House of Cards: THE BIG SHORT

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

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

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

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

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

Stale Act: MAGIC IN THE MOONLIGHT

Woody Allen works so quickly that it’s hardly surprising he tends to alternate his more interesting efforts with movies that clearly could’ve used some extra revisions before filming. You don’t make a film a year for over forty years without making a statistically notable batch of stinkers. (There’s your obligatory reference to Allen’s large body of work.) When he’s good, he’s good, but when he’s bad, the movies sit there slowly dying before your eyes. To make a metaphor out of his favorite music style, he’s a jazz virtuoso who has noodled around the same notes for so long, he’d rather hit bum notes than stop. His latest feature, Magic in the Moonlight, is as somnambulant a picture as he’s ever made, a snooze from frame one. It’s easily one of his weakest efforts.

It tells a dusty story of a world-famous magician (Colin Firth) asked by his best friend (Simon McBurney) to help investigate a pretty young psychic (Emma Stone) and her stage mother (Marcia Gay Harden). He fears they are scamming a rich widow (Jacki Weaver) and her grown son (Hamish Linklater) who have fallen for a phony baloney medium act hook, line, and sinker. It’s a fine screwball setup, but it’s played without a pulse, without wit, and completely devoid of inner life. It looks pleasant, filled up with sun-dappled cinematography by Darius Khondji in widescreen compositions showing off sumptuous locations in the south of France. Set in the Jazz Age that was deftly exploited in Midnight in Paris, there’s no magical realism here, just characters in period garb trading the stalest of bon mots.

There’s a dash of Pygmalion in reverse to the proceedings, as a stuffy British gentleman is determined to unmask the young lady’s attempts to pass herself off as something she’s not. In inverting the classic concept, comedy is lost to condescension. It’s not about a man helping a woman, but instead tearing her down and lording his superior position and power over her. (It’s hard to escape thinking of various Allen scandals with such flatly played underlying ugliness.) That there’s a romance involved – not to mention one with such an age difference – makes it all the more difficult to get on board. Firth is a perfect pompous fussbudget and Stone’s wide eyes and flapper’s physique make a fine foil. I especially liked the way she twitched her eyes wider when receiving her “mental vibrations.” But the plot turns so slowly, situations developing without much in the way of conflict or character. There’s nothing to latch onto.

The worst of it is, I can easily imagine a charming period comedy that could be made with this ensemble and crew. It looks wonderful, the ensemble has a talent for crisp comic scenarios, and Allen can be a funny writer. But none of that appears on screen. It’s so thinly developed, with supporting roles fading away and the leads dutifully making their characters’ arcs hit their marks. Allen’s investigation of a skeptic and a scam artist matching wits is tired. The characters can only be as witty as the script allows, so they come across as gullible drips. And every time a character finds something close to genuine emotion, it’s played off with a scoff. If the movie wasn’t going to take itself too seriously, that’s one thing. But to be light and airy without providing a single pleasing development, tickling thematic construct, or interesting turn of phrase is to be nothing at all.

Earned Run: 42

We haven’t had a solid, clear, feel-good biopic in quite some time, so 42 will do nicely. It tells the story of Jackie Robinson (Chadwick Boseman), a star baseball player in the late 1940s Negro Leagues who is given the chance to join the Brooklyn Dodgers by that team’s stubborn general manager (Harrison Ford). In the grand tradition of illustrated easy reader biographies – you know, the kind with a title like Jackie Robinson: Young Sports Trailblazer – this is a film of big broad strokes of biographical material spiced up with vivid, simple lessons about how terrible racism is and how average people with courage to do good things can sometimes make all the difference in the world. Writer-director Brian Helgeland, no stranger to sports movie formula given his anachronistic jousting movie A Knight’s Tale, brings a sense of sturdiness to the proceedings. It’s a brightly lit crowd-pleaser and a fine piece of Hollywood hero worship.

I’ll leave it to baseball historians to tell you how accurate the movie is, but as a movie, 42 works well to limit itself to Robinson’s ascent to the Dodgers and his first season playing for them. The incidents it chronicles are roughly those featured in the 1950 film The Jackie Robinson Story. Although that film starred Robinson as himself, I’ll go out on a limb and say that this new film is more truthful about the extent of the problems Robinson faced as the first African American to play in what was at the time an all-white league. There’s dissension from the public, sure, as well as from rival teams. In the film’s most effective sequence, an opposing team’s coach (Alan Tudyk) sends a relentless barrage of ugly slurs and stereotypes towards the batter’s box during every at bat. The film is also wise to avoid hiding the dissent that came from within the Dodgers organization, making it clear that Robinson’s mere presence in a previously all-white society was sometimes enough to unsettle otherwise reasonable people.

Despite the admirable details, Helgeland pulls his punches a bit. The ugliness of history is ugly here, but maybe not ugly enough. The thematic import of some scenes is underlined too forcefully, like in a cute but clunky scene of a little boy in the crowd explaining the game and, in the process, Robinson’s talent, to his mother. Still, it’s a better movie when it’s a baseball movie that’s incidentally a history lesson than when it’s the other way around. It’s my own personal prejudice that baseball is the most cinematic of sports, with naturally occurring long stretches of slow suspense and an interesting geometric playing field good for wide angles and interesting depth in framing. (That opinion may also have something to do with baseball being the only sport I find interesting to watch for any length of time.) Helgeland stages the games vividly and enjoyably, grabbing at scraps of tension related to both the game and the dynamics between the players, while never losing sight of Robinson’s presence.

As Robinson, Chadwick Boseman takes advantage of his first starring role, dripping charm and inviting sympathy with every glance. He plays the role as a simple ballplayer, aware of the pressure he’s under, but unaware of his legacy. If only all biopic performances were worn so lightly. There’s a dusting of romance care of Mrs. Robinson (Nicole Beharie, very fine) and the sweet sparkle between she and Boseman balances out the historical import that could’ve easily weighed the film down. The film has plenty of good performances from welcome character actors in sharply written historical caricatures. As the boundary-busting general manager Branch Rickey, Ford is a crusty charmer in what has to be his liveliest acting in quite a few years. Team management (Christopher Meloni, T.R. Knight), teammates (Lucas Black, Ryan Merriman, Hamish Linklater), and a radio announcer (John C. McGinley) are also given brief little moments in which to shine. It’s the well-rounded ensemble that helps fill out the background and keep the film from becoming only hagiography.

But what a wonderful sight to see such hero worship! Robinson’s a true black hero, a subject too infrequently taken up by filmmakers, at least on a massive, mainstream, studio level. (It’d make for an interesting double feature with Django Unchained in that regard.) When was the last time Hollywood deigned to roll out a major release focusing on a strong, complicated figure of African American history? I think you’d have to look back just over ten years, to 2001’s Ali, or twenty years, to 1992’s Malcolm X, to find such a picture. 42 may not have the artistry of those films, but is such a sturdy success that I’d love to see many more like it.  

Sunk: BATTLESHIP

I don’t know if the nonstop digital chaos and noise wore me down or what, but parts of Battleship aren’t that bad. The main plot point of this movie-based-on-a-board-game is that during joint military exercises between the United States and Japan off the coast of Hawaii, an alien ship of some kind comes in for a splash landing and opens fire. So the movie’s basically American and Japanese sailors protecting Pearl Harbor from alien invasion. Why, that’s almost enough to bring a tear to the eye. Well, in a better movie it would be, one interested in exploring context and building characters or metaphors or providing any sort of narrative momentum or rooting interest other than “Blow up them aliens real good!” It’s a thin blockbuster that takes forever getting started and then has little but unoriginal drivel to get to once it does.

The payoff of all this is actually somewhat competent as far as these kind of big, impersonal blow-‘em-up blockbusters go. It’s the setup that’s totally bonkers and tonally messy, which dilutes the climactic excitement, reducing it to merely better than what’s come before. Screenwriters Erich and Jon Hoeber start us off with some pretty weird scenes that collide into each other in awkward ways. First, we meet twenty-something screw-up Alex (Taylor Kitsch) sitting in a bar, getting a lecture from his Naval-officer brother (Alexander Skarsgård). It’s a grow-up and get-responsible kind of lecture that awkwardly segues into a happy-birthday cupcake. Then a blonde bombshell (Brooklyn Decker) walks in and Alex goes over to hit on her. She wants a burrito but the bartender won’t give her one this late at night. Alex tries to get one for her and ends up breaking into a closed convenience store to do so, getting tased for his troubles.

Cut to some unspecified time later. Alex is now in the Navy, too. He’s talking about marrying blondie, but she wants him to ask her dad, Admiral Liam Neeson, for her hand first. Also there’s a pre-war games soccer game between America and Japan’s sailors that he loses and a subsequent fight that he gets into. He’s in real danger of getting bounced out of the military after these military exercises are over with, but is also third in command or something. I don’t get it either. This whole jumble of exposition and character building is so confused and tone-deaf, as if the writers had a vague sense of how movies worked and figured they better set up the whos, whats, wheres, whens, and whys before getting into the action, but had little idea of how to actually go about doing that.

But then, the aliens arrive. These unseen baddies set up a force field around the islands, cutting off a few battleships from all outside help. Poor Liam Neeson can only appear in one or two scenes where he looks determined, worried, and utterly powerless to intervene. Meanwhile, blondie is stuck on the side of a Hawaiian mountain where she is occasionally called upon to interact with a veteran (real veteran Gregory D. Gadson) who has two prosthetic legs and together the two of them look over at some aliens off in the distance and look worried. It’s up to good old Alex to rise to the occasion and figure out how to stop the alien invasion. And I haven’t even mentioned the quivering scientist (Hamish Linklater), also stranded on that mountain, whose satellite array brought the aliens to Hawaii in the first place. There’s also the scowling Petty Officer played by pop star Rihanna and the comic relief (I guess?) provided by Jesse Plemons. They get to scowl and crack wise and shoot big guns.

But anyways, all these characters are trapped in this impenetrable energy bubble. I was all ready to hate the movie based on how terminally uninvolving and unbelievably sloppy I found the schlocky first hour (or more) of this 131-minute movie. Even the opening alien salvo is just nonsense, shredding city streets and toppling buildings in a familiar and dull way. A main character dies almost immediately when a battleship goes down and I hardly cared. But then a funny thing happened. The movie picks up some steam and charges forward into occasionally diverting silliness. It doesn’t get good, exactly, but it moves up from awful to just plain watchable mediocrity. By the end I wasn’t enjoying myself, exactly, but the highly improbable use of a floating museum in the climax made me smile a little.

And it’s kind of clever how the gameplay of Battleship is integrated into the movie. The battleships can’t detect the alien vessels on their radar, but luckily the alien ships can’t seem to spot them either. Luckily a Japanese officer (Tadanobu Asano) comes aboard to help the Americans detect the vessels. He does something related to water displacement and buoy sensors, but the end result is a grid that looks suspiciously like the board game. “E-11!” “Fire!” “Anything?” “It’s a miss!” The following sequence is rather suspenseful, if more than a little goofy. But it’s not any sillier than the way the alien’s missiles are cylinders with little pegs in the bottom so that they stick in the battleships before blowing up. Again, like the game. This is what’s modestly involving about the movie. I never cared about the characters. The humans are mostly indistinguishable except for the main characters that we’re told to like and root for just because they are the main characters. The aliens are just a squishy, flavorless, derivative horde. What do they even want? Who knows? Open fire!

The problem that plagues the movie all the way through is the lack of personality. That’s why the flashes of board-game-referencing winks are the most enjoyable moments; they’re the only relatable, recognizable moments. The acting’s simply functional for such dysfunctional roles. Neeson’s wasted. Kitsch is a blank. (John Carter had a much better role for him.) Rihanna could actually be a good (or even great) action star in a better movie; she has plenty of tough charm here. Linklater’s scientist gets one sort of good line when he comes crashing out of the jungle: “They killed my grad students!” Decker was hired for her cleavage. Not helping the actors much at all are the action and effects which, from the aliens’ designs right down to the nonstop weightless carnage, are just so much shiny digital confusion.

Director Peter Berg, not the most consistent of filmmakers (on the one hand, Friday Night Lights, on the other, Hancock), has shot it all in a style that can only be called watered-down Michael Bay. It’s all of the militarism and convoluted plotting with none of the idiosyncratic personality and ability to create striking imagery. Love him or hate him, it’s hard to deny that Bay has a distinctive style and when he’s given a big, loud set-piece to execute he knows, for better or worse, how to play it up big.  Here Berg’s only cobbling together a pale imitation, serving up so little payoff that there’s little sense waiting through the setup.