Self-Aware: BOSS LEVEL and KEEP AN EYE OUT

Boss Level is only the third film in ten years from Joe Carnahan. As more a fan of his work than not, it’s frustrating that, of all his potential major projects that don’t get off the ground, this is his second in a row that’s basically tossed off and ignored. His last film, the loopy, uneven one-crazy-night crime comedy Stretch, was unceremoniously dumped direct to DVD just before its supposed theatrical bow all the way back in 2014. This new one — yet another Groundhog Day riff, this one with assassins at its core — has slipped onto Hulu with a shrug. Sure, it doesn’t work as well as his grimy Detroit cop thriller Narc or steely survival thriller The Grey does. It’s not even quite up to his cartoony guns-blazing action extravaganzas The A-Team or Smokin’ Aces. But there are car chases and sword fights that prove he still has a terrific sense of pace and space, cooking up overheated action in simple broad strokes across a wide frame. Yet the final balance is underwritten and too snarkily exaggerated to really land. It stars dependable man of action Frank Grillo as a ripped guy who finds himself in a time loop wherein he’s murdered by assassins. So many assassins. (It’s an eccentric ensemble which somehow accommodates both Michelle Yeoh and Rob Gronkowski.) Our lead starts his day with a machete swung toward his bed. If he survives, a machine gun tears up his apartment. If he survives that, he might be gunned down in the street or decapitated on an escalator. You get the idea. Eventually, he realizes it has something to do with his ex (Naomi Watts) and her dastardly boss (Mel Gibson). There’s also a subplot involving a moppet (Grillo’s actual son) who needs a positive male role model in his life. Turns out, the real Boss Level…is fatherhood. So the movie is stuck in two modes, outrageous flippant jokey gory violence on the one hand, sweet stuff about reconnection and growth on the other. The movie is far too bloody for the sentimentality, and far too sentimental for all the blood. It has flashes of teasing genre fun, but trudging through a wobbly smirking tone to get there is a bit much to ask.

Speaking of directors with careers I’m puzzling over: idiosyncratic French auteur Quentin Dupieux. He’s an original for sure. Read about one of his movies and you know it’ll be odd. The experience of watching one usually has identical pleasures to reading the log line. You hear Rubber is a bone-dry slasher satire about a sentient tire that rolls around exploding human’s heads. Watching the movie back in 2010 or so, the main thought I had was: yep, that sure is what this is. Ditto his most recent, Deerskin, a movie about a man who becomes a serial killer at the behest of his new jacket. Yep. That sure is what that is. I like his work in theory, but in practice it wears a little thin on my patience. Just now arriving on our shores in virtual cinemas is the most consistent fun I’ve had with his work: his 2018 film Keep an Eye Out. It’s a loony Möbius strip of a comedy set almost entirely in a police department office where a blustery detective (Benoît Poelvoorde) is taking a statement from a man (Grégoire Ludig) who found a corpse. The cop pecks out the statements on a clattering typewriter, casually smokes, and stalks the room, at least when he doesn’t step out for a family thing for a few minutes. The other officer in the room is a nice one-eyed dope. (Hence the double duty title, ha.) The film is one long digression, squeaking out to feature length, as an unspoken tension (the result of an early splash of slapstick violence imperfectly stowed away) simmers softly under flat-faced absurd roundabouts of dialogue. The pedantic detective keeps falling down rabbit holes of irrelevant questions and details as the suspect’s exceedingly boring story slowly develops. Flashbacks reenact the night in question, but even the characters in these past moments get tired of the immediate details and start having conversations bouncing off other elements of the film’s narrative. (We’re in a flashback, a man explains to a woman he won’t meet until later, which is our earlier.) Dupieux plays it straight, which makes it all the funnier as the casual silliness accumulates. As the spare plotting and simple staging backs itself into a narrative corner, the movie pulls back the curtain in a meta flourish that pulls the whole thing together in a most pleasingly nonsense way. The experience productively riffs on and extends from Dupieux’s interest in fictions and stories within stories and the exchange, the unspoken agreement, between a storyteller and an audience. And it’s just plain funny on a line by line basis, too. Take an early moment: when the suspect is asked how he could tell he saw a dead body if he’d never seen one before, he responds, he’s seen live bodies before, so he just compared.

Write and Wrong: THE BOOK OF HENRY

Now three films into his career, it’s safe to say the defining feature of a Colin Trevorrow picture is an unfamiliarity with actual human behavior. With irritating high-concept indie dramedy Safety Not Guaranteed and thunderously tone-deaf Jurassic World, he exhibited both basic competency behind the camera and a total lack of understanding as to how any consistent or recognizable human characteristics might develop in front of it. This led to some painful movies, potentially fun scenarios completely undermined and undone by a feeling like they’re movies made by someone only aware of other movies, endless regurgitations of tropes and ideas (and problematic perspectives) from better inspirations with no concept of why they were evocative in the first place. But his latest, The Book of Henry, takes such painful artificiality to new heights that I couldn’t help but admire its oddball overflowing grab bag of sentimentality, manipulation, and unpredictability. It got me. This might not be a good movie, dripping as it is in knockoff Amblin 80’s polish and driven by characters and decisions that strain credulity at many turns. But I found it to be an entertaining and involving one. It’s all of a piece. Here Trevorrow is making a strange B-movie, but hardly seems to know it, so smothers it in A-level, high-gloss mushiness, feel-good soppiness, and mechanical tear-jerking. This very tension, combined with the plot’s unpredictability, had me invested in discovering what could possibly happen next. 

As it begins, introducing a precocious 11-year-old (Jaeden Lieberher), the movie looks to be setting up a Very Special Kid narrative. He delivers a wordy extemporaneous paragraph in class, to which his teacher says in a transparently expository way, “Remind me again why we can’t put you in a gifted school?” Never mind that he doesn’t appear to be too terribly advanced for his grade level, he’s coded as brilliant. He helps his single mom (Naomi Watts) keep track of her finances. (They have no money problems despite her part-time waitressing job, with only tossed off references to stocks to explain it away.) He makes Rube Goldberg inventions. He reads incessantly. He indulges in some child’s play with his adorable little brother (Jacob Tremblay). He has a crush on the withdrawn, mostly silent dancer next door (Maddie Ziegler), and banters with his mom’s sarcastic alcoholic co-worker (Sarah Silverman). It treats him as unbelievably intelligent and persuasive, but at least the movie knows enough to make its ultimate plot resolution hinge on a key character reminding herself that no matter how brilliant an 11-year-old may be, that child should not be making life-and-death decisions for adults. 

All seems quirky family film well, but then the movie shifts into darker territory as the boy Rear Window-style spies a neighbor (Dean Norris) do something truly terrible. He secretly starts planning a way to take the man down. See what I mean by a B-movie in disguise lurking under the twinkling Michael Giacchino score and John Schwartzman’s crisp autumnal cinematography? Watch it with the sound off and you’d think you were watching a high-budget Hallmark card, not a pint-sized revenge-by-proxy movie. That’d be enough for some features, but the screenplay by Gregg Hurwitz (a thriller novelist in his feature debut) piles on more: a sudden disease diagnosis, a mild Psycho protagonist shift, a mysterious notebook, an elaborate posthumous plan, and a procession of sequences that, if you squint a little, make Movie Logic sense, but leave little room for how actual humans would process them. Characters instead cohere as collections of plot needs and design details. There’s heightened cloying button-pushing happening, with teary-eyed close-ups and dramatic flourishes built out of raw emotions used as phony grist for turning the gears of a treacly family drama with disturbing content kept slyly aloft from their full impacts.

Why, then, did it work for me? I chalk it up to the consummate professionalism on display by the craftspeople – this is one handsome movie – and the actors – Watts’ maternal warmth, Tremblay’s sympathetic cuteness, Norris’ subtle menacing gravity. They manage to hold it together, finding emotional continuity despite the plot’s best efforts. Its story lurches, but the tone doesn’t falter, like everyone involved had no idea how odd it is. I didn’t stop to ask questions, because I was pulled along by the movie’s heartfelt artificiality and was engaged by the likable performers who must be good, because I only noted the frayed edges and logical leaps to pull apart after the fact. I was in the moment. The movie stumbles and strains, but strides so confidently through its twists and turns and straight-faced improbabilities that I couldn’t help but be charmed by its very existence. As unlikely as it grows – each development more so than the last, right up to a climax intercutting a school talent show with, on the other side of town, a stalking sniper – I was entertained. It’s so blatantly artificial and earnestly manipulative, I didn’t mind going along.

DEMOLITION, Man

Jean-Marc Vallée is a filmmaker who tends to direct obvious emotional material by underplaying the overstatements and overplaying the understatements. This tendency can really sink a movie, trapping interesting performances, like Matthew McConaughey in Dallas Buyer’s Club, in a production that’s both too much and not enough in every moment. It takes a great talent with the right material to transcend that approach. (Look no further than what Reese Witherspoon did in Wild.) But this tendency of Vallée’s really works for his latest, Demolition, a story about a character whose life changes so quickly and profoundly that everything about him is off balance. He overreacts to small things – a squeaking door, a faulty vending machine – and finds the biggest problem he’s facing – the sudden death of his wife – hard to react to at all. He’s numb and oversensitive simultaneously, a perfect fit for Vallée’s too much and not enough approach.

As scripted by Bryan Sipe (The Choice) the film is a character study about a man (Jake Gyllenhaal) who doesn’t know what his character is. In the wake of a devastating car accident that viscerally and artfully gets things off on an upset note, he feels overwhelming grief that turns into gnawing emptiness. He just simply doesn’t know how to process his difficult emotions. It wasn’t a happy marriage, but it was what he knew. He can’t acclimatize to a life without his wife (Heather Lind), especially carrying the guilt he feels for doubting if he actually loved her. Worse still, her wealthy father (Chris Cooper) is his boss at the investment firm he suddenly finds hollow and meaningless. He skips work and wanders around, losing weight, skipping shaves, and taking apart annoyances – a leaky pipe, a glitchy computer – with the tools and precision he lacks in dissecting his raw, complicated feelings. He suddenly sees the emptiness of his comfortable life and is at a total loss as to how to go about filling it in with meaning.

Gyllenhaal sells this shell-shocked depression with wet-eyed hangdog blankness, yearning for connection and struggling to find release for his pain. (It’s the internalized opposite of his scary surface striving in Nightcrawler.) Maybe, he thinks, the only solution is more pain, smashing apart his belongings until they draw blood. He’s clearly in a bad place, lashing out with reckless and otherwise odd behavior when he can manage to rouse himself from a depressive daze. Idiosyncratic and moody, textured with fine grain and soft lighting, the film layers in flashes of memories as if to manifest the rattled headspace of its protagonist, explaining his obsessive behaviors and rootless drive to make a change or a connection while maintaining the trauma’s essential unknowable qualities. He alienates his wife’s family, his colleagues, and everyone else he’s known, simply because he know longer knows if the person he is is the person he wants to be.

One outgrowth of this erratic breakdown is unexpected friendship. Remember that faulty vending machine I mentioned he encounters? It’s in the hospital where his wife died, and it ate his money mere minutes after he received the bad news. He sends a letter to the vending company explaining the whole situation. Then he sends three or four more. It’s enough to get the sad, kind-hearted customer service representative (Naomi Watts, radiating empathy) to call him up and ask if he’s okay. This becomes not a romance, but an intimate exchange of sympathy. They lean on each other, becoming fast, close friends. She invites him into her life where he feels comfortable just hanging around, even sparking a big-brotherly relationship with her troubled teen son (newcomer Judah Lewis in a casually terrific performance as a sensitive troublemaker). This could be unbelievable, but the cast sells it. They all portray a desire for a low-key understanding person to hang out with, an unassuming vulnerable tenderness, a fragility beneath playacted toughness. It’s sweetly, warmly developed.

The film’s back half is loaded up with developments, sudden swerves into dramatic complications that weigh an already glum movie down. It’s manipulative, but not entirely unearned. The whole thing works under a melancholic existential panic, with people trying their best to look at the world in a way that makes sense. At one point Gyllenhaal sees an uprooted tree and muses, “everything’s a metaphor.” It’s both a too-obvious statement of the movie’s heavy hand and an acknowledgement of a man casting about for anything to help make sense of an all-encompassing tragic change in his life. It’d make a tidy double feature with Wild, two movies about lost souls setting their own terms for recovery and hoping against hope that a big gesture will accomplish just that. Demolition doesn’t know if anyone can easily launch themselves out of a bad emotional state, but is moving in its assertion that, when you’re at your lowest point, even fleeting kindness can help push you in the right direction.

Diversion: THE DIVERGENT SERIES: ALLEGIANT

Blandly proficient brand extension, The Divergent Series: Allegiant was presumably made because they’d already made two of them and there was one more book in the YA series by Veronica Roth. The predecessors didn’t flop, so why not? It even splits that final book in two, pushing the back half to another film to be released next year sometime. Hey, Harry Potter, Twilight, and The Hunger Games did it. Since The Divergent Series was already an amalgamated knockoff of every other teen-centric genre franchise, why not copy them right down to the money-grabbing two-part finale? The trouble is it’s not nearly as imaginative or interesting as its inspirations. A calculating lack of passion bleeds into every frame of the film, in which a talented cast and crew are here mostly because they’ve already signed the contracts, enacting a remarkably uneventful story somehow swollen to 121 empty minutes.

As the movie starts, the previous movies’ routine teen dystopia, a crumbling far-future Chicago, once made up of a populace divided into temperament- and talent-based factions, has collapsed. The very special person at the center of the collapse is Tris (Shailene Woodley), who fought off mean Kate Winslet’s efforts to take over the city. Now, though, a new leader (Naomi Watts) is determined to reshape the populace under her control, installing puppet courts and whipping her followers into a frenzy with wild prejudice and violent impulses. “You’ve incited a mob. I hope you can control it,” says her son, who also happens to be Tris’s lover (Theo James). Together the tough lovebirds – along with returning cast members Ansel Elgort, Miles Teller, Zoë Kravitz, and Maggie Q – decide to flee the deteriorating society and jump over the gigantic wall into the wild unknown, leaving poor Octavia Spencer behind to deal with the trouble they started.

Considering that each of these movies so far has ended by intimating that we were going over that wall, it’s about time. Once they get there they find a muddy red desert where in our world is Lake Michigan. They wander around just long enough to give Elgort the chance to stare dumbly at a bubbly puddle and utter the following line: “This hole looks radioactive, or it was some time in the last 200 years.” I wrote that down immediately, relishing its pulpy sci-fi nonsense. Anyway, the teens end up getting taken to a gleaming grey-and-white futurist building which a man in a suit (Jeff Daniels) tells them was once O’Hare International Airport. Why that should be a detail worth telling to these future kids is beyond me. They don’t know what that is. In this future world it’s the home of a militarized band of scientists who confess that Chicago and its factions are really their experiment to see if they can undo humanity’s downfall: customized genes. It’s not exactly the most thrillingly examined idea.

It all turns out to be a nefarious set-up by which genetically perfect people want to keep the damaged dopes locked away in city-sized labs. Obviously Tris won’t have any of this and, after well over an hour spent wandering around this dully-developed new location, finally decides to do something about it. Screenwriters Noah Oppenheim, Adam Cooper, and Bill Collage glumly hit all the expected bits of a film like this in a creakingly mercenary, sparsely developed plot. The arc of each of these Divergents is identical. An evil adult has bland middle-management style and a plan to wipe out her or his inferiors, while Tris slowly learns that she’s not only special and the only one who can save the world, but she’s even more perfect than she’d last been told. This all happens while pretty people stomp around anonymous sets – warehouses, mostly – and interact with flavorless effects, trading clunking dialogue and staring at each other with what I can only assume is a mixture of boredom and brooding.

Director Robert Schwentke returns from the last time, still happy to merely keep things brightly lit and occasionally move the camera in surprising ways. He finds a few interesting images, throwing in some unexpected split focus diopter shots early on, filming a decontamination room in inky silhouettes, and visualizing the effects of a memory-wiping mist by making a man’s recollections float next to him while slowly burning away. But mostly he just dutifully watches what has to be one of the most bored casts I’ve ever seen sleepwalk through endless exposition and fuzzy motivation. During a scene in which the teens catch a ride to future-O’Hare in glowing bubbles, Teller gapes at a CGI spire and gasps the least convincing “gadzooks” you’ll ever hear. (Really.) Later a pro forma dogfight of sorts is accompanied by lackluster shouts and screams from the leads, sounding like completely nonplussed theme park patrons trying to whip up their enthusiasm for an underwhelming roller coaster’s dips and swerves. There’s so little going on here, just charismatic performers resigning themselves to the lifeless nonsense around them.

Old's Story: WHILE WE'RE YOUNG

There’s a scene in Noah Baumbach’s bracing character study Greenberg where the eponymous middle-aged curmudgeon played by Ben Stiller finds himself in the middle of a young person’s party. He sits on the couch talking to energetic teens, is intimidated by their confidence, and concludes, “I’m freaked out by you kids.” That’s just one scene in the movie, the broad strokes with which the youngsters are drawn excusable as a concept to push Stiller’s character out of his comfort zone. Baumbach’s new low-key comedy While We’re Young essentially stretches Greenberg’s party scene to feature length, finding a contentedly neurotic fortyish married couple (Stiller and Naomi Watts) drawn into a relationship with easygoing hipsters (Adam Driver and Amanda Seyfried) who alternately attract and repel them.

The film sets up an interesting dynamic, with Stiller and Watts feeling displaced by their generational cohort’s baby-having ways. Friends (like Maria Dizzia and Adam Horovitz) are disappearing into this different middle-aged demographic, so Stiller and Watts try to fit in with Driver and Seyfried’s crowd despite obvious confusion and discomfort over a lifestyle of twee handcrafted locavore retro-kitsch irony. The older couple still feels young, like they’re only pretending to be grown-ups. But confronting the alluring and confusing ways of the young folks forces them to choose between regressing in a return trip to extended adolescence or embracing the comforting steady grind of adulthood. They try out a new routine and see how it fits, a form of generation gap tourism.

A soft and comfortable film, the result lacks precision. Where’s the well-observed bitterness of Greenberg, or the sweet youthful energy of his previous film, the charming twentysomethings’ comedy Frances Ha? Baumbach has seen the age gap from both sides in better films, so it’s harder to accept the mushy generalizations and broad caricaturing at work here. It's still, in the typical Baumbach approach, full of characters who think they’re one clarifying conversation away from a better, more fulfilling life, and yet keep talking themselves back into corners of their own making. They leave each scene feeling worse than they were before. On some level it works. But here the lines are fuzzy more than sharp. Stiller and Watts make the most of their pleasant banter, able to slide easily into prickly married-life arguments. But Driver and Seyfried float through on a cloud of pixie dust as magical bewitching younger people, contrasts and sometimes foils, but never fully alive.

The young couple is a collection of stereotypes, a jumble of traits meant to make them specific and yet only serves to make them unknowable. He wants to be a documentarian, loves vinyl and VHS, hates social media, raises chickens, and encourages his partner’s burgeoning homemade ice cream business. You can tell on a surface level why that’d be exciting for a couple who otherwise spends their time avoiding pals’ children, chatting about arthritis, academia, and business meetings, and then going to bed early. But there’s no sense of who Stiller and Watts were as younger people, or what they’re trying to reclaim by hanging around these willowy strawmen who drag them to block parties and New Age shaman cleanses. Eventually, as the younger people prove more calculating than they first appear, the plot returns our middle-aged protagonists to the comfort of their generation, suspicious of young people all the more.

The final shots of the film confirm this fear of youth as we watch a baby expertly manipulate an iPhone, then cut back to Stiller and Watts pulling horrified faces. What is this world coming to? How can people of such different worlds coexist? While We’re Young’s not so sure they can, or should. The writing is full of prickly barbs, one part sublimated Borscht Belt and one part relaxed New Hollywood indie, the bright and sprightly Woody Allen-style New York City imagery hopping along bridging the gap. The cast (including a welcome, but small, role for the great Charles Grodin) spits the lines with great aplomb and winning chemistry. But Baumbach’s usual emotional specificity is stale, even strained, here. I saw where he was going, poking fun at youthful affectations and aging insecurities alike, but it never rose past the level of thinly imagined sketch.

Chosen Dumb: THE DIVERGENT SERIES: INSURGENT

The Divergent Series: Insurgent is the clumsily titled second entry in one of the more recent attempts to spin a series out of a YA dystopia. Its predecessor introduced us to a crumbling future Chicago, the populace divided into a small set of job-based factions – lawyers, farmers, police, and do-gooders – that seems unworkable practically, theoretically, politically, economically, logically, and grammatically. No matter. These YA worlds aren’t so much real fantasy spaces as extended metaphor. Take Hunger Games, with its impactful allegory stew churning with war, propaganda, and inequality, or Twilight, a monster mash dating game cautionary tale. Divergent, on the other hand, is mainly an overheated high school analogy. No wonder the adult authority figures are universally played like patiently exasperated vice principals.

The hero is a teenager who threatens the status quo by being too awesome for any one clique to claim. Last time, our protagonist Tris (Shailene Woodley) stopped Kate Winslet’s evil plan to take over the city, but as a result had to flee to the wilderness, a hidden hippie commune run by Octavia Spencer. This time, Tris and her Factionless buddies want to get enough resources to fight back. But they don’t know Winslet has found a gold box she thinks will clinch her control over the other factions, if only she could open it. Tris, by virtue of being the single most important very special perfect super talent in all the factions, this time with the bar graph to prove it (“100% Divergent!”), is probably the key to opening it. So there’s some conflict for you. There’s not much there, just a reason to run into some chases and gunfights in between conversations with overqualified cast members.

Maybe we should think of this YA series most of all as a sort of Hollywood finishing school. It puts promising younger performers in scenes opposite great veterans who, in turn, get to be on set for only a day or two each. Woodley, along with stoic Theo James, subservient Ansel Elgort, and charm overdrive Miles Teller, hold their own against effortless screen commanding by Winslet and Spencer, Mekhi Phifer, Naomi Watts, Daniel Dae Kim, and Janet McTeer. The screenplay, cobbled together from Veronica Roth’s book by Brian Duffield, Akiva Goldsman, and Mark Bomback, wisely backs off the flimsy worldbuilding and just lets these talented people do the best they can at selling the nonsense. They lean into the adolescent motivations. It is a story about how it’s totally stressful to be too awesome. They believe it, and that’s half the battle.

Helping out is director Robert Schwentke (Flightplan, R.I.P.D.), who moves the camera and provides proficient crosscutting to gin up routine action suspense in the moments when our heroes are forced to flee armed baddies. Later, he does decent work with the swoopy blinking lights and assorted vaguely familiar sci-fi trappings in the interiors. There are special effects moments involving psychological tests – virtual nightmares the must be conquered to unlock the MacGuffin – creating worlds of dissolving buildings, shattering glass, a rotating floating flaming house, and a man who evaporates into silvery fragments. Those are neat, and are tied to Woodley’s performance in some mostly effective ways. A close connection to a female protagonist is what sets Insurgent’s blandness above crushing masculine banalities of other YA competitors like The Maze Runner.

It’s overall an improvement over Divergent, a far more confident and open film, and far more watchable, too. Not only lifeless formula, it often manages to feel like a real movie hobbled by some deeply inconsequential source material. It’s watchable dreck that starts nowhere and spins its wheels, a narrative with nothing to do. Scene by scene it might work, but moments don’t connect or grow or build. The society it assembles only works as a perfect environment for narrativized teen angst, and is as tedious and impenetrable for an outsider as the real thing. If the crux of adolescent problems is the cognitive dissonance between feeling like the most important person in your world and the nagging knowledge you’re not, then this series finds the least interesting solutions.

Same Old Story: ST. VINCENT

Over at Forbes, Scott Mendelson wrote that St. Vincent, the new Bill Murray/Melissa McCarthy film, “could have been written in a quirky indie comedy Mad Libs book.” That’s precisely the reason why I was set to ignore it. I went to see it last weekend and paid good money to do so, but the experience left me completely empty. There are a few sweet touches to the performances, but I could barely hear them over the clunks and clanks of the plot machinery.

It’s a movie about a cranky old man (Murray) whose quiet life of sleeping, gambling, and drinking is interrupted by new neighbors, a single mom (McCarthy) and her precocious ten-year-old son (newcomer Jaeden Lieberher) he reluctantly agrees to babysit after school. Reading that sentence, anyone who has seen any comedy-tinged indie-adjacent drama knows that Murray’s crusty exterior will soften enough to let his warm heart through, McCarthy’s harried mom will find a new support system, and the kid will learn life lessons from an unlikely source.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with telling familiar stories, but writer-director Theodore Melfi brings absolutely nothing to latch onto. It’s not even a tired story told with fresh perspective or confident familiarity. It’s just exactly what you think it’ll be every single step of the way. Like the Ancient Greek poet Hesiod said, “A bad neighbor is a misfortune, as much as a good one is a great blessing.” And sometimes you can find both in the same neighbor, especially if you have someone like Murray who can play up the sarcastic grump as well as the likable schlub with a tragic backstory.

The performances are all fine across the board, including the stacked supporting cast with the likes of Naomi Watts, Chris O’Dowd, and Terrence Howard. They’re good, and Murray has his charming curmudgeon act down as perfectly as McCarthy has instant audience sympathy. Then there’s young Lieberher, who has the right amount of believable intelligence behind his eyes to sell even the most specious precocious moments. But the material is just not up to the level of the performers, who simply can’t make something out of nothing. It’s not that anything goes too terribly wrong with the film. But nothing was engaging or interesting, either. It’s agreeable, but empty, like Melfi’s obvious plot beats, simple sitcom staging, and bright cinematography.

I was all set to let St. Vincent pass uncommented upon by me, but the box office held up surprisingly well in its second week. It’s starting to smell like a modest performer, the kind of warm, undemanding, unsurprising movie that three weeks from now the guy in your office who almost never sees movies and doesn’t particularly like them anyway tells you he saw and wasn’t it something special? I suppose it is a totally competent version of this kind of movie. The performances are good and the final notes of redemption, complete with the typical big school event and a grown-up running in at the last second to show off misty eyes and a solemn nod of support, do ring with a certain earned pleasant feeling that can yank on audience heartstrings. But it’ll be far more entertaining the fewer movies you’ve seen.

An Actor on the Verge: BIRDMAN OR (THE UNEXPECTED VIRTUE OF IGNORANCE)

At the corner of anxious depression and artistic frustration is Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance), an emotionally and physically claustrophobic backstage comedy of sorts. It stars Michael Keaton as an actor on the verge of a nervous breakdown. He plays Riggan Thomson, an actor whose stardom peaked two decades ago with his role as Birdman in a series of superhero movies and now sees his mental state rapidly deteriorating as his passion project comeback – writing, directing, and starring in a Broadway play based on a Carver story – nears opening night. If the first part of the conceit sounds a lot like Keaton, who two decades ago left the Batman series and is now in what’s being touted as a “comeback role,” lets hope his psyche’s in a better state.

The film floats through lengthy Steadicam takes from master cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki edited to look (nearly) like one long fluid shot. Hardly novel, Hitchcock made one film look like one shot all the way back in 1948 with Rope. But it’s a trick so few attempt that it retains an impressive power. It’s transfixing, sliding through rehearsals and previews with smart elisions of time as the camera roams in and around this New York theater on the week leading up to the opening night. As characters zip in and out of scenes with expertly timed dialogue and blocking, I sometimes sat back from the proceedings, simply enjoying the logistical satisfaction of so many moving parts coming together. It’s a little better than a gimmick, effectively trapping the audience in the film’s headspace with no down time. The pressure is high. The walls are closing in.

Keaton, one of our finest actors when it comes to exploring the wilds between id and ego, does a terrific job holding down the increasingly mad center of the film. His character is a pitiable narcissist who has bitten off more than he can chew. He’s doing this to be relevant, to be loved, and to make art, definitely in that order. He’s frazzled, overwhelmed by the multitasking asked of a multi-hyphenate, his only solace talking to the voice hallucinating inside his head egging him on for better or usually worse. Surrounding him is a fine collection of showbiz types. There’s the exasperated producer (Zack Galifianakis), the leading ladies (Naomi Watts and Andrea Riseborough), the preening Method actor (Edward Norton), the ex-wife (Amy Ryan), a critic (Lindsay Duncan), and stagehands (including Merrit Wever). Best is Emma Stone as Keaton’s ex-addict daughter working as his assistant, a non-showbiz voice in rooms of people rapidly disappearing up their own egos.

The parts are performed with great precision, words spat out in rapid-fire monologues and tense dialogues that harmonize with the all-drum-solo score from Antonio Sanchez. Together they’re an endless clanging keeping the entire experience off balance and driving forward. The cast is free of the usual shot/reverse shot coverage, allowing them greater control over the rhythms and pauses, the psychological space as well as the physical. They create a world of people symbiotically clinging to each other as both a career move and an artistic expression, acting out their interpersonal dramas in the wings and dressing rooms before sublimating those energies into performances on stage. Their banter is as crisp and funny as it is painful, and the laughs start to choke off the more desperately the sweat appears. Narcissism and insecurity make a potent mix, one the film is unrelenting in conjuring.

At first it appears tonally different and a stylistic outlier in Iñárritu’s oeuvre. It’s lighter, more fluid, and about a feeling of emotional constipation and professional frustration that, though deeply felt and important to the characters, pales in severity to the violence and misery on display in his Very Serious Dramas Amores Perros, 21 Grams, and Babel. I appreciated those film’s miserabilist impulses, but he hit a wall with the dire Biutiful, luxuriating in signifiers of importance without much more to say with them. So on the one hand, Birdman’s relative lightness on its feet is a much-needed artistic rejuvenation. On the other, it’s as deeply pessimistic as anything he’s made. It loathes, thinking artists are egomaniacs, Hollywood is hollow, critics are lazy, and audiences are stupid at worst, gullible at best. The core of rage in Keaton’s performance, playing a character who feels most upset that after all this effort he may not receive affection for it, plays off this omnidirectional frustration that assumes the worst out of everyone.

Birdman’s bravura cinematography is also a reflection of this cramped, thematically repetitive expression, as pressure mounts and the play stumbles on its way to opening night, the drums clanging, the camera ceaselessly swirling, the cast executing their tightly choreographed blocking. It plays on the surface pleasures of the backstage drama, threading it with humor sometimes so dark it borders on gallows. By the end, it’s miserable. Still, it’s hard to look away from such a high wire act on the last nerve’s edge tension between comedy and tragedy. You get the sense Riggan’s entire existence depends on this play going well. And given his, and the film’s, tendency to assume the worst, the outcome looks bleak, indeed.

Swept Away: THE IMPOSSIBLE

J.A. Bayona’s The Impossible is exactly what it wants to be and you should know what you’re getting into. It’s a film in which a recent real-world natural disaster is recreated in horrific detail. I almost couldn’t handle it. Perhaps the filmmakers couldn’t either, choosing to tell one small story instead of taking in the disaster in all its disturbing immensity. Rather than attempting to tell a wide, generous panoramic story set during the devastating December 26, 2004 tsunami that wiped away miles of Thailand, the film narrows in on the plight of one vacationing European family. It’s through their eyes we see the wall of water drown a picturesque resort in the blink of an eye. It’s their plight we follow in the aftermath as, heartrendingly separated, they struggle to survive, locate medical help, and find one another. This has the effect of lessening the big picture while making it all seem like a particularly bad instance of a spoiled vacation, but the acting is so strong, the filmmaking so powerful, that it’s overwhelming (for better and worse) all the same.

The film’s opening scenes are structured with the suspense of a horror film. Even if you somehow managed to stumble in blind, unaware of the impending tsunami, the opening title cards will quickly let you in on the disaster that’s about to unfold. We meet a nice young family, a father (Ewan McGregor) and mother (Naomi Watts) with a young teen boy (Tom Holland) and a couple of towheaded youngsters (Samuel Joslin and Oaklee Pendergast). They check into their hotel. They open their Christmas presents. They swim in the pool and party on the beach. These scenes of comfort and fun are, much like the opening of any slasher film that follows a group of carefree youths into the woods unaware of the masked killer awaiting them, tense. We know what’s about to happen; it’s hard to be comfortable while awaiting the sudden arrival of discomfort.

And arrive it does. Through enveloping special effects, the family is swept away in a scary swirl of muddy waters that overpowers then recedes, before spinning back around to scrape away even more of the recognizable features of the land. Amidst the fallen trees, downed utility lines, and jumbled piles of debris, the mother and her oldest son find themselves entirely alone, cling to what little they can find, and painfully make their way to help. They don’t know where to locate it or even where, exactly, the sudden catastrophe has deposited them in relationship to their hotel and their loved ones, but they continue to move anyways. Rest will surely equal death. Watts and Holland do fine work here as people forced to move forward on instinct and determination alone, the full extent of the destruction and the possible deaths of their entire nuclear family unable to fully sink in while they drag their bruised and bloody bodies to safety.

This is shell-shocked filmmaking that made me wince and squirm. I’m not the most squeamish filmgoer around, but this is uncommonly effective, harrowing stuff that had me asking if this is really what the MPAA is calling PG-13 these days. The camera moves with the young boy, capturing a kind of horror that will off-handedly find grotesque body horror in the edges of the frame, then stop to linger just long enough for the full grossness to sink in, before quickly averting the gaze. Walking behind his mother, he catches a glimpse of her leg with a large flap of skin dangling loose. When he alerts her to this fact, she turns, her shirt ripped revealingly, exposing her chest and her lacerated skin. The boy winces and averts his eyes. Later, scenes at an overwhelmed hospital catch glimpses of ripped and mangled bodies, loose limbs, and drips of unidentifiable liquid. At one point, a wretched retching sound fills the soundtrack as Watts, slightly out of focus in the middle distance, vomits what appears to be plant matter and is joined by a nurse who quickly helps her pull what appears to be a tangled vine out of her throat. Reader, I’ve managed to sit through bloodier films of splatter and gore without once shielding my eyes, but this scene had me looking away, wishing for it to end. I wanted it out of my head.

But I suppose that speaks to the power of Bayona’s filmmaking. This is an overpowering experience. It eventually cuts away from mother and son to discover the fate of McGregor and the two little boys – I won’t spoil it here – and the script by Sergio G. Sánchez and María Belón orchestrates nearly-unbearably teasing moments of sentimental suspense as the various main characters survive, or don’t, and are reunited, or aren’t. In the end, I cried a little, but felt so emotionally mangled by the film that I almost wished I hadn’t. It’s undeniably effective, but the small scope, which, although beneficial, making the devastation personal and slightly more manageable, begins to feel like it’s doing the event itself a bit of a disservice by limiting the full impact.

In the film’s final shots, the camera flies away with survivors, peering back at the destruction while gliding away from the island and out over open waters. It’s a survival narrative that’s ultimately only about escape and not about the ramifications for the people – and supporting characters – left behind. I was more than ready to escape; I was glad to escape. But I wondered if a film less single-minded could have found room to tell a small, simple story without losing so much of the big picture. The ending plays triumphant, but the film was so effective that by that time I was exhausted.