Beasts of the Southern Wild

Or, Auroch paper scissors.

Beasts of the Southern Wild is not so much a narrative as a collection of images and scenes and character sketches, an attempt to capture a place and time rather than a story per se. In this case, director Benh Zeitlin wants to place us in a grindingly poor, off-the-grid community living on an island called "The Bathtub" off the Louisiana coast. 

Beasts has a Biblical flood (complete with an Ark and animals), and an invasion of extinct cattle straight out of the imagination of Hushpuppy (Quvenzhané Wallis), a six-year-old girl through whose eyes the audience views this world.

Everything that I've said about the movie so far makes it sound like a Terence Malick movie. Malick makes beautiful movies that make you feel just like you were there...even if watching it's kind of boring and often doesn't make much sense.

For a first-time director with a minuscule budget and a cast of unknowns headed by a six-year-old, Beasts is pretty impressive. But I have to say that the critical French-kissing that it has received is kind of a mystery to me. Many of the reviews can't really seem to say what exactly it is they like. When reviews start waxing all poetic and vague, my BS detector starts beeping. When they declare, as The New Yorker's David Denby did, that its narrative incoherence was actually necessary because if the film made sense it would actually have been worse, that's when it goes into the red.

The only explanation I have is that the dreck that comes out of Hollywood is so mind-numbingly similar that anything that smacks of originality looks like genius, and on that score I have to concede the point to the French-kissing reviewers.

If you asked me whether this movie showed promise, I'd say absolutely, tons. I can't wait to see what Zeitlin does next. If you asked me if Wallis was a good actress, I'd say she was cute, why don't we let her grow up a bit and see if she turns into Dakota Fanning? But Best Picture and Best Director for a first-timer and Best Actress for a six-year-old? Has the critical establishment lost its collective mind? It's one movie. It's too soon. Prizes like this should cap a successful career–not begin one and risk killing it by ego inflation.

So, at the risk of getting an Internet drubbing, I'm going to be the kid calling out the emperor: this film is pretentious, patronizing poverty porn.

No doubt, to a New Yorker like Zeitlin (hey, I'm one too), rural poverty in Louisiana seems downright charming–accents! levees! crawfish!–but like Slumdog Millionaire, I feel like Beasts of the Southern Wild tells us more about our illusions than ourselves. Of course it's true that money can't buy happiness, but to delude your rich, pampered modern self that it's much better to live in poverty and squalor so you can enjoy the spiritual richness is a bit much. 

I'm not telling you that you're not allowed to enjoy it because it's not politically correct, but I think you should ask yourself why you like it. Beasts is like the film equivalent of a Renaissance Fair. If you go into it realizing that there was no dentistry or flush toilets in the real middle ages, you're fine–but in that case, it's not really a soaring religious experience.

Again, let me repeat that it's promising pretentious, patronizing poverty porn, so if you liked the movie we can at least agree on that. But best movie of the year? There, we'll just have to agree to disagree.

Zero Dark Thirty/Skyfall

Or, Give My Regards to Langley.

I've realized this week that I'm massively behind in my movie reviewing, and so I asked myself which movies I'd seen recently could co-star in a review. This pairing might seem like an odd double feature, but in a way, Zero Dark Thirty is what a Bond movie might be if the CIA rather than MI-6 was the starring agency. And not only do we have MI-6 facing off against the CIA in this review, we also have two Oscar-winning directors going head-to-head: Sam Mendes for Skyfall, and Kathryn Bigelow for Zero Dark Thirty. Let the fireworks begin!

James Bond is notorious for his disrespect for legally constituted authority. He does whatever it takes to get his man, and he always does. If he breaks a few laws, or destroys a few buildings, in the process, what of it? Of course, I don't remember James Bond torturing anybody. Perhaps that's because he has been tortured himself, in Casino Royale–a scene that makes Film School Rejects' list of the Ten Best Torture Scenes in American Cinema.

It's possible that Zero Dark Thirty is aiming to push Casino Royale off the list. At the beginning of the movie, Jessica Chastain's CIA agent Maya finds herself witnessing the interrogation of a suspect at a CIA "Black Site." The interrogator, Dan (Jason Clarke) strings him up, parades him around naked, waterboards him, and stuffs him in a small box. The reaction shots of Maya make very clear that she is very uncomfortable watching. But it's not long into the movie before she is eagerly participating in these tactics. 

The movie makes clear that they are necessary because they work. All of the important developments leading to bin Laden are attributed to the torture allowed during the Bush administration. One suspect says: "I don't want to be tortured again," and spills his guts right away. There is even a scene in which President Obama appears on screen declaring an end to the torture of detainees at black sites, and the characters simply look away, as if they are embarrassed by the commander-in-chief. 

If watching the torture scenes makes you uncomfortable, the movie seems to say, you just can't handle the truth. Unlike Bigelow's previous masterpiece, The Hurt Locker, which allowed viewers to choose how they wanted to interpret the politics of the film, Zero Dark Thirty allows no such ambiguity. Every terrorist attack since 9/11 is interwoven into the film–most on television, but a few directly affect the characters. In the film's world, terrorism is very real, very personal, and very threatening. Zero Dark Thirty takes place in a very dark, very imperfect world, and it seems to say that the good guys can't be perfect either.

Skyfall has a very similar and not very deeply hidden political agenda. After Bond's acerbically amusing boss M (Judi Dench) is blamed for losing a maguffin (in this case, a list of undercover agents), the legally constituted authorities call her on the carpet and grill her. One prattling minister proclaims MI-6 completely unnecessary in the modern world. M attempts to claim that there are shadowy threats in the world that MI-6 is necessary to defend the realm against, but the minister doesn't seem to buy it. If you suspect that this blowhard will have the urgent necessity of MI-6 personally demonstrated to her before the movie is out, you will not be disappointed. 

Zero Dark Thirty also has an M of sorts–Joseph Bradley, the CIA station chief (Kyle Chandler). Bradley's role in the movie is the spineless bureaucrat who doesn't believe in Maya's hypothesis that a shadowy figure named Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti will lead them to bin Laden, and won't give her the resources to pursue it–until she delivers a rather histrionic soliloquy calling him out and personally attacking him. You wouldn't think this would be the right way to get what you want, but evidently in the CIA it can work. 

Or at least, it works in a movie. It's precisely this kind of Hollywood-playbook plotting that leads me to believe that there's more poetic license than fact in Zero Dark Thirty. Politicians and op-ed columnists have already begun either using the film to underscore their points or attacking it because it undermines them. But it's really irrelevant. Even a movie that's "based on a true story" is still fiction, and it's best treated as such. After all, even James Bond is based on real people that Ian Fleming knew. It's fine to use it as a pretext to open a dialogue about a political subject–movies do that all the time–but treating it as investigative journalism is a huge mistake.

And as fiction, it's beautifully written. Maya is a very compelling heroine, and Bigelow and Chastain easily convince the audience to root for her. First she has to fight the CIA bureaucracy in Pakistan to let her pursue Abu Ahmed until he leads her to the Abbottabad complex where bin Laden may be hiding. Then the movie takes a semi-comic turn as Maya returns to Washington and has to fight the CIA bureaucracy in Washington to do something about it. In one extended sequence, she grabs a red marker and writes on the glass wall of her superior's office exactly how many days it has been since she located bin Laden that the Agency has done nothing about it.

Zero Dark Thirty stays far away from any personal details that might bog it down. So we learn nothing at all about Maya's past, or her personal life. This is no doubt to avoid casting any aspersions of soap opera on a "serious" film. And yet it is the fact that Skyfall, for the first time, delves into 007's past that helps put it a cut above the average Bond film; This might actually be the only movie where Bond has an actual character arc. Skyfall is really about Bond's filial relationship with M, a relationship that is threatened by the appearance of an evil foster brother-in-arms (the villain Silva, played by Javier Bardem). And there's even a hint of an origin story, as Bond goes back to the remote corner of Scotland he hails from.

Have no fear that Bond will spend much time nattering with his maiden aunts, though. These are both action movies, and both have some stupendous action sequences. In the case of Skyfall, the best may be the one in a deserted Shanghai office tower. In this scene, Bond follows his prey to an empty upper floor of a steel-and-glass skyscraper, and the two of them battle each other, silhouetted, wrapped in neon like the naked women in the opening sequence of every Bond film. 

It's interesting to note the progression of location shoots in the Bond series; once upon a time, 007 spent most of his time in Europe. In recent movies, Bond has spent some time in more exotic, if still picturesque, locales (as have his yankee stunt doubles, Ethan Hunt and Jason Bourne). In addition to Shanghai, which has become synonymous with neon corporate excess in a way that Tokyo once was, back before the collapse of the Japanese economy, Bond drops in on Macau and Istanbul in this installment.

Maya pursues her quarry across the globe as well, but the locations are less picturesque: Islamabad, Gdansk, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, Kuwait. In general, Zero Dark Thirty's grittier locations work to the film's advantage, allowing it to be bigger than life and yet just realistic enough to be believable. Bigelow and cinematographer Greig Fraser have wisely chosen to avoid the fake-documentary feel that, at this point, is reserved for monster movies (although see my review of Chronicle for a counterexample where it works). Instead, the frame is often characterized by a desert bleakness, punctuated by bursts of occasional subcontinental color.

I often joke that although the movie Titanic takes a lot of potshots, the real sign that it's a great movie is the moment when you find yourself thinking, gosh, I really hope the ship doesn't sink. Zero Dark Thirty chalks up a similar success when the Navy SEAL team finally attacks bin Laden's complex, and you find yourself on the edge of your seat, wondering if the operation will succeed, or whether the team will actually find bin Laden before the Pakistani air force arrives. 

The entire sequence takes place at night, so the cinematographer has little to work with other than night-goggle green. But this is where the editors, William Goldenberg and Dylan Tichenor (both Oscar-nominated), really shine. A sequence taking place entirely at night, with the characters all shrouded in identical fatigues and goggles, might easily become completely incomprehensible. Taking a mountain of footage like that and transforming it into something completely understandable, but still too suspenseful for a bathroom break, is truly a remarkable achievement.

I don't know if I've truly done either movie justice in this review; there seems to be so much more about both of them worth discussing. But one last thing that the two movies have in common is that they are both emphatically worth seeing.

Of books and movies

Is the movie ever better than the book?

I was asked that question by a friend after my review of The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, after revealing that I had tried to read the book and hadn't really liked it.

It feels like a given that it never is, but I believe that's because of observational bias rather than the intrinsic quality of movies. You only see the movie if you loved the book–why go see a movie based on a book you didn't enjoy? But on the other hand, if you loved the book, the movie is bound to disappoint. They will have changed something that you liked, or left out something important.

What's more, they have no choice. French filmmaker Robert Bresson is famous for saying "a film is born three times: when it is written, when it is shot, and when it is edited." If the director sticks too closely to the book ("when it is written"), he misses the opportunities provided by the second and third births. If fans of the book insist that he do so, they will, perversely, get a movie that satisfies them less rather than more.

A rule of thumb is that a script will take one minute per page, so even a long movie probably only has a script of around 150 pages–and of course a screenplay has many times the whitespace of a book.

So there's just a lot fewer words in a screenplay than in a book.

On top of that, much of a book can't be turned into a movie at all. A character's internal monologues can be conveyed by voiceover, but as all beginning screenwriters learn, voiceover is a clumsy, sledgehammersy tool in a movie. A book might spend a page describing a character's moral views, or his leather jacket, which simply won't translate directly to the screen at all.

There are other aspects of books that are difficult to translate. For instance, a book like The Hobbit can comfortably accommodate a cast of fifteen main characters (thirteen dwarves, a Hobbit, and a wizard). The seven dwarves in Snow White are enough of a challenge, and as a child I was convinced one of them was named Sneaky; who could possibly keep track of a baker's dozen? If you're reading the book, and you confuse Fili and Kili or Dori, Nori, and Ori, you can always stop for a minute to think about it, or even go back a few pages and review. In film, obviously, this is impossible. As Woody Allen famously said about relationships, so it is in film–it's like a shark, it has to keep moving forward or it dies.

When you put it like that, it makes film seem like a very poor format compared to paper, and it's completely understandable why every film pales in comparison to a novel.

But that's only if you insist on judging a film by the plots and the words. When film is scanned, it's usually stored at a resolution of over 2,000 lines, which means there are about 8 million pixels in every frame, and 24 frames per second. If you consider the amount of data passing before your eyes when you're watching a movie, it turns out that a picture is actually worth far more than a thousand words.

So often, in translating a book to the screen, dialogue and description must ideally become image and sound. 

This is why some of the best moments in the film of The Hobbit are barely in the book at all. For instance, the Storm Giants merit only a passing reference in the book, but their battle is one of the most visually stunning parts of the movie. The trouble is that the reason it's only a passing reference in the book is that the Storm Giants don't really play any part in the narrative. In order to justify turning this scene into a major part of the movie, the script really needed to give them a narrative role, and it doesn't do that. So it's a stunning set-piece, but it stops the movie dead until it concludes.

On the other hand, the prologue, which has been taken from the appendices to The Return of the King and therefore doesn't really "belong" in The Hobbit at all, is not only visually stunning but also helps stitch the narrative together by making it clear what the dwarves who show up on Bilbo's doorstep are after. So from my perspective this is a much more successful example of adapting a book to film.

The prologue also contains a brilliant moment of acting that goes almost unnoticed. The dwarf king Thrór becomes extremely rich and the other races are shown paying fealty to him, but it is clear from the expression on the elf-king's face that he is not pleased. Then, when the dragon Smaug comes, the elf-king turns his troops away and does not help the dwarves. 

The voiceover doesn't explain this decision, because it doesn't have to. It also provides an explanation for why elves and dwarves don't like each other–and it's not in the books. I don't think this is sacrilege, unless you regard the source novel as scripture.

Finally, I'm going to commit hubris by suggesting one way in which the movie misses a golden opportunity to improve on the book. Films are a multidimensional art form. I've praised the effects in the Storm Giant sequence, and the acting in the Erebor prologue. Now (since I'm an editor), I'd like to demonstrate how a simple edit could have made a noticeable improvement to the story.

In both film and book, it's kind of a mystery why Bilbo suddenly decides to join the dwarves, after they have ravaged his house and mocked him. In the book, Gandalf suddenly appears and simply urges Bilbo out the door, and he goes. It gives the impression that he joins the company simply because he doesn't have the stones to tell Gandalf to get lost.

But the book does contain one important clue. The night before, the dwarves are singing a song about their home, and Tolkien writes: "As they sang the hobbit felt the love of beautiful things made by hands and by cunning and by magic moving through him, a fierce and a jealous love, the desire of the hearts of dwarves."

Composer Howard Shore has composed a beautiful, mystery-shrouded tune for "Misty Mountains Cold," and while Bilbo does appear to be listening to it rather intently, the film doesn't quite connect this moment to his decision to leave. As it is, Bilbo gets up, notices the contract that the dwarves have left on the mantel, and dashes out the door. What if, as he picked up the piece of paper, an echo of "Misty Mountains Cold" played under it? This would allow the song, which is unique to the film, to play a narrative role as well–a role entirely consonant with the author's intention.

I guess all of this is to say that I hope readers will allow filmmakers a little latitude with the adaptations of their favorite books. To answer the question I started with: maybe it's never possible for the film to be better than the book, but it is definitely possible for it to be just as good in a totally different way, providing a way to enjoy a story twice for the first time. My personal favorite adaptation is The Remains of the Day, which is both one of my favorite books and one of my favorite movies.

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey

Or, The Fillership of the Ring.

What, exactly, was unexpected about this journey? If you ask me, it was only a matter of time. A lot of time–over two hours, in fact. This has been the problem with the entire Lord of the Rings series: the fanboys (and girls) can't get enough, and everybody else wishes it was over already.

Can you tell which category I'm in?

Don't throw tomatoes, please: I actually thoroughly enjoyed the prologue to The Hobbit, which explains how the dwarf kingdom of Erebor was destroyed by the dragon Smaug–with a little help from the mercenary dwarves themselves. Anybody who knows my taste in film is liable to be surprised by this, as it features a boatload of voiceover, which I hate. But the prologue also features some truly stunning animation, and even better, some subtlety.

Subtlety is usually lacking in Middle Earth, which is lousy with Exposition Fairies who tend to harangue the viewer with backstory. This sequence, apparently set before the coming of the Exposition Fairies to Middle Earth, explains beautifully why elves and dwarves don't get along, even though it never says so explicitly. The dragon itself is never fully seen, making it extremely convincing.

And then...to the Shire, and the perpetually perplexed, vexed, and miffed Hobbit Bilbo Baggins (Martin Freeman). Freeman appears to be playing Bilbo the same way he plays John Watson on the BBC's excellent series Sherlock, which seems to make Ian McKellen's wizard Gandalf the Sherlock here.

Bilbo is besieged with dwarvish visitors in a sequence lasting an eon or two. I still don't know how many dwarves there were or what their names are, so the whole thing was lost on me. I do remember that their leader is Thorin Oakenshield (Richard Armitage), the grandson of the last king of Erebor, and the company of oafish midgets is out to retake the mountain from the dragon. 

Gandalf wants Bilbo to come with. I can't see any middle-earthly reason why the homebody hobbit should sign on with this group, nor does the movie give us one. It's also unclear why the group needs him, except that it will make for nice emotional moments later on. To be fair, at one point Gandalf utters some blather about how he brought Bilbo because of the Hobbit's everyday goodness and how inspiring it is, which, frankly, it is not.

From this point on, The Hobbit begins to feel very similar to The Lord of the Rings. It's a buddy movie with too many buddies, and a road movie without any roads, and it's just too damn long. The group heads to Mordor Erebor, is beset by lots of orcs and goblins, and apparently the elf city of Rivendell is on the way from the Shire to anywhere, because they run into that too. There, the wizards and elves rave ominously, while Cate Blanchett's Galadriel paces bizarrely in a circle.

The movie is filled with the fantasybabble that is so common in movies like these, and it's really a shame, because however well it reads on the page, in a movie fake-Shakespearean dialogue like that inevitably sinks, Ophelia-like, and drowns the movie withal. The only light in this thespian obscurity is Gandalf's fellow wizard Radagast the Brown (Sylvester McCoy), the film's Mercutio, who brings a desperate, birdshit-festooned looniness to the proceedings that it sadly needs.

There are some lovely fight sequences, and it's a shame that some of the best ones, like the encounter between the Storm Giants, appear to be completely and utterly irrelevant to the plot. This is the problem with many modern movies. There are some movies that are stupendously visual but have pretty much totally dispensed with story, so that they are enjoyable only as long as you suspend not just your disbelief, but also your intelligence. 

The strange thing is that the movie ends almost like a television episode–it's only missing the title To Be Continued–and maybe The Hobbit would have made a nice miniseries. As it is, the next movie will apparently be subtitled There And Back Again–but I think, metaphorically, that's exactly how I felt about this one. I'm sure fans of the Tolkien universe will be thrilled, as they should be; I just wanted to be enthralled as well.

Argo

Or, Farsi this movie.

The quote "truth is stranger than fiction" has been waiting around all these years just to describe the movie Argo. The movie's greatest achievement is the mere fact that people are not watching it and thinking, "what a crock of %*$@$."

Argo comes off a little bit like a steamy love letter to the CIA. Perhaps because the movie itself is aware of this, it begins with a series of animated storyboards explaining the recent history of Iran. This history explains that the CIA deposed a democratically-elected Iranian government and installed a lunatic despot, thus indirectly causing the Iranian Revolution and explaining why Iranians might stand outside the American embassy day after day chanting "Death to America."

Whether you buy this particular Luther-to-Hitler line of historical reasoning is kind of moot, because you are almost immediately plunged into the storming of the embassy, which is a beautifully created set piece. I don't know if it's historically accurate, but more important for a movie, it's visually accurate. It feels a little bit like you're watching Nightline–and Ted Koppel does, of course, make several cameos on television sets throughout the movie. 

As the students storm the embassy, six minor bureaucrats slip out a side door and find refuge in the Canadian ambassador's residence. Not only is the movie head-over-heels in love with the CIA, but it has a definite hard-on for Canada as well, which took these hapless functionaries in (when the British and the Kiwis would have thrown them to the wolves, as the movie points out).

Victor Garber, as Canadian ambassador Ken Taylor, is asked only to wear a funny wig–he is spared the funny facial hair and the gigantic glasses and the hysterical hairstyles that afflict many other characters. Maybe, being a real Canadian, he needed less makeup? Not so Ben Affleck, as CIA exfiltration specialist Tony Mendez. Affleck may deserve an Oscar for pulling off not just the beard, but the gold chain. 

When the scene moves from Tehran to Washington, the mood changes from horror to comedy, and it's a very deft move. The State Department wants to sneak the six Americans out of the country by giving them bicycles and asking them to ride across the Iranian countryside to the border in the middle of winter. Affleck's best acting moment is not rolling his eyes at this ludicrous proposal, or the ones that follow.

And then he suggests something even more outlandish. Mendez wants to pretend the six are part of a Canadian location scouting team looking into Iran as a location for a breathtakingly stupid science-fiction film called, of course, Argo. They will just drive to the airport and fly right out with their fake Canadian passports.The CIA brass ask him: "you don't have a better bad idea than this?" and Bryan Cranston, as Mendez's boss, deadpans: "this is the best bad idea we have, sir."

The genius of this premise is that it allows director Affleck to poke fun at Hollywood–and himself. The joke is that everyone, including the Revolutionary Guard, knows Hollywood is filled with people who'd sell their mothers for a hit movie. When Mendez asks makeup artist John Chambers (John Goodman) if he can teach one of the hostages to be a director in a day, Chambers responds: "you could teach a rhesus monkey to be a director in a day." 

It's the best double-entendre of the year. How can you not like a film that allows the characters to talk to the director that way? And it's not the only moment where Affleck compares the spy business to the movie business: both Mendez and the director of the film-within-a-film, Lester Siegel (Alan Arkin), have messed up their personal lives. Lester says: "it's like working in the coal mines, you come home and you can't wash it off." And you can't help thinking: well, he and the CIA agent clearly have that much in common.

Nothing is perfect. The table read of the fake movie is head-scratchingly intercut with a revolutionary press conference, for instance. But that's the thing about Argo. It's like a dog that follows you around and rubs against your leg and simply refuses to give up until you love it. Criticizing the movie is like kicking the dog. 

What's nice about all of this background is that by the time Mendez arrives in Tehran, we really feel like we know him. That's the fault with most action movies; the action begins so early that we know absolutely nothing about the hero. He's a cipher, an archetype, a straw man. Not so in Argo. 

And it's not just Mendez: Scoot McNairy plays one of the fugitive nobodies. He's clearly in love with Iran (he's the only one of the group that speaks Farsi) and wracked with guilt that he wouldn't leave with his wife when he had the chance; he's also a coward and threatens to wreck the whole operation. You know he's going to redeem himself; the way he does is both poetic and hilarious. All of the acting is superb. Affleck isn't shabby himself, but his directorial modesty even extends to hiring actors who can make him look mediocre.

The climax in which the hostages finally escape is predictably Hollywoodized, but let's forgive the dog for being a dog. Let Argo smell your butt, sit on your lap, and lick your face.