Guess Who: GLASS ONION

Glass Onion isn’t exactly a sequel to Knives Out. It’s simply another complicated case for its sole returning character to puzzle through. Good thing detective Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig) is such great company, oozing Southern charm and confidence, while behaving an enlightened, affable gentleman who can slip right into any social context. He somehow stands out and blends in, the better to be underestimated as he gathers clues. And good thing, too, that writer-director Rian Johnson knows a thing or two about constructing a sequel that zigs when you’d expect it to zag, and ends up satisfying even more for giving you what you didn’t know you’d like to see. This one is a larger film, trading the first’s bickering family clad in cute sweaters, holed up in a cozy New England house while all their grievances tumble out, for a palatial mansion, with enormous sunny sets on a private Greek island filled with rich friends hanging around in sunglasses and beachwear. If Knives Out had an autumnal Thanksgiving vibe, Glass Onion is pure summer vacation.

It finds Blanc invited to a murder mystery party. He’s the ringer, and stranger, in a group of obscenely wealthy friends—a satirical send-up of every contemporary societal ill. There’s the host: an out-of-touch, and out-of-his-mind, tech bazillionaire (Edward Norton). And there are the guests: a hypocritical politician (Kathryn Hahn), a private-sector scientist-for-hire (Leslie Odom, Jr.), an alt-right YouTuber (Dave Bautista) and his girlfriend (Madelyn Cline), a ditzy model-turned-mogul (Kate Hudson) and her assistant (Jessica Henwick), and a former business partner who may be out for revenge (Janelle Monáe). It’s pretty easy to believe one of them will actually be murdered, and that they’ll all be so greedy and stupid that it might give Blanc quite a challenge. Johnson gives us a long, glittery, rambling opening hour that provides introductions to all of the characters and their dynamics. Invitations are delivered. The group assembles in Greece for the boat ride to the island. (Set during the first COVID summer, the way they wear their masks upon arrival is a big clue about their personalities.) They settle in for their first night in the mansion—a massive high-tech structure with dozens of rooms and topped with a gargantuan glass onion. The camera often pulls back to sweep around in bright establishing shots and drink it in, the sets and the setting providing a gleaming backdrop for the scheming. And throughout, Johnson, by taking his time, makes these political cartoons into bantering people we can size up and keep in mind as believable variables at play as the plot unfolds.

By the time the screenplay springs its surprises, doubling back on itself and deliberately filling in gaps I hadn’t paused to realize were left open, the film reveals it is awfully clever in a way that never stops paying out. There’s plenty of enjoyment on the surface of the movie, but when the setup reveals its full intentionality, there’s an added layer of rewards for the attentive viewer. This is a charmer of a mystery that you could practically chart on graph paper as its various setups converge with supremely satisfying reveals and conclusions. There’s an airtight clockwork construction at play, with each gear of plotting and character and humor turning at just the right time to click into place for crowd-pleasing punchlines and payoffs. Johnson’s a filmmaker with a great sense of genre play. See his straight-faced high-school noir Brick, or pretzel-logic time-travel thriller Looper, or his vivid, moving Star Wars episode. Here he’s totally at home, and clearly having fun, constructing these crafty mystery plots. They twist and turn, dangle detours and dole out tricks of perspective, but they always play fair with the audience. You can keep up with the logic, and by the end see the details close in with a pleasing snap. (It’s the dialogue and editing that does all the crackling and popping.) There’s evident delight in the construction, and that extends to the ensemble’s winning commitment to throwing themselves into the proceedings with wit and verve, too.

This has been a busy year for the whodunit movie. We got Greg Mottola’s shaggy, appealing Confess, Fletch. There was Kenneth Branagh’s opulent, excessive, and over-acted adaptation of Agatha Christie’s Death on the Nile; that has its velvety 70mm melodrama pleasures. We got a quaint and cozy little jewel box of a Christie homage, See How They Run; that’s a cute, winking meta-movie about a fictionalized murder mystery around the stage production of Christie’s The Mousetrap. (That movie actually brings Christie onstage, as if to say it was Agatha All Along.) But Glass Onion is head-and-shoulders above the rest. Rather than falling into homage or dutiful resuscitation of old tales, it’s the real deal itself. It’s built for maximum audience pleasure, and is quite pleased with itself, too. It’s formula without being formulaic. We return to these stories, not to be shocked and appalled or grossed out, but to take the mental exercise. Maybe it’s the cozy comfort of knowing, though the film may start with a dead body, it’ll end with a murderer revealed, and something like justice doled out.

Nope: THE DO-OVER

Has a movie star ever done less on screen than Sandler in any of his recent lackadaisical performances where he’s little more than a black hole of energy and appeal? Maybe, even after years of scraping near the bottom of the barrel with the dire likes of Grown Ups 2 and Blended, it was combined impact of the relative box office disappointment of his hard-R, but twisted funny, That’s My Boy in 2012 and the bad luck to stretch dramatic chops in two total flops, 2014’s Men Women & Children and 2015’s The Cobbler, that pushed him to do less than the bare minimum. Since then he’s slept through an action comedy (Pixels) and a western parody (The Ridiculous 6), each worse than the last. And each time around he fades under the spotlight, committing less and less to silly voices or high-concept goofiness. He lets the supporting players and desperate flop-sweat gross out gags do the heavy lifting while he appears to look forward to the next time the director calls cut so he can get on with his life.

I dutifully fired up Netflix to sample The Do-Over, the streaming service’s second film from a four-picture deal with Sandler. (Creatively it’s their worst original programming move, but since they keep the numbers secret there’s no telling if it pays off financially.) I quickly found that any attempt to write about it would be putting more thought and effort into it than anyone involved did. The story concerns two unlucky dopes (Sandler, sleepwalking, and David Spade, playing against type as a timid dummy instead of a sarcastic dummy) who fake their deaths to escape their miserable lives only to discover the plan goes awry when they end up in a conspiracy involving cancer drugs. If you think it sounds a bit more complicated than the typical Sandler material, you’d be mistaken. It’s a collection of dumb complications, sloppily plotted, lazily performed, and shot with all the flat visual interest of a stock photo with the watermark still attached. What would be worse: if Sandler has stopped trying, or if this is really the best he can do?

Why does it exist? Is it for the product placement, logos for cell phones and beers and others in a parade of brands prominently displayed? Is it to get attractive women, extras and featured performers (like Paula Patton) alike, in tight dresses, low-cut shirts, and bikinis? Is it to get Netflix to bankroll a trip? Long scenes take place on a tropical island, or in swimming pools, so it’s also another of his paid vacations with a little bit of a film shoot on the side. He’s brought along a host of his usual pals in front of the camera (Spade, Nick Swardson) and behind the scenes (director Steven Brill, veteran of Little Nicky and Mr. Deeds, lackluster comedies that seem better in retrospect compared to this).  It’s such a flaccid, baggy, boring movie, working in cameos for all sorts of people I just felt sorry for, like Kathryn Hahn, Sean Astin, Michael Chiklis, and Matt Walsh. I felt worst for the great character actor Luis Guzmán, who has an embarrassing scene involving sweaty testicles, one of many desperate R-rated jokes fruitlessly attempting to yank some life into this dud.

And then if you happen to take the story seriously for even one second, the whole thing is even worse than the lack of laughs and narrative or visual interest. It’s wrapped in toxic masculinity’s misogynistic expression, blaming the characters’ misfortunes entirely on women who exclusively wish to torment, tease, trick, and otherwise torture the men in their lives. It ends with Spade repeatedly punching a woman in the stomach while shouting, “I’m sick of women lying to me!” The whole thing’s nothing you couldn’t get if you asked a dozen of the worst commenters on a shady website to write a screenplay about how much they feel wronged by women. If out of perverse curiosity you end up watching this movie you have my condolences. To review Sandler films is too often an exercise in finding rock bottom move ever lower.

Old Folks Home: THE VISIT

M. Night Shyamalan has proven himself a masterful visual storyteller several times over. From his breakthrough The Sixth Sense, which sold its famous big twist in a wordless reveal, to Signs and The Village, which kept their monsters almost entirely out of the frame, he’s shown a facility with long takes and precise composition, playing with background and foreground information and use of focus. Such patience, which he’s put to great effect even in big digital spectacles like After Earth, is rare in mainstream filmmaking these days. His latest film, The Visit, is a found footage horror movie, at first glance a form antithetical to his visual precision. But he uses it for all it’s worth, making its shaking and self-aware status assets instead of impediments. The carefully casual cinematography is used to highlight the importance of what’s seen and what’s not seen, how people perform for a camera and for each other, and how scary it can be to not have access to full information about a situation or a person.

The movie we’re watching is a documentary a 15-year-old girl (Olivia DeJonge) is making about her estranged grandparents. She and her 13-year-old brother (Ed Oxenbould) are meeting them for the first time, their mother (Kathryn Hahn) having had an angry severing of ties before their births. A precocious film buff thinking she’s on the verge of creating a moving story of family reunion, she conscripts her brother to be an assistant cameraman. So that’s how cinematographer Maryse Alberti convincingly explains two angles on the happenings as they head off to their grandparents’ remote Pennsylvania farmhouse to spend a week. She lectures her brother on the importance of mise-en-scène, on allowing the frame to suggest more beyond what it literally sees, on making sure they only film that which they’re directly involved with. (Consequently, the movie’s the best-looking, well-considered example of its type.) He’s happy to help, but also admits, “Who gives a crap about cinematic standards?”

Setting the groundwork for understanding why these kids end up with many fussy shots, and continue to film even when their vacation starts getting creepy, Shyamalan uses the camcorder footage to stage scenes of great visual mystery and uncanny normalcy to directly comment upon our position as viewers. We see what we see because of characters’ decisions. This puts us close to their thoughts, where a zoom or a pan can clue us into the mind of the person behind the scenes. Before the camera, we see people playing roles, pulling faces, trying to be what others expect of them. Behind it, we see curiosities in revealing visual choices. Like the best found footage – The Blair Witch Project, Cloverfield, Paranormal Activity, Unfriended – the closeness it affords, and the commonness of its look, comments directly upon the character’s preoccupations. Here we see a girl who thought she could shape her life’s narrative, but realizes her grandparents aren’t following the script she’d had in her head.

When the kids first arrive, Nana (Deanna Dunagan) and Pop Pop (Peter McRobbie) go out of their way to be grandparently stereotypes. They’re excited to meet the youngsters and are eager to fill a role they’ve never before gotten to play, giving tours, playing games, and providing lots of baked goods. Together the four characters have funny and awkward attempts to connect, forcing a family dynamic while gingerly ignoring as best they can the fact they’re total strangers. The charade can’t last long, and the first sad twist is a reveal of encroaching senility. While the kids wander around, hang out, ask questions, and get footage (the movie is perceptive about kids’ aimless free time to be filled with hobbies and wondering) they notice something off about the old folks. It’s not just the strict 9:30 bedtime. The elderly couple is suffering from forgetfulness, confusion, mood swings, sleepwalking, incontinence, violent anger, and maybe dementia or schizophrenia, too.

They’re just old, the kids think. That’s what their mom tells them when they worriedly Skype with her. They should just be careful and make the best of it. It’s only a few more days. Besides, it’ll make for a better documentary. Sliding into mercilessly nasty suspense, the movie accrues creepy details (a locked shed, a child-sized oven, a muddy well) and brilliant misdirection before springing surprise jolts in a finale full of jumpy scares, gross out shocks, perfectly timed violence, and the worst game of Yahtzee ever recorded. Every step of the way, it’s about what’s known and what’s unknown, what we can see for sure and we fear we can’t. While satisfying genre demands, Shyamalan makes good use of his conceit, cleverly pointing out its own mechanics (“This can be the dénouement,” the girl whispers excitedly near the climax) while sitting in unsettling intimate territory. It plays on common fears that older people in your life will inevitably slip away from you and become something you don’t recognize.

The Visit is a movie about the nature of performance, the person you try to be when others are watching. It’s smart about finding the performative aspects of childhood, and family life in general in another of Shyamalan's stories of broken families looking to be made whole. The form is an added wrinkle. The theoretical audience the camera represents is a factor in the leads’ behavior. We see the kids setting up shots, playing for the camera, looking at footage, editing, putting in music, and discussing their creative decisions. The girl hopes it’s not too schmaltzy. The boy wants to rap over the end credits. As the creepiness of their week builds, their posturing falls away. Eventually the camera is left to only capture clear slashes of fright, as characters become not who they want to be seen as, or who they hope to find, but who they really are. Amusing, scary, admirably strange, and expertly button-pushing, this is Shyamalan at his most crowd-pleasing.

Jokes Without Laughs: SHE'S FUNNY THAT WAY

She’s Funny That Way is funny in that way where you can see where all the jokes are supposed to be, but can’t quite figure out where to laugh. It’s an old-school screwball attempt, lousy with references to Lubitsch, Astaire and Rodgers, and Charles Boyer, without ever living up to its great inspirations. It turns itself in knots introducing a web of interconnected New York neurotics. We meet an aspiring actress working as a call girl (Imogen Poots) who is cast by her former john playwright (Owen Wilson) in a production he’s mounting starring his wife (Kathryn Hahn) and her ex-flame (Rhys Ifans) with the boyfriend (Will Forte) of the call girl’s psychiatrist (Jennifer Aniston). So far so good, a near perfect farcical setup that proceeds to fizzle out for the remaining 90 minutes.

Its director and co-writer is Peter Bogdanovich, a critic and historian who has made several great movies. His debut decade or so of work includes a disturbing mass shooting horror picture (Targets), a charming caper (Paper Moon), a tender small town drama (The Last Picture Show), a documentary (Directed by John Ford), a screwball comedy (What’s Up, Doc?), and a farce (They All Laughed). Not a bad track record, but he’s spent the last thirty-plus years infrequently making films that simply don’t live up to his early promise. Presently he’s slightly more interesting as a public figure, where he can occasionally be found blogging, lecturing, acting, or playing himself in one of the otherwise terrific The Good Wife’s worst scenes. His latest film is his first theatrical feature since 2001. I suppose he thought this would make for a fun little movie.

And it does at times live up to its potential. With co-writer Louise Stratten he’s concocted vaguely pleasant and moderately charming scenarios in which misunderstandings, deliberate misdirection, and relationships falling together or apart are enacted through juggled phone calls and slamming hotel room doors. There’s even a bubbling subplot involving detectives that recalls the best loopy moments of his They All Laughed. And what a cast assembled to pull it off! You don’t get the aforementioned grouping of usually reliable charmers assembled without generating a few smiles, at the very least. They’re terrific at what they do, holding the screen, digging out avenues for amusement while zipping towards emotional truths of their characters’ conflicts. It’s just a shame that the writing and filmmaking surrounding them is so lifeless, casual, and musty.

No scene is entirely successful. They are strings of mismanaged performances fumbling through fuzzy characterizations in a stumbling pile-up of frazzled lines. No one is miscast, exactly, but they can’t quite manage to make their thin types really pop in a way to be successful broad farce, or deep enough for real drama. This makes the film ultimately too shrill and too airless. Bogdanovich has the right idea, and a lot of the right notes, to make his nostalgia for Lubitsch movies into pleasant throwback comedy, but the rhythm and tempo is all off. Poots plays charming accent whack-a-mole, Wilson seems to have floated in from his Woody Allen collaboration, and the rest wrestle admirably and amiably with grating miscommunications. When farce goes bad, it goes very bad, indeed. At a certain point, I stopped struggling to have a good time and simple sat back and waited it out.

Family Tries: THIS IS WHERE I LEAVE YOU

A family gathers in the shadow of their patriarch’s death, four grown children living under one upstate New York roof for one week at the behest of their mourning mother. “You can cry. You can laugh. There’s no right way to grieve,” the mom (played by Jane Fonda, carrying more dignity than the plot allows) says early in This is Where I Leave You, a movie that wants you to do a little laughing and a little crying. It’s a fairly contained and awfully schmaltzy comedy-tinged drama, completely predictable in the beats that it hits. Uptight jerks learn to loosen up. Irresponsible cads mature a bit. Generational gaps are bridged, but slightly. The grown kids have a prickly, but deep down loving, reunion that involves old grievances, new secrets, and a reason to rethink their lives’ trajectories. The film’s heart is in the right place.

The ensemble is filled with welcome faces, each an interesting presence in their own right. There’s Jason Bateman as the middle son, a man who loses his job and his wife on the same afternoon and arrives for the funeral convinced he won’t share his bad news. Of course that doesn’t happen. It’s a secret-spilling free-for-all. His sister (Tina Fey) is in a marriage in the process of chilling, so much so that her husband only lingers around two or three scenes, a total non-issue the rest of the time. She has an adorable kid or two, so that’s nice, except for the scene involving potty training gone wrong. That’s gross. Also back to sit shiva is their older brother (Corey Stoll). His wife (Kathryn Hahn) wants to get pregnant, a goal that drives her a little crazy in a condescending way. There’s also a younger brother (Adam Driver) and his cougar girlfriend (Connie Britton). Talk about a full house.

The ensemble is strong, if unevenly deployed in thin subplots. Bateman and Fey have good rapport, with similar clenched braininess that feels warmly familial. Stoll gets lost in the shuffle, but is a steady, mildly neurotic, rock, and Driver seems incapable of an uninteresting line reading. Mother Fonda gets lost in the sea of subplots for most of the film, drifting through as only a punchline for her oversharing and her boob job. She deserves better. They all do, really. Jonathan Tropper’s screenplay (based on his own novel) gives each family member their own little undercooked plots, complete with their own, largely separate, set of supporting characters (Rose Byrne, Ben Schwartz, Timothy Olyphant, Dax Shepard). None of them are all that interesting on their own, but collectively, it adds up to a passable amalgam of middle-aged concerns and family tensions.

Director Shawn Levy is an effective manipulator, able to execute material efficiently and professionally. I liked his robo-boxing movie Real Steel, and found small charms in his Cheaper by the Dozen remake, one-crazy-night comedy Date Night, and unfairly maligned flop The Internship. Those aren’t great movies, but at least they hit some good notes. With This is Where I Leave You, though, despite all the soft lighting, on-the-nose pop song choices, and sunny greeting-card encouragements, the movie never quiet achieves emotional lift it seeks.

I couldn’t help but wonder what a Robert Altman type would’ve done with this material, and not just because the family’s last name is Altman. With such a large, talented ensemble in a small location, a balanced approach with overlapping dialogue and thematic concerns might’ve worked better. Though certainly non-Altman family reunion films like August: Osage County and Dan in Real Life manage to hit similar notes with greater aplomb that Levy and Tropper’s work here. It’s bland and comfortable, but never really comes alive in any way. Still, for a superficial, sentimental, predictable little middle-of-the-road thing, it could be worse. 

Not a Family Movie: WE'RE THE MILLERS

The runtime of We’re the Millers is listed as 110 minutes, but I don’t know what takes so long. It’s a fast-paced movie that’s all plot, dragging along gags and leaving the characters lagging behind. It’s a high concept comedy that leaps so quickly into its concept that we’ve barely met the characters before they’re already completely into the movie’s central scenario. I have no idea how this movie could’ve possibly filled up nearly two hours of screen time. It’s in a constant rush, terrified of downtime or a single thought beyond the overpowering demands of its plot mechanics, which are at once incredibly simple and yet somehow in constant need of further propulsion. The plotting is so brisk and constant that the movie feels paced, especially in its relentless opening minutes, like a series of its own trailers or a playlist of connected YouTube videos set to autoplay. That it literally starts with a string of YouTube videos (double rainbow, surprised cat, etc.) under the opening credits is an odd choice that nonetheless sets up the fast pace.

With that opening paragraph, I’ve probably taken more time getting to the main concept that the movie does. Dave (Jason Sudeikis) is a low-level pot dealer whose stash and cash is stolen by a gang of hoodlums. His supplier (Ed Helms) offers to wipe clean the debt and even throw in a few extra thousand dollars if he goes down to Mexico and smuggle back a “smidge of marijuana.” Dave doesn’t have much of a choice, so he agrees. Looking no further than his front steps, he sees a clean-cut family in an RV and decides that’d be the perfect disguise to sneak a bunch of pot across the border. He recruits the woman in the apartment next door, a freshly evicted stripper (Jennifer Aniston), to play his wife, and two neighborhood teens, an abandoned boy (Will Poulter) and a homeless girl (Emma Roberts), to play their kids. They may not be related, but they’re sure going to try their hardest to pass as a family. “The Millers” are going on a road trip.

It’s a great concept and I don’t blame screenwriters Bob Fisher and Steve Faber (of Wedding Crashers) and Sean Anders and John Morris (of Hot Tub Time Machine) and director Rawson Marshall Thurber (of Dodgeball) for rushing there as quickly as possible. Unfortunately, reducing the characters to types leaves little room for the movie to maneuver as it plugs them into gag-filled scenarios that attempt to wring laughter out of who the characters are instead of what they do. There’s an underlying mean-spirited judgment upon these characters because of their types, jokes that appear to find Aniston’s character inherently funny because she’s a stripper, Poulter funny because he’s a lonely overeager goof, Roberts funny because she’s homeless. Similarly, the unhappy murderous Mexican supplier (Tomer Sisley) who becomes a villain chasing them is a plot development that’d play a lot better if the movie didn’t play up Mexican “otherness” as inherently intimidating. One scene lingers on Aniston during a routine, but breaks the fourth wall with a wink. That the film knows it’s being exploitative doesn’t make it okay. Other scenes play uncomfortably with homophobia in a similarly talking-out-of-both-sides-of-the-mouth tone.

This sense of judging its characters doesn’t mix well with the otherwise freewheeling permissiveness of their behavior as they try to avoid getting caught with the pot. But luckily the movie just barrels right on past by getting great mileage out of how appealing the cast is. I liked them, and by extension their characters. The central four have a core likability and the banter they’re given is often funny in interactions that are prickly but deep down affectionate towards each other. It’s a combination that does much to alleviate the notes that sit so sourly. Even though the movie doesn’t take them seriously as people, and sometimes the characters seem a little under-concerned about the stakes of it all, I found myself wishing them well anyways. The road-trip structure of the movie keeps things hurtling along quickly. If you can survive the opening barrage of rushed, choppy set-up, you might find the pay offs to be a bit more relaxed and amiably crude. It falls into a groove that’s works well, especially whenever an RV full of a seemingly squeaky clean family (parents Nick Offerman and Kathryn Hahn with daughter Molly Quinn) runs into our disreputable foursome and attempts some good old-fashioned Americana bonding over campfires and Pictionary. That couldn’t be a worse fit with the behavior of these four and their drug-smuggling ways. 

Though for all the inappropriate dialogue, crude sight gags, and shock gross out moments, it’s a movie that’s sneakily square. The selfish, marginalized members of this family slowly come to rely on one another to find safety, camaraderie, and financial stability. These things, the movie ends up arguing, come exclusively from the typically structured nuclear family. The appearance of being mainstream-society-approved good not only lets them get away with being bad, it ends up making them, if not good, at least better. Potentially exciting avenues of sharp comedy – like the comically aggressive border patrol, say – are dumped for the squishy sentimentality of the narrative trajectory. That the “Millers” come to actually care for one another is perhaps the only way to have a movie so otherwise dedicated to bad behavior go down so easily, and with a cast so likable, it was perhaps inevitable anyways. But it results in a movie with a cynical, ugly point of view that also desires of a return to familial stability and camaraderie. Weird.

But there’s a funny thing that happens to a problematic comedy when it can manage to be funny. The wholly mechanical plotting and sour aftertaste has enough situational escalation and likable archetypes that it snowballs into something that is entertaining at the time. I felt bad later about having fallen for it, but as it played I wasn’t unhappy to be there. I found myself pulled right along and reader, it’s my duty to report to you that I occasionally laughed. I could tell you that I had a bad time watching this movie, but the truth of the matter is that I didn’t. The speed that seemed so off-putting at first soon became an asset. The totally perfunctory characters that seemed simple plot constructs in a story that had a bit of a mean streak became, through the pleasant cast, easy enough to take. To make a long story short, the movie’s fairly entertaining provided you let it evaporate naturally before you think about its implications and contradictions for too long.

Lost in America: WANDERLUST

It’s not unusual to find a Hollywood comedy based on the assumption that harried big-city people would love a chance to enjoy a slower-paced lifestyle out in the country. The beauty of David Wain’s Wanderlust is that it takes that basic concept and twists it all around, making it a story of self-discovery through true personal experience rather than a superficial geographical shift. It features characters who are having a difficult time no matter where they go. They’re lost, searching for answers whether they know it or not. So it’s a comedy of personal crisis. But it’s also a comedy about society in some kind of crisis and, though there’s not too fine a point put on such ruminations, it’s ultimately a fairly sharp social satire. It not easy to become who you want to be in a society that offers up only easy, unsatisfying answers.

The movie stars Paul Rudd and Jennifer Aniston as George and Linda, a married couple who go through a sudden shift in employment status, forcing them to move out of New York City. On their way to stay in Atlanta with George’s brother (Ken Marino, who’s also the film’s co-writer) and wife (Michaela Watkins), they pull off the highway following GPS instructions towards a bed and breakfast.  This is Elysium, a hippie commune of free love, pot-smoking, tree-hugging, nudist outsiders. And you know what? It’s kind of nice. There’s a competitively mellow guy (Justin Theroux), a kindly but oblivious nudist author and wine-maker (Joe Lo Truglio), an angry hippie (Kathryn Hahn), and a gray-haired burnout (Alan Alda), among others. They have their peculiarities, but they seem to genuinely enjoy each other’s company and welcome newcomers with open arms.

But, the next morning, George and Linda eventually make it to Atlanta, where they find a surly nephew, a blustering brother, and a perpetually drunk sister-in-law who one day declares her intentions to apply for a Real Housewives spin-off. It’s a lifestyle of conspicuous consumption and overworked callousness. The couple bounces back to Elysium, where they find that their first positive experience is not easily recreated when staying there on a maybe-permanent basis. The film takes tired stereotypes – the materialistic bourgeoisie and the off-the-grid tree-huggers – and injects them with an energy and a wit that help them skip around potentially exasperating thinness. I mean, how many movies have you seen in which a square city dweller goes on an accidental drug trip? Here, it’s funny all over again.

It helps that the performances are uniformly so very funny. Rudd has such a sweet, easy-going surliness that even when he improvises lines of stunning filthiness, he seems to be a man trying out uncomfortable personas for himself. As he casts about for a new purpose in life, he finds himself getting increasingly distraught at the lack of easy answers even as everyone around him seems to have them. Meanwhile, Aniston throws herself into her role with such an incredible commitment and skill that I found myself taken aback. I’ve never been much of an Aniston fan; to me, she’s been capable at best. I’m reminded of Ebert’s line about her being upstaged even in scenes by herself. But here, she does her best work, a complex and hilarious performance that bounces off of the various personalities in the film in ways that match Rudd in tone and effect note for note. They bring their characters to vivid, hilarious life. These are two people in desperate need of something that they can’t even explain: a place and a purpose. They’ll know it when they see it.

David Wain films are about odd groups, makeshift communities forming on the margins of society. There are the Elysium hippies here, but similar kindred spirits can be found in the summer camp of his cult favorite Wet Hot American Summer and the troubled-kids mentorship program and the Live Action Role Playing of Role Models (one of the funniest movies of recent memory). These are films in which collections of weirdoes find reason to congregate and reasons to genuinely like and care for each other. Somehow Wain pulls off a tricky feat, getting big laughs out of these characters’ eccentricities and then still managing to find the genuine warmth and humanity within the group dynamic. There’s genuine human interest here. By the end, you just care about them and want to see them all end up happy, and that’s what makes the laughs worthwhile.

Brother's Keepers: OUR IDIOT BROTHER

Despite a title that sounds like a mean-spirited insult, Our Idiot Brother turns out to be one of the sweetest, kindest, warmest, and generous comedies of the year. It’s an R-rated movie that’s so big hearted it barely registers as raunchy, that loves its characters and wants to see them end up happy. It’s surprisingly fleet, nimbly shifting registers between straight-faced silliness and heartfelt emotion. By the time the film ended I was sad to see it go. Perhaps this summer’s mostly misfiring comedies wore me down, but this is exactly the kind of nice, refreshing, genuine entertainment I didn’t know I was yearning to see.

The film stars Paul Rudd as a man who has to be one of the nicest people on the planet. He has long hair, a casually messy wardrobe, and an easy smile. He treats everyone he meets in a similar way, speaking to them in a soft easygoing voice. He just loves life, aimless and simple as his is, but he keeps inadvertently making things difficult for those around him. He means well, but his complete refusal to go along with little white lies, his scrupulous honesty and his instinctual mellow kindness, unravels situations that are held together by nothing more than all the small untruths people tell themselves and each other. He’s lucky that his unconditional love for his family is (mostly) returned. Even when they are utterly exasperated, there’s real familiar warmth.

He bumbles through the lives of his sisters after he’s released from jail. Oh, he’s not a criminal of any terrible import. In the opening scene, he sells pot to a uniformed police officer just because the man seemed to be having a tough day. Upon his release, it’s this fact that causes his parole officer (Sterling Brown) to assume that he’s “retarded.” “I get that a lot,” Rudd says.

Since his girlfriend (Kathryn Hahn) dumped him and won’t even let him take Willie Nelson, their dog (major bummer), the newly free Rudd crashes at the house of his mom (Shirley Knight), but soon makes his way to each of his sisters’ New York houses in turn. There’s the high-strung sister (Emily Mortimer) with two kids and an inattentive husband (Steve Coogan), the ambitious professional journalist sister (Elizabeth Banks) with a casual relationship with her neighbor (Adam Scott), and the free-spirit lesbian sister (Zooey Deschanel) in a committed relationship with a lawyer (Rashida Jones). While there are differences between the siblings, and a fair number of conflicts, this is not simply a dysfunctional family. This may be a film that showed at Sundance, but it doesn’t betray the aggressive quirk for quirk’s sake, the ugly look-at-these-wacky-losers aftertaste that infects the worst of what is lumped into loosely defined “indie comedy” prejudices.

Director Jesse Peretz and writers Evgenia Peretz and David Schisgall have crafted a rather loose and unhurried film that amiably ambles from enjoyable scene to enjoyable scene, funny in ways that provoke smiles more often than belly laughs. It’s remarkably unremarkable. The very lack of showiness – there’s no irritating insistence in its comedy – is its greatest virtue. This gives room for the characters to completely take over, dominating the central interest. The ensemble is uniformly excellent and their characters compelling. The relationships and conflicts between these characters are written in an ever so slightly over-the-top way that manages to stay relatable, if not entirely believable.

In this talented cast, Rudd stands out above them all. He’s such an appealing character. He may wear Crocs, lack ambitions, and be way too trusting, but he’s so very nice and, doggone it all, wouldn’t it be fun to hang out with him? It may be tiresome, it may be trying, but just like his sisters, I found that this is one social idiot just too lovable to dismiss. Likewise, the film is, in its own quiet way, utterly charming, sneakily effective and even a little bit moving.

THE GOODS. Not so much.

I had never realized how much I liked Will Ferrell until he showed up for one scene in the middle of The Goods: Live Hard, Sell Hard dressed as Abraham Lincoln while falling to his death in a tragic skydiving accident. As he plummets, he provides a running commentary that provoked the only smile to cross my face during the entire movie. That’s not to say it’s a particularly funny scene, but rather that Ferrell’s good-natured loopiness was a welcome respite to the mean, suffocatingly noxious humor provided by Jeremy Piven, dominating nearly every scene in the movie as Don “The Goods” Ready, a mercenary salesman who is hired to save a failing car dealership. Piven gives such a convincingly slimy performance as this cocky jerk that it coats the movie with unpleasantness and smarminess that would be less of a problem if the movie itself weren’t so persistently mean-spirited in its comedy and downright ugly in its visuals. It strands such likable actors as Ving Rhames, David Koechner, Kathryn Hahn, Ed Helms, Tony Hale, and James Brolin with embarrassingly unfunny things to do. This is a comedy that wields profanity and inanity as bludgeons in an attempt to beat laughter out of the audience. It’s just plain off-putting, ultimately giving cause for nothing more than 89 minutes of near constant, headache-inducing, brow-furrowing.

Revolutionary Road (2008)

Revolutionary Road is now available on DVD and Blu-ray.

Since 1961, when Richard Yates’ great novel Revolutionary Road was published, it has become thoroughly frequent to see “daring” artists scrape at the layers of happiness covering both suburbia and the 1950s and 60s to find the hopelessness and emptiness within. The biggest danger in adapting the book to film now is in failing to making what was original exciting once more. Director Sam Mendes fails for the most part. This is fairly routine stuff at times. The book’s greatest strength is its fluid prose which floats through character’s heads. We see motivation and emotion effortlessly woven and incorporated into character’s actions. As good as Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet are as performers, they don’t manage to convey the same intensity of purpose. For all the great histrionics of their acting they don’t dig into the roles. Here they become examples of Age-Appropriate-Dialogue-Delivery Devices, to use the astute nomenclature of the great Sam Van Hallgren.

But there are moments of visual perfection: a sea of top hats flowing into a subway station, a group of children staring at the television unaware of their father’s voice. But for every scene of effortless emotional twinge that the pictoral vision can evoke, even great early moments like the one that finds DiCaprio returning home from an affair in the city to be greeted by his children was done better by the TV show Mad Men. A curious thing about the movie, though, is that, although it starts by sputtering its engine, once it roars to life it has a pretty good roar.

The roar is due, in no small part, to the great supporting cast. David Harbour and Kathryn Hahn are perfect as a middle-class post-war all-American couple slowly colliding with the façade of the suburbs. Maybe they should have been the leads. But knocking everyone else in the cast out of the ballpark are Michael Shannon and Kathy Bates who are operating on another level altogether. They know just the way the material should be handled. Why didn’t anyone else (other than Harbour and Hahn) catch on? Even if the movie doesn’t, maybe even couldn’t, have the same wallop as the novel, the end still manages to deliver its plot twist with a satisfyingly sickening crunch – a sort of sick cinematic flip to the saccharine sacrifice that caps Kate and Leo’s Titanic. The extent that it does work I found a little surprising considering pessimism is much more relatable from the inside out and Mendes keeps the film firmly entrenched on the outside.