The Ides of March

Or The West Wing, minus all the walking and talking. Where's Aaron Sorkin's right hand Tommy Schlamme when a film needs him?

The title of this movie is very carefully chosen, as if to say that they want to appeal to an audience that remembers its high school Shakespeare just enough to remember what exactly "the Ides of March" is. It's almost as if the movie is saying: if you have to Google it, don't bother. It's kind of elitist. Why exclude John Q. Public from your movie by giving it a title that he doesn't understand?

But it's actually kind of accurate, because the movie appeals to exactly the sort of overeducated liberal political junkie who finds a title like that appealing. Ryan Gosling plays Steve Meyers, a brilliant young political operative working for the presidential campaign of George Clooney's Governor Mike Morris, who is seeking the Democratic presidential nomination.

Clooney also directed this film, and surprisingly, his direction lacks flair. The scenes where Morris is on a podium have the requisite bright klieg lights; the scenes in stairwells or the back of limousines are appropriately high-key; but the camera doesn't move much and the editing adds nothing to the dialogue. I wasn't really fond of the performances either, with the exception of Clooney's. It's almost as if he knew what he wanted but was unable to convey it to everybody else.


There's a lot of pseudopolitical babble in this film, "we're going to run the numbers in the 17th and the 22nd and check the demographics against the voter reg," and the like. The purpose of this eye-rolling nonsense is to give the movie a veneer of truthiness that it totally doesn't deserve, and to make us feel, as The West Wing does, that these are not slimy political operatives, but whip-smart, dedicated professionals. Meyers even makes a point of telling someone that he's working for Morris because he truly believes in him, because the country needs someone like him. Come on, only the interns really think that. You're bound to think that this kind of naiveté is going to get its comeuppance.

Morris is a liberal's wet dream. In the course of the movie, he manages to give speeches supporting every progressive cause. He refuses to compromise, dammit! He's going to win this his way! He's like Dennis Kucinich without the plaintive whining.

It makes you wonder why Clooney is play-running for President. After all, he's very good at it. Unless you live under a rock, you know that he's one of those liberal actors who teases the public about running for something, like Harry Belafonte or Alec Baldwin, and never does. Good God, he's like a horny teenager who watches porn endlessly but is afraid to actually approach a girl.

Luckily for the movie's ultra-liberal audience, Morris is a shoo-in for the nomination--unless he fails to make a huge, contrived compromise in his ideals, by making a deal with a senator played by Jeffrey Wright. If he sticks to his ideals, he will lose Ohio, and then he loses the nomination.

Frankly, though, this deal does not seem particularly awful, and I'm not fond of this kind of contrived plot anyway. My first thought was: if this is the worst thing you have to do in order to be president, jump at it! I know I'm sounding very politically cynical, but in a country of 300 million people, compromise and accommodation are necessary. Note that I didn't even say "necessary evils." This is the way things get done. You scratch my back, I'll scratch yours.

Then Meyers learns that Morris is not as squeaky-clean as he seems. The posters in his campaign headquarters rip off Obama, but his behavior is more Clinton. Need I say more? Meyers seems tragically upset by this discovery, which makes him look even more naive, and he handles it in a way that seems unnecessarily cloak-and-dagger. Again, my reaction was to think that if the movie really wanted its progressive audience to feel that outraged at Morris, they were going to have to find a much bigger skeleton.

So you clearly know there is a betrayal in this play, and I say "play" because it is actually based on Beau Willimon's play Farragut North, and unfortunately it looks a little like a play, as well. Morris often appears to be running for student council president, and Cincinnati, where most of the action takes place, appears to be completely deserted.

When the long-awaited knife in the back comes, the film wants us to see the birth of a political Darth Vader. Instead, it only feels like the allegedly smart Meyers has just figured out what everybody else has known all along: that politics is sausage and you shouldn't ask what the ingredients are unless you have a strong stomach.

Contagion

This movie is so good, I actually think I caught something from it. As I write this, my throat is sore, my nose is running and I have a mild cough. These symptoms are not unlike those of MEV-1, the fictional virus at the heart of this movie. I'm a little worried for me, because in the movies--dating back to Camille--a slight cough is usually a sign that you'll be dead in a week.


Many of you will be glad to know that the first cough belongs to Gwyneth Paltrow. She is Patient Zero for this scary new epidemic--an epidemic that was not caused by evil scientists or frothing terrorists and does not turn people into zombies or body snatchers. It just kills a quarter of the people who get it, and mathematically, that's more than enough. For the first few minutes of the film, the camera lingers on spots where germs are apt to spread; a doorknob, a keypad, a glass. It's a great way to heighten the tension right from the start.


The first half of the film, in which the virus gradually spreads all over the world, wreaking logarithmic havoc, reminds me of two books: Randy Shilts' And the Band Played On, the story of the beginnings of the AIDS epidemic, and Richard Preston's The Hot Zone, about the Ebola and Marburg viruses. In these books, the heroes are CDC doctors, and they are in Contagion as well, played by Laurence Fishburne, Kate Winslet, Marion Cotillard and Jennifer Ehle.


How refreshing to see a movie in which the scientists are actually the good guys. And they actually get to be the good guys by just doing what they do. There is no eye-rolling fake biobabble. The scientists do not have to swashbuckle through an African forest in search of a magic ingredient. The CDC labs look exactly like real labs, although you might not believe it unless you Google it. Apparently somebody in Atlanta takes a little time off from saving the world to make a few flashy graphics now and then, but hey, it's a movie.

If there's a flaw here, it's that the doctors are a little too goody-goody, which is why one of my favorite moments is when Fishburne's Dr. Ellis Cheever makes a very bad, and yet totally understandable, error in judgment, and starts a rumor that spreads like the virus he's fighting.

It's not all doctors versus germs, though. Matt Damon plays Gwyneth Paltrow's husband, who loses his wife and son but is determined not to lose his daughter as well. Damon may be moonlighting as Jason Bourne, but he really shines as a regular, overprotective dad. Meanwhile, Jude Law chews the scenery as a conspiracy-mongering blogger.

As the virus spreads, we quickly realize that it isn't the biggest threat out there, and this is where Contagion really sets itself apart. Civil society starts to fall apart. People become paranoid and violent; hucksters and charlatans reign; the authorities tighten their grip or lose control completely. The real question the movie means to ask is this: will the virus destroy us or will we destroy ourselves first? I'd tell you, but *cough*.

Drive

There really ought to be an Oscar category for "Best Film Noir," since it's really one of the most important categories in American cinema, and if there were I think this film would take it easily. Ryan Gosling plays an ordinary Joe with no name, some kind of unmentioned, criminal past, violent impulses, and deep down, a good heart.

In film noir heaven, Bogey is smiling.

If it's important to you that you be able to understand the plot of the movie--perhaps you have an advanced degree in particle physics and believe you should be able to follow a movie made for teenagers--then maybe you should give this a pass. There's something about one mob group hiring somebody to steal money from another mob group so they can...so they can...oh, never mind. It's really not important. Like The Big Sleep, this movie has no plot to speak of and it really doesn't matter. It's about acting. Well, okay, acting and car chases.

"Drive" is refreshing for what the characters don't say and what they don't explain. My favorite scene is where Ordinary Joe meets his pretty neighbor's husband, just home from the big house. It's pretty clear Joe has been sleeping with the neighbor, although the movie never actually shows us. So the tension is tighter than a PG&E gas line. And then the ex-con next door says to his son: "c'mon, let's go, let mommy talk to her friend." And the entire plot turns on the forgiveness that he never explicitly grants.

Did I mention there are car chases? Ordinary Joe has many jobs. He's a mechanic, he's a stunt driver for Hollywood films, and apparently he's also a getaway driver. The car chases in this film are notable for their lack of cliche. In your average car chase, it goes to eleven right away, and frankly, I get bored quickly. This is different. There is a very exciting moment in one chase scene where Joe is...stopped at a red light. Director Nicolas Winding Refn creates scenes with highs AND lows. It's breathtaking in its originality.

Since it's a film noir, there are bad guys who are much badder than Joe. One of them is played by Albert Brooks--lots of people are upset that his performance was overlooked. Personally, I can take it or leave it.

And yes, Joe will do One Last Job, as the noir hero must do in order to pay his debts and go legit, and this job will go spectacularly wrong, as it must do in order to get the screenwriter paid. If the film has a flaw, other than its inexplicable use of the totally inappropriate and illegible font Mistral, it's that Joe crosses a line that I don't think the filmmakers mean for him to cross. There's a moment when he does something very bad in front of the girl, and you can see on her face that he's lost her...and comes close to losing us, too.

We're supposed to love him for being willing to alienate her if that's what it takes to save her, but in point of fact at that moment the audience stops identifying with Joe and starts identifying with the girl: what did you do, Joe? We liked you, but you've crossed the line.

I liked Joe, and the movie. Your mileage may vary.

Midnight in Paris

Just as Avatar is a militaristic film that's ostensibly about the dangers of militarism, Midnight is a nostalgic film that's ostensibly about the uselessness of nostalgia. It's easy to forgive it, though, because it's such beautiful eye candy, a sort of "Manhattan" for the Left Bank. Woody Allen owes cinematographer Darius Khondji a drink.

Owen Wilson plays the Woody Allen character, a nebbishy screenwriter named Gil engaged to a harpy played by Rachel McAdams who exists only to be completely unworthy of Gil. As Kenneth Branagh discovered, it's a tough job playing Woody's stand-in, but Wilson is actually pretty good at capturing the stuttering, intellectual essence of a Woody Allen role without actually seeming to ape him.

Gil is rather fond of Paris, which apparently is an underappreciated city, like San Francisco, or Buenos Aires, or Venice, at least among American Tea Party philistines like his fiancée's parents. He discovers that if he waits on a certain street corner at night, a car will come take him back to Paris in the Twenties, a place populated exclusively by famous people--Fitzgerald, Picasso, Eliot, etc. Most of the actors don't really seem to know what to do with the opportunity, and Fitzgerald comes off as a frat boy, Zelda as a ditz, Buñuel as clueless, and Picasso as a bore.

There are some really great exceptions, though, which totally make it worthwhile: Kathy Bates as Gertrude Stein, Corey Stoll as Hemingway, and especially Adrien Brody as Dalí. Gil tells a group about the dilemma that is his love life, and Man Ray says: "I see a photograph," Buñuel declares: "I see a film," and Dalí exults: "I see...a rhinoceros!"

The question is whether Gil will return to the present or stay in the past with Marion Cotillard's Adrianna, who is not as scintillating as Gertrude Stein, but presumably Gil stands a better chance with her.

That question is solved rather cleverly, although the cleverness of it is brought down a little bit when the characters actually explain it to the audience. Still, this is some of Allen's best dialogue in ages, and I found it very enjoyable.

Tree of Life

Or "Koyaanisqatsi, if it starred Brad Pitt."

There's a lot of whispered voiceover, pretty pictures and thundering classical music here, and part of me wants to dismiss this as a very expensive student project: "for my thesis, I'm going to do a bricolage where I mash up 2001, Baraka, Sean Penn's 35mm childhood home movies and a National Geographic special."

That would not be entirely fair, though. It's not every day you see a huge blockbuster movie about the nature of God, starring Brad Pitt. The title of the movie is from Proverbs ("[wisdom] is a tree of life to those who hold fast to it") and it begins with an epigraph from the Book of Job, and if you guess right there that a big tragedy is going to occur and the movie is not going to explain it for you, then give yourself five points.

Then there's a long montage of truly breathtaking scope that attempts to cover the majesty of the entire universe. So you might well ask yourself why this human tragedy matters, when the point of this montage seems to be that the universe is vast and not being run for your comfort or your happiness? Why should we care about Brad Pitt's stern father-who-should-have-been-a-musician-but-missed-his-calling, or Jessica Chastain's adoring mother and their sullen-faced son Jack growing up in Waco, Texas in the fifties?

Well, if we roll back a few verses in Proverbs we come across the instruction: "whom the Lord loves, he chastises, as a father does the son he loves." So maybe Brad Pitt is God. And like the common view of the God of the Old Testament, Pitt is stern but also loving towards his children.

And what about mom, who flits around in gorgeous shifts that catch the breeze and the light? Is she the more loving God of the New Testament? Are the brothers Cain and Abel? What does it mean that dad is a little sorry he treated his family like a jerk? Watch the movie and make up your own mind.

I said earlier that it's not every day you see a movie about the nature of God. But the movie that this reminds me of the most, in terms of subject matter, is the Coen Brothers' film A Serious Man, which is also loosely based on the Book of Job and asks us to think about the nature of a God who allows such terrible things to happen to His children.

I would say that personally, the Coen Brothers' less bombastic, less pretentious, more human-scale, even humorous film appeals to me more. In the end, my feeling about The Tree of Life is that it is very well made, thought-provoking, and it reminds me of a lot of other movies that I like very much. The one thing I'm not sure it reminds me of, is itself.

Jumping the Broom

Or alternatively: "My Big Fat Black Wedding." 

This is a pretty slight movie, as you might guess, and wouldn't be worth your time except for one thing. There are so few good roles for African-American actors that this trifle is actually brimming with talent who make it surprisingly entertaining, in a schmaltzy, cliche, checking-off-the-boxes kind of way.

Rich Sabrina is going to marry poor Jason (Sabrina! Get it?) Their families don't get along. They break up the happy couple, but Love Conquers All. Oh, did I ruin the ending for you?

Sabrina (played by Paula Patton, who was so much better in Mission: Impossible 4) comes from a wealthy creole family, who live on Martha's Vineyard, which, as we all know, is the wellspring of Cajun culture. And the Vineyard has never been more beautiful. The whole movie looks like an L. L. Bean catalog.

Jason's family is from--GASP--Brooklyn, which is used here as a synonym for "the hood," which makes me wonder if the screenwriter has ever actually been to Brooklyn. The director clearly hasn't, as the only time we see Jason's mother in New York, she is on--don't snarf--the Upper West Side of Manhattan.

But Jason's mom is played by Loretta Devine, an amazingly skilled actress who manages to eat the role of the villainous, emasculating, easily offended mother of the groom rather delicately and with great humor, at least until she finally gets her comeuppance and magically turns into the good mother-in-law fairy.

She arrives with a retinue of cardboard characters that talented actors somehow manage to breathe life into: Tasha Smith as the sassy best friend, Mike Epps as the groom's ghetto-wise uncle.

On the bride's side, we find badass Angela Bassett in the unfortunate role of the cold rich bitch mother of the bride. I'm sorry, make that the cold, rich, French-speaking bitch. Could it be any worse? Ms. Bassett deserves an Oscar for actually managing not to make this character hateful. Julie Bowen from Modern Family even manages to generate a few laughs in her role as White Person Who Says All the Wrong Things Around Black People.

So where does this leave us? Well, I'm happy to report that nobody gets shot in this movie, you won't learn any cool ghetto slang, and it has absolutely no aspirations of being a Racial Message Movie. And it's not too painful to watch. Unfortunately what it isn't...just isn't enough to recommend this movie.

Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance

This is a really great, stylish movie. The lead's green hair is a little precious (he was an art student!), but Ryu is a great character. He's a deaf mute with a sister badly in need of a kidney--and he's the wrong blood type. That could be really schmaltzy, or really contrived...okay, actually it's a little of both, now that I think about it. But during the movie, I didn't.

Park has tied one hand behind his back by taking on a character who can't speak, but he actually turns it to his advantage. In one scene we learn that Ryu is double-shifting; a bell rings and all of the workers get up and leave. Ryu stares after them...and sits down wearily. After a few moments, more workers arrive and he gets up and starts to work again. That told me more about the character than ten voiceovers.

It also prepares us for another great scene, in which Ryu is fired; we see the boss extend his hand so that it looms threateningly in the foreground of the frame; Ryu puts his grimy thumb in red ink and presses it on the contract. This isn't the most dexterously political film, but if you feel strongly about Obamacare or multinational banks, it may resonate a little with you. Maybe Park is trying to say that the carnage in this film is nobody's fault except that of "the system"...I can't say. But that's as plausible an explanation as any.

Park kind of has a reputation as a really gory director; if you really like this kind of thing, then you might like this film for all the wrong reasons. If you don't like this kind of thing, you might hate this film...also for all the wrong reasons.

While there are moments where it's hard to watch, it actually didn't make me as squeamish as, say, Requiem for a Dream, and not because I didn't care about the characters, but because Park genuinely tries to spare us. There's a scene where a father is watching his daughter's autopsy, and the camera stays on him the entire time; only the soundtrack hints at what he's seeing. Okay, more than "hints at": it's actually pretty horrific despite the fact that it's all sound and no visual.

I have a few minor technical quibbles; I've complained about fades-to-black before, and this film is riddled with them. Also, there's a totally unnecessary voiceover at the end, that might as well say, "do you remember this earlier plot point which is suddenly relevant? No? Well, here it is again!"

On the one hand, I can't wait to see another one of Park's films. On the other hand, I'm not sure I ever want to. Maybe I'll try his film Lady Vengeance and see if I can discern some kind of a pattern.