Better Not Cry: HAPPIEST SEASON

Happiest Season, like any good grownup Christmas comedy, is a fizzy charmer leavened by the acknowledgment that, to adults, holidays can be just as much about family tensions and microagressions as togetherness and good cheer. So it is with the Caldwells, whose middle daughter (Mackenzie Davis) invites her serious girlfriend (Kristen Stewart) home to meet her parents (Victor Garber and Mary Steenburgen). The problem: dad’s a conservative mayoral candidate and mom’s an equally clenched socialite. So they’ll have to be introduced as roommates for the time being. Thus kicks off a Christmas week in the closet, which of course draws out fault lines in the women’s romantic relationship as a simmering backdrop to the twirl of social engagements and similarly fraught emotional sniping and jostling between the other grown daughters (Mary Holland and Alison Brie) back in the nest. Here’s a movie that knows that grown people back in their hometown, under the roof of their childhood home, can all-too-easily revert to bad habits and adolescent pettiness. The combination makes the movie thoroughly cozy —fireplaces and sweaters and scarfs and snow-dusted small-town shops and sidewalks — but also tremulously prickly—as eggshell-walking sensitive as its leads need to be to navigate the stresses of the week. Like that great Jodie Foster picture Home for the Holidays, if not quite on that level, here’s a movie that’s full of types in interesting combinations, and generously proportioned to give each their due. The cast (down to small parts for Ana Gasteyer and Aubrey Plaza) enlivens the drama beyond the formula so much that, even when the screenplay leans into some mild farce, a wacky best friend (Dan Levy), and big speeches, it nonetheless rings true. The movie sparkles with good laughs, and amusing scenarios (the kind that only occasionally tip over into sitcom broadness). It benefits greatly from the chemistry between all involved, and by treating their dilemmas with the weight they require while not letting it deflate the whole soufflé on the rise.

And how confidently the movie knows its lead characters' hearts. The proceedings are attuned to their shifts of feeling and desire. It knows keenly the way an off-hand comment can cut like a knife, a new situation can throw new light on a person you thought you knew. Stewart, especially, enters the picture as the outsider, and the way she gingerly tries to ingratiate herself with the family and do right for the woman she loves, even as she questions her (and their!) priorities, is written across her every gesture. (Stewart is truly one of the finest performers of her generation for how casually she holds the screen and communicates a scenario, even without a word.) I was invested in the emotional complexities at hand, even as the movie does its best to use them as grist for the feather-light touch it uses to draw them out and tie them up. Ultimately, the film plays fair by its characters while wearing its heart on its sleeve. And writer-director Clea DuVall not only gets great dynamics out of the cast, and paces out the comedic and dramatic bits with fine timing, but helms it all with high gloss and Christmassy production design and needle drops. It’s refreshing to find any studio comedy (albeit rerouted to Hulu in another of this year’s endless necessary schedule shuffles), let alone the rare Christmas one, that works this well at a human level. It’s broadly appealing and appealingly specific.

Do Androids Dream of Electric Love? BLADE RUNNER 2049

Ridley Scott’s proto-cyberpunk sci-fi noir Blade Runner is revived as a ponderous Villeneuve somber spectacle in Blade Runner 2049. Over thirty years after the original, which imagined a dystopian future L.A. with contours – smoggy rain; polyglot class stratifications; enormous looming digital neon advertising – setting the stage for many imitators, the new film digs into the implications of its world. Before, Harrison Ford played a cop tasked with hunting down rogue cybernetic beings called Replicants. Decades later, a new model Replicant played by Ryan Gosling is hunting down the last of the old models who are still hiding out under the radar, living lives of quiet desperation, their illegal problem programming allowing them just enough free will to shake off the yolk of their makers’ expectations. In the opening sequence Gosling flies his hovercar over a vast dried up terrain to a far-flung farm where a gentle giant of a Replicant (Dave Bautista) sighs in resignation, fighting back in futile self-preservation before the younger bot breaks him down and checks him off the wanted list. Sounds like pulp fun, but look and listen to the film’s atmosphere, director Denis Villeneuve using the suspense techniques honed on the likes of his Prisoners and Sicario to turn out slow, carefully considered images with grey-air-and-glowing-screen palates and a soft quiet unsettling as a pot boils in the background. These filmmakers mean to take a movie about robots, holograms, flying cars, and corrupted files very seriously indeed. 

After last year’s Arrival found Villeneuve working with a deep, powerful strain of emotional content – wrapping an egg-headed first-contact story around an effective contemplation of parenthood, memory, and grief – he takes a step back into ice cold dread. This late Blade Runner sequel is merely a speaker-rattling drone, a slow drip accumulation of dread and despair gorgeously lensed by the great Roger Deakins. He paints in greyscale gunmetal tones and harsh neon lights gracefully arcing across beautiful faces and austere jumbles of concrete-and-polymer industrial parks and towering brutalist architecture. This is a future world at once sparse and ornate, underpopulated and overstuffed. The place, brilliantly built out from the iconic look of Scott’s original, is tactile and disturbing in its all-absorbing qualities. The entrancing score – so often sounding like a window-rattling motorcycle engine roaring by outside, or like a pitch-distorted, extremely slowed down dial-up modem – and the beautifully photographed production design does the heavy lifting. Characters here are poses; worldbuilding is ominous terse monologue; emotion is as crisp and empty as watching an android kiss a hologram. We’re to be contemplating the chilly romanticism of digital beings, but it’s hard not to shake the feeling we’re watching ones and zeroes execute their complicated programs. That’s partly the point, but there’s a frustrating surface-level satisfaction to the movie’s long, languorous, cavernous contemplation of its eerie images. I loved a scene where a hologram slides over a human woman and syncs to her movements, an imperfect process of digital possession that creates ever-so-slightly overlapping images. But it looks cool more than it is actually intellectually stimulating.

The film runs nearly three hours, and its pleasures are absorbing but fleeting. Its appeal sits entirely in stoic characters wearing fabulous wardrobe – stiff high collars, starkly starched trench coats – and inhabiting handsomely striking sets – echoing rooms, windswept irradiated landscapes, a theater of holographic entertainers on the fritz, thunderous man-made waterfalls, junkyards exploding in sudden District-9-style bodily harm as sudden death rains from above. It’s the sort of movie interested in exploring the differences between mankind and artificial intelligence, probing the deep mysteries of what makes a soul and what it means to create life, but in which man and robot alike are equally placid and monotone in demeanor. The ace supporting cast – Robin Wright, Sylvia Hoeks, Ana de Armas, Mackenzie Davis, and even Jared Leto (who is fine in his blink-and-you’ll-miss-it turn) – are directed to be effective elements of the art direction, moving and emoting so precisely and mechanistically it makes a mockery of any sense you could figure out who’s real and who’s created. They’re all ghosts in the machine. Villeneuve’s style of handsome foreboding is admirably sustained, putting the script’s grinding inevitability and tangled, deliberately-paced core who-am-I? mystery plotting through a lens of impeccable craftsmanship. I was never bored, but never involved, always stimulated but never fully invested. It’s a remarkable technical achievement, but a hollow emotional and intellectual exercise. It’s incredibly cool and totally cold.

Robinson Crusoe on Mars: THE MARTIAN

Remember the great scene in Ron Howard’s Apollo 13 where, desperate to find a way to save stranded astronauts in a failing spaceship, NASA engineers are presented with a box of spare parts and told to figure out how those fit together as a makeshift solution? The Martian is that scene for over two hours. In its opening sequence the first astronauts on Mars evacuate the planet during a sandstorm that knocks one of their crewmates off the medical signals and into the deadly dusty darkness. They think he’s dead and leave him behind, where he wakes up alone and afraid with a desolate lifeless planet all to himself. He has to find a way to make 60 days worth of supplies last up to four years, the time it could take to get someone back to pick him up. And that’s only if he can make contact with Earth sooner rather than later.

It’s a surprisingly absorbing experience to watch one man think his way through complicated story problems. Sure, it’s the sort of mystery that’s impossible to think through faster than the characters on screen. But there’s a certain convincing popcorn logic to the whole string of science thought experiments presented for our Robinson Crusoe on Mars in a relatively hard sci-fi premise. No alien twists or sudden water-filled oasis on the horizon, he can only stay in the pressurized makeshift lab or wander out with his spacesuit to scavenge whatever mechanical bits he can to make his unexpected extended stay survivable. Though it wouldn’t be hard to root for anyone’s survival in that situation, it helps that he’s played by Matt Damon, a likable enough presence on screen, equivalent to stranding peak James Stewart or Tom Hanks. He’s corn-fed Americana aw-shucks smart, putting one foot in front of the other.

We watch as he tries to power his life support systems, grow crops, and phone home. Back on Earth his NASA colleagues (Jeff Daniels, Kristen Wiig, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Mackenzie Davis, Sean Bean, Donald Glover) quickly notice movement in satellite photos and start working on ways to get in touch, and get him back. In between are his traveling crewmates (Jessica Chastain, Michael Peña, Kate Mara, Sebastian Stan, Aksel Hennie), unaware the man they’re mourning is alive and might be calling on them to help, too. All those actors are great, believable in their competence and drive, with great timing delivering complicated dialogue. It’s one of those big Hollywood ensembles where the characters are the sum total of their job descriptions (their titles pop up on screen at each intro) and the recognizable faces are meant to fill in the unspoken rest. No one has time for backstory, personal problems, or emotional appeals. There’s not even a token villain. It’s all can-do cooperation and high-stakes business.

I’m sure the armchair rocket scientists in the crowd could still quibble with the results, but at least the filmmakers have a nuts and bolts commitment to showing their work. The characters walk through each new option or development with lots of technobabble patter and math lab/science center jargon, talking through variables, calculations, and equations, triangulating timetables and press releases while weighing the needs of the many with the needs of the few. This could be dull, especially in the relentless exposition and talky narration cutting down on potential poetry of space flight and lonely unearthly vistas of red-tinted desert. But what makes it work is the crisp tick tock editing, cutting for suspense and propulsion between people crowding around computers and white boards and the lonely plight of the one man they’re mobilizing brainpower to save.

Drew Goddard (Cabin in the Woods) has adapted Andy Weir’s book into a screenplay balancing determined problem solving, often clever and surprising, with a mild but charming wit cutting through the heavy material. It’s not glib banter. It’s the light needling and gallows humor of serious smart people who are good at their jobs, but feeling the pressure. It plays into director Ridley Scott’s interest in world building, process, data displays, and men on missions, allowing him to turn this Cast Away meets Gravity by way of Randall Munroe's What If? into something his own, an easily tense space survival story, even if the end is not once in doubt. The Martian has some visual overlap with his Alien/Prometheus world in cinematographer Dariusz Wolski’s unfussy 3D views of production designer Arthur Max’s functional worn-down tech and austere sand-swept Mars terrain. But Scott also has relaxed fun with it, making amusing tension out of, say, Damon struggling to duct tape a depressurizing suit shut, or finding room for a fun disco soundtrack. It’s an efficient and entertaining workmanlike brainteaser of a movie.