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.

The Man From U.N.C.L.E.

So, what do you remember about your

parents before their planet exploded?

Grade: B –

Director: Guy Ritchie

Starring: Henry Cavill, Armie Hammer, Alicia Vikander, Hugh Grant and Elizabeth Debicki

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Running Time: 1 hr. 56 min.

Several years ago, Quentin Tarantino said he was extended, but turned down, several offers to direct a film version of the 1960s television show “The Man from U.N.C.L.E.” In a way, he finally got his chance.

Guy Ritchie, one of the most notably post-Pulp Fiction-inspired auteurs, applies his Tarantino panache to the U.N.C.L.E. spy thriller adaptation, finally in theaters after over 20 years in development hell. Slick and ultra stylish, The Man From U.N.C.L.E.’s narrative nonetheless lacks a certain I-don’t-know-what. Watching the film is rather like admiring an exotic sports car with sleek lines and luxury features, only to discover a straight-twin engine under the hood.

Set in the early 1960s, Napoleon Solo (Henry Cavill, well, Superman), a former WWII profiteer turned CIA agent, and sullen KGB lackey Illya Kuryakin (Armie Hammer, once cast as Batman in George Miller’s aborted Justice League film project) are Cold War adversaries forced to join forces to track down an International Criminal Organization™ dabbling in stolen gold and loose nukes. The scoundrels have kidnapped a German nuclear scientist, whose daughter, Gaby Teller (Alicia Vikander), is the key to locating him and THE BOMB.

The Man From U.N.C.L.E. is a gorgeous film, with Ritchie’s sublime camerawork and kinetic editing bound by an eclectic soundtrack that borrows from Roberta Flack, Ennio Morricone, Nina Simone, Rita Pavone and many others. It’s “Mad Men” meets a “Vogue” magazine cover, with Vikander—having quite the breakout year—and Elizabeth Debicki, as a baubled and bangled baddie named Victoria, ably serving as sassy fashion plates.

While the actors are well-cast (save for Hammer and his Ruskie accent), the quippy script is droll without much sense of urgency. Although the world’s fate supposedly lies in the balance, Solo and Kuryakin quibble over whether you can accessorize a Paco Rabanne belt with a Tapu. There are several striking sequences: set to a Peppino Gagliardi ballata, Solo sits in a truck and sips Ruffino while a motorboat chase carries on in the background; a torture scene overseen by a Mengele-esque madman; the Dutch angles of Victoria lying atop a couch parallel to a prone, drugged Solo.

But if there’s such a thing as excessive cool. The Man From U.N.C.L.E. has it. Speedboats, race cars, Italian playboys, three-piece suits, Hugh Grant … it’s all there. What’s not there are genuine emotions and engaging action, from a confusingly edited backroads buggy chase to a mundane, detached climax. It’s a film to luxuriate over—like visiting an art gallery, you’ll enjoy much of what you see, but you won’t really feel like going back.

Mirror Mirror

Björk White, I presume?

Grade: C +

Director: Tarsem Singh

Starring: Julia Roberts, Lily Collins, Armie Hammer and Nathan Lane

MPAA Rating: PG

Running Time: 1 hr. 46 min.

You might experience a sense of deja vu while watching Mirror, Mirror, just not the kind you’d expect. This comic-fantasy version of the Snow White story lifts from both the Brothers Grimm original and the Disney animated classic. However, director Tarsem Singh and screenwriter Melisa Wallack loop in echoes of Robin Hood, Alice in Wonderland, and, for a good measure, a Bollywood-style song and dance coda.

The sometimes cheeky, sometimes clunky result does little justice to the source material nor does it advance the legend. However, it makes good use of its talent (with one notable exception) and conjures a convivial concoction that, while not spellbinding, is escapist fun.

As the evil Queen, Julia Roberts is far from an old hag. Her character’s ugliness is strictly subdermal, a psychotic combination of jealousy and paranoia. When she isn’t taxing her kingdom into poverty so she can host lavish parties in the hopes of wooing the rich, handsome Prince Alcott (Armie Hammer, The Social Network), she’s keeping her stepdaughter, the radiant Snow White (Lily Collins), under lock and key.

When Snow White stands up for herself and becomes a rival for the Prince’s affections, the Queen’s treatment of her takes a turn towards the homicidal. The young, raven-haired beauty escapes into the woods and happens upon a hovel occupied by a septet of diminutive bandits, scallywags armed with accordion-shaped stilts to elevate them to more intimidating heights.

Together, they essentially become Snow White and her Band of Seven Merry Dwarfs, robbing from the royal to give to the peasants. And, in order to save eventually herself and the kingdom, Snow White must vanquish the Queen and her own breed of Jabberwock. What’s more, when the Queen desires to commune with her titular oracle, she literally steps through the looking-glass and onto an overwater bungalow in the middle of, I dunno, Bora Bora or somewhere.

While warbling the most inconsistent English accent this side of Madonna, Roberts manages to beam a blend of both beauty and wickedness. It also helps to have a comedic foil like Nathan Lane, who plays the Queen’s obsequious footman.

On the other hand, a little of Hammer’s aw-shucks shtick goes a long way. The weakest link here, however, is Snow White herself, written and played by Collins as a virtual cipher. While exquisitely lovely—donning a tiara, she conspicuously resembles Audrey Hepburn—Collins simply doesn’t have the heft to navigate the nuances of a Snow White who alternates between naïve, oppressed, benevolent, idealistic, feisty and amorous.

You’d expect more narrative and visual audacity from the director who once fever-dreamed The Cell and The Fall. Instead, the closest Singh comes to intrigue is a pair of giant wooden marionettes that drop from the sky to lay waste to Snow and her friends.

Otherwise, Mirror Mirror is a light-hearted—and lightheaded—romp that shares one main common denominator with its Disney-produced predecessor: the dwarves steal the show.

Neil Morris

The Social Network

Have you ever had the dream where you're...?

Grade: A –

Director: David Fincher

Starring: Jesse Eisenberg, Justin Timberlake, Andrew Garfield, Armie Hammer, and Rooney Mara

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Running Time: 2 hours

During one of the legal depositions that serve as narrative reference points in The Social Network, Facebook creator Mark Zuckerberg (portrayed with neurotic kinship by Jesse Eisenberg) responds to a question posed by the attorney representing plaintiffs suing Zuckerberg for fraud and copyright infringement by derisively asking whether “a guy who makes a really good chair owes money to anyone who ever made a chair?”

It is the question that puts Zuckerberg on the proverbial hot seat throughout director David Fincher’s engaging motion picture about the creation – and creator – of Facebook. The screenplay by Aaron Sorkin (A Few Good Men; Charlie Wilson’s War) depicts Zuckerberg as a far-sighted savant on the online medium but also possessing an almost pathologic mixture of genius and jerkiness whose motives for constructing the world’s largest social network are as simple as revenge and the evergreen need for acceptance.

The film opens with Zuckerberg as a Harvard undergraduate feebly trying to stave off a break-up with his Boston U. girlfriend Erica (Rooney Mara) in a crowded café. Written and delivered using Sorkin’s trademark, rapid-fire cadence, the conversation ends with Erica telling Mark, “You’re going to go through life believing that girls don’t like you because you’re a nerd, and I want you to know from the bottom of my heart hat that’s not true. It’ll be because you’re an asshole.”

In Sorkin’s tableau, this incident propels Zuckerberg, then a Harvard undergrad, to hack into the private digital facebooks of various sorority houses and compile them into Facemash, in which users could compare photos and rate which coed was “hotter.”

It is no accident that this infantile stab at social networking – which was instantly so popular it crashed Harvard’s computer servers – indirectly assailed two groups: girls and the campus social elite. For Sorkin, rejection is the driving force behind Facebook’s genesis – rejection by girls, fraternities, athletes, and the privileged. Facebook was not merely a giant middle finger to Zuckerberg’s supposed tormenters. It was his way of constructing his own fraternal order in an arena where he felt most comfortable: the Internet. It is a club in which everyone is invited, but Zuckerberg is always the gatekeeper.

The marriage of Fincher and Sorkin seems odd at first blush. However, Fincher’s dark, deliberate style proves the calming yin to Sorkin’s rhythmic, propulsive yang. The film’s narrative structure essentially consists of scenes from depositions taken during the course of separate lawsuits brought against Zuckerberg, followed by flashbacks to the events that give rise to the testimony at hand. The Rashomon-style format leaves room for the film to present the perspectives of all participants, and for the filmmakers to hedge their factual bets.

The first lawsuit is brought by fellow Harvard classmates Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss (Armie Hammer in a digitally enhanced dual role), identical twin gentlemen of privilege and Olympic-caliber rowing champs. This conflict encapsulates not only Zuckerberg’s unease with WASP elitists, but also the age-old clash between nerds and jocks. The irony, filtered through Sorkin’s clever pen, is that while the Winklevosses can be viewed as whiners and borderline buffoons (then-Harvard president Larry Summers does as much when the brothers lodge a formal complaint against Zuckerberg with the university), there’s a legitimate argument that they are truest victims of all, having approached Zuckerberg with the idea for helping develop a Harvard networking website that he would turn into Facebook under their noses.

The other civil action, lodged by Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin (Andrew Garfield, recently tapped as the new Spider-Man) is more Shakespearean. Differences of opinion between Saverin and Zuckerberg over Facebook’s business model lead to a rift between the former best friends, one exploited by Sean Parker (Justin Timberlake, with relish), the one-time Napster co-founder and tech demigod that Sorkin couches as a smooth-talking scoundrel and leach. Parker coos a siren song of notoriety and billionaire wealth in Zuckerberg’s ear (predictions, it turns out, that were completely accurate) which prompts a spiral of betrayal and legal reprisals.

It’s always dicey to write the incomplete story of living people in the prime of their professional and personal lives. In loosely adapting Ben Mezrich’s 2009 book The Accidental Billionaires, Sorkin takes dramatic liberties in his portrait of Zuckerberg. Unsurprisingly, Zuckerberg declined to cooperate with either the book or film, flashing a desire for confidentiality that belies the man who claimed earlier this year that privacy is no longer a “social norm” in the Internet era. For that reason, The Social Network should not be strictly viewed as a biopic. Instead, it is more a snapshot of a time and place, one of the first films to effectively capture the youthful, technological exuberance that largely defined the aughts.

Still, Facebook fanatics and casual users alike will leave The Social Network with a disconcerting sense of knowing how the sausage is made. And, the film does stake his claim as to Zuckerberg’s psyche, one Sorkin believes is not governed by money or fame, but instead by simply wanting a seat at the cool kids’ table – Zuckerberg repeatedly resists Saverin’s efforts to monetize Facebook, insisting the site would “stop being cool.” The irony is this tech-led revenge of the nerds ends up succumbing to the same trappings of ambition, entitlement, and narcissism, as well as emulating the very social caste system they rebel against.

The denouement to The Social Network not only recalls Zuckerberg’s personal Rosebud but also the Faustian fate that befell such movie tycoons as Daniel Plainview, Michael Corleone, and, yes, Charles Foster Kane. Like them, Zuckerberg becomes a virtual prisoner of his success, attaining everything except the thing he wanted the most. The geek may inherit the earth, but that doesn’t necessarily include happiness – or getting the girl.

Neil Morris

*Originally published at http://www.indyweek.com/indyweek/facebook-gets-its-movie-courtesy-of-aaron-sorkin-and-david-fincher/Content?oid=1699046