Half-Assed Movie Reviews

January 7, 2009:  Doubt

Thinking back on my viewing of Doubt, I recall a lean, purposeful story about moral struggles laid over the struggles for power and influence in a New York City catholic church and boys’ school in the 1960s.  This is one of those movies which grows in my estimation in the weeks following the viewing.  A deceptively simple tale yet one which is almost irritatingly complex when you get to thinking about it, it’s a low-key acting showcase despite occasional forays into standard Oscar-trolling scenery chewing.  I wasn’t entirely sold on the story and certainly not on the pacing, and it will be interesting to see how that plays out on a second viewing.  I’d still recommend it, though.

The chief conflict is between the female principal of the school (Meryl Streep) and the resident priest (Philip Seymour Hoffman), over the priest’s supposed indiscretions with one of the young male students.  Amy Adams is a young teacher in the school who is instrumental in bringing the controversy to light but then caught in the middle, and Viola Davis goes head-to-head with Streep in a memorable scene as the boy’s mother.  To what lengths will Streep go to protect a boy she suspects but is not sure is being abused, when both the boy and his mother have their reasons for letting things continue along as they are?  How can the church and the God she believes in let this happen?

I say the story is deceptively simple because on the surface there is the issue of certainty versus doubt, and how either one of these can unite people (this is explored directly in one of the sermons), and how those two feelings play out differently in the minds of each different person.  Keep in mind the setting, a time when the Kennedy assassination was still fresh in everyone’s mind, racial tension was palpable but not always in the ways we imagine, and religion was a much more prominent backdrop to everyday life.  Religion is, of course, firmly rooted in the question of faith – certainty versus doubt.

The film is written and directed by John Patrick Shanley, adapting from his own 2004 play.  Shanley is primarily a screenwriter, his most notable entry being Moonstruck (1987).  He has directed once before, Joe Versus the Volcano (1990), which is unfortunately the type of fiasco which results in someone never directing again.  Let’s face it, 18 years between jobs means that’s NOT your profession.  Anyway, it looks like Shanley has seen a career resurrection in the film world as a result of this star-studded and successful piece of work.

Doubt ended up with five Oscar nominations, four of them for acting.  Powerhouse Meryl Streep, who is often accused of having a shelf full of Oscars but in fact only has two despite her now-record 15 nominations, gets a nod for Best Actress.  Best Actor winner from a few years ago for Capote and roundly considered one of the most versatile and courageous actors working today, Philip Seymour Hoffman also has a lead acting nomination.  Amy Adams is an up-and-comer sure to win eventually (check out her performance in Junebug from a few years back, when she really started to be noticed, and she has also proven herself in a wide range of roles) and has a supporting nomination as the young teacher who doesn’t know what to do in the face of her two major authority figures being stuck and confused.  Viola Davis has been around for a while and has done lots of TV work, but this looks like a break-out role for her (when Meryl Streep in an award acceptance speech demands that someone give you a movie, it’s a pretty good bet that you’re going somewhere).  Shanley also received a nomination for his screenplay adapted from his earlier play.  Alas, there were no wins on Oscar night, but such is life.

The ending does lend some desired clarity with Streep explaining her doubts in more detail.  There end up being some powerful questions asked, they have no answers and that’s how we leave these characters, and that’s exactly how it should be.  For me, the core strength of the story comes from the mother of the potentially abused child, as she directly forces us to consider what makes a good authority figure for a child, and the devastating but necessary compromises made when all of the available ones have major flaws.

January 6, 2009:  Changeling

OK, so call me illiterate, but I didn’t know what the word Changeling meant when I started watching this movie.  As it turns out, I didn’t know the definition by the end of the movie either, so I never really came to accept what it was about, and that may have affected my experience.  It seems that a changeling is a child or thing believed to have been secretly substituted for another, and NOT an alien shapeshifter which can transform, or “change” into other things at will.  I kept waiting for this little kid to change into a monster or something.  It never happened.

So the movie is based on a true story about a Los Angeles woman (Angelina Jolie) in the 1920s whose son goes missing, and when he is miraculously returned by the LAPD, it turns out to be the wrong kid.  The LAPD was suffering from bad publicity at the time, and to admit such an error would be disastrous, so they covered up the issue, even going so far as to have the mother committed to a mental institution for evidently not recognizing her own child.  But then there turns out to be someone kidnapping and murdering young boys, and it’s possible that the woman’s boy was kidnapped by this monster (see, there was one in the movie!).  As with most such cases, publicity helps to uncover the details and we find out in the end what actually happened.

I was reminded a fair bit of L.A. Confidential (1997), being a 20th century period film based around hatred of the LAPD, and showing the unglamorous day-to-day life in times and places which are often romanticized.

This is more Clint Eastwood Oscar bait, released in late October in time for awards season, and it was duly nominated for Best Actress for Angelina Jolie as the mother, as well as for the cinematography and art direction for this beautiful period piece.  Eastwood’s other big awards-trolling picture, Gran Torino, was completely passed over by the Academy this year, but rest assured that he’ll be back again.  Angelina Jolie won a surprise Supporting Actress Oscar for the Winona Ryder movie Girl, Interrupted (1999), and it seems that she’s been trying ever since to prove that she’s a real actress and that it wasn’t just a fluke.  Her work generally strikes me as being uneven, and in most roles I don’t forget that I’m looking at Angelina Jolie, but sometimes she really pulls it off.  For me, this wasn’t one of those roles where she pulls it off.

As I mentioned, the movie looks great.  Cinematographer Tom Stearn has done most of Clint Eastwood’s movies since 2002, and he has mastered that rich, flowing look Eastwood seems to favour these days – you can see real parallels to Mystic River and Million Dollar Baby here.  There’s obvious colour desaturation as well as emphasis of certain colours to bring us a deliberately stylized 1920s look, which generally works but might lose a bit too much detail and realism in pursuit of that particular look.  As with any big period piece, I find it difficult to immerse myself in the time, because I find the magnitude of the production design simply staggering – tracking down all the old vehicles and setting up streetscapes without modern buildings or signs, and having cluttered interiors with reproductions or originals of all kinds of mundane objects, all in the appropriate condition for their time.  I find it easier to immerse myself in period pieces set prior to the 20th century, where it’s more likely that there are some horse-drawn carriage exteriors which can be handled relatively easily, and all the interiors are in slightly modified historic homes which have been restored or preserved exactly as they would have been in their time.  That way, I don’t need to worry myself about how difficult a job the set designer must have had.  L.A. in the 1920s is not nearly so easy to reproduce!  Add in the digital effects available today, and it can be distracting to figure out what’s real and what’s not.  Did they really install a whole bunch of streetcar tracks in L.A. locations, or was it a back lot, or were the streetcars entirely faked up?  It’s fun to puzzle over all this, but I seriously doubt that the filmmakers want me to be distracted by it.

So what about this movie?  Well, it seemed to be headed toward some solid characterization, and the story was certainly compelling up to a point, but the pacing was odd and the focus of the movie wandered around too much.  I certainly felt that seeing this was well worth my while, but somehow the whole thing just didn’t gel.  It seemed to want to focus on Jolie as the desperate mother at the centre of the story, but delved into lots of detail about what was happening to the kidnapped boys and made it seem for long periods that that was actually what the movie was about.  I might have preferred that as the focus, but it would be a very different movie.  Also, there was a bunch of time spent on Jolie’s job at a telephone operator’s office, but minimal payoff to justify the intrusion into the film.  John Malkovich as the preacher generating publicity was well-cast, but grossly underused.  Character actors playing some of the LAPD roles really got into their parts, but the movie wasn’t willing to admit to being an ensemble piece as L.A. Confidential clearly was.  I have to proclaim this as being too muddled for an unqualified recommendation.

January 1, 2009:  Frost/Nixon

Now, here we have a nice contrast to my earlier review of Milk, the film about the late San Francisco city councillor Harvey Milk.  Frost/Nixon is a story about two people, but it doesn’t purport to be about their lives.  It is about a specific event in their lives, and that’s the major difference between this and a typical biopic.  In 1977, British TV host David Frost went through a cathartic series of televised interviews with former US President Richard Nixon, and the scale of this event is suitable for boiling down to a single feature.

Adapted from a 2006 stage play starring Frank Langella as Nixon and Michael Sheen as Frost, the two actors come to us now on screen reprising their roles under the direction of Oscar-winner Ron Howard (Oscar for A Beautiful Mind, also known for Apollo 13, Cocoon and Splash).  A significant Oscar contender this year, it is nominated for Best Picture, Best Actor (Frank Langella) and Best Director, as well as for its adapted screenplay and editing.

I must admit I wasn’t familiar with this TV event of the late 1970s, having been far too young at the time to know what was going on, and I suppose not being heavy into political history.  I found the film to be an educational look at the event, providing some background into how it came about and who was involved, and it inspired me to look into this deeper, including looking at part of a documentary program in which David Frost talks about the interviews decades later and excerpts heavily from the original TV programs.  Frost/Nixon is most definitely a movie, with all the usual character and dramatic constructs, but one with some depth behind it.

As with a previous Ron Howard true story adapted for the silver screen, Apollo 13, again we know where it’s going and that means what’s most important is that we’re OK with the ride.  I’ve contradicted my claim in the previous paragraph that I am unfamiliar with the events, but I’m referring here both to people who lived through that time as well as to folks like myself who gathered enough from descriptions of the movie to already gather roughly what happened in the end.  Nixon had refused to revisit the Watergate scandal in public since his resignation in 1974, but at the urging of his handlers and believing that he would be battling a lightweight opponent, he agreed to the interviews, only to be pushed in the end towards more or less admitting his mistakes in the scandal.  There was a good deal of tension in the interviews themselves and among the players offstage, but ultimately it seems that both men got something positive out of the experience – increased fame and credibility for Frost, and the chance for Nixon to tell his story in his own words and stress some key disagreements he had with how he his decisions had been characterized.

The film itself exhibits great pacing in its final third, but I found it a bit slow and unsatisfying for the first half.  Ron Howard as a director is despised by many due to his mile-wide sentimental streak and “nice-ifying” techniques, but it was widely agreed that those tendencies helped this movie to succeed and to become more accessible, rather than limiting it.

I’m not sure I could heartily recommend this film over viewing the actual interviews (which are quite compelling from the parts I’ve seen) and reading more about the background, so in that way, it falls a bit into my general feelings about biopic attempts.  But by addressing only this focused event rather than someone’s entire life, greater depth is achieved and we’ve got a worthwhile movie.  Best Picture?  I don’t think so.  But the acting and writing are real contenders.

December 31, 2008:  Milk

Milk is another biopic with serious Oscar potential, and while this is a genre which the Academy seems to love, I really have trouble investing myself in it.  Having in recent years seen Ray, the film about Ray Charles, and Walk the Line, the film about Johnny Cash (which I sometimes refer to as “Ray 2”), I didn’t set myself up to expect much from Milk.  Not that the story of Harvey Milk is in any way insignificant or boring, but these biopics seem to focus on manufactured melodrama and not go into a whole lot of depth about the actual people.  Reading about this movie before I saw it made me want to see/revisit the 1984 documentary The Times of Harvey Milk (I can’t recally whether I actually sat through this back in the 1980s or 1990s, or just saw snippets of it on TV several times).

What we’ve got here is Sean Penn portraying Harvey Milk, a San Francisco city councillor who was the first openly homosexual politician elected in the US back in the 1970s.  He became a symbol for the gay rights movement, suffered a lot of pressure and backlash, and was murdered (along with the mayor) by a fellow councillor after less than a year in office.

This film was directed by Gus Van Sant, a director who has successfully walked the line between independent (Drugstore Cowboy, Elephant) and studio (Good Will Hunting, To Die For) films over the past 20+ years, depending on his goals.  I tend to “like” his films, which is not to say that they are easy to take or necessarily designed to entertain in the traditional way, however, I don’t usually seek them out.  Elephant and Paranoid Park are two of his recent works I intend to check out soon.

Milk is an intimate film in its visual style, with a certain urgency to it, which is totally appropriate and in that respect it’s very well done.  Oscar nominations for Best Actor for Sean Penn and Best Supporting Actor for Josh Brolin (the murderous councillor) are supplemented by nominations for director Gus Van Sant, original screenplay, editing, costume design, and score by Danny Elfman (The Simpsons, Batman).

The publicity from this film arose in much the same way that it has in recent years for any film with high-profile straight actors playing gay characters (Sean Penn, James Franco and Emile Hirsch in this case), in much the same way that Brokeback Mountain did a few years ago.  The timing was also perfect to piggyback on the outrage around the successful “Proposition 8” vote in California to ban gay marriage.  As an openly gay director, one might presume that the story carries a personal angle for Van Sant as well.

So, I watched Milk, and it was fine, but I really don’t know whether or not it was a good use of my time.  Watching the real documentary or reading a book about Harvey Milk would likely give me more information.  I don’t know how biopics can rise above this dilemma and I certainly don’t think the format is necessarily unsuccessful.  It’s not the kind of thing I want to go out of my way for, but as long as the Oscars have a love affair with this type of film, I guess I’ll have to keep seeing them.

December 22, 2008:  Wendy and Lucy

Wendy and Lucy is a low-key, independent film which has crept onto a lot of 2008 top ten lists, not without merit.  It’s a sparsely told story of a young woman and her dog who have fallen on very hard times, and chronicles a few days in her life moving through the US midwest as she struggles to make her way towards the promise of work and eventual prosperity in Alaska.

I’ve been watching the career of Michelle Williams since her days on Dawson’s creek, and while she may not have been originally envisioned as the one from that show who would go on to greatest fame and fortune, she has made quite a name for herself and is emerging as one of the top actresses of her generation.  This was evident in her early work including the HBO original If These Walls Could Talk 2, and recently we’ve seen a strong and Oscar-nominated performance in Brokeback Mountain as well as a key role in Synecdoche, New York last year.  Unfortunately she’s had a heartbreaking time over the past year, following the death of Heath Ledger, her former fiance and father of her child.

Perhaps it was the heavy hype surrounding this film, but I found myself underwhelmed overall.  To be fair, while this is a small production and I was expecting a character study, I maybe wasn’t geared to the right scale of events, as I expected more to happen and more ground to be covered.  I may have been more affected if I knew the intimate scale of the film from the start.  I’ve never known whether that calibration to the scale of a film is something I have a right to expect from the filmmakers or need to provide myself.  To put specifics on my impression of the film’s structure upon first viewing, I found myself thinking that there wasn’t much of an ending, that not enough weight was given to her quest for work in Alaska, and that I couldn’t figure out the motives of anyone in the movie who either helped or spurned our heroine.  But even as I write this, it becomes clear that a second viewing will be essential to bring justice to a review of the film.

On the other hand, Michelle Williams’ performance is tremendous, and she fully inhabits the character.  Will Patton as a sympathetic (and honest!) mechanic brings a curious warmth to the film which is otherwise – by design – completely absent.  Parts of Williams’ plight made sense to me and rang true, but I didn’t feel like it all added up in the end.

I can only conclude at this point that one’s impression of this film will depend heavily on where one comes from in life, including how close one has come to the edge of (or immersion in) poverty.  As a person who has struggled at times with very limited money, I’m forced to realize that I was still leagues away from the level of desperation observed here.  Being generally risk-averse, I’ve always felt that I would naturally cut down to bare-bones earlier than necessary in order to avoid a situation in which I was stuck with no choices, as our protagonist is here.  But can we ever really know how we’ll behave before we’re faced with that?  A character our protagonist encounters, who is ultimately painted as unsympathetic (I thought there might be a turnaround but instead his insensitivity was emphasized) tells Williams straight up that she shouldn’t have a dog if she can’t afford to feed it.  I think there’s a very fine line between judging people’s choices (never mind telling them what to choose), and comparing other people’s choices to the ones you would have made.  The former is unfair, and the latter is in my opinion essential to maintaining perspective and remaining open-minded.  But I think the fineness of that line leads to an unfortunate consequence that it can be hard to identify with people (or characters, if we’re talking about fiction) who make choices so different from what we can understand.  I might weigh my basic subsistence more heavily than a personal connection with a pet, but for someone else that pet might be the only thing they have to cling to in an otherwise miserable and hopeless existence.  This is not to say that I have contempt for the other person or dislike them for their choices, but what I’ve got here is a movie which from the start focuses on a person whose actions don’t resonate with me.

So I’m conflicted about this film.  A snippet from a review I saw called it “grim to the point of tedium”, and while I’d agree with the grim part, I didn’t find it tedious.  I think it’s representative of how things might actually play out.  It’s also noteworthy that most of the people our protagonist encountered were ultimately sympathetic and just plain nice.  Unless an outlay of money is required, I think most people tend to be as nice and helpful as they can, and I believe that I would be as well, so that did ring true with me.

It only occurred to me after watching the film, and while thinking it through for this review, that the goal of reaching Alaska and finding work wasn’t a notion Williams was really tied to.  I had wondered why there wasn’t more of a focus on that quest, but understanding that it was a desperate grasp and not a driving force will help me to come to my second viewing with a different perspective.  Maybe I was expecting something more along the lines of Into the Wild.