Ill-Informed Gadfly

Ambition and laziness, virtuosity and incompetence: All collide in “Idlewild,” a period musical starring André Benjamin and Antwan Patton, a.k.a. André 3000 and Big Boi of OutKast. Perhaps I shouldn’t even call it a period musical, given its blasé anachronisms and the disconnect between the songs and the story. Templates exist for what “Idlewild” is trying to do: “Moulin Rouge,” which used modern music to capture the exuberant spirit, if not the specific sound, of a long-dead time and place, and “Singin’ in the Rain,” arguably the best movie musical ever made, which wove an original story around existing songs. Still, you might feel cheated to hear Patton and Benjamin performing cuts from their masterful 2003 double album, “Speakerboxx/The Love Below,” while nominally playing a speakeasy manager and his piano player in Prohibition-era Georgia. Especially given that the movie presents Benjamin’s character as a crackerjack songwriter just waiting to bust loose. If he’s so good, how about letting us hear a couple more of his songs?

Writer-director Bryan Barber is an accomplished director of music videos, including the exuberant clip for OutKast’s “Hey Ya!” But I can recall only one MTV director making a more awkward transition into narrative filmmaking, and that’s Tarsem Singh, director of “The Cell.” Barber’s dialogue is a parade of clunky clichés, and despite his bursts of visual energy, the story moves at a glacial pace. He can’t dramatize conflict or build tension. “Idlewild” needs more wild and less idle.

LISTEN: Idlewild

“We can’t all be you, Alan.”

This line, spoken by Claus von Bulow (Jeremy Irons) to Alan Dershowitz (Ron Silver) gets to the heart of my reservations about this fine 1990 movie. “Reversal of Fortune” is a paean to the genius of Dershowitz, and its commitment to showing his unmatched intelligence, wit, verve and moral fortitude makes me queasy. He gets to make big showy speeches about the sanctity of the legal system; he turns his home into a legal-eagle commune where his students prod each other to excellence between games of basketball and ping-pong; in his spare time, he defends “two black kids” (as he always refers to them) on death row for a crime they didn’t commit. All of this may be true, but the tone is altogether too worshipful.

It’s much more fun observing fragments of the absurd, self-destructive marriage between socialites Claus and Sunny von Bulow, which effectively ends when Sunny (Glenn Close) slips into a persistent vegetative state after an overdose of insulin, among other drugs. As the movie opens, Claus has been convicted of trying to kill Sunny, and it’s Dershowitz’s job to reverse that verdict on appeal. In a bravura stroke from director Barbet Schroeder and screenwriter Nicholas Kazan, Sunny narrates the movie from her living limbo. Schroeder and Kazan don’t cheat, though: They never let Sunny reveal what’s never been determined — exactly what caused the coma. The movie relies on Claus’ recollections and other public records; Sunny’s narration is a stylistic device that humanizes her but doesn’t leap into the unknowable. “Reversal of Fortune,” then, is a fine example of how cinema can mix objective and subjective points of view to explore the elusiveness of truth. Schroeder handles the complicated structure with ease; he is a talented filmmaker who seemed to lose his ambition after this movie, churning out schlocky thrillers, until he redeemed himself with “Our Lady of the Assassins.”

Schroeder has a sure hand with his actors. As played by Close and Irons, Sunny and Claus never become stereotypes of the idle rich. Close movingly plumbs Sunny’s sadness and desperation. She knows her marriage is a sham and can live with that, but when confronted with love letters written by Claus’ mistress or Claus’ suggestion that they divorce, she breaks down, and Close earns the pathos. Whether her husband pushed her over the edge or not, Sunny was clearly suicidal. And Irons, who won the Academy Award for Best Actor, brings a redemptive eccentricity to Claus. He is comfortable with wealth and privilege, yet he can’t adhere to the role of a docile society husband. Irons makes you want to believe Claus, yet he never lets you forget how Claus feels trapped, how frightened he is by his wife’s volcanic unpredictability — and how such feelings may have prodded him to try to kill her. With lesser actors, you might ask, “Who cares about these people?” But Irons and Close make them impossible to dismiss.

I play golf; Woody Allen makes movies.

This may seem like an inappropriate analogy, but it’s not. To some degree, we all need diversions, things we can get wrapped up in to help ward off our existential angst. Allen is lucky: He can make a living at his diversion. I’m a better-than-average golfer but not good enough to quit my day job. But golf is about as important to me as Allen’s movies are to him. It’s a source of joy, something I can immerse myself in so fully that I forget about everything else going on in the world. Would Allen make a movie every year if this weren’t also the case for him?

I’m serious about this. Ask Allen why he makes movies. He will tell you. He is a brutally honest interview subject. Scott Foundas did a great piece on him in LA Weekly last year that got deeper into his filmmaking process than anything I’d seen previously. It was also noteworthy because he got Allen to admit that some of his recent films aren’t very good. Allen singled out “The Curse of the Jade Scorpion” in particular; I hadn’t seen him get so specific before. More typical is this, David Segal’s recent interview with Allen in The Washington Post, in which Allen, 70, explains that the process of moviemaking is a great way to avoid confronting the deterioration of his body and his inevitable passage into the void. He also explains that he doesn’t spend much time writing his scripts and that even if he thinks he could get a better take after the 6 o’clock whistle has blown, he usually doesn’t bother. A few years ago, I remember him describing himself making a movie as “like an institutionalized person who basket-weaves.”

In a way I admire Allen for keeping himself busy by tossing off movie after movie, year after year. But here’s the big drawback to his method: It’s insulting to the audience. If it’s obvious he’s not trying very hard — if he admits it — why should we bother? I’ve never seen him answer that question. Frankly, I can’t even answer it myself: I continue to see his movies even when I have reason to expect the worst. It’s my pathology. Why can’t I help myself? Probably because, despite his crippling limitations, Allen has given me a lot of pleasure over the years. And as “Match Point,” “Sweet and Lowdown” and “Deconstructing Harry” prove, he’s still capable. (That would be three times in the past decade, if you’re keeping score.) Imagine how differently we would regard him if those were the only three movies he’d made over that span!

All this brings me to “Scoop.” It’s not the worst movie Allen has ever made, as Stephen Hunter claimed in The Post, although Hunter was right about why it’s so bad. But if you want to see Allen at his nadir, try sitting through the tedious, insufferable, self-consciously Bergmanesque dramas “Interiors” and “Another Woman.” I would argue that the shockingly wheezy, flat comedies “The Curse of the Jade Scorpion” and “Hollywood Ending” are worse as well. “Scoop,” after all, at least has Scarlett Johansson, doing her best to inject some vigor into Allen’s undercooked conceit.

Allen claims he has to shoot his movies in London now because it’s the only place he can find financiers who won’t meddle with his creative process. I think someone paying him to churn out crap like “Scoop” would be right to meddle. A studio director who showed the level of commitment that Allen brings to “Scoop” would risk being fired. The movie is astonishingly lazy. The gimmick is that Sondra Pransky (Johansson), a college journalism student in London for the summer, gets fed an incendiary story by the ghost of a legendary Fleet Street reporter (Ian McShane). Having a dead guy as Sondra’s source frees up Allen from having to worry at all about where the information is coming from. It’s hard to imagine thinner, more irresponsible storytelling.

Allen’s motive for making “Scoop” is transparent. After he watched Johansson burn up the screen in “Match Point,” he wanted to work with her again — and to perform with her this time. He doesn’t even try to inject himself into the story plausibly. He plays Sid Waterman, a.k.a. the Great Splendini, a magician whose tricks and shtick are as tired as Allen’s moviemaking. (I’d like to think there is some sly satire in the idea of such a lame act playing in the West End; after all, the London stage is where hoary old shows live forever, filling seats with tourists who don’t know any better. Allen can’t put himself in the company of “The Mousetrap” or “Starlight Express,” but he can play a performer whose Catskills gig would have run out in 1958.) Anyway, Sondra first sees the ghost while she’s acting as a volunteer for one of Sid’s tricks. Fine. But then, for no reason whatsoever, she insists that he accompany her while she does her sleuthing. That way, Allen gets to be in the rest of the movie.

I do appreciate Allen’s stylistic quirks, even when they shock me. He works with his costume designer to make Johansson, easily the most glamorous woman to grace the screen since Michelle Pfeiffer, look like Mia Farrow in “Hannah and Her Sisters.” She wears dowdy, curve-concealing layered clothing and big, round, gold-framed eyeglasses that went out of style in 1992. About the glasses, she says, “I need them. I can’t wear contacts — I don’t like putting my finger in my eyeball.” Johansson gets a laugh with this line. But this is Allen talking through her. Imagine any beautiful, blond, privileged American 21-year-old saying these words.

Allen is pathologically self-deprecating. He says he’s not a great artist, and that his best movies are happy accidents. At one point I would have called that modesty, but now I believe him. Even though he’s made a handful of great movies — including “Match Point,” released just last year — and a dozen or so very good ones, his work rarely has the ambition, depth of feeling or resonance that heralds art. And no one who takes the art of cinema seriously could release “Scoop” without being embarrassed.

I was very tired when I saw this 1948 movie, which played for one week at the Charles Theatre in Baltimore, but I didn’t want to pass up the opportunity to see Carol Reed directing a Graham Greene screenplay, adapted from his own short story, in what amounted to a warm-up to “The Third Man,” released a year later. In a fantastic hide-and-seek sequence, we see Reed trying out the tilted camera angles he would use throughout his classic of postwar malaise.

“The Fallen Idol” definitely feels like a minor work for Reed and Greene. It’s slow and talky. While Reed makes great use of interior and exterior space, it could almost be a play. But it’s interesting to see some of Greene’s signature elements — infidelity and existential crises among the diplomatic corps — through the eyes of a child. The fallen idol of the title is a butler named Baines (Ralph Richardson) who has essentially raised the son of the French ambassador in London. Although he doesn’t completely understand what he’s witnessing, the boy finds out that Baines has been having an affair with a French woman, Julie (Michele Morgan), and wants to leave his cold, shrewish wife (Sonia Dresdel). Someone dies, and in trying to protect Baines, the boy almost always does the wrong thing. Richardson, an actor I’ve seen little of, is wonderful as Baines, playing a bottled-up, unhappy man with irrepressible spirit. He knows he’s screwed, but he can’t get too morose about it.

The members of Broken Lizard, a comedy troupe formed at Colgate University, look like they had a lot of fun making their 2002 debut feature. And, after a slow start, their good time rubs off on you. “Super Troopers” crescendos nicely: The second half is full of laughs, and the plot is slyly well-constructed. The five Broken Lizard guys play laid-back, goofball Vermont state troopers confronting a rivalry with the arrogant local police force and the possible closure of their barracks. They show a willingness to do whatever is required physically, whether it’s growing a credible state-trooper mustache or display a flabby naked body in a jail shower scene. The movie is rated R, allowing for occasional raunchiness, but more important, it lets the actors relax and swear casually, the way people really do. It’s much more goofy than it is dirty. Jay Chandrasekhar, presumably the leader of Broken Lizard (he directed the movie and plays the straightest-arrow trooper, which in this context isn’t saying much) has a relaxed, everyday charisma, and he gets good comic mileage out of his ethnicity (Indian), which is a bit hard to place in whitewashed Vermont. I don’t know if Broken Lizard did any research, but they seem to get state-trooper culture. Chandrasekhar’s character is nicknamed “Thorny,” much like a Maryland State Police spokesman I talk to frequently while reporting the news: Sgt. Thornnie Rouse.

While Broken Lizard appeared to misfire with their next movie, “Club Dread,” and Chandrasekhar sold out by directing “The Dukes of Hazzard,” their latest feature, “Beerfest,” set for release Aug. 25, looks very promising. Comedy needs guys like this.

Edward Norton’s latest vehicle is a tepid puzzle picture with an underwhelming twist ending. I worry about Norton: He’s so bullheaded in his insistence on rewriting scripts and meddling with directors’ visions that I fear he has consigned himself to working with lesser talents that he can push around. Hence this year, in which he’s starred in “Down in the Valley,” directed by David Jacobson, and “The Illusionist,” from Neil Burger. Who? Exactly. The first hour of “Down in the Valley” was fantastic, the rest self-conscious and precious, in love with itself. Now, “The Illusionist,” which serves up mild, easily digested intrigue.

Burger, who directed the wretched “Interview with the Assassin,” capably conjures turn-of-the-century Vienna. He has a harder time getting his actors on the same page or speaking in the same accents. (This is what happens when you cast Jessica Biel in a European period piece.) Norton plays Eisenheim, a magician with mysterious methods. Biel is the aristocrat he loves, but she’s bethrothed to the evil, petulant prince (Rufus Sewell). Paul Giamatti is the best thing in the movie as the police inspector torn between his loyalty to the prince and his admiration for Eisenheim’s illusions. He brings touching human frailty to a morally compromised character. “Are you completely corrupt?” an aggrieved Norton asks him. “Not completely, no,” Giamatti responds, only slightly miffed. Norton brings his usual close-to-the-vest intensity to Eisenheim — he loves playing characters with secrets. But unlike in “Primal Fear,” “Fight Club” or even “Down in the Valley,” the revelation amounts to little.

“World Trade Center” is the 9/11 movie that could have been made in 2002. Solemn, reverent and intellectually sedate, it demands nothing but unceasing admiration for the police officers and firefighters who rushed into the burning twin towers in an attempt to rescue civilians. Despite working with far greater financial resources, director Oliver Stone has nowhere near the expansive vision that Paul Greengrass brought to his brilliant “United 93.” Both films are apolitical, but “United 93” opens itself up to troubling and provocative interpretation. “World Trade Center” is closed-off, hermetic, sanitized. It agrees to the fiction that what happened on 9/11 could be certified PG-13 by the Motion Picture Association of America. This new restraint doesn’t suit Stone. Forget politics: His football movie, “Any Given Sunday,” had twice the energy and passion.

Nevertheless, Stone wrings plenty of affecting moments from the true accounts of the final two Port Authority police officers to be pulled from the rubble of the towers. For me, most of them came from Michael Pena as Officer Will Jimeno and the ferocious Maggie Gyllenhaal as his pregnant wife, Allison. Their debate about what to name their second child, developed through flashbacks and cross-cutting, is beautifully played. And Gyllenhaal is brave enough to show that our responses to horrific news don’t always follow the appropriate, somber script. Too bad Stone doesn’t show similar courage. “World Trade Center” compresses unprecedented tragedy into paint-by-numbers formula.

LISTEN: World Trade Center

This is an exhilarating scare picture. It made me glad to be alive, on two levels — that I was still alive when it was over, and that I had the privilege of being alive to see it and savor its throbbing visceral impact. There’s no genre I feel less informed about than horror, but I know a great one when I see it. “The Descent” is visually arresting and coherent, dramatically shrewd, and terrifying.

The premise couldn’t be simpler: Six adventure-loving women explore an uncharted cave with creepy-crawlies inside. But writer-director Neil Marshall contributes shadings that elevate it far beyond the banal horror scenario. He begins with a whitewater rafting run by three friends — Sarah (Shauna Macdonald), Juno (Natalie Mendoza) and Beth (Alex Reid). When it’s over, Sarah climbs into a car with her husband and daughter, and with the camera behind them, we watch her husband drift across the center line, causing a freak accident that kills him and the daughter.

A year later, Juno has planned a caving expedition in the mountains of North Carolina. (This is a British-made film, and I believe the characters are intended to be Scottish, Irish and English. Holly, played by Nora-Jane Noone, mentions she’s from Galway, where Noone really is from. But Juno has Asian heritage and a hard-to-place accent, and a check of IMDB reveals that many of the actors had international upbringings. I suspect this non-specific Euro-casting was intentional on Marshall’s part — the women are brought together by their shared passion for outdoorsy pursuits.)

Marshall brings a somber, elegiac tone to the accident and the emotional fits and starts of Sarah’s recovery. It’s not just a deus ex machina intended to drive the plot — among other things, “The Descent” is a moving study of grief. Sarah’s loss has made her more wary, more conscious of her surroundings, and she’s the first to notice something’s not quite right about the supposedly tourist-friendly cave Juno is taking them to.

Now, onto the terror. What makes “The Descent” so amazing is that you’re already a jangled ball of nerves before the creatures even show up. Marshall plays on a variety of fears, both elemental and specific. The dark. Falling. Being trapped. Being crushed. Abandonment. Suffocation. Painful, debilitating injury. Marshall’s visualization of physical space is superb. Somehow, despite all the movies I’ve seen, I always believed these women were really in a cave — and weren’t likely to get out.

Then, the brilliant introduction of the creatures, referred to in the closing credits as Crawlers. Presumably they were once human — either miners or just hillbillies — and they evolved into pasty-skinned, carnivorous cave dwellers. (”The Descent” plays lightly with foreigners’ “Deliverance”-inspired fears of Appalachia.) Of course Sarah is the first to see one (she has already heard them and found other evidence of their presence). No one believes her, but soon afterward, one shows up, in close-up, in the viewfinder of an infrared video camera operated by Holly. Then, it’s feeding time. The cutting in the fight scenes is a little faster than I’d prefer, but Marshall’s filmmaking remains lucid. We always know who’s struggling with what, and where. The violence escalates, and Marshall plunges into a vivid hellscape. He embraces the grotesque, but always in a plausible context. He sets clear parameters and doesn’t stray from them. With a title like “The Descent,” Marshall clearly had Dante on the brain. Hell, he posits, is a lot closer to the surface than we think.

Ugh. I know I’m supposed to like this, but … ugh. James L. Brooks is just so hard to take. He’s certainly up to something — you wouldn’t mistake one of his movies for anybody else’s. He creates emotionally rich studies of smart, complicated people. But I don’t think what he does is cinema. It’s mostly people standing around and talking, and the dialogue is dense, wordy and patently false. He has the actors throw in stammers and mistakes every now and again in a transparently thin attempt to approximate the rhythms of actual speech. But mostly he just allows them to let fly with their feelings in a hyperarticulate manner that just doesn’t happen except in stage plays. On screen, the result is clunky and cloying. Brooks won’t allow the audience to discover through action the loneliness and desperation of the Holly Hunter character: Early on, he has her burst into tears whenever she’s by herself.

Thematically, he’s onto something as he explores the dumbing-down of network news. But the specifics never feel right. The vapid William Hurt character enjoys a meteoric rise because he’s good-looking and smooth on camera, but Brooks shortchanges the work even he would have to do to get the stories he gets. The layoffs that decimate the newsroom appear to come from nowhere, and Hunter’s climactic discovery of an ethical lapse by Hurt rings false, too — what he did should be readily apparent to any professional broadcaster who was paying the slightest attention.

All that said, Brooks gives his actors plenty to chew on. Hunter and Albert Brooks are wonderful as driven, principled and emotionally infantile workaholics. And Hurt is simply brilliant. He sets his fierce intelligence aside so casually it’s breathtaking. Yet he’s far from an empty shell: He’s driven to succeed, too, and genuinely thrilled to discover that he’s good at something. He personifies everything that’s wrong with the news business, and yet he has roundness and fullness. You root for him. You feel that he really does want to pay his dues instead of simply accepting every promotion that comes his way. Hurt had leading-man looks in the ’80s (”Broacast News” was released in 1987), and yet he approached his parts like the character actor he’s always been. I will remember his performance fondly as I reflect with satisfaction that I never have to see this movie again.

I haven’t rushed out to see all the stylized melodramas of Douglas Sirk; in fact, this is the only one I’ve seen, and thanks to TCM and a slow night at work I have now seen it twice. I’m more motivated now to seek out “Magnificent Obsession,” “All that Heaven Allows,” “Imitation of Life” and others, but by reptutation, none of Sirk’s movies is as much lurid fun as this one.

Released in 1956, “Written on the Wind” is melodrama writ large, set amid the phallic oil derricks of Texas, although it was shot mostly on sets and backlots. It’s essentially a love quadrangle involving Robert Stack as a drunken oil heir, Rock Hudson as his forthright, upwardly mobile right-hand man, Lauren Bacall as Stack’s principled wife and Dorothy Malone, who won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress, as Stack’s downright demonic sister.

The pleasures of this movie come from how far Sirk pushes the heightened behavior and the care he throws into every frame. Sirk luxuriates in Technicolor splendor as he simultaneously fetishizes and satirizes his characters’ opulent surroundings. Highlighting the artifice of the filmmaking process allows Sirk to find the bleak truth in a silly soap opera — a truth about dissolute, intellectually passive lives. We get rear projection, obvious painted backdrops and a wall-to-wall score that supplies a joyous surfeit of emotion (Malone gets her own rumbling, evil theme). Hudson and Bacall act with stoic restraint, while Stack and Malone blast away; all the performances are precisely pitched. Intentionally overwrought as he was, Sirk respects everyone’s humanity, including the African-American servants who might as well be invisible to the wealthy principal characters. “Written on the Wind” can be enyjoyed simultaneously as outré trash and as subversive, aesthetically daring cinema.