Cash Out: MONEY MONSTER

Money Monster goes to dramatic lengths to find what it’ll take to make a cable news show do some actual reporting. It starts when a smooth-talking business news host (George Clooney) – think an even more buffoonish Jim Cramer – starts his daily stock tip program. He usually offers up some buzzword advice and hyperbolic recommendations to buy and sell. But not today. An angry young man (Jack O’Connell) sneaks on set with a gun and demands the man behind the anchor’s desk strap on a homemade explosive vest. He wants time on the air to demand answers. He’s furious about Wall Street greed, the rigged system of a casino economy legalizing fraud – he’s definitely a Bernie bro – and despondent over a glitch in a certain stock’s price that wiped out his life’s savings.

The once-cocky host sweats with a gun to his head. The director (Julia Roberts) is trapped in the control room capably keeping crew running like usual. Lights, cameras, mics, and the rest must continue moving without a hitch, the better to keep the dangerous intruder calm while police (led by Giancarlo Esposito) gather outside, debating how to get in without setting off the bomb. With little setup, the screenplay quickly launches into this tense scenario. Writers Jim Kouf (Rush Hour), Alen DiFiore (The Bridge), and Jamie Linden (Dear John) build a convincing cable news environment, a hectic and frivolous place that falls silent when real danger enters the frame. As the man with the gun shouts and threatens violence, the crew scrambles to find him his answers.

An engaging effort of slick competence, Money Monster is the sort of meat-and-potatoes topical movie star thriller that used to be a staple of Hollywood filmmaking. Now, outside Oscar season, it’s mostly found on tiny VOD budgets or on TV, so it’s nice to see this old fashioned form of glossy, well intentioned, reasonably involving drama play out on the big summer screen. Here we have the likes of Clooney and Roberts playing perfectly to type in a plot that’s tautly structured and built on sturdy genre foundations while engaging with some interesting ideas floating around the news these days. It’s about Wall Street corruption and the news media industrial complex, and somehow makes it into the stuff of entertainment without going too obvious or too hypocritical. This is a diverting movie that works out genuine and legitimate class frustrations in the guise of a ticking bomb plot.

Roberts deploys producers and reporters to discover the secrets behind the man’s grievances, while on camera two very different men – poor and out of options, controlling what little he can through intimidation; rich and out of touch trying to talk his way out of the worst situation of his life – come to a cautious understanding. They’re stuck in one place, while in the world beyond the studio people are watching the events unfold with rapt attention. Some are amused, others angered. Still others are getting a little nervous, like a slimy C.E.O. (Dominic West) whose dastardly company IBIS (a fitting name for a bad corporation, like BS, IBS, and ISIS rolled into one acronym) was, through mysterious and sketchy business practices, responsible for the market fluctuation that left the hostage-taker with nothing.

There are clearly delineated good guys and bad guys here, but there are some welcome moments where expectations are upended in small ways. A scene where negotiators bring in the hostage-taker’s tearful girlfriend goes in a surprising direction, and the movie’s not unwilling to see the situation from a variety of angles. Someone seemingly in the wrong can come over to the other side, and vice versa. Directed with a steady hand by Jodie Foster, the events unfold with clarity, cinematographer Matthew Libatique’s camera finding snappy simple frames as the studio simmers with tension and many outside – techs, journalists, cops, PR people, hackers, bankers, and so on – scramble to figure out how to bring the danger to an end. The plot is involving on a surface level, while the simmering ideas underneath are just broad enough to be crowd pleasing and just specific enough to avoid feeling too condescending.

In the end it succeeds on the strength of its lead trio of performers, who bring a capable sense of weight and believability to their characters actions and decisions. Clooney could play a perfect wealthy dope in his sleep, here bringing unctuous charm covering repressed decency as a market mouthpiece who slowly grows a conscience at gunpoint. Roberts is security and stability under pressure as an expert manager trying to maintain some semblance of order and safety, speaking carefully and soothingly through her boss’s earpiece, helping him see the bigger picture. And O’Connell is a fine vessel of frustrated millennial economic angst, jumpy and tense, wound up with hopeless rage, smart but treading water in a dead end minimum wage job just to make ends meet. This story, with sensationalistic elements and vigorous political points, is too conventional and interested in small humane shadings to be a trashier satire or a sharper indictment. Instead it relaxes into thriller mechanics, looking at its characters with compassion and condemnation while finding its way to a logical conclusion.

Damon's Run: ELYSIUM

Set in a pessimistically plausible future, Elysium finds the world’s richest few orbiting the Earth in a space station of the same name. It’s a perfect artificial paradise free of disease and strife. Everyone else is struggling to survive on the planet below, a world that is overpopulated, polluted, and where poverty is pervasive and inescapable. To get sick here is a death sentence. That’s what happens to Max, an ex-con turned factory worker played by the always-likable Matt Damon. He’s caught in an accident on the factory floor and told he has five days to live. Desperate to survive, he begs a man (Wagner Moura) who specializes in getting illegal transports to Elysium to find him passage. The deal is this: if he can make it to the space station, he must agree to help those in need. Pumped full of painkillers and fitted with a robotic exoskeleton that’s been painfully drilled into his body, Max is sent out on a mission to crash Elysium and liberate health care for the masses.

The film is written and directed by Neill Blomkamp, who made his feature debut in 2009 with the phenomenally successful District 9, a movie that used aliens that land and are promptly subjugated in South Africa as a metaphor for apartheid. I wasn’t the biggest fan, but it’s certainly an enjoyable movie for the most part. Now, with Elysium, he’s made a film that’s even more overt and heavy-handed about its allegorical intent. It’s loud and simple, but powered by so much contagious anger towards a super-rich minority who here not only keep to themselves enjoying total worry-free luxury while the majority barely gets by, but horde clean air, clean water, and the best medical care available. It is an unjust situation, plain and simple. The icy head of security (Jodie Foster) is determined to keep out the unwanted masses, going so far as to shoot down incoming unauthorized space shuttles filled with illegal immigrants. She looks at them as moochers unworthy to even glimpse Elysium’s palatial suburban gardens or catch a sniff of their pristine air.

In the film’s opening minutes, terrific detail and convincing special effects fill up the screen in fine sci-fi fashion. Set in future Los Angeles far from the typical Blade Runner vision, vehicles are worn-down, technology is unreliable, the teeming masses speak a combination of English and Spanish and live in a sprawling, crowded series of favelas. Max is the victim of police brutality, the coldly logical robot cops beating him for nothing more than his criminal past and a bad joke. He sees his parole officer, a scuffed plastic head with a mocking frozen smile telling him in a muffled computerized accent that he has eight additional months probation. By the time he’s had the accident and makes the deal to attempt an escape to Elysium, we’re fully immersed in the labyrinthine details that keep the majority of the population poor. It’s a systematic failure enforced by Elysium and unwillingly perpetrated by those on the ground. What is made at the factory Damon works? The very robots that keep the populace down.

All the allegorical force and intriguing futurist conjecture of the film’s opening third is placed in the background as the action cranks up and the film becomes a thundering, clattering, lightning fast spectacle of fisticuffs, gunfire, explosions, and gore. The head of security activates an extralegal agent named Kruger (Sharlto Copley), a vicious creep outfitted with all kinds of fancy weaponry capable of liquefying anyone in his path. He storms after Max and the movie becomes a tense series of bruising combat and close calls. The haves-versus-have-nots throughline very nearly gets lost in the shuffle in a movie more interested in fun setpieces, super cool special effects, and villainous switcheroos than in making sure the allegory tracks perfectly at all times. But an innocent nurse (Alice Braga) and her sick daughter (Emma Tremblay) get caught up in the action to provide a boost of emotional content and obvious rooting interest. (Who can root against a sick child, right?)

Blomkamp keeps the look of the picture agreeably skuzzy. The amount of dirt, grime, dust, and sweat on display makes all the more vivid the earthlings living conditions, as well as their constant toil and exertion. It makes their striving all the more real and urgent, especially in contrast to all the sleek lines and pristine surfaces orbiting above them. He’s smart to make the drive to sneak aboard Elysium not about stomping on wealth out of jealousy or spite, but to provide life-saving resources (medicine, clean air, pure water) for those most in need. It’s a fight for rights. The fight turns into a fairly typical sci-fi actioner, but it’s done in a largely satisfying way, just inventive enough to keep things interesting. I could’ve done without quite this level of lingering on splattery violence, with futuristic weaponry that blows people apart, but I would not for one second suggest going without the film’s biggest gory shock to one character’s face and the coolest gross-out effect that soon follows. You’ll know it if you see it.

Though both the film’s intriguing world-building and hurtling action are largely symbolic and naturally, forcefully thin, the thinly written roles have the benefit of some fine actors. But only Damon truly elevates the material, with his natural, compelling ability to invite instant empathy put to use with a no-frills, working-man striving in his demeanor, a resigned sadness in his eyes that sharpens into steely, determined hope. He’s a compelling center around which a sci-fi concept can confidently turn into a mildly brainy shoot-‘em-up. Though it ends up in a more standard place than it initially appears headed, Elysium is ultimately fast and satisfying on the most basic levels. It’s entertaining and trim, fun in the moment and over before you know it.

Talks Have Broken Down: CARNAGE

One of the funniest comedies of 2011, or at least one of the most consistently amusing comedies both despite of and because of its sharply satirical ambitions, came in right under the wire – a late December limited release – from an unlikely source – polarizing director Roman Polanski. It’s Carnage, based on the Tony-winning play God of Carnage by Yasmina Reza who, with Polanski, wrote the adaptation. They don’t make the common mistakes of turning plays into films, inflating the play to dilute its talky passages or expand its setting. Instead, Polanski effectively embraces the lengthy dialogue and the inherent claustrophobia of the play’s concept. 

It’s set over the course of a single afternoon in one Brooklyn apartment while two upper-middle-class couples discuss what is to be done about their children. Earlier in the week, while playing in the park, one eleven-year-old boy struck another with a stick, resulting in the victim needing some amount of dental work. But overall, at least from what we can glean from the second-hand sources with which we’re presented, this incident has bothered the parents more than the children. On this particular day, their parents come together in the spirit of reconciliation to figure out an apology, compensation, retribution, or something. It turns out that’s easier said than done.

It starts as barely-disguised sniping over plates of cobbler. Soon the four of them are bickering about child rearing which in turn spills over into arguments about anything and everything. The battle lines formed, buried and coded at the beginning, couple against couple, are soon elegantly redrawn with startling ease as the conversation continues to devolve. Now it’s men against women, then perhaps its liberals versus conservatives, then maybe it’s just the hopelessly selfish against the helplessly altruistic, and then back again. The point of it is, these grown people, these supposedly responsible adults, have, through their personalities and the plot’s slick contrivances, devolved into juvenile fits while trying to solve their juveniles’ brief burst of conflict.

Polanski films these tensely funny moments with a considered eye. It’s a purposefully theatrical film that often feels like a single 80-minute scene that just goes on and on, gaining extended awkwardness and cringe-worthy behavior along the way. As the couples, the talented, multiple-Oscar nominated and winning cast – it’s Jodie Foster and John C. Reilly versus Kate Winslet and Christoph Waltz – chomps down into the material in a convincing and sustained way.

It’s a movie that does not offer a single performer downtime, a movie that seems to keep all four in the frame more often than not. It’s an impressive and compelling feat of screen acting. The four of them throw themselves into defiantly unlikable characters and make them completely watchable. They ultimately stalk around the enclosed space with a fervor that stops just shot of scenery chewing, spitting out more and more of their true feelings, losing the veneer of propriety and decorum. The tense insults and free-flowing emotions are punctuated only by Waltz’s constantly ringing cell phone bringing him updates from colleagues at a high-powered law firm.

I wished the final scene could have landed with a bit more heft, especially since Polanski’s previous film, 2010’s gripping, masterful thriller The Ghost Writer, is not only one of his best films in a very long time, it also has one of the most memorable finales in recent memory. Though Carnage definitely held my interest throughout, the final moment is a deflation that comes as a bit of a surprise following a short runtime that seems to be nothing but sustained escalation. It left me feeling less than fulfilled; the note the film ends on is little more than a shrug. After watching Polanski and Reza guide a talented cast, gearing up for a sharp, potentially deeply cutting, bite of satire, the conclusion just backs away, underlining the silliness and slightness of what came before. But it can’t quite undo the stellar work from an impressive group of artists. This is a film that’s short and sweet-and-sour. It might not ultimately make as great a point as it initially seems headed towards, but it’s still a well-acted, precisely directed, tersely amusing entertainment. 

Radical Therapy: THE BEAVER

The Beaver is a film with good ideas, good performances, and good effort, but it doesn’t add up to a good movie. It’s nearly there, but not quite. I enjoyed each individual piece, to a point, but there’s a sense that with just a bit more prodding, with a push just a bit farther, the whole could be much more than good. It could even be great. Instead, we’re stuck nearly there. We can see greatness from here even if we can’t quite reach it.

In the film Mel Gibson plays Walter Black, a deeply depressed and alcoholic executive of a failing toy company. When we first see him, he’s presented as a man who once was a huge success but has had his professional reputation and personal relationships crippled by his mental illness. Because of the resonances with Gibson’s personal life that have left him an incredibly unpopular figure – his alcoholism, his abusiveness, his signs of mental illness – this dark comedy gets off too a painfully realistic start. Walter’s wife (Jodie Foster) and two sons, one a moody teenager (Anton Yelchin), the other a precocious grade-schooler (Riley Thomas Stewart), are starting to think he won’t get better. He spends all of his spare time, and most of his workday, sleeping when he’s not trudging along barely alert.

After a bungled suicide attempt, Walter finds himself talking through a beaver puppet that he pulled out of a dumpster. The beaver talks to him, encourages him, and gets him back to a state of confidence and alertness that his family and his colleagues find surprising in its speed and its apparent insanity. Walter walks through life a new man, almost literally. He wears the puppet on his hand at all times, speaking through it and for it in a thick brogue. It’s a complicated dance of identity and neurosis.

Gibson is playing two characters that are also two aspects of one character. It’s tricky territory, at once darkly funny and bleakly emotional, but Gibson pulls it off in a truly good performance. It’s not easy, but its power comes not just from its novelty or level of difficulty. This is some fine acting. Also quite good is the supporting cast that surrounds the central joke and dysfunction of the film. Foster (who also directs) is nicely rattled yet hopeful about it all and little Riley Thomas Stewart is awfully cute.

Meanwhile, Yelchin gets a fairly meaty subplot featuring a romance with a fellow high-schooler played by Jennifer Lawrence. So good in last year’s Winter’s Bone, Lawrence plays her character with a wounded fragility covered up by her cheerleader valedictorian status. She and Yelchin have an easy, unforced chemistry. Unfortunately, their story is neither fleshed out enough to be a compelling subplot nor satisfying enough to be merely a sweet footnote. They’re good enough to deserve a movie all their own.

The movie is swamped by the story of Walter Black. All else fades into the background, much like the presence of Gibson has distracted press from the actual movie itself. Walter sets the tone of it all, a dark, depressive sadness that leeches through its outer covering of quirk. Kyle Killen’s screenplay takes strange turns and is loaded up with obvious symbolism (sticky-notes listing similarities between two characters, a hole in the wall, a memory box, a paper-mache brain) and overly explanatory emotional reveals which have characters just flat out speaking their feelings in improbably ways. Foster’s solid direction holds things together, but the film ultimately doesn’t add up. There was so much to like about what was on screen that I almost couldn’t believe it when the credits rolled and I felt the whole thing come up empty.