High Hopes: WILD ROSE and THE AERONAUTS

The year 2019 turned out to be a big one for British director Tom Harper. Previously best known on these shores, if at all, for 2015’s perfectly agreeable modern Hammer horror effort The Woman in Black: Angel of Death, his output this year encompasses two major prestige efforts. At least, that’s how their American distributors have positioned them. The films themselves wear their prestige qualities lightly, and, though they hail from dependably Oscar-y sub-genres and have the glossy handsome look of respectability about them, there’s a generosity of tone and humanity of spirit that enlivens what could be predictable, and makes imminently watchable works. The more successful of the two was this past summer’s small sleeper hit Wild Rose, a film about a scrappy Scottish woman (Jessie Buckley) and her quixotic dream to be a big American country star. It may seem an improbable dream, especially once you see she’s a single mom just out of prison with two kids waiting for her with her mother (Julie Walters). Immediately, a cynical viewer might start slotting the potential storyline into a conventional mode. If she can’t make steps toward her goal, we’re looking at kitchen-sink social realism. If she can, we’re looking at a sentimental rags-to-riches. But Nicole Taylor’s sharp and entertaining screenplay is wiser than that, imbued with a sense of specificity and heart that never steps wrong. It has both heartbreak and hardship, every success hard-won, every setback painfully felt. The result is a movie as warm and wise and true as the best country story songs. Buckley plays the lead as determined, optimistic yet realistic, sparkling and spunky and, yes, a helluva country singer. (The music is wall-to-wall and excellent.) We can see her dream should become true, even if others can’t. She’s charming and talented, but only a half-step ahead of sadness or despair. She’s falling behind fast — bills to pay, kids to raise, an ankle monitor that limits her ability to take advantage of a fluke of good fortune, let alone take a gig. That her mother sternly advises her to give up feels as kind as it is cruel; but so, too, is her wealthy employer (Sophie Okonedo) as she advises her to go for it. There’s no easy answer. Here’s a movie that is an unusually warm and clear-eyed look at what so often becomes behind-the-music cliche or pat blindly-follow-your-dreams foolishness. It understands with poignant, matter-of-fact clarity how difficult in can be to accept a lucky break and turn it into something bigger when you’re starting from a place of such disadvantage. The quotidian struggle, the painful mistakes, and the missed opportunities make the glimpses of success all the more powerfully bittersweet in a movie this vibrant and full of life. It earns every ounce of its uplift.

Harper’s other film of the year, opening just in time for the holidays, is the shallower and yet more visually striking The Aeronauts. It’s a based-on-a-true-story period picture whose commitment to the true story ends with the fact that there was an important hot air balloon experiment in 1862 England. The film really is as simple as it sounds: a pilot (Felicity Jones) and a weather scientist (Eddie Redmayne) want to see how high they can take a hot air balloon. It goes up really high, which, as you might expect for the first time such a thing has happened, gives them all kinds of wonderful views and terrifying complications. It gets cold. There are storm clouds. And how does one land this thing? This is the full extent of the film’s present-tense action, with the characters’ backstories filled in with studious flashbacks that pad out the runtime and give some emotional scaffolding to the awe-struck imperiled figures adrift in the skies. With such a thin story structure, Harper is free to demonstrate a true This is Cinerama or even L'arrivée d'un train level of simple visual power. It’s a case of a wow, look at that thing go! conception executed well, expertly realized and utterly convincing in its blend of practical and computer effects. When on the ground, George Steel’s cinematography has fine, overfamiliar, burnished period piece style, shot in scope with all the finest frippery of mid-1800’s detail in the costuming and production design. But get it up in the air, and the frame opens to full IMAX height, conjuring the most vertiginous filmmaking this side of Zemeckis’ skyscraper tightrope The Walk as they lean over the edge or, worse still, climb up the rigging. It thus builds great tension out of the mere height of the thing, gaping in wonder as the balloon passes through clouds or drifts above a town, or gripping tight as the characters must scramble around the balloon. Because Jones and Redmayne are capable at playing charm and vulnerability, it’s always evident that they’re one wrong decision away from plummeting and they do enough to make one hope not to see such a thing. They hold their own against the immense backdrop of this spectacular view. From such a simple idea comes a movie that’s captivating enough, capable of reminding one that a relatively simple story’s ability to be told on a scale of this enormity is one of the reasons we go out to the movies.

Just the Two of Them: AFTER EARTH

In After Earth, a distant father (Will Smith) takes a trip with his estranged son (Jaden Smith) at the urging of his wife (Sophie Okonedo). It’ll be good for them, she thinks. Too bad their transport crashes, leaving them stranded in the wilderness. Too badly hurt to assist in finding help, the father sends his son on the journey, traversing deadly terrain while using technology to remain in contact. This is no ordinary story of a camping trip gone wrong, although that simple emotional core is certainly what the film’s about. These characters are humans a thousand years removed from our time, long after our planet has been abandoned and left for dead. Their spaceship has crash-landed on the quarantined Earth, the most dangerous place in the galaxy, a planet that has evolved to reject its long gone human inhabitants. It’s a thin drama of man versus nature loaded up with appealing sci-fi trappings.

Help for the stranded can only arrive by one of the Smiths activating a beacon flung from the wreckage and subsequently now located miles away. It’s a two-person film for the most part, with father and son Smith bonding while trapped apart by necessity, stuck together on a digital tether. The elder Smith plays not just an expert, but the best member of a futuristic army corps knows as Rangers. He knows all about the tricks of survival, including avoiding nasty, blind alien beasts that can only track humans by smelling their fear. As if this metaphor weren’t subtle enough, one of these beasts is tracking the younger Smith as he makes his way up hillsides, down steep cliffs, avoiding angry monkeys, climbing wildcats, and pterodactyl-sized birds of prey. You see, he must literally learn to control his fear if father and son are to survive. He’s hunted by the metaphor of maturity he must physically overpower to grow up and save the day.

The story of a father teaching his son the skills that make him the best at what he does takes on a subtext worth noting when it’s a film starring one of the world’s best movie stars and his relatively inexperienced actor son. (That Will Smith receives a story credit here only further underlines this reading.) Will Smith is a charismatic performer, but here drops his charm into static, stoic, minimalist reserve. It’s a measure of his talent that he’s sometimes compelling and often affecting despite holding so much back. Jaden, on the other hand, has much less of a natural screen presence and when he drops down into the same spare acting style to match his father’s acting choices he simply drops emotionally out of the film entirely. He disappears into the spectacle as nothing more than a lethargic action figure going through the motions in what should be a grand boy’s adventure, tromping through flora and fauna, barely staying alive at every turn, but is in reality thinner and simpler than even that would be.

What keeps the film interesting despite its rather thin plotting and a performance that’s featured in nearly every shot so completely underwhelming is the direction by M. Night Shyamalan. Even when, in recent films like his The Last Airbender, his storytelling arguably creeps towards self-serious silliness (though I’d argue that less vociferously than his detractors), he has an incredible eye. Here, he creates an uncommon stillness and patience in this Hollywood spectacle’s visual style.Working with Peter Suschitzky’s cinematography, this is a film that drinks in natural beauty of its sweeping landscapes. Even when the action, such as it is, begins, there is maintained a refreshing sense of steadiness. In the very best scenes here, as in his very best films (The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable, Signs), Shyamalan builds suspense in simple sequences through nothing more than blocking and crisply edited moments of quiet dread. It’s in his style that the film manages to become something more than its spare, schmaltzy plotting might suggest.

Much of the film plays out in dialogue-free sequences of long shots following the Smiths’ progress. The first scene post-crash finds the younger Smith scrambling through the wreckage in a long take that finds the camera placed behind an emergency flap that’s rhythmically covering the corridor. As we watch the young man assess the situation, the frame is completely covered by the moving spaceship part at regular intervals. It’s the kind of choice that a less visually interesting spectacle would not think to make. As the film progresses through somewhat convincing creature effects and episodic encounters with nature dangers both recognizable and pure sci-fi, the camera remains steady, quiet and interesting. There’s uncommon beauty in some of the film’s passages, especially as consequences are at their most dire and a light dusting of something approaching Herzogian jungle madness descends upon the characters. Still, Shyamalan’s decisions make the film interesting without making it good. It’s the kind of stuff that could potentially elevate good to great, and here brings disposable to notable.