Track Changes: THE GIRL ON THE TRAIN

The Girl on the Train has all the right ingredients for a polished tawdry thriller, but it never really gets cooking. There’s a missing woman. There’s a cast of talented performers assembled to play suspects. There’s a glossy, handsomely photographed look, like its upstate New York setting is a high-end furniture catalogue with roiling undercurrents of jealousy, abuse, addiction, and intimate crime. There’s a solid, dependable director at the helm in Tate Taylor, whose previous films The Help and Get on Up also had some interest in complicated women’s roles. And there’s Emily Blunt acting her heart out in the center of the movie as a depressed, alcoholic, unreliable witness at her wits’ end, who either did or did not see something integral to the investigation. The stage is set for something interesting, but the movie is instead a total snooze. Its mysteries are haphazardly developed, its tension is erratically sustained, and its characters remain flat types.

Screenwriter Erin Cressida Wilson adapts Paula Hawkins’ bestseller with a scrambled chronology and shifting points of view. It’s a Three-card Monte plot, shuffling back and forth in time and perspective while withholding key information just because it can. By the time the pieces finally stop moving the picture comes up empty. Its central character’s confused mental state motivates the jumbled telling, which takes the idea of an unreliable narrator to its least helpful illogical conclusion. Blunt’s girl on the train is depressed. The dual shocks of learning she can’t have a baby and being left by her husband (Justin Theroux) for their realtor (Rebecca Ferguson) haven’t helped. Nor has incessant drinking improved her life, leaving her stumbling, slurring, blacking out, and missing time. It’s not uncommon for her to ask her roommate (Laura Prepon) what she did last night, a habit that carries over from her ex. She’s used to being out of control and not remembering. But she’s sure she saw the missing woman (Haley Bennett) on the night of the disappearance.

There is a dusting of interesting thematic work here. Blunt is playing a woman who is told stories about her life she has no choice but to believe given her condition. She, in turn, enjoys looking out the train window during her commutes, making up little stories about the people whose lives she glimpses for a few moments a day. That’s how she feels she knows the missing woman enough to try to give a statement to the detective on the case (Alison Janney) or approach the woman’s shocked husband (Luke Evans) or therapist (Edgar Ramirez) to slip some of her information or delusions into their narratives. Ah, but how to do that while seeming sane? It’d take a sharp mind and sober social skills to pull that off, and she can only fake it for so long. Besides, she’s not totally sure she didn’t have something to do with the vanishing. The movie takes us into flashbacks narrated by the missing woman describing her sad life, then back to Blunt wringing her hands over the state of things. This interest in the stories people tell to convince themselves of one thing or another is a good enough hook to make the lackluster execution all the more disappointing.

Taylor handles this material with some confidence. He trusts his close ups of Blunt’s tear-streaked face and woozy booze-soaked flashes of memory to carry across the haze through which the facts can be glimpsed. He’s also sure his oblique references to horrible things – a character’s tearful monologue about the death of her infant; a bludgeoning; a pattern of emotional abuse – are worth springing as surprises and then cutting away before the visuals get too rough. But ultimately there’s just not enough there there. The twists are artificially delayed through obfuscation, stretching out obvious developments for the sake of the story’s deliberately frustrating structure. (We can’t be sure of anything until late in the picture, by which point it’s hard to retroactively care.) And the whole ensemble of terrific performers (down to two scenes for the always great Lisa Kudrow) are stuck playing slight types whose actions are determined by the circuitous plotting and whose decisions and developments hinge only on the dictates of the surprises. Worst, there’s never any compelling question pulling it along. I was so frustrated by the film’s thin psychology and unforthcoming shiftiness I simply didn’t care where the missing woman went and whodunit. I was merely waiting out the runtime.

Crime and Punishment: 13TH

To solve our nation’s problems, we must understand their causes, and not just the easy, obvious causes that are most convenient to solve. In 13th, a powerful and persuasive new documentary from Selma writer-director Ava DuVernay, there is an explanation for mass incarceration and implicit bias, the twin ailments afflicting our criminal justice system. But our current crisis of overcrowded prisons and police brutality has roots that run deep. DuVernay builds a history of oppression in this country, showing how the evils of slavery were removed by the Civil War only for the routine dehumanizing of people of color to remain a constant in our society. She begins with Reconstruction, as slaves became criminals, locked up or lynched for the simplest of reasons, if any at all. The myth of black criminality was pervasive, a worry that freedom unleashed permission for a people to roam the South unchecked by white power. DuVernay draws a line from the KKK to the prison industrial complex in a smart, complicated, multi-faceted, well rounded, dazzlingly intellectual and undeniably emotional sociopolitical argument.

Here DuVernay is working in the tradition of documentarian Adam Curtis (his masterwork, The Power of Nightmares, a stunning recounting of the parallel rise of neo-conservatives and Islamic fundamentalism) and historian Howard Zinn (whose People’s History of the United States viewed the past through how it affected the least among us). Like them, she's synthesizing a vast amount of information, drawing connections, placing old and familiar stories and ideas next to fresh takes and new juxtapositions. It adds up to a history of white racial resentment and poisonous stereotyping as the prime driving forces behind American politics of the last 150 years. What is Jim Crow but an effort to rebuild a mechanism by which to prevent black people from entering white society? What is Nixon’s Southern Strategy but coded messages to whites letting them know the progress of black civil rights will be slowed? What is the War on Drugs, with its lopsided sentencing, but a method to punish people of color more harshly? What about the 1994 omnibus crime bill, privatized prisons, and militarized police forces? The film takes us right to present day, current discussions inevitably informed by the decades of buildup. 

DuVernay doesn’t argue that explicit, intentional racism is always the cause of laws’ consequences, but that it’s merely the soup in which we swim. Black people are viewed as criminal at a rate disproportionate to the percentage of actual crime. She reminds us of 1915’s Birth of a Nation codifying the image of dangerous black men, and of the nightly news and tough-on-crime campaign ads far more frequently parading dark skin in front of the camera as code for crime. She shows us Martin Luther King Jr, Malcom X, Angela Davis, Fred Hampton, and many more civil rights leaders and recalls how they were hounded by law enforcement and, in many cases, cut down in their prime. She unflinchingly shows us photographs of lynchings, footage of hoses and dogs deployed on peaceful protestors, of unarmed black men gunned down in the street by fearful and angry police. Our problems are not new, they are simply old problems found new form. DuVernay begins by showing us the 13th Amendment, which ended slavery, albeit with the proviso that it’d still be allowed as punishment for crime. This is a movie about how, in ways both intentionally and unintentionally, the amendment’s language has taken on the sneaky force of a powerful loophole.

13th collects perfectly judged archival footage to mix with a collage of talking heads from the across the political spectrum. We hear from historians, journalists, activists, politicians, lobbyists, and more – everyone from Henry Louis Gates and Michelle Alexander to Newt Gingrich – as their words are interwoven to tell the complicated story. (A few choice times she skewers a wrongheaded interviewee with judicious cross-cutting to the truth.) Stirred in with the usual graphs and text and lyrics of the modern message doc, these witnesses and chroniclers tell the narrative of our country’s last 150 years as a clear-headed examination of underlying, recurring problems. This film asks its audience to consider the core rot in our body politic and how it has continually transfigured itself every time we think we’ve gotten close to cutting it out. Systematic prejudice reconstitutes under the cover of new ideas or identities, continuing to propagate unfathomable and unfair harm, often before we even recognize its new form. The reinvention of oppression needs to be met with a radical compassion, recognition of the worth, the humanity, of every person. This movie is a good start.

Rise Up: THE BIRTH OF A NATION

A straightforward reenactment of Nat Turner leading a slave uprising in 1831 could make for a great movie. It hasn’t yet, but I hope someone will get it right. The one great film about Turner, Charles Burnett’s Nat Turner: A Troublesome Property, is a documentary interested in how little we can truly know about the man, due to the fact that so much of his record has been muddied, falsified, exaggerated, and expunged over the years. We know plenty about the white people he and his rebels killed. The slaves doing the killing, however, remain in many ways unknowable. Turner lives on as a complicated, ambiguous figure, heroic for fighting back, condemned for the brutality and totality of his tactics. Women and children were slaughtered, but so, too, did slavery butcher and brutalize a people. Two wrongs don’t make a right, but then again there’s nothing right about letting a wrong go on unimpeded. These are richly complicated ideas, but Nate Parker’s The Birth of a Nation simplifies and uncomplicates it in its telling.

Parker wants to make a big statement. The actor clearly has passion in the project, taking it as his subject for his debut as writer-director. It’s his Dances with Wolves, his Braveheart, a way to throw his Hollywood clout behind a picture built to flatter his own ego while making a big, broad period piece about racial injustice. You certainly can’t doubt that he’s thinking about making a dramatic statement, to shine a light on a moment in our nation’s history that’s too often ignored or consigned to a footnote in textbooks. His determination to right a wrong extends to the title, elbowing D.W. Griffith’s landmark 1915 film of the same name – a stirring Civil War epic that concludes in lengthy sequences of appalling black stereotypes and the KKK riding to the rescue – into sharing the spotlight with a tale more accurate and attuned to the moral arc of time. There’s little avoiding our current political climate in scenes of slobbering white men demanding slaves’ papers even when they have no reason to suspect them of a violation, in unarmed black men gunned down by people who feel justified in their control over and fear of their bodies.

But it’s no surprise that a movie about American slavery would be so harrowing and upsetting in dealing with sensitive and traumatizing material. What is surprising is how Parker brings so little illumination to his subject, trusting his audience to bring the loaded contemporaneous associations and historical context into the theater with them. He glosses past Turner’s upbringing, a young slave boy allowed to read because of his interest in the Bible, who then becomes a preacher rented out to other plantations in order to keep their slaves docile through the opiate of twisted scripture. It’s told in obvious gestures and borrowed imagery, as if he figured we’d seen 12 Years a Slave and Roots and the rest so he could let it play out in shorthand and stock types. But unlike those other, better works – and the many others besides – Parker’s tale isn’t interested in deepening our understanding or complicating our assumptions or peeking into the lived experience of the institution. He’s too interested in flattering himself as a performer – giving him tearful reactions to traumas others are dealing with, and providing opportunities for grand speeches and inspiring low-angle shots – to allow anyone in the talented ensemble (Dwight Henry, Roger Guenveur Smith, Gabrielle Union...) to make more than fleeting impressions.

Shooting it all in a pale blue digital glow which softens even the harshest violence, Parker simplifies and streamlines the narrative, to the detriment of his larger goals. It’s a fascinating story of Christian scripture as a double-edged sword, the preacher teaching the slavers’ self-serving self-justification version of bondage and freedom before turning and using the fire and brimstone of righteous anger to foment a rebellion. But Parker makes Turner’s story into simple Chosen One willpower – complete with mystical prophecy, cloudy visions, and an angelic symbol – and easy morality. He’s upset by what he sees, but is finally jolted to action because of an attack on his wife (Aja Naomi King), a woman reduced to a prop, her suffering the literal background of his story. Then, in the revolt itself, the real facts of the case – indiscriminate murder, followed by indiscriminate reprisals – are glossed over to create a more convenient tone of uncomplicated tragic martyrdom and comfortable retribution. The nice white people live. The ones who start nice but grow mean are attacked off screen. The worst of the whites (like Jackie Earle Haley, who does most of the worst) die slow, bloody deaths on screen as if it’s only a simple matter of revenge instead of also an attack on an institution.

This leaves the movie too often looking away, not digging into the nastiness and moral complications of the surrounding context. Its beginning is evocative, Turner silhouetted against a stained-glass window while his master (Armie Hammer) bleeds out. Its aftermath is powerful: a long, slow pull back to reveal body after body lynched, hanging in a tree while “Strange Fruit” anachronistically appears on the soundtrack. But after the sluggish build up, the central event is too indifferently staged and over before you know it. We came to see a story about a man, but he’s blandly developed. We came to see an uprising, an attempt to spark a Civil War that ended in horrible defeat. And then it, too, is used for the least effect it could have. The events within The Birth of a Nation are inherently powerful, and kick up provocative and complicated questions. But the movie itself does too little with this powder keg on which it sits. To the extent it’s interesting it’s in spite of itself, not because. The events that should be shocking feel routine, and no character emerges as fully humanized, not even the Turner who is so scrubbed of all complications even as he draws all focus. Talk about a missed opportunity.

Welled Up: DEEPWATER HORIZON

Peter Berg’s Deepwater Horizon is a compelling, workmanlike, gearhead recreation of a tragedy that was a prelude to an ecological disaster. He’s not so much concerned with artificially inflated human drama or even in the resulting fallout from the 2010 deep sea oil rig explosion that left several BP employees dead while millions of gallons of crude gushed into the ocean. Berg’s films (from Friday Night Lights to Battleship) are always most interested in group efforts. This one’s about systems failing, and a group who must survive as best they can when it blows up in their faces. There’s the usual disaster movie opening acts which introduce a variety of recognizable actors showing up to work on the rig and the various tensions slowly straining between the men who are there to put in hard work and the men who are there to cut corners. The sharply drawn division between the laborers and the money men put me in mind of The Towering Inferno, while the somber just-the-facts tick-tock of daily routine felt more in line with the grim United 93. The synthesis of these two approaches is compelling enough, but the movie really comes alive when it all blows up.

Because Berg and screenwriters Matthew Michael Carnahan (World War Z) and Matthew Sand (Ninja Assassin) take such an interest in the mechanics of the Deepwater Horizon in the movie’s throat-clearing beginning, with loving looks at the machinery including a camera sliding up the main pipe’s muddy buildup like a colonoscopy, there’s no need for belabored explanation later. Because they let us know how it’s supposed to work, they can let the pressure build until the rig erupts. We know what’s wrong. The way there provides human stakes, letting us watch good average capable workaday guys trying their hardest to make the task of seemingly impossible corporate orders – personified by meek dopes in polo shirts – work anyway. There’s Mark Wahlberg doing his earnest best, and Kurt Russell commanding attention and respect (and rocking a fine mustache). There’s no-nonsense Gina Rodriguez and sweet Dylan O’Brien and kind Ethan Suplee. They’re likable, but then there’s John Malkovich, bald and chewing through a splendid accent as the guy from the head office willing to push forward without completing all the necessary safety checks. Even if you didn’t know where this is going, you’d know where this is going.

You’d certainly know something’s about to blow if you paid attention to the heavy-handed foreshadowing. Before leaving for the rig, Wahlbeg and his wife (Kate Hudson) watch their adorable moppet show off her visual aid for a career day explanation of her dad’s job. It’s a Coke can she manipulates like it’s underground undersea oil. As the scene ends, the can ominously explodes. Later, Russell is handed a safety award by visiting company men, a scene crosscut with Malkovich barking at underlings to ignore a warning about unsafe pressure in the pumps. So the movie lays it on a little thick. But when the danger flares, the movie’s ready to turn its eye on knobs, dials, gears, switches, buttons, keys, screens, alarms, propellers, tubes, signals, readouts, levers, and more into watching every one fail. As the whole oil rig comes crashing down around the characters, they spring into action, trying to contain the mess or, failing that, getting themselves and their co-workers to safety. Everyone on screen is coated in grease, mud, and blood. It becomes a loud, cacophonous series of explosive sequences, one perilous development leading inexorably to the next as everything falls apart.

There are political points to be made through a story like this, but Berg keeps that ambiguous. It’s a celebration of hardworking human spirit and a condemnation of heartless profit motives driving them to doom. It’s a business calamity with bloody casualties, bailed out by civic good. We see the coast guard fly into action (an echo of Sully, the other recent-event-turned-movie of the moment), and the people on board the rig do all they can to help their fellow workers. There’s a thrill to watch such dramatic life-and-death circumstances play out on the big screen, the effects large and convincing, the booming sound design rattling the theater seats with every new blast of the inferno. But there’s also sadness to the spectacle. When one man sacrifices himself to stop a piece of equipment from falling on others, Berg holds close on his wincing face, then watches as he’s blown out a window, smacking into a bulkhead on his way out of sight. I fleetingly wondered what it would be like for the real man’s family to see this movie, and I hoped they wouldn’t. And yet the movie is so effectively produced, I was fascinated by its every development, as the best laid plans of men go horribly wrong in spectacular fashion.

Chess to Impress: QUEEN OF KATWE

In the broad outlines of its narrative, Queen of Katwe looks like standard inspirational based-on-a-true-story Hollywood product. But what elevates the material here is a warm specificity and gentle, humane subtlety. It tells the story of a girl growing up in extreme poverty in Katwe, Uganda. She doesn’t attend school. Her widowed mother and three siblings scrape by selling cheap corn in the crowded marketplace. Hunger and the constant looming threat of eviction are ever-present concerns. One day she discovers a kind man running a program where he offers porridge and chess lessons to local kids. Food and fun draw her in, but passion for the game soon consumes her. She dreams of becoming a Grandmaster. The more she plays, the more she practices, the more it seems like this is a dream within reach, if only she can make it past the societal, economic, and structural impediments standing between a poor African girl and the world stage.

Director Mira Nair takes this terrific story and imbues it with a closely attuned sense of place and space, both in the details of the character’s lives and situations, and in the way their environment and experiences inform their worldviews. Nair is always a quiet, precise observer of humanity. Her works about culture clashes (like Mississippi Masala) and immigrants (The Namesake), rituals (Monsoon Wedding), radicalization (The Reluctant Fundamentalist), and the past (Vanity Fair), show an adept ability to inhabit a particular cultural context from the inside out instead of the usual outside in. Queen of Katwe is humbly remarkable in this way. Nair, from a screenplay by William Wheeler (Ray Donovan, of all things), sets the characters’ lives as the norm, with not a hint of an outsider’s eye or Western point of view intruding. This isn’t an exoticized or aestheticized foreign poverty. This is the everyday lived experience of real people, presented as such, understood with compassion and empathy, and used as the fertile soil from which its hard-fought successes can grow all the more inspirational for it.

The warm, believably lived-in spirit extends to the lovely performances. The lead girl (Madina Nalwanga) is intensely sympathetic as her timid steps into the world of chess blossom into passion, her natural talent so evident she’s soon way ahead of the rest. The other children are a fine ensemble chorus, from an adorable little boy excited to win and tearful when losing, to a sweet dimpled girl who loves the feminist power of the Queen ruling the board and throws a fit at a competition when an older competitor removes her precious favorite piece. There’s something refreshingly unaffected and natural about the child performances here. Meanwhile, the chess teacher (David Oyelowo) is so pure-hearted and good that he’s almost unbelievable, but for the weariness in his irrepressible drive to make a difference. He, too, had a rough beginning to his life, and current financial concerns, and though he left and got an education he has returned with the mission of helping children. He’s able to connect in the enriching and encouraging manner of all the best teachers.

Lupita Nyong’o plays the lead’s mother, struggling to get by but rising to every challenge. She’s suspicious of an activity that’ll take her children away from the daily selling in the streets, but also begrudgingly accepts that it just might win them the chance to go to school on a scholarship. Nyong’o carries a life of hurt in her eyes, deepening and strengthening our understanding of her perspective, and her tragic backstory, in just a glance, or a meaningful stare. Here scenes play out with such pained tenderness, it’s the subtlest and most mature (but not inappropriate or out of place) subplot I’ve seen in a family movie in ages. Together the adults in this story make up a fine core of goodness, representing how even people who agree they want the best for a child can approach the task with honest differences. Even the usual board members and rules keepers in the sports movie structure are well-intentioned, if infuriatingly small-minded at times (also a requirement of the form).

This is the best, smartest, and most honest Disney based-on-a-true-inspiration competition-based drama since Remember the Titans. It takes what could easily be sentimental or button pushing and instead treats the material seriously and respectfully, trusting in its inherent power. It doesn’t talk down to family audiences or find artificial reason to inject white or western perspective. Nair simply sees her characters where they are, regards their quotidian daily demands and chess strategy, and shows them with great clarity and minimum explanation, trusting the audience is smart enough to figure it out and follow along. This is a movie in which conflict arises naturally out of the pressures of the game and the struggles of their lives. Nothing is artificially pumped up for the sake of drama. It’s a strong, smart, and patient movie about strength of spirit and sharpness of mind, honed through hard work, good luck, and inner power. It more than earns its crowd-pleasing uplift.

The Heist Guys: MASTERMINDS

Inevitably, the best part of any Jared Hess movie is whatever The New Yorker’s Richard Brody writes about it. Brody is the film critic most on Hess’s wavelength, able to enjoy his films’ fussy eccentricity, aloof absurdism, and reliance on characters who are stumbling stupid dopes. I look forward to reading Brody’s takes because, aside from the fact he’s a terrific writer worth reading even if you disagree with his position, I wish these movies worked on me like they do him. From the outside, they seem fun, with goofy premises and promising casts of talented performers. There’s his 2004 Napoleon Dynamite, the surprise hit about a gawky high school nerd, and Nacho Libre, with Jack Black as a monk moonlighting as a luchador. His best, though still uneven and hard to hang with for their entirety, are Gentlemen Broncos, in which Jemaine Clement plays a pompous sci-fi author, and Don Verdean, starring Sam Rockwell as a fraud Christian archeologist. These all sound like fun movies, but I always watch them slightly perplexed, delighting anytime a rare laugh surfaces. In Hess’s style the humor is often hermetically sealed in a signal my brain can only intermittently pick up.

Hess’s latest is Masterminds, a movie about a group of dim schemers who attempt to pull off a massive heist and then flail around in its aftermath. It’s based on a true story, loosely I hope. If you ever in your life find yourself in a situation so bad you look around and think to yourself, “this could be a Jared Hess movie,” something has gone terribly wrong for you. The characters here are all sad members of the working poor, and the movie’s perspective is aggressively condescending and dismissive. They work minimum wage jobs, live in trailers, and shop at big box discount chains, and Hess shoots every scene to emphasize the grotesque, the tacky, the pitiable. There’s not an ounce of empathy or sympathy in the film’s mocking construction or approach, desperate people willing to do dire things for dumb reasons squirming under pressure for our amusement. Of course a movie could theoretically get away with being cruel or mercilessly satirical, but not one so purposeless as this. It’s only out to deride and denigrate, looking down its nose in heartless smirking scorn.

At least the talented performers are bright enough to sneak in some endearing, even amusing, touches now and then. They try, anyway. Zach Galifianakis is an awkward armored car driver head over heels for his shift partner (Kristen Wiig). When her dumb friend (Owen Wilson) asks her to seduce the sap into stealing $17 million in cash from the warehouse after hours, she’s willing to go along with it. The driver doesn’t know he’s being duped, and that the woman he thinks he’s colluding with in heist and in love is never going to go on the run with him. He’d be better off staying home, following the law, and marrying his creepy fiancé (Kate McKinnon). Alas, the heist goes off and goes wrong, drawing the dogged pursuit of a weary FBI agent (Leslie Jones) and a wacky hit man (Jason Sudeikis). The plot is rigged against them all – and there’s something extra squirm-worthy to consider the real people in the real story seeing themselves presented in such a funhouse-mirror farce – but the actors involved scrape out enough eccentric line readings to make it seem like a comedy.

Remarkably low-energy and scattershot, the movie slowly grinds to its conclusion through increasingly broad and mind-numbingly exaggerated silliness involving kidnappings, death threats, disguises, stupid mistakes, lazy coincidences, and strained stakes. Hess doesn’t take advantage of the inherent comedy of his cast or concept. Instead it drains into gross out gags – a gooey bit about biting into a tarantula is so puss-filled it made me gag – and preposterous developments – like a hit man easily tricked into thinking a man with his stolen birth certificate is, in fact, a long-lost crib mate. It’s not heightened so much as artificial, with shallow, static framing always straining for oddball intent with claustrophobic fussiness and flat affect instead of coming by its weirdness naturally. Maybe there’s some way to understand the movie’s creative spark or unusual perspective, but I can’t find it. Aside from a few promising flickers here and there, the whole thing plays out like dead air to me. I left scratching my head, completely unaffected, a little repulsed, more than a little annoyed, and eager to see what Richard Brody had to say about all this.

Monster House: MISS PEREGRINE'S HOME FOR PECULIAR CHILDREN

Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children is a Tim Burton movie through and through. It’s yet another of his stories about pale loner weirdos confronting an abrasive normality that has no idea what to do with them. Here’s where I’d list off a few relevant comparisons from the filmmaker’s back catalogue, but we all know in this case it’d just be a complete list of his work, from Pee Wee and Beetlejuice to Batman and Edward Scissorhands to Ed Wood and Big Eyes to Sweeney Todd and Dark Shadows and on and on. This particular iteration, adapted by screenwriter Jane Goldman (Stardust) from the book by Ransom Riggs, locates a group of fantastical freak show oddities hidden in an orphanage in Wales wilderness and a time-bending bubble of stasis that protects them from prying normal eyes. Their secret is out, though, in the creepy bedtime stories of a grandfather (Terrence Stamp) whose mysterious death sends his teenage grandson (Asa Butterfield) off in search of the peculiar children.

That sounds simple enough, and it’s certainly sufficient reason for Burton to play around with eerie horror imagery. By the time the grandson finds the peculiars he sees an invisible boy, a girl as strong as ten grown men, a firestarter, tiny twins in spooky masks and white burlap suits, a surly teen who can animate the inanimate, and a girl lighter than air who must wear lead shoes to keep her grounded. It’s the sort of hard-edged whimsy that’s fine creature fantasy and can also hit genuinely unsettling notes, especially by the time their headmistress, Miss Peregrine (Eva Green, underplaying her wild-eyed chirping mode), informs the lad that they’re being hunted by tall, pale, long-limbed, faceless tentacle-squirming invisible monsters and their haunting masters (led by a campy, pupil-less, white-haired Samuel L. Jackson). It involves a disgusting plot to eat the eyeballs of peculiars everywhere in a bid for immortality, a slight shift after the villains’ plan to suck the lifeforce out of shape-shifting birds backfired in gnarly fashion.

As I recount the basic facts of the plot this doesn’t sound so complicated. But in practice it plays out as a ton of unwieldy setup that must be hurdled to get to the fun parts. Instead of drawing its point-of-view character – and, by extension, the audience – into the world, clearly establishing lines of conflict and reasons for suspense, the film progresses as a jumble of fits and starts. It leads to confusion. As I watched grotesque tableaus and cute creepiness I took some delight in the off-kilter Burton-y visual aspects – although its images are curiously scrubbed clean of the textures and atmosphere with which his other films excel – but it wasn’t cohering. Worse, it wasn’t providing a narrative engine, or a reason to care. It’s one of those teen fantasy novel adaptations where every faction has a name and every backstory has its corresponding jargon and every gesture is imbued with meaning readers can intuit while leaving the unfamiliar in the cold. By the time it is finished introducing everybody and sets up the stakes, it turns into something much more reasonably diverting. But even then it’s hard to be too invested in the happenings.

There’s a fun conclusion involving nonsensical time travel, a tapestry of teamwork powers in action, teeth-gnashing villain monologuing, and fun unreal effects work. Burton’s facility with CG still doesn’t match the thrill of his early days with makeup, miniatures, and stop motion tricks, but at least here it’s blended in with the slightly softer visual sense. Until the movie finally dispenses with cloudy setup and gets down to action, there’s no sense of true invention, all the best moments passing quickly while the plot follows a glum drumbeat of its own convoluted internal logic. There’s an artifice that’s not like the giddy creativity of early Burton or even the confident self-referential Gothic Hammer Horror-riffing that he’s played so enjoyably before. No, here it’s just phony, with a stiff lead performance (Butterfield clearly stifled under a so-so American accent) animating a painfully routine Chosen One secret-powers-and-totally-unconvincing-romance-subplot scenario. Even the peculiars themselves aren’t full characters so much as visual gags we’re meant to love for their adorable qualities while being alternately charmed and creeped out by their macabre features. The whole movie is a mixed bag, with maybe just enough to like jumbled in with a lot to endure.