The Giver

Son, I'm afraid this isn't another Tron sequel

Grade: C +

Director: Phillip Noyce

Starring: Jeff Bridges, Meryl Streep, Brenton Thwaites, Alexander Skarsgård, Katie Holmes, Odeya Rush, Taylor Swift, Cameron Monaghan and Emma Tremblay

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Running Time: 1 hr. 40 min.

It’s easy to see why it took 17 years to get Lois Lowry’s best-selling 1993 YA novel The Giver on the silver screen. Instead of embracing the potential depth of its subject matter, the film adaptation co-produced by Jeff Bridges and directed by Phillip Noyce—both able filmmakers—is distilled down to a promising premise bookended by empty mythology on one side and convenient, magical-transformative malarkey on the other.

A pre-credits narration informs the audience that after “The Ruin,” humankind rebuilt society into a cluster of utopian “Communities” ruled by a council of Elders and their authoritarian chief (Meryl Streep). Memories of the past have been all but wiped out so society can begin anew. The weather is always good, the trees are fake, there aren’t any animals and no one carries a surname. Your family and occupation are predetermined. Citizens must dress alike and aren’t permitted to lie or use “imprecise language.” Mandatory morning meds keep everyone docile, emotionless and, yes, colorblind. And elderly citizens and deficient infants are “released to Elsewhere”—you don’t need to watch Logan’s Run to know what that means.

Wondering what The Ruin was and how humans were able—logistically and ethically—to develop these uber-planned communities? Don’t bother. The Giver doesn’t explicate such pesky details about its backstory. Instead, we glean them through the eyes of Jonas (Brenton Thwaites), an 18-year-old tapped as the new Receiver of Memory. Jonas will telepathically inherit the entirety of human history and emotion from The Giver (Jeff Bridges), a curmudgeonly elder living in an oversized library near the edge of the town.

As Jonas’ eyes are opened to the wonders of colors, snow, dancing, elephants and war, this carefully chosen Receiver immediately starts to crack like a cheap windshield. One of his only rules is to never share with others what he learns during training, so of course the first thing he does is tell his friends about what he’s learned during training. Jonas gets surly with his delegated parents (Alexander Skarsgård and Katie Holmes) and wants to kiss doe-eyed girl-friend Fiona (Odeya Rush), to the dismay of Asher (Cameron Monaghan), whose unruly and jealous disposition is supposedly the sort of character flaw that gets ironed out by medication.

The Giver is blessed with the handsome cinematography of Ross Emery, who formerly directed photography for the Matrix trilogy and Dark World. The film’s early acts team with a youthful exuberance—conveyed using subtle jump cuts and off-angle shots—churning beneath a futurististic milieu muted by Emery’s black-and-white palette.

But once Jonas visits The Giver and color starts intruding on this sci-fi Pleasantville, the precarious plot starts to unravel. The Giver doesn’t want to just impart wisdom on Jonas, but also radicalize him into shaking up this dystopic Garden of Eden (including some subterfuge involving Fiona and an apple). And once Gabriel, a newborn future Receiver, is slated for “release,” Jonas decides that it’s finally time to go rogue.

Besides the contrivance of how it’s accomplished, it’s hard to accept that this meticulously engineered society could be so easily undone by one young boy and a baby going on a walkabout beyond some invisible border. Or that it hadn’t happened before Jonas came along.

Ultimately, the sense of Sameness plaguing the flawed utopia in The Giver afflicts its cinematic presentation. In the end, Jonas finds his Rosebud and a cabin echoing with Christmas carols. But viewers are left to mull an aftermath of Jonas’ journey as unexplained as everything before it. Maybe the audience needs its own Giver.

True Grit

The Big Le-Duke-ski

Grade: A –

Directors: Joel and Ethan Coen

Starring: Jeff Bridges, Hailee Steinfeld, Matt Damon, and Josh Brolin

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Running Time: 1 hour, 50 minutes

Released in 1969, True Grit came during at transitional stage for American cinema. In the same year that saw the release of anti-establishment films like Easy Rider, They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?, The Wild Bunch, and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, John Wayne’s first and only Oscar win is seen as a last gasp of Hollywood’s old guard venerating one of their most indomitable figures. Indeed, the ultimate irony is that the same year Wayne – filmdom’s most emblematic cowboy – won Best Actor (for a performance that essentially amounted to self-parody), the X-rated revisionist Western Midnight Cowboy won Best Picture.

The Coen Brothers conspicuously craft their 2010 updated adaptation of Charles Portis’ novel in a similarly progressive, oxymoronic vein: a traditional Western set during the twilight of the Old West. Between an opening scene that features an arrival by railway and an epilogue in which icons of the era are relegated to fodder for a traveling road show, there is a storyline about duty and honor driven not by men on horseback but a headstrong 14-year-old girl.

After her dad is gunned down by a drifter named Tom Chaney (Josh Brolin), Mattie Ross (newcomer Hailee Steinfeld) takes the train to Fort Smith, Ark. to tend to her father’s affairs. Endowed with a steely countenance and a rapid-fire parlance, Mattie identifies her father’s body and barters over funeral expenses in the same breath. In her matter-of-fact mission to see justice served, Mattie hires an irascible, drunk, and one-eyed federal marshal Rooster Cogburn (Jeff Bridges) to track down and capture Chaney. She has one strict condition: She must accompany him for the hunt.

Although the film is constructed like a conventional Western, the Coen Bros. pointedly eschew the romanticizing often applied in this genre. Money – not principle – is the primary motivation for Cogburn and LaBoeuf (Matt Damon), a preening, bounty-chasing Texas Ranger. The departed hold little value except to scavengers and bounty hunters.

“I don’t know him,” Cogburn sneers, realizing there’s no reward attached to cadaver he finds hanging from a tree. Elsewhere, he breaks a promise to give an adversary a Christian burial by saying, “Ground’s too hard…he should have died during the summer.”

With an eye-patch, guttural growl and withered physique, Bridges’ Cogburn resembles John Wayne’s resurrected remains more than the Duke himself. By the time of the film’s setting, Cogburn is already a dying breed – LaBoeuf has only derision for his tales of Confederate exploits, and neither man quite knows what to make of Mattie.

This is also one of the few Westerns that succeeds without a formidable and/or charismatic villain. When we finally meet the man who shot Frank Ross, he’s a scrawny nitwit situated on the bottom rung of even his own gang. Instead, True Grit focuses on three individuals who – as they traverse untamed terrain captured by Roger Deakins’ usual sumptuous lens – ascertain the true nature of each other’s character. The affinity Cogburn develops for Mattie is not born out of some paternal instinct, but rather his recognition and appreciation for her untainted determination. It is a trait Cogburn believed he’d lost long ago at the bottom of a whiskey bottle.

When he literally carries Mattie across field and plain in search of safety, he’s not just trying to save her but the soul of a bygone age. That spirit will live on, but Cogburn discovers – as do we – that this is truly no country for old men.

Neil Morris

*Originally published at http://www.indyweek.com/indyweek/walking-the-walk-in-stellar-true-grit/Content?oid=1894091

TRON: Legacy

I'm sorry, I thought I heard the space baby crying

Grade: B –

Director: Joseph Kosinski

Starring: Jeff Bridges, Garrett Hedlund, Olivia Wilde, Bruce Boxleitner, and Michael Sheen

MPAA Rating: PG

Running Time: 2 hour, 7 minutes

Tilt your head to the side, close one eye, and squint through those polarized spectacles, and you might just glimpse a mirage of deeper meaning in TRON: Legacy, the once unforeseen sequel to Disney’s 1982 sci-fi original. Gimcracks about the creation and evolution of life, religion, and God are encrypted throughout this executable extravaganza. The notion than an entire world can be condensed into terabytes on a jump drive is no less thought-provoking – or loopy – than the kicker to Men in Black in which galaxies are being thumped around a game of marbles.

Frankly, the more you try to think about the plot, the greater the chance of crashing your mental hard drive. Twenty-some years after computer programmer Kevin Flynn (Jeff Bridges) vanished without a trace, his son Sam (Garrett Hedlund) tracks a mysterious page back to his father’s old video arcade. A little Journey and a few keystrokes later, Sam finds himself uploaded onto the grid, where an aging Kevin has been usurped by his power-hungry avatar Clu (a digitized Bridges circa 1982), who is bent on attaining his creator’s goal of perfection, and world domination, by any means necessary.

A chase to derez baddies and access portals ensues, but dopey plotlines are not the aim here. TRON: Legacy is visual and aural masterwork, a marriage of eye-popping special effects and a vivacious, orchestral soundtrack from the French electro duo Daft Punk that combines classical and electronic elements – think Vangelis meets Moby. At its best, debut director Joseph Kosinski emulates Kevin Flynn’s aspirations by creating a bold new cinematic frontier.

Unfortunately, neither the storyline nor the performances keep up with the film’s sensorial mega-processor. Most of the younger actors, including Hedlund, are as lifeless as computer-generated automatons. On the other hand, Bridges morphs the elderly Kevin into a Lebowski-esque Zen-master spouting New Age bon mots. And, as the only one seeming to grasp the inanity of it all, the always-terrific Michael Sheen pops up as Castor, a flamboyant, alabaster-colored night club owner.

Unlike others films where 3D is an alternate or even favored viewing option, the only reason to ever see this one is in a 3D theater, preferably of the IMAX variety. Disney succeeds in creating an event film that triggers the primordial impulse that first drove us to movie houses. Once the bombast wears off, however, experiencing TRON: Legacy is rather like watching someone else play a video game. What you get is what you see.

Neil Morris

Crazy Heart

Mr. and Mrs. Oscar

Grade: B –

Director: Scott Cooper

Starring: Jeff Bridges, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Colin Ferrell, and Robert Duvall

MPAA Rating: R

Running Time: 1 hour, 52 minutes

“A recovering alcoholic country music singer/songwriter seeks to turn his life around through his relationship with a young woman and her son.”

Older, discerning filmgoers will recognize this synopsis of Tender Mercies, the 1983 Horton Foote-penned film that gave Robert Duvall his only Oscar. More than a quarter-century later, cinematic history is poised to repeat itself with Crazy Heart, a film with the same premise – and a supporting turn by Duvall, for Pete’s sake – that is probably going to give the just-nominated Jeff Bridges his first Academy Award.

Broadly, Crazy Heart rehashes the general theme of the down-and-out has-been looking for both personal and professional redemption. But its most glaring similarity with the likes of True Grit, Million Dollar Baby, The Wrestler, and, yes, Tender Mercies is their ideation of the Jungian archetype of the Wise Old Man, an authority/father figure and spiritual guide that manifests itself in many forms. According the Jung, the Old Man represents the masculine unconscious for women. Conversely, one facet of his ascendancy to Wise Old Man is an integration of the feminine components of the psyche.

Thus, the Wise Old Man is often accompanied in literature by a young girl, personifying the melding of Logos and Eros (Meaning and Life). With the lone exception of The Wrestler, where the two main characters were closer in age, such is the case in all the films mentioned above. (As an ironic aside, Bridges is slated to star in an upcoming Coen Brothers remake of True Grit.)

In Crazy Heart, middle-aged boozy crooner ‘Bad’ Blake (Bridges) suffers a solitary life of faded glory. Once the toast of Nashville, Bad now drives his beat-up pickup from one dustbowl to another, staying in cheap motels and grinding out gigs in seedy bars and bowling allies. Bad’s salvation begins once he launches a romantic relationship with the much-younger Jean Craddock (Maggie Gyllenhaal), an aspiring journalist and divorcée raising her 4-year-old son.

Besides its derivative storyline, this directorial debut from co-screenwriter Scott Cooper suffers from a lack of genuine chemistry between its lead actors. Beyond their distracting age difference (28 years), Gyllenhaal – long an indie darling who, admittedly, is also Oscar nominated for her performance here – has gradually devolved her once accomplished acting style into a collection of tics and mannerisms, suggesting a self-indulgence that demands roles and scenes adapt to her method instead of the other way around.

Conflict resolution comes easy, like speed bumps along the route to an altogether anticlimactic finish line. Bad’s sobriety is only an AA meeting montage away. His financial woes instantly vanish once he swallows his pride and starts composing songs again for former protégé, country music star Tommy Sweet (Colin Ferrell), who stands ready to help his erstwhile mentor. And when Bad visits a bar and loses track of Jean’s son, it only takes a few anxious moments for the boy to summarily turn-up; Jean’s ire at Bad’s irresponsibility is massively tempered by the fact that she lets an alcoholic scalawag babysit her son in the first place.

Still, even when Bad is at his baddest, he never fully loses his lovable Lebowski-esque charm. While Crazy Heart has as much originality as a country-standard cover band, Bridges’ terrific solo act is a showstopper. The film is transparently and unabashedly designed as a vehicle for his overdue Oscar, and, frankly, that’s a goal worth endorsing.

Neil Morris

*Originally published at www.indyweek.com

Iron Man

The latest in court-ordered GPS monitoring devices

Grade: B +
Director: Jon Favreau
Starring: Robert Downey, Jr., Jeff Bridges, Terrence Howard, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Shaun Toub
MPAA Rating: PG-13
Running Time: 2 hours, 6 minutes

Iron Man is the kettle corn counterpoint to the brooding psychoanalysis in Batman Begins, the Spider-Man trilogy, and even Superman Returns. It gamely balances character and plot development with the reasons most of us started going to movie houses in the first place: fun and funny. In so doing, slowly but surely improving director Jon Favreau flouts a string of insipid Marvel Comic-based films and a super-protagonist who is both unknown by the general public and venerated by a rabid core fan-base. He takes a Cold War relic, reconfigures it for current relevancy, and peppers it with a pitch-perfect cast, respect for the source material, and whiz-bang F/X. Iron Man is not a great movie, but frankly, it does not need to be.

For all those deserved hosannas, is real hero is Robert Downey, Jr., who in his world-weary forties seemed a dubious choice to play the role of an armored-plated, high-flying hulk. Favreau wisely recognized that today’s special effects could allow virtually anyone to don a CGI metal, rocket-propelled suit and save the world. Moreover, he realized that Downey was ideal to play wisecracking billionaire lothario Tony Stark, who parlays an M.I.T. education and a stake in his late daddy’s weapons manufacturing business into a worldwide conglomerate flooding the market with high-tech instruments of death and destruction.

While on a sales expedition in Afghanistan, Stark is injured, kidnapped, and tortured by a terrorist group called the Ten Rings. Seeing them flush with weaponry produced by his own company that was in turn being used against American soldiers, Stark experiences his own Road to Kabul epiphany. Under the guise of building a new missile for his captors, Stark and his fellow prisoner Dr. Yinsen (Shaun Toub) cobble together a crude suit-of-armor prototype that Stark uses to escape.

After returning home, Stark’s announcement that he is getting out of the weapons-building business sends his company’s stock price plummeting and puts him at odds with his mentor/partner, Obadiah Stane (Jeff Bridges). Meanwhile, Stark secretly proceeds with perfecting his original suit design and building, from the ground up, his titular superhero alter ego.

Downey’s past personal travails continue to camouflage the fact that he remains one of Hollywood most underrated actors. His quirks, ticks, and wiseacre persona create the perfect Tony Stark, a jet-setter who owns a private plane outfitted with pole-dancing stewardesses, is not yet bedeviled with the same split personality or mental anguish of a Bruce Wayne or Peter Parker. Stark is narcissist never really changes – only his priorities.

Nicely complimenting Downey is Terrence Howard Lt. Col. Jim Rhodes, Starks’ friend and military liaison, and Gwyneth Paltrow – in one of her breeziest performances in years – as the alliteratively perky Pepper Potts, Stark’s girl Friday. Against the backdrop of super-villains and terrorism, the three (particularly Downey and Paltrow) carry on a repartee that lends the characters depth without transforming this comic book adaptation into a cartoonish farce along the lines of the dreadful Fantastic Four series.

The final clash between Stark and Stane emits a perfunctory air, a la the father-son brawl that concluded Ang Lee’s The Incredible Hulk. However, the rest of Iron Man is smartly written, from Stark’s meticulous backstory to narrative markers scattered throughout that point to Favreau and Co.’s planned trilogy – e.g., the continued involvement of S.H.I.E.L.D.; Rhodes’ eventual stint as an alternate Iron Man and, later, the superhero War Machine. Emulating its comic book inspiration, Iron Man is a heady page-turner that, like the magnetized gadget surgically implanted in Stark’s chest, will get your summer movie-season heart palpitating.

Neil Morris