A Room with a Clue: 10 CLOVERFIELD LANE

John Carpenter initially thought his classic horror film Halloween could become a series of otherwise unconnected horror stories set around the eponymous holiday. Alas, Michael Myers proved too popular, and the one time that long-running property tried out the stand-alone idea (Halloween III: Season of the Witch) didn’t work out well enough to try again. But if you’ve been hoping someone else would take that great idea for a unique spin on franchise filmmaking and try it out, you’re in luck. J.J. Abrams and his production company Bad Robot have sprung a surprise on us. With the title of Matt Reeves’ great 2008 found-footage monster movie Cloverfield in its name, 10 Cloverfield Lane is a stand-alone thriller only similar in that it’s built around a small-scale high-concept executed with simple and engaging plotting. If the Cloverfield brand will continue and become synonymous with cheap, resourceful, and entertaining sci-fi tinged tension, then, based on the evidence at hand, count me in.

The setup is this. A woman (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) crashes her car in the middle of nowhere and wakes up chained to a makeshift hospital bed in what appears to be an empty anonymous basement (and with no reception, naturally). Soon an imposing older man (John Goodman) walks in. He’s her captor and self-appointed caretaker, intimidating and odd even before he informs her that he’s also her savior. You see, they’re in his doomsday bunker. He claims to have snatched her from the wreckage of her accident and allowed her to stay with him, locked away from a world that has fallen into radioactive or biological warfare, or maybe both. She’s not so sure he’s right, and even when the bunker’s other occupant, a nice young man (John Gallagher Jr.), corroborates the story, she’s still not so sure what’s going on. The good thing is the audience doesn’t know either. What follows is a measured mind game as the woman attempts to discover the truthfulness of her situation. Best-case scenario: a madman prepper has kidnapped her. Worst-case scenario: it really is the end of the world.

With a hook so intriguing, and a three-person cast of uniform excellence, the movie would be foolish to let all that go to waste. In its tiny setting, impeccably set-designed with rows of nonperishable food items, incongruously homey placemats and knickknacks, and bookcases overflowing with Tom Clancy novels (a low-key funny touch), the three characters maneuver around each other, pressing advantages, keeping secrets, and jockeying for power. Can we trust anyone? What are their motives? And what’s really outside? The answers are slyly and slowly teased out by screenwriters Josh Campbell and Matthew Stuecken, relative newcomers, with Damien Chazelle, an Oscar nominee for Whiplash, although this is closer in tone to his script for the pianist-held-hostage-mid-concert thriller Grand Piano. Director Dan Trachtenberg makes a slick, competent debut – a fan film based on the video game Portal was the most prominent item on his résumé before this – by letting his craft play subtly while trusting the writing, the mystery, and the cast to carry the picture.

A reasonably clever claustrophobic thriller – it’s practically an inadvertent B-movie echo of Room – 10 Cloverfield Lane takes its time, bit by bit building the setups for a string of payoffs. It earns this patience by sticking so closely to a sympathetic performance by Winstead. We don’t know much about the character and don’t learn much more, but she brings such an innately appealing presence, warm and capable, smart and scared, that it’d be difficult not to care about her suffering. Add to that a sweetly odd Gallagher Jr. and a simmering, unpredictable Goodman (a convincing, human-scale monster) you’re looking at a trio of fine actors who build a fine, prickly atmosphere on which Trachtenberg can hang the film’s deliberate escalation of unease and suspense. It’s a sturdy guessing game making for an entertaining 95 minutes or so, deflating only in its disappointing conclusion, which goes about 10 minutes further, explaining away ambiguities with overly literal and predictable action, effects, and unsatisfying late breaking twists. Even so, for a modest feature of chills and thrills, it’s a passably good time.

2013 Catch Up: SHORT TERM 12 and YOU AIN'T SEEN NOTHIN' YET

Destin Cretton’s Short Term 12 has an earnest verisimilitude that’s nearly undercut by plotting neatly organized with hidden-in-plain-sight exposition, dramatic payoffs, and impeccable structure, each moment building expertly on the last with character arcs dovetailing oh-so-neatly. Set in a group home for at-risk kids, the film follows the routine of Grace (Brie Larson, in a remarkable performance of considerable poise and easy charm), a young woman who is helping these troubled teens out of an honest desire to help, and as a way to work through memories of her own troubled upbringing. The place itself is achingly convincing with a charming collection of struggling teens suffering from a variety of circumstances and emotional afflictions. The employees, mostly nice twentysomethings portrayed appealingly by John Gallagher, Jr., Rami Malek, and Stephanie Beatriz, are tough but compassionate, eager to be friendly with their wards, but quick to get serious and severe if necessary.

The main trouble kid is a new inmate, an abused teen girl (Kaitlyn Dever, a strong performance in a film of great young actors) who becomes Grace’s special case. She feels like she understands her more than anyone because - wouldn’t you know it? – she has been in her shoes. Cretton’s screenplay is so deft and polished that I wished it would step back and breathe, letting the great setting and hugely talented ensemble relax and settle into the film without being pulled along by plotting with obvious signposts and predictable symbolism. It easily generates such a strong, emotional impact through the cast and setting that I only wish that power arrived with as much unforced ease in the plotting. I realize it may seem a minor complaint that the film is too transparently well written for its own good, but it’s a frustration of mine in this case nonetheless.

In You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet, a French playwright’s assistant calls the man’s closest actor friends – real French stars like Mathieu Amalric, Anne Consigny, Lambert Wilson, and Michel Piccoli playing themselves – to inform them that their old pal has died. They’re called to one of the man’s mansions, gathered in a darkened screening room, and shown footage from a rehearsal in an empty warehouse of a humble new production of his Eurydice. Those gathered have performed this play before at one time or another, and as the evening stretches out, memory and screen merge. They act out their old parts, doubling dialogue, inserting themselves into the conversation, moving into an imagined dreamscape of remembered or present-tense performance with dramatically lit sets and deliberately phony CGI backdrops, twisting back into their seats, smiling warmly at one another. The formality of the words and loose playfulness of the imagery creates a fun tension, as does the richly appointed home stretching across the wide screen and the smaller frame-within-the-frame play-within-the-play-within-the-movie’s humbler, scrappy production. It’s mischievously esoteric.

Cinema has the ability to reflect our lives back at us, provoking warm memories, deeply held feelings and truths. These artists are called back into their Eurydice characters, and into the memory of their dead friend by nothing more than the dramatic circumstances of sitting together in the dark, watching a flickering image projected before them. Humans may be mortal, but if we’re lucky we live on forever in the emotions sitting ripe for the feeling within art. That this spellbindingly experimental and intimately heartfelt film is a product of an old master, 91-year-old Alain Resnais, who brings together his mesmerizing hypnotic symbolic abstraction (a la 1961’s Last Year at Marienbad), sharply observed acting, and giddy, playfully dreamy imagery (like his 2009 film Wild Grass), is once more a welcome sign that great artists can retain their sense of vitality. Here is a man, like the playwright in his film, who will live on in his art, forever calling forth an audience to see if anyone still cares.

Traverse City Film Festival 2012: Dispatch #1

What may have been lost, if it was ever really known, in the stories of Kenneth Lonergan’s Margaret’s lengthy, contentious postproduction, subsequent botched limited release, further subsequent rise as a critical pet cause, and eventual extended cut DVD, is that the movie plays. In a big theater with a sold out crowd, a rare occurrence for this film that a screening today at the Traverse City Film Festival offered, the movie is a symphony of crowd reactions: gasps, laughs, groans, and heavy silences. Sometimes, all of these reactions mixed together with slippery agility, as in the harrowing, horrifying accident that sets the tone of the film early on with its mix of precise acting, remarkable realism, and sly gallows humor. On a day that the festival offered many interesting films and a packed Q&A with Susan Sarandon, this was the must-see event.

The story of a teenager (Anna Paquin) who witnesses a fatal bus accident and then spends the next weeks and months grappling with the emotional fallout of the tragedy while life somehow trudges on around her remains powerful and messy. The ensemble is rich and delicately balanced with her mother (J. Smith-Cameron), the bus driver (Mark Ruffalo), teachers (Matt Damon and Matthew Broderick), boys (John Gallagher Jr. and Kieran Kulkin), and an unlikely new friend (Jeannie Berlin), among others, playing their parts in her life story. Each character feels fully realized, even when in a plotline that feels edited down to evocative wisps or in a relationship – as in the sharply observed mother-daughter conflict - that slowly takes center stage. What’s most powerful about the film, what makes it such an emotional workout, is the way it manages to bottle a kind of whiplash self-important precociousness of adolescence where grappling with deep and powerful philosophical and emotional topics still unknowingly creates an incredibly self-centered point of view. This is a film about a girl who slowly begins to realize that others are not merely supporting characters in the opera of her life.

This is my second time through Margaret and I found it to be even better than I remembered. It’s an expertly written, breathtakingly acted, experience, a sort of interior epic that reconciles its lack of cohesion and conventional narrative within an emotional framework that makes intuitive sense. Sitting near the front of the theater with the towering screen revealing all the more strikingly the film’s visual powers – a scene in which a taxi cab is suddenly, subtly surrounded by buses felt nearly overwhelming – the film took on a precision that I somehow missed in my initial viewing. Though I really liked the film at the time, I have an even better appreciation now. How often can you sit and feel a big crowd wrestling with a film so emotionally and thematically dense and articulate, so deeply felt and so smartly filmed? The brilliance of Lonergan’s film is the way it invites us into the life of a character and is unafraid to explore, to allow plot points to exist and breathe like life events, to grow and develop, to wither or fade at their own paces.  It’s truly some kind of masterpiece.

Also screened:

            Christopher Kenneally’s documentary Side by Side is a decent primer on the history of digital filmmaking and its conflict with traditional celluloid. All arguments get their (sometimes surface-level) day in court here as the film follows our host and guide Keanu Reeves as he talks to prominent directors (Martin Scorsese, George Lucas, Steven Soderbergh, David Fincher, Richard Linklater, David Lynch, Robert Rodriguez, Danny Boyle, Lars von Trier, the Wachowskis, Christopher Nolan, James Cameron) and cinematographers (Michael Ballhaus, Anthony Dod Mantle, Wally Pfister, Vittorio Storaro, David Tattersall, Vilmos Zsigmond). The film’s a who’s who of modern cinema, filled with interesting, charismatic artists, which makes it all the more disappointing that it gets so carried away with its history lesson that it forgets to actually interrogate these artists’ theories, claims, and opinions. Instead of editing in a way that puts traditionalists, pioneers, and those in the middle in some kind of conversation, the documentary is content to be an overlong, occasionally repetitive, clip to show an Introduction to Film Studies class. That’s fine for what it is, I suppose, but it certainly doesn’t have the kind of depth I would have appreciated.

Everybody Hurts: MARGARET

Margaret’s two-and-a-half hour run time is a jumble of themes and scenes, adding up to a deeply affecting, bogglingly complex picture of human emotion and moral quandaries. It’s a film that feels sifted, chopped, and cajoled into being. It's a powerful, sweeping yet intimate collection of moments that build towards a powerful, unexpected climax: a thorough evocation of its difficult characters living lives in a recognizable world. It’s rich and thought provoking.

The film is a quintessential sophomore effort, bigger in ambition, weightier in scope, risking a mess. Writer-director Kenneth Lonergan, after the 2000 release of his terrific, small-scale debut You Can Count on Me, filmed this in the fall of 2005. Since then, the film has been wrangled around in post-production under a cloud of unhelpful lawsuits and countersuits between the studio and financiers, conflict between the director and the editors, and even the deaths of two of the producers. Getting the film finished at all with so much strife puts Lonergan on a short list with Terry Gilliam of directors who work with a potent mix of genius, patience, and bad luck. The final product proves the struggle was worth it. 

Margaret is about Lisa, a teenage girl (Anna Paquin) who is startlingly, frustratingly real. Her moods swing wildly. She can be pleasant and flirty or a snapping vindictive twerp. She’s just a kid, one capable of great precociousness and blind to the overwhelming extent of her own naïveté. Living in relative privilege with her stage actress mother (J. Smith-Cameron) and her little brother (Cyrus Hernstadt) in New York City, she has little practical reason to involve herself in anything but the constructed conflict that arises out of the typical teen problems. 

She fights with her family. She’s attracted to two of her peers (John Gallagher Jr. and Kieran Culkin) and can’t quite sort out her feelings. One of her teachers (Matt Damon) has caught her cheating on her geometry tests. Another, her English teacher (Matthew Broderick), strikes her as dorky, yet his readings of poetic language are sometimes moving in a way she can’t find words to express. These are all common enough adolescent problems, sources of angst that fade with maturity and age. She’s still in the midst of sorting out competing impulses and emotions. Then, one day while wandering the streets of the city in search of a cowboy hat to buy, she catches the eye of a bus driver (Mark Ruffalo) as he pulls away from the curb. He’s wearing a cowboy hat. She tries to run after the bus, hoping to get the chance to ask him where he bought his hat. In this brief moment of distraction, the bus hits a pedestrian (Allison Janney).

Lisa feels responsible for the accident and lies to the police to protect the driver. But then, the memory of the incident eats away at her. She’s deeply affected, rattled, disturbed and distressed. And yet the world moves on. Her mother finds a new boyfriend (Jean Reno). Her teachers keep teaching. Her friends (Olivia Thirlby and Sarah Steele) keep chattering. The boys are still interested in her. The world keeps spinning. And yet how can it keep spinning when she has been in the middle of such a traumatic incident, an out-of-the-blue moment of violence for which her sense of culpability is eating her alive, is churning her emotions, won’t let her rest easy? So she lashes out. (Several scenes in the film draw out a post-9/11 parallel with some potency.) She snaps at her mother. She cancels a trip to visit her father. She takes steps to contact the family of the woman hit by the bus and finds a strange sense of comfort in connecting with a woman (Jeannie Berlin) who was a friend of the victim. Lisa selfishly convinces her to sue, to keep the pain of the moment alive in the courts and hanging over the driver’s head. 

Though the plot is driven to a certain extent by the actions and emotions of Paquin, the film doesn’t rely for its impact on her alone. The supporting characters are so fully, tenderly realized with nuanced performances that weave into the frazzled fabric that they feel to be as startlingly, frustratingly real as the teenage girl they all come into contact with. Gallagher’s lovesick teen, Damon’s caring teacher, Ruffalo’s casually troubled bus driver, Culkin’s lothario, Janney’s dying woman and Berlin’s mourning friend all are so beautifully acted and wonderfully played that they add up to an ensemble of depth and interest. Each character feels fully realized, whether in a plot-line that feels edited down to evocative wisps or in a relationship – as in the sharply observed mother-daughter conflict — that slowly takes center stage. 

What’s most powerful about the film, what makes it such an emotional workout, is the way it manages to bottle a whiplash self-important precociousness of adolescence where grappling with deep and powerful philosophical and emotional topics still unknowingly creates an incredibly self-centered point of view. This is a film about a girl who slowly begins to realize that others are not merely supporting characters in the opera of her life.

Out of the cast, J. Smith-Cameron stands out. As the mother, she exudes thwarted warmth, a caring compassion that is ineffective and unreceived by the adolescent angst to which it is directed. She makes her living embodying emotions of characters, yet she finds herself frustrated by the difficulties of “playing” the mother. In a terrific scene, she argues with her daughter, devolving into a great mimic of her behavior. She plays the part, but she has no reference for her own identity. She'll be there for her daughter whenever her daughter rediscovers the need for maternal comfort. This is an example of the film’s beneficial looseness and choppiness. A character of great depth and thematic importance seems to float in and out of focus, ultimately useful, but not always clear. 

In total, the film is an expertly written, breathtakingly acted, experience, an interior epic that reconciles its lack of cohesion and conventional narrative within an emotional framework that makes intuitive sense. Sitting near the front of the theater with the towering screen revealing all the more strikingly the film’s visual powers – a scene from a low angle seeing a taxi cab suddenly, subtly surrounded by a canyon of buses felt nearly overwhelming, echoing the girl’s towering confusion. How often can you sit and feel a crowd wrestling with a film so emotionally and thematically dense and articulate, so deeply felt and so smartly filmed? The brilliance of Lonergan’s film is the way it invites us into the life of a character and is unafraid to explore, to allow plot points to exist and breathe like life events, to grow and develop, to wither or fade at their own paces. It’s truly some masterpiece.

Lonergan features a prominent allusion to a quote from George Bernard Shaw, tossed off and referenced casually, illuminating themes with which the film is playing. The full quote, from the 1903 play Man and Superman, is one character’s condemnation of another’s “regarding the world as a moral gymnasium built expressly to strengthen your character in, [which] occasionally leads you to think about your own confounded principles when you should be thinking about other people’s necessities.” This is a film about just that. Growing up is hard to do. Learning how to interact with others is complicated. Margaret is a sprawling evocation of this hard, complicated mess.