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.

Do Androids Dream of Electric Love? BLADE RUNNER 2049

Ridley Scott’s proto-cyberpunk sci-fi noir Blade Runner is revived as a ponderous Villeneuve somber spectacle in Blade Runner 2049. Over thirty years after the original, which imagined a dystopian future L.A. with contours – smoggy rain; polyglot class stratifications; enormous looming digital neon advertising – setting the stage for many imitators, the new film digs into the implications of its world. Before, Harrison Ford played a cop tasked with hunting down rogue cybernetic beings called Replicants. Decades later, a new model Replicant played by Ryan Gosling is hunting down the last of the old models who are still hiding out under the radar, living lives of quiet desperation, their illegal problem programming allowing them just enough free will to shake off the yolk of their makers’ expectations. In the opening sequence Gosling flies his hovercar over a vast dried up terrain to a far-flung farm where a gentle giant of a Replicant (Dave Bautista) sighs in resignation, fighting back in futile self-preservation before the younger bot breaks him down and checks him off the wanted list. Sounds like pulp fun, but look and listen to the film’s atmosphere, director Denis Villeneuve using the suspense techniques honed on the likes of his Prisoners and Sicario to turn out slow, carefully considered images with grey-air-and-glowing-screen palates and a soft quiet unsettling as a pot boils in the background. These filmmakers mean to take a movie about robots, holograms, flying cars, and corrupted files very seriously indeed. 

After last year’s Arrival found Villeneuve working with a deep, powerful strain of emotional content – wrapping an egg-headed first-contact story around an effective contemplation of parenthood, memory, and grief – he takes a step back into ice cold dread. This late Blade Runner sequel is merely a speaker-rattling drone, a slow drip accumulation of dread and despair gorgeously lensed by the great Roger Deakins. He paints in greyscale gunmetal tones and harsh neon lights gracefully arcing across beautiful faces and austere jumbles of concrete-and-polymer industrial parks and towering brutalist architecture. This is a future world at once sparse and ornate, underpopulated and overstuffed. The place, brilliantly built out from the iconic look of Scott’s original, is tactile and disturbing in its all-absorbing qualities. The entrancing score – so often sounding like a window-rattling motorcycle engine roaring by outside, or like a pitch-distorted, extremely slowed down dial-up modem – and the beautifully photographed production design does the heavy lifting. Characters here are poses; worldbuilding is ominous terse monologue; emotion is as crisp and empty as watching an android kiss a hologram. We’re to be contemplating the chilly romanticism of digital beings, but it’s hard not to shake the feeling we’re watching ones and zeroes execute their complicated programs. That’s partly the point, but there’s a frustrating surface-level satisfaction to the movie’s long, languorous, cavernous contemplation of its eerie images. I loved a scene where a hologram slides over a human woman and syncs to her movements, an imperfect process of digital possession that creates ever-so-slightly overlapping images. But it looks cool more than it is actually intellectually stimulating.

The film runs nearly three hours, and its pleasures are absorbing but fleeting. Its appeal sits entirely in stoic characters wearing fabulous wardrobe – stiff high collars, starkly starched trench coats – and inhabiting handsomely striking sets – echoing rooms, windswept irradiated landscapes, a theater of holographic entertainers on the fritz, thunderous man-made waterfalls, junkyards exploding in sudden District-9-style bodily harm as sudden death rains from above. It’s the sort of movie interested in exploring the differences between mankind and artificial intelligence, probing the deep mysteries of what makes a soul and what it means to create life, but in which man and robot alike are equally placid and monotone in demeanor. The ace supporting cast – Robin Wright, Sylvia Hoeks, Ana de Armas, Mackenzie Davis, and even Jared Leto (who is fine in his blink-and-you’ll-miss-it turn) – are directed to be effective elements of the art direction, moving and emoting so precisely and mechanistically it makes a mockery of any sense you could figure out who’s real and who’s created. They’re all ghosts in the machine. Villeneuve’s style of handsome foreboding is admirably sustained, putting the script’s grinding inevitability and tangled, deliberately-paced core who-am-I? mystery plotting through a lens of impeccable craftsmanship. I was never bored, but never involved, always stimulated but never fully invested. It’s a remarkable technical achievement, but a hollow emotional and intellectual exercise. It’s incredibly cool and totally cold.

No Man's Land: WONDER WOMAN

Patty Jenkins’ Wonder Woman is exactly what a big budget superhero spectacle should be. The film is so effortlessly crowd-pleasing you might wonder why others of its ilk make it look so difficult to accomplish so much less. It’s serious fun, a red-blooded adventure and fantastic light show, telling a complete story with no need for prior knowledge and no sense of burdensome teases for future installments. Best of all, it is fully aware and taking advantage of its hero’s iconography and bolsters the action by taking some consideration to the emotional weight of its violence. There’s fun to be had, but it also feels like a full and humane movie, driven by Wonder Woman’s inherent goodness and a sense that she and the ensemble around her are people and not mere action figures. It heightens the stakes, and it helps ground the inevitable swirls of effects. This is a movie about a god, the way all DC superheroes are totemic symbols, but here she is shown not through corrosively crass soulless cynicism, but the bright, pure light of virtue. She is a paragon of self-sacrifice, fighting for what’s right, what’s just, what’s true. All that and in a hugely entertaining popcorn entertainment, too? What a relief.

For Diana (Gal Gadot), princess of the demigod Amazons, raised on a picturesque matriarchal Paradise Island by her Queen mother (Connie Nielsen) who preached pacifism and her pragmatic aunt (Robin Wright) who trained her to be prepared to fight, being good is not a burden. She is the most talented Amazon, capable with sword, shield, whip, and her superpowered strength. We see her first as a little girl, eager to learn the skillful athleticism of the women warriors. Then, as a young woman, she takes great enjoyment in her powers, grinning as she spars in scrimmage battles. She’s ready, although her mother still hopes war will not find them, praying the island will remain hidden from ominous threats from their Greek myth origins. Alas, beyond their magically shrouded hidden paradise, World War I rages. The outside world arrives when an American spy (Chris Pine) crash lands in their bay pursued by a German platoon. The women manage to fight off the invaders and remain hidden from the world. But the soldier’s tales of the War to End All Wars touch Diana’s heart and she must leave with him to save mankind from itself. “They do not deserve you,” her mother says as she bids her farewell. The film is sincere about Diana’s goodness, and does not view her earnestness with skepticism. It is her uncomplicated moral certitude that makes her wonderful, and the world’s broken, ugly combativeness the clear force for evil.

This is a movie about a heroine whose conflict is not the weary woe-is-me moping of recent superhero movies, but a stirring call to action. The problem isn’t an obligation to do what’s right, but a struggle to get others to see the elegant simplicity of righteousness and empathy. Gadot inhabits the role’s decency and determination, anchoring the fantastical backstory in a fully realized person who has an uncomplicatedly genuine sense of goodness and virtue. Upon arriving in the world of early-20th-century London, there is easy humor as the mythological woman is a fish-out-of-water, finding a ruffled dress and corset combo a puzzle. “How do women fight in this?” she wonders. Gadot and Pine play these scenes with unforced humor that neither tries too hard, nor deflates the tension of the picture. Adding in a funny side character (his plucky secretary (Lucy Davis), one of those rare supporting players who gets a laugh with every line) makes the film’s bright touch. So, too, how lightly Diana takes the sexism of a military made up of men (like David Thewlis) who refuse to even acknowledge her presence, let alone allow her to advise. She simply doesn’t understand why they behave so cowardly. Luckily her guide sees her strength and determination and helps her to the front lines. He’s investigating a dastardly German general (Danny Huston) and a mad scientist (Elena Anaya) who’re preparing a devastating new form of mustard gas that’ll kill thousands at a time, and will surely undermine the ongoing armistice talks. This evil must be stopped and the movie becomes a winning soldiers-on-a-mission movie.

As Diana leads a small group of men behind enemy lines in search of the new weapon and its villainous makers, the movie lights up with colorful action. It’s great fun, staged for maximum impact, impressive choreography and strategic splashes of slow-mo built to showcase glowing comic book panel images that pop in the flow of frenetic frames. See her knocking back machine gun bullets with a swing of her indestructible shield, or kicking an enemy combatant through a window while she leaps after him, or using her lasso to take a pack of attackers off their feet. But it’s always driven by her obvious moral outrage. She wants to save a village torn up by German invaders. She wants to protect a group of soldiers pinned down in a trench. She wants to help her new allies end the war. This is gripping retro-pulp fantasy in a sleek style. The action progresses in a logical escalating fashion, drawn from clear conflicts, sharply delineated motivations, and a crisp sense of place and space. A hurtling momentum of crisis nonetheless takes its time to build feeling for and take pleasure in the chemistry amongst its ensemble, allowing each new development in the plot to follow inexorably from the character’s decisions, personalities, and convictions. 

With a steady hand and a light touch, Jenkins directs a full-blooded movie here, wearing heroism sincerely and excitedly, and building full characters to care about. Inspired by over seven decades of comics, Allan Heinberg’s sturdy, clever screenplay allows for plenty of fluid visual fanfares of action, explosions in a vibrant color palate and a quick-paced serial cliffhanger adventure mode. Yet it never loses a sense of humanity, a decision as evident in its concern for the impact of every punch as it is in the lovely little character moments – sweet exchanges, prickly flirtations, charming misunderstandings. Best is how both assets work so perfectly together, like when Diana first arrives in the trenches and is told the soldiers have made no progress in months. The enemy is too heavily fortified behind a vast No Man’s Land. She shrugs off her coat to reveal her iconic battle armor, and steps out of the trench and onto the battlefield ready to fight. The movie need not speak the Homeric obvious, as she strides forward confidently wielding her shield and drawing her sword, the score swelling with the triumphant, moving, exciting anticipation of heroic acts. She is No Man.

Into Thin Air: EVEREST

It’d be easy to call Everest a man versus nature story, but that’s downplaying the extent to which nature dominates. It’s never a fair fight. Telling the true story of a 1996 storm that left a group of mountain climbers stranded at the world’s tallest peak, making the return climb treacherous and nearly impossible, the film creates an enveloping sense of natural danger. When the winds kick up and gusts of snow pummel the characters as they stumble along narrow paths, clinging to guide ropes near cavernous drops, there’s a convincing sense of disorientation and danger. One wrong step, one wrong decision, and it could mean certain death. In the film’s most haunting image, a struggling member of the group steps wrong, wobbles, and simply disappears, falling off the edge of the frame while a man in the foreground holds on for dear life. He glances back, notices with horror the empty hooks swinging in the storm, and then continues trudging foreword towards his ultimate fate. As one character ominously warns early on, “the mountain always has the last word.”

Shot with solid meat-and-potatoes sturdiness and completely convincing effects and stunts, director Baltasar Kormákur (Contraband) indulges in a few sweeping spectacular vistas, but otherwise keeps the epic backdrop in the background. He chooses instead to focus on the people making their way through the landscape, as they joke, bond, argue, succeed, struggle, and die. William Nicholson (Unbroken) and Simon Beaufoy (127 Hours), no strangers to stories of remarkable survival, have written a screenplay interested in process and procedure, spending a great deal of time assembling the team and taking them through the steps of an ordinary climb up Everest, a fraught and fascinating prospect in and of itself. It’s clear how slow, difficult, and challenging it is to climb any mountain, let alone Everest. There are medical concerns, perilous heights, unexpected delays, deadly cold, and dwindling oxygen. And that’s before the storm even starts.

The main characters are a crew from New Zealand running an expedition up the mountain, a guide (Jason Clarke), a base camp supervisor (Emily Watson), and a doctor (Elizabeth Debicki). Their clients include a mailman (John Hawkes), a wealthy Texan (Josh Brolin), a journalist (Michael Kelly), and an experienced climber (Naoko Mori). Also on the mountain are rival groups, including one led by a brash American (Jake Gyllenhaal) trying to reach the summit, and one (led by Sam Worthington) going up the shorter mountain next to it and can only watch in horror as the storm clouds roll in over their colleagues. It’s not always easy to tell all these people apart, especially once they have oxygen masks over their faces and ice-covered hoods pulled low over their goggles. We see only figures struggling up the mountain, and then feeling the panic kick in once they desperately need to get back down.

When a mask is pulled off, revealing the character actor beneath, it’s easier to tell who is where. But maybe the point is to mimic some of the disorientation of thin air and exhausted lungs. The performances are solid physical presences, filling their corners of the frame with a sturdiness and confidence that’s all the more difficult to see fade away. Some are unpersuasively overconfident. Others are understandably worried. There are token characterizations to flesh out the ensemble. We hear reasons for the trip – to be brave, to be accomplished, to be awed – and overhear sentimental calls back home to nervous wives (Keira Knightley cuddling a fake pregnant belly, Robin Wright corralling teens). But these biographical details are sparse, adding only reliable extra gloom as the camera contemplates the thunderous darkness encroaching.

Kormákur shoots the proceedings with a relatively restrained eye. He doesn’t amp up the action, provide CGI dazzle, or find room for unrealistic cinematic heroics. As small mistakes and nature’s fury combine, death comes quickly for some, slowly for others, and narrowly misses still more. Cinematographer Salvatore Totino’s wide lenses capture an immense sense of beauty and danger, while the sound effects crunch and howl. It never comes to life as a personal journey, the characters remaining too vague to really develop, but as a view of process – of a feat of mountaineering giving way to a struggle to make it back alive – it’s gripping. As it narrows to consider the tiny interpersonal moments that seal each one’s fate, there are moving moments of triumph and pain, flashes in a storm that wipes away all certainty. It’s a big Hollywood epic with a small eye, with stories of survival not through any grand action, but through endurance and chance. It has the trappings of a disaster movie, but none of the thrill. It starts with cautious excitement, turns scary, then left me feeling only sad.