Separate Ways: TOGETHER and THE SHROUDS

Together is a gnarly little horror movie that emerges like a growth out of a simple relationship drama. It’s about a couple who’ve been dating for five years. Their move from the city to the country might induce a breakup. But that’d be pretty messy given all the entanglements that develop over so long living in each other’s lives. The horror springs up when it literalizes the idea that these two people might find it difficult to pull away and separate. It stars Alison Brie and Dave Franco, actual married actors, as the long-term couple. As such they have the sort of easy rapport that shows a total comfort with one another as they portray people who’ve started to take each other for granted. Brie plays the one who took a job that necessitated the move; Franco’s trying to make an idling career in music kick into another gear and laments leaving theoretical opportunity. She suggests they break up before they move or else it’ll hurt more later. (How right she is.) He dismisses the suggestion, shrugging off resentment we know is brewing under his increasingly strained grins as they move in.

Writer-director Michael Shanks, in his first feature, has a fine sense of atmosphere, letting their new little house in the woods become a reason for them to heighten the tension of the cracks forming in their relationship. And then there’s a paranormal thing in the woods that they come into contact with and suddenly, when they touch, it’s more and more difficult to pull apart. Hence the title. There’s are some fine cringing moments of sticky makeup and squishy Foley sound effects as the skin on their legs or arms (and even more uncomfortable parts) pull and stretch, increasingly strained as they rip apart. The trajectory of this logic is pretty clear once we get a fun sliding contortion scene where their bodies are literally drawn closer from across a hallway as they desperately try to grab hold of door frames and furniture. As a picture of a reluctantly co-dependent relationship that’s become a ’til-death situation whether they wanted that or not, it has its potent moments and crescendoes effectively. It also has a few moments where characters behave irrationally for plot purposes, and indulges some (hopefully accidental) nasty stereotypes in its suspicious neighbor character. That's all in service of an ending that’s satisfying in theory, but pretty underwhelming in execution. It may not ultimately know what it’s doing with its metaphor, but the vivid visuals are enough to keep it interesting right up until it’s not. 

David Cronenberg’s body horror movies never have that problem. In the likes of Videodrome and The Fly and Dead Ringers and eXistenZ and Crimes of the Future, he’ll follow a neatly nasty metaphor’s oozing and spattering with easy jolts and deep chills to its logical protrusions. He’s a master at the unsettling and the uncanny, looking at the fragility of the human body, penetrating the mysteries of life with keen psychology and a brave, unflinching look at physical and mental states of disrepair. Not to be too morbid, though I’m sure he won’t mind morbid, it’s worth mentioning that he’s at the age where every new movie might be his last. His latest, The Shrouds, is a work of such bone-deep grief and unshakable melancholic mortality that you’d surely pick up on its easy late style even if you didn’t know it was made by an 82-year-old. The movie stars Vincent Cassel as an entrepreneur who is an owner of a new style cemetery. His signature invention is a burial shroud weighed down with high-tech sensors that allow mourners to live stream the corpse. His wife is in one of the graves, and he shows her off to a date. The living woman’s expecting to see an old picture and is visibly disturbed in the background of a shot as, in the foreground, he pulls up an image of decaying skeletal remains. He obsessively zooms in and rotates the image, inspecting his late wife’s bones. He can’t look away, clinging all the more tightly the more she’s gone. 

Here’s a movie that literalizes a most painful aspect of a long-term relationship: how difficult it is to permanently lose the presence of a person whose life, and whose body, was joined with yours. We watch a man who has never emerged from mourning, watching as his wife quite literally fades away piece by piece. It’s unsettling, and in its exaggeration, painfully understandable. Cronenberg extrapolates upon this pain in his typical clinical style, staring straightforwardly into the plot’s complications with cold observational frames and a steady metronomic pacing that grows icily nightmarish. We get dream flashbacks to the wife (Diane Kruger) as she undergoes cancer treatments, showing up as a fleshy specter gaining stitches and losing limbs with each appearance. Kruger also plays the woman’s living twin sister, married to a frazzled programmer (Guy Pearce). The story soon encompasses gravestone vandals, a potential Chinese hacker conspiracy, eerie A.I. personal assistants, and a Hungarian tycoon’s blind wife (Sandrine Holt) who starts an affair with Cassel. It all clicks together with a chilly illogic, watching bodies and considering what we do with them, alive or dead. Where, then, is the soul, and the mind, as the body fails and exposes its fatal weaknesses? Cronenberg’s movie is so self-reflective and retrospective that it can’t help but echo back across his filmography’s pustules and decay and find another dark mirror on which to ruminate, all signposts and signifiers, an austere headstone to a auteur’s master thesis about human persistence and cold inevitabilities. 

JASON BOURNE Again

Matt Damon last played Jason Bourne in 2007, when The Bourne Ultimatum closed out a thrilling, cohesive action trilogy – and the character’s central drive – with the amnesiac rouge black ops agent learning the truth of his identity and exposing associated CIA misdeeds. Director Paul Greengrass said that he thought Bourne’s story was done, saying further sequels starring the character should be called “The Bourne Redundancy.” That’s why the fourth film was The Bourne Legacy, a terrific spinoff focused on a different agent who grows a conscience that puts him at odds with his agency handlers, which found writer-director Tony Gilroy deftly expanding the scope and possibilities for the future of the franchise. But now, somehow, the fifth time around has lured Greengrass and Damon back for more in the bluntly titled Jason Bourne. It’s a step backwards into the series’ comfort zone. Is there a good new story to tell about this character nearly a decade after we left him? Not particularly. But at least it has a decent grinding competency about it, a solid sense of shaky contemporary paranoia, and a couple great action shots.

Bourne, having spent the better part of ten years off the grid and on the run in the farthest overlooked corners of the world, is suddenly pulled back into the world of espionage and globetrotting skullduggery when an old ally (Julia Stiles) tracks him down. She’s uncovered yet another dirty secret about the CIA’s past involvement in his life. So off he goes, leaving his existence of lonely uncommunicativeness and earning money through backwater underground fighting, to once more look determinedly through binoculars, walk with grave purpose through patient multi-step traps and rendezvous, and slowly work his way into confrontation with the suits who conspire against him. Playing like an unnecessary epilogue to an already complete character arc, the new movie nonetheless operates from a baseline competency not unlike its protagonist’s. All superfluous movies should strive for such slick watchability. It’s restrained and methodical and, when all is said and done, accomplishes very little. But everyone involved is too much of a pro to let it be without some entertainment.

Greengrass, who also co-wrote with editor Christopher Rouse, has a handle on the mood of the piece, and is able to sustain mild interest in dependable scenes of great actors plotting and scheming and debating what to do while they glower at screens and bark into cell phones. He has Tommy Lee Jones as the agency’s director playing a sad-eyed cynic, a part that’d be described as a Tommy Lee Jones-like part if a lesser actor had been cast. He wants Bourne hunted down and to do so activates another in the series’ endless supply of covert killers (Vincent Cassel this time). Then there’s Alicia Vikander, the fresh-faced ingénue straight from a string of much better roles (like in Ex Machina, The Man from UNCLE, and an Oscar-winning turn in The Danish Girl). Here she's an ambitious young agent in normcore clothes who is determined to bring Bourne back into the fold instead of leaving him dead in the street. Elsewhere is Riz Ahmed (Nightcrawler, The Night Of, and other projects without the word “night” in the title) as a slick tech CEO whose Silicon Valley startup is entangled in the plot for reasons of token timeliness.

These actors, and Stiles (who doesn’t have enough to do, but that’s true of every movie for nearly 10 years now), go a long way to grounding the thin, insubstantial plot in something like weighty gravitas. They carry scenes of endless exposition by making it believable that these characters would speak to each other in terse jargon-filled exchanges of information. Damon, for his part, shows up after a rigorous workout all muscle, and keeps his head down, mostly silent with a few bursts of interrogation. He’s determination incarnate. Greengrass bookends the film in outbursts of violence and action, the first an escape through a riot in Greece that’s merely hectic, the finale a slam-bang car chase that includes a hijacked armored SWAT van plowing through a traffic jam in a most impressive display of stuntwork. It’s filmed, as you’d expect, in impressionistic smears of chaos cinema, a shaking camera and quick editing that are less precise here than the Bournes have previously been, but it gets the job done.

The least in the series, Jason Bourne is nonetheless a reasonably competent thriller coasting on affection for its predecessors. It’s a pleasure to be back in the recurring ideas and images of these films. The paranoid surveillance plotting can’t undo the comfort food elements of clever prop use in action beats, people snapping orders into headsets, hackers typing furiously, suits staring alternately intently or slack-jawed at screens and case files, Bourne talking on the phone to someone he’s watching through a scope, sudden blasts of gunfire, teeth-rattling car stunts, and Moby’s “Extreme Ways” playing us out into the end credits. The filmmakers’ bid to make the story matter either as a comment on our current world problems – “This could be worse than Snowden,” we hear twice – or to its characters lives – secrets even more closely intertwined with Bourne’s past – mostly falls flat. (That it repeats an inciting incident from The Bourne Supremacy is unfortunate, too.) And in the end the biggest surprise is how long it takes to have so little happen. But there’s that unstoppable competency driving everything along, elevating what could be totally disposable to the realm of passable diversion.

You're Getting Sleepy: TRANCE

Trance is an unusually twisty heist movie. I think that’s supposed to be the entertaining part. But in practice, the plot twists end up collecting so quickly and consistently, undoing the impact of the ones that came before, that the storytelling left me only thoroughly unengaged by the images flickering in front of me. It’s the kind of movie that starts complicated and only twists from there. In fact, by film’s end what has happened has shifted so substantially from what, at the beginning, appeared to be happening, that I’m hesitant to tell you much at all about the plot’s specifics. It’s the kind of movie that grows sillier the more it divulges. In this case, Joe Ahearne and John Hodge’s script seems to be a textbook example of how to overwork a flimsy premise.

But you didn’t come all this way just for me to tell you nothing, so all I’ll say is this. The film starts with a seemingly mild-mannered, everyman auctioneer (James McAvoy) at a London art gallery. During bidding on a nice-looking Goya, the auction is broken up by intimidating intruders. McAvoy finds himself confronted by thieves intent on making a much more forceful bid than anyone was expecting. In the ensuing drama, a nicely directed bit of action, the painting goes missing. That’s a suitably compelling – and simple – start to a would-be hypnotic thriller, but wait, there’s quickly more (and more, and more).

The thieves, a motley crew led by great French character actor Vincent Cassel, make away with a bag they think contains the painting, but, upon opening it, discover they only got the frame. Shame, then, that McAvoy was hit in the head during the heist and can’t remember where he stashed the Goya for safekeeping. Enter a hypnotherapist played by Rosario Dawson. She promises that she can unlock the secrets that amnesia has conveniently locked away, although at first McAvoy doesn’t tell her that A.) he’s there under duress and B.) can’t remember where he’s hidden a stolen painting. From there, the film cannot be said to contain a plotline so much as a plot pretzel with nearly every sequence undercutting the facts – and more importantly, the emotion – previously established.

It’s directed by Danny Boyle, a hyperkinetic stylist who specializes in jump and smash cuts, off-kilter angles, and shifts in the colors and textures of the image. Here he’s a bit more restrained than his usual jumpy, borderline manic style as seen in the likes of Trainspotting, 28 Days Later, Slumdog Millionaire, and 127 Hours. He also managed to achieve a living version of that energy when he choreographed the stunning opening ceremony at last summer’s Olympics in London, but with Trance his style feels sleepier, or maybe exhausted. It’s not that it’s sedate, exactly, just that the energy is a bit too relaxed for the level of acrobatic strain the plotting is putting the characters through. It’s as if the movie itself has fallen into a trance. For all Boyle’s skill at on-edge unease, he’s rarely done a straightforward thriller. But here it is, a film in which genre is the only straightforward thing about it. The thing about situating characters, and the audience, on-edge, is that there must be some awareness of an edge. There’s no mooring here when anything and everything is potentially thrown into doubt by the next twist.

I don’t mean to say the movie is confusing, at least not on the level of what happens, but it is confused. That is to say, it’s always clear what is happening at any given moment, even when we go inside minds under hypnosis for casually surreal dream states that reveal themselves with great meaningless import. What is increasingly muddled is why anyone should care. I felt bad for the actors, who are uniformly good, but trapped giving performances that are totally committed to nothing but the confusion of it all. (Dawson, especially, makes herself vulnerable in unfortunately unnecessary ways.) By the end, though it’s repeatedly explained, changed, and explained again, I wasn’t entirely certain what any of the characters wanted and what they would do if they got it. The last scene of the film features a character debating whether or not he will make a choice to literally erase from his memory the events of the entire film. Boyle cuts to the credits before the character makes the choice and, indicative of my level of interest and understanding, I neither knew nor cared what was decided.

Talking it Out: A DANGEROUS METHOD

In A Dangerous Method, Carl Jung (Michael Fassbender) meets Sigmund Freud (Viggo Mortensen). It’s a film as much an academic character study as it is a dramatized clash between crucial differences in the field of psychology just as it was gaining some respect. This is a clinical and, pardon the pun, methodical film, based on a similar play by Christopher Hampton, about intellectual lives spilling over into the personal lives of professional men hiding their passions and their personal and academic foibles. You might not expect such a relationship drama from David Cronenberg, who started his career directing gooey body horror like Scanners and The Fly, but in recent years has turned to icy, brooding, bloody thrillers like A History of Violence and Eastern Promises. But with A Dangerous Method, Cronenberg has made an outwardly composed film about messy psychological interiors, a film in which stillness and silence masks all manner of sins and contradictions, horror in its own interior way.

Expressive psychological horror is found in the character of Sabina Spielrein (Keira Knightley), a mad woman who is carted into Jung’s sanitarium howling and contorting herself, her psychological problems expressing themselves with painful physical movements. The film begins with Jung trying out the “talking cure” on Spielrein, who Knightley provides with great gasping hesitations in her answers, speaking through teeth not clenched, but painfully twisted, her jaw jutting out fearfully far. It’s a raw performance. The path history takes this woman on is a fascinating one; the role she plays in the film, her relationships to the men in question as well as to psychology in general, become more fluid than at first appears possible.

Jung grows fascinated with this patient and feels close to a breakthrough. That’s when he decides to head off to Vienna to meet and consult with the elder statesman of his profession, Freud. In contrast to Knightley’s Spielrein, Fassbender’s Jung is slick and carefully composed. He speaks with a cold clip, even to his wife (Sarah Gadon), a tone that grows suspicious when confronted with a brilliant, but crazy colleague-turned-patient (Vincent Cassel). The first glimmer of passion we see from Jung is when he discusses his work with Freud.

The older man is clearly a kind of mentor figure, maybe even a father figure. Theirs is a helpful, collegial, inquisitive relationship, but one that grows subtly territorial and divergent as the years go by. It’s a relationship upon which all manner of Freudian implications can be read. (I’m sure that’d make Freud happy). Mortensen’s Freud first appears as a bearded delight, a warm and welcoming presence, inviting Jung to share a meal with his family and passing hours discussing their work. (In a rare light touch, the film takes silent notice of the way Freud is always chomping down on a cigar). But Freud nonetheless can grow harsh and judgmental adhering to the infallibility of his own work and to some extent worried about the path forward for the field to which he dedicated his life.

The differences in approach and philosophy between Jung and Freud are well documented, but the small, quiet genius of the film is the way it takes the potentially dry history of psychology and makes it into the stuff of stately period drama, then puts it in the hands of a talented director with a great cast and allows it to grow into something unsettling. At times it errs on the side of stuffy and slow, but this material, fully capable of tipping at any moment into the stuff of moldy docudrama, has instead the kind of tangled emotional undergrowths of quietly compelling cinema.

Stage Fright: BLACK SWAN

Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan has the kind of opening scene that gives a good idea of the film to follow. It starts with a spotlight slicing through inky black surroundings. In the center a ballerina is perfectly poised with elegant movements. The music of Tchaikovsky begins to boom. The ballerina spins. As the camera draws closer, we can hear the ragged, athletic breaths of the dancer. This is all set to be a film that will scrape away the surface glamour of the ballet, but then a darkly monstrous figure begins to dance with her. Then, Nina (Natalie Portman) wakes up, the opening scene fading like a dream. The film’s truest intentions burst forth. This is a film that will clamber around inside her head, bumping into all kinds of unsettling, destabilizing elements that are eating away at her psyche.

She’s a hardworking perfectionist ballerina in a well-established ballet company and has just been given the lead role in a new production of Swan Lake. It’s a high-pressure moment for her, the wrong time altogether to lose her mind. (Though when would be a good time?) The people that circle around her life are all menacing figures. Her mother (Barbara Hershey) is a controlling, domineering force of emotional manipulation. Her ballet director (Vincent Cassel) is a sleazy, molesting presence of abusive power. An older ballerina forced to retire (Winona Ryder) scowls drunkenly from the sidelines while a young ambitious ballerina (Mila Kunis) seems all too ready to worm her way into the lead role.

This is a terrifying collection of characters made all the more unsettling because of the unreliable narrator Nina proves to be. Are all of these characters as dangerous as they appear to be? It’s possible. Nina thinks that is the case. Could it instead be the case that a rattled mind of a naïve perfectionist has developed a harmful persecution complex that causes her to lash out irrationally? It’s possible. At first glance, the characters can seem one-dimensional, shrill and without nuance, but in the growing craziness of Nina’s mental state, who can say with absolute certainty how trustworthy these portrayals are? The performers involved give wonderful intensity to their roles, but also show glimmers of other possible readings. What to make, for instance, of a particularly devastating shot-reverse-shot at the film’s climax that shows Nina’s mother sitting teary-eyed in the audience? What is she thinking? I, for one, take this small moment, rich with overwhelming emotion, as the most indelible moment with which to contemplate just how dependable the film’s characterization really is. I haven’t yet made up my mind.

Aronofsky accentuates Nina’s growing madness with small touches of unnerving hallucinations that flicker to life in unexpected moments, sometimes bold and obvious, other times lingering in the shadows of peripheral vision. Doppelgangers flit through Nina’s field of vision. Danger seems to sit in wait around every corner. Leering strangers and intimidating pretenders alike gaze at her with creepy, unknowable intent. All the while, Clint Mansell’s kaleidoscopic Tchaikovsky-infused score swirls around, the frames are filled with mirrors, and the dark, evocative grains of the varied film stocks seem to reflect the increasingly cloudy thinking of our protagonist.

Fits of body horror both real and imagined grow in frequency. Nina scratches at rashes. She obsessively pushes her body to its limits, practicing a routine just once more and then again, and again, and again. She doesn’t just want to be perfect; she needs to be perfect. One particularly agonizing moment finds Nina picking away at a hangnail until her cuticle is covered in blood. She claws and claws until finally, terrifyingly, a thin ribbon of skin pulls up and away down the length of her finger.

Nina’s drive and madness congeal in a film that’s so confidently told with its declaratory sensationalism that it just barely covers up its messy, lurid, clammy, calculated insanity. I mean that as a compliment. This is a movie that grows progressively over the top in beautifully horrifying ways. Imagine the brutal, grueling realism of Aronofsky’s The Wrestler mixed with a bit of Cronenberg. This is a film of pounding sensations, a film of color and music and frenzied outbursts of sex and violence. It’s an intense experience, a horror film with a florid luridness and confident craziness.