One Day

 Aren't I so Avant-garde?

 

Grade: C –
Director: Lone Scherfig
Starring: Anne Hathaway, Jim Sturgess and Patricia Clarkson
MPAA Rating: PG-13
Running Time: 1 hr. 47 min.

Beginning in 1988, One Day is actually 20 years worth of July 15ths distilled down to a series of schmaltzy, snappy Saint Swithun’s days. Screenwriter David Nicholls wisely eschews including all 23 chapters of his best-selling novel in the film. However, rather than snapshots of a relationship’s evolution, this Same Time Next Year simulacrum drops in periodically on the interwoven lives of middle-class bookworm Emma Morley (Anne Hathaway) and posh Dexter Mayhew (Jim Sturgess), beginning with their graduation from the University of Edinburgh. In the aftermath of an aborted booty call that day, however, begins an ebb and flow friendship that will eventually and inexorably develop into something more.

Unfortunately, books do not always convert effectively to film, and One Day is a story that never lifts off the page. Indeed, Danish director Lone Scherfig (An Education) displays more creativity in the graphics she uses to denote the passage of time than crafting logical, full-realized characters.

Having bought into the serendipity of a storyline in which key moments involving first encounters, breakups, betrayals, reunions and even death all happen fall on one particular calendar date, it is actually stunning that the seminal moment in Emma and Dexter’s relationship – when they finally succumb and have sex – happens midyear and off camera, a fact revealed to the audience during a casual conversation between them in which they express regret over the incident.

Such is the fractured structure of the plot. It’s not inconceivable that Emma would go from college graduate to waitress in a Tex-Mex restaurant to teacher to author, or that Dexter would transition from a graduate school instructor to an inept TV music video host. But, without the context of intervening events, their career and life paths prove jarring and meandering.

However, the most flawed part of One Day is that the main characters lack any palpable chemistry together and are individually unlikable. We don’t care much for Dexter because he is a self-absorbed, drunken jerk ostracized even by his mother (Patricia Clarkson) and father (Ken Stott).

And, we don’t like Emma because she can’t conjure the self-esteem to quit Dexter – one dinner-date during which she swears him off for good is followed immediately by a new year in which they’re chatting amiably again. It doesn’t help that Emma’s poor choice in men also extends to moving in with a part-time comedian, full-time putz named Ian (Rafe Spall). Perhaps Emma’s French boyfriend was a great guy, but we’ll never know because she unceremoniously leaves him sitting at a Parisian café to suddenly chase after and pledge her undying love to Dexter after he starts to cut short a trip to visit her.

Hathaway uses the same ropey British accent she deployed in Becoming Jane as her weak approximation of a Yorkshire brogue. But, it’s Nicholls’ attempt to convert his literary conceit to the silver screen that gets truly lost in translation.

Neil Morris

Easy A

How about a Scarlet Q for quitter to go with
that peanut butter delight, Bynes?

Grade: D –

Director: Will Gluck

Starring: Emma Stone, Amanda Bynes, Thomas Haden Church, Patricia Clarkson, Stanley Tucci, Lisa Kudrow, Malcolm McDowell, and Dan Byrd

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Running Time: 1 hour, 32 minutes

Easy A can slap on all the literary allusions it wants, but this stab at channeling Nathaniel Hawthorne by way of John Hughes is more deserving of a Scarlet F.

Emma Stone (Superbad) plays Olive, a high school ingénue whose reputation goes from prude to Prynne once she starts accepting gift cards and other remuneration from various freaks and geeks in exchange for allowing them to spread word about getting to second base and beyond with her.

This already specious premise – presented under the guise of a webcasted recap complete with incessant voiceover narration – collapses under the weight of tedious subplots, including married school staffers (Thomas Haden Church and Lisa Kudrow) and Olive’s irksome hipster parents (Stanley Tucci and Patricia Clarkson, slumming). While Olive appears to dance around the May pole, she is hounded by an offensive cartoonish campus Christian student group, presided over by Amanda Bynes (perhaps providing some insight into why she recently tweeted her intent to quit acting).

Meanwhile, Olive at first defiantly embraces the consequences of her mythomania – even embroidering red A’s on her increasingly skimpy outfits – until the story suddenly requires Oliver to play martyr by taking responsibility for other people’s sins (Christ…).

The auburn-haired Stone has worlds of potential, but this lurching, surprisingly lifeless teen com is a speed bump along her career path. Easy A isn’t nearly as smart as it thinks it is. To borrow from the name of a much better literary-based movie update, it’s just clueless.

Neil Morris

Shutter Island

I'm a sexy beast...No, I'M a sexy beast...

Grade: B

Director: Martin Scorsese

Starring: Leonardo DiCaprio, Mark Ruffalo, Ben Kingsley, Max von Sydow, Michelle Williams, Emily Mortimer, and Patricia Clarkson

MPAA Rating: R

Running Time: 2 hour, 18 minutes

Even Martin Scorsese’s missteps are spectacular. Like Stanley Kubrick and Roman Polanski before him, the 67-year-old Scorsese tries his hand at redefining the horror-thriller genre with Shutter Island. For everyone who will regale in Scorsese’s ageless craftsmanship, others will recoil from a story that trawls mental illness, domestic violence and the Holocaust for cheap thrills and chills. Adapted from a novel by Mystic River scribe Dennis Lehane, Shutter Island is awash in the very nihilism it meekly assails, erecting thematic and historical straw men to buttress Scorsese’s provocative visual flourishes.

Leonardo DiCaprio, now firmly ensconced as the muse of Scorsese’s later career, stars as Teddy Daniels, a U.S. marshal sent with his partner Chuck (Mark Ruffalo) to the titular (and fictitious) island in Boston Harbor. The year is 1954 and their mission is to track down an escapee from Ashecliffe Asylum, a hospital for the criminally insane. After a hurricane maroons Daniels on the island, he begins to suffer a torrent of nightmares, headaches and hallucinations that are associated with own demons, including the memories of the murder of his wife, Dolores (Michelle Williams), and atrocities he committed as a World War II Army grunt during the liberation of Dachau. In revealing Daniel’s true motives behind accepting his assignment to Ashecliffe, Scorsese fashions Daniels’ torment into a caldron of 1950s paranoia and mankind’s capacity for violence. In keeping with the Eisenhowerian milieu, there is lots of chatter about atolls, A-bombs, North Korean brainwashing and even the House Un-American Activities Committee.

How all these seemingly disparate plot points are shoehorned together is half the fun—or folly—of Shutter Island. Suffice it to say there is a corker of a plot twist that, while outlandish, manages to tie up most of the loose ends. Although DiCaprio gives his white-hot beleaguered best and an accent as thick as chowdah’, the film proves a divisive affair: sometimes brilliant, sometimes maddening. While DiCaprio has his pick of roles (and his willingness to parlay his career capital on fare like this and Revolutionary Road is admirable), here the 35-year-old actor still looks a bit young to effectively convey a world-weary war veteran and widower. Ruffalo adds little, but the other supporting cast includes meaty performances from Ben Kingsley and Max von Sydow, as well as memorable single-scene monologues from Patricia Clarkson, Jackie Earle Haley and Ted Levine.

Like the opening shot of a seasick Teddy, Scorsese regurgitates a bevy of cinematic influences, the most obvious being Sam Fuller’s 1963 film Shock Corridor, about a journalist who commits himself to a mental institution to solve a murder. Scorsese admits being inspired by the 1940s noir thrillers of Jacques Tourneur and Orson Welles’ adaptation of Kafka’s The Trial. Even casual moviegoers will see reflections of Kubrick’s The Shining and enough Hitchcock borrowings to shame even Brian De Palma: There are conspicuous allusions to Psycho, Spellbound, North by Northwest and Vertigo (a spiral staircase ascent to a tower’s overlook figures in the film’s climax).

In other words, for all its CGI genuflecting, Shutter Island is an old-fashioned potboiler that, despite its faults and self-importance, is unrelenting in its audacity and visual stimulation. In the end, your opinion of Scorsese’s oeuvre will likely dictate your opinion of this film. His devotees will be delighted: Count me in.

Neil Morris

*Originally published at www.indyweek.com

Whatever Works

You remind me of my stepdaughter. Will you marry me?

Grade: D –

Director: Woody Allen

Starring: Larry David, Evan Rachel Wood, Patricia Clarkson, and Ed Begley Jr.

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Running Time: 1 hour, 32 minutes

When will Woody Allen stop subjecting us to cinematic vehicles used to justify marrying his twenty-something stepdaughter? Yes, I know Allen supposedly wrote the screenplay for Whatever Works in the 1970s, and, indeed, its hoary air reeks of the bottom of the musty desk drawer that coughed up this misanthropic mistake. But, the story of an older man who finds himself in a May-December relationship with a comely ingénue he finds literally camped out on his stoop oozes with self-absorbed psychoanalysis.

If you ever wondered about the cosmic neuroticism that would emerge if Larry David were cast in a Woody Allen film, then Whatever Works is your answer. David plays Boris Yelnikoff, the standard-issue Allen stand-in, who ambles around Greenwich Village on a bum leg injured during a failed suicide attempt, spouting off random invectives against virtually everything and everyone, from health-conscious diets to religious zealots, from fear of terrorism to the young children to whom he futilely tries to teach chess. He boorishly peppers his vocabulary by incessantly labeling his intellectual inferiors “morons,” “cretins,” and “inchworms.” He even regularly breaks the fourth wall, wondering aloud why we, the audience, would bother buying tickets to watch a movie about his sad, uninteresting life story. Only the legion of Allen apologists would disagree.

Enter Melodie (Evan Rachel Wood), a NYC newcomer and former Southern beauty pageant queen with no money or board. Melodie charms her way into Boris’ brownstone and, eventually, his hardened heart. They eventually marry (although, curiously, Allen never captures a single moment of romantic intimacy between them, even a kiss), much to the chagrin of Melodie’s estranged, fundamentalist parents, Marietta (Patricia Clarkson) and John (Ed Begley Jr.).

Allen’s humorless, often unwatchable homage to secular humanism plays like bad community theater. The acerbic wit and browbeaten charm David embodies in Curb Your Enthusiasm turns dissonant in Allen’s hands. Wood occasionally flashes her innate acumen, but she suffers from a simplistic role and a hackneyed accent that sounds like something straight out of an episode of Hee Haw. Indeed, Boris/Allen’s constant barrage against Southerners is both artless and elitist. (At some one, Marietta tells Melodie she’s “living like a sharecropper.”)

From atop Allen’s lofty intellectual perch, a taste of Greenwich Village is all that is required to save Melodie and family from their backward, moralistic ways. Marietta dons a beret, finds her inner artiste, and carries on an open ménage à trois with two men. John, meanwhile, undergoes a ludicrous sexual awakening, realizing over drinks in a bar – and with virtually no sense of emotional turmoil – that he is homosexual. He then launches into a relationship with the first gay guy he meets (a slapdash sequence that reveals the elemental underpinning beneath Allen’s ostensible high-mindedness).

“Whatever works” is Boris’ credo about life and the search for happiness. To Allen’s ham-fisted handiwork, the only appropriate response is “whatever…”

Neil Morris

Elegy

Beauty and the Sexy Beast

Grade: B

Director: Isabel Coixet

Starring: Ben Kingsley, Penélope Cruz, Patricia Clarkson, Dennis Hopper, Deborah Harry, and Peter Sarsgaard

MPAA Rating: R

Running Time: 1 hour, 48 minutes

Stoutly acting and lushly photographed, Elegy is also a bit of a tweener – too slick for the arthouse yet too highbrow for the Oxygen channel. It is deliberate yet never boring, comfortable yet imbued with a healthy dose of cynicism. As far as films about growing old go, it is not as witty and melancholy as Alexander Payne’s underrated About Schmidt; in the realm of May-December romances, it is not as provocative as Last Tango in Paris nor as nuanced as Lost in Translation. However, it is a dynamic character study highlighted by interesting performances from two actors who, like the persons they portray, occupy opposite ends of the personal and professional spectrum.

Ben Kingsley plays author, professor, and cultural critic David Kepesh, a divorcee estranged from his only son (Peter Sarsgaard) and cognizant of the fact that he is quickly approaching the twilight of his life. His only semi-meaningful relationships are with a poet friend (Dennis Hooper) and a friend-with-benefits (Patricia Clarkson).

Enter Consuela (Penélope Cruz), the latest in a long line of female undergrads Kepesh has plucked from the student body to satisfy his own. Kepesh (and, by extension, the audience) has an acute skepticism over Consuela’s motives for bedding him and the surely finite time their tryst will last. Indeed, the more outward indices point toward a genuine attraction on Consuela’s part, the more Kepesh recoils and retreats into his solitary existence, sometimes exercising cruel and insensitive means to do so.

Adapting Philip Roth’s novella, “The Dying Animal,” Spanish director Isabel Coixet conveys an often achingly earnest portrayal of regret, loss, and personal dysfunction. Both Kingsley (last seen conoodling yet another young actress, Mary-Kate Olsen, in The Wackness) and Hopper are pleasingly restrained. Cruz is especially terrific, but the problem is that her performance takes off only after Consuela reenters to Kepesh’s orbit once she is diagnosed with breast cancer, an emotionally cheap plot turn that undermines the carefully constructed character development preceding it. That Kepesh’s neurosis is so acute he would drive away a young, beautiful woman who unconditionally loves him is a narrative worth exploring. However, who but the most hard-hearted would not exude a keener appreciation of life when the woman you loved and lost returns asking for your help as she faces possible death? Kepesh’s supposed redemption not a sign of delayed maturation; it’s a matter of elemental humanity.

Neil Morris