Notes on a Scandal: MAY DECEMBER

Todd Haynes is a modern master of melodrama, with films that thrive in the tension of societal norms straining to restrain his characters’ natural drives toward it. In his latest film May December, an actress arrives at the home of a family that was once the center of tabloid controversy in hopes of shadowing them for her latest movie role based on their scandal. The actress (Natalie Portman) has only surface-level questions to ask, and a kind of guileless confidence in her ability to soak up something real from the quotidian observations she’ll grok just by hanging around. The matriarch of the family (Julianne Moore), a dotty housewife with a flailing bakery business and a wispy lisping affect, just hopes the movie star won’t be rude (like Judge Judy), and that she’ll play fair with the facts of her life as she sees them. You see, her affair with her much younger husband (Charles Melton) started when he was in 7th grade. They got married after her release from prison, where she had their first child, and weathered a storm of national news attention. She doesn’t seem to think there’s anything wrong with that. Now he’s barely cracked his mid-30s and their offspring are graduating high school. For his part, he really loves his teenage kids, but it’s difficult to reconcile the fact that these fresh-faced youngsters are now older than their dad was when they were born. As the movie draws out his hobby of raising caterpillars to release as butterflies, it’s clear he’s been stunted in his cocoon by the unacknowledged abuse that’s shaped the majority of his life. Meanwhile, when not interviewing the woman’s estranged first family, the actress hovers on the margins of family life for a few weeks, watching in scenes of live wire discomfort as the dysfunction inherent in this family dynamic ripples and bubbles beneath metric tons of denial. The homogenizing force of suburban normality is stretched to the breaking point for these people—and the Savannah setting gives it a sense of oceanfront Southern Gothic as two phonies circle each other and the rest are adrift in the consequences.

Haynes stages scenes with elaborate framing for straight-faced jaw-dropping confessions and twisting entanglements of exploitation. (In tone, it’s somehow the perfect equidistant midpoint between Douglas Sirk’s Eisenhower-era stiffness and John Waters’ lurid vulgarity, right next to Pedro Almodovar in its tightly controlled stylish displays of repressions and unspoken depravities of character.) The lines between actress and her subjects get blurry, especially as the women seem to trade traits—listen to how that lisp drifts between them!—and Haynes loads the frames with mirrors and reflections and cameras and lenses. It’s all about image in that ineffable way. Isn’t that a typically Haynes subject, though? Here’s another of his seductively unsettling melodramas about the tragedy of being unable to recognize your true self behind the artifice you’ve built up around yourself. Like the Barbie doll Carpenters in his experimental Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story or the frosty domestic noirs of his Mildred Pierce or Carol, or the suffocating Sirkian vibrancy in Far From Heaven, he’s once more pinning his characters down with empathetic archness. Here it’s simultaneously moving and at a distance, and often darkly hilarious, in a gripping style pulsing with raw emotion beneath the surface. He uses stinging, borrowed piano cues on the score and a kind of hazy softness to the frames, like he’s dredging up dark truths through the scrim of a 90s ripped-from-the-headlines made-for-TV movie. And yet, by Samy Burch’s emotionally complex screenplay setting the action of the story two decades past its central scandal, and making explicit the ways in which attempting to fictionalize such sensationalized real world melodrama inevitably falls short, it makes for a movie using that distancing effect to be more invested in the long ugly aftermath. That roils underneath the apparent, twisted normality that’s settled over the pain, and no empty gestures of family life or hollow Hollywood artifice can fill that emptiness.

Center Stage: DEAR EVAN HANSEN andEVERYBODY'S TALKING ABOUT JAMIE

In Dear Evan Hansen, a painfully lonely depressed teenager accidentally insinuates himself into the life of the family of a dead classmate. A few unfortunate coincidences lets them think he was their suicidal son’s only friend, and the poor kid’s too awkward and inexperienced with human connection to tell them the truth. And that’s the kind of lie that’s hard to unwind if you let it go for even a moment. Besides, he starts to like a feeling of acceptance it brings him. That’s an extremely uncomfortable dynamic, as the fragile high schooler knowingly stakes his emotional well-being on this falsehood, just as surely as his deceased classmate’s mourning family members have done the same unknowingly. The wait for the truth to come out is an unpleasant underlying concern, almost unbearable in its raw potential compounding heartbreak upon heartbreak. You just know it’ll break everyone involved. And yet the whole thing is a musical, with songs from Benj Pasek and Justin Paul, whose work for the catchy Greatest Showman is probably their finest hour. Their kind of soaring pop uplift might make an awkward fit for material that wouldn’t take too much tweaking to imagine as a cold, creepy Michael Haneke feature.

That it somehow worked as a stage musical is something of a theatrical magic trick. Somewhere between the stage lights and spare sets is enough of an abstraction to allow the production to sit with its implications without letting its exposed nerves overwhelm with nagging doubts. On screen, it’s a tougher sit. The close-ups and medium shots invite a closer look at the emotional stakes. And, sure, as slightly mean internet frenzy goes, star Ben Platt, reprising the lead, is now slightly too old to hold the big screen as a believable teenager, especially as the filmmaking makes him somehow look even older. It doesn’t help that his every tic is still playing to the rafters. The rest of the cast is much better, and largely so good at embodying the enormous drama of the moments—Amy Adams, Julianne Moore, Kaitlyn Dever, and Amandla Stenberg, especially selling some tricky moments of tearful connection. The ensemble is doing work imbuing their characters with such depth of feeling that it actually reveals how thin some of the parts are written. Meanwhile, director Stephen Chobsky—whose Wonder and Perks of Being a Wallflower are better movies about young people’s struggles with mental health—shoots it like a glossy indie drama. Every set looks like a showroom; every tear is shown artfully dripping down quivering cheeks. It makes the songs ever-so-slightly out of place, especially as choreography is generally kept to a minimum, and the lyrics then become plainly presented soliloquies.  

Some of the plot’s turns look flimsier that way, the outsized feelings pushed down into a too-real-yet-unreal box. And the trims taken to the story tighten the focus on the pitiable Evan’s woebegone mistakes instead of expanding into the larger ramifications for the others. (One needn’t look further than the final number, which has been changed from a group coda to a solo.) This all leads to the final stretch, already slightly shaky on stage, playing out as somewhat inadequate to the task of resolving its messy complications without playing like pat absolution. Too easy it was to shunt the hard work of atonement and grace off screen. It’s one of those instances where the movie version can make one almost see why it was a Broadway hit—a provocative stew of topical ideas about bullying and social media and mental health stirred up with strings and sentimentality—without quite feeling the effect.

A far more successful stage-to-screen musical about a teenage misfit is the exuberant Everybody’s Talking About Jamie. Based on a glittery pop confection of a British musical, it tells the story of a 16-year-old boy who hopes to become a drag queen. In broad strokes, the picture is in the tradition of Billy Elliot and Kinky Boots, in which a working-class young person pushes against conservative boundaries and pursues their dream against all odds. We have the plucky youth of the title (Max Harwood), who keeps his hopes to himself, mostly. His mother (Sarah Lancashire) is supportive. His best friend (Lauren Patel) wants to understand. But the bullies at his school pick up on his insecurities and his estranged father (Ralph Ineson) is distant from discomfort with his son’s sexuality and interests. The boy clearly loves sparkles and heels, makeup and feminine style. He has for a while. Now that he wants to be even more flashy with it and maybe even get up on a stage in their small-town drag show, why, it’s like he’s coming out all over again. The cast imbues the plot’s predictable moves with a giddy believability, an emotional grounding that makes it feel real enough to its situation and relationships even as it takes off in flights of musical fantasy. Best of all is Harwood, who sells the sense of youthful excitement and experimenting barely outracing his deep insecurity and fear. He hides it well, with the stuff to fake it until he makes it.

The film has been cannily constructed, full of numbers reminiscent of everything from Pet Shop Boys to Madonna with a low-key Broadway sashay and more than a little pep in its jazzy step, stretching out across the screen. It sometimes dips into theatrical fantasy—like a cafeteria that fills with stage smoke as lunch ladies become background singers—and other times is snappily cut and styled like a glam music video. The debut director, Jonathan Butterell, and co-writers, Dan Gillespie Sells and Tom MacRae, are also the originators of the stage show and do a good job modulating the tone for the cinema. It’s a bit of kitchen-sink realism with a lot of dewey dreamy fizzy uplift involved. As it shifts between earnest drama and flashy dances, simple ballads and sparkling spectacle, it makes a nice balance of realism and fancy. Among the most moving is a sequence in which an older drag queen mentor (Richard E. Grant) sings to the young man about his days marching for gay rights as AIDS approached. While he recounts his past, we go into blurry VHS-style flashbacks haunted by the ghost of his future self. (His younger days are reminiscent of scenes in the heartbreaking It’s a Sin, Russell T. Davies’ recent excellent miniseries about that time and place.) Elsewhere, we have a suspenseful first drag show, parental confrontations, potential setbacks, and an isn’t-it-pretty-to-think-so sweet school dance conclusion followed by a dreamy mass dance number of a curtain call. The cumulative effect is a movie about acceptance that wears its lesson lightly and passionately. What a delight of a sugary (but not entirely sugar-coated) journey of self-discovery. It’s enough to make one believe what one character tells Jamie: somewhere there’s a party that can’t start without you.

The Lady Grieve: THE WOMAN IN THE WINDOW and THOSE WHO WISH ME DEAD

It’s a total fluke of Hollywood’s pandemic scheduling that brings to streaming this weekend two mid-budget studio thrillers with movie star turns for middle-aged actresses. That they both center on women drawn into strangers’ high-stakes dramas while suffering from their own near-debilitating flashbacks to past trauma is just another coincidence, I suppose. If only they were both terrific. Alas, Netflix got the short end of the stick there, having picked up The Woman in the Window as damaged goods when it was sold off to the highest bidder. (20th Century Fox made the adaptation of the bestselling mystery novel back in 2018 — we don’t even need to go into the even wilder story of how the author was later exposed as a habitual con artist and fraudster in a lengthy New Yorker piece — before getting acquired by Disney, which forced reshoots that delayed the release, at which point the theaters were closed and, well, here we are.) Even if you didn’t know it was a troubled picture, it’d be clear right away it’s a muddled one. Director Joe Wright (Atonement) and screenwriter Tracy Letts (August: Osage County) have been given a pretty junky piece of source material, a transparent Rear Window rip-off in which an agoraphobic child psychologist (Amy Adams) spies some suspicious behavior from her new neighbors. The filmmakers treat the set-up as an excuse to swoop through a creaky townhouse, peer out windows, and glide across dark rooms as reality gets slippery. Eventually we get a host of marquee actors (Gary Oldman, Julianne Moore, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Anthony Mackie, Wyatt Russell, Brian Tyree Henry) cycling through Adams’ home as she gets increasingly confused about what, exactly, is going on across the street.

With hysterical accusations, devious deceptions, potential psychosis and psychopathy, and convoluted conflicts, every scene could, and maybe should, be an excuse to chow down on ham, but the film somehow never delivers on that potential. The actors stand around waiting for the main course that never arrives. The whole thing is routine as can be, with dark and stormy nights, and gaslighting suspects, and circular arguments, pile-ups of red herrings, and boy, I wonder if Hitchcock himself could’ve made Google searches a compelling source of thrills. The picture looks as dim and muddy as its plotting. Wright doesn’t even bring his usual stylish flourishes with any consistency, which makes for a curiously restrained and sleepy spelunking into bloated paperback surprises. At best it’ll throw a clip from a Hitchcock movie on our lead’s TV, which might be a cute tip-of-the hat if it wasn’t merely a reminder of how far craft has fallen in a case like this. Even the big twists just meekly peek out and slide off, one more shrug before you go. At least Adams, much better served here than by the dismal Hillbilly Elegy, for whatever that’s worth, gets to put the entire lousy picture on her shoulders and nearly carry it solo to the finish line. She inhabits every loose nerve ending and boozy pill-popping distraction as her character’s unraveling unconvincingly brings her closer to actually leaving the house.

Much better is the straight shooter Those Who Wish Me Dead. Its opening act is a bow drawn simply back; the next 75 minutes or so are a direct flight of an arrow to a fiery conclusion. There’s something admirable about its easy confidence and sturdy execution. The thing delivers where it counts. The story starts with a boy and his father (Finn Little and Jake Weber) on the run from bad guys (Nicholas Hoult and Aidan Gillen) who want them dead. They flee to Montana, where you just know they’ll cross paths with the small-town cop (Jon Bernthal) and the troubled forest service firefighter (Angelina Jolie) whose introductions have been cross-cut with the rising action. Directed and co-written by Taylor Sheridan (Hell or High Water), with author Michael Koryta from his novel, the quick blooded tension rises fast. Soon enough, the film becomes a deadly cat-and-mouse game — machine gun hunters and their vulnerable prey — stalking through the woods. Shades of fairy tale logic, perhaps, with a little boy lost in the forest, wolves on his heels, a woodsman caught in a trap, and a beautiful lady by a lake who just might be able to help him survive. But the thing is too much a grizzled non-nonsense snap of a genre effort to push overmuch on its potential fable qualities. Instead, it rests on Jolie as an engine of redemption, a woman given a desk job, of sorts, after a deadly fire outcome that weighs heavily on her mind. Now there’s a rattled child who needs rescue. It’s easy to root for them.

The movie is short and simple, and all the more effective for knowing just how to lean on its best elements. It helps that Jolie, one of our great modern movie stars, has rarely had a straightforward starring role in the last decade—just four times above the title in live action and two of them were as Maleficent. She commands the screen and exudes competence, even in a role that’s so thinly drawn that there’s nothing else but her star power to generate interest. The plot itself, too, is built from stock parts, but Sheridan knows how to stage his thrills with brutal efficiency. The tension — close up threats against the wide open national park spaces — builds on a steady upswing as the various participants try to keep their cool and their control through strategies that eventually lead to gun fights and, by the end, a raging forest fire. There are efficient thrills to the sturdy brutality of its inevitable violence, the quickly sketched sympathy for the victims, and the consistently well-timed escalations of danger. If the movie still finds time for some loose ends — what’s in the letter? and did that Big Name villain just drive off after his one scene in hopes of a sequel? — there’s pretty much nothing important that isn’t driven to its logical conclusion. We don’t get solid mid-level star vehicles often enough any more. At least this one’s pretty good.

Grey Zone: THE HUNGER GAMES: MOCKINGJAY - PART 2

Hardly the victory march some will expect, I suspect The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 2 will surprise audiences unfamiliar with Suzanne Collins’ books with its glum, mournful approach. It’s a typical sci-fi dystopian setup involving an opulent fascistic regime controlling a population through violence and the common people rising up in rebellion. But what makes this concluding feature so potent and satisfying is the way it eschews easy moral binaries and the temptation to turn in a rousing finale of action and comeuppances. No, Mockingjay – Part 2 picks up where the previous feature left off, with the rebellious Districts of Panem preparing to invade the Capitol and depose evil President Snow (Donald Sutherland), and finds in the toil and terror of revolution only destruction and pain. It sits with our heroes and asks if their entire struggle was worth it. A quietly radical conclusion has us root for unrest and upheaval, and then explore the difficulties of putting a society back together, especially for those who blew it all up.

This is a series that’s gotten slightly better each time out, not because the overall quality has improved dramatically, but because it has complicated its character’s ideas and emotions. Now that we have all four films we can see the complete picture, a dim, cynical allegory with a glimmer of hope in the end. Our protagonist, Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence, fusing determination and uncertainty in one of her best performances), started as a pawn of the Capitol in their Hunger Games, a propaganda tool, gladiatorial combat to keep the masses intimidated and entertained. But, with her games partner, Peeta (Josh Hutcherson), she managed to escape certain death in the arena, and in the process sparked a growing rebellion that soon conscripted her to be their symbol. How rare to see a hero who is confused about her role, who recognizes and bristles at her lack of control, and yet continues to struggle to do what’s right.

As Mockingjay – Part 2 begins, rebel leaders (Julianne Moore, Philip Seymour Hoffman) allow Katniss to head to the front lines of the assault on the Capitol as part of a propaganda squad. With her old friend Gale (Liam Hemsworth), a kind-but-tough commander (Mahershala Ali), and team of soldiers (including Sam Claflin and Natalie Dormer), their job is to follow behind the fighting, inspiring the troops, and scaring the Capitol citizens, with video reports. Unfortunately, Snow has ordered the Gamesmakers to spread traps throughout the city, turning a bombed-out urban setting – all grey pockmarked rubble and dirt – into an even more twisted Hunger Games. This is how the action proceeds, the team picking through a minefield of deadly contraptions while working their way to Snow, the man they want to assassinate to end the war, bringing a new, and hopefully better, government to Panem.

Screenwriters Peter Craig and Danny Strong smartly keep the focus on our characters, allowing most of the epic battle to take place off screen through suggestion. The violence we see isn’t the massive depersonalized clashes of CG armies. It’s up close, panicked, sweating, sudden. Horror movie mechanics are used to spring traps – like automatic weapons, oil slicks, and mindless sewer mutants – with jump scares jolting firefights and foot chases into action. Between flashes of chaos, director Francis Lawrence (who has capably, artfully helmed three of the four Hunger Games) uses stillness and quiet, as characters catch their breath, debate strategy, and let the traumatic events stop ringing in their ears, if only for a little while. There’s dread everywhere, not only in the probing close-ups, which capture every bit of fear and doubt, but in the sense that all this fighting may be futile.

This has always been a series that’s both action-oriented and deeply disturbed by violence. From the shaky-cam elisions of the first Games and the brutal executions of Catching Fire to the bruising civilian uprisings in the first Mockingjay (the series' high point), it’s a franchise the looks at bloodshed with great sadness, keenly aware of cycles of trauma, fear mongering, propaganda, and war. It treats even the enemy as people, this last film finding fleeing Capitol citizens and viewing them with compassion. What started as a satire of reality TV and conspicuous consumption has become a war zone, with refugees fleeing both rebel bombings and oppressive government retaliations. (Real world echoes are impactful and messy.) The violence of the Hunger Games becomes the violence of revolution. It’s a movie too engaged with its tragic elements to create action scenarios full of mindless villains to slaughter. Every kill is felt. The cast convincingly inhabits characters who are exhausted by the chaos, and throw themselves into it anyway.

Where will it stop? And if it does, how will Katniss ever feel normal again? Her nightmares are getting worse. Her sense of purpose is the only thing keeping her moving forward. But it’s hard to tell who has her best interests at heart – one old ally has been brainwashed; others may just as soon allow her to be martyred for their cause. Worse still is the question of whether what’s best for Katniss and what’s best for Panem are or can be one and the same. It doesn’t stop with defeating Snow. Revolution is hard enough. Filling the power vacuum that follows it will be harder. Here’s a movie actually interested in contemplating these tough questions, and in a slick, pop blockbuster package that’ll draw big crowds to see this four-part story wrapped up. It takes gut-wrenching twists, and allows time to slowly contemplate howls of sorrow and confusion. That it doesn’t find easy answers, and leaves an unsettled feeling lingering in a dénouement of tenuous hope, is to its credit.

Hollywood Endings: MAPS TO THE STARS

David Cronenberg’s name is inextricably tied to body horror. His first couple decades of filmmaking brought us gooey protrusions, sunken orifices, and unholy amalgamations of oozing flesh as bodies betrayed their owners again and again. In The Fly, Jeff Goldblum fused with an insect in a crumbling mutation. In Videodrome and eXistenZ, man and machine melded physiologies, while Dead Ringers and Crash featured close-ups of metal objects later inevitably plunged into human flesh. And in Scanners, heads explode. These memorably disquieting horror images, playing off the fear of our physical being’s fragility and ability to turn against us with disease and disgust, sealed his reputation as a conjurer of disturbing images.

But his last decade of filmmaking has found a larger body to tease apart and catch mid-decay: society. Look at A History of Violence, a gory drama picture about the lingering effects of murder, or Eastern Promises, a grim Euro-thriller about borders between crime and safety, punishment and brutality, or A Dangerous Method, a period piece of mental anguish at the dawn of psychiatry, or Cosmopolis, with a young billionare on a limo drive through an emotionally and economically deadening New York City. In these films Cronenberg finds violence, yes, but also metaphoric putrefying flesh, seeping sickness deep down in the guts of humanity. His clinical eye finds great drama and the darkest comedy in the damage people do to each other. Certainly, our bodies can betray us. But our actions can perpetuate cycles of damage to all those around us. We fail ourselves when we fail each other, parts of a whole, unpredictable and easily broken.

His latest film, Maps to the Stars, has often been mistaken for a Hollywood satire simply because it’s set in Los Angeles amongst a group of industry types who are, to a person, capable of awful behavior unsparingly detailed in bleakly humorous ways. But what else could it be but some kind of societal body horror when we are regarding poison seeping into the culture? The film looks at damaged people scrambling to work out their psychosexual dramas in public for our amusement on our screens. This isn’t satire. It’s a deeply cynical creepy/comic biopsy, turning up exaggerated rot underneath glamorous surfaces. (Or, at least you can only hope it’s exaggerated.) Imagine Altman’s The Player, but darker, ruder, more lacerating in its oddball effects.

Characters include: an aging actress (Julianne Moore), a hack self-help guru (John Cusack), his stunted teen star son (Evan Bird), the boy’s terse mom (Olivia Williams), a meek chauffer (Robert Pattinson), and a mysterious burn victim (Mia Wasikowska) who arrives on a bus from far away, determined to make it in Tinseltown. They cross paths, some victims of the same tangled tragic backstories (arson, abuse, addiction), others on the precipice of fresh tragedy (mistakes, murders, and Machiavels). Speaking in dryly, believably ridiculous dialogue from screenwriter Bruce Wagner, these people behave like shambling showbiz types, selfish, rapacious id-driven beings. They’ll screw or screw over anyone they care to, while yearning in vain for something to bring meaning to their lives.

Under an intense California sun, Peter Suschitzky’s cinematography so bright it’s practically scorching, performances move with a hollowed-out quality. The guru appears exhausted in his TV appearances, Cusack playing him as a man who doesn’t believe what he’s selling anymore, if he ever did. The middle-aged actress is scrambling to stop falling back down the industry ladder, grasping for a role made famous by her long-dead abusive movie star mother (Sarah Gadon). Moore’s performance is a tightrope walk of vanity and desperation, playing a character at once tragically damaged, overwhelmingly insecure, and monstrously shortsighted, hilarious and heartbreaking. A different sort of heartbreak is the teen star. He has a flat affect common to anyone his age, but his dull gaze shows a boy who has already been to rehab, has access to temptations everywhere, and who thinks he sees ghosts. Perhaps he does.

The characters are running from haunted pasts, with apparitions real, imagined, or half-remembered returning to mock their emptiness. It informs their current pain. They’ve achieved some level of material success, and yet can’t shake memories of and impulses towards abusive behaviors, deceit, addiction, and insanity. The most eerily self-possessed among these desperate people is Wasikowska’s creepy spin on the ingénue role. She drifts into entry-level jobs, interacts with these supposed stars with a calm sense of destiny. She’s moved by prophecy, a sense of inevitable destruction she’ll embrace by film’s end. This confident madness brings out the madness in others, especially as we learn the full extent of her unexpected connections to them. At every step, under Cronenberg’s rigorously sinister sense of humor, the ensemble plays out wickedly funny, unsparingly unsettling sadness, warped, specific, and yet recognizable.

Games Over: THE HUNGER GAMES: MOCKINGJAY-PART 1

With each installment, The Hunger Games series gets more complicated and more interesting. The latest, The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 1, based on the first half of the last novel in Suzanne Collins’ trilogy, finds Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence) regrouping after a rebel cell sprung her from her second Hunger Games, a position she found herself in after inadvertently inspiring a revolution with her first win. In this film, she’s confused and distraught. Her friend and ally, Peeta (Josh Hutcherson), is captured, a hostage of President Snow (Donald Sutherland) in the ostentatious Captiol. She’s hunkered in an underground bunker in the wilds of District 13, helping the rebels plan how best to use her popularity to galvanize the whole Panem country and foment open warfare against the tyrants who’ve oppressed them for so long.

Returning director Francis Lawrence, this time with a screenplay adapted by Peter Craig and Danny Strong, turns this dilemma into the stuff of potent political allegory. The series has grown increasingly ideologically fascinating, starting as a surface-level jab at class conflict and reality TV competitions and evolving into what is now a radicalized story of class warfare waged through propaganda battles, lopsided bombing campaigns, and surprise attacks. It’s a grab bag of geopolitical reference points, but the central image of downtrodden working class folks rising up against wealthy tyrants is a stirring one. This feature, which picks up right where the last left off and builds towards yet another cliffhanger, extends the conflicts’ emotional damage while gearing up for the grand finale to hit theaters this time next year. It plays upon our sympathies built up in previous installments and our understanding that there’s more to come.

The film devotes most of its runtime to Katniss struggling with what the movement needs her to be and the conflicted feelings roiling inside her. She never asked to be a leader. In the first film, she was a symbol for the Capitol. The second film found her a symbol for Panem. In both cases, she had no say in the matter. Now, the leaders of the burgeoning rebellion expect her, the Mockingjay symbol incarnate, to appear in their stirring propaganda campaign, smuggled over the airways into the tinderboxes that are the increasingly violently oppressed districts ready to explode. It’s a movie about how heroes are not just born to lead, but built and shaped for their movement’s needs. We’re introduced to a team of commando cameramen (lead by Natalie Dormer) intent on following Katniss into guerilla warfare, capturing great galvanizing images to broadcast. These dispatches look an awful lot like an ad campaign for a Hunger Games movie, so you know they’re effective.

As the rebellion gets ready to make their next step, Katniss talks with familiar returning characters. She sees a friend (Liam Hemsworth), a mentor (Woody Harrelson), her image consultant (Elizabeth Banks), her sister (Willow Shields), and fellow Games’ victors (Sam Claflin, Jeffrey Wright). They’re a collection of great character actors involved in scheming, debating, giving orders, and delivering speeches. Most poignant is the late Philip Seymour Hoffman in one of his final roles as a canny political operative strategizing the rebellion’s next move. The rebel leader (Julianne Moore, sporting long grey hair) is a new addition, another forceful but sympathetic voice echoing in Katniss’ head.

This could all be static, marking time until the real action can ramp up for the presumably fiery climax of Mockingjay – Part 2. Indeed, it grows cramped and a little repetitive at times. (Tell me why Katniss needs to take a nearly identical tour of ruined District 12 twice?) And the emotional journeys the characters take are mostly minor adjustments that leave them better ready to launch into the next film. But with such great actors involved, especially Lawrence, Moore, and Hoffman, the political calculations of a growing rebellion feel meaningful. Most effectively, the filmmakers have an even greater sense of the world’s details. The spaces feel lived in and thought through. There’s a sense of weight and import to characters’ discussions, real meaning to the sporadic splashes of violence. It’s best when opening up the contained bunker dramas, showing us other parts of Panem carrying out strikes against the forces of Capitol-ism. In one moving scene, a folk song becomes a rallying cry in one of the more unblinking representations of uprising I’ve seen in recent years. There’s real impact to their decisions.

Perhaps we’ll eventually be better off thinking of Francis Lawrence’s three Hunger Games films as one three-part story instead of discreet units. For now, though, it’s fun to simply be back in an engaging world with smart ideas and some stirring action bouncing around a well-constructed blockbuster. I was pulled into the film’s space and enjoyed occupying it for a couple of hours, even if by the end I would’ve much rather watched another couple hours right then and there instead of having to wait a whole year to see it reach an actual conclusion. What’s most exciting about the story told here is the way the filmmakers – and Collins, in her books – are not afraid to change the dynamics, alter the scenario, and do things differently. Here, the games are over, the characters are on the run, with no hope of safety until they see things through to the end. And that’s where they leave us, eager to see where that end will be.

Can't Stop, Won't Stop: NON-STOP

In 2005 and 2006, we had a small post-9/11 glut of thrillers set on airplanes, all largely excellent in one way (United 93) or another (Red Eye, Flightplan), or another (Snakes on a Plane). It’s a subgenre I’m happy to return to yet again in Non-Stop, especially when it’s done well, and even better, when we’re seated next to Liam Neeson. He has such likable, intimidating intelligence on screen. Using his height, his gravely accent, and his piercing eyes to communicate a soulful determination and confident capacity for handling any situation in which he finds himself, he anchors and makes compelling even the junkiest of thrillers, like Taken 2. For very good thrillers, like The Grey, he helps make them into terrific suspenseful evocations of existential anguish. Non-Stop’s entertainment value falls somewhere between those previous pictures. It’s a relentless entertainment that constantly tightens the situation around Neeson, constraining options and narrowing his ability to maneuver until the panic reaches a crowd-pleasing intensity.

In this slow boil thriller of slickly increasing and enjoyable suspense, he plays an air marshal aboard a late night transatlantic flight from New York to London. Not long after takeoff, he receives a series of texts from a blocked number. Each new message flashes on the screen, the silence of the midnight flight turning ominous as the texts reveal an ultimatum. A passenger will be killed every 20 minutes unless $150 million is transferred to a specified account. It’s a hostage situation, but only the marshal knows, at least at first. Who is the hostage taker? It’s someone on the plane, but he or she is doing an awfully good job staying hidden. (Could this be the first organic and well-executed use of texting for the purposes of cinematic anxiety?) Director Jaume Collet-Serra, of the skillfully upsetting horror film Orphan and the Neeson-starring actioner Unknown, uses the darkened nighttime interior of the plane to heighten the drama and keep the stakes intensely enclosed.

A cleverly contained mystery, the film is smartly not a whodunit, but a who-is-doing-it. Any one of the people hunched over their tablets and smart phones could be doing the threatening. It’s a high-flying locked room mystery, Agatha Christie by way of Speed. The screenplay by John W. Richardson, Chris Roach, and Ryan Engle respects the audience’s intelligence as it follows Neeson looking around the plane, hunting for anything suspicious. The appealing ensemble is loaded with familiar faces playing passengers (Julianne Moore, Scoot McNairy, Nate Parker, Corey Stoll, Omar Metwally), flight attendants (Michelle Dockery, Lupita Nyong’o), and airline officials (Anson Mount). All of them can ably appear suspicious and innocent in the same instant. Neeson is desperately searching amongst and around them for a clue when events suddenly conspire for a corpse to turn up exactly on schedule. The threats are no mere prank. They are deadly serious.

As events on the plane grow increasingly desperate, curiosity escalates in the passengers and crew. Information and rumors spill out in dribs and drabs of context-free worry, eventually making their way to the ground where authorities, like Shea Whigham in a good voice performance as a security official calling the plane’s phone, and news media assume Neeson is the one doing the hostage-taking . That only makes solving the case harder for the poor guy. It’s a credit to the inexorable forward momentum of the film and the welcome shades of complexity to this Hitchcockian wrong-man panic that I found myself desperately wanting Neeson to be right, but half-prepared for a twist that would put him in the wrong. It sure looks like he’s being framed, but in this situation everyone is a suspect. The plane keeps cutting through the night sky, too far to turn back to America, still too far away from Europe to make a landing. But as the threat of violence looms, casualties slowly pile up, and Neeson’s behavior grows increasingly desperate, it’s agonizingly clear they’re eventually heading to the ground one way or another.

Non-Stop stays at a consistent height of peril, compelling and involving throughout. Neeson grounds it all with a weary humanity as an alcoholic ex-cop with sad family problems, a token amount of backstory that would seem cheap if a lesser actor was in his position. He reluctantly finds himself the center of this madness, and the one with the best chance of bringing it to a safe conclusion. Collet-Serra makes great use of Neeson’s height and broad shoulders in contrast to the tight aisles and low ceilings of the setting, finding ways to use every bit of the plane in clever ways, even sending the vehicle into sudden turbulence to punctuate dramatic moments. The raw material is nothing inherently special, but in its execution it rises to the level of superior craftsmanship. It is a solid, exciting, and satisfying thriller.

Hurt People Hurt People: CARRIE

Stephen King’s novel Carrie and the 1976 Brian De Palma film based on it are not particularly frightening examples of the horror genre.  Emphasis is on something more emotionally upsetting than surface scare. They have blunt force pulp power, bludgeoning and disturbing. What makes them something approaching classic is that truly distressing and upsetting material comes well before an ostracized teenage girl has a nasty prank pulled on her at prom and finally snaps in a frenzy of telekinetic fury. No, what’s upsetting about Carrie is the all-too-real horror of everyday cruelty. She’s a girl who is abused at home by a tyrannically religious mother who preaches a twisted gospel of self-loathing and shame, bullied at school by packs of mean girls and boys who perpetuate a cycle of trauma that is seemingly endless. When one girl snarls that Carrie’s “been asking for it since the sixth grade,” it’s hard not to wonder why this wounded young woman could ever been seen as anything other than psychologically brutalized. Sadly, compassion is something easily lost in adolescence, especially in group dynamics when one’s qualms can get swallowed up in mob mentality.

Where the new version of Carrie, a fresh adaptation scripted by Lawrence D. Cohen (he wrote the 1976 version) and Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa (a writer for Marvel comics as well as TV’s Glee and Big Love), goes right is in its sharp psychological eye in these early sequences of casual real-world cruelty. (Take the writers’ previous works of high school campiness, a focus on religion as familial strain, and a splash of King horror intruding on small town normality, and you have a good start on understanding this film’s approach.) Unlike De Palma’s brash showiness, with its nearly-exploitative eye for bodies on display in all their various states, this adaptation is inspired by the characters’ interiorities. Carrie, who is slowly realizing her telekinesis, is painfully shy, guarded. She’s preemptively defensive and rightfully so. After the opening scene, in which she’s relentlessly mocked in the gym class locker room, her mother picks her up from school. Full of sickly maternal rage, she punishes Carrie, telling her if she hadn’t been sinful that wouldn’t have happened. The poor girl is abused by her peers and then comes home to further punishment. For Carrie, there is no such thing as a safe place. 

Played here by Chloe Grace Moretz, Carrie is a pretty teenage girl who hides it well. She’s restlessly wary, hunched, arms held perpetually in a cautious defensive posture in front of her body that is swimming in formless oversized clothes. Her eyes dart, ready to find the next source of pain. A smile teases across her lips as she comes to realize that she has the ability to move things with her mind, along with a tremble of worry that if anyone found out, she’d only invite more mockery. Her mother (Julianne Moore) has wild hair and tends to hurt herself, pricking her thighs with her sewing needle, clawing at her wrists with her fingernails in religious fervor. It makes sense that she thinks the only reason she has a child is because of spiritual weakness, momentary lapses of sinful behavior. She keeps her daughter in line with threats of violence and confinement. When Carrie gets up the courage to announce that a cute boy (Ansel Elgort) has invited her to prom, her mother responds by telling her not to go. When Carrie pushes back ever so slightly, her mother hits herself repeatedly.

The boy feels sorry for Carrie and has invited her upon the request of his girlfriend (Gabriella Wilde), who regrets the bullying. A far more typical response comes from the ferociously catty mean girl (Portia Doubleday) who blames the victim when bullying gets her banned from prom. “We didn’t even do anything!” she cries, completely missing the point. She, along with her scary boyfriend (Alex Russell) plans to get even, blaming Carrie for missing out on prom. The nasty act they plan – the iconic Carrie prom moment that’s about as spoilable as Psycho’s shower scene, but I’ll avoid mentioning it anyway – is what sets off the more typically horror filled finale. In it, this film, like De Palma’s, becomes bloody. But unlike De Palma’s, this is a tragedy more than a spectacle, a film about a bullied girl who finally gets the strength to lash back at her tormentors and becomes a super-bully in the process, mangling indiscriminately. Even a kindly, well-intentioned teacher (wonderfully played by Judy Greer) gets caught up in the conflagration. This is no mere revenge fantasy. It’s troubling. When the nastiest bullies get taken out in spectacular horror film kills – staged here with freshly inventive jolts and jabs – it’s not only comeuppances. It’s a lament that it has gone this far.

The director here is Kimberly Peirce. Her first two films, 1999’s Boys Don’t Cry and 2008’s Stop-Loss, were haunting dramas that end up as tragedies. They’re about late-adolescent and early-adulthood yearnings, desires, and fluid identities in the process of stabilizing brought up short by intolerance and injustice. Here, in Carrie, those intolerances and injustices do their part in forming Carrie’s identity until the time when she has the empowerment to take control – take full command of her powers, both literal and metaphorical – and seizes it with great violence and only flashes of regret. Peirce handles the interpersonal relationships tenderly and sharply, so that by the time the violence of the finale emerges, almost right out of a comic book adaptation in its splashiness, like an X-Man gone sour, it’s as sad as it is shocking. Peirce makes a sympathetic portrait that’s never a voyeuristic freak show. She looks compassionately and sadly upon the events of the story, finding notes of embarrassment, anger, shame, and pity. Without attacking the material with the same outward bite and sleaze of De Palma, Peirce has made a humane, haunting and affecting adaptation from the inside out.

Coming to New Conclusions: DON JON

The title character in Don Jon is a big fan of his routine. An image conscious guy in his late twenties, he goes to the gym, to his bartending job, to the clubs, to church, to confession, to Sunday dinners with his family. He projects confidence and swagger that’s too good to be true. In fact, it is. He never really connects with another person, chasing women with his friends every night, but finding more enjoyment in seeing pictures of women online. They, after all, never ask anything of him. His approach to relationships is so simplistic and one-sided you know from frame one the movie is going to be about finding Jon a new, healthier way of approaching the world. That Jon is so confident in his delusions and superficial understandings of the way the world works makes him not pitiable, but somehow worth cheering for. I wanted him to improve and find true happiness. He’s just that charming.

Played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Jon is a fun character to spend 90 minutes with as he slowly makes his way towards a better view of the world (and the women) around him. Gordon-Levitt also writes and directs, making Don Jon a one-man show of sorts. But instead of the movie becoming a tired case of a talented actor taking on too much in an attempt to create a vanity project, he has instead made a fairly generous movie that’s willing to throw attention to welcome supporting parts. He gave himself a fun part to play, but also provided his game cast of talented and sometimes underutilized performers nice little turns of their own. As his parents, Tony Danza and Glenne Headly commit to charmingly broad stereotypes of New Jersey Irish Americans, cooking up pasta and wondering when he’ll find a nice girl and settle down. His younger sister is played by Brie Larson in a largely silent performance that’s nonetheless full of personality. The scenes of the family together are full of charm.

Elsewhere, the plot’s main turns hinge on Jon’s relationships with women. The first is a supremely attractive good girl he meets while clubbing. She’s easily a 10, he tells his buddies as he sets out to play “the long game” to get her, sending her a Facebook message and inviting her to coffee. You know, starting slow. She’s played by Scarlett Johansson as a woman who is used to getting what she wants. And what she wants now is Jon, on her own terms and at her own pace. Even though she’s gorgeous and he’s over the moon to be dating her, he finds he can’t stay away from all those pretty girls whose images are only a click away. Rapid-fire montage of Pavlovian computer noises – the Apple startup tone becoming a call to action of sorts – takes us inside Jon’s addictive need for what’s on the other end of that googling.

Part character study, part romantic comedy, both slide sideways into an addiction/recovery dramedy that threatens to turn purely judgmental before pulling back into something a tad more reasonable. His addiction to pornography intersects with and eventually derails his perfect compartmentalized routines, forcing him to take a good look at his understanding of women and images thereof. It’s ultimately a kinder more compassionate film than you might initially think. The problem is not that he likes images of naked women; it’s that he’s lost all perspective about what those images mean. It’s not about perfecting a disciplined routine, but knowing when it’s healthiest to break from it. It’s not about objectification so much as it is about moving past initial appearances. It’s not that he’s a bad person. He simply needs to learn how to interact with actual women. To paraphrase actual dialogue, he needs to truly lose himself in another person and let that person get lost in him.

At a night class he meets a woman who helps him understand all of the above. She’s played by Julianne Moore in a decent performance that’s dedicated to enlivening a character who is purely a plot point personified. That’s too bad, and too convenient, but every character, from Don Jon on down exists here to be nothing more than vivid sketch characters of broad impact and light tone. It handles some strong material with a light hand, drawing swift cultural observation (note Jon’s perspective on rom-coms) with a wink and a grin. Gordon-Levitt’s writing and directing exhibits so much of the charm, confidence, and swagger of his character that the movie’s a largely enjoyable experience. It’s a charismatic debut feature, one that shows he’s certainly a promising talent on both sides of the camera. 

Love is a Battlefield: CRAZY, STUPID, LOVE.

Crazy, Stupid, Love is a romantic comedy that tries to do something new but in the process finds only stale ways to do the same old things. It’s a film with a deeply talented ensemble that walks through intertwining rom-com plotlines, but at the core the whole thing is flat and unconvincing. It has one foot in low-key observational humor and another in broad sentimental jokiness with no idea how to reconcile the two. As a result, the film lurches from moment to moment and, though individual scenes and performances can be quite good, the whole thing is nothing more than a disappointment.

The film stars Steve Carell and Julianne Moore as a married couple of twenty-five years. We are quickly made aware of their deteriorating relationship in an opening scene that makes economical use of editing and framing. We see a bustling restaurant from the point of view of several pairs of feet in fancy shoes, one after the other paired off playing footsie. Then, we cut to two pairs of feet that are stationary and separated with shoes of decidedly lower quality and flashiness. These feet belong to Carell and Moore as they sit with their dessert menus trying to decide what they want. “Why don’t we say what we want at the same time?” Carell suggests. So they do. He says “crème brûlée.” She says “a divorce.”

From there on out we follow Carell as he tries to get back into the dating game with the help of a ladies’ man (Ryan Gosling) he runs into at a local bar. Meanwhile, his soon-to-be-ex wife makes tentative steps towards an office romance with her company’s accountant (Kevin Bacon). Sprinkled throughout the main thrust of the plot, their thirteen-year-old son (Jonah Bobo) wrestles with his crush on the teenage girl (Analeigh Tipton) who babysits his little sister (Joey King) while the ladies’ man may have finally found the one perfect girl (Emma Stone) who will make him decide to settle down.

Writer Dan Fogelman, who has also written Tangled and Cars (how’s that for variety?), weaves the various plot threads together as clumsily as he handles the tone. The characters are sometimes well drawn and other times seem to be barely more than a one-note joke. Take Marisa Tomei, who shows up in a handful of scenes in barely more than a cameo, for an example that’s indicative of the strange approach the film takes. Her character, a woman who is picked up at the bar by Carell, is made the butt of relentless sexist jokes. She’s ridiculed for being aggressive in her pursuit of a relationship, then ridiculed for later expressing surprise that Carell doesn’t call her back. When she reappears in a crowd of people during the climax, all she can do is sit on the sidelines and shoot daggers with her gaze as she flips him the bird. What a waffling, cruel way to treat a character, not only by the film but also by the characters within it.

Similar problems exist with the Gosling character. Now, Gosling is super charming and his rakish role works just fine, but by the time the film makes an attempt at deepening the character, it feels forced. It’s fun to see his wandering ways tamed by Emma Stone, who flips the power balance in the relationship, but it doesn’t feel like it should move as fast as it does. Far more honest and patient is the way Bobo’s puppy love is handled, at least until it becomes precocious mawkish speechifying in the final twenty minutes before returning to subtlety in the end, giving him the final shot of the film. In fact, his is the most compelling of the plot lines. Maybe this should have been his coming-of-age story instead of an I-still-love-my-ex divorcee’s fantasy. Carell and Moore do all the heavy lifting with characterization that the screenplay doesn't quite give them. They communicate more in body language than they do through speaking.

Directors Glenn Ficarra and John Requa, who directed last year’s I Love You, Phillip Morris, a terrific raunchy based-on-a-true-story farce, do their best impression of a mid-80’s James L. Brooks or perhaps a mid-90’s Cameron Crowe, but the script just isn’t up to their level of craftsmanship. There are scenes here that shine. I especially loved a late backyard confrontation that features every character’s secret revealed in a believably funny and tense way. Perhaps what the film lacks most is an intensity and immediacy that comes forth in that moment and in others like that opening scene, or some of the material between Bobo and Tipton, or the first real date between Gosling and Stone. There’s great stuff here, but not, unfortunately, a great movie.

Family Ties: THE KIDS ARE ALL RIGHT

Writer-director Lisa Cholodenko’s The Kids Are All Right arrives as one of the most acclaimed films of the year. While I don’t find myself in agreement with the most ebullient of raves, I can understand where they’re coming from. It didn’t entirely thrill me with its charm, but I nonetheless found the film to be a source of great enjoyment. As a portrait of a marriage, as a portrait of a family, I appreciated its honesty. As a comedy, I appreciated its wit. It’s well done.

On the plot level, I found the film to be surprisingly lacking. The film finds a family’s teenage daughter (Mia Wasikowska) getting ready to leave for college. It also finds fractures in its lead couple’s marriage. Both aspects of the plot are joined by its greatest inspiration, the introduction of the daughter’s, and her brother’s, “real” father (Mark Ruffalo), a sperm donor. What makes the film’s fairly standard family dramedey plot sing with small originality is the fact the parents are lesbians. Annette Benning and Julianne Moore are convincing as an aging married couple, with Benning delivering an especially rich performance.

While the film is about a gay marriage, it never lingers on that fact. It doesn’t become a parade of one-note scenes that chip away at an obvious message of tolerance. This sure isn’t a remake of Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. Instead, the film is simply a routine indie-comedy about a family, about parenting, about marriage. In fact, the sense of familiarity sometimes works against the film, but by keeping the message implied, Cholodenko ends up making the message even stronger.

Benning and Moore play characters that are not far from the parent characters in any other film of this type, but they have the added benefit of additional nuance. They’re a loving couple with small cracks in their relationship that will only be widened by secrets and ever-increasing busyness. Wasikowska and her brother, played by Josh Hutcherson, are perfectly normal teens. They push back against their parents while still finding themselves drawn to the comfort they represent. But, of course, they’re also curious about their donor-dad.

Ruffalo’s character feels more like a plot point than a character. Despite fine acting, the donor-dad is ultimately just an excuse for all of the other characters to react in ways that reveal their character through behaviors that aren’t always interesting. He’s an excuse for characters to reveal their thoughts and personalities without resorting to monologues. Ruffalo’s as charming as always, and the unknown donor angle keeps the movie fresh while giving it an attractive, intriguing hook. But I couldn’t help feeling that I would rather the film have just focused on the four most intriguing characters instead of becoming a subdued farce.

Yet, plot quibbles aside, the movie really works on an emotional level. I loved the tone of the piece, a melancholic lightness that feels just right for the last summer before the first child goes away to college. There’s a palpable sense of a family on the brink of change, a sense that’s only aggravated (almost unnecessarily so) by the literal plotting of the film. The editing is razor sharp; there’s a nice shape to the scenes. There’s an honest, good-natured randy quality to some of the humor that shoots through the relationships, a candidness in the family that is admirable and funny.

This is a picture of such generous clarity and truthfulness that, by the end, I didn’t care about the story at all. Instead, I loved these characters. I loved this family. I had a feeling that whatever happened to them, I’d love to watch. No story could squelch the contagious, warm-hearted goodwill these characters exude.

Quick Look: CHLOE

In Chloe, Julianne Moore feels emotionally cut-off from her teenage son (Max Thieriot) and suspects that her husband (Liam Neeson) is cheating on her. Rather than rest on her suspicions, and yearning for a way out of the loneliness and distance she feels growing in her familial relationships, she hires a prostitute (Amanda Seyfried) to flirt with her husband, befriend him, and see if he’ll have an affair. From that bare-bones plot description, it sounds like the film’s interests lie only in its more prurient scenes. While, yes, the film is interested to a certain extent in what goes on between sheets, it is a film that is much more interested in what goes on behind closed doors. And that is an important distinction. The film is not about sex; it’s about secrets. It’s not about affairs; it’s about what we assume. It’s not about what we see; it’s about what we think we see. Director Atom Egoyan is keenly interested in the darker side of human nature, the self-destructive, impulsive desires lurking in the corners of our minds. Chloe is no Exotica or The Sweet Hereafter, to name two better Egoyan efforts, but it’s still a dark, gut-twisting thriller about these characters and the way they interact (or don’t). It’s an exceedingly well-crafted exercise, well-acted and handsomely shot, but one that’s at its best the further it strays from standard thriller tropes. Funnily enough, the film only gains tension the more it gets away from questions like “who knows what?” and “what’s around the corner?” Egoyan’s film falls apart in the last act, with Erin Cressida Wilson's script giving in to its latent thriller tendencies in some fairly goofy ways. But isn’t it funny that the film shares the same downfall as its characters? They, too, find it hard to resist the allure of that which could leave them worse off than before.

Quick Look: A Single Man (2009)

A Single Man, the directorial debut of fashion designer Tom Ford, is art directed and artfully edited to within an inch of its life. This is a suffocatingly persnickety film; Ford turns everything into a prop, lingering on the physicality of every performer and every object with the same intense gaze. He slows moments until they sizzle with a vibrancy and then past any such aesthetic pleasures until they are no longer indelible moments, but instead merely fussy ones. The only sense of urgency in the film is the heart-pounding sense of being fully immersed in the thoughts and feelings of the main character, a man planning to kill himself since he is distraught over the death of his lover. This man is played by Colin Firth, a fine actor who recently received an Oscar nomination for this very performance. The nomination makes a certain amount of sense to me, since Firth carries the film. His face and physicality show far more emotion than it first appears the filmmaking will allow. There’s genuine anguish and pain here, in the softly etched lines on Firth’s face, in the slow frowns and the slightly furrowed brow. Firth effortlessly made me care, bringing me in to the character’s plight in ways the overly designed film barely allows. Ultimately, the movie’s unsatisfying. It’s the kind of movie that’s so determined to leave an impact it leaves almost nothing at all. Potentially great supporting performances by the likes of Julianne Moore, Matthew Goode, and Nicholas Hoult are buried under the art design and the frustratingly oppressive score by Abel Korzeniowski. Tom Ford has a strong, confident directorial style, but I wish he could just get out of his own way a little bit. Too often I felt like I was watching a deadly serious perfume ad.