Past Participants: THE GREATEST BEER RUN EVER and AMSTERDAM

We flatter ourselves if we think we’re better than the past just because we know how it’ll turn out. A story’s ending, after all, depends solely on where we choose to stop telling it. As Faulkner once reminded us, the past isn’t even past. The present sure isn’t either. Peter Farrelly’s The Greatest Beer Run Ever is a movie about how much it might take to make an unthinking person recognize the truth about his own historical moment. In this case, it’s the late 1960s. New York barfly Chickie (Zac Efron) spends his time, when off from hard shifts on merchant ships, drinking with his buddies. Together they lament those friends who are deployed in Vietnam. One has just been shipped back in a casket. The guys grumble about war protestors and the media coverage and grouse that it is unfair American soldiers are losing hope on account of all this negativity from the homefront. On a whim, Chickie decides to hitch a ride on a cargo ship and deliver some beer to these friends serving overseas. Turns out spending time in a war zone isn’t the lark he thinks it’d be, though the movie’s breezy tone and ambling smirk matches its lead’s stupid grin as that lesson takes its sweet time sinking in. Chickie isn’t the fastest learner, but even he can recognize that his army buddies are way more distressed about his bumbling into battlefields than he thought they’d be. (The first deflation has to be learning they can get beer there.) Efron plays this slow-dawning realization by degrees, calibrating his wide grin and frat boy antics—he breezes past Generals by letting them assume he’s CIA, to name one of his carefree gambits—into appropriately chastened through near-death encounters.

Farrelly began his career making, with his brother Bobby, hilariously raunchy (but secretly sentimental) comedies like Dumb and Dumber and There’s Something About Mary. Lately he’s pivoting solo, with Green Book and now this new effort, to spin simple lessons out of complicated truths. It’s a little historical depth and extra sentimentality in a slightly more serious version of his studio comedy packaging. (In other words, he’s traded gags about bodily fluids and anatomical functions for gentler punchlines and Important Human Connection.) These movies are dopily well-intentioned at best. Unlike Green Book’s retrograde buddy-comedy approach to race relations, Beer Run is a little more honest about its character’s progression from ignorantly self-righteous into a humbled observer. The trappings of Vietnam in this telling may look flat and overlit and sitcom stagy, but the increasingly harrowing implied violence around the character makes his journey less of a lark. It helps that he meets a world-weary war correspondent played by Russel Crowe with every bit of effortless gravitas that casting implies. Eventually, Chickie realizes that journalists are telling the truth, the military isn’t being honest, and, though some soldiers are brave in the face of senseless killing, the war was probably a mistake. If he makes it home, he might just live up to a British journalist’s description of his feat: “It may be idiotic, but it’s a noble gesture.” There’s the review right there.

Better use of true trappings to tell a caper in the shadow of real war is David O. Russell’s Amsterdam. It’s at least more invested in the bodily damage combat leaves in its wake, and finds metaphors to match. Two American soldiers in The Great War (Christian Bale and John David Washington) bond when they, riddled with shrapnel, are pulled from the trenches. Each saved the other. Their nurse (Margot Robbie) extracts jagged metal from their flesh and stores it for use in her found-materials art projects. Turns out she’s an emigre living the European life, and as the long post-war years loom, the three become good friends. She’s in love with one, and a dear friend of the other, and they all live together in a cozy loft apartment in Amsterdam—a gauzy, artful, open-minded arrangement in the caesura between World Wars. And yet, because they met in bloody circumstances and the shock of the war is nonetheless the engine driving the culture in which they swim—surrealism and modernism elbowing into their rosy, softly-lit lives—it’s an inextricable part of their fleeting friendly connection. Reconfigured and reclaimed, it literally surrounds them: a tea set, a photograph, a memory. The city of the title takes on a similar symbolic weight. It’s a place, and a mindset, that’s an oasis from the usual, and a respite removed from the weight of prejudices back home that’d make their casual arrangement unthinkable.

That the characters can’t stay so cozily in the emigre state of mind fuels the bittersweet heart of the picture as it plunges into a knotty conspiracy back home in America. The central trio has parted, and when they meet again a decade and a half later, on the streets of New York City, they’re all mixed up in a plot involving white supremacist agitators hoping to shake off FDR’s New Deal and align their country with the rising tide of European fascism. A beloved General is suddenly dead, and his daughter is subsequently pushed under a moving vehicle. When the murderer tries to pin the blame on Bale and Washington, they scramble about looking to clear their names. (All this, and they’re trying to stage a charity reunion revue for their old army unit—shades of White Christmas—too.) The movie ambles along, slowly untangling the various threads by the time the credits roll. It plays loosely with history, but fairly in identifying between Europe and America a shared moneyed class with a taste for authoritarian control to protect their business interests. Imagine Frank Capra doing John le Carré, complete with unsubtle sentimentality hammering home a too-easy moral (hear that interminable final monologue) after the hard work of international intrigue. Buffeted by these competing demands, the central trio is a beguiling collision of acting styles. Bale stumbles and squints and blusters; Washington lets it all slide down easily; Robbie flits and flutters and flusters. And together they push and pull at the edges of the stifling story’s baggy pace and semi-complicated mystery to find moments of improbable melancholic grace.

Russell, no stranger to mismatched slow-boiling character conflicts, is usually quite good at cooking up scenarios in which good actors can cut loose and spread out potentially silly turns in serious subjects with a full commitment to both. His best movies—Flirting with Disaster, Three Kings, Silver Linings Playbook, Joy—have compelling stories told with a kind of farcical plate-spinning quality, keeping a varied cast’s competing aims and through-lines legible even as they overlap and collide. This one’s sleepier, bringing on eccentric supporting characters in a soft-shoe of a mystery. The large ensemble—Rami Malek, Anya Taylor-Joy, Robert De Niro, Andrea Riseborough, Timothy Olyphant, Michael Shannon, Mike Meyers, Chris Rock, Zoe Saldana, Taylor Swift, and so on—makes for information devices and red herrings. There’s a wan quality to the imagery that keeps them pinned down, and a soft looniness to the line readings and complications that make for a hazy unreality that never quite gathers the heft it needs. The performances are a collection of tics and takes, with actors given space to spin out their competing ideas and aims. The story occasionally curlicues into distraction—and some overfamiliar fake-outs. But, for all the tricks it pulls, there’s a sharp political point in the middle about the collusion of corruption, and the way it tears at the happiness of those who just want to love each other and make art and help the defenseless and live in peace. Didn’t they almost have it all? One almost wants this ersatz Rick and his Ilsa to say we’ll always have Amsterdam.

Shooting Stars: THE GRAY MAN and BULLET TRAIN

Netflix’s latest big attempt at making a summer blockbuster is The Gray Man, for which they’ve recruited Anthony and Joe Russo, the directors of Captain Americas 2 and 3 and Avengers 3 and 4. Those were huge financial successes, so I can see why the streamer thought their directors would be a good choice to helm an action spectacle the company hopes can compete with the usual warm-weather multiplex fare. A problem, though, is that the Russo brothers are comedy directors, and you can tell in their leaning on light quipping attitudes and a reliance on medium shots and close-ups. They started in sitcoms and never quite shook it. The best moments in Avengers: Infinity War, far and away their most enjoyable Marvel effort, are all the characters-in-a-room stuff, and the way it builds to satisfying character entrances and exits that even leave room for the audience applause the way a filmed-in-front-of-a-studio-audience series would. Their sense of spectacle is entirely farmed out to effects people pinned in by the lack of decisions—a flattening and deadening of space and place, the better to slot in their swarms of indistinguishable enemies. That means it’s better when it’s outer space or Wakanda than when they just set generic power contests on a wide open parking lot or civic center.

That their newest feature has distinguishable characters in something like real-world places serves their talents well. It’s a Spy vs. Spy setup with Ryan Gosling defecting from a covert assassin job and subsequently hunted by an unhinged rival assassin, played by Chris Evans. The Russos know they’re dealing with two marquee Movie Stars, and shoot with all due reverence. The men are shot from flattering angles, in perfect dramatic lighting, and spring into action in fluidly faked, CG-assisted prowess. And each role plays to the actors’ strengths. Gosling gets his earnest smolder, his underdog confidence. He’s been able to dial that in one direction (Drive) or another (First Man) or another (La La Land) throughout his appealing lead roles. Here he’s every bit the capital-s Star. On the other hand, Evans gets a gum-chewing character turn, cranking his Captain America gee-whiz can-do attitude into a malevolent Team America villainy. There’s some actual crackle to their antagonism. Then their world is filled out with choice supporting turns for familiar faces filling familiar roles for this genre. There are potential Deep State allies (Billy Bob Thornton and Ana de Armas), shadowy suits (Jessica Henwick and Regé-Jean Page), a girl in danger (Julia Butters), and an elder statesman with important information (Alfre Woodard). They’re all talented enough to be a little bit memorable but otherwise just exactly what they need to be to keep the shootouts and chase sequences flowing.

It’s all of a piece—a little samey, totally artificial, everyone written at the same de rigueur canted angle toward seriousness. Which is to say that it’s a blockbuster whose relationship to the world is only other blockbusters. To the Russos, and their screenwriters and craftspeople, the high-stakes shoot-‘em-up globetrotting is all about the real world and real stakes only insofar as we can glimpse them through a mirrored simulacrum—pointing backwards and through the Bourne movies and Bond pictures and so on and so forth. Sure, there’s something pleasingly frictionless about an entirely phony chase in, around, and through a train running down tight turns on cobblestone European streets. Cars flip and spin, sparks fly, bullets careen, and the leads shimmy away from rampaging computer effects. (It’s a little bit clever some of the time, too, like when Gosling uses his reflection in passing windows to guide his aim into the train.) It’s a weightless charge of motion and faux-danger.

That’s the case with all of the action scenes here. They have the form and pace of excitement, but are of mere passably diverting interest. I didn’t exactly have a bad time watching it, though. Its cliched convolutions and obvious developments, acted out by pros who could do this in their sleep, is, as the kids might say, totally smooth-brained. It slips right off the old dome painlessly and without interrupting one with anything worth thought or reflection. That’s right in the Netflix mode these days, as their plummeting stock price has resulted in the board room making noise that they want to cut back on expensive auteurist art pieces (sorry to Baumbach, Scorsese, Coens, Campion, etc.) and instead focus on these time-passing mass-market baubles. As far as their efforts there go—think Red Notice or The Adam Project—this one’s at least thoroughly fine.

A little better than fine is Bullet Train. This one’s a glossy theatrical studio picture with Brad Pitt in the lead. Now there’s a Movie Star. He knows how to hold the frame’s attention without even seeming to try. (His oft-commented upon blend of character actor charm and matinee idol good looks is one of modern movies’ great constants.) Here he’s a reluctant gun for hire who won’t even take his gun with him now that he’s taken some time off to work on himself. Wearing a bucket hat and glasses, talking almost exclusively in therapy speak—“hurt people hurt people”—he has easy, shaggy charm while cutting an odd figure for an action movie. But then again the whole movie is full of such figures. Based on a pulpy Japanese novel, the movie puts Pitt’s mercenary on a speeding bullet train from Tokyo to Kyoto. The mission: get on board, take a briefcase full of ransom money, and get off at the next station. If you suspect it won’t be so easy, you’d be right.

On the train are hitmen and schemers in a variety of styles and quirks. The cast is loaded with familiar faces and voices—Brian Tyree Henry, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Joey King, Logan Lerman, Hiroyuki Sanada, Michael Shannon, Sandra Bullock, Bad Bunny, and a few fun cameos, too. Each is given a splashy title card announcing their name, a scattered assortment of quick-cut flashbacks, and one or two whimsical character details. (One is obsessed with Thomas the Tank Engine, for example.) I’ve seen this movie’s manic post-modern approach referred to as if it was in the late-90s and early-aughts trend of snarky post-Tarantino, post-Ritchie crime pictures. But I think we should remember that that was twenty to thirty years ago, and in this case counts as a throwback. I didn’t mind that too much. The movie’s eccentricities fly by as quickly as its speeding set.

The result is a Rube Goldberg machine of an action comedy. Every actor and prop introduced circles back around at least once for another payoff, some expected and some surprising. The straight line simplicity of the main plot, one MacGuffin and one Final Destination in perpetual motion, is interrupted by a jumble of obstacles in each train car, some recurring irritants and some a constant danger. Meanwhile the story curlicues with unexpected doubling-backs—sometimes cutaways within cutaways or long montages that build backstory for a sudden reversal or reveal. This results in some enjoyable scrambling, separating or delaying effects from causes or vice versa. It’s all quite clever and pleased with itself, and the movie bounces along with the music of comedy without quite the words to make it really sing. It’s a constant juggle of witty cutting and awful violence—a kind of cold karmic comeuppance for its largely disreputable and dangerous cast of characters.

Director David Leitch has made this jocular mood for bloody combat cleverness his stock-in-trade. After co-directing the dizzying choreography of John Wick, he’s given us the likes of Atomic Blonde, Deadpool 2, and Fast & Furious: Hobbs & Shaw. He shoots action brightly and legibly and knows how to frame with and hold for impact. But those pictures all have a rather flippant bravado, charging hard at action while characters skip across the implications. They leave a high body count behind them while twisting out of spectacular slam-bang dangers. Any respect for human life is gone, the better to gawk at all the ways bones snap and vehicles crash. Bullet Train might be Leitch’s best post-Wick effort simply for giving in to that breezy carelessness entirely. It treats the smacks and thuds and stabs as staccato punctuation—literal punch lines—for sleazy characters ground under by twists of fate. Pitt floats above it all, desperately trying to talk it out, and inevitably pulled back into violence. That he survives any of his attackers' onslaughts is almost an accident. And all the while he keeps bemoaning his bad luck. I guess it really is all in how you look at it. As far as violent distractions go, this one at least starts at a fast pace and never lets up.

Cutting Class: KNIVES OUT

One of writer-director Rian Johnson’s greatest qualities is his ability to surprise without sacrificing his trustworthiness as a storyteller. His films are idiosyncratic without being unduly erratic, thoughtfully engaged with their chosen genres without stepping outside of their tropes, capable of grand loop-de-loops surprising audience expectations while making the outcome beautifully air-tight inevitable. He’s a mainstream filmmaker — recently with appealing sci-fi spectacles like moody time-travel assassin thriller Looper and the soulful, satisfying Last Jedi — aware of both the necessary elephantine expressions of recognizable story mechanics and burrowing termite interest of carefully selected specific details. He can take us effortlessly into places we’d never expect, because at every step of the way, we know we’re in good hands. He’s as clever as he is knowledgeable. His new film, Knives Out, is a wickedly well-done murder mystery, indebted indisputably to hundreds of detectives stories of yore, and yet plays out its story so fluidly and delightfully that it feels fresh nonetheless. As the movie begins, an elderly millionaire mystery author (Christopher Plummer) has been found in his study with his throat slit and a knife in his hand. The local cops (Lakeith Stanfield and Noah Segan) are prepared to call it a suicide when a well-known detective (Daniel Craig, with a melodious Southern accent) steps in to consult on the case. He’s prepared to look at every detail again, and scrutinize every member of the dead writer’s squabbling, privileged family. Sure, the case appears open-and-shut, but he just wants to see it with his fresh eyes, eliminating no possibilities and no suspects. Holmes and Poirot and Dupin would be proud. In Johnson’s hugely entertaining screenplay, bristling with witty asides, barbed feints, and prickly offhand political resonance, the family members are interviewed, with plenty of brisk, bantering back-and-forth editing into and out of interlocking flashbacks sketching in the moments leading up to the mysterious death. So many have motives, and so many witnesses weave in and out of other’s stories, that it’ll take a while to untangle the knotty web, to winnow the suspects' bratty rich-kid motives from those capable of murderous intent.

It’s a terrific ensemble, perfectly cast, every person on screen, down to the smallest one-scene roles, quickly, expertly characterized with energetic shorthand and snappy individualism. There’s the regal real estate mogul daughter (Jamie Lee Curtis), her duplicitous husband (Don Johnson), and their entitled grown boy (Chris Evans); a business-manger son (Michael Shannon) and his glowering alt-right offspring (Jaden Martel); a shallow daughter-in-law (Toni Collette) and her differently-shallow daughter (Kathryn Langford); and, in the center of the madness, a home health aide (Ana de Armas) whose sweetness and good heart made her a kind companion to the late old man, but leaves her on the outside looking in as the vultures circle. Whodunnit is of course the primary question, but as Johnson unravels his tale, the why’d-they-dunnit becomes as interesting. As in all good detective stories, the personalities and the accumulation of clues are as deeply pleasurable as the eventual reveals where the puzzle snaps into place, and Johnson places each new piece on the table with stylish verve. The whip-smart cutting and pace stays just ahead of the characters and just behind the mystery’s solution, while never going out of its way to hide its cards or throw up false tangents to shake off the scent. It all falls into place with a logical snap, each payoff set up, even when you didn’t realize it at the time. The production design — a big house full of creaky staircases and teetering bookshelves and morbid knickknacks — is a handsomely cozy setting, fitting such a tale. As one investigator quips, the old man lived in a Clue board. The camera work is energetic and inspired — and, oh, so beautifully textured — without distracting from the cool logic of the proceedings, while the characters are broad yet warm, at once caricatures yet imbued with all-too-understandable humanity. It’s richly developed, never just a film of pawns in a master-mystery-mind’s game. That’s how well this game is played. This is the best film of its kind in quite some time.

Run All Night: MIDNIGHT SPECIAL

One of the most remarkable aspects of Jeff Nichols’ Midnight Special is just how far it gets without needing to explain itself. In fact, by the time the end credits roll there hasn’t been extended meaningful exposition. Instead we’ve seen a sci-fi tinged on-the-run thriller about a boy and his father fleeing shadowy government forces and heavies from their church’s compound, a chase across the South that charges forward with simmering tension and intimate, methodical strategy. It’s a thriller with respect for the majesty of the unexplainable. With casual magic and mystery, it weaves into suspense tiny grace notes, finding large wonderment in small details, implying more than it says outright. The film saves big reveals for so long, and answers them in sideways intuitive ways. We’re left with more questions than answers in a most satisfying result. It’s tantalizing and evocative, grand filmmaking on a small scale, huge implications left dangling with an ethereal, almost spiritual mystique.

As the story begins we hear the muffled sounds of an Amber Alert on an old TV in a shabby motel room. A boy (Jaeden Lieberher) has been kidnapped. He’s in this room with his captors, a situation diffused of immediate danger to him as it’s slowly revealed he has been taken from a fundamentalist cult and its pastor (Sam Shepard) by his biological father (Michael Shannon) and a friend (Joel Edgerton) determined to take him to freedom. They travel under the cover of darkness, move quickly, and meet up with collaborators (including Kirsten Dunst) for daylight respites. They’re under a tight deadline involving coordinates and secret messages. They’re moving him to a better life, following mystery directives we slowly come to understand. Nichols maintains impeccable tension in this cloud of ambiguity by keeping close attention on the specificities, the small details in the process of fleeing across state lines.

The film works through a confident and relaxed focus on the hows, not the whys, allowing its later leaps to feel more intuitive and excusable. Steady shots take in precise steps taken to avoid detection, lingering on the clack of a gun being loaded, the stretch of swimming goggles perpetually protecting the boy’s eyes, the engine noises in various makes and models of vehicles, the snap of headlights disappearing on a dark Texan road in the middle of the night. The danger sits in the risks the boy’s father is willing to take to keep him from agents (like Adam Driver) and other governmental forces who seek to claim the boy for further study (echoes of Spielberg’s Close Encounters and E.T. and Carpenter’s Starman), and the church’s flunkies (Bill Camp and Scott Haze) who are out to capture him for the purposes of exploiting his gifts. Science and religion both attach grand meanings to massive unknowns. Fear and tension is in the doubt about what’ll happen if his father fails. The stakes are clear.

Nichols, whose work including the powerful mental illness nightmare Take Shelter, laconic family tragedy Shotgun Stories, and boyhood crime-fable Mud shows a gift for patient, empathetic, and self-assuredly paced stories, approaches Midnight Special with his typical good judgment. It’s not a loud or flashy sci-fi adventure; we don’t get genre efforts this confidently circumspect, beautifully restrained everyday, certainly not bankrolled by a major studio. He trusts silence, stillness, while still ramping up the thrills when called for. He reveals what we need to know through action, tells us about character through behaviors. This is a beautifully photographed (by Nichols’ usual cinematographer Adam Stone) and contained movie – set in stolen cars, cheap motels, tiny command centers – gathering suspense and sweep off the back of small emotional exchanges and intimate interpersonal investments.

It helps that the cast does fine work across the board, performers who can sketch in pain and determination with a glance, or a few well-chosen lines. It approaches Cormac McCarthy territory in some of its terse dialogue in dusty landscapes, sharp and expressive for their brevity, people who can’t risk feeling too much lest the crushing weight of their actions’ enormity – embodied in the wide open spaces around them – stops them cold. Shannon looks at his boy with such tenderness and caring, while charging forward with single-minded drive to protect him at all costs. Edgerton’s blind loyalty is quiet competence. Dunst’s maternal energy manifests itself as submerged worry pushed into protective energy, while young Lieberher has a serene otherworldliness that makes incredibly clear the uneasy extrasensory gifts will lead this road-trip to an ending no one understands. They just know it must be done.

What, exactly, are the powers of this boy at the center of so much drama? They remain beautifully vague. He can hear radio and satellite signals, is affected by sunlight – hence another good reason for night travel beyond hiding from authorities – and occasionally his eyes glow with eerie blue light. We’re told that to look into this illuminated stare is to see glimpses of a better world. Could there be a more lovely, forceful, intuitive metaphor for the lengths a parent will go to protect a child? They see overwhelming hope in his eyes. It’s a movie about parents protecting a child from the world and helping manifest his gifts, even if they don’t understand them. It’s about support for the boy’s future, wherever it may take him. It’s about the pain and profound contentment of caring for a child – a key moment finds Shannon telling his boy, “I like worrying about you” – and the difficulty of letting that child make his own path. The film’s powerful conclusion brings this metaphor to stirring heights, conjuring Amblin awe and blending it with an unearthly melancholy.

The result is a movie that plays out as a plaintive old-fashioned country flavor in a hair-raising low-key sci-fi mode, an usual combination that’s nonetheless comforting in its throwback appeals. It is involving and compelling for what is not said and what is left to the imagination, giving the Big Moments that much more room to excite and entrance. Nichols’ interest in human-scale stories brings great sensitivity to Midnight Special’s thrills and astonishments. The film crackles with intrigue and personality without overly insisting on it. Here he injects genre elements into a patient thriller, widening the scope of its implications only in its final moments, executed with aplomb. He trusts an audience to groove on a delicate metaphor and move with trembling echoes of extrasensory wavelengths without needing it all spelled out. Another fine entry in our recent cycle of vintage sci-fi throwbacks, it, like Super 8 and Tomorrowland, looks backwards and forwards, a timeless reinvention of a sturdy genre storytelling mode.

Inequality for All: 99 HOMES

Michael Shannon and Andrew Garfield are opposing economic forces in 99 Homes, a deliberate and obvious recessionary American thriller set in the scraggly, ugly, ragged edge of the popped housing bubble. The older man is a Grim Reaper of real estate, evicting exhausted homeowners in a flurry of bullying panic, the better to flip the house for a nice profit. He’s colluding with banks, police, and lawmakers to line his pockets, exploiting loopholes, cheating the system, and calling that winning. The younger man is one of his victims, a single dad who, along with his son (Noah Lomax) and mother (Laura Dern), is thrown out of his family home after an unsuccessful appeal. Desperate to make money any way he can, he takes a job working for the very man who so slimly kicked his family to the curb. The young guy wears jeans and smokes; the older guy wears suits and vapes. They’re a study in contrasts, naïveté versus cynicism, good intentions versus heartless greed, together making the Faustian bargain we call the American dream.

Painting in big strokes, writer-director Ramin Bahrani combines the low-key observation of his breakthrough indies, films like Man Push Cart and Chop Shop, intimate class-conscious portraits of marginalized urban poverty, and the swaggering melodrama of his overripe corporate-agriculture-fighting-family-farms message movie, the pleasurably outsized At Any Price. The blend is an uneasy mix of scene chewing monologues and pokey naturalism. We follow Garfield as the need for money draws him into the shady underbelly of Florida real estate, the vulture capitalists preying on misfortune sown by the very industry in which they operate. “We don’t bail out the losers!” Shannon snaps, as if he’s prepping to open a Trump fundraiser. He’s made to speak the film’s moral perspective by shouting the opposite, unblinking in the face of the tragedy Bahrani wants to portray. Garfield, on the other hand, is asked to simply inhabit its lessons.

Towering over his new employee, Shannon’s shark lays out his worldview: America is a nation “of the winners, by the winners, for the winners!” It’s screaming blunt moralizing, while the movie’s message is better imbued in Garfield’s uneasy posture and embarrassed expressions as he’s forced to serve eviction notices, suddenly on the other side of the very shock he experienced not so long ago. He is living in a cheap motel room with his son and mother, surrounded by other similarly displaced families. Then he heads out on the job, where he’s creating insecurity in lives of people just like him. It’s a nasty position in which to be, especially when the siren song of material success shows him McMansions glittering for those who are able and willing to step on others to get there. This is the sort of deeply felt hot-button message movie that so cleanly and clearly lays out an obvious wrong, that its most agonizing moments caused bile to build up in the back of my throat.

Watching economic devastation and its exploitation is hard to take, especially as Garfield’s pained expression and torn conscience run up against the cold eyes of Shannon’s harsh money-grabbing, property-cheating worldview. It’s all too real, and yet Bahrani pushes past the immediate feeling of right and wrong, overemphasizing the devilish bargain with overheated speeches and undercooked characters. They’re symbols, no matter how good the actors are. Garfield is every blue-collar worker shoved out of a comfortable life, and Shannon is every suit who did the pushing. There’s not a lot of nuance here in the design, a defeatist plot loaded with coincidences, built only to shine a light on a murky corner of wrongdoing presented in obvious dichotomies. The muddy digital photography, at times a nearly unwatchable storm of fuzzy washed-out pixels, is an inadvertent compliment to the film’s unsatisfying approach: it’s too bright, and too smeared, starkly revealing too much while flattening the picture.

Still, what keeps this well-intentioned monotonous one-note movie marginally interesting are the performances. Garfield and Shannon are allowed space to breathe complexities into their characters that aren’t necessarily inherent in the material. The former reveals mild shark-like ambition through his psychological and economic turmoil, shaking off sadness to earn some dough, while the latter lets sneaking warmth bleed in around the edges of his evil eye for exploiting his worst tendencies. Then there’s Dern who plays the pure conscience of the movie, with literally nothing more to do than register the wrongness of what’s going on around her. She somehow makes that into something like a real character, a minor miracle. But what Bahrani does with these characters is so schematically obvious, clashing two mirrored men in an uneasy business relationship to the breaking point, the better to leave us wrung out with reminders of our country’s debased and broken response to continually deepening inequality.

Almost Super: MAN OF STEEL

There are superheroes I enjoy more as characters, but none I enjoy more as resonant myth than Superman. He is an icon, a titan, a God. He’s Greek myth, Messianic, a Shakespearean conflicted hero, a piece of Americana and refutation of it. He’s not merely a superhero; he’s the superhero. And so, like the rarified company in which this character can be placed, his story is one worth retelling and one that can survive a bad telling. In Richard Donner’s 1978 Superman and its first sequel, a light touch to the myth was sunny and inspiring in its classically endearing earnestness that flirts with corniness without giving over to it. By the time the blue-suited, red-caped hero flew back to the silver screen care of Bryan Singer in the retro-modern stylings of 2006’s Superman Returns, he was suffused with regret and longing in a film that’s both mature and lyrical. Now, with Man of Steel, he’s back, this time in the hands of Zack Snyder, director of 300 and Watchmen. He’s a generally talented visualist who ramps up the surface spectacle and brings admirable weight to the myth before sinking into the same lumbering traps that so many modern blockbusters settle for.

It starts, as it must, with the birth of Kal-El, last son of Krypton, born in the final days of his planet’s existence. His father (Russell Crowe) and mother (Ayelet Zurer) send him away in an escape pod that crashes on Earth. There, the yellow sun and rich atmosphere give the alien, who to all appearances looks human, powers of strength, flight, and speed, among other superhuman feats. He’s faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive, and can leap tall buildings in a single bound. From a distance you just might mistake him for a bird or a plane. Nope. He’s Superman. But not right away. The script by David S. Goyer, from a story he co-created with Dark Knight auteur Christopher Nolan, cuts between a lost young man searching for evidence of his identity and a little boy scared of what these strange abilities mean for his life with his adoptive parents (Kevin Costner and Diane Lane). In the fractured chronology, we catch glimpses of important moments – discovering his powers, saving people, wrestling with his sense of purpose – building towards the crescendo that is the unveiling of the man we’ve been waiting to see.

I find the Superman origin so deeply moving and archetypically resonant that the glimmering, artful opening passages of Man of Steel are an often stirring experience. Snyder and his team emphasize the alien in the story, focusing on what isolates Clark Kent in the days before his Superman identity. As a young boy his powers are strange. He’s not sure to what use, if any, he should put them. They scare him.  As the origin story starts to fade, villains, in the form of exiled evil Kryptonians led by General Zod (Michael Shannon) arrive on Earth demanding to meet Kal-El or else. Between an identity crisis on a galactic scale and otherworldly villains, this is less a superhero movie as we’ve come to understand them, more an alien invasion space opera, dark, complicated, and endlessly explaining itself. Krypton’s a fantasy world (like something out of Star Wars or John Carter) brought into conflict with our world and Superman must choose which to save. It should be a real struggle, but the film makes it awfully clear for the man which way to go. He doesn’t have to decide to be a hero; the decision is forced upon him, no matter how heavily Snyder underlines the Gethsemane moment.

The film is expertly cast and beautifully shot – though the action is sometimes barely contained by the frame – full of the story beats one would want out of a Superman movie. It purports to tell the story of Superman, but eventually it becomes clear that it has skipped out on deeper characterization. As Clark Kent/Kal-El/Superman Henry Cavill fits the suit and fills the angst, but he’s otherwise a symbol. It’s a demanding, unforgiving task and he handles it well. In the supporting cast, great actors show up in roles we recognize and the film’s attempt to flesh them out mostly stops there. Amy Adams plays Lois Lane. Cultural osmosis tells us she’s a smart, capable, Pulitzer-Prize-winning reporter at the Daily Planet and the movie follows suit. As expected, she takes an interest in this Superman story. Her tough-but-kind editor is Perry White, played by Laurence Fishburne, so wonderful you wish he had something more substantial to contribute to the plot. There’s endless fatherly gravitas from both Crowe and Costner (his casting alone causes the farm scenes to play off of Field of Dreams echoes) and Lane is a beacon of maternal warmth. Shannon, all crazy-eyed, gargling intensity with each barked shout, makes for a good hateful villain.

And then it all goes to pieces with an extended action set piece that grows more weightless and small the bigger, more destructive and depressingly weighty it becomes. Snyder spends much time lingering on skyscrapers tumbling in cringe-worthy bouts of collateral damage. Evenly matched superpowered beings slug it out around and, more often, through buildings of all shapes and sizes for extended periods of time, zipping away while debris falls and massive structures collapse. There’s such an overpowering sense of seriousness that we can’t even luxuriate in the serious silliness of it all, the spandex, scene-chewing mythos that should be able to carry us through. Instead we have to pretend yet another sequence of violence erupting around a world-ending alien laser beam shooting into the sky in the center of a cityscape is something we haven’t seen twice a summer for half a decade.

The film is both too much and not enough. I loved seeing Superman on the big screen again, but found myself wishing it could have been in a film that did more than satisfy the basic demands of a summer blockbuster: percussive score, excessive property damage, recognizable symbols, muddled ideology, self-seriousness. Sitting through the protracted climax, it all felt so endless. But by the time the credits rolled I found myself thinking, “That’s it?” After over two-and-a-half hours, I realized I knew the characters, but I barely knew these characters. It’s a film that plays with iconography and summons all the best that Superman can offer, before leaving it thin and pushing it aside to give us a big, repetitive superpower slugfest that’s just like any other grim, grey blockbuster conclusion. Maybe they’re saving the really inspiring stuff for the sequel.

The Chase: PREMIUM RUSH

As a screenwriter, David Koepp is among the most successful Hollywood has. He’s had a hand in writing an Indiana Jones, two Jurassic Parks, a Spider-man, a Men in Black, a Mission: Impossible, and several original screenplays for some of the most distinctive directors of the past twenty years including Brian De Palma, Robert Zemeckis, and David Fincher. That’s an impressive resume of popcorn filmmaking, but where he’s somewhat-secretly come into his own is as a writer-director. He’s become a genre journeyman filmmaker par excellence. With a clean, consistently professional style and a confident ease with actors, he’s created films like the creepy Stephen King adaptation Secret Window and the charming, gently moving, comic paranormal romance Ghost Town. His newest film is Premium Rush, co-written with his occasional writing partner John Kamps. It’s a light, sunny, zippy chase movie that starts in motion and never lets up, pedaling full speed ahead all the time.

Set in the world of bike messengers in New York City, the film opens with a speed demon named Wilee (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) riding as fast as he can down city streets, weaving in and out of traffic, narrowly avoid collisions. In voice over, he extols the virtues of his dangerous customized bike: no breaks, one gear, the pedals always in motion. That’s an apt description of the film as well, for right off the bat his boss (Aasif Mandvi) sends him to pick up an envelope that must be delivered in 90 minutes’ time. Premium Rush. Intercepting this envelope is of supreme importance to a sweaty, nervous, desperate detective (Michael Shannon) who fixes Wilee with a wild-eyed stare and asks if he could take it off his hands. Perplexed by this odd request, a request that’s against company policy anyways, Wilee takes off. The detective takes off after him. The chase is on.

Filmed in smooth, sliding shots crisply edited together, the film is lightening fast, quick and uncomplicated, with a structure that’s a thing of beauty. After some time running forwards, it spins its gears backwards to speedily fill in the story of the envelope –the young woman (Jamie Chung) who needed it sent and why this bad guy needs to get his hands on it – interlocking with the scenes just witnessed with breathless ease before smashing forwards again. Koepp keeps things fast and funny, folding in a rival bike messenger (Sean Kennedy), Wilee’s somewhat exasperated girlfriend (Dania Ramirez), and a tenacious bike cop (Christopher Place) as the envelope crisscrosses Manhattan in a messenger bag, the deadline drawing nearer.

This is a film of great stunt work and charisma from all involved. Joseph Gordon-Levitt keeps the heart of the movie pumping, pedaling constantly through many of his scenes, eager to keep the creep away from the apparently precious contents of the envelope. It’s a great, expressive physical performance that’s convincing in its athletic detail. He’s playing a young guy with an intense job of fast reflexes and reckless skill who gets pulled into action movie shenanigans just because he’s good at what he does. He’s immediately likable and, as the full extent of the plot comes into focus, it’s easy to hope that he gets everything set right and that he remains unharmed. Part of the reason is Gordon-Levitt’s inherent charm, but some of this is the Michael Shannon factor. He’s one of our greatest actors (see Take Shelter if you haven’t yet) and here he’s a fine slimeball in the best hiss-worthy tradition. Instead of playing his crooked cop as a scene-chomping villain or a misunderstood guy in over his head, he’s just a mean brute sloppily covering up his mistakes. That’s even scarier.

The danger in the movie is palpable, with bikes weaving this way and that, swerving around obstacles, in and around cars both moving, barreling through intersections and switching lanes, and parked, with doors unpredictably opening and closing. The end credits have an iPhone-shot behind-the-scenes look at a real on-set bike accident, Gordon-Levitt grinning as he shows off his bloody arm like Jackie Chan once did in credits of his films. Indeed, the choreography of the bikes has something of the grinning skill and speed of a well-executed fight scene, filmed and edited for clarity and speed. It’s especially thrilling to see an action movie so committed to a great gimmick. Refreshingly, there’s only one gunshot in the entire 91-minute running time. The pace is breathless, the thrills relentless. The film turns New York into a citywide obstacle course with all the nervous, propulsive energy that comes with bikes careening about and coming within a hair of crashing at every turn.

It’s a movie of simple human geography – Koepp cuts to a grid of the city streets from time to time – and feats of endurance as convincingly portrayed by stunt drivers and effects artists in a seamless illusion. As a summer packed with the typical bloated blockbusters –several quite good – is winding down, it’s nice to have a late-August break, an after-dinner mint to stave off cinematic indigestion. This is a film that’s mercifully simple and skillful, original yet comfortable, straightforward and speedy. It takes what could be standard genre stuff and livens it up with creativity and adrenaline. It’s a chase picture so go-go-go even the final shot before the cut to the credits is in motion and contains a fun visual trick. Motion picture indeed.

Un-Caged: BAD LIEUTENANT: PORT OF CALL NEW ORLEANS

The last several years have proven that there is a large market for bad Nicolas Cage thrillers. Remember National Treasure? Ghost Rider? Bangkok Dangerous? National Treasure: Book of Secrets? They all opened at the top of the box office charts on their opening weekend despite being largely terrible. For some reason, the general public will only see Cage if he has odd intensity and likably exaggerated mannerisms tied to a thin character wading through schlock. He’s a great actor though, so it’s a shame that his best projects have a tendency to slip through the cracks. In theory, that shouldn’t have happened to Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, which is at once a very good sleazy thriller and a perfectly marketable film. Why, then, has the film seen only a small limited release and is now being limped out on DVD and Blu-ray? Maybe it’s because it happens to be so cheerfully wicked in its insanity.

Helmed by the great German auteur, and suspected crazy person, Werner Herzog, the movie features Cage as a New Orleans cop who injures his back saving a prisoner during Hurricane Katrina. This cop gets addicted to his painkillers and then starts to self-medicate in addition to his prescriptions by lifting some confiscated cocaine from the evidence room. Soon, he’s wandering the ravaged streets of New Orleans, lifting drugs off of unsuspecting addicts and snorting it right in front of them. He tortures and badgers witnesses and suspects, barks out orders, makes backroom deals and bargains, and generally looks at the world through a stare of vague, bug-eyed intensity.  Also, he’s investigating the brutal killings of an entire immigrant family.

Herzog and Cage don’t care much about making this man likable, or even relatable, but they aren’t following him down increasingly depraved paths like Abel Ferrara did with Harvey Keitel in their Bad Lieutenant (1992), a film that’s related to this one in name only. (The Bad Lieutenant part of the title was forced on the picture by a producer with the subtitle Herzog’s idea). Instead, Cage simply presents a man ravaged by circumstance and temperament, mirroring the locale. Herzog’s camera follows his central character through a crumbled and waterlogged city filled with slimy characters and creatures (including hallucinated iguanas and a twitching crocodile corpse), that match the decaying mental state of this bad lieutenant. New Orleans is a place of harsh beauty for Herzog as he uses his usual “voodoo of location” to great effect, not to mention skilful use of his beloved man-versus-wild imagery, not just in the iguanas and crocodiles, but also from the slimy snake the slips through dirty water in the opening scene and the film’s final shot with two men dwarfed by a sinisterly tranquil aquarium.

Often, a Herzog film will become more interesting the more it drifts away from the ostensible point of the scene.  Take, for example, his wonderful Antarctic documentary Encounters at the End of the World in which he places his narration over an interview to explain how lengthy and rambling the interview became. While Port of Call New Orleans remains a luxurious wallow in low genre pleasures and a seriously cracked procedural, there are plenty of excellent moments where the camera drifts away and maybe the plot will follow it. There are plenty of welcome detours, like the aforementioned iguanas that only Cage can see, and there are lots of rich parts for character actors. Jennifer Coolidge unexpectedly turns up playing Cage’s stepmom, but there are plenty of other strange and fascinating moments with a cast of characters that includes a drug dealer (Xzibit), Cage’s coworkers (which include Val Kilmer and Michael Shannon), and a prostitute (Eva Mendes).

This is a film of debauched anecdotes and bizarre incidents, of terrible criminals and sometimes worse officials. It plays like a conventional cop film that happens to be on about as many drugs as are in its main character. Herzog charges the film with his usual intensity of specificity and Cage brings a great performance of the kind that he is capable of delivering, but many recent roles have either misused or reined in. When you have two entertainers as eccentric, engaging and unpredictable as Cage and Herzog, it’s startling, maybe even a little disappointing, to see that, though they create a strange and captivating thriller, it seems to still pull up short. These are two men who could push each other so far over the top that the film would be in free fall. They only get us to the precipice, but what a lovely, beautifully schlocky view.

Revolutionary Road (2008)

Revolutionary Road is now available on DVD and Blu-ray.

Since 1961, when Richard Yates’ great novel Revolutionary Road was published, it has become thoroughly frequent to see “daring” artists scrape at the layers of happiness covering both suburbia and the 1950s and 60s to find the hopelessness and emptiness within. The biggest danger in adapting the book to film now is in failing to making what was original exciting once more. Director Sam Mendes fails for the most part. This is fairly routine stuff at times. The book’s greatest strength is its fluid prose which floats through character’s heads. We see motivation and emotion effortlessly woven and incorporated into character’s actions. As good as Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet are as performers, they don’t manage to convey the same intensity of purpose. For all the great histrionics of their acting they don’t dig into the roles. Here they become examples of Age-Appropriate-Dialogue-Delivery Devices, to use the astute nomenclature of the great Sam Van Hallgren.

But there are moments of visual perfection: a sea of top hats flowing into a subway station, a group of children staring at the television unaware of their father’s voice. But for every scene of effortless emotional twinge that the pictoral vision can evoke, even great early moments like the one that finds DiCaprio returning home from an affair in the city to be greeted by his children was done better by the TV show Mad Men. A curious thing about the movie, though, is that, although it starts by sputtering its engine, once it roars to life it has a pretty good roar.

The roar is due, in no small part, to the great supporting cast. David Harbour and Kathryn Hahn are perfect as a middle-class post-war all-American couple slowly colliding with the façade of the suburbs. Maybe they should have been the leads. But knocking everyone else in the cast out of the ballpark are Michael Shannon and Kathy Bates who are operating on another level altogether. They know just the way the material should be handled. Why didn’t anyone else (other than Harbour and Hahn) catch on? Even if the movie doesn’t, maybe even couldn’t, have the same wallop as the novel, the end still manages to deliver its plot twist with a satisfyingly sickening crunch – a sort of sick cinematic flip to the saccharine sacrifice that caps Kate and Leo’s Titanic. The extent that it does work I found a little surprising considering pessimism is much more relatable from the inside out and Mendes keeps the film firmly entrenched on the outside.