White Boy Rick

Grade: C + Director: Yann Demange

Starring: Richie Merritt, Matthew McConaughey, Bel Powley, Jonathan Majors, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Brian Tyree Henry, Rory Cochrane, Bruce Dern, and Piper Laurie

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Running Time: 1 hr. 56 min.

White Boy Rick isn’t just the title of a film about a real-life drug dealer. The problem is that it’s also the sum total of the character depth plumbed from Richard Wershe Jr., a white teenager growing up on the mean streets of 1980s Detroit who becomes embroiled in the criminal underworld and an oppressive, duplicitous justice system. It’s a common tragedy for minorities, and Wershe’s singularity— that he eventually becomes the longest-serving nonviolent juvenile offender in Michigan history—is a fact learned only during the film’s postscript. Everything preceding that is a string of promising plot points that aren’t fully or effectively connected.

Rick (Richie Merritt) lives with his strung-out sister (Bel Powley) and schivy father (Matthew McConaughey, the film’s unquestioned bright spot). When Rick becomes an apprentice to his dad’s gun-running enterprise, it puts Rick in the same oribt as a dangerous drug lord, Johnny (Jonathan Majors). Rick ingratiates himself with Johnny’s crew for reasons that aren’t fully fleshed out, and in turn Johnny integrates Rick into their operations, which also involves the cover of Detroit political elites. That puts Rick on the radar of FBI agents (Jennifer Jason Leigh and Rory Cochrane) looking for a big score, who ignore the illicit activities of Rick and his dad in exchange for information on Johnny and bigger fish.

It’s a commonplace movie story made more mundane by Yann Demange’s by-the-numbers direction and Merritt’s bland portrayal, a performance that doesn’t elicit excitement, anger, or sympathy. The concern and care Rick expresses for his addict sister is touching, but otherwise he sleepwalks through the highs and lows of his checkered existence. It falls to McConaughey to repeatedly infuse pathos into this Scarface simulacrum, a burden so daunting you can practically see the flop sweat. When a film’s emotional heartbeat is its epilogue, perhaps it’s worth fast-forwarding through the rest.

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 Wolf of Wall Street

Flair Jordan

Grade: A–

Director: Martin Scorses

Starring: Leonardo DiCapiro, Jonah Hill, Margot Robbie, Matthew McConaughey, Kyle Chandler, Rob Reiner, Jon Favreau and Jean Dujardin

MPAA Rating: R

Running Time: 3 hr.

After a career spent exploring the mean streets of his beloved New York City, Martin Scorsese finally trains his lense on its most corrupt, nefarious byway: Wall Street. And whether motivated by guilt, revelation or inspiration, Scorsese amply compensates for previous oversights with The Wolf of Wall Street, a three-hour Grand Guignol of white-collar decadence.

In the memoir of stock swindler Jordan Belfort (Leonardo DiCapiro), Scorsese finds his gateway into the feral financial markets of the 1980s and 90s that ushered in the likes of Belfort and his outlaw brokerage firm, Stratton Oakmont. By day, Belfort and his disciplines peddle junk stocks onto unwitting marks. After hours, their trading floor becomes a Caligulan debach, where brokers blow off steam using profanity, prostitutes, alcohol, marching bands and dwarf-tossing. Testosterone flows freely, and hookers are ranked in descending order of quality as “blue chip,” “Nasdaq,” and “pink sheets.” And, oh, the drugs. Belfort’s likes his ludes and cocaine, but his hallucinogenic holy grail is the Lemmon 714, whose discovery features in (quite arguably) the film’s most maddcap sequence involving Belfort, his skeevy friend Donnie (Jonah Hill), a Ferrari, and juxtaposing Popeye's spinach with inhaling a vial of blow.

The ungainly core of The Wolf of Wall Street isn’t an exhaustive exposé of our bacchanalian securities market or even an engrossing biopic. This is Scorsese’s raised middle finger to the orgy of excess endemic to a privileged class that flouted while Rome nearly burned. But that protruding digit is also directed somewhere else.

The Wolf of Wall Street is the imperfect but audacious product of a seemingly younger, feistier director … or a cinematic capo di tutti capi looking to reclaim his turf. American Hustle, another Greed Decade favorite of this holiday season, has been called an homage to the 71-year-old Scorsese. But if that film is Scorsese redux, The Wolf of Wall Street is Scorsese 2.0.

*Originally published at Indyweek.com

Tropic Thunder

They say this cat Downey is one bad mother...
SHUT YOUR MOUTH!

Grade: B

Director: Ben Stiller

Starring: Ben Stiller, Robert Downey, Jr., Jack Black, Nick Nolte, Brandon T. Jackson, Jay Baruchel, Danny McBride, Steve Coogan, Matthew McConaughey, and Tom Cruise

MPAA Rating: R

Running Time: 1 hour, 47 minutes

It’s official – I worship at the altar of Robert Downey, Jr. The question of whether Downey is a top-flight actor was definitely answered way back in 1992 after his thus-far lone Academy Award-nominated turn in Chaplin. The years since have been a well-documented roller coaster of professional triumphs and personal travails that have both sharpened his acting skills and lent a hardscrabble edge to his aura.

Perhaps it is that professional street-cred, or the cache he earned after elevating Iron Man into one of the year’s most unexpected blockbusters, that gives Downey the leeway to tackle a part like Kirk Lazarus in Tropic Thunder. (Set aside the obvious fact that the character’s surname is itself a comment on Downey’s rise from the Hollywood – and nearly literal – dead). One fact is indisputable: a minute number of actors would have the guts to accept such a risky role, and even fewer could get away with doing so without incurring public scorn and/or falling flat on their blackface.

Downey’s Lazarus is a five-time Oscar-winning Australian known for totally immersing himself into character – a less-than thinly veiled parody of Russell Crowe, or, nationality aside, the Method-obsessed Downey himself. To play a black soldier in the eponymous Vietnam War movie, Lazarus undergoes a skin pigmentation procedure and adopts an accent falling somewhere between Fred Williamson and Redd Foxx. Sure, Lazarus is a riff on the practice of movie actors’ plundering roles that cross racial, gender, age, and handicapped lines for the sake of critical acclaim and “craft.” Moreover, as a self-absorbed aesthete wrapped inside a Hollywood blaxploitation archetype, he is a raw, razor-sharp satire of the cinema’s traditionally uneasy, even patronizing relationship with reality. A part that could have gone so horribly wrong becomes – in Downey’s talented, transformative hands – epically hilarious and almost transcendent. Rarely has such an average film demanded repeat viewings thanks to a single performance.

The rest of Tropic Thunder is a decidedly mixed-bag, less a whole than the sum of its parts. Lazarus is one of several prima donna actors shooting a big-budget war movie, including an aging action star Tugg Speedman (Ben Stiller, pulling double-duty as director), rotund, heroin-addled comedian Jeff Portnoy (Jack Black), and a hip-hop entertainer with the handle Alpa Chino (Brandon T. Jackson). When the cast is stranded in the jungles of Southeast Asia, they inadvertently stumble across the real danger of a Thai drug cartel. Yet, as a consequence of their privileged insularity, the actors believe they are participating in a form of verite filmmaking and endeavor to play their parts.

The inside-baseball references come fast and furious, including virtually every Vietnam War movie ever made. In one of three faux-trailers that “precede” the film, the flatulent Portnoy stars in a Klumps-style franchise called “The Fatties.” Less obvious, but just as incendiary, is a fleeting subplot involving Chino and the ambiguous sexuality that many rap stars camouflage behind a façade of overheated machismo.

Uneven satire and Downey’s tour de force notwithstanding, the film’s worth is judged exclusively on a cameo-by-cameo basis. Many are wasted – Bill Hader and Steve Coogan – while others are simply underutilized – Danny McBride as a pyrotechnician and Nick Nolte as a grizzled Viet vet from whose novel the titular movie is being adapted. The two true standouts are also two surprises. Matthew McConaughey has limited range, but he was born to play a Hollywood agent. And, Tom Cruise’s extended turn as a paunchy, balding film mogul is the worst-kept surprise of the film; his foul-mouthed, booty-shaking routine may well inject some much-needed cool back into his career. His performance would walk away with any other film. As it is, Cruise’s presence – however amusing and audacious it is for a while – only magnifies the fact that he is among the plethora of actors who could never pull off a role like Kirk Lazarus.

Indeed, the overheated, over-the-top performances carry the comedy, but they also drown out the satirical cleverness.

At times, Tropic Thunder threatens to transform into the big-budget action movie it seeks to lampoon. But, Downey always comes back to save the film, spitting out antiquated cultural clichés in equal measure with Hollywood bons mots. When Tugg bemoans the abject failure of his misbegotten attempt at a dramatic star turn in a film named “Simple Jack” – in which Tugg plays a mentally challenged man-child – Lazarus cites real-life examples to buttress his simple, sadly true diagnosis: “Never go full retard.”

The obvious irony is that Downey ends up earning and deserving critical acclaim for a role that lambastes the very fondness for heaping awards upon roles such as his. Like Lazarus, he is “just a dude playing a dude disguised as another dude.” In my estimation, Downey’s just one bad dude.

Neil Morris