Family Business: THE PHOENICIAN SCHEME

In a filmography full of flawed father figures, there’s a good case to make for The Phoenician Scheme’s Anatole Zsa-Zsa Korda (Benicio del Toro) as the most flawed Wes Anderson father yet. He’s a rapacious international tycoon, brazenly skirting laws and regulations to exploit the world by any means necessary for his business interests. Those interests? Getting more. Little wonder his cold disregard for others leaves him dodging assassination attempts. They’re so frequent he practically yawns as he shrugs off others’ concerns about dangerous developments. “Myself, I feel very safe.” That we’ve seen an employee of his literally exploded in half in the opening moments makes us wonder where he finds that sense of safety. But it nonetheless must be this sense of mortality that drives him to invite his estranged daughter Liesl (Mia Threapleton) for a visit where he insists she leave her intention to become a nun and instead be his official heir. He takes her, and a nerdy tutor-turned-assistant (Michael Cera) on a whirlwind tour of a fictional Middle Eastern country. At each stop he renegotiates with various scoundrels and business interests (a diverse group including Tom Hanks, Riz Ahmed, Jeffrey Wright, Scarlett Johansson, Benedict Cumberbatch, and more) to fund parts of an enormous real estate and public works project that he claims will be his legacy. Of course he brings gifts to grease the wheels: complimentary hand grenades. 

You may at this point have suspected that this sounds a little harsher than the usual Wes Anderson picture. Indeed, it is his coldest picture, with a hard edge and, despite his usual visual whimsical specificity, little of his obvious sentimentality. Even his masterful Grand Budapest Hotel, with its parable of encroaching fascism, found a bit more lightness in its step. Here the characters speak in the deadest of deadpan, extreme even for his style, and the emotion buried deep within is deeper still. Sure, the film is stuffed with his usual love of still-life, dioramas, old-fashioned effects, and mid-century frippery, contained in his dryly funny framing and hyper-specific structural eccentricity. (This one is built out of a series of plans kept in small, ornate boxes.) One goes to a Wes Anderson film to delight all over again at his cohesive and coherent style or one doesn’t go at all. But here in The Phoenician Scheme he’s taking a hard look at a bad man and asking what could stop the greed in his heart. All of the capitalists, con men, and crooks he meets have some stage of the same affliction. Greed is an insatiable monster. Contemplating the monster makes for a movie that’s darkly cynical, with violence tossed off as casual gags and an imperious Del Toro unflappably determined to bulldoze any obstacle in his way. In true Wes Anderson fashion, he has an intricately imagined procession of obstacles and eccentrics to reveal along that route. Is there hope for Korda? Perhaps the only thing that’ll make a bad man even a little bit better is if he could possibly be forced to have nothing at all. 

Unfortunately, Korda’s in the business of more, more, more, and has a habit of corrupting all relationships toward this aim. This gives the movie an interest in the state of the soul, with religion and business and politics twisting around for purchase in materialistic persons. It’s a movie filled with schemers surrounded by paintings and literature and classical music. What beauty could a businessman possibly leave behind? Contemplating mortality, this spiritual dimension is underlined by the movie’s most startling and moving element: visions of an afterlife in blocky black-and-white where bearded sages, deceased family, and God himself sit in judgement of Korda. Whether or not his near-death experiences could help him come to a sense of self-improvement is up in the air. Like Royal Tenenbaum and Steve Zissou before him, Anatole Korda thinks he has it all figured out and needs no such self-reflection, convinced that he’s the father who knows best. But his daughter challenges him to be more of an actual, not just a theoretical, father figure, even if he may have murdered her mother. The ways in which their personalities collide and converge is a source of interest in the movie which clearly has lineage and legacy on its mind. Korda also makes mention of an unseen late father of his own whose influences on his son continue to reverberate in his decisions. (That lends poignant echoes to the short conversation which he has with God. Oh, how sons are treated.) The movie, though clever and bemused, is not as immediately lovable as Wes Anderson’s best works, so wedded as it is to its discomfiting, closed-off characters. But the ending finds Korda’s logic collapsing, and there just might be tentative hope in the wreckage.

Dark Side: ROGUE ONE

Rogue One takes what could’ve been trivial noodling around in Star Wars lore and turns it into a proficient sci-fi action movie building to intimations of grand space operatic tragedy. It’s the second film made after creator George Lucas sold his remarkable galaxy to Disney, who have thus far been studious, respectful, and cautious custodians. Instead of an idiosyncratic vision from one artist’s mind, it’s a committee polishing up effective fan service. (At least the emphasis is on “effective.”) For promising new narrative future, this latest film has nothing on last year’s The Force Awakens, with its immediately vibrant new personalities and their lingering unresolved promise: the simmering twisted villain Kylo Ren and fresh Force heroine Rey. But in staging Star Wars-ian action, Rogue One is the more complete experience, with a beginning, middle, and end, a style more efficiently beholden to what came before without strain, and a tone more willing to fit the enormity of the sacrifice in this conflict. It’s overly engineered to be a gleaming widget, fitting seamlessly into the larger franchise plan instead of springing from a singular revelation. But at least this is still a film that dreams a little bigger than most blockbuster product, playing in a hugely enjoyable and intricately imagined fantastical universe with some sense of the painful struggle to resisting brutal fascism.

This entry tells a big, confident tale of a dark corner of the galactic conflict we’d long known about but never seen: the process by which the Rebel Alliance discovered the existence of the super-weapon Death Star and stole plans that’ll end up given by Princess Leia to R2-D2 in the 1977 original’s opening moments. A self-contained – despite the endless references and offshoots into other areas of franchise canon – and admirably scruffy combat heist film – think The Guns of Navarone…In Space!! – it has a motley diverse crew of insurgents striking back against the forces of an evil empire. Better symbols than characters, the underwritten rebels make decent action figures. Through swooping, crashing, clamorous adventure sequences across all manner of terrain – deserts, villages, space stations, jungles, and tropical beaches – they fight. Reluctant rebel Jyn Erso (Felicity Jones) joins a spy (Diego Luna), a comic-relief combat robot (Alan Tudyk), an Imperial defector (Riz Ahmed), and two monk-like warriors (legendary Chinese action stars Donnie Yen and Wen Jiang bringing fun choreography). Their mission: contact her father (Mads Mikkelsen), an unhappy Imperial scientist who knows how to take the Death Star down.

This leads to varied action beats, like an ambush in a far-flung marketplace, a mountainous recon mission in a downpour, and a dizzying dogfight above a gleaming citadel. Along the way we learn a little more about the Rebellion than the earlier films had time to explore, with different factions of the Alliance debating battle plans and how to deal with extremists (like an under-used Forest Whitaker) in their midst. This mirrors the Empire’s side, as a commander (Ben Mendelsohn) fights off the life-and-death office politics of battle-station life. The script, pieced together by four credited contributors (Chris Weitz, Tony Gilroy, Gary Whitta, and John Knoll) juggles the movie’s hard-charging tough-minded warfare with hit-and-miss cameos, fun one-liners, smart retcons, terse exposition, and shorthand emotion. That’s a lot of balls to keep in the air – and the strain sometimes shows, especially in the final product’s clearly tinkered dropped connections and foreshortened beats – but there’s fun to be had in the tactile look and crisp pace. There’s even a welcome commitment to feeling the losses, culminating in a staggering shot of good characters embracing certain doom knowing they’ve done all they could to win some small hope for their cause.

Although this is a side story, a spin-off, it’s identifiably Star Wars in its concern with family dramas writ large in galactic conflict and a sense of spirituality amidst tactics, plus gearhead love of spaceships taking off and landing and fantasy anthropologist appreciation of interesting creatures and beasties. (We get all the old familiar X-Wings and TIE Fighters and fish-heads and tentacle-haired beings, as well as slick new designs and goofy new aliens, like a massive Force-sensitive slug used as a lie-detector test.) Plus it has a key insight to style the cast like they’re actors from the 70’s – shaggy hair, groovy mustaches – playing the characters. Though cinematographer Greig Fraser shot gorgeous location photography and ILM filled it up with top-of-the-line digital fakery, it has the scuffed retro-future look of the original trilogy, like a modern re-creation of a 70’s vision. The much-ballyhooed lived-in universe aesthetic of Lucas’s original trilogy still draws visual appeal because it’s so densely designed. It proves there’s still a sense you could find a fascinating new story around every corner in every frame of this series. It also proves once more director Gareth Edwards (of 2014’s great Godzilla) is a master popcorn image-maker (despite many eye-popping shots featured in trailers ending up on the cutting room floor).

The movie works best when it has soaring spectacle clued into the enormity of its scale – a shuttle dwarfed by a planet behind it, the orbiting Death Star creating a solar eclipse, a city destroyed by laser-blast sending enormous shockwaves ripping up surrounding terrain in waves, and massive space structures colliding in the way everyone has played with the toys has dreamed about. But even in the moments when it’s merely workmanlike – or overworked franchise caretaking – it has some of the appeal the old Expanded Universe paperbacks did, varying in quality but consistently a drip, drip, drip of more, more, more for fans. It has all the bells and whistles, the immediately identifiable sound effects, music cues, and visual hallmarks of the series, even if it now has an over-polished committee’s recreation of what was once a singular personal pulp remix. The best thrills – a sensational final battle like something out of N64’s Rogue Squadron video game – feature dazzling effects and action better staged than Abrams’. It may still be imitation Lucas – or maybe imitation Kershner at this point – but it’s sturdy and entertaining nonetheless.

JASON BOURNE Again

Matt Damon last played Jason Bourne in 2007, when The Bourne Ultimatum closed out a thrilling, cohesive action trilogy – and the character’s central drive – with the amnesiac rouge black ops agent learning the truth of his identity and exposing associated CIA misdeeds. Director Paul Greengrass said that he thought Bourne’s story was done, saying further sequels starring the character should be called “The Bourne Redundancy.” That’s why the fourth film was The Bourne Legacy, a terrific spinoff focused on a different agent who grows a conscience that puts him at odds with his agency handlers, which found writer-director Tony Gilroy deftly expanding the scope and possibilities for the future of the franchise. But now, somehow, the fifth time around has lured Greengrass and Damon back for more in the bluntly titled Jason Bourne. It’s a step backwards into the series’ comfort zone. Is there a good new story to tell about this character nearly a decade after we left him? Not particularly. But at least it has a decent grinding competency about it, a solid sense of shaky contemporary paranoia, and a couple great action shots.

Bourne, having spent the better part of ten years off the grid and on the run in the farthest overlooked corners of the world, is suddenly pulled back into the world of espionage and globetrotting skullduggery when an old ally (Julia Stiles) tracks him down. She’s uncovered yet another dirty secret about the CIA’s past involvement in his life. So off he goes, leaving his existence of lonely uncommunicativeness and earning money through backwater underground fighting, to once more look determinedly through binoculars, walk with grave purpose through patient multi-step traps and rendezvous, and slowly work his way into confrontation with the suits who conspire against him. Playing like an unnecessary epilogue to an already complete character arc, the new movie nonetheless operates from a baseline competency not unlike its protagonist’s. All superfluous movies should strive for such slick watchability. It’s restrained and methodical and, when all is said and done, accomplishes very little. But everyone involved is too much of a pro to let it be without some entertainment.

Greengrass, who also co-wrote with editor Christopher Rouse, has a handle on the mood of the piece, and is able to sustain mild interest in dependable scenes of great actors plotting and scheming and debating what to do while they glower at screens and bark into cell phones. He has Tommy Lee Jones as the agency’s director playing a sad-eyed cynic, a part that’d be described as a Tommy Lee Jones-like part if a lesser actor had been cast. He wants Bourne hunted down and to do so activates another in the series’ endless supply of covert killers (Vincent Cassel this time). Then there’s Alicia Vikander, the fresh-faced ingénue straight from a string of much better roles (like in Ex Machina, The Man from UNCLE, and an Oscar-winning turn in The Danish Girl). Here she's an ambitious young agent in normcore clothes who is determined to bring Bourne back into the fold instead of leaving him dead in the street. Elsewhere is Riz Ahmed (Nightcrawler, The Night Of, and other projects without the word “night” in the title) as a slick tech CEO whose Silicon Valley startup is entangled in the plot for reasons of token timeliness.

These actors, and Stiles (who doesn’t have enough to do, but that’s true of every movie for nearly 10 years now), go a long way to grounding the thin, insubstantial plot in something like weighty gravitas. They carry scenes of endless exposition by making it believable that these characters would speak to each other in terse jargon-filled exchanges of information. Damon, for his part, shows up after a rigorous workout all muscle, and keeps his head down, mostly silent with a few bursts of interrogation. He’s determination incarnate. Greengrass bookends the film in outbursts of violence and action, the first an escape through a riot in Greece that’s merely hectic, the finale a slam-bang car chase that includes a hijacked armored SWAT van plowing through a traffic jam in a most impressive display of stuntwork. It’s filmed, as you’d expect, in impressionistic smears of chaos cinema, a shaking camera and quick editing that are less precise here than the Bournes have previously been, but it gets the job done.

The least in the series, Jason Bourne is nonetheless a reasonably competent thriller coasting on affection for its predecessors. It’s a pleasure to be back in the recurring ideas and images of these films. The paranoid surveillance plotting can’t undo the comfort food elements of clever prop use in action beats, people snapping orders into headsets, hackers typing furiously, suits staring alternately intently or slack-jawed at screens and case files, Bourne talking on the phone to someone he’s watching through a scope, sudden blasts of gunfire, teeth-rattling car stunts, and Moby’s “Extreme Ways” playing us out into the end credits. The filmmakers’ bid to make the story matter either as a comment on our current world problems – “This could be worse than Snowden,” we hear twice – or to its characters lives – secrets even more closely intertwined with Bourne’s past – mostly falls flat. (That it repeats an inciting incident from The Bourne Supremacy is unfortunate, too.) And in the end the biggest surprise is how long it takes to have so little happen. But there’s that unstoppable competency driving everything along, elevating what could be totally disposable to the realm of passable diversion.

It Bleeds, It Leads: NIGHTCRAWLER

Nightcrawler is a slow burn thriller that gets the entirety of its suspense out of the electric sociopathy of its lead role. We first meet Louis Bloom stealing metal to sell for scrap. He’s desperate for employment, but possesses an eerie confidence, having pumped his head full of free online business courses, DIY sloganeering, self-help mumbo jumbo, and faux-MBA jargon. A chance encounter with a news crew starts the wheels in his head spinning. Soon, he’s roaming the Los Angeles night, police scanner running and camcorder at the ready, charging hard towards the first rung in the news business: collecting footage of accidents and violent crime for sale to the highest bidder. Because it’s clear that he’ll do anything to get ahead, and views people only as tools to either take advantage of or cast aside, this bottom-feeding can’t be good news for the rest of us. He’s a danger.

Jake Gyllenhaal plays Bloom in an intense, unforgiving performance that takes everything appealing and earnest (sometimes overly so) about his screen persona and turns it rotten. His driven, desperate mania is scary. This man is capable of the same Gyllenhaal ingratiating puppy dog eyes and easy grin, but they are made creepy by his intensity of focus and the vacant space where his ethics and empathy should be. With an arresting, unblinking calm, he walks through the picture with big bug eyes, a gaunt wiry frame, and stringy hair pulled back. He’s part Gordon Gekko, part Travis Bickle, greedy with delusions of grandeur. We don’t know what he’s capable of. He’s awkward, and that’s darkly funny, until it’s clear he could very well hurt someone.

It starts with sneaking past police tape into a home, the better to film the bullet holes in the fridge, right between the family photos he slides around to get a better shot. At a later scene, having arrived before the police, he drags a dead body into a smashed car’s headlights to get a better angle. He’s not a murderer, but that’s the only thing separating him from the serial killing cameraman of Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom. He grins as he films the bloody messes he scavenges the scanner for, sees the violence of man only as a way to make a buck. Luckily for him, the culture is ready to abet his efforts. He meets a night shift news editor for the lowest rated local news station in the area. They just might be able to help each other.

She (Rene Russo, as a shark we’re never sure whether to fear or pity, maybe both) is desperate to increase station ratings, but not so interested in hiring a new freelance film crew, until he brings her gory footage of a mugging victim bleeding out on a gurney. “Call us first,” she tells him, asking specifically for footage of rich white people wronged by people of color. (It’s what really gets the audience scared, and ready to tune in to hear more.) That’s all the encouragement he needs. He hires an assistant, a poor street kid (Riz Ahmed) who takes $30 a night under the table, to help navigate and identify crimes in progress. Together they roar down dark streets, swerving down highways and residential areas alike, chasing the sound of sirens and the distant sight of flashing lights. Their goal is to get as close as possible, as early as possible. Bloom wants better footage than his competitor (Bill Paxton). Ideally, he’ll get there before the cops to ensure that perfect, untouched, lurid Red Asphalt-style fearmongering for the morning news.

Screenwriter Dan Gilroy, who co-wrote Tarsem’s The Fall as well as such gleaming, polished Hollywood product as Real Steel and The Bourne Legacy, here makes his directorial debut. He has written and directed a spare, unsettling character study that bristles with the uncomfortable danger of madness that can sit within the hearts of desperate men, especially those warped by the American dream into monsters of capitalism, who hear “pursuit of happiness” and think “pursuit of profit,” then add “at any cost necessary.” It’s a picture of symbiotic, parasitic dynamics, a business that relies on relaying human misery that makes more money the bloodier and more frightening the footage. It’s the right place for this sociopath to make a mark. Gyllenhaal commits to the ugly irredeemable monster and Gilroy builds a world for him to stalk.

Gilroy has cinematographer Robert Elswit shoot L.A. from unflattering angles, finding strip malls, barren expressways, and rundown parking lots to stage their crime scenes. In between we pass streetlights, stoplights, headlights, briefly providing light to the dark. It’s an unsparingly nocturnal movie, the nighttime shot in the same digital haze Michael Mann’s been working with for a decade, detailed blackness and glow. Daytime is bright, filmic textures, a different world entirely. Bloom doesn’t fit there. He’s a creature of the night. Violence is framed through Bloom’s camera, keeping it largely just off screen, mediated by screens within screens. It emphasizes the disconnectedness this character feels, and emphasizes the eerie, disturbing dispassion. We’re pulled so swiftly into an uneasy worldview that as we’re inexorably moved deeper, tumbling down the slippery slope towards exploitation and obstruction of justice, it feels only natural. And that’s what makes the suspense so effective. How far will he go? How far will we let him?