Blast from the Past: The Gift

Joel Edgerton (right) in The Gift, a film Edgerton also wrote and directed.

In movies, the Australian actor Joel Edgerton is best known for playing a wide assortment of muscle men and meatheads. Edgerton was the thuggish small-time crime lord in Animal Kingdom, one of the Navy SEALs on a mission to take out Osama bin Laden in Zero Dark Thirty, and the MMA fighter who reconnects with his estranged brother (Tom Hardy) by kicking his ass in the Octagon in Gavin O’Connor critically acclaimed, sweat-stained male weepie Warrior. (On stage, he has taken on the greatest meathead role in the pantheon of the American theater, Stanley Kowalski, in two separate productions of A Streetcar Named Desire.) When Edgerton finally got the chance to play a character who doesn’t come down to dinner in his undershirt, it was the oafish nouveau riche villain Tom Buchanan in the 2013 Baz Luhrmann travesty The Great Gatsby.

There, he made the fatal mistake of trying to scale his performance to match the bombastic style of his director. Neither Luhrmann nor Edgerton seemed to understand that Tom’s lines about the scientific basis for racism and looking out for number one are enough on their own to mark him as an obnoxious fellow; it isn’t really necessary for the actor to underline things by bellowing every syllable. Edgerton makes his directing debut with The Gift, which he also wrote and acts in, and it’s a bit of a shock: a deft, perfectly controlled little thriller, a commercial entertainment but one that’s smart and detailed and rewards close attention to the nuances of what’s being said and how. It is that rarest of oases in the late summer movie release schedule, an actor’s movie.

Black Mass: Not Enough Color

Johnny Depp as James “Whitey” Bulger, in Black Mass.

As James “Whitey” Bulger in Black Mass, Johnny Depp levels a cobra’s hooded gaze at his enemies and at those he suspects might become his enemies. That isn’t much of a distinction, and it doesn’t take much to cross it. Depp gives a thoughtful, intelligent performance as a charismatic sociopath, and in some scenes he’s very frightening. But he needs more colors, and I don’t think that’s his fault but the fault of the screenplay, which Mark Mallouk and Jez Butterworth culled from Dick Lehr and Gerard O’Neill’s book Whitey: The Life of America’s Most Notorious Mob Boss. I haven’t read the source material, but Depp is obviously faithful to the Bulger you saw in the news every day during his 2013 trial and who emerges in last year’s riveting documentary Whitey: United States of America v. James J. Bulger. The prosthetics have transformed Depp’s face so that he looks eerily like Bulger, but this kind of real-person camouflage, impressive as it is, always misses the point. (God knows it did when Steve Carell was buried under his make-up in Foxcatcher: the combination of Carell’s vocal tics and that artificial face, constructed to replicate that of a true-life lunatic most people couldn’t identify anyway, made him look and sound like an automaton.) Black Mass, which was directed by Scott Cooper, is a prestige project, carefully assembled and made with obvious integrity. But it would be a more satisfying movie if Depp were slyer, more ironic – if he loosened up and had more fun with the part. You don’t want Jack Nicholson’s Bulger-inspired turn in The Departed, whose behavior was so clownish and preposterous that you couldn’t believe his gang didn’t just stage an insurrection and take him out, but you do need to get more of a sense of the character’s charm and of an outrageousness that isn’t just linked to a pathological taste for violence.

End of Binge: Netflix’s Bright

Will Smith and Joel Edgerton in Netflix's Bright. (Photo: Matt Kennedy/Netflix)

Netflix wants to dominate the movie market. They want you to stay home and watch their original programming – like Bright, a Los Angeles cop movie starring Will Smith and Joel Edgerton – instead of leaving your couch and spending money at a multiplex. Bright is a big play for them, meant to be proof that their previous forays into original programming were just precursors to the main event: fresh big-budget blockbusters that you can watch from home. Netflix was convinced that this sure-fire hit, directed by David Ayer and written by Max Landis, would end this argument before it even began. Anyone who’s seen Bright will tell you that it . . . doesn’t do that.

Biblical Bore – Exodus: Gods and Kings

Christian Bale as Moses in Ridley Scott's Exodus: Gods and Kings

Director Ridley Scott’s latest epic, Exodus: Gods and Kings, makes Moses the second biblical patriarch to have his story butchered by Hollywood this year. The first, of course, was Noah in Darren Aronofsky’s deluded treatment last spring. Scott’s film doesn’t punish its audience with caustic melodrama the way the second half of Noah did. He’s a better craftsman than Aronofsky, and his visual palette more sensible – the movie’s landscape has the craggy wildness you associate with the Old Testament universe. But it matches its predecessor for clouding the meaning of the central narrative themes and injecting bizarre, half-baked spirituality into them. The result is a rare feat: a movie that’s at once both bloated and a fiasco.

It’s Just Something He Does: Midnight Special

Michael Shannon, with Jaeden Lieberher, in Midnight Special. (Photo: Ben Rothstein)

We’re all aware of the writer’s maxim that says it’s a terrible faux-pas to have characters telling each other things they already know, as a means of getting this information to the audience. Hollywood seems to employ this clumsy tactic too often, as if paranoid that audiences will stand up and walk out if plot details and character motivations – especially in a genre film context, where weird shit happens all the time – aren’t spoon-fed explicitly to them. Writer-director Jeff Nichols (Take Shelter) seems to have crafted Midnight Special as a fierce rebellion against this dumbing-down of popular cinema. This is a science fiction story about a father and son that traffics in emotion, not exposition, and it’s all the richer for it.

In Passing

Colin Farrell, Joel Edgerton and Viggo Mortensen in Thirteen Lives.

This piece includes reviews of Thirteen Lives,The Good Nurse,Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery and The Pale Blue Eye.

At the outset of Thirteen Lives, Ron Howard’s dramatization of the 2018 Tham Luang Cave rescue in northern Thailand, we see the twelve pre-teen and teenage football players and their coach enter the cave and then the monsoon begin to batter it. But then Howard and the screenwriter, William Nicholson, make an unconventional choice: they don’t show us the trapped souls again until, about halfway through the picture, the British divers, Rick Stanton (Viggo Mortensen) and John Volanthen (Colin Farrell), come upon them near the mouth of the cave twelve days into the ordeal, when many participating in the story or following it on the news fear they must be dead. Naturally the filmmakers understand that presenting the facts of the narrative from the point of view of those outside the cave is dramatically effective, but I think there’s an ethical dimension to their showing us what Stanton and Volanthen discover as they discover it. Howard and Nicholson strive to avoid melodrama; they don’t want to rev up the audience by cutting back and forth between the deprivations the footballers are suffering and the efforts of the crew – a wide, disparate combination of divers, Thai Navy SEALS and other military, police officers, volunteers of every stripe and the representatives of about a hundred government agencies – to track them down. They are resolute about draining Thirteen Lives of sentimentality; I wouldn’t say there’s none at all, but given the nature of the material there’s remarkably little. It’s a film of great integrity as well as tremendous skill. And the subject matter is so gripping that you’re grateful for the foreknowledge that the coach and all the kids got out alive. (One of the SEALS, Saman Kunan, played by a charismatic young actor named Sukollowat Kanarat, did not survive the operation, and another died a year and a half later of a blood infection he contracted during it.) 

The King: Get Me Rewrite!

Timothée Chalamet in The King (2019).

This review contains spoilers.
 
In a capsule review of a 1932 straight-dramatic movie of Madame Butterfly, the critic Pauline Kael wrote, “Is there someone out there who has always wanted to know what the opera was about, without being distracted from the plot by the music?” The new film The King (which was in some theatres in October and is currently streaming on Netflix) sets out on an equally dunderheaded mission: rewriting Shakespeare’s Henry IV and Henry V without the distractions of, you know, the verse and the humor and the greatest coming-of-age narrative ever written and the most complex treatment of war ever put on a stage.

Polemics and Action: Kathryn Bigelow's Zero Dark Thirty

Jessica Chastain  in Zero Dark Thirty (Photo: Jonathan Olley/Columbia Pictures)

Kathryn Bigelow, the director of the “get Bin Laden” thriller Zero Dark Thirty, is – like Walter Hill and John Woo in their prime, and John Sturges and Don Siegel before them – a master action  film-maker. Period. It’s a highly specialized category, and one that far fewer directors fit into than you might expect, given the degree to which action films dominate the marketplace. Plenty of hacks, and any number of good directors trying to score a hit that might allow them to work on the films they care about, know how to stage gunfights and chases and explosions, or can at least cede control of a production to the stunt coordinators and pyrotechnics experts for a few days. Bigelow is one of those rare people who can stage figures in a composition and set them in motion in such a way that the release of kinetic energy is both exciting and aesthetically satisfying. It’s because of directors like Bigelow that some critics are able to get away with claiming that physical action caught on film is the true essence of “pure cinema.” 

Bigelow can generate that kind of excitement even when her actors are confined to tight quarters, as in the tense, intelligent K-19: The Widowmaker (2002), about  a nuclear accident aboard a Soviet military submarine. Although K-19 was a box office disaster, it may have marked a significant turning point in Bigelow’s career.  Throughout the ‘90s, she turned out a string of ever gaudier failures (Blue Steel, Point Break, Strange Days) that showed a lot of confidence in her ambitious, high-decibel vision and not a lot of interest in narrative believability. Making a movie that was set among men who lived by a military code, with a story that had at least one foot in the real world, did wonders for her ability to focus. Her next film, The Hurt Locker, starring Jeremy Renner as a bomb-disposal expert in Iraq, was even better, a wartime character study that combined Hemingway’s romantic attitude about grace under pressure with the kind of gonzo vision of the absurdity of war that came out of the most original fiction and journalism about the Vietnam war.

Back to High School: The Great Gatsby

Leonardo DiCaprio in The Great Gatsby

Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby bears little resemblance to the slender masterpiece on which it is based – F. Scott Fitzgerald’s now iconic 1925 novel – but that probably won’t come as much of a surprise to anyone who has followed this director’s career. While his critics see him as a sort of Andrew Lloyd Webber of movies whose histrionic period pieces (Moulin Rouge!, Romeo + Juliet) put one in mind, to borrow a phrase from Pauline Kael, of “a dog with the broken bones of a cat sticking out,” few of Luhrmann’s fans would likely contest that characterization. To them, Luhrmann’s movies are carnival sensations, romances to excess that celebrate the hysterical pace of the modern age in brazen, trashy style (and anyone who doesn’t like their cats grafted messily onto dogs is just a purist, patrician snob). There’s a faint odor of schoolyard allegiance that clings to the debate around Baz Luhrmann, and it never fails to make me feel like the teenager who chooses to stay home with a book while all her friends go out to a rave.

Two Movie Movies: The Martian and Shanghai

Matt Damon in Ridley Scott's The Martian.

Ridley Scott has a reputation for making engrossing large-scale entertainments, but most of his movies are somber and bloated in almost equal parts. The somberness seems to be a pass at seriousness, but movies like Gladiator, American Gangster and Prometheus are humorless blockbusters that substitute layers of mass for layers of meaning. (At least his last, Exodus: Gods and Kings, had John Turturro camping it up Old Testament drag as Pharoah Seti, but the film killed him off early, Joel Edgerton inherited the throne, and any chance at fun went out the window.) Only occasionally does Scott turn out something I care about. Black Hawk Down is a conventional war picture but visceral and affecting; A Good Year, which got little attention, is a vivifying, sun-drenched comedy about an investment broker who inherits a vineyard in Provence and recalibrates his misdirected life. A Good Year is in the mold of the marvelous early-eighties Bill Forsyth movie Local Hero, where a corporate type sent by his Houston-based company to purchase an island off the Scottish coast falls in love with it, and Russell Crowe, as the main character, is supple and animated (his performance in Gladiator was paralytic); he seems turned on by both the bronzed light and all the beautiful women Scott has surrounded him with. Sensuality isn’t generally Scott’s forte, so you keep pinching yourself – and he’s done nothing remotely like it since. (It sank at the box office.) And I had a terrific time at The Martian, Scott’s latest, based on the Andy Weir bestseller about an astronaut on an exploratory trip to Mars (played by Matt Damon) whose crew abandons him on the mistaken assumption that he’s been killed in the sudden storm that leads NASA to abort the mission and send them back into space.

Year-End Movies III: The Boy and the Heron and The Boys in the Boat

The heron in Hayao Miyazaki's The Boy and the Heron.

One of the cinematic high points of 2023 was surely the great Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki’s return from retirement with The Boy and the Heron. (His last feature was The Wind Rises in 2013, though imdb.com lists a 2018 short, unknown to me, called Boro the Caterpillar.) Conceived and written by Miyazaki, The Boy and the Heron is a gorgeous fairy tale set, like The Wind Rises, during the Second World War. The young hero, Mahito (voiced in the dubbed version by Luca Padovan), loses his mother during the bombing of Tokyo; a year later his father, Shoichi (Christian Bale), moves them into the countryside, where he has opened a new factory. He is now romantically involved with Natsuko (Gemma Chan), who is carrying his child. This will be Mahito’s new home, but it’s alienating to him. Aside from the sudden news that a woman he has never met before, whom he addresses politely as “ma’am,” is about to become his new stepmother, there’s little actual education going on in his new school. The children spend more time working the land for the war effort than in the classroom, and as soon as he arrives he’s bullied by his classmates; his response is to bash himself in the head with a rock, claiming a fall, so he doesn’t have to go back the next day. Yet in unexpected ways this unfamiliar environment links up with the boy’s identity. Natsuko, it turns out, is his aunt and looks eerily like her, and this is the place where the two sisters grew up; the strange, Medieval tower that is the most striking landmark was created by their great-uncle. And a talking grey heron (Robert Pattinson) who gloms onto Mahito insists that he’s an emissary sent to take him to his mother, who isn’t dead at all. The boy’s adventures begin when Natsuko, whom he has seen, from his bedroom window, entering the woods, vanishes, and his quest, at the heron’s invitation, to find his mother becomes, in the mysterious transformative manner of a dream, a search for Natsuko. It takes him into the tower and out again into an island world where pelicans and parakeets are omnivorous creatures the size of human adults (the main pelican is voiced by Willem Dafoe, the main parakeet by Dan Stevens) and where the bent-backed, protective domestics from Mahito’s world are echoed by small wooden dolls that reside on shelves and around beds and operate as totems.