In the Bleak Mid-November: DEADFALL

Deadfall is the kind of unassuming thriller that’s built entirely out of familiar parts and yet still manages to make the parts work well together from time to time. It’s a dark, wintry little movie that starts on the eve of Thanksgiving, with brother and sister criminals (Eric Bana and Olivia Wilde) counting the money from their heist while zooming up a snowy, rural Michigan road. Trouble starts when they hit a deer and flip their car into a ditch, an accident that draws the attention of a passing state trooper. Covering their tracks, the brother and sister shoot him dead and split up, running their separate ways through the forest as a manhunt quickly assembles from the nearby police station.

A sort of rural noir with splashes of local color, this small, tight movie grabs suspense out of endless white plains and forests of hunters, cabins, and snowmobiles, as well as the kindness of strangers. Even though it’s actually Montreal substituting for Michigan, the setting feels convincing and atypical enough to draw some attention. Now, I’m not saying Deadfall is as good as Fargo, but much like the Coen brothers did with that film, this crime picture gains some fun and novelty out of setting traditional crime movie elements against the backdrop of an unexpected setting. Unlike the Coens, who appear to be constitutionally incapable of playing anything straight for too long – indeed it’s their verbal and visual wit that make them near constant delights – this film is dark and relentless.

The plot grows to include a couple of broken families trying to reconnect over this Thanksgiving weekend. In a big house in the country, mere miles from the opening accident, there’s a crusty old retired sheriff (Kris Kristofferson) and his wife (Sissy Spacek) who get a call from their son (Charlie Hunnam) downstate. He’s just been released from jail and wants to stop by. We also meet a tenacious young deputy (Kate Mara) who clashes with the protective, condescending sheriff (Treat Williams), who just happens to be her father. As these family dramas play out against the backdrop of potential danger, the film primes some setup for later satisfying, if a touch predictable and routine, payoff. Especially by the time a snowstorm closes the road and the prodigal son picks up the hitchhiking fugitive woman who’s desperate for a place to meet up with her brother and continue their getaway, it’s clear the shape the story will take. Still, it has some fun getting there.

I certainly don’t mean to oversell this movie. It sags in the middle, drops a few plot points, and cuts off interesting undercurrents before they have much time to develop. We never do figure out the exact nature of the brother and sister’s relationship or receive clarification on various convenient coincidences here and there. It’s also a little silly at times, like when Bana gets into a fight with a stereotypical Native American man who gravely informs his attacker that he was warned about this in a dream, or when two people (I won’t say who) are meant to be in love after a brief, relatively unconvincing, period of time. Come to think of it, just about everything involving Bana’s solo hike to the climax seems awkwardly motivated and weirdly irrelevant to the big picture.

But, working from a script by Zach Dean, director Stefan Ruzowitzky, an Oscar-winner for his Holocaust thriller The Counterfeiters, keeps the tension at a nice even keel. Through unfussy craftsmanship and a trustable, solid cast, he moves things along in a way not entirely dissimilar to the feeling of compulsively turning the pages of some just-satisfying-enough airport novel. I wasn’t involved so much as I was curious to see how the plot would resolve and through what twists the stock characters would have to live to get to the end. This is a movie that works well on that level and on that level alone I was satisfied. 

Dissonance: JOYFUL NOISE

Dolly Parton hasn’t had her big hair on the silver screen in twenty years. Though she’s clearly had some work done to her face, her screen presence is unchanged. She’s dynamite. In Joyful Noise, she stars opposite Queen Latifah as members of a church choir on its way to winning a national championship. Parton and Latifah could be a great match in a better film. They’re actresses who can go big without going over-the-top and can sell feisty one-liners with a nice blend of warmth and prickliness. (They're also often better than the kinds of movies they appear in). The choir finds some obstacles, sort of, and complications, most definitively, but these ladies just want to perform and who could ever stop them? The plot finds nearly constant reason to, but when the movie finally gives them the chance to open up their singing voices to a full blast, it sings too. What’s strange is how much time the movie spends not singing. During the lulls, things get weird.

Writer-director Todd Graff (most recently of Bandslam) takes a simple, thin story and loads it up with so many tangents, half-hearted thematic concerns, and dropped plot points that the whole clunky thing is perpetually on the verge of collapse. It’s an awkward joining of some disparate good ideas and a whole bunch of bad ideas into one tonal mess that sloshes about from flat attempts at comedy to thudding dramatic moments and back again within even the same scene. It’s just so weird, as weird as the soft and bland visuals. The movie opens with the choir director (Kris Kristofferson) having a heart attack on stage and then goes on to contain any number of inexplicable plot elements that collide and combust every which way.

This is a movie that contains a scene in which a man dies after a one night stand and leaves the poor woman who finds him dead in her bed crying at his funeral because she thinks all men will be afraid to come near her from now on. And that scene is played for laughs. Yes, you read that right. This is an actual subplot in an otherwise wholesome movie about a choir. It’s a movie that tries to get laughs and tears, even at the very same subject. A sorrowful scene of a closing mom-and-pop hardware shop is followed immediately by a wacky slapstick fight in a restaurant that gets a waitress fired, ending on a note so half-hearted and comedic it’s practically scored with a sad trombone.

Taking center stage in this tone-deaf movie is Latifah as a struggling mother with two jobs and two kids, a teenage boy (Dexter Darden) with a conveniently cinematic version of Asperger’s syndrome and a talented but marginally unhappy adolescent girl (Keke Palmer).  Sharing the spotlight is Parton as a sassy widow and her interloping bad boy grandson (Jeremy Jordan). These two women are confident but troubled as they try to handle family problems while getting the choir in a good position to win its competition. They’re strong, independent ladies and it’s inevitable they’ll clash, especially since the daughter and the grandson have made googly eyes at each other.

But the characters never really come alive. I didn’t buy the young romance and I certainly never believed that these two sweet, funny, musical ladies would actually have the kind of animosity they’re supposed to have based on the slim evidence resented. The characters’ personalities shift depending on the needs of any given scene, which slides around as erratically as the movie’s mood. At least they have something resembling a personality, which is more than you can say for the supporting cast that is filled with mostly anonymous glorified extras who are lucky if they get a one-note running gag. But when the big choir competition climax comes and the ladies lead their flock in a rousing off-the-cuff mash-up of pop music and gospel sentiments, it put a smile on my face and a tap in my toes. There’s huge talent in this movie, but I can’t for the life of me figure out why the messy, erratic plot insists on hiding it behind a bushel of ridiculousness.