Swing Shift: SPIDER-MAN: HOMECOMING

The latest product from the Marvel Studios factory is Spider-Man: Homecoming, a co-production with Columbia Pictures, that company making less an admission of failure and more a signal of strong showbiz jealousies. The Sony subsidiary hasn’t been able to make a Spider-Man feature as good as Sam Raimi’s since letting him go, but surely the powers that be were only interested in loosening the reins on their rights to the character when they saw the consistent huge grosses and quality control over at the Marvel Cinematic Universe. They didn’t want to do right by the character so much as do right by their producers and stockholders. Still, the result is precisely what you’d hope and expect from bringing in the people who brought us the whole Avengers product line. It’s brightly lit and full of good-humored banter, features a great cast of familiar faces playing colorful characters, and stops every so often for a dazzlement of colorful CG. Though the formula’s getting tired, this new entry manages a high degree of charm and fast-paced entertainment (and even a few genuine surprises). In addition to the predictable polish and routine beats of a Marvel plot machine, this widget has a sweetness and an energy that makes it slightly better than average. It’s good fun.

Picking up during the events of last year’s Captain America: Civil War, where this new interpretation of Spidey was first introduced recruited by Iron Man to be a potential second-string Avenger, Homecoming finds Peter Parker (Tom Holland) initially excited to be one of the gang. (This movie’s biggest uphill climb is having to bounce its continuity out of what was easily the MCU’s worst movie, a dull grey 147-minute slog.)  Alas, his dreams will not be coming true any time soon. Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) gifts him a souped-up supersuit and tells him to stick to being a friendly neighborhood Spider-Man. The boy’s just fifteen, after all. There’ll be plenty of time to be a real hero when he’s older. This leaves the kid antsy and eager to prove himself, and allows the movie to stretch out with what’s always best about Spidey’s appeal: his average, every day, everyman problems. He has homework, an extracurricular academic challenge team, a cheerfully nerdy best friend (Jacob Batalon), an unrequited crush (Laura Harrier), a bully (Tony Revolori), a sweet prickly teammate (Zendaya), and a kind aunt (Marisa Tomei). He has a lot on his plate, plus the whole sneaking out every evening to patrol the streets, swinging from buildings to stop bike thieves and ATM bandits. 

Writer-director Jon Watts (of the small, tense, kids-in-over-their-heads thriller Cop Car) and his five co-writers understand the inherent charm of Spider-Man. They make him a relatable stressed-out teenager, just trying to fit in and do well at school while testing his powers. (They’re great, after all, and so, too, are his responsibilities.) With a bounce in its step, the movie makes like its hero and juggles the demands placed upon it quite skillfully. It weaves itself into the fabric of the MCU with better deftness than some of its inferiors, rooting its villain (The Vulture, played by Batman and Birdman himself, Michael Keaton) motivation in the aftermath of The Avengers. One of the more memorable villains in this mega-franchise, his backstory has him with a contract to clean up the damage from the alien battle, a lucrative deal that gets pulled when SHIELD classifies the high-tech debris. Now he’s flying in a makeshift jet-propelled wingspan, making his money on the black market, smuggling gadgets stolen from the various film’s climactic calamities (Winter Soldier’s D.C. craters, Ultron’s rattled fictional city, and so on). He and Peter – little guys hoping to make big marks – both have struggles proving themselves in this new outsized ecosphere of heroes and villains, which gives their clash a little charge. Keaton’s world-weariness plays nicely against Holland’s adorably boyish happy-to-be-here excitement, making for a compelling conflict.

Because the bad guy’s a local low-level troublemaker, he first shows up on Peter’s radar. Since the boy has trouble convincing Stark’s assistant (Jon Favreau) to take his calls, he feels obligated to put a stop to the mystery man’s bad deeds as he continually crosses paths with the evil plot. All this and the big dance, too. There’s the usual roster of fun character actors popping up to give the zippy plot some added wit and texture (Donald Glover, Bokeem Woodbine, Hannibal Buress, Angourie Rice, Martin Starr, and Michael Mando among the pleasant surprises popping up in tiny roles). They keep things pleasant and crackling with an agreeable comic charge between big splashy two-page spreads of action – leaping between buildings and off monuments, tussling with henchmen and saving civilians – that make for the usual superhero shenanigans. These are all suitably loud and explosive, but also swing with Spidey’s nimble acrobatics. Watts has managed to make a movie sparkling with enough fun and invention that its small piece pumps some life back to the larger franchise puzzle. It simply feels good to spend two hours with a character whose biggest conflict is wanting to contribute more positive impact in the world than he can manage. It’s easy to root for him.

Adventureland (2009)

Films like Adventureland are thrilling in their specificity. This is not exactly neo-neo-realism, but it's a pitch-perfect story of a young man’s summer job at an amusement park, a film that perfectly captures the melancholy rhythms of a minimum wage job. The customers are bizarre, rude, baffling, and funny. There’s long periods of downtime, rambling conversations about pop culture, philosophy and gossip, and, in the accurate running joke, the same song seems to be played over and over and over again.

This is James (Jesse Eisenberg, performing as a cross between Woody Allen and Michael Cera) and his existence the summer of 1987. Writer-director Greg Mottola has created a film of moods and rhythm, finding moments of fleeting beauty and awkward humor, perfectly creating the kind of nervous, half-ironic ways of speaking that people of a certain age have, the sense that the whole world may be judging your next sentence. James knows what he wants to do with his life but is caught in a sense of mid-schooling confusion. He sees his life closing in around him, sees that it’s time to stop dreaming about what he wants to be when he grows up because he’s almost there.

Mottola lets us get to know the other characters, and I mean characters, who work at the park including the Gogol-reading, pipe-smoking, Slavic languages major (Martin Starr), the maintenance man (Ryan Reynolds) who plays in a local band and is rumored to have once jammed with Lou Reed, and the eccentric owners, (Bill Hader and Kristen Wiig, very funny but somewhat underdeveloped and underused). The employee of most interest to James is Em, played by Kristen Stewart with the warmth and genuine fragile emotion she brought to Into the Wild but lacked in Twilight. Em and James strike up a flirtation with the thrilling, romantic edge of a burgeoning friendship that may become more.

The characters are truthfully drawn, and compassionately followed by the film which presents bad decisions in a nonjudgmental way and good ones in an ambivalent light. This is a film with its pulse on the feelings of youth, the confusion about purpose and the thrill of discovering new things, or even just the old things with new people. The film has humor that bubbles up naturally out of the characters and their situations rather than relying on coasting from gag to gag. There’s a natural, conversational, anecdotal feel much of the film, which oozes 80's pop as it watches its characters interact and develop over the course of the summer.

Yes, this is one of those “and that was the summer that changed my life” movies, the yuppie-white-boy-comes-of-age variety, or at least it starts out on that path. It doesn’t end up there, however, as it turns out his life isn’t changed, or at least not in all the ways we’d expect. It's an unexpectedly touching and tender comedy that has an impact that snuck up on me. This is the kind of movie that calmly observes a young man in transition, enjoys hanging out with his new friends, listening to cool music, admiring girls, watching fireworks, gossiping, eating, romancing (or trying), getting high (or trying), talking philosophy, art, theology, family, and working every day running rigged carnival games while planning for the future. This is a movie that captures this type of employment but also captures a state of mind, a sense that it’s hard to shift while the ground is shifting under you.

Note: It’s R-rated for a reason – it certainly reflects this kind of reality – but it’s not coarse for coarse sake like so many other films that think profanity is a suitable substitute for a punch-line (I’m looking at you Step-Brothers).