Interiors: QUEEN OF EARTH

If you hear there’s a new tiny character drama about a woman who, mourning the death of her father and having left her boyfriend, rents a vacation home with her best friend, you’re probably already imagining a treacly little indie going through the same quirky life-affirming motions. Luckily Queen of Earth, the movie in question, does no such thing. It imagines an entire psychological world for its characters, and commits to following their complicated emotional drivers to intense and uncompromising places. We open on Elisabeth Moss’s face, makeup streaked after what must’ve been a tremendous cry. She’s breaking up with her partner, who remains off screen as we’re pinned mere inches from her face, taking in every jagged breath and spit of anger. “Don’t look at me,” she snaps. And yet we can’t look away.

This is an Alex Ross Perry movie, a designation we can now, after four films, start to identify as marking a project that’ll start with recognizable territory and take us somewhere unexpected. He’s a terrific writer-director who seems to have made it his mission to take on projects which are in broad strokes overfamiliar types, and then coloring them in with a whole interesting palate all his own. His 2011 sophomore effort The Color Wheel was on the surface a brother/sister road trip movie shot through with mumblecore plotting and fumbling banter, but it was photographed in gorgeously textured black and white and built to a tremendous scene that caught its characters in close sustained crescendo of messy feelings. Then there’s his previous feature, Listen Up Philip, which was a prickly man-child relationship comedy that allowed its characters unusual room to be themselves, following various members of the ensemble down wandering paths of lovely character moments rich and tender.

What sets Perry apart is the thought and intentionality behind his creative choices. He’s not simply showing off his chops – although he is – or making movies that’ll get him studio paychecks – though he will. He’s telling cinematic stories, taking the raw material of any indie drama and making of it self-consciously literary dialogue and overwhelming visual precision. So when the opening title card of Queen of Earth stomps in with fancy red cursive popping against the stark grey sadness of the opening image, it’s clear we’re in the hands of a confident filmmaker. We follow Moss into a lake house chamber drama where her friend (Inherent Vice's Katherine Waterson) finds herself moving cautiously, walking on eggshells, as her friend grieves over her intersectional heartbreaks. Perry uses slow dissolves, sharp cuts, and icy silences to simmer with suspense. With glacial horror pacing and a needling thriller score, it’s less Your Sister’s Sister, more an American Persona done up with hints of Repulsion.

With editor Robert Greene’s methodically precise cutting, the mood of the film is intoxicatingly deliberate and unblinkingly disorienting. It will cut back to the previous year, where we see a much happier Moss in the same rental house. Watterson is there as well, a little grumpy because her friend’s boyfriend (Kentucky Audley) is along for the vacation. Serving as an ironic counterpoint to the sad present, where the presence of what Moss perceives as an interloping neighbor (Patrick Fugit) seemingly reminds her of what she’s lost, these glimpses of happier times cut into long pushes in on intense emoting. It is uncut psychological pain artfully rendered, where even good memories are jabs in the side. Social interactions become a nightmare, others looming over. Precise blocking, smooth surfaces, and dramatic lighting highlight the air of tension even in mundane moments. Acutely misophonic sound design heightens chewing, swallowing, choking.

A tricky two-hander, the film captures the stultifying balancing act of trying to support someone in their time of emotional distress, a period of psychic suffering that’s difficult to be around, and yet hard to avoid for those who care about their loved one. As a portrait of depression, it’s the most soul-draining, nerve-jangling one since Von Trier’s Melancholia. But unlike that film, which was so drunk on melancholy it left me sick to my stomach – a compliment, by the way – Queen of Earth maintains an icier tone, a clinically sympathetic eye on Moss’s elusive, slippery performance. She’s called upon to play a double-edged emotional high-wire act. In flashbacks, she’s sunny. In the present, she’s on the bleeding edge of stability. Waterson, meanwhile, has an even slipperier role, filtering layers of grumpiness and wariness through an exterior that’s trying not to compound her friend’s problems. It’s rare to find a film so concerned with and attuned to friends’ interdependent emotional support systems. In doing so, there's warmth, even some laughs, underneath fraught feelings.

Shot on film by cinematographer Sean Price Williams, the film’s cold touch and sharp blocking keep the characters pinned in together, caught in adjacent headspace even when not physically together. They can hear muffled sounds through walls. They can take phone calls in the yard, leaking one-sided conversations into the house, though they can maintain mystery with a brisk “Don’t ask.” One striking shot captures both floors of the house in the same frame, perched on the stairs in such a way that we can really feel the disjunction between the figure leaning against a kitchen counter downstairs and the one upstairs slowly dragging herself out of bed. Perry shows equal interest in the character’s mental states as he does the filmmaking techniques he so adeptly manipulates. This is a difficult and finely sustained work of psychological observation, diving into miserable depths of pity, ego, and insecurity with a shifty but unblinking thriller’s eye for dread.

Going...Going...GONE GIRL

Gone Girl is a sick dispatch from the dark center of a poisoned culture. It’s a missing person thriller imbued with the tick-tock urgency of a well-wrought procedural. But for all his precise surface sheen, David Fincher is a director interested in implications far more troubling and upsetting than any given episode of any given crime drama. Just look at how he turned the true crime Zodiac into a masterful investigation of obsession and unknowablity. With Gone Girl, the screenplay by Gillian Flynn, from her novel, obliges his impulses, creating a world that snaps into revealing action when a woman in a small Missouri town vanishes from the home she shares with her husband of five years. In doing so, it exposes a culture that’s selfish, prejudiced, misogynistic, easily misled, and eagerly superficial. And in the middle are characters who exploit these flaws.

At first, we know the drill. And because Fincher is a director who loves process and information, we appear to be on solid genre ground. The front door is open. The glass coffee table is smashed. There’s a bit of blood on the kitchen cabinet. And Amy Dunne (Rosamund Pike) is nowhere to be found. Her husband Nick (Ben Affleck) calls the cops. Officers (Kim Dickens and Patrick Fugit) show up to collect samples and rope off the suspected crime scene. He’s interviewed, then released to stay with his twin sister (Carrie Coon) while his wife’s parents (Lisa Banes and David Clennon) race to town. Search parties are gathered. A tip line is established. The media flocks, from local station vans getting all Ace in the Hole on lawns and sidewalks, to the tabloid media sharks (Missi Pyle and Sela Ward) ripping their teeth into the story’s details from the desks of their cable news channels.

This is how these things always go, whether in Law & Order or in real life. The husband is a source of suspicion. The wife is valorized. Fear and excitement creep through the community, media whips the nation into a frenzy of judgment, and the police chase down clues with professionalism. It's dryly funny, a mixture of unease, bewilderment and practicality. This is the least showily directed of Fincher's work, but he still ably deploys Jeff Cronenweth’s cinematography – clean, simple images, clear shadows and soft colors – to keep the vice grip of tension screwing tighter. Sinister steady shots glide together with propulsive, clever editing – like a cute, creepy cut from a flashback to the couple’s first kiss to his mouth being swabbed by forensics – to bring considerable menace and dread to the procedural beats as the story grows more complex.

As the investigation moves forward, Amy narrates past scenes from their marriage, happy days and growing ominous inklings alike. In the present, clues begin to add up to an unpleasant picture for Nick. The police grow more skeptical of his story. They and we see uglier sides of his personality. What begins as a wrong-man thriller starts to gather a nauseous nagging weight. But that’s not the end of the story, and it doesn’t end up where you’d think from that set up. The film takes loop-de-loops with audience identification, recontextualizing characters, shifting sympathies with each new piece of information.

The cast expands. We meet a high-powered defense attorney (Tyler Perry), a mistress (Emily Ratajkowski), a chatty neighbor (Casey Wilson), a wronged ex (Scoot McNairy), a stalker (Neil Patrick Harris). But, with confident and nuanced performances across the board, none are as they seem. Dangerous people end up victims. The sleazy end up noble. The helpful are dupes. The clueless are shrewd. It’s important to consider not only what we know, but from what perspective we learned it, what we’ve seen and what we’ve only heard. Fincher deftly navigates the script’s developing mysteries and twists with a dread as steady as his eye for accumulating detail, even if some of the plot devices come across as only that.

In the center remain the couple, the husband left behind and the wife who is missing. They’re each playing a role in this case, exposing their lives to the world and leaving it up to the media’s interpretation. They weren’t perfect. They weren’t happy. They left New York crushed by the recession to take root in the Midwest, and found their seemingly perfect lives crack under the pressure. Selfish motives filled the cracks and pulled them apart. And now this. Now what?

Affleck and Pike play complicated roles that develop from stock types into richly complicated contradictions. They are both convincing as normal people trapped in a marriage that’s nearing a turning point, and heightened genre constructs heading towards a startling conclusion. Fincher gets them playing the easily digestible surfaces and the roiling ugliness underneath, hanging everything out for us to see them fully. The better to twist the plot in directions that are as surprising as they are sickening. The resulting gender politics are queasy, either sloppy or too clever and more than a little troubling in the ways it plays into a sexist’s worst nightmare assumptions. But the performances carry the film over anyway. It’s worth puzzling over because of how ice cold complicated the actors manage to be, by steering into the ugliest aspects of their characters.

Our culture values easy surface details and convenient narratives. They let us avoid the need to look further, think more deeply. In Gone Girl, there are those exploiting this for their own benefit. And I’m not just talking about the villain(s). (I’m being purposely vague there.) The cops make assumptions. The media finds easy targets. It’s easy to frame people, mislead the public, and obscure the obvious. Public relations becomes a way to win a case, or at least wriggle out of suspicion. Even Amy’s parents turned her childhood into a series of idealized kids’ books, then enjoyed conflating the character and their daughter for financial gain.

So it’s not merely a story of lurid violence and voyeuristic chills with fear mongering, although that’s certainly exploited here. (The film’s closer to De Palma than Hitchcock, if you catch my drift.) It’s also a movie about psychological damage of many kinds, drawing upsetting conclusions about the lengths people will go to appear good, to appear innocent, to get what they want and look right in others’ eyes. Why else would a do-gooder snap a selfie at a vigil, then get offended when asked to delete? She wants proof of appearances for her own use, no matter how unsettled or difficult it leaves those in her wake. It’s a film full of such troubling details.

Being so detail-oriented, Fincher makes films with impeccable craftsmanship of the highest order. Handsomely photographed and hermetically sealed, Gone Girl looks and moves like hard-edged blockbuster pulp, confident, prurient, and expensive. And yet it’s a wholly pessimistic and scathingly misanthropic Hollywood thriller, an eerily beautiful and darkly funny poison pill swallowed straight into the heart of our chaotic frivolousness. It resolves thematically with a chilling snap, leaving its implications dangling, lingering, and staining. What’s going on inside the minds of others? You can think you know someone, but once you learn the truth, there’s no unknowing.

Lions, Tigers, and Bears: WE BOUGHT A ZOO

Cameron Crowe is the kind of writer-director who can manufacture moments so broad and sentimental, then deploy them with such total earnestness (accompanied with a tasteful mix-tape of a soundtrack) that they work wonders. Remember John Cusack holding the boombox under Ione Skye’s window in Say Anything? Tom Cruise telling Renée Zellweger that she “had him from hello” in Jerry Maguire? A group of rockers and their teenage embedded reporter having an impromptu Elton John sing-along on the tour bus in Almost Famous? These are moments of great magic that could have gone wrong in lesser hands, but when Crowe’s films sing, they really sing. There’s so much heart and humanity coursing through the films that they create comfortable places to settle into. Even when characters are running into problems, there’s a sense of a warm, gentle humanist spirit that will take care of them.

I should have remembered all of that when I went into Crowe’s first film in six years, We Got a Zoo. Instead, I had low expectations. It’s a comedy/drama based on a true story and featuring cute kids and lots of animals. I was worried the film would be too schmaltzy, too gooey sweet, too simple and formulaic. And it is, to a certain extent. But what surprised me was how caught up in it all I found myself. It’s hardly a subtle film, but it’s a comforting one all the same. It’s a movie with heavy material handled with the lightest of touches. It’s such a calm, warm, sunny film that it’s a pleasure to simply bask in it for two hours.

The film is about Benjamin Mee (Matt Damon) a new widower with two kids, a young teen son (Colin Ford) and a seven-year-old daughter (Maggie Elizabeth Jones). Crowe makes a film about grief and mourning that isn’t all that concerned with the immediate aftermath of a death. Instead, this is a film that recognizes that life moves on whether you’re ready for it or not. They’re not. They’re still very much grieving, floundering under the demands of day-to-day life. Benjamin has quit his job. The son is moody and misbehaving; for this he has been expelled. The daughter, sweet as she can be, is nonetheless troubled in her own way. Hearing the sounds of a late night party next door she finds her dad and tells him “their happy is too loud.” The Mees need a change of pace.

Out house hunting, the realtor (J.B. Smoove) shows them a nice property that he warns has complications. They fall in love with the house and its vast expanse of fields. The complications? It’s a zoo shut down by state regulators. If there’s no buyer willing to fund and run the zoo, the animals will be sent away in a permanent fashion. Summoning up his courage – and his pocketbook – and against the advice of his brother (Thomas Haden Church), Mr. Mee buys the house and the zoo right along with it. His daughter is thrilled. His son is very much less so. Suddenly, they’re the owners of a lion, tigers, and a bear (and, oh my, zebras, peacocks, snakes, monkeys, and more). The workers that come with the zoo, including the young, passionate zookeeper (Scarlett Johansson), are just glad the place will open back up and the animals will remain under their care.

This is a film about rebuilding a zoo and rebuilding a family. The zoo’s employees become a kind of second family for the Mees as they try to rebuild their lives in a new place without their wife and mother. I would have liked to learn a little more about the actual process of running the zoo, which would have given more screen time to other zoo employees like Patrick Fugit and Angus Macfadyen. But that’s a minor quibble in a film that’s only interested in what owning the zoo means for the characters. It’s sprinkled with lovely little bits of acting and wonderful moments of soft cinematic delight. Its approach to mourning is a small wonder in a moment when a photo comes to life with a full memory or when a simple story can bring back the lost loved one, if only for an instant. Damon and the rather wonderful child actors sell these moments, yes, but they achieve a kind of visual power as well. Without a single proper flashback, the extent of their loss is felt.

As these characters try to move forward – Damon throws himself into the zoo and is a little startled by his hesitant feelings towards Johansson, his son develops a crush on the zoo volunteer next door (Elle Fanning), his daughter falls in love with the animals – there’s naturally some tension to be felt and life lessons to be learned. But what makes this film so satisfying is the way Crowe sets up an interesting situation in which the characters are all likable. (Well, except for the token jerk zoo inspector who exists solely to give the film some small semblance of deadline-based conflict). Little aspects of character work ring so true (I was particularly taken with Johansson’s halting, rushed pronunciation of Mr. Mee’s name, “Ben-jamin,”as she remembers his preference). I genuinely wanted to see things turn out well for each and every one of them. This is essentially a warm, broad, sweet embrace of a movie. I felt myself settling in to enjoy it as if it were cinematic comfort food.