Family Quest: ONWARD

Pixar spent the last decade mostly turning out sequels, some good (Incredibles 2) and many middling. Now the once great factory of fresh computer animated classics has given us its new standalone feature: Onward. Like the best of its recent original works — Coco, Inside Out, The Good Dinosaur — it’s a film about growing up, a coming-of-age scramble nestled inside a melancholy metaphor that pushes on the emotional pressure points of its audience. Here’s a movie about an elf-boy in a world that imagines the fantasy pasts of cheap paperbacks and roleplaying games is now our modern day — the wilds of wizards and castles and enchanted forests now suburbs and gas stations and highways, the magic of staffs and spells now smartphones and minivans. (As you might expect, the widescreen visual look of the world has its little delights and storybook charm.) The boy is missing his long-dead father acutely on this, his sixteenth birthday. Luckily, his dad left a present to be opened on this day: a spell that’ll bring him back for just one day. It goes slightly wrong, leaving only a pair of legs in father-fashion khakis and loafers. (There are some good gags made out of this, and the more upsetting details are assiduously ignored.) Now the son must find a phoenix jewel (rebirth and all) with the help of his oafish Dungeons & Dragons-style fanboy older brother, a quest that takes them out into the magic on the edges of society, while testing their prickly fraternal bond. So it’s also the vintage Pixar special: the buddy comedy. It’s as sprightly a chase as it is a jab in the tear ducts, somehow giving the audience something that’s at once overfamiliar and unexpected, warmly funny, easily appealing, and comforting even in its rougher edges.

The film is full of typical Pixar touches, though more modest in its effect and depth. Writer-director Dan Scanlon (of the strangely forgotten Monsters University) brings to the picture genre play that is featherlight, a gentle needling of fantasy tropes while wholeheartedly embracing the fetch quest construction. But for however simple the plot, the emotions do run deep and true. It may have the shape of a machine-tooled moving response machine — all levers and buttons flipped and pushed to shape the necessary payoffs — but the warm vocal performances of Tom Holland and Chris Pratt are loveably believable cartoonish brothers, and the ache of their need to connect with a father they barley knew is sometimes palpable. The ultimate conclusion is surprising and satisfying, though I wish the movie was better equipped to dig deeper and more cleverly into its premise. (What, exactly, is the relationship between the very real magic and the rest of society? No underground support group like the shark’s in Finding Nemo? And why doesn’t the boy’s mother (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) get to spend time with her husband’s legs?) Pixar of yore would’ve wrung every drop of wonder and delight out of its conceit, its premise, and its world. Imagine the airtight structure of Toy Story or the swooning accumulated details of WALL-E. Alas. Onward nonetheless points a way forward, reaffirming the studio’s commitment to new stories to tell in its typically detailed style and earnest emotive effort. The characters are just too sympathetic and the quest too pure to deny. A sequence where the lad prepares to step out over a bottomless pit is as good — suspenseful and charming — as any I’ve seen of late, and a fine metaphor for the company itself. I’d rather Pixar be taking that leap of faith than retreading past successes any day. Onward and upward.

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.

Crazy Train: SNOWPIERCER

Snowpiercer is a smorgasbord of sci-fi ideas and images. The plot is simple, but its world of pulpy imagery and thoughts are not. The thrilling film imagines a future in which the Earth has frozen over. International efforts to combat global warming were too much, too late. They backfired, covering the world in a thick, uninhabitable winter. Seventeen years later, several hundred survivors, all that remains of humanity, live in a futuristic, heavily armored, self-sustaining, climate-controlled train a billionaire built, the lengthy locomotive endlessly circling its tracks. Brutal guards carefully maintain order inside. The billionaire industrialist who ordered the train and the tracks built sits at the controls. The rich get to live in luxury in the front cars, mindlessly worshiping his capitalist impulse. They paid for their spots. The poor are huddled in squalid conditions in the caboose. They were lucky to get on board in the first place. Perpetual poverty is the price they pay. It is a blunt force allegory primed to explode.

Equal parts pleasantly preposterous and wickedly intriguing, the film is the rare sci-fi film that starts fascinating and maintains that level of interest throughout, getting better, richer, and more surprising as it goes along. It hurtles forward with imagination and momentum. We meet a reluctant hero (Chris Evans), a tortured back-of-the-train citizen who is fomenting a revolt. Gathering allies (a fine international cast including John Hurt, Octavia Spencer, Jamie Bell, Song Kang-Ho, and Ko Ah-Sung), the revolution smashes forward, aiming for the engine room at the very front of the train. The movie fights its way forward with them, car after car, each serving a different function in the train’s ecosystem. The set design and action choreography changing with each car – a food factory, a garden, a classroom, a prison – bounces nicely off the consistent claustrophobic dimensions that remain the same. Dumped into the moving vehicle with scant background, we learn more about how this society operates, who lives there, and why they’re in this mess as we storm through.

Along the way, we meet some fabulous villains, pawns of the train’s corporate dictator and founder. The unseen force that is the head of the train radiates backwards through his soldiers and his minions. (Eventually, we see him, and he does not disappoint, but to spoil who plays him and what he’s like would rob you of a pleasant surprise.) Most memorable is the sniveling, condescending, ice-cold officer (an nearly unrecognizable Tilda Swinton) who coos over the aristocratic excess and luxurious hoarding of the rich and snarls with glee at the conditions of the poor. As heroes and villains are slowly fleshed in and the full splendor and horror of the train is bit by bit revealed, the movie takes on darker, more powerful emotional underpinnings to its more intellectual allegorical force.

Shot with dark humor and rattling with gushes of artfully applied blood, this is an exciting, impactful sci-fi actioner that sleekly tracks forward, finding twists and complications every step of the way. The actors give tough, memorable genre performances, types done right. The camera finds cutting away as valuable as lingering on chaos. Cinematographer Hong Kyung-pyo's mix of shooting styles finds deliberate lateral moves as tense as jangly hand-held work. Ondrej Nekvasil and Stefan Kovacik's production design creates an immersive world, enveloping and all-consuming in its detail. Each new car is a revelation. From the prisoners kept in massive metal drawers, to the creepy-crawly secret of the underclass’ protein rations, to the Gilliam-esque warped environments of the rich and comfortable, this is a film of wonderfully thought-through spaces on which the stage is set for resonant, expressive, satisfying conflict.

Snowpiercer represents the modern economics of global film production at its finest. It’s a multinational ensemble working with Bong Joon-ho, a great South Korean director, filming in Prague and creating visual effects in London and Vancouver, an English-language adaptation of a 1980’s French comic. The final product is fantastic international multicultural synthesis, bigger and more idiosyncratic than most of what makes it to movie screens. It’s immensely satisfying to sink into a film so intricately designed and find images and ideas at once familiar and foreign. Bong Joon-ho, with his previous off-kilter genre efforts like 2006’s creature feature The Host and 2009’s murder mystery Mother, showcased his great eye for striking pulp visions. Here, with moments from a man punished by having his arm stuck out an exterior hatch and frozen off to a fight in total darkness between resourceful rioters and thugs with hatchets and night-vision goggles, he's made a film with a new jolt of surprise and imagination behind every doorway.

As we smash forward with righteous fury on the heels of the uprising, the screenplay by Bong and co-writer Kelly Masterson raises interesting questions amidst hugely entertaining excitement. Is it best to stay quiet and know your place in what is clearly a corrupt system, hoping for marginal improvement? Or is it better to blow it all up and start again? Snowpiercer is actually interested in interrogating these questions rather than using them as tantalizing flavoring for its premise and then discarding them once the action starts. It’s part of the fun. This is a rich experience, tremendously entertaining, funny, sad, and thrilling, with plenty of personality that doesn't sacrifice thoughts for thrills or vice versa. It’s one of the most involving and compelling science fiction films in recent memory, a great ride that moves and moves.

A Day in the Life: FRUITVALE STATION

Fruitvale Station is named for the train station in Oakland, California where an unarmed 22-year-old African American man named Oscar Grant was shot in the back and killed by a transit policeman on January 1, 2009. This could easily have been a film of martyrdom, a single-minded story of how a wholly good person was gunned down by societal forces that to this day allow certain members of our society to view certain groups as somehow inherently suspicious, even dangerous, for arbitrary reasons. But 27-year-old writer-director Ryan Coogler in his most promising feature film debut has instead smartly made this a story about life in all its complexity and promise. The inherent and real societal problems illuminated by this tragic story shine all the more clearly by both not forcing the details of Oscar’s life to fit simplistic politically convenient stereotypes and reducing the violent act itself to a small part of the overall narrative. This is not a film that looks for tears only by showing the details of a wrongful death, but by showing the details of the life that was cut short.

After chunky, shaky cell phone footage, a partially abstracted scene of impending doom that sets an ominous mood, the film moves backwards to its real focus, starting the morning of December 31, 2008. Oscar (Michael B. Jordan) starts his day with his girlfriend (Melanie Diaz) and their extremely cute four-year-old daughter (Ariana Neal). It’s a day of transitions. A new year is nearly here, the world poised to change in superficial ways, while staying all too the same in all the ways that matter. We follow Oscar around town as he makes preparations for the evening’s celebrations, which will culminate in catching the train into San Francisco for New Year’s fireworks, but start with a birthday party for his mother (Octavia Spencer). He meets friends, runs errands, and tries to talk the manager at the grocery store into rehiring him. He gets gas, cradles a stray dog, and offers advice to a friendly lady at the deli counter. It’s an ordinary day, albeit one positioned perfectly for contemplation of the future.

This slice-of-life film simply presents a moment of time. The action on screen could be the day-to-day life of a great many people. What makes it important and notable is not the way this day will end. It’s important for no reason other than the core humanity on display. Jordan allows his performance a staggering amount of unshowy range, shifting between pride and love, stubbornness and compassion. In his interactions with friends and family, we see a young man with an identity still in flux. He’s dependable, ambitious, compassionate, and searching. He contains multitudes. He’s pulling his life back together after a brief stay in prison, but he’s not simply an ex-convict. He’s a loving boyfriend, father, son, and brother. But he’s not simply a one-note family man. He’s an adaptable striver, able to fit into many situations with a sense of ease. He’s not just an everyman. He’s this man.

This is a performance and a film that draws upon cinema’s capacity for empathy, for giving us deep insight into a life that’s not our own. It’s a film filled with countless little details of performances that resonate through nothing more than their ordinariness. It’s a film of moments, warm and natural: a birthday party, a car ride, a soft romantic interlude, a fatherly reassurance, a tense exchange. These and more feel merely normal with an unforced ease. Brief moments of foreshadowing might push too hard, but Coogler’s script is admirably loose in moments that feel spontaneous. His camera, often reminiscent of the Dardenne brothers’ in its sense of precise connection to the performances and found poetry of location shooting, follows his actors closely, tenderly, observing without judgment, without generalization, and without insistence. There’s only humanity here. That’s what takes center stage in this narrative, despite the knowledge that a tragic turn of events draws nearer.

Because we’ve come to know these characters, the final moments play out not with overwhelming horror, but a sense of stunned disbelief. It’s here that it is easiest to see Coogler’s remarkable restraint and emotional precision. The film is tender and compassionate to all involved. Look at Spencer’s face in the hospital as she’s confronted with the sad news, stunned and raw. The shot feels long and devastating. Earlier at the station, look at the face of the officer (Chad Michael Murray) as he realizes what just happened, an expression of ambiguous shock. The shot is quick, yet important to the film’s observant style. Most haunting is a shot of Diaz and Neal during a long pregnant pause in the final scene, the occasion to cut to credits before we hear a character’s reply.

This is a film that wisely stops unresolved. How can there possibly be a satisfying resolution here? There are no easy answers and it is to Coogler’s credit that he doesn’t let the film reach for closure it can’t find or conclusions it can’t draw. But how did we get here, from such a promising young man’s daily life to its sudden, shocking end? Coogler’s calm filmmaking takes the film to a place more lingeringly emotional and more productively complex than overt anger or hagiography would have. Injustice is obvious. How we’re to feel about this is wisely complicated by the film instead of simplified and pre-digested. It’s a powerful drama, forceful and accomplished, with plenty to consider well after the credits have rolled. This story of a death is filled with so much heartbreaking life. The final moments are a tragedy not just for what happened, but also for what was taken away.

Help Me Help You: THE HELP

Written and directed by Tate Taylor from the bestselling novel by Katheryn Stockett, The Help is a glossy middlebrow Hollywood civil-rights drama. It’s set in the early 60’s in Jackson, Mississippi and concerns itself with the plight of African American women working as maids cooking, cleaning, and child-rearing for well-to-do white women. The film is all well and good, filled with fine intentions. On its surface, however, several storytelling decisions water down the point of view to make institutionalized racism easier for mainstream audiences to handle.

First, the story is kicked off from the perspective of a white woman (Emma Stone), a recent college graduate and aspiring journalist who gets it in her head to help write down and take the help’s stories to the larger public. Second, there’s the case of the film’s villain, for Hollywood can’t just make racism itself the subject of scorn and therefore requires a character to stand in as its personification. Here it’s a women’s club leader (Bryce Dallas Howard) who drafts a bill to require private citizens in the town to have a separate bathroom in their homes for their black employees. She’s not a real character to speak of, just pure racist evil made all the worse for her not knowing the extent of her own flaws. “You know, there’s some real racists in this town!” she obliviously exclaims at one point.

But here I go, sounding like I disliked The Help when really I was drawn into it past these problems. Emma Stone’s story ends up sharing its space with two maids who are wonderfully drawn characters, stirringly acted. The great Viola Davis anchors this movie with her weary spirit, even narrating occasional sections of the film in her lovely alto voice. She’s the first Jackson maid to agree to help with the book project. After having worked since the age of 14 raising other people’s babies, cooking other people’s meals, cleaning other people’s valuables, and gaining from it all far too little in the way of money and respect, she’s more than ready to tell her life’s stories. She convinces her best friend, played with great humor and poignant warmth by Octavia Spencer, to speak up as well. Together, the three women prepare to reveal the insidious injustices of this system of employment.

All the while, the society of Jackson is explored through a talented ensemble cast. Allison Janney plays Stone’s fussy, cancer-patient mother who really does mean well, while Sissy Spacek plays the aged mother of the villain as a cranky old lady with moments of clarity. Amongst the younger members of the cast, Jessica Chastain plays a woman who is just a little too much of an individual and is thus cruelly outcast from the local society of debutants and bridge games. In these characters, there is the insistence that gentle Southern cruelty cuts even those who just barely fall out of the line of acceptability. This is no equivalence to the pain of institutionalized racism, but rather an illustration of how tightly controlled this society is.

Because Taylor focuses on the deeply felt performances from these women, the film held my attention. Its visually undistinguished and loosely paced, but it’s a relentless crowd-pleaser, pushing all the expected, but often welcomed, buttons. But there’s a sense in the slickness of the whole production that the proceedings are being held ever-so-slightly back from the full grim reality of the situations presented. There’s a little rosy historical handholding in its sunny disposition punctuated by cruel behavior from the nastier characters. It’s as if the filmmakers were insisting that yes, things were bad then, but that was the past.

What breaks through this veneer of ossified history is the immediacy of the performances, from Davis and Spencer especially. I truly cared about what happened to them and the movie treats them with total respect as characters and as people. By the end, the movie wisely skips artificial uplift and arrives at something just a little more honest than I expected, giving these characters a small victory tainted by a sense that little has actually changed. Racism isn’t going to disappear over night.