The Walk

This mock-up demonstrates how much I'm

going to drink before trying this stunt.

Grade: C +

Director: Robert Zemeckis

Starring: Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Ben Kingsley and Charlotte Le Bon

MPAA Rating: PG

Running Time: 2 hr. 3 min.

If The Polar Express elevated director Robert Zemeckis’ visual acuity to new heights, it also broadened his reliance on caricature over character. Two more motion capture films followed that prioritized style over substance, then even the R-rated Flight was eroded by half-written supporting roles, heavy-handed metaphors and a soppy ending.

There’s a moment early in The Walk, the latest from Zemeckis, when the director rewinds the milieu all the way back to 1968 Paris. The palette goes grayscale—save for a glint of Spielbergian red—and street performer Philippe Petit (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) peddles about the city on his unicycle sporting a top hat. I half expected to see a baguette tucked under his arm.

Petit earns local acclaim as a tightrope artist, slacklining between trees and walking a high wire across the Notre Dame Cathedral. But his dream is stringing and traversing a steel cable between the nascent Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York City.

The painstaking planning and intricate execution of Petit’s self-described “coup” in 1974 is fascinating, although it’s also material covered in greater detail in James Marsh’s 2008 Oscar-winning documentary, Man on Wire. The full impact of Zemeckis’ 3D IMAX visual wizardry in The Walk is felt during the roughly half-hour act as Petit crosses the mise en scène 1,350 feet over Manhattan. The audience soars above and around Petit as he paces, pirouettes, kneels and lies on his wire, spurring acrophobia even among the steadiest of stomachs.

Unfortunately, that sensational sequence is sandwiched between essentially a live-action cartoon. Beyond Gordon-Levitt’s excessive emoting, bad wig and Pepé Le Pew accent, every character—lead and supporting—comes in easily conceivable form. A passing American tourist in Paris wears a cowboy hat and Texas twang. Some of the youngsters Petit recruits to help carry out his stunt are ‘70s stoners straight out of a Cheech & Chong flick. There are ‘Noo Yawk’ cops, and a construction foreman softened by small talk about “that SOB Nixon” and how the country went to hell after Kennedy died.

But the most irksome, infuriating element of The Walk is Petit’s intrusive, needless narration. It tramples almost every scene, including the climactic coup, when Zemeckis’ stark visuals have already conveyed all necessary sentiment. Moreover, Gordon-Levitt (as Petit) frequently delivers these asides atop a mock-up of the Statue of Liberty’s torch against the digital backdrop of the Twin Towers jutting from the Manhattan skyline.

The film’s obvious effort to juxtapose Petit’s heroism alongside 9/11 pathos isn’t offensive—his tale can’t be told today without at least unintentionally evoking the looming tragedy to come. And the assertion that Petit’s accomplishment breathed life into buildings that many New Yorkers previously considered eyesores is backed by some contemporary commentary and oral history.

But all that is sufficient for a spectacular short film, not a long, weary Walk.

Flight

Grade: B

Director: Robert Zemeckis

Starring: Denzel Washington, John Goodman, Don Cheadle, Bruce Greenwood and Kelly Reilly

MPAA Rating: R

Running Time: 2 hr. 8 min.

For quite some time, I’ve had an idea for a movie. The basic premise involves an everyman who wins the lottery, seemingly guaranteeing him lifelong security and happiness. However, this seminal event soon alienates him from suddenly envious, greedy friends and family. Moreover, his newfound celebrity status becomes an albatross once the 24-hour media that builds him up uncovers and airs his personal foibles (an old arrest here, an extramarital affair there) in their insatiable hunt for tomorrow’s headline or talking point.

It’s perilous to evaluate a movie based on what you hoped it might be. Still, Flight had the potential to dissect that tragic arc of the accidental celebrity. Captain William “Whip” Whitaker (Denzel Washington) is an airline pilot who executes a miraculous crash landing of his suddenly freefalling plane en route from Orlando to Atlanta, saving all but a few of its 102 passengers. Although rightly hailed as a hero, Whip is also secretly an alcoholic and drug user whose demons destroyed his marriage and estranged him from his teenage son.

The key additional plot point is that Whip was also drunk and coked up during his aerial miracle, needing to ingest both substances together in order to achieve inflight acuity—to “level him off,” so to speak. So instead of a critique on contemporary culture, director Robert Zemeckis makes Flight a character study more akin to The Lost Weekend or Leaving Las Vegas. Alternating episodes of binge boozing and short-lived sobriety become the film’s repetitive refrain, often in concert with Whip’s newfound (and rather improbable) relationship with Nicole (Kelly Reilly), a recovering heroin junkie hoping to steer the captain towards sobriety.

Directing his first live-action film since 2000’s Cast Away, Zemeckis still knows how to assemble impressive set pieces. A taut takeoff through storm-cloud turbulence is only a table setter for the amazing crash sequence, whose one of the most breathless scenes in recent cinema. Still, every protracted exchange between Whip and Nicole stops the film dead in its tracks when it should be focusing on the procedural particulars of the ever-tightening investigation into the plane crash and the efforts by a pilot’s union rep (Bruce Greenwood) and lawyer (Don Cheadle) to save Whip’s self-destructive backside.

No time is devoted to the undoubtedly conflicted feelings of the passengers whose lives Whip saved or the families of those who didn’t survive. And while the emotional pain is palpable when Whip strong-arms the loyalty of Margaret (Tamara Tunie), his flight attendant and an old friend well aware of Whip’s addictions, a visit to his crippled copilot is used as an occasion for religious mockery. The sight of Whip’s foundering airplane clipping the steeple off a rural church serves a similar subversion, along with the sardonic testimonial by a terminal cancer patient (James Badge Dale) who Whip and Nicole meet while sneaking ciggies in the hospital stairwell.

Ever the Steven Spielberg protégé, Zemeckis can’t resist his mentor’s penchant for soppy endings and heavy-handed metaphors, or his own crutch of classic-rock music cues. Buttressed by another career-defining performance from Washington, the ill-fated aircraft parallels the path of its protagonist: a life in free fall that must be inverted to level off its descent before a crash landing that starts him down a course of introspection and redemption. Still, Flight could have cast a wider cultural net about the media, hero (de)construction and survivor guilt, not just the story of one self-absorbed antihero.

*Originally published at www.indyweek.com 

A Christmas Carol

Get that light outta my face or you're getting
a visit from the Ghost of PETA Present!

Grade: B

Director: Robert Zemeckis

Starring: Jim Carrey, Gary Oldman, Colin Firth, Bob Hoskins, and Robin Wright Penn

MPAA Rating: PG

Running time: 1 hour, 36 minutes

Combining digital 3-D visuals with a 2.0 version of the animated, performance capture technology he employed five years ago in The Polar Express, director Robert Zemeckis fashions a phantasmagorical retelling of A Christmas Carol. that also fully embraces the dark textual themes (too dark for young children, I’m afraid, despite the Disney imprimatur) lurking within Charles Dickens’ venerable morality tale.

Jim Carrey pulls multiple voiceover duty, principally as the irascible Ebenezer Scrooge, which Zemeckis renders as a reptilian apparition whose skeletal frame is seemingly held together only by withered flesh and a dingy overcoat. As 3-D snowflakes appear to fall inside the theater, Zemeckis pulls few punches during visits from the great beyond by a truly terrifying Jacob Marley (Gary Oldman) and Christmas Ghosts Past (ethereal), Present (jolly and eerily demonic), and Yet to Come (silent but deadly), all of them voiced by Carrey. Together, they accurately summon the sort psychological cataclysm that could actually wipe away Scrooge’s crippling avarice, so entrenched that Scrooge filches the coins from the sunken eyes of his dead partner.

From the stunning opening shot, an aerial tour through every parcel of Victorian London, Zemeckis utilizes his animation pet ably to conjure fantastic visions of the unreal or merely bygone with an enthralling mixture of classicism and modernism. To make room for his London flybys, Zemeckis does not linger long over Scrooge’s boyhood – hints of a neglectful father here, an unexplained fear of poverty there – or his cruel domineering over Bob Cratchit (Goldman again).

Morover, Zemeckis’ continued bugaboo, as in Polar Express and Beowulf, comes with assimilating likenesses of actual actors – simulacra of Oldman, Bob Hoskins, and Colin Firth resemble slightly melted wax effigies. And, while I admire Zemeckis’ attention to artistry and literary faithfulness, it is a shame – and ultimately financially counterproductive – that much of the haunting imagery is too frightening for the youngest members of the film’s target audience.

Rehashes of Dickensian anti-capitalism overtones – “This Boy: Ignorance; This Girl: Want. Beware!,” bellows Christmas Present – lack immediate social resonance. But, it is the inner-metamorphosis, the same that fueled such subsequent fare as It’s a Wonderful Life and How the Grinch Stole Christmas!, that rings loudest and longest. Conceptually imaginative and touching, this Christmas Carol carves out its own, unique place amongst the myriad adaptations of this holiday classic.

Neil Morris