Living on the EDGE OF DARKNESS

For a knee-jerk reactionary vigilante thriller, Edge of Darkness is surprisingly restrained with a long, slow burn of a mystery capped with swift brutal vengeance doled out in efficient action beats. It often follows a traditional structure for this type of movie, but it’s still shockingly satisfying even if we’ve more or less been here before.

At the film’s opening a corpse bubbles up to the surface of a lake with an ominous factory in the background. We return to this event later, but for the time being we are introduced to a grizzled Boston detective played by Mel Gibson. Whatever you think of his personal behavior (his drunken anti-Semitic rant is rightly a permanent smudge on his reputation) he has a compelling screen presence. He’s not a great actor, necessarily, but he has a force that draws attention and sympathy. In the opening moments of the film, his character is meeting his twenty-something daughter (Bojana Novakovic) who is returning home during time off from the nuclear facility at which she works. Just when we get our bearings she’s gunned down on the front porch, just minutes into the film. The act of violence is shocking in its force and gore, the shot flinging her back through the door with blood splattering the doorframe and staining the rug. But, as we are told, every action has an equal and opposite reaction, especially in the kind of movie in which the bereaved father has access to all the tools of a professional detective.

Probing the mystery of his daughter’s murder, Gibson visits her place of work, which brings us to the ominous factory of the opening shot. There he meets her boss, a slimy executive played by the great Danny Huston. Although he’s clearly the villain from the minute he walks on screen, Huston plays it so well, so coolly, that the point isn’t “how’d or why’d he do it?”, but “when will he be taken down?” Along the way, there are plenty of other slimeballs propped up as fodder for the vengeance machine, including an infuriating senator (Damian Young) and a shadowy suit (Denis O’Hare). There’s also a wild card whose allegiances may or may not be slippery; he’s played by the always welcome Ray Winstone who brings a performance filled with perfect shades of gray.

Gibson’s search for the truth is entertainingly handled, with this slick, professional production smoothly turning the gears of the plot. By the time the big reveals occur, the sensation of bloody justice feels earned. It is always a little queasy to have a movie so thoroughly work up the blood lust, coaxing dark feelings of violence out of the audience, but this movie, despite its sometimes squishy gunshots, doesn’t linger on injury in unseemly ways, nor does it go out of its way to glamorize the violence. This is a tight thriller with sharp blasts of satisfying revenge. Director Martin Campbell, adapting a 1980's miniseries that he directed, does a capable job of managing tone and expectations. The movie held my interest all the way through. I cared about Gibson’s quest for revenge and, yes, I felt a rush of adrenaline every time he moved closer to his ultimate goal. This is a smoothly enjoyable piece of popcorn filmmaking, a dependable, if ultimately slight, piece of entertainment.

Quick Look: Invictus (2009)

At this point, can we expect anything less from a film directed by Clint Eastwood than a good-looking film? Even when they’re not good – I didn’t care for Flags of Our Fathers or Gran Torino – they still look just fine, with a classic sheen that comes from dependable Hollywood craftsmanship. Certainly, Invictus does nothing to reverse this trend, but the film comes up short in a few other areas, mainly in the arenas of character and passion. Eastwood, in telling the story of Nelson Mandela’s first months as president of South Africa, has chosen to focus on Mandela’s interest in uniting the country through its rugby team. It’s an interesting story, but one that I’d have rather seen as a subplot in a Mandela biopic. Even so, I have to judge the movie in front of me and not the movie I wanted to see. Eastwood had the good sense to have Morgan Freeman play Mandela. It’s a performance that borders on mere imitation but Freeman has a quiet dignity that suits the role. The presentation of Mandela feels a little superficial, but Freeman carries the part, giving it the feeling of greater depth than what must have been on the page. As the rugby captain is Matt Damon doing a capable job in a role that requires him to mostly just shout “let’s go, guys!” The movie seems aimless for a while, even if it’s enjoyably so. I liked every scene with Mandela; he gives excellently performed monologues and dialogues and I got great enjoyment out of the scenes that simply observed his political process. I also enjoyed a subplot that runs through the film which follows the black and white members of Mandela’s security team learning to work together. Once the all-rugby finale kicks in, the movie finds a drive that it had been missing, but it pushes Freeman to the side in the process. He’s the emotion, but not the thrill, I guess. At moments, Invictus is genuinely soul-stirring but I left the theater wishing my soul could have been stirred up just a bit more.

Quick Look: Daybreakers (2010)

The Spierig Brothers’ Daybreakers takes place in a world of inky black and vivid white. It’s a color movie, but most of it takes place during pitch-black night illuminated only by soft, chilly, blue-tinged lights. It’s a striking vision of a world gone mad, with corporations literally draining away humanity’s life-force. You see, the movie takes place in a world that is filled almost exclusively with vampires. The few humans that do exist are either in hiding or locked in giant blood-sucking devices. This is a futuristic world that doesn’t sparkle with glamour; it oozes a sense of ice-cold danger. The Spierigs have not rested on striking visuals alone, unlike with their deliberately mucky – and consequently ugly – zombie movie Undead. Here they have written a story that moves along quickly and entertainingly, by turns suspenseful and exciting. Action beats and gross-out jump moments (with plenty of gushing gore) are well paced and the world the film creates is somewhat interesting both metaphorically and on a plot level. Ethan Hawke, playing a scientist tasked with finding a substitute for the dwindling supply of human blood, brings a believability to the world, along with Michael Dorman as his brother and Sam Neill as their slimy boss, grounding the outlandishness with a sense a weary sentiment. Unfortunately, the weak link in the movie is a human played by Willem Dafoe who is given horrible lines to say and delivers them in a way that doesn’t mask that fact. Dafoe leads a group of humans who end up convincing Hawke to help them find, instead of a blood substitute, a cure. Once the movie starts to move with this plot, it’s easier to ignore and accept Dafoe’s poorly-drawn character and get back to enjoying the production design and the shivery moments of explosive B-movie thrills and spills (and splatter).

Quick Look Early Review: When in Rome (2010)

Kristen Bell is cute, but cute doesn’t carry a movie, especially one like When in Rome which has a script that was seemingly written by an ersatz rom-com robot (actually it’s worse, the writers of Old Dogs) capable of only creating dialogue and situations that play slightly better than clanging pots and pans together for 90 minutes. It’s a painfully unbelievable and unlikable story about a career woman (Bell) who takes coins from a fountain in Rome which causes the previous owners of the coins to fall in love with her (all of the coins were thrown by New Yorkers, coincidentally). The way the character is written and performed, magic would be needed to fall in love with her. She’s incredibly annoying, as are the men who follow her around in a lovesick haze, the rules of which change according to the whims of the filmmakers. These men are played by Josh Duhamel, Will Arnett, Danny DeVito, John Heder, and Dax Shepard, likeable performers, but their likability is drowned in the mush. Most incredibly, someone tricked Anjelica Huston into appearing in this mess. Don’t ask me how. The movie makes no sense and proceeds from one hopelessly unfunny moment to the next, inspiring nothing but pure hatred that I could direct towards the screen. It’s shot without distinction and directed by a seemingly uncaring Mark Steven Johnson who previously made superhero movies like a bland Ghost Rider and an okay Daredevil (yeah, I kind of liked that one). Even he is slumming here. Everyone involved deserves much, much better than this, especially the audience.

When a Problem Comes Along: WHIP IT

It’s always risky for an established actor to take on directorial duties. They could become the next Clint Eastwood or the next C. Thomas Howell, and it’s nearly impossible to tell which kind they’ll be until the finished product is available for scrutiny. Luckily for Drew Barrymore, her directorial debut is Whip It, a fast-paced, crowd-pleaser that announces her as a director to watch. She generously allows the actors in the film room to breathe, room to explore their characters in deeper and more unexpected ways than you would think would be allowed film that, prior to viewing, sounds so schematic and predictable.

Ellen Page stars as a sassy small-town teen who feels stuck in her world of beauty pageants and standardized tests until she discovers an outlet she never knew she needed at a roller derby. It sounds like a typical coming-of-age, parents-don’t-get-it, teen sports movie, and indeed it has all the beats that such a film would require like the moment where the adolescent lead finds a secret thrill in a new passion, the moment where the mismatched group of outsiders take the teen into their group, the moment where the parents find out about what their kid has really been doing all this time. (See: Saturday Night Fever, Breaking Away, etcetera). And yet, the movie isn’t a typical example of that type, hitting those beats in unexpectedly refreshing and satisfying ways. If it’s not quite Breaking Away, and it isn’t, it’s not for lack of trying.

Page gives her best performance yet (yes, including her Oscar-nominated turn in Juno), giving her character a depth and a yearning that ring true. It also helps that she’s surrounded by wonderful acting. Alia Shawkat (Maebe in Arrested Development) plays her best friend, their rapport also ringing true. Every time they share the screen, it feels like watching two old friends in the way they subtly read each other’s moods, keep long-running jokes moving even farther, warbling along with the radio, and breaking down into fits of giggling. It’s a relationship that feels so truthful, that when a cute guy (Landon Pigg) comes along, making eyes at Page, I genuinely cared about how he would change the girls’ friendship.

Like the friendship, Page’s interactions with her parents hit a particularly truthful nerve in the mixture of awkward candor and unfathomable love that often develops between a teenager and parents. There’s a core of mutual respect in their relationship that feels right. Daniel Stern, as her father, has a loveably awkward sense of a father struggling with connecting to his teenage daughter, careful to say the right thing, desperately wanting to not seem desperate in his attempts to stay an important figure in her life. Marcia Gay Harden, as her mother, is not some stage-mother stereotype, despite early scenes that threaten to push her in that direction. Instead, she’s a woman who very much wants her daughter to succeed. She’s not closed-minded; she merely stubbornly wants her daughter to be great. There’s a feeling of genuine love in the parent-child relationship on display here, not just snarky dysfunction that’s so often a teen-movie cop out. A quiet dialogue scene that finds Harden and Page sitting on the floor of their kitchen, engaging in an intense heart-to-heart, is one of the most memorable scenes I saw in any movie of 2009.

It’s memorable because Barrymore knows the strengths of her actors and the strengths of the script by Shauna Cross. She hasn’t drained her movie of stylistic flourish, but she isn’t suffering from first-time director look-what-I-can-do waywardness either. She knows when she can set up a fairly simple dialogue scene and trust that her actors will more than carry the moment. This is an enormously entertaining film as a result, with a smart, fast-paced script and great actors to perform it. The great indie-rock soundtrack and the vibrant colors are only an added bonus.

Speaking of added bonus, there’s the roller derby girls themselves. Played by the likes of Kristen Wiig, Eve, Zoe Bell, Juliette Lewis, Ari Graynor and Drew Barrymore (humbly giving herself a bit part), the athletes have great sense of comedic timing and are an energetic source of frenzied fun on and off the track, even if they are forced into a food fight in the one wrong note the movie manages to hit. Characters on the periphery of the derby are entertaining as well, especially a goofy announcer (Jimmy Fallon) and a sarcastic but supportive coach (Andrew Wilson). But, even with such minor male influences, this movie is a blast of girl-power gusto. Whip It is a hugely entertaining experience, a kind of feel-good movie that doesn’t go out of its way to make you feel good. I just had no other option when confronted with a movie so endearing, energetic, and sweet. This is the kind of movie that could have felt common, but is instead told uncommonly well.

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.

Ladies and Gentlemen, Boys and Girls: THE IMAGINARIUM OF DOCTOR PARNASSUS

Reader, I must confess that I’m as likely to find a Terry Gilliam film as baffling as I do dazzling. Don’t get me wrong, I like the chap and adore some of his movies, but I’ve never really felt an emotional connection to any of his work. Even Time Bandits, my favorite Gilliam movie – not counting Twelve Monkeys, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and The Fisher King, films I still haven’t seen – has its share of moments where I just stare at the screen with my forehead wrinkling asking myself “what’s all this then?” And yet, I’m drawn to each new Gilliam movie, not just for the imagery that’s delightfully inventive and genuinely surprising, a consistent attribute dating back to his days of Monty Python. I’m drawn to his work for the sense that he’s spinning a delirious story and loving every minute of it, whether or not we can keep up. I think it is because of this possible handicap that I enjoyed The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus as much as I did, not just because it’s one of Gilliam’s most accessible works, but because it just might be his most personal.

Doctor Parnassus, played by the great Christopher Plummer, is a sort of wizard as storyteller, an immortal who derives his power not just from his deal with the Devil (Tom Waits, of course), but from the sheer power of the imagination. There’s an early scene that finds Parnassus and the Devil discussing the nature of existence. It’s a tensely playful conversation until Parnassus experiences a revelation of great import. As long as someone somewhere is telling a story, he decides, the universe will go on existing. I feel that Gilliam believes that, right down to the core of his artistic soul, for his films not only feed the imagination, but in their strange journeys and bizarre tangents, in their grimy grounded connection between reality and fantasy, they spin out whole worlds that are conjured from that most wonderfully strange location: the human mind.

Parnassus is on a journey to prove to the Devil that the power of the human imagination has not been dulled by modernity and so he travels in a ramshackle horse-drawn cart that unfolds into his Imaginarium, a scruffy stage upon which he and his band of performers try to enchant customers with their invitation to pretend. But of course, it is not all pretend, for Doctor Parnassus has a portal in the form of a false mirror that, when stepped through while he is in a trance, takes people right into the depths of their imaginations, forming a world just for them. These are incredible special-effects fantasias with looming, giant props, vast, gaudily colored landscapes, and unpredictably shifting circumstances. One elegantly dressed lady imagines a world with large, elegant shoes dotting the embankments of a tranquil river. Of course, the Devil will tempt those in this strange world, but if their imagination stays pure, Parnassus is closer to winning his wager.

The crew of the Imaginarium is an entertaining bunch. The coach driver is a sarcastic midget (Vern Troyer). The ringmaster (Andrew Garfield) is a bumbling runaway, hopelessly in love with the fourth member of the ensemble, Parnassus’s daughter (Lily Cole). Garfield takes what could have been one-note and makes it something a little greater and Cole, for her part, gives a soulful and earthy performance with the ability to suggest great depths in her big eyes. The four of them make a strange group, stranger still when their tattered cart opens up in front of a bar or in the parking lot of a hardware store. They’re always uninvited, almost always unwelcome, and urgency is closing in. You see, as part of Parnassus’s Faustian bargain, he had to make some dark promises for the future of his daughter if he failed to win over enough souls by the time she turned sixteen. Her sixteenth birthday is in three days.

But now I’ve gotten carried away telling you what the film’s about instead of how it’s about it. This is just the type of movie that’s so thrillingly complex in its fantastical elements that I feel I could explain it for hours and never get to the entirety of its wonder and detail. And I haven’t even gotten to the complication that truly kick-starts the plot. It’s the element of the film that has received the most press: the character played by Heath Ledger. It’s a charming performance but there are several moments when there is an uncomfortable subtext hanging about, a deep sadness that wouldn’t have been as deep if Ledger were still alive. And yet, his death forced Gilliam to greater heights of invention as there was work left unfinished when the unfortunate incident occurred. The scenes that find Ledger on the other side of the mirror had yet to be filmed and so Johnny Depp, Jude Law, and Colin Farrell play the character in the most fantastical moments. It makes perfect sense and Gilliam even manages to make the shape shifting resonate thematically, illuminating the character in ways more superficial and yet deeper still.

But what role does Ledger play in the plot? I’d rather let you find out, just as I won’t spoil any more of the complications, the stunning effects, hilarious sight gags, or the jaw-dropping moments of awe. This may be Gilliam’s finest accomplishment, may be better than Time Bandits, may be better than Brazil. (But then, all Gilliam films need time to settle past their immediate impact). Here is a movie that reflects in every aspect the vision and worldview of its maker, a handcrafted testament to imagination in every frame. In the character of Parnassus – doomed to walk the earth forever as those around him tire of his stories and find no need for his techniques of entertaining – is an astute reflection of Gilliam himself, a filmmaker who started so promisingly and yet has been thwarted by studio meddling and unforeseeable complications at nearly every turn. Yet Gilliam, like Parnassus, thrives when he is in his element, growing close to the height of his powers.

And yet, the film is still a bit of a mess, wobbly at first and often confused. It’s marvelously complicated fantasy occasionally works as a detriment as the film threatens to collapse under its obfuscation. Still, though, Gilliam manages to pull it together, creating a weird and wonderful film, continually surprising and more than a little moving.