Warrior

A Street Kid Named Desire

Grade: A -

Director: Gavin O’Connor

Starring: Tom Hardy, Joel Edgerton, Nick Nolte and Jennifer Morrison

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Running Time: 2 hr. 19 min.

Whether because of its generic title, the stale tropes of the sports drama genre or a seemingly barefaced effort to tap the rabid legion of mixed martial arts fans, I was totally unprepared for the quality and gritty emotional depth of Warrior. In truth, the film’s MMA tableau is incidental – the film could just as easily be about boxing, tennis or even chess. Its real lessons about betrayal, familial strife and America’s widening stratification are universal and timeless.

The Shakespearean story revolves around the fractured Conlon clan, a Pittsburgh family ripped apart years ago by its alcoholic patriarch, Paddy (Nick Nolte). The details behind why Paddy’s dying wife and estranged son Tom (Tom Hardy) left town, Tom and his older brother Brendan (Joel Edgerton) don’t speak or Brendan doesn’t even let Paddy see his grandchildren remain largely unexplained. But, as with Blue Valentine, the consequences are achingly apparent even if the reasons for them are not.

On the eve of Paddy’s 1,000th day of newfound sobriety, Tom, a former amateur wrestling champion and U.S. Marine, appears on his father’s stoop, still angry but asking for the former pancratiast’s guidance to train for an upcoming MMA tournament. On the other side of town, Brendan, an ex-MMA fighter, steps back into the octagon after he’s suspended from his job as a high school physics teacher and faces the foreclosure of his home.

This path puts the brothers on a collision course fed by the crowd-pleasing knack that writer-director Gavin O’Connor employed for Miracle, his pom-pom waving melodrama about the 1980 U.S. Olympic hockey team. Unchained by the shackles of Disneyfication, however, O’Connor creates something more genuine...more informed. Against the backdrop of a full-realized family drama, Warrior critiques predatory lending and the war in Iraq while also managing to incorporate references to Beethoven, Moby-Dick and the ancient Greek athlete Theogenes.

O’Connor’s expert pace and execution papers over the film’s few missteps, including a needless, hole-riddled subplot involving Tom’s recent military service. And although well-produced, the glitzy Atlantic City tournament that forms the film’s finale distracts from Warrior’s quieter, more affecting moments.

The film’s unquestioned revelation is Hardy, whose performance is – dare I say – Brando-esque, both physically and stylistically. Backed by a script blessed with authentic and breezy dialogue, Hardy’s scenes opposite the equally wondrous Edgerton and Nolte are sublime and heart-wrenching. Tom is both unwilling and unable to conjure a modicum of compassion for a contrite, sober Paddy until the old man falls off the wagon, the only state in which Tom has ever really known his father. And, the climactic contest is an exercise of emotional catharsis by means of physical brutality.

Comparisons between Warrior and Rocky are as misguided as they are inevitable. Instead, the film is a hard-edged story of loss, redemption and forgiveness, the cinematic contender that the massively overrated The Fighter should have been.

Neil Morris

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

The Spiderwick Chronicles

Frodo and Gollum together again

Grade: C
Director: Mark Waters
Starring: Freddie Highmore, Mary-Louise Parker, Nick Nolte, Joan Plowright, and David Strathairn
MPAA Rating: PG
Running Time: 1 hour, 37 minutes

It is a tricky enterprise to apply logic to a kid’s fantasy film. But, The Spiderwick Chronicles, the latest progeny of the Harry Potter and Chronicles of Narnia child fantasy templates, invites such scrutiny. Unlike its forerunners, which are typically situated in some extra-dimensional universe, Spiderwick sets its action squarely within the grounds of a rundown New England estate. Indeed, during one scene, a troll chases the protags through a maze of underground tunnels and up a manhole in the middle of town, where the creature is promptly flattened by a passing truck.

So, when brothers Jared and Simon Grace (Freddie Highmore, pulling double duty) accompany their sister Mallory (Sarah Bolger) and mother Helen (Mary-Louise Parker) in moving into the Spiderwick Estate, former home of great-great uncle Arthur Spiderwick (David Strathairn) before he mysteriously disappeared 80 years ago, the questions start piling up faster than the supernatural oddities. Jared stumbles across Uncle Spiderwick’s homemade “Field Guide to the Fantastical World Around You” locked away in the bowels of the old house, affixed with a handwritten card warning against reading or even opening the book. Naturally, Jared does both, awakening a horde of goblins and a powerful ogre named Mulgarath (voiced by Nick Nolte) bent on nabbing the book and unlocking its secrets.

Pardon the interruption, but exactly what was Mulgarath and the goblins—which resemble the animated mucus creatures in those Mucinex commercials—doing for the past three-quarters century besides waiting for some dopey kid to come along and serve up a book to them? A magic spell shields the Spiderwick house itself from invasion, but the goblins roam free outside it, capable of pillaging, invisibility and, in Mulgarath’s case, shape-shifting. Why do they need this book, and why can they not ferret out its secrets the same way Arthur Spiderwick did? Come to think of it, what exactly is in the book, how did Spiderwick discover the information and why did he commit it to writing knowing it could only be used for evil? And, is that really Seth Rogen and Martin Short doing voice work?

Most of these questions are addressed in greater detail in Tony Diterlizzi and Holly Black’s five-novel series, first published in 2003. But, much gets lost in their translation to a screenplay doctored by eight different writers (though only three are credited). One of them, indie filmmaker John Sayles, came up with the idea of compressing the entire series into this 97-minute cinematic CliffsNotes. The result is slipshod and curiously anti-climactic—something to do with tomato sauce, oatmeal and a bird-eating hobgoblin—while also adrift in narrative perplexities and fixated on off-putting subtexts like Jared’s anger management problems and the estrangement between his mother and father.

Like Highmore’s last film, the similarly abstruse The Golden Compass, The Spiderwick Chronicles is a kid’s flick that lacks the grownup virtues – and logic – that make other fantasy series so durable.

Neil Morris