Unlove Song: THE LAST FIVE YEARS

Telling the story of a failed marriage, The Last Five Years is a musical two-hander. It’s sung through, trading perspectives between spouses with each new number. This gives it a good sense of balance, starting with Cathy (Anna Kendrick) lamenting the end of a relationship, before launching into a back-and-forth chronology that shows us Jamie (Jeremy Jordan) at the beginning of their time together. Then it keeps switching as their overlapping timelines cross in the middle and then leave them on opposite sides once again. Yanking us between the good times and the bad, it attempts to dissect what went wrong, juxtaposing happy rushes of love, domesticity, and success with frustrations, arguments, and difficulties. Adapted by writer-director Richard LaGravenese from Jason Robert Brown’s Off-Broadway play, the results are small, cramped, low-budget intimacy decorated with cutesy theatrical flourishes. I found it mostly irritating.

But if you have to spend 90 musical minutes with a couple, it may as well be Kendrick and Jordan. Both accomplished Broadway performers, they’re terrific singers who know how to modulate their performances for film. They’re big and tuneful, but carry the light touch of film acting, knowing when a small shift of eyes will sell a feeling just as well as projecting to the back row. I can only imagine how unendurable the film would be without them. As it is, the plotting lets the audience in on the futility of the relationship immediately, emphasizing the disjunction that was always there, which makes the entire experience one of watching charming Kendrick stuck in a doomed marriage that never seems worth it. Sure, they had love, but we can read the early warning signs she muddles past. Such ironies are meant to be insightful, but I couldn’t take satisfaction reading hindsight.

There are fleeting minutes of enjoyment, a few hummable bars here and there, but it’s a blur of melody that started sounding awfully samey to me. It’s monotonous musically and emotionally, especially once you get the hang of its flip-flopping chronology. The couple’s moments of happiness – he signs a book deal, she works at a summer theater, they get married and move in together – are sickly sweet. Their arguments are bickering that’s supposed to be real and raw, but are instead just vague specificities, Mad Lib style conflict. Kendrick plays blushing excitement and exhausted frustration well, and Jordan, to his credit, leans into his character’s insufferable clichés, like a wandering eye, and a big ego brought about by early success. (Is the line “He’s like a young Jonathan Franzen!” foreshadowing?)

But their enervating disagreements are just as hard to sit through as their lovey-dovey syrupy good times. LaGravenese films their numbers with the usual American-indie faux casual looseness, but layers in some theatrical conceits – backup dancers, breakaway walls, dramatic lighting – to emphasize important moments. It’s fine, but never rings true. The film made a break straight for my last nerve and scraped away for the duration. I found it irritating, not just for how little it worked on me, but also for how much I wanted to like it – we don’t get too many musicals these days.

Creature Features: BEAUTIFUL CREATURES

Rare is the film adaptation of the first book in a young adult series that tells a full and complete story in and of itself. Rarer still is the Hollywood spectacle that’s about a young woman realizing her potential to make her own destiny and take charge of her own powers. That Beautiful Creatures is a good example of both is some kind of minor miracle of popcorn filmmaking. In broad strokes the film about a mysterious new girl (Alice Englert) and the good-natured local boy (Alden Ehrenreich) who is drawn in by what makes her different is like many teen paranormal romances that have popped up in recent years drifting off of the success of all kinds of roughly congruent hits and fads. But in the specifics, this film sets itself apart by being full of local color, fizzles of real danger and a romance that works all the better for how relaxed and casual it feels. It’s not burdened by haphazard world building or overpowered by a flimsy urgency derived from True Love. It’s a pop horror fantasy, a piece of Southern Gothic that devours the Twilight template for the better.

It’s sharper and more literary than you’d think with flashes of wit and an embrace of the concept’s creepiness. The movie tips its hand with an early shot of a Vonnegut novel in the male lead’s hands. (I’m not saying it’s as good as Vonnegut, just that it’s in the ballpark.) He’s Ethan, a smart high school kid who is mourning the death of his mother. He’s interested in good books – or at least all the ones banned by the moralizing busybodies in this small South Carolina backwoods town. (Nice details of the production design are the empty Amazon envelopes sitting next to the stacks of books in his room.) He’s also interested in getting out of town as soon as he can by applying to any and every college that’s at least 1000 miles away. “Go to hell,” a local goody goody girl snaps at him, meaning every word of it. “I’d like to stop off at New York first,” is his smirking reply. But soon he has reason to stay, at least for a little while, as he tries to get to know Lena Duchannes, a sullen, pretty girl who arrives to live in the town’s biggest, most secretive house with her uncle, the reclusive Macon Ravenwood (Jeremy Irons), a man the town gossips about freely since he’s never around to disprove their conjectures.

The leads here are fun, charismatic, likable young performers. Ehrenreich, so good in Francis Ford Coppola’s Tetro, has a looseness to his affable screen presence here. He’s easy to like and root for. He has a good match in Englert, daughter of the great director Jane Campion. She seems otherworldly; her dark eyes look out of a pale face as if possessed with a secret. That sense of mystery is what leads the boy, and by extension the audience, to want to learn more about her. They haven’t known each other for very long when Lena’s family arrives from out of town, including a sashaying, bewitching Emmy Rossum and a flashily bewigged flibbertigibbet Margo Martindale, ready to perform some of kind of secret ritual. As the full extent of the family’s cursed history and paranormal powers come into play as writer-director Richard LaGravenese’s script (from Kami Garcia and Margaret Stohl’s novel) springs mostly satisfying supernatural surprises, the movie becomes pleasantly complicated with stakes that matter.

As Philipe Rousselot's fine cinematography captures a stormy, puzzling battle of forces both good and bad as it clouds the skies behind the humble downtown, the swaying weeping willows and creepy gated manors, the film never loses sight or shies away from the fact that it’s also a solid chunk of cheese on which veteran performers can chew. There are darkly murky, occasionally unconvincing, special effects that are whipped up whenever the beautiful creatures begin threatening each other, but the best effect of all is the sight of Jeremy Irons gravely scratching out ominous monologues and heavy pronouncements of exposition. The town also has a sharp-tongued Bible thumper played by Emma Thompson, who plays up her down-to-earth antagonism with real relish, a pure actorly delight that really ramps up after her character goes through a devilish transformation of sorts. Also on hand is a wise librarian played by Viola Davis, who gets a few juicy scenes of her own, although she plays it in a lower register than the scene chewers dancing around her.

LaGravenese, whose work on such films as Freedom Writers and P.S., I Love You didn’t prepare me for how good this picture is, finds an appealing genre groove, making the metaphors work for him as he plays out a darkly simmering story of young adult fiction in an uncommonly compelling way. What’s most satisfying is how it starts as the story of a local boy intrigued by an outsider girl that slowly shifts to being her story. It’s a shift in perspective that’s welcome, especially as the movie starts with his narration and, by the end, includes a voice over from her, taking charge and finishing her part of the story herself. Though it’s largely a fun, mildly goofy, effects-embellished, teen-centric, small-town horror fantasy with a sizable dose of low-key romance, it’s also a movie about how society claims and labels certain types of women as good or bad and what it takes for young women to take charge and make their own decisions about who they want to be. That it manages to be all things at once and for the most part get away with it too is something worth noting, even celebrating.

Ladies and Gentlemen, Boys and Girls: WATER FOR ELEPHANTS

Water for Elephants is based on a bestselling novel by Sara Gruen that has been recommended to me on a handful of occasions. For all I know, it’s a good read. The movie adaptation scripted by Richard LaGravenese, however, is a total snooze. I felt myself leaning closer to the screen, trying desperately to connect with the movie and yet enjoyment stayed frustratingly out of reach. The story seemed to be of interest but the telling muddles it.

It’s an awfully pretty movie, though, featuring gorgeous cinematography from Rodrigo Prieto who has also contributed his skills to such other (better) pretty features as 25th Hour, Brokeback Mountain, and Broken Embraces. It’s also a fairly charming throwback, a circus picture, or to put it even more accurately, a run-away-and-join-the-circus picture. To get away with this narrative, the story is set in the Great Depression. Star Robert Pattinson plays a young man who drops out of college due to tragic circumstances within his family and hops the rails, ending up on a train carrying a circus from town to town.

This particular circus is struggling, but luckily Pattinson has just the skills necessary to help them out. He didn’t drop out of just any college; he dropped out of a veterinary program. This endears him to the abusive owner and ringmaster (the great Christoph Waltz) who hires him to take care of the menagerie of animals, including a difficult new acquisition in the form of an aging elephant. The trick rider in the circus is the owner’s younger wife (Reese Witherspoon), who grows to love the elephant almost as much as she does its new caretaker.

I thought this kind of Hollywood filmmaking had gone extinct after it peaked somewhere between Disney’s 1941 Dumbo and DeMille’s 1952 Oscar-winner The Greatest Show on Earth. This new film is a handsomely mounted romance set against the danger and spectacle of an equally extinct form of showbiz. They just don’t make the circus like they used to, which was dangerous and a bit of a rip-off. They just don’t make these kinds of movies anymore, either. I guess that Hollywood has forgotten how. Or more accurately, this specific collection of talent can’t make it work this time.

The stiff script buries its leads under its underwhelming leadenness. Pattinson, who has been stuck in the Twilight series, has yet to prove his acting chops and is given no help here. Witherspoon, without her typical bubbly charm, barely registers. Waltz, Hans Landa himself, is quite good but muted as the film’s source of menace. There’s a tepid love triangle that develops between the three of them, but it barely registers. It’s a plot that’s acted out rather than felt.

The blame here would have to fall to director Francis Lawrence. He can stage a good-looking film but he doesn’t do anything to elevate the script he’s given and doesn’t do much to help his cast navigate it. The film’s a bit of a departure for him, though, with his previous feature being the good 2007 Will-Smith-is-the-last-man-on-Earth thriller I Am Legend. In that case, Lawrence used a simple, gripping plot, created a nice tone and had basically one actor to work with. Here he has a larger cast and a duller script. It’s a film of pictures and moments rather than momentum and emotion. It wants to be a three-ring middlebrow melodrama but I could barely muster up one ring’s worth of interest.