Secrets and Lies: SNOWDEN

Edward Snowden makes perfect sense as an Oliver Stone protagonist. Like JFK’s dogged district attorney Jim Garrison or Born on the Fourth of July’s veteran turned war protestor Ron Kovic, Snowden is a man whose pursuit of what he sees as unambiguous and truthful duty to country causes him to endure outer skepticism and scorn, and inner destabilizing life changes. Like Savages, The Doors, Platoon, and two Wall Streets, it’s about a young person drawn into a career with exciting upsides, but with downsides readily apparent as well. Like Nixon and W. and World Trade Center and Alexander it’s about a man driven by and ultimately fated to be crushed under the weight of history and expectation. But unlike those previous movies, Snowden finds Stone at his most restrained. He views the proceedings from a remove, not digging into the psychology as deeply, or using filmmaking flash as ostentatiously. It’s a movie that sees the spreading web of surveillance with a mournful paranoia. Look at what our government can do and has done, it says, lauding its hero while wondering if what he did will actually matter in the long run.

To best make the case for their protagonist as a misunderstood hero, Stone and co-writer Kieran Fitzgerald (The Homesman) begin by showing us Snowden (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) at the point of his earliest civic duty. In 2004 he’s discharged from boot camp after a painful leg injury, after which his drive to serve his country leads him to transfer to the C.I.A. He’s a smart, unassumingly confident computer nerd who defends George W. Bush, gently teases his liberal girlfriend (Shailene Woodley) about her beliefs, and admits to a fondness for Ayn Rand. (It’s not hard to read this material as Stone inviting conservatives into the story with a “See? He’s one of you?”) The movie then follows Snowden’s gradual disillusionment with the intelligence community as he moves from one contract job to the next, finding increasingly shadier tactics used in gathering and deploying data scooped up from a global dragnet. Each new revelation gives him waves of anxiety that seem to pass, but slowly and steadily accrues in the back of his mind until he has to act.

The movie becomes a portrait of a man whose work anxiety grows so potent his only recourse is to exorcise it by releasing it into the world. There’s something of the terror I remember feeling then to this telling now. (If his revelations about the wide-ranging surveillance tactics at the fingertips of our country (and others) didn’t have you slap a piece of tape over your webcam, I don’t know what would.) Because we know what Snowden did – and what we don’t know remains Top Secret and therefore a ripe target for Stone’s mythologizing speculation – there’s little surprise to the film. It’s even structured as flashbacks around scenes of documentarian Laura Poitras (Melissa Leo) filming Snowden’s secret whistleblower interview with The Guardian’s Glenn Greenwald (Zachary Quinto) and Ewen MacAskill (Tom Wilkinson), footage which would become the Academy Award-winning film Citizenfour. This creates a strangely sedate sense of dutiful reenactment, making the characters mere pawns in historical inevitability. Gone is the volatile conspiratorial frenzy of Stone’s heated political films or the schlocky gusto of his genre fare. Here there’s an almost serene sense of data flowing, history written in bits and clicks, coded to produce this outcome.

This calm befits what is Stone’s fastest turnaround for contemplation on a flashpoint in modern American history, beating WTC (another of his eerie calm films) by two years. Anthony Dod Mantle (frequent Danny Boyle collaborator) makes images of clean simplicity, cut with occasional smeary doubling or reflections through layers of screens and glass. Snowden is trapped in a digital world made tangible, with information glowing and streaming, collected and collated. His personal dramas – simple fights with his girlfriend, a late-breaking health issue – are halfhearted, well-acted but beside the point. The most vivid crisis points are when his work life intrudes with unwelcome force on his home life. He can’t take his medication to prevent seizures because it slows his response time. A woozy snap zoom interrupts a heated love scene as he catches the unblinking cam eye of an open laptop, the extreme close up of the tiny black circle showing their nakedness reflected in it. There are standard thriller elements of people avoiding surveillance, befitting a news story that’s already informed dozens of action movies from Jason Bourne to Captain America 2 and Furious 7. Its tension remains at a constant low-boil, mystery dulled by unavoidable outcomes.

It all adds up to a movie that’s vital and turgid, obvious but with flickers of surprise and life. The known facts of the story are bulked up with lesser-known or fictionalized incidents, inconvenient truths and convenient fictions pumped through with enjoyable personalities. Around even corner is a likable recognizable face bringing fine energy opposite their scene partners. Part of the fun is wondering who’ll show up next: Rhys Ifans, Nicolas Cage, Timothy Olyphant, Scott Eastwood, Keith Stanfield, Logan Marshall-Green, Ben Schnetzer. Each is used by Stone to keep interest and curiosity flowing, never quite sure whether each new co-worker is a sympathetic ear or a reason to raise Snowden’s disillusionment. They create a pattern to the movie’s pulsing compelling/dull, scary/stale info-dumps (the best of which is an abstract swirling animation of social media chatter and secret metadata flowing into a black hole that slowly forms an eye, the sort of image so hypnotizing it doesn’t matter how blatant the symbolism), playing key roles in the process and personifications of various view points.

In the end it’s another Stone movie of weary patriotism. It’s about the burden of being a good American, about loving the country so much it’s worth wishing it were better. Clinging stubbornly to ideals is difficult, especially when calling into question the ratio of security to liberty from within the government can make you a target for, at best, criticism and stress, and at worst jail or exile. Stone makes Snowden a figure unambiguously good, leaking information as a last-ditch effort to improve what he sees as a slippery slope to tyranny. After the deed is done he literally has Snowden walk out of the dark data center into gleaming white sunlight. And yet the unsettled aftermath – stuck in Russia, communicating in warnings from a robotic screen – creates uncertainty, ending on a slightly more ambiguous note. He receives applause and attention, yes, but isolation and confusion, too. He thought it was important we hear what was happening. Now we know. Now what?

Diversion: THE DIVERGENT SERIES: ALLEGIANT

Blandly proficient brand extension, The Divergent Series: Allegiant was presumably made because they’d already made two of them and there was one more book in the YA series by Veronica Roth. The predecessors didn’t flop, so why not? It even splits that final book in two, pushing the back half to another film to be released next year sometime. Hey, Harry Potter, Twilight, and The Hunger Games did it. Since The Divergent Series was already an amalgamated knockoff of every other teen-centric genre franchise, why not copy them right down to the money-grabbing two-part finale? The trouble is it’s not nearly as imaginative or interesting as its inspirations. A calculating lack of passion bleeds into every frame of the film, in which a talented cast and crew are here mostly because they’ve already signed the contracts, enacting a remarkably uneventful story somehow swollen to 121 empty minutes.

As the movie starts, the previous movies’ routine teen dystopia, a crumbling far-future Chicago, once made up of a populace divided into temperament- and talent-based factions, has collapsed. The very special person at the center of the collapse is Tris (Shailene Woodley), who fought off mean Kate Winslet’s efforts to take over the city. Now, though, a new leader (Naomi Watts) is determined to reshape the populace under her control, installing puppet courts and whipping her followers into a frenzy with wild prejudice and violent impulses. “You’ve incited a mob. I hope you can control it,” says her son, who also happens to be Tris’s lover (Theo James). Together the tough lovebirds – along with returning cast members Ansel Elgort, Miles Teller, Zoë Kravitz, and Maggie Q – decide to flee the deteriorating society and jump over the gigantic wall into the wild unknown, leaving poor Octavia Spencer behind to deal with the trouble they started.

Considering that each of these movies so far has ended by intimating that we were going over that wall, it’s about time. Once they get there they find a muddy red desert where in our world is Lake Michigan. They wander around just long enough to give Elgort the chance to stare dumbly at a bubbly puddle and utter the following line: “This hole looks radioactive, or it was some time in the last 200 years.” I wrote that down immediately, relishing its pulpy sci-fi nonsense. Anyway, the teens end up getting taken to a gleaming grey-and-white futurist building which a man in a suit (Jeff Daniels) tells them was once O’Hare International Airport. Why that should be a detail worth telling to these future kids is beyond me. They don’t know what that is. In this future world it’s the home of a militarized band of scientists who confess that Chicago and its factions are really their experiment to see if they can undo humanity’s downfall: customized genes. It’s not exactly the most thrillingly examined idea.

It all turns out to be a nefarious set-up by which genetically perfect people want to keep the damaged dopes locked away in city-sized labs. Obviously Tris won’t have any of this and, after well over an hour spent wandering around this dully-developed new location, finally decides to do something about it. Screenwriters Noah Oppenheim, Adam Cooper, and Bill Collage glumly hit all the expected bits of a film like this in a creakingly mercenary, sparsely developed plot. The arc of each of these Divergents is identical. An evil adult has bland middle-management style and a plan to wipe out her or his inferiors, while Tris slowly learns that she’s not only special and the only one who can save the world, but she’s even more perfect than she’d last been told. This all happens while pretty people stomp around anonymous sets – warehouses, mostly – and interact with flavorless effects, trading clunking dialogue and staring at each other with what I can only assume is a mixture of boredom and brooding.

Director Robert Schwentke returns from the last time, still happy to merely keep things brightly lit and occasionally move the camera in surprising ways. He finds a few interesting images, throwing in some unexpected split focus diopter shots early on, filming a decontamination room in inky silhouettes, and visualizing the effects of a memory-wiping mist by making a man’s recollections float next to him while slowly burning away. But mostly he just dutifully watches what has to be one of the most bored casts I’ve ever seen sleepwalk through endless exposition and fuzzy motivation. During a scene in which the teens catch a ride to future-O’Hare in glowing bubbles, Teller gapes at a CGI spire and gasps the least convincing “gadzooks” you’ll ever hear. (Really.) Later a pro forma dogfight of sorts is accompanied by lackluster shouts and screams from the leads, sounding like completely nonplussed theme park patrons trying to whip up their enthusiasm for an underwhelming roller coaster’s dips and swerves. There’s so little going on here, just charismatic performers resigning themselves to the lifeless nonsense around them.

Chosen Dumb: THE DIVERGENT SERIES: INSURGENT

The Divergent Series: Insurgent is the clumsily titled second entry in one of the more recent attempts to spin a series out of a YA dystopia. Its predecessor introduced us to a crumbling future Chicago, the populace divided into a small set of job-based factions – lawyers, farmers, police, and do-gooders – that seems unworkable practically, theoretically, politically, economically, logically, and grammatically. No matter. These YA worlds aren’t so much real fantasy spaces as extended metaphor. Take Hunger Games, with its impactful allegory stew churning with war, propaganda, and inequality, or Twilight, a monster mash dating game cautionary tale. Divergent, on the other hand, is mainly an overheated high school analogy. No wonder the adult authority figures are universally played like patiently exasperated vice principals.

The hero is a teenager who threatens the status quo by being too awesome for any one clique to claim. Last time, our protagonist Tris (Shailene Woodley) stopped Kate Winslet’s evil plan to take over the city, but as a result had to flee to the wilderness, a hidden hippie commune run by Octavia Spencer. This time, Tris and her Factionless buddies want to get enough resources to fight back. But they don’t know Winslet has found a gold box she thinks will clinch her control over the other factions, if only she could open it. Tris, by virtue of being the single most important very special perfect super talent in all the factions, this time with the bar graph to prove it (“100% Divergent!”), is probably the key to opening it. So there’s some conflict for you. There’s not much there, just a reason to run into some chases and gunfights in between conversations with overqualified cast members.

Maybe we should think of this YA series most of all as a sort of Hollywood finishing school. It puts promising younger performers in scenes opposite great veterans who, in turn, get to be on set for only a day or two each. Woodley, along with stoic Theo James, subservient Ansel Elgort, and charm overdrive Miles Teller, hold their own against effortless screen commanding by Winslet and Spencer, Mekhi Phifer, Naomi Watts, Daniel Dae Kim, and Janet McTeer. The screenplay, cobbled together from Veronica Roth’s book by Brian Duffield, Akiva Goldsman, and Mark Bomback, wisely backs off the flimsy worldbuilding and just lets these talented people do the best they can at selling the nonsense. They lean into the adolescent motivations. It is a story about how it’s totally stressful to be too awesome. They believe it, and that’s half the battle.

Helping out is director Robert Schwentke (Flightplan, R.I.P.D.), who moves the camera and provides proficient crosscutting to gin up routine action suspense in the moments when our heroes are forced to flee armed baddies. Later, he does decent work with the swoopy blinking lights and assorted vaguely familiar sci-fi trappings in the interiors. There are special effects moments involving psychological tests – virtual nightmares the must be conquered to unlock the MacGuffin – creating worlds of dissolving buildings, shattering glass, a rotating floating flaming house, and a man who evaporates into silvery fragments. Those are neat, and are tied to Woodley’s performance in some mostly effective ways. A close connection to a female protagonist is what sets Insurgent’s blandness above crushing masculine banalities of other YA competitors like The Maze Runner.

It’s overall an improvement over Divergent, a far more confident and open film, and far more watchable, too. Not only lifeless formula, it often manages to feel like a real movie hobbled by some deeply inconsequential source material. It’s watchable dreck that starts nowhere and spins its wheels, a narrative with nothing to do. Scene by scene it might work, but moments don’t connect or grow or build. The society it assembles only works as a perfect environment for narrativized teen angst, and is as tedious and impenetrable for an outsider as the real thing. If the crux of adolescent problems is the cognitive dissonance between feeling like the most important person in your world and the nagging knowledge you’re not, then this series finds the least interesting solutions.

Gone Girl: WHITE BIRD IN A BLIZZARD

There was something wrong with Kat’s mother. She cried at strange times. She behaved awkwardly around guests. And one day, when Kat came home from school, her mother was napping in her daughter’s bedroom, all dressed up in gown, heels, and pearls. But Kat was busy finding love with the neighbor boy and hanging out with her friends. They didn’t have time to dwell on such peculiarities. Then, just as Kat was coming into her own, exploring more mature facets of herself as she prepared for graduation and adulthood, her mother disappeared. Now she and her father go about their routines dazed, the case growing cold as life moves on.

The mother’s absence informs the rest of White Bird in a Blizzard. Based on the novel by Laura Kasischke, it’s the latest film from writer-director Gregg Araki, whose work narrows in on emotional displacement in a variety of contexts. His work as an early-90’s indie provocateur has, over the course of his career, been distilled into pure moody energy with his prankish spirit tamed but present. He’s been able to mellow his mischievous impulses into mannered, languid considerations of people who are unmoored, searching for answers about who they are and where they’re going. In the last decade, he’s given us a thoughtful, empathetic child abuse survivor drama (Mysterious Skin), a hilariously spacey pothead comedy (Smiley Face), and a raucous paranormal pre-apocalyptic college sex farce (Kaboom). Talk about range.

In White Bird in a Blizzard, the least of his recent features but interesting all the same, Shailene Woodley stars as a girl who is jolted by her mother (Eva Green) simply vanishing without a trace. She finds her boyfriend (Shiloh Fernandez) pulling away, her dad (Christopher Meloni) putting on a brave face, her best friends (Gabourey Sidibe and Mark Indelicato) ready to talk, a psychiatrist (Angela Bassett) lending a compassionate ear, and a detective (Thomas Jane) investigating the disappearance and creepily flirting with her, too. Woodley moves through her relationships with an open body language that betrays her confidence-covered insecurities quick to appear when she’s pained. It’s another of her fine-tuned emotional teen roles (after The Descendents, The Spectacular Now, and The Fault in Our Stars), and here, in perhaps her most vulnerable performance, she finds a similar core of strength and determination to make the best of a bad situation.

As Kat moves on with her life, Araki threads flashbacks of her mother’s eccentricities into the aftermath of the sudden void. She was loving, sometimes distant, excitable, but prone to melancholy. Green’s performance is wild-eyed scene-chewing, dominating even in its absence. But the absence becomes normalized, just another thing to deal with in a busy teen life, like the haunting dreams of Kat’s mother emerging from a snow storm that repeat with ominous regularity. Araki gives the film, past and present alike, a hazy mood in a locked down camera and cinematographer Sandra Valde-Hansen's near-Sirkian color palate. It’s a period piece – 1988, to be exact – but, though it gets details right, it feels closer to sickly 50’s melodrama, the kind where the rot’s showing through the surface shine. Something is not right here, a dangling unsolved mystery. The initial shock has worn off, but the pain remains.

The film has tender character work in a somnambulant plot. Kat moves forward, the ensemble (fine performances all) relating to her in a variety of mostly normal ways as she finishes high school, chooses a college, and moves away. All the while, the mystery remains, a nagging thought in the back of her mind, and ours. Where did her mother go? There comes a point when Araki’s direction signals the answer so far in advance of the characters learning it that the final scenes feel agonizingly empty, a wait for an underwhelming reveal to make itself fully known.

Until then, though, it’s a minor key work of small gestures and controlled style, nothing overwhelming, but quiet, insinuating, and full of stunned pain, stunted rebellion. Being on the cusp of adulthood is confusing enough under normal circumstances. Here, that confusion is magnified by the missing person mystery, making coming of age an all the more uneasy process.

Love, Cancer Style: THE FAULT IN OUR STARS

They’re young. They’re in love. They have cancer. She meets him in a support group for kids with terminal illnesses. She needs an oxygen tank to breathe. He has an artificial leg. They’re in remission, but for God only knows how long. She’s only alive because of an experimental treatment. No one knows if and when it’ll stop working. He’s only alive because he gave up part of his leg. They hit it off right away. Their chemistry is immediate, obvious, and overwhelming. They feel comfortable together. Maybe it’s because for them love means never having to say you have cancer.

That’s the basic premise of The Fault in Our Stars, a teen romance wrapped tightly around a disease-of-the-week weepy. What makes it work is the strength of the performances, which are clear-eyed and emphatic, and the writing, which is sappy and sentimental, but never loses a sense of humor and perspective. This isn’t a blinkered story of doomed true love. It’s a story about two sick kids who make a connection in what just might be their final days. Rather than letting this possibility weigh the film down, it’s simply accepted as a reality. They’ve been living with their diagnoses for years now. They’re used to it.

The girl, Hazel, is our entry point into the story. Played by Shailene Woodley, she’s a bookish, contemplative girl who appreciates the time she’s given, while wondering why she can’t have the freedom to be a little more of a normal teen. She certainly doesn’t want to go to the support group in the bottom of a church basement, where the sweet man with testicular cancer (Mike Birbiglia) makes everyone listen to his acoustic guitar playing. She goes anyway, and meets Augustus (Ansel Elgort). They can’t keep their eyes off of each other. Afterwards, they hang out. Soon, they text back and forth. It’s a typical modern teen flirtation sliding easily into romance. If it weren’t for the cancer, it’d almost not be worth telling. The disease gives their flirtation underlying, unspoken, urgency.

Woodley and Elgort’s performances are appealing and comfortable. Woodley makes even the corniest narration sound like nothing more than what a reasonably intelligent teenager might be thinking. She has an open face and wet eyes that communicate a sadness and wonder, convincing as a person who has been sick since she was a child, and is tentatively forging a new relationship despite her worry about hurting one more person with her death. Elgort’s hugely charming, playing the type of cocky that can only be compensating for fear. And yet he seems totally at ease. He has to be the dreamiest, most Tiger Beat-ready cancer patient I’ve ever seen, confident and glowing with a love of life. They look good together, banter well, and are easy to root for.

The supporting cast is filled with terrific actors as parents and fellow support group members. Laura Dern is especially good in a role of maternal warmth and care as a woman for whom caring for a terminal child has become second nature. She has a devastating flashback scene, weeping while trying to comfort her hospitalized daughter, that’s so good it’s repeated twice. Nat Wolff, who between this and Palo Alto is cornering the market on troubled-best-friend teen roles, plays a kid with cancer of the eyes, nervously awaiting surgery that’ll leave him blind. That he’s good comedic relief should tell you something about the movie’s approach. It’s not morose or death-obsessed. It’s about people living their lives one day at a time complete with tiny triumphs, interesting anecdotes, sad setbacks, and funny jokes.

There’s nothing visually interesting about the movie. It’s simply lit and full of medium and close-up two shots, what we’d more easily call TV-like before TV went and got a smidge more cinematic at its upper edge. Director Josh Boone gets fine performances out of his cast and keeps the style merely functional, stepping out of the material’s way. It’s based on a popular novel by John Green, who wrote a well-oiled melodrama machine. I mean that in a good way. Screenwriters Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber (of (500) Days of Summer and The Spectacular Now) retain its most appealing elements, faithfully flavoring a low-key and sympathetic story about families living with a sick child with fantasy romance elements. The main characters have an idealized perfect teen love that’s all the more intense for the cold reality of cancer potentially growing within them.

The movie has a brisk pace, humanizing detail, and a good-humored snap to the dialogue. It hits metaphors a little too hard – a scene drawing a parallel to Anne Frank is misjudged – but, in its simple scenes of characters interacting, it is often deeply felt. It’s gooey, sappy at times, intent on wringing a tear or two out of the audience. But it’s warm, appealing, and never loses sight of the characters, balancing their youthful vitality and the deadly stakes of their conditions. Most importantly, they’re rarely reduced to their types. They’re presented as people who laugh, dream, plan, hope, think, and love. They try not to let their disease define them. That the movie doesn’t either is to its credit. And that’s what makes this glossy, bright, manipulative Hollywood drama an engaging entertainment that can hit authentic, tearful notes.

Generic Dystopia Blahs: DIVERGENT

So many young adult novels have gotten so lugubrious and solemn about subject matter that’s inherently exciting pulp. They’ve forgotten that fast and fun are not adjectives that preclude serious themes. Stories of teenage vampires and teenage gladiatorial combat and teenage dystopias have become these long, slow, formless blobs of deadening trembling import, eliding any B-movie energy they could potentially kick up. It’s like they feel the need to reassure their teen readership that they’re important by placing protagonists their age in the center of every single thing of importance in any given YA world. The weight of these decisions crushes the fun. The Hunger Games adaptations have just barely managed to escape this fate by working an interesting and enjoyable vein of satire and having actual characters for adults to play. You get why moments matter in those movies.

But Divergent has no such luck. It’s empty and bland, a movie built from the ground up to flatter its protagonist. You see, the world it imagines, a post-apocalyptic Chicago that’s been dried up and cordoned off, is split into five discreet career-based factions: scientists called Erudite, lawyers called Candor, farmers called Amity, soldiers called Dauntless, and philanthropists called Abnegation. The divisions between the groups are intensely policed. Once a teen picks their faction in a choosing ceremony, there’s no going back. Flunking out of the track chosen means a faction-less life of abject poverty and homelessness. Our protagonist’s only problem is that she’s too smart, too talented, and too all-around great to fit in only one faction. She’d be perfect in any and all of the factions. She can do everything. And that’s why she’s a threat. She’s just too good for this world.

She’s Tris, played by Shailene Woodley, who is good enough at suggesting interiority to make something of a character out of nothing at all. Her primary attribute is her boldness, which leads her to drift away from her parents’ selfless charity-based Abnegation towards the law enforcement Dauntless. It’s there that she realizes the problems of being labeled Divergent, what the world of this story calls those who fit more than one category. I guess if they have a name for it, then Tris isn’t the first. How this society operates, I’m not quite sure. They claim to have existed in these five separate but equal factions for 100 years. Yet the overarching plot is about the villainous head of Erudite (Kate Winslet) deciding to overthrow and wipe out one of the other factions. Why hasn’t this happened sooner? The whole system seems unstable to me, partially because it seems calculated to avoid any explicit political messaging while providing a scenario in which the protagonist is the most special of all special people and can see their world’s grand design. Good for her, I guess.

The story follows Tris as she slowly becomes a great Dauntless and ends up involved with every major machination of the plot. The fate of future Chicago is in her hands. She meets a handsome Dauntless guy (Theo James) and has a crush on him. The architecture of his face probably has something to do with that, especially the way the camera lingers on his intense stares. Lucky for her, he eventually reciprocates those feelings. Along the way we get endless training montages and some uncomfortable militaristic hazing between barking about showing no fear from an ensemble of young heroes (Zoe Kravitz, Ansel Elgort), villains (Jai Courtney, Mekhi Phifer), and at least one wisenheimer who is not quite either (Miles Teller). Joining Winslet as the token adults in the cast are Ashley Judd, Tony Goldwyn, Maggie Q, and Ray Stevenson in a collection of helpful or harmful influences on Tris and her friends. They stand around in their awkward costumes and pretend this all makes sense, lending it a modicum of weight by reminding us of the better roles they’ve had.

Director Neil Burger’s approach is generic, impersonal, but sometimes serviceable. One nice scene involves a zip line off the top of a skyscraper and through the abandoned skyline of the city. I liked that. But most of the movie, adapted by Evan Daugherty and Vanessa Taylor from the book by Veronica Roth, involves pretty faces held in close-up. For over two hours they murmur towards each other, worried about who is going to be Dauntless, what the Erudites are up to and who is spreading rumors about Abnegation. They find it far more important than I did. All the intent declarations involving their faction titles only had me wondering why this society would choose such unwieldy adjectives for their groups’ names.

The film feels so claustrophobic and small, spending most of its time in rooms and caves and warehouses. When we finally pull back for wide shots, the sense of CGI space it tries to create feels fake and tiny, utterly inconsequential and entirely arbitrary. Chicago is a husk of its former self, but the “L” is still running and apparently automated? Okay. Maybe it works on the page (somehow I doubt it). But on screen, the whole thing just looks dumb.

Lush Life: THE SPECTACULAR NOW

The Spectacular Now is filled with fine performances that make big impacts. It’s not just the leads, Miles Teller and Shailene Woodley, as two teens in love or something close to it, who generate an emotional interest. I found even greater emotion in the faces of the character actors playing the adults around them. As a small business owner with fatherly feelings towards his teenage employee, Bob Odenkirk has only a scene or two, but generates an amazingly resonant and memorable presence. Similarly, when Kyle Chandler shows up late in the picture as a deadbeat dad, the sense of strained affection and inescapable personal failings is palpable. There’s a seriousness to the brief scenes with these men that extend to the film’s approach to capturing performances.

Director James Ponsoldt shoots the film with a sense of specificity and atmospherics, using a widescreen frame to grab intimate close-ups and spacious two-shots that register small shifts of emotions across a vast stretch of screen space. When the high school seniors played by Teller and Woodley go on their first date – he, an overconfident life-of-the-party guy; she, an introverted bookish type – the impression of the emotional terrain is vivid and subtly expressed. There are shifting feelings, of testing out the other, of hesitantly pressing forward and retreating, unable to reveal too much without feeling self-conscious about it, but plunging forward anyway. It’s all too real.

And yet, no matter how finely acted and well-crafted a film it is, Spectacular Now is ultimately nothing more than a dreary addiction drama embellished with uncommonly truthful performances, but ending up in the same place, walking over the same well-trod after-school-special plot beats we’ve seen before. Teller’s seemingly carefree kid is a not-so-secret alcoholic, wielding his spiked SuperGulp as a perpetual source of his next sip. Particular attention is paid to the way he’ll grab a red Solo cup at a kegger, pushes beers on his girlfriend, and traces his way back through the mixed signals from his most recent ex (Brie Larson) who is more simpatico with his drinking habits. His romantic prom-night gift to Woodley is an engraved flask. How sweet. It’s like Flight without the sensational plane crash sequence. Instead, we’re watching a slow-motion crash, as a promising young guy can’t even see his promise.

The opening scene shows us a blank page of a college application essay. The hackneyed opening narration promises to fill us in on what he writes, but he quickly discards the endeavor in favor of partying. The frustration of watching this character is as raw as it is affected. Ponsoldt’s been here before, in his previous (and better) film Smashed, the story of an elementary school teacher trying to hide the dangerous drunken lifestyle of her off hours. There as here it’s all too easy for a film to grow repetitive as it glumly traces a character’s long, painful downward spiral. Smashed had a sense of focus that helped keep it on track. It also had a fantastic lead performance by Mary Elizabeth Winstead, who also turns up in Spectacular Now as yet another of its few-scene wonders, playing Teller’s sober older sister. This film keeps alcoholism an ominous subplot, with romance foremost on its mind for a while. That the boy and girl Meet Cute when he wakes up hungover with no idea as to his location is certainly an unpromising start and a key to the film’s real concerns.

Like a Cameron Crowe movie without the killer soundtrack or a John Hughes movie without the cheerfully archetypical yet somehow convincing teenagers, Spectacular Now wears its heart on its sleeve. Unlike those directors’ films, it’s only so convincing, without ever quite finding its own approach. The screenplay by Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber, who brought a clever (some might say too clever, but I digress) approach to young love with (500) Days of Summer, here adapt a novel by Tim Tharp, finding ways to tone down the emotion of love without misplacing heart. It’s certainly an earnest film, shaggy and spirited in a low-key, hangout kind of way. That the film flirts with dullness, occasionally growing drab and slow, is its price to pay. Some of the best scenes are the ones that simply unspool, painfully mundane dialogue exchanged between a boy and a girl eager to impress the other and quickly finding a comfort that allows their energy levels to merge.

They push each other in ways both good and bad. That all feels true. For some time the film gives equal weight to their plights, their single mothers (his Jennifer Jason Leigh, hers Whitney Goin), their dreams, ambitions, and attraction to one another. The interior lives of both boy and girl are balanced nicely. But because he’s the alcoholic, and the film in the end is far more interested in his struggle with that, she’s slowly diminished in importance until she becomes just a plot device. I’d say she’s literally thrown under the bus, but that’s not exactly true. (It’s a truck.) We so rarely get films genuinely interested in the interior lives of girls, let alone a girl like this. To go to so much trouble creating such believable characters in an even-handed way and end up downplaying one of them for the sake of formulaic Lessons Learned, for a character who is far more familiar, is frustrating. This is a film with considerable sensitivity and a fine cast, but which puts it to use on a plot that takes its time getting to much the same places any other less talent-rich after-school-special would go.

Ohana Trouble: THE DESCENDANTS

Until now, writer-director Alexander Payne hadn’t made a movie since 2004’s fine comic drama Sideways. (Though his short in the 2007 anthology Paris, Je T’aime was easily the best part of that film). Watching his new film, The Descendents, I realized how much I had missed his cinematic voice. It wasn’t until it was gone that I discovered how much I enjoyed having new work from him appearing every couple of years. Funnily enough, not knowing what you have until it’s gone is also the major theme of this new film. Lawyer Matt King (George Clooney) is away on business when he receives word that his wife has been in a speedboat accident. He rushes back to their Hawaiian hometown where in the hospital she lies in a coma, kept alive by the tubes for breathing and feeding. Her heart’s still beating, but her brain is silent. They didn’t have a perfect marriage, but now they’re on the verge of never seeing, never speaking to each other ever again.

Matt is left having to take care of their daughters all on his own. Little Scottie (Amara Miller) is in trouble at school for bringing in a scrapbook filled with pictures of her comatose mother for show and tell. Alex (Shailene Woodley) is standoffish and, when he picks her up from boarding school, he finds her just a little drunk. These girls are going through a hard time. Alex invites her “friend” Sid (Nick Krause) to come stay with them, emotionally blackmailing her struggling father to get him to agree to the unexpected guest’s presence. “I’ll be a lot more civil with him around,” she threatens with a spiteful teenaged glower.

Matt’s doubly distracted by an impending real estate deal that must be resolved. His ancestors owned a large parcel of land on the island that is now held in common amongst all of his cousins. They’re preparing to sell it and become instant millionaires. It’s a pretty big deal, but it’s hard to make such a major decision when your wife is on the precipice of death. Her will asks that she not be kept alive artificially in the case of just such a catastrophic accident. Matt tells his girls and then sets off to tell close family and friends that it’s time to say their goodbyes.

On top of all this, when he finally confronts Alex on why she’s behaving so bratty, she tells him that his wife, her mother, had been cheating on him prior to the accident. This could easily be a soapy twist, but the film is stronger than that, or rather it’s working for a calmer, more perceptive goal. Discovering and possibly confronting this other man is just another plate that Matt has to keep spinning. How is it possible to be mad at the one you love when it’s impossible to confront her, when it’s time to be saying your final goodbye? The complex emotions in this film are not easily resolvable.

The opening of the film spells out some of this set-up in narration that becomes a bit of a crutch. Most of what’s told is easily understandable from context clues and most of what isn’t could have easily been inserted into dialogue or the production design. What follows, though, is a film of such well-lived performances and thoughtful directorial choices. Reflecting the laid-back atmosphere of a tropical island while taking place in the kind of mundane suburban side-streets and office buildings that could be found in any location, the sturdy, relaxed pace and glimmering observational eye of the film help bring to life this man’s story in a moving and empathetic way without tipping over into self-seriousness.

This is lovely, emotionally engaged filmmaking from Payne who is working from a script co-written with Nat Faxon and Jim Rash that’s moving and involving precisely because of its specificity. Payne has a sharp, observant sensibility that can find the humor in deathly serious situations, making such a clean cut to laughter that emotional heft is left unscathed. This is hardly the funereal dirge that the above plot details could easily have been describing. There’s a vibrant sense of life here in a deep and talented ensemble that includes lovely character moments for a father in-law (Robert Forster), a cousin (Beau Bridges), and a goofy neighborhood couple (Mary Birdsong and Rob Huebel). There’s some especially fine work in scenes given over to a realtor (Matthew Lillard) and his wife (Judy Greer) who first appear late in the film but leave a lasting impact on the emotional terrain. Payne gives the characters room to breathe and grow at a comfortable pace.

This is a film that earns its quiet laughs and warm, tear-jerking sentiment without appearing to break a sweat. Clooney, at the center of it all, gives such a warm, relaxed yet controlled performance that’s removed from the easy charm he brings to most of his roles. Here he disappears into the character in a way that allows his pop culture persona to fade away. Here he’s just an average (though definitely handsomer than average) man struggling with a life that has taken sudden, and unexpected, turns. His performance matches the filmmaking. This is not a flashy movie, but one that lets a potentially loud human drama unfold quietly with great care, great humor, and great sensitivity.