Fate of the Furriest: THE CALL OF THE WILD

Chris Sanders, animator and director behind such modern family classics as Lilo & Stitch and How to Train Your Dragon, now gives us a Great Illustrated Classics gloss on the middle school staple The Call of the Wild. The movie sands down Jack London’s brutal law of club and fang, retaining its episodic pull devolving a pampered house dog to a more instinctual creature of the wilderness, but making it bloodless and glancingly brutal. Here’s a rich man’s dog stolen away to the Yukon on a Gold Rush dogsled, battered in silhouette, confronted with stock villainy from alpha dogs, until one day he stand with his snout held high as the leader of the pack. By the end, he won’t need human masters at all. Sanders places computer animated dogs — rendered with more expressive realism than Favreau’s brain-dead Lion King Xerox, due to a hint of humanity in motion capture movements by Terry Notary and a dash of cartoon to lolling grins and twinkling eyes — next to human actors and gleaming fake landscapes. It’s all tweaked and heightened, Janusz Kaminski making a glowing Bob Ross backdrop of perfect forests and postcard ready snowcapped mountains, with a picture book appeal. When a dog is dramatically backlit by the Auroa Bourealis, or a mossy cabin is encrusted with the most verdant greens in an oasis right out of Tom Waits’ Buster Scruggs chapter, it’s nothing less than simple a-man-and-his-dog perfection. Here London’s story of canine instincts and the interiority of the animals is more or less intact for the novel’s first half until the second veers into screenplay tricks, obvious setups and payoffs, and a dash of sentimental gilding of its reconfigured, dramatically convenient conclusion. We get avalanches and dashes to destinations and low-key panning for gold as the dog shares the stage with beefed up roles for humans. There’s a wisp of a background love story for two Quebecois mail carriers (Omar Sy and Cara Gee), and a sniveling villain in a pompous rich prospector wannabe (Dan Stevens). And, best of all, throughout the film are the grizzled world-weary charms of a lovable Harrison Ford, whose ways with land and beast show him to be a true Jack London vision of benevolent masculinity. He’s grandfatherly and stolidly adventurous in all the right ways, and such a spry 77 that I’m not doubting a prospective fifth Indiana Jones as much as I was before. (Can you believe we thought he was nearly too old back when the fourth one came out, or that that one was twelve years ago?) What we’re left with is a movie of poses and personalities, pulled along by a classic story’s sturdy structure. It’s no great shakes, and no SparksNotes replacement, either, but it’s what, in earlier years, would’ve been a long-running kids’ matinee picture, a classy, square diversion with the right humble peaks of excitement and charm amidst a relaxed aged stars’ easy charisma and talented filmmakers’ perfectly phony visual splendor.

Art Attack: THE SQUARE

Ruben Östlund makes thesis movies, films laying out clinical observations about human interactions and then slowly working out a variety of scenarios in response that serve to bolster the central argument. It worked so well in his prickly, icily perceptive Force Majeure – a mercilessly contained film about a ski trip that turns sour when the dopey dad flees an avalanche and leaves his wife and kids to fend for themselves, an act of cowardice that’s even more pathetic when the disaster doesn’t strike – that there’s little wonder The Square can’t compete in focused anxiety. It drifts and wanders where the earlier film bored down with unflinching examination. But Östlund remains an expert dramatist of exceptional awkward encounters, scenes squirming with discomfort. It makes for a compelling watch. Here the plot precariously teeters (wobbling on the line between too-obvious and too-obtuse) on a Stockholm museum of contemporary art where good progressive values and high-minded boundary pushing are all well and good until they’re put to the test in the lives of the curator (Claes Bang) and his staff. This is heightened by Östlund’s stubborn camera, locked down in such a way that often leaves a confrontation bifurcated, half playing out off screen. It’s about reactions, about the complications stirring up distress despite and because of our inability to completely understand what’s going on.

Contained in a gallery – piles of ashen gravel; a wall-sized video portrait of a growling man; a pile of chairs with a scraping soundtrack – it’s fine, even noble, to see provocations. But then a pickpocket’s convoluted scheme interrupts a morning commute, a patron with Tourette’s constantly and profanely interrupts an artist (Dominic West) during a serious Q&A session, a journalist (Elisabeth Moss) interrogates her one-night-stand while a docent peers around the corner to eavesdrop, callow young ad men propose a nasty viral video to promote a peaceful installation, or a performance artist (Terry Notary) monkeying around escalates anxiety in a posh fundraising dinner. Well, that’s another thing entirely. Here’s a world of big money donors and thoughtful artists while beggers sit ignored on the street outside before them. How productive is an interest in being provoked if it’s only to be easily digested and safely squared away? Early in the film, the curator explains a conundrum: will anything become art if placed in an art museum? What, then, about the opposite? Is a provocation only fruitful when safely walled-off? What is a boundary of good taste, of free speech, of proper behavior? This is a fussily meandering movie, slowly interrogating the ideas by knocking the characters out of their comfort zones and then pulling them back, leaving them frazzled. The movie slowly accrues, and ultimately peters out, but moment by fascinatingly uncomfortable moment it’s hilariously sharp. Painstakingly dissected encounters, pulled off with fine deadpan slightly-heightened realism, become, at their best, sustained tremors of pleasurable suspenseful disruption.