The Impossible

Grade: C +
Director: Juan Antonio Bayona
Starring: Naomi Watts, Ewan McGregor and Tom Holland
MPAA Rating: PG-13
Running Time: 1 hr. 54 min.

Is it a compliment to label a film about a natural disaster that claimed the lives of an estimated quarter million people “a technological achievement?” The Impossible recounts the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami from the perspective of a real-life vacationing Spanish family caught in its deadly torrent, although recast here (for little legitimate reason) as an English family spending Christmas at a luxury resort in Thailand. The film opens with Henry (Ewan McGregor) and his wife Maria (Naomi Watts) bickering over who armed the security system before they left home. That will seem utterly inconsequential two days later when a Boxing Day by the pool turns tragic once the first 100-foot wave hits, sundering the couple and their three boys, including the eldest, Lucas (Tom Holland).

Spanish director Juan Antonio Bayona (The Orphanage) accomplishes the nearly impossible task of chronicling the incalculable mayhem of this unimaginable event. Digital effects capture the power of waves strong enough to topple trees and sweep away cars, and the helplessness of being pulled underwater and tossed around like a rag doll. Set design recreates destruction so utterly vast that survivors lose any bearing of where they are or where to go. Thrust together by the calamitous current, Maria (hey, at least her name is still Spanish) and Lucas spend the night sleeping in a tree to avoid the danger of a secondary waves.

Yet, notwithstanding a leg gash Mara suffers that proves nearly fatal due to harried medical care, the bulk of The Impossible becomes a human scavenger hunt led on two fronts by Henry and Lucas. Separately, they search for the rest of their clan through razed resorts full of white tourists, emergency shelters full of white tourists and hospitals full of white tourists. You hardly know whether any brown-skinned natives even got their feet wet, except to wade in and rescue the white, well, you get the idea.

The cast is uniformly terrific—especially Watts, who again reminds us of her superlative acting range no matter the script or subject-matter. But while there’s nothing wrong with a story of perseverance in the face of disaster capped by a happy ending, it becomes myopic if told to the virtual exclusion of the surrounding carnage. It’d be like making a movie about surviving 9/11 without mentioning that lots of people died.

*Originally published at Indyweek.com

Fair Game

Rove says Spicoli is "fair game"

Grade: B

Director: Doug Liman

Starring: Naomi Watts and Sean Penn

Running Time: 1 hour, 48 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG-13

I have no idea whether the outing of CIA operative Valerie Plame led to either the deaths of Iraqi nuclear scientists seeking asylum in the U.S. or them bringing their talents to the highest terrorist state bidder. However, partisan leanings notwithstanding, discerning absolute truth is not the proper yardstick by which to judge Fair Game, which dramatizes the run-up and aftermath to “Plamegate.”

Instead, judge the film for what it is: a part-procedural, part-polemic that shines a personal light on a very public affair. Between the thriller tropes that open the film and the sermonizing that ends it, director Doug Liman (The Bourne Identity and Mr. and Mrs. Smith, ironically) ably contextualizes the Plame episode’s place amid the Bush administration’s efforts to conjure a justification for Iraq war. Moreover, the film’s strongest suit is its portrait of an already schizophrenic marriage – dinner parties at home one night, secret flights to Kuala Lumpur the next – put under the increased strain of worldly events and the politics of personal destruction.

Jez and John-Henry Butterworth’s script, inspired by a pair of unsurprisingly self-serving books written by Plame and Wilson, casts Plame as a virtual Double-O agent, hop-scotching the globe in search of terrorists. Meanwhile, Wilson, a former U.N. ambassador during the Clinton years, wiles away his days hustling the occasional advisory odd-job when not branding dinner guests who dare express the slightest bit of post-Sept. 11 apprehension as racists.

What happens next is well-chronicled: the CIA (perhaps upon Plame’s suggestion, perhaps not) sends Wilson on a fact-finding trip to Niger to investigate rumors the African nation sold tons of yellow-cake uranium to Iraq. Despite Wilson’s debunking, the allegation finds its way in to the president’s State of the Union address and is used as a justification for the impending war. Wilson penned a 2003 op-ed in the New York Times publicizing his contrary findings, whereupon the White House – represented here by Vice-President Chief of Staff Scooter Libby (David Andrews) and Karl Rove (Adam LeFevre) – embarks on a smear campaign against Wilson that reveals Plame as a covert CIA operative and effectively kills her career.

One problem with the latter half of Fair Game is that it strays so little from the public record, lacking much-needed nuance in its depiction of post-outing events. Indeed, several days after having seen the film, I am struck by how little of the film still lingers with me. Wilson and Plame’s carefully crafted backstory transitions into a series of dramatized media appearances and lecture tours. Wilson – with a lion’s mane and a roar to match – almost manically traverses the countryside finally armed a cause he so desperately desired. For her part, Plame mourns the loss of her professional livelihood by tackling the travails of hands-on motherhood.

Despite its minor flaws, Fair Game remains both intriguing and eye-opening, thanks largely to a uniformly solid cast that smoothes over some of the script’s rougher patches. Before Penn gets to dust off his Willie Stark finger-wag for some late-film speechifying, he manages to couch Wilson as both heroic and flawed – after all, a newspaper article he wrote without his CIA-employed wife’s sanction about his national security is what triggered the events that led to Plame’s eventual outing.

However, the unquestionable headliner is a pitch-perfect performance from the ever-reliable, still-underappreciated Watts. She imbues Plame with both emotional vulnerability and steely resolve without a bevy of award-baiting scenes.

Some are rushing to brand Fair Game as this generation’s All the President’s Men. A more apt comparison, both stylistically and thematically, would be Michael Witterbottom’s The Road to Guantanamo and A Mighty Heart, both tales of individual tragedy that play out against the backdrop of the so-called “war of terror.” In all three films, the personal outlasts the preaching.

Neil Morris

Funny Games

Mr. Orange, meet...well, Mr. White

Grade: B +
Director: Michael Haneke
Starring: Naomi Watts, Tim Roth, Michael Pitt, and Brady Corbet
MPAA Rating: R
Running Time: 1 hour, 47 minutes

That the so-called “American remake” of Austrian director Michael Haneke’s 1997 film Funny Games – which Haneke directs and filmed in the U.S. – is not only a mere shot-for-shot reproduction of its predecessor but also stars two actors born in England (Naomi Watts and Tim Roth) comes off like an elaborate swipe at the common practice of reconfiguring original works to make them more palatable for American ingestion.

However, there is little palatable about watching two young sociopaths hold a bourgeoisie family hostage inside their lakeside, upstate New York vacation home and torture them with sadistic glee. And that is just how Haneke intends it. Funny Games is a singularly disquieting experience, as cold and calculating in its execution as the two antagonists. It is also gripping from the moment white-clad/bred Paul (Michael Pitt) and Peter (Brady Corbet) first appear on the doorstep of Ann (Watts), George (Roth), and their young moppet Georgie (Devon Gearhart) asking to borrow eggs. After disabling George, the two tormentors engage in a prolonged spectacle of physical and psychological cruelty, all of its glazed with an irksome, spurious patina of courteousness.

The loathsome young men’s derivation is purposefully camouflaged: They refer to each other by alternating names (Tom and Jerry; Beavis and Butthead, etc.) and concoct false backstories, including sexual abuse at the hands of their parents and drug-usage, that sound well-rehearsed for some future jury. In truth, their erudition betrays an upper-middle-class background that makes them all the more alarming. They emanate from within the same carefully insulated redoubt Ann, George, and their well-heeled neighbors have erected for themselves, a micro-community isolated from populated areas and shielded behind iron gates, chain-linked fencing and elaborate surveillance systems.

Haneke turns these accoutrements of security on their head, transforming them into a kind of prison in which the barbarians are free to pillage at will, similar to the techno-terror seen in Haneke’s last film, Caché. Those girded gates become a cage, and so dependant are Ann and George – and we, posits Haneke – on the salve of technology that, in one excruciatingly extended sequence, they squander precious minutes of potential escape time trying to revive a dead cell phone to call 911 instead of promptly dispatching Ann to run for help.

At the same time, Haneke’s primary intent is crafting a Brechtian mind-game that defies, even mocks genre rules for the sake of some meta-function. All the brutal bloodshed – and in one scene, forced nudity – takes place off-camera, accompanied only by sound effects, their aftermath, and our imagination. The lone instance of visible violence – when Ann guns down one of the attackers – is literally rewound by Paul via remote control in order to alter the outcome, positioning the audience to cheer the one onscreen slaughter and then revile its erasure.

When Ann asks the intruders why they don’t just get it over with and kill her family, Peter reminds her that she “shouldn’t forget the importance of entertainment.” More significant, on several occasions Paul breaks the fourth wall and addresses the audience directly, at one point scoffing at whose side we are undoubtedly taking and later justifying his prolonged acts of agony for the sake of offering us “a real ending with plausible plot development.”

Haneke has referred to the film as a parody of the thriller genre – echoes of A Clockwork Orange, Hitchcock’s Rope, and countless other films abound – in keeping with the director’s stated desire to offer “polemical statements against the American 'barrel down' cinema and its dis-empowerment of the spectator.” Haneke reduces the role the audience to that of semi-culpable voyeur then sticks his thump through the peephole. In the end, it becomes clear that we, not necessarily this fictional family, are being toyed with and tormented. At once both brilliant and nihilistic, the real paradox is that while Funny Games demands a second-viewing, you might not want to give it one.

Neil Morris