Song and Dance, Man: LA LA LAND

I saw La La Land a few weeks ago and, though fun, the more I’ve thought about it the less I’ve thought of it. There’s much to admire about its shaggy fastidiousness bringing the movie musical to an aw-shucks shuffle and mumble aesthetic bursting with glitter at the margins. Writer-director Damien Chazelle glides the Steadicam with dancers great and small, dialing up the colors in the smooth cinematography to just shy of Technicolor vibrancy. The songs don’t exactly burst forth in memorable wit or hummable melody, but noodle around with a passive aggressive earworm tendency to quietly wrap a measure or two around the back of the brain. There’s something appealing about sitting in the theater watching it unspool, but little to stick with you beyond the feeling of having seen something largely pleasant, a mostly empty exercise in style and self-satisfaction. But that's not so bad, considering.

It begins with one of the most exuberant curtain raisers in recent memory, pure joy as a traffic jam erupts in dance, buoyant and colorful gestures totally swept up in moving to the beat. The movie ends with an even better sequence: one of the loveliest sustained passages in any movie I’ve seen lately. I held my breath as the film steps into a poignant, melancholy, graceful dream ballet about fleeting moments, about love and loss and the fantasy of what might have been. In between the film isn’t quite as enchanting and transporting, but it’s really trying, you know? Chazelle has traded in cachet gained from the gruff, buzzy, and percussive Oscar-winning drama Whiplash for the chance to make an original movie musical. We don’t get too many of those anymore, let alone evocations of a Jacques Demy style peppered with allusions to MGM’s Freed unit fare all nestled in a quipping romantic comedy (another genre that’s fallen fallow of late).

Like his earlier film it’s an exploration of artists pushing their talents to the limit, unsure whether their passion is enough to get them to the level of success necessary to make a living, let alone becoming a Great. But instead of that film’s dark central relationship – a jockeying for power between a domineering professor and an aggressively ambitious student – this film is a fuzzy and light romance, as charming as can be while still maintaining a simmering striving sadness underneath. This film’s central couple is a pair of dreamers trotting through a fantasy Los Angeles. She wants to be an actress like her studio-era idols. A huge Golden Age Hollywood poster covers one wall of her tiny bedroom in a cramped apartment shared with three other girls, a place to crash between auditions and barista shifts at the Warner Bros. lot. He wants to run a jazz club. In the meantime he’s obsessively hording artifacts from when jazz was king and piecing together savings from small time gigs playing background noise piano in restaurants or New Wave cover bands at shallow parties.

She is Emma Stone. He is Ryan Gosling. They turn up the movie star charm and crackling chemistry as they perform the expected rom-com moves, starting out prickly, jabbing at each other with glowing conversational daggers. They don’t like each other, each quick with an insult. But they dance so swimmingly in sync, a soft shuffle of steps, a sudden graceful motion, a swooping flourish. In true Astaire and Rogers fashion (in spirit, but definitely not in skill) feet tell the real story of feelings. We know they’re meant to be, and soon they’re giving it a go. Their only problem is being young in 2016, a time in which it’s awfully hard to make jazz pianist or glamorous star a career goal. (Not that it was ever easy to succeed in those professions, but it sure was a lot smoother when there was popular demand.) This makes La La Land, a self-consciously colorful and charmingly artificial romantic musical, a bittersweet tale of people who just weren’t made for these times. They bond over artistic passions – he explaining jazz, she taking a backlot tour – and fall in love, before the demands of selling-out start them on separate paths.

Chazelle makes use of his leads’ appealing banter and expressive moves, turning this into a slight two-hander. No time to flesh out others, it is a duet for young talent with enough experience to shoulder the demands of the roles and smooth-enough faces to play striving ingénues and ambitious self-starters. They are figures conjured for genre play, the types we’d expect to find in a movie like this, their movements and behavior dictated by the way a dress should ruffle, the way glitter should float on a puff of breeze, the way a hop-skip-slide should gleam under a lamppost at night. It’s all rather sweet, but narrow. Their pursuit of success (and each other) is the movie’s exclusive interest, crowding an ace supporting cast (fleeting glimpses of Rosemarie DeWitt, J.K Simmons, Finn Wittrock, and others) out of the chance to strut their stuff. And in the end, even their relationship is lopsided – far more interested in his jazz than her acting – and remains vague on their actual progress to career destinations.

The central question for the characters is whether or not they’ll be true to their artistic ambitions – he likes real jazz; she prefers serious roles – or give in to temptation. And maybe choosing one means losing the other, or each other. That their potential sell-out moves – a gig playing fun popular music with a John Legend type (played by the man himself); a role on a series described as Dangerous Minds meets The OC – sound at least as, if not more, fun than their dream art maybe muddies the movie’s point. Gorgeous widescreen colors stretch across the screen, and the film’s protagonists’ swooning, naïve worship of modes of artistic expression fallen from peak popularity (clinging to an ideal that keeps their prospects slim and dusty instead of embracing the actual mess of creating art) is mirrored in the fussy (and sometimes fusty) evocation of genre gone by. I was frustrated by all this inconsistency, but then there’s that final dreamy conclusion that practically lifted me out of my seat. And, hey, it was worth hanging in there after all. Any movie with two great scenes bookending a technically accomplished (if hollow) middle can’t be all bad.

House of Cards: THE BIG SHORT

The world economy collapsed in 2008, brought down by the banking industry’s unchecked power to make gigantic risky bets on the housing market, an investment they’d somehow deluded themselves into thinking was a sure thing. Bankers decided to treat the savings and loans of millions upon millions of people as poker chips in their own personal casino. Eventually, they lost, and we were stuck bailing them out. But maybe poker is a bad metaphor. Maybe it was like they were playing blackjack, or spinning the roulette table. No, perhaps it’s more accurate to say they were playing Jenga, and when people in over their heads couldn’t make payments on subprime mortgages, the whole tower fell down. Wait, maybe it would help you understand it better if you thought of bankers bundling bad debt to resell as investments like chefs repurposing leftovers and hoping no one would be the wiser. But forget the metaphors for a second. Would you rather hear all this from a gorgeous woman in a bathtub?

Writer-director Adam McKay tries out every metaphor above and more too, even stooping to cutting to a lady in the bath to spice up exposition, as his latest movie, The Big Short, attempts to explain the 2008 financial crisis in a narrative feature form. You’d think the whole thing would be better suited to a documentary. (That’d be Charles Ferguson’s masterfully comprehensive doc Inside Job.) On the basis of this film, you’d be right. McKay’s clearly burning with anger over the conditions of unchecked, unregulated greed that led to these problems, and the stasis that led to exactly nothing being done to fix them in the years since. He communicates this fervor by bringing a raucous pace to scenes (shot in jittery style by cinematographer Barry Ackroyd) of men in suits sitting around talking numbers. But he also doesn’t trust his audience to follow along, and so drags down a rapid-fire pace and zippy editing with endless narration, fourth-wall breaking lectures, snarky asides, and endless explanations.

Inspired by the well-reported book of the same name by Michael Lewis (Moneyball), McKay, with co-writer Charles Randolph (Love & Other Drugs), focuses the story on the handful of people who, in the early 2000s, saw the housing bubble growing and braced for the impact of the burst. There’s an eccentric hedge fund analyst (Christian Bale), an angry money manager (Steve Carell), a high-stakes trader (Ryan Gosling), and more (including Brad Pitt, Hamish Linklater, Finn Wittrock, and John Magaro). They’re not really fully formed people, more like representations of worldviews and information, conduits through which we are shown aspects of the larger looming problem. Bale and Gosling concoct a scheme to short securitized subprime mortgages. Carell and his employees get in on the action, then research the instability in the housing market on the ground, visiting sleazy loan sharks, underemployed homeowners, and shallow realtors. Everyone’s laughing them out of meetings for betting against the housing market. But the more the characters we follow uncover about the financial system, the more they’re convinced catastrophe is around the corner.

These guys are smart enough to figure out the problems, but only use this knowledge to make themselves money off the inevitable calamity. Sure, they try to tell people about their discoveries – colleagues, journalists, credit rating agencies – but nothing is done to avert the crisis. No one wanted to hear. Powered on frustration and fury, McKay builds an argument that the economy as we know it is essentially a mass delusion built on stupidity and fraud. We the people will believe anything if it’s in rich people’s interest to make it seem true. As difficult as it is to watch this recent history reenacted, it’s even harder to take realizing it could easily happen again. The large ensemble does fine work communicating these ideas, condensing and dispensing piles of spreadsheets at the expense of becoming actual characters, but the movie goes ahead and overexplains anyway.

He’s usually directing comedies (Anchorman, Talladega Nights), but here McKay shifts to a serious message movie out of clear passion. After all, he’s the guy who put in the end credits of his 2010 buddy cop comedy The Other Guys a biting PowerPoint presentation explaining how Wall Street is essentially a Ponzi scheme. The Big Short is well intentioned, and argues a sharp political point. But it’s so tediously expositional and smirkingly condescending. The narration acts like the information it recounts is boring or complicated, often pausing to say, “Confusing, right?” It’s a faux jocular tone that assumes the audience will quickly lose focus on the jargon or get lost in the overflow of technical dialogue. McKay loads the film with celebrity cameos explaining concepts, characters lecturing to the camera, and rapid-fire pop culture signifiers representing the passage of time. It’s basic, but overcomplicated, a deeply irritating approach. I’m not saying the roots of the financial crisis are necessarily simple or quick to grok, but I bet the sorts of people who would go see this movie in the first place might be interested enough to keep up.

Survivor of the Fittest: UNBROKEN

Unbroken tells a true story with bright, well-built, Hollywood epic storytelling. That’s fitting, since its subject, Louis Zamperini, lived a full and amazing life, built out of the stuff movies are made of. He’s a man for whom the adspeak “incredible true story” seems to have been made. He was born in 1917, became a juvenile delinquent, then a high school track star, an Olympic athlete, a World War II bombardier whose plane was lost at sea, a captive in a Japanese prisoner of war camp, and a survivor of all the above. I’m sure he was one of the only people who could’ve seen Memphis Belle, Bridge on the River Kwai, Stalag 17, Chariots of Fire, and Life of Pi in their original theatrical runs and see something of his own life experience reflected back at him.

The film is an effective dramatization by turns unflinching – gaunt bodies caked in dirt and blood – and sentimental – wistful flashbacks and swelling score. It’s button pushing in that way. It coasts on the easily apparent drama of the story itself, which certainly has enough surface incident to fill a run time. It starts in the skies over the Pacific front in the middle of WWII, a tense dogfight shot completely inside Zamperini’s plane. We linger behind the various gunners and pilots, watching as small dots grow into enemy fighters, spraying bullets and getting return fire. It’s exciting stuff, brightly lit, displayed with convincing effects courtesy Industrial Light and Magic. We then cut back to our hero’s early life, following childhood scrapes through his Olympic competition, notable backstory swiftly filled in. Then we’re back to the war, where his dangers are just beginning.

Directed with smooth competence by Angelina Jolie from a screenplay with credited drafts by Joel and Ethan Coen, Richard LaGravenese, and William Nicholson, the film has clear admiration for Zamperini’s resilience. They’re most concerned with portraying his indomitable spirit, returning again and again to his face as Jack O’Connell plays the man staring purposefully past the problems at hand. He’s stranded on a lifeboat with the survivors of his plane’s crash (Finn Wittrock, Domhnall Glesson). They’re lucky enough to be rescued, but unlucky enough to find their rescuers are the enemy. He ends up at a POW camp where he’s beaten by a cruel Japanese sergeant (Miyavi), and falls in with the scarred and weary prisoners (Garrett Hedlund, Luke Treadaway). He looks purposefully into every obstacle, the punches, the backbreaking labor, the blood and bruises. He grits his teeth and lives to see another day. He’s unbreakable.

What gives Zamperini the strength to go on? How did he survive? Was it luck or happenstance? Determination or divine intervention? Optimism or sloganeering? I don’t know. The movie’s more enamored with the facts of his survival than investigating him as a character. It’s a surface level examination, which is fine when the plot’s hopping, but drags down the occasionally monotonous dark night of the soul in the POW camp. The film hits every big mark, but I was starving for small details to color in the time between. There’s never a sense of who the characters are, just what misery they’ve been through.

I couldn’t tell you much of anything about the people trapped in various conditions with Zamperini, or his family, or his captors. They’re simply facts of his life, the elements that make the miraculous extremes possible. There’s some great early details in the young man’s homelife, scenes of discipline, religion, and discovery of his talents. In some ways it plays like the opening moments of a superhero origin story. The film’s first hour is its best, time to follow an eventful life on its first, positive trajectory with energetic sequences of sports and war. But it seems to skip so quickly through these vital foundational moments that by the second hour it starts to feel like a catalogue of miserable incidents where I’d hoped to find a character study wrapped up in epic trappings. Instead, it’s all smaller.

But Unbroken is respectful, handsomely made, and technically proficient. Jolie has cinematographer Roger Deakins behind the camera and he does sharp, solid work. She has a fine cast, and they inhabit their roles convincingly. The editing is propulsive, the sound crackling, the score syrupy strong. In style and perspective – the square, proud, sturdy take – it could’ve been made more or less exactly like this ten, twenty, thirty, forty, fifty or more years ago. It’s old-fashioned, made with professionalism and care, but it’s also anonymously produced and a bit bland. There’s plenty of craftsmanship put into a story interesting enough on its own the filmmakers didn’t feel the need to really dig into the details. They simply evoke the big moments and trust our interest will follow enough to excuse the all-surface approach.