Family Law: THE JUDGE

The Judge is the sort of glossy adult-driven Hollywood melodrama we tell ourselves they don’t make any more. Perhaps this perceived shortage led the filmmakers to stuff several dependable formulas into one picture. It’s a father/son reunion story, a courthouse drama, a big town lawyer reconnecting with his small town roots parable, and a workaholic learning to slow down and appreciate the people in his life fable. That’s a lot going on, then add in a handful of medical problems, tragic backstories, mental illness, an old ex-girlfriend, and a tornado warning. It’s overstuffed with reasons to be sentimental, manipulative, and formulaic, turning up reveals and developments at a predictable pace. This is exactly the kind of movie easy to dismiss as too calculatingly sincere and sloppily emotional. And it is. But it’s also the kind of handsome, sturdily square drama that can get in your guts and pull on the heartstrings anyway.

Robert Downey Jr. plays a snarky Chicago lawyer called back to his small Indiana hometown after the death of his mother. There, he clashes anew with his estranged father (Robert Duvall), the picturesque community’s respected judge. He’s boarding the flight home when his brothers (Vincent D’Onofrio and Jeremy Strong) call with terrible news. Their dad has been arrested after blood on his car matched a corpse found on the side of the road, the victim of a hit and run. The old man’s weak of body, but obstinate of spirit. And now he’s charged with manslaughter, a charge increased when the victim is discovered to be a murderer he regretted giving a lenient sentence to years earlier. So it’s up to the hotshot lawyer son to defend his small-town judge father, a tall order given the importance of the case and the history he has with his town and family.

The cast sells it. Downey can do the character arc from cocky pro to humbled man in his sleep. He gives it his usual rascally charm, weaving in some appealing notes of wistful regret as he spars with his old man, catches up with his brothers, and considers rekindling his relationship with his high school girlfriend (Vera Farmiga, glowing with warm charm), who happens to have a daughter (Leighton Meester) as old as they’ve been apart, give or take nine months. Holding down the other half of the drama is Duvall who, at the age of 83, remains an actor incapable of a dishonest moment. He imbues his character with a righteous stubbornness, mourning his wife while bottling up love and pride for his son over resentments that have festered in his two decade absence, and holding back fear for his reputation. The father-son relationship works well, as the plot machinery creaks through its paces.

It’s the craftsmanship that elevates the material. It could’ve been a dopey TV movie without such a strong cast (including a fine supporting turn by Billy Bob Thornton as a sharp-tongued prosecutor who makes a perfect dry foil for Downey’s persona) and a wonderfully expensive look, bathed in light by cinematographer Janusz Kaminski. It’s a movie with perfect Main Street Americana, and where every drive down a country road looks like a car commercial. But there’s real manufactured heart in this glossy professionalism.  Screenwriters Nick Schenk and Bill Dubuque generate a series of scenarios that allow talented actors to breathe some life into cliché. And this is easily director David Dobkin’s best movie, after years of dreck like Fred Claus and the execrable The Change-Up. He directs with slick button-pushing competence. It’s transparent in how it’s going about getting its effects, but, hey, it worked on me.

Life at a Funeral: GET LOW

Get Low is the latest example of how competent direction of a middling script can be elevated, even saved, by a host of great actors. The direction from Aaron Schneider, in his feature debut, is flat and flavorless. The script from Chris Provenzano and C. Gaby Mitchell is full of phony cornpone sentiment that aims only at those with the most easily softened emotions. All involved in the creation of the film should be thankful that they attracted actors who can cut through the falseness to convey some emotion truth that would otherwise be nonexistent.

At the center of this modest little depression-era tale is the great Robert Duvall as a man who has lived like a hermit for 40 years. Naturally, he has also been cultivating an aura of mystery and danger among the gossiping people of the nearby town. He’s getting old and feels the weight of time and age pressing down. He heads in to town and asks the local funeral home to throw him a funeral party while he’s still alive so he can invite “everyone who has a story to tell” about him.

The owner of the funeral home is, of course, a welcome Bill Murray. He calmly sizes up the odd request and offers to get it done. Murray, and his young associate Lucas Black, set about setting up the party and grappling with the old man’s eccentricities and inconsistencies. There’s small humor to be found in the ways these three men try to get the invitations out by radio and by posters. Duvall brings to the role distant warmth that balances Murray’s sly, shifty subtlety and Black’s fresh-faced good-intentions.

The plot is wrapped around a profoundly uninteresting, though not entirely uninvolving, mystery about the true intentions behind Duvall’s self-imposed exile that is haltingly teased and ultimately revealed, but by then I cared even less. Early on, Duvall stares at a faded photograph of a young woman in a shot that fades into a close-up of a flickering flame, annoyingly telegraphing part of his past. She’s his old flame (get it?) that he has carried a torch for (get it?). Do you think the secrets in this old man’s past have anything to do with all of this flame imagery? If you do, don’t worry. Schneider won’t give you a chance to miss a thing, even if you try.

The hermit’s past is not as interesting as the film seems to think it is, but at least it gives a reason for Sissy Spacek and Bill Cobbs to enter the picture and remind us why they’re so good. Spacek has a nicely restrained emotion to her behavior while Cobbs towers over his scenes with a well-earned sense of command and a welcome melodious voice. Their performances are wonderful to watch. They even overcome the contortions the script puts them through to avoid revealing things prematurely.

Glancing back over what I’ve written, it sounds like I disliked the movie more than I actually did. At the time, I found it passably enjoyable. Only afterwards has my head been full of small complaints. This is a perfectly fine little film that’s quick and unchallenging. It’s a chance to see great actors working, using their craft in ways that go above and beyond that which this particular film calls for. It’s a nice 100 minutes with an amiable company of top-notch actors. It’s a pleasant enough diversion, enjoyable on its own terms, but it’s certainly nothing more than that.

It's the End of the World as We Know It: THE ROAD and THE BOOK OF ELI

Two recent Blu-ray and DVD releases, The Road and The Book of Eli, use the post-apocalyptic world as a return to the aesthetics of the Western. Instead of dusty plains of promise and danger, we have gray, oppressive landscapes which overwhelm in their vast emptiness that is punctuated only with sharp, crumbling reminders of the way things used to be. They set up struggles to survive while asking why it would be worth doing so, what the world would have to offer in such horrible circumstances.

The Road is based on Cormac McCarthy’s brutal masterpiece which had prose so brittle and hard that I could almost hear the keys of a typewriter pounding out each word. Director John Hillcoat also helmed 2005’s The Proposition, a western set in the Australian Outback which foregrounded brutality, lingering on violence while refusing to glamorize, a technique typified by the moment where a gunshot pulls off half of an Aborigine’s face. Hillcoat uses similar skills here while tracking a man and his son as they make their way to the coast mere years after the unspecified cataclysm that reduced the world to rubble and ash. They have a small glimmer of hope, but it quickly becomes clear that refuge from the world’s newfound horrors will be hard, if not impossible.

Viggo Mortensen is raspy and gaunt. He’s affecting as he tries to protect his son’s childhood innocence while keeping him acutely aware of the dangers they could face at any moment, not just from the harsh, unforgiving landscape of ruins and the scarcity of food, but also from the nomadic bands of cannibalistic thieves that prey on the weak in a last-ditch effort to delay their own deaths by bringing about the deaths of others. Of great importance is the attention given to the father’s gun, and the somber acknowledgement of the low number of bullets in his possession.

As the son, Kodi Smit-McPhee is Mortensen’s equal: even thinner, even paler, and even more frighteningly fragile. They share the screen by themselves for most of the film, always moving, always scavenging for food in abandoned houses and burnt-out cars. The imagery is purposefully rough, carefully composed to look harsh in its portrayal of world gone unfathomably wrong. The father and son’s monotony of hunger and pain is broken only by brief confrontations, violent and creepy, with the starving cannibals. In a particularly moving sequence, they have an encounter with a more benign individual in the form of a wrinkled, weak, and staggering old man (the great Robert Duvall) who fakes dementia in hope that it will give him meager protection against those who would harm him.

There are also brief, misguided flashbacks to Charlize Theron as Mortensen’s wife and Smit-McPhee’s mother. It should be moving and painful, but they’re too clumsily written and awkwardly spaced. The film is also the victim of clumsy dialogue at times and a score of tinkling strings that attempt to make up for the dialogue by underlining subtext with unwelcome force. What works so well on the page becomes numbing and monotonous in sluggish and repetitive ways. But the film has a disquieting power, a haunted hopelessness that lingers.

The Book of Eli is pulpier, with a slick and fluid camera that the Hughes brothers (of Menace II Society and From Hell) use to compose vivid imagery that pops with B-movie flair. Like The Road, it features a man walking across the ruins of our culture, though in this movie it has been 30 years since the unspecified devastation occurred. This time, it’s Denzel Washington struggling to survive, though he gets to wield a large knife and protect a dusty, leatherbound volume. He stumbles into a small neo-frontier town which is held under the tight grip of its megalomaniacal mayor. The mayor sizes up Eli and determines that he needs to get that book. It is the Bible, after all.

This is a film filled with actors chomping on scenery and strutting about inhabiting their roles with great relish, especially Gary Oldman as the mayor and Mila Kunis, as his daughter, looking much more stunning and scrubbed than the film’s world should allow. There’s also a string of great evocative supporting roles filled by the likes of Tom Waits, Jennifer Beals, Frances de la Tour, and Michael Gambon. They all seem to know they’re in a slightly goofy western transposed into a dusty apocalyptic wasteland and act accordingly.

Washington and Oldman clash over the book as two of the only literate individuals left in the world. Denzel is looking to kindle his small spark of mankind’s long-lost culture. Oldman wants to take advantage of the Bible’s ability to be warped into a tool to control and persuade a populace. What keeps the movie from turning into a broad silly mess about fighting over a book, or worse still, a story about how only the Bible can save us, or even worse, The Postman, is the way the conflict becomes a parable of sorts about the power of the written word. There’s something kind of thrilling about a movie that pits a sort of warrior-monk devoted to close readings against a horde of anti-intellectuals led by a man whose only interest in knowledge is in the way it can be twisted to fit his ambitions.

Even though there are moments of great action, including an incredible siege that’s a small masterpiece of sound design, the moment that stands out is when Kunis looks at Washington a simply says “teach me.” Sure, it’s a pulpy B-movie and unashamedly so. (After all, it has a prison cell improbably decorated with a poster for the post-apocalyptic cult classic A Boy and His Dog). But this is a film that gets its biggest thrill from the hope that humans will always yearn to learn, ending with a sort of Fahrenheit 451 conclusion that encourages savoring stories, no matter how goofy.

The seriously grim The Road is somber and sluggish and the seriously silly The Book of Eli is more conventionally entertaining. Which is better? It’s hard to say and it doesn’t matter. Despite their surface similarities in setting these are two films using similar starts to work towards different goals. They’re two different approaches to similar material, but what they share is an interest in exploring human strength and mankind’s capacity for survival. They take us past modern anxieties to show us that things could be a whole lot worse. If we’re not careful, we could all be suddenly thrust into a sick Western.

A Man Named "Bad": CRAZY HEART

Crazy Heart is a stunningly self-assured debut feature written and directed by Scott Cooper. It’s confident, steady work that wisely foregrounds its lead performance, which also happens to be its best asset. If at worst the film seems to be cliché, it serves to remind us that some peoples’ lives sound like a cliché. There’s a specificity to the film that keeps it honest, especially in the deeply felt and tenderly wrought performance from Jeff Bridges as “Bad” Blake, an alcoholic country singer whose glory days are a couple of decades behind him. Here is a character that feels real despite being a familiar type. As the film ends, with two characters literally walking into the sunset, there’s a feeling that the film may be ending, but the characters will continue to exist, pulling their weary selves through one more day, one more week, and one more song.

At its most interesting the film is a portrait of the modern country music scene with a striking dichotomy between the raw, intimate singer-songwriter style and the super-slick productions that border on pop. In the film, Blake’s protégé (Colin Farrell) illuminates this difference. He has surpassed his mentor in popularity and success, selling out huge arenas while Blake fills dive bars and bowling alleys. The difference is one of glittery buses on one side and beat-up pickups on the other. And yet, there is no demonization of this difference. Its matter of fact interesting and it leads up to a brilliant set of scenes in the center of the film that play out with beautiful ease. Bridges and Farrell flesh in back-story in a natural, unforced way, not through exposition, necessarily, but through acting and tone. We get a sense of their history and their friendship without any kind of forced conflict or tension, and especially without pages of on-the-nose dialogue. Neither man is a villain. Neither man is a hero. They simply are.

This respect extends to the other relationship that is central to the film. The radiant Maggie Gyllenhaal is a small-town reporter who falls for “Bad” Blake. She sees through the grizzled exterior and spies the soul of a true artist. He begins to work on a new song that might provide a needed boost to his income. We hear snippets of lyrics and melody for at least half of the film. Only at the very end do we hear a character slowly strumming a guitar, rasping out the words until the sound and scene segues into a full-blown country-radio version played by another character which carries us into the end credits with the feeling of artistic accomplishment. We have seen a great new song develop before our very eyes and ears.

If the relationship between Bridges and Gyllenhaal feels a little forced, and it does, it’s never the fault of the actors, who bring to their roles a bone-deep sense of characterization. Bridges, especially, brings a sense of seriousness and depth to characterization with a performance that’s worn comfortably. The late addition of a character played by the unmatchable Robert Duvall only adds to this feeling of expertly performed roles. The plot may grind them down in sometimes tired ways, but they never let it feel false. This is a film that is respectful and intelligent with well-earned sentiment. It left me with a deeply felt sense of satisfaction that settled comfortably upon me as the credits began to roll.