Romancing Atone: YOU, ME & TUSCANY and THE DRAMA

If I started listing everything that annoyed me about Kat Coiro’s You, Me & Tuscany it’d start sounding like my reaction was more negative than it was. It’s a big, bright, broad romantic comedy and grooves along pleasantly. It has a cute leading lady (Halle Bailey) playing an aspiring chef who cashes out her meager savings to visit Tuscany. Once there she crashes in a vacant villa and is promptly mistaken for the owner’s fiancé. She decides to go with it because the big stereotypical Italian family are so welcoming and lovely—and travel into each scene en masse like the family in the Big Fat Greek Wedding movies. (No wonder Nia Vardalos cameos in the first scene). As she learns to love life under the Tuscan sun, our heroine’s quickly attracted to a handsome vineyard owner (Regé-Jean Page) who feels a connection with her but doesn’t pursue it, thinking she’s engaged and all. Quite a conundrum. But it’ll work itself out more or less how you’d expect. There’s something to be said for the comforting rhythms of formula storytelling. It almost carries the movie over low-res establishing shots, clunky ADR exposition, flat chemistry from the leads, and a supporting friend character who exists almost exclusively to repeat plot points over FaceTime. Funnily enough for a movie about a wannabe chef, it just adds to a feeling that the whole thing is just a little undercooked, under-spiced, and on too low a boil. It’s the kind of middling dish that gets the job done, but doesn’t truly satisfy. But how often do we get rom-coms that rise to even that level these days, especially in a theater? 

Kristoffer Borgli’s The Drama is also technically a romantic comedy, insofar as it is about romance and has a consistently percolating sense of humor bubbling over into hugely funny moments. But to call it a rom-com would lead potential viewers astray. For all its surface gloss and handsome New York apartments, this is a spiky, prickly movie about a relationship on the brink of marriage and the precipice of disaster. It’s the week of the wedding and the happy couple are given a trust exercise. Name the worst thing you’ve ever done. Big mistake. Robert Pattinson’s flustered Brit — he’s giving 90’s Hugh Grant — becomes slightly, slowly, then all at once undone by the admission of his fiancé (Zendaya). I shan’t spoil her answer, but it’s worth mentioning the movie’s tricky tone and prankish social satire comes out of the sheer liability of the leads and the jolt of electric discourse that their confessions inspire. The movie smirks as it watches others with comparable, or worse, behaviors get sanctimonious, and as it finds characters asking if you can ever really know another person. Here’s a movie about the baggage everyone carries, and how difficult it can be to open it up for someone, even the closest someones, knowing that you’re risking judgment. And, if you’re getting married, you know their baggage will be weighing you down, too. It allows scenes of usual pre-marriage jitters to compound the stress through squirming social situations and escalating psychological sweatiness. The movie’s a sly conversation starter like that, tossing up awkward behaviors and philosophical posturing and watching as the characters flail to get back to a livable normal. Let he who is without sin cast the first stone. 

Borne Back Ceaselessly: TENET (70mm Re-Release)

Christopher Nolan’s Tenet is forever a present-tense movie where its now meets the past. Talk about a temporal pincer movement. Here I am, in late February 2024, having just stumbled out of an IMAX theater where I saw Tenet on 70mm in its limited re-release. I’d seen the movie only once before, when it was freshly on 4K Blu-ray in late December 2020. But I feel like I’ve now really seen it for the first time. For a movie about heists moving forwards and backwards in time simultaneously, that seems fitting.

After my initial viewing I wrote: In Christopher Nolan’s Tenet, backwards run sequences until the mind reels. It’s a time travel thriller, but not like you’re thinking. It’s about a magic box that can reverse the chronology of an item—or a person. Reverse entropy, they say. Inversion. The plot concerns a secret agent (John David Washington) recruited to stop a snarling Russian arms dealer (Kenneth Branagh) from reversing the flow of time for the entire universe. That’d destroy everything, one reluctant ally (Elizabeth Debicki) is told simply and slowly. She considers it for a moment and solemnly intones: “including my son.” 

Yeah, that line’s still a clunker. But on a second viewing—and one on such a massive scale—it gets swallowed up in the massive machinery of the thing. I almost felt it as a small pang of the personal in the middle of the impersonal grinding inevitabilities of societal collapse. 

When first reacting to Tenet I wrote that it’s “simultaneously one of Nolan’s most logistically jaw-dropping and emotionally flimsiest.” I don’t agree with my past self’s math there. If anything the logistically jaw-dropping elements are even more apparent, stark and enveloping. Here it’s…all go-go-go M.C. Escher timeline. Cause and effect are ruptured in boggling ways. There are stunts and combat and strategizing, with some elements of the action behaving unusually: a bullet hole filling up as the ordnance flies back into the barrel; tumbling fisticuffs that cartwheel with unnatural grace as one combatant flies backwards when they should be ahead; a car zipping the wrong way through traffic after rolling back over from a crash, windows reconstructing as tires squeal in reverse. 

This time, rather than straining against what I once took as the flimsy strains of emotionality within, I now found myself drug into the undertow of the sensation of all that dazzling craftsmanship and felt the animating melancholy under that surface chill. And the cool logic of its time travel convolutions are all the more compelling for the intuitive logic of it all. Why did I, along with the common critical refrain of late 2020, insist that the movie is convoluted or confusing? Maybe it just takes a second look to smooth out those wrinkles. The movie is nothing but logical, laid out on clear time travel tracks that need just a bit of mental energy to sort out—a bit of story problem graphing in the margins of your mind as the car chases and shoot outs rattle your senses. 

…there are agents rappelling up a building or spinning a sailboat or crashing a plane or maneuvering through a series or airtight vaults or hanging off the side of a moving firetruck to hop between cars. That’s all thrilling stuff. 

And within that logic, there’s that buried emotional core, contained in a glimpse of a future you’s freedom leaping into the ocean, or the hint of a beautiful friendship that may be ending with a violent abrupt foreshortening in the present, but the future will fill in the past. I found myself curiously moved by the movie’s consequences—rending cause and effect with regret, only to be joined again my the insistence of the montage, and its characters’ motivations. 

I came away from a first viewing with sheer admiration for its construction, its impressive scope, its grounding sense of tactile reality even as the effects slip sense away. This time, the sense was present. It’s perfect movie sense, one image and sound after the next building a persuasive fantasy vision of a twilight world, where time’s running out, and where the future grows dim but for the valiant efforts of those who hold out that dim distant flicker of hope. It’s strikingly photographed globetrotting, with the hero and his partner in spies (Robert Pattinson) dashing and capable in slick suits and big action beats. The pounding score and booming bass has a pavlovian effect—it’s exciting, and kicks up the energy of seeing a great Christopher Nolan movie… The me of 2020, with all the sociopolitical anxieties that assumes, and the lonely, isolated, individual TV viewing it implies, doubted it was a great Nolan film. The 2024 me, back in the world, in a crowded theater, before an enormous screen, and surrounded by massive sound, is sure it actually is. I felt like I met myself in the middle distance between then and now, on my way back to realize it then.

Dark City: THE BATMAN

Even after all these years of superhero movies, Batman remains perhaps the most uniquely cinematic. Take Bruce Wayne, the Caped Crusader, striking fear in the hearts of Gotham City’s villainy, all the way back to his early comic book origins. He’s always been at the intersection—thematically, visually, tonally—of gangster pictures, German expressionism, and film noir. He’s accrued Art Deco shadows and grungy urban doom. It’s sometimes dialed up to goofy midcentury camp (hello, Adam West), sometimes dialed down to mumbling Michael Mann skyscraper canyons (howdy, Christian Bale), sometimes drawn out in luxuriously complicated Saturday morning cartoons (the Animated Series and Beyond) or stretched out in gargantuan backlot artifice (holy Tim Burton, Batman!). But it’s always recognizably this stew of influences, plus his costume a simple silhouette with silent film recognizability. His gadgets and gumshoe approach to avoiding the pain of the orphaned billionaire boy grown up collide with the sick and sicker in his crumbling home metropolis. Even the bad Batman movies are still often fun visions of this world, engaging as pulpy interiority blown out to blockbuster dimensions. The latest, directed and co-written by Matt Reeves, and starring Robert Pattinson as the angular chin and brooding eyes hidden within the cape and cowl, is maybe the most downbeat and dreary version yet, once again stumbling down dark alleys in pursuit of something like justice that’s forever out of reach.

There’s something pessimistic at the core of this hero. When talking DC’s icons, Superman is what we hope America can be. Batman is who we fear America is. No high-flying truth and justice here. Bruce Wayne and his alter ego can suit up and punch villains every night, but the sad truth of capitalist corruption and crime—a city where the cops and robbers are often one and the same, and everyone from the Mayor to the District Attorney to the mob bosses are all part of the same pool of dark money and influence—just won’t budge. So Reeves, an intelligent big budget filmmaker coming off of two interestingly textured and thoughtful Planet of the Apes pictures, visualizes these ideas by making his Gotham constantly overcast, usually raining, generally nocturnal. (It has to be a close cousin to the unnamed city in Fincher’s compellingly gross serial killer thriller Se7en.) There’s always a cloud hanging over the scenes, and the slow, patient drip of detective information about the central mystery takes precedence over slam-bang action. That makes the one fun car chase all the more thrilling, a welcome sparking rattling roar of an engine revving to life as the Batmobile makes its long-awaited appearance tearing off after a slimy bad guy. And it leaves the proceedings to move at a steady trudge, resisting the usual fanfare. To its credit, this downbeat affair that creaks by at a long three-hour run time, is trying for something genuinely wiggly and unsettling in the middle of so much iconography and cliche.

The whole thing kicks off with the murder of the mayor by a mysterious killer known only as The Riddler (Paul Dano). More victims follow. At each, he’s recording viral videos and leaving taunting clues in greeting cards at the scene for lead detective Gordon (Jeffrey Wright) to give to The Batman. Together, the two men hunt for clues and chase down leads. Sometimes they cross paths with a slinky nightclub waitress Selina Kyle (Zoe Kravitz), whose cat burglar outfit is the best since Pfeiffer’s. She has her own reasons to investigate the goings-on at a club run by the town’s top gangster (John Turturro) and his waddling underling (Colin Farrell buried in a fat suit). Reeves leans into the tight-lipped pathos of these pathetic, wounded characters creeping around the shadows of society, looking for leverage over each other in an attempt to make things a little brighter by any means necessary. Unlike the usual comic book dichotomy—or pat mirroring that leads villains to the inevitable “we’re two sides of the same coin” monologuing—this movie makes clear that everyone’s inevitably shaped by societal forces beyond their control. Batman, Catwoman, The Riddler, Detective Gordon—all are willing to bend rules and skulk around to reshape Gotham toward their ends, some for slightly better, some for way worse. There’s never a sense anyone will actually unambiguously triumph. Michael Giacchino’s pounding score takes that cue, edging along Elfman horns while plucking some “Tubular Bells.”

Here’s a city possessed with an urban rot that no one can escape. This makes for a brooding, brutal, cynical, ice-cold, paranoid and conspiratorial picture. It’s not fun, exactly, but from its opening montage of vandals and muggers spooked by the sight of the Bat-signal in the sky, to an ending where Gotham is significantly worse off than before the movie started, there’s a grimly compelling fatalism that gets its hooks in, even as the plot dwindles to a hesitant close. It’s all of a piece—a mumbled noir narration, a dimly fuzzy filmic-by-way-of-digital-and-back-again look, a sumptuously gaunt color palate, a murmuring collection of careful performances, a superhero movie that resists the overfamiliar spectacular climaxes we’ve come to expect. Like Pattinson’s sunken performance—a rare Wayne that’s not even a little sparkling—The Batman is obsessive, haunting, and unresolved. Sure, that’s partly the usual superhero move of making one feel like a first entry is so much prologue for promised future story. (And, sure, I’ll take another one with this cast and vibe.) But here that lack of resolution has tonal and thematic sense, too. Gotham, as we’ve long known, has deeply rooted systematic problems. No wonder its citizens, good and bad alike, are going mad. Who can relate?

Hello, I Must Be Going: TENET

In Christopher Nolan’s Tenet, backwards run sequences until the mind reels. It’s a time travel thriller, but not like you’re thinking. It’s about a magic box that can reverse the chronology of an item—or a person. Reverse entropy, they say. Inversion. The plot concerns a secret agent (John David Washington) recruited to stop a snarling Russian arms dealer (Kenneth Branagh) from reversing the flow of time for the entire universe. That’d destroy everything, one reluctant ally (Elizabeth Debicki) is told simply and slowly. She considers it for a moment and solemnly intones: “including my son.” It’s this collision of high-concept headiness and laughably simple personalities that sink the film, which is simultaneously one of Nolan’s most logistically jaw-dropping and emotionally flimsiest. (It’s also a narrative convolution, running backwards and forwards at the same time, and dazzling as much as it is deliberately obtuse.) For as much as he’s gotten a reputation as a cold technician, it’s not until confronted with a movie like this — which has none of the tragic backstory or family sentimentality or rule-setting exposition that some critics have dinged him for in the past — to see how essential those are for the Nolan formula. Here without that rooting interest or well-sketched setup, it’s rather empty, though all go-go-go M.C. Escher timeline. Cause and effect are ruptured in boggling ways. There are stunts and combat and strategizing, with some elements of the action behaving unusually: a bullet hole filling up as the ordnance flies back into the barrel; tumbling fisticuffs that cartwheel with unnatural grace as one combatant flies backwards when they should be ahead; a car zipping the wrong way through traffic after rolling back over from a crash, windows reconstructing as tires squeal in reverse. I found myself wondering what it’d be like re-edited in Memento style.

It’s a film that surprises and exhausts in equal measure. There are those wild visual flourishes, so convincingly done — although it did, on occasion, remind me of Bob Saget’s America’s Funniest Home Videos doing fun rewind montages — I barely could process them, but appreciated their effective  crescendos. Elsewhere there are agents rappelling up a building or spinning a sailboat or crashing a plane or maneuvering through a series or airtight vaults or hanging off the side of a moving firetruck to hop between cars. That’s all thrilling stuff. Would that there was any reason to hold onto the inventiveness other than sheer admiration for its construction, its impressive scope, its grounding sense of tactile reality even as the effects slip sense away. When you get past the scrambled visual conceits, the movie underneath is too straightforward to care about overmuch. There’s the protagonist and antagonist, sparsely characterized, fighting over a MacGuffin. It’s strikingly photographed globetrotting, with the hero and his partner in spies (Robert Pattinson) dashing and capable in slick suits and big action beats. The pounding score, booming bass, and enormous images have a Pavlovian effect—it’s exciting, and kicks up the energy of seeing a great Christopher Nolan movie, even if it doesn’t exactly reach those heights. By the ramp up to the enormous climactic action sequence, I was rather worn out. I found myself thinking about how thrilling it was to see Inception a decade back, and could understand why the temptation to make a whole movie out of that one’s hallway fight must’ve been tempting.

Other People: THE DEVIL ALL THE TIME

Hell is, as Sartre tells us, other people, and that’s certainly the source of evil in Antonio Campos’ The Devil All the Time. Here’s a litany of human ugliness and violence consistently inflicted on and by a couple families over the course of a couple decades in small-town backwoods Appalachia in the middle of the last century. It’s just about as far north as you can take a Southern Gothic tale—the eccentric misery without the humid atmosphere. Based on a novel by Donald Ray Pollock, who also narrates in a nice honeyed tone that gives a layer of slightly wry literary gravitas to the dark goings-on, the film contains murders, suicides, poverty, con men, serial killers, animal cruelty, trauma, and madness, all drenched in a self-righteous pseudo-religiosity that’s the cause of and solution to their problems. Campos, whose films like his previous Christine or early breakout Afterschool have similar interests in violence and mental unravellings of one sort or another, treats the procession of this narrative with a grave seriousness. He regards his characters with the squirm-inducing attention to their terrible fates that one associates with a butterfly pinned in a display case. Lol Crawley’s elegantly textured cinematography, all blasts of sun and evocative shadow in a CinemaScope-sized frame, gives a tony prestige to the images, even and especially as the nastiness accrues. The cast is uniformly haunted: wide stares, pale skin, curling lips chewing over every gnarled line with pulpy accent work. There’s a WWII vet (Bill Skarsgård) scarred by his experiences and trying to start a family with a nice lady (Haley Bennett). There’s a creepy photographer (Jason Clarke) and his wife (Riley Keough). There are two different slimy preachers (Harry Melling and, later, Robert Pattinson). There’s a cop (Sebastian Stan), a devout young woman (Mia Wasikowska), and a couple of troubled orphans (Tom Holland and Eliza Scanlen). These lives collide in mostly tragic ways over the course of two plus hours, gaining a dreary monotony as each new sequence becomes a waiting game to see which character will exit the murdered and which will walk out the murderer. Either way, blood will be spilled. Few of the human characters walk out alive, and even a few of the animals end up strung up. In the end, it becomes a slog of fine filmmaking put toward a simple idea repetitively asserted: if hell is other people, then the devils are among us.

Hollywood Endings: MAPS TO THE STARS

David Cronenberg’s name is inextricably tied to body horror. His first couple decades of filmmaking brought us gooey protrusions, sunken orifices, and unholy amalgamations of oozing flesh as bodies betrayed their owners again and again. In The Fly, Jeff Goldblum fused with an insect in a crumbling mutation. In Videodrome and eXistenZ, man and machine melded physiologies, while Dead Ringers and Crash featured close-ups of metal objects later inevitably plunged into human flesh. And in Scanners, heads explode. These memorably disquieting horror images, playing off the fear of our physical being’s fragility and ability to turn against us with disease and disgust, sealed his reputation as a conjurer of disturbing images.

But his last decade of filmmaking has found a larger body to tease apart and catch mid-decay: society. Look at A History of Violence, a gory drama picture about the lingering effects of murder, or Eastern Promises, a grim Euro-thriller about borders between crime and safety, punishment and brutality, or A Dangerous Method, a period piece of mental anguish at the dawn of psychiatry, or Cosmopolis, with a young billionare on a limo drive through an emotionally and economically deadening New York City. In these films Cronenberg finds violence, yes, but also metaphoric putrefying flesh, seeping sickness deep down in the guts of humanity. His clinical eye finds great drama and the darkest comedy in the damage people do to each other. Certainly, our bodies can betray us. But our actions can perpetuate cycles of damage to all those around us. We fail ourselves when we fail each other, parts of a whole, unpredictable and easily broken.

His latest film, Maps to the Stars, has often been mistaken for a Hollywood satire simply because it’s set in Los Angeles amongst a group of industry types who are, to a person, capable of awful behavior unsparingly detailed in bleakly humorous ways. But what else could it be but some kind of societal body horror when we are regarding poison seeping into the culture? The film looks at damaged people scrambling to work out their psychosexual dramas in public for our amusement on our screens. This isn’t satire. It’s a deeply cynical creepy/comic biopsy, turning up exaggerated rot underneath glamorous surfaces. (Or, at least you can only hope it’s exaggerated.) Imagine Altman’s The Player, but darker, ruder, more lacerating in its oddball effects.

Characters include: an aging actress (Julianne Moore), a hack self-help guru (John Cusack), his stunted teen star son (Evan Bird), the boy’s terse mom (Olivia Williams), a meek chauffer (Robert Pattinson), and a mysterious burn victim (Mia Wasikowska) who arrives on a bus from far away, determined to make it in Tinseltown. They cross paths, some victims of the same tangled tragic backstories (arson, abuse, addiction), others on the precipice of fresh tragedy (mistakes, murders, and Machiavels). Speaking in dryly, believably ridiculous dialogue from screenwriter Bruce Wagner, these people behave like shambling showbiz types, selfish, rapacious id-driven beings. They’ll screw or screw over anyone they care to, while yearning in vain for something to bring meaning to their lives.

Under an intense California sun, Peter Suschitzky’s cinematography so bright it’s practically scorching, performances move with a hollowed-out quality. The guru appears exhausted in his TV appearances, Cusack playing him as a man who doesn’t believe what he’s selling anymore, if he ever did. The middle-aged actress is scrambling to stop falling back down the industry ladder, grasping for a role made famous by her long-dead abusive movie star mother (Sarah Gadon). Moore’s performance is a tightrope walk of vanity and desperation, playing a character at once tragically damaged, overwhelmingly insecure, and monstrously shortsighted, hilarious and heartbreaking. A different sort of heartbreak is the teen star. He has a flat affect common to anyone his age, but his dull gaze shows a boy who has already been to rehab, has access to temptations everywhere, and who thinks he sees ghosts. Perhaps he does.

The characters are running from haunted pasts, with apparitions real, imagined, or half-remembered returning to mock their emptiness. It informs their current pain. They’ve achieved some level of material success, and yet can’t shake memories of and impulses towards abusive behaviors, deceit, addiction, and insanity. The most eerily self-possessed among these desperate people is Wasikowska’s creepy spin on the ingénue role. She drifts into entry-level jobs, interacts with these supposed stars with a calm sense of destiny. She’s moved by prophecy, a sense of inevitable destruction she’ll embrace by film’s end. This confident madness brings out the madness in others, especially as we learn the full extent of her unexpected connections to them. At every step, under Cronenberg’s rigorously sinister sense of humor, the ensemble plays out wickedly funny, unsparingly unsettling sadness, warped, specific, and yet recognizable.

On The Road: THE ROVER

The post-apocalyptic Western plays upon the inversion of its setting. Where a traditional Western is always on some level responding to progress, the inevitable movement from a Wild West to our present day, the post-apocalypse goes backwards. There’s the same iconography: rugged untamed landscapes, solitary masculine figures, and periodic outbursts of gunfire. But instead of representing a flowering that leads for good or ill to modernity, it is sickly, decayed, frayed, beaten up and downbeat. The post-apocalyptic setting is hardly fresh, but this particular iteration can draw upon its genre roots to compelling effects.

It’s certainly the most, and almost only, interesting aspect of Australian writer-director David Michôd’s new film, The Rover. It takes place against just such a crumbled West backdrop, even if it’s not the American west in this case. Opening text tells us that we’re in “Australia. Ten Years After The Collapse.” We never learn what is meant by this “collapse,” a refreshing change of pace. But we certainly feel its effects. The outback has risen up, nature swallowing the sparse towns with plant growth and choking supply routes along crumbling shantytowns that clearly used to be quaint villages, roadside stores, and suburban sprawl. Here there is desperation without even a glimmer of hope.

Guy Pearce stars as a man who really wants his car back. It’s stolen in the open sequence that watches as a thief (Scott McNairy) and his accomplices (Tawanda Manyimo and David Field) crash their truck and continue their escape with in the stolen car. Pearce, a stoic, grizzled man wearing faded, unflattering shorts and a determined grimace, sets out to reclaim his property, giving chase across an unforgiving wilderness sparsely populated with criminals and those simply doing what they have to in order to eke out another day. Along the way, he finds the car thief’s brother (Robert Pattinson), shot in the gut and left for dead. Turns out, the young man isn’t too happy about that turn of events and is happy to help Pearce track his brother down.

It’s a simple plot, spare and episodic. The two men are moving inevitably towards the car and to a showdown of some kind. That conclusion seems likely to be bloody, what with the carnage that seems to follow wherever Pearce and Pattinson’s dusty road trip takes them. Creepy characters along the road include a grandmotherly madame (Gillian Jones) with a shack full of teenage boys, a gun runner (Jamie Fallon), a doctor (Susan Prior), and some military men (Nash Edgerton, Anthony Hayes) whose presence hints at something of a governmental force that exists so far away and so theoretically that only their big guns give them any power whatsoever. The people are malnourished, dehydrated, and suspicious. Even the encounters that manage to end nonviolently are fraught with tension and danger.

The fabric of society is as frayed and on edge as these men are. Pearce and Pattinson hold the screen with a grim smolder. Their performances are gruff, fly-bitten. (Was there a fly-wrangler on set?) Pearce moves deliberately, keeps his eyes deathly quiet, and isn’t answering any questions. Why is his car so important? His determination tells us it’s all he has. Pattinson speaks more, but with a gargled mumble that’s hard to parse. He’s earnest, naïve, and maybe has some mental problems of one kind or another. They’re an awkward match, held together only by their final destinations.

The film takes its two central performances, clenched and uncommunicative guys who fumble around for words when they speak at all, and radiates their inner pain outwards. Their grief and guilt pulse in the very landscape around them, vast and foreboding in Natasha Braier’s razor-sharp cinematography, Peter Sciberra’s austere editing, and the sparse, precise sound design. It’s all so very intriguing, but never gets beyond that initial level. It remains an interestingly visualized and imagined world, convincing and complete. But what happens inside it just doesn’t add up to much. In the final shots we finally learn why Pearce is so driven to reclaim his car, and it’s at once a mild punch in the gut and cause to say, “that’s it?” Throughout it is excellently evocative, but uninvolving. The more that happens, the more that’s revealed, the less I cared. Its setting is expertly drawn, but what happens in it disappoints. Individual details are impressive, but add up to nothing.

Vampire Ever After: BREAKING DAWN - PART 2

You can learn a lot of things watching Breaking Dawn Part 2, the fifth and final Twilight movie. For starters, you can learn that decapitating a vampire looks much like decapitating a Lego person. You can also learn that vampires have so many different variants that when they group together they look like undead X-Men.  Most importantly, you can learn that some of the earlier Twilight movies weren’t so bad after all. On a meta level this is the story of a franchise that fell in love with itself, growing ever more thin in plot, ludicrous in tone, confused in implications, and yet approaching each new scene with a sense of suffocating reverence to the Stephenie Meyer-penned source material. What seemed to be cheesy or earnest in Catherine Hardwicke’s original installment or heavy-handed romanticism in Chris Weitz’s first sequel seems in retrospect to be appealingly situated, allowing genuine humor and creepiness to sneak in ever so slightly around the edges of what could easily have become ponderously bonkers. Because, oh boy, Breaking Dawn Part 2 is nothing if not ponderously bonkers.

Having resolved most of the tension involved in the Bella Swan (Kristen Stewart) supernatural love triangle way back in the third film and then spending a fourth film limping its way through a dull wedding on its way to some surprising last-minute body horror, there’s nowhere else to go but to bring back the biggest delight of the franchise. They are the Volturi, a scheming group of vampiric overlords based in Venice. Only glimpsed here and there since their introduction in the second movie, they police the hush-hush world of bloodsuckers, maintaining this secret for thousands of years. It’s a fun pulpy concept deliciously devoured by former child-star Dakota Fanning and Michael Sheen with long black hair and glowing red eyes set so agreeably in his pasty pale skin. This time around he gets a fun moment where he lets out a startled laugh that goes up and down and trills around. Anyways, you may recall that in the last film Bella, while still human, was impregnated by Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson), vampire. That child poses a threat to vampire kind for one reason or another so there’s the last gasp of conflict.

But the thing is, to describe the film to someone unfamiliar with the material would sound like utter hallucinatory madness. It’s a film with a family of vampires who stand around like they’re posing for a Lands’ End catalog, a creepy CGI psychic baby and her werewolf soulmate, and superpowered multicultural vampire covens that feel borrowed from somewhere else. And yet the film doesn’t even try to live up to its full nutty potential despite director Bill Condon’s attempts to inject some style on occasion. No, each and every moment has to quake with stultifying self-importance. Even the levity feels like forced fan service. Why else include a gratuitous – and coyly edited – scene in which the heartthrob werewolf (Taylor Lautner) suddenly disrobes before changing into his wolf form?

This final installment spends the bulk of its runtime introducing new characters and engineering strange one-last-scene curtain calls for just a couple of series regulars in between rote, sullen recitations of franchise lore. And yet no one found room for supporting character MVP Anna Kendrick, as one of the only human characters left, to stop by and bring a few laughs? By the time the Volturi float in and bring with them a scene of true energized conflict by way of a standoff that explodes into surprisingly satisfying violent, twisty digital combat before a fine rug-pull moment, it’s like finding a cheap prize at the bottom of a box of stale caramelized popcorn.

The longer the series goes on, the more it grows difficult to ignore the ways in which the story runs from its truly interesting aspects. Just look at how the half-vamp child is handled here as nothing more than cutesy, the total opposite of the concept’s inherent eeriness. I’m not asking for Kirsten Dunst in Interview with the Vampire level pathos here, simply acknowledgement of the idea’s complexity. The overarching idea of a hundred-year-old vampire falling in love with a teenage girl (and vice versa) has plenty of taboo frissons, a creepiness mingling with forbidden romance. To wish to become a vampire in order to be with him forever is a puppy love desire that dooms forever, limiting the poor girl’s future options, to say the least. The relationship has the potential to literally poison her. That’s why, upon reflection, the first film works fairly well. It marries vampire horror and adolescent angst quite nicely. That film’s final scene, in which Bella almost, but not quite, gets fanged at prom is a fun recognition of the situation’s implications, desire painfully denied for the benefit of all involved.

But now, in its final 115 minutes, the franchise engineers a resolution that works through magical thinking, resolving supernatural conundrums because True Love or something. After two mild entertainments and two films of increasingly slow, dumb storytelling, this finale’s best feat is activating a mild affection in me for the franchise’s earliest days, before it was for True Believers only. I don’t begrudge fans their enjoyment of the series; I just wish that, after a certain point, the filmmakers will still interested in letting me in instead of assuming that I already was.

Vampire and Wife: BREAKING DAWN - PART 1

There’s a good chance that you already know whether or not you’ll enjoy the new Twilight movie, the latest in this series of movies about Bella (Kristen Stewart), the human who falls in love with Edward (Robert Pattinson) the vampire, but kind of likes Jacob (Taylor Lautner) the werewolf too. Mostly unfamiliar with the books by Stephanie Meyer, I found the first film pleasantly mediocre, the second, New Moon, a bit better, and the third, Eclipse, considerably worse. My disinterest towards the story is at an all time high. This central trio started off with some small amount of genuine sizzle – never better than in the second movie – but has settled into somnambulant performances. The plot had run out of steam somewhere between the second and third films. Still, it’s the big movie of the weekend and I figured I might as well review it, so I dutifully shuffled off to see number four, Breaking Dawn Part 1.

This time around, it all starts with a wedding that somehow expects us to believe that an 18-year-old high school student should be allowed to marry a 100-year-old vampire. Fine. I’ve fallen for some pretty odd plots in my day, too. But this opening ceremony is drawn out beyond all reason. I didn’t time it, but I think I sat there for a couple of days waiting for the movie to move on to something else.  At least the wedding allows (Academy Award nominee) Anna Kendrick and Billy Burke to walk in and bring some genuine human warmth and life to the proceedings. (I think they retain their likability because they’re playing the closest thing to real people in neglected supporting roles). While lots of characters we’ve never met smile and wave, Bella and Edward drive off to start their honeymoon.

Once there, off the coast of Brazil in a mansion on a remote island owned by Edward’s adopted vampire father figure, naturally, the happy couple finally does something that they haven’t done in any of the previous films. Yes, that’s right, they sit down and play chess. What did you think they’d do? They also swim and smile and, oh yeah, they also consummate their love. This is the inciting incident for the second and pretty much final plot point of the film. You see, Bella gets pregnant even though her new husband told her it would be totally fine and, besides, he knew he couldn’t even get someone pregnant. That’s the one big lesson this stretch of the story has to teach the discomfortingly young audience I was sitting amongst. Always use protection, especially since vampirism is apparently not a good form of contraception.

More so than any of the other Twilight films, Breaking Dawn Part 1 provoked my disgust at its central premise, one of terrible gender politics and a twisted approach to sexuality. Poor Bella has absolutely no life beyond loving Edward, except when she thinks she might like someone else. This film postulates that her ultimate function is as wife and mother, even if it kills her. There’s simply no other option for a female character this weak and flat, and that’s simply unacceptable. But, by this point, I just need to acknowledge it and move on. This is also a movie series that includes a tribe of youths who turn into giant dogs that stand around and think at each other. There’s only so much you can read into it all before you start to feel a little silly.

The director this time around is Bill Condon, who got his start in horror, moved on to glossy prestige pictures like Dreamgirls and has kind of merged the two here, though it’s really a worst-of-both-worlds situation. It’s slick and sick, but without the impact each aspect could offer. He does bring the film some good stylistic touches amidst complete and utter straight-faced serious ridiculousness. This is a two-hour film in which nothing of interest happens for long stretches of time, a film with its only fleeting moments of significance arising from when Condon tries his hardest to push against the constraints of the material and expectations to punch up the style. This is a far more colorful Twilight film than we’ve received before. It’s brighter and at times sunnier (though I never did see a vampire sparkle). At the very least, it looks like he woke up the cast.

Condon serves up some stylish dream sequences and a nightmarish birthing that stays barely this side of the PG-13. For all the supernatural monsters stomping around the series, this is the first to get this close to the horror genre. After the opening, Melissa Rosenberg’s adaptation takes a long, dull slide into body horror as the demonic vampire fetus tries to suck the life out of Bella. She sips some blood, at the urging of her vampire doctor, to keep the little monster happy and Condon lovingly regards the dark red liquid as it gets slurped up a straw. “It tastes…good,” she says. Creepy. This all leads to the film’s best, most effective moments: sudden, intense, spine cracking labor pains followed by a bloody, jagged, Caesarean performed by teeth. Most of the gore is kept off-screen but the ragged editing, blurry focus, and squishy sound effects leave little to the imagination.

There are a few good moments, but they’re built on such shaky foundation. Condon’s not a bad filmmaker, but he’s also not prepared to completely subvert the material of a series that has so many fans. It would be unreasonable to expect him to be. The plot slides into crazy territory by the end. We’re talking who-in-their-right-mind-thought-this-up? crazy. At worst, it’s not even laughably bad. It’s just plain bad. It’s not sick in a horror way, but more in a total nonsense way. Of course, this is only Part 1. I can’t for the life of me guess where this is all going in next year’s fifth and final movie of the series. It’ll either be pure, unfiltered freaky craziness or utter boredom. Actually, judging by the previous films, it’ll be the dull mid-point between the two.

Ladies and Gentlemen, Boys and Girls: WATER FOR ELEPHANTS

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Sleepy Kind of Love: ECLIPSE

By far the lousiest of the Twilight movies, a series that has thus far managed to be only watchable at best, Eclipse is a film only the most passionate fans, those who already know they’ll just looove it, could enjoy. It contains the worst acting, the worst set design, and some of the worst effects. Or maybe it was made worse by the movie’s slow pace and endlessly circular dialogue that allowed me to stew in my discontent. It all seems thin and chintzy, as if any old thing could have been slapped together to please the fans as long as it contained all the moping and doe-eyed expressions they could get. A handful of scenes late in the film take place on the top of a mountain that looks so unconvincing that I got the feeling that a slight shift of the camera would reveal a stagehand shoveling fake snow. Even the gorgeous deep autumnal color palate of the second film has been replaced with thin grey tones, a warning of depressing blandness to come.

The other Twilight movies were no great cinema, but at least Catherine Hardwicke and Chris Weitz, who directed one installment each, had a good handle on what worked best about their films, and it sure wasn’t the source material or the horribly uncomplicated love triangle at its center. They played up the supporting cast, where the series’ best talent is kept, giving juicy scene-stealing moments to a great actor like Michael Sheen or allowing supremely talented young actresses like Anna Kendrick and Dakota Fanning to bring some class to so much hogwash. Even poor Billy Burke, in the thankless role of a clueless father, was utilized for his ability to show with a glance how he can seemingly sense the ridiculousness. Here the supporting cast is nothing but glorified extras.

Eclipse is all about Bella and Edward and Jacob and how Bella loves Edward but has feelings for Jacob too. This is also the same basic plot as the second film, but this time it’s played with considerably less energy. The returning leads – Kristen Stewart, Robert Pattinson, and Taylor Lautner – almost appear to be sleepwalking through their scenes. Stewart and Pattinson, especially, seem to have none of what little chemistry they had in the first film while Lautner has lost any spark of romance he had in the second.

Of course, they aren’t helped by the fact that most of the dialogue in the movie, when it’s not simply dull exposition, is nearly sub-literate statements of emotions and desire. “I want you.” “I have feelings for him.” “You love me.” “This is dangerous.” “You know I’m hotter than you.” All of the above are actual lines of dialogue that can be heard at different points in the film, but the last of those at least has the decency to be something of a laugh line. This is a film that cuts out all but the sappiest and dullest of moments, stripping away all the little moments of real humanity or small humor that caused its predecessors to have some modicum of life.

To his credit, director David Slade (of Hard Candy and 30 Days of Night) shoots the dialogue scenes close and quick, trying, but failing, to spark some life into the movie. After some time, the extreme close-ups of pale faces started to run together. Slade is at his best in three flashbacks that are the sole sources of excitement to be found. They’re chances to break out of the dull colors and duller conversations. My favorite of the three presents brief snippets of a story about a bride-to-be who is beaten and left for dead at the hands of her fiancé. Saved from certain death by being turned into a vampire, she takes her revenge. There’s a great shot of this vampiric woman, all dressed up in a wedding gown, bursting in on her abusive ex. That’s the kind of dynamism I would have loved to see in the rest of the movie.

Instead, our simple characters are still dithering over who loves whom, and how much, in endlessly tiresome fashion. Not even a big, dumb vampires-and-werewolves-versus-evil-vampires brawl at the end could rouse me from the stupor that I entered after looking at the time, certain that the movie was almost over, and discovering that there was still an hour to go.

Quick Look: REMEMBER ME

Remember Me takes its central romance very seriously, draping it with all kinds of somber import. College-aged New Yorkers Robert Pattinson and Emilie de Ravin meet and grow to love each other over the course of a summer. He’s from a rich family, represented by his businessman father (Pierce Brosnan). She’s from a lower middle-class family, represented by her policeman father (Chris Cooper). The movie moves in often predictable ways, but it’s elevated by the fine work from Brosnan and Cooper who turn stock roles into something a little more meaningful. The movie leans too heavily on de Ravin’s moodiness and Pattinson’s leftover deathly pallor from Twilight, but the story essentially works despite itself. The romance felt believable and both the inter- and intra-family conflict is handled nicely. Despite the burdensome tragedy that surrounds the characters (it opens with a fatal mugging and ends with, well, let’s just say it’s so ridiculously surprising and bracing that it almost becomes a fittingly sick punchline), the movie makes them feel, if not real, at the very least like well-inhabited types. Director Allen Coulter, from a script by Will Fetters, keeps the plot moving and the imagery simple while playing to the strengths of his actors. The main couple is believably drawn and the supporting cast, from their fathers and families to the stereotypical goofy best friend, is fine as well. This is a simple, standard film that satisfies in its ordinariness, in its small charm and mildly involving subplots, in its refreshing seriousness and in its good turns from dependable character actors. At least until the ending that becomes a real test of the audience’s loyalty. I went with it, so unexpected that it almost circles back around to retroactively inevitable, but with an ending this out-of-left-field, your reactions may vary.

Squeeeeeeeeeeeeeeal! It's NEW MOON!

There’s a moment late in New Moon, the second movie in the wildly popular Twilight series, when Bella Swan, our protagonist-of-sorts, is confronted by an evil vampire who attempts to read her mind to see if she has a special power that makes her invulnerable to vampire E.S.P. He gives it a go and then pulls away from her, clearly disappointed. “I sense nothing,” he says. I thought: that’s about right. I wouldn’t be so quick to decide you can’t read her mind if I were you, Mr. Vampire.

Bella’s a weak character precisely because she appears to be a very unthinking person. This goes beyond just simple teenage feelings of invulnerability or hubris. She simply hasn’t a thought in her head. She’s a weak person who falls easily under the spell of strong, dangerous males and is quick to mistake simple lust for everlasting love. This, or rather the glorification of this, can be seen as incredibly irresponsible, especially in light of the masses of tween and teen girls that adore the series, since girls like Bella in the real world can, and sometimes do, fall into abusive relationships. A real abusive boyfriend is much more terrifying than any supernatural force.

It’s this squirmy undercurrent to the plot that is most responsible for sinking Catherine Hardwicke’s 2008 adaptation of Twilight. Though, to be fair, Stephenie Meyer’s horrible writing doesn’t inspire great filmmaking all on its own. Even so, that’s no excuse for Hardwicke’s strange choices in hokey special effects and inflated reverence, not to mention her apparent inability to direct actors or sustain a tone. I would be surprised if she had cut anything from the film for being too cheesy. The movie’s a bit of a drag as it spends vast portions of the movie introducing us to Bella, a wholly uninteresting protagonist, and Edward, a vampire whose primary characteristic is his ability to look handsome. There’s not a lot going on here and, although Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson have some degree of talent, there’s not a lot to the characters to get an uninitiated audience excited. The movie asks you to buy a deep love between the two that just doesn’t seem to be there. She pushes her hair back. He says he needs to control himself so he doesn’t bite her. She wants to be a vampire so she can be with him forever. He says no. Repeat. There’s just not enough meaningful conflict happening here.

To my surprise, director Chris Weitz, taking the reins of the franchise for New Moon, seems to recognize the fundamental lack of energy in the plot handed down by Meyer. He’s still fairly reverential to the source material, bringing along all its problems. Despite expanding the plot to include a pack of werewolves to counterbalance the vampires, with whom they have a nasty, centuries-old feud, the events and ideas presented simply don’t live up to their potential. Instead, we find that Jacob, a nice Native American kid with a small role in the first film, is falling in love with Bella. Taylor Lautner plays Jacob, and he’s more than capable of filling a third corner in a developing love triangle. He’s so good, actually, you wonder why Bella would want to stay with the icy, controlling, emotionally abusive vampire when she could have a warm, caring, doting werewolf? After all, Edward jets off in the first reel and doesn’t show up again until the climax. (Does this make me a member of Team Jacob? I’m not clear on the specifics of these things).

Weitz manages to bring this conflict to a bit of a sizzle through sheer filmmaking alone. He almost overcomes the weak material by bringing in Javier Aguirresarobe, of such films as Talk to Her and The Others, as cinematographer, and the great Alexandre Desplat as composer. These two gentlemen are at the height of their powers here. By not condescending to the material and instead doing some of their best work, they help the movie not feel so cheap. The movie looks and sounds rich and sumptuous; the colors are deep and warm, the string section soars. This isn’t the dishwater palate of the first film. Here is a movie that looks romantic and lush, even if the plot isn’t always as convincing in that aspect. And even though we get plenty of slow-motion moments featuring a character moving closer to the camera, all the better for the 12-year-old girls to swoon, it’s not a technique that’s gets overused. I was reminded of the short pauses for laughter that can be spotted in Marx Brothers’ movies.

The plot’s still mostly a drag with effectively nothing happening for most of the second act, but at least we have fun supporting actors like Anna Kendrick and Billy Burke to liven things up. Weitz and screenwriter Melissa Rosenberg have tried their hardest to keep things moving with a chase here, a stalking there, a near-death experience here, a funny interlude there. Mostly, though, it’s just our characters sitting around talking about immortal rules and mortal emotions. It’s amazing so much time can be spent on characterization and yet we still end up with pretty flat characters. And yet, Chris Weitz’s New Moon does something that Meyer couldn’t do, no matter how many pounds of terrible prose she expends. This movie occasionally generates a sense of rushing teenage emotion, strong and nonsensical, the headlong crash of a crush and the first sparks of attraction. Maybe later on in the franchise (I stopped reading after the second book) we’ll have to accept that True Love has developed. For now, this is almost good enough.

The movie really picks up speed with an ending that is actually kind of fun. We go to meet some of the Volturi, a clan of vampires that, in these movies’ mythology, rule all the vampires in the world. Played by grade-A actors like Michael Sheen and Dakota Fanning, they, for lack of a better term, vamp it up wonderfully. They’re at once funny and menacing, no small feat. I enjoyed their contributions so much, with their dry line readings, billowing black cloaks, and piercing red eyes, that they very nearly pushed the movie into solid recommendation territory. But they aren’t in the movie for long enough. Their screen time is probably only 15 to 20 minutes (if that) of this over-two-hours production.

There are plenty of people who care very deeply about these Twilight books and movies. On the one hand, I’m glad they’re excited about something. On the other hand, I’m disappointed so many seem to be missing the uncomfortable, fairly silly, and potentially dangerous, undercurrents of the story. And yet, I have to admit I was kind of captured by this movie at times, enjoying supporting performances and adoring the style and score. I would never say that it’s a good movie, but I would say it’s a watchable, even at times enjoyable, movie. Unless you have already completely lost yourself in fandom for the series, the less seriously you take it (you hear that, vampire geeks and werewolf nerds?*) the more fun you will have.

*I say this lovingly.