Tuesday, December 30, 2008

"Frost/Nixon"

Ron Howard is a resolutely lame filmmaker, a low-rent Spielberg who can successfully film every kind of genre with an equal eye for awfulness. "Far and Away," "Edtv," "How the Grinch Stole Christmas," "The Da Vinci Code," and "Willow" all look and feel exactly right for an epic, a farcical ensemble comedy, a kid's candy movie, a thriller, and a fantasy movie - the visual aesthetics are so perfect - and since each of them are respectively the worst example of their respective genre, Ron Howard can proudly call himself Hollywood's Retard Chameleon.

"Da Vinci Code," his most recent uber-successful crapfest, is a good example: it's darkly lit, there's lots of shaky closeups, the score is by Hans Zimmer, the love interest is a brain-crush-cute brunette actress who's so serious that she only gives the protagonist one kiss the whole movie, and the main character has a flashback-past in which he falls through a hole in the ground. That flashback was specifically added into the movie and rips off a scene from "Batman Begins" (co-scored by Zimmer), which proves that Ron Howard is at least uniquely gifted at stealing from the best.

The weirdest thing about Howard, though, is that no matter how perfectly bad he is at everything else, give him a true-life 20th Century story of everyman heroism and he somehow makes at least half a masterpiece. "Apollo 13," "Cinderella Man," and "Frost/Nixon" all suffer from imperfections, but Howard, who knows how to work with great actors, is confident enough to just set his camera down (even if it's weightless) and watch everyday fellas discover themselves at the epiccenter of history. (You can also throw in the first half of "A Beautiful Mind" into this batch, before the mid-movie twist sends the whole movie spiralling towards the outer reaches of the solar system.)

"Frost/Nixon" is probably the best of the bunch. The film centers on a mesmerizing battle of wits between a joke journalist and a failed President - the interview between David Frost and Richard Nixon which proved historic when Nixon seemed to almost maybe apologize for breaking the law- and the genius of the movie is that both actors seem to be overplaying their parts for the first hour (Michael Sheen's David Frost speaks through a wide grin, and Frank Langella somehow makes you see Richard Nixon's jowls using only his voice), and then the Interview begins and you see their true personalities emerge. Both actors originated their roles onstage, and it's intriguing how, in the first half of "Frost/Nixon," they both play for the people in the back row - more theatrically - whereas, after the interview begins, they become more precise, direct, more cinematic. Sheen plays Frost playing Frost, and Langella plays Nixon playing Nixon, and the film becomes a cat-and-mouse switcheroo.

The film would have been better just focusing entirely on the interview, but this is Ron Howard film, so the essential energy of the two actors' conflict is dampened and homogenized with precisely-honed cliches like The Girlfriend, The Character Played By Oliver Platt, and The Doing-Lots-Of-Stuff Montage. None of these things are particularly bad, and none of them detract from Sheen and Langella, except by virtue of not just letting them Just Be onscreen.

"Valkyrie"

"Valkyrie" is a minor-key thriller, a story told in whispers and behind closed doors, featuring men who know they're doomed to failure and that failure means death. "Valkyrie" is a WWII movie the way that last year's "3:10 to Yuma" was a western - both movies completely ignore practically everything iconic about their much-belabored genre, settling instead for a resolutely destylized vision (both movies feature lots of interior close-ups and fluid Steadicam movements which refuse to call attention to themselves.) Characters in both films are heroic, but in decidedly non-bullshit ways; in both films, the lead protagonist is an amputee played by a former glamour boy (Christian Bale in "Yuma" had only one leg; Tom Cruise in "Valkyrie" has just one eye and half a hand.) Both movies seem to come straight out of the 1950s, and so they'll probably look much better 50 years from now.

It's difficult to talk about "Valkyrie" without discussing the bad buzz it accrued all during 2008, most of which centered on Tom Cruise, who is still making up for a messy 2005 which proved to everyone in America that he was an insane gay fascist satanist who jumped on couches and probably stuffed gerbils up his ass. Listen, I think Scientology is totally bullshit, but I think the same thing about Catholicism, and as long as Tom Cruise doesn't make the L. Ron Hubbard version of "The Passion of the Christ," we're cool.

People tend to hate on Tom Cruise because he's weird. This reflects a basic misunderstanding of the film business in general and the acting art in particular, because every single actor is completely strange, narcissistic, preachy, egotistical, neurotic, secretly gay, and generally not the kind of person you would like to bring home to mother or even meet casually for a drink. Daniel Day-Lewis may be the weirdest person to ever exist in the universe, which is why he's able to fully inhabit his roles. "There Will Be Blood" would barely be a movie if it starred anyone other than Daniel Day-Lewis, because the whole joy of the movie centers on watching an incredibly bizarre person live and breathe onscreen, and only an incredibly bizarre person could inhabit such a role. Actors need to lie to everyone all of the time. So what if Tom Cruise believes that space ghosts live in human minds?

ANYWAYS, "Valkyrie" was directed by Bryan Singer, who somehow spent ten years making superhero movies before he got around to this one. Admittedly, all three of those movies were good in their own way - "X-Men" kickstarted the comics film revolution by virtue of its not-badness, "X2" was the first great action movie sequel of the modern age, and "Superman Returns" was such a strenuously accurate sequel-remake to the essentially forgotten "Superman 2" that it practically rivals "Grindhouse" for insanely-precise subgenre fetishism. (For a very particular kind of movie geek, the opening titles of "Superman Returns" give a long tall brain hard-on.) "Valkyrie" basically ignores that near-trilogy, and plays like the logical next step from "The Usual Suspects" and "Apt Pupil," combining the measured heist-thrill of the former with the lofty themes of the latter. Not quite awesome but absurdly watchable, "Valkyrie" indicates that Singer might become a thrillingly low-key action filmmaker along late-period Eastwood lines, so long as Warner Brothers keeps him away from "Superman Returns Returns."

Thursday, December 18, 2008

"Doubt"

"Doubt" is not quite an amazing movie, although it does have the two most amazing scenes from any movie all year. Weirdly, these two scenes are also the stagiest scenes in this stage adaptation - you can almost see the spotlight falling on the characters, at times. The themes are huge, the dialogues long and wandering, the faces of the fine actors relentlessly impassive - Meryl Streep is forced, by the material and by her own attention to detail, to give a horrendously over-the-top performance, with just a very few hints (including the devastating final line) that it's intentional. The film centers on the conflict between Meryl Streep's head nun and Philip Seymour Hoffman's head priest - she's the pre-Vatican II conservative, he's the progressive liberal who wants to bring some secular music into the chapel - and you can realistically watch the movie rooting for or against either of them.

Usually, after I see a movie that I don't like, my first instinct is to call it the worst movie ever, and my second instinct is to compare it to the movie I saw right before it. So it is that "Doubt" seems to provide the perfect explanation, as I think back on it, on why I so totally despised "Australia" a couple of nights ago. Nothing is worse for a movie than a silly, shallow, one-dimensional motivation. Almost every great movie is built upon a series of characters' wants and needs, and how those desires intersect and oppose each other. In great drama, and great comedy, every desire holds several different levels of meaning, some of them oppositional within themselves. So, in "The Great Gatsby," the title character claims to want Daisy, but also wants what Daisy represents (wealth, glitz, transcendance), and so his defeat comes not at the hands of a rival (although Daisy does not choose him), but rather, from Daisy herself - the object of his affection is also that affection's defeat.

Not every great dramatic desire need be so paradoxically frustrated, but consider an equally fascinating character from a more debased medium: on "The Wire," Jimmy McNulty is a cop trying to put criminals behind bars. On normal TV, cops do this because they want to protect innocent people; on "The Wire," McNulty does it because he wants to stuff his victory in the faces of his superiors, because he believes himself to be better than everyone else, because he enjoys the thrill of it, and because "chasing bad guys" allows him to justify his own perpetual immorality (ignoring his children, cheating on a wife and a girlfriend, drinking enough to fill Ireland.)

"Doubt" may tread heavily on overwrought themes, but in its best scenes, characters hold a number of ideas in their head, all at once. Meryl Streep's Sister Aloysius claims that she's just protecting the children under her care; but, she also hates Hoffman's Father Flynn and wants him gone; and, more generally, she hates what Flynn stands for, the modern age, "Frosty the Snowman." On an even deeper level (and this comes purely from the actors), she may even be attracted to him. When characters claim to stand for something, but their actions prove different, one cannot help but be interested. This is why the underrated "Rome" may age better than any of its HBO contemporaries - it gave the impression of seeing behind the curtain of history, watching its characters sanitize their actions and remove dimensions from their own character.

This is why "Australia," I think, is such a particular bummer. Characters don't really have some deeper, hidden agenda - Nicole Kidman's love for the young half-caste boy in her charge spurs the entire latter half of the movie, and indeed, that love seems to inspire all of Australia (except for Evil Faramir) to de-racistize themselves. There is one scene where Kidman's and Jackman's characters actually seem to dig into each other's nature - it is the most clinical scene of the movie (both discuss their past marriages), but also the most romantic, and worth a million Luhrmann Technicolor sunsets.

Wednesday, December 17, 2008

"Australia"

No one could possibly conceive what Baz Luhrmann would possibly do with a war movie. Turns out he was making the antipodal version of "Pearl Harbor," complete with a pointless series of mini-plots that fritter away two hours of time before a sudden ruthless attack by phantom-like Japanese airplanes attempts in vain to add a sense of depth and historical sweep to what is actually a one-note soap opera shot like a pop art propaganda poster. "Australia," like "Pearl Harbor," centers on an emotional triangle of people whose mutual love is so heavily remarked upon but so little in evidence that after awhile you begin to suspect everyone onscreen suffered partial lobotomies immediately before the film started.

In "Pearl Harbor," the triangle is romantic, which is lame, but involves Kate Beckinsale, which is nice; in "Australia," the triangle is more familial, and centers on the multicultural cross-strata family dynamic which develops between Nicole Kidman (who acts the shit out of her ridiculous role and is awesome but underutilized), Hugh Jackman (who scarcely seems to act but exhudes enough charisma that you almost believe it when his character regularly shifts from Clint Eastwood to Crocodile Dundee to Cary Grant), and Brandon Walters, who carries the whole dramatic weight of the movie's larger themes - institutional racism and the conflict of civilization against the wild are but two college-level topics that get chatted about once or twice - on his tiny shoulders, playing a young half-Aboriginal, half-white kid who occasionally narrates the film but mostly hangs about waiting to find out if the evil white people or the good white people will decide his fate.

The anti-racist message of the film is handled so obliquely, with such a weird blend of naivete and political correctness, that it actually emerges feeling weirdly colonialist, if not, well, racist. Jackman's character is careful to loudly honor aboriginal culture throughout the movie, but the film's vision of aboriginal culture is basically personified by an elder named King George, who, it pains me to inform you, spends the first hour of the movie standing on a hillside dancing by a fire and singing songs with Yoda lyrics which seem to telepathically speak to characters sleeping miles away. (The other primary black character in the film is Jackman's sidekick, who only speaks when spoken to and might as well walk around with a target on his head.)

We can argue back and forth about Luhrmann's treatment of aboriginal culture - certainly, the film critiques the shallowness of white civilization, and anyone who dares utter a racist remark gets their eventual comeuppance - but the King George character is never allowed to interact with anyone, and seems to float above the fray like a halfway Messiah figure (example: in an eye-popping shot which looks unfortunately like something out of a Michael Bay film, King George stands in the middle of a missile run without being hurt.)

Armchair sociology aside, more than half of "Australia" is much worse than anything you thought Luhrmann was capable of. This is one of those movies, like Wes Anderson's "Life Aquatic" or Michael Mann's "Miami Vice," where a great director's imprint is unmistakable but somehow everything that works so well in their great films works impossibly, terribly, simply not at all. Like those other misfires, this was a film conceived by a director in the throes of passion - Wes Anderson first doodled "Life Aquatic" as sketches in a middle-school notebook, Michael Mann created the original "Miami Vice" and wanted to update and correct its glammy glitz, and Baz Luhrmann seems set on filming THE definitive historical epic of Australia, both the real continent and some fantasyland Oz that exists our dreams, or the dreams of all Australians, or the dreams of Baz Luhrmann.

It took the guy 8 years after "Moulin Rouge!" to make this movie, and in that time, two other films have been made which way stole his thunder. "Rabbit-Proof Fence" was a far more realistic depiction of the Stolen Generation (half-white, half-Aboriginal kids who were taken from their parents and forcibly injected into white society); it was also far more exciting, and its vision of the Outback seemed genuinely frightening, and expansive, and demanding adventure (in "Australia," the Outback plays itself, unconvincingly.) "The Proposition" was a fierce anti-western about order and chaos waging war at the dawn of Australian civilization. It was a totally ludicrous film - like "Australia," it boiled the myriad forces of history down to a few characters prone to speechifying. But unlike "Australia," "The Proposition" seemed to view each of its characters with equal measures of belief and suspicion - there truly was no one in the right.

Here, Kidman and Jackman must represent old-Hollywood romance, contemporary post-feminist love, and politically correct multiculturalist do-goodery. They play nice people falling in nice love, and so the movie is really an epic ode to niceness. Bored my fucking eyes out.