Skeletons Out of the Closet

Wiig and Hader get serious in The Skeleton Twins.

««« The Skeleton Twins. Written by Mark Heyman & Craig Johnson. Directed by Craig Johnson. At selected theaters.

Craig Johnson's The Skeleton Twins sounds like a Tim Burton movie, but it isn't. It stars Saturday Night Live alumni Kristen Wiig and Bill Hader, but it isn't an overblown skit like A Night at the Roxbury or Austin Powers. Here's what it is: a spare, well-wrought drama about a pair of mismatched siblings who happen to be indispensible to each other. Insofar as it's about a couple of damaged people trying to find a way forward, it's much like Silver Linings Playbook—except without that film's "love conquers madness" magical thinking. Depending on your inclination, you can take it either as an amusing movie about depression, or a grim kind of comedy.

          Wiig and Hader are Maggie and Milo, twins who parted in mutual distaste a decade earlier. When Milo attempts suicide after a bad breakup, the equally glum Maggie plays the dutiful sister, inviting him to recuperate with her. More out of embarrassment as need, Milo accepts. Of course, by inviting her brother into her house Maggie is also inviting the past, which inevitably up-ends the rapport they forgot they shared.

          It should come as no surprise that sketch comics like Wiig and Hader are capable of delivering plausible, touching performances. They were part of the strongest SNL casts in the last decade or two, and anybody who can wring laughs out of the occasionally paper-thin writing on that show has to be talented.

          True, there's an element of waiting for the punch-line here—the suspicion that Wiig must inevitably come forth wearing doll baby arms, and Hader lapse back into playing "Stefon". It's an inevitable risk when any of Lorne Michaels' crew attempts a dramatic role. (Everybody remembers the lonely Bill Murray of Lost in Translation, but what about enlightenment-seeking Bill Murray in 1984's The Razor's Edge?) Newcomer Craig Johnson keeps a lid on Wiig and Hader's broader antics, but lets them off the leash enough to let laughs become the currency of their relationship. It's a real accomplishment that he found the right balance.

          This film has come while many are still puzzling over the suicide of Robin Williams. That such a wrenching contradiction is possible—that a man with such irrepressible instincts to amuse others could be so inwardly miserable—came as a surprise to many of us. But as The Skeleton Twins shows, while laughter can be part of happiness, it can never be the entirety. "Laughing until it hurts" is a cliché, but laughing because it hurts is close to the truth.

          That said, this writer will be looking forward to the deleted scenes on this movie's DVD edition. We can only hope Wiig didn't forget the baby arms there.

© 2014 Nicholas Nicastro

Less Than Zero

Waltz and Thierry add it up in The Zero Theorem.

«« The Zero Theorem. Written by Pat Rushin. Directed by Terry Gilliam. At selected theaters.

Full disclosure: I've never been much of a fan of Terry Gilliam's work as a director. Not his gonzo animations for Monty Python—those were terrific. I'm speaking of features like Brazil, Twelve Monkeys, his Baron Munchausen movie, which overflowed with the kind of visual flair schoolboy critics take for great profundity, but were actually pretty vacuous at their cores.

          I therefore give Gilliam some backhanded credit for the premise of his latest. For The Zero Theorem is literally a story with a vacuum at its core, about a man in search of proof that the universe is governed by nothing but a self-cancelling equation. In a year with movies about Steven Hawking (The Theory of Everything) and Alan Turing (The Imitation Game), this is another movie about math.

         It's the very near future, where London is a ringing, buzzing mess of floating animated billboards and constant surveillance. Qohen Leth (Christoph Waltz) is some kind of cryptologist-prole whose job is to crack mathematical puzzles for a conglomerate controlled by a boss known only as "Management" (Matt Damon). Not fulfilled in his work "crunching entities", he aspires to be allowed to telecommute from home, where he can be present to receive a particularly important phone call (writer Pat Rushin apparently forgot that you don't need to be home to get a call anymore, though there are cell phones everywhere in the movie). Management finally relents, but on one condition: Qohen must attempt to crack a virtually insoluble problem called "the Zero Theorem", proving that the Universe is a purposeless accident.

          There are some fun ideas in the movie. Apparently, there will be soon be a "Church of Batman" for us to seek redemption in. There will also be an "Occupy Wall Street" department store. Mathematical innovation in the future is not an exercise in broad theorizing, but literally exercise: employees solve teeny, tiny pieces of complex puzzles by pedaling stationary bikes. As he embarks on his new project Qohen is gifted with a call girl companion (Mélanie Thierry) who seems determined to rouse him from his metaphysical funk by any means necessary, including some picturesque cock- and brain-teasing.

          But the fun is thin on the ground, and Qohen (played by Waltz with a spiritual constipation that is truly Teutonic) never becomes more than a mope. The motives of Management are muddled, with Gilliam apparently unable to afford Matt Damon's services for more than couple days of shooting. The motives of Thierry's character—the stereotypical "hooker with a heart of gold" who falls in love with her john—are worse than muddled. Tell me again: how does sending in a beautiful woman in a latex nurses' uniform help a straight man concentrate on the evening's problem set?

          Sometimes it seems like Gilliam wants to get at something. Rushin's script occasionally sounds like a parodic answer to The Matrix, with Qohen as "the One" elected to challenge the evil mainframe. Other times, Gilliam seems inclined to say something about religion. But all these gestures seem abortive, dropped as if from the sheer exhaustion of crafting a consistent theme.

          "Crunching entities" turns out to be pretty dreary work.

© 2014 Nicholas Nicastro    

Farewell to the Boss

James Gandolfini's final role in The Drop.

««« The Drop.  Written by Dennis Lehane, based on his short story. Directed by Michaël R. Roskum. At area theaters.

By the time James Gandolfini died in 2013, he had only begun to explore his limits as an actor. It was clearly a question that was on his mind: after playing the archetypal modern gangster on The Sopranos for eight years, only one of the roles left in the can after he died was in a straight-up mafia flick. That single exception was a supporting turn in Michaël R. Roskum's The Drop.

          The reason he chose it turns out to be straightforward. Unlike The Sopranos, The Drop has a small-time focus, centered on only a few characters in and around a minor watering hole in Brooklyn. The hero is Bob (Tom Hardy), a seemingly slow-witted barkeep with a long and mysterious connection to his cousin, "Uncle" Marv (Gandolfini). Marv's bar is one of the places the mob uses to collect its cash pay-offs in the neighborhood (thus a "drop"). The guys manage to keep their noses clean until a pair of gunmen pull an ill-advised robbery—leaving Bob and Marv on the hook for the lost money.

          The story (based on Dennis Lehane's short story "Animal Rescue") is full of unspoken history wrapped in a layer of outer-borough grit. Gandolfini's interest in it comes clear about midway through, when he complains that he was once a player, "a guy to be feared"—but no longer. It's tempting to think Gandolfini saw Uncle Marv as one version of Tony Soprano's future, after losing his family and all his power. Lonely and irrelevant, terrified he's becoming just another "jerk-off", he's a guy liable to desperate gambles.

          The Drop is a latter-day Sidney Lumet film that feels about as Brooklyn as Flatbush Avenue. This is remarkable in that virtually none of the principals are actually from Brooklyn or anyplace else in America. Hardy is Australian, Noomi Rapace is Spanish/Swedish, Matthias Schoenaerts and director Roskum are Belgian. (Gandolfini and writer Lehane are from New Jersey and Massachusetts, respectively—both about as foreign to Brooklyn as Belgium.) Would a typically Brooklyn director, say Spike Lee, have produced something equally authentic about the working-class neighborhood of Marollen in Brussels? Qui sait?

          For his part, Hardy has mastered that particularly Brooklyn tilt of the head, that way of looking a guy in the face without overtly confronting him. Though the obvious comparison is to DeNiro, there's something Brando-esque about Hardy's presence that bodes well for the future. (Hardy will play Mad Max in the upcoming Road Warrior remake.)

          When The Sopranos ended in 2012, many fans were disappointed by David Chase's decision to close with no ending at all. At least with respect to Tony Soprano, The Drop presents one version of what might have been.

© 2014 Nicholas Nicastro    

Sweetest Songs, Saddest Thoughts

Brydon and Coogan peruse the stones in The Trip to Italy.

««« The Trip to Italy.  Written and directed by Michael Winterbottom. At selected theaters.

If paradise is a place where all the cooks are Italian and all the comics are British, then The Trip to Italy, Michael Winterbottom's sequel to his 2010 road comedy The Trip, is a slice of Heaven.

          It wouldn't have taken much for this writer to sign on for another culinary tour. Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon play characters named "Steve Coogan" and "Bob Brydon" extremely well—arguably better than anyone else could. Like on road trips taken by you and me, their by-play is a salad of idle gossip, in-jokes, movie quotes and impersonations, including a bout of "dueling Michael Caines" that, even in rehash, is bloody hilarious. Like the original, the sequel has been assembled out of episodes of the BBC's The Trip TV-series. Though director Michael Winterbottom is given script credit, much of the dialog feels (as in The Trip) deftly improvised.

          The new movie finds Coogan and Brydon going in different directions professionally. Coogan (who co-wrote and starred in the hit Philomena) has achieved serious success in America, but faces a stretch of unemployment after his TV series is cancelled. Brydon, as a somewhat better-read Rich Little, is less known but on the upswing after landing a part in a Michael Mann film. In a late summer with a decidedly "mid-life" feel to it, Coogan joins Brydon on a tour of restaurants in Italy that will (he claims) end up anthologized in a book.

          The food is, of course, only a pretext; neither Coogan nor Brydon even bother to take notes on what they've eaten, or ever so much as chat up a chef. Their real passion is literature—specifically, the Romantic poets, whom they argue over and quote as vigorously as Al Pacino movies or the music of Alanis Morrisette. Alas, these guys are more bitch-and-moan than sturm und drang. When they board a rubber dinghy to begin their tour of the Gulf of Spezia (where Percy Shelley drowned), they worry, "This isn't the actual boat, is it?"

          Much as they seem to circling around the same three subjects of poetry, women, and career, these lads have clearly gone some distance since their last trip. Last time both were hungry most of all for mainstream success. Now that Coogan's ship as come in, and Brydon's is about to, there's a whiff of letdown in the air, of questioning whether "making it" in Hollywood has landed them in a good place after all.

          There's much chatter on the web that the inevitable next chapter will be a Trip to America. But that would almost be redundant. America—and the values it represents abroad—already looms large over these movies. The poets Coogan and Brydon idolize are more than sources of fancy verse to recite and impress the chicks. The dejected Keats had a lovely, wind-swept gulf to drown in. We have an ocean of cultural mediocrity.

© 2014 Nicholas Nicastro

Special Pleading

Moss and Duplass play doubles in The One I Love.

««1/2  The One I Love.  Written by Justin Lader. Directed by Charlie McDowell . At selected theaters.

It’s been fifteen years since Spike Jonze and Charlie Kaufman unleashed Being John Malkovich on an unsuspecting world. While other films (including Kaufman's own Synecdoche, New York) have come close, Malkovich remains the benchmark for a kind of loopy cerebrality, for conjuring not just unsolvable puzzles but a universe where that futility doesn’t really matter. In short, though highly self-aware, it also felt fresh—no easy trick.

          Newcomers Justin Lader and Charlie McDowell almost certainly had Malkovich in mind—along with a few Twilight Zone episodes—when they made their head-scratcher, The One I Love. If a label helps explain it, it might be called a “rom-con”, with “con” being short for “conundrum”.

          Lader’s script concerns Ethan and Sophie (Mark Duplass and Elizabeth Moss), a couple giving their fraying relationship a last chance.  At the prompting of their therapist (Ted Danson), they retire to a certain vacation home from which many couples have come back “renewed”.  It turns out to be a nice spot indeed, but more populated than Ethan and Sophie expected: already in residence are another Ethan and another Sophie, each a slightly cooler, slightly sweeter version of their real counterparts.  Though inexplicable (and, in fact, never really explained), their idealized versions naturally have a profound appeal. Ethan ultimately gets so jealous of his doppelganger that he stalks his wife, hoping and dreading to catch her in the act with…himself.

          No question it’s a striking premise, exploited well as Lader and McDowell proceed to bid up the stakes. They’re also spot-on in their dark appraisal of human nature, which tends to be more bothered by what is being lost than what might possibly be gained. Duplass is fine, but the slyly seductive Moss (Peggy in Mad Men) continues to show why, with her air of a character actor suddenly pushed into the lead, she’s one of the more intriguing leading ladies emerging now.

          The problem with The One I Love goes back to what Malkovich did especially well—feeling fresh while also being a kind of “meta-story” about people trapped in a story. All too often Duplass delivers lines that start with “I know it sounds weird, but…”, or “I know we’re having a really weird weekend, but…” By the time he calls his situation “some real Twilight Zone shit,” we’re already kind of tired of Ethan’s (and the filmmakers’) whiny yearning to exist both on the screen and out in the audience, eating popcorn with us.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with characters that are self-aware of their predicament as characters, or—for that matter—with stories that pose questions never meant to be solved. As long as we get something else, such as laughs, it’s all good. Smart as it is, The One I Love simply lacks enough of that “something else” to earn our love.

© 2014 Nicholas Nicastro

One Country for Old Men

Eenhoorn and Nelson happily tread water in Land Ho!

««« Land Ho!.  Written and directed by Aaron Katz & Martha Stephens. At selected theaters.

Sooner or later, you end up seated on a plane, bus or train next to someone who is 1) much older than yourself, and 2) chatty. And it inevitably happens that, expecting an ordeal, you get surprised—your seatmate is actually pretty interesting, and more than a little cool for their age. If you haven't learned something by the end of the trip, you at least feel a little chagrined at expecting the worst.

          That's pretty much the impression left by newcomers Aaron Katz and Martha Stephens' septuagenarian road movie, Land Ho! It's another departure in the growing genre of similar films (Sideways, The Trip, Eat Love Pray, the upcoming Trip to Italy) premised on the notion that, sometimes, you need to go away to find yourself. It's become a formula as familiar as the old Bing Crosby/Bob Hope "Road to…" movies, except instead of G-rated hijinx and tunes, we get cuisine, scenery, and personal growth.

          The travelers this time are Mitch (Earl Lynn Nelson) and Colin (Paul Eenhoorn). Mitch is a doctor who recently retired under vague circumstances. An unapologetic sensualist, he's a charmer so sincere in his vulgarity that it's hard to fault him. He pairs uneasily with widower and former brother-in-law Colin, a soulful ex-concert musician long ago forced to give up his art for a desk job. Out of little more than loneliness, Mitch cajoles the bereft Colin into accompanying him on a trip to Iceland, promising spectacular landscapes, juicy lobsters, and lots of lovely Scandinavian ladies.

          The chemistry between the two leads—bird-dogging clown vs. mopey artist—is reminiscent of Sideways, except perhaps running at 33rpm instead of 45. (If you don’t get this reference, youngsters, ask your grandparents.) As a virtual newcomer, the seventy-two year-old Nelson is unpolished and stunningly authentic. He's a guy who naturally charms the camera. Eenhoorn, a veteran from Australia, seems crafted by comparison, but no less compelling in his ruefulness.

          Nothing of much urgency seems to happen as we travel with these guys, and it doesn't much matter. Iceland, after all, is famous for its "Golden Circle", an itinerary that puts you back exactly where you started—hopefully a little wiser for the journey.

          How Land Ho! combines character and landscape is perhaps the most surprising thing about it. Iceland's moody starkness almost insists on Bergman-esque treatment—two pilgrims on the edge of mortality staring out into a gray, eternal sea. But Katz and Stephens chose to see Iceland as it really is, as one of the geologically newest pieces of real estate on earth. In that sense, this is no valedictory for old men, but the birth of something too young to have a name.

© 2014 Nicholas Nicastro 

Waiting for Augustus

A few days ago, Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy set a box office record for an August opening weekend of $94 million. That's on top of $713 million earned worldwide by the latest Captain America, $707 million for The Amazing Spider Man 2, and $739 million for X-Men: Days of Future Past. The $2 billion-plus bonanza is just for 2014. Next year we're due for another Avengers opus, something called Ant Man, and the first attempt to resurrect Fantastic Four since way, way back (in 2007, that is). With these kinds of numbers, Marvel's deep catalog, and the fact Hollywood prefers to package familiar, pre-sold properties that don't require much explaining to sell, it appears we're very far from "peak-Marvel".

          Arguably, all this is a quintessential American success story. Marvel Comics Group, which Stan Lee launched in its modern form in 1961, began as an upstart challenger to then-dominant DC, owner of Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman.  Marvel revolutionized the genre by introducing more complex, troubled characters that resonated well with audiences in the latter '60's and early '70's. Shortly after, Star Wars revolutionized Hollywood by pioneering both the "event" movie and the special effects epic. From there, it probably was only a matter of time before the Age of Movie Comics dawned.

          It's an inspiring story, and from the box office numbers it's clear audiences like what they've seen. Yet Marvel (along with DC's movie properties) are only the tip of this cultural iceberg. They typify a way of telling stories that studio elites increasingly love: the superhero archetype, where everything depends on some gifted individual who transcends all limitations. Before they green-light a movie, studio developers typically ask: "What about this figure that makes him or her indispensible? How are they uniquely capable?" Examples of this mentality in action—the Star Wars movies, the Jason Bourne movies, the Mission Impossible movies, the 300 movies, the resurgent 007 series—are not hard to list. Even Guardians of the Galaxy, which is supposed to present an ironic take by making heroes of a handful of misfits and criminals, is rendered "superhero-ish" in its big reveal at the end (which I won't spoil here).
          True, it's in the nature of archetypes that they've always been around. Trouble is,  this one arguably never been more dominant than now, and that surge in popularity suggests a few troubling things about us.

          The flip-side of needing superheroes to solve our problems is that ordinary folks become—and in practice are almost encouraged to be—useless. In the Thor movies, the heroes are literally gods, in the path of whom ordinary mortals don't stray. At the climax of The Avengers, as New York City is under attack by aliens, only six people fight back while the rest of humanity stands around and watches. Both the Marvel and DC-derived movies are full of scenes like this, with the regular folks consigned to varying degrees of passivity.

          What is it about our contemporary problems that make superheroes so appealing? It's tempting to look at the raft of intractable worries we face, from arrested organs of government to planetary climate disruption to economic upheavals on a globalized scale, and conclude that many of us have simply given up hope that ordinary people or institutions can handle them. In a sense, we all seem to be waiting for our Augustus Caesar—a colossus who will bestride our world and single-handedly set it right. That this rescue, like that of our Roman antecedents, would come at the expense of our unquestioning compliance is, well, the price of the ticket. (I suggest Augustus here because, with his rise, the Romans finally turned away from the challenge of governing themselves.) Behind fantasies of super-powers lies the fear of powerlessness.

          Compare this with the kinds of stories Americans used to prefer. In virtually every old movie about war, and in modern throwbacks like Band of Brothers and Saving Private Ryan, it's the average Joe under extraordinary circumstances that rises to the occasion. In Ryan, Tom Hanks is not only not able to fly, teleport himself, or control metal objects with his mind—he was a rather unremarkable English teacher from Pennsylvania. Steven Spielberg's film was released sixteen years ago, but it seems almost inconceivable now, a curio of bygone, weirdly can-do times. At today's multiplex, it is only the hobbits of Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings movies, who save Middle Earth despite their preference for comfy chairs and pipe-weed, that faintly echo that ideal. But of course, nobody goes to Jackson's movies just for the hobbits.

          A world where only superheroes can change anything is a world doomed never to change. But that's where we seem to be now in our collective imagination: stuck, passive, and waiting for someone with "a very particular set of skills."

© 2014 Nicholas Nicastro