Bad Dog: THE SECRET LIFE OF PETS

The animators at Illumination Entertainment have taken a break from their anarchic Minions to show us The Secret Life of Pets. It’s a far more conventional and predictable kids’ movie, operating from the shameless question, “What if Toy Story, but with pets?” It wouldn’t surprise me if writers Cinco Paul, Ken Daurio, and Brian Lynch had a plaque over their desks saying, “What would Pixar do?” Their movie is about an overconfident little guy who feels threatened when his owner brings home a new buddy. Feelings of jealousy lead him to try to get rid of this intruder and return to being the leading recipient of his owner’s affections. Unfortunately, his attempts to do so leave him lost far from home, with only his new nemesis for company. A group of pals left behind try to figure out how to save these two, while a group of misfits the mismatched pair encounter on their journey home start out menacing before revealing themselves as cuddly help. Along the way there’s a dollop of sentimental backstory and by the end there’s a big scrambling chase after a truck. Sounds familiar?

There was barely a moment of this movie where I wasn’t reminded of Toy Story, except for the climax, which has a little more in common with the end of Finding Dory. Chalk that up to bad timing more than copying, I suppose. The problem with playing the Pixar formula – especially when the originators themselves are reaching the limits of its potential – is that Illumination is no Pixar. They’re trying to be something they aren’t. They have nothing of their inspiration’s deep thought-through approach to imagined worlds and none of the cleverness of premise. Pets is a pretty easy and lazy display of the simplest possible imagination. There’s a secret society of pets under their owner’s noses, a reasonable enough picture-book assumption. What does that entail? Well, in this New York City apartment building it means the animals roam the halls and end up partying and hanging out together all day before the people return at night. They play it safe, content with their lot in life. There’s no great community built up, just a bunch of animals sitting around.

The lead dog is Max (Louis C.K.). He’s jealous of a big new dog (Eric Stonestreet) his owner (Ellie Kemper) brings home. Their neighbors include a fluffy white dog (Jenny Slate), a surly cat (Lake Bell), two more dogs (Hannibal Buress and Bobby Moynihan), and a falcon (Albert Brooks). I’d tell you more about who these characters are, but they’re not much. Relying entirely on what little personality the famous voices can filter through, they’re bouncy bright cartoony critters with little in the way of interior lives and only the simplest one-note motivations. It’d be fine if there weren’t so little else to pay attention to. The movie’s best creation is a sewer gang of discarded animals who call themselves The Flushed Pets and plot to hurt humans. A rough bunny voiced by Kevin Hart leads them. Unfortunately the rigidly deterministic message of the movie softens them – after a lengthy bus crash sequence in which surely several people die – saying all counterculture revolutionaries secretly want to learn their proper place in the world and be happy with that. It’s nothing if not a settling-for-the-status-quo downer.

At least co-directors Chris Renaud and Yarrow Cheney keep the look colorful and cuddly, and the voice work does sell a funny line here and there. It’s best in an early sequence setting up the daily routine of pets. This gives the chance for animators to get funny gags out of their characters identifiable animals behaviors next to anthropomorphized emotions. Max whines about his owner leaving only to snap into a tail-wagging leap when he hears the click of a door. That’s nice. Later, though, the movie grinds through predictable paces, scurrying here and there, engaging in predictable pratfalls, cartoon violence and vertigo, and growing thinner all the while. It’s best when unexpected, like a hallucinogenic hunger dream in which hot dogs sing “We Go Together.” Moments like that are rare. It feels mechanical and routine. Ho-hum, just another technically competent computer animated comedy with celebrity voices on an adventure learning to appreciate what they have and whatnot. It’s programmed to hit the right beats, but not for intelligence or heart. At least it’s watchable and not downright hateful like The Angry Birds Movie. It’s just mindless. Why have such low expectations for what’s going in kid’s minds?

Smart Guy, Dumb Movie: TRUMBO

Jay Roach’s Trumbo strikes me as a movie with a small target audience of people who care about Hollywood history without caring too much about movies themselves. It’s a well-intentioned recounting of the time when blathering idiots in Congress whipped up enough Americans with anti-Communist propaganda that they had to do something about it, that something being mindless persecution costing a great many people their livelihoods. (That we, too, live in a time where blathering politicians make a lot of noise about taking away civil liberties is a parallel not unnoticed.) At the center is screenwriter Dalton Trumbo (here played with gravel and scene-chewing by Bryan Cranston, late of Breaking Bad) who wrote many films (including A Guy Named Joe and Gun Crazy) before running afoul of conservative business folks who were sufficiently spooked by his Communist party affiliation to blacklist him and others like him. The movie lays out the broad strokes of the Blacklist’s rise and fall without caring too much about pesky things like nuance, context, or ambiguity.

With docudrama gloss, Roach (best known for directing Austin Powers, but who has done the reenactment thing before, with election-based HBO films Recount and Game Change) sets about recreating 1950’s Hollywood. He uses the too-bright, too-clean style of every biopic unconcerned with capturing anything but the events. He’s armed with a clear message of right and wrong (Yay, artists! Boo, bullies!), an interesting real-life hook, and a host of recognizable faces playing famous people. (There’s Michael Stuhlbarg as character actor Edward G. Robinson, Helen Mirren as gossip columnist Hedda Hopper, Dean O’Gorman as Kirk Douglas, and so on.) The screenplay by John McNamara (NBC’s Aquarius) serves up the narrative with simple clarity and strictly expositional dramaturgy, which renders every line flat with the dust of a particularly earnest book report. People stand around explaining things to each other, talking like they’re dictating their thought processes, philosophies, and motivations for posterity. At one point, Trumbo is told to “stop talking like your words are being chiseled in granite.” Would that the film had taken its own hint.

The shame of it is that there’s a good story here. Trumbo was a first amendment hero, and the movie does the bare minimum to show it. He speechifies, he testifies, and he’s always a charismatic charmer. The scene where he refuses to name names and runs quippy circles around a Congressional committee is the highlight in this regard. But as he spends years hammering out scripts under pseudonyms for less pay and no credit, even winning Oscars for movies (like Roman Holiday) he can’t acknowledge he’s written, the film merely twinkles with the comfort of hindsight. Sure, poor Trumbo went through some tough times, didn’t he? But, ah, look who got the glory in the end, eh? After all, the Red Scare tried to drive him out of the movies and look who’s still here. Two-plus hours of uncomplicated back-patting from a movie that’s content to view the past from a know-it-all modern standpoint is hard to take. There’s not an ounce of genuine surprise or feeling in the whole thing.

Where’s the real investigation of Trumbo the character? The filmmakers have him on such a high pedestal they forgot to bring him down to our level and really dig into his thoughts and feelings. We see him interacting with his wife (Diane Lane) and kids (including Elle Fanning), but instead of illuminating his personal life, it plays like perfunctory “here’s the family” scenes.  We see him organizing support from writer pals (Alan Tudyk, Louis C.K.) and producers (Roger Bart, John Goodman), but those also play like dutifully arranged footnotes played lightly for strained seriousness. Trumbo the movie is clumsy and overfamiliar, too thin for those who know their Hollywood history, too flavorless for anyone. Trumbo the man was a good deep thinker, now immortalized in a movie of depressingly airy superficiality. The good news is that no one will remember this movie in six months, let alone last as long as his works. That’s the problem with bad movies about good filmmakers: there’s no good reason not to just go to the source.

Games People Play: AMERICAN HUSTLE

There are no sincere moments in David O. Russell’s American Hustle. It goes beyond the narrative, which follows an F.B.I. operation in the late 1970s that involved blackmail, bribery, corruption, and con men. And that’s just the guys doing the investigating. The film’s characters are constantly pulling one over on each other, trying to make any given situation slippery enough to wiggle away with the upper hand. The problem is the film takes after its characters and in doing so refuses to take them seriously. It’s a true(ish) story filled with great heist movie-style brinksmanship and game playing, but I didn’t believe any of it for one second. That’s not to say I called foul on the facts, but that I never bought into the stakes or emotions of the story. The whole thing is exhaustingly inauthentic, full of pushy camera moves, fussily casual period piece production design, and self-satisfied banter. It expends lots of effort, but ends up with only awfully thin insight. Turns out people, given the right circumstances, might con other people to get what they want. You don’t say.

The film is a nesting doll of deceit, cons within cons within cons. Christian Bale plays a con man sleazily juggling many cons at once. He supplements his laundromat business by selling forged paintings on the side, as well as accepting payment from sleazeballs in return for trying to set them up with loans that will, of course, never materialize. His partner in crime is his mistress (Amy Adams), so there’s another con, this one the relationship he’s hiding from his boozy young housewife (Jennifer Lawrence). Bale and Adams are busted for fraud by an ambitious FBI agent (Bradley Cooper) who says they’ll walk free if they help him bust some of their fellow fraudsters. It takes a con to run a con to find a con or two.

With no choice, that’s what they do, helping to create an elaborate entrapment scheme that soon involves a New Jersey mayor (Jeremy Renner), a fake sheik (Michael Peña), and increasing amounts of FBI money sitting in bank accounts and renting private jets and hotel suites. With each new expenditure request, Cooper’s boss (Louis C.K., a welcome sight) grows increasingly exasperated, denying them until his boss (Alessandro Nivola), another guy smelling good career moves, overrules him. Cooper keeps urging the project’s expansion, using each new mark to get to another mark. It’s a tangled web of competing interests that’s bound to ensnare some of the people laying the traps as well as their targets.

In the middle of it all, the cast’s central quartet delivers big booming performances that fit the film’s swaggering shallowness. Bale, with a protruding gut and complicated combover, exudes frustrated confidence mixed with desperation, while Adams, shifting her accent around, comes across as a fiercely determined faker and striver. Cooper’s a hard-charging naïve, smart enough to cook up a plan, but overeager to see it through. He’s too earnest for his own good. When one mark says something incriminating, Cooper smiles a little too broadly and exclaims, “That’s great!” Lawrence, meanwhile, thinks she’s scheming, but she’s just good old flighty passive aggressive. Her performance is a whirlwind. The film’s phoniness is hardly their fault. They’re giving the best possible performances this material could get. They’re so good I kept wishing I could like the movie more, if only to reward their likable hard work. They throw themselves into unflattering clothing, funny hairdos, and silly accents, chewing through the script with energy and humor.

But that’s not enough to make it anything more than sporadically entertaining. It’s breezy enough – well over two hours and rarely dragging – but scene after scene, I found myself feeling emptier. Russell and co-writer Eric Warren Singer’s script follows the hodgepodge of cons in a slapdash manner, sometimes revealing too much or too little and scrambling up who we should care about at any given time. It’s shifting allegiances, but always tilting towards mockery – a style that scoffs at strong feelings, a howl of emotion seen as a plot point and a joke and little more. When it all shakes out in the end, it doesn’t feel like resolution for characters as much as it is checking off boxes with little sense of what it all means for the individuals in question beyond the surface level of winners and losers. No matter how fine the performances are, there’s nothing to latch onto.

Why am I to care about the results of any of these cons when the film is only interested in playing them out to play them out? It only cares about pulling out rugs and staring at scheming. When it comes to the whys and who cares, it could care less. The actors give it their all, and to the extent the film is watchable and compelling, it’s that they manage to break through the film’s suffocating artifice with some actual emotion. The rest of the time, Russell’s swooping, energetic camera and non-stop period rock, pop, and disco soundtrack – often the only aspects of the film Russell seems interested in, and a passable, if muddled, copy of every other big swinging 70s-set crime film's style – pounds out and counteracts every genuine emotion with insistent inauthenticity.

Woman Past the Verge of Nervous Breakdown: BLUE JASMINE

As painful and precise a character study as Woody Allen has ever made, Blue Jasmine is built around an incredible performance by Cate Blanchett. She plays Jasmine, a New York City socialite whose banker husband’s financial malfeasance resulted in a rare prison sentence for him. The legal proceedings wiped out their collective wealth and now she’s stuck living with her working class sister (Sally Hawkins) in a tiny apartment in San Francisco. Allen deftly cuts between flashbacks that swim with ostentatious wealth – palatial vacation homes, richly decorated ballrooms, apartments with wide spaces filled with elegant bric-a-brac – and her daily struggle to survive post-scandal. We hear that some time before the film’s present day she was found alone in the street babbling to herself. Coming out of a flashback, the camera sometimes finds her in the corner of the frame, muttering and mumbling about the events we’ve just seen. As the film slowly fills in the full picture of the downfall of her riches and her husband, it’s clear that this damaged woman so tenuously restarting her life is a woman well past the verge of a nervous breakdown. She’s deep in the midst of it, with only fleeting slivers of hope of making it to the other side.

What we have here is a duet between a master filmmaker and a virtuoso performer. Blanchett is remarkably fragile, broken in deeply neurotic ways that run well past the typical Allen type. Here she’s a woman in the middle of a self-deception. Although she’s broke, has barely a cent to her name, she’s stuck in a wealthy state of mind that keeps her realities from sneaking into her consciousness too deeply. Her husband (Alec Baldwin) was a man who kept her in the dark about his business practices, but she was complicit in that lack of information. She enjoyed the rewards too much. In a potent metaphor for recent economic turmoil, he’s caught in the wrongdoings while she’s the one left to scramble with nothing, not even able to fully process what she’s lost. (Of course, that the legal system actually punished this bad banker is a cinematic fantasy.) In one of the opening scenes, she’s complaining to her sister about the conditions of the first class flight that took her to San Francisco. “I thought you said you were broke,” her sister says. “I am!” Jasmine howls, not seeing the contradictions that sit so plainly on the surface of her narrative.

Allen sees them, though, and the film is unsparing as it watches Jasmine struggle. It’s a film that’s scathing and sympathetic, a contradiction that’s reconciled by the push and pull of the film’s elegantly composed, beautifully filmic cinemascope cinematography by Javier Aguirresarobe and the raw emotion storming under and cracking through Jasmine’s barely composed exterior. The film is so cleanly cut, crisply crosscut between past and present. It’s gorgeously blocked, stretching across the frame with care. It’s sharply drawn, surrounding the simple story of a woman trying to find some way to put her life back together with a vividly sketched ensemble of strivers that counterbalance the emptiness of her aspirations and vacuousness of the lifestyle she lost.

Her sister’s surrounded by romantic entanglements old and new, an ex-husband (Andrew Dice Clay), a current boyfriend (Bobby Cannavale), and a maybe-new boyfriend (Louis C.K.). They’re all working class guys who draw the scorn of Jasmine. Their personalities clang against the personalities of the wealthy guys she had grown used to. “You settle for the men you think you deserve,” she snaps to her sister. She, on the other hand, sets her sights on a guy (Peter Sarsgaard) who has eyes on climbing a ladder of social influence. Of course she can’t tell him who she really is. Is it better to be honest with a problematic guy you get to know, or dishonest with a guy who remains unproblematic the less you care to know and care to let him know? The answer seems clear.

But Jasmine could care less if she’s doing the right thing, so long as she thinks she is. She has a need to be correct at all times, or at least a need to be seen as correct. She views every slight, no matter how minor, as a personal affront. Any potential career starter she views as beneath her. She wants the results only and wants them now. Told she has to get a job, she sniffs that the only options for a middle-aged college dropout are “menial.” But she doesn’t see herself and her reality in the terms she entertains just long enough to dismiss. She’s an all-American temporarily disadvantaged millionaire waiting for her ship of money to come in. She simply doesn’t know what to do with herself until then. The film doesn’t know what to do with her either, content to show her to us without much else to balance out the cruelty and emotional damage (to herself and others) following her wherever she goes. Allen is content to serve up this character portrait, vivid and wounded, and leave it at that. It’s as invigorating as it is frustrating, a pained fascination with an uncomfortably complicated character worth turning over in one’s mind long after she’s off the screen and the credits have rolled.