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For the second straight month, my SOMA magazine feature made it online. This time, it's a profile of Patrick Fugit, who made his name starring in Cameron Crowe's Almost Famous and now headlines the recently released indie Wristcutters: A Love Story.
Note: As is always the case with SOMA's site, the below link will simply get you to the main content page. From there, select the article.
Almost Famous, And Happy That Way (SOMA magazine)
Not much time to blog - even on a Sunday night, family stuff calls - but here are my four latest reviews, three of which are for films that opened this past Friday.
In Theaters:
Bee Movie (Slant magazine)
Martian Child (Slant magazine)
Fat Girls (Slant magazine)
Coming Soon:
Lions for Lambs (Slant magazine)
James Gray is an old-school classicist whose two films – Little Odessa and The Yards – were archetypal crime dramas set in the director’s beloved New York City. We Own the Night is cut from the same cloth, as it once again finds Gray breathing gritty, electric life into a conventional tale, this time about two brothers on opposite sides of the law in 1988 Brooklyn. Bobby (Joaquin Phoenix) is the manager of a shady, Russian-owned nightclub that functions as a front for Vadim’s (Alex Veadov) drug-running operation. Joseph (Mark Wahlberg) is his straight-and-narrow brother, a decorated cop who has chosen to follow in the footsteps of his police chief dad (Robert Duvall). Their conflict is initially set up as a microcosm of the war on drugs – a civil war, if you will – but Gray soon changes gears to focus more squarely on Bobby’s transformative decision to collaborate with the men in blue and inform on his Russian acquaintances. It’s a switch that doesn’t offer profound storytelling surprises but does allow Gray to stage two magnificent set pieces: a meeting-gone-awry between undercover Bobby and Vadim, and a rain-soaked car chase presented primarily from Bobby’s inside-the-vehicle visual and sonic perspective. We Own the Night can be narratively stilted, and Wahlberg, consigned to the background for large portions of the late going, isn’t given a whole lot to do except look stern. Yet Phoenix is never less than a transfixing figure of moral doubt. And Gray’s direction is something stellar, from his sly use of the color red, to a series of heart-stoppingly ravishing images involving Bobby’s girlfriend Amada (Eva Mendes, shot like the most beautiful woman on earth), the finest being a tender sequence that concludes with Amada stroking a kneeling, grieving Bobby’s hair as her own locks fall, in a crescent shape, in front of her troubled face.
Reeling from a break-up with girlfriend Desiree (Leslie Bibb), bereft Zia (Patrick Fugit) does himself in at the outset of Wristcutters: A Love Story. Rather than eternal peace, however, suicide merely lands the twenty-something in an afterlife that resembles a more mundane, dreary version of our own world. Based on Etgar Keret’s short story, Goran Dukic’s film has something of a promising premise, and for a time, it also has an eccentric whimsicality that stems from its characters’ wryly resigned attitudes toward their worse-than-purgatory fates. Once Zia learns that Desiree may also be in this netherworld, he sets out – along with wacko Eugene (Shea Whigham) and obvious-true-love Mikal (Shannyn Sossamon) – on a road trip to find her. However, aside from the inspired notion of a black hole existing underneath the front seat of the trio’s car, it’s here that the tale begins to sputter. Will Arnet’s religious cult leader proves a wasted opportunity, and Tom Waits’ Kneller does little more than exude ragamuffin Waits-ian charm. Fugit, though, ably keeps this superficially controversial, and yet actually rather conventional, film from devolving into obnoxious oddness, thanks to his ability to convey a surprising range of emotions even though Zia, like all of the suicide-dead, isn’t allowed to smile.
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