Word Crimes:THE TRIAL OF THE CHICAGO 7 and BEING THE RICARDOS

An Aaron Sorkin screenplay comes in one of two modes: too much, and way too much. I love the former, but the latter can clang and grate and scrape across my patience. He’s such a wordy, witty writer, capable of soaring rhetoric and juicy monologues. His ear for embedding characterization in the pithiest of comebacks and most garrulous walk-and-talks is a good match for his interest in high-wire halls-of-power and behind-the-scenes tensions. His characters are often people with inflated egos or self-important positions of influence. He must understand them so well because he’s one of them. When he’s on, he’s one of our best. The too-muchness of his writing makes a perfect match for material. His The Social Network, so sharply perceptive about Facebook’s founding conflicts, balanced with beautifully clinical David Fincher direction, remains one of the finest scripts in recent memory. But when he’s off—taking his tendencies to overwrite his subtext until it spills out as just plain text like in howlingly clunky tone-deaf attempts like media-matters dramas The Newsroom or Studio 60—it curdles fast. When you’re an artist who thrives when high on your own supply, it’s easy to get way too much out of each moment.

Take last year’s The Trial of the Chicago 7. It’s based on the real circus of a court case following protests at the 1968 Democratic Convention that were violently broken up by a bludgeoning police presence. A group of leading leftist activists were targeted by the newly elected Nixon administration to make an example of them. The judge ended up a loony attention seeker who made all kinds of questionable decisions—like ordering Bobby Seale, a leader in the Black Panthers, bound and gagged—while the defendants, many previously unknown to each other, often used the massive press interest in their plight as a soapbox on which to make important points about the state of the country. (They also used it as an excuse to poke prankish fun at the authorities who were in the process of overreaching.) Sorkin sees in this case good reason to comment on our present right-wing lunacies and various social movements protesting them. But he puts too much spin on the ball in each sequence. Characters are practically explaining this connection to us as monologues and jostling debates are carried out with musty pseudo-historical perspective.

Not helping matters, the flat staging from Sorkin as director tends to undercut the few good moments he’s written.With Trial he somehow can’t pull off the courtroom sparring he crafted so well as screenwriter for A Few Good Men's "you can't handle the truth," or the Social Network depositions. Here it’s self-consciously, and badly, theatrical, with a host of fine actors in full showy character mode (Sacha Baron Cohen, Jeremy Strong, Eddie Redmayne, Michael Keaton, Frank Langella, John Carroll Lynch, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) chewing over flashy phrasing as the camera pushes plainly and shafts of light falls simply and dramatically. One wonders what a better visual sense would’ve shaped out of these lumpy scenes. But then I recall how Sorkin’s shaping of the pages pushes the real events toward big fake movie climaxes that are somehow flatter and less surprising than the actual events. Just when he builds up a head of self-righteous steam and winds up a character to let them go, it rings the falsest. The best scenes are the smallest, and the simplest, where an old pro like Keaton can underplay the overwritten and end up, on balance, just fine. Strangely, for a writer prized for his verbal pyrotechnics, the court sequences are somehow less outrageous and dramatic and hilarious and suspenseful than the actual court transcripts. Those have been used as the basis for a fine animated documentary from a dozen years back—Brett Morgen’s Chicago 10—and are available for free online. Those are the better way to experience the trial.

With that in mind, one might think the new Sorkin picture, a behind-the-scenes of I Love Lucy in a moment of high-stakes drama, would pale in comparison to simply watching the still-brilliant original episodes of the classic sitcom. Of course it does. But that’s where I was pleasantly surprised to be wrong that it wouldn’t be fun enough on its own terms. I was quite taken with Being the Ricardos for playing up the ways in which it stacks up historical conflicts into one stuffed week. Lucille Ball is accused of being a communist (which she was, once) at the heights of the Red Scare. Desi Arnaz is tagged as a philanderer (which he was) at one of many periods of peak tabloid power. And, if the sponsors or the network don’t pull the plug for either or both of those scandals, the power couple behind the program are determined to use Lucy’s real life pregnancy for her character, too. (One suit bristles at the idea that it’ll make viewers think about…you know…how that happened. They sleep in twin beds, he reminds.) That Sorkin’s invention places these tricky moments all in the same short period of time—the structure is all showbiz hustle, as the movie starts with a table read and ends with a taping—gives the movie a pressure cooker of competing interests. His script weaves in and out of the various conflicts and keeps the ensemble a plate-spinning act of worries and wants. It successfully cross-breeds the let’s-put-on-a-show zippiness with an earnest grappling with the people behind-the-scenes and What It All Meant.

Sorkin’s brand of pushy cleverness fits a great cast of actors playing performers and other creative types. Here Nicole Kidman becomes a Lucy who’s ambitious, steely, hugely talented, and knows what she wants. She is clearly in charge of the show, and really won’t back down from insisting being a Communist used to be considered a valid option for supporting the workers of the country. Javier Bardem plays Desi as a chipper man constantly tending to his ego, but with real love for Lucy. (He also doesn’t suffer fools, such as one well-meaning producer who tries to convince him he’s the “I” who “Loves Lucy” and therefore the top-billed title character.) His Cuban roots make him a bit more uncomfortable with her politics. (There Sorkin tries a smidge too much for phony both-sides balance.) The main couple is, as on the show, surrounded by a sharp-tongued supporting cast. Nina Arianda’s Ethel and J.K. Simmons’ Fred are great inhabitations with sly side-eyed commentary on, challenges to, and support for the main pair. And the show’s crew features Tony Hale, Alia Shawkat, Jake Lacy, Clark Gregg and more hustle through the stages, wardrobe department, and writing rooms. It’s a fine feat that mixes the sort of clever darting dialogue and blunt force messaging that a great cast can sell if Sorkin serves it up well.

There’s a kind of gleaming soft-focus romanticism to its approach, a weren’t-the-olden-days-grand? gloss to the sometimes-reductive smushing of so much social upheaval and conflict into one heavy week. (It spackles it over, somewhat, by having fake documentary talking heads from actors playing older versions of the writers’ room act as a Greek chorus of sorts.) And the writing sometimes tries too hard to make the ideas fit our modern context. Would Lucy really have accused someone of “Gaslighting” her? Nonetheless, it’s has the kind of fizz and pop that’s pleasing to the ear and flies by in a flash. Sorkin’s direction stays out of his writing’s way, and has a fine eye for the difference between on- and off-stage antics. I found it a satisfying and entertaining look at making a show in a time with an actual blacklist bouncing entertainers out of the business for their politics, when sexual mores were tamped down and repressed and not to be discussed, and when women and people of color weren’t to be treated as equals on or behind the screens. And yet, through making one of the greatest television comedies (who doesn’t know the chocolate factory sequence?), here’s a couple that manages to push on the edges of those societal constraints at a time when it could’ve resulted in a show going off the air. Now that’s cancel culture.

Guess Who: UNKNOWN

Unknown is a nice, chilly thriller that’s so pleasantly confounding for so long that the biggest shock of the last act is to find how dull and routine it becomes. I enjoyed the film, but only to a point. The mystery is tantalizing, but the big twist left me disappointed. It’s a real shame, considering how much enjoyment I had been getting from the moody opening which finds a biologist and his wife landing in Berlin for a big scientific convention of some kind. The biologist is Martin Harris (Liam Neeson, in the same ballpark as his surprise hit Taken), an imposing figure with a soft-spoken demeanor. His wife (Mad Men's January Jones) is an alluring frosty presence. The happy couple threads through the airport and end up in a taxi that cuts through the snow and slush taking them to the fancy hotel and conference center. When they arrive, Neeson discovers that he has left his briefcase at the airport. Rushing back to retrieve his important files, his taxi driver swerves to avoid an accident and ends up plunging off of a bridge and into the ice-cold river below.

Four days later, Martin Harris wakes up in the hospital. His only problem is his newfound sense of disorientation. He learns his wife wasn’t searching for him. That’s odd. When he shows up at the hotel, she claims she doesn’t know him. That’s odder. What’s more, another man (Aidan Quinn) is claiming to be the real Martin Harris. The camera tilts and the focus pulls. What’s going on here? The sense of confusion and impenetrable mystery kicked up by this development is intriguing.

Director Jaume Collet-Serra, who last directed the disturbingly effective 2009 horror film Orphan, keeps the atmosphere heavy and slick. The wintry Berlin wind kicks off-white snow down endless mazes of grey concrete and imposing architecture. There’s a chill in the air as Neeson makes his way through a crisis of identity. The existential dilemma is balanced nicely with the sub-Hitchcockian silliness of the plot. For quite some time, it’s a nice little B-movie with A-list talent.

As Neeson sets out to discover the truth behind his situation, the plot thickens. He searches for his cab driver (Diane Kruger) and, when he finds her, discovers that she doesn’t want to talk to him. Hit with a dead end there, he talks to a kind nurse who tells him about an acquaintance of hers, a former Stasi agent (Bruno Ganz) who likes to keep his mind agile by doing some light investigation on the side. Intrigued, he agrees to help.

After several enjoyable chases and surprising murders that force Neeson to team up with Kruger to find the truth behind the mayhem, the elderly agent makes a breakthrough. This leads to the greatest scene in the picture, a case of when very good scenes happen to mediocre movies. It involves Bruno Ganz’s investigator coming into contact with a shady gentleman played by Frank Langella. For this one brief scene, the two world-weary men converse easily and warily while revealing some Big Secrets about the upcoming plot twist. It’s an example of accomplished, dignified actors elevating their material.

But, unfortunately, the movie goes downhill from there. Once Martin Harris realizes the true nature of his reality and the full ramifications of what is about to happen, the film turns into a series of fairly standard action beats. While still technically accomplished pieces of action filmmaking, all the central tension of the film has gone missing. I could not care less about the late breaking MacGuffin. What hooked me into the film were the nice chilly thrills with a suitably rattled protagonist. It begins as a movie of icy blondes, mysterious strangers, and wise old men. It ends as a rote action thriller with a ticking time bomb of a threat. The questions the film sets up made me curious for answers and when they arrived I wish they hadn’t. It’s a shame that the long-awaited answers end up killing the tension. When a thriller about a man who doesn’t know who he is turns into thriller about a man who simply has to save the day, that’s kind of a letdown.

Crime and Punishment: WALL STREET: MONEY NEVER SLEEPS

Oliver Stone’s 1987 financial thriller Wall Street worked because it pinpointed the human tragedies imbedded in the fluctuations of the stock market by placing a young stockbroker (Charlie Sheen) between his union-man father (Martin Sheen) and a slimy potential father-figure mentor, the financial tycoon Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas). The movie thrills with its juicy drama, electric script, and the almost tactile sense of the stock market as one giant game played only by the rich and the power-hungry.

How was Stone to know that Douglas’s Gekko, the film’s villain, would become a hero of sorts to a generation of Wall Street employees? Gekko’s central, memorable speech, where he explains the virtues of unchecked greed (it’s, “for lack of a better term, good”) is chilling in context. Once ripped from the film, the speech entered the business lexicon. Rather than serving as a cautionary tale (Gekko eventually gets in big trouble for his shady dealings), good greed became the name of the game. The film is dated now and not just because of the fashions, the music, and the technology. In 2010, the financial crimes and outrages of 1987 seem quaint.

The time is exactly right for a follow up. Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps is set in 2008 in the moments leading up to the financial meltdown and the subsequent bank bailouts. Though following fictional characters, the basic facts of the crisis are left unchanged. There weren’t competing banks run by Frank Langella and Eli Wallach, but it’s not hard to assume that the nameless bank owners who sit in ominous boardrooms and backrooms stand in for those who really were partly responsible for running our economy into the ground. The milieu in which the film takes place rings more or less true.

It is the build up to this crisis that Gordon Gekko finds himself witnessing after being released from prison seven years before the film’s action begins. In the interim, he’s written a book and become a hit on the lecture circuit. There’s the sense that he’s merely circling his old stomping grounds, waiting for the right moment to get back in the game. He’s been burned before, but he’s learned from his mistakes. He may be older, but he’s no less ruthless. He may appear slightly softer, mildly gentler, but this is a man who still has deep reservoirs of danger and anger with which he can sting his enemies.

And yet, this is a film that will never really live up to the promise of its premise. Scenes involving slimy bankers, especially the suave sleaze of Josh Brolin’s billionaire investor, are often captivating in their rush of jargon and amoral greed. This is where we need to see Gekko. He needs to be going toe-to-toe with the people who make his villainy outdated. Instead, he’s working by proxy through Shia LaBeouf, a young ambitious suit who also happens to be the fiancé of Gekko’s estranged daughter (Carey Mulligan).

LaBeouf and Mulligan are perfectly fine in ill-conceived roles. Their respective struggles with the Wall Street game – LaBeouf wants to get in it while Mulligan is still dealing with the destruction it did to her family – are of some mild interest. But the relationship between LaBeouf and Douglas, though it has its moments, isn’t as deeply felt as the similar relationship between Sheen and Douglas in the first film. And Mulligan, despite all her considerable talent, is given little more to do than tear up from time to time and constantly refuse to have anything to do with her father. At best, the interfamily relationships, including Susan Sarandon in little more than a cameo as LaBeouf’s mother, are perfectly watchable and appealing. At worst, they distract from the real fun.

And there is certainly real fun to be had with Money Never Sleeps. Fueled by a score that includes great songs from Brian Eno and David Byrne, it’s effortlessly enjoyable when it follows its characters manipulating stock prices, schmoozing at galas, and engaging in tense discussions of economic and business policies. The ease with which the stock market can be influenced and the simplicity with which billions can be lost is real-world scariness channeled into rapid-fire thriller-speak. The film watches the fluctuations in stock prices, keeping the audience informed how the shapes of the graphs are being used for revenge, for greed, for the sheer dark pleasures of playing the game.

The script by Allan Loeb and Stephen Schiff is not at all as sparkling as the writing to be found in the first film with its great monologues and memorable exchanges penned by Oliver Stone and Stanley Weiser. In fact, the sequel includes a lengthy speech that is clearly intended to be the new “greed is good” moment. Douglas delivers it well, but it goes on for far too long with no stakes involved and not one memorable line. Stone’s filmmaking picks up some of the script’s slack with its mostly solid craftsmanship. This is a fast, messy 133 minutes, despite occasional symbolic hiccups. It’s filled with genuine interest in the fascinating, infuriating machinations of Wall Street.

What's in THE BOX?

Richard Kelly has been working on an odd little resume, but I like that about him. He made his directing debut with Donnie Darko, a deeply strange, but dreamily haunting little movie about a boy who hallucinates (or does he?) an evil giant rabbit. That film flopped, but developed quite a loyal following. As a follow-up, Kelly made the even stranger, and totally insane, Southland Tales, a cluttered futuristic allegory so disjointed and chaotic it’s as if Kelly skipped the main plot and wrote his own fan-fiction for a world only he knows. Nonetheless, some thought it brilliant while the rest of us scratched our heads. Now we arrive at his third feature, an adaptation of a Richard Matheson short story and Twilight Zone episode, The Box and, while it doesn’t quite have the same emotional spark of demented creativity that can be found in Darko, it has its own haunted brilliance about it.

Set in 1976, the movie opens with a suburban middle-class couple (Cameron Diaz and James Marsden) receiving a mysterious package, left on their doorstep under equally mysterious circumstances at dawn. Upon opening the package, they find a box and a note, informing them that a Mr. Steward will show up at 5pm to explain everything. Indeed he does. Steward (Frank Langella) tells them that if they push the button on the box within 24 hours, two things will happen: 1. they will receive $1 million in cash. 2. someone whom they don’t know will die.

This sets up a moral dilemma that is debated (or dithered about, depending on your point of view) for the better part of the first act, following more or less the format of the original story. But Kelly is sowing the seeds for his expanded plot so that, when the decision is made, the movie makes a leap into stranger and stranger territory while still retaining a spooky sci-fi Twilight Zone sizzle. This is the kind of movie that pulls the rug out from under you and then keeps going, finding more and more rugs until you realize you had been standing on more rugs than you could have ever thought possible. Cue the theme music.

The movie is not set in the 1970s just to take advantage of the garish wallpaper and tight bellbottoms, although those accoutrements are certainly present and accounted for. The movie embodies a low-tech terror in the way research must be done at a library, in the way characters can’t communicate quickly, and in the way that, when something really creepy starts going down, there’s not the calming promise of help a mere cell-phone call away. This is a period-piece freak-out that takes full advantage of its setting, but also its subconscious ties to the filmmaking of the time. Kelly shoots the movie with a soft image, lightly grainy with slightly smeared colors, giving the movie a dreamlike feel of stumbling late at night into a pretty good, half-forgotten and half-junky 70s suspense flick. It feels like it would make a great double-bill with something like The Fury.

The performances are nearly perfect (besmirched only by Diaz’s odd accent) for their type, the kind of perfectly bland persons who find themselves more harried and mangy as the story unfurls. There are all sorts of wonderfully cast supporting roles filled by actors who had to have been picked based mostly on their ability to look conspiratorial. Langella projects an eerie calm in the center of the plot, doing things in specific and methodical ways but with his goals obscured to maintain utmost oddity and creepiness. It’s when we learn why he’s doing what he’s doing, through a long expository sequence, that the movie loses some of its effectiveness.

Like Darko before it, The Box doesn’t quite add up its divergent strands of sci-fi subplots and even if they did it would probably be disappointing, but it cruises along with such admirable effectiveness and a shivery haunted quality that it doesn’t quite matter. The movie stirred up my fears, stimulated my heart rate, and jangled my nerves. Even though the movie lets the air out of its balloon a little too early, it still manages to finish strong by turning the finale into a nifty mirror of the first-act’s moral dilemma, crystallizing the central quandary and pushing aside the twisty, complicated plot to shoot straight to the gut. In the end, The Box is a movie of mood and suspense so admirably sustained that it left me smiling while shivering in my seat as the credits rolled.

Note: The Box would make a great third-section to a triptych with The Happening and Knowing. The three recent films, modern B-movies really, have been on the receiving end of sneers and derision from some critics and audiences, but all three have wonderful Twilight-Zone-style hooks that are enjoyably, if a little inconsistently, executed.