Movie Box Review

The Golden Globes are given out by 80 international journalists whose opinions, when they're not voting on these awards, are of no importance whatsoever to anyone on the planet other than their particular loved ones.  But the combination of a usually entertaining TV show (hosted again this year by Ricky Gervais) and enough years to have established a brand name has created a collective delusion that The Globes Matter, and therefore they do.  The full list of nominees is here, and let's talk a bit about the day's winners and losers--Movies first.

THE FAVORITES:  WINNERS - The Artist, The Descendants and The Help all reinforced their status as the films to beat in the Oscar race, stacking up the most nominations (6 for Artist, 5 for the other two).  Ditto Brad Pitt, George Clooney and Jean DuJardin for Actor,  and Meryl Streep, Michelle Williams and Viola Davis for Actress. 

EXTREMELY LOUD AND INCREDIBLY CLOSE:  LOSER - Is it the 9/11 theme?  The very late start to industry and press screenings?  Not clear yet, but this seemingly sure-thing Oscar contender has been coming up dry everywhere so far.

WAR HORSE:  LOSER  Yes, even with a Picture nomination.  The snub of Spielberg for director, apart from being a reminder of the bad old days when Jaws and The Color Purple could receive Oscar nominations while Spielberg was excluded, strongly suggests that War Horse isn't in the top rank of nominees.

THE TREE OF LIFE:  LOSER - One might have thought that the international sensibility of the Globes would lend itself to Terence Malick's hugely ambitious, equal parts brilliant and pretentious epic.  But one would be wrong, as Tree couldn't manage a single nomination.

THE IDES OF MARCH:  WINNER - George Clooney's mixed-bag political drama had been largely ignored thus far, but the Globes went for it in a big way, with nominations for Picture, Director, Actor (Ryan Gosling) and Screenplay.  Which leads us to...

RYAN GOSLING:  WINNER - Nominated not just for Ides, but in the Comedy/Musical Actor category for Crazy Stupid Love.  But--

CRAZY STUPID LOVE:  LOSER - Despite some of the best reviews of any comedy this year, Gosling's was its only nomination.

MONEYBALL:  WINNER:  Was in danger of being relegated to the acting and script categories, but its Picture nomination puts it back in the big-boy conversation.  (Bennett Miller's absence from the Director nominees, though, means it may not have much chance to win.)

GLENN CLOSE:  WINNER - Nearly fell out of the Best Actress race entirely for a minute there, but although she's clearly a notch below the Streep-Williams-Davis trio of favorites, at least she's back in the running.

MELISSA MCCARTHY:  LOSER - She's been the darling of critics' groups, but didn't make the cut here.  It's worth noting that 8 of the 10 Supporting Actor/Actress nominees are from Dramas rather than Comedy/Musicals, the only exceptions being Berenice Bejo from The Artist and Kenneth Branagh from My Week With Marilyn, both so clearly classy they transcend mere "comedy."

ROONEY MARA:  WINNER - The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo hasn't been much in the mix so far, but Mara gets her foot in the door for an Oscar Actress nomination.  

MADONNA/THE PAPARAZZI:  WINNERS - The Globes have never been shy about nominating celebrities so they'll show up at the awards and get some attention, and if it takes giving 2 music/song nominations to the dreadful W.E. to get Madonna to the party... so be it. 

Coming Soon:  The TV Nominees

THE IDES OF MARCH:  Watch It At Home - An Excellent Play Becomes a Merely Good Movie

The Ides of March, one of the most eagerly awaited of this year's festival crop, is more entertaining than it is good. Oddly both low-key and melodramatic, claptrap and high-minded drama, it represents a series of curious choices by director/co-screenwriter/co-star George Clooney. 

The film is based on a crackling good play called Farragut North by Beau Willimon, but although Willimon is one of the credited screenwriters, the script makes broad changes in both the story and tone of the play. Both concern Stephen Myers (Ryan Gosling), a rising star in the campaign team of Mike Morris (Clooney), a Governor running for the Democratic presidential nomination. Stephen works for campaign manager Paul Zara (Philip Seymour Hoffman), but on a fateful day when Tom is out of town, he takes a call from the opposition's campaign manager Tom Duffy (Paul Giamatti), an act that sets quite a few lives in turmoil.

In the play, the aftereffects of the opposition's call was the main storyline, and Stephen was an overtly ambitious, even arrogant young man. The Ides script introduces an entirely new story about intern Molly (Evan Rachel Wood) and her relationship with the campaign, which amps up the plot considerably. Stephen is also more idealistic at the start than he was in Farragut. The grafting of the new plotline onto the original results in tonal inconsistency and some plot fogginess. 

Clooney's direction is also uneven. The movie starts out too muted for its theatrical origins, all the actors underplaying. By the end, we're in full -on soap opera mode, with Phedon Papamichael's initially naturalistic photography reaching into Godfather territory. None of this is a favor to the extremely fine cast, which is hard-pressed to traverse Clooney's shift in tone. It also has the effect of turning the movie's final act into an exercise in familiar political cynicism. 

For all this, Ides of March is smart and compelling most of the time. The scenes that preserve Willimon's play still zing, and while the new plot is less convincing than the old, it's still fun. Oscar hopes may be more of a reach than the film's credentials had seemed to promise, but Ides is still worth a vote.

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DRIVE is a self-conscious genre movie, and those are tricky propositions.  On the one hand, you need to make your existential or other textual statement with all the artistry at your command; on the other, you still have to fulfill the demands of the genre you've chosen.  If you do it right, you have Heat; make a mistake and you've got The Driver.  Nicolas Winding Refn has for the most part made smart decisions, and the result is an exciting, moody thriller graced with an exceptional cast and some high-caliber moviemaking.

Taking a cue from The Driver, the protagonist of Drive has no given name, and is credited merely as "Driver."  (Walter Hill's picture pushed the pretention farther, with hardly any of the characters having names.)  Ryan Gosling, continuing to find a sweet spot between commercial vehicles (so to speak) and art-house cinema, plays a man with overlapping jobs:  he's a movie stunt-driver, an auto mechanic and a getaway driver for heists.  (In all 3 professions, he works with Shannon, played by Bryan Cranston.)  As a getaway man, he insists on strict rules:  he has nothing to do with the robbery itself, but provides the crooks with a window of exactly 5 minutes.  If they're in his car with the loot within that window, he guarantees they'll get where they want to go; any earlier or later, and he's gone. 

Our hero is reticent (of course), but immensely loyal, and he lets Shannon talk him into a plan to work together on a NASCAR auto, for which he'll be the driver.  This requires capital, however, which brings them into the orbit of gangster Bernie Rose (Albert Brooks) and his partner Nino (Ron Perlman).  As one may easily imagine, no good can come of this.  Meanwhile, he's also met his neighbor down the hall, Irene (Carey Mulligan) and her young son Benicio (Kaden Leos).  The three become close, but then Irene's husband Standard (Oscar Isaac) is released from prison, which starts the plot rolling and the characters dying.  Inevitably, things boil down to the Driver facing off against those who threaten the people he cares about. 

Refn directed the Danish Pusher trilogy, as well as the prison drama Bronson, so he's not a newcomer to the melding of thrills with character and theme.  Working from a spare script by Hossein Amini (from the novel by James Sallis), Refn works the genre conventions--the heist gone bad, the chases, the double-crosses that become triple, the killings that have to happen because a man's gotta do what a man's gotta do--with style and speed, and no compunction about mixing aesthetically composed chase sequences with sudden, bloody and brutal violence.  The gorgeous LA photography is by Newton Thomas Sigel, whose films include 3 Kings and The Usual Suspects, and the swift, lucid editing is by Mat Newman, a Refn veteran.  Also notable is the score by Cliff Martinez, a regular member of Steven Soderbergh's team. 

This side of Michael Mann, rarely do genre efforts draw this kind of cast. Gosling's streak of quality movies continues, and in what easily could have been a rote Man-With-No-Name kind of role, he brings humanity and a believably heartfelt wish to avoid the violence he wreaks.  Mulligan has perfected the heartfelt yearning she conveyed in An Education and Never Let Me Go; her part here is thin, but she fills it with emotion.  Probably the movie's biggest surprise is Albert Brooks--he did a jokey convict role in Out of Sight, but here he's utterly convincing as an aging gangster who's wearily willing to handle the dirty work himself.  Perlman, Isaac, Cranston and Christina Hendricks all contribute tasty supporting bits.

It's difficult to sell a movie like Drive, because even great reviews can drive the genre fans away, while promos that center on car chases and shoot-outs may not appeal to the art film crowd.  Gosling, although one of the fastest-rising actors around, has yet to prove that his name can open a movie on its own.  However it does at the box office, however, Drive is a superior example of having your genre and deconstructing it too.

Without further ado:  CRAZY STUPID LOVE is the comedy of the summer.  Also the drama.  There are certainly spectacles out there now providing fantastic visual thrills, and some of them (X-Men, Harry Potter) are quite good, too; but if you want to watch an uproarious, surprising story about human beings whose only magic powers are for screwing up and somehow managing to keep trying again, this is your movie.

The script by Dan Fogelman (previously known mostly for cartoons like the original Cars, Tangled and Bolt) and direction by Glenn Ficarra and John Requa (themselves screenwriters, with idiosyncratic films to their names like Bad Santa and I Love You, Philip Morris) are triumphs of tone that mix slapstick with surprising poignancy.  The story begins with the marital break-up of Cal (Steve Carell) and Emily (Julianne Moore), a function of midlife crisis and Emily's straying with co-worker David (Kevin Bacon).  Cal is utterly bereft by the loss of his family, and his attempts to rejoin the dating scene are pathetically bad.  He's fascinated to watch a local Lothario, Jacob (Ryan Gosling) in action, and Jacob in turn is amused and horrified by Cal's failures; he takes Cal under his wing, teaching him tricks to attract women. 

This is the part of the movie featured in the marketing, and it delivers a lot of big laughs, fueled by the terrific comic chemistry between Carell and Gosling.  The great thing about Crazy Stupid Love, though, is that even that relationship has more to it than just comedy:  Cal may master Jacob's tips, but he's too genuine to use them without feeling, and on some level, Jacob envies that.  And all of this is just a slice of the film's portrait of romantic and family misadventure, which keeps expanding to such an extent that I can't reveal some of what happens toward the end without spoiling the fun.  We stay with the developing friendship between Cal and Jacob, but we're also following Jacob's own relationship with the reluctant Hannah (Emma Stone), a young lawyer who threatens to change Jacob's carefree theories about sex and life.  We watch Emily's experiences as a newly single woman, and the awkward crush her son Robbie (Jonah Bobo) has on his babysitter Jessica (Analeigh Tipton)--not to mention Jessica's own romantic issues.  At its best, Crazy Stupid Love recalls the classic Woody Allen movies of the 1970s and 80s, presenting a wide, varied portfolio of lovers both skilled and inept.

The cast is just about perfect.  Carell keeps his physical comedy emotionally grounded and delivers a performance more like his work in Dan In Real Life and Little Miss Sunshine than in his big-budget vehicles.  Julianne Moore is, as always, remarkably truthful even in comedy, and she and Carell fit together better than you'd expect.  Gosling is the film's major surprise, effortlessly shifting from the wrenching indie drama of Blue Valentine to reveal himself as a suddenly deft Hollywood comedian; it's no surprise at this point, though, that Stone is peerlessly appealing and smart.  Marisa Tomei is hysterical in a role that shouldn't be described in too much detail, and the lesser-known Bobo and Tipton more than hold their own in the ensemble.

Crazy Stupid Love is so smoothly engineered that it's easy to underrate:  Ficarra, Requa and Fogelman maneuver hairpin turns between pathos and farce as though they're moving up their own driveway.  There are a few minor missteps (the ending could be a little less neat), and the movie is content to work within the confines and style of conventional Hollywood filmmaking--there's nothing innovative about it.  (Although the cinematography by Andrew Dunn--he shot Precious, among many others--and editing by Lee Haxall are notably first-rate.)  But it affords the pleasure of a marvelous story, superbly told.

This has been an odd summer for comedy:  R-rated comedies aplenty, all of them proud of their own raunch, and all of them tremendously successful (only Friends With Benefits won't get to $100M, and even that film will do fine), but hardly anything geared to simple old-fashioned storytelling.  This could well explain the huge success of Woody Allen's Midnight In Paris, an intelligent, likable little film that's exploded (by indie standards) at the boxoffice, even though no one would seriously compare it to his classic work.  Crazy Stupid Love, with its PG-13 rating and largely older cast, seems unlikely to hit the first weekend heights of its rowdy mates--Mitch Metcalf is predicting a mild $16M opening--but it should thrive over time as people see it and spread the word.  It's sane exhilarating good.