Hail, Caesar!

Magic Mike USN

Grade: C +

Director: Joel and Ethan Coen

Starring: Josh Brolin, George Clooney, Alden Ehrenreich, Ralph Fiennes, Jonah Hill, Scarlett Johansson, Tilda Swinton, Frances McDormand and Channing Tatum

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Running Time: 1 hr. 40 min.

One of the panoply of old Hollywood parodies in Hail, Caesar! is a high society film project directed by venerable studio hand Laurence Laurentz (Ralph Fiennes). At one point, Laurentz instructs his ill-suited leading man, singing cowboy star Hobie Doyle (Alden Ehrenreich), to begin his lines by expelling “a mirthless chuckle.”

'A mirthless chuckle' is also what most merits the Coen brothers’ homage to 1950s moviemaking. The filmmakers lovingly and gorgeously—thanks to their longtime collaborator, cinematographer  Roger Deakins—skewer everything from sword-and-sandal pictures, to Westerns, to song-and-dance musicals. But the screenplay’s disparate parts and characters never coalesce, so the whole of Hail, Caesar! is strikingly less than the sum of its parts.

The film’s protagonist is Eddie Mannix (Josh Brolin), a “fixer” for Capital Pictures tasked with rescuing starlets from risqué photo shoots, jousting with twin columnists (both played by Tilda Swinton) looking for a scoop, and working damage control over the impending out-of-wedlock pregnancy of DeeAnna Moran (Scarlett Johansson), a fussy, Esther Williams-type aquatic musical star.

A burned-out Mannix is also weighing a lucrative 9-to-5 job offer from an aeronautics corporation. But as his final decision looms, Baird Whitlock (George Clooney), the bankable star of the titular peplum pic—subtitled The Tale of the Christ, an obvious allusion to Ben-Hur—is kidnapped by a gaggle of Communist screenwriters holed up in an area beach house.

As Mannix frantically tries to find Whitlock before his movie implodes, he must also cope with the sundry calamities of his job, including Laurentz’s complaints about Doyle, whose aw-shucks drawl clashes with an urbane comedy named Merrily We Dance. Mannix visits a soundstage where Channing Tatum channels Gene Kelly in a Navy musical patterned after Anchors Aweigh—the dance routine to a diddy titled “No Dames” is a showstopper. Along the way, we strumble across glorified cameos by Frances McDormand as a grizzled film editor, Jonah Hill as a shadowy notary and Christopher Lambert as a lascivious movie director.

Watching Hail, Caesar! becomes an exercise in star-gazing, as any hope of an engaging, cohesive storyline vanishes sometime between Whitlock’s umpteenth humorless prattle with his blacklisted captors, and the appearance of a Soviet submarine off the coast of Malibu. The Coens’ trademark deadpan absurdism grinds along like an engine trying to find its gear. The whip-smart wit of the directors’ seminal farces is lacking, save for an uproarious scene in which clergy of disparate faiths debate the proper cinematic depiction of Jesus.

The Coens appear torn between lionizing and lampooning the so-called Golden Age of Hollywood, a fine line they expertly traversed in Barton Fink. Hail, Caesar! is like Whitlock’s climatic “Speech at the Feet of the Penitent Thief”—rousing at its best, but ultimately bloated and leading nowhere.

Trainwreck

Amy, let's toast you leapfrogging me on the marquee

Grade: B –

Director: Judd Apatow

Starring: Amy Schumer, Bill Hader, Colin Quinn, Brie Larson, Tilda Swinton, Vanessa Bayer, Mike Birbiglia, John Cena and LeBron James

MPAA Rating: R

Running Time: 2 hr. 5 min.

Although Trainwreck strikes a cursory blow for comedic gender equity, it’s really a perpetuation of conventional mores gussied up in broad-based, off-color garb. Comedian Amy Schumer carries over her biting TV and stand-up act to this ribald rom-com directed by Judd Apatow (Knocked Up: The 40-Year-Old Virgin). While the film puts on airs of female empowerment, its derivative message is that the women can’t achieve happiness until they embrace sports, curtail the crazy and settle down with a man.

Amy (also the name of her character) was weaned from childhood on the mantra that “monogamy isn’t realistic” by her racist, rascal father (Colin Quinn). Years later, Amy is a YA living in NYC and working at a lads’ mag for a merciless editor (Tilda Swinton in a terrific, rare comic turn). At night, a (usually drunk) Amy hops from bar-to-bed with a carousel of anonymous men—she wakes one morning and, spying a Scarface poster on the wall, quietly intones, “Please don’t be a dorm room.”

Her closest thing to a steady is Steven (WWE wrestler John Cena, sneaky good), a beefcake with intimacy issues and a predilection for ambiguously gay exclamations. He’s into Amy. Amy isn’t into anyone—for her, sex is a grim chore.

The more intriguing character for this setup would be the charming city girl whose sensuality is divorced from a recognition about the corrosive consequences of her selfish sexual appetites. Instead, Amy is caustic and emotionally abusive to everyone, particularly Aaron Conners (Bill Hader), New York’s hottest orthopedist to the sports stars, whose wide grin and easy manner stir Amy’s inner romantic, much to her chagrin. The inexplicably single Aaron is drawn to Amy despite her pathological efforts to sabotage their relationship.

Amy constantly lambasts the suburban family life of her sister Kim (Brie Larson, badly in need of another starring vehicle), her milquetoast husband (Mike Birbiglia) and her precocious stepson (Evan Brinkman). But that idyllic ideal is Amy’s—and the film’s—teary destination. Even the New York Knicks cheerleaders that Amy skewers as a gyrating exemplar of female ideation ultimately figure into her scheme to finally win back her man.

There’s also the recurring elitist streak that runs through much of Apatow’s recent work, typified by a supporting cast seemingly recruited from one of the filmmaker’s dinner parties. LeBron James acquits himself well as one of Aaron’s devoted patients. But long, lumbering scenes feature Aaron and LeBron getting lunch, playing basketball and attending a glitzy charity jam fest of some sort. Meanwhile, the film devotes scant time to hilarious slice-of-life sequences, like one featuring Leslie Jones (Saturday Night Live) showing the reflexive rudeness of New York subway passengers.

At one point, LeBron, Matthew Broderick, Chris Evert and Marv Albert conduct an intervention on Aaron for no discernable reason other than Apatow’s stargazing. Trainwreck could have used similar assistance. At its best, it’s a gender-reversal, neo-Woody Allen comedy. If only it hadn’t settled down.

We Need to Talk About Kevin

Funny...this is the sort of film I figured

Polanski would put me in

Grade: B

Director: Lynne Ramsay

Starring: Tilda Swinton, John C. Reilly, Ezra Miller, Jasper Newell, Rock Duer and Ashley Gerasimovich

MPAA Rating: R

Running Time: 1 hr. 52 min.

An absorbing, haunting film that’s part character study and part social commentary, We Need to Talk About Kevin is also another pious European appraisal of American culture. It’s directed and adapted by Brits—Lynne Ramsay and Rory Kinnear—and stars the indomitable Scottish actress Tilda Swinton as a mother living with the aftermath of an unspeakable tragedy committed by her teenage son.

Lionel Shriver, the Gastonia, N.C., native who penned the critically acclaimed source novel, is an American expatriate living in London—indeed, Shriver has written that her book climaxes “in a high-school massacre of the sort Americans are rightly ashamed of.”

At the heart of the story is an exploration of nature vs. nurture. Kevin is the first-born child of Eva (Swinton) and Franklin (John C. Reilly), and the narrative oscillates between Eva’s life before and after the murders perpetrated by Kevin, who is played over 15 years by three actors (Rock Duer, Jasper Newell and, as a teenager, Ezra Miller).

Already grabbling with maternal ambivalence, Eva becomes convinced, with good reason, that her son is a budding sociopath harboring both patent and latent malice, particularly towards his mother and little sister Celia (Ashley Gerasimovich). Kevin assumes the aura of a demonic Damien, committing acts both innocuous (ruining walls Eva papered using rare maps; repeatedly pooping in his pants out of spite) and sinister (Celia loses her eye in a household “accident”). When Franklin introduces his son to archery, it’s the ironic moment that seals the fate of their family and town.

The far more intriguing portions of Kevin are those depicting Eva’s life post-massacre. Indeed, there are moments when a more appropriate title for the film would be We Need to Talk About Moving to Another Town. Already racked by emotional torment, Eva suffers the daily whispers and sidelong glances of strangers. At the start of the film, she awakens one morning to find red paint splattering her house and car; later in the day, she’s punched without warning by an aggrieved woman while walking down the sidewalk. And when Eva rebuffs the advances of a seemingly genial coworker (Alex Manette), he responds with vicious verbal assault. Eva is not only treated as a pariah, she’s viewed as virtually subhuman. The cruelest act Kevin commits against his mom is leaving her alive.

Ramsay proceeds at a meditative pace, allowing the gloomy undertones to take full root with the audience—this is not a film for the easily anxious…or expectant mothers. The plaintive atmosphere is also underscored to great effect by an eclectic soundtrack heavy in the strains of 20^th century Americana, including Buddy Holly, the Beach Boys, and Jimmie Rogers (rendered by British skiffle king Lonnie Donegan), plus the recurring, mournful melody of “Mother’s Last Word to Her Son” by Texas gospel singer Washington Phillips.

Still, Kevin isn’t worth talking about without Swinton, who was inexplicably snubbed for an Oscar nomination. With searing minimalism, the wraithlike actress expertly connotes a woman alive only in the physical sense. She channels the conflicting complexities of a mother who both fears and loathes her child yet cannot bring herself, against all logic, to quit trying to understand him or earn his love. The bulk of We Need to Talk About Kevin is art house horror—Swinton confers its humanity.

Neil Morris

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

Don't rise up too fast, son, or that

latex is liable to fall off.

Grade: C +

Director: David Fincher

Starring: Brad Pitt, Cate Blanchett, Taraji P. Henson, Tilda Swinton, Julia Ormond, Jason Flemyng, and Jared Harris

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Running Time: 2 hours, 39 minutes

For all its highbrow aspirations, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button remains a gimmick in search of a message.

Brad Pitt plays the titular orphan, born near the end of World War I as an osteophytic infant abandoned by his father (Jason Flemyng) on the stoop of a New Orleans old-folks home run by a black woman called Queenie (Taraji P. Henson). As death envelopes those around him (including his biological mother, who died during childbirth), Benjamin slowly improves until it becomes apparent that he is growing younger physically as he ages.

So, while the audience sits around waiting to see the youthful, golden Pitt circa A River Runs Through It, Benjamin sets out for a life of adventure, much of it as first mate aboard a tugboat helmed by an irascible captain (Jared Harris). He carries on a summer tryst in Russia with a well-heeled Englishwoman (Tilda Swinton). But, his heart ultimately belongs to his childhood friend Daisy, who as an adult becomes a world-renowned ballet dancer (played by Cate Blanchett) cavorting in the New York bohemian scene before tragedy forces her to move back to Orleans.

If this all sounds a bit like Forrest Gump, it is no coincidence since Gump scribe Eric Roth also adapts this film from a 1922 F. Scott Fitzgerald short story.

Benjamin Button offers an inverted view of life and loss, particularly as it applies to Benjamin’s star-crossed relationship with Daisy. Blanchett gives a sturdy performance that would be hailed as Oscar-worthy if it was rendered by an actress blessed with lower expectations. However, Pitt fails to make the most of a meaty role, spending most of the film channeling a lazy Southern accent and staring off into space from beneath a patina of wigs and aging make-up.

The only thing that ameliorates the excruciating 167-minute running time is director David Fincher (Se7en; Zodiac), who paints a lush, imaginative canvas, beginning with a sublime prologue about a blind artisan who, after losing his son in the Great War, builds a giant clock that runs backwards for the New Orleans train station. On the other hand, time seems to stand still during the film’s many dull sections, particularly the present-day framing device of an elderly Daisy laying in her hospital death bed as her daughter (Julia Ormond) reads Benjamin’s story aloud from his diary, all against the backdrop of an encroaching Hurricane Katrina. Curious, indeed.

Neil Morris

Burn After Reading

Tonight's feature presentation: "Righteous Kill"

Grade: B
Director: Joel and Ethan Coen
Starring: George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Frances McDormand, Tilda Swinton, John Malkovich, and Richard Jenkins
MPAA Rating: R
Running Time: 1 hour, 36 minutes

I probably rehash the following observation every time I review a Coen Brothers' movie, but it always bears restating: the corrosive influence of greed and/or temptation are the overriding themes in nearly every one of their films. The sometimes compulsory, always creative ways the Coens conjure their moral(istic) object lessons rank them among the most acclaimed American filmmakers of the last half-century.

In that vein, Burn After Reading is a return to classic Coens: a black comic rendering of morally duplicitous people lured and eventually destroyed by greed, yes, but more so the lure of a life supposedly better than their own. Such was the theme to 2001’s The Man Who Wasn’t There, the last original screenplay the Coens penned. Yet, as the Coens enter their 50s, what has changed is the cynical edge of their material – call it cranky Coens. At the end of Raising Arizona, the baby gets returned to his family while H.I. and Ed settle down for a long life together. In Fargo and Blood Simple, the bad guys get their comeuppance while the righteous are left to ponder the inanity of it all. A change of sorts is found in the Coens’ last film, the Oscar-winning No Country for Old Men; sure, Tommy Lee Jones is left scratching his head at a devolving world, but Anton Chigurh also gets to walk away, battered but alive to kill another day.

In many ways, Burn After Reading is even more pessimistic, despite the fact that it is more of a smiling cobra. An A-list cast gets to cut loose by cutting up, but unlike the Coens’ previous moral plays, there isn’t a canary to be found in this nefarious coalmine. A disgruntled, chronically drunk ex-CIA analyst, Osborne Cox (John Malkovich), decides to write his memoirs. At the same time, his ice-cold wife, Katie (Tilda Swinton), is having an affair with a married, low-level Treasury agent (George Clooney), whose penchants run the gambit from post-coital 5-mile jogs to exotic food allergies. When Katie decides to file for divorce, she copies the family finances along with Osborne’s memoir onto a CD. A copy accidentally turns up at the local Hardbodies and into the hands of two dimwitted gym employees, Chad (Brad Pitt) and Linda (Frances McDormand), herself locked in an ongoing struggle over how to pay for some “much-needed” cap-a-pie cosmetic surgery.

Linda and Chad’s attempt to return the disc to Osborne – with the expectation of compensation, natch – is met by Osborne’s raging temper. Convoluted circumstances also involving the Internet dating phenomenon eventually bring each character into the same orbit, with disastrous consequences. Private eyes are mistaken for G-Men and chance encounters are viewed with heavy suspicion. In this postmodern satire, greed and paranoia form a combustible concoction in which the hoi polloi reflexively buy into whatever bogey man the government or infotainment conglomerates prop up, whether it is domestic surveillance or rivals from abroad. “The Russians?!,” a CIA chief (J.K. Simmons) repeats with puzzlement when he is informed that Linda and Chad tried to sell their disc of Osborne’s “drivel” to the Russian consulate. [You couldn’t blame them if they’ve been listening to our current presidential campaigns, who have recently dusted off old Cold War rhetoric to gin up votes.]

The subtle brilliance of Burn After Reading is that it is really an anti-spy, nonpolitical film, where the governmental espionage is a MacGuffin masking the fact that the actual intrigue flows wholly from the foibles of flawed, regular people who, although living in an increasingly interconnected world, are more personally estranged from their neighbors than ever. All the while, the actual intelligence community watches on both bemused and confused, armed with near omnipresence - if not omnipotence - but clueless as to how to exercise their power.

Unfortunately, that disengagement also leads the Coens to yet another truncated, shoulder-shrug ending, a la No Country for Old Men, made worse by the fact that nearly all the key climactic events take place off-camera and are only vocalized by bureaucrats trying to make sense of it all, postmortem. “So, what did we learn?”, asks Simmons’ CIA head. Only that the Coens are not yet willing, or able, to share the answer to that question.

Neil Morris