Fulfilling the ambitions of his debut Brick, Rian Johnson crafts a scintillating neo-noir gem of existential
quandaries and inescapable fatalism with Looper.
In 2044, Joe (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) works as a Looper – a mob assassin who,
because it's too tough to dispose of bodies in the future, kills targets sent
back in time by his employers. That vocation becomes complicated when he's
tasked with offing himself, a practice known as "closing the loop" that
goes awry when his future self (Bruce Willis) escapes, thus putting both men on
the run from crime boss Abe (Jeff Daniels), and eventually leading them to the
farmhouse of Sara (Emily Blunt), whose son Cid (a terrific Pierce Gagnon) may
grow up to become the mysterious underworld kingpin who's determined to close
out all Looper contracts. That intricate narrative path is handled with assured
and thrilling aplomb by Johnson, who forgoes his prior films' self-conscious
cutesiness for a grim, no-nonsense mood of dread and futility. Aided by an
editorial structure that keeps various threads in expert balance, his gorgeous
and graceful camerawork exhibits a fluidity that's at odds with the increasing literal
and moral messiness of Joe's plight. Wearing facial prosthetics to better resemble
a young Willis, Gordon-Levitt has a hardboiled weariness that's simultaneously
endearing and pitiful, and is juxtaposed with Willis' somber desperation and,
amusingly, his frustration and fury at the foolishness of his younger self. With
both its urban and rural-cornfield milieus marked by consuming bleakness, Looper harkens back to both Blade Runner and The Killers while nonetheless crafting its own unique spin on noir
fatalism. That culminates in an inventive third act that – integrating further
sci-fi elements which enhance and complicate its larger ideas about
actualization, free will, and sacrifice – determines that, regardless of noble
intentions, there's ultimately no changing one's fate.
A taut, unnerving thematic follow-up to There Will Be Blood as well as the work of Stanley Kubrick, Paul
Thomas Anderson's The Master investigates
the line between bestiality and civility through the 1950 story of Naval veteran
Freddie Quell (Joaquin Phoenix) and his burgeoning relationship with new age
guru Lancaster Dodd (Philip Seymour Hoffman). With a hunched, gaunt body, his
arms habitually on his hips so that his elbows stick out like jagged wings, and
speaking out of the side of his crooked mouth, Quell is a physically and
psychologically twisted individual who, returning from war to work as a
department store photographer, spends his days snapping shots of happy faces unlike
his. Driven by base urges to drink, screw and lash out against the world with
violence, Quell is an uncoiled spring. And to Dodd – a man (clearly based on
Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard) developing a cult facing establishment
persecution with whom Quell accidentally hooks up – Quell seems the perfect
candidate for "platforming" therapy, which seeks to unlock the
original, "perfect" self that's in complete control of itself. Yet as
evidenced by his baby-talk paternalistic relationship with the vet, as well as his
own penchant for sudden angry outbursts, it also becomes increasingly clear
that Dodd subconsciously views this outcast as not just a patient, but as a
kindred "animal" spirit.
Anderson's interior spaces (department store, boat cabins, a Pennsylvania house) reflect his characters' circumstances – including Dodd's pent-up true-believer wife Peggy (Amy Adams) – as being circumscribed by both a society that doesn't accept them, and by their own inner fury, misery and discontent. The director visualizes this without look-at-me flair, regularly highlighting the disconnect between foreground and background spaces through varying shallow and deep focus cinematography. Paired with Jonny Greenwood's nerve-jangling clickity-clacking score, his aesthetics have a cool, measured beauty that create an unerring mood of volatile madness, and of a need to escape, as evidenced by those few moments (a sprint across a field; a motorcycle ride through the desert) that find characters fleeing toward some indistinct and unattainable freedom. The Master's primary tension, however, is rooted in the push-pull between Quell and Dodd, two men desperate to find a way toward peace and contentment. It's a process stymied by their underlying rage, epitomized by their shared love of Quell's unique alcoholic concoctions – which are made with paint thinner and, thus, akin to poison – and one that, in Quell's case, Anderson links to There Will Be Blood's Daniel Plainview in an early shot of Quell descending into a deep, dark naval ship chamber where the man actually drinks liquid pouring out of a missile (a haunting vision of imbibing violence).
The Master's critique of Scientology is plain, intermittently jabbing at the organization's belief in aliens, trillion-year-old spirits, and inconsistent philosophy, the last never more pointedly than during a late conversation between Dodd and an acolyte (Laura Dern) about his new book's terminology that concludes with an incensed outburst that exposes Dodd as a charlatan. Nonetheless, that thread is secondary to Anderson's portrait of anger and the ways in which men attempt to control and/or embrace it – a depiction that, in a scene of kicking and screaming ferocity in a jail cell, also associates Quell with Raging Bull's Jake LaMotta. As ironically insinuated by his name, Quell can't quell his sex-alcohol-fight urges, and yet through Quell's work with Dodd, Anderson finds more hope for his protagonist, who at least is honest with himself about his true nature, than for Dodd, a man consumed with perpetrating (to himself and others) a false sense of enlightened poise and restraint. Their rapport is the lifeblood of The Master, and made titanic through the commanding hot-air bluster of Hoffman and the magnetic intensity of Phoenix, the latter of whom embodies Quell with an impulsive wildness that's colored by hints of deep-rooted longing and heartbroken anguish, most centered around a lost love. At once explosive and ramshackle, unpredictable and expertly modulated, it's a magnetic performance that's nothing short of primal, and masterful.
Subpar material gets a tonal and aesthetic – and, by extension, thematic – boost from directorial virtuosity in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, David Fincher’s American remake of the Stieg Larsson best-seller that was first adapted for the screen in its native Sweden, to largely dismal results, in 2009. Working from Steven Zaillian’s sharply modulated script, Fincher hews closely to his source material’s narrative, which fixes on the investigation by disgraced journalist Mikael Blomkvist (Daniel Craig) into the decades-old death of Harriet Vanger, who disappeared without a trace from her family’s island home and whom wealthy scion Henrik Vanger (Christopher Plummer) believes was offed by a member of his wretched, Nazi-populated family (which includes Stellan Skarsgård’s heir apparent). This quest eventually compels Mikael to enlist the services of punk computer hacker Lisbeth Salander (Rooney Mara), whom in the most significant of many subtle changes Fincher and Zaillian make to their tale, is eloquently fleshed out into a three-dimensional human being, rather than the super-goth-badass caricature that Noomi Rapace brought to grating life in Niels Arden Oplev’s substandard original film.
Fincher shoots Lisbeth in alienating compositions (behind her head, to the side of the frame) to capture the way in which she – most obviously via her mohawk, leather get-ups, and piercings – has retreated within herself as a defense mechanism against a lifetime of male abuse, and Mara embodies her with a stoic anger that’s muted by a constant look of hurt, vulnerability and fear in her wide-open eyes. Lisbeth feels real in this Dragon Tattoo without ever seeming any less imposing or intimidating a figure of righteous fury, and Craig matches Mara’s nuanced performance with his own delicately reserved turn, making Mikael less an unctuous know-it-all than – as with an undercurrent about Harriet’s religiosity that dovetails with Mikael’s own daughter’s turn toward faith – a lost soul in desperate search of clarity and purpose. It’s Fincher, however, who’s most responsible for this version’s overriding form/content improvements. The director refuses to shy away from the material’s more tawdry, titillating rape-and-violence elements, and yet even during said moments, he rigorously prioritizes characters’ frenzied emotions above salacious nudity and nastiness – a fact most stunningly felt in the infamous assault sequence between Lisbeth and her vile legal guardian (Yorick van Wageningen), a scene that oozes otherworldly dread (the camera panning away from the bedroom’s closed door) while sticking, with piercing intensity, to Lisbeth’s anguished countenance.
As befitting a Fincher film, the opening credit sequence – here, a motif-laden montage of inky keyboards, computer plugs, flowers, dragons, and faces in agonized screams being shattered by fists – is alone worth the price of admission, and the same can be said of Trent Reznor’s score of unholy, pulsating electronic rhythms. Dragon Tattoo’s steely, color-filtered palette eerily evokes the story’s portrait of a present turned ashen by crimes of the past, and Fincher’s propulsive editing (often moving the story forward at a breakneck pace sans dialogue) and ominously gliding cinematography create an atmosphere of inevitable doom and heartache even for those who might, in terms of the story’s nominal whodunit plot, eventually triumph. It’s a film that’s directed with such dexterity, confidence and exacting attention to conveying mood and theme through visual and aural means that it manages the feat – one not just considerable but, on the basis of its Swedish predecessor, seemingly impossible – of turning what was transparently scandalous and simplistic anti-misogynistic, women-and-their-troublesome daddies material into a sleek, sumptuous vision of wounded people searching, with varying degrees of success, to find salvation through human connection.
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is a film about death, and the dead men who willingly and hopelessly ensnare themselves in lies, subterfuge and detached amorality. Condensing John le Carré’s seminal 1974 spy novel (originally adapted into an Alec Guinness-headlined 1979 BBC miniseries) into an efficient, chilly feature-length gem of formal rigor and atmospheric bleakness, director Tomas Alfredson’s espionage yarn roots itself in the fall of post-WWII British imperial/military dominance via the figurative resurrection of secret agent George Smiley (Gary Oldman), who’s brought back into the fold of the MI6 (“the Circus”) – after having been let go for a mission gone awry a year earlier – to uncover a Russian mole within his covert group. That mission necessitates unraveling a web of deceit involving Hungarian defectors, Russian double-agents and a bevy of possible traitors-within-his-midst, an anxious and claustrophobic universe that Alfredson visualizes with austere, methodical cinematography comprised of compositions awash in harsh angular lines and constricting geometric shapes. Bolstered by a superb cast and – through a recurring flashback to an MI6 Christmas party that captures the depressing absurdity of these spooks’ existence – a very subtle, sly black-humor drollness, Tinker Tailor generates tension from both its aesthetic and narrative stillness. In the same vein, Oldman’s Smiley boasts an outward placidness that can’t quite mask the chest-gripping pain of his wife’s (and cohorts’) betrayal. With the actor’s subtle, evocative modulations of expression and comportment working in tandem with Alfredson’s deft editorial structure (full of gliding, graceful montages), it’s a film that conveys a hauntingly cynical view of a world in which allegiances are illusory, ethics and loyalty are unreliable, and one’s efforts to affect change – positively or negatively – make little, if any, lasting impact.
Credit motion-capture technology for reinvigorating Steven Spielberg, who with The Adventures of Tintin (produced by Peter Jackson, who will direct its forthcoming sequel) recaptures the same buoyant, childlike B-movie zest that powered his first three Indiana Jones efforts. Never has the oft-derided animation process been put to better use than in this faithful imagining of Hergé’s iconic mystery-solving boy reporter Tintin (Jaime Bell), whose signature upturned coiffure, long coat and exclamations (“Holy Snakes!”) are brought to life with a bracing blend of photorealism – also found in the faces of its supporting characters (note a Moroccan bazaar’s populace) and exotic locales – and pliable rubbery cartoonishness. The effect is a surprisingly entrancing mix of the real and unreal, a technological achievement that’s more than matched by Spielberg’s direction. With his virtual “camera” zooming, plummeting, spinning and soaring about its expertly detailed environs, Spielberg takes full advantage of not only CG’s anything-goes potential but also of 3D, as the director – from a beautiful silhouetted credit sequence to centerpieces involving car chases, plane derring-do, and nautical hijinks – creates thrilling, dynamic tension between foreground and background.
Written by Steven Moffat, Joe Cornish and Edgar Wright (and boasting the same gonzo energy found in the latter’s Scott Pilgrim Vs. the World), The Adventures of Tintin sends its hero on a quest regarding a long-sunken pirate ship’s treasure sought by villainous Ivanovich Sakharine (Daniel Craig). Paired with Haddock (Andy Serkis), the always-drunk descendant of the mysterious ship’s captain, Tintin embarks on an adventure that plays to Spielberg’s fondness for the relationship between men and their male forbears, though action and humor are the thing in this rollicking saga, which comingles mile-a-minute thrills and gags to a point that borders on the frenzied. Even so, the sheer vibrancy of Tintin’s stout resourcefulness and bulbous-nosed Haddock’s sloshed intrepidness do much to lend the proceedings a decidedly human center. Like the Indiana Jones films, Tintin boasts a wide-eyed fondness for tales involving ancient buried fortunes, plentiful globetrotting, and predicaments that – as with the pursuit of a pickpocket by Tintin and bumbling twin cops Thompson (Simon Pegg) and Thompson (Nick Frost) – meld danger with slapstick comedy. That marriage reaches a crescendo during a harried pursuit through Moroccan streets that’s captured in one prolonged shot – a sequence that, no matter the digital trickery involved, is a pure marvel of sustained choreography, imagination and pulse-pounding excitement.
Alexander Payne takes the easy way out time and again in The Descendants, a tale that wants to be mature but can’t help shortchanging its drama through constant reliance on its protagonist’s unimpeachable nobility. Lawyer Matt King (George Clooney) is a man faced with two unavoidable deadlines regarding his need to let go of the past: his wife is in a fatal coma and has a pull-the-plug living will that must soon be executed, and his family’s enormous centuries-old real estate holdings must by law be sold. The former is hardly a choice, and the latter’s outcome is never in question – especially since Matt is encouraged early on by a local woman to not sell his land, and he later visits the property and is told (foreshadowing!) by his youngest daughter Scottie (Amara Miller) that she wishes she could have camped there like her mother and older sister Alexandra (Shailene Woodley) did. On top of these issues, as well as Scottie’s profane acting-out in school and Alexandra’s drunken troublemaking, Matt’s in-crisis life is thrown for a further loop when he learns that his wife was cheating on him before her catastrophic accident, a plot twist that might have worked in this overcrowded script (based on Kaui Hart Hemmings’ novel) if it hadn’t turned out that her extramarital paramour (Matthew Lillard) had intimate, and thoroughly contrived, ties to Matt’s land deal. Payne’s direction is competent but his depiction of Hawaii as a place of both everyday suburban normalcy and great beauty would have struck a stronger chord if that point weren’t overtly articulated by the film’s unnecessary and lazy intro narration. Similarly, Clooney’s performance treads a winning line between serious pathos and comedic likability, yet his Matt is too often driven not by real anger, frustration and vengeance as much as fantasy-land holier-than-thou dignity and decency. Consequently, the film’s portrait of both letting go and embracing one’s family and heritage (replete with more than one sequence of Matt staring at sepia-hued ancestral photos) repeatedly fails to find a true emotional note – a fact never more stark than in Matt’s wholly unbelievable decision to be accompanied on his various dramedic shenanigans by Alexandra’s dim-witted friend Sid (Nick Krause), with whom Matt eventually bonds in a scene of near-stunning phoniness.
Peeling back societal facades of cheerful propriety and political correctness to reveal the ugliness of human nature is Carnage’s somewhat familiar and clichéd aim, yet Roman Polanski’s adaptation of Yasmina Reza’s heralded play “God of Carnage” offsets its familiar thematic arguments with deliciously nasty wit and fractured, tension-wracked visual framing. After a dialogue-free credit sequence reveals a playground spat in which one child whacks another in the face with a tree branch, the film opens in the apartment of Penelope (Jodie Foster) and Michael (John C. Reilly), the parents of the injured boy, where Nancy (Kate Winslet) and Alan (Christoph Waltz), the parents of the attacker, have come to cordially smooth things out. No such luck, as immediate, minor disagreements about a document’s use of the term “armed” soon devolve into out-and-out warfare between the two couples. A kindred spirit to Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolf? (and, more subtly, Caché), Polanski’s script is a slow boil to eruption in which workaholic lawyer Alan’s cell phone interrupts all conversations, Penelope fumes with vein-popping indignation at her son’s victimization, Michael lets fly his sexist and racist opinions after being slammed for abandoning his kid’s pet hamster to die on the sidewalk, and stressed-out Nancy vomits all over the coffee table (ruining Penelope’s precious catalogs). From Penelope’s faux-humanitarian desire to write a book about Darfur to Alan’s general disinterest in family (and its responsibilities), the urban upper middle class and its socio-cultural pretensions are eviscerated as a pose masking greed, self-interest, contempt and hate, which Carnage lays bare with rat-a-tat-tat writing elevated by a quartet of biting performances. More impressive still, though it’s material is clearly stagey in construction – with the proceedings limited to the interior, and hallway just outside, its apartment location – Polanski’s direction is as assured as ever, creating so much friction between his frame’s foreground, background, and left/right/up/down quadrants that his aesthetics mirror, with pinpoint precision, the action’s composed and yet immensely edgy dynamics.
The 2011 New York Film Festival
A mood of ominous psychotic dread and two finely calibrated performances successfully compensate for a slight final misstep in Take Shelter. Likely destined to be compared to Melancholia, another tale in which internal chaos threatens to manifest itself in apocalyptic external ways, Jeff Nichols’ superbly controlled film concentrates on Curtis (Michael Shannon), a construction worker married to Samantha (Jessica Chastain) and father to their deaf daughter Hannah (Tova Stewart) who’s wracked by terrifying dreams of cataclysmic storm clouds and motor oil rain that transforms pet dogs into feral monsters and strangers into would-be attackers and abductors. Given that his mother was beset by paranoid schizophrenia in her mid-30s, 35-year-old Curtis soon suspects he’s going mad. Library books, sleeping pills and sessions with a free-clinic counselor do little to dissuade him from his end-of-days fears, which he channels into fanatically remodeling the backyard’s subterranean storm shelter. That project entails extra loans and missing work, both financial risks made all the more perilous by Hannah’s upcoming surgery, and Nichols’ film finds true, bone-deep terror in the way in which Curtis’ behavior places his family on an all-too-contemporary precipice of economic ruin. Somewhat less showy than his similar turn in Bug, Shannon exudes haunting frantic-volatile-raging instability, and Chastain nicely balances that pent-up explosiveness with her own, more modestly composed variation on suppressed anger and fear. Even if his central shelter metaphor (of descending/ascension) feels a tad too obvious, Nichols’ formally assured direction exhibits dawning-dread restraint through slow zooms and tense framing, although the eventual revelation that Take Shelter wants Curtis’ lunacy to actually be in question leads to a conclusion that, while beautifully staged, comes close to reducing the proceedings to something of a surprise-ending gimmick.
Co-screenwriter Aaron Sorkin’s baseball variation on The Social Network, Moneyball focuses on another outsider-rebel-wunderkind determined to upend traditional social and business paradigms through technological innovation via the story of Billy Beane (Brad Pitt), the general manager of Major League Baseball’s Oakland A’s franchise. Based on Michael Lewis’ book (and co-written by Steven Zaillian), and playing fast and loose with facts and contextual information, Bennett Miller’s film charts Beane’s efforts – after losing to the Yankees in the 2001 playoffs, and then losing his top three players to free agency because of strict budgetary concerns – to compensate for his club’s inability to spend like the league’s big boys by using statistical analysis to pinpoint unheralded players with potential. That idea comes courtesy of Peter Brand (Jonah Hill), a fictional variation on Paul DePodesta, who champions Bill James’ sabermetric approach to player evaluation, looking at key numbers (like on-base percentage) and ignoring more famous calculations like home runs and RBIs, a shift that angers Beane’s old-school scouts and leads to talk-radio ridicule until, lo and behold, the approach begins to pay dividends. Despite some moments with his daughter and doubts about his course of action, Beane remains throughout a two-dimensional figure, but a charismatic and decidedly human Pitt nonetheless embodies him with engaging verve, and Hill exhibits a droll understatement that helps enliven what amounts to a rather standard underdog-makes-good fable. For a film about insurgency from within, it’s disappointing that director Miller treats his material like conventional Oscar bait, but his stewardship is shrewd and light on its feet, and his integration of real-life footage into the proceedings is deft. Moreover, while it never strays far from its path, and more or less wastes Philip Seymour Hoffman in the limited role of A’s manager Art Howe, Moneyball manages the not-inconsiderable feat of transforming its true-life story into a feel-good fairy tale while also – courtesy of a sobering postscript – recognizing that sometimes, happily-ever-afters are more complicated than uplifting Hollywood films can manage.
Rise of the Planet of the Apes takes the predictable franchise-rebooting route, delivering a modern-day origin story about the ascension to intelligence and power of the planet’s simians. That climb up the evolutionary ladder comes courtesy of Will (James Franco), a geneticist whose potential cure for Alzheimer’s makes ape Caesar – a test subject’s offspring whom Will takes home and cares for after his program is shut down by an avaricious corporate overlord (David Oyelowo) – smart, cunning, and eerily human. Rupert Wyatt’s directorial debut is a Jurassic Park-style cautionary tale about the folly of man’s noble scientific intentions, and one that at its core has little to say about the ethics of gene therapy or man’s relationship to his ape ancestors. However, if a thematically thin work that largely squanders John Lithgow (as Will’s Alzheimer’s afflicted dad) and Freida Pinto (as his perfunctory love interest), Rise is a reasonably muscular popcorn film with a surprisingly tender soul. Fixated on Caesar’s joyous upbringing with Will and his transformation into the leader of a species-against-species insurrection – a change motivated largely by Harry Potter alum Tom Felton’s cartoonishly abusive zookeeper – the film ultimately winds up exuding empathy for the primate rebellion. It’s a rather odd anti-people viewpoint for a summer blockbuster, but one made more palatable by Andy Serkis’ nuanced motion-capture performance as Caesar. A Golden Gate Bridge showdown may implausibly posit apes as more knowledgeable about basic flanking maneuvers than their human counterparts, as well as capable of felling airborne helicopters in a single bound, yet it allows the heretofore character-based action to finally reach a reasonably rousing crescendo that even Franco’s halfhearted turn can’t sully.
‘80s nostalgia has evolved from cheeky fun to putrid cultural stain, and Take Me Home Tonight merely furthers that progression, trotting out shoulder pads, big hair, Michael Jackson dance moves and Appetite for Destruction album covers as dim-witted signs of tongue-in-cheek retro coolness. Along with these trappings – which also involve a soundtrack of the era’s hits that practically begs to be noticed, and an appearance by I Love the… talking-head Michael Ian Black – Michael Dowse’s film mimics its chosen decade’s cinematic conventions as well, charting a historically crazy night in the life of Matt (Topher Grace). An MIT grad fleeing career and responsibility to work at Suncoast Video, Matt, alongside his twin sister Wendy (Anna Faris) and best friend Barry (Dan Fogler), attends a high school reunion party where he aims to woo long-time crush Tori (Teresa Palmer). This formulaic nerd-gets-the-hottie fairy tale is embellished with all manner of wackiness – stolen cars! Cocaine! Cougars who want to have sex while their German boyfriends watch! – that feels as stale as its wink-wink nods to Whitney Houston and wearing sunglasses at night. The cast is game but dull beyond belief, with Grace a bland everyman, Fogler a manic wannabe-Jack Black, and Farris an earnest cipher stuck with a lame subplot involving her disinterest with boyfriend Kyle (Chris Pratt). Take Me Home Tonight offers up lessons on lying and honesty, fear and courage, but it’s all so much pap in service of wistfulness about a time period now thoroughly mocked to death.
Brutal men in desperate situations are Nicolas Winding Refn’s (Bronson, the Pusher Trilogy, Valhalla Rising) stock and trade, a preoccupation that continues with Drive, the story of a nameless Hollywood stuntman and auto-mechanic (Ryan Gosling) who spends his evenings working as a wheelman for heists set up by boss Shannon (Bryan Cranston). Like many of Refn’s prior protagonists, Gosling’s Driver is a lone wolf with a volatile streak, though in this case, he’s less an embodiment of barely contained masculine rage than a neo-noir cool customer (toothpick in mouth, puffy silver jacket embroidered with a giant red scorpion on its back) in the mold of Alain Delon’s Le Samouraï crook or James Caan’s titular Thief. Driven by rigorous ritual and code of conduct – in this case, an intro speech to cohorts that lays out his professional ground rules, and solitary honing of his trade (as when he’s spied cleaning and perfecting car mechanisms) – Driver maintains control, stability and safety via diligent adherence to procedure, and by remaining a figure hidden from the spotlight. That notion of exposure/concealment is repeatedly visualized by Refn (who won best directing honors at Cannes 2011) through canny use of light and shadow as well as clear/obscuring framing, never more so than in Driver’s repeated use of a latex mask, as well as a shot in which, after committing murders that will unavoidably endanger him, Gosling’s well-lit, close-up face slowly recedes until it disappears behind a doorway’s corner.
Driver’s attempts to preserve anonymity and security amidst scenarios that render him visible and vulnerable to enemies meshes nicely with Drive’s guiding noir belief in the tragedy that comes from trying to be someone you’re not by behaving in ways contrary to one’s guiding principles. In this case, that ill-advised course alteration comes courtesy of Driver’s relationship with neighbor Irene (Carrie Mulligan) and her son Benicio (Kaden Leos), strangers with whom Driver becomes so enamored that, when Irene’s husband Standard (Oscar Isaac) returns home from jail and finds himself in debt to murderous thugs threatening to kill his family lest he pull off a robbery, Driver – to protect Irene and Benicio – throws his assistance Standard’s way. Predictably, things go awry, putting Driver in deep, dark trouble with Bernie (Albert Brooks), a crime boss who’s backing Driver and Shannon’s race car-driving dreams, and Bernie’s more sadistic partner Nino (Ron Perlman). That this chaos all hinges on Driver and Irene’s feelings for one another is Drive’s weak link, since the bland Mulligan is an unconvincing encapsulation of Driver’s dreams of noble nuclear-family stability and escape. It’s not a fatal flaw, however, as Gosling’s systematically reserved cool rarely seems like a pose, with the actor layering both sincere compassion and amoral savagery beneath his façade of good-natured detachment.
While Refn’s auto-chase sequences could use a bit more visceral punch, his stewardship is as precise and magnetic as Gosling’s performance. From hot-pink script titles to Cliff Martinez’ pulsating tonal synth-pop score (as well as tunes by Kavinsky, Chromatics and College), Refn evokes the ‘80s as a means of linking his material with Thief, To Live and Die in L.A., and likeminded era-specific neo-noirs, a mood enhanced by the director’s typically assured, expertly composed widescreen. Downtown Los Angeles glitters like a diamond in Refn’s loving gaze, while shot-reverse-shot conversational sequences routinely create dynamic friction from the relative placement of characters on either side of the screen, bestowing Drive with an aesthetic grace and subtlety that’s married to slow-motion imagery of mayhem (a flipping car, say) or – as in a gorgeously wrought elevator sequence – of the marriage between love and violence. When complemented by his period embellishments, Refn’s self-conscious formalism can occasionally make the proceedings’ fatalistic mood and stoic performances seem a tad affected. Yet the potent humanity found in the performances of Gosling, Cranston, and Brooks – who warps his typically nebbish, complaining persona into something unsettlingly sinister – is the soulful antidote to the film’s retro-chic stylization, lending evocative heat and despondence to this tale of a man who, faced with a critical fork in the road, discovers that both paths inevitably lead only to doom.
Tom Tykwer dazzles the eye and dulls the mind with 3, the Run Lola Run director’s tedious promotion of a new identity-definition paradigm. In modern-day Berlin, long-time couple Hanna (Sophie Rois) and Simon (Sebastian Schipper) are struggling with a loss of sexual excitement, a problem that leads first Hanna, and then Simon, into the inviting arms of Adam (Devid Striesow), a geneticist whose stem-cell research – in which new cells are created from old ones – provides Tykwer with a dreary central metaphor for his story’s advocacy of pansexuality as natural and progressive. That open-minded premise is essentially all there is to 3, which feigns interest in its characters as three-dimensional beings – layering them with dilemmas (Simon’s testicular cancer) and hang-ups (Simon and Hanna’s conflicted feelings over having children) – but rarely gets deep enough under their skin to make them seem like more than devices in a socio-political thesis. That’s especially true of Adam, who receives the least attention and thus comes across as the most paper-thin of the film’s three protagonists, and his featurelessness ultimately sabotages the increasingly tense threesome dynamic at play, since none of these people’s attractions to each other are ever fleshed-out or potently felt. Simplistic as its core may be, though, Tykwer manages the not-inconsiderable feat of habitually distracting attention away from his material’s underlying didacticism through aesthetic dexterity, with his rushing camera, his information-overload split-screens, and his fleet cross-cutting providing the material with far more urgency than does its let’s-all-get-together plotting.
Everything goes viral in Contagion – most critically a rampant new disease that threatens to wipe the globe clean, but also fear, rumor, panic and information. Sharing with his Oscar-winning Traffic a multi-character, multi-focus structure, Steven Soderbergh’s pandemic thriller fixates on hands and mouths as they silently pass germs, and potential apocalypse, from public bus railing to restaurant water glass to gentle shoulder touch. That visual schema immensely heightens the tension of his tale (written by Scott Z. Burns), in which the sudden seizure-prefaced death of a cheating housewife (Gwyneth Paltrow) and her young son is the catalyst for worldwide illness. Soderbergh tracks numerous points along the response, from the woman’s seemingly immune husband (Matt Damon) and his daughter, to a CDC bigwig (Laurence Fishburne) and his on-the-ground right-hand woman (Kate Winslet), to a righteous blogger (Jude Law) who preaches conspiracy in the face of official government declarations. In certain cases – specifically, a thread involving a World Health Organization employee (Marion Cotillard) who’s kidnapped and held hostage in a small Chinese village – this fractured plotting detracts from the material’s dramatic urgency. But Soderbergh paints assuredly in quick, potent brushstrokes, particularly with regards to Damon’s protective efforts toward his daughter. The director’s digital cinematography has a swift anxiousness that further propels forward his depiction of the way in which not just viruses but ideas and feelings can spread and mutate in unpredictable and lethal ways. As much as it’s a high-gloss, star-studded, consistently gripping modern-age horror film apt to make one stockpile hand sanitizer, Contagion is also a portrait of the terrifying fragility of the tangled biological, social and emotional networks that govern our lives.
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