Human Boys from the Deep: LUCA

As gentle and lovely as a seaside breeze, and as fragile and fleeting as a summer friendship, Pixar’s Luca is a magical animated movie. So many American animators claim Miyazaki as an inspiration, but here’s the rare film that proves it in action. In ways reminiscent of the Japanese master, director Enrico Casarosa (of the short La Luna) and his talented team have made a film aware to subtle shifts in character dynamics, legible to even a small child, but stirring in the detail, compassion, and earnest emotion, with which it’s carried out. And it’s one with nature, keyed into the dappling sunshine and soft tides, the waves lapping the beach and the drops of dew and rain slowly dropping on cobblestone streets. Within these sights, the story follows a timid young sea monster (Jacob Tremblay) who is curious about land. He falls into a quick companionship with a slightly older sea monster boy (Jack Dylan Grazer) who, shockingly to our young protagonist, lives in an abandoned lighthouse in a bay overlooking a charming cliffside Italian village. When out of water, these sea creatures look human, and the boys have fun learning to play like people do. Flipping their fins got them this far. Sure, the villagers in a small-town mid-century Italian paradise — with exquisite rustic architecture and period detail from crackling radios to apt movie posters — hate the mythical beasts of the sea, but they have gelato and bikes and plenty of pasta. The boys are going to like it here, if they can stay. Dazzling Pixar craft makes the movie a consistent stunner of light and movement as the boys try on life in this new place. The look of the film is a soft cartoony embellishment that’s rounded and cozy, befitting the swooning picturesque setting and sophisticated simple wackiness motoring the plot.

The picture remains causal and loose as far as these types of stories go, with the goals and stakes relatively small, but oh-so-big for those involved. The boys think they want a Vespa. They must avoid the younger boy’s parents (Maya Rudolph and Jim Gaffigan), who figure out blessedly quickly what’s happened. They all must hide their identities and thus even the tiniest splash of water, no small feat by the beach. With Pixar’s typical clockwork plotting and mad-scramble climaxes done up here in a beautifully underplayed mood, the movie navigates a sweet whimsy. There’s strong melancholy in swift and impactful moments that never loses the overall childlike wonder, with soft but strong laughs and rubbery cartoony gags stretching the adorable character designs in fancifully well-designed slapstick. When a daydream finds a herd of wild Vespas roaming the countryside, or a bike crash ends with a halo of fish swimming around one’s head, or an eccentric uncle from the deep goes on about whale carcasses, the movie shows off its fantasy with quick shorthand strokes. And it has good fun watching the boys scramble around water to avoid capture, though of course the surly cat named Machiavelli smells something fishy. A fast friendship with a sweet underdog girl (Emma Berman) is a good sign; that her dad is a one-armed fisherman is maybe less so.

The consistent charming invention on display always returns to the boys’ shifting emotions, plugged into their perspective to an attentive and sensitive degree. Despite potential dangers and disappointments, the movie keeps things in perspective. This sunny and well-paced movie is always tenderly attuned to the dynamics of friendships, with the boys’ giddy good-natured playfulness, brash inquisitiveness, and nervous energies making for a fizzy boyish chemistry. And their evolving understanding of themselves and those around them makes this the rare coming of age story that understands such a process happens not all at once, in one momentous summer, but by testing and attempting, by forging new connections, stepping safely out of your comfort zone, discovering new talents, and learning how to be yourself. That Luca arrives at the same well-earned bittersweet teary-eyed character beats by the end that you’d expect of Pixar’s best should be no surprise. But it’s all the more impactful for slipping in naturally and honestly as an outgrowth of getting to know these characters, springing out of their smallest shifts of mood and maturation. The result is as bittersweet, sunny, and satisfying as a perfect summer day.

Write and Wrong: THE BOOK OF HENRY

Now three films into his career, it’s safe to say the defining feature of a Colin Trevorrow picture is an unfamiliarity with actual human behavior. With irritating high-concept indie dramedy Safety Not Guaranteed and thunderously tone-deaf Jurassic World, he exhibited both basic competency behind the camera and a total lack of understanding as to how any consistent or recognizable human characteristics might develop in front of it. This led to some painful movies, potentially fun scenarios completely undermined and undone by a feeling like they’re movies made by someone only aware of other movies, endless regurgitations of tropes and ideas (and problematic perspectives) from better inspirations with no concept of why they were evocative in the first place. But his latest, The Book of Henry, takes such painful artificiality to new heights that I couldn’t help but admire its oddball overflowing grab bag of sentimentality, manipulation, and unpredictability. It got me. This might not be a good movie, dripping as it is in knockoff Amblin 80’s polish and driven by characters and decisions that strain credulity at many turns. But I found it to be an entertaining and involving one. It’s all of a piece. Here Trevorrow is making a strange B-movie, but hardly seems to know it, so smothers it in A-level, high-gloss mushiness, feel-good soppiness, and mechanical tear-jerking. This very tension, combined with the plot’s unpredictability, had me invested in discovering what could possibly happen next. 

As it begins, introducing a precocious 11-year-old (Jaeden Lieberher), the movie looks to be setting up a Very Special Kid narrative. He delivers a wordy extemporaneous paragraph in class, to which his teacher says in a transparently expository way, “Remind me again why we can’t put you in a gifted school?” Never mind that he doesn’t appear to be too terribly advanced for his grade level, he’s coded as brilliant. He helps his single mom (Naomi Watts) keep track of her finances. (They have no money problems despite her part-time waitressing job, with only tossed off references to stocks to explain it away.) He makes Rube Goldberg inventions. He reads incessantly. He indulges in some child’s play with his adorable little brother (Jacob Tremblay). He has a crush on the withdrawn, mostly silent dancer next door (Maddie Ziegler), and banters with his mom’s sarcastic alcoholic co-worker (Sarah Silverman). It treats him as unbelievably intelligent and persuasive, but at least the movie knows enough to make its ultimate plot resolution hinge on a key character reminding herself that no matter how brilliant an 11-year-old may be, that child should not be making life-and-death decisions for adults. 

All seems quirky family film well, but then the movie shifts into darker territory as the boy Rear Window-style spies a neighbor (Dean Norris) do something truly terrible. He secretly starts planning a way to take the man down. See what I mean by a B-movie in disguise lurking under the twinkling Michael Giacchino score and John Schwartzman’s crisp autumnal cinematography? Watch it with the sound off and you’d think you were watching a high-budget Hallmark card, not a pint-sized revenge-by-proxy movie. That’d be enough for some features, but the screenplay by Gregg Hurwitz (a thriller novelist in his feature debut) piles on more: a sudden disease diagnosis, a mild Psycho protagonist shift, a mysterious notebook, an elaborate posthumous plan, and a procession of sequences that, if you squint a little, make Movie Logic sense, but leave little room for how actual humans would process them. Characters instead cohere as collections of plot needs and design details. There’s heightened cloying button-pushing happening, with teary-eyed close-ups and dramatic flourishes built out of raw emotions used as phony grist for turning the gears of a treacly family drama with disturbing content kept slyly aloft from their full impacts.

Why, then, did it work for me? I chalk it up to the consummate professionalism on display by the craftspeople – this is one handsome movie – and the actors – Watts’ maternal warmth, Tremblay’s sympathetic cuteness, Norris’ subtle menacing gravity. They manage to hold it together, finding emotional continuity despite the plot’s best efforts. Its story lurches, but the tone doesn’t falter, like everyone involved had no idea how odd it is. I didn’t stop to ask questions, because I was pulled along by the movie’s heartfelt artificiality and was engaged by the likable performers who must be good, because I only noted the frayed edges and logical leaps to pull apart after the fact. I was in the moment. The movie stumbles and strains, but strides so confidently through its twists and turns and straight-faced improbabilities that I couldn’t help but be charmed by its very existence. As unlikely as it grows – each development more so than the last, right up to a climax intercutting a school talent show with, on the other side of town, a stalking sniper – I was entertained. It’s so blatantly artificial and earnestly manipulative, I didn’t mind going along.

Mother & Child: JAMES WHITE and ROOM

In James White and Room, two of 2015’s sharpest, most intimate, and intelligently moving dramas, the stories of a mother and her son take center stage. These are films with rich emotional terrain in claustrophobic settings, relationships trapped in place, with characters hoping for a miraculous way out to better futures. In James White an aimless twenty-something is caring for his mother as she slowly dies of cancer in her New York City apartment. In Room, a kidnapped young woman lives imprisoned in a shed with the 5-year-old she had with her captor and rapist. The films follow two very different dramatic scenarios, traumatic events where the love between mother and child is the only lifeline. The sons are naïve, confused, easily frustrated. The mothers are strong, complicated, and sad. And there are no easy answers.

James White is the feature debut of writer-director Josh Mond, who makes a great first impression with a film of uncommonly blistering emotional honesty. The title character (played by an intense and sorrowful Christopher Abbott) is a painfully relatable rootless man in his late twenties – jobless, single, stuck. He’s a guy theoretically with many options for creating a life for himself, but can’t figure out where best to start, or how to find his break. This could be the start for an Apatow-ian man-child redemption arc, complete with a potential new love interest (Mackenzie Leigh) and a funny friend (Scott Mescudi). But Mond, through a close, expressive camera and sharply perceptive script, excavates arrested adolescent clichés to find deep, overwhelming reservoirs of pain and truth underneath. Here’s a young man who is truly stuck, not only by immaturity, or the obligations of taking care of his ailing mother, but by a helpless feeling as he sees the comfortable future he’d always assumed he’d have slipping away. He can’t see a way forward, so he’s just waiting for life to start.

Cynthia Nixon, as his dying mother, delivers an astonishingly complex portrait of a sickly woman who sees the struggles of her son and wishes she could help, even as she leans on him to get through each day. She knows there’s only so much encouragement she can provide before he needs to find on his own the initiative and lucky breaks that’ll help him move forward. She doesn’t want him using her illness as just another excuse to stay put. Sure, she’s scared of dying, but she’s also worried about leaving her boy to figure out the world on his own. (She’s been separated from his father, who has died shortly before the film begins, an added mournful layer.) Slow-motion grief is displayed in agonizingly precise emotional specificity, as are the frustrations of being young and disconnected from those around you. It’s not every young person who has to watch a parent die. It’s one thing to head out into the so-called real world to start your own life. It’s another thing entirely to have no parents to go back to.

An early scene finds James in a club, alone, listening to his own music through headphones. He’s always separated, distant, suffocating in his sadness and stasis, even when talking to friends and flirts. Selfish, bitter, angry, anxious, and mean, James isn’t always a pleasant figure, but that’s what makes Mond’s film so satisfying an unflinching character study. It’s a film of compassion towards its characters, but never indulges their flaws, understanding them without excusing them. This makes moments of fleeting pure goodness and connection all the more transcendent. In the film’s most moving and devastating scene, James uses his tendency to live in his own interior world to extend an invitation to his mother, using a shared imagined cozy future to provide some comfort. They talk about a time, years from now, when she’ll be the warm grandmother and he’ll be the happy family man. They know it’ll never arrive, but can still take solace in this oasis of hope and connection in a world stretched thin with sadness.

While James White is about a mother slowly fading away, hoping her son finds some way out of his depression, Room concerns itself with a more literal captivity, where hope is for a more literal freedom. And yet it finds in its potential True Crime luridness – screenwriter Emma Donoghue, adapting her own novel, was inspired by similar real life stories – a wisely observed empathy. Steadfastly humane, and gentle in its decidedly non-sensationalistic approach to the nastier moments, the film is attuned to the psychological effects of its scenario on all involved. The mother (Brie Larson) is both victim and protector. The boy (Jacob Tremblay) has never known any different. He thinks Room is the entire world, and everything else is imaginary outer space. When his mother finally decides to tell him the truth, at a level he can understand, it’s a shock. He doesn’t want to believe, but then, slowly, he begins to understand that they need to escape.

The first half of Room is claustrophobic, intensely small. The mother leads her boy through exercises, tries to teach him as best she can, and feeds him with supplies dropped off by the captor on his weekly trips to rape her. (The boy is hidden away in a wardrobe where he can’t see the attacks on his mother.) This is intense subject matter, softened but not diminished by its perspective, narrated by the kid in a precocious and innocent voice. There’s great narrative and emotional clarity, as the film presents its character’s thoughts with ease, Larson and Tremblay doing impressive work communicating interiority with a shift of appearance. The camera is close, always ready to catch faces in motion, in dramatic outbursts and microexpressions alike. And yet the movie never grows visually stale, always finding clear and casual ways to chart their predicament without imprisoning the viewer alongside them.

When it, at last, approaches a pivot point, the film grows richer still, allowing us to see how difficult it would be to go on living with such a massive trauma, such lingering confusion. There’s an entire second half to the story that continues well past where other, lesser, versions of this story would claim victory, then catharsis, then stop. Donoghue keeps going, committing to the concept so fully she wants to see it through, consider its implications from all sides. We go beyond the room. We see other characters. The world opens up, as overwhelming as it is a relief. And there we find the movie’s real power sits not in its skillful conjuring of unimaginable trauma, but in its wise and compassionate understanding of how thoroughly such a scenario would complicate one’s life.

There’s no easy resolution, and the messy emotions it invokes in the characters will take a great deal of time to heal. By allowing us access to the mother’s conflicting and confusing feelings – great love for her child, but great fear and resentment for the situation that led to his creation – that’ll make healing a long, difficult, and in some ways impossible challenge. This is a film that’s smartly concerned with the impact of its ideas. The strong script and tremendous performances make this director Lenny Abrahamson’s best film. He brings it to vivid life by focusing it all on the emotional core, modulating the production design, from expansive smallness of captivity, to exterior wide spaces pressing in, as he creates a convincing world of complicated psychological territory seen through the eyes of a child, and through the lens of connection between mother and son. Love can’t conquer all, but it sure can help.