Weathering with You: PRESSURE

Pressure is a movie for people who’d rather doze off in a movie theater instead of falling asleep on the couch in front of the History Channel. It’s a World War II drama about the last three or four days of planning for D-Day. The epic moment is narrowed down to just a few rooms through the limited perspective of the meteorological team. At first they think it won’t be stormy weather. Then they do. The top weatherman is played by Andrew Scott. He has a nice pregnant wife at home and now he’s sequestered with the top brass barking at him to make a call. Is he sure? It’s a prediction. He’s a little worried that they don’t know how weather forecasts operate. He goes against the other top weatherman in the room (Chris Messina). General Eisenhower—a growling Brendan Fraser—looks at him with skepticism, then reluctant agreement that still bubbles up with skepticism. A storm could ruin all their planning and maybe even tip the course of the war. Damian Lewis plays a general whose reaction to hearing about the impending bad weather’s potential for delaying his invasion plans is to rant that they should just start “taking Kraut lessons now!” Scott has a great stiff upper lip and slightly teary eyes that sell the stress of being the naysayer in a situation like this. It’s a movie that, if nothing else, will make you say, yeah, I guess it would be a lot of pressure to tell the assembled Allied Commanders whether or not their closely guarded plans will be stymied by high winds. 

There’s just not much going on here beyond the obvious. First Scott has to argue it’s about to storm and the leaders growl. It’s sunny outside! They begrudgingly respect him when it starts raining a few hours later. A key scene comes late in the picture where Scott has decided that the weather is about to change. Eisenhower yells something like: “You say don’t go when it’s sunny, and to go when it’s storming!” Something tells me the real guy knew a little bit more about how weather works. But here’s a movie that’s desperately stretching to make drama out of its little corner of a massive event. I don’t doubt there was actual drama here, but the movie doesn’t much find it. Going deeper into the actual process of collecting data for their forecasts, instead of glossing over it with montage, might’ve helped. Instead we have little montages of devices and charts followed by broad scenes of flat dialogue and pat, easily resolved tensions. Director Anthony Maras has assembled a fine cast, dressed them in period costumes and set them in convincingly historical rooms. It looks and moves and sounds like a proper prestige picture, all surface polish. But screenwriter David Haig, adapting his own stage play, seems to trust the subject matter to do the heavy lifting. The movie ends with an abridged combat sequence that mostly reminds viewers of Saving Private Ryan’s much more successful balance of the personal stakes in the epic terror of combat in this very historical moment. I wanted to like a talky movie about WWII strategy. But this is a flat foregone conclusion of a movie. 

Justice for All: JUROR #2

Clint Eastwood spent the first three decades of his career starring in movies about retributive justice, and the last three decades directing movies problematizing that notion. How beautifully consistent, the iconographic cowboy cop whose might made right aging into a thoughtful interrogator of the systems whose corruption supports such misguided notions, and the kinds of steady professional cooperation that can truly save the day. The distance between Dirty Harry—grizzled, violent, taciturn, impulsive—and Sully—warm, calm, communicative, expert—says all you need to know. He’s always been drawn to darker, more complicated figures, but in his older years, his films slowed down, grew melancholic and doubtful, cast about in the shadows and grays he brought to his images for glimmers of light and truth that still shine through despite the flaws. This receives a clean, clear, lovely, and maybe final, expression in Juror #2, a movie that in decades past would’ve been a basic studio programmer—a legal thriller with a great hook and few fine performances. Now, given the rarity of that form, and the credentials of its 94-year-old director, it gathers an old-fashioned sense of craft and consideration. It finds a juror (Nicholas Hoult) listening intently to the arguments in a murder case, tracking the back and forth between a prosecutor (Toni Collette) and defense attorney (Chris Messina) about the behavior and character of the accused (Gabriel Basso). As the juror hears the facts of a body found by the side of the road on a dark and stormy night some months prior, he begins to suspect the deer he thought he hit on that very day was in fact this victim. What follows in Jonathan Abrams’ script is a sturdy courtroom procedural of motions and objections and testimony and cross-examination and closing arguments and deliberations.

Eastwood makes it a subtle study of actors faces and gestures. And building off such a compelling moral quandary gives the genre’s standard moves a charge of genuine high-stakes philosophical inquiry. To come forward would save an innocent man’s life at the expense of his own. Will he make the right choice? As we learn more about Hoult’s home life and back story, as well as the defendant’s, the movie twists the lines of sympathy as we see the goodness and flaws of each. The right thing starts to feel not so clear cut. What Eastwood’s driving at here is that of faith in the justice system—watching attentively as it goes wrong in this extreme circumstance, and watching patiently to see if just enough will go right. How fitting for an American moment in which we wonder if we’ll ever see justice for what’s so clearly wrong. Eastwood earnestly believes in the goodness of people trying to do a good job, and trying to do what’s right. It may not be a perfect system, and we are certainly not perfect people. But it’s the best we’ve got, and we are all we have. Eastwood builds his case with methodical clarity, adjusting the characters and situation with low-key confidence in letting their complications energize a well-constructed concept. It’s a textured satisfaction as the movie finds its way to a close and lets the fullness of its implications linger in a final moment of harrowing uncertainty and pregnant silence. And yet, because he actually believes there is civic goodness in even a flawed system—he has us watch the jury duty promotional video with his characters, after all—we can, too.

Flight Risk: BIRDS OF PREY

The key object in Birds of Prey is a priceless diamond everyone’s waiting for a pickpocket to defecate, and if that’s not a metaphor for the current state of superhero Hollywood, I don’t know what is. Here’s yet another movie that tries to wring originality out of the subgenre by swallowing another genre whole and attempting to digest whatever charm can be found by extruding it out the other end. In this case, we get a small crime picture, shades of noir, with circling mobsters and cops, that missing diamond, and a host of scheming tough gals whose competing agendas just might align long enough to take down some badder guys. It’s done up in a half-real pop art explosion of Gotham City, though this DC spinoff luckily avoids the toxic cheese of Suicide Squad and the pretentious thematic mess of Joker, the last two villain-centric Batman-adjacent pictures. This one’s just barely the best of the three, mostly by finding a genuinely wackadoo performance at its center. Unlike Joaquin Phoenix, shackled to an origin story that left lots of room for capital-A acting, but little in the way of coherent ideas, this film gets Margot Robbie in a tour-de-comic-book-force, squeaking and squirming and strutting and pouting and slouching (even, by the end, rollerskating) all over every line reading. We’re never meant to take her Harley Quinn, the Joker’s ex-girlfriend, as a person. It’s hard to invest in the character’s plight, but it’s fun to see Robbie’s having a blast. Here she’s a bubble gum time bomb, a splash panel drawn in smirks and squiggles, in a movie that sets its tone as equal parts cotton candy and corroded battery. The whole thing’s sugar-high insubstantial and poison-dart smiley face cynical complete with sickly cutesy title cards and doodles on freeze frames. But I did like the overt musical Howard Hawks homage, and when she storms a police station with glitter bombs then, later, under the downpour of a misfiring sprinkler system. The movie’s a bad good time, or a good bad time, right up until you realize it’s nothing at all.

The screenplay from Christina Hodson (Bumblebee) is told in a jumble of chronology to bend the narrative to the scattershot personality problems of its main antihero, name dropped in the self-consciously wordy parenthetical subtitle And the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn. It’s like Deadpool if he was a fourth as self-aware and twice as pleasant company. We get the backstory of a half-dozen characters and endless wheel-spinning setup for most of the relatively slim runtime, just reason enough to give enjoyable performers occasion to swan around in silly caricature performances that are never quite funny enough to call comedic, and never once grounded enough to feel the weight of the stakes. There’s Rosie Perez as a no-nonsense detective, Mary Elizabeth Winstead as a crossbow killer motorcyclist, Jurnee Smollett-Bell as a deadly lounge singer, and Ella Jay Basco as the aforementioned pickpocket, a surly and precocious teen. Together they form the unlikely allies who’ll eventually confront the preening gangster played by Ewan McGregor and his bleach-blonde, face-peeling (a particularly, discordantly gross detail) henchman (Chris Messina). When the action finally hits, and the women all work together in a funhouse carnival climax, it’s a fun bit of cleanly cut and crisply choreographed action. The way there is a halting, stop-and-start maze of exposition and vulgar banter that’s both too much and not enough, holding the rest of the DC cinematic universe at arm’s length to protect its R-rated violence and cussing, while avoiding getting tangled in continuity dilemmas. It feels like its own thing, to the extent it can, though it has nothing on the joys of Wonder Woman, Aquaman, and Shazam! Director Cathy Yan can stage action and set a scene in relatively eye-catching ways, and keeps the plates spinning fast enough to stave off complaints of the film’s thinness and predictable plot moves. There’s a diamond in there if you can wade through the rest of it.

Geopolitical Showbiz: ARGO

In early 1980, an unknown producer quietly, but with a modicum of industry press attention, put a next-to-no-budget science fiction movie named Argo into production. This movie was not destined to be a hit. It wasn’t even to be made at all, cancelled before it even got off the ground. It was, however, a movie of some small historical importance. Argo was a C.I.A. cover story for an attempted extraction of six Americans trapped in Tehran during the Iran Hostage Crisis. This unlikely true story is now a movie named Argo, so the whole thing comes full circle. Now a movie about itself, to a certain extent, its new iteration, directed by star Ben Affleck, is a nicely paced period piece thriller.

Though smartly scripted and narrowly focused by Chris Terrio, this film starts messily, with a flurry of heavy-handed exposition and clumsily staged scene setting. Laying out a Cliffs Notes background of 20th century Iranian history right off the bat led me to believe that the film would be far more interested in providing and exploring the political context rather than leaving the setting and situation as mere set-dressing and plot motivators for its primary concerns. Those concerns are nothing more than crisply presented scenes of period detail and men in suits urgently taking care of business, a terrific collection of character actors doing what they do best: lending weight and likability to small, but impactful roles.

In the film’s opening moments, the American embassy in Iran is taken over and six of its employees (Tate Donovan, Clea DuVall, and others) manage to flee, taken in by the Canadian ambassador (Victor Garber). They can’t stay there for long. Soon someone will grow suspicious. The embassy hostage-takers will realize they don’t have all the Americans in their possession. Domestic pressure is mounting as well. The days go by with little news, good or bad, and the populace grows weary and restless. Affleck fills the opening of the film with copious cutaways to news footage both mock and real, filling in information of the political malaise of the times with overeager intrusiveness. Still, the point gets across. What will become of this dangerous situation? The U.S. government needs a plan.

That’s where the fake movie comes in. It’s, in the words of the C.I.A. operative played by Bryan Cranston, “the best bad idea we’ve got.” The agent played by Ben Affleck will fly into Tehran posing as a producer of a Canadian science fiction film, meet up with these hiding Americans and fly away claiming them as Canadians in his film crew. To do so, the movie needs be adequately believable, which is where two Hollywood veterans – a special effects expert (John Goodman) and a weary producer (Alan Arkin) – come in. They’re there to make the whole thing look legitimate. The Hollywood sequences in the film are dryly funny in the tension between the literal life-and-death stakes of the agents’ plans and the been-there-done-that attitudes of the showbiz types.

Focusing on the process of this unlikely, stranger-than-fiction rescue attempt, Argo mixes scenes of tense walks down hallways, conversations around rotary phones and passing manila folders between men in sharp suits and shaggy facial hair. (This is a film that gets a lot of mileage out of its period costuming, a sort of spy game Mad Men in that way.) In sequences set in America, great that-guy actors like Chris Messina, Kyle Chandler, Zeljko Ivanek, and Titus Welliver fill in quickly sketched government roles, spouting jargon, delivering terse one-liners, and getting the plot moving. In Iran-set sequences, threats are presented as vague foreign rage that rumbles outside the home in which the six Americans are nervously hiding, unable to even look out a window for fear of capture and execution. As the hidden Americans’ and their hopeful rescuers’ plotlines slowly merge, the film builds to an extended period of undeniably effective suspense, skillfully made.

Affleck has proven himself a relatively unshowy auteur, creating functional pieces of serious-minded mid-budget genre filmmaking – thrillers of one sort or another, all – without generating much in the way of distinctive filmmaking. In Gone Baby Gone and The Town, as in Argo, he gets good actors solid material and stays out of the way, doing only what’s necessary to get the story on the screen. That’s not an altogether unworthy approach. Even if here it leads to some visual uncertainty – he’ll go for three shots when one would do – he knows when to capture strong popcorn energy and how to build tension out of nervous editing and tense parallelism. The final stretch of Argo is a nearly white-knuckle tightening of dramatic tension that unfolds so crisply and intensely that I could feel the collective exhale in the theater when the pressure eventually released. This is strong work. 

In and Out of Love: CELESTE AND JESSE FOREVER

Rather than being lousy and dull all the way through, Celeste and Jesse Forever has the unfortunate disappointment-enhancer of seeming rather promising at the start. The central joke of the film is a funny one. Celeste (Rashida Jones) and Jesse (Andy Samberg) are best friends, cozily intimate, and giggle their way through countless in-jokes. The problem? They’ve been divorced for six months. That’s a good joke and a fine reverse-rom-com riff, but if you wait around for director Lee Toland Krieger to expand upon that promising nugget, you’ll be waiting a long time. This is a mopey relationship movie about characters dealing with real problems in a film that is content to use them in schematic and dispiriting ways.

Celeste is a successful publicist and author while Jesse is an artistic layabout. She still cares about him, but would really like him out of the house. When he meets a girl and does just that, she’s hurt. There’s real emotion here, but it’s bleached away by all the predictable storytelling machinations from which the film initially seemed to be turning away. There are plot developments that, though I understood why the screenwriting handbook would need them to happen, feel wrong, feel too disruptive to the gentle character work that Jones and Samberg are up to here.

Jones, so good on the essential sitcom Parks & Recreation, co-wrote the movie with Will McCormack (who turns up in a small, likable role as a pot dealer/relationship guru), and together they’ve written themselves some interesting roles. There’s also room around the margins for delightful-in-theory roles for a solid ensemble that includes Ari Graynor, Chris Messina, Emma Roberts, and Elijah Wood. They’re all likable screen presences that aren’t given enough time or good material to make much of an impact. This is a movie about the leads and Jones and Samberg are perhaps too good at selling their chemistry, since the ultimate breakdown of the relationship is only partially and haltingly convincing.

Most unfortunately, Jones and McCormack didn’t write a movie that can capitalize on these characters and the promising setup. At first I was straining to like the film, but as it meandered its way to an unsatisfying conclusion, I just couldn’t keep my enthusiasm from wandering away. Krieger shoots the film in a routine loose way that does the slack plotting no favors, occasionally indulging in visual beauty – a shot of fireworks was rather lovely, if pointless – that only serves to reveal just how empty the whole thing ultimately is. The film coasts on the charms of its cast and the strength of its concept far further than that will actually take it.

In the Details: DEVIL

The world of Devil is in trouble right from the opening frames. Gliding gray establishing shots of Philadelphia create an immediate sense of unease just by being upside down. The world is off-kilter. Something is very wrong. Narration from a skyscraper’s superstitious security guard (Jacob Vargas) tells us that the Devil can torment the damned while they still live by entering our world through spaces created by suicides. No sooner than the frame reorients itself, a person jumps out of one of the building’s high windows.

Soon after the policeman with a tragic past (Chris Messina) shows up to investigate, the real trouble starts. An elevator mysteriously breaks down leaving five people stuck suspended over twenty stories high. One is a sleazy mattress salesman (Geoffrey Arend). Another (Bokeem Woodbine) is one of the building’s security team, though it’s unfortunately only his second day. Also along for the ride are a spooked young woman (Bojana Novakovic), a suspicious elderly lady (Jenny O’Hara), and a guy with a sketchy beard of stubble (Logan Marshall-Green).

The cast remains stuck there for most of the movie as the plot unravels like Irwin Allen by way of Rod Serling. They aren’t exactly the most compelling bunch of characters, but the way they inevitably turn on each other is tensely exciting. The script by Brian Nelson, from a story concept by M. Night Shyamalan, is efficient, wrapping the whole thing up in a little less than 80 minutes. It turns out the deaths, and ratchets up the suspense, like clockwork. The lights go out. We hear ominous noises, punctuated by shouts and screams and various other sorts of exclamations. When the lights flicker back to life, there is one less person alive in that elevator. Who is the murderer? Spoiler alert: the answer is in the title.

The unconvincing pseudo-religious premise, which had me hopelessly wishing a third-act twist would reveal a real-world solution to the killings, is worn a little too heavily. But director John Erick Dowdle makes sure the proceedings move along quickly and creepily. The cinematography by the great Tak Fujimoto turns out surprisingly varied images, cannily exploiting claustrophobia and acrophobia. The movie has a strong sense of both confinement and extreme height that keeps the sense of danger omnipresent. I was much more unnerved by the feeling of being stuck in an elevator and the potential of a sudden drop than I was by any of the supernatural goofiness that adorns the plot.

The final moments overreach, as do various moments throughout the movie that border on just plain silly. A security guard talks about how everything in the building is going wrong this day and punctuates this by tossing a piece of toast in the air. It lands jelly side down. Maybe it’s just me, but I don’t find wasted toast particularly frightening.

What I do find frightening is how effectively this movie worked on me. It’s silly and inessential, but I can’t deny that it had me shivering for more or less the entire time. Fujimoto’s images got under my skin. Dowdle’s brisk direction of Nelson’s thin script moves along swiftly and keeps things agreeably eerie. This is a dumb little suspenseful horror movie that’s sheer simplicity works.