent and reserved, painted not in optimism or pessimism, but in a sort of Rorschach test naturalism, ripe for analysis and conversation. Two fine-tuned performances – a subtle and brilliant acting duet – are enough to send one out of the theater eager to interpret the feelings within.

End of Her World: MELANCHOLIA

Danish provocateur Lars von Trier’s Melancholia opens with striking slow motion shots of a metaphorical nature. A bride (Kirsten Dunst) tries to move through an ominous forest with dark, heavy strings tangled around her arms and legs. A woman (Charlotte Gainsbourg) tries to run across a golf course carrying her young son, but finds her feet sinking into the ground. Then the world ends. This is a movie about depression, about the soul-deadening dive into unceasing and motionless sadness. These opening shots, strikingly unnerving, are such a perfect evocation that the following film is merely a two-hour plus continuation of the themes that have been so simply expressed. This film is tiresome and oppressive and that’s exactly the point. It’s every bit as emotionally draining as I’m sure Von Trier would want me to find it. It’s a good approximation, an evocation, of depression.

The first part of the film follows a wedding reception that slowly drains of revelry as the distracted bride’s depression grows clearer and stronger. She slips away from the party to wander through the mansion of her sister (Gainsbourg). She tries to nap. She takes a bath. Meanwhile the guests are getting anxious. Her new husband (Alexander Skarsgård) grows increasingly confused. Her mother (Charlotte Rampling), who didn’t want to be there in the first place, wanders away as well. Her father (John Hurt) seems mostly oblivious. Her sister’s filthy rich husband (Kiefer Sutherland) is stewing, thinking this party is fast becoming a waste of money. The wedding planner (Udo Kier, in a very funny performance) is so upset in a dry, passive-aggressive way that he declares he will no longer look at the bride, covering his face with one hand to block her from his vision.

This poor woman is so clearly troubled, slowly sinking into her depression as if it were quicksand. She gets testy. Her boss (Stellan Skarsgård) finds reason to doubt her fresh promotion. A few different people forcefully tell her to “be happy.” As if that will help. This marriage is over before it’s even begun. There’s a destabilizing depression settling into its foundation.

The second part of the film follows this woman as her condition has worsened. She’s back at the mansion of her sister and her sister’s husband and son. She sleeps constantly. Sometimes she can’t even bring herself to move, not even to take care of herself. Her sister half-carries her to the bathroom, runs a bath, undresses her, but can’t get her to lift her leg to get in the tub. Her sister cooks her favorite meal, but one bite of meatloaf has her weeping, saying it tastes like ashes. This is truly becoming a debilitating depression. It threatens to pull in all of the characters around her.

Of course, it doesn’t help matters that a newly discovered planet many times larger than our own has a wide arc of an orbit that will swing it past the Earth with some chance of a devastating collision that would engulf the entire planet. This planet is named Melancholia, clearly marking it as a symbol of the film’s central concern. Depression is a terrible and terrifying condition that seeps bone deep into Dunst’s character then slowly infects Gainsbourg and the others. The panic over the looming potential of a forthcoming apocalypse adds to the sense of inescapable devastation and understandable pessimism. Melancholia, like her depression, may very well destroy their lives.

These are fantastic performances, filled with a kind of immediacy and depth that belies Von Trier’s more schematic aims. He’s content to lay out the themes of the film in broad, though artful, strokes, but through the skillful actresses’ best efforts, this depression moves beyond a collection of signifiers both vague and specific, both literal and metaphorical. Dunst utter helplessness in the face of it, the aching battle within her that is masked at times by her stoic unhappiness, is painfully honest. Gainsbourg joins her in a duet of emotion with a performance that, once it descends into pure anxiety, is infectious. These sisters live contagious emotional lives that bring an edge of danger to their respective, intertwined, psychological issues.

I had an intense physical response to the aesthetics of the film. The swirling shaky handheld camera, especially during the wedding reception, made me nauseous. I’ve never before had that response to a shaking, swooping camera. Something about the intensity with which the film explored such a strong, corrosive state of mind melded with Manuel Alberto Claro’s cinematography to make me sick to my stomach. Later, as Melancholia grows closer, I found anxiety for my nerves to match my stomach. By the time the film arrives at its gut-rattling cataclysmic climax, it was as if a weight was lowering onto my shoulders. In short, this film left me a bit of a wreck and in desperate need of a recovery period. This is such a powerful and upsetting film, as well as often tedious and seemingly repetitive, maddening and overwhelming in equal measure. It’s a great evocation of a seemingly insurmountable problem. In the end, it’s a film about how depression is great practice for dealing with the end of the world.

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.