Into Thin Air: EVEREST

It’d be easy to call Everest a man versus nature story, but that’s downplaying the extent to which nature dominates. It’s never a fair fight. Telling the true story of a 1996 storm that left a group of mountain climbers stranded at the world’s tallest peak, making the return climb treacherous and nearly impossible, the film creates an enveloping sense of natural danger. When the winds kick up and gusts of snow pummel the characters as they stumble along narrow paths, clinging to guide ropes near cavernous drops, there’s a convincing sense of disorientation and danger. One wrong step, one wrong decision, and it could mean certain death. In the film’s most haunting image, a struggling member of the group steps wrong, wobbles, and simply disappears, falling off the edge of the frame while a man in the foreground holds on for dear life. He glances back, notices with horror the empty hooks swinging in the storm, and then continues trudging foreword towards his ultimate fate. As one character ominously warns early on, “the mountain always has the last word.”

Shot with solid meat-and-potatoes sturdiness and completely convincing effects and stunts, director Baltasar Kormákur (Contraband) indulges in a few sweeping spectacular vistas, but otherwise keeps the epic backdrop in the background. He chooses instead to focus on the people making their way through the landscape, as they joke, bond, argue, succeed, struggle, and die. William Nicholson (Unbroken) and Simon Beaufoy (127 Hours), no strangers to stories of remarkable survival, have written a screenplay interested in process and procedure, spending a great deal of time assembling the team and taking them through the steps of an ordinary climb up Everest, a fraught and fascinating prospect in and of itself. It’s clear how slow, difficult, and challenging it is to climb any mountain, let alone Everest. There are medical concerns, perilous heights, unexpected delays, deadly cold, and dwindling oxygen. And that’s before the storm even starts.

The main characters are a crew from New Zealand running an expedition up the mountain, a guide (Jason Clarke), a base camp supervisor (Emily Watson), and a doctor (Elizabeth Debicki). Their clients include a mailman (John Hawkes), a wealthy Texan (Josh Brolin), a journalist (Michael Kelly), and an experienced climber (Naoko Mori). Also on the mountain are rival groups, including one led by a brash American (Jake Gyllenhaal) trying to reach the summit, and one (led by Sam Worthington) going up the shorter mountain next to it and can only watch in horror as the storm clouds roll in over their colleagues. It’s not always easy to tell all these people apart, especially once they have oxygen masks over their faces and ice-covered hoods pulled low over their goggles. We see only figures struggling up the mountain, and then feeling the panic kick in once they desperately need to get back down.

When a mask is pulled off, revealing the character actor beneath, it’s easier to tell who is where. But maybe the point is to mimic some of the disorientation of thin air and exhausted lungs. The performances are solid physical presences, filling their corners of the frame with a sturdiness and confidence that’s all the more difficult to see fade away. Some are unpersuasively overconfident. Others are understandably worried. There are token characterizations to flesh out the ensemble. We hear reasons for the trip – to be brave, to be accomplished, to be awed – and overhear sentimental calls back home to nervous wives (Keira Knightley cuddling a fake pregnant belly, Robin Wright corralling teens). But these biographical details are sparse, adding only reliable extra gloom as the camera contemplates the thunderous darkness encroaching.

Kormákur shoots the proceedings with a relatively restrained eye. He doesn’t amp up the action, provide CGI dazzle, or find room for unrealistic cinematic heroics. As small mistakes and nature’s fury combine, death comes quickly for some, slowly for others, and narrowly misses still more. Cinematographer Salvatore Totino’s wide lenses capture an immense sense of beauty and danger, while the sound effects crunch and howl. It never comes to life as a personal journey, the characters remaining too vague to really develop, but as a view of process – of a feat of mountaineering giving way to a struggle to make it back alive – it’s gripping. As it narrows to consider the tiny interpersonal moments that seal each one’s fate, there are moving moments of triumph and pain, flashes in a storm that wipes away all certainty. It’s a big Hollywood epic with a small eye, with stories of survival not through any grand action, but through endurance and chance. It has the trappings of a disaster movie, but none of the thrill. It starts with cautious excitement, turns scary, then left me feeling only sad.

Crime Time: LIFE OF CRIME

A neat little thriller dressed up in 70’s clothing, Daniel Schechter’s Life of Crime is a humble charmer coasting on genre pleasures. After a summer of big digital things crashing into other big digital things and muscled men standing around slugging it out while feeling bad about it, how nice to settle into a small scale heist that twists with a sense of humor. Here the women are strong, the men are stupid clever, and the dupes are below average. Even when blindfolded and kidnapped, bored Detroit housewife Jennifer Aniston is still in more control of the situation than you’d think, while the men who caught her spin their wheels, befuddled by how sideways a simple extortion has gone.

The nifty plotting is lifted wholesale from the Elmore Leonard novel The Switch, keeping his ear for breezily laconic pulp dialogue and fine sense of darkly comic thriller plotting. The kidnappers are Ordell (Yasiin Bey, the artist formerly known as Mos Def) and Louis (John Hawkes). If those characters sound familiar, it’s because they were also key criminal elements in Tarantino’s 1997 Leonard adaptation Jackie Brown, where Samuel L. Jackson and Robert DeNiro played them. That film is a great crime picture full of tremendous performances and Tarantino’s finest filmmaking to date. Of course Life of Crime isn’t nearly as good as Jackie Brown. That it manages to be its own agreeable thing with faint pleasing echoes of that earlier film instead of a flat out impersonating prequel is a nice surprise. Schechter doesn’t push too hard, keeping the proceedings sharp and quick.

It’s fun to watch Aniston struggle to outsmart the men holding her captive as they try to get money out of her rich husband (Tim Robbins), especially once it becomes clear he won’t pay up. He’s out of town with his mistress (Isla Fisher). Getting a threatening call from a stranger promising to make it so he never sees his wife again is sort of a blessing. That throws everyone in a loop. Aniston tries to keep herself alive. Fisher lounges around in a bikini, trying to keep her man from paying up. Bey and Hawke try to keep Aniston cooped up with a slobby neo-Nazi (Mark Boone Junior) while they rethink their plans. It’s one quickly paced complication after another as the gears turn and a wry bumbling crime drama tips towards dark farce without tipping all the way over.

Period detail is abundant and charming, quite intentionally drawing a connection between this and small crime pictures of the era. The source material was first published in 1978, and it’s not a stretch to imagine a Walter Matthau circa Charley Varrick or Karen Black circa The Outfit appearing in a contemporaneous adaptation, were such a thing to have happened. This is undeniably a modern film harkening back to an older way of doing these kinds of pictures, but the feeling is a pleasant approximation. The direction is a throwback to a crisp and clear style. The cinematography by Eric Alan Edwards is simple and grainy. The crime plotting is character driven and cleverly executed, a nice balance. It knows a Leonard story isn’t about what happens, but how it happens and who has what to say about it.

The ensemble is perfectly calibrated for a well-balanced blend of danger and dopey grins. (I haven’t even mentioned a hilarious subplot featuring Will Forte as Aniston’s panicked lover who has to decide whether to report her missing and reveal their affair or ignore it and hope nothing too bad happens to her.) The performers play well together, crackling their competing goals against each other as plots diverge, and stumbling blocks send everyone angling for their best possible outcome. Crosses, double-crosses, and strange bedfellows are the name of the game. It’s an enjoyable Leonard adaptation, one of the few that get his tricky tone and twisty stories right, and, in its humble way, probably the best since the brief 90’s heyday of its kind.

Bed Time: THE SESSIONS

For a movie based on a true story about a severely disabled man who decides it’s time he finally experienced sex, The Sessions feels awfully safe. That it doesn’t become smutty or distasteful is a credit to the warmth and humor that writer-director Ben Lewin brings out of the film’s lead performances. John Hawkes plays the disabled man, a poet who spends most of his time in an iron lung. During the few hours a day in which he’s not contained in this life-sustaining device, his assistant (Moon Bloodgood) wheels him about on a stretcher. Feeling he’s nearing his “expiration date,” and after consulting with a compassionate priest (William H. Macy), he decides that he’d like to understand what real intimacy is all about. He gets in contact with a sex therapist (Helen Hunt) who schedules six sessions of body awareness exercises. It’s an edgy concept softened and diluted by sleepy, soft-focus sentimentality until it’s about nothing more than better living and better relationships through better physical awareness.

But rather than growing sanctimonious, the film remains low-key and character-driven, playing out in simple scenes, developing the relationship between the man and his therapist. Rare is the sequence that holds more than two characters at a time. Thin and short, the film proceeds with a dash of charm and gets by on an unexpected matter-of-fact, all-smiles approach that preemptively deflates the base, exploitative approach that one can imagine a lesser production might have, even inadvertently, fallen into. Lewin builds a story that’s out to do nothing more than assert the basic humanity of all persons no matter what their conditions or occupations and to do so with some fine acting and surprising lightness.

That’s nice, I suppose, and the total visual indifference – flat staging and inexpressive framing – doesn’t interfere with those aims all that much. Lewin’s seemingly apathetic direction and plain visual sense is hardly enough to kill the film outright, no matter how treacly and plodding the whole thing becomes at times. Periodic scenes of Hawkes bonding with Macy’s remarkably patient and accommodating priest underline the breezy seriousness of the whole thing. It’s a glossy, decently put together film that, if it weren’t for its R-rated giggliness, could’ve passed for a mildly daring TV Movie of the Week in the 90s.

It’s all about the acting here. Hawkes, working wonders with an effortful pinched, nasally voice, has a limited physical range in the role, placed flat on his back, forcing him to wrench his neck around to speak to other characters in the scene. He’s convincing. You’d never know he wasn’t bedridden if he hadn’t been a stellar character actor for a couple decades now. He plays the role as a full, convincing person with a rich interior life, where there had to have been the unfortunate temptation of using restricted movements and vocal acrobatics as an Oscar-gambit gimmick. He projects the countenance and tenor of a man for whom it takes a great deal of work to speak, let alone write, and yet in his poetry and in his narration, he has a grace of expression that’s rather touching.

Hunt has a trickier role. The film simply asks more of her, a nakedness of expression and presentation that Hawkes isn’t called to provide in anything close to the same quantity. She carries with her the entire balance of the film’s matter-of-fact method. In her acting duets of therapeutic intimacy and slowly expanding openness with Hawkes, he projects nervous anxiety. She’s all earthy, natural comfort, ready and willing to do what it takes to help this man feel some release, even for one brief moment. That the two develop a friendship that deeply affects both of them is hardly in doubt. That there will be medical challenges and a dénouement of weepy uplift is another given. But somehow Hunt and Hawkes, in the movie’s best moments, distract from those inevitabilities.

It’s a simple movie about how we should be kind and understanding to one another that’s carried only by the hard work of the cast. The totality of its worth rests with them. This is a movie that’s content to be a thin true story softly told, visually shoddy and narratively predictable. As such, this is a film that has little to recommend it beyond the chance to see two good actors do very good work in a mediocre movie.

The Lost Girl: MARTHA MARCY MAY MARLENE

Where are we? When are we? As Martha Marcy May Marlene opens we see men and women working in fields and a farmhouse, chopping wood, harvesting, laundering, cooking. At the end of the day, the men eat slowly, quietly, huddled around a dark table in a dark kitchen. They slowly file out and the women take their place, finally their turn to eat the meal. The sun sets. Members of this group go to sleep on mattresses packed on the floor of unfurnished rooms.

In the haze of daybreak, one of the young women (Elizabeth Olsen) slips away from the farmhouse, across the fields and comes upon a thick slice of asphalt breaking up the natural world and helping to narrow down the period of time in which she lives. She crosses the road and disappears into the forest beyond. We follow her as she seems to escape, eventually ending up in a modern small town where she uses the pay phone outside of the diner to call her sister. “Martha?” her sister says. “Where are you?”

We learn that Martha’s family hasn’t heard from her in two years, knowing only vaguely that she was “upstate” with a “boyfriend.” Her sister, Lucy (Sarah Paulson), and Lucy’s husband, Ted (Hugh Dancy), pick her up and drive her back to their vacation house. They quickly decide to take her in, to help he get on her feet. They seem remarkably uncurious as to where Martha has been or what happened to her. Something is so very wrong here that, though this couple’s attempts at kindness is sympathetic, their situational blind spots contribute to the film’s dread. How can they so easily ignore the warning signs that this young woman is so troubled?

After all, what could explain her behavior? She seems, in subtle ways, unaccustomed to what we would call a relatively normal life. The house in which she now lives is an expansive wood-and-glass lakeside domicile surrounded by woods. It’s modern yet secluded, different from where she was, but with resonances of reminders. She will cast her gaze nervously about her surroundings, as if anticipating sudden danger, or else remembering the possibility. The married couple can’t quite see how disturbed Martha is. There are unspoken histories between these characters, familial tensions that are teased out with some subtlety by the capable cast.

The full extent of Martha’s previous two years is slowly parceled out by the film, which slips between the two time periods with chilling silkiness in the editing. We continually return to that farmhouse with the eerie timeless quality of the dress and codes of conduct. We come to learn that the group of people living there are all enthralled by a cult leader (John Hawkes, seemingly effortlessly disquieting) who slowly draws his victims in with his soft-spoken philosophizing and simply plucked guitar compositions, creating a sense of community. Then, we come to understand how he uses psychological domination and torture as well as ritualized patterns of behavior, a strict work ethic, an unflinching schedule, and punishing initiations including shocking violence and rape, to control and retain his followers. As what we know more about Martha’s time amongst these people, the darker and more disturbing the implications grow.

As the trauma of her time in the cult regularly intrudes upon the film’s present tense, the collision draws the atmosphere into the same haze of paranoia and aftershocks of anxiety that Martha is feeling. This is remarkably assured debut work for the writer-director Sean Durkin who keeps the focus on fuzzy compositions and ominously open spaces in the blocking and backgrounds of shots. (In some ways it reminded me a bit of Lucrecia Martel’s The Headless Woman, but that’s a fairly obscure connection for the benefit of what is likely to be only a small portion of those reading this). The visual style of the picture matches Martha’s fuzzy mental state, clear and warm at times, but all-too-soon giving way to confusion and cold, unflinching traumatic memories. It’s a slow mystery – what is the full extent of the awfulness of what happened to her, and will she get the help she needs? – that is in some ways a slow-motion horror movie. One sequence late in the film is a like a quieter, simpler, though no less startling, version of something right out of a slasher flick.

The film tells the story of Martha’s steps towards a new, better life, tying it relentlessly to the slow and steady reveal of what she must overcome. It took great courage for her to escape her situation, but is it possible for Martha to outrun her past? We are given reason for hope, but as the end credits crash in, it’s still very much a tense, pressing, frustratingly unanswerable open question. In that moment, the film reveals itself to be a bit too teasing in its restraint to be fully believed (I’m tempted to call it Haneke lite). But it’s overall an undeniably effective piece of filmmaking and a strong debut.

The First Cut is the Deepest: WINTER'S BONE

Debra Granik’s Winter’s Bone is a thriller that chills in ways that set it apart from most other thrillers. There’s a chilliness that sets in during the opening scenes, and before I knew it the chill was bone deep. It’s a chill that goes further than the film’s pale blue coloring and the wintry setting, with pale faces, crunchy steps and icy puffs of breath. It’s a chill that comes from cold actions and intentions, from cold hearts and harsh realities of the character’s lives.

The film is anchored by a powerful performance from 19-year-old Jennifer Lawrence who stars as a small-town Missouri teenager left by her deadbeat, drug-dealer dad to take care of her younger brother and sister and their invalid mother. The plot is set in motion when the sheriff (Garret Dillahunt) shows up to say that her missing father has a looming court date and has put up the property as his bail. If he doesn’t show, they’ll lose their house.

The teen sets out to find her father. At every turn the suspicious townsfolk who usually run in the same circles as the man claim they haven’t seen him in a while. But their eyes and demeanors hint at darker truths. This small-town society is closing in our lead. Even her uncle (John Hawkes) would rather forget about his missing brother than plunge into the question of the man’s whereabouts. There’s a conspiratorial nature that’s striving to keep secrets hidden, all the more dangerous for being a collection of people who all know each other, who have deep, tangled roots.

There are those who would keep the truth of her father’s location hidden. If she doesn’t find out the truth soon, her family will be homeless. They barely have the resources to survive as it is. They get by on luck, thriftiness, and the kindness of their neighbors. The menacing figures lurking around the plot are no more menacing than the threat of being pushed even further down the economic ladder.

There’s a realism on display here, building a picture of a community wherein crushing poverty is nearly as dangerous as the film’s central mystery. The specifics of the setting and character ground the frightening, chilling moments to come. It’s a subdued ache of a film that borders on becoming a slice of ice-cold southern gothic.

The restraint on display only heightens the anguish. It’s upsetting to see the girl beaten and intimidated, but it’s nearly as upsetting to watch the parallel story of their financial situation. They, and the people in their community, are endlessly trying to scrape up enough to keep living. This is not a film that looks down its nose in pity on the less fortunate. This is a film that locates their basic humanness and surrounds them with production design that feels just right. Too often though, Granik lets the local color overpower plot and character. Luckily such lapses don’t overpower the film as a whole.

The film builds to very disturbing scene, despite having the grisliest moments kept out of frame (small spoiler: it involves a rowboat and a chainsaw). But the scene that hit me the hardest is one of the smallest. After hunting squirrels, the lead’s 12-year-old brother scoops out a slimy handful of squirrel guts and asks his big sister “Do we eat these parts?” Her reply: “Not yet.”