Ill-Informed Gadfly

I can’t recall an R-rated comedy in which the actors were more uncomfortable with profanity than they are in “Going the Distance.” “F this” and “F that,” they keep saying, but they’re often embarrassed about it, and it’s hard to blame them. In a different movie, cursing would lend verisimilitude to the dialogue, but the actors understand they’re playing characters in a cutesy-poo romantic comedy, not real people. The makers of “Going the Distance” have clearly been pressured, either implicitly or explicitly, to dial up the raunch. “Wedding Crashers” or “The 40-Year-Old Virgin,” this is not. Yes, it’s plausible that a dating couple separated by 3,000 miles would get horny, but when the long-distance pair is played by Drew Barrymore and Justin Long, few will be eager to see them act on those desires. Barrymore was a sex symbol for a few months in 1995, when she posed for Playboy and flashed David Letterman. For the past decade, she’s made herself a symbol of plucky girl power, a suitable onscreen mate only for milquetoast men happy to cede the spotlight — your Luke Wilsons, your Jimmy Fallons and, inevitably, your Justin Longs. Turns out the Mac guy has a toned rear end, which I can’t imagine anybody needed to know. Barrymore and Long clearly enjoy each other’s company, but they struggle to share that enthusiasm with the audience. It’s a story of banal infatuation, with geography the only obstacle in the path of a thoroughly boring couple. “Going the Distance” only feels like it lasts longer than a coast-to-coast flight.

“The American” is a spare, elegant, beautifully directed and ultimately vapid film about an aging assassin on reluctant assignment in the Italian countryside. George Clooney plays the title role, in a performance even more subdued and minimalist than his masterful work in “Michael Clayton.” Clooney shows physical grace and emotional intelligence as he reacts to his immediate circumstances. But he makes no attempt to let you in. Where Michael Clayton was a three-dimensional person, “The American” is a stylized abstraction. A more commercial movie would try to make this distant killer more sympathetic or excuse him for his profession, but Clooney and director Anton Corbijn treat him as an existential hero who lives entirely in the present. That doesn’t mean his deeds are fascinating. He works, custom-building an assault rifle for a shifty female client. He strolls through an ancient hillside town, occasionally warding off a gun-toting stalker. He bonds with the local priest. And he satisfies his carnal desires with an improbably beautiful hooker who promptly falls in love with him. Corbijn stages these episodes with a stately rhythm and uses his locations exquisitely. The town and its narrow, hilly, zigzagging streets can be ethereal one moment, menacing the next. And when the prostitute disrobes in front of a gurgling stream, it’s an ecstatic moment. The fine filmmaking masks the cliches that undergird the action, but it can’t transcend them, especially in the desultory, uninspired final sequence. “The American” ends as it must, but there’s no resonance to be found in the gloom.

Without Robert Duvall, “Get Low” would be tough to endure. With him, it’s mostly tolerable and, for a few minutes near the end, glorious. No description of this boutique drama, set in rural Tennessee in the 1930s, could make it sound exciting. Director Aaron Schneider assembles dry, talky scenes and awkward transitions, apparently confident he can coast on quirk and the talent of his cast. Duvall stars as Felix Bush, an elderly hermit who proposes throwing himself a living funeral. Felix is universally feared and misunderstood, yet he wants anyone with a story about him to show up and tell it. There’s no reason he can’t pull off this bizarre gathering, especially with the help of a cash-strapped funeral director played by Bill Murray. What little conflict there is resides within Felix: The question is why he wants to participate in his own funeral in the first place. Schneider drops plenty of hints to this central mystery, and the audience has the broad outlines well in hand by the climax. That’s when Duvall fills in the specifics with a heart-stopping monologue. Whether you think it’s worth slogging through the rest of “Get Low” to see Duvall deliver this acting master stroke is a matter of taste. The scene is so good, and the movie that precedes it is so modest, that I think it might be just as affecting if you watch it on YouTube. Duvall clearly understands Felix and knows how he would behave in any situation, even if the performance is a bit hammy by his standards. He has no choice but to carry “Get Low,” and while he’s up to the task, he can’t make it a noteworthy film by himself.

Midway through “Eat Pray Love,” a friend reminds hero Elizabeth Gilbert why she has traveled to an ashram in India. “This is about you!” he says. It’s hard to imagine that Gilbert, or anyone in the audience, needs to hear those words. “Eat Pray Love” is an odyssey of self-absorption, a yearlong journey to the continents of Me, Myself and I. Plotless, superficial and devoid of irony, this Julia Roberts vehicle only works if you never question the motives or validity of anything Gilbert says or does. Five minutes into the movie, she kneels in her spacious Manhattan home and weeps as she prays for a solution to her troubled marriage. I was waiting for a hint of satire that never arrived. Director Ryan Murphy’s treatment of Gilbert is entirely earnest — deferential to her popular book and to the charisma of his star. I think Roberts is great too, but I also think Gilbert’s life wasn’t so bad and that her freedom to spend a year in Italy, India and Bali, then come home and write a book about it, was fueled by extraordinary good fortune. Gilbert hardly acknowledges her privileged circumstances, illustrating the distinction between self-involvement and self-awareness. Off she goes, and Murphy, working with top-shelf cinematographer Robert Richardson, makes certain Italy looks delectable, India looks chaotic and Bali looks like paradise. Since there’s no story, Murphy plays up any hint of conflict or feeling with overwrought camera movement and a cloying score. He even uses a Mozart aria. “Eat Pray Love” is no opera. It’s a narcissistic travelogue — “Sarah Palin’s Alaska” with glitzy production values.

“I Am Love” is a swoony, voluptuous movie that rhapsodizes over food, architecture and human faces and bodies. It can be called operatic both for its heightened atmosphere and for the relative simplicity of its plot. A wealthy family, an affair, a tragedy: That’s about it, but “I Am Love” packages everything beautifully. The project was shepherded to the screen by its star, the consistently daring Scottish actress Tilda Swinton, who learned to speak Italian to play the wife of a Milanese textile heir. She looks the part as she strolls the avenues with sunglasses and shopping bags. But she lacks the verbal grace of a native speaker, and it’s eventually revealed that her character, Emma Recchi, is Russian. It’s a critical moment of vulnerability that allows Emma to drop her imperious veneer and sets up the momentous events that follow. Swinton is a compelling and magisterial performer, and she proves an electrifying muse for director Luca Guadagnino. He’s an avid natural filmmaker who uses images to propel the story and transforms ordinary events into mesmerizing cinema. He somehow finds a fresh approach to sex scenes, staging them first elliptically, then explicitly, but never giving in to cliché. There’s hardly a line of dialogue in the sad but exhilarating final reel, and Guadagnino communicates every moment with gorgeous lucidity. When it’s over, you may question whether “I Am Love” has any lasting significance, but nonetheless, it’s a joy to behold, packed from start to finish with aesthetic thrills.

“The Kids Are All Right” is an engrossing, if mild, comedy-drama that chronicles an eventful summer for a close-knit family. Director and co-writer Lisa Cholodenko hits on familiar emotions as she explores the everyday conflicts of two married parents and two teenagers, and she correctly sees nothing remarkable about the fact that the parents aren’t Mom and Dad, but Moms. Both kids were conceived via artificial insemination, and they decide to track down their biological father. Their encounters with bio-dad expose the turbulence beneath the family’s placid surface. Cholodenko is a wry and skillful observational humorist: She trusts that facial expressions and intonation will generate laughs from attentive viewers. “The Kids Are All Right” tries to pay equal attention to all four family members, but Cholodenko falls short, perhaps unintentionally, thanks to Julianne Moore’s effervescent performance as Jules, the spacier, less successful of the two moms. Moore steals the movie, and hers is the only character arc that feels complete. Annette Bening’s Nic is a sour, humorless, fanatical control freak with a drinking problem. As the sperm donor, Mark Ruffalo projects sensitivity and sex appeal, but at some point his good-guy persona doesn’t jibe with his actions. Cholodenko can’t let him stay sympathetic, because she needs to goose the drama and reaffirm the bonds of the nuclear family. “The Kids Are All Right” ultimately feels conservative, an affirmation of responsible two-parent households and the well-adjusted kids they raise. It’s well-made, but you can’t call it exciting.

“Inception” contains some of the most spectacular nonsense ever committed to film – drivel with intellectual and aesthetic rigor. Writer-director Christopher Nolan crafts a fine impersonation of a good movie, with strong, brooding performances, gorgeous atmospherics and inventive, if showy, digital effects. But Nolan is more interested in toying with his audience than telling a story that holds together, a gambit that should be familiar from his previous original screenplays, “Memento” and “The Prestige.” Leonardo DiCaprio stars as a corporate spy who steals from people’s dreams. He’s hired to attempt the more ambitious “inception” — planting an idea in the mind of a target. The genre trappings are familiar from any heist movie — a damaged hero whose only hope for future happiness rests on one last job. To its credit, “Inception” stages this material intriguingly, within an elaborate, shared dreamworld. This choice allows DiCaprio’s dead wife, played with luminous bitterness by Marion Cotillard, to supply the emotional weight. But Nolan eventually loses control, shuffling between incoherent and unnecessary action sequences, underlined by a droning, bleating Hans Zimmer score. His aim is to tantalize people into seeing the movie again, but there’s a difference between a lucid film that rewards multiple viewings and a deliberately vague puzzle picture that taunts you to make sense of it all. “Inception” is the work of a filmmaker with something to hide. Nolan hasn’t made up his mind or committed fully to his ideas — so he asks the viewer to do the hard work for him.

“The Last Airbender” was an old-fashioned turkey, easy to mock for its spectacular ineptitude and its desperate 11th-hour conversion to 3D. A week later brings a new bid to goad families into theaters, the animated comedy “Despicable Me,” about a washed-up supervillain who adopts three orphan girls. It will get better reviews. But to these eyes it’s a more insidious and depressing film. “The Last Airbender” was clueless and dunderheaded; it couldn’t help itself. The makers of “Despicable Me” know exactly what they’re doing, and what they’re doing is reprehensible. It’s a calculatingly vapid commodity, always making the lazy, obvious choices. It doesn’t entertain; at best, it distracts. It has virtually no story or likable characters, so it’s packed with throwaway sight gags, most of which ask us to chuckle at physical pain or humiliation. The French filmmakers lack vision or charm, and they wallow matter-of-factly in the coarsest elements of American culture. They make no attempt to amuse adults and children at the same time. “Despicable Me” is festooned with references that young viewers have no capacity to understand, like a shameless and pointless homage to the horse’s-head scene in “The Godfather.” On top of the violence and mild scatology, there is of course cloying sentimentality, as the malevolent if hapless bad guy is reformed by fatherhood. Of course, he only turned dastardly because his mother neglected him. The moral, then, is that parental love is a good thing, so take it to heart and spare your kids from “Despicable Me.”

“The Last Airbender” plays like the most expensive instructional tai chi video ever made. The heroes can move air, water and earth with their minds, and before they do, they often gesticulate like the congregants in a Beijing park at sunrise. Since the acting is so poor, the story so incoherent and the dialogue so wooden, they might as well turn to the camera and explain earnestly how the ancient martial art enhances their physical and mental well-being. Instead, they just do their tai chi and are surrounded by elaborate and costly digital effects. It’s not clear what the practice has to do with telekinesis. Mostly I think it’s thrown in to add some Asian flavor to this inexplicable production. “The Last Airbender” was adapted from an anime-style Nickelodeon series, but it’s about as Asian as P.F. Chang’s. The art direction, the costumes and the mythology carry Eastern influences, but the heroes are white, the villains are mostly Indian and other ethnicities get thrown in only when convenient. Paramount Pictures must be desperate for a new tentpole to throw 150 million dollars at this ragged material and entrust it to the faded filmmaking prodigy M. Night Shyamalan. His name doesn’t sell tickets anymore, and the actors are mostly unknown, so the 2D production was retrofitted for 3D, which means you wear the uncomfortable glasses but rarely notice any stereoscopic effect. It doesn’t help that the term “avatar” is crucial to the plot. “The Last Airbender” was intended as the first chapter of a trilogy, but like “The Golden Compass,” it may endure as an embarrassing standalone.

You know who you are. You love movies, or at least you used to, but you’ve been avoiding them this summer because everything on the marquee looks like the shoddy remake of a sequel to a video game. I can’t say “Knight and Day” will enthrall the discerning moviegoers who’ve sent the box office into a well-deserved slump, but it should placate them. At least it did for me. The versatile director James Mangold relies on an endangered formula: A-list stars, glamorous locations, action, humor and romance. “Knight and Day” knowingly takes place in a fantasy version of the real world, where feats of derring-do are tossed off blithely, recognizable in their aftermath only because the hair of Tom Cruise or Cameron Diaz is slightly tousled. Cruise again puts his feral energy in service of comedy, satirizing the super-competent Ethan Hunt of his “Mission: Impossible” series. Diaz is less ideally cast. Her persona in material like this is bubbly-flighty-ditzy-clumsy, and she does it well. But it doesn’t jell with her character’s occupation, restoring vintage cars, or with her surprising acumen in the world of high-stakes espionage. Mangold packs every scene with delirious action and banter, and it’s charming, especially for the first hour or so. But just when the movie should be serving up its most memorable delights, it falls into a rut, repeating setups, transitions and barely-literate catchphrases, like Cruise reacting to desperate situations with three words: “I got this.” “Knight and Day” is similarly enamored of its own sleek competence. It seduces itself when it should still be seducing the audience.