Past Lives: WE LIVE IN TIME and HERE

Movies are uniquely situated to capture time. They’re built of finite moments, assembled with a definite end in mind. Unlike the open-endedness of television, the ephemerality of theater, the personalized pace of literature, or the stasis of paintings and sculptures, a movie is each moment in performance and photography and music temporally unified and held infinitely replayable. And yet to experience it in full is to move through time with its choices and for its ends. Its life-like qualities are also its greatest falseness—that we can return again to experience a life anew. It works on us by working it out through time. So when a movie leans into an idea about time, it’s meeting the medium at one of its great strengths.

This is the case with We Live in Time, which gets quite a boost by emphasizing clocks ticking and timers counting and calendars turning. It tells a pretty conventional tearful story about a couple who fall in love, have a kid, and live through illnesses. It swells with conventional sentiment. But it gets out of feeling cheap by embracing its centering of time. The story is told out of order, bouncing between high-emotion moments within the couple’s relationship. We get a wacky Meet Cute and a sober diagnosis, a wedding invitation and a pregnancy test, a career accomplishment and a medical setback. It adds to a sense of time slipping away, each discreet moment feeling so big and lasting in that moment, and yet so fleeting and short in the aggregate. The leads are played with lovely chemistry—sensual and sparkling with unforced intimacy and an easy flirtatiousness—by Florence Pugh and Andrew Garfield, who genuinely connect on screen with quiet teasing and fluttering sensitivity. They have eyes that water with unspoken fears and desires, and then run over when they’re finally spoken.

Director John Crowley (he might be best known for the lovely romantic Saoirse Ronan picture Brooklyn from about a decade ago) wisely frames the movie in warm tones and cozy close-ups, letting the performances breathe with natural interaction even as the high-gloss appearance and occasionally cliche moves tilt toward the conventional. There’s such depth of feeling to this acting duet. It adds up to quite a tear-jerking work-out, constantly teetering on the edge of melancholy even in the moments of satisfaction. It’s all those timers and tests and countdowns and waiting rooms and Save the Dates that end up important factors in so many scenes. We feel their time together slipping away. It made me acutely aware that we’re never truly cognizant of how little time we have with the ones we care about. How could we go on if we did? And how will those hundreds of little moments continue to resonate long after we’re gone?

That’s also the subject of Robert Zemeckis’ latest film: Here. In true Zemeckis fashion, it’s one of the more audacious visual experiences in recent multiplex memory. Would we expect any less from the guy who gave us Roger Rabbit’s believable hand-drawn cartoon co-stars, Forrest Gump’s proto-Deep Fakes, and three eye-boggling early motion-capture efforts? He’s been consistently pushing against the limits of popular cinema’s visual forms. This latest experiment, inspired by Richard McGuire’s graphic novel of the same name, tells the entire history of one particular spot. The camera doesn’t move. Its perspective is fixed at one angle, in one position, as everything from the dinosaurs’ extinction to the COVID pandemic plays out. It’s a simple observation, perhaps, but also a profound one, in its way, to recognize that through each and every spot on the planet the entirety of history runs. The movie draws this out by, from a flurry of images across all time, settling down into telling several stories in parallel, each with a small group of character who live here. We see: a prehistoric indigenous couple; a family in colonial America; a family in the early 20th century; a couple in the early 1940s; a family in the late-twenty-teens. Here is a home.

The film cuts freely between all of these stories, each told in chronological order, while the overall history of the place is suitably scrambled. A main storyline emerges telling the birth-to-elderly arc of one Baby Boomer (Tom Hanks) as he grows up in a childhood home that becomes his own in adulthood. He marries his high school sweetheart (Robin Wright) and then pulls a George Bailey trying to chase dreams that always lead him to stay. Life happens anyway. The cuts between the subplots and this main one tend to follow thematic threads—a man holds up his newborn so it can see the moon in one century, then another—or trace rhyming trajectories. Sometimes Zemeckis will draw a panel around one part of the frame, allowing it to stay frozen in time as the rest of the image moves, further exploiting these juxtapositions. Throughout are recurring motifs as we find the characters dealing with children, disease, technology, aging, money, work, dreaming, and despair. Same as it ever was.

The concept is so committed that I found myself tearing up at the sheer sentimental exercise of it all. (One could imagine a 60-second version repurposed for a life insurance commercial. See it and weep.) And yet the movie is also playing out at this formal distance, a tension between visual stillness and elaborate effects to age and de-age that location and its actors. Within these dense digital frames, the writing and performances are actually quite broad and theatrical, each story pretty obvious, each point triple-underlined in explicitly thematic dialogue. It’s presentational within the experimental frame. And yet I found myself so moved by its daring—crying more at the concept than the characters—that the uneven specifics’ sheer volume made up for any particular clanging miscalibration. At times Zemeckis and co-writer Eric Roth lean into their worst Gumpy tendencies, with a few scenes of cutesy cultural coincidence and a few fine ideas undone by their broadness. (Look at the scene with the grad students and wonder how those performers were possibly directed that way for the takes they used.) But the overall affect of the picture is one of visual playfulness and soft-hearted storytelling. Zemeckis is too charming a technician to take it all at face value—his roots in wacky comedies are here mixing it up with his prestige polish—and too much of a crowd-pleaser to risk letting his visual experimentation drown out the emotion. He pitches it all at such a heightened tone—even in blocking that cheats out toward the camera—that you can’t miss the overflow of human drama painted in primary colors. It’s a movie that works because of its big swings more than its small details. It just takes some time to adjust.

Spies Like Thus: ALLIED

It is fitting Allied, a glossy new film from Robert Zemeckis, opens on Thanksgiving weekend, because its appeal is not dissimilar from a Macy’s parade. The movie is a shiny empty spectacle in which two performers of balloon-sized star power are paraded down a straightforward, unsurprising route. Zemeckis is too skilled a technician to make it badly, but for all the sharp, clear staging and gleaming period detail, he hasn’t thought through a way to make the screenplay jump into anything resembling life. It’s beautifully inert, handsomely dull. He’s clearly out to make a grand old-fashioned entertainment, a World War II spy picture that – colorful widescreen use of the R-rating aside – could’ve been made in the forties. It starts in Casablanca – a real statement of purpose, that – with two Allied spies (Brad Pitt and Marion Cotillard) meeting on sand-swept streets. They are to play husband and wife Vichy sympathizers, get invited to the German ambassador’s upcoming party, and then kill every Nazi in the place. That’s a great hook, and afterwards it’ll spin out in what should be gut-wrenching consequences, but instead dwindle to boredom.

The peculiar tension of Zemeckis’s artificial approach is highlighted in the opening shot, a slow move around Pitt parachuting into the desert as he slowly, gracefully, lands upright on two feet with a soft puff of sand. It looks as if he’s standing still with scenery composited in around him, like a promo shot for a Virtual Reality headset. But it’s also a terrifically entertaining dose of stardom as Pitt – perfectly coiffed and tailored – is met by a car in the middle of nowhere. He’s driven to town where he meets Cotillard, who is wearing a glossy dress stunningly draped over her figure. Zemickis is in full command of his dazzling technique, letting the two spies get drawn into a real romance flowering under their cover story. Asked how she can be such an effective spy, Cotillard responds that she keeps the emotions real. Indeed, the same goes from the opening hour of the film, which features elaborate camera fakery and intimate collisions of charisma, climaxing in two moments. First, they finally make love in the back of a car, the camera spinning around the vehicle while a howling digital sandstorm whirls outside. Second, they gun down Nazis at a blood-splattered party. Fun times.

After a decade spent making (underrated) animated films, Zemeckis is now three films into his return to live action. He’s clearly enjoying the full CG complement of tools at his disposal to finally create complex camera moves he’s been working towards his whole career. Think about the trickery on display in Back to the Future, Forrest Gump, and Contact and watch how much bigger, longer, and more complicated the artifice can be in Flight’s wild plane crash or The Walk’s vertigo-inducing skyscraper tightrope. He’s not doing anything so elaborate here, instead concocting with cinematographer Don Burgess’s scrubbed smooth images a sort of vintage throwback spy movie, with patiently filmed polished backlots and wardrobe, perfect and shiny, the better to complement his movie stars. There’s just nothing like putting a real person in an elaborately imagined feat of moviemaking. (Perhaps it’s worth pointing out Zemeckis’s three post-animation films contain nude scenes. I suppose that’s making use of the live in live action?) So when sharply dressed people watch the sun rise over the sand dunes, Nazis get blown apart, or London’s skies light up with enemy fire, there’s a charge to seeing the layers of phony visual interest designed for our amusement.

But for such a good-looking film, it grows tedious the instant it introduces its most gripping complication. Pitt and Cotillard return from Casablanca to England, where they promptly decide to get married. A year passes, during which they have a child, born during an air raid in one of the movie’s best hyperbolic set pieces. Then, one fateful Friday, Pitt is called into a secret meeting where his superiors (Jared Harris and Simon McBurney) tell him his wife is most likely a Nazi spy. They’ll know for sure by Monday morning. He’s to act like nothing’s out of the ordinary, but if she’s found guilty he’ll be the one pulling the trigger. If he doesn’t, he’ll face indictment for conspiracy. This should be gripping material, like Mr. and Mrs. Smith in reverse, dazzling espionage funneled into a comfortable domestic life instead of the other way around. Every minute of this weekend should be loaded with portent. And yet writer Steven Knight (Dirty Pretty Things) has designed a screenplay that separates the couple for large portions of this second half, sending Pitt on increasingly inane attempts at investigating that are both useless and fruitless. For such a great spy, it takes him a dreadfully long time putting the clues together.

Zemeckis has the right cast and crew to pull off a stylish WWII thriller, but the screenplay tunnel visions into its least interesting aspects. It privileges a limp mystery over a rich vein of emotional marriage metaphor lingering untapped below the surface. In sidelining Cotillard, it shoves the romantic tension and the questions of betrayal far into the background. In isolating Pitt it leaves him adrift in a plot beyond his control despite all attempts to gin up conflict to wander into. (A late breaking jaunt behind enemy lines is especially dunderheaded, adding nothing to the plot while separating him from where the entirety of the film’s dramatic interest sits.) As the movie enters its long, slow, concluding sequences, it finally succeeds in choking off personality and promise while snoozing through dull revelations and last minute attempts at shocking turns of events. After such dazzling artifice and dopey movie pleasure up front, it’s depressing to watch it all fade to nothing by the end. It’s simply a great idea – and some polished, confident filmmaking – going to waste.

Man on Wire: THE WALK

The Walk opens on a question: Why? It tells the true story of Philippe Petit, a French tightrope walker who, in 1974, decided to string his high-wire between the towers of the newly built World Trade Center in New York City. The question is a natural response, and a reasonable place to start. Why risk death on a dangerous and illegal act of daredevil theatrics over 100 stories above the ground? To Petit, who fancies himself an artist, a death-defying poet of motion, it is do or do not. There is no why. It’s quickly apparent that neither the man nor the film can adequately articulate a response that’ll explain. They both leave it to the sheer beauty and wonder conjured up by the act itself to feel out an answer. He’s a dreamer who simply wants to surprise the world with something amazing, a fleeting moment of transcendence, because he believes he can. Why? No. Why not?

Think of the film as one sparkling feat of ingenious three-dimensional spectacle paying homage to another. Director Robert Zemeckis has made a career out of pushing special effects out on the high-wire of believability. He’s made time traveling characters doubling back on themselves (the Back to the Futures), cartoons interacting with real actors (Who Framed Roger Rabbit), grotesque slapstick maiming (Death Becomes Her), manipulated historical footage (Forrest Gump, Contact), scarily vivid plane crashes (Cast Away, Flight), and uncannily fluid motion capture worlds (The Polar Express, A Christmas Carol). Taking full advantage of what movies can do, he’s a master technician interested in telling classically developed narratives in popcorn cinema at the edge of what’s possible. So of course he’s committed to bringing to life the story of a man who saw the impossible and stepped out on the wire anyway.

Starting with a sharp close-up of Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s grinning face – it arcs out of the 3D frame with topographical specificity like Herzog’s cave paintings – The Walk’s first shot pulls back until we see he’s perched on the Statue of Liberty’s torch. Behind him glowing computer sunshine gleams off a perfect shiny CGI New York City skyline. It’s vintage in look and theatrical in presentation, utterly and perfectly unreal. Playing Petit gives Gordon-Levitt a chance to be larger than life, leaning into ebullient ringleader’s bravado. He plays a man who’s always putting on a show. How else could he convince not only himself, but a small group of accomplices as well, to plot a stunt that never stops looking insane to outside eyes? With an acrobat’s posture and a showman’s energy, he breaks the fourth wall, jauntily narrating his story like he’s telling a tall tale. Well, it’s certainly tall, and would definitely be hard to believe if it weren’t already proficiently chronicled in James Marsh’s 2008 documentary Man on Wire.

We watch as fluid, sparkling CGI and Dariusz Wolski’s gliding camera animate broad nostalgically filtered scenes of Petit’s early life. As a boy, a family of tightrope walkers performing in a circus near his small town fascinated him. He strung up some rope between two trees in his backyard and slowly learned to keep his balance. (It’s a fine allegory for any kid who knew early passion for an art.) Once grown, he trained with an expert (Ben Kingsley) before heading to Paris where he scraped by with money made from impromptu sidewalk shows. Eventually, he’s crossing small ponds, then the two peaks of the Notre Dame cathedral. But it’s seeing New York’s twin towers in a magazine that really ignites his imagination.

For most of its runtime after the introduction to Petit’s origins, the film – scripted by Zemeckis with Christopher Browne – is a thin, light, and functional heist movie, where all the reconnaissance, team-building, and scheming has a benign, maybe even noble, goal. The only thing they’re out to steal is a moment of bystanders’ attention, a moment to look up in awe at what one determined daredevil is capable of. He recruits his girlfriend (Charlotte Le Bon) to travel to New York with him. Two friends (Clément Sibony and César Domboy) join them, willing to help sneak the wire between the tops of the towers. Along the way they find some Americans (Steve Valentine, James Badge Dale, Ben Schwartz, and Benedict Samuel) who are willing to get involved in this daring scheme. There’s a simple pleasure in process during the planning stages as a brisk montage flows from Petit’s imagination out into the tricky real world of elevators, foreman, and security guards.

Often treading close to surface-level corniness – music booms and the camera swirls with sentimental reverence, while the ensemble trades likable banter – the movie is completely intertwined with Petit’s exuberant self-confidence. It builds in anticipation. How could a recreation of this impossible act possibly make the build-up pay off? There’s double-edged suspense, wondering if Petit will fall, and if the movie will. Then he steps off the edge of a tower onto a wire strung across the 200-foot gap 1,350 feet in the air. That’s a long way down. It’s terrifying and beautiful, intense feelings mixed in one transcendent breathless sequence. Zemeckis floats across the expanse with Gordon-Levitt in some of the most brilliantly realized heights I’ve ever seen on a movie screen. It’s worth the wait. Both the film and the stunt that inspired it are examples of people putting faith in the power of their skill and planning to pull off impressive amazement.

When Gordon-Levitt first stands at the very corner of the roof, wind blowing his hair as he wavers, holding his precarious balance, the effect is shockingly peaceful in its intensity. The movie climaxes with this dizzying, lovely sequence, as overwhelmingly tense and lovely as it should be to sell the majesty of the moment. It’s moving to see the characters nervous and astonished as Petit slowly maneuvers across the open air with no safety precaution to catch him. That’s also what provokes a tangibly physiological response. I’ve never been as lightheaded with vertigo while sitting in a theater—palms sweating, teeth clenching, stomach fluttering. Not since Scorsese’s Hugo has a big studio production used 3D so well. Here it captures not only the scale of the stunt, and the danger below, but the strangely serene unreality of a truly remarkable moment. The effects are a perfectly realized essence, not photorealist, but beyond, convincing and strikingly vivid in depth and scope.

And yet it’s not only a thrill of technical accomplishment. It’s stirring to see a dream realized. It’s a simple story told with complex visuals conjuring convincing and transporting awe, inviting an audience to contemplate what a small group of dedicated human beings are capable of, great creation, but also great danger. 9/11 resonances are deftly sidestepped, but are difficult to avoid entirely. Though they remain unspoken, it’s hard not to feel the tower’s extratextual modern absence elevating the final moments as Petit leaves us with his wistful pride in his old memories, and the skyline slowly fades to black. Zemeckis has skillfully returned us to a time when the towers were riskily made magic, Petit daring us to watch and gasp.

A Bumpy FLIGHT

Howard Hawks once said a good movie has three good scenes and no bad scenes. Flight, director Robert Zemeckis’s first live-action movie in twelve years, tweaks the formula by giving us three great scenes and a few bad ones. Two of the great scenes are right up front. The opening puts us in a hotel room with airline pilot Whip Whitaker (Denzel Washington) and the flight attendant (Nadine Velazquez) he spent the night with. The camera’s nonchalant capture of skin, sheets, and bottles of booze reveals a director who, after making (mostly great) animated movies over the past decade, is reveling in his return to live action, to flesh and blood and earthly pleasures. The pilot, slow to wake up, does a line of cocaine, snorting it up as classic rock on the soundtrack blares to life and the camera flings back with his newly energized head. He’s ready to go, and so is the movie.

Right away, the script by John Gatins puts the audience in the unusual position of not knowing how to take the main character. There’s an instinctive cringing dread to seeing a pilot drunkenly inhale coke before a flight, but the smart casting balances this out. Denzel Washington, confident and cool, has intense audience affection. (He’s one of the few true Movie Stars left). The audience wants to root for Denzel the wise, Denzel the tough-but-fair, but the movie gives us a different kind of Washington role. Here his bravado is empty. He’s good at his job, very good as we’ll soon find out, but his addictions have gotten the best of him. His overconfident suaveness covers up all manner of lies and deceptions that are barely hidden from sight. In a small gesture Zemeckis catches in the corner of a frame, Whitaker slips, only just catching his footing, while climbing aboard the plane.

In the movie’s next great scene, the ordinary flight goes horribly wrong, but not because of its impaired pilot. Suffering devastating mechanical failure, the plane enters a terrifying nosedive. The shot that looks through the cockpit window as the clouds part to reveal the rapidly approaching ground is a gripping moment of stomach-flipping suspense. With convincing special effects and precise blocking, the plane crashes. With miraculous quick thinking, Captain Whitaker brings the plane down relatively safely, through a scary, effective extended scene in which the plane, falling out of the sky, ends up flying upside down before slicing through a church steeple and slamming into a field. Somehow, out of 102 people aboard the flight, 96 survive.

The film follows the aftermath of this accident. The media calls the pilot a hero. The pilots’ union rep (Bruce Greenwood) tells Whitaker to keep a low profile, to not speak to the press. The union calls in a lawyer (Don Cheadle) to handle the criminal side of the accident investigation. It’s clear that the plane suffered mechanical difficulties. It’s also clear that the pilot was inebriated. He is hero; he is a criminal. The film creates a convincing scenario from which there can be no easy answers, from which there’s no easy way out. It’s perhaps somewhat inevitable that, in pursuit of some sort of resolution, the film can’t bring this conflict to a convincing resolution. That it tries is its biggest miscalculation.

Until that point, however, the film is an intermittently gripping character study in the body of a procedural. As the accident investigation moves forward, step by methodical step, Whitaker struggles with his addictions to drugs and alcohol. He calls his dealer (John Goodman), but refuses to take more drugs. He befriends an addict (Kelly Reilly) and encourages her to get help, all the while refusing to admit he has problems of his own. In a quick-cut montage, he dumps all his booze down the drain, but days later buys a case and can’t even get out of the parking lot before he takes a swig.

He’s a man given a big wake-up call, a near-death experience that might result in his going to prison, and yet he still refuses to let himself admit that he has a problem. One night, confronted about his drinking, he bellows that he “chooses to drink.” Advised by his lawyer to stop drinking, Whitaker calmly says that he will. He thinks he can stop cold turkey by simply choosing to do so, through his sheer force of will. The last great scene in the film involves the soft hum of a refrigerator generating suspense in the middle of the night. It calls to Whitaker. Will he open it? Will he break his sobriety once more?

Gatins script could have been directed as nothing more than a standard Hollywood substance abuse parable and, though it occasionally is just that, especially in the painfully obvious music cues, it’s often energized by Zemeckis’s confident, composed studio dramaturgy and Washington’s seemingly effortlessly complicated performance. The only problem with creating such a high-flying drama is the high probability that it’ll be brought in for a crash landing. In a funny structural echo of the doomed flight at the center of it all, the film starts strong, soars high, but then loses altitude before crash landing into the end credits. By choosing to focus on a situation that’s intriguingly irreconcilable, I can’t exactly blame the filmmakers for finding a way to reconcile the film’s various strands that seems too easy and even has one particular scene that’s so bad it appears to be counter to their thematic intent. I’m just disappointed that they couldn’t find the film a landing to match the sensational takeoff. 

An Early Gift: A CHRISTMAS CAROL

Last fall, there was something very odd about sitting in a state-of-the-art multiplex, wearing plastic 3D glasses, and watching a movie that is, in some ways, so thoroughly, reverentially, old-fashioned. A Christmas Carol is one of the most often retold stories, starting with Charles Dickens’s original story from the mid-1800’s and including at least one version for each generation afterwards. Now director Robert Zemeckis has taken cutting-edge Hollywood technology (the same motion-capture animation that he used in the brilliant Polar Express and the noble failure Beowulf) and put it to work on this old story, seemingly lifting most of the dialogue word-for-word from the original text. The sense of looking both backwards and forwards doesn’t distract from the story, however. I’ve heard it many times before. Who hasn’t? But by the end I was still elated for Scrooge and filled with goodwill and Christmas cheer.

The movie mostly follows the mood and spirit of the classic tale like clockwork, moving through the very familiar plot once again, but the dust doesn’t settle around the gears. Zemeckis uses long flowing shots that slide and glide. Many sequences play out in one long take. A marvelous trip through 19th century London is a stunning opening to the film, grounding the movie in an impressive sense of time and place. The encounters with the ghosts are likewise stunning, expressive and bold and sometimes quite frightening. Zemeckis doesn’t forget that this is a ghost story, using swiftly shifting scale, color, and movement to throw the viewer, and Scrooge, off balance. I’m thinking specifically of an extraordinarily well-done sequence with the Ghost of Christmas Present that finds the floor of a room becoming translucent, and then the room itself breaking free from the laws of physics to take Scrooge on a vertigo-inducing trip around London without him ever having to leave his house. Except for a slightly miscalculated sequence involving icicle-related slapstick, this is a film of amazing imagery and narrative fidelity.

Speaking of Scrooge, he’s creepy and crotchety, a great example of excellent character design. He’s wrinkled and elongated with long, bony fingers and a slightly crooked, pointy chin. Jim Carrey, as the performance-capture and voice of the character, does not, despite my worst fears, devolve the role into rubbery shtick. Instead, he remains, like the film itself, remarkably faithful to Dickens words, capably delivering the dialogue and intent behind it. (Though, to be fair, there’s a bit of Alastair Sim in his performance). Carrey also plays the ghosts quite well and the animation supports him superbly; each design is strong and striking, even appropriately haunting. The acting and animation excellence extends to the rest of the cast. Gary Oldman shows up in a handful of roles (including Marley, Mr. Cratchit and Tiny Tim) as do Colin Firth, Bob Hoskins, and Robin Wright Penn. They all bring fine physicality and welcome voices.

Even though this is an oft-repeated story, it still moved me. Supported by his excellent cast and a stirring score from Alvin Silvestri, who weaves in rousing renditions of Christmas carols, Zemeckis dazzles visually. He’s always possessed the potential to be, and many times he has been, a great visual storyteller, and with this particular style of animation he has brought his visions to greater heights. Always an innovator, from the time he mixed hand-drawn animation into a neo-noir comedy in the masterful Who Framed Roger Rabbit to the CG tweaking of archival footage in Forrest Gump, Zemeckis has now found, for better or worse, the perfect expression for his technologically driven storytelling. Bringing his skills as a live-action director into a fully animated environment, he moves the camera in ways that would be impossible in the real world, but he rarely lets his technology merely show off. The stunning technique only underlines the story’s inherent compelling qualities. In this case, he creates an admirably faithful, and smart, adaptation of a great story. What’s old is new again. This scary ghost story and moving, comfortably warm Christmas chestnut feels at once fresh and timeless. It thrills and moves like I never thought a new adaptation of A Christmas Carol would or could.