Downsizing

Honey, I Shrunk the Plot

Grade: D

Director: Alexander Payne

Starring: Matt Damon, Kristen Wiig, Christoph Waltz, Hong Chau, Jason Sudeikis, and Udo Kier

MPAA Rating: R

Running Time: 2 hr. 15 min.

Rarely have I witnessed the second half of a film spiral downward so quickly, decisively, and egregiously as Downsizing. The premise is promising: in the not-so-distant figure, Norwegian scientists develop a process called “cellular miniaturization,” in which organic matter can be shrunk to a fraction of its original size; in the case of humans, it’s down to about five inches. The breakthrough is fashioned as a cure for the ills of overpopulation, a 200-to-300-year transition that will end with humankind imposing less strain on finite natural resources.

The incentive for people to undergo the irreversible procedure is that because the expanding, but still-isolated downsized communities utilize less space and resources, modest means in the regular world are compounded in the downsized world. The middle class can suddenly find themselves millionaires living lives of luxury in a land where dollhouses are mansions and toy boats become yachts. That’s the lure for Paul Safranek (Matt Damon) and his wife Audrey (Kristen Wiig), who learn that their $150,000 in savings converts to $12.5 million in the downsized world. Paul decides to abandon his Middle America woes and move to a gated microcommunity called Leisure Land Estates.

There’s an initial satire of the extremes people will go for the sake of material possessions and upward mobility. Where Downsizing could, nay, should have headed are the cascading mores of a consequence-free culture, introduced by Paul living downstairs from a wealthy hedonist played by Christoph Waltz. There are hints that the downsizing technology is being wielded as a means of subjugation by various countries and factions, and a better film would have further explored how this oppression intrudes into the supposed utobia of the miniature world. Finally, fiscal reality suggests that as more humans downsize, an economic equilibrium would take root and any financial disparity between the large and small worlds will ultimately diminish, if not disappear.

So, in what direction does writer-director Alexander Payne (Sideways; Nebraska) take Downsizing? An ill-defined eco drama, which begins with Jeff meeting Ngoc Lan Tran (Hong Chau), a one-legged Vietnamese dissident exiled to the downsized world, where she works as a cleaning lady. Jeff feels bad because he broke Ngoc Lan’s prosthetic leg, and instead of fixing it or finding a new one, he tags along with Ngoc Lan’s workaday. A lot of aimless earnestness ensues, punctuated by some problematic humor revolving around Ngoc Lan’s broad broken English.

Eventually, Jeff and Ngoc Lan take a pilgrimage to Norway, where Payne doesn’t just squander his promising premise, but virtually forgets it. Nothing that occurs over the film’s final third realistically has anything to do with the consequences of miniaturizing. Instead, there’s a lot of really bad dialogue and really bad acting in service of a rudderless storyline. It’s both stunning and depressing to watch it all unravel, for a film with such big ideas become so suddenly small.

Jason Bourne

Now I remember ... I'm pre-Batman Bruce Wayne

Grade: B

Director: Paul Greengrass

Starring: Matt Damon, Tommy Lee Jones, Alicia Vikander, Vincent Cassel, Julia Stiles and  Riz Ahmed

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Running Time: 2 hr. 3 min.

After Matt Damon and director Paul Greengrass spent years denying interest in making another Jason Bourne movie, it’s worth pointing out that Jason Bourne is the first in the spy film series for which each has a producer credit. For all their critical accolades, Bourne is their go-to cash cow, much like Tom Cruise and his Mission: Impossible film franchise.

Jason Bourne is the fifth Bourne film and the fourth starring Damon in the titular role of the somehow still amnesiac ubër-agent. Those who enjoy the series’ pulsating vibe, particularly Greengrass’ two entries—The Bourne Supremacy and The Bourne Ultimatum, will find plenty of  throwback fun in revisiting this milieu after nine years off-screen. Anyone looking for new material will have to settle for a greatest hits set.

Living a nomadic life off the grid as a street fighter, Bourne is lured out of hiding by Nicky Parsons (Julia Stiles), the ubiquitous CIA field operative now turned freedom-of-information fighter. Parsons has unearthed secrets about a new black ops program code named Ironhand, along with, naturally, more details about Bourne’s true background.

Even though the sense of discovery regarding Bourne’s past was already teased out over three films, those trademark memory flashes start to flicker, careening Bourne into an opening act that cribs Bourne Supremacy’s intro. This time, Bourne wants to get to the bottom of the shadowy circumstances surrounding the death of his actual father. Do we find out in the next sequel that Bourne’s mother was named Martha?

The most taut part of Jason Bourne is the labyrinthian cat-and-mouse games of spy versus spy. Young, ambitious CIA analyst Heather Lee (Alicia Vikander) believes she can lure Bourne back into the fold. Skeptical CIA director Robert Dewey (Tommy Lee Jones) instead wants to Take Out Bourne™, aided by an agency assassin (Vincent Cassel) with his own axe to grind.

This sequel’s search for topicality lands in the post-Edward Snowden era, as Dewey is also trying to strongarm his way through the backdoor of a Facebook-like social media platform named Deep Dream. But the tech giant’s head, Aaron Kalloor (Riz Ahmed), has privacy and stockholder reservations, and he’s is threatening to expose Dewey nefarious role in the surveillance industrial complex.

It’s hard to decide which is shakier, Greengrass’ camera-in-a-blender or Vikander’s American accent. The elaborate action set pieces are capped by a punishing chase sequence through the Vegas Strip. But the bombast is also punctuated by visual grace notes—the bullet wounds in Bourne’s back call back to the 2002 original film; Bourne casually discards a ball cap to blend into a crowd; a spy recorder he lifts from a tech expo that doesn’t resurface until the denouement.

There’s a sense of self-parody afoot. Just as it wouldn’t be a James Bond film without girls and vodka martinis, it wouldn’t be Jason Bourne without the umteenth sight of CIA agents glaring at monitors while barking two-word orders. But while Greengrass and Damon try to adapt Bourne for current events, it’s high time to advance the Bourne character beyond the hunted spy still hunting for his true self. Jason Bourne knows his identity—it’s time for the Bourne movies to update theirs.

Interstellar

Coming up on Season 10 of True Detective...

Grade: B +

Director: Christopher Nolan

Starring: Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway, Michael Caine, Jessica Chastain, Casey Affleck, David Gyasi, Wes Bentley, Ellen Burstyn, Mackenzie Foy, Topher Grace, John Lithgow and Matt Damon

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Running Time: 2 hr. 49 min.

During the somewhat-distant-future in director Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar, mankind’s pioneering impulse has been purposefully supplanted by a socially engineered “generation of caretakers.” With food resources becoming scarce, all but the best and brightest grade school children are steered away from college and into agricultural careers. Militaries have been mostly disbanded. School textbooks have been revised to reflect the “truth” that the Apollo space program was a hoax designed to lure the Soviets into a financially ruinous space race. A skeletal NASA has been literally and figuratively forced underground.

In other words, Nolan redirects the conservative political leanings of his Dark Knight trilogy into a space saga centered around a dad, grandpa and two younguns living in corn-covered flyover country, decimated by blight into a neo-Dust Bowl. The film stops short in its explanation for the crop decay and increasingly contaminated air that will make Earth uninhabitable for humans in a matter of decades. A drive-by explanation from Dr. Tom Brand (Michael Caine), an aging scientist, references excessive nitrogen dioxide levels but sidesteps any mention of climate change or human causes. “Mankind was born on Earth. It was never meant to die here,” Brand conspicuously declares.

“We’ve forgotten who we are,” bemoans former NASA pilot-turned-farmer Joseph Cooper (Matthew McConaughey), swigging on a beer and Nolan’s script. “We used to look up at the sky and wonder at our place in the stars. Now we just look down and worry about our place in the dirt.”

Recruited by Brand, Cooper faces a Sophie’s choice whether to remain on Earth with his daughter Murph (played as a 10-year-old by Mackenkie Foy) and son Tom (Timothée Chalamet) and betray his altruistic principles, or rocket into space on a mission to save the human race but leave his children behind to possibly perish on a dying planet.

Ultimately, Cooper follows the film’s refrain, Dylan Thomas’ villanelle “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night,” and completes a quartet of spacefarers who include the knowingly named Amelia (Anne Hathaway), Brand’s daughter, along with a sarcastic, interactive articulated machine named TARS (voiced by Bill Irwin). Their destination is a wormhole near Saturn, opened by an unknown someone/thing, that leads to another galaxy and a trio of possible habitable worlds, each named for three astronauts sent into the breach years earlier as part of the also knowingly titled Lazarus scouting expedition.

Interstellar is densely plotted, even confounding at times, and canopied by a constellation of plot holes and contrivances. And that’s before it arrives at an inscrutable, pretentious final act that’s part M. Night Shyamalan, part sappy Steven Spielberg. There was an actual Plan B available to Cooper and Amelia—and the filmmakers—that would have stamped this saga with poignancy coupled with the bittersweet hope of Eden. Instead, a script grounded on the virtues of courage and sacrifice ultimately shirks from both.

That said, the same critiques of being plodding, pretentious, illogical and capped by a head-scratching climax (or shaggy God story) were hurled at 2001: A Space Odyssey nearly a half-century ago, one of the many films Nolan admits influenced Interstellar’s captivating visuals and structure. [And in truth, being riddled with plot holes is a regular occurrence with Christopher Nolan scripts.]

Like Stanley Kubrick’s space-set magnum opus, Interstellar is epic filmmaking that’s operatic in its grandeur, ambitions and sheer scope—seeing the IMAX rendering is a must, despite some muddled sound mixing that’s increasingly endemic to Nolan’s films. Set to Hans Zimmer’s engrossing, relentless and pipe organ-laden soundtrack, the film envelopes the audience for its nearly three-hour running time and transports them on a journey to the far reaches of the cosmos.

But unlike 2001, the film also traverses a labyrinth of human traits and frailties: love, friendship, betrayal, pragmatism, idealism and family. Particularly, the parent-child relationship is reflected by the funhouse mirror of relativity, so that while Amelia watches her father die from across the stars, Cooper sees Murph and Tom (played as adults by Jessica Chastain and Casey Affleck) age past him and grow their own families and lives.

Indeed, Nolan’s “caretakers” rejoinder may also be directed at the current generation of big-budget moviemakers, cogs in an assembly line of sequels-of-the-week and shoot ‘em ups. Interstellar is a big movie about big ideas—the intertwining of society, technology, the planet and humankind—that most studio bean counters would rather eschew since they don’t fit neatly inside a Happy Meal or video game.

The lineage of Interstellar is as old as D.W. Griffith and as recent as Spielberg. And while Thomas’ challenge to “rage against the dying of the light” refers to our resistance to extinction in the film, it’s also a clarion call to push the boundaries of an art form. The voyage might be bumpy and include some unfortunate detours, but it’s a helluva ride worth taking.

The Monuments Men

Does anybody know when Brad Pitt's

supposed to get here?

Grade: C +

Director: George Clooney

Starring: George Clooney, Matt Damon, Bill Murray, Cate Blanchett, John Goodman, Jean Dujardin, Hugh Bonneville and Bob Balaban

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Running Time: 1 hr. 58 min.

Originally slated for release in the heart of the December movie awards season, The Monuments Men was suddenly pushed into the February dump zone mere weeks before its scheduled opening. Considering the pedigree of its filmmakers and cast, the change was jarring and foreboding. The good news is that writer, director and star George Clooney’s latest vanity project is not the unadulterated disaster its release date portends. The bad news? The impetus for shifting that release date is patently clear.

Adapted by Clooney and longtime collaborator Grant Heslov from a book by Robert M. Edsel, the film tells the little-known true story of an Allied task force assigned to traverse the European theatre and save millions of pieces of art and other culturally significant items from the Nazis near the end of World War II, especially before their destruction on orders from Adolf Hitler.

Frank Stokes (Clooney), the leader of the squad, recruits a band of past-their-prime art experts. However, instead of an earnest, dramatic rendering of their mission and the motives of their adversaries, the breezy screenplay pairs its protagonists off in order to conjure subplots and kill screentime. So, John Goodman and Jean Dujardin play the ugly American and sophisticated Frenchman. Bill Murray and Bob Balaban carry on a dull Mutt & Jeff routine. And, George Clooney and Brit Hugh Bonneville are full of charm and charisma. Meanwhile, Matt Damon travels to Paris to woo information out of a wary former museum curator, played by Cate Blanchett.

Yes, it’s Ocean’s WWII, except that amid the wise-cracking homage to the homespun Hollywood war pictures of yesteryear, there are deaths and other deadly serious subject matter at hand that lend the film a tonal inconsistency. Clooney and Damon are charming enough, but Murray is virtually neutered. Meanwhile, Blanchett’s role is fatally uneven—one moment she’s aiding the French resistance, the next she’s inexplicably jailed for being a Nazi collaborator; she goes to tremendous lengths (including the offscreen death of her brother) to keep artwork from being removed by the Nazis, yet she tarries when the Americans ask for her help in retrieving it (presumably to chew up even more screentime).

Indeed, there are extended sequences that exist for seemingly no reason other than eating up the nearly two hour running time—other examples include Murray and Balaban’s nocturnal encounter with a young German soldier, and the squad’s slaphappy response after Damon’s character accidently stands on a landmine.

Ultimately, the actual race to retrieve the works of Rembrandt, Rubens and Rodin before the Nazis can torch them or the Ruskies can pilfer for themselves occupies the final act of the film. By then, The Monuments Men has mustered all the heft of a History Channel docudrama. That’s not all bad, especially if it awakens viewers young and old to the importance of classical art. But, a stroll through a gallery might accomplish the same thing and be twice as exciting.

Elysium

Oh, Mad 'Max' ... I get it.

Grade: C +

Director: Neill Blomkamp

Starring: Matt Damon, Jodie Foster, Sharlto Copley, Alice Braga, Diego Luna, Wagner Moura and William Fichtner

MPAA Rating: R

Running Time: 1 hr. 49 min.

At the risk of recycling a well-worn idiom, I liked Elysium … when it was called District 9. Writer-director Neill Blomkamp follows-up his 2009 Oscar-nominated sensation with another science-fiction fable revolving around the rank mistreatment of society’s downtrodden by the privileged elite, and a genetically altered Joe who is able to breach that divide—battling a jackbooted enforcer along the way—in order to save his kinsmen. Even Sharlto Copley—who played the human-turned-prawn in District 9—is back, although this time as the murderous, paramilitary baddie.

Also back is Jodie Foster, although any memory of her as a great actress is fading fast. Foster—channeling the world’s worst Vanessa Redgrave impersonation—plays Secretary Delacourt, head of defense for the titular Stanford torus space station that serves as home for the rich and privileged few in the year 2154. Those aboard the lush, climate-controlled utopia also enjoy access to private medical machines that can cure seemingly any ailment. It’s a world away from the Third World slum that Earth has become, an impoverished, overpopulated hellscape with rampant disease, pervasive crime and fleeting liberties. Refugee ships that try to escape Earth for Elysium are liable to be destroyed, and any aliens who get through are quickly deported.

After Los Angeles working stiff Max de Costa (Matt Damon) absorbs a lethal dose of radiation during a workplace accident, he agrees to get outfitted with a neurologic exoskeleton by a tech-savvy freedom fighter (Wagner Moura). It turns Max into a robo-rebel who manages to download the key to Elysium’s mainframe.

Immigration, access to affordable health care and the widening disparity between rich and poor are important, hot-button issues. But the way Elysium incorporates them smacks of heavy-handed hokum. Seriously, you’re telling me Elysium’s citizens won’t spare even a couple of med pods for the hoi polloi? Or that a poor populace that can otherwise develop and install a neurological suit of armor and transfer encrypted computer code from one person’s brain to another can’t figure out how to construct one cure-all gizmo?

The pacing runs both frenetic and pat, the sort of phony confusion where all the plot pieces just happen to fit nicely together. Along the way, we know surprisingly little about Max—despite some nice work by Damon—and even less about Delacourt. Moreover, Blomkamp substitutes his meticulous development of time and place used in District 9 with a few opening expository title cards this time around.

Elysium is agitprop masquerading as a loud, explosion-filled blockbuster—I suspect newcomer Ryan Amon composed his score while listening to Hans Zimmer’s Man of Steel soundtrack on repeat play. But even if you agree with the messaging, the way it's delivered still matters, no matter the century.

Promised Land

The latest in State Fair chic

Grade: D +
Director: Gus Van Sant
Starring: Matt Damon, Frances McDormand, John Krasinski, Hal Holbrook and Rosemary DeWitt
MPAA Rating: R
Running Time: 1 hr. 50 min.

The makers of Promised Land want you to hate fracking, and they aren’t going to let little things like a script, acting or the filmmaking acumen of Gus Van Sant (taking the day off) get in the way. Steve (Matt Damon) and Sue (Frances McDormand) are a couple of natural gas sales people sent by their big, bad corporate minders to buy up the mineral rights in a small backwoods town named McKinley (filming took place in rural Pennsylvania), populated by sort of prideful but vulnerable hicks Hollywood imagines are ripe for such plucking.

Space does not afford a discussion about the pros and cons of hydraulic fracturing (I rather side with the filmmakers). But it’s hard to achieve high-minded aims using this single-minded, half-baked screenplay penned by Damon (who once co-wrote something called Good Will Hunting) and John Krasinski (not a typo). We’re told Steve and Sue are savvy, flannel-clad operators, but they’re apparently unprepared for the entirely predictable obstuctions of a meddlesome environmentalist (Krasinski) and a cantankerous fogey (Hal Holbrook). And despite the fact they a seemingly vast majority of property owners sign away the family farm or the land below the singlewide, it all somehow comes down to the Big Vote™ by townsfolk in a high school gym who will decide, well, I dunno. Whether fracking is bad? Whether property owners have the right to control their own land? Why Steve particularly cares what the resident hot schoolteacher (Rosemary DeWitt) thinks about him? Why Matt Damon has started making dreary, uninteresting movies?

*Originally published at Indyweek.com

The Bourne Legacy

"Why didn't I get to play The Hulk in The Avengers...Answer me!"

Grade: B –
Director: Tony Gilroy
Starring: Jeremy Renner, Rachel Weisz, Edward Norton, and Stacy Keach
MPAA Rating: PG-13
Running Time: 2 hr. 15 min.

A rogue secret agent shoving a tracking device down a wolf’s gullet to mislead a missile-armed predator drone is a scene that sounds awesome even on paper. Unfortunately, there’s not enough of those adrenaline rushes in The Bourne Legacy, the fourth installment in the movie spy series.

Relentless early cross-cutting reveals that events in this sequel take place concurrent with those in the last Bourne film. With Jason Bourne on the loose and running amok (Matt Damon doesn’t appear, but his photograph does several times, curiously), the CIA decides to terminate other black ops programs, including their chemically-enhanced field agents. When Aaron Cross (Jeremy Renner) escapes a drone attack, he circles the globe looking for Dr. Marta Shearing (Rachel Weisz), a geneticist with access to the chems and viral cultures needed to keep Cross super fit and focused.

Whereas the original Bourne trilogy was a modern-day Frankenstein story—a mind-altered monster searching for a creator now trying to destroy his creation—this reprise is about a junkie jonesing for his pills and a vial of liquid detox. Little else really happens aside from Cross and Shearing dodging repeated efforts to, you guessed it, eliminate them.

Still, consider me a sucker for jut-jawed bureaucrats—played here by Edward Norton, Stacy Keach, Dennis Boutsikaris, Scott Glenn and others—barking urgently to “cut off all loose ends” and “minimize the damage.” Tony Gilroy (Michael Clayton), who adapted the screenplays for the preceding three Bourne films, assumes the series’ directorial reigns from Paul Greengrass. The consequence is an increased predilection for dialogue and labyrinthine plot lines and less for kinetic action. The film has its breathless moments: a workplace shooting massacre is cruelly captivating, while a climactic car-and-motorcycle chase through the streets of Manila is exciting if haphazardly shot. And while Renner doesn’t possess Damon’s magnetism, he grittily fills his predecessor’s shoes.

As a standalone, The Bourne Legacy is an engaging spy thriller. As the inheritor of the Bourne mantle, however, it’s merely an adequate continuum…until and if Damon and Greengrass decide to jump back in.

Neil Morris

The Adjustment Bureau

You're not leaving this room until you sign onto "The Bourne Legacy"

Grade: B

Director: George Nolfi

Starring: Matt Damon, Emily Blunt, Anthony Mackie, John Slatterly, and Terence Stamp

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Running Time: 1 hr. 46 min.

The Adjustment Bureau ultimately isn’t a Matrix-esque sci-fi thriller or some metaphysical foray into the eternal questions of free will and fate.

Sure, there are heady issues bandied about in this loose adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s 1954 short story, “Adjustment Team,” in which an unseen, omnipotent, and conspicuously ecumenical “Chairman” dispatches his band of “adjusters” to steer the course of human events.

Clad in Mad Men attire, these angels of fate do not control human thoughts or actions – although they are able to wipe a person’s memory – but can influence external events in order to obtain a predetermined outcome. For example, they cannot force someone crash their car into another, but they can alter a traffic control signal at the moment your vehicle is entering an intersection.

Instead, writer-director George Nolfi constructs a giant hamster maze designed to test the lengths two crazy kids will go to find true love. David Norris (Matt Damon) is a charismatic Congressman seemingly destined for political stardom. In the midst of an unexpected election night defeat, David has a random but memorable encounter with Elise (Emily Blunt), a beguiling beauty and aspiring dancer.

It turns out the Chairman and his bureau – including Harry (Anthony Mackie) and Richardson (John Slatterly) – has future plans for David and they do not include Elise. What follows is a cat-and-mouse game between David’s compulsion to be with Elise and the efforts by higher authority to keep them apart.

Plot holes abound, even discounting the script’s science-fiction context. No reasonable explanation is given for why this league of extrasensory gentlemen can perceive human emotions but not thoughts, or how they know where all of mankind is and will be at all times but somehow keep losing track of David and Elise whenever they enter each other’s orbit.

That said, there’s a witty, charming Ernst Lubitsch touch applied to much of The Adjustment Bureau – memories of Heaven Can Wait spring to mind. It nicely partners with the palpable chemistry between Damon and Blunt, two able, handsome actors who entice us into caring about their characters.

Alas, Nolfi – and perhaps studio “adjusters” – don’t trust the strength of their material. Matters take a revealing, but dark turn when a taciturn, troubleshooting adjuster named Thompson (Terence Stamp) arrives on the scene. Time and again the filmmakers try to amp up the script with chase sequences - filmed on location in Manhattan – involving cars, doorway portals, and a stairway to nowhere except a finale that feels suspiciously like the product of test-audience pandering. The mixing of styles and genres is Nolfi’s stated intent, but his execution creates tonal inconsistencies that keep the viewer constantly off-kilter.

Fortunately, it’s the rapport between Damon – ever the likeable Everyman – and Blunt that determines Adjustment Bureau’s fate. In particular, this is Blunt’s best performance since her early work in My Summer of Love and, later, The Devil Wears Prada. Here, she is mischievous, vulnerable, and always fetching. And, scenes of Elise’s modern dance routines made me envision another alternate reality: one where Blunt was cast as the Black Swan.

Neil Morris

*Originally published at http://goo.gl/unU3H

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

Green Zone

Aim for the cameraman!

Grade: C

Director: Paul Greengrass

Starring: Matt Damon, Greg Kinnear, Brendan Gleeson, and Amy Ryan

MPAA Rating: R

Running Time: 1 hour, 55 minutes

Everything in Green Zone is punctuated with exclamation points. The Iraq War is LOUD! The Middle East is DANGEROUS! Helicopters, jeeps, and sprinting soldiers move FAST! No one, not even your friends and allies, can be TRUSTED! It’s not so much an adrenaline-rush as a steroid-transfusion.

Unfortunately, if you want in-depth analysis of the film’s gravamen—the quixotic hunt for weapons of mass destruction—the best you will get is Army warrant officer Roy Miller (Matt Damon) repeatedly screaming variations on “Where are the WMDs!” or “Tell me about the WMDs!”

Although a good movie can and should be made that investigates the political misinformation used to justify the war in Iraq, Green Zone, which was shot more than two years ago, feels like a dated political drama grounded in theatrics and buzzwords. The film’s in-your-face sense of urgency now seems strangely passé—it may as well be about feverously hunting for leprechauns or trying to uncover Iraq’s stockpiles of pixie dust.

Paul Greengrass, director of the latter two Bourne movies, sets the action in the spring of 2003, between the end of the initial invasion phase of the war and the formal establishment of the Coalition Provisional Authority. What could have been a sweeping indictment of the way the United States bungled the formative stages Operation Iraqi Freedom is instead a reductive, fictionalized potboiler regarding Miller’s one-man mission to ferret out the truth about the covert, purportedly reliable intelligence about Iraq’s weapons program being spoon-fed to the whole world.

Along his road to going rogue, Miller encounters of host of half-written ciphers, each trying to extract information from him to further their own aims—at one point, Miller’s backpack was weighted down more by business cards than MREs. Clark Poundstone (Greg Kinnear) is a Paul Bremer-esque Pentagon hack carrying the water for his neocon minders. Martin Brown (Brendan Gleeson, wearing a five-day growth and constipated scowl) is the CIA bureau chief who calls bullshit on the supposedly sound intelligence regarding the presence of WMDs. And, Lawrie Dayne (Amy Ryan) is a Wall Street Journal reporter—and Judith Miller doppelganger—who, having helped Poundstone propound his warmongering propaganda, is now suspicious of him and his clandestine informant who goes by the code name “Magellan."

In Greengrass’ brilliant, affecting United 93, the director enlarged a single, incendiary incident into a broader canvas to create a taut, authentic and comprehensive portrait of the Sept. 11 attack. By contrast, screenwriter Brian Helgeland (still running off the fumes of L.A. Confidential) distills the disreputable underpinning for the war and all its complexities into a flurried chase to track down one Saddam general or commandeer one little black book.

Green Zone is credited as having been inspired by Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq’s Green Zone, the 2006 book by Washington Post war correspondent Rajiv Chandrasekaran. However, in place of the novel’s sardonic juxtaposition between the gilded, Oz-like bubble encasing the Green Zone and the social and ethnic tumult brewing outside its gilded gates, Greengrass fashions an action-thriller in which sound, fury and his camera-in-a-blender camouflage the narrative shortcomings of a revisionist fantasy in which one man uncovers and exposes the lies that led us to war. Instead, in terms of tone and relevance, Green Zone needed more Dr. Strangelove and less Jason Bourne.

Neil Morris

*Orginally published at www.indyweek.com