Who Let the Dog Out: NIGHTBITCH

Its title suggests it could be some combination of David Cronenberg body horror and John Waters provocation and Universal Monster Movie metaphor. But Marielle Heller’s Nightbitch is, after all, a Marielle Heller movie, and therefore up to something more intimate, contained, and subtle. It atypically speaks its thesis loud and proud, early and often, but does so as a quiet domestic drama indulging the occasional flight of magical realist fantasy. Heller is the writer-director who gave us the warm-hearted A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood—a sideways Mr. Rogers’ biopic via appreciation by watching his ethos warm an unsuspecting journalist’s heart—and the prickly Can You Ever Forgive Me?—a con woman publishing story that balances mordant humor and real empathy for its desperate and unpleasant lead character. Those movies feature strong, specific performances that enliven their characters with nuanced observation of their situations. Nightbitch is similarly wedded to a strong lead performance as Amy Adams plays a stay-at-home mom who starts to suspect she’s turning into a dog at night. It’s an obvious metaphor for motherhood as a time of transformation that can leave a person unfamiliar to themselves. This mother used to be an artist, and now spends her days alone tending to her angelic son’s every need. He’s not a difficult kid; he’s just two years old. Her husband (Scoot McNairy) is often away for work, and when he’s home rarely offers to help, and needs lots of help himself even when he does. We get montages of her repetitive schedule, moments of loving connection with the child interspersed with receptive tasks and building frustrations. She makes mistakes, she harbors resentments, and harbors resentments for the way a mistake—not committing to breaking her son’s co-sleeping habit, say—can get harder to fix the longer she lacks the patience to do so.

We hear her inner monologue full of frustrations and resentments, toward her husband, toward the other moms in her social groups, toward her former artist colleagues, and especially toward herself. It’s a picture of motherly obligations and duties, fleeting satisfactions, and growing depression. She’s in a crisis of self-worth in a life of unbalanced routines. All of this is so precisely noticed and complicatedly enacted—it’s a real, messy, complicated picture of a woman trying to rediscover herself after growing alienated and isolated through the process of giving birth—that the whole dog transformation thing is both too much and not enough. It’s never a full-bore high-concept horror comedy—imagine the cult classic we’d have from the 80s or 90s with this premise, where people would feel smart for saying actually it’s about the conflicted emotions of motherhood—although it’s best in those moments when it emerges as an awkward social moment. Instead, the high concept is rather thinly stretched, mostly playing as separated embellishments of (sometimes gross) fantasy, moments where she imagines a taste of animalistic freedom that matches the burbling bodily transformations that have made her seem different in every way, and which she must reconcile to become her new, best self. Adams is really good at embodying those contradictions and making them work.

Child's Play: C'MON C'MON and PETITE MAMAN

Children, as the old song goes, are the future. But that’s not quite the case, right? The children are also now. They exist in the present, too. And yet to see a child is also to see a future, the potential not just for that person’s life, but for humanity itself. This recognition is one that can drift easily into sentimentality, shaving away the uncomfortable elements of childhood into a purity of progress. Far better to also recognize children’s humanity, in all the mess that implies. Tennessee Williams once wrote that kids are “precociously knowing and singularly charming, but not to be counted on for those gifts that arrive by no other way than…experience and contemplation.” (I might quibble with this quote, too, but I’ll get to that later.) Some movies about children try too effortfully to pile on the experience and contemplation. I usually prefer those that more artfully let young lives take their course.

Writer-director Mike Mills tends to understand this. He’s made lovely films about growing into the person you’re always becoming—a short documentary Paperboys; a late-in-life coming-out in Beginners; and his best, 20th Century Women, a deeply-felt 70s’ ensemble piece about a teenage boy and the various influences in his life. His latest is C’mon C’mon and it has the gentle rhythms and tones of an episode of This American Life. It stars Joaquin Phoenix as a cuddly, bearded, well-intentioned New York intellectual out collecting interviews with children for his public radio program. He goes to Detroit, Los Angeles, and New Orleans with his producers finding participants. How do these kids see the world? How do they see their future? Each kid, in a real interview, gives answers that seem honest in their unfussy plainspokenness, though one wonders if they think it’s also what he and his audience wants to hear: parents just don’t understand, the dangers of our world weigh heavily on them, and so on. But Phoenix presents such an open and earnest listener that it’s clear he draws something natural out of them as their subtle interlocutor. They also talk about their dreams and aspirations, and the real difficulties and obstacles in their way. Phoenix warmly guides them toward comfort in these exchanges, promising nothing more than a sympathetic ear.

Into this project arrives his precocious grade-school-aged nephew (Woody Norman), left in his care as the boy’s mother (Gaby Hoffmann) has to see to the institutionalization of the boy’s troubled father (Scoot McNairy). Phoenix clearly loves his nephew and wants what’s best for him. He’s delighted by his creativity and impressed by his thoughtfulness. But he’s also worn down by the daily demands of child care and tending to the emotional needs of a boy still learning how to regulate himself. (He also has some ritualized flights of fancy that can grate on his caretaker.) The movie is patient with both characters, allowing them the space to challenge each other as well as grow in mutual understanding. That makes for a small, delicately crafted movie perched on the same soft-spoken NPR assumption that it’s worth hearing what others have to say. It has not a perspective so much as an attitude, stubbornly sentimental and loaded with references to books and art spoken and shared reverently by its cast of characters. In simply observed black-and-white frames, the film blends documentary and fiction for a small, close story of cross-generational understanding. And in this style it finds a real familial warmth and charge in the scenes between Phoenix and the boy, a tentative and tender forging of meaningful memories in fleeting everyday moments. It doesn’t push to make its child characters beyond-their-years clever, and resists turning anyone into a mere symbol. This can sometimes give the movie a meandering focus. But at its best, it has the observational insight to simply let its performances play out and develop in something close to life-like dimensions.

An ever more delicate and mysterious vision of childhood is Céline Sciamma’s Petite Maman. It proceeds like a fragile spell, a magic trick, a fable. And even that doesn’t do justice to the ways in which its fantasy just happens, casually, without fuss, with barely a flicker of the unreal. Sciamma’s films—the observational likes of Water Lilies, Girlhood, and Tomboy forming a triptych of perspectives on formative years in lives of young women—are typically cast in a realist light. Here she uses the same techniques to make a film built entirely out of a high concept, but anyone watching a random clip might never guess it. A little girl goes with her parents to a small house in the woods, the home of her recently deceased grandmother. The adults have the task of cleaning out the place, which gives the kid plenty of time to occupy herself. She wanders off into the yard, through some trees, and arrives at what she thinks is the neighbors’ house, where there’s a little girl her age inviting her to play. There’s something sweet and real about how a child can just make a friend, form a bond, in a blink of a simpatico eye. What a viewer will notice right away is that the girls look suspiciously alike. (They are played by twins, so that explains that.) Their houses, through subtle cues of set design and prop placement, are similar, too. As the girls meet in the woods for playtimes multiple times, it’s clear: the daughter has made friends with her own mother as a child—her petite maman.

One could imagine this twinning time-travel conceit in lesser hands heading for antics or silliness—maybe The Parent Trap by way of Back to the Future. Sure, if done right, that could be fun. But Sciamma approaches this picture with supreme restraint and total straight-faced matter-of-fact seriousness and commitment. She’d understand that Tennessee Williams shortchanged a child’s capacity for contemplation. In the faces of the two girls at the center of this film, she locates all the gentle severity of such an occurrence. As they realize their relationship’s time-bending qualities, they ponder and reflect on what it might mean. The future mother looks into the face of a child she now knows she’ll have, and can learn when, exactly, her own mother will pass away. The younger (if one can call her that) can now see concretely the tangible childlike qualities that surely still sit buried within her mother. Together, though, they just are who they are. Sciamma lets them be, playing politely and sensitively together as little girls can do—tromping through the woods, making plans for little imaginative games and skits, plotting the best way to get a sleepover. There are moments nestled within these quotidian affairs, though, that catch one’s breath in a simple, hushed expression of fantasy cross-generational connection. Typical of its effect is a gift from the future—music played on a pair of headphones we don’t hear, but the girl in the past hearing this unknown song out of time smiles an inscrutable Mona Lisa smile at the sound, a private preview. Most striking, though, is a softly murmured admission from mother to child—I’ve always wanted you. Here’s a movie that appears to do very little—and accomplishes so much. It respects a child’s capacity to take things as they are, and to engage in a sense of wonder that’s perfectly natural—deep thinking taking place in growing minds.

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.

Can't Stop, Won't Stop: NON-STOP

In 2005 and 2006, we had a small post-9/11 glut of thrillers set on airplanes, all largely excellent in one way (United 93) or another (Red Eye, Flightplan), or another (Snakes on a Plane). It’s a subgenre I’m happy to return to yet again in Non-Stop, especially when it’s done well, and even better, when we’re seated next to Liam Neeson. He has such likable, intimidating intelligence on screen. Using his height, his gravely accent, and his piercing eyes to communicate a soulful determination and confident capacity for handling any situation in which he finds himself, he anchors and makes compelling even the junkiest of thrillers, like Taken 2. For very good thrillers, like The Grey, he helps make them into terrific suspenseful evocations of existential anguish. Non-Stop’s entertainment value falls somewhere between those previous pictures. It’s a relentless entertainment that constantly tightens the situation around Neeson, constraining options and narrowing his ability to maneuver until the panic reaches a crowd-pleasing intensity.

In this slow boil thriller of slickly increasing and enjoyable suspense, he plays an air marshal aboard a late night transatlantic flight from New York to London. Not long after takeoff, he receives a series of texts from a blocked number. Each new message flashes on the screen, the silence of the midnight flight turning ominous as the texts reveal an ultimatum. A passenger will be killed every 20 minutes unless $150 million is transferred to a specified account. It’s a hostage situation, but only the marshal knows, at least at first. Who is the hostage taker? It’s someone on the plane, but he or she is doing an awfully good job staying hidden. (Could this be the first organic and well-executed use of texting for the purposes of cinematic anxiety?) Director Jaume Collet-Serra, of the skillfully upsetting horror film Orphan and the Neeson-starring actioner Unknown, uses the darkened nighttime interior of the plane to heighten the drama and keep the stakes intensely enclosed.

A cleverly contained mystery, the film is smartly not a whodunit, but a who-is-doing-it. Any one of the people hunched over their tablets and smart phones could be doing the threatening. It’s a high-flying locked room mystery, Agatha Christie by way of Speed. The screenplay by John W. Richardson, Chris Roach, and Ryan Engle respects the audience’s intelligence as it follows Neeson looking around the plane, hunting for anything suspicious. The appealing ensemble is loaded with familiar faces playing passengers (Julianne Moore, Scoot McNairy, Nate Parker, Corey Stoll, Omar Metwally), flight attendants (Michelle Dockery, Lupita Nyong’o), and airline officials (Anson Mount). All of them can ably appear suspicious and innocent in the same instant. Neeson is desperately searching amongst and around them for a clue when events suddenly conspire for a corpse to turn up exactly on schedule. The threats are no mere prank. They are deadly serious.

As events on the plane grow increasingly desperate, curiosity escalates in the passengers and crew. Information and rumors spill out in dribs and drabs of context-free worry, eventually making their way to the ground where authorities, like Shea Whigham in a good voice performance as a security official calling the plane’s phone, and news media assume Neeson is the one doing the hostage-taking . That only makes solving the case harder for the poor guy. It’s a credit to the inexorable forward momentum of the film and the welcome shades of complexity to this Hitchcockian wrong-man panic that I found myself desperately wanting Neeson to be right, but half-prepared for a twist that would put him in the wrong. It sure looks like he’s being framed, but in this situation everyone is a suspect. The plane keeps cutting through the night sky, too far to turn back to America, still too far away from Europe to make a landing. But as the threat of violence looms, casualties slowly pile up, and Neeson’s behavior grows increasingly desperate, it’s agonizingly clear they’re eventually heading to the ground one way or another.

Non-Stop stays at a consistent height of peril, compelling and involving throughout. Neeson grounds it all with a weary humanity as an alcoholic ex-cop with sad family problems, a token amount of backstory that would seem cheap if a lesser actor was in his position. He reluctantly finds himself the center of this madness, and the one with the best chance of bringing it to a safe conclusion. Collet-Serra makes great use of Neeson’s height and broad shoulders in contrast to the tight aisles and low ceilings of the setting, finding ways to use every bit of the plane in clever ways, even sending the vehicle into sudden turbulence to punctuate dramatic moments. The raw material is nothing inherently special, but in its execution it rises to the level of superior craftsmanship. It is a solid, exciting, and satisfying thriller.

Criminal Minds: KILLING THEM SOFTLY

Killing Them Softly is a tense, talky little thriller, shot through with obvious arty nods towards oblique, gritty crime movies of the 1970s, the kind where glowering character actors talk all around their conflict between moments of bloody consequences. Writer-director Andrew Dominik, adapting the novel Cogan’s Trade by George V. Higgins, moves the setting from 1970s Boston to late-2008 New Orleans, the better to suit his thesis that connects American capitalism to the robbery and retribution that powers the film’s plot. The connection is made early and often, most obviously and effectively in the film’s crackerjack inciting incident in which two low-level criminals (Scoot McNairy and Ben Mendelsohn) stick up a card game organized by a mid-level criminal (Ray Liotta). While cash is forced into a pair of briefcases at gunpoint, the TV in the background breaks into regularly scheduled programming, filling the room with the sounds of George W. Bush explaining the need to bailout Wall Street.

It’s immediately obvious that Dominik is going to hammer home his thematic intent with all the subtlety of blunt force trauma, throwing a sharp elbow into the audience’s side shouting “Get it?” To say it has subtext would be too kind. Luckily, the film, a small, tough work of quiet tension, is just good enough to sustain itself in the face of its auteur trying a little too hard. Besides, I far prefer a film that’s trying a little too hard to a film that’s too lazy to leave much of an impact. Here, the ultimate entrepreneurial criminal is represented by Brad Pitt playing a dark, smoking, and professional hitman. He rides into the picture to the tune of Johnny Cash on the soundtrack, ready to clean up the mess caused in the underworld by this first-act robbery. Negotiating with a lawyer for shadowy interests (Richard Jenkins), Pitt agrees to bring in a big-shot out-of-town killer (James Gandolfini) to help take down three conspirators and one scapegoat. Nobody’s going to stick up a card game in this town and think they can get away with it. Not on his watch, not as long as he gets his money.

Pitt’s performance is controlled, unshowy work that forms a quietly dangerous center around which the other characters can turn. The film is structured around scenes of men glowering across tables and cars at each other, talking through long-winded monologues and dialogues about what they’re about to do or what they’ve just done. The writing in these moments is alternately humdrum and prickly, occasionally finding laughs so easily that if it weren’t such a carefully scripted picture you’d think it was by accident. In roundabout discussions and unexpected twists of language, the movie works. In between these scenes of tightly wound wordiness are directorial flourishes of fades, slow motion, jarring edits, and surprising jolts of sound design. Much like last year's Drive, this is a kind of distillation of crime movie tropes built back up with self-conscious moodiness and stylishly upsetting splashes of violence.

Though Dominik gets fine performances out of his cast and puts them through tough, crisp crime plotting of a fairly satisfactory kind, the film is in the end only an argument for itself. The closed loop of plotting leaves it all feeling empty, like drab pessimism for nothing more than the sake of drab pessimism. The coldly cynical underpinnings that reverberate throughout the film are often electrifying, juxtaposing speeches by then-candidate Barack Obama or news reports about the freefalling economic conditions with the story’s matter-of-fact preparations and negotiations leading up to theft and violence. But such stabs at weightier intent and broader implications are as exasperating as they are electrifying, both too obvious and too muddled. Cynicism comes cheap, something made especially clear when a general air of disaffected, inconclusive unhappiness is really all this particular film is up to in its grumbling thematic content.

It’s a good thing that Dominik just about makes up for the thematic mud underneath his glossy images and appealingly (type)cast group of sad, violent, greedy men. Even if by its conclusion, the film comes up emptier than you’d expect, it’s still a competent genre exercise, suspenseful and engaging all the way through. Its characters are unapologetically looking out for nothing more than reasons to advance in their criminal occupation of choice, to get the job done and get paid. As such, it’s a small film that only steps wrong when it tries to act bigger than it is.