Movie Box Review

Harvey Weinstein has two movies on the way in the next couple of months featuring actresses who are presumptively in line for Oscar consideration: The Iron Lady with Meryl Streep as Margaret Thatcher, and MY WEEK WITH MARILYN, starring Michelle Williams as Marilyn Monroe.  Let's take a look at the signals Mr. Weinstein may be sending out about which movie he's favoring, based on his actions in connection with both films yesterday.  On Sunday night, Weinstein personally introduced Marilyn to the packed house at Grauman's Chinese for the AFI Film Festival, and brought Williams with him, even though she was due in Chicago at 4AM this morning for a very early call on her new Wizard of Oz movie.  He also had a Steinway grand piano schlepped to the front of the Chinese just so celebrated concert pianist Lang Lang could come in for 5 minutes (before rushing to his own LA Philharmonic concert downtown) and play the theme music from the movie for the gathered crowd.

Oh, and he postponed the opening of The Iron Lady until virtually the last possible date it's even eligible for Oscar consideration, December 30.

So the fair-haired child is clearly Williams and My Week With Marilyn (although where Best Picture is concerned, it's probably still The Artist).  And although it would be foolish to dismiss any work by Meryl Streep sight unseen, it's fair to say that she'll have her hands full trying to unseat Williams, whose work is quite dazzling, an astonishing channeling of Monroe that is without doubt one of the thrilling performances of the year.

My Week With Marilyn is based on the real-life recollections of Colin Clark (played in the film by Eddie Redmayne), an assistant director on the unexceptional 1956 comedy The Prince and the Showgirl that starred and was directed by Laurence Olivier (Kenneth Branagh).  Clark became the liaison between the production and the very difficult and troubled Monroe, and for a short time he was her confidante and perhaps more (the movie is a bit ambiguous on this score).  In the course of this time, he fell in love both with show business and with the ultimately unattainable star.

The narrative track of Marilyn is actually quite similar to the 2008 Me and Orson Welles.  In that one, Zac Efron was the young innocent learning about the theatre from a legend (Christian McKay as Welles), as well as about the vagaries of love from someone older and more experienced (Claire Danes).  Although McKay gave a superb performance, the movie went nowhere, probably because sadly the Welles name doesn't mean much to audiences anymore.  Marilyn Monroe, though, has retained her cultural fascination (not to mention that she looked a lot better than Welles in a tight dress), and with Williams' remarkable performance, Marilyn has a much better chance of breaking through.  

Screenwriter Adrian Hodges and director Simon Curtis both come out of British TV, and their work is professional and compelling without being exciting:  along his way, young Colin meets his share of colorful movie people like Judi Dench as Sybil Thorndike (to much better advantage than as Hoover's mother in J. Edgar), Dominic Cooper as Monroe's producer Milton Greene, Toby Jones as her publicist Arthur Jacobs (he would go on to produce the original Planet of the Apes movies, among others), Julia Ormond as Olivier's then-wife Vivien Leigh, Zoe Wanamaker as Monroe's acting coach Paula Strasberg, and so on.  He's forced into high-pressure situations and has to prove himself.  There's a "nice girl" (Emma Watson, in her first substantial non-Hermoine role) for him to like but abandon for the sake of Marilyn.  Colin is dazzled, and then hurt, and finally stronger for the experience.  All of this is pretty much a by-the-book coming of age tale.

The movie's portrayal of Monroe, too, doesn't have any particular surprises.  She's insecure, voraciously needy, in love with her then-new husband Arthur Miller (Dougray Scott) and even more with the high culture he represents (this was the time when she was thinking of appearing in "The Brothers Karamazov" on Broadway), but not loyal to him.  (Nor is he to her, in the way that counts--he's writing cruel "fiction" based on her.)   She's untrained and essentially unskilled as an actress, but the camera ravishes and is ravished by her.  One of the sharpest lines of the script notes that she hoped working with Olivier would turn her from a movie star into a real actress, and Olivier hoped working with her would change him from a great actor into a star, and neither was likely to happen.  (They didn't; The Prince and the Showgirl was a flop.)

All of this is familiar Monroeiana, but it's never been captured with such conviction and complexity as Williams conveys in her portrayal.  She doesn't do an imitation; her breathy voice and mannerisms suggest, rather than duplicate, Monroe.  (Although the recreations of actual scenes from Prince and the Showgirl are unerring.)   It's so easy to overdo Monroe, but Williams never falls into that trap --one of the movie's best moments has her asking if she should do "Marilyn" for a gathered crowd and then launching into her own trademark gestures--and instead suggests the troubled, increasingly desperate mind behind the eyes of the icon.

Williams' performance is the real thing, and if the movie that surrounds her doesn't quite rise to her level, it's still a pleasure to watch.  The pace is brisk at 99 minutes, the hair, costume and make-up staffs have done an marvelous job of turning Williams into Marilyn Monroe, and other technical credits are first-rate as well (it's a particularly nice touch to see how Ben Smithard's cinematography changes to match the actual 1950s color look of The Prince and the Showgirl in scenes from the film-within-the-film).  

My Weekend With Marilyn may only be a vehicle, but what a driver!  It's an entertaining, reasonably intelligent and well-crafted film that preserves one of the year's jewel performances at its center.

It's a little unexpected that of all the films Clint Eastwood has directed, his new biography J. EDGAR most resembles The Bridges of Madison County.  Measured and mournful, the film, which opened the AFI Film Festival in Los Angeles last night and opens nationwide next week, provides a superficial account of American politics over 50 years while favoring the story of an agonized love that dared not speak its name.

The title, of course, refers to J. Edgar Hoover, the first and only head of what became the FBI from the post-World War I era until Nixon was in the White House.  Hoover (played by Leonardo DiCaprio) was legendary for his iron-willed control of his agency and, behind the scenes, for his "private files" that supposedly contained the dirt on every public figure in the country, which he used unmercifully to blackmail everyone from Presidents on down to bend to his every command.

Dustin Lance Black's script (he wrote Milk) has a loose flashback structure that jumps from the 1960s, when Hoover is dictating his memoirs to a variety of junior G-men (including, disconcertingly, Chuck Bass from Gossip Girl) while obsessing over the sex tape he's recorded of Martin Luther King, Jr. (he thinks its existence will compel King to turn down the Nobel Peace Prize he's just won), to the early part of his career, especially his pursuit of anarchists and Bolsheviks in the 1920s and the investigation of the Lindbergh baby kidnapping in the 1930s.  Along the way he builds and protects his power base, constantly increasing the bureau's budget and autonomy.

The emotional focus of the story, however, becomes Hoover's close relationship with his mother (Judi Dench), and his savagely repressed homosexual feelings for his closest aide, Clyde Tolson (Armie Hammer).  In the film, at least, Tolson wants the two of them to have a full-fledged romance, but Hoover, while obsessed with Tolson and keeping him close till the end of his life, is--at least in part because of his mother's brutal rejection of the very suggestion that he could be gay--unable to reciprocate, and even forces himself into relationships with occasional women.  The result is emotional torture that goes on for decades.

J. Edgar is an extremely odd movie, sometimes powerful but not really successful.  It's hardly news that a swift pace isn't part of Eastwood's repertoire as a director--when his material has a pulpy drive, like Mystic River or Grand Torino, that deliberate pace can bring a crushingly effective fatalism to the storytelling.  His historical pageants like Changeling, Flags of Our Fathers and Invictus, however, often just feel slow, and that's the case here; even with a half-century of dramatic material to choose from, the pace is often glacial.

Eastwood is also famous for not favoring a great deal of script development--if he reads something he likes, he just films it, more or less as is.  In this case, Black's screenplay needed some more work.  Huge swaths of American history are summed up in bite-sized pellets with little or no explanation (you'll get a better idea of Hoover's role in the pursuit of Depression-era bank robbers by watching Billy Crudup as a young J. Edgar in Michael Mann's Public Enemies).  Although intellectually one can see how Hoover's use of massive, unchecked power against perceived threats ties into concerns about revenge and the justification for violence that have always fascinated Eastwood, as presented here they have little force or complexity. 

Hoover had to have been an immensely complicated man, both hero and monster, able to function at the highest levels of political strategy but also an uncomfortable outsider, but the figure portrayed in the film exists in a narrow band of ambition, repression and panic.  (While we see his obsession with King, there's no consideration of any feelings he may have had about race--it's all subordinated to Hoover conflating what he sees as King's aberrant sexual behavior to his dread of his own desires.)  All of this constricts DiCaprio's performance--it's hard to imagine him getting the Oscar for this role.  He ends up re-using mannerisms from his (better) Howard Hughes in The Aviator, and looking generally agonized.  Secondary characters are even thinner--to describe Naomi Watts's role as "loyal secretary" is to say absolutely everything there is about her character (there's an early scene where she expresses that she has her own ambitions, but we never learn anything else about her after that).  And although Hammer is the most human character in the story as Tolson, since he's the only one who gets to express his emotions, mostly all he does is cast despairing and disapproving glances in Hoover's direction.

Stylistically, J. Edgar almost looks and feels like an imitation of Eastwood's house style:  Tom Stern's photography drained to an almost monochromatic consistency; spare plinking piano keys for music; editing by Joel Cox and Gary Roach that is never in a rush.  The old-age make-up on DiCaprio is fairly successful, but Watts and Hammer look mummified.

In an era where Hollywood has almost abandoned the concept of serious adult biography, the fact that Eastwood is still out there making movies like J. Edgar is nothing but admirable, and the film's final act, in which Hoover wrestles both with his legacy and his (apparently) never-realized love for Tolson, is sometimes quite moving.  In the end, though, it doesn't come to much more than warmed-over Brokeback Mountain with a lot of prosthetics, and Hoover's monumental, unsettled place in American history merited more than that.

ANONYMOUS is history tailored for the 1%.

Although screenwriter John Orloff and director Roland Emmerich have swirled it into a complicated tangle of conspiracies and scandals, the idea at the center of Anonymous is simple enough (uh, Spoiler Alert):  William Shakespeare (Rafe Spall in the movie) was an ignorant actor and full-time lout, utterly incapable of writing the plays attributed to him, which were actually the work of Edward DeVere, Earl of Oxford (Rhys Ifans). 

There are apparently many good reasons for believing this theory to be balderdash.  Among them is the fact that 2 of Shakespeare's late plays were not only first produced after DeVere had died, but were inspired by historical incidents that didn't occur until he was, as Monty Python would say, bleeding demised.  (The film doesn't help its believability by having DeVere write A Midsummer Night's Dream at the age of 9, a feat even Mozart would have found impressive.) 

But there's nothing wrong with fictional emendations of history.  I don't think any of us were aware of just what role super powers played in the Cuban Missile Crisis until this summer's X Men:  First Class.  Quentin Tarantino killed off Hitler and ended World War II prematurely in Inglourious Basterds.  Mark Zuckerberg may not be the sad misfit portrayed in The Social Network.  Shakespeare himself, for that matter, certainly wasn't above fiddling with facts in the historical plays.  And of course Shakespeare In Love invented Gwyneth Paltrow's character as not only a love interest, but the inspiration for some of his best plays.

But if you're going to screw around with history for the sake of a story, it had better be a good one.  And that Orloff and Emmerich don't have.  In fact, at least for an American audience, their tale is a snobbish swipe at the lower classes:  how could the plays of Shakespeare have been written by anyone other than a nobleman?  Only one born to power and erudition would be able to create such poetry and tell such tales.  This isn't just a false--maybe an offensive--premise, it's an unentertaining one, unless perhaps you're a member of the Trump family.. Who wants to see a movie about the triumph of superciliousness?  

Not being content with a bad central idea, Anonymous lards the story with increasingly far-fetched plots and revelations, for many of which a working knowledge of 16th Century British history would be helpful.  These culminate in one involving Queen Elizabeth (played by Joely and Vanessa Redgrave at various ages) and DeVere that has to be seen to be believed. 

Although the bones of Anonymous are brittle and creaky, no one ever said Roland Emmerich didn't know how to make a movie.  All that technical expertise that went into The Day After Tomorrow and 2012 are piled on here, and the film's production design, costumes and some bravura CG landscapes of old-time London are superb.  The actors, too, are committed.  Rhys Ifans, freed from his usual role as comedy relief, brings intelligence and suffering to the brilliant but hapless DeVere.  David Thewlis is a fine villain, and of course the Redgraves are impeccable.  It's a bit unsettling to see Derek Jacobi, a magnificent actor of Shakespeare himself, endorse the DeVere theory by more or less playing himself as the presenter of the tale, but this is why actors should mostly avoid talking about their deeply-held beliefs.  

Anonymous is a watchable display of craft, yet dramatically uninvolving and factually silly.  Somebody--but who?--once mentioned "a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."  Apart from everything else, it turns out he was the world's first film critic.

No one is going to see PUNCTURE in theaters, and that's a shame, because unaccountably, it's one of the best pictures around.  "Unaccountably," because this is a film that doesn't even seem to know there's a radar to fly below:  although it contains an award-caliber performance by Chris Evans--yes, Captain America Chris Evans; No, I don't get it either--it made little stir when it screened at the Tribeca Film Festival last spring, it's playing in 2 theaters in NY and 1 in LA (the latter was half-full for a weekend show), and according to Amazon, a January date has already been set for the DVD release.  So like the story it tells, the film itself is something of a lost cause, but one that deserves to be championed.

At first, Puncture seems like it's going to be the FX version of TNT's goofy TV show Franklin & Bash  That's the one about a pair of wacky young lawyers who are brilliant in the courtroom but who party hard and constantly after hours.  (It being TNT, "hard-partying" means a great deal of beer and some bong jokes.)  Mike Weiss (Evans) is a lot farther gone, with tastes that include coke, crack, pills and a copious number of hookers.  Mike has driven off his wife, his colleagues, and really almost everyone else except his best friend and partner Paul Danziger (Mark Kassen, who also directed with his brother Adam); he's a genuinely, if sometimes barely, functioning drug addict.

Puncture is one of the rare "based on a true story" movies that actually feels as if it is one, and that's probably due in part to the fact that Danziger himself gets co-story credit on the script with Ela Thier, and that he's clearly a believer in the "warts and all" school of storytelling; the screenplay itself is by Chris Lopata.  (This is the first feature for both directors and all of the writers.)  When the partners, in the late 1990s, take on the case of a nurse (Vinessa Shaw) stricken with AIDS due to a dangerous type of hypodermic needles used in hospitals, and then the inventor (Marshall Bell) whose far safer needle is being kept from sale by the medical supply conglomerates, their interests are more ambitious than charitable.  And even when they commit to the case, they falter as much as they succeed, often at the mercy of the conglomerate's lawyer Nathaniel Price (Brett Cullen, in a marvelously smooth villainous turn).

The film is, to a large extent, about human frailty and corruption, and it doesn't spare anyone, going far darker than you'd ever imagine it would (this isn't Erin Brockovich).  Even the characters whose hearts are in the right place fail their friends and colleagues, and the story has the challenging ring of real life.  Evans is stunningly convincing as someone whose brain simply will not turn off (he practices his closing statements on the hookers, pimps and druggies who hang out with him), a man on the precipice between the possibility of rescuing himself and falling apart.  To its credit, and indicative of Puncture's startling tone, the movie never has the scene where anyone tells Mike moralistically how he's ruining his life, or where he almost runs over a child or commits some other heinous act while under the influence so he can understand that he has to change his life; when he tries to reform himself, it's for the most pragmatic reasons.  

With the exception of Bell's stubborn client, in his own way as self-destructive as Mike, the other characters are thinner--Danziger is little more than the responsible partner with a pregnant wife, Price's corporate evildoer is straight out of every John Grisham novel--but all are extremely well played.  Even in small parts, Shaw as the pitiable nurse and Kate Burton as a blunt Senator whose influence the lawyers court are worth noting.  Despite what must have been a very low budget, there is crisp photography by Helge Gerull, hurtling editing by Chip Smith, and a distinctive score by Ryan Ross Smith, all of them also doing their first notable feature work.  

Puncture isn't fully satisfying.  There's a plot device late in the story that's played far more sentimentally than anything in the rest of the movie, and although what happens in the final scene makes sense, it's something that also would have made sense had it happened 45 minutes earlier, and there's no attempt to explain why it didn't happen then.  But the film is head and shoulders above what we usually see in this genre, and it's marked throughout by what appears to be a high degree of honesty.

Puncture will probably vanish from any theater near you in the next week or so.  But get it on your Netflix queue, and check for it in early 2012 to stream or record on your DVR.  It's worth the effort.

MACHINE GUN PREACHER simply isn't good enough for the story it wants to tell.

And the story, a true one, is remarkable:  Sam Childers (played by Gerard Butler in the film) was a drug addict and violent criminal who found Jesus and became a contractor and Pennsylvania country preacher (in a church he built himself), but in a different sense never renounced violence.  Childers was inspired to build an orphanage and church in the brutal area of Northern Sudan and Uganda, and became committed to saving the children in those lands, where war-lords and government heads have murdered, mutilated, raped and enlisted the very young unwillingly in their armies; in that cause, Childers picked up his guns and has served as a very active warrior.

Childers is a complicated figure.  Although he's done undoubted amounts of good, his wife and daughter (Michelle Monaghan and Madeline Carroll) have had to bear his absences and the psychological scars he bears from what he's witnessed in Africa.  He's also a personification of the uneasy relation between religiously-inspired charitable good and the decision to respond to the ugliest kind of violence in a simiilarly deadly way, as well as the place foreigners have in a deep-rooted native conflict.  

Jason Keller's script gets credit for addressing all of this, but it does so in a flat, superficial way.  The hard truth is that tackling difficult subject matter doesn't allow for more leeway in the quality of the effort; on the contrary, even the smallest inadequacies become glaring in a context as demanding as this.  Far too much of Keller's dialogue and plot turns are painfully ham-handed and cliched (there's a painful subplot involving a scarred boy Childers befriends), and the film lurches from one part of Childers' life to the next, without any real insight or subtlety.  The result is odd, because the portions dealing with Childers' religious conversion seem to be aimed at fundamentalist audiences, but the rest of the movie is full of R-rated language and violence, and even some sexuality.

The cast is not ideal.  Butler is a good physical match for Childers but gives a very blunt, unenlightening performance, switching from stolidity to screaming intensity without much modulation.  Monaghan has nothing to play but "the wife," and the Africans with whom Childers comes into contact are one-dimensional.  Only Michael Shannon, in the small role of Childers' desperate childhood friend, bursts with troubled life; when he shares the screen with the other actors, he unintentionally makes them look bad.

Marc Forster, the film's director, remains a frustratingly uneven filmmaker.  Forster did very strong work on Monster's Ball, and seemed surprisingly comfortable with Stranger Than Fiction, but his excursions into genre like Stay and the Bond movie Quantum of Solace have been disastrous.  Machine Gun Preacher most resembles his The Kite Runner, a dogged and worthy but unsatisfying adaptation of the novel.  Forster isn't able to make the stateside scenes emotionally convincing, and even his African action sequences feel routine.  

Disparaging a movie as well-meant and serious as Machine Gun Preacher doesn't make one feel good; it's a film that tries to do justice to an extraordinary life, but just doesn't have the goods.  A noble failure, unfortunately, is a failure nonetheless.