Capsule Reviews: End of Watch, Flight, The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey

End of Watch (David Ayer, 2012)

Whether the cops in End of Watch talk like cops matters less than the joy of them talking like actual human beings. Jake Gyllenhaal and partner Michael Peña enjoy a natural chemistry that works with Ayer’s hyperactive, disjunctive direction to give the impression of normal police work on L.A. streets even as the calls to which they respond are not only blatantly cinematic on an individual basis but also link up in a building narrative arc. That frenetic direction is the result of handheld cameras, most of which appear diegetically, toted by cop and criminal alike as their colleagues attempt to dissuade the would be filmmakers from carrying around evidence against them. It figures: the one time these characters are spared the weight of allegorical importance, they strive to be symbolic stars of their own movies. Admittedly, the sheer frantic collision of shots holds the film back, but it also pays off in some nearly surreal setpieces, especially during a rescue effort in a burning house that actually manages to communicate the terror of heat forming physical barriers and exits being lost behind smokescreens at a second’s notice. Besides, the technique cannot be too distancing, as End of Watch creates an immediacy of emotional connection rare to cop films. Grade: B+

Flight (Robert Zemeckis, 2012)

Doing press for this film, Robert Zemeckis objecting to an interviewer’s question about what it was like to return to live action, asserting that he had never left. Judging from this film, though, he’s still making cartoons. The opening plane crash sequence is one of the most thrilling sequences of the year, in which the tension of mechanical failure is compounded by the question of just how functioning an alcoholic Denzel Washington’s pilot is. Washington suits the role well, his mix of natural charm and the increasing droop of his hang-dog neutral expression preparing him for the task of facing the world with a dubiously believable smile while always standing on the brink of his self-control. But Zemeckis cannot let Washington’s subtleties sell the picture, instead relying on ridiculous side players (one woman’s brief “Praise Jesus” rivals the totality of John Goodman’s “Sympathy for the Devil”-scored entrances as a Brundlefly version of The Dude and Walter Sobchak) and thudding moral twists to put forward a message far blunter and more one-sided than the real ambiguity Washington suggests. And yet, for all the plodding obviousness of Zemeckis’ choices (not to mention the hilariously on-the-nose soundtrack), Washington’s performance stayed with me after watching it. Initial, mixed-to-negative thought slowly crawl toward a positive appreciation of the honesty that Washington, if not the film around him, brings to a subject that usually fares even worse than some of the eye-rolling clichés found within this uneven picture. Who knows, maybe after a revisit I will like it even more. That I want to revisit it at all places it on a level above Zemeckis’ motion-capture work. Grade: C+

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey (Peter Jackson, 2012)

Freed from the debate over its much-lambasted 48fps 3D presentation, the first of Peter Jackson’s strung-out Hobbit trilogy is a stupefyingly bad film in its own right. Jackson’s inconsistent direction of the Lord of the Rings films is compounded here by the general lack of tactility stemming from the transition from a mix of CGI and physical effects to all-digital wizardry. The results make for tacky, clearly fake production design, makeup and effects, all in service to a lugubrious story that takes pains to introduce a cast of characters for whom it does not care in any way. Even Martin Freeman’s natural comic timing does not get a chance to shine, and the host of dwarves he accompanies manage to be even more indiscriminate from one another than in Tolkien’s pages. It is disastrous filmmaking, its chaotic, incoherent action setpieces nothing more than the video that will play in the waiting line for whatever amusement park ride is made out of this travesty. Grade: D

Les Misérables (Tom Hooper, 2012)

When set against the experience of seeing a production of Les Misérables,Tom Hooper’s adaptation single-handedly disproves Chaplin’s notion that life is tragedy in close-up and comedy in long shot. Hooper is so fixated on the musical’s reputation as a tear-jerker that he has no sense for its epic sweep, and his camera is rarely more than inches from an actor’s face as he or she sings. At times, performers even lurch suddenly toward the lens in a disorientingly pop effect, a gesture of spontaneity that sometimes comes across as their way of saying, “Would you back the hell off?”

Based, of course, on Victor Hugo’s epic, social romance novel, Les Misérables is one of the few musicals ripe for the current fetish for “realism” (emphasis on the quotation marks). Hooper always makes sure each face is covered in grime just so, that the stars’ teeth are not sparkling but also not blackened like the extras or significant characters of disrepute. These details make the film seem more fake than a stage show, not less, though the camera does such a fine job of its own on that front that the relatively minor sin of aesthetically arranged grit. One might not even notice this if, again, Hooper could bear to mix up his agonizingly long close-ups with a medium or long shot that lasted more than a second.

Hooper’s awkward framing should be familiar to viewers of the John Adams miniseries, and I almost gave in to hope that the more freewheeling style afforded by the genre might give his distracting direction a stronger foothold to remotely reflect the content. But that reasoning is, of course, flawed: shoddy filmmaking on a vast scale can only be that much worse than the same lack of talent closer to the Earth. The wide-angle lenses, the haphazard editing, and the inability to ever be more than two shots away from a close-up rob nearly every song of its power by turning every performance into a mediocre music video.

And for someone who makes the camera more noticeable and prominent than any of the actors, Hooper also proves infuriatingly literal when it comes to adaptation. Some numbers feel tethered to the stage with too short a leash. Take, for example, the downturn of already low fortunes for Fantine (Anne Hathaway): on stage, the actress playing the character would necessarily have to move from a sewing job to prostitution in one movement to save time. On screen, though, the fast edits that track her descent ironically feel as if they pass in real time more than the unbroken movement of a live production. One makes allowances in suspension of disbelief for a tacitly agreed-upon pass of time in a theater, yet Fantine’s fall appears to occur within the span of, oh, about 90 minutes as Hooper presents it, turning her sad story into something more akin to self-aware comedy.

Even that cannot hold back Hathaway, however. Having already proved the most electrifying and focused aspect of the overstuffed and underwritten Dark Knight Rises, she gives an even better performance in a much worse film. She walks a balancing act as Fantine, mixing the broad naïveté and innocence necessary to give her woeful existence a shade of instant heartbreak with the believable weariness of someone with a much more realistic and frank knowledge of the world. The film peaks early with her showstopping rendition of “I Dreamed a Dream,” in which she turns Hooper’s banal style to her advantage with the tiniest shifts in her face as her wistful recollection turns slowly to full anguish. The subtleties she loads into her to-the-rafters expression also makes for the only payoff to the much-ballyhooed talk of the cast’s singing being recorded live. All the theoretical ups of this decision are displayed in her performance, where the ragged, low moan that chokes her voice attains a visceral power that elevates the gimmick from an overhyped brag of doing what stage players have done with the musical for decades now.

Sadly, no one else enjoys these benefits, and the actors’ talents are left to the mercy of the careening movement of the camera. Hugh Jackman, for example, can sing, but none of his performances convey anything of Valjean’s redemptive arc. On the other end of the spectrum, Russell Crowe’s dismal singing becomes oddly endearing as he goes one further than the speak-singing everyone employs and instead SHOUT!-sings every single line he has. In a film so drearily serious, a bit of accidental camp is a welcome relief, and his hilarious miscasting entertains more than any of the songs outside of “I Dreamed a Dream.”

That, fundamentally, is the film’s failing. For all Hooper’s irritating incompetence, he might be forgiven had he invested the numbers with any life. Instead, he takes bad songs like “Master of the House” to an all-new nadir and saps all of the energy out of rousing pieces like “Can You Hear the People Sing?” and “One Day More.” As the act-ending centerpiece that collects the melodies and lyrics of most of the songs that came before, “One Day More” is the best song of the production. By virtue of collecting pieces of all of Hooper’s treatment of the other numbers, though, this version stands out as the worst disappointment of the film, its clueless cutting between groups serving only to sever the cast from each other instead of uniting them. Les Misérables climaxes with a doomed revolution, but Hooper’s isolating close-ups leave one wondering how a rebellion ever got off the ground at all.

It's Such a Beautiful Day (Don Hertzfeldt, 2012)

Don Hertzfeldt brings a trilogy of short films about a psychologically impaired everyman named Bill to a close with It’s Such a Beautiful Day, his longest and most ambitious work to date. The 23-minute film is a tour de force for the filmmaker from its opening images, which flicker onto the screen and back into darkness with a literal gasp. Hertzfeldt’s prior two films, Everything Will Be O.K. and I Am So Proud of You, delved into Bill’s life with aesthetic subjectivity. The director’s mash-ups of forms, avant-garde collages of images, objects and lights, were never more prominent as he used them to visualize the poor protagonist’s slipping grasp on reality as his mind slowly rebelled against him.

Taken with those films, as a feature-length fusion of the three shorts now allows, It’s Such a Beautiful Day begins as a (relatively) logical continuation of the mounting visual instability. On its own, however, the Brakhagean intensity that ushers in this final chapter is radical in its immediate impact and only more powerful when the intellectual play of the construction is bent toward emotional communication. The foundation of Hertzfeldt’s wild compositions are deceptively simple pencil drawings, the sort where a single figure is always visibly shifting even when not moving as each frame shows contains an outline with subtly different shading.

Yet even this stable grounding can be subverted when Hertzfeldt blacks out the screen and animated in a hand-drawn, amorphous thought bubble. This creates a blank area around most of Bill’s life, broken up only by the myopic splotches of repetitious activity against a void a broken image of memory loss and the anchors of rote that keep him going, even though he does not know why he continues to perform these same actions. But then, can someone without mental and memory impairments answer that question any better?

Hertzfeldt alters this basic style in a myriad of ways, including live-action shots amid various tricks of light and three-dimensional objects. He creates a play of images overwhelming in their individual and even collective placement, objects that pass by so quickly that merely identifying them is a challenge in itself, much less what that object “means.” Of course, film is an object of motion, and what each piece of Hertzfeldt’s puzzle is and symbolizes (if anything) is secondary to its effect when combined with 23 other frames of action each second. The abstract imagery, then, has meaning only in what it conveys from second to second, and what it conveys (to me, at least) is an overwhelming sense of loss, confusion and anxiety. Some of Bill’s unexplained illness can feel vividly concrete and specific, yet Hertzfeldt’s wise decision to leave his protagonist’s issues unnamed permits a universality. Bill’s inability to get a handle on anything past his perfunctory routine, the feelings he cannot place when looking at a face that seems familiar but distant at the same time, these are exaggerated and visualized but still resonant takes on life itself. Life is chaotic, fleeting and overwhelming, and if Bill seems to have more downs than ups, sometimes it is hard to tell which is which until looking back in retrospect.

The greatest moment, however, occurs when the film appears to end, naturally, on a down note. Suddenly, Hertzfeldt’s own psyche shatters and wars with their Ur-self, demanding that Bill not suffer so sad a fate. Hertzfeldt then hits rewind, gradually moving back from the brink and then gaining speed as a mere aversion of fate becomes a total reversal of it. It is the most brazen ending since F.W. Murnau likewise changed the logical end of his character in The Last Laugh, only Hertzfeldt goes further than Murnau’s cheeky break in fortunes. As Bill goes from a mentally collapsing basket case to the smartest man who ever lived, Hertzfeldt fulfills all the greatest dreams we hold for the characters we love. But then, he keeps going, until Bill achieves an immortality that proves, in its own way, to be worse than death. It is a masterful piece of bravura filmmaking, and one that truly announces Hertzfeldt as not merely a gifted, absurdist delight but one of the finest filmmakers working in America today.

Consuming Spirits (Chris Sullivan, 2012)

A whopping 15 years in the making, Chris Sullivan's work of cross-format animation is not only a beautiful ode to outsider art but a deeply felt human drama on its own terms. Filled with uncomfortable humor and wrenching insights into its disturbed, lonely characters, Consuming Spirits is as powerful a reminder as any that ennui affects the poor and rural, not just the wealthy and urban. It is one of the great surprises of the year, and one of my favorites in a year that has given me nearly 30 contenders for placement in a top 10.

My full review is up now at Spectrum Culture.

Cosmopolis (David Cronenberg, 2012)

For the last decade, David Cronenberg has retreated from his body horror nightmares of modernity and moved into the traumas that inherently exist in life, well outside contemporary anxieties. The postwar kitchen sink drama cum shattered mental breakdown of Spider. The instinctual savagery of man displayed even in the title of A History of Violence. The histories made visible on bodies via gang tattoos in Eastern Promises. The formation, and potential inadequacies, of theories to explore the psychology of all of this in A Dangerous Method. The old monsters still remain, if they are not as visible. Where the mind tends to ooze out of suppurating wounds in prior Cronenberg films, the dynamic reverses in Spider to make the body horror internal as the body collapses into the mind. In A Dangerous Method, it is Keira Knightley herself, her jutting jaw and angular frame thrown into disarray as her illness complicates the work and professional relationship of its two psychiatrists.

Cosmopolis bridges the earlier, topical body horror with the abstract, unseen terrors of Cronenberg’s late period. Indeed, in this film, the monster may be the camera itself, an Arri Aflexa that renders a picture of undeniable ugliness. Black levels pool like ink, unreal colors bleed into each other, and attempts at old-school in-camera effects make some of Hitchcock’s laughable rear-projections look like location shoots in comparison. That this is all clearly deliberate does not, on the face of it, serve as a full defense of the garish unpleasantness of the frame, and those alienated from this alienating movie cannot be blamed much for pushing outside of it. Speaking for myself, though, Cosmopolis is just about the most enthralling film of the year, capable of sucking in a viewer into the same black hole that consumes the image and the strange (and even more strangely delivered) dialogue. Not explicitly an apocalypse movie nor a Death of Cinema picture, Cronenberg’s latest feels like both, as the sudden meaningless of money threatens to take the world (and film) with it.

The film focuses on Eric Packer (Robert Pattinson), a young business genius and head of his own mutli-billion-dollar corporation. With the president in town and sparking traffic and protests, Packer informs his head of security (Kevin Durand) that “we” would like a haircut, specifically one from a barber all the way across a gridlocked Manhattan. That, more or less is it, though the film’s draining power comes from the arduous slog of the limo’s creep through town and the strange, distanced conversations Packer has in and out of his vehicle.

Pattinson, of course, is known for playing a vampire in the Twilight pictures, and here he carries himself a bit like Count Dracula, at once dignified and animalistic. He has sex with his art dealer (Juliette Binoche, all feline slink) with his hands behind his back before casually telling her he wishes to buy the Rothko Chapel and put it in his flat. He views violence with dispassion, even a smirking sense of entertainment, as he does when he sees the head of the International Monetary Fund get gruesomely killed or when an Occupy-like protester immolates himself outside Packer’s limo. The billionaire looks upon the latter with such complete remove that he ends up arguing about the unoriginality of the act with his “head of theory” (Samantha Morton), debating the sight on its grounds as a statement and dismissing it for lacking sufficient relevance and that “new” quality.

Cronenberg clearly repositions DeLillo’s novel for the 99% era, and the film aestheticizes Packer’s separation from the world just outside his bulletproofed windows and cork-lined, noise-cancelling doors. Pattinson speaks in arch dialogue, his royal “we” one of the least insufferable, incomprehensible things to come out of his mouth. He manages to be both blunt and abstract, and his line readings hit disharmonies within the natural rhythms of speech to make his speech yet more jarring. Interactions with other members of his small world provide yet more alienating talk, be it Morton’s theoretical notion that “Money has lost its narrative value” or Sarah Gadon’s wonderfully chilly performance as Packer’s new, sex-averse bride. Her reading of the line, “I smell sex all over you,” is perfectly perched between reproach and apathy, as if some part of her feels angry over her (correct) assumption of his infidelity but the rest of her is beyond caring.

Complementing the detached dialogue is some of Cronenberg’s most subversive direction. Everything about the look of Cosmopolis serves to distance Packer from the audience as much as his limo acts as a barrier between himself and the mounting unrest outside. The aforementioned inkiness of Peter Suschitzky’s digital cinematography comes into play with the black leather of the limo interior, in which everything is made inhumanly slick. This feeling is compounded by the pale glow of electronics casting an eerie, unnatural light on faces. These are garish and subtly unnerving tricks that Cronenberg takes even further by the way he gradually tilts the direction of its axis, decentering the actors and using different focal lengths to warp the spatial properties of the frame. Heads hang away from their bodies with more sense of stereoscopic depth than 3D has yet produced, and a close-up of Binoche’s arm seductively reaching for Pattinson is stretched beyond reason until the shot resembles King Kong’s mighty paw groping for Fay Wray.

Cronenberg’s typical direction resembles a doctor noting his diagnosis into a tape recorder, a clinical observation of physical and psychological traumas disturbing in its remove. Here, his camera becomes a part of the story, its image altered by a collapsing system and, more personally, Packer’s mounting stress as his bet against the value of the Chinese yuan becomes more and more foolish. The positioning of Packer as an anthropomorphization of the economic crisis is obvious, but it is the way that the camera, rather than coldly document, subjectively becomes that disaster as well that the film achieves its true power. Funny, then, that this newfound intimacy should prove more divisive and repellent for many than the rest of Cronenberg’s filmography.

The central conflict, then, lies less within its comic depiction of the 1% watching the poor literally burn as the world falls apart than the struggle of humanity against these new, digitizing forces. Technology has its own text, with its various programming languages, and its own forms of visual communication, as seen through the off-putting cinematography. Yet if the film practically dares the audience to hate it, it also does not truly embrace its revulsion, and one is left with the sense that the issue is not that new technologies are edging out humanity but that humanity is dragging its feet on its own evolution.

Technology (and the world it powers) now evolve so quickly that even Packer, in Pattinson’s 26-year-old body, admits he feels old and obsolete when confronted with an even younger whiz employee. Paul Giamatti appears at the film’s climax as a disgruntled ex-employee, the rat imagery used throughout the film finally made manifest in that most rat-like of character actors. Clammy and nervous, Giamatti’s Levin wants to kill Packer, less for revenge at being fired than as an outlet for his bewilderment at a world that now makes money by the nanosecond and thus requires constant calculations and communications faster than humans can process. When Packer confronts Levin and invites his “credible threat” to sit and discuss philosophy with him, both men almost betray a sense of relief that, despite the tension of their interaction, they can take a second just to get their bearings.

Giamatti’s shivering, despairing stalker helps visualize the fear and anguish Packer will not permit himself to show, save only for the most unexpected of triggers. The death of a favorite musician elicits his only tears, while the childhood barber he finally reaches near the end provides a level of comfort for him that no longer exists as his world changes. Where the digital focus of the film ties Cosmopolis to Cronenberg’s trendy technological horrors (think Videodrome and ExistenZ), these inklings of humanity help link the film to the director’s recent string of work. These films, either set in the past or, in the case of A History of Violence and Eastern Promises, bearing the scars of the past, set human pathology outside the modernity exhibited in his early work and in his typical style. Underneath its emotional detachment and spatial distortion, this is a human film, even if the humanity poised to perpetuate itself at the end does so in such a way that the ugliness of this new world may be preferable to what we have now.

Capsule Reviews: The Deep Blue Sea, Cloud Atlas, Rust and Bone

The Deep Blue Sea (Terence Davies, 2012)

Lit in a stuffy haze by Florian Hoffmeister, Terence Davies’ adaptation of Terence Rattigan’s play The Deep Blue Sea continues the director’s penchant for visualizing the confining boundaries of conservative British upbringing. Ambiguities poke through, though, as they did for his masterpiece Distant Voices, Still Lives. Here, the cukolding love triangle of Rachel Weisz, lover Tim Hiddleston and elder husband Simon Russell Beale certainly exhibit melodramatic flourishes—“To the Impressionists!” is a boisterously funny outburst begging to join the ranks of a cinephile’s referential quotes. Yet the material also resembles a British take on Anna Karenina, where the cheated husband responds not with blustering, annihilating anger but a measured, conflicted tone of hurt and resignation. Weisz and Hiddleston face the negative consequences of passion, but it is Beale who grounds the film and threatens to steal the film as the person truly suffering in all this. His flicker of a smile and the pant of excitement in his voice when he notes Weisz still wears her wedding ring is so delicate the film threatens to blow away with the extra breath in his exhale, and his subsequent offer to help her transition away from him in any way he can is more poignant and heartbreaking than the subsequent travails Weisz faces with her impetuous new beau. Grade: B+

Cloud Atlas (Larry Wachowski, Lana Wachowski, and Tom Tykwer, 2012)

The Wachowskis and Tom Tykwer adapt David Mitchell’s novel by breaking up its Matryoshka doll structure into a cross-cut epic spanning time and space, yet the end result feels curiously unambitious. As with Mitchell’s book, each of the six stories is told in its own generic style, be it a corporate espionage thriller in the 1970s, a period melodrama of the early 20th century, a dystopic sci-fi social commentary in the not-too-distant future, and so on. But where Mitchell handles these transitions not simply with narrative adjustments but overhauls in prose, the direction across these separate stories is curiously homogenous despite some visibly different input between the chunk of segments primarily shot by the Wachowskis and those of Tkywer. Perhaps this was intended to keep the film stable, as it does not follow the novel’s structure but constantly leaps between each story. Nevertheless, this undermines each of the sub-films within the larger framework, for they lack direction unique to them, while the overarching themes of suffering and kindness echoed across each avatar lack the passion I expected. The remarked-upon race- and gender-bending of the cast members across the different stories brings to mind, of course, Lana Wachowski’s own violation of social binaries (a.k.a. that vile “natural order” bandied about by the villains who recur in different power positions throughout). Strange, then, and unfortunate, that the final film should feel so removed from its own earnest call for upending that system in favor of making a better, gentler world. The altered conclusion takes that quest literally, but that only makes the setting as removed as the tone, and indeed the hollow but sincere warmth the filmmakers find in the material can also feel like a capitulation to the order. Grade: D+

Rust and Bone (Jacques Audiard, 2012)

Two scenes in Rust and Bone bring Jacques Audiard’s direction in alignment with the complex, multitudinous emotions conjured by his actors. The first is Stéphanie’s (Marion Cotillard) return to water after an accident during her orca show at a sea park left her without legs. Cotillard’s face registers fear, nervousness, eagerness and, eventually, rhapsody as kickboxer Ali (Matthias Schoenaerts) carries her into the ocean and she finds herself “home” again even as she struggles to adjust. The second, when the pair have sex for the first time, brings those same emotions back as Audiard playfully moves with Stéphanie’s preparations, holding on the removal of stockings and darting to trace her quick concealment of her prosthetic legs. The rest, tragically, betrays the subtleties the leads bring to the movie, with intrusive close-ups and ill-advised fade-outs to the soundtrack force emotions where Cotillard and Schoenaerts so deftly left matters without easy conclusions and invited the audience to truly engage with their characters. Grade: C

This Is 40 (Judd Apatow, 2012)

In Knocked Up, Pete (Paul Rudd) and Debbie (Leslie Mann) played a side role to Seth Rogen and Katherine Heigl’s unstably formed relationship. Mann played Heigl’s sister, and the rough patch of Pete and Debbie’s established bond ran parallel to the shaky formation of ties between the leads. Yet their arguments quickly crossed the line from the disruptions that test a relationship’s mettle to obvious, serious problems between two people clearly wrong for each other. Their eventual reconciliation is meant to show that Rogen and Heigl can and should make it too, but the desperate, artificial consolation left lingering fears of a futurish, even more nightmarish breakdown.

Enter This Is 40. Approaching their nearly simultaneous 40th birthdays, Pete and Debbie have regressed further in the last five years, their prickly resignation at spending the rest of their lives with each other now wholly removed of any evidence of true love save a few, futile lines of dialogue. In the Knocked Up DVD commentary, Apatow noted that Mann, his wife in real life, would never be able to stand Rudd’s lackadaisical, unserious approach to problems. This tension between the actual actors was visible in their supporting appearances in that film, and it seeps into every frame of this (over-)full-length examination of Pete and Debbie at a crossroads. The result is a terrifyingly toxic film in which the usual Apatow humor falls flat in the face of its nightmarish depiction of an entire family in freefall.

Amazingly, Pete and Debbie feel less developed now than they did as secondary characters, and what Apatow does establish of their relationship raises questions as to why they ever got together in the first place. This can be seen in minor incompatibilities—Pete’s rockist love of college rock classics is set against, in reductive and heteronormative Apatow fashion, Debbie’s “girly” enjoyment of dance music and Lady Gaga—and a larger, dysfunctional inability for the two to stand sharing the same space. Often, that is literally true: Pete hides out in the bathroom multiple times a day just to get away from his wife, playing iPad games in a clever recurring insight into his childishness.

This opens the door for cutting, probing black comedy in the mold of Elaine May (whom Apatow has routinely extolled up to and including featuring an interview with May and old partner Mike Nichols in his recent, guest-edited issue of Vanity Fair), but the director tackles the material with his usual style. The director’s over-reliance on contemporary pop culture has weighed down even his stronger features, but the recurring use of Lost as a plot device smacks of desperation and laziness and leaves the film instantly dated, as if the film were shot back in 2010 and only just now received distribution. But that is preferable to the sexist treatment of women, who speak only in screaming fits later explained by one of a choice of Women’s Troubles. (Well, that’s not true: Megan Fox, as Debbie’s possibly embezzling employee, is simply depicted as a whore.) There is even room for racism, such as when Pete and Debbie go to an “Eastern doctor” (Debbie’s words) and Pete mockingly imitates the man’s accent.

At all times, these two come off as if written by a 40-something who has forgotten his own age even as he blithely attempts to tackle issues nearer to it. When Debbie gets rid of the Wi-Fi in the house in some unexplained, asinine cleanse she forces onto the family, she and Pete encourage their kids (Apatow and Mann’s own daughters) to play with sticks and forts like they used to. This idiot was born in 1972; she was 10 when TRON came out, for God’s sake, and she acts like she grew up with the Joads. Apatow can barely process that oldness shifts with time, that the things that date a person culturally move with culture. It is also why this film, with the key role it gives the Lost finale, will date the movie horribly.

Around the time Mann was reduced to shrieking “Stop eating cupcakes!” at her physically fit husband, This Is 40 became truly intolerable. The moment should mark a warped kind of catharsis for Debbie, but there is no genuine pathos underneath her outburst, nor anywhere else in the film, for Apatow telegraphs his conservative need to uphold the family unit from the start. Because their eventual reconciliation is ordained, their caustic squabbles hold no weight, and the harsh, continuity-defying cuts between shots only compounds the feeling that the film is pointlessly bouncing around until it gets to its pre-accepted conclusion. To see the film that might have been, look no further than the performances given by Albert Brooks and John Lithgow as Pete’s and Debbie’s fathers, respectively. They manage to infuse their one-note roles with actual humanity, making even their thin sketches feel like people, a step up from the leads. Pete and Debbie struggle with issues outside Apatow’s demographic, but they are undone by having to still appeal to that younger group, leaving This Is 40 as stunted as its characters, unable to treat them lightly but equally incapable of handling their issues with any believable sincerity.

Capsule Reviews: The Day He Arrives, Bad 25, The Sessions

The Day He Arrives (Hong Sang-soo, 2012)

Hong Sang-soo’s The Day He Arrives begins with a man walking down a street and taking a left. It ends with him returning to that street and going right. This mirroring movement captures the film, so reflective that even the lead actor’s name, Yoo Jun-sang, is spat back out as the character Yoo Seong-jun, an ex-filmmaker who returns to Seoul to catch up with friends, pitifully attempt to rekindle an old flame, and idly philosophize. Hong’s subtle but pristine compositions and varied repetitions tease out character beliefs, hypocrisies and longings as Seong-jun’s rants against the lies of fate that cinema propounds even as he chases a waitress solely for resembling his ex. The repetitions also cinematize the life he feels is so separate from the artifice of movies, the distorted sense of time starting over until Seong-jun “gets it right” recalling a more poetic Groundhog Day. But it’s that poetry that makes all the differences, making even Hong’s cheeky (sometimes outright funny) reflexive details so human that they work not only as critical observations but affecting conduits for the character’s own feelings. Grade: A

Bad 25 (Spike Lee, 2012)

Going into Bad 25, I had fears of the banal, uninsightful visual monographs VH1 used to do (still does?) for classic albums. Happily, Spike Lee is no slouch documentarian, and Bad 25 goes far beyond the usual fluff pieces in the detailed technical accounts for each song. But it is the other areas Lee must probe, the interviews with business managers and, especially, music video—excuse me, short film—directors that deepens the film. The doc is a map of a carefully orchestrated, cross-media campaign to take over the world using the 11 songs contained in the album’s grooves. Thriller, of course, was the more dynamite success, but it caught even MJ by surprise. With Bad, he, and the team of talented people he attracted to help him, were ready. The only objection: for a film that pointedly leaves out the tabloid traumas that would corrupt so much of Jackson’s legacy, Lee includes an unsettlingly exploitative montage of friends and collaborators tearfully remembering where they were when they heard the news back in 2009, a rapid tour through tears complete with zoom-ins to make sure the camera picks up the glistening drops sliding down cheeks. A host of interview subjects offer a wealth of personal anecdotes, technical information and retrospective appraisal, but sadly it is that montage that remains in the head as much as a desire to revisit Bad. Grade: B-

The Sessions (Ben Lewin, 2012)

There is such great potential in The Sessions, starting with its forthright admission that the disabled have sexual urges, too. Too often, disabled people get pitied into a kind of dehumanizing sanctity, one that especially weighs on Mark O’Brien (John Hawkes) as a guilt-ridden Catholic. The film acknowledges the basic humanity of sex, and it even treats sex and nudity as mere facts of life. A shot resting casually on the exposed torsos of Mark and his sex surrogate, Cheryl (Helen Hunt), shows veins in the actress’ breasts that feels more beautiful and unvarnished than Hollywood’s coy, idealized treatment of nudity. Yet one can almost watch the film deflate in real time, its warm comedy tipping into trivialization as the frank treatment of its subject turns sheepish and deflecting. Hawkes does not get to grow and reflect with O’Brien, and his defensive humor never falters as Mark’s time with Cheryl introduces him to the realities, not the punishing self-perceptions, of his body. Numerous “Sundance” touches riddle this picture, from William H. Macy’s awkward Hip Priest to Levin’s banal direction being put toward a wan approximation of visual poetry, but nothing sums up how The Sessions squanders its assets like its approach to male nudity. Cheryl holds up a mirror to Mark’s naked body so he can finally see the real him, to see how normal he really is, but fear of the MPAA trumps honesty. Likewise, the denouement trades the somber, resigned reflection of the essay that inspired the movie for a treacly conclusion that rebuilds the pedestal that, ever so briefly, this film seemed primed to destroy. Grade: C-

Tabu (Miguel Gomes, 2012)

Miguel Gomes’ cinephilic tendencies are embedded into the very title of Tabu, taken from F.W. Murnau’s final film and modeled after its bifurcated structure. Black-and-white photography, visibly shot on film instead of digital, only exacerbate the cinematic artifice. Yet the Portuguese director’s aims go well beyond referential touches, and the one on-screen character linked to filmmaking in any way is described in narration as finding movies trivial. Tabu dabbles in trivial matters of its own, but they are played against themselves as Gomes traces the ennui and isolation of the first half back to surprisingly poltiical roots in the second.

A hint lies in an enigmatic prologue that precedes the two stories. A melancholic colonialist stands about idly with sad eyes as African servants labor around him. A Murnau-esque smooth track over hilly terrain speaks to the man’s detached boredom as a narrator (Gomes himself) talks of a lost love that tugs at his heart. The segment ends with the colonialist transformed into an equally sad crocodile, a strange image that will return in the film’s second half.

First, though, Gomes moves to present-day Lisbon, where a Catholic social activist, Pilar (Teresa Madruga), attends to a dementia-stricken woman named Aurora (Laura Soveral). Soveral plays the old woman like a mad specter of old wealth, clad in oversized, designer sunglasses and an ostentatious fur coat. Underneath her amusing caricature, however, are darker impulses, including a gambling addiction that has left her penniless and the racism that manifests itself openly and, in a dream about “talking monkeys,” obliquely. Gomes hones in on Aurora’s rapport with her Cape-Verdean maid Santa (Isabel Cardoso, who quietly seethes with terrifying intensity), using the old lady’s frustrations at her daughter abandoning her and leaving a stranger in her stead to bring out her bigotry. In one moment, Gomes even makes ironic commentary on Aurora’s privileged racism, plunging Santa into shadow to make her even darker as Aurora flips out on her in a two-shot and makes open reference to her maid’s race. Then the director cuts to follow Aurora as she exasperatedly walks out of frame, trapping her in a white sunbeam that subverts the stereotypical moral split of black and white by illuminating what a disgusting person she is.

But she is not the only target of criticism communicated through Rui Poças’ immaculate cinematgoraphy. The first half floats in soft focus, an obvious signifier of the characters’ isolation but meaningful in how broadly the focal lengths are used. Gomes does not simply film Aurora in shallow focus but Pilar as well, cutting the well-meaning righteousness from under her protests and prayers. An early shot in what appears to be one of those restaurants that revolves around a skyline makes for a surreal swirl of blurred, shifting blotches behind the medium-close-up of Aurora as she describes the aforementioned monkey dream, but reverse shots of Pilar only mildly dampen the effect of the background, trapping her in the same headspace. Later, Gomes plays a mild joke on the convictions of Pilar’s activism, framing a close-up on her laptop as she closes out browser tabs before going to sleep. With every click, an article with a provocative political headline on poverty or war is replaced by another. The last tab, though, is a game of solitaire, a reminder that a liberal activist in the West still has comforts and distractions from the Fight.

Those who do not have that luxury can be seen after Aurora passes and an old lover, Ventura (Henrique Espírito Santo), returns to relate the story of how he and the departed met. Ventura sits with Pilar and Santa in a restaurant decked out in jungle décor, and as he starts his story, the film suddenly jumps across time, space, and film stock to settle back in Africa in 16mm as the young Aurora (Ana Moreira) settles in with her husband (Ivo Muller), only for Ventura (Carloto Cotta) to appear and cause havoc.

The second half represents a slyly comic high in anti-colonial critique. Silent but for Santo’s narration and some diegetic noise (added in such a way as to seem non-diegetic), this portion of the film, titled “Paradise” to complement the first half’s “Paradise Lost,” traces the Western, modernist ennui of the first half to the imperial superiority and colonial wistfulness that informs it. Containing echoes of details scattered throughout the first half, this section is as much a stylized version of Aurora’s backstory as a straightforward piece of context. Gomes even shoots the young lovers’ interactions like a classical silent movie, with faces you can read at 100 paces (especially now that the focus depth increases), wild gestures and melodramatic action.

Less stylized are the shots of the Africans around the white colonials, tending fields or even sharing the frame with the whites and contrasting their stoic, impassive faces with the flourishes of the love triangle. A revolt simmers among them for most of the film, fed by outrage at the ridiculous and destructive solipsism of the romantic drama around them and the climactic act of the triangle acts as the final straw for those who cannot bear to let themselves be ruled by such people any longer as Aurora retreats back to Portugal to eventually pour all of her racial obliviousness out onto one poor woman. Tabu ends in the past, but it offers a radical recontextualization of the present, one that provides understanding for its addled petit-bourgeois elder and complicated new levels of withering criticism of her, and the mood of nationalist regret expressed through her.

Lincoln (Steven Spielberg, 2012)

Like so many modern movie titles, Lincoln is only one word, and as with so many other titles, this offers an oversimplified, even misleading idea of what the actual film contains. Though Steven Spielberg roped in perhaps the most noteworthy white elephant actor of our time, Daniel Day-Lewis, to portray the 16th president, Lincoln concerns the man only elliptically. He appears chiefly as a do-gooder who relies on Machiavellian practices, one of which is the use of others to do his dirty work. And though the film concentrates on the passage of the 13th Amendment, Lincoln’s most celebrated achievement and undoubtedly an act of great good, Lincoln reveals that the path to that moment was rough and dirty, indeed.

That filth can be seen in the film’s first shots, the only ones of the movie to take place on a battlefield, or at least the only one to do so during a battle rather than the still aftermath. In a few gruesomely intimate but stably mounted shots, Spielberg manages to top the false realism of Saving Private Ryan for sheer visceral repulsion. Unionists and Rebs have moved too close for musket fire, resorting to bayonet stabs, fistfights, even drowning foes in the rising rainwaters in trenches. It is brute savagery at its most chaotic and meaningless, and it hangs over the rest of the film as Lincoln alternately uses and is hindered by war developments in his quest to get slavery abolished. And as the footage is revealed to be the memories of black soldiers relating the battle to Lincoln, the pride they express in getting back at Confederates massacring all captured black soldiers hints at the tangle of racial strife that will only be compounded by the amendment, not solved by it.

That lays the foundation not for a Great Man tribute to Lincoln’s unimpeachable honesty and conviction but for the intense politicking one must employ to effect change on a federal level. If anything, the image of Honest Abe is cast asunder by Spielberg and Munich writer Tony Kushner, peeling back the noble but nevertheless Machiavellian schemes he used to get his way. Late in the film, Lincoln’s biggest misdirection and sin of omission is revealed to one of his most loyal supporters, and the man’s quivering, aghast declaration, “You lied to me,” could be the voice of all the disillusioned seeing how all-too-human the president could be. But that is one of the few times where Lincoln even comes into direct contact with his schemes; for the most part, Day-Lewis is relegated to the occasional appearance as the bulk of the movie moves with the friends in high and low places who charm members of the opposition as well as the disagreeable elements within the Republican party. Compromise, that most uncinematic of political “victories,” is the subject here, and it is valorized as much as it is called into question.

Admittedly, the moments in which the film lionizes the ends reached by such means ring the most hollow. The structuring of the final House vote on the 13th Amendment teases it as dramatic suspense, and the obvious passage is a joyous victory made more treacly by Janusz Kaminski’s trademark overlighting in a cutaway scene from the vote results to Lincoln standing by the window of the White House with his young son, Tad. Spielberg Faces abound, and Day-Lewis’ is always tilted downward, bowed by the weight of Lincoln’s responsibilities. There are also the requisite scenes of distracting comedy: James Spader’s sneaky Republican operative is shot at by a Democratic Congressman, then has time to flee, run back, and flee again before the man can reload. Likewise, ardently liberal Republican attack dog Thaddeus Stevens (Tommy Lee Jones) gets moments to be sarcastic with the somewhat caricatured opposition, letting contemptuous syllables dart out in savage clips. These are moments that threaten to undo what the film accomplishes elsewhere, adding a doe-eyed, lightweight tone to the deflating elements.

Thankfully, Spielberg balances out most of the dubious moments with a look behind ostensible breakthroughs to reveal the inner (and outer) turmoil they create. If the film unwisely plays the vote for suspense, it successfully wrings much more believable drama out of the pressure to table, even abandon, the hope for abolition in order to bring about peace. By pursuing one goal, the Republicans must forsake another, and each issue could have chaotic historical ramifications if allowed to continue. Among the many issues Aaron Brady raises with the film in his article for Jacobin, one of the angriest concerns how Spielberg handles Stevens, whose extreme (if absolutely correct) views are cowed in a crucial moment on the House floor in order to cement moderate support. Brady calls Stevens demurral his “shining heroic moment,” and there is some discomfort to the way in which Stevens rallies and turns his instance of moral cowardice and compromise into a rousing, applause-filled rant that deflects from what principles were just sacrificed. But for a movie Brady accuses (not unfairly) of omissions, he makes one of his own by ignoring the scene that directly follows, in which Stevens sits outside the assembly hall, clearly grappling with what he just did and using a morose argument with another radical colleague to justify himself to himself as much as the other man.

And then, of course, there is Lincoln. So many movie Lincolns resemble James Stewart in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, a creature of unassailable innocence perhaps too good for the realm of politics but able, for however brief a time, to bring the system to his level. Day-Lewis’ Lincoln resembles more the Stewart of Anatomy of a Murder, a man who proves that someone can be streetwise even where the streets are but dirt paths. He is simultaneously disarming and infuriating, particularly when deflects mounting hostility with a disarming, folksy story that allows him to hook a crowd for a long divertissement that allows Lincoln to subsequently return to the argument from which he skillfully departed, only now he controls the angle of approach. These scenes show Lincoln at his most approachable but also his most shrewd, and one sympathizes with the mix of anxiety and anger in the voice of his secretary of war (the always great Bruce McGill) when he realizes another tale is coming and flees the room to spare himself.

If this Lincoln is inspiring, and he ultimately is, it is because this great compromiser still has just enough conviction preserved after four years of war and internal strife to risk everything for it. A reasonable alternate title for the film might have been The Last Temptation of Lincoln, wherein a return to the status quo looks painfully welcome after so much bloodshed, even if the status quo would keep millions subjugated and likely lead to another conflict down the road. An eerie dream sequence near the film’s start places Lincoln on a ship heading to unknown and foreboding territory, the voyage hopeful but terrifying in its unknowns. For Lincoln, the 13th Amendment became an endpoint only when he was shortly thereafter prevented from seeing through its consequences. Spielberg mercifully keeps the dramatic irony of that subject mostly away from the film, but when Lincoln humbly admits to his servant, “I don’t know you,” his own confession of human separation from the cause he champions casts a far more troubling pall over what the future will bring than the president’s weary, relieved walk to the carriage that will take him to the Ford Theatre.

Romancing in Thin Air (Johnnie To, 2012)

By virtue of their outlandish style, Johnnie To’s films often broach the postmodern and Brechtian even at their most straightforward; think the opening gunfight of Exiled, in which the sight of a door being suspended and even pushed back and forth in midair is both a source of hilarious cognitive dissonance and the oddly logical climax of the sequence. Romancing in Thin Air, though, features the director at his most nuanced and subtle, stylistically grounding the film so that the many flourishes become not par for the course but formal means of breaking down distinctions between art and life.

If the film ultimately erodes such barriers, however, it opens with a clear delineation of reality from artifice. With HDTVs now offering a home cinema experience even for news shows, To pointedly uses analog, full-frame TVs to show actor Michael Lau (Louis Koo) winning Best Actor at the Hong Kong Film Awards and proposing to his actress girlfriend, Yuan Yuan (Yuanyuan Gao), then being stood up on his wedding day when her first love (a coal miner) turns up out of the blue and wins her back. The farcical turn of events plays out in a constricted frame on old, standard-definition video quality, marking it as something false. But then, what To shows is gossip, the world of celebrity, which belongs neither to the real world outside privileged circles nor to the art that is corrupted by it. But even this aesthetically separated realm is complicated when Michael, driven to alcoholism and ruin, is expelled from the television into the world, the final indignity of the fallen star.

Michael stumbles into the back of a truck and comes to in Shangri-La. No, really. The driver of the truck, Sue (Sammi Cheng), watched Michael’s antics on TV before heading back to the countryside, and when she arrives back at the inn she owns, her co-workers, rabid fans of Michael’s who sob at what has become of him, turn apoplectic when they see her truck in the background of some tabloid footage of Michael. In a small way, the garishness of celebrity press claims a piece of the real world. Eventually, Michael gets out of the car and wanders into the hotel, where Sue catches him playing a piano. Her puzzling reaction, a cautious recognition not of the actor but of someone she knows, sets the film’s deeper explorations into motion.

As it happens, Michael’s piano playing reminded Sue of her husband, Tian, who went missing seven years ago. Flashbacks reveal that Tian was the original innkeeper, a shy man who fell in love with Sue when she would vacation there as a student. Heretofore the only person who treats Michael as the sad human being he has become rather than the heartthrob who sends the other women into frenzies, Sue is shown in the flashbacks to be just as giddily enthusiastic about Michael as her co-workers in the present, and is even a member of Michael’s fan club. To woo her, Tian apes elements of Michael’s films, from motorcycle riding to playing the piano theme Michael composed for a movie. Art adapts life to its purposes, but here, life reworks art to its own.

This makes a warped love triangle between the missing husband, his loyal wife and the star who unknowingly brought them together and now matters to the former superfan less for his own presence than the connection he provides back to the lover who mimicked him. This complicates melodramatic cliché across metaphysical levels, introducing a troubling element to Michael’s rehabilitation and growing relationship with Sue that is further compounded when the man who appropriated Michael’s art to communicate how he felt about Sue subsequently becomes fodder for a film Michael makes with the same intentions.

To fully explore the depths To wrings out of this material would divulge too much of the story and the way it constantly offers surprises despite following a broad genre formula. To’s capacity for visual storytelling is almost unmatched by any contemporary filmmaker, and various shots speak to the slow blending of realities as well as the larger arcs. To establishes Shangri-La with sweeping, naturalistic panoramas, but as Michael and Sue’s interactions become more cinematic, the mise-en-scène grows more stylized. When their nurse-patient relationship inverts in a scene of Michael toting a drunken and despondent Sue through the snow, the sadness of the moment is magnified by the way To and cinematographer Cheng Siu-keng dampen down the forest, removing the twinkle of light on snow that looks so dull and still that the deadness around the characters resembles nuclear winter rather than the seasonal kind. Later, Michael takes Sue to see a film that eerily parallels how Sue lost Tian and how she struggles to let go of him. In one of the film’s most striking shots, the pair sit in the foreground, their heads far enough apart for the space in-between to be filled by the shot on-screen in the film within the film, a close-up of the Sue-esque figure finally removing her wedding ring. The meaning is clear, but the beauty and anguish of the shot overpower its symbolic obviousness, the heady, metaphysical dimensions of the film linked by raw human emotions of grief, desire and coping.

The moment also captures the tonal midpoint Romancing in Thin Air achieves between its affectionate attitude toward how even the lightest piece of populist fluff can speak trigger real feelings and the darker manipulation, even exploitation inherent in art’s relationship to life. The cinema of 2012 has been obsessed with the supposed end of the world, or at least cinema. To's film sidesteps such hyperbolic terms and therefore can grapple with nuanced complexities. As such, Romancing in Thin Air manages to probe the tangible discomforts of its subject matter, wrap them in the dual obsolescences of the melodrama genre and the notion of the remote, rustic countryside as the ideal real world getaway, and emerge with something that proves the enduring vitality and richness of what is being mourned elsewhere this year.

Capsule Reviews: Beasts of the Southern Wild, Life Without Principle, On the Road

Beasts of the Southern Wild (Benh Zeitlin, 2012)

Benh Zeitlin’s debut feature, Beasts of the Southern Wild, uses memories of Katrina as fodder for a sub-magical-realist burst of half-stylized poverty porn. Zeitlin aims for inoffensiveness by casting the severe limitations the poor face—no access to healthcare, poor education, the laughably weak safety net—as fantastical positives. This is a film where witch doctors brew medicine in jars, where everyone looks freshly rubbed down in dirt to achieve just the right look of want, and where only the truly worthy both refuse to evacuate from a coming storm and violently reject any attempts by outside bodies to help them. Young Quevenzhané Wallis and Dwight Henry give performances entirely too good and revelatory for such heinous rot, but even their raw and honest work is undone by the falsity of what they are meant to invoke. Like Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, the film approaches a serious, national trauma and filters it through the eyes of a child. And like that other disaster, it does not use this perspective to grapple with the scope of tragedy but to infantilize it. Grade: D-

Life Without Principle (Johnnie To, 2012)

Life Without Principle cuts against the grain of financial crisis movies that take place behind solid, wooden doors, instead curving around the public floor of the bank, where employees are watched through their transparent barriers to provoke them into selling more, always more. It also moves among those unconnected to the financial industry save the shackles they place on themselves to pay for their lifestyles, linking not only the benign social climbers reaching beyond their grasp but the criminal element who come off as farcically sloppy compared to the machinations of the banks. By keeping his camera street-level, To can approach the tangled web of culpability with empathy and admonishment without the saccharine crucifixion of the fatcats who set the collapse into motion. We do not even have to sit through yet another portentous realization that the market will crash; it simply does one day, and we know about it because the financial analyst struggling to make her quota suddenly fields dozens of frantic, furious calls from people watching their life savings disappear. Movies like Arbitrage spare false sympathies for those who had every indication of what was coming but kept ignoring it, but Life Without Principle truly captures the sudden upheaval experienced by those who subconsciously put their faith in the system, and the coldness of that faceless, inhuman greed hangs over the proceedings. Even its resolution, a triumph on material grounds, reflects the amoral, arbitrary meaninglessness of a world in which the vagaries of monetary value hold sway. Grade: A-

On the Road (Walter Salles, 2012)

Shot as if making a teen film set in the present, On the Road divorces the Beats first of aesthetic, then social context. Salles’ film portrays the characters as the sort of listless creatures who populate our current movies, youth in medicated, dead-eyed search for a cause, rather than having a plethora of choices at their disposal. Drug use, sexual experimentation and jazz run through the film as they did the book, but there is no element of transgression to the behavior, no feeling that they are doing something wild. So interminably dull, even repellent, are the characters and their journey to nowhere that, for a brief spell, I began to hope the film would undermine and critique the solipsistic Beat escapism on display, with privileged white youth rebelling against a society that affords them such comfort that they can do as they please while others must toil. But no, there is a terrible earnestness to the self-evidently awful lives inflicted on an entire nation as the road carries the characters back and forth. So maybe it’s a faithful adaptation, after all. Grade: D

Anna Karenina (Joe Wright, 2012)

Joe Wright's previous literary adaptations have been awkward affairs, defined by a perennially miscast Kiera Knightley and an ostentatious visual style that overpowered whatever sense of respect with which he attempted to treat Austen and McEwan. The same is true of The Soloist, which tries to take mental illness seriously but aestheticizes it to such an extreme degree that the whole movie beatifies paranoid schizophrenia. Last year's Hanna worked better than his first three features precisely because the stakes of the material were lower, allowing the director to indulge himself even more and revealing that his prior films actually exhibited some form of restraint.

Anna Karenina reunites the director with his leading lady and, more broadly speaking, canonical adaptations. But it resembles the director of Hanna more than the maker of Atonement, at last jettisoning Wright's lip-service reverence for his source novels to fully bend a great work of literature to his own ends. If over-direction marred his earlier works, Wright here gives in fully to his id, making over-direction its raison d’être. If that means the director gives less precedence to the book being adapted, it marks no change from his earlier films save that Wright is finally being honest with people. By dropping the pretense, the most over-directed work by the most notorious over-director currently working stands clearly as his best work to date.

Tolstoy’s writing is renowned for its expansive scope, its ability to survey wide swaths of characters and social strata; Wright’s adaptation of the author’s novel, however, is characterized by geographical myopia, shrinking the St. Petersburg social circles where much of the novel takes place to a single, theatrical set. Proscenia border shifting backgrounds as the camera dives, ducks and soars around ever-shifting levels of the stage, and a model train that seems to come right out of Wes Anderson’s films serves as a cheeky mode of transport. The entire city of St. Petersburg, even, resembles one of Anderson’s dollhouse worlds, and Wright uses this setup in a similar manner: to establish the cloistered privilege of its inhabitants.

Where the British director differs from the American one, though, is in the manner he focuses not on the emergence of a maturing individual from the shelter afforded by wealth but how that shelter can expel those who disrupt the status quo. The person in question is the titular princess (Keira Knightley), whose life of comfort is thrown into chaos by the intrusion of the young Count Vronsky (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) into her life. Introduced as a suitor for Anna’s niece, Kitty (Alica Vikander), Vronsky soon turns his attentions to Anna, who finds unknown desires awakened within her and must decide whether their pursuit is worth her sudden ostracism from high society.

Wright and cinematographer Seamus McGarvey use Sarah Greenwood’s astonishing production design to the fullest in visualizing the way society turns on Anna like antibodies locking on to a foreign contaminant in the blood. Wright arranges attendees at the ball where Anna and Vronsky share their first, highly charged dance in static tableaux. The other dancers freeze in action until the new couple sweep past them, while insert shots of onlookers in silent judgment break up the romance with the forces that will conspire to destroy it. The film’s best sequence, recreating Vronsky’s doomed horse race within the closed set of the giant stage, uses shots of Vronsky against a black void (and a flat wall painted with spectators enjoying an outdoor race) for a deliberately false effect compounded by the horse tripping off the stage and falling into the orchestra pit. Anna cannot contain herself, and all heads turn not toward the shrieking horse and shaken rider but the hysterical woman who just gave away her true, socially unforgivable feelings.

In such moments, where members of St. Petersburg’s elite become immobile in disapproval and rejection, Anna Karenina almost resembles the Godard of Passion, and the primary Russian influence on this film may not be Tolstoy but Aleksandr Sokurov, whose Russian Ark clearly informs some of the swooning movements through this world. That admittedly leaves the film cold, but then the focus is not on the passionate romance and midlife crisis it engenders but the hypocrisies of high society that result from these “transgressions," the most visible of these hypocrisies being the perpetual forgiveness of adulterous men as Anna is spurned. Why, even Knightley’s miscasting as a woman old enough to look back on a life suddenly filled with regrets could almost count as a metatextual commentary on the way these films are cast with the young. (The film’s biggest unintentional laugh stems from Knightley reminiscing about being “your age” with Vikander, a scene that comes off like a pompous senior’s advice to a freshman.)

The closest the film comes to tragedy is in the recurring juxtaposition of Anna’s breakdown in St. Petersburg with a character who gets to live a much happier form of separation from it. Konstatin Levin (Domhnal Gleeson) lives on a rural estate outside the dizzying, interior world of Russia’s cultural capital, demonstrating that a person of privilege can exist outside those walls. But then, Levin got to leave of his own volition, and he plays by the sanctimonious rules when he returns to town to try and win Kitty’s hand. As one chirping member of high society says of Anna in the film’s most focused self-summary, “I’d call on her if she’d only broken the law. But she broke the rules.” In that sense, the most affecting aspect of Anna Karenina is what a sick joke it all is.

Capsule Reviews: Tim and Eric's Billion Dollar Movie, Skyfall, The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel

Tim and Eric's Billion Dollar Movie (Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim, 2012)

Anticipating the ire of their many detractors, Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim build their feature-length Billion Dollar Movie on a joke that plays on them inexplicably receiving money from major corporate interests to do their thing in the mainstream. The creative duo's audacity has often eclipsed the actual content of their 11-minute episodes on Adult Swim, making the prospect of a 95-minute feature daunting. Surprise, surprise, this is amazingly focused, with something approaching a plot and everything. Because a relatively stable foundation grounds the film, Tim and Eric's usual diversions manage to pack more punch for letting the nuances of their weirdness shine through. Every technical hiccup, awkward insert shot and flat line of dialogue delivered just a second too late creates a sense of discomfort like a low-frequency sound. I cannot explain why I find that effect hilarious, but then, the sight of John C. Reilly hacking up a lung as a Dickensian, wolf-raised orphan or Ray Wise presiding over a grotesque sort of body cleanse need no justification. Grade: B-

Skyfall (Sam Mendes, 2012)

I had intended a podcast appearance I made with Corey Atad of JustATad and fellow guest Calum Marsh (a fantastic freelance writer you can follow on Twitter here) to stand as my Skyfall thoughts, but sadly the audio was lost. To condense the thoughts I expressed there, I found myself mildly mixed but, for the most part, highly satisfied by this latest Bond outing. Mendes is the director, but it's Roger Deakins who steals the show, silhouetting and backlighting action sequences to visually match M's (Judi Dench) assertion that war now takes place in the shadows and just generally setting a new aesthetic standard for action films. Skyfall attempts to bridge the franchise reinvention under the Daniel Craig era to Bond's larger history as an ostentatious escape vehicle. When Deakins lights Craig in such a way that he looks both haggard and more iconic than any Bond since Moore, maybe even Connery, or when Craig pauses for a second in the middle of a visceral action sequence that rips the end out of a train to adjust his cufflinks, this really does seem like the best Bond movie of them all.

But the audience cannot be trusted to pick up on such things, so we get a barrage of cute references to previous films that may end up dating Skyfall as badly as prior attempts at self-awareness. The plot is as nonsensical and half-justified as any other Bond film, but here it places so much stock in Joker-esque plotting that the holes stand out more. Nevertheless, this is superbly acted (Javier Bardem continues to be an arresting villain, while Ralph Fiennes suggests gulfs of hidden personality and secrets within a small part), and the Shanghai sequence may be a franchise-best action scene. But as much as Craig's films have cut the waffle on a bloated franchise, Skyfall retains certain elements of misogyny and fascism that now seem inseparable from the brand, and as pleased as I was with so much of the movie, I was left feeling that it could have been the best of the 50-year-old franchise rather than merely in the top 10. There are worse "disappointments" in the world. Grade: B

The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (John Madden, 2012)

Eat, Pray, Love rubbed down with Bengay, The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel uses a vibrant, agreeably "real" (read: poor and densely populated) India to allow a group of British retirees to find themselves. Like so many movies of this ilk, Marigold Hotel takes place in a cultural green zone, where the impoverished Indians always smile at those born when India was still the Jewel in the Crown and everyone conveniently speaks perfect English until someone has a racist comment to make, at which point the recipient of hate can only continue to smile ignorantly. Wouldn't want anyone to register the sting of harsh words and break the spell, would we? But of course, the mixture of bewildered and hateful Brits who arrive are slowly softened by tours of places that contain just enough reality to not seem like the kept-up attractions they are. With a cast comprising such talents as Judi Dench, Tom Wilkinson and Bill Nighy, the film cannot help but be entertaining, and its message of it never being too late to make amends or find new happiness is a fine one. Wilkinson's arc, a retired judge who is returning (not merely traveling) to India in order to make peace with a horror he left behind, even manages to treat the areas outside the romantically dilapidated and hermetically sealed realm the characters inhabit with severity and actual empathy. Yet the most insightful comment of all may come from the most sheltered and enduringly prejudiced of the characters, who falls to pieces as the rest acclimate and accuses everyone else of self-delusion. She is positioned as the most repugnant character in the film, more so even than Maggie Smith's virulently racist housekeeper, yet her words ring truest of all. Grade: C-

Generation P (Victor Ginzburg, 2012)

Generation P starts strong as an amusing take on Russia's post-perestroika marketing boon, where communism is made capitalist to sell Western goods to a civilization weaned on propaganda. When it tries to become an ad-centric Brazil, though, it falls apart, filled with half-baked ideas that are never expounded upon and ambitious but hollow images that do not even work for their own sake, much less a broader satiric point. Its first half is great fun, but the rest feels like a letdown.

My full review is up now at Spectrum Culture.

The Turin Horse (Béla Tarr & Ágnes Hranitzky, 2012)

The contemporary prevalence of apocalyptic films reaches its apex with The Turin Horse. It contains the various dualities that have marked this recent spate of subject matter: ascetic and deeply aesthetic, primally raw and analogously mannered, ending the world with a bang (or at least a howl) and a whimper. If it is to be Béla Tarr's final film, it is a disturbingly appropriate one for an artist whose stately, enigmatic corpus comprises some of the most quietly yet profoundly horrific films in all of cinema. It is a film so bleak that musical collaborator Mihaly Vig's ominous cues almost offer relief despite their sinister tones, for at least they suggest that music of some sort still exists within this whiting-out world.

The title refers to the infamous, apocryphal story of Friedrich Nietzsche going mad at the sight of a horse being flogged, a tale related to the audience by a narrator. The speaker goes into some more detail of Nietzsche, though the specificity slips on other things, say, the name of the abusive cabman, now lost to time as only his occupation was needed to make the legend. "Of the horse," the narrator admits at the end of his introduction, "we know nothing." Tarr then opens on a horse, though it is not meant to be the one from Turin. Nor even is it a stand-in for the suffering beast; instead, one could argue that the film that follows could possibly be what Nietzsche saw in his collapsed mind after his final rush of incomprehensible letters and his final words, spoken 10 years before his actual death. But the closest Tarr's film (which credits editor Ágnes Hranitzky as co-director in keeping with his last few works) comes to Nietzsche is in its depiction of a world beyond, well, everything, not just good and evil.


With his characteristic long takes, Tarr follows that horse and its masters, an old man named Ohlsdorfer (János Derzi) and his unnamed daughter (Erika Bók), over the course of six days defined by an aggressively mundane routine set against increasingly strong winds that add a surreal flavor to the tedium. One's thoughts turn to Jeanne Dielman, especially when the centerpiece of each day's schedule is the boiling and eating of potatoes, the father and child's only sustenance. But Tarr and Akerman use their intense focus on the things omitted from most films in vastly different ways. Jeanne Dielman offers a fascinating deconstruction of domestic life along social and gendered lines, revealing the myriad ways society imposes itself even in the sealed-off space of the woman's home and informs her relationships with others and her sense of self. The Turin Horse, on the other hand, shows a parent-child bond as the last bastion of humanity as society outside their isolated hovel is wiped off the face of the Earth by the endless gales.

But as my friend Andreas noted in a brief conversation we had on Twitter about the vague Akerman connection, Tarr does not position father and daughter as our last beacon of hope. Far from it, their time together serves only to delay the inevitable, and the hardships they face simply to live their banal lives suggest that they would be better off merely surrendering to the storm. Tarr films them in unbroken takes, each shot ever moving outward as it gently curves with what could pass for action. What he documents are two people locked into almost animalistic instinct, not too discernible from the horse who shares their routine of drinking ice water, feeding on bare nutrition and carrying out heavy burdens. The first day's shot of the pair's meal starts close on the daughter's preparation of the food and her setting of the plate in front of her father, whose fingers reach into frame and clumsily, gingerly claw at the skin of the steaming tuber. The camera moves back to show the man's face and upper body as he feeds with instinctual remove, rapidly cramming his mashed potato into his mouth while his face remains unsettlingly impassive. His feeding is all the more bestial thanks to his paralyzed right arm, which comes off as a transference of abuse from Nietzsche's unseen horse to a parallel dimension where the driver suffers the wounds.

And if the driver in this realm exhibits some of the horse's traits, so too does the horse seen on the screen exercise a willpower more suited to a human than a beast of burden. After seeing it drag the cart along in the first shot, the horse decides it has had enough of that and refuses to budge when the humans harness it and the father attempts to set off for town. After that, they cannot even get the harness on; by the third day, it ceases to eat, and by the fourth, it will not drink. The humans continue on with their tasks, but the horse knows better. This makes for dark humor, with father and daughter eventually reduced to tugging their cart around themselves as the horse follows freely, subtly driving them on as they attempt to flee their increasingly inhospitable home, only to turn back after the shot holds on their trek for an excruciating length of time. The shot becomes the funniest joke of the movie, even over the visitors who occasionally intrude upon the isolated family with wild warnings and anarchic behavior. Tarr's style, so unsettling in its spatial distance and temporal length, becomes a single-shot shaggy dog anticlimax in which the most major variation in the action amounts to nothing.

Through it all, the wind blows, getting worse each day until the last, in which its absence may be the only thing scarier than its constant roar. Mirroring the story of the Creation, The Turin Horse uses its six days to slowly undo what God wrought, and by the sixth day, with food and water exhausted and only a small amount of brandy to ease the end, even the sun has left, plunging the home into a void. It is Tarr's last, sick joke, making the previous mise-en-scène seem relatively dense in retrospect compared to the table existing in infinite blackness. Might as well go out with a laugh, I suppose, even if the chuckle, like the characters on-screen, freeze into silent stasis.

The Comedy (Rick Alverson, 2012)

I've been more fascinated than consistently entertained by the likes of Tim Heidecker, Eric Wareheim and Gregg Turkington (a.k.a. Neil Hamburger), yet their performances in The Comedy seem almost a scathing rebuke of their own style even as they push it to new, rewarding limits. Heidecker in particular is incredible as a man who pours a bit of Rupert Pupkin into mumblecore heroes, amplifying that sociopath's incapacity for humor into a disgusting reliance on irony just to interact (and avoid interaction) with others. It is a harrowing film, though it also lives up to its title, wringing pained laughs out of its most nightmarish scenarios. One of my favorites of the year.

My full review is up now at Spectrum Culture.