Star Command: TICKET TO PARADISE

There’s a scene late in Ticket to Paradise when stars Julia Roberts and George Clooney, playing a divorced couple who have heretofore been bickering and bantering, finally stop for a quiet moment together. They’re on the top of a mountain on a tropical island and the sun is low in the sky, casting soft orange light all around them. They speak softly and openly to each other and, as their eyes start to sparkle, for the first time from beneath the needling chemistry that’s been sending sparks, we can see the real glow of affection they still have for each other. As they kindle this reconnection, I found myself thinking: I hope they kiss right now. And if that’s not a sign a romantic comedy has its hooks in you, I don’t know what is. The movie is a welcome example of a mode of moviemaking that’s all-but extinct—the glossy Hollywood rom-com—generously containing a further throwback—the comedy-of-remarriage. It finds in this comforting return to sturdy formula yet more resuscitation: a studio movie driven solely by Movie Star power. Roberts and Clooney, in particular, are at this point underutilized old pros, performers totally at ease with effortless charm. The movies these days afford them too few opportunities to appear at all, let alone uncork the full extent of their appeal. And so here we care about this couple because their actors are so good at embodying even the flimsiest formula with depth of personality, and projecting a charismatic likability in every angle and with each line reading. Because they’re pros, we can feel comfortable they can take this journey to its destination and find enough fun along the way.

Writer-director Ol Parker’s previous film was the fizzy lifting drink of a musical: Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again. That one, far and away his best work, and as feel-good a movie as any released in the last decade or two, must’ve unlocked something in his filmmaker toolkit. Here he continues capably marshaling the charms of stars swanning about gorgeous island locales enacting slightly silly but earnestly felt family dramas that bubble and sparkle with clever dialogue and float toward some convincing sentiment in the end. Clooney and Roberts reluctantly reunite en route to their daughter’s impromptu destination wedding. She (Kaitlyn Dever) has only known the guy for a few weeks, so the parents plan to talk her out of it. Even with just those two sentences, I’m sure you can start to piece together the plot. Yes, it has the miscommunications and mishaps and mistakes and moments of genuine connection and affection. But the joy isn’t in the story per se, thought it is sturdy, but its telling. The proceedings are kept agreeably light and amusing, photographed with brightly-lit scenic views, and build to those moments where, yes, you really do want to see the couple get together in the end. Paradise? Perhaps not exactly, but, when all the stars align, it’s in the neighborhood.

Cash Out: MONEY MONSTER

Money Monster goes to dramatic lengths to find what it’ll take to make a cable news show do some actual reporting. It starts when a smooth-talking business news host (George Clooney) – think an even more buffoonish Jim Cramer – starts his daily stock tip program. He usually offers up some buzzword advice and hyperbolic recommendations to buy and sell. But not today. An angry young man (Jack O’Connell) sneaks on set with a gun and demands the man behind the anchor’s desk strap on a homemade explosive vest. He wants time on the air to demand answers. He’s furious about Wall Street greed, the rigged system of a casino economy legalizing fraud – he’s definitely a Bernie bro – and despondent over a glitch in a certain stock’s price that wiped out his life’s savings.

The once-cocky host sweats with a gun to his head. The director (Julia Roberts) is trapped in the control room capably keeping crew running like usual. Lights, cameras, mics, and the rest must continue moving without a hitch, the better to keep the dangerous intruder calm while police (led by Giancarlo Esposito) gather outside, debating how to get in without setting off the bomb. With little setup, the screenplay quickly launches into this tense scenario. Writers Jim Kouf (Rush Hour), Alen DiFiore (The Bridge), and Jamie Linden (Dear John) build a convincing cable news environment, a hectic and frivolous place that falls silent when real danger enters the frame. As the man with the gun shouts and threatens violence, the crew scrambles to find him his answers.

An engaging effort of slick competence, Money Monster is the sort of meat-and-potatoes topical movie star thriller that used to be a staple of Hollywood filmmaking. Now, outside Oscar season, it’s mostly found on tiny VOD budgets or on TV, so it’s nice to see this old fashioned form of glossy, well intentioned, reasonably involving drama play out on the big summer screen. Here we have the likes of Clooney and Roberts playing perfectly to type in a plot that’s tautly structured and built on sturdy genre foundations while engaging with some interesting ideas floating around the news these days. It’s about Wall Street corruption and the news media industrial complex, and somehow makes it into the stuff of entertainment without going too obvious or too hypocritical. This is a diverting movie that works out genuine and legitimate class frustrations in the guise of a ticking bomb plot.

Roberts deploys producers and reporters to discover the secrets behind the man’s grievances, while on camera two very different men – poor and out of options, controlling what little he can through intimidation; rich and out of touch trying to talk his way out of the worst situation of his life – come to a cautious understanding. They’re stuck in one place, while in the world beyond the studio people are watching the events unfold with rapt attention. Some are amused, others angered. Still others are getting a little nervous, like a slimy C.E.O. (Dominic West) whose dastardly company IBIS (a fitting name for a bad corporation, like BS, IBS, and ISIS rolled into one acronym) was, through mysterious and sketchy business practices, responsible for the market fluctuation that left the hostage-taker with nothing.

There are clearly delineated good guys and bad guys here, but there are some welcome moments where expectations are upended in small ways. A scene where negotiators bring in the hostage-taker’s tearful girlfriend goes in a surprising direction, and the movie’s not unwilling to see the situation from a variety of angles. Someone seemingly in the wrong can come over to the other side, and vice versa. Directed with a steady hand by Jodie Foster, the events unfold with clarity, cinematographer Matthew Libatique’s camera finding snappy simple frames as the studio simmers with tension and many outside – techs, journalists, cops, PR people, hackers, bankers, and so on – scramble to figure out how to bring the danger to an end. The plot is involving on a surface level, while the simmering ideas underneath are just broad enough to be crowd pleasing and just specific enough to avoid feeling too condescending.

In the end it succeeds on the strength of its lead trio of performers, who bring a capable sense of weight and believability to their characters actions and decisions. Clooney could play a perfect wealthy dope in his sleep, here bringing unctuous charm covering repressed decency as a market mouthpiece who slowly grows a conscience at gunpoint. Roberts is security and stability under pressure as an expert manager trying to maintain some semblance of order and safety, speaking carefully and soothingly through her boss’s earpiece, helping him see the bigger picture. And O’Connell is a fine vessel of frustrated millennial economic angst, jumpy and tense, wound up with hopeless rage, smart but treading water in a dead end minimum wage job just to make ends meet. This story, with sensationalistic elements and vigorous political points, is too conventional and interested in small humane shadings to be a trashier satire or a sharper indictment. Instead it relaxes into thriller mechanics, looking at its characters with compassion and condemnation while finding its way to a logical conclusion.

No Business Like Show Business: HAIL, CAESAR!

There’s a zen saying that suggests, “The most dangerous thing in the world is to think you understand something.” This could be a good description for the outlook of any Coen brothers’ film, works invested in ambiguities and absurdities of human lives as reflected in the worldviews and systems that control them. One man’s belief is another man’s mystery, and Joel and Ethan Coen have made a career out of stories of existential crises told through oddball humor and offbeat suspense. Their latest is Hail, Caesar!, a film full of people who think they understand, having figured out deep reverence for some larger ideological force or another: the Bible, Das Kapital, Hollywood’s studio system. But where does that certainty get them? It’s the early 1950s, and a studio fixer (Josh Brolin) is heading into a day that’ll be full of complications to test many a person’s certainties, a straight-faced screwball panic, or maybe philosophical wrestling on laughing gas. Either way it’s a pip, but with typical Coen precision and deliberateness.

Sustained goofing on classic Hollywood, a day-in-the-life on the backlot not too far removed from Don Lockwood and Lina Lamont’s, the Coens follow Brolin’s studio suit from set to set wrangling stars, quelling complaints, and staving off controversy. The fictional Capitol Pictures is hard at work on several movies: a bathing beauty musical, a wordy melodrama, a dancing sailors movie, a singing cowboy picture, and a Biblical epic. Bopping between the films in progress we’re presented with a great imitation of Hollywood iconography: a little Robert Taylor here, some Esther Williams there, with Gene Kelly, Roy Rodgers, and others thrown in for good measure. It’s like a bleary Turner Classic Movies binge if you kept passing out and dreaming ridiculous connective behind-the-scenes tissue between disparate films. The Coens have fun conjuring up winking nods to historical references points, and mimicking the style of 50’s filmmaking. (Lap dissolves, rear projection, matte paintings and more show up.) It’s in love with its pastiche, but has enough distance to maintain an aloof absurdism.

Between fun sketches of films within the film we’re treated to a stew of behind-the-scenes silliness, wacky shenanigans that find increasingly offbeat expression on their way to some head-scratching conclusions. (“Accept the mystery,” as a character from the Coen’s great, maybe greatest, work A Serious Man might say.) Hail, Caesar! is set in motion when work on said Biblical epic is thrown into jeopardy when its star (played with daffy blockheaded charm by George Clooney) is kidnapped by two devious extras intent on delivering him to a clandestine meeting of Hollywood subversives in Malibu. This is, of course, the day’s biggest problem for Brolin’s harried studio middleman, who’s fielding a job offer from an aircraft manufacture, but can’t quite shake the fun of all this show business. He tries to keep the story quiet, even as ransom notes show up and there’s a dozen other problems needing his attention. Who ever said his job was easy?

This is the Coen’s fizziest man-on-the-verge-of-a-nervous-breakdown story, like the better, more downbeat, though still plenty funny, Barton Fink or Serious Man or Inside Llewyn Davis played in a major key. Brolin scurries around dealing with an unmarried ingénue (Scarlett Johansson) whose pregnancy is a problem for her innocent image, a Western star (Alden Ehrenreich) who is an awkward fit for a drawing room drama by a fancy director (Ralph Fiennes), and competitive twin gossip columnists (Tilda Swinton) sniffing around the smell of scandal. A host of studio employees (played by the likes of Channing Tatum, Clancy Brown, Wayne Knight, and Frances McDormand, to name a few) scramble through the story, most getting a few amusing moments bouncing off Brolin’s clench-jawed determination. He’s grinding through the day, keeping total calamity at bay. Sure, a job overseeing airplane factories would be easier, but wouldn’t he miss the fun of racing around Los Angeles, dealing with all the kooks and their crisises?

In its meandering way, Hail, Caesar! takes the usual Coen delight in dialogue, peculiar turns of phrase, droll patter, looping repetition, dry sarcasm, airy eccentricities, and narrative dead-ends and cul-de-sacs. And all this, of course, serves only to reveal characters dancing over the deep abyss of uncertainty. Like a softer version of what their sharply cynical Burn After Reading did to the espionage game – turning paranoid thriller mechanics on their ear to amplify the absurdity and the impossibility of “making sense” – this film asks if cinema – with all its egos, pretentions, and petty gossip – is serious business. The answer is: not really. Show business is cut from some deeply silly cloth. But it’s no better than anyone else who claims to be doing important work – a priest, a rabbi, a pawn of the military-industrial complex, a studio stooge, a Communist. That round-up sounds like a cast list for a great joke, and that’s what the Coens try for here, staging scenes in which all the above, and more too, make themselves out to be figures of fun when they take themselves too seriously.

The film often feels slight, busy goofing around, doodling with silly details and funny performances, Roger Deakins’ brightly lit, primary color-popping cinematography letting wacky backstage antics and a variety of movie genres bleed off the backlot and into conversation with one another. But it picks up weight as it punctures windbags’ hot air and scoffs at those who are too sure they have the perfect understanding of anything – history, economics, politics, morality, you name it. Everyone’s spinning their own stories about how the world works, but their boats are easily rocked. Shouldn’t there always be room for doubt, like an actor delivering a passionate speech, but forgetting his closing line? The movies, this film seems to say, may be frivolous gossamer illusions, but isn’t anything we cling to in order to make sense of our lives? If we’re going to lose ourselves in soothing fictions, it may as well come from dazzling Technicolor fantasies lighting up the silver screen.

Retro-Future City: TOMORROWLAND

Tomorrowland tells a science fiction story we don’t usually hear these days. It’s a story of hope, saying the future doesn’t have to be as bleak as we fear. After a couple decades worth of cultural output drumming the dystopian beat, not to mention the generally terrifying disasters worldwide, how wonderful it is to find a movie taking on the mission of encouragement. Director Brad Bird, who also co-wrote with Damon Lindelof and Jeff Jensen, looks towards an imagined world in which science and progress really can change the world for the better, if only we allow it to be shared. The filmmakers give us a shiny city on a hill, chrome and glowing with Art Deco spires and Space Age retro-futurism. Jet packs and flying cars, robots, teleportation and Jules Verne-inspired rockets fill the frame, as a great big beautiful tomorrow comes to life, beckoning us to shake off cynicism and join in the fun.

This is a vision of the future straight out of the 1964 New York World’s Fair, where, coincidentally enough, our story begins. A young boy (Thomas Robinson), visiting the fair with an optimistic invention in tow, follows a mysterious girl (Raffey Cassidy) through a secret doorway contraption to Tomorrowland, the futuristic city full of scientific wonder. Skipping forward to our time, we meet an irrepressibly sunny teenager (Britt Robertson) who remains excited by a potential for good in the world despite the her NASA engineer father (Tim McGraw) losing his job. After a great many (too many, perhaps) complications, she discovers a vintage pin. When touched, it shows her and only her a glimpse of Tomorrowland off in the distance, untouchable and irresistible. So begins the mystery powering the plot engine, as she tries to figure out what this city is and how to get there, a quest that leads her eventually a middle-aged man (George Clooney), who once was the boy who went there, and is now cagily reluctant to return.

The film trusts the very fact of mystery to pull us along, keeping characterization thin and the obfuscation thick. Late in the game, the truth about the city is revealed and the full extent of the stakes is known. The way there is a series of thick tangles of exposition punctuated with whiz-bang special effects sequences as the teen learns of secret societies, killer robots, laser guns, quantum particles, and ultimately the answers she and we desire about Tomorrowland. Bird and crew take great pleasure in concocting complicated backstory and appealing design, then hiding it, parceling it out in frustrating and tantalizing doses between cliffhangers and info dumps. There’s a cheery sincerity to this clunking structure, recalling early sci-fi stories in which an ordinary person discovers extraordinary secrets in episodic dreamlike fashion with great wonderment. It plays like an updated serial, with bigger effects, but the same potentially hokey spirit.

Although the cluttered exposition bogs things down, Bird comes to life when staging his exciting flights of sci-fi with an animator’s flair for visual timing. Would you expect any less from the director of The Iron Giant, The Incredibles, Ratatouille, and Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol? Tomorrowland isn’t as fluid an experience. Though the actors mostly sell the sloppy connective tissue, it could've used more showing, less telling, and telling, and telling. But then a toy store is suddenly the stage for a martial arts battle, or a farmhouse bursts forth with high-tech booby traps. And I won’t even begin to spoil what happens to a famous European landmark, but it’s like something out of an eye-catching old pulp magazine cover. It’s a film full of images of wide-eyed speculative goofiness, and completely committed to meeting them on that level. The film’s design is charming, and photographed in cheerfully luminous ways. Who cares if the characters are vaguely defined and the world’s a jumble? Look at this thing go!

Bird approaches the concept with evident delight in conjuring, with cinematographer Claudio Miranda, these bright images and gleaming theme park (it is named for a section in Disney parks, after all) spectacle. But there’s also a sincerity of purpose and earnestness of tone as it moralizes about the power in the stories we tell ourselves about our future. It asks us not to accept dystopia as our only option, but to realize it’s never too late to change the world for the better. It may be given a cornball hard sell here, with a big speech at the end laying it on thick. But, boy, is it an honest sentiment, too. What we learn about Tomorrowland eventually sets a selfish figure intent on keeping progress to himself against those who’d rather open the possibilities to anyone willing to pitch in. Our heroes discover that even a perfect, gleaming city can’t survive without those willing to work at make things better for everyone.

It’s ultimately another film with world-ending stakes, but Robertson and Clooney, two utterly charming performers who work well together and steer the film lightly, embody a more humanist ideal. What good is a secret world for special smarties if you can’t invite people in? Why accept a bad outcome for humanity when you can work to change it? The message – and the worldbuilding – gets muddled in the telling, but Tomorrowland asks us to reach for the best of humanity instead of tolerating the worst. If our imagination dies, so do we. Accepting dystopia is easy and cynical. Making utopia requires talent, cooperation, creative thinking, and hope. We’re in this together, so we might as well imagine ourselves a nice, fun, shiny future where anything is possible. In its own imperfect, heartfelt way, Tomorrowland wants us leaving the theater thinking a little brighter.

Free Falling: GRAVITY

A relentlessly suspenseful technical exercise, Alfonso Cuarón’s Gravity is a visual marvel. It tells a story of survival as a space shuttle is destroyed by a cloud of debris mid-space walk, leaving two astronauts adrift. For the next 90 minutes or so, they scramble to survive in a plot that’s spare and tough, unblinkingly and unceasingly orbiting with these imperiled characters. It’s just one thing after another going wrong, the cold hard cruelty of physics throwing ever more obstacles in the way. The film is an absorbing astonishment of virtuoso visual expression and aural detail. The plot is so simple and yet the feeling of floating unmoored and unprotected in the dead of space, scrambling to find some way, any way to safety is harrowing and overwhelming. The sense of isolation and sensory alienation is vast and impressive, a tension that tightens early and doesn’t even begin to let up until barely before the end credits roll.

I would describe the film as containing sequences of sensational special effects, but it’s more accurate to describe the entire film as one fluid effects sequence. Cuarón’s camera, guided by master cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki, floats freely and smoothly in long takes in stunning 3D that contain staggering amounts of visual information, subtle details of stars twinkling in the far background as our planet sits below, the astronauts walking outside their spacecraft near foreground. Careful attention is paid to the ripple effects of one motion in the void of space, tethers twisting, metal shifting, a screw slowly floating away once loosened from its position. The opening scene has tranquility about it, a subdued sense of motion as if the characters were simply underwater. It is silence and perspective that shows otherwise. When the first wave of debris hits, disaster unfolds in eerie near-total silence, metal ripped to ribbons and twisting in the vacuum of space with nary a sound but the ragged gasps and exclamations of the panicked survivors.

It’s a scenario that’s instantly chilling. As the actors in the suits, Sandra Bullock and George Clooney need not push too hard to make the sense of peril and hopelessness known, surrounded as they are by so much black, cold space. As performers, they’re two of the most naturally likable screen presences around, but though that’s part of the attraction here, they’re also delivering terrific pared down performances. These are impressive physical performances, fit and expressive in movements and body language, working seamlessly within precisely calibrated shots filled with exacting and convincing computer generated detail. Bullock especially does fantastic work here, for a character in which determination and hopelessness exist in close proximity, a mournful resignation that’s scraped away by steely determination. It’s all about the essentials. They’re people struggling to survive, all business, but for some light conversation that attempts to flesh out a token amount of backstory. Their characters move forward, proceeding to the next logical step, then the next. I found myself wondering how they could possibly get out of this situation.

The events of the film seem completely rigorously plausible, at least within the heightened movie nature of it all. As I’m not a scientist – far from it – I can’t comment on that further or more specifically. But the film proceeds with a cool, observational approach to its resolution that both makes sense and provides constant surprise from the characters’ combinations of resourcefulness and skill. The wonder of the film is not the characters behaviors or even, strictly speaking, the events of the plot. The film’s constant astonishment is the way it is shown, in smoothly composed shots of seamless digital amazement. There are moments I can’t wait to see again, mostly to wrap my head around the complexity with which they unfold, quickly and gracefully, as I gaped at the screen trying to process it all.

Cuarón has always been something of a visual master, from his sci-fi masterpiece Children of Men (2006) and fantasy adaptations A Little Princess (1995) and Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (2004) to even something as deceptively grounded as his earthy relationship drama Y Tu Mamá También (2001). His camera’s curiosity and exquisitely choreographed (and digitally assisted) fluidity in conjunction with his characters’ inner lives is his trademark source of amazement. In Gravity, he pushes the visual immersion of his style as far as it has ever been. It is the work of one of our most visually accomplished filmmakers showing off. Its rigorous simplicity is a constant source of wonderment. Nothing more or less than a feat of technology creating an impressive, immersive experience, I spent Gravity in a state of tense awe.

Ohana Trouble: THE DESCENDANTS

Until now, writer-director Alexander Payne hadn’t made a movie since 2004’s fine comic drama Sideways. (Though his short in the 2007 anthology Paris, Je T’aime was easily the best part of that film). Watching his new film, The Descendents, I realized how much I had missed his cinematic voice. It wasn’t until it was gone that I discovered how much I enjoyed having new work from him appearing every couple of years. Funnily enough, not knowing what you have until it’s gone is also the major theme of this new film. Lawyer Matt King (George Clooney) is away on business when he receives word that his wife has been in a speedboat accident. He rushes back to their Hawaiian hometown where in the hospital she lies in a coma, kept alive by the tubes for breathing and feeding. Her heart’s still beating, but her brain is silent. They didn’t have a perfect marriage, but now they’re on the verge of never seeing, never speaking to each other ever again.

Matt is left having to take care of their daughters all on his own. Little Scottie (Amara Miller) is in trouble at school for bringing in a scrapbook filled with pictures of her comatose mother for show and tell. Alex (Shailene Woodley) is standoffish and, when he picks her up from boarding school, he finds her just a little drunk. These girls are going through a hard time. Alex invites her “friend” Sid (Nick Krause) to come stay with them, emotionally blackmailing her struggling father to get him to agree to the unexpected guest’s presence. “I’ll be a lot more civil with him around,” she threatens with a spiteful teenaged glower.

Matt’s doubly distracted by an impending real estate deal that must be resolved. His ancestors owned a large parcel of land on the island that is now held in common amongst all of his cousins. They’re preparing to sell it and become instant millionaires. It’s a pretty big deal, but it’s hard to make such a major decision when your wife is on the precipice of death. Her will asks that she not be kept alive artificially in the case of just such a catastrophic accident. Matt tells his girls and then sets off to tell close family and friends that it’s time to say their goodbyes.

On top of all this, when he finally confronts Alex on why she’s behaving so bratty, she tells him that his wife, her mother, had been cheating on him prior to the accident. This could easily be a soapy twist, but the film is stronger than that, or rather it’s working for a calmer, more perceptive goal. Discovering and possibly confronting this other man is just another plate that Matt has to keep spinning. How is it possible to be mad at the one you love when it’s impossible to confront her, when it’s time to be saying your final goodbye? The complex emotions in this film are not easily resolvable.

The opening of the film spells out some of this set-up in narration that becomes a bit of a crutch. Most of what’s told is easily understandable from context clues and most of what isn’t could have easily been inserted into dialogue or the production design. What follows, though, is a film of such well-lived performances and thoughtful directorial choices. Reflecting the laid-back atmosphere of a tropical island while taking place in the kind of mundane suburban side-streets and office buildings that could be found in any location, the sturdy, relaxed pace and glimmering observational eye of the film help bring to life this man’s story in a moving and empathetic way without tipping over into self-seriousness.

This is lovely, emotionally engaged filmmaking from Payne who is working from a script co-written with Nat Faxon and Jim Rash that’s moving and involving precisely because of its specificity. Payne has a sharp, observant sensibility that can find the humor in deathly serious situations, making such a clean cut to laughter that emotional heft is left unscathed. This is hardly the funereal dirge that the above plot details could easily have been describing. There’s a vibrant sense of life here in a deep and talented ensemble that includes lovely character moments for a father in-law (Robert Forster), a cousin (Beau Bridges), and a goofy neighborhood couple (Mary Birdsong and Rob Huebel). There’s some especially fine work in scenes given over to a realtor (Matthew Lillard) and his wife (Judy Greer) who first appear late in the film but leave a lasting impact on the emotional terrain. Payne gives the characters room to breathe and grow at a comfortable pace.

This is a film that earns its quiet laughs and warm, tear-jerking sentiment without appearing to break a sweat. Clooney, at the center of it all, gives such a warm, relaxed yet controlled performance that’s removed from the easy charm he brings to most of his roles. Here he disappears into the character in a way that allows his pop culture persona to fade away. Here he’s just an average (though definitely handsomer than average) man struggling with a life that has taken sudden, and unexpected, turns. His performance matches the filmmaking. This is not a flashy movie, but one that lets a potentially loud human drama unfold quietly with great care, great humor, and great sensitivity. 

Et tu, Clooney? THE IDES OF MARCH

George Clooney’s fourth film as director is The Ides of March, a modern political drama with the look, tone and score of a thriller. It features tense conversations between men in suits, always attempting to position themselves with their words, scheming, shifting, and weighing the consequences of each word and every thought. It tells us that good people and bad people alike get sucked into the gamesmanship that is running for public office until the difference between the two is next to nonexistent. There are only politicians.

Centered on a high level campaigner (Ryan Gosling), the film shows us the behind-the-scenes machinations of a run in a presidential primary. This man is an idealist and a pragmatist. He believes in his cause and he believes in his candidate (George Clooney), a sitting governor. He reports to the candidate’s campaign manager (Phillip Seymour Hoffman), a weary and shrewd man who values loyalty above all else. Loyalty to ideology or even to coworkers is not the kind of loyalty he holds in such high esteem. No, he considers loyalty to the campaign the end all be all of political life.

His counterpart (Paul Giamatti) in the campaign of the main competition is similarly gruff and slimy, ready to throw anyone under any bus. He makes decisions that ruin lives and we’re supposed to dislike him. But what about our guys? They wouldn’t be so cold, would they? Greedy negotiations with a Senator who has dropped out of the race (Jeffrey Wright) and a brewing scandal involving a pretty young intern (Evan Rachel Wood) try the moral mettle of the protagonist and throw harsh light onto the dirty deeds that go on in dark backroom deals. True to its namesake, The Ides of March contains plenty of backstabbing. It’s a drama of disillusionment.

The film has a kind of frostbitten cynicism. It’s covered in impressive craggy displays of wounded chilliness, but scrape them away and what’s underneath is stale. It’s all too easy to point at politics and politicians and issue easy scorn. “They’re all nice guys,” says a reporter, a small role played by Marisa Tomei, “but they’ll always disappoint you.” This is an awfully easy thesis to prove, and the film sets out to prove it well. The oldness and obviousness of this sentiment doesn’t make the film less relevant, just less inherently compelling, especially when there is an almost uncanny-valley level of disregard for real-world political references. This is a film that has just enough in common with our current situations (and a few select pundit cameos) that everything it doesn’t address, even off-handedly, creates a distancing effect. We don’t even get to meet the competition, or even anyone from the other party. In our world, campaigns are a noisy buzz machine surrounded by gossip and megaphones. Here, things are strangely isolated for narrative and thematic simplicity.

It’s a good thing, then, that the performances make up for the void left by such thematic posing. Gosling is a bit of a blank here, a functionary who fills the role of increasingly disenchanted political operative. But the characters that surround him are terrifically complicated, lived-in performances from a collection of some of our greatest character actors. Clooney has the right combination of movie-star looks and gravitas of presence to look like a presidential candidate. He also has the depth in his eyes to play a man who can carry deep secrets without ever once letting on the extent of them. As the operatives and politicians that move along the plot, Hoffman, Giamatti, and Wright are pitch-perfect jargon machines that open up to reveal cold personal politics that are chilling in their icy logic of naked careerism.

Each character gets a moment when they can plunk down in the middle of a scene and deliver the kind of monologue that causes my ears to prick up, the better to hear every word. These are fine moments superbly performed, moments that betray the film’s origins as Beau Willimon’s play Farragut North. Adapted by Willimon, along with Clooney and Grant Heslov, The Ides of March fits in comfortably with Clooney’s other directorial efforts. Like the paranoid showbiz thriller Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, the black and white docudrama Good Night and Good Luck, and the mothballed screwball comedy Leatherheads, this latest film has a stylistic and thematic connection with the past. Like the cynical political films of the 70’s – Michael Ritchie’s The Candidate, Robert Altman’s Nashville – Ides marches to its own glum drum. What it lacks is the same sense of vibrancy, of discovery, of a looseness and reality to its disgruntled surprises. It ticks along with wonderful performances and tense moments, but it never really gathers the pessimistic reality it aims to accrue. When the film ended, though I had been entertained and distracted, I was still waiting to be told something that would surprise me. 

Mystery Man: THE AMERICAN

George Clooney is often unfairly accused of coasting on his twinkly-eyed Cary Grant charm. That’s because even when he plays characters disaffected with their lifestyle or disconnected from human interactions, like in Syriana, Michael Clayton, and last year’s Up in the Air, his naturally stylish sparkle shines through. Looks can be deceiving, as they say. Though his characters may not always have things figured out, they can put up a good front, a distraction from the hollow aspects of their personalities.

In The American, Clooney takes this darker persona and pushes it into darker, subtler areas. Here he is less Cary Grant and more Alain Delon. As a graying professional assassin, Clooney is slim and weathered, with his expressive eyes taking on haunted qualities. Slipping into the role with startling ease, he finds great power in stillness and in economy of gestures. This is a character that is developed and changed so subtly and simply that a cursory glance could too-easily lead a person to mistake this quiet film’s contemplative nature for lack of interiority.

The film’s icy moodiness and chilled atmosphere is established in the opening Sweden-set moments that find sudden violence shattering the tranquility of an undisturbed snow-covered field. A mission has gone wrong, ending badly and deadly. The rest of the film follows Clooney to Italy where he hides in a small village as he prepares for his next job. As he sips coffee in small cafes, tinkers with metallic objects that will add up into deadly machinery, and moves deliberately through cobblestone streets, he comes into contact with three figures of shifting importance to the plot.

There’s a jovial local priest (Paolo Bonacelli) who takes an interest in this mysterious solitary foreigner and pleasantly offers conversation. There’s a prostitute (Violante Placido) from a nearby brothel who finds herself drawn to find the true man behind this secretive loner, her newest client. And there’s the eerily composed businesswoman (Thekla Reuten) who quickly and crisply delivers the specifications for a firearm that she will need from him in order to complete some unknown task of violence that he only wants to eventually discover from the newspapers. These three characters serve to both illuminate and reflect the nature of the inscrutable presence that is Clooney’s slick, mostly silent, and deadly cautious character. Otherwise, we would only have the carefully composed long shots of this single figure, or perhaps his vehicle, moving purposefully across a gorgeous, dominating landscape.

Though nominally a thriller, director Anton Corbijn is not too interested in fulfilling the genre’s requirements. His first feature, after work on music videos and still photography, was the 2007 Ian Curtis biopic Control, an austere, charily unfolding and somewhat distancing visual work that was nonetheless mostly successful in its goals. To The American, Corbijn brings a similar sense of a story sparsely sketched and coolly told. This is to the film’s ultimate benefit. On a plot level, the film’s script by Rowan Joffe is fairly routine spy stuff, falling back on clichés about heart-of-gold hookers and shady spy-like double-crossings, which are in turn hampered by some easy symbolism and on-the-nose dialogue. On a filmmaking and storytelling level, however, the film crackles with an impenetrable mystique that coats the cliché in a slick layer of cool, distinctly European atmospherics and a beautifully sustained mood of melancholy suspense.

All of Corbijn’s impeccable visual skill rests on the capable shoulders of Clooney, who ends up delivering one of his best performances, and the nicely nuanced work of the small supporting cast. This is a small, stylish, moody film that deserves to find an audience that is willing to be rewarded for patience and tolerance in watching such a smartly visual film quietly and deliberately unfold.

Purposely Adrift: UP IN THE AIR

I’m trying to resist the urge to call Up in the Air “timely” or “the movie of the moment,” but it can’t be helped. Director Jason Reitman’s film, which he wrote with Sheldon Turner from the novel by Walter Kirn, captures the zeitgeist in its opening moments and never lets it go. This is the kind of movie that feels just right. It made me sit back in my seat and think to myself “Yes, this is how we live now.” And yet, the film isn’t self-important or singularly focused on making broad statements about our time. Reitman never loses sight of the fact that he’s telling a story about specific characters. These characters are so fully formed through perfectly pitched writing and acting that I could have spent time with them for much longer.

The film opens with a series of firings, the despondent faces of the fired looking back at us angry, confused, on the verge of tears. Then we meet the man on the other side of the table, the bearer of bad news. He’s Ryan Bingham (George Clooney). He’s contracted by companies to fire their employees. In the current economic downturn, he’s given remarkable job security which enables him to cultivate his deliberately untethered lifestyle, a kind of life that has him away from his Omaha apartment for over 300 days out of every year. When he is forced to stay in Omaha he returns to an apartment that is cold, sterile, and bare, without any indication that someone lives there. It’s a home that is less personal than a hotel, which is, of course, where he’d rather be.

He has a system for travelling that is nothing short of perfection. We see him packing his suitcase, going through security, and boarding a plane, each step moving with a rapid pace and crisp precision. We see tranquil aerial views announcing each new city that illuminate the respite Bingham finds while in flight. He’s hiding his emptiness behind routine, or at least that’s how it would be clearly delineated if this were the traditional Hollywood effort setting up the jaded cynic to learn how to open up and love life. This isn’t that movie, even though Bingham does receive some unanticipated changes in his perfectly honed routine.

These changes come in the form of two women. The first is a frequent flyer with whom he starts a casual romance when their paths cross in a hotel bar. As played by Vera Farmiga, this woman is the female equivalent to Bingham, a career-driven woman who can only meet him when their flight schedules happen to cross. The interactions between Farmiga and Clooney are filled with spark and wit, two incredibly confident personalities bouncing off and feeding into each other. Farmiga is radiant, and it’s not just the reflection off of Clooney’s likability. This is one of the most likable on-screen romances I’ve seen recently. How often do you actually want the characters to end up together instead of just mutually agreeing to go along with the movie’s romantic formula? I’m even more grateful, then, that the romance is so touchingly nuanced, so grounded in reality. Neither of them makes unbelievable shifts, even when they do something surprising. This is an adult interaction, an adult romance. That’s not to say it’s pornographic (though it manages to be frank without being specific), but rather it’s a casual romance that involves two adults who conduct their relationship in a thoroughly adult manner. Romances in Hollywood productions, even a wonderful film like (500) Days of Summer, lock their participants in a state of stunted romantic development with notions relating to relationships stuck in an adolescent state. Here, Farmiga and Clooney behave as adults who have had experiences, have lived lives, and are finding some moments of solace in finding each other.

The other woman who causes change in Bingham’s lifestyle is a new hire at the company that keeps him on the road. Played by Anna Kendrick, she’s a motormouthed delight. Fresh out of college, she wants to eliminate the need for so much travel despite much protest from Bingham who argues that she should understand the nuances of firing before trying to shake things up. Their boss (the always excellent Jason Bateman) sends them on the road together on a whirlwind downsizing mission. Kendrick and Clooney have an unforced rapport that starts in a place of hostility but has the possibility to become, not friendship exactly, but something closer to mutual respect. The relationship between these two characters is so convincing that it carries the film through what could have been treacherous avenues. The characters, with their age gap, are never drawn into a squirmy romantic attraction but nor do they move in a more paternal direction. This is an unforced portrait of cross-generational exchange that feels accurately and closely observed.

In a film like this, casting is almost everything. If the wrong actors were put in place, the movie, even with its strong writing, would fall apart. Luckily Farmiga, Kendrick, and Clooney are perfect in the kind of convergence between performer and character that leaves one entirely unable to imagine a different cast. Farmiga gives a glowing portrait of thirty-something beauty and she’s totally charming, but she also brings a hint of hidden depths of pain behind her easy-going attitude. Kendrick is a force of nature, always moving, always quick to speak, and yet she projects a fragility behind her confident bravado that reveals how young and out-of-place she feels, especially when firing a person twice her age. But Clooney may pull off the greatest acting feat out of the three of them, taking his winning one-step-ahead star persona and subtly subverting it in a way that seems effortless, turning Bingham into a man who lies to everyone about how happy he is, especially himself. He, like the film, is all sparkling charm over a nearly unfathomable sadness.

As the film moves into its final moments, it risks falling into a false crisis or a sappy sentimentality, especially with Bingham deciding to attend an event he seems indifferent towards at the opening of the film. That doesn’t happen. Jason Reitman has remarkable control over the tone and trajectory of the film, manipulating it with skill, staying true to his characters. He has grown remarkably as a director over the course of his first three features. Thank You for Smoking (2006) was a funny satire that would occasionally get a little sloppy in its tone. Juno (2007) featured incredible performances that were sometimes hurt by the odd faux-slang of Diablo Cody’s otherwise heartfelt screenplay. Now, with Up in the Air, Reitman has delivered a work that feels of one smooth piece from beginning to end. It’s a film that operates from a perceptive base of knowledge that filters through every scene, thoughtful and touching about how people really interact. And yet it is wedded to a Hollywood-slick style that features impeccable craft from all departments. This is truly one of the best of the year, not just because it’s timely, but because it’s well made in all aspects. This is a studio dramedy that scrapes at real emotions, that has a sense of reality in its ability to hold painful melancholy underneath the unexpectedly sweet.

Quick Look: Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009)

Sure, Fantastic Mr. Fox is animated. Sure, it’s based on a book by Roald Dahl. But that doesn’t mean that it isn’t purely a Wes Anderson movie. Mr. Fox (George Clooney) is the latest in what is becoming a long line of typical Wes Anderson protagonists, joining Dignan from Bottle Rocket, Max from Rushmore, Royal from The Royal Tenenbaums, and Zissou from The Life Aquatic as another man who exercises control over a family unit, but whose struggle to reconcile his incredible talents (or perceived talents) with his lifestyle brings his entire unit into crisis. If it sounds like Anderson (and co-writer Noah Baumbach) deviated from Dahl’s slim novel, it is because they did. This is as oddball a family film as Spike Jonze’s and Dave Egger’s Where the Wild Things Are and as distinctive in its visuals. Anderson has created a stop-motion dollhouse world of flat backgrounds and diorama-like sets that have tangibility and specificity in their exquisitely detailed bric-a-brac. Essentially, what Anderson and his team of animators have achieved is the perfect recreation of the Anderson aesthetic, or rather, through the complete control of animation, they have allowed it to be brought to its greatest realization yet. That the story itself, a wildlife-planned heist of sorts that pits forest critters against a trio of vindictive farmers, moves in an uneven pace with dialogue occasionally too precious (like using the word “cuss” as an all-purpose profanity stand-in) almost doesn’t matter. This is a movie worth seeing just to look at, not just in its auteur’s style and its excellent miniature set dressing, but in its incredible character design that makes the animals look like gorgeously designed toys ready to play with.

The Men Who Stare at Goats (2009)

The Men Who Stare at Goats has a great title and, with George Clooney, Ewan McGregor, Jeff Bridges, and Kevin Spacey, a great cast. Unfortunately, it’s a comedy that’s stuck awkwardly between light and dark, soft and edgy. It spins its wheels tonally while also forgetting about narrative drive or thematic development. As a result, it’s merely 90-minutes of watching big stars goof around in a giant sandbox playing true characters, mostly (Clooney, Bridges and Spacey) psychic soldiers trained in a secret Armed Forces project known as New Earth Army. McGregor is just a tag-along journalist (inexplicably shifted from London to Ann Arbor in a pointless case of adjusting the truth) learning about the history of the group, who call themselves Jedi Warriors (cute, considering they’re talking to Obi-Wan Kenobi).

The four men provide the film some modest pleasures. Clooney is good-natured and humorous, as he usually is, here deadpanning dubiously effective combat technique and flatly describing improbable abilities including a “death tap” that killed a man (Instantly? Nope. Eighteen years later. One never knows when the curse of the death tap will strike). Bridges is basically an enlisted Lebowski who indulges in New Age hippie-culture and invents the majority of techniques on display. Spacey has a great few scenes, rolling back his eyes and talking in a funny voice for one scene in which he tries to fake paranormal powers. In another scene he will calmly pass on good wishes to a newlywed couple with the funniest two lines in the movie (Spoiler: “Congratulations. Sorry it doesn’t work out”).

Directed by first-timer, but longtime actor, producer, writer, and friend of Clooney, Grant Heslov, the movie ends up a wishy-washy mess, not as good as it should be, but not as bad as it could have been. The movie’s good-natured enough, but ultimately Heslov can’t muster up enough heft to really start the movie so that by the time it’s wrapping up I found myself thinking “is that all?” It’s a goofy, insubstantial little thing (save for a case of most unfortunate timing with a scene showing an acid-tripping soldier shooting up his base) that just never works. The last scene has McGregor’s reporter typing away, promising to tell the world what happened, then lamenting that his story received little coverage in the media. We’re supposed to sympathize with him, but I found myself agreeing with the media. This story’s a non-starter.