Have-Nots v. Have: TOWER HEIST

The great irony of Tower Heist is that it’s an expensive Hollywood production made by and starring wealthy people that nonetheless manages to tap into some of the 99% rage that’s sweeping the country. The plot concerns a Bernie-Madoff-style Ponzi scheme that sends sleazy finance titan Arthur Shaw (a slimy performance from Alan Alda) into house arrest pending trial. The employees at The Tower, the – what else? – towering New York apartment building he lives in had their entire pensions invested with the man. They’re understandably furious and disappointed when they learn that not only is their money gone, but also that the man will be locked up on the top floor for the near future. It seems that they’ll never get their money back, until a plan begins to form. What follows is involving and enjoyable escapism, competently executed fluff.

Ben Stiller plays Josh Kovacs, the manager of the building, a man who is great at his job, who cares deeply about the building, it’s inhabitants, and it’s employees. It was his idea to ask about investing the pensions with their richest resident. When the FBI agent (the always welcome Téa Leoni) in charge of investigating and detaining Arthur Shaw tells the manager that it’s unlikely that the staff will get their money back soon, if at all, he storms up to the penthouse with the concierge, his brother-in-law (Casey Affleck), and the newly hired elevator operator (Michael Peña). Much to their surprise, Kovacs takes a golf club and destroys some of Shaw’s personal property. The Tower’s owner (Judd Hirsch) promptly fires them.

The three of them are now in the perfect position to execute a plan that, if it succeeds, will steal back enough money to give to the staff that has had their savings ground under by this financial skullduggery. They’ll rob Shaw, a daring, high stakes heist, and find the missing millions that the FBI has been unable to find. To pull off the heist, the three guys get in contact with an ex-banker (Matthew Broderick) who was too meek and honest for the business, apparently, and who was recently evicted from The Tower. He’s good with numbers, but they’ll still need help with the actual robbing part. Luckily, Kovacs went to daycare with a man from his neighborhood who was just the other day arrested for his thievery. They bail him out and get him to help, bringing into the picture Eddie Murphy, who talks a mile-a-minute in his slickest, funniest performance in over a decade.

Now that the team has fallen into place, it’s only a matter of pulling off the heist. It’s complex to a certain degree, although nothing compared to the works of Danny Ocean and crew, filled with double crossings and unexpected complications. The film sets up the stakes and then sends the cast through it capably. The other staff members – Gabourey Sidibe (a maid with a slippery Jamaican accent), Marcia Jean Kurtz (a no-nonsense secretary), and Stephen Henderson (a twinkly-eyed doorman) – fill out the rest of the supporting cast nicely, which is already peppered with talented people giving funny performances. The heist has to work with and around the staff to pull it off and it’s nice to see a big Hollywood production make decent use of its ensemble.

Director Brett Ratner has a reputation as a shallow studio hack that’s not entirely unearned. His films do generally feature a baseline competency, though. I’m not prepared to make some kind of grand auteurist defense on his behalf, but I will say that when paired up with good actors and a decent script, he has at times shown that he knows how to stay out of the way. He is not a filmmaker of distinctive personality, but that’s okay here as it is in, say, his Rush Hour. This is nothing more than a super slick, pleasing and broad, feather-light entertainment. It gets the job done. The writing can’t be called especially nimble, but the script by Ted Griffin and Jeff Nathanson is light enough on its feet to generate enough excitement and enjoyment. There’s some fun stunt work and great use of the building’s height to create some stomach-dropping moments, all the while the score by Christophe Beck, which must be a partial homage to David Shire’s for the original Taking of Pelham One Two Three, keeps things bouncing along nicely. Dante Spinotti shoots the film in warm, shining autumn colors that enhance the New York City in late November setting with some terrific location shooting during Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade.

That’s probably the best, if awfully imperfect, analogy for why the film worked for me. It’s a soothing, professional spectacle of a comic thriller that parades big stars and photogenic locations through an exciting plot that is both familiar and new. There’s little attempt to flesh out the emotional or personal lives of the characters, although there’s a charming low-key romance the starts to develop between Stiller and Leoni before it’s dropped entirely once the plot really gets going. It’s a big, shallow entertainment that nonetheless taps into some very real class outrage and gives the whole thing a bit more of a kick than it would otherwise have. Tower Heist is light recessionary escapism that’s just satisfying enough to be a lot of fun. 

Big Fan (2009)

In Big Fan, Patton Oswalt inhabits Paul Aufiero, a painfully realistic character, a needy, dead-end man who latches onto his small nugget of fame as he calls in nightly to a sports talk-radio show to display his fandom of the New York Giants to the region by way of his angst-filled pep-talk monologues which he endlessly writes and rewrites all day as he sits at his job in a parking garage. He’s going nowhere fast, but he barely has time to notice as long as he can keep things all Giants, all the time. It would be a shame to reveal too much about what happens to this character. Shame is exactly what the editors of the trailer and the writers of the official studio synopsis should feel, for revealing is precisely what they did. It’s far better to merely describe the characters, rather than risk betraying the small (near) perfection to be found in the structure of the story created by writer-director Robert Siegel (he previously wrote the screenplay to last year’s most excellent The Wrestler).

Paul lives with his mother (Marcia Jean Kurtz), a tough old woman with pain for her son etched onto her face. His siblings are more successful than he. His brother (Gino Cafarelli), for example, is a lawyer. But to Paul, the Giants are the only thing that matters. This is a dim, grimy, gray Staten Island neighborhood, which Siegel shows us through the spray tans, the breast augmentations, the scrimping, the scheming, and 50 Cent on child’s birthday cake. These are working- and middle-class people struggling, but Paul barely notices, or perhaps suppresses his awareness of his and his neighbors’ circumstances, by relishing his team and his small talk-radio call-in fame. To him, he is an integral part of the team. His best friend (Kevin Corrigan) will listen to the radio show and afterwards call Paul saying “you were great tonight!”

Needless to say, Paul’s fandom becomes a problem. After our slow introduction to the world of the character, there is a sequence of slow-building suspense that ratchets higher and higher as Paul’s fandom causes him to become the victim of a crime. The sequence is superb, closing out the first act with a shock. The second act, however, spins its wheels. The irony, played for both humor and pathos, is that the Giant’s chances of winning the season are now actually in Paul’s hands, but once that is established, and wrung out of its usefulness, the characters continue to fret about what will happen. As interesting as it is that Paul becomes more aware of reality at the same time his fantasy comes true, it’s a great relief when the third act kicks in.

The actions Paul begins to take are kept hidden for some time. Half-glimpsed at the margins of the frame are props which give us clues. Mirroring the first act, the third act is a great showy sequence of slow-building dread mixed with sick suspense. The release of this tension – the punchline, if you will – is one of the biggest rushes of satisfaction I’ve had from any film so far this year.

The film is two perfect sequences sandwiching a flabby midsection, but even when it’s stalling, I was never outside of the film. Paul is a compelling character, a believable character, and I cared what would happen to him, I cared about the other characters in his world, I cared about what he would decide to do next. This is a comedy, sure, but it’s also an affecting character study. It’s not as good as The Wrestler, but Siegel has crafted another interesting, memorable character (though he’s no Randy “the Ram”) and a fairly good movie in which to house him.