Lessons of Darkness

Take Shelter (2011): B+

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.

 

Moneyball (2011): B

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 (2011): B-

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.

Take Me Home Tonight (2011): C-

‘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.

Drive (2011): A-

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.

3 (2010): C

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.

Contagion (2011): B+

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.

Our Idiot Brother (2011): C+

Paul Rudd is a divine moron who brings peace and harmony to his secretly miserable sisters in Our Idiot Brother, a pleasant-enough trifle that ensnares itself in the uneasy middle ground between indie drama and dumb-guy comedy. The titular doofus is Ned (Paul Rudd), a hippie who gets himself incarcerated for selling pot to a uniformed police officer, and upon his release eight months later bounces between the homes of his siblings, all of whose lives he temporarily shatters via uncontrollable truth-telling. Given his blissfully naïve, laid-back “hey man” vibe, Ned’s rampant honesty should result in hilarity, but Jesse Peretz’s film instead refuses to indulge in the very cartoonishness that might amplify the amusing atmosphere. Opting instead for toothless family squabbling and personal/professional crisis, Our Idiot Brother exudes engaging empathy not just for Ned but also his sisters – careerist journalist Miranda (Elizabeth Banks), frustrated stay-at-home mom Liz (Emily Mortimer), and bisexual artist Natalie (Zooey Deschanel) – as well as their various acquaintances. That’s fine as far as it goes, but that’s not quite far enough, as the action often coasts by on the cheerfully amiable performances of its leads, in particular Rudd, who layers Ned’s warm-hearted innocence with serious frustration at others’ inability to accept or reciprocate his guileless altruism and sincerity. Epitomized by its grainy, poorly lit low-budget aesthetics, the film exhibits a tossed-off slacker-ness that too closely resembles the attitude of its protagonist.