Dead Reckoning: KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON

There’s a storm on the plains. Thunder and lightening rumble in the distance. Rain drops on the farmhouse in a steady drumbeat. The white man (Leonardo DiCaprio) goes to close a window. The indigenous woman (Lily Gladstone) stops him. The storm is powerful, she tells him. Give it your attention. It must be paid respect. And so they sit, she meditatively, he uncomfortably, as the rain falls. The sound fills the empty spaces in their awkward conversation, their fumbling flirtation. It’s a simple scene, and yet a key to understanding Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon. Here’s a movie about a metaphorical storm of violence and conspiracy and desire running through an Oklahoma community in the early 20th century. It gives us space to understand the conditions that created it, and the lasting consequences of it. The setting on the last bleeding vestiges of a wild west finds the moment when horses were traded for cars, fields for oil wells, and bartering for bank accounts. It’s a film about the transition, about beginnings and endings and who gets to lay claim to the land, and to the stories about it. Scorsese, always a director sharply interrogating human fallibility, fragility, and fearsome self-justification, here finds a moral righteousness driving underneath a knowing, provocative, and enveloping complexity. He finds the most staggering shifts of history sit squarely in the pressures of relationships and gestures.

It is a movie about real evil. It paints a damming portrait of the queasy intimate violence of greed and prejudice that built many a wealth in this country. It’s based a true story of an all-American evil—systematic murders in the early 20th century that chip away at the Osage tribe’s rights to Oklahoman oil money. We see a vibrant indigenous community living socially and economically intertwined with a rising white working class of maids and drivers and cooks and farmhands and bootleggers—and the wealthy white grifters rising to take advantage of them all. The wide frame, with ensembles in vintage attire and convincing locale looking for all the world like D.W. Griffith or John Ford had been building classical blocking in CinemaScope from day one, bustles with this activity of a society in flux. Notice how the scenes are full of Native Americans as the movie begins, and as it stretches on and on, the faces in the crowds are whiter and whiter. This time period finds freshly fading into the past the settlers’ mass exterminations and relocations of Native Americans in the poisoned name of Manifest Destiny. Now they’re in a stage of erasure as a more intimate kind—akin to domestic violence or terrorism. (No coincidence that the Klan has a big presence in the territory.) Here we see how a genocidal project can settle into a matter of encroachment. This is extermination by way of taking and taking and taking because it’s there and you want it and you can get away with it.

Scorsese locates deep-rooted pain of this history by making a sweeping movie that runs over three hours with a large cast and contains endless fascinating tributaries and details within its methodical momentum. He’s a filmmaker skilled with hard-charging historical panorama, sweeping scope in which he finds the up-close personal dynamics that drive the larger picture, whether with gangsters, financiers, filmmakers, priests, or Jesus. With Killers of the Flower Moon he situates, at the core, a real personal sense of betrayal. DiCaprio plays a World War I veteran returning stateside to work with his rich uncle (Robert De Niro). The older man is the one who suggests wooing Gladstone’s Osage woman. De Niro has never looked more sinister as an avuncular presence — loudly declaiming his support for the Osage, chummy condescension, while plotting their demise for the inheritance, and the insurance fraud. DiCaprio, for his part, has never let himself look more foolish, scrunching his face with the squint of half-comprehension, muttering and self-deceiving as he woos and eventually marries her and starts a family, without entirely understanding that his uncle hopes to murder the wife’s family to make sure their oil rights are passed to his. Does this husband love his wife more than money? The self-justification as he’s pulled deeper makes every tender moment with Gladstone all the more gripping and complicated and devastating. She plays the most multi-faceted role here, as a strong and observant woman who sees her friends and family die around her and yet is slow to implicate her own husband in her suffering. The stronger the love, the deeper the betrayal.

This is Scorsese at his best, as ever, with an ability to see a complicated world with clear-eyed understanding of its implications and resonances, and the supreme filmmaking skill to bring it to life in all its complexities. His emphatic camera moves and generous staging returns to his subjects of great moral complication and human nuance. His light touch with actors lets them get deeper, with richly textured performances and an easy rapport slipping easily between tenderness and toughness, dark laughs and darker depravity. It’s a story of crime and punishment, love and loss, ritual and art, religion and despair. The forward pull of its accumulating incident invites contemplation of the lingering effects of such tragedy. Here is history that’s not even a century old. We live with the after-effects. His telling overflows with memorable faces and enraging detail. He stages murders with vivid matter-of-fact brutality—a sudden pop, a splatter, a fall. He reveals culprits with a tilt of the camera or a quick, implicating cut. Because he draws out the humanity of its characters—lingering in uncomfortable grey areas with people making grave mistakes and planning, then taking, terrible action—it doesn’t allow us the comforting distance of historical perspective.

This picture has all the dimensions of historical horror, a potential for lurid melodrama held back by the restraint of cold, hard facts. It’s also a film that knows to explore the darkness that lurks in humanity, and the lengths to which people will go to build wealth and deny justice to their fellow man, is to explore its characters in all their dimensions. There’s immediacy to this discomfort. One of the darkest moments is an intimate domestic scene with a fire raging outside, their faces lit by flickering hellish orange through every window. Scorsese heightens the drama with this theatrical staging, and also looks close and sees them sweat. They’re only human, after all. We can’t safely put this in the past and feel better about our present enlightenment. The times may have changed, but the darkness remains. In the end, it’s about who gets to control the story, too. Whose narrative makes it to court, or the papers, or the True Crime retellings? Scorsese knows the importance of perspective, and the power of an image. Here is cinema put to powerful use, each formal flourish or patient development drawing fresh insight. Its final moments are moving and transformative in a way only cinema can accomplish. The film holds the audience in the middle of a storm and demands our patience as we pay it the attention it deserves. One leaves the theater still vibrating from its thunderous force.

Past Participants: THE GREATEST BEER RUN EVER and AMSTERDAM

We flatter ourselves if we think we’re better than the past just because we know how it’ll turn out. A story’s ending, after all, depends solely on where we choose to stop telling it. As Faulkner once reminded us, the past isn’t even past. The present sure isn’t either. Peter Farrelly’s The Greatest Beer Run Ever is a movie about how much it might take to make an unthinking person recognize the truth about his own historical moment. In this case, it’s the late 1960s. New York barfly Chickie (Zac Efron) spends his time, when off from hard shifts on merchant ships, drinking with his buddies. Together they lament those friends who are deployed in Vietnam. One has just been shipped back in a casket. The guys grumble about war protestors and the media coverage and grouse that it is unfair American soldiers are losing hope on account of all this negativity from the homefront. On a whim, Chickie decides to hitch a ride on a cargo ship and deliver some beer to these friends serving overseas. Turns out spending time in a war zone isn’t the lark he thinks it’d be, though the movie’s breezy tone and ambling smirk matches its lead’s stupid grin as that lesson takes its sweet time sinking in. Chickie isn’t the fastest learner, but even he can recognize that his army buddies are way more distressed about his bumbling into battlefields than he thought they’d be. (The first deflation has to be learning they can get beer there.) Efron plays this slow-dawning realization by degrees, calibrating his wide grin and frat boy antics—he breezes past Generals by letting them assume he’s CIA, to name one of his carefree gambits—into appropriately chastened through near-death encounters.

Farrelly began his career making, with his brother Bobby, hilariously raunchy (but secretly sentimental) comedies like Dumb and Dumber and There’s Something About Mary. Lately he’s pivoting solo, with Green Book and now this new effort, to spin simple lessons out of complicated truths. It’s a little historical depth and extra sentimentality in a slightly more serious version of his studio comedy packaging. (In other words, he’s traded gags about bodily fluids and anatomical functions for gentler punchlines and Important Human Connection.) These movies are dopily well-intentioned at best. Unlike Green Book’s retrograde buddy-comedy approach to race relations, Beer Run is a little more honest about its character’s progression from ignorantly self-righteous into a humbled observer. The trappings of Vietnam in this telling may look flat and overlit and sitcom stagy, but the increasingly harrowing implied violence around the character makes his journey less of a lark. It helps that he meets a world-weary war correspondent played by Russel Crowe with every bit of effortless gravitas that casting implies. Eventually, Chickie realizes that journalists are telling the truth, the military isn’t being honest, and, though some soldiers are brave in the face of senseless killing, the war was probably a mistake. If he makes it home, he might just live up to a British journalist’s description of his feat: “It may be idiotic, but it’s a noble gesture.” There’s the review right there.

Better use of true trappings to tell a caper in the shadow of real war is David O. Russell’s Amsterdam. It’s at least more invested in the bodily damage combat leaves in its wake, and finds metaphors to match. Two American soldiers in The Great War (Christian Bale and John David Washington) bond when they, riddled with shrapnel, are pulled from the trenches. Each saved the other. Their nurse (Margot Robbie) extracts jagged metal from their flesh and stores it for use in her found-materials art projects. Turns out she’s an emigre living the European life, and as the long post-war years loom, the three become good friends. She’s in love with one, and a dear friend of the other, and they all live together in a cozy loft apartment in Amsterdam—a gauzy, artful, open-minded arrangement in the caesura between World Wars. And yet, because they met in bloody circumstances and the shock of the war is nonetheless the engine driving the culture in which they swim—surrealism and modernism elbowing into their rosy, softly-lit lives—it’s an inextricable part of their fleeting friendly connection. Reconfigured and reclaimed, it literally surrounds them: a tea set, a photograph, a memory. The city of the title takes on a similar symbolic weight. It’s a place, and a mindset, that’s an oasis from the usual, and a respite removed from the weight of prejudices back home that’d make their casual arrangement unthinkable.

That the characters can’t stay so cozily in the emigre state of mind fuels the bittersweet heart of the picture as it plunges into a knotty conspiracy back home in America. The central trio has parted, and when they meet again a decade and a half later, on the streets of New York City, they’re all mixed up in a plot involving white supremacist agitators hoping to shake off FDR’s New Deal and align their country with the rising tide of European fascism. A beloved General is suddenly dead, and his daughter is subsequently pushed under a moving vehicle. When the murderer tries to pin the blame on Bale and Washington, they scramble about looking to clear their names. (All this, and they’re trying to stage a charity reunion revue for their old army unit—shades of White Christmas—too.) The movie ambles along, slowly untangling the various threads by the time the credits roll. It plays loosely with history, but fairly in identifying between Europe and America a shared moneyed class with a taste for authoritarian control to protect their business interests. Imagine Frank Capra doing John le Carré, complete with unsubtle sentimentality hammering home a too-easy moral (hear that interminable final monologue) after the hard work of international intrigue. Buffeted by these competing demands, the central trio is a beguiling collision of acting styles. Bale stumbles and squints and blusters; Washington lets it all slide down easily; Robbie flits and flutters and flusters. And together they push and pull at the edges of the stifling story’s baggy pace and semi-complicated mystery to find moments of improbable melancholic grace.

Russell, no stranger to mismatched slow-boiling character conflicts, is usually quite good at cooking up scenarios in which good actors can cut loose and spread out potentially silly turns in serious subjects with a full commitment to both. His best movies—Flirting with Disaster, Three Kings, Silver Linings Playbook, Joy—have compelling stories told with a kind of farcical plate-spinning quality, keeping a varied cast’s competing aims and through-lines legible even as they overlap and collide. This one’s sleepier, bringing on eccentric supporting characters in a soft-shoe of a mystery. The large ensemble—Rami Malek, Anya Taylor-Joy, Robert De Niro, Andrea Riseborough, Timothy Olyphant, Michael Shannon, Mike Meyers, Chris Rock, Zoe Saldana, Taylor Swift, and so on—makes for information devices and red herrings. There’s a wan quality to the imagery that keeps them pinned down, and a soft looniness to the line readings and complications that make for a hazy unreality that never quite gathers the heft it needs. The performances are a collection of tics and takes, with actors given space to spin out their competing ideas and aims. The story occasionally curlicues into distraction—and some overfamiliar fake-outs. But, for all the tricks it pulls, there’s a sharp political point in the middle about the collusion of corruption, and the way it tears at the happiness of those who just want to love each other and make art and help the defenseless and live in peace. Didn’t they almost have it all? One almost wants this ersatz Rick and his Ilsa to say we’ll always have Amsterdam.

Smell of Success: JOY

Joy is an inventive young woman with her dreams on hold, a real George Bailey with no angel coming to her rescue. She’s single-handedly holding her family together at the expense of her own ambitions. She wants to make useful things, objects that’ll be admired and owned by everyone, but in reality she’s stuck in a dead-end minimum wage job, having skipped college to help her parents. They’re all just barely getting by. But, when inspiration strikes, she scrapes together her courage and resources to build a prototype of a self-wringing mop. (It’s also machine washable, a nice feature.) This Miracle Mop could be her ticket to success. A capitalist parable as feminist empowerment, David O. Russell’s Joy, loosely based on the real mop’s inventor, is the sort of story we’re used to seeing men enact. Take Citizen Kane, or The Godfather, or countless other canonical classics of business acumen and its costs. But here the narrative is a woman’s, a perspective that’s long existed in this area, but gone woefully underrepresented in movies like this.

We meet Joy through the eyes of her grandmother (Diane Ladd), a kind and encouraging woman who tells her little granddaughter that she’ll do great things with her life. Ladd narrates the film, giving it a slightly unreal glow, like a heartfelt business biography picture book read with grandmotherly warmth. By the time Joy is a young woman (played by Jennifer Lawrence), she’s trying to run a sprawling, eccentric household with meager emotional and financial support. Her mother (Virginia Madsen) is a soap opera addict who stays in bed all day. Her father (Robert De Niro), a small-business owner long divorced from her mom, was kicked out of his latest wife’s place and moved into the family’s basement. That’s also where Joy’s ex-husband (Édgar Ramírez) lives, unable to afford his own house on a mostly-unemployed lounge singer’s income. They have two young kids who are caught up in this harried maelstrom of chaotic family life, including a condescending step-aunt (Elisabeth Rohm) who offers criticisms but little help.

Lawrence’s commanding performance – her best grown-up role yet – is driven with determination. In the opening scenes of family drama she’s harried, rushing around trying to fix everyone else’s problems – from cleaning up spills and planning kids’ days to ripping up floorboards and working on the plumbing – while trying to make ends meet. Once she decides to try to bring her invention to market, she ignites her frazzled energy into swaggering determination, albeit still cut through with self-doubt and ever-present financial and familial pressures. She’s too motivated to quit, gambling on her skills and talents. As a result, she’ll either end up wealthy or bankrupt. There’s not much room for middle ground in this endeavor. The film is an intimate American epic of domestic chambers and boardrooms, factory floors and TV soundstages, as she tries to get her mop manufactured and selling. Failure is definitely an option, and Lawrence brings a great energy, halfway between self-confidence and nagging doubts, as she strides into difficult situations.

The entrepreneur’s dream is not an easy one. She’s just as likely to be ground under by others who don’t share her vision, or who view her as an easy target. Joy’s story may come from the Shark Tank business school, or Horatio Alger stories, but her lean in isn’t uncomplicated. Russell, working from a script by Annie Mumolo (Bridesmaids), creates a film keenly aware of the razor’s edge, the stomach-dropping plunges into debt as Joy struggles to get taken seriously, gain recognition, avoid getting taken advantage of, and realize her product’s potential. (That Russell fought Mumolo for writing credit on such a story is a sad irony.) Joy finds her family a doubting chorus, and everyone in the business world trying to be a bigger success, a more glamorous person, thinking they can get there through hard work and delusion. A buyer (Bradley Cooper) sees himself as a studio mogul. A wealthy widow (Isabella Rossellini) thinks her inheritance is a measure of her business savvy. Money is essential, but getting it is not a panacea.

Intermingling paperwork, finances, factories, and salespeople with family squabbles and pains, Russell stages scenes with a variety of moving plot parts and competing characters’ motivations in close-quarters drama played at comedy speed. Russell specializes in ragged and heightened amusing melodramas about squabbling families (Flirting with Disaster, Silver Linings Playbook, The Fighter). Unlike his last film, the pretty, but fundamentally phony American Hustle, he keeps Joy’s comic and dramatic incidents spinning through a variety of tempos and film stocks, making its inconsistency its consistency, animating Joy’s sense of hard-charging ambition and precarious insecurities. Intensely felt with a booming soundtrack of unexpected needle-drops and smooth, emphatic camera movements (director of photography Linus Sandgren dancing amongst the lively cast), the unusually unstructured story (a conventional three-act structure told with a loose rambling quality) pushes forward with relentless momentum. I was invested in its medley of tones and terrifically sympathetic hero from her first frame.

Tidily untidy on the surface – with theatrical flourishes, elaborate visual metaphors, dream sequences, flashbacks, cameos, and even a musical number – Joy takes, well, joy in broad characters and boisterous performances, showy filmmaking and layered writing. I found it gripping and moving, an involving business story smashed up against an affecting family drama, peppered with lovely touches – a warm voice from beyond the grave, an exquisite Christmassy sales call montage, a low-key mother/daughter bond over crayons and blueprints, and a dance of fake snow flurries accompanying a strut towards victory intercut with a melancholy flash-forward. It captures the real and unreal aspects of self-mythology, the inherent falseness of singular up-from-bootstraps triumph, and the odd flukes that lead to both setbacks and success.

Joy emerges as a great character, an exhausted woman always with a stain on her blouse from helping others, who decides to become something more, slowly coming alive and into her own in the spotlight. The movie surrounds her with endlessly entertaining complications, and great actors (each a total delight) wonderfully filling in their characters’ eccentricities and peculiarities. Funny and moving, exciting and sad, it sees the promise and artifice of the American dream, and the fortuitous incongruities (like a shopping network in the middle of Amish country) that can lead to accomplishment. It simultaneously celebrates her hard-working attempt to turn her great idea into a big business, and also realizes money won’t fix her family’s problems.

Human Resource: THE INTERN

A cozy comedy of human connection with just enough drama to give its sweet conclusion some weight, The Intern is a mostly charming fantasy of intergenerational cooperation. The story follows a lonely retired boomer businessman (Robert De Niro) who is looking for a way to stay busy after the death of his wife. He finds a flyer for a local tech startup looking for senior citizen interns, a gimmicky outreach idea. They want people with experience (and, no doubt, pensions making lack of salary less of an issue) to help the growing online clothing retailer make ends meet. Of course the old guy gets the position, where he finds himself working closely with the company’s busy founder (Anne Hathaway). You might guess that the rest of the film shows that a 70-year-old and a group of twenty- and thirty-somethings can learn from each other, become friends, and all end up slightly happier for it. You’d be right.

Pleasant and comfortable, the movie is soft, fuzzy, and warm—the cinematic equivalent of a fancy comfy sweater fresh from an expensive dryer. It happily goes for surprisingly few cheap shots about the generation gap. De Niro wears a suit every day while his younger colleagues go fairly casual. But there’s no stumbling bumbling how-do-you-work-this-thing shtick. Hathaway is an ambitious techie small business owner juggling devices (and a marriage) while looking to grow her brand. But there’s no kids-these-days digital curmudgeon muttering. It’s not a story about a classy old guy helping a frazzled young lady build a better business. Nor is it a story about an out-of-touch grandpa doddering his way to hip style. Instead, the film in its quiet way asserts that all people are basically the same, friendships are important, and goofy grown children (De Niro’s desk is surrounded by young dopey dudes) and dapper old folks alike can bond over shared values. It’s sweet.

Undeniably sentimental, it’s nonetheless refreshing to see a big studio comedy deal in such small stakes. Hathaway and De Niro have warm sympathetic chemistry basically free of mansplaining, and never once tips over into icky romance. In fact, it’s a light movie about relationships that doesn’t feel an obligation to hit any romantic beats, slipping a few glimpses into subplots simply for extra flavoring. The bulk of the story follows the leads through the ups and downs of daily office life, going to meetings, talking to suppliers, debating strategy, or retrieving a errant nasty email (a stretch). The growing company has its problems, though not so many they can’t have a good masseuse (Rene Russo) on staff as an age-appropriate flirtation for De Niro. The movie is not really interested in the nuts and bolts of business anyway, using its setting as reason for little comic beats (mostly amusing, but occasionally too broad) on the way to its intended and effective gooey center.

Slowly but surely the leads open up to one another. It’s a rare story: an older man and younger woman who become completely platonic friends, admire one another, and provide much-needed support. De Niro meets his boss’s family (stay-at-home dad Anders Holm and adorable little daughter JoJo Kushner) and soon becomes a helpful assistant on that front as well. At work, he encourages an ensemble of young colleagues (Christina Scherer, Zack Pearlman, Jason Orley, Adam DeVine) to have more confidence. It’s a movie with a high-gloss sheen and a brightly photographed sunny disposition. Even when the plot gears turn up some potential melodrama in the final third, things remain bouncy and optimistic. Sure, these people have obstacles to deal with. But they’re so agreeable and capable it’s never much in doubt. You’d be excused for thinking every office of young’uns could use a magic grandpa figure.

Written and directed by Nancy Meyers (It’s Complicated, Something’s Gotta Give, The Parent Trap), an expert in exactly this sort of comfort food cinema, it has her typical beautifully appointed upper-middle-class interiors. Sets – vast open offices, handsome brownstones, and fine hotel rooms – are decorated like a two-page spread in an interior decorator’s portfolio. Characters’ clothes could just as easily be ready for upscale catalogue photo shoots. Every prop – Apple products, Stella Artois, a vintage briefcase – is photographed like it’ll be the basis of a new lifestyle newsletter. It’s all part of the fluffy good feelings, an aspirational setting for an aspirational story that finds a working mom and a retired man finding comfortable friendship, gets young guys a classy role model, and arrives at a cheerfully optimistic conclusion that’s so low-key and deeply sweet I didn’t mind I found myself wondering if this company (or any of the relationships involved) will last. It’s uncomplicated, but so committed to its twinkly feel-good conclusions that it makes sure it has leads so likable you need them to be happy.

Bucket List Hangover: LAST VEGAS

Far and away the funniest thing about Last Vegas, a comedy about a bunch of old guys reuniting for a weekend in Las Vegas, is something that’s not intended to be a joke. It’s a movie about guys trying to recapture their better days that hopes the audience remembers its cast’s. Michael Douglas, Morgan Freeman, Robert DeNiro, and Kevin Kline have been on the big screen since before I was born and in their many decades of work have been in some of the best movies of all time. Last Vegas is not among their better efforts, but at least it’s not a total embarrassment. It’s certainly not any more than not an embarrassment, but that’s not nothing. The movie is built only to capitalize on their likability derived from all their time spent building up loads of audience affection. It’s counting on it, in fact, to fill in generic jokes and slight plotting. The movie is pleasant, undemanding, and flimsy.

It’s an old person hangout movie in which likable and wrinkly familiar faces sit around and enjoy each other’s company while working through some old tensions that are saddled upon their characters in a mostly doomed attempt to differentiate them from the actors’ personas. The story starts when the guy played by Michael Douglas calls his old pals and tells them he’s getting married in Vegas that weekend. They, being retired and not particularly busy, make the appropriate travel arrangements and head off for a septuagenarian bachelor party. It’s The Bucket List by way of The Hangover, but not nearly as schmaltzy or raunchy as that comparison suggests. There’s all the gentle geriatric humor you’d suspect such a premise would invite.

Talk of surgery, pills, and doctors’ orders mixes freely with misunderstanding slang, fumbling around gadgets, shouting over pounding nightclub music, and talking to the much younger partiers around them. One young lady tells Kline he reminders her of “Grandpa Lou.” The concierge tells them their suite was previously booked by 50 Cent. “Fifty people in here?” Freeman marvels. A nice lounge singer played by Mary Steenburgen shows up from time to time, and she’s a nice break from the borderline sleazy montages of poolside bikinis and showgirls. It’s nice to give the guys someone closer to their own age to interact with.

Director Jon Turteltaub, who as of late has been making tame action movies like National Treasure for Disney, and screenwriter Dan Fogelman, of Crazy, Stupid, Love and The Guilt Trip, keep the proceedings loose and mellow. They don’t spend too much time insisting on their movie’s funniness, which makes it easier to take the fact that it isn’t all that funny. It goes down smoothly since it’s not spending its time being obviously unfunny. It’s just watchable and friendly. Even the prerequisite mistaken identity crossdresser gag is relatively kind and free of shame or awkwardness, as a more casually hateful comedy would stoop to. No, here all are welcome to relax with the old guys, have a few drinks, reminisce, play some blackjack, and party till it’s time to take more Lipitor. It’s too somnambulant to work up the energy for more than a handful of moments that even threaten to be in bad taste.

Without being in a hurry to get much of anywhere, Last Vegas simply shuffles along through rote comic beats and unrushed sightseeing. Someone’s going to fall into the pool. Someone’s going to either win or lose a great deal of his pension on the casino floor. Someone’s going to try to use that little blue pill before the weekend is over. It’s a film that lazily lollops its way to pretty much exactly where you think it’ll go. There’s not much inherently funny about any of this – no, not when Kline puts on his reading glasses to ogle a pretty girl, or when Freeman busts a disco move, or when DeNiro is grinded upon by LMFAO’s Redfoo. It’s barely even worth a chuckle when 50 Cent turns up as himself, asking the guys to keep the noise down because he’s trying to sleep. It’s supposed to be funny because he’s 50 Cent, much like the rest of the lame jokes are supposed to be funny because of the cast of legendary actors who also happen to be old. It’s a bland, vacant experience. I’d rather see a movie about what these guys did between takes. Over the credits they could roll footage of whatever they’ve bought with their paychecks. 

(Senti)mental: SILVER LININGS PLAYBOOK

In Silver Linings Playbook, characters at once sharply drawn and broadly sketched bounce off of each other with personalities informing every bit of dialogue that zings around the room. This film has writer-director David O. Russell squarely in his wheelhouse, orchestrating ensembles through funny quips on their way to deeply felt characterizations, much like his 1996 indie screwball Flirting with Disaster or the family scenes in 2010’s The Fighter. In Playbook, Russell (working from a novel by Matthew Quick) makes broad, yet well defined, character studies out of a plot that’s part recovery drama, part romantic comedy, part sports film and part dance movie. It’s not as complicated as it sounds and goes down oh so smoothly.

The film starts with a woman (Jacki Weaver) checking Pat, her adult son (Bradley Cooper), out of a mental hospital. He’s had a breakdown that matches the collapse of his marriage. Now living with his mother and freshly unemployed father (Robert DeNiro), Pat thinks that if he can put his life back together convincingly enough, he’ll win back his wife. This seems like denial, seeing as she got a restraining order on him. He seems like a smart man, but he’s unable to face his problems head on. His therapist (Anupam Kher) encourages him to stay on his medication, encouragement he’s quick to ignore. He obsessively jogs, reads, and lingers on the edges of his former life. Sometimes he lingers too closely, leading a friendly cop (Dash Mihok) to wander over and remind the family about certain court-ordered distances.

Realizing that living in the past is no help, friends and family set up a dinner at which Pat can be introduced to Tiffany (Jennifer Lawrence), a widowed young woman who has been through more than her fair share of therapy. It’s not clear what their relationship will develop into, although it’d be nice if they could find some way to ease their anguish together. Russell frames their tentative steps towards friendship in likably loose scenes of brisk comedy and bracing emotional truths. The ensemble features characters with their own goals and aspirations – DeNiro needs to win money gambling on football games; a mental patient (played by a funny, restrained Chris Tucker) just wants to find his way out of the hospital; Weaver is desperate to see her family whole again – and Russell weaves the strands of plot and character together in a nicely handled balancing act. By the time the movie involves a high-stakes dance competition such developments seem only natural.

Cooper and Lawrence have pleasant chemistry that’s fraught with crackling irreverence. They’re drawn to each other by their inappropriateness, each with a tendency to flatly state what should not be shared in polite company. They have no filters. At their first meeting, he bluntly asks how her husband died. They bond over their shared experiences with antidepressant medications. There’s a certitude to their speech, a hard edge to their movements, and yet a hesitancy in the eyes, as if they’re convincing themselves as much as the rest of the world that they’re okay. She ambushes him while jogging with a sharp “Hey!” They run together until they end up in front of a diner. “Do you want to eat here?” he asks. It’s a date. They speak with the sparkling speed of the wittiest romcoms, but spit each line as if wedging it into the moment, as if the words can’t be contained. Altogether, the strong ensemble inhabit the roles with care and nuance, bringing the broader tendencies of the screenplay pleasingly down to earth with Russell’s casual camerawork assisting.

It’d be easy for the film to turn cutesy or schmaltzy and, though it’s certainly an easy crowd-pleaser, it treats the characters’ mental problems with a degree of seriousness where a lesser film would use them as a simple plot device or, worse yet, an affliction for which romance is a perfect panacea.  No, instead Russell builds a satisfying Hollywood ending that accepts the characters for who they are, recognizes their individual capacities for change, and dares to find them a happy ending that fits just right. As far as the genres and character types Russell’s dealing with are concerned, he’s not exactly reinventing the wheel, but isn’t it nice that he’s managed to make just about the best possible wheel he could?

Jagged Little Pill: LIMITLESS

In Limitless, a down-on-his-luck mostly unemployed guy (a convincing Bradley Cooper) is struggling to fulfill a writing contract that he had signed some months ago. After all this time, he’s still looking at a blank page. (“I know the feeling,” comes the mirthless response from the writers in the audience). He bumps into an old acquaintance (Johnny Whitworth), his ex-brother-in-law actually, who was a minor pill pusher but has now graduated to the majors working for some shady thugs. Anyways, he has a fancy pill that will allow the user to access not just some of the brain, but the entire brain all at once. This is no placebo, in other words. It’s some heavy duty chemical something.

So, this guy takes the pill and decides that he has become a genius. Or, more accurately, he gets really good at mental math and other such activities that simply lean upon having a great memory. Before you know it, he’s an addict, and it seems to be working for him. He becomes an expert pianist, learns several languages, starts and finishes his stalled novel, wins back his recent ex-girlfriend (Abbie Cornish), and lands a job working for a high powered titan of finance (a severely underutilized Robert DeNiro). But with his great powers of great memory carry some great danger. There’s those thugs his pill provider was working for and certain other ominous forces that gather about, waiting around for the third-act twist.

Now, forgive me for getting more intellectual than the movie at hand probably requires, but it was Friedrich Nietzsche who said, “Many a man fails to become a thinker only because his memory is too good.” Thus the plight of Bradley Cooper in Limitless boils down to that of a man who is supposedly the smartest person in the room trapped doing stupid things just to keep the plot pushing forward. He has a great memory, but is hardly a thinker. The thriller itself is far less intelligent than it thinks. It has a good memory, for a while, dutifully paying off its set-ups, but by the end of the film, which leaves at least two murders completely unsolved, it’s clear that the plot’s been in shambles for quite some time. It has a climax, sure, but it never really builds there. By the end, the film even seems to halfheartedly embrace putting a seal of approval on the protagonist’s addiction in an rather off-putting way.

So, I guess the blame for such a thoroughly underwhelming movie can lay at the feet of screenwriter Leslie Dixon, the same person who brought us such achievements as Look Who’s Talking Now, Mrs. Doubtfire, and Pay it Forward. She just can’t whip this killer concept into something manageably entertaining. Lord knows, director Neil Burger tries. He’s a solid director (I’m a big fan of his peculiar, stylistic 2006 film The Illusionist) and here he brings visual energy and even, at times, inventiveness that serves as a nice distraction for a while. I especially liked his handful of computer-assisted zooms that leap out of the realm of the possible and extend to trippier and trippier lengths.

This is a movie that could have easily been very smart but instead veers quickly into the realm of the cluttered and underwhelming. It’s can’t even live up to being a dumb B-movie, but let me go ahead and spoil the strangest, liveliest moment of pure goofiness to be found within the film. At one point, Abbie Cornish is pursued through a park and beats back her attacker by slicing his face with a pair of ice skates that are still being worn by a little girl. The sight of a woman wildly swinging a small child at an attacker is simultaneously the best and worst moment of the film. I stared unbelieving at the screen in awe of the sudden turn into complete unpredictable weirdness. But the moment passes soon enough, returning to the regularly scheduled disappointment. If the film wasn’t going to be smart, it could have at least made a stronger commitment to being appealingly odd.

Schlock and Awe: MACHETE

The latest film from Robert Rodriguez, this time sharing director’s credit with editor and special-effects artist Ethan Maniquis, is Machete. It’s based on a fake trailer that he created to show before Planet Terror, his faux 70’s exploitation film that was half of Grindhouse, his genre double-feature throwback collaboration with Quentin Tarantino. But you don’t need to keep up with all the levels of meta filmmaking at work here to enjoy Machete. Sure, it’s loud and sloppy, simultaneously overstuffed and underdeveloped, but this movie is alive, ambulatory with a crazed B-movie spirit and chockablock with goofy, groovy grindhouse gore. It’s the type of movie that, when you hear a doctor explaining the length of the human intestine, you know that it will be valuable information in an upcoming action set-piece.

The great, craggy Danny Trejo slashes his way through the film as the mysterious man known only as Machete. He’s out for revenge on not just one, but two clearly defined revenge paths. Machete’s out to avenge the death of his wife at the hands of an evil, samurai-sword-wielding Mexican drug lord (Steven Segal, of course) and out for revenge against a double-crossing political slimeball (Jeff Fahey). Then again, to put the plot so simply is to ignore great swaths of exposition that are occasionally relevant to the forward momentum and ultimately needed for the film’s big shootout climax.

This racing explosion of schlock and awe manages to work in plot threads about a sort of Underground Railroad for illegal immigrants led by Michelle Rodriguez and a government agent who is on her tail and is played by Jessica Alba. There’s also a group of vigilante amateur border patrollers led by Don Johnson and a red-meat xenophobe senator, none other than Robert DeNiro, who whips up his supporters with ugly racism. After all of that, there’s still room enough in the movie for the troubled wild-child played by Lindsay Lohan and the Catholic priest played by Cheech Marin. One of them is playing against type.

The cast gets to riff on their personas just as much as the movie itself riffs on its inspirations. Trejo steps up and ably fills a role to which a career of playing tough-guys has led him. Lohan’s entrance is great, as is her character’s arc, which is a perfect metaphoric blueprint for a comeback. Segal is the most purposefully entertaining he’s been in a long time, maybe even ever. Fahey, fresh off his scene-stealing stint on Lost, is a perfect growly villain, DeNiro is fantastic, if a little underused, and Don Johnson is made exceptionally sinister with his eyes constantly hidden behind gleaming sunglasses.

This is easily Rodriguez’s best film since Spy Kids, though that says more about the weakness of Rodriguez’s last decade of work. Machete is a rush of junky influences with a spirited 70’s vibe. With so many plot threads and character types mingling with the brute-force efficiency of the bloody action beats, the movie is inescapably messy. But those action scenes are more fun than not, hyper and stylish while still perfectly understandable in construction. And the movie’s a wicked satire that’s, you know, about something real, current and tangible and actually dares to draw blood with its bite. This is sledgehammer-satire that moves with a force and purpose that agitates for basic human rights and sensible immigration policy. The satire’s not exactly coherent, and it’s certainly not clearly explained, but it’s sharp and hilarious nonetheless and the images have lingering power. A priest’s bank of surveillance monitors is arranged like a crucifix. A senator’s racist rant of a campaign commercial intercuts footage of border crossings with extreme close-ups of wriggling insects. A heavily armed Machete walks unharmed into a villain’s house because the guards think he’s the gardener. This isn’t exactly great art – it’s not even an entirely consistent piece of action filmmaking – but it has a raw excitement that carried me along and kept me entertained.