Note Worthy: MARIA, BETTER MAN,A COMPLETE UNKNOWN

Musical biopics tend to work better when they’re working a thesis about the performer in question. It’s certainly preferable to a dutiful recounting of their life story that’s somehow less entertaining than finding the original concert footage and reading their Wikipedia page. In the case of Pablo Larraín’s Maria, the thesis about opera singer Maria Callas is somehow the same as the ones in his dreamy, subjective approaches to Jackie Kennedy in Jackie and Princess Diana in Spencer. The read on each figure is: look, how beautiful, how troubled, how resilient, how tragic. Fair enough. I happen to like those movies’ cramped opulence and grainy wooziness and temporal limits as acting showcases on a pedestal of swirling style. This one’s more of the same. It has Angelina Jolie lip-syncing to Callas’ diamond-cutting voice crackling with lyrical vibrato and tearful tremulousness. The film takes place largely in the singer’s final weeks as she struggles to regain her voice, seemingly wanting to sing more than live. There are also some flashbacks to a moment in her career during which she’s romanced by Aristotle Onassis. (An appearance by JFK hints at a Larraín biopic cinematic universe.) This funeral march uses Jolie’s contradictory qualities as well as any of her best non-Tomb Raider performances—Girl, Interrupted’s mental patient, By the Sea’s troubled wife, Maleficent’s wounded witch. She’s a stunning statuesque figure wielding sturdy charisma and steady fragility. The movie never quite fully activates an interesting narrative around Maria, but it consistently provides a beautiful look—Ed Lachman bringing faded cool colors in shooting a finely upholstered production design—and an enveloping mood. There are worse ways to spend a couple hours than hanging out with a movie star in lovely images that let one contemplate opera music.

An even more obvious thesis biopic is Better Man, an authorized recounting of Brit-pop’s bad boy Robbie Williams’ career so far. He came from a troubled family to join a 90’s boy band, and then go solo. It’s a typical arc from foundational childhood pain to fluke sudden success to sex, drugs, and gossip columns. What makes it atypical is the fact that he’s played here by a CG monkey in a musical that uses Williams’ songs to explain his emotional states. Who’d have thought, watching the recent motion-capture performances in the terrific recent Planet of the Apes films of the past decade, that one day the technology would be put to use for a metaphor of pop stardom? That it nearly works—sustaining its meager insight and mild visual interest for nearly the entirety of a feature length effort—is credit to director Michael Gracey. He gives it plenty of amped-up pizzazz in musical sequences with lots of extras, zippy editing, and fancy camera work. The best is a number stunningly done in a single stitched-together take that flows unblinkingly through multiple vehicles, buildings, and streets as talented dancers (and one animated monkey) hoof it with the right razzle-dazzle. Following up his fun debut feature The Greatest Showman, Gracey’s becoming the go-to guy for fantastical musicals that are more “inspired by” than factual accountings of a real person’s life. This one, though oddly more true, is not as good, because it’s bogged down in so many of the usual rise-fall-rise cliches and dreary dramatic scenes where dialogue expresses what the dancing could do and had done. Gracey’s strength, however, remains his emotional shorthand, which hits all the harder for flying so quickly it outraces its obviousness. It’s just more unevenly deployed here. And there’s only so much novelty to the monkey metaphor before it all feels overfamiliar again. It remains so purely metaphorical, with his simian appearance never acknowledged as real by anyone on screen, that it stretches its insight—he feels like a wild animal, or a trained zoo act—quite thinly. But Robbie Williams made some catchy pop songs, and there’s real earnest wildness here that keeps it from being entirely tiresome. If nothing else, looking at this monkey in all these standard biopic scenes certainly makes the sex part of sex and drugs weirder to contemplate.

A thesis about Bob Dylan in James Mangold’s A Complete Unknown is that he’s ultimately unknowable, which could be a cheap trick to wiggle out of telling us anything about the man, but in practice makes his trickster inscrutability itself too vivid to ignore. All the best Dylan movies—Todd Haynes’ kaleidoscopic re-castings in I’m Not There, the self-contradictory interviews of classic verité doc Don’t Look Back—realize this. He’s both completely earnest and totally joking, a brilliant, purposeful writer and a persuasive crafter of public persona. Somehow he’s simultaneously earnestly artful and an impish improviser. He’s deliberately cultivating a mystique, and sometimes just a jerk. Either way he’s a poet and a genius and this movie is more about how people react to him than anything else. And then it pushes back with his own confusion about who others want him to be. That’s nice tension finely dramatized. The sturdy meat-and-potatoes Hollywood craft of this new film quite effectively communicates why people responded so strongly to his work, and why some would feel a sense of betrayal when he went electric. The movie ends with that divisive moment in his career, but begins with his arrival in the New York City folk music scene of the early 1960s, and follows his rise to fame before concluding with him trading his acoustic guitar for that electric one. Mangold, who also co-wrote with frequent Scorsese co-writer Jay Cocks, brings a fine sense of pacing and placing to the events, and fills the picture with loving recreations of the sights and sounds of the time, including tons of satisfying musical performances. It helps us understand how Dylan hit big, and returns to these old classics some of the shock of the new. We see him through the eyes of: folksy singer Pete Seeger (Edward Norton), who takes him under his wing; sweet college activist Sylvie (Elle Fanning), who falls in love with him; sharp, ambitious Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro), who’s as much a collaborator and competitor as love interest; and various other music industry types who try to pin him down from managers and programmers to Johnny Cash (Boyd Holbrook). (That means Mangold, whose Cash picture Walk the Line was two decades ago, also has a biopic universe at play.) Dylan himself is played by Timothée Chalamet in a proficient impersonation that also always seems like Chalamet putting on an act. Maybe that’s the point. So is Bob.

Retired: INDIANA JONES AND THE DIAL OF DESTINY

The most incredible part of Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny is how quickly it promises little, and how thoroughly it proceeds to under-deliver even on that. The deficit of imagination starts from the first shot. Remember how Spielberg’s great adventure serials would always immediately signal their exuberant visual playfulness with clever transitions out of the Paramount logo and into the action in ways that cue us to the fun to follow? Raiders of the Lost Ark fades from the studio’s painted mountain to an actual one—a flourish announcing an exciting adventure filled with cleverness. Temple of Doom goes to an engraving on a gong—the better to tell us the following will be loud, splashy, over-the-top clamor. Last Crusade fades into Monument Valley—a Western throwback telling us it is back in the zone of a comfortable lark with real imposing danger—while Kingdom of the Crystal Skull reveals a gopher hill—the better to signify the following picture will confound expectations with a mix of the self-referential and self-critical. Dial of Destiny, a much belated sequel helmed by James Mangold, and for which the raison d’être seems to be simply to cash in on one last chance for 80-year-old Harrison Ford to wear the fedora and wield the whip of everyone’s favorite action-archeologist, does something else entirely. New corporate owners mean we first see the Disney castle. Then we see the Paramount logo, followed by the Lucasfilm crest on a black background. We then cut to: a suitcase. There’s no attempt at making it a clever fade in or even a cute match cut. It just starts. I know it seems a small detail on which to focus, but the longer the movie went on, the more it seemed to typify the whole approach. Here’s a movie that cues us right from frame one to expect less.

The only one giving his all in this fifth and presumably final Indiana Jones movie is Harrison Ford. Every unadorned close-up of his aged face is full of pathos and experience that sells years of adventuring nearing its end. He’s now mostly done with field work, on the eve of retirement from his professorship, and feeling out of place in 1969. But of course a MacGuffin from his past—an ancient Grecian dial that just might have something to do with time itself—is suddenly the source of eager hunting from an ex-Nazi (Mads Mikkelsen, perfectly slimy) who’s hoping to beat a younger rogue archeologist (Phoebe Waller-Bridge, gratingly insincere) to its enormous powers. Good old Doctor Jones is the only one who can help. Or get in their way. Or both. It takes a long time for Indiana to get back in the whip-cracking spirit, and he often is without his trademark hat. He’s really, truly tired of all this. (There's nothing on that idea wasn't said more elegantly and effectively in Crystal Skull. We're in repeat territory here.)  But save the world he must, though Ford’s better at sympathetically selling the weariness and reluctance now than the hard-charging action, which is left to a de-aged CG version of himself in an interminable flashback prologue or computer-assisted stunts in the present tense stuff.

Mangold, whose Logan and 3:10 to Yuma show he can make sturdy adventure elsewhere, does this no favors by shooting everything too close, and in a phony digital sheen slathered over, while cutting quickly with modern zippy animated stunt people. Early limp chases on a train and through a parade look so false and play so low-energy it’s hard to get the pulse up to care. The Foley work might be the familiar thwacks and thunks with each booming punch and echoing gunshot, and what a treat to hear John Williams once again scoring a movie with his lush orchestrations. But the pacing is all off throughout—too smooth and routine and so blandly choreographed that it all slides right off the eyeballs in an instant. Ford is the only element that feels real, even and especially when everything’s growing flimsier around him. There are a few fine gambits here—the fantastical final act, especially, is bound to be divisive, though I liked it, if more for the attempt than the weak execution. But this whole movie is weak like that, simply tired and underdeveloped thorough and through. It’s loaded with clunky plot points, scarce characterization for most side characters, and with barely an interesting image, let alone a compellingly staged action beat. Previous Indiana Jones pictures were rollercoasters. This one just coasts.

No Country for Old Mutants: LOGAN

Logan, the latest (and maybe last, but you know how money talks) Wolverine-centric film in the X-Men franchise, contains one of the most jarring moments I’ve ever felt in a superhero movie. It takes place after an unhurried sequence in the middle of the story in which our heroes stop to rest at the farmhouse of kind strangers. Sharing a meal, they enjoy quietly the generosity offered by this kind, warm, family of normal people. For a gentle pause, they aren’t mutants on the run in a hard-charging action movie. They simply exist in the world. When violence crashes back into the picture it crashes hard. There’s a mad scientist, an evil clone, shotguns and decapitations. The whiplash is harsh, discordant. I found I had been so involved in the humanity, the real character, of the prior sequence I was suddenly resisting the intrusion of genre dictates. But that’s part of the film’s gutting approach, with glum pessimism leaving barely enough energy to squeeze itself into the expected clichés that come with a cinematic superhero suit. It’s small-scale, soft-spoken, and soulful.

Inspired by the darkest and bloodiest of Wolverine comics, writer-director James Mangold (with co-writers Scott Frank and Michael Green) makes a bracing, atypical vision, with stretched anamorphic subtlety in the staging and stubborn downbeat grime in the mood. (This is certainly less colorful than his Japanese-set The Wolverine.) For a while it’s quite exhilarating to knock about in a far future (yet too close for comfort) world where the X-Men are gone for unexplained reasons and mutant kind is slowly dying out. Once rare, now rarer, no new mutant has been born in two decades. Natural born, that is. The plot hinges on Laura (Dafne Keen), an 11-year-old test tube mutant fleeing the evil corporation that made her. Its lead scientist (Richard E. Grant) wants to make gene-spliced lab-grown soldiers from the greatest hits of X-genes. But now one young subject has escaped, and she ends up running into an exhausted Logan (Hugh Jackman) and half-senile Professor X (Patrick Stewart) hiding out in the middle of nowhere at the U.S./Mexican border. A mercenary (Boyd Holbrook) with a bionic hand gives chase, and the tired old pair of marquee mutants must once more do all they can to save the future of their kind.

Placed at the far worst-case-scenario end of the film franchise’s timeline, this entry has a sorrowful finality about it. Not a grand ensemble epic, this is instead a sad and lonely chase picture, imagining the dwindling mutant population as a demonized, hunted minority. Average folks see them as a distant memory immortalized in comic book legends of yore. Corporations are deputized to round them up, hound them to extinction, and extract monetized power from them all the way there. Mangold and company take this all very seriously (or, rather, as seriously as you can while still including an evil clone). It’s bleak, watching characters we love like Jackman’s Wolverine and Stewart’s Professor X miserable and weary, on the precipice of giving up or death, whichever comes first. Because we’ve seen these great performers inhabit these roles for nearly twenty years now, there’s tremendous audience affection on which to draw, making their plight only more poignant. The early going emphasizes their isolation, pushing them into corners of the frames, surrounded by crumbling structures or grotesque “normality.” When the mute young mutant shows up needing help, the tremor of sentimentality, of hope for the future, feels life sustaining.

Cranking the gore up way past PG-13 and well into R, the line on which the previous movies about a mostly-immortal healing beast man with metal claw hands were already dancing, the movie takes an interest in imagining the toll a life of superhero violence would take on a person. Add to that the sense of despair over a history of fighting for your cohort’s safety and ending up with nothing to show for it, the movie’s core of physical, psychological, and moral exhaustion is often harrowing. Affecting, mournful, and with genuine surprise and sorrow behind its deaths gives many a bloody slice and stab its due weight. Where most superhero movies take violence as mindless sensory overload, the X-movies have often been embodied, concerned with the horror of mutation and the squirming ways the human body can turn on itself. This one in particular feeds its exciting action sequences with simple staging and brisk splatter. Wolverine is a reluctant hero, here at his most reluctant, a feature-length version of his answer to the question asked about his claws in 2000’s X-Men: “When they come out, does it hurt?” “Every time.”

That Mangold can pull it off while still spinning a crowd-pleasingly amusing, exciting actioner is a testament to the resiliency and elasticity of the franchise, and the willingness of cast and crew to put real heart into the slow, simple, quiet moments. Jackman’s Wolverine has always had a wounded soul beneath his star-power charisma, and here he lays it bare. He’s raw, scraping together just enough power for one last good deed. It’s a fitting tribute to the character to make what may be his farewell to the role with such a considered, complicated, and, yes, mature, performance. His scenes with Stewart crackle with genuine affection and history. Their new dependent is a wild animal when provoked (revealing a kinship between the old warrior and the young fugitive). The three of them just might make it to safety, but what then? The end-of-the-line futility gives even the fleeting moments of goodness and sweetness a sour aftertaste. The film has a compelling commitment to a certain slicing serenity, suspense visceral and absorbing yet filtered through a state of zen weariness. It knows we’re all dying, the world is collapsing, and nothing will ever again be as good as it once seemed. But maybe it’s worth trying every day to make sure children are equipped with the opportunities to do better than us with what little we can leave them.

Sharper: THE WOLVERINE

In a summer that’s found every science fiction superhero spectacle level city blocks without batting an eye, it’s refreshing to find that in The Wolverine, violence has an impact. The film is lean, focused, contained, and personal; violence and destruction happens to and is perpetrated by flesh-and-blood characters we know. But then again, that’s what the cinematic X-Men series has largely aspired to. The first image in Bryan Singer’s inaugural entry back in summer 2000 was of worn shoes squishing through the mud of a concentration camp. Wolverine, the sixth in the series, opens on a Japanese prisoner of war camp located on the shores of what we come to understand is Nagasaki, soon to be leveled by a mushroom cloud. This isn’t your average cartoonishly violent comic book film. Here violence has a substance and presence that feels not always historical and real – these are, after all, still films about superpowered humans hurtling towards each other in scenes of vivid and exciting action – but has a kind of moral weight.

That’s not to say that this is a film that’s grim or self-serious, a la Zack Snyder’s underwhelming Man of Steel from just a month ago. As directed by James Mangold from a script by Mark Bomback and Scott Frank, the film is a blast of expertly staged action, colorful set design, and pulpy characterizations. The plot twists and slides effortlessly, the rare tentpole production that doesn’t feel as if it falls immediately into autopilot. There’s a flavor and a pace that feels thoughtfully and patiently put together, not to slow down the action or burden the plot with heavy-handed themes, but to allow it maximum impact. This feeling of flavor and style is refreshing in a summer during which the trend has been towards gray design, lumbering franchise care, and bounteous uncaring collateral damage

After two prequels, the X-Men series returns to its chronological present in this film, picking up after the events of 2006’s X-Men: The Last Stand, which cleared the cast of some big name characters. This leaves Wolverine (Hugh Jackman, still one of the best and most appealing pairings of star and character I’ve ever seen) wandering depressed and alone in the wilderness until he’s drawn into a self-contained world of intrigue. This pared down plotting puts the focus squarely on the seemingly immortal mutant with adamantium claws. We’ve learned in the World War II-set opening scene that he saved a Japanese soldier from the atomic blast. Decades later, that man, now a dying tech company tycoon (Hal Yamanouchi), invites Wolverine back to Japan to say goodbye and receive his thanks. The tightly focused plot finds the lone mutant drawn into a world of corporate intrigue involving the old man’s embattled company, the yakuza, and a group of ninjas. The man’s son (Hiroyuki Sanada) and granddaughter (Tao Okamoto), as well as a mutant adopted granddaughter (Rila Fukushima), have their own roles in the plots that are already in motion when we arrive.

There’s a terrific Japanese flavor to the film, at once traditional and with smoothly incorporated sci-fi embellishments. In wardrobe and architecture, color and cuisine, this is a great evocation of place and space. Even the score by Marco Beltrami takes on lovely Asian instrumentation. It’s a refreshing change of pace. The sensational action sequences, nicely shot by cinematographer Ross Emery, benefit from this as well. An early stunner involves a yakuza attack at a traditional funeral, the placid garden of bonsai trees and calm waters around small rocks becomes a broad-daylight scene of martial arts, archery, and metallic claws. This leads almost immediately into a great use of a bullet train. Later, a small snowy village crawling with ninjas forms a nice black and white contrast. Elsewhere there’s great use of sliding doors, interlocking wall panels and swooping roofs to put architecture to use creating tension and visual interest alike, staging clear, crisp, and vivid action sequences of color and consequence in which the special effects and designs are convincing and creative without overwhelming their narrative purpose.

Through all the creatively staged violence, there are real stakes and squirming moments of physical peril. There’s a focus on character that heightens the stakes, rather than falling back on typically overblown world-ending cataclysms of the genre (a fate the series as a whole has tended to avoid). It’s easier to care when a movie puts specific characters in consistent peril. Jackman’s performance as Wolverine is as good as always, but here, given material leaps and bounds above his previous solo outing in X-Men Origins: Wolverine, he’s given a chance to play the character as worn and tortured, haunted by his recent past. Here he’s scruffy and muscled, but soulful and wounded as well, intensely sympathetic in his vulnerable toughness. It’s the comic book action movie as character piece, which gives room for the terrific Japanese cast to play real human beings as well. None are here just to pose and fight while special effects happen around them. It’s a full-blooded film with emotional stakes and complicated feelings.

Even though the film’s biggest assets are its leanness, focus on one character’s journey, and comic book injection of dependable Japanese action genres (ninja combat, yakuza noir, samurai honor), it nonetheless falls into the X-Men series easily and compellingly. It doesn’t linger on mutant metaphors, but has some nice resonances around the edges. It doesn’t contain the X-Men, but their presence is felt in Wolverine’s psychological condition. What we have here is an adventure serial with real heft, that’s able to hop eras, countries and characters, and maintain a sense of continuity while finding ways to stay fresh and exciting. How many big budget superhero franchises arrive at their sixth entry and still feel fresh? The Wolverine is sharp, solid, exciting, and unexpectedly elegant in design, the most satisfying picture of its kind this year. 

Running On Empty: KNIGHT AND DAY

As Knight and Day began, I found myself underwhelmed. Maybe it’ll get better, I told myself. If I hadn’t given up on the movie somewhere about half-way through, I would have been telling that to myself for another hour. But isn’t giving up on a middling movie sometimes liberating? When this particular example, an especially dull action-adventure, reaches its one (yes, one) mildly enjoyable action sequence, I found myself, not enjoying it exactly, but slightly thankful that the whole endeavor had just barely skated over my freshly lowered expectations.

But why should such a promising premise have to go to such waste? It’s sad that it only ever satisfies because it has thoroughly prepared a viewer to expect much less. After all, it stars Tom Cruise. Sure, he’s a little nutty, and everyone thinks he’s lost his mind. That’s what jumping on Oprah’s couch and ranting conspiracy theories earns you these days, I guess. But that didn’t affect my opinion of his work in the last decade. Minority Report, Collateral, War of the Worlds, Mission: Impossible III, and Tropic Thunder managed to put him to good, sometimes great, use. With Knight and Day he plays a character that doesn’t seem a stretch from either his public persona or his past roles, stepping easily into the role of a rouge spy who may have experienced a total break with reality. The character is as thin and underdeveloped as it can be without becoming just a cardboard cutout.

He’s in possession of the movie’s MacGuffin – a perpetual energy device invented by a bespectacled Paul Dano – and is consequently on the run from the F.B.I. and a powerful arms dealer. Why are these parties interested in the device? Who plans to use it for what? Why do the characters do anything that they do? I don’t know. How is an audience supposed to care about character or plot when the movie itself can’t even figure out what’s going on?

Most clueless is the character played by Cameron Diaz. It’s not Diaz’s fault – she’s more likable than Cruise and as charming as the movie allows – but it’s just that she’s not a character exactly. She’s drawn into the plot for no other reason than because Cruise likes her. If he really liked her, he would have kept her out of the mayhem that follows their Meet Cute that quickly turns into a crash landing. Besides, she turns out to be less a character and more like a vaguely disguised plot device that can shrilly say and do whatever is necessary to keep the plot moving. Cruise’s character is similarly sketchy and vaguer, but at least he ends up sitting out some of the movie.

While our leads flee vaguely sinister people like Peter Sarsgaard and Viola Davis, the cast gets involved in coldly unexciting action sequences that are loaded down with CGI and often seem cut short. The actors never seem to be physically present in any of the commotion. It’s almost as if the cast was lazily pasted from an abandoned initial sequence into fresh effects with little thought or planning. Special effects can do amazing things these days, but why don’t they look better here? It’s bad enough that the movie plays like some mishap deleted every third scene, but does it has to look lazy and unconvincing too?

The main perpetrator of this mess, aside from Patrick O’Neill, the half-dozen rewriters, and their screenplay, is director James Mangold. To his credit, the movie often looks quite good when the effects aren’t swirling by, and it flows quickly. It’s not entirely unenjoyable, nor is it interminable. It’s merely clumsily explicated and only half as funny as it thinks it is. I like Mangold. He’s done fine work in the past, creating films that are appreciably better than they could have been. His last two films were the sturdy and compelling Johnny Cash biopic Walk the Line and the fun 3:10 to Yuma remake, films memorable for their great performances, wonderful pacing and perfect middlebrow (I mean that as a compliment) sheen. With Knight and Day, Mangold has made a film that is significantly worse than it should have been, a bland, underwhelming contraption that fits comfortably only in the empty spot on Fox’s release calendar. Luckily for all involved, it’s not memorably atrocious. In fact, it’s just not notable at all.