Gone Girl: WHITE BIRD IN A BLIZZARD

There was something wrong with Kat’s mother. She cried at strange times. She behaved awkwardly around guests. And one day, when Kat came home from school, her mother was napping in her daughter’s bedroom, all dressed up in gown, heels, and pearls. But Kat was busy finding love with the neighbor boy and hanging out with her friends. They didn’t have time to dwell on such peculiarities. Then, just as Kat was coming into her own, exploring more mature facets of herself as she prepared for graduation and adulthood, her mother disappeared. Now she and her father go about their routines dazed, the case growing cold as life moves on.

The mother’s absence informs the rest of White Bird in a Blizzard. Based on the novel by Laura Kasischke, it’s the latest film from writer-director Gregg Araki, whose work narrows in on emotional displacement in a variety of contexts. His work as an early-90’s indie provocateur has, over the course of his career, been distilled into pure moody energy with his prankish spirit tamed but present. He’s been able to mellow his mischievous impulses into mannered, languid considerations of people who are unmoored, searching for answers about who they are and where they’re going. In the last decade, he’s given us a thoughtful, empathetic child abuse survivor drama (Mysterious Skin), a hilariously spacey pothead comedy (Smiley Face), and a raucous paranormal pre-apocalyptic college sex farce (Kaboom). Talk about range.

In White Bird in a Blizzard, the least of his recent features but interesting all the same, Shailene Woodley stars as a girl who is jolted by her mother (Eva Green) simply vanishing without a trace. She finds her boyfriend (Shiloh Fernandez) pulling away, her dad (Christopher Meloni) putting on a brave face, her best friends (Gabourey Sidibe and Mark Indelicato) ready to talk, a psychiatrist (Angela Bassett) lending a compassionate ear, and a detective (Thomas Jane) investigating the disappearance and creepily flirting with her, too. Woodley moves through her relationships with an open body language that betrays her confidence-covered insecurities quick to appear when she’s pained. It’s another of her fine-tuned emotional teen roles (after The Descendents, The Spectacular Now, and The Fault in Our Stars), and here, in perhaps her most vulnerable performance, she finds a similar core of strength and determination to make the best of a bad situation.

As Kat moves on with her life, Araki threads flashbacks of her mother’s eccentricities into the aftermath of the sudden void. She was loving, sometimes distant, excitable, but prone to melancholy. Green’s performance is wild-eyed scene-chewing, dominating even in its absence. But the absence becomes normalized, just another thing to deal with in a busy teen life, like the haunting dreams of Kat’s mother emerging from a snow storm that repeat with ominous regularity. Araki gives the film, past and present alike, a hazy mood in a locked down camera and cinematographer Sandra Valde-Hansen's near-Sirkian color palate. It’s a period piece – 1988, to be exact – but, though it gets details right, it feels closer to sickly 50’s melodrama, the kind where the rot’s showing through the surface shine. Something is not right here, a dangling unsolved mystery. The initial shock has worn off, but the pain remains.

The film has tender character work in a somnambulant plot. Kat moves forward, the ensemble (fine performances all) relating to her in a variety of mostly normal ways as she finishes high school, chooses a college, and moves away. All the while, the mystery remains, a nagging thought in the back of her mind, and ours. Where did her mother go? There comes a point when Araki’s direction signals the answer so far in advance of the characters learning it that the final scenes feel agonizingly empty, a wait for an underwhelming reveal to make itself fully known.

Until then, though, it’s a minor key work of small gestures and controlled style, nothing overwhelming, but quiet, insinuating, and full of stunned pain, stunted rebellion. Being on the cusp of adulthood is confusing enough under normal circumstances. Here, that confusion is magnified by the missing person mystery, making coming of age an all the more uneasy process.

Have-Nots v. Have: TOWER HEIST

The great irony of Tower Heist is that it’s an expensive Hollywood production made by and starring wealthy people that nonetheless manages to tap into some of the 99% rage that’s sweeping the country. The plot concerns a Bernie-Madoff-style Ponzi scheme that sends sleazy finance titan Arthur Shaw (a slimy performance from Alan Alda) into house arrest pending trial. The employees at The Tower, the – what else? – towering New York apartment building he lives in had their entire pensions invested with the man. They’re understandably furious and disappointed when they learn that not only is their money gone, but also that the man will be locked up on the top floor for the near future. It seems that they’ll never get their money back, until a plan begins to form. What follows is involving and enjoyable escapism, competently executed fluff.

Ben Stiller plays Josh Kovacs, the manager of the building, a man who is great at his job, who cares deeply about the building, it’s inhabitants, and it’s employees. It was his idea to ask about investing the pensions with their richest resident. When the FBI agent (the always welcome Téa Leoni) in charge of investigating and detaining Arthur Shaw tells the manager that it’s unlikely that the staff will get their money back soon, if at all, he storms up to the penthouse with the concierge, his brother-in-law (Casey Affleck), and the newly hired elevator operator (Michael Peña). Much to their surprise, Kovacs takes a golf club and destroys some of Shaw’s personal property. The Tower’s owner (Judd Hirsch) promptly fires them.

The three of them are now in the perfect position to execute a plan that, if it succeeds, will steal back enough money to give to the staff that has had their savings ground under by this financial skullduggery. They’ll rob Shaw, a daring, high stakes heist, and find the missing millions that the FBI has been unable to find. To pull off the heist, the three guys get in contact with an ex-banker (Matthew Broderick) who was too meek and honest for the business, apparently, and who was recently evicted from The Tower. He’s good with numbers, but they’ll still need help with the actual robbing part. Luckily, Kovacs went to daycare with a man from his neighborhood who was just the other day arrested for his thievery. They bail him out and get him to help, bringing into the picture Eddie Murphy, who talks a mile-a-minute in his slickest, funniest performance in over a decade.

Now that the team has fallen into place, it’s only a matter of pulling off the heist. It’s complex to a certain degree, although nothing compared to the works of Danny Ocean and crew, filled with double crossings and unexpected complications. The film sets up the stakes and then sends the cast through it capably. The other staff members – Gabourey Sidibe (a maid with a slippery Jamaican accent), Marcia Jean Kurtz (a no-nonsense secretary), and Stephen Henderson (a twinkly-eyed doorman) – fill out the rest of the supporting cast nicely, which is already peppered with talented people giving funny performances. The heist has to work with and around the staff to pull it off and it’s nice to see a big Hollywood production make decent use of its ensemble.

Director Brett Ratner has a reputation as a shallow studio hack that’s not entirely unearned. His films do generally feature a baseline competency, though. I’m not prepared to make some kind of grand auteurist defense on his behalf, but I will say that when paired up with good actors and a decent script, he has at times shown that he knows how to stay out of the way. He is not a filmmaker of distinctive personality, but that’s okay here as it is in, say, his Rush Hour. This is nothing more than a super slick, pleasing and broad, feather-light entertainment. It gets the job done. The writing can’t be called especially nimble, but the script by Ted Griffin and Jeff Nathanson is light enough on its feet to generate enough excitement and enjoyment. There’s some fun stunt work and great use of the building’s height to create some stomach-dropping moments, all the while the score by Christophe Beck, which must be a partial homage to David Shire’s for the original Taking of Pelham One Two Three, keeps things bouncing along nicely. Dante Spinotti shoots the film in warm, shining autumn colors that enhance the New York City in late November setting with some terrific location shooting during Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade.

That’s probably the best, if awfully imperfect, analogy for why the film worked for me. It’s a soothing, professional spectacle of a comic thriller that parades big stars and photogenic locations through an exciting plot that is both familiar and new. There’s little attempt to flesh out the emotional or personal lives of the characters, although there’s a charming low-key romance the starts to develop between Stiller and Leoni before it’s dropped entirely once the plot really gets going. It’s a big, shallow entertainment that nonetheless taps into some very real class outrage and gives the whole thing a bit more of a kick than it would otherwise have. Tower Heist is light recessionary escapism that’s just satisfying enough to be a lot of fun. 

Precious: A Review Based On Precious: Based On the Novel 'Push' by Sapphire

Precious Jones, 16-years-old, obese, illiterate, pregnant for the second time, living in inner-city squalor with her monstrous mother, has had a hard life. The victim of perpetual familial and societal abuse, it’s amazing that she has any drive within her at all. Newcomer Gabourey Sidibe, already much heralded for her performance, does a remarkable job of disappearing into her frame so, despite usually being the largest person on screen, Precious is hiding within her own skin, constantly squinting and scowling as if she is afraid to let others get too close to her. That fear is certainly well founded, given the horribly hellish treatment she has endured from those who claim to love her. The movie that tells her story, the unwieldy titled Precious: Based on the Novel “Push” by Sapphire, is a button-pusher and a grueling watch, to be sure, but while it’s almost saved by its indomitable title character and a host of fine acting, it’s ultimately undone by its director.

The first film directed by Lee Daniels was the queasy exploitation thriller Shadowboxer. One of the worst movies I’ve ever seen, it’s a queasy mixture of in-your-face stylistic flourishes – odd color schemes, whiplash editing – and monstrous inanity that cavalierly mixes brutal abuse and violence in a volatile and absurd plot that, at its most sensical, casts Helen Mirren and Cuba Gooding, Jr. as a mother-and-son assassin team. Thankfully Daniels hasn’t brought his full bag of noxious tricks to the table here, but, given the nature of the extreme child abuse occurring on screen, not much exaggeration is needed to make the necessary points.

Unfortunately, exaggerate he does, self-importantly rubbing the audience’s faces in the depravity. Luckily the movie calms down after a while, settling in to a subtler groove that, while still hard to watch, is only occasionally spurred into exaggerated grotesquery, once Precious is finally moved to an alternative school and begins to receive support and encouragement from a luminous, saintly teacher (played gorgeously by Paula Patton) and a compassionate social worker (played by Mariah Carey, the most endurable she’s ever been). But until that point, Daniels foregrounds the abuse, shooting it in a nauseating style. Certainly, Mo’Nique gives a whirlwind of a performance as the tyrannical mother, but the performance, the events, and the set-design would be strong enough to stand on their own without constant sensationalized direction.

 Viewers will have their own tipping point where the onscreen depravity becomes unbearable. Will it be when a massive sweating belly in a rape scene is cross-cut with shots of frying fatty foods? Will it be when Precious steals a bucket of fried chicken and we get a close up of her greasy chin as she gobbles it up? Will it be the scene that immediately follows in which she throws up the stolen chicken with explicitly chunky vomit? Or maybe it will be the scene in which Mo’Nique drops a newborn baby? Or the scene where Precious rolls down the stairs while holding the baby, every thump wickedly amplified?

Still, Precious is an impressive character, and it’s easy to root for her. The characterizations ring slightly true; unfortunately there are some in this country who are living lives closer to hers than we would like to admit, despite the presentation here leaning towards stereotyping. The scenes in the alternative school, especially Precious’s interactions with her classmates and teacher, are welcome respites to her home life, calming sequences with humor, hope, warmth and love amidst the hardships. Precious wants to change her circumstances, but realizes it will be hard work. It’s a relief to see her slowly finding a support system that’s more tangible than her gaudy fantasy sequences.

But this is a movie that presses its message too hard, not allowing breathing, or thinking, room for an audience. Daniels knows exactly what he wants us to feel and think and goes after it with single-minded determination, ending up with a movie that’s often grueling to watch and intellectually shallow. The movie’s a classic example of bungled execution. There’s no interest in actually digging in to the real emotions of the situations presented. It’s a movie that just wants to provoke, to push buttons and make you squirm, gasp, and laugh. It’s an absurdly surface treatment of potentially deep topics.

There’s a scene late in the film in which Mo’Nique’s character finally gets to open up delivering a harrowing monologue that’s more involving and disgusting than any of the visualized abuse that occurs up to that point. It’s what the movie should have been, more reserved and observant with a quieter power instead of loud and uncomfortable with every emotion pounded into the crowd. The story is powerful enough that my train of thought would have arrived to the emotions naturally without Daniels greasing the tracks. It’s an uncomfortable and grueling clash of intentions and execution.