Adieu Langage, Bonjour Cinema: GOODBYE TO LANGUAGE

How appropriate that a movie titled Goodbye to Language should cast a spell difficult to put into words. It’s a sustained trip, lighting my brain on fire for the duration, then smoldering satisfactorily for days after. Its director is the legendary Jean-Luc Godard, now 84, who has long expressed through his work a deep love of what movies can do, and an eagerly experimental disregard for anything approaching conventional rules of filmmaking. A palpable presence behind the scenes, his guiding hand can be felt in every edit, each gesture, from his cool black-and-white jump-cut debut feature, 1960’s world cinema landmark Breathless, through his increasingly dense essayistic stream-of-consciousness musings – the towering achievement being Histoire(s) du Cinema, a 288 minute inquiry into the very nature of motion pictures.

Goodbye to Language is another pinnacle, a full expression of his idiosyncratic approaches that heads straight into an added dimension: 3D. Every other 3D film you’ll see uses the technology to trick the audience’s eyes into seeing vast depths to the background while the foreground looms closer, perhaps breaking the proscenium in ways that (theoretically) enhance a narrative. Godard uses these illusions, but doesn’t leave them at face value. He plays tricks, experiments. An animating question of the film seems to be, “Didja know 3D could do this?” It’s a film so lively and playful, it’s clear even he was not sure at the start. He lets us watch as he finds out. There’s continual visual astonishment at play here, stimulating and invigorating. With cinematographer Fabrice Aragno, Godard starts from the standard Hollywood setting, like a shot with metal bars, a hand reaching through them, and the fourth wall. But then he stretches, pulling the angles and distances between planes of depth in befuddling and exhilarating ways.

Extra perceptions of dimensionality provide added mind-altering qualities to the visual essay trickery Godard’s been up to for a few decades now. Superimpositions, layered dissolves, unexpected cuts, and off-kilter angles add up to a rough-hewn beauty of a visual experience. Even without dealing with the ideas the images contain, it’s a exhilarating pleasure to watch when 3D throws a title card right into your face, blocking out text underneath, or when a chair, or a dock, or a book is strangely disassociated from its surroundings, hovering neither here nor there in your field of vision. Or try this shot: a woman is holding her iPhone. The camera is perched next to her arm, which comes towards the audience. The phone and the images on it sit in the midground, the reflections on the screen simultaneously pulling deep into and floating out of the background. In every shot, Godard invites you to say goodbye to language and see the world anew on a visceral visual level.

But that doesn’t mean the film is silent or plotless, though the sound isn’t calibrated for clarity and the narrative, such as it is, isn’t entirely comprehensible on first glance. The soundtrack is filled with classical music, loud sound effects, and murmured dialogue. It cuts in and out, switches volumes and sources suddenly, shifting placement in the mix in startling changes. We hear epigrammatic philosophizing, arty muttering, arguments, and borrowed quotations, all the while watching a couple, two couples, sit by the water, lounge naked at home, perform their daily ablutions, have deep thoughts and arguments. At least twice there’s violent death, just off screen. One scene goes back in time to show us Mary Shelley. And there’s a dog, Godard’s pet Roxy, who wanders through several scenes, staring, thinking, playing, being. At one point she’s joined by a contemplative voice over you’d swear was written by Herzog if Monet wasn’t cited.

If this all sounds impenetrable to you, I hate to say I won’t solve the film here. Not on one viewing I won’t. But a Godard film is not a story problem to be solved. It’s for adventurous filmgoers who’ll find the playfulness of its experimentation its own reward. Get drunk on the delights within, and be left marveling at the possibilities of cinema yet unexplored. Godard has made a film that proceeds with its own logic, riffing on 3D’s doubling effect by doubling down on that symbolism: mirrors, repetitions, reflections, two sets of couples, juxtapositions, a dialectic methodical cleverness to forming ideas through interplay of image and sound, layers of references and signifiers. At one point, a man declares that the act of defecation is the only true equality in the world, the camera finding him sitting on the toilet as he speaks, Rodin’s The Thinker versus Taro Gomi’s Everyone Poops.

The doubling comes to a head in the two instances of the year’s best camera move, the one you’ve definitely heard of if you’ve heard anything at all about this film. The two cameras used to capture 3D follow different characters moving away from each other, in total a layered abstraction that’s also two separate shots you can edit between by closing one eye or the other. It’s a moment so head-splittingly novel, I found myself wanting to rewind the film and rewatch it right then and there.

Here’s a movie that gives you image after image, letting you add them up for yourself. Goodbye to Language makes as good an argument as any for the ease with which language and all its history, culture, and metaphor, can complicate what we’re actually trying to tell one another, and that cinema transcends language, moving images making pure ideas. This is, after all, the foundational cinematic idea, of making meaning out of nothing more than what’s in the frame and what’s out of it. Godard puts in his frame images you’ve never seen before.

House Haunters: WOMAN IN BLACK 2: ANGEL OF DEATH

The Woman in Black 2: Angel of Death is not a particularly outstanding horror film, but it’s a welcome sight nonetheless. For one, it’s not found footage or zombie, the two subgenres well exhausted as of late. It’s simply a handsome chiller, an old-fashioned period piece ghost story that, like its predecessor, continues the revival of Hammer horror. That’s the most welcome sight here. Hammer, a British production company famous for its midcentury monster movies with literary(ish) inspirations and pretty production design – most notably, its series of Dracula movies featuring Christopher Lee – had been dormant for decades. But, with 2012’s The Woman in Black, last year’s The Quiet Ones, and now a sequel to the former, they’re back in the game, putting ghostly happenings in creepy houses filled with British ensembles in period costume. Even if the actual films aren’t all that yet, it’s nice to know a venerable tradition marches on.

Actually, I quite liked the first Woman in Black. It starred Daniel Radcliffe as a turn-of-the-20th-century lawyer sent to a dilapidated mansion isolated in the English countryside. Holed up settling the estate of its last occupant, he was stuck in the house as tides daily turned the marshes into a moat. There, he was terrorized by tropes of the haunted house kind – thuds, scrapes, flickering lights, footsteps, slamming doors, apparitions and screams. It worked, enough that a return visit to the mansion didn’t seem too bad a prospect. Besides, the hook of Angel of Death is pretty great. It takes place decades later, during World War II. A group of children are sent away from London bombing to a makeshift orphanage in, surprise surprise, the very same house that scared Radcliffe so. It’s the perfect opportunity to exploit dread with children in danger, vulnerable people fleeing violence and pain heading straight into the heart of paranormal activity. Creepy stuff.

The kids are staying with two women, volunteers from the city who’ve agreed to travel along and keep them safe. The older woman (Helen McCrory) is a military wife, no-nonsense, completely unwilling to listen to the younger woman (Phoebe Fox) as she insists there’s something not quite right with this place. There are mysterious footsteps in the cellar, creaking floorboards and opening doors, and the younger woman has unpleasant dreams of a bombed out maternity ward full of spectral nurses and flickering bulbs. Not even the hunky pilot stationed nearby (Jeremy Irvine) can help her. One serious, silent, lad (Oaklee Pendergast) has taken to staring intently at the cracked ceiling of the bedroom, and at peeling wallpaper in a grubby old nursery full of crumbling antique toys. It’s unsettling.

The whole thing gets by on suggestion, director Tom Harper and screenwriter Jon Croker providing a feeling of unsettling wrongness, that something horrifying is just off screen. It’s all very pleasingly reminiscent of Val Lewton in its low-tech, non-explicit creepiness. A mix of World War II anxieties and childcare concerns create the chills here. Children are continually in peril, sometimes hurt badly. Threat of wartime injury – no lights after dark for fear of bombing – infects the more ethereal worry. There’s an overwhelming sense that nowhere is safe. It’s a ghost story with historical heft, underlined by the serious, handsome production design that recreates the mansion’s details in a similarly crumbling freakiness. It’s a place dense with bad vibes and jump scares.

What I’ve been describing sounds like a pretty good movie, and indeed it is a largely agreeable and watchable one. But it’s an “almost” movie, with its heart in the right place, an ensemble up to the task, a look rich in detail, long on atmosphere and thick with mood. But it’s short on characterization and incident, leaning a bit too heavily on jumpiness and portent. I sat there almost scared, almost involved, almost caring. But it’s a film that settles for almost. It’s striking at times, and quite satisfying on all technical levels. But there’s nothing distinguished or exceptionally worthwhile about it, either. I was pleasantly diverted, but never affected in any way. It plays in one pitch, without much variation, worthwhile only for fulfilling its modest aims for those who enter with low expectations. I liked being back in a Hammer horror world, but it’d be better if something happened within it I could worry about more than superficially.

Bet Your Life: TWO DAYS, ONE NIGHT

Belgian writer/director brothers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne are masters of cinema as empathy. Their films are studies of people on the margins, working class people struggling to get by or living with a modicum of comfort they fear will be taken away. With sensitive camerawork and brilliant naturalistic acting, they create small-scale portraits of lives lived in quiet desperation. They’re remarkably consistent. In their every film, from La Promisse and Rosetta to L’Enfant and The Kid with a Bike, there are characters confronted with problems that threaten to destabilize them, the filmmakers showing us with great patience and sympathy reactions and responses. They’re preternaturally attuned to moral questions, watching characters as they try their best to work them out.

In their latest, Two Days, One Night, Marion Cotillard plays a woman whose factory job rests in the hands of her coworkers. She’s been off work for a while dealing with debilitating depression, her husband looking after the kids and keeping the household running. Now that she’s finally ready to return, bringing in her family’s much-needed main income, the bosses have called for a vote. Money is tight, so the employees must decide between their annual bonuses and Cotillard’s job. The first vote went resoundingly to bonuses. Extenuating circumstances have allowed for a revote on Monday. When the film begins, it’s Friday. She decides to use the weekend to visit her coworkers one by one, face to face, hoping to get enough votes to save her job.

The film follows her as she enacts this sadistic game show construct foisted upon her. It’s almost too much for her to bear. We see she cries easily, would rather be staying in bed, and is generally in a bad state. She’s barely able to work again, and certainly not in any condition to be confronted with such a cruel turn of circumstances. Cotillard, in a brilliant performance rich with interiority and psychological detail, embodies the bruised psyche of a woman who has barely clawed her way back to the early hints of an even-keeled emotional state. She moves with fragility in her posture, preemptive pain in her eyes before every encounter. She hopes her presence will remind her coworkers of her humanity, and their own.

The film’s structure takes on a ritualistic movement, confronting each coworker in turn with the moral and economic calculus involved in the vote and seeing their true selves reflected in their reactions. The Dardennes tensely and inquisitively build scenes of confrontation, quickly sketching in working relationships between Cotillard and her coworkers as we hear their reasons, excuses, and evasions. The saddest thing is, the others need their bonuses, often badly, or at least for clear, convincing reasons no less important than Cotillard’s need for her job. In small, but momentous, encounters, each character must confront a crucial question, weighing the ideal collective action against their rational self-interest. What is more important? A bigger year-end paycheck or the continued employment of one of their own?

Simply structured, plainspoken, deeply felt, Two Days, One Night is a tremendous emotional wringer. It pushes a woman into an unbearably fraught condition, and watches as she desperately appeals to others for help. That her employers, the very source of her income and social interaction, have put her in this spot makes it all the worse. As an evocation of the economic construct so many live out on a daily basis – the establishment forcing the working class into conflict with each other, the better to keep them from turning conflict upwards – it’s merciless of plot. We watch this dynamic play out in these characters lives, and the Dardennes bring to it every bit of their humane specificity, charting the emotional terrains of people forced into making big decisions about another’s life. It’s a work of invigorating empathy.

The Bad News Bros: THE INTERVIEW

For all the hullabaloo surrounding its release, from the hackers to the threats to the studio waffling and beyond, the new Seth Rogen/James Franco comedy The Interview has only minor pleasures to offer. With its high concept, dirty jokes, sporadic violence, casual insensitivity, and queasy morality, it’s the kind of movie that, were it made in the 1970s, would be a staple of exploitation pictures recommended by Tarantino. There’s a spirited absurdity to the whole endeavor that finds Franco and Rogen as a talk show host and his producer who land an interview with Kim Jong-un, ruler of North Korea, and are promptly asked by the CIA to help them carry out an assassination. It’s one part fish-out-of-water buddy comedy, one part spy spoof, and one part bloody satire. The whole thing’s deeply silly and omnidirectionally offensive.

Franco’s talk show is positioned as a vapid gossip peddler. He’s a force of personality who gets confessional interviews out of celebrities, a sort of super dumb Dick Cavett. He’s a total idiot, a self-absorbed nonsense man so totally lost in his own media stardom he’s convinced every thought he has is worth sharing. His producer, on the other hand, has aspirations of doing more important work. He’s the one who figures out how to land this monumental interview. Though, to be fair, he’s smarter than his boss, he’s only marginally less bumbling in practice. A CIA agent (Lizzy Caplan, excellent as always) gives them a scant briefing, some secret poison, and lets them on their way to meet with a dictator and take him down. It’s a dubious plan, but, despite utilizing a real country’s actual ruler as a character and target, this isn’t a movie big on sense.

Most of the movie plays out in Kim’s vast grey compound as the two guys stumble their way around, trying not to mess up the mission and utterly failing most of the time. There are real jabs at North Korean ills – famine, executions, propaganda, isolation – mixed into scenes of technical malfunctions, missed connections, and endless coarse banter between the leads. Rogen’s the straight man, while Franco delivers a weirdly artificial performance in which every gesture, every line is letting us know he’s in on the joke. It rarely works. Funniest, even lovable at times, is Kim himself, played with charisma and sly charm by Randall Park as an insecure guy who just wants his guests to like him.

Best is the relationship they develop, as the talk show host finally meets a man as egocentric and needy as he is. There’s something biting in there about an American celebrity, especially one in something like the news business, finding much in common with a dictator. But the film’s largely sloppy as satire, blending sharp commentary and free-range goofiness. There’s also a heaping helping of the typical R-rated bro comedy’s crutches of so-called ironic sexism, racism, and gay panic, masked with a thin veil of knowing wink-wink ain’t-this-awful posturing. It’s part of the film’s broad jumble of potent nihilistic cynicism and gross out gags.

The film was helmed by Rogen and Evan Goldberg, writing partners whose directorial debut was last year’s funny-at-times, and even sloppier, This is the End. Here they wrangle their story, scripted by Dan Sterling, into a mix of bro hangout, male anxieties, and satiric jabs, until culminating in an absurdly violent third-act shootout. It’s a big, hard-edged, live action cartoon, at its best when it steers straight into the absurdity. I especially liked a recurring Katy Perry song used to undercut, and later amplify, tension, the right kind of dopily weird. Otherwise, it’s a mixture of easy geopolitical points, mild media teasing, and sex, drugs, and poop jokes.

The comedy is hit-and-miss, and it’s too goofy to offend as much as it wants. But in the end, the worldview on display through the parade of idiots and violence is more scathing than maybe it thinks. At one point a North Korean propagandist (Diana Bang) discovers their plan to enact a CIA-backed overthrow of a foreign dictator and asks, “How many times will America make the same mistake?” Franco shouts back, “As many times as we have to!” Here’s a movie that says the whole world’s supremely screwed up – with dumb Americans, cruel dictators, and the empty-headed media rhetoric of them both – and the only people who eke out a win are those whose buffoons control the message. 

Know When to Fold 'Em: THE GAMBLER

The Gambler stars Mark Wahlberg as a gambling addict. He doesn’t know when to hold ‘em or fold ‘em. He’s chasing that next payout, sinking more and more money into his habit, unable or unwilling to quit. The movie starts in an underground casino where he’s stuck to the blackjack table. At one point he’s up tens of thousands, but quickly sinks back in the red. He now owes six-figures in debt to some shady characters, some of them lurking about this very establishment. He’s given an ultimatum: pay up in 7 days or he’ll risk, at best, certain death. This is the start of an addiction drama and character study crossed with a glum thriller about a man who’s dug himself a mighty deep hole and can’t help but keep digging, hoping against hope he’ll find a way out.

In this reworking of Karel Reisz’s James Caan-starring 1974 film of the same name, screenwriter William Monahan gives us a good understanding of the man’s life. He’s an English professor who resents his nonstarter novelist career. He bitterly tells a class his mantra: “If you’re not a genius, don’t even bother.” He comes from a wealthy family, but his recently deceased grandfather (George Kennedy) left him nothing in the will and his socialite mother (Jessica Lange) has cut him off. He’s a man born into privilege who has just about exhausted its supply. He’s smart, published, has a good job and makes decent money. He just so happens to be in over his head, owing more than he could possibly scrape together in a week. The movie tightens the grip of this scenario, counting down the days, watching as every lucky break leads him to relapse, gambling away much needed cash. Dangers creep closer.

This is one of Wahlberg’s best performances. He’s playing a tired, frustrated, unhappy person, a man of talent and intelligence who has long since given in to his worst habits and tendencies. Wahlberg is one of those actors easy to miscast because, though he has plenty of skill, it’s in a narrow range. He’s perfect with goofy charm or eager determination in his great roles – Boogie Nights, Three Kings, The Other Guys, Pain & Gain – but easily goes wrong in a part that doesn’t ask for those attributes. Here he plays depression and addiction with stillness and hollowed out blank stares. Wahlberg constantly appears exhausted, a tad disheveled, a little out of breath. Addiction has taken its toll. Bad decisions beget bad decisions. He’s finally backed himself into a corner. He wears the burden of depression and anxiety heavily, compensating with sarcasm masked as truth telling and moping. It’s a glossy star vehicle with a deliberate pace, and his weary presence owns it, but for the moments he turns over to the supporting cast.

We meet his black market creditors, a diverse but menacing bunch played by a fine collection of character actors. There’s a grandfatherly soft-spoken Korean (Alvin Ing), a chummy but deadly gangster (Michael K. Williams), and a scary deep-pockets moneyman (John Goodman as a bald, glowering mountain of intimidation). In between nervous one-on-one confrontations with the dark side of his life, he’s back in his respectable teaching career. We see him meet with students both troubled (Anthony Kelley) and promising (Brie Larson, making the most of the film’s worst aspect which makes her a clichéd object, pure feminine ideal symbolizing a light in the darkness). But mostly his students are bored as he prattles on, lecturing on literature as his troubles lurk in the back of his mind. This lurking infects the filmmaking, every catchy rock song on the soundtrack abruptly cut off by the next development.

A slick, steady, confident film, The Gambler is the third feature from Rupert Wyatt. His previous directorial effort resurrected the Planet of the Apes franchise (with Rise of the…). He’s used the clout earned there to make a muscular studio drama, a lean, tough, modest little self-contained character-driven thriller built out of crackling conversations and sharp, writerly dialogue. The screenplay is wordy and tense. No one talks like this, but isn’t that one of the pleasures of the movies? Characters here are always ready to hold forth on life philosophies and armchair psychiatric opinions of each other. Scenes of talky negotiation and high-stakes gamesmanship create a picture of a man who’s smart enough to know better, is well aware of that flaw, and gambles on his ability to get out of trouble anyway. It’s involving to watch the plot develop, humming along its downbeat groove until the last bets are made and the results are in.

Uses of Enchantment: INTO THE WOODS

After over a decade of box office success with revisionist fairy tales of one sort (Shrek) or another (Snow White and the Huntsman) or another (Maleficent), I suppose it was about time Hollywood got around to adapting Stephen Sondheim’s original Grimm mashup, Into the Woods. That musical, co-written with James Lapine, was first produced in 1986. It took long enough for something so cinematic and imaginative as this series of head-on collisions between a variety of classic tales made it to the screen. Perhaps the delay was simply how much further the material takes its revisionist impulses, to a place darker and more destabilizing to the very idea of fairy tales than those others dare.

Disney, no stranger to wonderful fairy tales, but rarely willing to overtly dig down dark, has brought the stage to the screen with director Rob Marshall, whose Chicago put a layer of dreamy glitz on a sordid murder musical. The resulting Into the Woods adaptation, scripted by Lapine with music supervision by Sondheim, gets at what’s most provocative about the story, stripping away layers of feel-good fantasy while attempting to still let some sentimental magic in around the edges. It’s a partial equivocation to crowd pleasing in a more conventional sense, pulling back from a few of the nastier moments, but remains admirably committed to being a big feel-bad musical, a bunch of great lyrics and melody with a bittersweet aftertaste.

The opening sets a collection of familiar characters – Little Red Riding Hood (Lilla Crawford), Cinderella (Anna Kendrick), Jack who will have the Beanstalk (Daniel Huttlestone), Rapunzel (Mackenzie Mauzy) – off on their recognizable stories. The first twist is placing them all in the same world, crossing paths, each story’s simple patterns trailing ripple effects through the others’. The second twist is a baker (James Corden) and his wife (Emily Blunt), childless because of a witch (Meryl Streep) and her curse, heading out into the woods to get the curse reversed. The ingredients they must collect: a cow as white as milk, a cape as red as blood, hair yellow as corn, and a slipper pure as gold. This quest brings them into direct conflict with the other plotlines, further complicating simple tales.

By the midpoint, every story has reached its happy ending, everyone happily married off or with child or rich. The only people disfigured or blinded are wicked stepsisters. But then the real story begins, revealing happily ever after to be short lived. Their wishes have been granted, and yet their lives are no easier, and choices they made to get there have unintended consequences. The easy morality of fairy tales leaves these characters unprepared for dissatisfaction, revenge, abandonment, infidelity, and death. That’s the sour note of real life infecting giddy childhood fantasy. And so the movie follows suit, buzzing with clever Grimm knottiness for an hour before tipping over into sadness and upsetting developments. Sondheim’s play is about the limits of life lessons gleaned from these tales, and how destabilizing it can be to feel alone in the world without easy answers to guide you.

The movie version gets there, but it’s by its very nature flashier, cutting between storylines quickly and inelegantly, making an occasional jumble out of its various strands. Trims to the plot, especially in the back half, foreshorten motivations and rush the revelations. But there are smaller miscues of editing. Early on we’re told about a prince, singular, throwing a festival. Then a few cuts later, we meet a prince, a different one. In the last third, two characters die in different ways, presented so obliquely it may as well be off screen. Their fates aren’t clear until other characters tell us later. One literally falls out of frame, later revealed to have been a fatal plunge from a cliff, not a trip over a branch as one could reasonably assume.

Stumbles of staging aside, there’s a fine patina of fakery to it all. The woods never feel like a real place, just a soundstage. I didn’t mind it much.  The set has its charms and Marshall finds real emotional engagement between his actors that enlivens the glittering falsehoods around them. Corden and Blunt’s bakers are especially good, with breezy repartee and excellent timing. Kendrick’s charming as always, this time as a flustered indecisive young woman. These three are the heart of the picture, shouldering the burden of the tonal shifts while Streep hams it up howling and cackling in the background as the witch goads the stories forward. Elsewhere, there’s room for small but juicy comic parts played with aplomb by Chris Pine, Christine Baranski, Tracey Ullman, Johnny Depp, Lucy Punch, and more. They’re welcome flavoring to this world.

Marshall steps out of his cast’s way and lets them spill forth with Sondheim’s delectable wordplay, rhyming, punning, and clattering with all manner of delightful alliterations that trip off the tongue and sweet simple poetic constructions that sit pleasantly on the ear. The big musical moments land because of the writing, and the skill with which the performers feel it. These little moments, aching with yearning and surprise, work wonders. But the big picture doesn’t cohere in the way it should. The story’s pacing’s off and the staging imprecise, but the hopeful bittersweet conclusion is affecting, even if the remaining pieces feel a tad forced to fit. Masterpieces of one medium rarely retain that status in the leap to another. That Into the Woods is a good movie, but not a great one, is only a minor disappointment.

Survivor of the Fittest: UNBROKEN

Unbroken tells a true story with bright, well-built, Hollywood epic storytelling. That’s fitting, since its subject, Louis Zamperini, lived a full and amazing life, built out of the stuff movies are made of. He’s a man for whom the adspeak “incredible true story” seems to have been made. He was born in 1917, became a juvenile delinquent, then a high school track star, an Olympic athlete, a World War II bombardier whose plane was lost at sea, a captive in a Japanese prisoner of war camp, and a survivor of all the above. I’m sure he was one of the only people who could’ve seen Memphis Belle, Bridge on the River Kwai, Stalag 17, Chariots of Fire, and Life of Pi in their original theatrical runs and see something of his own life experience reflected back at him.

The film is an effective dramatization by turns unflinching – gaunt bodies caked in dirt and blood – and sentimental – wistful flashbacks and swelling score. It’s button pushing in that way. It coasts on the easily apparent drama of the story itself, which certainly has enough surface incident to fill a run time. It starts in the skies over the Pacific front in the middle of WWII, a tense dogfight shot completely inside Zamperini’s plane. We linger behind the various gunners and pilots, watching as small dots grow into enemy fighters, spraying bullets and getting return fire. It’s exciting stuff, brightly lit, displayed with convincing effects courtesy Industrial Light and Magic. We then cut back to our hero’s early life, following childhood scrapes through his Olympic competition, notable backstory swiftly filled in. Then we’re back to the war, where his dangers are just beginning.

Directed with smooth competence by Angelina Jolie from a screenplay with credited drafts by Joel and Ethan Coen, Richard LaGravenese, and William Nicholson, the film has clear admiration for Zamperini’s resilience. They’re most concerned with portraying his indomitable spirit, returning again and again to his face as Jack O’Connell plays the man staring purposefully past the problems at hand. He’s stranded on a lifeboat with the survivors of his plane’s crash (Finn Wittrock, Domhnall Glesson). They’re lucky enough to be rescued, but unlucky enough to find their rescuers are the enemy. He ends up at a POW camp where he’s beaten by a cruel Japanese sergeant (Miyavi), and falls in with the scarred and weary prisoners (Garrett Hedlund, Luke Treadaway). He looks purposefully into every obstacle, the punches, the backbreaking labor, the blood and bruises. He grits his teeth and lives to see another day. He’s unbreakable.

What gives Zamperini the strength to go on? How did he survive? Was it luck or happenstance? Determination or divine intervention? Optimism or sloganeering? I don’t know. The movie’s more enamored with the facts of his survival than investigating him as a character. It’s a surface level examination, which is fine when the plot’s hopping, but drags down the occasionally monotonous dark night of the soul in the POW camp. The film hits every big mark, but I was starving for small details to color in the time between. There’s never a sense of who the characters are, just what misery they’ve been through.

I couldn’t tell you much of anything about the people trapped in various conditions with Zamperini, or his family, or his captors. They’re simply facts of his life, the elements that make the miraculous extremes possible. There’s some great early details in the young man’s homelife, scenes of discipline, religion, and discovery of his talents. In some ways it plays like the opening moments of a superhero origin story. The film’s first hour is its best, time to follow an eventful life on its first, positive trajectory with energetic sequences of sports and war. But it seems to skip so quickly through these vital foundational moments that by the second hour it starts to feel like a catalogue of miserable incidents where I’d hoped to find a character study wrapped up in epic trappings. Instead, it’s all smaller.

But Unbroken is respectful, handsomely made, and technically proficient. Jolie has cinematographer Roger Deakins behind the camera and he does sharp, solid work. She has a fine cast, and they inhabit their roles convincingly. The editing is propulsive, the sound crackling, the score syrupy strong. In style and perspective – the square, proud, sturdy take – it could’ve been made more or less exactly like this ten, twenty, thirty, forty, fifty or more years ago. It’s old-fashioned, made with professionalism and care, but it’s also anonymously produced and a bit bland. There’s plenty of craftsmanship put into a story interesting enough on its own the filmmakers didn’t feel the need to really dig into the details. They simply evoke the big moments and trust our interest will follow enough to excuse the all-surface approach.