Future Shock: X-MEN: DAYS OF FUTURE PAST

Its first entry was released 14 years ago in the summer of 2000, making Fox’s X-Men the only superhero franchise to not be concluded, rebooted, remade, or canceled. There have been spin-offs and prequels, but all have fit into one universe, separate and distinct from the other superhero franchises crowding into the multiplexes with increasing regularity. Perhaps because their cinematic origins predate the flat, noisy, homogenous sci-fi slugfests that make up so much of the subgenre, the X-Men movies have managed to retain their idiosyncrasies. Following the plight of mutants, people who are born with strange and varied powers, from as helpful as telekinesis or regeneration, to as useless as a frog-like tongue, there’s an obvious and potent metaphor at the center. A minority group fights for the right to peacefully coexist with the majority. These movies work best when they tap into that real emotion and empathy.

The first sequel, 2003’s X2, has a quiet and unexpected scene in which a teenager comes out as a mutant to his family. (“Have you ever tried not being a mutant?” is his mother’s response.) It’s moving and human, an example of the kind of scene few other superhero movies have room for. Director Bryan Singer, who helmed the first two entries, got the series off on the right note, with slickly designed thrills and the characters showing off their powers in grounded yet comic-book ways, while taking the metaphors very seriously. It’s a good combination. After 11 years and 4 films of varying quality without him, the franchise is once again under Singer’s direction with the latest, X-Men: Days of Future Past, an attempt to bring together the various strands of timelines and plotlines the series has accumulated.

Days of Future Past is serious, a little silly, and geekily detailed. Simon Kinberg’s script features authentically comic-bookish storytelling, quickly lining up a thinly sketched conflict, presenting the powers, winding up the scenarios and then getting tied in time-travel knots before exploding in big full-page spreads of colorful commotion. It begins in a dystopian future where Sentinels, giant mutant-killing robots, have gone wild. Ruthless machines, they’ve turned the world into a wintry hellscape not unlike the future of The Terminator, filled with stray skulls and bands of resistance fighters. It is this dark future from whence the cast of the first few X-Men pictures, including on-again-off-again allies Professor X (Patrick Stewart) and Magneto (Ian McKellen), must send the ever-repairable adamantium-claw-wielding Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) back in time to prevent the mass-extinction.

Conveniently, that sends him back into the 1970s where the characters of X-Men: First Class, including young Prof. X (James McAvoy) and Magneto (Michael Fassbender), are about to inadvertently lay the groundwork for the Sentinels. The key line comes from Kitty Pryde (Ellen Page), who uses her powers to project Wolverine’s consciousness back into his 1970’s body. (See, I told you this was comic-booky.) “Whatever you do becomes our past,” she says to him. That line frees the movie from real-world history and its franchise backstory. Anything can happen. The movie includes the Vietnam war, Paris peace talks, and references to the Kennedy assassination. Richard Nixon consults fictional weapons manufacturer Bolivar Trask (Peter Dinklage, sporting a great 70’s stache) and unscrupulous scientists. It’s a free and excited blend of alternate history and retcon loop-de-loops enjoyable enough to distract from how completely incomprehensible it is the more you think about it.

It’s a movie that embraces possibilities for fun throwaway details in its plot. A Paris disco blares a Francophone cover of a Motown hit. How many blockbusters have time for that? It’s a movie in which a bunch of great actors chew over dopey expository dialogue and earnest character work with such gravitas and enjoyment that it reads as simply entertaining. The movie takes itself the right amount of serious, willing to wink in amusement at itself. Take this exchange between the fuzzy blue mutant known as Beast (Nicholas Hoult) and the time-travelling Wolverine. Beast: “In the future, do I make it?” Wolverine: “No.”

It’s all treated sincerely enough to keep the plot gears turning, characters intriguing, and action interesting. The filmmakers have thought through the ways various mutant powers can be used in action sequences, allowing the movie to escape the sameness that creeps into these kinds of movies. If heroes and villains are capable of great sci-fi/fantasy feats, why do so many movies of this type culminate in endless point-and-shoot, punching bag calamities? Any old hero can do that, no superpowers required. Here there are fine pop visuals, including a great sequence with a super-fast mutant who can zip around a room and take out a whole squadron of bad guys in the space of a blink. At one point Singer slows the action down, letting him get through a confrontation while all the regular-speed folks are moving so imperceptibly as to not be moving at all. It’s a neat concept cleverly staged.

Most welcome is the way the plot hinges on preventing violence to save the future. It doesn’t come down to a knockdown drag-out fight, but rather a race-against-the-clock to prevent an inciting incident that will lead to bloodshed decades later. There’s no shortage of action, with the shape-shifting Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence) playing the part of globetrotting villain and the 70s X-Men giving chase while, 50 years in the future, X-Men ready themselves for a confrontation with a massive fleet of Sentinels. But the thrust of the film is still the metaphoric, with mutants continuing to stand in for any oppressed minority group fighting over how best to fight for rights and protections. Days of Future Past adds to the mix commentary on drones, with the mindless robots meant to protect going horribly bad, and drug addiction, featuring a subplot with a character hooked on a substance that dulls mutant powers presented in a way that looks a lot like heroin.

That’s all just flavoring, though. After a certain point, Days of Future Past doesn’t have time for quieter human moments. It’s content to borrow emotion with quick flashes of previous entries as it hurtles to the plot contortions necessary to tangle together the various loose ends it’s required to bring together in order to move the franchise forward. This is a movie that slowly loses cleverness as it creaks towards necessary plot points and tidy franchise care. Its time travel narrative carefully clears one table while setting two or three more. That wore me out by the end, and makes my head spin trying to piece together the web of alternate universes and timeline fractures implied by the events. Those burdens hold this solid entertainment back from being one of the X-Men’s best.

Of course, maybe the novelty has just worn off. This one has the feel of a curtain call about it, bringing everyone back on stage for one last bow. It’s warm and comfortable to see old cast members returning, even as it’s coasting on the nostalgia of seeing actors inhabit characters they haven’t in nearly a decade. In the feeling of completion that’s brought about by the end, it feels like a satisfying series finale. And yet, barring catastrophe, it will go on. I’ve had affection for these movies, the first two buying a lot of goodwill through subsequent highs and lows. But after this one acts far more enjoyably like a conclusion, I’m not sure how much more I want or could take. At any rate, the X-Men will go on, borne back ceaselessly into days of future past. This entry is fun, even as it adds layers of complication and continuity wrinkles in the name of streamlining and simplifying. The characters are sharp, the acting sharper, the metaphors workable, and the spectacle bright and clear. It hits its marks well.

Built in a Day: TO ROME WITH LOVE

To Rome with Love, Woody Allen’s forty-third film, is far too slight to hate outright. It’s a light, whimsical concoction made up of various plotlines following various sets of characters through Rome with no real sense of connection or cohesion. The film’s structure is of mild interest, the postcard-ready cinematography from Darius Khondji is gorgeous, the actors are fine and Allen’s writing is occasionally funny, but the whole enterprise feels so undercooked. Unlike the best of his European films – Vicky Cristina Barcelona, You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, and, my favorite of the bunch, Midnight in Paris – there’s no clear reason why the characters, stories or themes within should find themselves set in this particular city. Instead, we’re cycling through a fairly typical series of Allen plots with the lowest amount of charm and dramatic interest necessary to provoke a modicum of my affection in response.

The various plotlines that make up the film are arranged in a dawn-to-dusk structure that opens on the beautiful sunny streets of Rome and ends underneath a sky of twinkling stars, which makes the various timelines of the stories themselves – one takes place over the course of an afternoon, others during few weeks, one over several months – a mildly diverting jumble to keep straight. These plots, the simplest, most gently surrealistic and overtly comic conceits to come from Allen in quite some time, could hardly support a full feature on their own, so it’s good to see that the prolific writer-director has shuffled a handful of half-baked concepts into one film so that we could get them all over with in one underwhelming lump so he and we can move on to better things.

One story in the film follows a pair of native Italians, country newlyweds who arrive in the big city. The wife (Alessandra Mastronardi) gets lost and the husband (Alessandro Tiberi) finds himself mistaken by a prostitute (Penélope Cruz) for her newest client and they’re in the process of arguing when the husband’s family shows up and create a drawn-out case of mistaken identity. The wife ends up stumbling into her own convoluted storyline with mistaken identity and mixed-up romantic signals and so the couple finds their fresh marriage tested in somnambulant screwball scenarios. I couldn’t find this story convincing or effective, although there’s a nice payoff when the husband ends up at a business meeting accompanied by the prostitute and all the business men start sweating bullets upon recognizing the new guy’s companion.

And that’s not even the broadest story in the film. That would be the scenario that finds Roberto Benigni as an average Italian family man who suddenly, inexplicably, becomes famous. He’s hounded everywhere he goes by photographers and reporters, gets invited to fabulous parties and on talk shows, and has beautiful women throwing themselves at them. It’s Allen’s attempt at lampooning those famous for being famous, but the mystery of it all here generates a lack of specificity that stretches too thin for effective satire. A much better comment on celebrity (in a roundabout way) is a storyline starring Allen himself as a retired classical music executive who travels to Rome with his wife (Judy Davis) to meet their daughter (Alison Pill) and her fiancé (Flavio Parenti), as well as their future in-laws. Allen’s delighted to find that the fiancé’s mortician father (Fabio Armiliato) has a great voice for opera, but will only sing in the shower.

All this is mere garnish, however, for the main course of the piece, a somewhat structurally complicated story about a middle-aged architect (Alec Baldwin) who wanders away from his wife’s sightseeing in order to visit the neighborhood in Rome where he spent some post-collegiate years. Once wandering down this memory lane, he meets a young man (Jesse Eisenberg) who recognizes him and invites him to visit his apartment he shares with his girlfriend (Greta Gerwig) and where they are anticipating the arrival of one of her friends from college (Ellen Page). Baldwin lingers around the edges of the scenes that follow, interacting with the characters in ways that make him seem removed from the actual physical, temporal reality of the goings-on. It soon becomes clear (although the film never spells it out) that the young man he met is in fact his younger self. He is literally wandering around, reliving his past. This is the only thread in the film that would almost be enough, with some expansion, to fill up a satisfying feature on its own.

What Woody Allen has here is a collection of scenes and sketches with little reason to be thrown together in this way in this city. But what he does have is a nice sense of commitment to the various conceits of varying realism and broadness, complete and unwavering. And once again Allen proves that he knows good ways to make use of actors, feeding off of their screen personas in ways that make them at once utterly believable in character and completely of a piece within the Allen oeuvre. Of the cast, I’d most like to see Pill, Gerwig, Page, and Eisenberg in a future Allen film. They’re pretty terrific here, finding good ways to perform Allen’s dialogue and scenarios while breathing life into what is ultimately fairly uninvolving lightweight material. 

Mind Games: INCEPTION

Christopher Nolan has always been interested in movie puzzles, movies which break apart expectations and examine why the pieces fit the way they do. His Memento follows a man with a brain injury that forces him to reconstruct the past from clues he leaves behind. The Prestige is about deconstructing magic, only to build it back up for a great twist. Insomnia is about a detective who finds that he is doubting his own memory of a shooting. Even Batman Begins and The Dark Knight aren’t mere superhero exercises; they’re interested in the tensions between chaos and order, how the dynamics of modern urban societies both foster and reject vigilantism with equal force. Now, with Inception, Nolan has plunged boldly and audaciously into the biggest puzzle of all, the subconscious mind. He has emerged with what is perhaps his finest film.

Like all the best science fiction, Inception quickly draws viewers into its world, explaining the rules efficiently and easily. In the world of this film, almost entirely like our own, there is a secret technology that allows for dreams to be shared and constructed. Nolan uses this imagined technology to construct an elaborate boxes-within-boxes plot driven at its center by an epic, meticulous dream-world heist that seems to take up most of the run time. There are a team of characters that wish to enter the mind of a certain man (Cillian Murphy) through his subconscious, laying out a dream that they designed. They wish to escape with a secret buried safely in his mind. This is all played out in fast-paced, carefully designed detail that allows Nolan to stage action across varying levels of reality and unreality. Funnily enough, what would seem like cause for confusion is handled nimbly and clearly. Here, Nolan stages the best action sequences of his career.

At the center of the film is a haunted performance by Leonardo DiCaprio as a man who has made a career out of infiltrating dreams. He’s a man who has been forged in the subconscious minds of others and yet is continually brought up short by his own. He’s haunted by memories, real and dreamt, half-remembered and half-invented. Every time he enters into another dream, he finds himself further removed from reality despite being fully aware of the artifice and possessing the tools to change the circumstances. Even his wife (Marion Cotillard) found herself seduced by the logically illogical fantasies of the mind.

DiCaprio grounds the film in an emotional truth, just as the heist plot keeps it hurtling forward. Through the planning of the heist, we get to learn how the creation of the dream-world will allow the characters to control to a certain extent the realities that they are creating, the stages on which their subject’s subconscious will play out his inner dramas and store his deepest secrets. Because the characters are enforcing their own vision on the subject’s dream, the film never tips into overtly symbolic psychedelic surrealism. These are professional people performing a job. They design a dream that will allow them to perform their task. Joseph Gordon Levitt, Ellen Page, Tom Hardy, and Dileep Rao are excellent as the young professionals who set out helping DiCaprio, as is Ken Watanabe as their mysterious bankroll. Together, they add up to a formidable team, cool, smart and efficient.

Once in the world built for the heist, the film takes what we’ve learned about the rules, what we’ve seen the team planning, and throws in twists and swerves. It doesn’t all go according to plan, but because we are aware of the plan, and the stakes, it’s not so hard to keep track of the plot. Still, Nolan’s film requires concentration. It’s constantly on the move; there’s no easy spot for bathroom breaks. Nolan is not interested in holding the audience safely in a comfort zone, excessively explaining every plot detail. Here he is only interested in providing a hugely entertaining rush that is proudly imbued with the potential to baffle.

While Nolan arranges the pieces of the puzzle he is building, he keeps the pacing relentlessly exciting. This is one of the most endlessly thrilling action movies I’ve ever seen. The editing and style are energetic and slickly rewarding. The levels of reality, and surreality, involved in the physics and locations are convincingly real and satisfyingly odd. Staircases turn into M.C. Escher mazes; a train roars through a traffic jam; gravity slides; cities fold in on themselves. There are great unexpected twists to the action, like a very slow-mo fall that serves as a countdown clock of sorts, a sudden ambush on an packed city street, and an incredible sequence of hand-to-hand combat in a hotel with a suddenly constant shifting sense of up and down. I usually hate it when a critic falls back on the metaphor of a roller coaster to describe the experience of seeing a movie, but this one fits the description.

Through the unrelenting action, woven with deep emotion, Nolan creates a film with considerable power, both as an intellectual puzzle and as a feat of sheer filmmaking prowess. The cinematography presents a vision of industrial dreaming, of glossy specificity to this real-world artifice where the dreams are all the more unsettling for being so close to how we experience what we call reality. These are not loopy, wildly colored and bizarrely populated dreams of the kind we are used to seeing represented on screen, and it’s all the creepier for their relative sane insanity. The film creates clearly delineated levels of existence, of sleep and wake, or experiences both real, remembered, created, dreamt and suggested and then proceeds to push even further, blurring the lines in subtle ways. And yet the editing keeps things totally clear. It’s unceasingly exciting, hurtling through its complicated plot at breakneck speed, but I always understood where we were and what reality was understood to be. I think.

The film moves with a visceral velocity. I felt like I was being pulled forward by the force of the filmmaking. I found myself leaning forward trying to catch every detail on the screen, straining my ears to better hear. Like the victim at the center of the film, Nolan had me totally immersed in his fiction, in this world of his creation. It has the kind of great sci-fi hook that is used as a starting point for exploring deeper concepts and harsher truths, all the while thrilling with fantastically gripping action. It so thoroughly transported me that I hardly realized time had passed before the credits appeared. As I walked out of the theater my mind was racing and my heart was pounding. And when I walked down the hall to my apartment, for a brief, fleeting moment, I thought I could feel the walls move and gravity shift. It’s been a few hours now since the movie ended and I’m still racing with excitement. Inception is the biggest thrill of the year so far.

When a Problem Comes Along: WHIP IT

It’s always risky for an established actor to take on directorial duties. They could become the next Clint Eastwood or the next C. Thomas Howell, and it’s nearly impossible to tell which kind they’ll be until the finished product is available for scrutiny. Luckily for Drew Barrymore, her directorial debut is Whip It, a fast-paced, crowd-pleaser that announces her as a director to watch. She generously allows the actors in the film room to breathe, room to explore their characters in deeper and more unexpected ways than you would think would be allowed film that, prior to viewing, sounds so schematic and predictable.

Ellen Page stars as a sassy small-town teen who feels stuck in her world of beauty pageants and standardized tests until she discovers an outlet she never knew she needed at a roller derby. It sounds like a typical coming-of-age, parents-don’t-get-it, teen sports movie, and indeed it has all the beats that such a film would require like the moment where the adolescent lead finds a secret thrill in a new passion, the moment where the mismatched group of outsiders take the teen into their group, the moment where the parents find out about what their kid has really been doing all this time. (See: Saturday Night Fever, Breaking Away, etcetera). And yet, the movie isn’t a typical example of that type, hitting those beats in unexpectedly refreshing and satisfying ways. If it’s not quite Breaking Away, and it isn’t, it’s not for lack of trying.

Page gives her best performance yet (yes, including her Oscar-nominated turn in Juno), giving her character a depth and a yearning that ring true. It also helps that she’s surrounded by wonderful acting. Alia Shawkat (Maebe in Arrested Development) plays her best friend, their rapport also ringing true. Every time they share the screen, it feels like watching two old friends in the way they subtly read each other’s moods, keep long-running jokes moving even farther, warbling along with the radio, and breaking down into fits of giggling. It’s a relationship that feels so truthful, that when a cute guy (Landon Pigg) comes along, making eyes at Page, I genuinely cared about how he would change the girls’ friendship.

Like the friendship, Page’s interactions with her parents hit a particularly truthful nerve in the mixture of awkward candor and unfathomable love that often develops between a teenager and parents. There’s a core of mutual respect in their relationship that feels right. Daniel Stern, as her father, has a loveably awkward sense of a father struggling with connecting to his teenage daughter, careful to say the right thing, desperately wanting to not seem desperate in his attempts to stay an important figure in her life. Marcia Gay Harden, as her mother, is not some stage-mother stereotype, despite early scenes that threaten to push her in that direction. Instead, she’s a woman who very much wants her daughter to succeed. She’s not closed-minded; she merely stubbornly wants her daughter to be great. There’s a feeling of genuine love in the parent-child relationship on display here, not just snarky dysfunction that’s so often a teen-movie cop out. A quiet dialogue scene that finds Harden and Page sitting on the floor of their kitchen, engaging in an intense heart-to-heart, is one of the most memorable scenes I saw in any movie of 2009.

It’s memorable because Barrymore knows the strengths of her actors and the strengths of the script by Shauna Cross. She hasn’t drained her movie of stylistic flourish, but she isn’t suffering from first-time director look-what-I-can-do waywardness either. She knows when she can set up a fairly simple dialogue scene and trust that her actors will more than carry the moment. This is an enormously entertaining film as a result, with a smart, fast-paced script and great actors to perform it. The great indie-rock soundtrack and the vibrant colors are only an added bonus.

Speaking of added bonus, there’s the roller derby girls themselves. Played by the likes of Kristen Wiig, Eve, Zoe Bell, Juliette Lewis, Ari Graynor and Drew Barrymore (humbly giving herself a bit part), the athletes have great sense of comedic timing and are an energetic source of frenzied fun on and off the track, even if they are forced into a food fight in the one wrong note the movie manages to hit. Characters on the periphery of the derby are entertaining as well, especially a goofy announcer (Jimmy Fallon) and a sarcastic but supportive coach (Andrew Wilson). But, even with such minor male influences, this movie is a blast of girl-power gusto. Whip It is a hugely entertaining experience, a kind of feel-good movie that doesn’t go out of its way to make you feel good. I just had no other option when confronted with a movie so endearing, energetic, and sweet. This is the kind of movie that could have felt common, but is instead told uncommonly well.