Rewinding 2009: Part II

Reviews of Avatar, Away We Go, Bad Lieutenant, and The Cove, plus 10 one-line reviews.

Please join me while I play catch-up on the year in film.
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If I understand the PR and punditry correctly, the goal of James Cameron’s science fiction epic Avatar is immersion — a chrysalis of cinematic completeness, wrapped in the beautiful visuals of a computer-generated world and whisked away on a dreamlike adventure. Using this as a benchmark, Avatar is a mixed bag. For every moment it draws you into its world (and there are many, this is a gorgeous and gigantic technical achievement), there is another moment where its clunky and ham-fisted screenplay pushes you out.

Yes, Avatar is a dizzying spectacle of performance-capture technology and computer-generated imagery that envelopes the audience and brings everyone sitting in the theater into its world, the alien planet Pandora, where a U.S. Marine (Sam Worthington), occupying an avatar of the alien species, is sent on a reconnaissance mission to displace the species. (His loyalties shift as his knowledge grows.) It’s not difficult to admire the ambition and hubris on Cameron’s part that went into imagining this film, which cost in the $300-million range and relies on technology that’s been in the works for something like the better part of two decades. Only time will tell how influential this film’s style and special effects will be, but as you’re positioned in your theater seat, it feels like the door has been opened to a world of new cinematic possibilities.

However, even if its pioneering use of technology makes it the movie-going event of the year, Avatar in its totality is far from the year’s best offerings. While narrative subtlety has never been among Cameron’s strengths, the fundamental failings of the storytelling here — wooden dialogue, bloodless characters, a cliched script that makes no attempt to conceal the scaffolding of its rather sophomoric “Big Ideas” — are particularly egregious. What baffles me is that if you’re going to invest this much time and money into the possibility of cinematic history, why wouldn’t you spend a few more weeks at the drafting table or the writers’ room, tweaking (or radically changing) the script and turning Avatar, which already promises visual uniqueness, into a fresh work of sci-fi? (Even Star Wars, a film that borrows generously from archetypal characters and heroic mythos, found its own breath and pulse.)

The blame and praise fall equally onto the shoulders of Cameron, who serves the film as director, writer, and producer (and in various other capacities, I’m sure). You can tell where his allegiances lie, how he’s stacked the deck, and how he’s buying off the moviegoer. All that is a bit unfair, and even though the film is ultimately effective, it’s only minimally so. Cameron created an addictive new world without bothering to move the one we currently occupy.

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I’m not sure director Sam Mendes could have helmed a more different film after his 2008 drama Revolutionary Road than 2009’s Away We Go. The former, a beautifully daring yet flawed adaptation of Richard Yates’ novel, peered into the tortured and destructive marriage of a couple where the 1950s bled into the early 1960s. The latter, from an original screenplay by Dave Eggers and Vendela Vida, peers into the life of — surprise! — a couple genuinely in love. This is perhaps not traditional fare for art, but it works with ease and pleasantry in Away We Go. Burt and Verona (John Krasinski and Maya Rudolph) are in their thirties, happily together and deeply in love, but a little lost as they struggle to discover where “home” is before the birth of their first child. The film is a bit of a road comedy, where they take off and try our new locations and visit kooky friends and family. Krasinski and Rudolph are comfortable and likable, and the film is sweet and warm, with well-written touches of humanity. Though by no means perfect, it is a small, affecting love story that is a welcome respite from Hollywood’s bankrupt romantic comedy machine. 

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I can imagine a few circumstances under which Werner Herzog’s Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call - New Orleans, starring Nicolas Cage, would not be a success — for example, if it hadn’t been directed by Werner Herzog or starred Nicolas Cage. As simplistic as that response may be, it does seem to encapsulate this film’s strengths and the bizarre, twisted pleasure taken in seeing post-Katrina New Orleans through Herzog’s lens and watching Cage play an unstable, corrupt police officer who spirals further out of control than you can potentially imagine. Terence McDonagh, Cage’s character, steals drugs from criminals and the confiscated stash in police headquarters, pays regular visits to an escort girlfriend, uses violence and intimidation, and routinely breaks police protocol. It is a shocking and unhinged performance, the sort of role Cage will do out of the blue when he isn’t wallowing in blockbuster trash, and his character’s (I think it’s only his character’s) mania is riveting: he snorts, he shakes, he hunches, he snaps, he smokes, he twitches, he cackles, he pistol-whips, he blocks a person's assisted breathing machine, he randomly pulls out an electric razor and shaves during an interrogation. It is at once a parody every police procedural in existence but also an over-the-top performance that raises the stakes. The screenplay, adapted by William Finkelstein from the 1992 film Bad Lieutenant by Abel Ferrara, offers little beyond the limitations of the genre, but Herzog’s lens captures an array of strange scenery and capitalizes on the bizarre. I have no doubt that this Bad Lieutenant could have been played entirely straight, but the way Herzog and Cage duck and twist into darkly comic realms allows the film to stay one step ahead of the audience. If you don’t end up laughing and asking yourself what the hell is going on, you’re not paying attention.

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The Cove commits the cardinal sin of the activist documentary: it conflates the subject with the self when the two are decidedly unequal. Insofar as its subject is concerned, the film is a heart-breaking and horrifying look into the Japanese dolphin industry, the corrupt practices of Japan’s participation in the International Whaling Commission, and the spread of toxic mercury that follows the consumption of dolphin meat. The discussions that emerge through these parts of the film feel essential, although the way it builds its thesis is often hindered by a series of unfinished threads. But when the film becomes less about the dolphins and more about the brave antics and espionage-like tactics required of the filmmakers to capture their footage, The Cove loses its soul. The director, Louie Psihoyos, is the co-founder of the Oceanic Preservation Society, a non-profit organization that produced the film. The essayistic bend to this slice of agitprop is not the problem; it’s the distance and perspective. Under the direction of someone less interested in glorifying the filmmakers and activists, the film would have been tighter and more focused on

I won’t deny the power of the final images captured by the hidden cameras — men killing dolphins; dolphins struggling for life; the cruel handling of dead dolphin bodies; the bloody water that seems straight out of a horror film. They are unsettling and haunting. They sent chills down my spine and brought tears to my eyes. Yet, when I finally classified the feeling of discomfort that lingered after the end of the movie, it was as a combination of sadness at the images and frustration at cheapness of the filmmakers’ self-aggrandizing. Am I glad a film like this exists? Yes, for the reason that it brings attention to this issue. But am I glad that film is The Cove? The answer to that question is more complicated.

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• Earth, a re-cut and family-friendly version of BBC’s groundbreaking documentary Planet Earth, captures a lot that miniseries’ beautiful images, but suffers from an annoying voiceover that dumbs down the quality; certainly not recommended for anyone who can watch the miniseries instead.

• I found The Hangover to be one of the funnier films of the year, an unexpected and full-front assault of vulgarity, but now that 2009 is complete, I can only remember laughing but not what it was exactly that earned that laughter except a bizarre performance by Zach Galifianakis and a surprise cameo by a tiger.

• I Love You, Man: a funny but forgettable film.

• Extract: A not-so-funny but forgettable film.

• The Girlfriend Experience = Steven Soderbergh at his experimental worst.

• The first hour of Notorious is an above-average biopic of the early years in the life of rapper Christopher “Biggie” Wallace, but once the character hits it big, the film’s ambitions narrow rapidly.

• Rumor has it that Christian Bale fought to have the entire focus of Terminator: Salvation shifted from the Marcus Wright, a prototype cyborg character played by Sam Worthington in a a good performance, to vapid resistance hero John Connor, which might easily qualify as one of the worst screenplay decisions of 2009.

• Woody Allen’s Whatever Works doesn’t work.

• Although the goal of Lars Von Trier's Antichrist seems to be conscientious audience repulsion, in reality the most offensive quality to the film is how frighteningly dull, sloppy, and self-absorbed it is (not to mention its  heavy-handed aspirations of portraying depression, mania, grief, and humankind’s connection with religion and the natural world).

• Monsters vs. Aliens may not be the worst film of 2009 (many contenders left to go), but it’s among the least enjoyable experiences I’ve had with a movie in quite some time; at every turn this DreamWorks film misfires in its attempt to satirize and honor the science fiction b-movies of the 1950s, and it’s safe to say that the talented writers and dreamers at Pixar have no legitimate threat against them for title of greatest contemporary American animation studio.

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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.

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