Flight Improvement: PLANES: FIRE & RESCUE

A professional racer is told by his doctor to take it easy. Looking to put his new free time to good use, he agrees to help his tiny hometown by leaving home and getting his fire rescue certification. He ends up spending the summer at a mountaintop resort, finding new firefighter friends and getting his training in while helping them prep for forest fire season. It’s a sweet, simple, predictable little story with safe, easy lessons about being selfless, helping others while being true to yourself and other gently affirming stuff. I sort of enjoyed it, at least whenever I could half-forget that all of the characters were planes.

This is Planes: Fire & Rescue, a sequel to last year’s Planes, a spin-off of Pixar’s Cars movies. That pretty dumb and awfully flimsy movie was produced by DisneyToon, Disney’s direct-to-video arm, but got promoted to a theatrical release, presumably because someone at the studio thought it was good enough to do so. Or maybe there was a blank spot on the schedule that had to be filled quickly and cheaply. Either way, there it was, a bland regurgitation of Cars plot points and cheaply animated pap. Families bought tickets. Now it’s eleven months later and we have a sequel.

Maybe because director Roberts Gannaway and screenwriter Jeffrey M. Howard knew they were aiming for the big screen from the beginning, the movie has a wider scope, rather lovely and detailed backgrounds, and that aforementioned predictable-but-likable story. The forest is lush and leafy, fires ripping through with convincingly rendered snap and flicker bleeding ominous reds and oranges through the picturesque greens and browns of the secluded resort area. The story about a group of professionals taking a newbie under their wing and teaching him the ropes is made up of stock parts, but plays reasonably well. The problem, and it’s kind of a big one, is the planes.

I liked the Cars movies. They had a certain charm and moved fast enough to outrace logical questions about how a world in which all living things are vehicles operates in any way. Sure, I idly wondered about questions like, “where do baby cars come from?” But the movies moved quickly, had Pixar’s trademark visual wit and emotional intelligence, and just plain knew not to steer the plot directly into areas that would immediately confront the core nonsense of the fantasy world’s workings. Not so Planes, which operated at a cheaper, thinner level, but worst of all foregrounded the nonsense. That’s a pattern that continues with Fire & Rescue.

It’s a movie that spends more time than necessary (that is to say, any at all) focusing on the planes’ bodies. A major plot point is a plane who is told he has a failing gearbox that can’t be replaced because “the factory discontinued the parts.” What!? You mean to tell me in this world of anthropomorphized vehicles there is a factory that can declare a death sentence for a whole type of being (species? product line?) by declaring them obsolete?  How horrible! At one point the camera zooms into the plane’s inner workings and watches as gears turn and spark. I don’t want to think about this! Throughout we get cutaways to dashboard gauges and knobs. Why are they there? Who is looking at them?

The movie’s obsession with the planes’ mechanical processes reveals only the failure to imagine the fictional world in any detail beyond the surface jokiness. It’s simply unworkable. What does work on some modestly engaging level is the story, which would be a humble charmer if someone were to rewrite it to star human beings. Whenever I could forget that Dusty Crophopper (Dane Cook) and his new firefighting pals (voices of Ed Harris, Julie Bowen, Curtis Armstrong, Wes Studi, Regina King, and more) were planes, it has a mildly diverting kid-friendly flow. The fire and rescue of the title is treated seriously enough to come with a dedication to real firefighters. That’s nice. So is the crackling danger that the planes fly through in visually appealing ways.

What’s not so nice are the nagging implausibilities and backfiring wit. I don’t want to think about a small-town bar named “Honkers” where a hybrid rebuffs a pickup truck’s pick-up line. Or an elderly fire truck voiced by Hal Holbrook complaining about his “rusty, blistered bumper.” Or a pair of elderly RVs who over-share that they “wore down their [tire] treads on their honeymoon…with all that driving.” Or a helicopter who is a broad offensive Native American stereotype who speaks in a pantomime of Native sayings.

Why this simple little kids’ movie insists on playing around in its most distracting, baffling corners while poking along at a pace that makes sure we have plenty of time to ponder its nonsense is beyond me. It’s not even close to even the worst of either Cars, but at least it’s an improvement over its immediate predecessor. Fire & Rescue is totally watchable, with better animation, design, characters, and story, and with fewer lame jokes. It’s not so bad, pleasant enough, but fundamentally preposterous.

Fracked: PROMISED LAND

Fracking, the process by which energy companies drill into shale deposits deep underground and then shoot a mixture of water and undisclosed chemicals into the hole in order to extract natural gas, is rightly controversial. You may not have seen Gasland, the essential documentary on the subject, but you’re surely aware of that film’s most remarkable images of people lighting their tap water on fire. Fracking is safe and contamination of nearby water sources is next to impossible, at least that’s what the energy companies have a vested interest in having you believe. The good idea behind the newest anti-fracking film, Promised Land, is the way it puts those words in the mouth of its main character, a company man played by Matt Damon. His job is to ride into a small town and convince property owners to sell the rights to the shale under their feet in exchange for a big check and promises of residual checks to come.

Damon and his coworker (Frances McDormand) go door to door in an economically devastated town where the money offered sounds good. Too good to be true, says the local science teacher played by Hal Holbrook. An out-of-towner environmentalist played by John Krasinski joins the wise old science guy in a campaign to educate the townspeople about the dangers of signing away their town’s livability for an easy payout. Sure, the town would have a brief boom time, but is it worth trading their future livestock, farming, and fresh water? Director Gus Van Sant shoots the small town lovingly, with overhead shots of endless green expanses broken up only by farmhouses, silos, and herds of animals, the better to emphasize what can potentially be taken away.

The script, by Damon and Krasinski with an assist from novelist, essayist, and literary icon of sorts Dave Eggers, makes no effort to hide its didactic intentions. Well, almost no effort, I should say. There’s a wisp of a plot involving both men’s understandable, low-key, low-stakes romantic pursuit of a local teacher (Rosemary DeWitt) that doesn’t really go anywhere productive, but at least it distracts from scenes like Krasinski teaching a class about water contamination or Damon standing in front of an American flag answering tough questions in a local information meeting. It’s all pretty obvious, with character motivations and lines of dialogue blatantly standing in for the sociopolitical argument that’s inelegantly happening in a place somewhere between text and subtext.

The kicker is that the argument is so very noble. Of course we should be worried about what fracking will do to small towns. If anything, it’s a conversation that’s not being held often enough in the public sphere. The way the movie blends an economic and environmental argument is worthy, asking its audience to weigh the considerations of a struggling town’s short- and long-term best interests as the townspeople do. The problem is that there’s nothing else on which to ponder as the film plays out. It’s an editorializing documentary sitting just underneath the thin veneer of drama and I resented being asked to care about characters when they’re nothing more than living, breathing talking points. This is an artless message movie from artful people so carried away with their good message that they forgot to make a movie.

LINCOLN Belongs to the Ages

A big historical drama, all the more weighty and impressive for how simple and contained it feels, Lincoln is an epic of process and detail, unabashedly, unashamedly intellectual and literary, crafted by a master filmmaker in full command of his cinematic powers. Like War Horse, last year’s Spielbergian historical epic, Lincoln is beautifully old-fashioned and powerfully new. The life of Abraham Lincoln is hardly an inauspicious subject matter for a film. No less than John Ford and D.W. Griffith have used the iconic president – routinely considered one of, if not the, greatest American president – as material for impressive filmmaking and biographies in general often lends itself to static, overwhelmingly uneven, films. The genius of Spielberg’s Lincoln is the way he, and Pulitzer Prize-winning screenwriter Tony Kushner, narrow the focus, suggesting a large canvas with precise brushstrokes of great style.

The very first scene – after a harrowing, closely shot sequence of soldiers fighting with ugly, personal violence ankle deep in sickly grey mud – recognizes Lincoln as icon, as a stovepipe-hat-wearing, Emancipation-Proclamation-signing, quotable rhetorician of the public imagination. The camera watches adoring soldiers, some black and some white, who, as we’ll soon learn, have memorized the Gettysburg address. As the dialogue plays out, Lincoln remains off-screen for quite some time, slowly revealed sans hat, sitting casually, but leaning slightly forward, listening with evident interest. The Lincoln that the film proceeds to reveal scrapes away the fawning legacy and replaces him with an even more glorious portrait of a human man, smart, charming, troubled, wise, and crushed down under the burdens of the job and anxieties in the face of overwhelming uncertainty.

This portrayal’s greatness rests, first and foremost, with Daniel Day-Lewis in a performance so good that it could more accurately be called an inhabitation. Will I ever cease being surprised by Day-Lewis? Having already earned his reputation as one of the very best actors of his generation several times over, this feat of acting is no less completely convincing. From the first second he appears on screen, I forgot I was watching a performance, let alone a performance so remarkable and convincing that it’s as if a 150-year-old photograph has come to life. No, from his first to his final moments on screen he is fully and completely Abraham Lincoln. This is acting from the inside out with a presidential posture, lanky country lawyer mannerisms, and a hoarsely emphatic tenor that slips slightly higher for emphasis. We see that he’s an ordinary man who has bad dreams, who enjoys telling anecdotes as a way to charm his way sideways into larger points, who occasionally fights with his wife (Sally Field) and adores his surviving sons, one older and collegiate (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), the other younger (Gulliver McGrath), scampering around the White House in a child-sized army uniform. Unlike characters in lesser biopics, this president is simply a man doing his job, unaware of his historical importance.

Instead of a sweeping skim across the surface of Lincoln’s life, or even just the Civil War, the film, based in part on historian Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Team of Rivals, concerns itself with early 1865, the final months of the war and the attempt to pass the 13th Constitutional amendment which would eventually end slavery once and for all. What unfolds is a legislative procedural, a thrilling and involving clash of personalities and powers that reveal the messy, halting uncertainty of doing the right thing. This is a film that successfully removes the certitude of hindsight, drawing its story in a way that’s immediate and powerful with a hugely talented ensemble of actors in terrific supporting parts. We meet members of the cabinet (David Strathairn and Bruce McGill) and Lincoln’s staff (Joseph Cross), passionate abolitionists (Tommy Lee Jones, David Costabile, and Hal Holbrook), vehement opposition (Lee Pace and Peter McRobbie), undecided votes (Michael Stuhlbarg and Walton Goggins) and those lobbying to win them over (John Hawkes, Tim Blake Nelson, and James Spader). When Congress is in session, the halls of power reverberate with passionate arguments, sneering counterarguments, and witty rejoinders that become a raucous clamor of insults, outrage, and powerful rhetoric.

Tony Kushner’s lively script gives all of the actors wonderfully written, fully formed roles. In fact, this script as a whole is a marvel: sharply written, dense, easily complex and learned, funny, moving, and genuinely inspirational as well. After Angels in America and Munich, he continues his pattern of turning history into deeply felt, expansive works of art. With Lincoln he’s written one of the sharpest, smartest screenplays in recent memory, eagerly intelligent and memorably erudite in a way that respects the audience’s ability to keep up. He gives the film a structure of conversations, debates, and monologues that Spielberg films closely and attentively. Cinematographer Janusz Kaminski, painting the frames with light, generously holds the actors steady in the frame, slowly pushing in for dramatic emphasis or pulling back to reveal import of relationships within their surroundings.

This is a film of deceptively simple craft; beautifully complex compositions and subtle camera movements add up to an epic that’s gloriously restrained, spending much time indoors amidst impeccable period detail of mud and cold, flickering flames and creaky floors. Perhaps Spielberg’s least formally showy film is in fact a tremendous fragile beauty with sharp lovely imagery that bores into the core truth of any given scene. There’s nothing inherent in the material that’s stopping Spielberg from pulling back, sweeping his camera across a CG 19th-century Washington D.C. skyline or panning across a massive troop formation. But he keeps his camera close, emphasizing the humanity of these historical figures, no matter how heroic or loathsome. It’s a film about how epochal historic change is never easy, is made by flawed people trying to balance idealism and pragmatism to the best of their abilities.

The film’s an experiential nail-biter, as involving and transporting as period films come. Though we know how it all must end, the film’s final moments hit triumphant notes of uplift and sorrow. Lincoln’s assassination is handled beautifully, all the more powerful for what it omits and elides. It’s smartly staged, sure, but it’s also hugely emotional, one of the most powerful death scenes in recent memory despite its tact and relative lack of sentiment. A film that begins by humanizing an icon returns this man to his iconic status, a position all the richer for having lived through his final months. Now, once again, he belongs to the ages.