Star Command: TICKET TO PARADISE

There’s a scene late in Ticket to Paradise when stars Julia Roberts and George Clooney, playing a divorced couple who have heretofore been bickering and bantering, finally stop for a quiet moment together. They’re on the top of a mountain on a tropical island and the sun is low in the sky, casting soft orange light all around them. They speak softly and openly to each other and, as their eyes start to sparkle, for the first time from beneath the needling chemistry that’s been sending sparks, we can see the real glow of affection they still have for each other. As they kindle this reconnection, I found myself thinking: I hope they kiss right now. And if that’s not a sign a romantic comedy has its hooks in you, I don’t know what is. The movie is a welcome example of a mode of moviemaking that’s all-but extinct—the glossy Hollywood rom-com—generously containing a further throwback—the comedy-of-remarriage. It finds in this comforting return to sturdy formula yet more resuscitation: a studio movie driven solely by Movie Star power. Roberts and Clooney, in particular, are at this point underutilized old pros, performers totally at ease with effortless charm. The movies these days afford them too few opportunities to appear at all, let alone uncork the full extent of their appeal. And so here we care about this couple because their actors are so good at embodying even the flimsiest formula with depth of personality, and projecting a charismatic likability in every angle and with each line reading. Because they’re pros, we can feel comfortable they can take this journey to its destination and find enough fun along the way.

Writer-director Ol Parker’s previous film was the fizzy lifting drink of a musical: Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again. That one, far and away his best work, and as feel-good a movie as any released in the last decade or two, must’ve unlocked something in his filmmaker toolkit. Here he continues capably marshaling the charms of stars swanning about gorgeous island locales enacting slightly silly but earnestly felt family dramas that bubble and sparkle with clever dialogue and float toward some convincing sentiment in the end. Clooney and Roberts reluctantly reunite en route to their daughter’s impromptu destination wedding. She (Kaitlyn Dever) has only known the guy for a few weeks, so the parents plan to talk her out of it. Even with just those two sentences, I’m sure you can start to piece together the plot. Yes, it has the miscommunications and mishaps and mistakes and moments of genuine connection and affection. But the joy isn’t in the story per se, thought it is sturdy, but its telling. The proceedings are kept agreeably light and amusing, photographed with brightly-lit scenic views, and build to those moments where, yes, you really do want to see the couple get together in the end. Paradise? Perhaps not exactly, but, when all the stars align, it’s in the neighborhood.

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.

Tech-ed Off: MEN, WOMEN & CHILDREN

It’s easy to see Jason Reitman’s ambition for Men, Women & Children to be a big statement about How We Live Now. The film is a Very Serious ensemble drama about a cross-section of characters living intertwined melodramas a la Crash or Babel. In this case they’re a bunch of high schoolers and their parents in suburban Texas – though really a vague Modern Anytown, USA – who live disconnected from their feelings and each other. We see lives of quiet desperation mediated by screens showing digital spaces that alternately soothe and exacerbate their problems. Fair enough, but despite fitfully operating as effective drama, it’s clearly a movie built thesis statement backwards into character and incident, frozen by its own sense of importance. Worse, there’s not much to its thesis, which is as muddled as it is trite, developing its emptiness with a heavy hand.

I suppose muddled moralizing speaks, even accidentally, to our societal ambivalence towards technology. It’d be an interesting idea around which to build a drama, but Reitman, adapting with Erin Cressida Wilson a novel by Chad Kultgen, creates a series of events that reflect bland reprimand, concerned handwringing, or vacuous same-as-it-ever-was resignation, sometimes all at once. Caught halfway between scolding and shrugging, it has a view of the Internet that feels so outdated and incomplete I almost expected to hear a modem dial up on the soundtrack. Plot threads involve infidelities, romances, repression, self-harm, painful yearning, and a variety of questionable decisions. Each is filtered through and aided by the Internet. That’s what gives it a patina of timeliness around which it spins rather empty, cliché stories saved only fitfully by strong acting across the board.

The best plotline, perhaps because it draws best on the small character work Reitman did well in better movies like Juno and Young Adult, involves two high school kids dealing with emotional issues. She (Kaitlyn Dever, of Short Term 12 and ABC’s Last Man Standing) is a loner, bookish, sweet, and under the surveillance of a technophobe mother (Jennifer Garner). He (Ansel Elgort, of The Fault in Our Stars) is a football player who quit the team when his mom left the family, leaving his dad (Dean Norris) inattentive to his son’s depression. The kids forge a connection that feels genuine, and twists around the tech in a reasonably convincing way. Other stories aren’t as successful. A bored married couple (Rosemarie DeWitt and Adam Sandler) each secretly turn to the web to find affairs, a plotline that’s a weird blend of shame and forgiveness and, unfortunately, does not turn into a “Piña Colada Song” situation. Their son (Travis Tope) is addicted to porn. His real-life crush is a fame-hungry cheerleader (Olivia Crocicchia) whose mother (Judy Greer) lets her start a modeling website. Meanwhile, a fellow cheerleader (Elena Kampouris) suffers from body image problems brought about by bullying and egged on by online friends.

With a sprawling Message Movie format, there is unevenness built into the structure. Individual stories or scenes work well, but the big picture is a muddle of good intentions, flawed observations, and bad decisions. It’s all tied together with arch narration (by Emma Thompson, speaking in a voice not too far from her Stranger Than Fiction storyteller) that prattles on against the backdrop of space, speaking about Carl Sagan as NASA hardware floats by. Then she’ll dip down with an edit into quotidian explanations about character thoughts and actions, drolly telling us details we can plainly see before us. Reitman’s repetitive screenplay includes heavy-handed, awkwardly inserted, digressions reflecting on 9/11 and “my, how much the world has changed.” Yes. And? It’s a dash of self-serious muttering.

The film’s worst tendencies are reflected in Garner’s character, who has a keystroke logger on her daughter’s devices and hosts fearmongering info sessions for fellow parents. She starts as a humorless paranoid scold who means well. Over the course of her storyline, she goes from spying on everything her daughter does to stopping cold turkey. In the world of this movie, it’s all or nothing, ignoring both the very real benefits of parental oversight and the virtues of trust and flexibility. It’s too uncomfortable lingering in grey areas, too eager to wrap up conflicts. So much so that for all its overt exploring of the screen-saturated culture’s impact on individuals – I liked a recurring image of crowds, everyone looking at screens, their apps hovering translucently above them like a cloud of distraction – the worst events any characters go through happen entirely (or almost entirely) offline.

The movie seems to want a Big Statement, but isn’t sure what to say. In some ways it’s progressive, acknowledging that sometimes lonely, socially isolated people can find solace online that can improve their real world well being. And it’s certainly true that one can get lost in the muck of the web’s worst tendencies. Our world is complex. But every story in this movie that resolves wraps up neatly with a pat Internet-good-for-this, Internet-bad-for-that judgment. Other storylines drop off without resolution, maybe for the best, since I don’t think the filmmakers, though they bring the subjects up, had meaningful discussion of body image, sexual fantasies, or sex work in them. What’s here is an attempt to pass off well-intentioned fumbling in the shallow end as an important deep dive.

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.