Rewinding 2009: Part I

Reviews of Invictus, Funny People, In the Loop, Julie & Julia, and District 9.


Please join me while I play catch-up on the year in film. Following last year’s example, I’ll be reviewing movies from across the like-dislike spectrum over the next few months, culminating in a (relatively complete) best-of list by the Oscars.

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Morgan Freeman plays a really good Nelson Mandela in Invictus, a really bad movie about Nelson Mandela. Actually, Invictus approaches Mandela from an oblique angle, focusing on the first year of his presidency in South Africa through the lens of the 1995 World Cup rugby match, where the S.A. team brought together blacks and whites in the shaky years after the defeat of apartheid. There are some biopics that need a narrative device such as this, but I’m not sure the story of Mandela is one of them; had it not been for Freeman and director Clint Eastwood, it’s difficult to see how this script — which rather clumsily engages the themes of reunion and race relations — would have ever be taken seriously.

There are few men like Mandela, after all: a brilliant and canny leader who valued forgiveness and reconciliation, who managed to put aside all the indignities he suffered and lead a nation out of its moral chaos. Mandela's presidency was an act of intranational diplomacy, with the precision of a laser and the subtlety of a master-class politician, and his life is one of the most poignant stories of the twentieth century. Invictus does a disservice to him and his legacy by clomping around, vanquishing subtlety, and announcing its intentions at every turn. Eastwood, functioning on autopilot, is lazy with visual cues, and the tone-deaf script is in competition with the cinematography to keep everything superficial and convenient. Moments like the 1995 World Cup exist; they are crucial moments of community, sometimes calculated and sometimes not, that can bring together feuding factions and resonate louder than any spoken apology. Invictus makes no attempt to capture that sensation as anything close to organic. The result is deeply shameful, particularly when you consider just how powerful Freeman is. Great men do not deserve films this derisory.

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With a name like Funny People, you might expect Judd Apatow’s third directorial effort (after The 40-Year-Old Virgin and Knocked Up) to be, you know, funny; instead, it turns out to be about people. Not to be mistaken, let me say that the film is humorous, certainly good for a few laughs; but in this look into the lives of comedians—the famous, the fortunate, the flailing—the adjective “funny” is defined less by its connection to the humorous than it is to the strange, the unusual, and the offbeat, embodied in George Simmons (Adam Sandler), a sophomoric actor diagnosed with a rare blood disease; side effects include realizing where his life was misspent and a friendship with a young comedian, Ira Wright (Seth Rogen), who George takes under his wing with a mixture of selfishness and desperation. The strength of Apataow’s films is finding the humanity within unlikely characters, and at least as far as his directorial efforts are concerned, he’s turned it into a profitable enterprise by splicing such psychological analysis into the raunchy comedy genre. After a rather stellar first-hour, Funny People struggles through an overlong midsection (total running time is close to a two-and-a-half hours). In the end it emerges ultimately as a rewarding demonstration of Apataow’s ambition and a realistic portrait of everyday struggles and the means we use to conceal them. It’s not a great film, and it doesn’t nail funny-haha, but in its own way it nails funny-sad and proves the unlikeliest characters are capable of redemption.

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Let’s get this out of the way: the British political satire In the Loop is clever and quick, a film that delivers some good laughs and, heaven knows, owns the political allegiances of my heart. But let’s also acknowledge from the outset that it never really arrives in terms of sheer ferocity. The film concerns two diplomatic corps, American and British, jockeying for power (and when that doesn’t work, the mere illusion of power) as the two countries accelerate a potential war in the Middle East. The appeal here is in the language; writer-director Armando Iannucci’s screenplay is an icy sidewalk of barbs, jabs, and every conceivable conjugation of the word fuck (“Fuckity-bye” as a sign-off is among my favorite). But it’s a sort of witty slipperiness that masks itself as something sharper than it is. I spent the entire running time waiting for In the Loop to pull out the big knife and finally stab its victim, to make its definitive statement, but instead the film ends on a series of a thousand paper-cuts. Hey, if the object is to make them bleed to death, that’s one way to go. It just sure isn’t as efficient as it could be.

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Like Invictus, Nora Ephron’s Julie & Julia delivers a partial biopic that is not an out-and-out success. It is the story of a contemporary blogger named Julie Powell (Amy Adams), who finds strength and assurance as she works her way through the cookbook of Julia Child, played in a coming-of-age story of her own by the impeccable Meryl Streep. The two stories feed (and feed off) each other, although the clear winners by the end are Streep, who sublimely channels Child, and Stanley Tucci, who plays Julia’s devoted husband Paul. The film has a heaping dose of charm and sweetness, which can’t be undersold, and there is a good deal of pleasure to be had through its humor, cuteness, and warmth. But there is never any escaping the fact that Julie & Julia this is one half of a potentially great movie married to one half of a rather standard movie. What’s worse is now Streep has already played Julia Child, and a full-length look into her life, her career, and her personality will probably not happen any time soon. Oh well: I’ll settle for what I can get.

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District 9, a sci-fi parable from debut director Neill Blomkamp (and producer Peter Jackson) that’s part apartheid allegory and part video game, is all the evidence necessary that the situation and the story are complementary yet profoundly discrete narrative elements. Aliens, having parked their spaceship above Johannesburg, become abused on earth at the hands of humans, who force them into a ghetto and attempt to profit from their intergalactic weaponry. The film begins as a faux documentary, clearly evincing the themes of prejudice, racism, and social justice. It’s easy to swept away in the potential — at least until the story begins, and the missed opportunities, the hopscotch plot, and Swiss cheese logic quickly sour the experience. This alternate universe Blomkamp constructs leaves too many essential questions unanswered and too many threads untied; much like the themes it initially puts on display, the film fronts an attitude and an angle that isn’t backed up with heavy thinking, and its attempts to go for the heart are often scattershot. I can admire the trajectory Blomkamp gives the film, but it is unwise to aim high if you have no intention of following through. And if I feel too let down, it’s only because I believe it could have been possible.