Ill-Informed Gadfly

Does anybody have the slightest idea what this movie is about? I know this much: There’s a chest. Inside the chest is a heart. The heart belongs to Davy Jones (Bill Nighy), a tentacled, undead, humanoid sea-beast. Somehow, whoever possesses the heart will rule the seas. But why? I’m not sure even the moviemakers know. The chest is a giant, rickety MacGuffin on which to build an endless series of effects-driven set pieces. “Pirates of the Carribean: Dead Man’s Chest” is loud and wearying and strangely inert, all kinetic energy but no destination — like a NASCAR race where nobody keeps score. At the end of its 2 1/2 hours, nothing has changed! The quest, such as it is, continues, as if the story were controlled by a gamer who got bored and decided to reboot.

I wasn’t wild about “Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl” either. Obviously Johnny Depp was inspired during its making and, out of thin air, fashioned Captain Jack Sparrow into an indelible character. The baffling, witless script was no help — he did it all on his own. As I recall, he seemed to be acting in a different movie than everybody else — and the rest of it wasn’t a movie I cared to watch. It was tortuously long, with repetitious sequence after sequence of ghost pirates slaughtering live English soldiers, which seems to me an unfair fight. Orlando Bloom and Keira Knightley were tragically vanilla, and Geoffrey Rush chewed the scenery, as he does.

I give both movies credit for having top-notch production design and cinematography, by Dariusz Wolski, that somehow makes the incredible look real, much like Bill Pope’s work in the “Matrix” trilogy. For me, the saddest thing is that the director, Gore Verbinski, actually has a lot of talent when he’s working on a reasonable scale: “The Ring” and “The Weather Man” are crackling entertainments with suprising depth of feeling. He hopscotches easily across genres, and he scatters evidence of his cinematic intelligence like doubloons through the bloated, soulless “Pirates” movies. Two down, one to go!

Please, Renee Zellweger: Go back to Texas.

“Little Children,” the triple-Oscar-nominated movie that New Line Cinema conspired to allow very few people to see until after the Academy Awards, has finally stumbled its way into the secondary markets. You’d be right to wonder, at this point, whether it’s worth the trouble. Beyond Jackie Earle Haley’s acute, insidious and empathetic portrayal of a pedophile – he makes you feel the smallness of this tiny man’s self-regard – I’d argue that it’s not. “Little Children” is a toothless satire of self-centered suburban parents who seek an escape from lives of quiet conformity. Director Todd Field undercuts the humor and the despair of their circumstances. Field clearly idolizes Stanley Kubrick, and he tries to replicate the tone of Kubrick’s remarkable period piece “Barry Lyndon,” which simultaneously skewered and engendered sympathy for its vapid characters. He borrows from Kubrick the bemused and intentionally redundant voice-of-God narrator, who describes the characters’ actions in flat, reductive prose. Clearly we are intended to view Sarah and Brad, the cheating stay-at-home spouses played by Kate Winslet and Patrick Wilson, as little children themselves. They may be fools, but Field shortchanges their humanity: Winslet and Wilson ache for something specific to play beyond sexual tension. The pedophile subplot at least provides a few jolts – it makes Brad and Sarah’s affair feel inconsequential. That may be the point, but it’s not a compelling one.

LISTEN: Little Children

For a more detailed discussion of this movie, written earlier … Read the rest of this entry »

If you’ve seen any of their movies, you know what you’re getting into with the brothers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne: grim, sickeningly compelling social realism, set among the working class and below in their native Belgium. I had seen “Rosetta,” and while the specifics of the story were lost to me before I refreshed my memory by reading a couple reviews, I remembered its bleak, honest vision of the economically disadvantaged and its austere formal rigor. It’s not the sort of movie that sets your mind aflutter with the expressive possibilities of cinema, but it accomplishes what it sets out to accomplish with surgical precision. For that appreciably rare achievement, “Rosetta” won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival in 1999, and the Dardennes tallied a second Golden Palm in 2005 with “L’Enfant,” which was released in U.S. theaters in 2006. I can’t say whether one movie is better than the other because “Rosetta” is so fuzzy in my memory, but “L’Enfant” is a doozy. Tough, provocative, unsympathetic but nonjudgmental, it chronicles a young petty thief, Bruno (Jérémie Renier), and his girlfriend, Sonia (Déborah François), who’s just out of the hospital after giving birth to their child. As the Dardennes make clear with sequences in which Bruno and Sonia slap and chase one another, the young lovers are children themselves, although the divergent ways they confront parenthood suggest Sonia would win the maturity sweepstakes. She wants him to get a job so they can raise their son, whom they name Jimmy, together; he says “work is for fuckers” and continues along his single-minded path. When he’s out of money, he’ll do anything to get it, and when he’s got it, he can’t spend it fast enough. It’s remarkable how quickly cash flies out of his hand and how quick he is to pawn his meager possessions for fractions of what he paid for them just days before. In the rare quiet moments when Bruno has to sit or stand and wait for something, the Dardennes like to use their camera to box him in against walls, and Renier, in a remarkable performance, conveys a scarily self-destructive restlessness. Given the detailed characterization the Dardennes and Renier are able to build in the first half-hour, it’s not at all surprising that, when Sonia leaves Bruno alone with the baby, he immediately arranges to sell his son. “L’Enfant” finds its devastating emotional center when Bruno tenderly removes the child’s hand from his shirt and lays down his jacket on a bare apartment floor, then places the boy on the jacket and leaves him for the buyer. The Dardnnes compose grim poetry, and despite their resistance to conventional film grammar — they avoid cutting until it’s absolutely necessary, and their handheld camera never calls attention to itself — they build surprising tension through the remainder of the movie as Bruno confronts the consequences of having given away his firstborn for several thousand euros. At first, he honestly does not realize that he’s done anything wrong, and the Dardennes’ power of observation allows us to understand how such an attitude, unthinkable to us, could have developed. This stuff ain’t fun to watch, but wow — what a movie.

No actor had as good a run in 2006 as Maggie Gyllenhaal, with this movie, “World Trade Center,” “Stranger Than Fiction” and “Trust the Man.” She’s a dynamo, and it’s absurd that she wasn’t nominated for an Academy Award, although I can understand it. Not enough people saw “Sherrybaby,” which only played in theaters in a handful of cities, and Academy voters appeared rightly put off by the sanitized reverence of Oliver Stone’s twin towers movie, even though Gyllenhaal’s performance broke through the soppy veneer.

Anyway, onto “Sherrybaby.” I rented it (it never played in Washington or Baltimore), and I popped it in late at night to get the taste of an excruciatingly bad movie out of my mouth, and I was thrilled by how quickly it accomplished that. It offers a pleasure that should be manifest in every movie: a director who knows how to use the camera to tell a story. Thank you, Laurie Collyer, and I look forward to more from you. “Sherrybaby” follows Jersey girl Sherry Swanson (Gyllenhaal) as she’s released from prison following a stint for drug-related theft. An alcoholic and a heroin addict since her teenage years, Sherry must rebuild her life and reconnect with her five-year-old daughter, who’s being raised by Sherry’s brother and his resentful wife.

The problem that Gyllenhaal effortlessly makes clear is that Sherry really is a baby. She’s about as emotionally mature as her daughter. She can’t let anything go, and she never sees the big picture. She lives entirely in the moment, and she can go from ecstasy to rage in an instant. She wears wildly inappropriate clothing, inviting sex, which functions as a distracting sport or as a means to get what she wants. Couple this crippling arrested development with a disarming self-confidence, and she’s truly frightening at times. At the same time, she connects beautifully with children because she never finished growing up. Gyllenhaal bares her body and her soul, yet her performance never becomes a look-at-me exercise in slumming, like, say, Halle Berry in “Monster’s Ball.” There’s no thick Jersey accent or working-class affectation; Sherry comes from a financially stable middle-class family. She’s smart and articulate enough, but that doesn’t mean she can function. And her upbringing failed her in other ways, as one horrifying scene with her father makes clear. Collyer is shrewd enough to simply document his abuse and never comment on it.

Low-budget character studies like “Sherrybaby” are often described as “good little movies,” praised and deemed irrelevant in the same breath. (They’re even treated that way by distributors, who don’t market them at all and prepare the DVDs with inadequate care; the DVD of “Sherrybaby” offered by Netflix was not letterboxed. You couldn’t even read the opening credits, for God’s sake!) We need a lot more good little movies like this, in which an actor embodies a human being in all her frail, frayed glory.

Ecstasy: No movie released in the past year has made this ephemeral feeling more gloriously permanent than “Venus,” in the scene where aging actor Maurice Russell (Peter O’Toole) and his young muse, Jessie (Jodie Whittaker), get a limo ride to a movie set. “You must be really famous,” Jessie coos. “I am,” Maurice responds, luxuriating in his ability to impress her. As Corinne Bailey Rae’s sugary neo-soul number “Put Your Records On” plays on the sound system, the driver opens the sunroof so Jessie can peer outside. She stands up, giving an unobstructed view up her short skirt to Maurice, who cranks up the stereo and rocks out.

“Venus” continues in this delightfully lecherous vein. If Maurice ever pretended to be uninterested in nubile young bodies, he’s given that up now, in the twilight of his life and confronting a prostate operation that will leave him impotent. O’Toole turns unrequited and inappropriate sexual desire into a graceful last dance. “Venus” is improbably life-affirming as it observes Maurice’s all-too-quick decay. He’s comfortable in his skin and only slightly rueful. Watch him with his ex-wife (Vanessa Redgrave), whom he cruelly left after a brief marriage, as he recalls that his greatest contribution in life was the giving of pleasure. The light in their eyes shows that he’s still capable, and that it’s a talent worth celebrating. What a splendid and thrilling late-career turn from O’Toole. To watch him is to share in Maurice’s sensual bliss.

A promising trailer had me excited last summer about this independent sex comedy about a Cleveland marketing exec (Parker Posey) who can’t achieve orgasm. “The Oh in Ohio,” though, had a very brief stay in theaters, and after catching up with it on a bare-bones, improperly letterboxed DVD, I can’t exactly call it an undiscovered gem. It’s amusing, and you could do worse, but it feels unfinished. It lacks a third act. First, Posey can’t have an orgasm. Then she can. (She solves her problem in banal fashion, with a vibrator.) That’s about it. Director Billy Kent uses Cleveland locations well, but he can’t imbue the movie with much focus or energy. When it comes to life, the actors deserve credit, because they’re not working with grade-A material. Posey and Paul Rudd, as her husband, are shrewd and sprightly comic performers. They get sly support from Danny DeVito and Keith David. Even Mischa Barton, rarely accused of competence during three seasons on “The O.C.,” makes a charming, daffy nymphet. Much as I appreciate any movie, comic or otherwise, that’s frank about sex, “The Oh in Ohio” does little to distinguish itself. It’s strangely tame.

Read “Doonesbury”; avoid this drivel. For the past 2 1/2 years, Garry Trudeau has, with grit, lucidity and authenticity, chronicled the difficulties confronted by soldiers wounded while fighting in Iraq. The story of B.D., the longtime Army reservist who lost a leg outside Fallujah, has provided comics readers with astonishing insights about the physical and psychic scars of combat. Somehow, Trudeau manages to keep the B.D. episodes funny — a testament to the depth and breadth of human experience. (If you don’t believe me or aren’t familiar with the strips, read Gene Weingarten’s exemplary profile of Trudeau from The Washington Post Magazine.)

Irwin Winkler doesn’t allow any humor into “Home of the Brave.” He doesn’t want you to forget for a second how serious his movie is. This strategy backfires, of course, since screenwriter Mark Friedman supplies some legendary forehead-slapping groaners. My favorite, spoken by the estranged boyfriend of a female soldier (Jessica Biel) who lost her right hand: “I guess you only need one good hand to push people away.” Forget how lame this is; it’s not even accurate! To have one good hand, you need one bad hand; she has one hand!

“Home of the Brave” is continually straining credulity, in ways large and small. Biel comes home from Walter Reed Army Medical Center after one month, already wearing a prosthesis (she heals and rehabs so fast, apparently, that Wolverine would be jealous), and her family meets her at the airport. Um, they never went to visit her? Do they hate her? I wondered that a lot whenever the soldiers interacted with their relatives. The transition back to life at home is difficult enough when everyone you know isn’t a total asshole or an incompetent boob, but that’s what Winkler and Friedman inflict on their wounded warriors. It’s insulting, both to the steadfast fathers, mothers, husbands and wives of our fighting men and women, and to the intelligence of the audience.

After an hour and a half or so of accumulated misery, Winkler decides his Iraq veterans have been through enough and ties up their stories in neat little bows — well, except for Jamal Atkins (Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson), whom he callously kills off, courtesy of the most idiotic police hostage team ever shown on film. Remember what I said earlier about assholes and incompetent boobs? They’re behind the cameras, too.

Penélope Cruz spends much of “Volver” poised on the precipice between sorrow and wrath, and it’s not until near the end that we find out why. Yet we remain patient because Pedro Almodóvar’s storytelling is so confident, and because Cruz’s Raimunda, while mysterious, is warm and tough and true – a radiant survivor. She allows a messy stew of emotions to bubble up from her seemingly flawless exterior. For whatever reason, it took a gay director to equip Cruz with neck-snapping curves and the most spectacular cleavage since Sophia Loren. “Volver” offers the uncomplicated pleasure of spending time with beautiful and three-dimensional women. It’s a relaxed and breezy effort for Almodóvar, who sets aside the formal ambition of his last two movies, the masterpiece “Talk to Her” and the difficult but worthy polemic “Bad Education.” He weaves a twisty domestic melodrama with offhand mastery. The title means “to return,” and it suggests the unfinished business and unspoken troubles surrounding Raimunda, her sister, her 14-year-old daughter, her recently deceased aunt and her aunt’s cancer-stricken neighbor. Almodóvar begins the movie in a graveyard, and he throws his characters into a limbo where death only complicates matters for those left behind. There’s plenty of confusion and misdirection, yet “Volver” has nothing but sweetness at its center.

LISTEN: Volver

“Pan’s Labyrinth” engages your conscious and your unconscious, your brain and your gut. It’s wondrous but horrifying, timeless but somehow entirely new. These contradictions emerge easily from the structure of Guillermo del Toro’s electrifying fairy tale, which mixes beguiling fantasy with the repellent reality of Fascism in 1940s Spain. Del Toro’s hero is an 11-year-old girl named Ofelia whose mother has married a sadistic captain in General Francisco Franco’s Army. While her stepfather seeks to crush what remains of the Republican resistance, Ofelia retreats into a magical underworld guarded by a faun who may have similar tyrannical impulses. As in his previous Spanish Civil War tale, “The Devil’s Backbone,” del Toro subjects children to shocking physical and emotional trauma. He knows that political upheaval doesn’t spare the young, and that they can sometimes see the folly of ideology more clearly than adults. The way he incorporates this theme into the parallel universes of “Pan’s Labyrinth” is nothing short of masterful. Del Toro tells his stories with visual dynamism and rigor. He has a painterly feel for the way color can evoke mood, and his set pieces, particularly Ofelia’s encounter with a spindly, voracious monster with eye sockets in his palms, throb with the excitement that only great movies can conjure. “Pan’s Labyrinth” is heart-rending and ecstatic – a work of art to be treasured.

LISTEN: Pan’s Labyrinth

For more on this movie, Click here to read my interview with del Toro.