Talk it Out: ENOUGH SAID

If simply stated, the story of Nicole Holofcener’s Enough Said could sound like a movie that would lend itself to flailing misunderstandings in service of an Idiot Plot. In it, a middle-aged woman finds herself with a new friend and a new boyfriend and then proceeds to get herself in a situation in which she can’t tell one that she knows the other and vice versa. Now she must juggle the two new relationships without letting the one spoil the other. It’s a quandary that could easily be played with broad implausibility, but instead becomes both understandable and funny through the precision of the writing and performances. Holofcener’s script is smartly written, perceptive in the way it teases out characters’ worries and preoccupations without going too big or too small. It’s a film that’s just right.

As a writer-director, Holofcener has an easy, comfortably verbal way of exploring emotional terrains that feel relatively normal. Potential for high drama remains subdued and situations seemingly primed for broad comedy never quite ignites with silliness. Most of her characters here and in films like her debut Walking and Talking (1996) and her wonderful Please Give (2010) would rather not experience feelings that’d knock them too far beyond even keel. They just want to be happy, feel good about their positions in life, and have good relationships with friends and family. These films present this struggle to either stay there or get there in ways that feel natural. In Enough Said, Holofcener positions her main character, a divorced middle-aged masseuse played winningly by the great Julia Louis-Dreyfus, in the middle of changes to her life. Taking a night off from dealing with an emotionally distant 18-year-old daughter (Tracey Fairaway) who is going away to college soon, she goes to a party where she meets both a nice guy (the late James Gandolfini) who will become her boyfriend and a new client (Catherine Keener) who will become her friend. She’s happy, at first.

The film develops into a light, modest movie about adults having adult problems that arrive more or less believably and are resolved in patient and relatively mature ways. That’s a treat. Holofcener pushes situations forward with bright, sunny cinematography and dialogue that crackles with unhurried natural wit that never feels overwritten. The film is breezy and delicate in the ways it allows the actors to let situations develop and punchlines land harder for not seeming to be punchlines in the first place. There’s fine observation in the comedy that’s airy without seeming superfluous. Louis-Dreyfuss has such ease on camera playing a woman who is relatively confident, but finds her relationships taking on complications she didn’t expect. Her scenes with Gandolfini are the highlight of the picture. His performance is terrific, tender and warm with understated heft. They have an extraordinarily unforced chemistry that’s prickly and flirtatious without seeming overtly giddy or extreme. They’re simply two divorced middle-aged professionals slowly growing fond of each other date after date. It feels so very grown up, and all the more romantic for not trying to be romantic.

Not quite a romantic comedy, the focus is instead on Louis-Dreyfuss as she navigates her many relationships. As her new friend, Keener projects a kindness and a neediness beneath her earthy poet persona that makes it easy to see why she wouldn’t be a friend one would feel eager to lose. It’s important for the balance of the plot that we not care more about a romance with Gandolfini than a friendship with Keener, and it’s to the actors’ and Holofcener’s credit that these characters each feel important in their own ways. Elsewhere, Louis-Dreyfuss has great scenes with old friends (a bristly married couple played by Toni Collette and Ben Falcone) and her daughter’s best friend (Tavi Gevinson). That relationship is especially fascinating, as this teen pulls closer to her friend’s mom even as the daughter pulls away. As an ensemble, the cast feels cohesive, never distracting from the major performance at the center, but adding nicely sketched minor notes of richness. It is with this richness that Holofcener creates a smart comedy that is light, satisfying and so intelligently performed and skillfully written that it doesn’t feel as light as it is.

Slight of Bland: THE INCREDIBLE BURT WONDERSTONE

What a difference ten years makes. In 2003, Jim Carrey starred in the comedy Bruce Almighty as an average guy given the chance to borrow God-like powers, but the real scene-stealer, indeed the only person whose contribution I can remember to this day, was Steve Carell in a supporting role. Now here we are in 2013 with the comedy The Incredible Burt Wonderstone. It stars Carell in the title role while the more memorable moments appear courtesy of Carrey in a supporting role. It’s amazing what can happen to a showbiz career in only a decade, an observation worth noting in connection with Wonderstone since it happens to be a point on which the plot hinges. Carell plays a cheesy, theatrical, old school magician who, with his partner Anton Marvelton (Steve Buscemi), has headlined at a Las Vegas hotel performing the same magic act for ten years. They were wildly popular and wealthy, but the act’s gone stale and ticket sales are plummeting. Their hotelier boss (James Gandolfini) says he’ll fire them and hire a flashy new magician (Jim Carrey), a decision that spurs Wonderstone to put together a new show that’ll wow the crowds all over again.

What follows is a movie that’s big, broad and bland. It’s predictable in every beat right up to the rather mean-spirited finale that’s nonetheless played as triumphant victory. Carell’s Wonderstone is nothing more than a pompous and out-of-touch cheeseball, a sort of softer, off-brand Zoolander. In the movie he follows the predictable arc that starts from top of the world before getting knocked down to low lows until he finds it within himself, through the help of the characters around him, to know better how to find his way back to the top. What little that’s interesting here relates to the tension between the older style of magic making, typified by a mail order magic kit hawked by a slick showman (Alan Arkin) that holds a special place in the lives of Carell and Buscemi, and the newer more aggressive and ugly magic as practiced by the flashy, gross magician played by Carrey. Where our protagonists are average guys all dressed up with pompadours and in velvet making a dancing entrance to Steve Miller Band's "Abracadabra," he’s wiry, with long stringy hair, black clothing and pounding heavy metal. He’s obnoxious, at one point cutting open his cheek to pull out a bloody, folded up playing card. “Is this your card?” he asks. It is. (His final trick is super gross, too. I shall not spoil it, except to say it’s horrifying, cringe-worthy, and a little funny.)

The tension between types of magic, though, is ground under by the homogenized mediocrity of it all in a film eager to use that central conflict as set dressing rather than utilizing it as the intriguing idea that it is. Director Don Scardino (a sitcom staple) finds little of visual interest, preferring instead to keep the in medium shots and let the lines land. It’s too bad the lines in the script by Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daley (they of Horrible Bosses) are largely inoffensive clunkers that go down easily and without impact. It’s a comedy that fails on both on a plot level and on a scene-by-scene basis, gathering up few laughs and even less of a reason to care. Why, then, did I not out-and-out hate this movie? It’s the cast and the cast alone. Carell and Buscemi have a funny sort of buddy chemistry that occasionally wrings some laughter out of the neglected premise. A few of Gandolfini’s line readings are just unexpected enough to bring a sort of backwards gravitas to some very silly moments. And Carrey, flailing about with little to do, nonetheless makes a big impact by bringing total commitment to a nutty part that a lesser comic actor would’ve no doubt undersold.  

I haven’t even mentioned Olivia Wilde yet and that’s a shame. She’s playing a nothing character, a token female presence that is only around to provide an anemic romantic subplot. You could take Wilde out of Wonderstone entirely and the movie would lose exactly nothing in terms of coherence and impact. That’s unfortunate, but the movie is a big nothing all around. It has so many promising elements mixed in with a game cast and yet proceeds to make use of none of them. It’s blandly uninvolving and perplexingly dull, aside from the once or twice I snickered or half-smiled at the best efforts of everyone involved. The whole thing was leaving my head even as I walked out of the theater. I barely remember it as I type these words a day after I saw it, so I doubt I’ll remember anything about it in ten years.

History of Violence: ZERO DARK THIRTY

Zero Dark Thirty is a mercilessly suspenseful thriller, a truthy drama that’s powerfully absorbing as it moves to a foregone conclusion. It is recent events turned into instant ambiguous myth, history rendered cinematic while the ink’s still wet. The story electrically told has intense feelings within. Telling of the decade-long hunt for Osama Bin Laden, especially when starting by playing a mix of static and audio from emergency responders on 9/11 over a black screen, can kick up a desire for revenge. But this is not a movie in which a swooping, heroic camera with broad, patriotic blasts of triumphalism executes a bad guy. Much like Alan J. Pakula and William Goldman’s handling of the then-fresh Watergate scandal in their terrific 1976 film All the President’s Men, director Kathryn Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal play out their procedural through the eyes of the professional people who gathered and sorted inconclusive intelligence, chased down tantalizing leads to dead ends, and sweated out difficult decisions every step of the way.

These are professional people and we are allowed access to their seemingly insurmountable tasks. Detainees are painfully tortured for information that is at best tangentially helpful. Informants meet deadly ends. Bureaucratic shake-ups force shifting strategies. Our guide through it all is a tenacious agent played by Jessica Chastain. She, like Jodie Foster’s Clarice Starling, her closest cinematic relation, is powered by a steely determination to see this investigation through to the end. She guides, prods, and cajoles her coworkers to push further, to simply get something done, even when the exact nature of the something is very much hidden, unknowable in the murk. An officemate in the CIA’s Pakistan office played by Jennifer Ehle asks Chastain how her needle-in-the-haystack operation is coming along. This is a film in which the needle is always clear, the haystack always in the way, and the argument for much of the time is how to analyze a handful of strands. The film is nearly ten years of setbacks and dead ends that are suddenly energized by unexpected breakthroughs, becoming a stop-and-go rush to a long awaited finish line.

Bigelow makes this into the highest-stakes workplace drama imaginable. Violence is used sparingly in the film, occurring suddenly in the field, away from the halls of power where characters try to make sense of it. The supporting cast is rich with great actors doing quickly sketched, jargon-filled, vivid character work. Jason Clarke, Kyle Chandler, Mark Strong, Edgar Ramirez, Harold Perrineau, Mark Duplass, Joel Edgerton, Chris Pratt, and James Gandolfini move around the world of the film, some suits, some military, some Navy SEALs. They each have a job to do and set about doing not a mere patriotic duty, but what they feel is best for their own careers and the lives of their coworkers. A life-and-death mystery plays out simultaneously secretly in cubicles of agencies and embassies and in clandestine spycraft, as well as on a world stage. The latter is kept carefully in the background, through glimpses of Bush’s “Mission Accomplished” speech and Obama’s anti-torture comments on 60 Minutes seen only on TVs pushed into the farthest sides of shot compositions, yet their images are still in sharp focus. Year after year, the big picture, the ultimate goal, remains clear; it’s the foreground, the immediate, that grows fuzzy.

Through the accumulation of detail and interplay between interior and exterior spaces, danger grows and recedes. Through tense focus pulls and quietly layered compositions, the film draws tension out of mundane and brings the mundane into moments of tension. So much is instantly felt when a gust of wind allows a pair of black boots to be glimpsed underneath the hem of a burqa. All is not as it seems. Much like the expertly terrifying sequences following a combat zone bomb squad in her previous film The Hurt Locker (also scripted by Boal), Bigelow creates sequences in which little details add up to sustained nerve jangling suspense. In the opening scene – our protagonist’s first day in the field – she’s instructed to bring a pitcher of water to an interrogator preparing to waterboard a detainee. She draws it from slush in a scuffed blue cooler in the corner of the grimy cell. Torture is shown as a process, a technique, horrifying and casual. Later, there’s a scene in which a maybe suspicious car slowly makes its way into a sandy forward operating base, each puff of its dusty exhaust pipe cause for (hopefully false) alarm.

It all builds, of course, to the raid on Bin Laden’s discovered compound, a mission the details of which are both secret and well publicized. It plays out here in a suspenseful set piece expertly crosscut between grubby night-vision, smoothly dim digital photography, and Chastain sitting before a bank of communications devices back at the base. The special effects are persuasive, William Goldenberg and Dylan Tichenor’s editing and Greig Fraser’s cinematography are crisp and confident, but this is more than mere edge-of-the-seat climactic action momentum. Though it’s certainly that too, an earned sequence of thrills that come partially from exhilarating clarity at last rising up. Rather than building to a bloody, fascistic blast of propagandistic violence, Bigelow plays the violent acts as almost perfunctory. Osama is barely glimpsed. The soldiers maintain utmost professionalism. The aftermath is relief at a job well done mixed with mournful exhaustion.

This is a self-reflexive and sometimes critical look at events that could have been glorified, that could have easily been cheap thrills on a way to a flag-waving triumphant climax. Instead, Bigelow is interested in creating deep thrills, rooted in character, painted in ambiguity and subtlety. This isn’t a movie that’s about a country’s proxies getting righteous revenge. This is a movie about watching a professional, capable agent getting the job done the best way she knows how, with the best information she can get at any given time. It’s ultimately exciting and moving not because of sentimental human-interest material. No, this film is too crisp and focused for detours like that. What makes this film exciting and moving is how sharp and subtle the character at its core becomes. Chastain creates a matter-of-fact, driven hero, continually underestimated, taking ambiguous steps to symbolic victory. This is not a film that tells us how to think about recent history, but rather, through the eyes of a memorable character, shows it in a convincing, exciting tick tock procedural of uncommonly involving suspense and complexity. 

Criminal Minds: KILLING THEM SOFTLY

Killing Them Softly is a tense, talky little thriller, shot through with obvious arty nods towards oblique, gritty crime movies of the 1970s, the kind where glowering character actors talk all around their conflict between moments of bloody consequences. Writer-director Andrew Dominik, adapting the novel Cogan’s Trade by George V. Higgins, moves the setting from 1970s Boston to late-2008 New Orleans, the better to suit his thesis that connects American capitalism to the robbery and retribution that powers the film’s plot. The connection is made early and often, most obviously and effectively in the film’s crackerjack inciting incident in which two low-level criminals (Scoot McNairy and Ben Mendelsohn) stick up a card game organized by a mid-level criminal (Ray Liotta). While cash is forced into a pair of briefcases at gunpoint, the TV in the background breaks into regularly scheduled programming, filling the room with the sounds of George W. Bush explaining the need to bailout Wall Street.

It’s immediately obvious that Dominik is going to hammer home his thematic intent with all the subtlety of blunt force trauma, throwing a sharp elbow into the audience’s side shouting “Get it?” To say it has subtext would be too kind. Luckily, the film, a small, tough work of quiet tension, is just good enough to sustain itself in the face of its auteur trying a little too hard. Besides, I far prefer a film that’s trying a little too hard to a film that’s too lazy to leave much of an impact. Here, the ultimate entrepreneurial criminal is represented by Brad Pitt playing a dark, smoking, and professional hitman. He rides into the picture to the tune of Johnny Cash on the soundtrack, ready to clean up the mess caused in the underworld by this first-act robbery. Negotiating with a lawyer for shadowy interests (Richard Jenkins), Pitt agrees to bring in a big-shot out-of-town killer (James Gandolfini) to help take down three conspirators and one scapegoat. Nobody’s going to stick up a card game in this town and think they can get away with it. Not on his watch, not as long as he gets his money.

Pitt’s performance is controlled, unshowy work that forms a quietly dangerous center around which the other characters can turn. The film is structured around scenes of men glowering across tables and cars at each other, talking through long-winded monologues and dialogues about what they’re about to do or what they’ve just done. The writing in these moments is alternately humdrum and prickly, occasionally finding laughs so easily that if it weren’t such a carefully scripted picture you’d think it was by accident. In roundabout discussions and unexpected twists of language, the movie works. In between these scenes of tightly wound wordiness are directorial flourishes of fades, slow motion, jarring edits, and surprising jolts of sound design. Much like last year's Drive, this is a kind of distillation of crime movie tropes built back up with self-conscious moodiness and stylishly upsetting splashes of violence.

Though Dominik gets fine performances out of his cast and puts them through tough, crisp crime plotting of a fairly satisfactory kind, the film is in the end only an argument for itself. The closed loop of plotting leaves it all feeling empty, like drab pessimism for nothing more than the sake of drab pessimism. The coldly cynical underpinnings that reverberate throughout the film are often electrifying, juxtaposing speeches by then-candidate Barack Obama or news reports about the freefalling economic conditions with the story’s matter-of-fact preparations and negotiations leading up to theft and violence. But such stabs at weightier intent and broader implications are as exasperating as they are electrifying, both too obvious and too muddled. Cynicism comes cheap, something made especially clear when a general air of disaffected, inconclusive unhappiness is really all this particular film is up to in its grumbling thematic content.

It’s a good thing that Dominik just about makes up for the thematic mud underneath his glossy images and appealingly (type)cast group of sad, violent, greedy men. Even if by its conclusion, the film comes up emptier than you’d expect, it’s still a competent genre exercise, suspenseful and engaging all the way through. Its characters are unapologetically looking out for nothing more than reasons to advance in their criminal occupation of choice, to get the job done and get paid. As such, it’s a small film that only steps wrong when it tries to act bigger than it is.

Where the Wild Things Are (2009)

Based on the much-beloved (for good reason) 1963 children’s book by Maurice Sendak, Where the Wild Things Are had much to live up to, a fact not helped by the transcendent short film that was its wildly-acclaimed teaser trailer. So it is with great joy, and no small amount of exhilaration, that I can report that Spike Jonze’s film is a gem. It’s a beautiful playground of a movie, wild and rambunctious, scary and sad, fun and funny. It’s not only a great family film and a daringly imaginative piece of filmmaking; it’s also Jonze’s best film to date (and that’s saying something after the wildly creative, but totally inappropriate for family viewing, Being John Malkovich and Adaptation). Here kids, and the whole family, are given a great treat. It’s a moving experience and a wonderfully crafted film.

Jonze, working from a lovingly adapted screenplay by novelist Dave Eggers, shoots the film with a startling specificity, positioning the camera at the level of a child’s point-of-view, following Max (played very well by young Max Records) as he wanders through his daily life. Jonze and Eggers have said that they didn’t want to “make a children’s movie but a movie about a child.” They have succeeded. The camera can be buoyant or frantically hand-held in one sequence, quiet and still in the next, capturing the rhythms of childhood. It’s down to even the littlest things that the film gets perfectly right: the way Max builds his snow-fort in the opening scene, pausing to sneak a taste; the way he sprawls at the feet of his mother (a warm performance from Catherine Keener) while she works, gently pulling at the toes of her socks; the way he is effortlessly creative and loving, or worried, lonely, and angry.

After a temper-tantrum, Max flees into his imagination, finding himself arriving at the shores of a place where Wild Things are. They are massive, fearsome and loveable creatures (perfectly voiced by James Gandolfini, Catherine O’Hara, Chris Cooper, Lauren Ambrose, Paul Dano and Forest Whitaker) who are practically extensions of his personality. Max will be their king, and, difficult though they can be, he will learn to love them. By learning to deal with them, lessons will be learned, but this is thankfully not a story of easy moralizing and empty advice. This is also not a picture-book adaptation that goes overboard with padding out the story with false conflict or unnecessary exposition. (Why did Ron Howard think we needed to see The Grinch as a child?) This is a vibrant, messy, wondrous film with endless charm and invention (not to mention a great soundtrack by Karen O and Carter Burwell).

The world of the Wild Things is a realistically fantastical one, with sweeping landscapes (forest and ocean, desert and cliff) both amazing and foreboding. As for the creatures themselves, they are easily identifiable as the ones from the book, their designs perfectly replicated from the illustrations, but they have a surprising tangibility to them thanks to a marvelous mix of puppetry, suits, and CGI, that gives them a sense of weight and warmth. I felt like I could reach out and run my fingers through their fur, feel the warmth of their bodies, sense the vibrations of their thudding footsteps.

The Wild Things (seemingly more childlike and more adult than Max) have their fun and their foibles, their quirks and the squabbles. The problems and pleasures of these creatures are similar to what we’ve already seen in the life of Max, but it’s not a simple matter of “A” equals “B”, like Ms. Gulch equals the Wicked Witch in The Wizard of Oz. Aspects of personalities and situations are reminiscent, but not identical, to the real world. Max is learning about life through his imaginative play, dreaming perchance to live.

Because of the realistic nature of the fantasy, there’s a small sense of danger, as if Max’s imagination could threaten to take over, yet I always sensed that he was safe, because ultimately he was in control of his own fantasy land, thoroughly immersed in it though he may be. Like Max with the Wild Things, the movie is a journey into another viewpoint. It offers the chance to view the world through the eyes of a little boy. It’s a strong sensation, one that could easily be nostalgic, but Jonze and Eggers don’t tip the film in that direction. They know that to be a child is to be small and without control in a world full of people bigger, more powerful than you. Throughout the film, there are several shots of Max looking at those older than him (his sister and her friends, his teacher, his mother and her boyfriend) and we get the sense that he’s staring into a mysterious world only half-comprehensible, so it’s only natural that, to process his feelings, he flees into another mysterious world with large creatures, one that’s only a little easier to understand but one in which he is king.

The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3 (2009)

In 1974, journeyman director Joseph Sargent pumped out the lean, gritty, hijacked-subway B-movie The Taking of Pelham One Two Three, with a sardonic, sarcastic Walter Matthau going up against the crisp and creepy Robert Shaw in a battle of the wills fleshed out with eccentric supporting characters and local color with the grimy and goofy New York City (back when crime and bohemianism were high, civic pride and public services were low) a character in its own right. But that was thirty-five years ago. Now director Tony Scott has updated without besting the original concept – bringing to it his trademark restless but uncurious camera – and without finding a way to make the story relevant to how the city is today. Rather, Scott has created a movie that feels disconnected from our time and drums through its plot mechanics with a grim, unsatisfying sense of déjà vu. It’s more than the fact that it’s a remake that makes the movie feel generic. The bleary, numbing cinematography works in concert with the blandly clunking score to create a sense of tiring excitement where I felt commanded to be entertained.

Denzel Washington replaces Matthau and does a fine job with a role that, as written, is less than taxing. Anyone with sufficient screen presence could have pulled it off. This is no slight against Washington, a great actor, but rather against the script by Brian Helgeland (who’s done fine work in the past). This isn’t a distinctively written character. Like most of the characters, he’s given nothing distinct or interesting to say beyond tired thriller lines that have slid out of the thriller factory like clockwork for decades. Maybe he should be grateful, for when Helgeland attempts to write something different and distinct, it ends up sounding stupid like poor John Travolta (loudly hamming it up in the Shaw role) who is forced to punctuate nearly every sentence with an ill-fitting profanity. Treated even worse are the great character actors, like Luis Guzman and John Turturro, who are given next to nothing to do, or James Gandolfini who does so well with what he’s given (the one stab at current reflection that sticks) you wish he had more, and better, things to do.

Any suspense that does arise comes from the plot itself, but the inherent suspense in the story goes unexploited. The subway car is stuck underground. How will the hijackers escape? The plot’s central thrill comes from the lack of motion. The subway is gumming up the works and Matthau/Washington main goal is not saving the day, but getting things running again. But Scott doesn’t trust stillness to raise tension, nor is he interested in exploring the mundane goal of getting the subway system running. His camera zooms and spins in a desperate attempt to whip up extra tension but instead spins further and further away from tension.

The movie works on a superficial level. It’s an involving story and exceedingly watchable performers. I was even tricked into a mildly positive response upon exiting. I wasn’t blown away but could have been heard proclaiming it “alright” and “reasonably diverting” if “not as good as the original.” Now, having settled in my mind, the memory has curdled. It has sunk in my estimation, but not by much. This is a cold, mechanical movie, heartlessly calculated, loudly screaming “aren’t you thrilled?”