Shadows Searching: THE MANY SAINTS OF NEWARK

In 2007, David Chase’s classic New Jersey mobster drama The Sopranos left us with a last supper. Now, it returns to us with The Many Saints of Newark, a prequel. It’s nothing if not consistent—a sprawling story deeply engaged with struggles of masculinity, family, moral weight, and the agonizing dissatisfying guilt the comes from a lifetime of sin. It’s religious and contemplative, torn between atonement and destruction, the holy and profane. That it’s also a multi-generational story of America in decline, a sad pack of boomers chasing the glory of their fathers and leaving less and less opportunity or exit strategy to their children, makes it uniquely suited to chronicle its moment and prefigure ours. But it’s also, at its core, and perhaps at its most appealing, a series about a husband, a wife, their children, and extended family connections; it’s the domestic dramas set up as counterpoint and intersection with the gangster plot lines that are the glue that holds the audience’s affection together. A viewer invested in them as a family, and the accumulation of character detail and thematic concerns consistently streamed forth from that font. A reason why the sudden cut to black in the series’ final episode is so shocking—still a jolt, a chill—is that it not only amplifies the ambiguity long embedded in the show’s philosophical concerns, but denies us closure on the people who, however deeply imperfect and morally compromised, have a humanity we learned to care about. Cold comfort it may be to know the cut to black is headed for us all no matter what we do. But it’s good to know life goes on and on and on and on until then, and for others after.

I like that Chase maintains the mystery of that moment, to the extent that any continuation of the Soprano family story simply had to go back in time. For a family, and a business, to concerns with legacy and lineage, it’s still a rich vein to mine. It feels haunted by future events, an inevitability that what’s set in motion here will reverberate down through the generations. There’s preordained tragedy in the mob life, a foreshortening of life and opportunity when the family and The Family are inextricable, petty crime and petty slights in the same terrible chain of cause and effect. Many Saints finds its main character in Dickie Moltisanti (Alessandro Nivola), a father and uncle whose absence, having long been whacked when Sopranos began, shaped some of his descendant’s actions and perspectives. Here he’s still in the prime of his life. It’s the late 60s. (Chase’s other major feature film effort, 2012’s Not Fade Away, sets its tender musical coming-of-age story against the time’s cultural upheaval.) In this new film Newark is burning. Gangsters are scheming. The world seems to be coming apart, and for the members of the interconnected Jersey crime families their underworld black market power is the thing that gives their lives structure and some sense of control. You can see why a young Tony Soprano (here played by the late, great James Gandolfini’s son Michael in a finely tuned performance) would think this time was a golden age of sorts, although the deaths and prison sentences might make one think it’s no better than his own.

This anxiety of influence as it relates to generations cycles of dysfunction and distress animates Chase’s screenplay, co-written by Lawrence Konner and directed by Alan Taylor, series' vets both. It becomes a movie about people who almost know the way to do the right thing, but, mirroring the show’s Zeno’s paradox of morality, never can get there. Here it’s Dickie, who clashes with family and rivals, gets entangled in affairs and crimes alike, and who ultimately presents himself so slickly that the more impressionable around him might see in him a reason to perpetuate what is the cause of both the family’s wealth and its doom. That Dickie is given an almost literal angel and devil dispensing advice, in the form of a father and his twin brother (in a well-differentiated dual role for Ray Liotta) emphasizes the weight of his choices, and two potential futures. (That the whole movie is narrated from beyond the grave by another character related to him—the thing literally starts floating over gravestones where we overhear ghostly monologues—gives the project that extra weight of funereal fate.) Around him is a cavalcade of character actors playing younger versions of the old guard who haunted Tony’s adulthood: his intimidating father (Jon Bernthal) and snapping mother (Vera Farmiga), his bald bespectacled—and dangerous—Uncle Junior (Corey Stoll), and young up-and-coming gangsters like Paulie (Billy Magnussen) and Silvio (John Magaro). The extra-textual sense of winking inevitability is sometimes a nudge to the fans, but is also often adds to the overarching doom that settles around the ice-blue images and the sturdy mid-century design.

The movie is a relatively brisk two hours, but rambles and expands and never quite digs in to its shuffling surfaces. There’s something uneven—at once too much and too little—about its design, tracing a standard gangster set of concerns with hits and schemes and twists, against a larger family tapestry. It slips through time a bit, and finds pockets of characterization in which to get turned around. Without the space of a season of television, the scenes of sly humor and dark juxtapositions, simple philosophizing and earnest psychologizing, take up inordinate space. Though the movie leans on its Sopranos prequel status in ways that make this particular picture sometimes incomplete, there’s something alive in its ungainly design, especially as Chase introduces Leslie Odom, Jr. as a Black associate of the mobsters. He has his own through line that criss-crosses the other plots, and serves as intriguing counterpoint and counterbalance to their privilege, as well as valuable historical context. One scene finds a hit carried out in an army recruitment center where the flummoxed solider behind the desk yelps that Vietnam’s not his fault. Another has a white man drive a car with a dead body in the passenger seat through a line of riot cops too busy pointing artillery at protestors to notice. These ideas of whose behavior is policed, and who is allowed to get away with what, is emphasized and mirrored by the story of an innocent Italian immigrant (Michela De Rossi) who is brought into the Moltisanti family and becomes part of the mob lifestyle (with all the danger that entails) even as she dutifully takes classes to improve her English and assimilate. Even here there’s a sense that the events—moments of grace, and moments of betrayal—will continue to haunt the family, casting a long shadow.

Let the Right Wan In:THE CONJURING: THE DEVIL MADE ME DO ITand MALIGNANT

Two recent Warner Brothers’ horror movies have been a case study in James Wan’s talents as a director. Maybe the clearest example of what he can do is the one he didn’t do, proof through absence, since The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It is a sequel to two movies he directed. After Saw and Insidious, he launched The Conjurings. The series starring Vera Farmiga and Patrick Wilson as paranormal investigators, loosely based on real people who claimed they were such a thing, had a good start. It also made him one of a select group of directors who’ve kickstarted three iconic horror franchises. Wan gave it style and character, long slow build ups to good ghost scares and in between the great actors were allowed to build warm chemistry for a portrait of a loving marriage. It satisfied, and made a whole cinematic universe of spin-offs in which other directors tackled the story of haunted objects largely disconnected from the central Conjurings, and therefore freed from the direct comparison with the flagship’s style and tone. (Even the ones that featured good cameos from Wilson and Farmiga, like a third Annabelle movie about a possessed doll, managed to do fun creep-outs with its ideas without stepping on the larger franchise.) What a disappointment, then, that the third in the central series is such a slack and boring affair.

Wan passed the reins to Michael Chaves, whose modestly effective The Curse of La Llorona was the least connected in the Conjuring-verse. (It was also, coincidentally, the second-best film of that Latin American folk tale in recent years.) With this new movie, he makes a competently framed sequel, but the screenplay is just so weak that it hardly matters he can do the sliding digitally-assisted camera moves and gin up some token suspense. Instead of the haunted house tours of the prior films, this one feints toward the idea of being a legal thriller. There’s a grisly murder, and the main suspect tells his lawyer that the devil made him do it—hence the title. So Wilson and Farmiga, taking this very seriously because the alleged murderer was a witness at one of their exorcisms lately, tromp off to investigate. Weirdly, the courthouse is left entirely behind so that they can snoop around secret Satanists and ferret out a conspiracy of evildoers lurking in the shadows. (Maybe because the “true story” would find a judge dismiss the defendant’s claim of possession and lock him up, the filmmakers needed something more supernatural to happen.) Its 80s setting places it squarely in Satanic Panic territory, a time when a frenzy of right-wing Christian scaremongering about phony devil-worshipping cabals led to false accusations against all manner of teachers, parents, and childcare workers. (n+1 editor Richard Beck’s 2015 book We Believe the Children is a well-researched overview of this history.) So it’s certainly more difficult to take the series’ fake “true story” claims in good fun when it’s now pretending this damaging falsehood might’ve had a point, even in such a limited case. Even if I could get past that, though, the movie itself is mechanical and dry, self-seriousness tipped fatally toward silly, with its good leads stranded in a plot that plods. I was thoroughly bored.

That’s not to say the movie Wan did direct, Malignant, is any less silly, but it owns it. The thing is so committed to its kookiness it reaches a fever pitch of style and confidence. The thing starts overheated and maintains a roiling boil from there. After some spasms of plot-setting, we arrive in the life of a woman (Annabelle Wallis) who, recuperating from having her skull cracked against a wall by her abusive husband, dreams he’s killed. She awakes to discover he was. From there it’s a not unfamiliar story of its kind, as the woman imagines herself present at more and more grisly murders—bodies torn apart with gross effects for gooey stabbings. The police view her suspiciously. Her sister tries to be supportive. It all ramps up until there’s a huge twist or three, and the movie adds a kind of manic glee to its increasingly wild images. Wan starts with the show-off overhead shots and gliding through walls he so loves. But the dialogue seems a little too flat, and the acting seems all dialed a bit off from the norm. The investigation is sluggish, and the psychology half-baked. The thing starts to feel strikingly composed—with dark and stormy nights and color filters and self-consciously posed blocking—but bog standard. It’s maybe the awkward halfway point between Dario Argento’s excess and M. Night Shyamalan’s earnestness for a while.

But by the time a stunt person, makeup, and wriggling gross-out body horror erupts into spasms of mind-boggling action and violence in pursuit of an amped up high concept giddily displayed, it’s hard not to get on board. I could appreciate the whole project then. It started by showing us a deceptively normal (in genre terms) idea, the better to satisfy when it reveals its extreme grotesqueries from the other side, an awkward but not unenjoyable mix. Wan isn’t pursuing the virtuosic symphonies of jump scares and spectral visions he brought to his ghost stories, or the twisting suspense gore of his earlier works. Instead he’s in pursuit of just how far over the top he can take a concept while still playing it straight. Does that make it a good movie? Maybe not quite. But it makes it a watchable and memorable one with a few fun sequences. It’s certainly the superior Wan production of the year. It strikes me as the kind of outlier horror movie best appreciated for what it’s trying, and admiring what it can pull off.

Haunted Again: THE CONJURING 2

Does director James Wan believe in ghosts? Or does he simply believe in the power of horror cinema to suggest the possibility so earnestly and intently that it might as well be the same thing? Either way, The Conjuring 2 is the work of a believer. It’s a ghost story focused on the people involved, characters who need to believe in order to make sense of their lives. The haunted need proof they’re not hallucinating frauds, an explanation, no matter how otherworldly, for their traumatic experiences. Those who arrive to assist them in this terrifying time carry the baggage of prior encounters and the burden of their unique skills. They simply can’t ignore cries for help only they can answer. Like its predecessor, this horror sequel finds the humanity in the mechanical workings of the haunted house genre, summoning real scares where others turn up only stale fright. This movie contains sequences of such masterful manipulation, drawn-out scenes of goosebumps-laden patience and shiver-inducing jolts, that it’s hard to ignore its power.

Once again the film splits its focus between a family in supernatural crisis and its heroes, Lorraine and Ed Warren, a pair of paranormal investigators who claim to have been witnesses to all sorts of ghostly goings-on. As with last time, the inspiration comes from the real Warrens’ case files, which gives reason enough for a “based on a true story” title card, and groovy 70’s fashions, an added bonus for the retro throwback appeal of these films, in stylistic and thematic continuity with some of the biggest horror of the time. Like The Exorcist or The Omen (or The Amityville Horror, also based on a case the real Warrens’ were involved with, and explicitly referenced in this film’s chilling prologue), The Conjuring movies are handsomely polished works that hire great dramatic actors and allow them to chew on horror tropes, lending unusual emotional weight and seriousness to the downtime between jump scares.

The Warrens (Vera Farmiga and Patrick Wilson) are professionals doing their job. The spiritual haunts them. Their marriage is built on their trust in one another, and their shared faith in what they’ve been through. Their comfortable, lived-in, low-key romance unfolds in the margins of scenes, lending the unsettled mood background tenderness. In The Conjuring 2, they’re feeling the pressure of increased visibility. They’ve been experts called in to explain, exorcise or experiment with the validity of all sorts of hauntings, an urgent need in the world as this series understands it, albeit one greeted with healthy doses of skepticism from the scientific community. They’re worn out, ready to take a break, when they hear about a poor, frightened family living in what appears to be a haunted house in North London. The screenplay – by Wan with David Leslie Johnson (Orphan) and Carey and Chad Hayes (of the original) – has been cutting back and forth, filling us in on the details of an 11-year-old girl (Madison Wolfe) who is sleepwalking, seemingly communicating with things that go bump in the night. Her mother (Frances O’Connor) doesn’t know where to turn, especially once objects start flying about.

The film is at its best in these early sequences of the family, a single mother and her four terrified children, increasingly tormented, discovering the extent of their ghostly domicile. They’re not as individuated as the family in the last one, but Wan has a toolbox full of effective horror movie tricks and proceeds to pull them out one by one, building tension out of sturdy, familiar components. He uses sudden noises, menacing voices, surprise movements, disorienting shifts in perspective, eerie apparitions, and long, trembling looks into dark corners. The children’s bedroom has posters on the wall, the better for pale faces to trick your eyes in the dead of night. There are windup cars and other vintage toys that move on their own accord, a TV mysteriously turning on or off. One of the film’s best effects involve the main girl’s sleepwalking, the camera in one seamlessly faked take slowly pushing in on her face as she sleeps in bed and a low rumbling sound fills the ambient noise, then pulling back revealing her on the floor of a different room.

Drifting and sliding, sometimes through floors and walls, Don Burgess’s pale, wide cinematography deploys sinister SteadiCam, glides and floats above and behind its characters, trapping them in the ethereal creepiness. By the time – Christmastime, in fact, a warm contrast to the film’s shivers – the Warrens meet up with a British counterpart (Simon McBurney) to investigate and document, they bring some stability, but the atmosphere remains unsettled. The spirit realm and the human world do battle. A particularly scary unbroken shot involves Ed Warren speaking to the malevolent spirit with his back turned. He sits in the foreground in complete clear focus, while behind him there’s a terrifyingly blurry figure held out of focus as it creaks and croaks out its ghostly answers. Wan holds tight on Wilson’s face, a calm professional steadily confronting the shifting target that is the intruder from the afterlife. It’s a perfect example of humanity in the face of the unknown.

Following the same formula that made its predecessor such a satisfying genre exercise, The Conjuring 2 slowly sets up a family’s distress and then follows the Warrens as they try desperately to fix the situation before someone can get seriously injured. This makes it the rare horror series that doesn’t make its villain the star – the stock in trade for Universal and Hammer monsters, Godzilla and assorted kaiju creatures, and every slasher. The Warrens make this into something of a paranormal procedural. The fun is in the repetition of images and ideas, and the slight variations. (This one’s British setting allows for fun touches, like a newspaper headline that reads, and hear this with the proper accent in your mind’s ear, “Terror for family in spook riddle!”) By the end, everyone has gotten up close and personal with ghostly suffering, in sequences that jolt and jump in all the right spots. It doesn’t reinvent the haunted house genre, or even its precursor’s techniques, but instead relies on the sturdiness of its construction. It adds up to a little less than the first, with a finale that's more routine than its setup, but there's a contagious and enveloping scary mood throughout nonetheless.

Family Law: THE JUDGE

The Judge is the sort of glossy adult-driven Hollywood melodrama we tell ourselves they don’t make any more. Perhaps this perceived shortage led the filmmakers to stuff several dependable formulas into one picture. It’s a father/son reunion story, a courthouse drama, a big town lawyer reconnecting with his small town roots parable, and a workaholic learning to slow down and appreciate the people in his life fable. That’s a lot going on, then add in a handful of medical problems, tragic backstories, mental illness, an old ex-girlfriend, and a tornado warning. It’s overstuffed with reasons to be sentimental, manipulative, and formulaic, turning up reveals and developments at a predictable pace. This is exactly the kind of movie easy to dismiss as too calculatingly sincere and sloppily emotional. And it is. But it’s also the kind of handsome, sturdily square drama that can get in your guts and pull on the heartstrings anyway.

Robert Downey Jr. plays a snarky Chicago lawyer called back to his small Indiana hometown after the death of his mother. There, he clashes anew with his estranged father (Robert Duvall), the picturesque community’s respected judge. He’s boarding the flight home when his brothers (Vincent D’Onofrio and Jeremy Strong) call with terrible news. Their dad has been arrested after blood on his car matched a corpse found on the side of the road, the victim of a hit and run. The old man’s weak of body, but obstinate of spirit. And now he’s charged with manslaughter, a charge increased when the victim is discovered to be a murderer he regretted giving a lenient sentence to years earlier. So it’s up to the hotshot lawyer son to defend his small-town judge father, a tall order given the importance of the case and the history he has with his town and family.

The cast sells it. Downey can do the character arc from cocky pro to humbled man in his sleep. He gives it his usual rascally charm, weaving in some appealing notes of wistful regret as he spars with his old man, catches up with his brothers, and considers rekindling his relationship with his high school girlfriend (Vera Farmiga, glowing with warm charm), who happens to have a daughter (Leighton Meester) as old as they’ve been apart, give or take nine months. Holding down the other half of the drama is Duvall who, at the age of 83, remains an actor incapable of a dishonest moment. He imbues his character with a righteous stubbornness, mourning his wife while bottling up love and pride for his son over resentments that have festered in his two decade absence, and holding back fear for his reputation. The father-son relationship works well, as the plot machinery creaks through its paces.

It’s the craftsmanship that elevates the material. It could’ve been a dopey TV movie without such a strong cast (including a fine supporting turn by Billy Bob Thornton as a sharp-tongued prosecutor who makes a perfect dry foil for Downey’s persona) and a wonderfully expensive look, bathed in light by cinematographer Janusz Kaminski. It’s a movie with perfect Main Street Americana, and where every drive down a country road looks like a car commercial. But there’s real manufactured heart in this glossy professionalism.  Screenwriters Nick Schenk and Bill Dubuque generate a series of scenarios that allow talented actors to breathe some life into cliché. And this is easily director David Dobkin’s best movie, after years of dreck like Fred Claus and the execrable The Change-Up. He directs with slick button-pushing competence. It’s transparent in how it’s going about getting its effects, but, hey, it worked on me.

New Old Haunts: THE CONJURING

I was dubious when I saw too-promotable-to-be-true reports that The Conjuring was rated R for being too scary for PG-13, but actually seeing the film has me thinking otherwise. With barely a drop of blood, the movie had me more frightened than any horror film of the last year or two. It is an expertly calibrated haunted house experience complete with all the strange noises, fleeting movements, and odd apparitions you’d expect. But even though it draws upon all the expected tropes of the haunted house movie, it scares early and often. It’s a tingling, absorbing horror film full of dread and wittily staged and framed scares. What makes it so compelling and convincing is not just that it’s an impeccably timed series of jumps and jolts, but that it’s a fully inhabited film with superbly real production design, excellent natural performances, and a relaxed and patient approach to building up to its best moments of panic and fright. Director James Wan has been making horror films for nearly a decade now, from the nasty, torturous Saw to the sleek freak out of Insidious. With this new production, he’s made his best film yet.

It’s a film with a clear appreciation for its genre’s history (the 1970’s setting allows for appealing echoes of that decades horror landmarks) and a dedication to fulfilling tropes in surprising and unrelentingly creepy ways. As it must, it starts with a nice normal family moving into a big old house in the country. The mother (Lili Taylor) and father (Ron Livingston) wearily unpack boxes while their five daughters (Shanley Caswell, Hayley McFarland, Joey King, Mackenzie Foy, and Kyla Deaver) run around exploring. It’s not too long before the family starts to feel something is not quite right with their new surroundings. Their dog dies. One girl starts sleepwalking. Each morning, the family wakes to find every clock in the house has stopped at exactly 3:07 am. Footsteps, whispers, and claps are heard in empty areas of the house. Some events can be explained away, but as they pile up, coincidence gives way to a sense of oppressive invisible spookiness.

This is all familiar haunted house stuff, but Wan manages to create a sense of novelty. Sure, we, the horror audience, have seen this type of thing before. But this is the first time it’s happening to this family. Because the acting is so unaffected and comfortable, because the family dynamics feel so real, the growing unease is all the more shivery. The surprise of creaking floorboards and drafty door swings escalates to the insinuating presence of something not quite right and it feels fresh once more. A stroke of genius in the film’s construction is to introduce and intercut the story of a pair of paranormal investigators for whom this is not fresh. Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga play Ed and Lorraine Warren, a married couple that specializes in investigating reported hauntings. While happenings at the house in the country grow increasingly distressing, we occasionally cut to the Warrens giving lectures, conducting interviews, and inspecting properties. They’re professionals. By the time they show up at the house at the center of the film and express concern, we know that means trouble. It amplifies the dread.

The script by Chad and Carey Hayes builds and escalates with a nicely varied assortment of dangers and scares. (I especially appreciated the creepy and clever solution to the eternal haunted house question “Why don’t they just leave?”) This is a horror film that’s in confident command of its mood, able to sustain the absorbing hushed creepiness even as the events on screen are teasingly normal. Scenes of familial warmth and professional confidence may scare the darkness away, but the dread lingers. The production design is impressive, a homey lived-in 1970s of complete and convincing period detail that emphasizes the “Based on a true story” trappings. Publicity would undoubtedly emphasize “true story,” but the key word is always “based.” Also sold this way was the 1979 film The Amityville Horror, the quintessential film of this subgenre, despite its vaguely dull pulpy junkiness. Its “true story” also involved an investigation by the real-world Warrens.  There’s a connection here that’s nicely felt, a continuity with horror past not just with the Warrens and the period setting, but in The Conjuring’s smooth steady long takes, the period design, and the oblique nods to hauntings past. Classically, handsomely designed, the film’s a throwback without feeling old-fashioned.

Its most welcome throwback aspect is in the way it is a bit more of a character piece than you might expect. It has time for small moments – a shy smile the oldest daughter shares with a young research assistant of the Warrens, a scene in which the family bonds with the investigators over a breakfast of pancakes. Small details turn scary, too, like a friendly hide-and-seek game involving claps and blindfolds that becomes predictably, but oh-so-effectively, chilling when a ghost gets involved. Wan may have set out to make something like the ultimate haunted house movie, filled with possessions, poltergeists, curses, and exorcisms, but like all good horror movies, The Conjuring scares not through genre prowess alone, but through skillful filmmaking on every level. It’s a film that builds up a big creaky house, populates it with people to care about, and grooves on a frightening atmosphere of anticipation punctuated by scares that work allusively, metaphorically, and viscerally. Its scares may make you jump, but it never feels cheap or exploitative. It is unrelentingly entertaining and terrifically effective.

Burning Down the House: SAFE HOUSE

Safe House is a generic studio thriller on a preordained course to exactly where you think it’s going. That it managed to hold my attention for as long as it did is some small miracle. It’s a trust-no-one spy movie shot in quick cut chaos style with the kind of grainy, high-contrast look that’s become the stylistic shorthand for post-9/11 thrillers. There are few surprises to be found within but director Daniel Espinosa is smart to lean on his overqualified cast of character actors to carry out the clichéd plotting in David Guggenheim’s script and to allow Denzel Washington to use his considerable charisma to anchor it all. It’s a wholly forgettable experience, but at least it managed to hold my attention for most of the way through until it just fizzles out about two-thirds of the way in.

The film starts with rookie CIA officer Matt Weston (Ryan Reynolds) house-sitting a secure location in South Africa. It has seen nothing of interest, indeed not a single person, in the twelve months he’s been stationed there. When rouge agent Tobin Frost (Washington) is brought in for questioning, the excitement comes in greater quantities than the rookie could have ever expected. A small group of heavily armed, villainous men shoot their way in and almost catch Frost. But Frost talks the rookie into fleeing. The captive seems awfully calm about all this, even when Weston asks him to get into the trunk of the car. The younger man is under the impression that he is taking a dangerous captive to his superiors. The rouge master spy sure seems to be getting his way, though.

On the run from these unknown attackers and trying to coordinate with the CIA, Weston and Frost have an antagonistic partnership in which only one man really seems in control, even when he’s unarmed and handcuffed. Washington exudes a twinkling confidence and a gravity of intention that makes the early parts of the film a mostly competent diversion. It’s nothing we haven’t seen before, but it proves that, done well enough, the old tropes can be used to fine effect now and then. Reynolds mostly stands by and lets Washington dominate each and every scene, but he manages to hold his own. After unmitigated disasters of starring roles in the likes of Green Lantern and The Change-Up, it’s nice to see Reynolds sink back into an ensemble for a film that’s just barely north of mediocre.

The movie’s about men pointing guns, cars going fast, and intense phone calls in shadowy Langley conference rooms. Back at CIA headquarters we have the prickly Brendan Gleeson, the soulful Vera Farmiga, and the grizzled Sam Shepard talking strategy and ordering underlings around while they contemplate how to put an end to this situation. It goes without saying that they aren’t all on the same page and, in a page right out of the Bourne playbook, there’s a sense that they might not all be playing for the same team or with the same rules. If you’d guess that there’s going to be some ulterior motives to be revealed towards the climax, I’d say you must have seen a lot of the same thrillers that I have.

My early tolerance for the brisk, efficient action, including a decent car chase, turned into dismay over the lifeless confrontations that follow. By final few fight scenes I could rarely make heads or tails of the action. Instead of grooving with a visceral abstract chaos, the filmmakers just threw up blurriness and hoped the Foley artists did their job well enough. Weston, clutching a gun, edges around a corner. So does Frost. So do some bad guys. Where are they in relationship to each other? Who is about to encounter whom? Who knows?

As the double-crosses fall into place and the movie zigs and zags its way to where I figured it was headed all along, my interest fell off. When the true villain is revealed, I practically shrugged. When crucial, damaging information about the intelligence community may or may not be leaked, I found myself without a rooting interest one way or the other. As the plot tries to thicken, it just gets thinner and thinner. I found myself without a reason to care. I found myself wondering why the setting of the climax is given so many intermittently loud buzzing flies, which made me think of Emily Dickinson. I looked up the poem when I got home. “I heard a fly buzz when I died / The stillness round my form / Was like the stillness in the air / Between the heaves of storm...” When you’re sitting in a dark theater watching a dumb thriller of low ambition and find yourself thinking more about recalling a poem than the action on screen, you know the movie has lost you completely.

Strangers on a Train: SOURCE CODE

Duncan Jones’s directorial debut, 2009’s Moon, was a sci-fi study in loneliness and isolation anchored by a wonderful performance by Sam Rockwell as the one-man crew of a lunar mining platform coming to the end of his three-year shift. He slowly finds cracks in the corporate messages and, though he’s more than ready to go home, discovers that it might not be so simple. I didn’t see the film during its small release and didn’t catch up with it until it had been on Blu-ray for a few weeks. But when I had caught up, I found myself wishing I could have seen it on the big screen. It’s a strong effort, a quiet, grey film with which Jones manages to evoke an epic sense of endless emptiness on a relatively small budget.

Now here comes his sophomore effort, Source Code, another sci-fi effort focusing on a man stuck in a difficult job. Jake Gyllenhaal is that man, a soldier who wakes up on a Chicago-bound commuter train in the body of another man. The woman sitting across from him (Michelle Monaghan) seems to know him, or rather know that man that he sees when he spies his reflection. Before he can figure out what kind of displacement has befallen him, an explosion rips through the train.

But Gyllenhaal does not die. Instead, he wakes up in some kind of dark clammy capsule, receiving instructions from a mysterious military officer (Vera Farmiga) who has a suspicious-looking scientist (Jeffrey Wright) looking over her shoulder. They tell him that he is wired into a program they call Source Code. It is explained that he has become part of a baffling experiment that enables a person to relive the last eight minutes of a person’s life (making use of the brain’s post-mortem afterglow and some parabolic calculus, along with quantum mechanics, naturally).

It might not make a lot of sense but it enables the film to engage in narrative loops that send us spiraling back into the same time span with plenty of variation. The bomber must be found and identified since, Gyllenhaal is told, the explosion was only the first of a wave of attacks that have been threatened. The Source Code, however, is not time-travel. It merely creates an alternate space within reality for the participant to relive the past. What happened happened; there’s nothing that can be done to stop the explosion, to avert disaster. This is a prevention program, not a cure. This causes problems for Gyllenhaal, especially as he starts to fall for the woman on the train.

This is a swift, engaging film that’s a nice twisty puzzle that has a solid level of craftsmanship behind it, cleanly photographed, featuring some nice special effects and a using a likable score. I enjoyed its surface pleasures – it’s filled with pleasingly displayed technological gadgetry and, at times, a cool demeanor of confusion – but it’s hard to care too much about the situation. The ticking-clock is ill defined and the characters aboard the train were already dead (nothing can change that, we are often told) so every failure to stop the explosion was just like watching a friend fail a level on a videogame.

What imbue the situation with dramatic weight are the chemistry between Gyllenhaal and Monaghan and the growing frustration he feels with the futility of his mission. There’s a sense of dismay to be found in the pattern of events that make up the action of this thriller. It’s brisk and energetic but also fundamentally sad. Jones, working from a script by Ben Ripley, may not have equaled his debut feature but he’s managed to make a film that works fairly well on its own terms.

Purposely Adrift: UP IN THE AIR

I’m trying to resist the urge to call Up in the Air “timely” or “the movie of the moment,” but it can’t be helped. Director Jason Reitman’s film, which he wrote with Sheldon Turner from the novel by Walter Kirn, captures the zeitgeist in its opening moments and never lets it go. This is the kind of movie that feels just right. It made me sit back in my seat and think to myself “Yes, this is how we live now.” And yet, the film isn’t self-important or singularly focused on making broad statements about our time. Reitman never loses sight of the fact that he’s telling a story about specific characters. These characters are so fully formed through perfectly pitched writing and acting that I could have spent time with them for much longer.

The film opens with a series of firings, the despondent faces of the fired looking back at us angry, confused, on the verge of tears. Then we meet the man on the other side of the table, the bearer of bad news. He’s Ryan Bingham (George Clooney). He’s contracted by companies to fire their employees. In the current economic downturn, he’s given remarkable job security which enables him to cultivate his deliberately untethered lifestyle, a kind of life that has him away from his Omaha apartment for over 300 days out of every year. When he is forced to stay in Omaha he returns to an apartment that is cold, sterile, and bare, without any indication that someone lives there. It’s a home that is less personal than a hotel, which is, of course, where he’d rather be.

He has a system for travelling that is nothing short of perfection. We see him packing his suitcase, going through security, and boarding a plane, each step moving with a rapid pace and crisp precision. We see tranquil aerial views announcing each new city that illuminate the respite Bingham finds while in flight. He’s hiding his emptiness behind routine, or at least that’s how it would be clearly delineated if this were the traditional Hollywood effort setting up the jaded cynic to learn how to open up and love life. This isn’t that movie, even though Bingham does receive some unanticipated changes in his perfectly honed routine.

These changes come in the form of two women. The first is a frequent flyer with whom he starts a casual romance when their paths cross in a hotel bar. As played by Vera Farmiga, this woman is the female equivalent to Bingham, a career-driven woman who can only meet him when their flight schedules happen to cross. The interactions between Farmiga and Clooney are filled with spark and wit, two incredibly confident personalities bouncing off and feeding into each other. Farmiga is radiant, and it’s not just the reflection off of Clooney’s likability. This is one of the most likable on-screen romances I’ve seen recently. How often do you actually want the characters to end up together instead of just mutually agreeing to go along with the movie’s romantic formula? I’m even more grateful, then, that the romance is so touchingly nuanced, so grounded in reality. Neither of them makes unbelievable shifts, even when they do something surprising. This is an adult interaction, an adult romance. That’s not to say it’s pornographic (though it manages to be frank without being specific), but rather it’s a casual romance that involves two adults who conduct their relationship in a thoroughly adult manner. Romances in Hollywood productions, even a wonderful film like (500) Days of Summer, lock their participants in a state of stunted romantic development with notions relating to relationships stuck in an adolescent state. Here, Farmiga and Clooney behave as adults who have had experiences, have lived lives, and are finding some moments of solace in finding each other.

The other woman who causes change in Bingham’s lifestyle is a new hire at the company that keeps him on the road. Played by Anna Kendrick, she’s a motormouthed delight. Fresh out of college, she wants to eliminate the need for so much travel despite much protest from Bingham who argues that she should understand the nuances of firing before trying to shake things up. Their boss (the always excellent Jason Bateman) sends them on the road together on a whirlwind downsizing mission. Kendrick and Clooney have an unforced rapport that starts in a place of hostility but has the possibility to become, not friendship exactly, but something closer to mutual respect. The relationship between these two characters is so convincing that it carries the film through what could have been treacherous avenues. The characters, with their age gap, are never drawn into a squirmy romantic attraction but nor do they move in a more paternal direction. This is an unforced portrait of cross-generational exchange that feels accurately and closely observed.

In a film like this, casting is almost everything. If the wrong actors were put in place, the movie, even with its strong writing, would fall apart. Luckily Farmiga, Kendrick, and Clooney are perfect in the kind of convergence between performer and character that leaves one entirely unable to imagine a different cast. Farmiga gives a glowing portrait of thirty-something beauty and she’s totally charming, but she also brings a hint of hidden depths of pain behind her easy-going attitude. Kendrick is a force of nature, always moving, always quick to speak, and yet she projects a fragility behind her confident bravado that reveals how young and out-of-place she feels, especially when firing a person twice her age. But Clooney may pull off the greatest acting feat out of the three of them, taking his winning one-step-ahead star persona and subtly subverting it in a way that seems effortless, turning Bingham into a man who lies to everyone about how happy he is, especially himself. He, like the film, is all sparkling charm over a nearly unfathomable sadness.

As the film moves into its final moments, it risks falling into a false crisis or a sappy sentimentality, especially with Bingham deciding to attend an event he seems indifferent towards at the opening of the film. That doesn’t happen. Jason Reitman has remarkable control over the tone and trajectory of the film, manipulating it with skill, staying true to his characters. He has grown remarkably as a director over the course of his first three features. Thank You for Smoking (2006) was a funny satire that would occasionally get a little sloppy in its tone. Juno (2007) featured incredible performances that were sometimes hurt by the odd faux-slang of Diablo Cody’s otherwise heartfelt screenplay. Now, with Up in the Air, Reitman has delivered a work that feels of one smooth piece from beginning to end. It’s a film that operates from a perceptive base of knowledge that filters through every scene, thoughtful and touching about how people really interact. And yet it is wedded to a Hollywood-slick style that features impeccable craft from all departments. This is truly one of the best of the year, not just because it’s timely, but because it’s well made in all aspects. This is a studio dramedy that scrapes at real emotions, that has a sense of reality in its ability to hold painful melancholy underneath the unexpectedly sweet.