Nocturnal Animals

Grade: B +

Director: Tom Ford

Starring: Amy Adams, Jake Gyllenhaal, Michael Shannon, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Armie Hammer, Isla Fisher and Laura Linney

MPAA Rating: R

Running Time: 1 hr. 56 min.

“You gonna cry?” It’s a question posed thrice during Tom Ford’s Nocturnal Animals. twice aloud and a third hovering, unspoken, over the film’s gut-wrenching finale. Twice no answer is given; by the end, none is required.

An over-stylized, byzantine veneer camouflages a revenge tale as obvious as the word-art Susan Morrow (Amy Adams) forgot she bought for her sterile LA art gallery. Susan’s life is awash in “junk,” both professionally and in her troubled marriage to Hutton (Armie Hammer), the wealthy hunk who cheated with Susan before cheating on her. With her life at a vapid crossroads, Susan receives a parcel containing a draft of a novel written by Edward Sheffield (Jake Gyllenhaal), her ex-husband 19 years removed. Susan and Edward met during her carefree and artsy days, before foreshadowing became prophecy and she became the same materialistic ice queen as her right-wing mother (Laura Linney).

Ford splits the narrative into three parallel tracks. There are flashbacks to the rise and crash of Susan and Edward’s relationship. As present-day Susan reads Edward’s manuscript, we are immersed in his neo-noir thriller set in West Texas, part Deliverance, part Straw Dogs. Three yokels accost and assault Tony (also Gyllenhaal), an Edward doppelganger who is also too weak to save his family, in this instance a redheaded wife (Isla Fisher) and teenage girl (Ellie Bamber) who not-so-subtly resemble Susan and her daughter with Hutton.

After his wife and child are found in a trash pit, Tony turns to a terminally ill Texas detective (Michael Shannon), who has seen too many scumbags slip through legal loopholes and ain’t gonna let that happen again. Legal recourse morphs into vengeful, self-destruction retribution.

The visual and character overlays across plotlines are partly Edward’s prose, partly Susan’s projection. Indeed, does Tony resemble Edward because that’s way Edward wrote the character or the way Susan is visualizing him? Regardless, fiction informs fact, which, in actuality, is also fiction. Ford himself is a West Texas native who earned his fortune in the fashion industry. The unspoken undercurrent of Nocturnal Animals is his familiarity with and contempt for the extremes of both milieus.

The film is thematically reductive, yet potent in its presentation, particularly Abel Korzeniowski’s intoxicating score with its obvious echoes of Bernard Herrmann. The already-infamous opening credits montage is an encapsulation of the contradictions that inform everything that follows: lurid, patriarchal, elitist, engrossing and mesmerizing.

American Hustle

And your host, Mr. Johnny Carson

Grade: A–

Director: David O. Russell

Starring: Christian Bale, Amy Adams, Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence

MPAA Rating: R

Running Time: 2 hr. 18 min.

The author and journalist Max Lerner once said, “History is written by the survivors.” In this spirit, American Hustle, director David O. Russell’s fictionalization on the Abscam sting operation of the late 1970s and early 80s, is itself a cinematic hustle. Indeed, it’s unwittingly coincidental that the title of screenwriter Eric Warren Singer’s original spec script was American Bullshit.

Starting in 1978, John Good and Tony Amoroso, two New York-based FBI agents, launched Abcam in order to root out political corruption. They utilized the services of Mel Weinberg, a con man and FBI informant, and an ersatz Arab sheik (actually an undercover FBI agent). The operation eventually led to 19 convictions, including seven members of Congress. It also garnered criticism over the bureau’s tactics and, notably, the duplicity of Weinberg and his coitre of cohorts, including his wife Marie and mistress Evelyn Knight.

In Jan. 1982, as Marie was publicly blowing the whistle on alleged fraud perpetrated by Weinberg and law enforcement officials during Abscam (and with Weinberg and those same officials negotiating a movie deal involving director Louis Malle), Marie was found dead in a Florida condo after apparently hanging her herself.

Russell’s rewrite of Singer’s screenplay changes the real-life participants to fictionalized characters and conflates the story into a zany black comedy. With Weinberg still alive and living in Florida, and both Good and Amoroso consulting on the new film, it’s not coincidental that Irving Rosenfeld (Christian Bale), Weinberg’s cinematic doppelganger, is a brilliant, slovenly scalawag who loves his mistress Sydney (Amy Adams) and his adopted son, harbors a heart of gold beneath his disreputable doings, and is harried by his wife Rosalyn (Jennifer Lawrence), a gorgeous dingbat and floozy.

Yet, creative license and one-sided storytelling has always been the province of cinema, from Nanook of the North to Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas and Casino. Indeed, the framework of Russell’s American Hustle—competing narrations from colorful characters; elaborate Steadicam sequences; an eclectic vintage soundtrack; a darkly comedic depiction of the criminal underworld—is an unabashed, borderline shameless Scorsese homage (indeed, a Raging Bull-style intro and an uncredited appearance by a famous Scorsese regular as a lieutenant to Mafia boss Meyer Lansky drives home the emulation).

Still, there are far worse auteurs to ape, and the notoriously tempestuous Russell (Silver Linings Playbook, Three Kings) is an accomplished filmmaker. Indeed, the nuances and non sequiturs in a Russell script fly at the audience with the speed, dexterity and unpredictability of a technically proficient pugilist.

And according to published reports, Russell’s actors feel similarly bludgeoned. But an uncanny symbiosis exists between Russell and his adroit cast, particularly Bale, Adams and Bradley Cooper as Richie DiMaso, an ambitious, madcap G-man based on Amoroso. Jeremy Renner plays Carmine Polito, the earnest but shady mayor of Camden, N.J. whose early corrupt involvement in Abscam blazes a trail that eventually leads to bigger political marks. Only the otherwise talented Lawrence is miscast as Rosalyn, a streetwise yet world-weary woman whose backstory is unsuited to a 23-year-old ingenue.

The marriage between director, script and cast generates a jaunty glimpse at the historical nexus between Watergate and the greed decade of the 1980s. Cops and prosecutors longingly hope to leverage the specter of government corruption (real or otherwise) for professional advancement. Meanwhile, a cadre of nefarious con artists are poised for the decadence ushered by Reaganomics. “F**kin’ Jimmy Carter,” both Irv and Sydney mutter at one point.

Russell’s haze of verbosity sometimes stunts the narrative progression. Moreover, Russell untangles the complex relationships he conjures in overly tidy fashion, particularly the Irv, Syd and Richie triangle, while convenient contrition and redemption resolves Irv’s shoehorned kinship with Carmine. On the other hand, maybe this is the history the film wants to tell, and the hustle at the center of American Hustle is just a grift that’s still being played today. After all, as Irv Rosenfeld conspicuously points out, “People believe what they want to believe.”

*Originally published at Indyweek.com

The Master

I'm Still Here...

Grade: B

Director: Paul Thomas Anderson

Starring: Joaquin Phoenix, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Amy Adams, Laura Dern, Ambyr Childers and Jesse Plemons

MPAA Rating: R

Running Time: 2 hr. 17 min.

Of all the influences on Paul Thomas Anderson’s post-World War II American saga The Master, the life and times of L. Ron Hubbard ranks no higher than Upton Sinclair’s Oil! and tycoon Edward L. Doheny did on There Will Be Blood. While Anderson acknowledges using Hubbard as an inspiration for Lancaster Dodd (Philip Seymour Hoffman), a shaman-cum-charlatan heading an Eisenhower-era spiritual movement called “The Cause,” don’t expect a roman à clef chronicling the birth and belief system of Scientology.

The Master’s central focus isn’t even the nature of personality cults, as in Martha Marcy May Marlene, though that’s certainly one of many undercurrents to this enigmatic epic. Instead, Anderson returns to familiar themes found throughout his short but resplendent filmography: the search for a father figure or lost son; dysfunctional family relationships; and flawed men fated to self-destruction.

The biggest surprise, however, is that The Master isn’t really Dodd’s story—indeed, the film’s title is a misnomer, referring not simply to Dodd but rather those things in everyone’s lives that preoccupy or even control them. Rather, the real protagonist is Freddie Quell (Joaquin Phoenix), a sailor stationed in the Pacific Theater who spends his R-and-R humping anatomical sand castles and masturbating in the surf. Returning stateside and suffering from some unspecified emotional disorder, the dissipated Freddie’s only real passion is mixing bootleg liquor using darkroom chemicals, paint thinner, cleaning supplies and anything else at his disposal. When he loses a job as a department store portrait photographer fighting one of his many coifed, well-heeled subjects, he lashes out at an ideal he knows he’ll never appreciate or attain. After he’s chased away from work as a Steinbeck-ian cabbage picker, Freddie winds up a stowaway aboard a yacht being chartered by Dodd and a handful of his followers.

Dodd takes in the brutish Freddie, whom he likens to a fearful animal that eats its own excrement. However, it’s never clear whether the Master’s motives are altruistic, opportunistic or even sexual. Through a system of “processing”—undoubtedly modeled after Scientology’s “auditing”—Dodd seeks to exorcise Freddie’s demons and assimilate him into the fold.

Encased in atmospheric amber, The Master emulates the pace and palette of There Will Be Blood—if you splice Jonny Greenwood’s score for both, you couldn’t tell where one ends and the other begins. Although Blood is 20 minutes longer, theater viewers may exit The Master believing the opposite to be true. However, while Anderson’s oil epic was a character-driven allegory about Americanism and religion, the writer-director came to his newest project full of big ideas but became both enamored and distracted by his formidable actors along way.

Phoenix, appearing in his first film since the underappreciated I’m Still Here, gives an engrossing, awards-worthy performance. He compresses Freddie’s morass of rage, insecurity and anti-social behavior behind an inarticulate mumble, frozen sneer and graceless gait, a vessel that sometimes appears only vaguely human. Dodd—who describes himself as “a writer, a doctor, a nuclear physicist, a theoretical philosopher”—leans on charm and polish to peddle his mix of mysticism, science fiction and dime store psychology. But, he’s most revealing when Hoffman flashes an anxiety and anger simmering just below his well-scrubbed facade, such as when a naysayer challenges his dogma at a dinner party or a benefactor (Laura Dern) frets over a word change to a processing question made in Dodd’s second tome—through Hoffman, Dodd responds to this incident with irritation tinged with a vague surprise that anyone would notice, much less brood over such vagaries.

Together, Dodd and Freddie are two sides of the same animalistic coin—a scene in which they meet, physically and emotionally, in the middle of conjoining jail cells is unforgettable. Still, there’s only so many ways to (re)make this point. Anderson doesn’t pivot away from his two leads long enough to fully develop the many underwritten supporting characters, including Dodd’s biological son (Jesse Plemons) and daughter (Ambyr Childers), and his son-in-law (Rami Malek). Amy Adams is terrific as Peggy, Dodd’s wife, the power behind the throne who is part feminine ideal, part Lady Macbeth, but her performance becomes frustratingly one-note the more it plays second fiddle to Hoffman and Phoenix.

As a result, narrative opportunities are squandered. When the police show up to arrest Dodd, Anderson not only leaves viewers to assume Dodd is guilty of an unexplained financial grievance, he also wastes screen time show Freddie yet again fight someone (this time cops) that could have been used to elaborate on big ideas like a historical intolerance, sometimes hostility, by the government towards nontraditional faiths in a country that promises freedom of religion.

The one question The Master does lucidly pose is whether reforming the personality of a lout like Freddie is possible or even prudent. In so doing, Anderson—an avowed Stanley Kubrick devotee who reportedly filmed portions of The Master using the actual 65mm camera used to shoot 2001—has made his version of A Clockwork Orange. It’s a comparison underscored by such scenes as a dinner party in which Freddie visualizes all the ladies in attendance naked, and a final shot that I half expected to be accompanied by a voice over proclaiming, “I was cured all right.”

In one of the film’s more tedious montages, Dodd assigns Freddie an “application” that involves walking back and forth across a well-furnished room and finding different ways each time to describe the wood wall and windowpane he touches on either side. It’s an exercise not unlike watching The Master, a handsome canvas that’s open to interpretation, not explication.

Neil Morris

*Originally published at www.indyweek.com

Trouble with the Curve

Stay Off My Pizza!

 Grade: C +

Director: Robert Lorenz

Starring: Clint Eastwood, Amy Adams, Justin Timberlake, John Goodman and Matthew Lillard

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Running Time: 1 hr. 41 min.

Trouble with the Curve is a hunk of homespun hokum pointedly designed as the anti-Moneyball, where the geezer scouts cast out of the temple by Brad Pitt’s Billy Beane find redemption back in the bleacher seats. It’s a baseball picture framed within minor league parks and high school diamonds, where Sabermetrics can’t calculate that a batter’s hands drift on a breaking ball and a computer can’t process that the only thing a struggling prospect needs to break out of slump is a visit from mama. But while the film succeeds in painting a Rockwellian portrait of the national pastime, its plot proves as old-fashioned as its cultural viewpoint.

As aging, erasable baseball scout Gus Lobel, Clint Eastwood doesn’t lecture empty chairs, but he does have trouble with tripping over them due to failing eyesight that’s pushing Gus’ increasingly unproductive career towards retirement. So, his sassy daughter Mickey—as in Mantle (Amy Adams)—postpones her partnership track in an Atlanta mega law firm to join her widower dad, to his chagrin, for an important assignment scouting a cocky, hard-hitting prospect in Western North Carolina. Along the way, Mickey harbors hopes of healing their strained relationship.

Eastwood and Adams’ whip smart interplay carries the film, embracing the oft overlooked father-daughter sports bond. And no one can grouse a line like Clint, who’s essentially playing a variation on Walt Kowalski, his last on-screen role in Gran Torino. However, Mickey’s dalliance with a former flamethrower turned Red Sox scout (Justin Timberlake) lacks authenticity. It’s just part of writer Randy Brown’s safe script, capped by a lazy, overly tidy final act that erases any semblance of narrative nuance and transforms the film from simple to simplistic. Just when Trouble with the Curve could use some high heat, it serves up slow pitch softballs.

Neil Morris

The Fighter

Queensbury rules, baby!

Grade: B –
Director: David O. Russell
Starring: Mark Wahlberg, Christian Bale, Amy Adams, Melissa Leo, and Mickey O’Keefe
MPAA Rating: R
Running Time: 1 hour, 54 minutes

Cut from the carrion of Raging Bull and Rocky, the only rational explaination for the existence of The Fighter is the Affleck-ian notion that any fable set in the blue-collar streets of a Boston burb deserves cinematic veneration.

The true story of boxer “Irish” Micky Ward and his trainer and half-brother, Dickie Ecklund, remains lore in their hometown of Lowell, Mass. But, the film adaptation of Ward’s fall-and-rise is pat and derivative, the story of a palooka who endures his drug-addled brother and meddlesome family to achieve the sort of greatness that director David O. Russell apparently believes is best shared with the audience via film-ending postscripts.

The film opens in 1993 with Dickie – an ex-pugilist turned reprobate and crack addict – acting as trainer to Micky, a former Golden Gloves champion who has seen his once-promising ranking erode to where he is now regarded as a “stepping stone” up-and-coming fighters use to catapult their own careers. Disserved by the chronically high and/or absent Dickie and his officious manager and mom, Alice (Melissa Leo), Micky looks to revive his dormant career after his brother is sent to prison and Micky embraces the charms of Charlene (Amy Adams), a rough-and-ready barmaid who possesses just enough book-learning to threaten Micky’s gaggle of femullet-sporting half-sisters.

The Fighter is the standard story of the down-and-out fighter looking for one last shot at glory. Unfortunately, the film does not possess sufficient narrative drive, whether inside or outside the ring. Moreover, Russell’s penchant for interjecting humor into his narrative – which worked to great effect in Three Kings and I Heart Huckabees – proves distracting here, fostering a tonal inconsistency that constantly uproots any stab at dramatic tension. As comic relief, Russell usually trots out Micky’s siblings to play their part in some garish Massachusetts minstrel show.

Adams and Bale – whose lone one-on-one scene late in the film is like a breath of fresh air – are the pros in this bunch, although Bale’s widely ballyhooed, sure-fire Oscar-nominated turn often feels like a masterwork of mimicry. The true standout, however, is Leo, whose performance conjures a less sadistic, more boisterous version of Jacki Weaver’s matriarch in Animal Kingdom.

Still, as The Fighter marches steadily to its inevitably feel-good finale, the film’s biggest enigma is not only scrubbing Dickie’s recent relapse into drugs and crime, but also its virtual omission of Micky’s epic fights against Emanuel Burton and Arturo Gatti – three of his four total bouts against them were named Ring Magazine’s Fight of the Year. It’s akin to making Raging Bull without mentioning Jake La Motta’s bouts with Sugar Ray Robinson.

It took Wahlberg – who also coproduces – four years to bring this film to fruition. Unfortunately, the round-robin of directors, screenwriters, and actors linked to the project exacted a narrative toll. Consequently, this Fighter is a scrappy underdog that remains stuck on the undercard.

Neil Morris

Leap Year

Grade: C –

Director: Anand Tucker

Starring: Amy Adams, Matthew Goode, and Adam Scott

MPAA Rating: PG

Running Time: 1 hour, 37 minutes

Missing only a leprechaun jonesing for his Lucky Charms, the Irish-set Leap Year loops in as many lush landscapes and quirky archetypes as the Emerald Isle can bear. If it were a product of the country’s tourism board, the film would be a four-leaf clover. As a romantic-comedy, however, it’s cinematic stein of stale ale.

Dismayed that her cardiologist boyfriend, Jeremy (Adam Scott), hasn’t yet proposed marriage, Anna Brady (Amy Adams), a Boston-based apartment stager (a distinctive occupation that, naturally, figures nada in the film’s inert plot), Googles the supposed Irish custom that says women may propose to their reluctant beaus every four years on February 29.

Well, it just happens that Jeremy – who’d rather tend patients than his gal – is in Dublin for a medical conference on leap day. So, Anna packs her Louis Vuitton and strikes out for Ireland to pop the question herself. However, weather-related contrivances plant Anna somewhere along Ireland’s coast, a two days drive away from engagement.

So, Anna needs a ride into town. And, the town’s only courier is a handsome, boorish bar/innkeeper named Declan (Matthew Goode). And, Anna and Declan can’t stand to be in each other’s presence. You don’t need an itinerary to see where this story’s heading; the only hard part is figuring out why you chose to go along for the ride.

Director Anand Tucker (Shopgirl; Hilary and Jackie) has a grasp of visual style, but he buries his romantic plotline somewhere between stepping in cow pies and wringing chicken necks. Lame pratfalls and DOA yucks litter the comatose screenplay by go-to hacks Deborah Kaplan and Harry Elfont – their writing credits could fill the $5 DVD bin at Wal-Mart. The film wants to emulate gender-bickering classics like It Happened One Night. Instead, it’s part of an odd trend of women’s pictures in which the smart, independent woman must get abased before she wises-up and hooks-up with the man of her dreams – who she usually met just 48 hours ago or so – and dump her otherwise innocent boyfriend.

Adams deserves better than slumming in some mindless January release. If only Leap Year were the sort of film that came ‘round as often as its namesake.

Neil Morris

Julie & Julia

I'm happy to accept this award on Ms. Streep's behalf...

Grade: C +

Director: Nora Ephron

Starring: Meryl Streep, Amy Adams, Stanley Tucci, and Chris Messina

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Running Times: 2 hours, 3 minutes

As shallow as a soufflé, Julie & Julia is a puff pastry of epicurean ecstasy. It is a testament to the enduring talents of Meryl Streep and the iconic chef she portrays. But, in the vacuous hands of director Nora Ephron, it is an example of subtraction by addition, as two storylines that would barely sustain a feature-length film by themselves are diluted to the point of near irrelevance (in the case of Julie) and paucity (in the case of Julia) for the sake of splicing them together under a single title. Simply put, the ingredients don’t mix.

Streep is a deservedly acclaimed actress, and she is a mistress is two characters traits: accents and the ice queen. Thankfully, it is Julia Child’s Boston Brahmin brogue that Streep emphasizes for her charming, disarming portrayal of the famous chef, author, and television personality. The Julia-half of Ephron’s screenplay is drawn from “My Life in France,” Child’s autobiography that recounts the culinary experiences she and husband Paul Child (Stanley Tucci) indulged while living in post-World War II Paris and Marseilles, along with the infancy of her writing career.

Streep and Tucci – reuniting after costarring together in The Devil Wears Prada – portray these as heady times for the Childs, full of the wonderment of French culture and cuisine juxtaposed against the dismal tide of McCarthyism swamping citizens at home and foreign diplomats working abroad, like Mr. Child.

Against the glare of this iconic spotlight, the marginalized (or not outright marginal) protagonist of Julie & Julia is actually Julie Powell (Amy Adams), a struggling author who cures personal and professional malaise – and jumpstarts her literary career – by starting a Web blog in 2002 chronicling her mission to cook all the recipes in Child’s “Mastering the Art of French Cooking” over a year.

We’re told that the tie binding these two is that they are both strong, resourceful women who find inspiration in the joy of cooking. Thing is that Julie’s domestic travails in her tiny New York City apartment and her post-September 11^th job inside a cubicle working for the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation pale in comparison to Child’s worldly ventures.

The film is satisfied with the morsels of manufactured tension it concocts along the way (particularly during Julie’s timeline). Still, it is telling that its funniest scene is the replaying of a 30-year-old Dan Akroyd skit.

Moreover, Ephron eventually tethers a giant elephant in the kitchen near film’s end. I suppose the director and Powell deserve some measure of credit for including the dim view the actual Julia Child held for Powell’s Internet adventures in cooking. But, by addressing the rift only in passing, it serves to erode the essential connection between the two women suggested by both the screenplay and the film’s title. It also further minimalizes Powell’s standing in this two-headed narrative, making you wonder whether it was more than the rain that caused Child’s longtime publisher, Judith Jones (Erin Dilly), to cancel a dinner date with Powell.

They are both talented actresses, but in Julia & Julia (just as in Doubt), Streep gets to chew the scenery, while Adams gets consumed by it.

Neil Morris