Just His Luck: THE LUCKY ONE

By now, after the likes of The Notebook, Dear John, The Last Song, and more, the ingredients needed for making a Nicolas Sparks adaptation are awfully predictable. You need sun-dappled Southern beaches prone to thematically relevant rainstorms. You need an earnest, but troubled young man and a beautiful, suffering young woman. You need a wise, loving, but imperfect parental figure and a precocious little kid. All of the above must have somewhat tragic backstories and be prone to misunderstandings. The plot needs miscommunications and romantic obstacles and a conclusion that’s deeply romantic with moldy notes of melancholy. Death of a major minor character is optional but encouraged. The ingredients are then tossed in a pot (along with corn and cheese) and cooked until they’re a good, thick mush.

The newest iteration is The Lucky One. The earnest, troubled young man is Zac Efron. He plays a Marine who finds a picture in the Iraqi desert and, while he walks over to pick it up, narrowly escapes a deadly explosion The picture shows a good-looking blonde (Taylor Schilling) smiling in front of a lighthouse. He decides it’s a good luck charm. When his tours of duty are over, he heads back to the States, determined to find the woman in the picture and thank her in person. If it weren’t for that photo, he’d surely be dead.

He finds her rather quickly upon his arrival in a small, rural Louisiana town. She owns, works and lives at a dog shelter with her loving and supportive grandmother (Blythe Danner, underused here) and talented, but self-conscious young son (Riley Thomas Stewart).  But, for reasons of drawing this thing out to feature length, Efron can’t bring himself to tell them why he’s arrived. Instead, the ex-Marine gets hired to help out, which leads to several scenes of Efron moping about while starting a rusty tractor, hammering a broken gutter back into place, and dragging away fallen branches. You see, he’s going to fix their lives. It’s a metaphor. Get it?

The adaption by Will Fetters doesn’t think you will. In fact, the script is so simple-minded that it thinks incident will pass for plot and arbitrary events will pass for characterization. It’s a movie that relies on characters not telling each other important information and, when presented with new revelations, they will assume the worst about each other. And then, when things are finally straightened out, when characters actually open up to each other, the very important conflicts just fizzle out as if they never were a problem at all. But we just spent an hour or whatever watching characters dance around these problems, fretting over what amounts to nothing. From the first shot they share, it’s achingly obvious that Efron and Schilling will fall in love and live happily ever after. The only convincing reason to delay the obvious with unbelievable obstacles is to make sure the story takes 100 minutes to tell.

Take the character of the woman’s ex-husband (Jay R. Ferguson), for example. He’s comically threatening with a bunch of traits that make it seem like he was created from a checklist of nasty clichés. He’s an abusive, alcoholic, jealous, condescending cop with high-level connections within the local government. He’s not much of a character beyond a collection of traits targeted to provide maximum disruption in what would otherwise be a plot almost entirely without conflict. He’s a distraction; the only purpose he serves is, like Efron’s decision not to reveal his lucky charm, simply a way to keep the movie going. When the ex-husband has finally outlived his purpose in the plot, he’s written out in a comically overwrought and underwritten way that’s supposed to be a Big Moment, but is in fact just an atonal cop out.

The whole endeavor is directed by Scott Hicks, a filmmaker who has, in the past, helmed glossy prestige projects, adaptations of true stories (Shine and The Boys Are Back) and novels (Snow Falling on Cedars and Hearts in Atlantis). He doesn’t (and probably couldn’t) do much with the material besides keeping things moving and looking competent on a technical level. The cast hardly elevates things either. Efron has little experience in carrying a drama and it shows. He’s never convincing as an ex-Marine and his way of projecting inner turmoil is by keeping his face as still and expressionless as possible. Still, he’s far better here than in Charlie St. Cloud, that drippy movie from a few years ago about a kid who plays catch with the ghost of his dead little brother. Schilling, for her part, has a scene where she laughs and cries at the same time, which, if nothing else, proves that her scary, emotionless lead performance in the worst movie of last year, Atlas Shrugged: Part 1, was in all likelihood a purposeful decision to help reveal the lunacy of that project from within it.

But maybe the filmmakers didn’t want me sitting there thinking about even worse movies that Efron and Schilling have made. They probably weren’t expecting me to sit there thinking about much at all beyond caring about the characters and their situations. But I just wasn’t invested in anything that was happening on screen. Even when Efron and Schilling break their long, dull flirtation with a heavy-duty, fully-clothed make-out scene under an outdoor shower, it plays less like an expression of romantic tension, and more like another box to be checked. The movie’s so thin, programmatic and uneventful that I had difficulty remembering what happened in it even minutes after it was over.

Radical Therapy: THE BEAVER

The Beaver is a film with good ideas, good performances, and good effort, but it doesn’t add up to a good movie. It’s nearly there, but not quite. I enjoyed each individual piece, to a point, but there’s a sense that with just a bit more prodding, with a push just a bit farther, the whole could be much more than good. It could even be great. Instead, we’re stuck nearly there. We can see greatness from here even if we can’t quite reach it.

In the film Mel Gibson plays Walter Black, a deeply depressed and alcoholic executive of a failing toy company. When we first see him, he’s presented as a man who once was a huge success but has had his professional reputation and personal relationships crippled by his mental illness. Because of the resonances with Gibson’s personal life that have left him an incredibly unpopular figure – his alcoholism, his abusiveness, his signs of mental illness – this dark comedy gets off too a painfully realistic start. Walter’s wife (Jodie Foster) and two sons, one a moody teenager (Anton Yelchin), the other a precocious grade-schooler (Riley Thomas Stewart), are starting to think he won’t get better. He spends all of his spare time, and most of his workday, sleeping when he’s not trudging along barely alert.

After a bungled suicide attempt, Walter finds himself talking through a beaver puppet that he pulled out of a dumpster. The beaver talks to him, encourages him, and gets him back to a state of confidence and alertness that his family and his colleagues find surprising in its speed and its apparent insanity. Walter walks through life a new man, almost literally. He wears the puppet on his hand at all times, speaking through it and for it in a thick brogue. It’s a complicated dance of identity and neurosis.

Gibson is playing two characters that are also two aspects of one character. It’s tricky territory, at once darkly funny and bleakly emotional, but Gibson pulls it off in a truly good performance. It’s not easy, but its power comes not just from its novelty or level of difficulty. This is some fine acting. Also quite good is the supporting cast that surrounds the central joke and dysfunction of the film. Foster (who also directs) is nicely rattled yet hopeful about it all and little Riley Thomas Stewart is awfully cute.

Meanwhile, Yelchin gets a fairly meaty subplot featuring a romance with a fellow high-schooler played by Jennifer Lawrence. So good in last year’s Winter’s Bone, Lawrence plays her character with a wounded fragility covered up by her cheerleader valedictorian status. She and Yelchin have an easy, unforced chemistry. Unfortunately, their story is neither fleshed out enough to be a compelling subplot nor satisfying enough to be merely a sweet footnote. They’re good enough to deserve a movie all their own.

The movie is swamped by the story of Walter Black. All else fades into the background, much like the presence of Gibson has distracted press from the actual movie itself. Walter sets the tone of it all, a dark, depressive sadness that leeches through its outer covering of quirk. Kyle Killen’s screenplay takes strange turns and is loaded up with obvious symbolism (sticky-notes listing similarities between two characters, a hole in the wall, a memory box, a paper-mache brain) and overly explanatory emotional reveals which have characters just flat out speaking their feelings in improbably ways. Foster’s solid direction holds things together, but the film ultimately doesn’t add up. There was so much to like about what was on screen that I almost couldn’t believe it when the credits rolled and I felt the whole thing come up empty.