All for One: LONE SURVIVOR

The true story Lone Survivor tells is inherently mournful, but the film is too slickly pumped up and narrowly focused to communicate much of it. The story follows a SEAL Team on a mission to kill a Taliban leader in the mountains of Afghanistan that went wrong, trapping the men in a firefight that ended with all but one dead. This sad story of sacrifice is presented simply as an extended action sequence that envelops at least half of the runtime. Focused on one moment of pain and death, the film traps its characters, boxed in by the inevitability of their story. We don’t get to see them as living people so much as we sit around waiting to see how they die. It’s a film happy to play with broad types, sparsely characterized, quickly sketching in their specifics in cheap and easy ways. One’s a rookie. Another’s getting married. We should care about them as people – the better to make the lengthy bit of action filmmaking impactful – but instead we’re to care about them as the same standard crew war movies have had since they’ve been an identifiable subgenre. It’s not fair to them, and it’s not fair to the audience.

Writer-director Peter Berg (Friday Night Lights, Battleship) easily creates a sense of what it might be like to be in the middle of a gun battle in Afghanistan if Hollywood filmmakers staged them. It is loud, repetitive, chaotic, and a chance to show off squibs and pyrotechnics as the SEALs are slowly picked off one by one by a largely faceless enemy force. Before we get there, though, we sit with these men through their briefing and then as they set up a stakeout of a mountain village, spying their Taliban target below. Because the actors are likable – Mark Wahlberg, Taylor Kitsch, Emile Hirsch, and Ben Foster – it’s easy enough to sit through their macho militarism. Because Berg and cinematographer Tobias A. Schliessler have a fine sense of thriller-y procedural nervous energy, the scenes in the command bunkers with Eric Bana – as their commanding officer – and Alexander Ludwig – as an overeager rookie – play out with some surface sleekness. It’s all so very professionally done.

In these early moments the film is full of gleaming glamour shots of hardware and camaraderie right out of a recruitment ad. The SEALs are buddies who jog around the base and haze each other (gently, of course) and listen intently as they’re told their target is a “bad guy” in an info dump briefing that has more in common with a video game cut scene than anything more convincing. We don’t know who these characters are, but they sure look the part. They seem to know what they’re doing. The movie doesn’t have time to slow down otherwise. By the time they’re sitting in the mountains, staring down at their target, it’s been a pretty successfully rosy picture of war that’s about to be shot down. But it’s not like the movie has much of a point of view. It’s bad luck that gets them into their doomed mission and good luck (and a kind deed returning unexpected dividends) that gets one out.

Two kids and an old man herding their goats back to their home accidentally infiltrate the stakeout. Here the film finds an interesting moral dilemma briefly entertained. Let them go and risk being found by the Taliban in the village? Or kill them and be sure of completing the mission without exposure? They do the right thing after brief debate, which leads the Taliban fighters right up the hill to find them. (It’s unclear if their decision directly led to this, but that’s certainly the implication.) What follows is the hour of tense bloody conflict up and down the mountainside, crouching behind branches and rocks as the dead pile up on both sides of the conflict.

I’m reminded of the famous quote from Francois Truffaut about the impossibility of making an anti-war film because of the action’s inherent exciting qualities. That’s certainly a problem for Lone Survivor, with its endlessly exchanged rounds of gunfire, overeager effects work – look at that exploding helicopter and its lovingly CGI carnage – and gunsight crosshairs killshots right out of a first person shooter. Or rather, it’d be a problem if it seemed to be a film interested in being anti-war or anything at all.  (Or if it didn’t grow less exciting the more attempts are made to thrill.) It’s a film that’s not thinking about any sort of big picture. It doesn’t see any further than the barrels of its guns. It tries to sell heroism, but seems perversely uninterested in the characters it’s selling as representative of some larger ideal of patriotic machismo or something. The final moments, which shows photos of the actual SEALs killed in this mission, is more moving and respectful than the two hours that came before. It’s a serious subject tackled in a self-defeating manner, utterly lacking the weight it deserves.

In the Wild: PRINCE AVALANCHE

Right from the start, David Gordon Green was labeled the Next Great American Auteur. In 2000, his debut feature George Washington, a lyrical and tenderly detailed portrait of a poor young African American boy, marked him as a master in the making. His subsequent films – sensitive romance All the Real Girls (’03), stormy Southern Gothic Undertow (’04), emotional small-town drama Snow Angels (’08) – initially seemed to confirm his status as a director of Serious Intent set on saying Important Things with capital-C Cinema. By now, though, it’s clear that there’s no other director as intent on resisting critical and commercial labels. It took a jaunt through stoner clowning (Pineapple Express), TV (HBO’s Eastbound and Down), unimaginably awful fantasy goofing (Your Highness), and a Hollywood comedy (The Sitter) to redefine his career downwards, in some cases unfairly, but fairly in most. He’s off the pedestal to which he was so prematurely elevated.

Green’s latest feature is Prince Avalanche. It’s undoubtedly his smallest and least important project. Purposely monotonous and adrift, the film features a tiny cast and plotting so loose it may as well be plotless. Paul Rudd stars as a sad sack road crew supervisor, out painting lines and hammering posts along a rural stretch of road. His only companion and employee is his girlfriend’s brother played by Emile Hirsch. The younger kid only got the job because the boss loves his sister and wants to be nice to her. The relationship between the two men is not an easy one, a prickly, reluctantly chummy arrangement that’s just as likely to devolve into total silence as anything else. That’s the main focus of the movie, as the guys slowly let the summer pass them by, working for the weekend. Hirsch heads into town to party while Rudd stays back. He sees himself a wilderness man, fishing, cooking, and writing letters to his girl. By Monday, it’s back to painting stripes on the highway together.

Stuck partway between the unforced lyrical observation of Green’s earlier work and his broader, coarser Hollywood comedy of late, it’s unsuccessful precisely because it’s the worst of both. The film is unfocused and painfully small in scope. The cinematography from Tim Orr, who has done great, evocative work for Green and others for years now, captures the setting with an eye for interesting visual detail. But it quickly grows stagnant. The swirling ambient noise of the soundtrack by the band Explosions in the Sky works overtime overselling importance, while the camera returns again and again to repetitive shots of light dappling leaves and the sun coming up over the crest of the horizon, shots through which Rudd trudges and Hirsch schleps. It’s all so precisely shot and thinly sketched that it feels like the work of a cast and crew seized with a great idea, but who skipped to “how” before really puzzling through a good, clear answer for “why?”

Though Rudd and Hirsch share enjoyable chemistry at times, their characters are frustratingly limited in emotional range. They’re stumbling along, doubting their masculinity, alternating between dumbly meditative and sweetly insecure, hesitantly bonding with one another if they can ever get past their surface nastiness towards each other. But no amount of homosocial bonding can make these characters feel anything but incomplete. Rudd’s letters and Hirsch’s urgently recounted stories of hook ups and relationship strategies don’t flesh out their backgrounds so much as they play like an attempt to do so. It just feels phony. By the time the movie arrives at its only plot point of any consequence, it feels entirely unexpected and unconvincing because it takes place almost entirely off screen and is entirely unmotivated. This is a strangely passive film. It’s the kind of movie that feels like a couple of actors stuck in an acting exercise. To see the movie is to watch talented people play around in the forest for a while.

Go Wachowskis, Go!

A year ago, the film community had almost forgotten about Speed Racer, caring only about its box office failure and the horrible critical consensus. I, on the other hand, loved it and took comfort in finding that Dennis Cozzalio, Richard Corliss, and Rob Humanick shared my enthusiasm. The film ended up on all four of our lists of favorite movies for 2008 (Cozzalio: #1, Corliss: #9, Humanick: #2) but it will take some time for the cult of Speed Racer to grow. Allow me to add another voice to the choir singing the praises of this film that was so unfairly beaten up and left for dead. This is a future cult classic.

Like most little boys, I loved Saturday morning cartoons, the louder, the flashier, the more action-packed the better. Sure, the quieter, funnier ones were great but they failed to occupy the same fever-dream intensity in the imagination that boiled them out onto the playground. The genius of the Wachowski Brothers’ film adaptation of the early pre-anime series Speed Racer is in its effortless capturing of those feelings. The film is a big, over-the-top, live-action cartoon, and unapologetically so. The film is a wide-eyed digital creation, a film of non-stop action and intense gumball colors that pop and blur and burn their ways across the screen.

It’s every boy’s cartoon-fueled fantasy filmed and thrown onto the screen. It’s fitting that the film opens with a young Speed Racer sitting in class daydreaming about being a racecar driver. The classroom melts away into a childish doodle of a race that soon slides into the most remarkably dense and layered opening sequence of any film this year with three flashbacks simultaneously unfolding. It’s smart of the Wachowskis to throw us right into a race-sequence (two of the flashbacks are races). As fun as the film is, when the cars take off down the track the movie becomes a flashing, spinning, kaleidoscopic, neon pinball machine. These exciting races are not only inspired by the original show’s early-anime aesthetic but seem equally inspired by Hot Wheels, “Mario Kart,” and “Wacky Races” while still seeming radically original in execution and style. The look is, in influences, part futuristic, part retro, but all cartoon.

The races take up a good portion of the film but the plot itself is a topsy-turvy speed through all kinds of cartoon clichés which are invigorated by the pitch-perfect cartoonish performances by all involved. All of the performers know exactly the kind of movie they are in and acts accordingly. Emile Hirsch hits just the right notes of earnest naiveté as Speed Racer who races in the shadow of his older brother who was killed racing years before. His father (a perfectly paternal John Goodman) and mother (Susan Sarandon bringing just enough maternal warmth) support him, as does his younger brother (Paulie Litt, the right amount of annoying). They’re a family right out of the 1950’s but the villains are right out of a mid-80’s cartoon: a nefarious head of a corporation (Roger Allam) with a troupe of slimy henchmen out to fix the race. While on the subject of performances and casting, why don’t we pause to marvel at Christina Ricci (playing Trixi, Speed’s girlfriend), who, through a combination of costuming, hairstyling, makeup and genetics has the perfect look of a cartoon heroine with her big, wide eyes.

This is an overstuffed and over-the-top film with moneys, ninjas, piranhas, cars, trucks, booby traps, throwing stars, and machine guns but the Wachowskis never seem to be operating with a checklist of cartoon staples and stereotypes. Even moments as bizarre as a monkey, drunk on candy, driving a vehicle and rocking out to Lynyrd Skynyrd almost, no, definitely, make sense in context. All sorts of puns and slapstick that, in any other setting, would have no reason to be funny work surprisingly well. I had to laugh with glee when, in the middle of the race, while still in their cars, one racer punches another in the face. As with anything radically original, there will be those resistant to its charms. Don’t listen to them. This is truly a film that has to be seen to be believed.

A decade ago, Andy and Larry Wachowski made the genre-busting, envelope pushing special-effects picture The Matrix, a film the ramifications of which are still being felt in the genre. Blockbusters still ape the color palate and every action film slightly out of the ordinary can count on finding someone to call it “the next Matrix.” Now, with Speed Racer, the Wachowskis, dare I say it, have bested themselves. They have created a heart-pounding action-adventure family film that’s such a radical and successful fusion of style and content that it’s nearly impossible to copy. This is uniquely exhilarating, startlingly vivid filmmaking that creates a delirious candy-coated kaleidoscope of colors that swirl and mix to make up this live-action cartoon that is a persistent and immersive world that exists only in the realm of the imagination.

The fluid, dynamic and expressive score from Michael Giacchino, in concert with the sensational sound editing, work overtime to keep the ears as dazzled as the eyes; the technicians are more than successful. Yes, the film can at times be overwhelming, threatening sensory overload, but it’s the same effect cartoons can have on kids. This is terrific entertainment, not just for its technical achievement but because it had me stumble exhilarated from the theater pulse-pounding, blinking the colors from my eyes, and with a smile so wide it hurt my face.