Cutting Class: KNIVES OUT

One of writer-director Rian Johnson’s greatest qualities is his ability to surprise without sacrificing his trustworthiness as a storyteller. His films are idiosyncratic without being unduly erratic, thoughtfully engaged with their chosen genres without stepping outside of their tropes, capable of grand loop-de-loops surprising audience expectations while making the outcome beautifully air-tight inevitable. He’s a mainstream filmmaker — recently with appealing sci-fi spectacles like moody time-travel assassin thriller Looper and the soulful, satisfying Last Jedi — aware of both the necessary elephantine expressions of recognizable story mechanics and burrowing termite interest of carefully selected specific details. He can take us effortlessly into places we’d never expect, because at every step of the way, we know we’re in good hands. He’s as clever as he is knowledgeable. His new film, Knives Out, is a wickedly well-done murder mystery, indebted indisputably to hundreds of detectives stories of yore, and yet plays out its story so fluidly and delightfully that it feels fresh nonetheless. As the movie begins, an elderly millionaire mystery author (Christopher Plummer) has been found in his study with his throat slit and a knife in his hand. The local cops (Lakeith Stanfield and Noah Segan) are prepared to call it a suicide when a well-known detective (Daniel Craig, with a melodious Southern accent) steps in to consult on the case. He’s prepared to look at every detail again, and scrutinize every member of the dead writer’s squabbling, privileged family. Sure, the case appears open-and-shut, but he just wants to see it with his fresh eyes, eliminating no possibilities and no suspects. Holmes and Poirot and Dupin would be proud. In Johnson’s hugely entertaining screenplay, bristling with witty asides, barbed feints, and prickly offhand political resonance, the family members are interviewed, with plenty of brisk, bantering back-and-forth editing into and out of interlocking flashbacks sketching in the moments leading up to the mysterious death. So many have motives, and so many witnesses weave in and out of other’s stories, that it’ll take a while to untangle the knotty web, to winnow the suspects' bratty rich-kid motives from those capable of murderous intent.

It’s a terrific ensemble, perfectly cast, every person on screen, down to the smallest one-scene roles, quickly, expertly characterized with energetic shorthand and snappy individualism. There’s the regal real estate mogul daughter (Jamie Lee Curtis), her duplicitous husband (Don Johnson), and their entitled grown boy (Chris Evans); a business-manger son (Michael Shannon) and his glowering alt-right offspring (Jaden Martel); a shallow daughter-in-law (Toni Collette) and her differently-shallow daughter (Kathryn Langford); and, in the center of the madness, a home health aide (Ana de Armas) whose sweetness and good heart made her a kind companion to the late old man, but leaves her on the outside looking in as the vultures circle. Whodunnit is of course the primary question, but as Johnson unravels his tale, the why’d-they-dunnit becomes as interesting. As in all good detective stories, the personalities and the accumulation of clues are as deeply pleasurable as the eventual reveals where the puzzle snaps into place, and Johnson places each new piece on the table with stylish verve. The whip-smart cutting and pace stays just ahead of the characters and just behind the mystery’s solution, while never going out of its way to hide its cards or throw up false tangents to shake off the scent. It all falls into place with a logical snap, each payoff set up, even when you didn’t realize it at the time. The production design — a big house full of creaky staircases and teetering bookshelves and morbid knickknacks — is a handsomely cozy setting, fitting such a tale. As one investigator quips, the old man lived in a Clue board. The camera work is energetic and inspired — and, oh, so beautifully textured — without distracting from the cool logic of the proceedings, while the characters are broad yet warm, at once caricatures yet imbued with all-too-understandable humanity. It’s richly developed, never just a film of pawns in a master-mystery-mind’s game. That’s how well this game is played. This is the best film of its kind in quite some time.

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.

Run All Night: MIDNIGHT SPECIAL

One of the most remarkable aspects of Jeff Nichols’ Midnight Special is just how far it gets without needing to explain itself. In fact, by the time the end credits roll there hasn’t been extended meaningful exposition. Instead we’ve seen a sci-fi tinged on-the-run thriller about a boy and his father fleeing shadowy government forces and heavies from their church’s compound, a chase across the South that charges forward with simmering tension and intimate, methodical strategy. It’s a thriller with respect for the majesty of the unexplainable. With casual magic and mystery, it weaves into suspense tiny grace notes, finding large wonderment in small details, implying more than it says outright. The film saves big reveals for so long, and answers them in sideways intuitive ways. We’re left with more questions than answers in a most satisfying result. It’s tantalizing and evocative, grand filmmaking on a small scale, huge implications left dangling with an ethereal, almost spiritual mystique.

As the story begins we hear the muffled sounds of an Amber Alert on an old TV in a shabby motel room. A boy (Jaeden Lieberher) has been kidnapped. He’s in this room with his captors, a situation diffused of immediate danger to him as it’s slowly revealed he has been taken from a fundamentalist cult and its pastor (Sam Shepard) by his biological father (Michael Shannon) and a friend (Joel Edgerton) determined to take him to freedom. They travel under the cover of darkness, move quickly, and meet up with collaborators (including Kirsten Dunst) for daylight respites. They’re under a tight deadline involving coordinates and secret messages. They’re moving him to a better life, following mystery directives we slowly come to understand. Nichols maintains impeccable tension in this cloud of ambiguity by keeping close attention on the specificities, the small details in the process of fleeing across state lines.

The film works through a confident and relaxed focus on the hows, not the whys, allowing its later leaps to feel more intuitive and excusable. Steady shots take in precise steps taken to avoid detection, lingering on the clack of a gun being loaded, the stretch of swimming goggles perpetually protecting the boy’s eyes, the engine noises in various makes and models of vehicles, the snap of headlights disappearing on a dark Texan road in the middle of the night. The danger sits in the risks the boy’s father is willing to take to keep him from agents (like Adam Driver) and other governmental forces who seek to claim the boy for further study (echoes of Spielberg’s Close Encounters and E.T. and Carpenter’s Starman), and the church’s flunkies (Bill Camp and Scott Haze) who are out to capture him for the purposes of exploiting his gifts. Science and religion both attach grand meanings to massive unknowns. Fear and tension is in the doubt about what’ll happen if his father fails. The stakes are clear.

Nichols, whose work including the powerful mental illness nightmare Take Shelter, laconic family tragedy Shotgun Stories, and boyhood crime-fable Mud shows a gift for patient, empathetic, and self-assuredly paced stories, approaches Midnight Special with his typical good judgment. It’s not a loud or flashy sci-fi adventure; we don’t get genre efforts this confidently circumspect, beautifully restrained everyday, certainly not bankrolled by a major studio. He trusts silence, stillness, while still ramping up the thrills when called for. He reveals what we need to know through action, tells us about character through behaviors. This is a beautifully photographed (by Nichols’ usual cinematographer Adam Stone) and contained movie – set in stolen cars, cheap motels, tiny command centers – gathering suspense and sweep off the back of small emotional exchanges and intimate interpersonal investments.

It helps that the cast does fine work across the board, performers who can sketch in pain and determination with a glance, or a few well-chosen lines. It approaches Cormac McCarthy territory in some of its terse dialogue in dusty landscapes, sharp and expressive for their brevity, people who can’t risk feeling too much lest the crushing weight of their actions’ enormity – embodied in the wide open spaces around them – stops them cold. Shannon looks at his boy with such tenderness and caring, while charging forward with single-minded drive to protect him at all costs. Edgerton’s blind loyalty is quiet competence. Dunst’s maternal energy manifests itself as submerged worry pushed into protective energy, while young Lieberher has a serene otherworldliness that makes incredibly clear the uneasy extrasensory gifts will lead this road-trip to an ending no one understands. They just know it must be done.

What, exactly, are the powers of this boy at the center of so much drama? They remain beautifully vague. He can hear radio and satellite signals, is affected by sunlight – hence another good reason for night travel beyond hiding from authorities – and occasionally his eyes glow with eerie blue light. We’re told that to look into this illuminated stare is to see glimpses of a better world. Could there be a more lovely, forceful, intuitive metaphor for the lengths a parent will go to protect a child? They see overwhelming hope in his eyes. It’s a movie about parents protecting a child from the world and helping manifest his gifts, even if they don’t understand them. It’s about support for the boy’s future, wherever it may take him. It’s about the pain and profound contentment of caring for a child – a key moment finds Shannon telling his boy, “I like worrying about you” – and the difficulty of letting that child make his own path. The film’s powerful conclusion brings this metaphor to stirring heights, conjuring Amblin awe and blending it with an unearthly melancholy.

The result is a movie that plays out as a plaintive old-fashioned country flavor in a hair-raising low-key sci-fi mode, an usual combination that’s nonetheless comforting in its throwback appeals. It is involving and compelling for what is not said and what is left to the imagination, giving the Big Moments that much more room to excite and entrance. Nichols’ interest in human-scale stories brings great sensitivity to Midnight Special’s thrills and astonishments. The film crackles with intrigue and personality without overly insisting on it. Here he injects genre elements into a patient thriller, widening the scope of its implications only in its final moments, executed with aplomb. He trusts an audience to groove on a delicate metaphor and move with trembling echoes of extrasensory wavelengths without needing it all spelled out. Another fine entry in our recent cycle of vintage sci-fi throwbacks, it, like Super 8 and Tomorrowland, looks backwards and forwards, a timeless reinvention of a sturdy genre storytelling mode.

Hello Goodbye: ALOHA

Aloha is another Cameron Crowe picture about a successful man who finds his professional life in jeopardy while his inner life is restored by romance. Furthermore, it’s another of his romantic comedies spiked with office drama, like Jerry Maguire was falling in love while negotiating sports agent business and Matt Damon fell for Scarlett Johansson while she helped him with his zoo in We Bought a Zoo. There’s also Orlando Bloom’s disgraced suit meeting Kirsten Dunst in Elizabethtown, and you could throw the reality-scrambling Vanilla Sky into the mix, with publisher Tom Cruise crushing on Penelope Cruz, if you view its twisty ending optimistically. In Aloha, a depressed defense contractor (Bradley Cooper) survives an explosive encounter in Kabul and is reassigned to Hawaii, where he’s to negotiate a new roadway through Native Hawaiian territory. His military liaison is a bright charming young woman (Emma Stone). If you already think he’ll fall in love and grow a conscience, you’ve been paying attention.

Because Crowe is a warm writer sincere in his sentimentality, he can usually make his formulaic tendencies work. (Of course, he’s even better when drifting away from formula. It’s why Say Anything… is still his best film.) What’s most peculiar about Aloha is how everything around this central romance plot is much more fascinating and effective than what is inside it. Cooper and Stone have fine chemistry playing two people who have to fall in love because they’re the stars of the movie and the script keeps pushing them together. It’s largely unconvincing, following a period of initial irritation, then intense love, then a tearful misunderstanding, and so on. What’s far more interesting is watching Cooper’s interactions with other characters in a breezy, low-key, undemanding story of a man slowly regrowing his conscience.

This growth takes root as Cooper works with his boss (Bill Murray), a tycoon trying to launch a satellite with the armed forces’ help. One gets the impression Cooper has been unscrupulous in the past. Half-articulated military industrial commentary abounds in a guardedly biting way, as the rich man’s real aims are hidden from the brass (Danny McBride and Alec Baldwin). Meanwhile, both public and private interests are all too willing to manipulate Native Hawaiians to go along with their schemes, trading them land and assistance to wave construction through sacred spaces. This thread is far more interesting than whether or not the girl will fall for the guy, especially when their relationship is so thinly sketched and taken for granted. The story is dusted with a few intimations of magical realism that never amounts to anything, and is resolved far too neatly and softly to retain its teeth, but is a more intriguing element in every way.

Better still is a subplot involving an ex-fiancé of Cooper’s, played by Rachel McAdams with glowing happiness tinged with a hint of regret. It's been a dozen years since their break up. She has two kids (Danielle Rose Russell and Jaeden Lieberher) with a military man (John Krasinski). She loves her family. And yet the appearance of her old love gets her thinking. This storyline features the best writing and acting in the film, Crowe at his best drawing relationships that play out with real compassion and unexpected developments. It’s a reflection of where the main character’s life went wrong, a cozy family unit he’s invited to spend time with, but left just on the outside of embracing. There’s too much history there, and too much pressure to get his job done. If the corruption he encounters is the seed of his moral reawakening, seeing the love he left is the fertilizer for this new growth. 

There are plenty of worthwhile pieces to Aloha, but Crowe doesn’t put them together. They play like separate elements instead of a cohesive whole, connected by character and only faint echoes of each other. It’s telling that the conclusion finds several final moments, tying up individual threads – an arrest, several reconciliations, a tearful reveal – without a feeling of overall finality. This is a film of gentle rhythms and light tropical breezes. French cinematographer Eric Gautier captures lovely island landscapes and floats between the performers with ease. Crowe writes a handful of terrific lines and finds some nice cuts from his record collection for the soundtrack. It’s certainly well intentioned. But why does it feel so slight and disconnected? The writing lacks a certain sparkle, and lingers in disjunction between disparate elements. There are strange asides – a grisly toe injury, a ghostly vision – distractingly out of place, appearing once, then never mentioned again. Hardly a disaster, it’s perhaps best to approach Aloha as a sweet, earnest jumble, likable parts in search of a whole.

Same Old Story: ST. VINCENT

Over at Forbes, Scott Mendelson wrote that St. Vincent, the new Bill Murray/Melissa McCarthy film, “could have been written in a quirky indie comedy Mad Libs book.” That’s precisely the reason why I was set to ignore it. I went to see it last weekend and paid good money to do so, but the experience left me completely empty. There are a few sweet touches to the performances, but I could barely hear them over the clunks and clanks of the plot machinery.

It’s a movie about a cranky old man (Murray) whose quiet life of sleeping, gambling, and drinking is interrupted by new neighbors, a single mom (McCarthy) and her precocious ten-year-old son (newcomer Jaeden Lieberher) he reluctantly agrees to babysit after school. Reading that sentence, anyone who has seen any comedy-tinged indie-adjacent drama knows that Murray’s crusty exterior will soften enough to let his warm heart through, McCarthy’s harried mom will find a new support system, and the kid will learn life lessons from an unlikely source.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with telling familiar stories, but writer-director Theodore Melfi brings absolutely nothing to latch onto. It’s not even a tired story told with fresh perspective or confident familiarity. It’s just exactly what you think it’ll be every single step of the way. Like the Ancient Greek poet Hesiod said, “A bad neighbor is a misfortune, as much as a good one is a great blessing.” And sometimes you can find both in the same neighbor, especially if you have someone like Murray who can play up the sarcastic grump as well as the likable schlub with a tragic backstory.

The performances are all fine across the board, including the stacked supporting cast with the likes of Naomi Watts, Chris O’Dowd, and Terrence Howard. They’re good, and Murray has his charming curmudgeon act down as perfectly as McCarthy has instant audience sympathy. Then there’s young Lieberher, who has the right amount of believable intelligence behind his eyes to sell even the most specious precocious moments. But the material is just not up to the level of the performers, who simply can’t make something out of nothing. It’s not that anything goes too terribly wrong with the film. But nothing was engaging or interesting, either. It’s agreeable, but empty, like Melfi’s obvious plot beats, simple sitcom staging, and bright cinematography.

I was all set to let St. Vincent pass uncommented upon by me, but the box office held up surprisingly well in its second week. It’s starting to smell like a modest performer, the kind of warm, undemanding, unsurprising movie that three weeks from now the guy in your office who almost never sees movies and doesn’t particularly like them anyway tells you he saw and wasn’t it something special? I suppose it is a totally competent version of this kind of movie. The performances are good and the final notes of redemption, complete with the typical big school event and a grown-up running in at the last second to show off misty eyes and a solemn nod of support, do ring with a certain earned pleasant feeling that can yank on audience heartstrings. But it’ll be far more entertaining the fewer movies you’ve seen.