A Fish With a Bicycle

Hilary Swank gits r done in The Homesman.

««1/2 The Homesman. Written by Tommy Lee Jones, Kieran Fitzgerald & Wesley A. Oliver, based on a novel by Glendon Swarthout. Directed by Tommy Lee Jones. At selected theaters.

In a political landscape dominated by arguments subtle enough to fit on bumper stickers, one of the oldest is "A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle." First coined by Australian writer-activist Irina Dunn, it's a classic and maybe the most silly, because five million years of evolution attest to the fact that, yes, most women do need men.

          The question haunts Tommy Lee Jones' new anti-Western, The Homesman. I say "anti-Western" because the movie focuses not on the conquest of the frontier, but a retreat from it. Mary Bee Cuddy (Hilary Swank) is a "fish without a bicycle" type—an intelligent, resourceful woman perfectly up to busting the sod on her Nebraska farm and setting a fine dinner table when she aims to. Unmarried but seeking, she approaches men not as a romantic suppliant, but as an equal with a business proposition. So formidable is Miss Mary Bee that she volunteers for a task none of the men in her town will touch: to escort three deranged frontier wives (Grace Gummer, Miranda Otto, and Sonja Richter) through hundreds of miles of lawless territory to Iowa, where they will find rest and refuge from their clueless husbands. On the way, she rescues claim jumper George Briggs (Jones) from the end of a lynch-rope, but at a price of helping her accomplish her errand of mercy.

          Novelist and "Cowboy Hall of Fame" member Glendon Swarthout (The Shootist, Where the Boys Are) crafted an interesting premise when he wrote the book in the 1980's.  The movie rights were owned for years by Paul Newman, who never was able to get the project made. The Homesman then became a passion project for Jones, who directed this version himself.

          There's no question that the film has all of the elements it needed to succeed. Foremost is Hilary Swank, who has made a career of playing women struggling against the petty limitations of gender. No less impressive here as she was in Boys Don't Cry or Million Dollar Baby, she gives Mary Bee a dignity that reads as almost Lincolnesque, but with a core of vulnerability that makes her strength all the more appealing. She makes an interesting match with Jones' gristled anti-hero, who makes a career of traversing his own kinds of boundaries. They're different enough—and share enough—to be good dance partners.

          Jones has shot his film sparely, as if trying to distill some kind of classically tragic essence. In this context, the three damaged women they escort become a kind of mute chorus, responding to what they see in the only rational fashion insanity deserves.

          So why isn't The Homesman better? Perhaps more than any other recent film I can think of, it goes off the rails in one fell swoop, with a turn in the plot that shouldn't be spoiled here. Suffice it to say that Swank's character needs men after all. She departs the story in a sudden fashion that is neither sufficiently prepared for, nor adequately explained. Swarthout might have done so in the book (which I haven't read), which Jones may have lived with long enough to believe was clear enough. But on the screen, it isn't—at least without a goodly amount of post hoc rationalization.

          It's a shame. Though the Western is often thought of as a spent genre, it is a quintessentially American one, big enough to contain themes that are still relevant. Those gunslingers and cowboys were the original superheroes, the Indians the original "others" who turn out not to be so alien. (Star Trek, incidentally, was originally sold as a "space Western"). The story of women in the West is a vast, largely unexplored universe. Jones may have finished this journey, but he missed an opportunity by leaving its soul behind.

© 2014 Nicholas Nicastro

They Came for My Neighbor

Bodnia and Bernal duel in Rosewater.

««« Rosewater. Written and directed by Jon Stewart, based on the book Then They Came for Me by Maziar Bahari & Aimee Molloy. At area theaters.

           

Most of America knows what The Daily Show host Jon Stewart did two summers ago: he went to the Middle East to direct a movie. His subject is the ordeal of journalist Maziar Bahari, who was imprisoned by the Iranian regime after covering street protests against the 2009 election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Bahari's plight was directly connected to The Daily Show, as footage of a kidding interview with correspondent Jason Jones was used as "evidence" that Bahari was a spy for the CIA. Considering that Bahari's appearance was used against him, Stewart apparently felt that making a movie about his case was the least he could do.         

          The result is Rosewater, and it can at least be said that Stewart did not spend his summer vacation in vain. Based on Bahari's memoir Then They Came for Me, this is a well-wrought, definitely non-satirical account of one man's ordeal inside a modern police state (no, not the one Fox News accuses Obama of running—a real police state). In a characteristically chilling scene, Bahari's interrogator (Kim Bodnia) collects Bahari (Gael García Bernal) from his childhood bedroom in his mother's house—literally from a sound sleep. "We are here now," he announces, as if they both knew it was inevitable. From there he is packed off to Tehran's infamous Evin prison.

          Bahari's "crime" was to videotape troops shooting protestors during the post-election demonstrations. After presenting his arrest, Stewart flashes back for the background—Bahari's life in London with his British wife (Claire Foy), his arrival in Tehran to cover the elections, his encounter with a highly schizoid Iranian society, half its people gazing in hope to the West, the other burning with resentment for half-imagined national humiliations. By the time Stewart circles back to Evin, he abruptly narrows his focus on the two rooms Bahari knew for 118 days—his bare cell, and the office where he was interrogated. Most of the latter he endured wearing a blindfold, knowing his tormentor only by his voice and his rosewater cologne.

        Stewart is a competent director largely because he seems to have watched a lot of other movies. While his portrayal of Bahari's confinement is vivid, it doesn't exactly break new cinematic ground. Bernal, likewise, is earnest and relatable, but not characterized very strongly. The impression overall is that Stewart is a frustrated progressive—he believes in both government and journalism, but yearns for both to more often achieve their ideals. It's a point many critics of The Daily Show miss, that its snarkiness and cynicism is only an act, barely hiding an almost dewy-eyed humanism.

        That Rosewater is non-satirical doesn't mean it lacks humor. Stewart gets a few yuks out of the Iranians' ignorance of American culture ("The Sopranos, that is porno, yes?"). When Bodnia invites Bahari to call his wife, he advises him to "dial 9" to get an outside line.

        That little snap of absurdity, that you need to dial 9 to call out of Evin Prison, is pure Jon Stewart. No argument that Rosewater has its heart in the right place. A little more bite, though, would have made a memorable film out a merely admirable one.

© 2014 Nicholas Nicastro

The Fault in Ourselves

McConaughey, Anne Hathaway and David Gyasi in Interstellar.

«««1/2 Interstellar. Written by Jonathan Nolan & Christopher Nolan. Directed by Christopher Nolan. At area theaters.

Why don't more people find spiritual fulfillment in space science? One particular virgin birth has sparked millennia of devotion, but the births of whole solar systems elicits little more than a shrug. A one-day supply of oil lasted eight in the Hebrew temple, but nobody worships a Mars rover designed for 90 days that has lasted ten years.

          The obvious answer is that the miracles of human religion are really all about us, in the most personal sense. The universe is awesome, but it surely doesn't revolve around our little corner of the galaxy, or the race of hairless apes in temporary residence. The Crab Nebula doesn't give a shit about you, your life choices, or whether you're a good parent to your kids. Better an imaginary friend who lives in the sky than the apparently indifferent reality.

          Christopher Nolan's Interstellar is a lot of things—an engrossing space adventure, an homage to Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, another notch in Matthew McConaughey's current streak of terrific performances. Maybe most significant of all, though, is that it's an attempt to present a vision of a universe that is both scientifically plausible and congenial to human hopes. It's a tough goal—maybe even impossible without a goodly amount of sentimental cheese. But it's fun to watch him try.

          The script by Nolan and his brother Jonathan opens on Earth in the near future. The planet is suffering from a vague ecological crisis, an epidemic of "blight" that is destroying the food supply and sucking up the world's oxygen. Mostly it just looks like global warming—but of course that's a politically toxic subject, so the movie presents it as another dust bowl. (Incidentally, crop failures are a predicted effect of climate change, as agricultural pests get to move into areas formerly too cold for them.) Troublingly, Americans chose to blame science and technology for the problem, instead of looking to them for solutions. Perhaps the film's most entertaining scene is early on, when former astronaut Cooper (McConaughey) learns that his daughter's school teaches that the Apollo Moon landings were a hoax. "Better we concentrate on this planet," says the teacher, "instead of wasting our time on useless machines." Cooper's response is less than diplomatic.

          NASA—now an underground organization—has a rescue plan: utilizing a wormhole that has miraculously appeared in our solar system, they send survey missions to habitable worlds in another galaxy. Cooper agrees to help, but must pay a steep cost. The mission will take him away from his family for years, perhaps decades. His daughter (Mackenzie Foy, played later by Jessica Chastain and Ellen Burstyn) is angry at his abandonment, but you can't stop a guy with the Right Stuff.

          "Miraculous" is the key word here, because Interstellar follows 2001 in imagining there's Someone out there tinkering with our fates, ineffable and omnipotent and certainly not riding a cloud or sporting a white beard. The film's combination of enormous scale, intimate emotions, and mystical hand-waving doesn't "jell" by any means. It is occasionally quite touching, though, as McConaughey is convincing as the dedicated, guilt-wracked father.

          Along with the shadowy "aliens", Nolan pays tribute to Kubrick in other ways, such as the monolith-like robot that comes along for the mission, and the torus shape of Cooper's spacecraft. In spirit, though, Interstellar more closely follows the conceit of Carl Sagan's Contact—that beings clever enough to cross gulfs of space necessarily must be benign. (Others, such as Stephen Hawking, aren't so sure of this.)

          If you're not disposed to believe in a universe invested in our survival, the movie won't convince you otherwise. It is possible, though, that some similar kind of illusion will be necessary to make humanity finally a multi-planet species. The Church of the Crab Nebula awaits its apostle Paul.

© 2014 Nicholas Nicastro

Fifty Shades of Black

Tessa Thompson stirs the pot in Dear White People.

««« Dear White People. Written and directed by Justin Simien. At selected theaters.

Depending on where you stand, we Americans either don't talk enough about racism, or we never stop talking about it. There's no shortage of solemn calls to "have a national conversation about race." But when conservation does start, it too often devolves into lecturing, hectoring, shaming—everything but listening. Many blacks justly see whites as oblivious to the enormous challenges of their lives, subject to a system of institutions and attitudes that preserve white privilege. Many whites, demographically downsized and economically squeezed, laugh at the notion of being "privileged" in a society where the only truly advantaged color is green.

          Justin Simien's Dear White People won't solve any of this. It does manage to do the next best thing, though: to enact real conversation about race, instead of just overlapping monologs. It is largely for this reason that it was one of the big hits at the Sundance festival last year.

          It's important to acknowledge first what Simien's movie isn't. It isn't a "Spike Lee joint" like Do the Right Thing (1989) or Lee's black college movie School Daze (1988). Both of those films covered similar territory, but along with the politics Lee showed great affection (or nostalgia) for the deep heritage of black culture. Simien has little of Lee's visual flair, and none of his brotherly sentimentality; his "black community" as really just a collection of individuals, each with bitterly conflicting agendas. Dear White People isn't laugh-out-loud funny. It is sharp, though, with moments of dialog that snap and cut like icicles. In short, where Lee made poetry, Simien is more of a prose satirist.

          His script concerns the simmering racial scene at fictional "Winchester University". Biracial student Sam White (Tessa Thompson) runs a campus radio show called "Dear White People", where she knowingly stirs the pot of racial anxieties in the college's white majority. ("Dear white people—it is no longer OK to call us 'African-Americans'," she announces. "If you're afraid just saying the word 'black' will make you seem racist, then you probably are racist.") Among her peers are Coco (Teyonah Parris), an ambitious blogger with a reactionary bent, Troy (Brandon P. Bell), scion of the school's first African-American dean, and Lionel (Tyler James Williams), a writer and gay man whose social alienation is equal-opportunity. Simien sets his characters in motion in and around the staging of a campus Halloween party that supposedly celebrates "the end of racism" by inviting white partygoers to don black-face, act gangsta, and quaff "purple drank" (an event Simien based on real occurrences at various, mostly-white colleges).

          To say Sam, Troy et al. object to all this is both to state the obvious and do it no justice, because it's just about the only thing they agree on. Simien's complex, conflicted souls, black and white, give him scope to air the anxieties of both sides. Stereotyping and lumping—respectively the bread and butter of prejudice—are hard to sustain when Simien insists on treating his characters with such tender specificity. Here, race colors everything, but can never be separated from issues of power, privilege, and personality. And nobody is just a victim.

          It's become a truism to say that race is a "cultural construction". Indeed, it is often declared as if mere awareness of this fact will set us all free. But people have deep cognitive need of their "constructions". It's hard to say what will eventually replace the defining power of skin color in a post-racial America—but Simien has gone the farthest so far in exploring the possibilities. It will be interesting to see where he goes next.

© 2014 Nicholas Nicastro

Furious Basterds

Pitt and Co. pause on the way to Berlin.

««1/2  Fury. Written and directed by David Ayer. At area theaters.

The heart of David Ayer's  Fury is right in the first shot. It is 1945, with the coup de grâce about to fall on Nazi Germany. A lone figure on horseback rides out of the mist, looking oddly archaic in what we've been told is a movie about World War II. The rider turns left, passing a knot of deserted, burning tanks—until an American GI jumps out and kills him. Then the American (Brad Pitt) gently untacks the horse and sets it free.

          So there it is: Ayer sees these guys in tanks as the inheritors of knightly chivalry—but also its murderers. There's truth in this theme, both in how armored soldiers saw themselves and how they (and the machine gun) ended three thousand years of cavalry dominance on the battlefields of Europe. There's a bitter sort of beauty in how Ayer envisions it. Trouble is, he has no idea how to make the rest of Fury as evocative as these first few minutes.

          Pitt is Sgt. "War Daddy" Collier, a veteran tank commander who aptly summarizes the arc of his story by saying "I started this war killing Germans in Africa. Now I'm killing Germans in Germany." As portrayed by Pitt, he's exhausted by his war but also savors it, as if he knows nothing else in his life will compare to it. He's promised the men under his command (including Shia LaBeouf as a Bible-quoting gunner and Logan Lerman as a quaking greenhorn) that he will bring them home alive—an absurd but perhaps necessary lie. His boys even start to believe it, until their "War Daddy" tells them they must stand alone to defend a strategic crossroads against an entire German battalion.

          Americans have a particular talent for seeing themselves at the Three Hundred at Thermopylae. We're always the intrepid band of defenders against the barbaric hordes—even when we're really more like the Persians, gifted with overwhelming force. Steven Spielberg got away with this conceit in the final thirty minutes of Saving Private Ryan, largely because what came before was so magisterial we'd have gone with him anywhere. Ayer, alas, is no Spielberg. Despite a few inspired moments, Fury never gathers enough momentum to blast through the clichés of this genre. Of course the rookie learns to kill; of course the guys feel victory in their grasp but their humanity slipping through their fingers.

          Few Hollywood films about World War 2 find themselves in truly new territory. With the possible exception of the Western, no genre is so thoroughly picked-over, so challenging to present in a new light. Spielberg, and to a lesser extent Quentin Tarantino (Inglorious Basterds) came the closest recently—and they are two of our most naturally gifted filmmakers. Ayer, whose directorial credits so far include a few undistinguished cop dramas (Street Kings, End of Watch) has a way to go to enter that company. Though Fury makes a credible run across the battlefield, it still ends up a burning wreck in the end.
© 2014 Nicholas Nicastro

Burning Bed

Rosamund Pike is a revelation in Gone Girl.

«««1/2  Gone Girl. Written by Gillian Flynn, based on her novel.  Directed by David Fincher. At area theaters.

The nation is in the midst of an apparently endless debate over the right of gays and lesbians to marry. The conservative argument against gay marriage is it somehow "ruins" the institution. But given its manifest problems, given that its legal advantages could readily be enshrined in civil unions, why would anyone fight for the right get married at all? The rest of America already seems to be going the other direction: according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, for the first time in history, more than 50% of American adults are now single. Given the demographic trends, our LGBT brothers and sisters seem to be rushing onto a sinking ship.

          David Fincher's Gone Girl is ostensibly just a Hitchcock-style thriller about a man suspected of killing his wife, but its point isn't crime and punishment. Its real subject is the central conundrum of marriage—that the imperfect, constantly evolving natures of individual human beings can or should be bound in an institution that involves the concept of "forever". It should come as no surprise that the script by Gillian Flynn (based on her 2012 novel) has more on its mind than twists and thrills. Even Hitchcock's films were rarely just about what they were about.

          Nick (Ben Affleck) is a magazine writer of less-than-certain income. This is dangerous territory when you're married to Amy (Rosamund Pike), a beautiful woman from a privileged background and very high standards for the kind of man worthy of her lifetime loyalty. Their romance was so storybook at first that neither could believe it ("We're so cute I want to punch us in the face," she says). Nick's unemployment soon leads to money problems, and the strains that can lead to infidelity. But his problems really start when, one ordinary afternoon, Amy disappears from their home. There's sympathy for him at first. As the façade of their marriage begins to crack, public suspicion inevitably shifts to Nick, who likewise begins to suspect he never really knew his dearly beloved at all.

          Gone Girl is a smart thriller with enough kinks in its plot to make nearly two-and-a half-hours go by very quickly. In the tradition of the genre's best, it not only keeps us all guessing, but uses that uncertainty to force audiences to see the characters in constantly new ways.

          Director Fincher (Seven, Fight Club, The Social Network) is a master craftsman who knows how to propel a story, and knows how to get good performances from his leads. Even as his character seems more and more like a shit-heel, Affleck retains that movie-star superpower that keeps him likeable. Rosamund Pike—a British actress who has flitted on the edges of stardom for well on a decade—is nothing less than a revelation. Catnip to men, burning with an intelligence she has no good use for, this character is the most compelling femme fatale since Linda Fiorentino twisted all those men around her little finger in The Last Seduction (1994).

          Ultimately, there may be one or two twists too many in Flynn's script to make sense. By the time this becomes obvious, though, Gone Girl has really become about something more important than solving a mystery.

© 2014 Nicholas Nicastro

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