Starred Up: NO HARD FEELINGS

Jennifer Lawrence is a Movie Star. If a dozen years of good performances in all sorts of genres, including anchoring the Hunger Games franchise and her multiple trips to the Oscars weren’t enough to prove that, here’s a new strong piece of evidence. In No Hard Feelings, she takes a character that’s slightly ridiculous, in a plot that’s a bit of a stretch, in a screenplay that’s a little undercooked, and filmed in a generic style, and edited to just-the-plot functionality, and easily commands the screen every step of the way. She makes the movie worth seeing. Now that’s a star. She lifts the familiar and the awkward into something entertaining, and even finds some honest sentiment in it all.

Her character is a struggling Uber driver who gets her car repossessed, so she answers an ad placed by a wealthy couple (Matthew Broderick and Laura Benanti) who want a young woman to date their shy 19-year-old son (Andrew Barth Feldman) and “bring him out of his shell” before he heads off to college. If she can successfully seduce him, she’ll get a car. He can’t find out about the arrangement, of course. (Guess what’ll happen about an hour later?) The concept clunks and clanks as it falls into place, but Lawrence dances effortlessly across the lumpy writing and polishes every scene until it’s entertaining. Consider this exchange, in her job interview:

“I just turned 29. Last year.”
“So you’re 29?”
“Last year."
“And how old are you right now?”
“32.”

Lawrence makes lines like that sparkle with a blend of obvious half-joking deception and self-effacing sarcasm. At first, her character—though teetering on the edge of desperation—comes on way too strong, a broad burlesque of feminine wiles that purposely falls totally flat, wriggling in tight dresses and leaning into obvious innuendo. It’s only when she stops trying that something softens up inside her and she can’t quite bring herself to break the boy’s heart. Lawerence sells both aspects, a quick witted desperation turning into flailing false seductiveness becoming something low-key real and charming. She elevates the material with a quicksilver timing—when told the boy’s going to Princeton, she nods and deadpans “heard of it”—that surfaces class consciousness and real connection alike.

That the movie never quite becomes a hard-edged romantic comedy is for the better. Her boyish co-star is an endearing dork we might actually care about. His awkward charms and slow-thawing shyness are played real, and not judged. But what is judged is his cocoon of privilege. The movie’s dancing a tricky line there, and it’s Lawrence’s generous, and generally real, interplay with his insecurities and ignorance alike that makes a fine counterweight to all the ways these scenes could be played wrong. She makes it almost believable this over-the-top comic premise might leave these characters slightly better people by the end. Even when the movie takes an idea to excess—neither ostensibly comedic scene of clinging to the roof of a speeding car works, though the nude fight scene is a so-bold-it’s-funny total commitment to a bit—the filmmakers are lucky they have their star just barely holding the whole picture together.

I couldn’t quite believe that I was nostalgic for this sort of movie. Here’s an R-rated relationship comedy shaggily assembled and thinly plotted, perched entirely on the charisma of its famous lead and the general likability of its supporting cast. Ten or fifteen years ago this would’ve been par for the course—every few months you could expect one or two just like it. Now, though, when the big screen is often missing Movie Star personality pictures, not to mention comedies without guns or fantasy conceits, a movie like this is a breath of fresh air. How nice to see a movie in which the only real failing is its occasional preposterousness of behavior and some formulaic plotting. At least it’s the kind of preposterousness that’s trying to entertain at a human scale, and the formulas are old enough to feel like long-lost friends. Oh, here’s where she develops real feelings for the mark. Ah, here’s the moment when the secret’s revealed. Oh, here’s the reconciliation. How nice. That such sweetness can emerge from a filthy concept is not news, but here director and co-writer Gene Stupnitsky (in a vast improvement on his painfully awkward Good Boys) makes it feel fresh enough just by letting it happen again. It helps that he trusts entirely in Lawrence’s star power to elevate everything around her. She sure does.

Hooray for Hollywood: RULES DON'T APPLY

Rules Don’t Apply is an old-school Hollywood movie with throwback Hollywood pleasures. But it’s also unusual enough it's never quite the movie you think you’d get. It starts in the early 60s at the bottom of the business, with two fresh-faced young people ready to make a go of careers in showbiz. There’s a meek but determined chauffer for the Howard Hughes companies (Alden Ehrenreich) who hopes to one day actually meet the man and propose a real estate venture. There’s a comely chaste Christian beauty queen (Lily Collins) invited to L.A. to be under contract, put up in a fancy bungalow, and given a salary of $400 a month while awaiting a screen test. They’re each just one of many such people in the Hughes universe, drivers and ingénues kept waiting for a day he may need them, underlings getting by despite the rules and stipulations that come with their paychecks. Of course these two sweet young people start making eyes at each other, progress to light flirting, and eventually might even fall into something like unspoken love underneath their contract’s strict no-fraternization policy. The setup is there for a frothy farce, a gentle rom-com, but it keeps getting crashed into, stirred up, distracted and diverted by the mad man running the show.

That’s the movie’s appeal, a handsome period piece comedy steered by the choppy, unpredictable whims of its outsized supporting player. Hughes, the eccentric billionaire, is by this time of his life retreating into isolation and madness. He’s a figure of mystery, star-power held at first off screen, then hiding in dark rooms or barking orders over the phone. When he’s not around, his power and influence dominates nonetheless. It’s fitting, then, that Warren Beatty, one of Hollywood’s most famous leading men once upon a time, plays him. Now 79, the multi-hyphenate behind Reds and Dick Tracy hasn’t appeared on screen in 15 years, a long absence for someone of his stature, so his impeccably delayed arrival mirrors Hughes’ reclusiveness. When he finally does appear, stuttering, drifting off topic, lost in his own thoughts, giving in to his eccentricities, we can feel the sense of his fading glory by seeing Beatty play up how little cool he brings to the part. He still has charisma, but he funnels it into a figure who is losing his, and who maintains it through wealthy and mystery. He has a great Movie Star entrance, but soon commands the screen by being both more and less than you’d think.

Beatty, who also wrote and directed this passion project (his first behind-the-camera work in nearly 20 years), uses himself sparingly. He lets the picture sit squarely with the youngsters who are struggling to get ahead by using Hughes’ erratic largess and ignoring or indulging his inconsistent follow-through. This fizzy youthful possibility simmering as sublimated romantic interest powers the movie’s rushing sensation of lives out of control. Hughes is desperately trying to hang on to his business interests as investors cast doubts on his ability to manage his assets while an odd, stubborn recluse. He wants control – an idea that extends from his particular instructions about every aspect of his life, down to the behaviors of his underlings – even to the point of changing his mind simply because he can. (Or because he makes so many frivolous micromanaged decisions he can hardly keep track of them all.) It’s a tremendous part Beatty’s written for himself – simultaneously fumbling with befuddled humor and carrying a constant underlying gloom – which is all the more effective for occupying the unusual position of driving the plot while staying on the margins.

Clearly wrestled into submission, the just-over-two-hours final picture has four credited editors and a brisk pace, rocketing through scenes and developments with a quick chop-chop-chop attitude. A host of great actors (Martin Sheen, Matthew Broderick, Candice Bergen, Annette Benning, Haley Bennett, Megan Hilty, Paul Schneider, Taissa Farmiga, Ed Harris, Amy Madigan, Oliver Platt, Alec Baldwin, and many more) waltzes through small roles, clearly enjoying chewing meaty material in fun scenes. None stay long, but all add immeasurably to the texture and personality of the worlds in which our leads swim. (The ensemble is so stuffed, the performers must’ve shown up at the mere call to be in Beatty movie. Or maybe they all had larger roles in earlier cuts.) The zippy speed feeds the fast pace of life lived according to an unpredictable boss, and the rushing energy of young people trying not to be in love. The pair at the film’s center do, after all, seem perfect for each other. They’re cute – Collins with young Hollywood’s most expressive eyebrows, while Ehrenreich is blessed with one of his generation’s most sympathetic half-squints – trading rat-a-tat dialogue with screwball aplomb.

As the mechanics of the plot send the young nearly-lovers together and then apart, into their own personal setbacks while chasing diverging goals and unsettled futures, there’s a tinge of melancholy that settles over Caleb Deschanel’s warm cinematography. Hughes, too, serves as a funhouse mirror reflecting and refracting (in addition to compounding) their problems. Here’s a man who turned his father’s company into a global success, and still feels empty inside, trying to fill futile days with pretty women to ogle, underlings to boss around, and technology to futz with. (There’s a pretty terrific reaction shot of a speaker, dryly funny as an emphasis of loneliness when one character’s over-the-phone revelation is met with icy silence.) Beatty knows how to get the tragicomic mixture in exactly the right proportions, and the film’s paradoxical frantic meandering settles into a lovely rhythm of dramatic and comedic incidents, big laughs that can get swiftly choked off in a poignant pause. It’s as spirited on the surface as it is sad and reflective underneath even the bubbliest moments. It’s a big glossy movie working in the spirit of a small scrappy one.

Traverse City Film Festival 2012: Dispatch #1

What may have been lost, if it was ever really known, in the stories of Kenneth Lonergan’s Margaret’s lengthy, contentious postproduction, subsequent botched limited release, further subsequent rise as a critical pet cause, and eventual extended cut DVD, is that the movie plays. In a big theater with a sold out crowd, a rare occurrence for this film that a screening today at the Traverse City Film Festival offered, the movie is a symphony of crowd reactions: gasps, laughs, groans, and heavy silences. Sometimes, all of these reactions mixed together with slippery agility, as in the harrowing, horrifying accident that sets the tone of the film early on with its mix of precise acting, remarkable realism, and sly gallows humor. On a day that the festival offered many interesting films and a packed Q&A with Susan Sarandon, this was the must-see event.

The story of a teenager (Anna Paquin) who witnesses a fatal bus accident and then spends the next weeks and months grappling with the emotional fallout of the tragedy while life somehow trudges on around her remains powerful and messy. The ensemble is rich and delicately balanced with her mother (J. Smith-Cameron), the bus driver (Mark Ruffalo), teachers (Matt Damon and Matthew Broderick), boys (John Gallagher Jr. and Kieran Kulkin), and an unlikely new friend (Jeannie Berlin), among others, playing their parts in her life story. Each character feels fully realized, even when in a plotline that feels edited down to evocative wisps or in a relationship – as in the sharply observed mother-daughter conflict - that slowly takes center stage. What’s most powerful about the film, what makes it such an emotional workout, is the way it manages to bottle a kind of whiplash self-important precociousness of adolescence where grappling with deep and powerful philosophical and emotional topics still unknowingly creates an incredibly self-centered point of view. This is a film about a girl who slowly begins to realize that others are not merely supporting characters in the opera of her life.

This is my second time through Margaret and I found it to be even better than I remembered. It’s an expertly written, breathtakingly acted, experience, a sort of interior epic that reconciles its lack of cohesion and conventional narrative within an emotional framework that makes intuitive sense. Sitting near the front of the theater with the towering screen revealing all the more strikingly the film’s visual powers – a scene in which a taxi cab is suddenly, subtly surrounded by buses felt nearly overwhelming – the film took on a precision that I somehow missed in my initial viewing. Though I really liked the film at the time, I have an even better appreciation now. How often can you sit and feel a big crowd wrestling with a film so emotionally and thematically dense and articulate, so deeply felt and so smartly filmed? The brilliance of Lonergan’s film is the way it invites us into the life of a character and is unafraid to explore, to allow plot points to exist and breathe like life events, to grow and develop, to wither or fade at their own paces.  It’s truly some kind of masterpiece.

Also screened:

            Christopher Kenneally’s documentary Side by Side is a decent primer on the history of digital filmmaking and its conflict with traditional celluloid. All arguments get their (sometimes surface-level) day in court here as the film follows our host and guide Keanu Reeves as he talks to prominent directors (Martin Scorsese, George Lucas, Steven Soderbergh, David Fincher, Richard Linklater, David Lynch, Robert Rodriguez, Danny Boyle, Lars von Trier, the Wachowskis, Christopher Nolan, James Cameron) and cinematographers (Michael Ballhaus, Anthony Dod Mantle, Wally Pfister, Vittorio Storaro, David Tattersall, Vilmos Zsigmond). The film’s a who’s who of modern cinema, filled with interesting, charismatic artists, which makes it all the more disappointing that it gets so carried away with its history lesson that it forgets to actually interrogate these artists’ theories, claims, and opinions. Instead of editing in a way that puts traditionalists, pioneers, and those in the middle in some kind of conversation, the documentary is content to be an overlong, occasionally repetitive, clip to show an Introduction to Film Studies class. That’s fine for what it is, I suppose, but it certainly doesn’t have the kind of depth I would have appreciated.

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. 

Everybody Hurts: MARGARET

Margaret’s two-and-a-half hour run time is a jumble of themes and scenes, adding up to a deeply affecting, bogglingly complex picture of human emotion and moral quandaries. It’s a film that feels sifted, chopped, and cajoled into being. It's a powerful, sweeping yet intimate collection of moments that build towards a powerful, unexpected climax: a thorough evocation of its difficult characters living lives in a recognizable world. It’s rich and thought provoking.

The film is a quintessential sophomore effort, bigger in ambition, weightier in scope, risking a mess. Writer-director Kenneth Lonergan, after the 2000 release of his terrific, small-scale debut You Can Count on Me, filmed this in the fall of 2005. Since then, the film has been wrangled around in post-production under a cloud of unhelpful lawsuits and countersuits between the studio and financiers, conflict between the director and the editors, and even the deaths of two of the producers. Getting the film finished at all with so much strife puts Lonergan on a short list with Terry Gilliam of directors who work with a potent mix of genius, patience, and bad luck. The final product proves the struggle was worth it. 

Margaret is about Lisa, a teenage girl (Anna Paquin) who is startlingly, frustratingly real. Her moods swing wildly. She can be pleasant and flirty or a snapping vindictive twerp. She’s just a kid, one capable of great precociousness and blind to the overwhelming extent of her own naïveté. Living in relative privilege with her stage actress mother (J. Smith-Cameron) and her little brother (Cyrus Hernstadt) in New York City, she has little practical reason to involve herself in anything but the constructed conflict that arises out of the typical teen problems. 

She fights with her family. She’s attracted to two of her peers (John Gallagher Jr. and Kieran Culkin) and can’t quite sort out her feelings. One of her teachers (Matt Damon) has caught her cheating on her geometry tests. Another, her English teacher (Matthew Broderick), strikes her as dorky, yet his readings of poetic language are sometimes moving in a way she can’t find words to express. These are all common enough adolescent problems, sources of angst that fade with maturity and age. She’s still in the midst of sorting out competing impulses and emotions. Then, one day while wandering the streets of the city in search of a cowboy hat to buy, she catches the eye of a bus driver (Mark Ruffalo) as he pulls away from the curb. He’s wearing a cowboy hat. She tries to run after the bus, hoping to get the chance to ask him where he bought his hat. In this brief moment of distraction, the bus hits a pedestrian (Allison Janney).

Lisa feels responsible for the accident and lies to the police to protect the driver. But then, the memory of the incident eats away at her. She’s deeply affected, rattled, disturbed and distressed. And yet the world moves on. Her mother finds a new boyfriend (Jean Reno). Her teachers keep teaching. Her friends (Olivia Thirlby and Sarah Steele) keep chattering. The boys are still interested in her. The world keeps spinning. And yet how can it keep spinning when she has been in the middle of such a traumatic incident, an out-of-the-blue moment of violence for which her sense of culpability is eating her alive, is churning her emotions, won’t let her rest easy? So she lashes out. (Several scenes in the film draw out a post-9/11 parallel with some potency.) She snaps at her mother. She cancels a trip to visit her father. She takes steps to contact the family of the woman hit by the bus and finds a strange sense of comfort in connecting with a woman (Jeannie Berlin) who was a friend of the victim. Lisa selfishly convinces her to sue, to keep the pain of the moment alive in the courts and hanging over the driver’s head. 

Though the plot is driven to a certain extent by the actions and emotions of Paquin, the film doesn’t rely for its impact on her alone. The supporting characters are so fully, tenderly realized with nuanced performances that weave into the frazzled fabric that they feel to be as startlingly, frustratingly real as the teenage girl they all come into contact with. Gallagher’s lovesick teen, Damon’s caring teacher, Ruffalo’s casually troubled bus driver, Culkin’s lothario, Janney’s dying woman and Berlin’s mourning friend all are so beautifully acted and wonderfully played that they add up to an ensemble of depth and interest. Each character feels fully realized, whether in a plot-line that feels edited down to evocative wisps or in a relationship – as in the sharply observed mother-daughter conflict — that slowly takes center stage. 

What’s most powerful about the film, what makes it such an emotional workout, is the way it manages to bottle a whiplash self-important precociousness of adolescence where grappling with deep and powerful philosophical and emotional topics still unknowingly creates an incredibly self-centered point of view. This is a film about a girl who slowly begins to realize that others are not merely supporting characters in the opera of her life.

Out of the cast, J. Smith-Cameron stands out. As the mother, she exudes thwarted warmth, a caring compassion that is ineffective and unreceived by the adolescent angst to which it is directed. She makes her living embodying emotions of characters, yet she finds herself frustrated by the difficulties of “playing” the mother. In a terrific scene, she argues with her daughter, devolving into a great mimic of her behavior. She plays the part, but she has no reference for her own identity. She'll be there for her daughter whenever her daughter rediscovers the need for maternal comfort. This is an example of the film’s beneficial looseness and choppiness. A character of great depth and thematic importance seems to float in and out of focus, ultimately useful, but not always clear. 

In total, the film is an expertly written, breathtakingly acted, experience, an interior epic that reconciles its lack of cohesion and conventional narrative within an emotional framework that makes intuitive sense. Sitting near the front of the theater with the towering screen revealing all the more strikingly the film’s visual powers – a scene from a low angle seeing a taxi cab suddenly, subtly surrounded by a canyon of buses felt nearly overwhelming, echoing the girl’s towering confusion. How often can you sit and feel a crowd wrestling with a film so emotionally and thematically dense and articulate, so deeply felt and so smartly filmed? The brilliance of Lonergan’s film is the way it invites us into the life of a character and is unafraid to explore, to allow plot points to exist and breathe like life events, to grow and develop, to wither or fade at their own paces. It’s truly some masterpiece.

Lonergan features a prominent allusion to a quote from George Bernard Shaw, tossed off and referenced casually, illuminating themes with which the film is playing. The full quote, from the 1903 play Man and Superman, is one character’s condemnation of another’s “regarding the world as a moral gymnasium built expressly to strengthen your character in, [which] occasionally leads you to think about your own confounded principles when you should be thinking about other people’s necessities.” This is a film about just that. Growing up is hard to do. Learning how to interact with others is complicated. Margaret is a sprawling evocation of this hard, complicated mess.