Michael Keaton’s directorial debut is smart, opaque, fascinating.
The Merry Gentleman is a film that will frustrate you. You will sometimes wish it moved faster and that it would open itself more, and reveal something besides only the tantalizing amount of information that its very shrewd and deliberate script wants to divulge. The ending will likely haunt you, not in a satisfying sense but rather in a way that compels you to make sense of its painstakingly-wrought ambiguity. And you might actually love the film for all of those reasons.
Directed byMichael Keaton – an intelligent leading man long overdue for a major comeback -from a script by relative unknown Ron Lazzeretti (The Opera Lover), the film often manages literary feats of structure and innovation while remaining grounded in a concrete sense of place and tone. Keaton also stars as Frank Logan, a solitary and antisocial tailor who moonlights as a contract hit man drowning in depression and guilt. Yet he is not the real star of the film. That place is occupied – gracefully, charmingly - by Scottish actress Kelly Macdonald (No Country For Old Men) as Kate Frazier, a woman escaping her abusive policeman husband by escaping to a nondescript (though vaguely Chicago) major city.
Their solitary existences bring them together at Christmastime, which anyone with depression can tell you is the cruelest time of the year by far. After shooting someone in Kate’s office building, Frank attempts to throw himself off a neighboring rooftop, after glimpsing her in a wonderfully-constructed moment of grace. But she sees him and screams, stopping his suicide. Later, the two formally meet as Frank shows her a small kindness. Kate is the type of person you suspect would rather not risk inconveniencing anyone with her friendship. She’s strong but vulnerable to even the basic ruthlessness that most people take for granted, and her attempts at isolation only draw other lonely souls into her path, including a emotionally needy co-worker (Darlene Hunt) and Dave Murcheson, the police detective (Tom Bastounes) investigating the shooting.
But she’s drawn to Frank, probably as much because he asks nothing of her and doesn’t seem prepared to offer anything for which he might expect gratitude down the line. “I think we’re good for one another,” Kate tells him, and when minutes later she explains, “You’re possibly the sweetest man I’ve ever met” you get a sense of how bad her life must have been to that point. The script moves ahead in time, cleverly, and there’s a sense as spring rolls around that the two are making progress helping one another. Then of course their respective pasts close in on them. Kate’s husband (Bobby Cannavale) tracks her down, spouting born-again Christian rhetoric that, not surprisingly, makes the skittish Kate even more terrified. Meanwhile Murcheson and his partner dog the shooting investigation as well as the apparent suicide of one of Frank’s associates. Frank is unafraid, permanently removing Kate’s husband from her life and continuing his tailoring business.
The pivotal scenes arrive as Murcheson visits Frank’s store. The two men size each other up, instant dislike getting submerged by going-through-the-motions polite conversation. “I tend to see the suit, not the person inside it,” Frank tells him, a pretty unsubtle way of explaining that life is often meaningless to him. Murchison ambles off, ready to confront Kate – the object of his affection as well as a potential witness and accomplice alike – of his concerns. His clumsy, well-intentioned effort pushes Kate and Frank into a confrontation that’s minimal on dialogue but no less emotionally resonant. Kate is ready for them to admit the truth about each other but Frank’s not there yet, setting up an ending that leaves more questions then it’s prepared to answer.
Even when playing the comic buffoon (Beetlejuice, Mr. Mom), Keaton the actor has always prioritized reserve, holding something back from the audience that gave his characters nuance and depth. In directing a film his greatest flaw may be following that impulse with too much trust. The film is slow-paced, and there are times when the script begs for elaboration – even a hint or line of dialogue would suffice. And as good as Lazzeretti’s script is at building suspense and giving its characters lines worth saying out loud, it also often explains something (such as in Kate’s dialogue mentioned above) that’s obvious to anyone paying attention. As the film dares its audience to think, the occasional lapse in artistry feels too much like gimme questions. The narrative skips ahead at least once, leaving details in its timeline unresolved.
But these complains are petty grievances. Keaton knows how to direct himself and (with one exception) his actors, mining fascinating complexities out of virtually every role. MacDonald gives Kate layers of anxiety and innocence, letting her be paranoid in one scene and carefree the next. Bastounes is exceptional as the self-sabotaging Murheson, a man at once reaching out for someone’s warmth but retreating into his police authority whenever challenged. He’s the third part of Frank and Kate’s lonely constellation, dimmer by comparison but no less sincere despite his lack of self-awareness. Only Cannavale fails to impress, bringing too much ham to his rambling fire-and-brimstone monologue. We understand that his character is a petty and vile man because Kate has already sold us on the idea. Cannavale’s overacting only sets her own work back.
And the ending: vague, inconclusive, maddeningly open to interpretation. There are dozens of pat endings possible, and if you’ve been watching movies for any length of time you can imagine probably half that many without really trying. If the last five minutes are flawed, they’re still not enough to undermine the beauty and intelligence of the 105 minutes preceding them. The Merry Gentleman is in that sense daring right until its wide-open end.
Ricky Gervais leads a sprawling ensemble cast in a high-concept comedy about truth.
We couldn't find an image of the poster. Honestly.
Imagine a world where no one ever lies and where everyone is always completely candid and trusting, until one man learns to use the power of bullshitting for his own gain. That’s the setup for Ricky Gervais’ (Ghost Town) September-released farce, which looks to be the kind of sprawling, high-concept piece that Woody Allen could have made in the 1970s and Garry Shandling might have tried a decade ago. Though Gervais (who also directs and co-wrote the script) is probably capable of making more of the premise than most other actors, he’s got great backup in a huge ensemble supporting cast that includes at least one legend and a platoon of so-hip-right now co-stars.
Gervais plays a film executive in a world so completely honest that its culture doesn’t even include fiction: performers simply tell true stories based on facts from history. With his career bottoming out and a romance with the object of his affection Jennifer (Jennifer Garner) going nowhere fast, Mark has a brainstorm: lie about how much money he wants to withdraw from a bank. The teller believes him (apparently it’s a world without ATM’s, too) and his lying career is off and running. The film goes onto show the consequences of bearing false witness and, we imagine, the redemptive power of honesty.
Probably the first film that comes to mind here, at least after watching the pretty standard trailer, is 1997’s Liar, Liar. The twist is that instead of Jim Carrey only telling the truth, the plot has one guy telling lies while everyone around him is utterly forthcoming. Gervais’ previous film, last year’s Ghost Town, was about a hapless schmoe given the unwanted gift of communication with dead people. That film eventually sank into the usual Hollywood cliches but was buoyed by Gervais’ and c0-star Greg Kinnear’s impossible-to-dislike screen presences. Likewise, there’s little to suggest this film is going to be anything too unpredictable: Gervais as movie star remains an emerging marketable brand for the over-35 set, as do the careers of co-stars Garner, Jason Bateman, and Tina Fey.
Joining them are Rob Lowe as Mark’s nemesis, Louis CK as his buddy and Christopher Guest, Patrick Stewart and Jeffrey Tambor, all showing up in various roles. That sounds promising enough, but big ensemble groups rarely pay off for comedy: Shandling’s Town & Country (2001) had a staggering amount of talent but ended up the biggest money-loser in motion picture history, a failure caused somewhat by its failure to meet expectations. But the comparison is probably unfair. While The Invention of Lying doesn’t share that earlier film’s production problems and budget overruns, it also lacks its pedigree, which paradoxically might actually help keep expectations down. On the other hand, more recent and comparable films like The Family Stone (2005) and Dan In Real Life (2007) didn’t set the world afire.
Ultimately, it’s somewhat hip to like Gervais, and the film will find an audience among its target demographic while possibly luring a few college kids thanks to the inclusion of Jonah Hill (Superbad). Which is probably all it wants: to find a nice corner of the multiplex and settle in for a pleasant enough and profitable run. Its working title was The Other Side of Truth, but may we suggest Universal Pictures follow the example of its premise and rename the film Adult Ensemble High Concept Comedy for Autumn 2009? Truth in advertising, and all that.
The Invention of Lying opens nationwide September 25th.
80s vampire cult favorite gets a new DVD release tomorrow.
Long before the red state chastity of the Twilight series or even the homoerotic glamour of Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles, vampire films got a strange and visceral twist courtesy of co-writer/director Kathryn Bigelow’s 1987 b-flick Near Dark, a gritty take on the sub-genre that was as much Western adventure as it was horror story. Already a cult classic for decades, the film gets its first DVD re-release in five years July 7, even as the director’s The Hurt Locker opens nationwide to riotous critical applause. Fans of the Whedonverse and HBO’s True Blood won’t want to miss it, while Twilight devotees owe it to themselves to check it out.
Small-town Oklahoma boy Caleb Colton (Adrian Pasdar, Heroes) gives comely drifter Mae (Jenny Wright, St. Elmo’s Fire) a ride home and gets a bite on the neck as thanks. The next day, as his skin catches fire in daylight, he’s kidnapped onto the open road by her gang of roaming vampires, including their leader Jesse (Lance Henriksen, Aliens) and his psychotic henchman Severen (Bill Paxton, Big Love). Severen wants to kill the newcomer and have done with it, but Jesse gives him a week to prove his worth or face undead exile. But Caleb wins the group’s trust during a daytime gunfight with police at an abandoned motel, and conspires with Mae to sustain him as he refuses to drink innocent blood. Eventually, he must save his father (Tim Thomerson, Trancers), his sister and Mae from the group’s repeated attcks and find a cure for his affliction.
The action scenes that ensue are classic 80s cult: gory, at times romantic in shot composition and texture, flaunting their heavy emphasis on mood and feeling. The film was only Bigelow’s second feature, and though its visual restraint and narrative focus sometimes slip from her control there’s a definite sense of creative voice at work, a voice that informs her more polished (though no less noir-inspired) subsequent efforts such as Blue Steel (1989) and Strange Days (1995). Bigelow was married to director James Cameron in the late 80s, and it’s hard not to see the influence of his mid-decade work present here, borrowing especially from The Terminator (1984) and Aliens (1987) in use of lighting and in a pervasive skepticism about the world and its moral standards.
Much of the film’s energy comes from its fresh approach to vampire tropes: there is no baroque lore, no sense of tradition or of internal struggles with obsessive self-loathing and loneliness. Jesse is ancient and eerie, suggesting a history to their affliction, but the gang doesn’t resemble a coven or guild commonly found in more mundane vampire adventures; rather, they recall the James Gang, or even a touring punk rock band, bound together by mutual needs and ambitions. Caleb and his family are the archetypal Western homesteaders, defending themselves as much as their property. The film even includes a massacre at a roadhouse that might just as well be a frontier saloon.
Though absolutely a film of its time, Near Dark also saw a return to treating the vampire subject seriously after a spate of broad comedies like Fright Night and Once Bitten (both 1985) used vampire gimmicks for humorous effect. Its release at the box office was disappointing, no doubt hampered by the release of the somewhat similar The Lost Boys just two months before. That film had major studio backing and a cast that collectively boasted the best cheekbones of any group of the era. Nevertheless, like the majority of cult films of the era Near Dark’s fame rests largely on multiple showings on late-night cable movie channels, at a time when those fledgling networks seemed perennially half-starved for programming.
It’s unfair to dismiss Near Dark as a runner up genre excercise or journeyman work from a director still coming into her own. It’s a standout b-movie from an era that was often a Golden Age for such humbler-budget efforts, Perhaps more significantly, it’s become in intervening years a touchstone for a larger cycle in American culture, a signal flare about what we’re feeling and when we feel it. Vampires swell in popularity as American cynicism about the nation’s direction grows, whether in the current recession, the depths of Reagan’s morning in America or the premillennial ennui of the 90s. In taking a grittier approach to the genre and melding it with the Western – the hoariest of the nation’s ego-boosters – Near Dark offers a more visceral reflection of how we entertain ourselves when things start looking grim. Hard times come around again and again, while vampires live forever.
Michael Mann’s true-life gangster saga amounts to a misdemeanor in his storied crime film career.
The first half of the 1930’s, when America endured the worst of the Great Depression, also gave rise to a renewed public fascination with crime and the people who committed them. History tells us that the bank robbers, outlaws, and gangsters of the era were lionized for defying the same corrupt system of laws and commerce that drove America to the brink of ruin. Outsized personalities like Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker, John Dillinger, and Pretty Boy Floyd received media and public adulation, becoming in a sense the original stars of reality entertainment thanks to newsreels and an entire new genre of film.
Though by no means the first attempt at bringing the life of charismatic bank robber Dillinger to the screen, Public Enemies lacks the immediacy of the best gangster films of the 30s while at the same failing to offer perspective or context to its subject or the era to which he belonged. It’s a disappointing work by director and co-writer Michael Mann that’s further encumbered by vague and unconvincing performances from stars Johnny Depp and Christian Bale. It’s also not very entertaining to watch.
The movie begins in 1934, as Dillinger (Depp) attempts to break his mentor and several other convicts out of a bunker-like prison. The jailbreak goes wrong, but Dillinger and his gang head to Chicago, where in short order they’re robbing banks in a manner that allows Depp to jump over counters and look dashing. Their bravado rankles Bureau of Investigation chief J. Edgar Hoover, at a time when the politically rapacious bureaucrat wants Congress to allocate more funding for his fledgling agency. Hoover appoints agent Melvin Purvis (Bale) to pursue Dillinger, sending him to head the Chicago field office via a ready-made press conference.
La fille en rouge: Cotillard
Dillinger meanwhile romances a hatcheck girl named Billie Frechette (Marion Cotillard, La Vie En Rose), whom he meets and decides to love in the space of a single night. She’s as restless as he is, we’re told, and swoons for Dillinger’s promises of eternal love, wealth, and adventure. “Where are you going?” she asks him, in dialogue obviously meant to evoke the romantic patter of classic Hollywood films. “Anywhere I want,” Dillinger tells her. They head for Miami, then Tucson, where Dillinger is arrested and returned to Indiana for trial. Their scenes are interspersed with Purvis’ attempts to make lawmen out of the Chicago field office’s staff of earnest but woefully inexperienced agents. After an early attempt to arrest George “Baby Face” Nelson gets an agent killed, Purvis brings in three lawmen from Texas to assist in the Dillinger manhunt.
What happens for the rest of the film should have the feel of slowly encroaching fate, or at least a collision course between the disciplined but ferocious Purvis and the flamboyant but no less ferocious Dillinger. History itself gives them a spectacular final confrontation, and Mann’s best film, Heat, had just such a trajectory. Instead Mann builds the film as a series of scenes with little or no resonance with one another. Only once, as Dillinger receives a visit from Purvis while awaiting trial, do the two men size each other up. But the scene is typical of the movie’s problem: Depp talks too much, Bale says almost nothing, and little is put forward by either actor or the plot. An important confrontation at a Wisconsin resort, in which the g-men’s bungling gets innocents killed but allows Dillinger and Nelson both to escape, never achieves its set piece potential but instead becomes mired in ear-splitting gunfire and under-lit cinematography. The gunfight was a crucial event in Dillinger’s life and in the history of American crime, but the film gives it only perfunctory attention.
Such indifference runs throughout Mann’s direction. Regarded for his work in the crime genre (Heat, Manhunter, the decades-ahead-of-its-time television series Crime Story) and known for his attention to cityscapes and the often corruptive power of urban life, both early gangsters and the cities of the Great Depression ought to play naturally to his strengths. Yet the script, co-written with Ronan Bennett and Ann Biderman, cannot manage to place the events in any kind of context. Worse still, the sense of sameness that pervades the look of the film – pasty faced agents and snarling gangsters, dozens of murky rooms and grimy exteriors, too many of the same characters in repetitive dialogue – keeps it from building momentum or establishing a rhythm that would help the audience immerse themselves in the narrative.
This is especially problematic in the scenes with Depp and Cotillard, all of which amount to the same conversation played out in different locales. Cotillard is a charming actress and Mann’s films are seldom sensitive to the female psyche, yet she rises to the part given her better than most. It’s easy to imagine an American actress demanding a monologue or a crying scene; here Cotillard is above such silliness. Depp, conversely, may be letting the constant critical praise lavished on him since the first Pirates of the Carribbean go to his beautfiul head. His Dillinger always seems thoughtful about something, but Depp seldom allows the audience an indication of his character’s thoughts. Dillinger – the daring, brash bank robber – remains opaque under Depp’s portrayal, except in the scenes where he’s required to be romantic or dashing. At those times Dillinger behaves suspiciously like Johnny Depp, movie star.
Regarding the other performances, Bale plays the righteous Purvis with low-key intensity, suggesting an anger or indignation that unfortunately never boils to the surface. Even after he and his men gun Dillinger down (in an overlong and unnecessarily graphic sequence), Bale’s iron curtain stays shut on the character. For as gifted and versatile an actor as he is, the indifferent portrayal here is especially frustrating. Alternately, a bright spot arrives in the form of veteran actor Peter Gerety, who barnstorms his way through a courtroom scene as Dillinger’s lawyer. Jason Clarke (Death Race) does a lot with the role of Dillinger flunkie Red Hamilton, despite having lines like “when your times up, your time’s up.” Finally, longtime Mann fans should also recognize Stephen Lang (Death of A Salesman), a mainstay of the director’s work in the 80s, as Texas Ranger Charles Winstead. Lange surfaces completely out of the grim mire only near the end, and his final scene with Cotillard at least allows the film to end with a bittersweet grace note.
Items of interest and observation that don’t merit 750-1000 words.
The Fourth of July is more or less the halfway point of summer, meaning we’re virtually halfway through the biggest movie season of the year. And yet for a while now we’re been just trying to stay awake. Far from anything really memorable, summer 2009 will likely go in the books as more memorable for what it wasn’t than what it ever was. Films are making money, by and large: Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen had its 200 million dollar opening week, putting it on a fast track to top the summer’s current money maker Star Trek. But there’s no surprise, crossing-demographic runaway blockbuster this year, compared to 2008’s The Dark Knight or even Iron Man. The big summer movies, immediately recognizable as such, are marching through the theatres with dreary precision, one giving way to another like multimillion dollar dominoes.
Still, movie news keeps accumulating. The following list includes some observations, ideas, and occasional snarky remarks we’ve compiled while working on longer pieces. All the opinions are just our own, of course.
1. Is the lowest common denominator approach that’s been stifling the selection of available Blu-Ray format titles finally beginning to thaw? Recent weeks saw such classics as The Seventh Seal, Dr. Strangelove, and Last Year at Marienbad making their debut on the high-def medium, classing up shelves usually dominated by much lower brow fare. Fans of foreign cinema will be glad to know that Akira Kurosawa’s Kagemusha makes its Blu-Ray debut August 18, while Spike Lee’s Do The Right Thing debuts just this week. We imagine Sal’s Pizzeria looks great in high definition.
We expect lots of this.
2. Meanwhile, the Lord of the Rings trilogy seems to be inching closer to a release of its own, according to this report, even though a release of the films’ straight-to-DVD expanded versions will wait until the 2011 premiere of The Hobbit. The three films collectively made just shy of three trillion dollars in worldwide box office receipts, so why Warner Brothers would drag heels on releasing a full edition in the meantime is anyone’s guess. Maybe they’re as pessimistic about Hobbit co-director Guillermo Del Toro’s vision for the LOTR prequel as we are?
Box office 'Deliverance': Ferrell in LOTL
3. In a summer with no surprise hit (yet), what about the bombs? So far Terminator: Salvation, Angels & Demons, Land of the Lost, and The Taking of Pelham 123 have all fallen short of expectations, while the mid-range budgeted Year One also seems destined not to recoup its money. Poor word of mouth hurt Terminator, and Pelham 123 likely should have come out later in the year, when more adults frequent multiplexes. As for Land of the Lost, Angels & Demons and Year One, we’re blaming audience shtick fatigue in all cases. We’ll tempt fate here and predict that Bruno also disappoints: previews make it out to be nothing more than Gay Borat, and audiences may take a “been there, done that” attitude as a result.
Just dandy: Depp
4. If Universal pushes Public Enemies any harder they’re going to risk a groin injury. The seemingly relentless advertising campaign, already somewhat misleading in depicting Michael Mann’s reported character study as an action-adventure romp, has commercials all over television, mostly featuring Johnny Depp’s good looks. We expect very good things from the film, but if early audiences feel baited and switched the film could likely join the crowd of turkeys mentioned above. It’s also not a good sign that all the rave critical comments used in the TV ads are from Rolling Stone’s Peter Travers, who’s essentially the go-to guy for movie critic testimonials.
The cast of The Nine
5. DirecTV deserves some applause for bringing two of HBO’s most acclaimed dramas that aren’t The Sopranos to a wider audience. Last month the satellite provider began airing reruns of Deadwood and Barry Levinson’s landmark 90s-era prison drama Oz on its The 101 channel, presenting them uncut and without commercials. Coupled with its resurrection of worthy but prematurely cancelled network dramas Smith and The Nine, the all but unknown The 101 offers better summer programming than the major networks.
Not your father's G.I. Joe - and that's the problem.
6. The rumors about fired directors and other postproduction crises surrounding G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra only throw fuel on a bonfire of backlash for a film that’s due to premiere for another five weeks yet. Part of the cynicism, and a big chunk of the problem, is that the creators have violated a lesson that Hollywood seems to finally have learned about adapting comic books: don’t screw with what endeared the subject matter to audiences in the first place. Past superficial costuming similarities in some of the characters, the film bears little resemblance to the 80s cartoon and toy line, trading loyalty to that nostalgia for some generic looking Michael Bay-style histrionics. The producers should know better. And knowing is half the battle.
7. Continuing his long odyssey through the entirety of genre flick purgatory, Nicolas Cage will appear next March in Swordfish director Dominic Sena’s sword and sorcery horror adventure Season of the Witch. Cage plays a knight transporting a witch to a group of priests who will determine if she started the Black Plague. Ron Perlman (Sons of Anarchy) and British actress Claire Foy (Little Dorritt) co-star. Hard to believe Cage was once considered one of America’s most potent leading men, with versatile turns in Leaving Las Vegas and Red Rock West. But, films like this, Knowing and Bangkok Dangerous must be making money somewhere, because they keep getting made.
8. Finally, Ang Lee returns to theatres with August’s Taking Woodstock, a based-on-true story about the small Upstate New York town that more or less played host to the Woodstock music festival (the original one in 1969, not the corporate crap in the 90s.) Though comedy is probably no one’s first thought when discussing the meticulous Lee (Brokeback Mountain, The Ice Storm) the unpretentious feel and goofy spirit in the trailer below looks all kinds of promising. The broad ensemble cast includes Eugene Levy, Emile Hirsch, Zoe Kazan, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, and Paul Dano. It also stars Liev Shreiber as a gun-toting transvestite, which we hope was actually a common sight at the over-revered music concert.
Join us Friday for our review of Public Enemies. Thanks for reading.
One of the year’s best dramas arrives on DVD and Blu-Ray tomorrow.
Writer-director James Gray’s Two Lovers opens, as his previous We Own The Night began, with a succinct visual metaphor of what’s to come. Leonard Kraditor (Joaquin Phoenix), a deeply troubled young man draped in heavy winter clothes, throws himself off a pier into an icy body of water. Pulled to safety by passers-by who witnessed his plunge, he remains dumbstruck, unable to express gratitude for their efforts to save his life. Those themes of hopes rejected and stalled self-destruction form the backbone of the film’s searing character study and help establish it as one of the past year.
Skittish and sorrowful, Leonard stands on shaky ground both in his head and in his life. Diagnosed with bi-polar disorder and numbly devastated by an engagement that ended with ruthless logic by his lover’s family, he’s returned to the Brighton Beach home of his parents (Moni Moshonov and Isabella Rossellini) with nothing more ambitious in mind than working for their dry cleaning business and keeping to himself. The Kraditors are moving ahead, however, on the verge of merging their business with that of the neighboring and prosperous Cohen family. As a way of cementing the union, both sets of parents wouldn’t mind if Leonard struck up a romance with the Cohen’s smart, sensitive daughter Sandra (Vinessa Shaw).
Leonard and Sandra’s early flirtation is tentative, halting, almost childlike, and you get the sense that such gentle charm uses about all the energy Leonard can manage. That ennui changes once he meets his fiery upstairs neighbor Michelle (Gwyneth Paltrow), who’s come to live in their fortress-like Brooklyn apartment house as a kind of voluntary exile rendered by her boss and lover Ronald Blatt (Elias Koteas). Leonard is instantly transfixed by Michelle, who’s a beauty in the most painfully Daisy Buchanan-esque sense: always promising, in an elusive way, something great in return for love and devotion. Leonard pursues her to the best of his ability but finds his attentions first gently ignored and then rebuked. Disappointed, he pulls Sandra further into his orbit, settling into a comfortable relationship with her until the opportunity to win Michelle rears its dangerous head once again.
Gray co-wrote the script (with Ric Minello) based on the Fyodor Dostoevsky novella “White Nights,” and that author’s thoroughly downbeat worldview is well-suited to Gray’s visual vocabulary, which interprets Brooklyn and Manhattan alike as vast mazes of dreary buildings occasionally brought to ephemeral life by splashes of light and color. Gray’s films are always romantic in tone if not in attitude, and their characters are kept in almost chiaroscuro proportion to the urban megaliths surrounding them. That Two Lovers is set largely near the steely Atlantic during wintertime only heightens the sense of lifelessness surrounding the human drama. But unlike his earliest films (Little Odessa and The Yards) here Gray is getting more proficient at achieving a balance between the two contrasts. With Two Lovers the setting works in service to the characters, not the other way around.
Those characters, for their part, are played well and without ostentation, though some cast members inhabit their roles more than others. Phoenix gives Leonard a fragility that makes his vacillation between Michelle and Sandra not just believable but tightly suspenseful. The scenes in which Leonard attempts to fit in with Michelle’s group of clubbing friends is almost heart-rending to watch. Likewise Sandra’s futile attempt to convey her tenderness to Leonard, especially with a third-act gift that’s symbolic on probably a half-dozen different levels while simultaneously thumbnailing her character. Shaw is an underrated actress capable of showing great volume of emotion with the simplest of body movements, and here she takes a part that in lesser hands would have been irretrievably bland and makes a fleshed-out character worth liking – even loving, as we come to hope Leonard will.
Paltrow’s career has been dogged by skepticism for years, and in making Michelle both attractive and then repulsive she has in some ways the heaviest load to bear. By and large she succeeds, though in some scenes – as in her moments alone on the wind-swept rooftop with Phoenix – she seems to hold too much back; there’s a sense of a missing depth that might bring both characters into greater clarity. Of course that might be the fault of the script, but as everything else is planned and executed with clockwork precision such an oversight seems unlikely. Michelle is a woman who can’t get past her own selfishness to believe in anyone else’s sincerity. She’s a time bomb, one probably everyone but Leonard can recognize as such. Paltrow never quite lets that danger materialize.
Rossellini, regal even when talking on the phone, gives perhaps the film’s most poignant dialogue late in the film. Without spoiling anything, anybody who’s ever left home will recognize what she says as exactly the words you want to hear upon departure. It also arrives just as the events of the story collapse in on themselves, making what’s still to come seem as bitter as the winter wind howling around Leonard as he returns to the waterfront.
The ending is raw, uncompromising, and multi-faceted. Everyone – almost everyone – gets what they want, which in the finest Russian literary tradition only seems charged with the potential for more misery. Whether you approve or agree with Leonard’s final decision, you can’t argue with its logic or question its unconventional contrast to most Hollywood dramas. You’ll definitely have an opinion about it, though, one way or another. Two Lovers is a movie audacious enough to make you think.
-Michael Kabel
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(Note: An earlier version of this review originally ran for the film’s theatrical release.)
Martin Scorsese’s breakthrough film is still a joy to watch, even as its age begins to show.
One of its decade’s most influential films, 1973’s Mean Streets launched the careers of stars Robert DeNiro and Harvey Keitel while pushing then relatively unknown director and co-writer Martin Scorsese into the critical limelight. The film also sparked the Scorsese-DeNiro partnership, a long and fruitful collaboration which eventually created such important works as Taxi Driver (1976), The King of Comedy (1980), Raging Bull (1982) and Goodfellas (1990), among others, over the next three decades. If Mean Streets’ many sins are largely the result of youthful exuberance, it’s nonetheless impossible not to appreciate the film if only too see so many of the great director’s themes and tropes in their nascent forms.
Scorsese began work on the project after fellow director John Cassavetes (Faces) advised him to make movies based on personal experience and conviction. Working with frequent script collaborator Mardik Martin, he based the loose, episodic screenplay on his own deeply religious childhood in New York’s Little Italy, fusing elements of religious doubt and conviction with an unsentimental portrayal of the stifling influence of the mafia, a stranglehold that ran through almost all walks of neighborhood life. The quartet of young men at its center – played by Keitel, DeNiro, Richard Romanus and David Proval – circle the edges of the criminal lifestyle, spending their days in a cycle of gambling, drinking, and low-level theft that never quite seems to bring enough money or satisfaction.
Only the quiet and principled Charlie (Keitel) seems capable of imagining a more worthwhile existence, but that same wonder has led him into a moment of spiritual crisis. His passionate Catholicism on the wane, he takes solace in an illicit affair with his childhood friend Johnny Boy’s (DeNiro) cousin Teresa (Amy Robinson), an epileptic outcast from her family and a kindred lonely soul. She’s getting out, to an apartment Uptown, and wants Charlie to come with her. But after years of collecting bets for his uncle Giovanni (Cesare Danova), Charlie finds himself on the brink of managing a troubled restaurant, a move that might at last bring him a measure of true responsibility. Meanwhile the neighborhood, tradition, and his wearying loyalty to Johnny Boy, a compulsive gambler and malcontent, all keep him running in circles.
Presaging and inspiring the generation of movies to come, Mean Streets uses its setting both as a character and force of nature that defines its residents while at the same time trapping them. Charlie and his friends dress in stiff suits and guzzle scotch at a time when the rest of their generation was going nude and smoking grass. They live with their (never shown) parents in cramped apartments overstuffed with heirloom furniture. The restaurants and business are choked with cigarettes, cooking grease, and sweat. It’s a dirty world with few diversions that aren’t venal, but by and large the inhabitants are numbed and toughened to anything else. No wonder, as other critics have noted, the inhabitants break into fightfights at a moment’s notice: stuck in the fugue of their surroundings, the violence becomes a form of tacit commiseration.
Glimpses of the outside world come sometimes as palpable breaths of fresh air. A trip to the seashore with Teresa allows Charlie to express his joys, but even there he’s soon pulled back into the world from which they’ve temporarily escaped. “Nobody tries anymore,” he tells her. “To help. To help people.” Restless as he is, he’s unable to get out from under his uncle’s shadow, or cast off community expectations. In a fit of lust he asks out a dancer at his friend Tony’s (Proval) bar but stands her up for fear he’ll be seen in public with a black woman. He tries to rebuff Teresa when Giovanni describes her as “sick in the head.” His only unflagging loyalty is to Johnny Boy, whose increasingly self-destructive behavior – he owes low-level fence Michael (Romanus) several thousand dollars in unpaid “vig” – endangers both their lives.
Keitel and DeNiro, both young and eager to prove themselves, put one hundred percent into every scene. That’s a good thing more often than not, but as with the movie’s breakneck pace you often wish their characters would slow down – to think – and then come up with a plan rather than bulldoze through the next obstacle. It’s a smaller-scale version of the film’s larger issue of failing to endow lesser characters, such as Michael and Tony, with motivations for their action. For Michael especially, whose ultimate disgust with Johnny Boy sets the film’s climax in motion, such absence is sorely obvious. Johnny Boy, the only one to regularly venture outside the neighborhood, is a voice of contempt for the status quo, demonstrated by his refusal to repay loans and gambling debts (shown in the clip above). At times he seems more a force of nature than a person, but the character remains grounded by and lage by Charlie’s friendship, itself fueled by the leads’ natural camaraderie.
The script suffers from an embarrassment of riches – or rather, the potential for riches. It’s filled with a half-dozen unnecessary digressions and scenes of dialogue that boil down to only a few userful facts or lines. Other scenes are left too implicit, drifting off or getting shunted out of the viewer’s attention before ever pulling their own weight. And somewhat like Orson Welles making Citizen Kane, there’s a sense that Scorsese used every innovative camera trick or odd perspective he could imagine. Sometimes, as when a drunken Charlie wanders through Tony’s bar (with the camera strapped to Keitel’s chest, creating woozy intimacy), the result is revelatory and powerful. Other times, as with a long scene with Charlie and Teresa in bed together, the camera tricks and edits feel derivative and forced. Filmgoers who came of age in the 80s and 90s might find it hard to comprehend Scorsese paying homage to someone else, instead of the far more familiar other way around.
The film is also notable for watching Scorsese begin to craft ideas and imagery that would later become nothing less than iconic. Compare this scene from Mean Streets:
to a similar moment in Goodfellas, released seventeen years later:
Scorsese is hardly alone in quoting his own body of work (Michael Mann and Robert Redford have done it as well, to name just two), but there’s a sense when comparing the two clips above of Scorsese the director as a beginner and as an artist in his prime. With Mean Streets, the gusto – the exuberance – sustains the film through the technical overreach. Even until the ending, which is pretty baldly concerned with artistic effect over narrative cohesion, the attempt at creative filmmaking – the ambition – is unmistakable and completely worth celebrating.
To a certain degree, that exemption applies to many of the superfluous scenes, if only to watch the director work at making his ideas come across on camera. Some pay off, even in their gestating form – as above – while some don’t. If Scorsese the judicious editor was yet to come, watching him discover his own limitations – and in the 70s they were still few and far between – is a joy in itself.
Great novels that are due and overdue for a leap to the big screen.
Ignatius Reilly, the poster child for Development Hell
Books, as we’ve said before, are like movies that play in your head. Good books are movies you don’t mind watching over and over again on the screen in your mind. The film industry has appropriated all kinds of books virtually since its inception, taking material from the best fiction and nonfiction as well as from the lowest genre potboilers. There’s just no way of predicting how a book will translate: Hollywood has made masterpieces out of humble paperbacks but also made garbage of bona fide classics. Films and movies aren’t exactly alike, but they’re close enough in structure and pacing that it’s sometimes hard to believe filmmakers could screw up excellent source material. But they manage.
We were excited by recent news announcing that Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War and Edgar Rice Burroughs’ John Carter of Mars novels are headed for filming soon, at last bringing two classics of science fiction into cinema. The following is five additional examples of worthy books we’d like to see on the screen, if only so that cinema’s much wider audience can take notice of their superb stories. Just for the sake of variety, we’ve tried to include samples of literature of many different styles and periods.
Life During Wartime, by Lucius Shepard (1987) Shepard’s Cold War thriller is part horror tale, part allegory and part military war epic, forming a mosaic of genres typical of his strange genius. Set amid a U.S.-led guerrilla war in Central America, the story follows infantryman David Mingolla as he joins an elite cadre of psychic tacticians but finds his fledgling abilities much much vaster than he realized, allowing him to bend reality to his will and challenge the other psychics manipulating world events. Suggested cast: We imagine Jeremy Renner (The Unusuals) playing Mingolla, with Vinessa Shaw (Two Lovers) as his adversary and kindred spirit Deborah. Imagine the film as: A cross between Scanners, Apocalypse Now, and The Matrix. Ideal director: David Cronenberg.
The Big Nowhere, by James Ellroy (1988) A homophobic sheriff’s deputy, a mafia thug and an anguished investigator desperately pursue a brutal serial killer through McCarthy-era Los Angeles while communists, gangsters and politicians jockey for power. The second and arguably the darkest of Ellroy’s “L.A. Quartet” cycle of novels, it’s similar in tone and structure to L.A. Confidential but even bleaker and more cynical. And its ending, for better or worse, is anything but “Hollywood.” Suggested cast: Ryan Gosling (Fracture) stars as the self-loathing Deputy Danny Upshaw, alongside Michael Hogan (Battlestar Galactica) as repentant enforcer Buzz Meeks and Dean Winters (Oz) as weary crusader Mal Considine. No one on Earth should be allowed to play the monumentally evil Dudley Smith except James Cromwell, who nailed the same role in L.A. Confidential. Imagine the film as:Chinatown, Body Double and Manhunter combined. Ideal director: James Gray.
Five Skies, by Ron Carlson (2007) Three men – a petty criminal, a recent widower, and a Hollywood construction foreman – work at building a stunt ramp beside a gorge in the Idaho wilderness, all so that a female stunt driver (think Danica Patrick) can jump the ravine on Pay Per View. The three men confront their past as the ramp slowly takes shape and form. Suggested cast: Damian Lewis (Life) stars as the guilt-ridden foreman Arthur Key, alongside Chris Pine (Star Trek) as thief Ronnie Panelli and Sam Elliott as the heartbroken Darwin Gallegos. Imagine the film as:The Wages of Fear and Tender Mercies merged with Days of Heaven. Ideal director: Terrence Malick.
The Good Soldier, by Ford Madox Ford (1927) Easy to visualize as a costume drama with an edgy anger to it - an antidote to the huffing and puffing Oscarbait of recent years – Ford’s Victorian Era novel swirls around two married couples spending weeks together over twenty years at a German spa. The titular good soldier, Edward Ashburnham, is a perfect English gentleman except for his almost compulsive need to seduce women – including his friend’s wife. Long praised as an influential work both for its structure and style, the book was previously a 1981 telepic, so its time has easily come round again. Suggested cast: Liev Shreiber (Defiance) and Cate Blanchett (Bandits) play Ashburnham and his lover Florence Dowell; Robert Downey, Jr. costars as the cuckolded John Dowell alongside Maggie Gyllenhaal (The Dark Knight) as Leonora Ashurnham. Imagine the film as: A mix of Last Year At Marienbad, The Ice Storm, and The English Patient. Ideal director: Michael Winterbottom.
Night Train, by Martin Amis (1997) Amis’ critically-lauded 1997 fling with the hardboiled detective genre features an alcoholic, emotionally crippled police detective trying to solve the apparent suicide of a beautiful scientist with every reason to live. The investigation takes a turn for the darkly existential, and Amis twists conventions further by making the troubled detective a woman, too. The novel’s abrupt ending is like two fingers joliting out of the page, poking you in the eyes. Suggested cast: Laura Linney (Breach) plays the self-destructive Detective Mike Hoolihan, Amy Adams (Enchanted) plays the deceased Jennifer Rockwell, and Paul Schneider (Away We Go) co-stars as Rockwell’s lover and suspected killer Trader Faulkner. Imagine the film as:The Pledge,Prime Suspect and Laura compressed into a brainy whodunnit. Ideal director: John Dahl.
Mike Judge’s new comedy puts Jason Bateman and Mila Kunis in a sex-charged workplace comedy.
Arriving as something like a gourmet dessert after a summer more loaded with junk food than usual, September’s Extract returns animation guru Mike Judge to the big screen for the first time since the whip-smart genius of 2006’s Idiocracy. Judge’s films, such as that one and the now-classic Office Space, have a tendency to run a bit ahead of their time, only getting their due recognition once the rest of our culture catches up to their subversive wit. If five years from now we all remember Extract as a classic, remember you heard about it here first.
Recalling Office Space’s hapless Peter Gibbons, the new film follows a well-meaning everyman as his life goes through some professional and personal rejuvenation. Joel (Jason Bateman) owns a factory that makes and bottles flower extract for cooking, a job that’s every bit as exciting as it sounds. Bored with his job, his life, and especially his marriage, he spends a lot of time complaining to laid-back bartender pal Dean (Ben Affleck) and trying to woo his wife Suzie (Kristen Wiig) into bed. Suzie may be having an affair, it seems, leaving him shut off from getting any despite earnest efforts to play by her romantic rules.
Things change after a freak chain-reaction mishap leaves a male factory employee hurt in a bad place and on the hook for a giant insurance settlement. The injured worker’s replacement, a sexy temp named Cindy, gets Bateman worked up enough to start taking charge of his life.
Though none of that sounds like groundbreaking comedic material, remember how Office Space used the same plot contrivance as Superman III to potent comic effect. Judge has never shared the killer instinct that fellow animation auteurs Seth MacFarlane, Trey Parker and Matt Stone frequently exhibit, and while that means his humor is often more nuanced it’s also likely cost him a degree of edginess. His films are more about performance and observational satire more than invention, not poking fun so much as holding the already ridiculous up to light and letting it speak for itself. King of the Hill has served as the SCTV to Family Guy’s more aggressive early years-Saturday Night Live for years now.
In that regard Extract is a perfect vehicle for Bateman, who’s been honing his John Ritter-esque ordinary guy charm in films like Hancock and The Break-Up without yet finding the part that plays perfectly to his easygoing screen charisma. Likewise Kunis, who apparently plays the same tempting sweetheart she was in Forgetting Sarah Marshall. Seeing as she didn’t get the attention she deserved for her performance there, we can’t really fault her taking another stab at perfecting her luminescent romcom potential. The film also stars the mighty J.K. Simmons as one of Bateman’s managers, continuing the dark comic snark that let him steal all his scenes in darker comedies like Burn After Reading and Thank You For Smoking.
Judge himself has described the film as a flip side to Office Space, this time making the boss the nice guy and the owners the troublemakers. Given the hip star power of his tight ensemble cast, which also includes Clifton Collins, Jr. (Sunshine Cleaning) and the ubiquitous David Koechner (Anchorman), maybe this new film will escape the unfair fates that befell his previous efforts. Extract opens in limited release September 4.
Eight of the worst films of the early 1990s, our generation’s gilded age.
About half a dozen things wrong with the era are in this picture.
When assorted by quality, the movies of any given period resemble a pyramid, or a mountain. There is very little at the top and much more in the middle. But the bottom is the widest section, the part that’s hard to get around or avoid. There are far more bad movies than good ones, and by proportion it just makes sense that there are more really, really awful films – films that can make you angry they even exist – than films that deserve lasting notoriety. Yet our culture is mesmerized by irony (a trend that started – ironically – in the 90s), so as a bitter result many of these craptacular movies linger on, year after year.
The early 90s were not the best handful of years for American cinema, but they likely weren’t the worst, either. In fact the truly horrendous films of the late 90s far outnumber their counterparts from the decade’s first half. Last week we mentioned seven films from the period that deserved more recognition. This week, as we threatened then, we’re considering seven of the worst from that pocket of history between the Big 80s and the Shallow 90s, an era that often encapsulated both decade’s cultural pitfalls.
This list is not supposed to detail the absolute worst films, and by no means should it be considered exhaustive. A couple of them are justly forgotten; some were notorious in their time and then forgotten later. Each one’s inclusion is just our opinion, and we understand that every film is somebody’s favorite. We hope yours isn’t among those below.
Highlander 2: The Quickening (1991)An early cable TV mainstay, the first Highlander was an overachieving B-movie about immortal humans fighting a clandestine war among themselves for the prize of omniscience. For the sequel, the creators made the immortals dissidents from the planet Zeist instead, sent here in exile by its fascist dictator (Michael Ironside). Also, this time around the noble immortal Conner MacLeod (Christopher Lambert) teams up with a freedom fighter (Virginia Madsen) to overthrow the corporation that’s keeping Earth locked in perpetual night. Overly violent, stupid, and yet pretentious thanks to a global warming subplot, the film buried the franchise for years – until the first film got a TV spinoff that jettisoned almost everything about the sequel.
Hudson Hawk (1991) The early 90s were also a time when studios were still working out the bugs of making ultra-expensive blockbusters that people would get excited about seeing. Hudson Hawk, a smartassed caper comedy starring Bruce Willis and the last dregs of the Bruno shtick he’d worked through the 80s, goes nowhere while spending giant piles of cash on pretty much everything – sets, stars, special effects, the works. Yet the film died hard, becoming a punchline and euphemism for “megaflop” until BattlefieldEarth stole that dubious distinction in 2000. Not the absolute worst film of the era, except that Tri-Star expected people to line up for tickets. And play the video game. And collect the plastic cups, all to pay off its wretched excess.
The Vanishing (1993) We figure in his fifty-year career Jeff Bridges has only made maybe four or five really lousy films. This remake of the 1988 Dutch thriller Spoorloos, directed by that film’s Geroge Sluizer, is almost assuredly one of them. Cast somewhat against type as Machiavellian serial killer Barney Cousins, Bridges steamrolls over costar Kiefer Sutherland (playing a boyfriend obsessed with finding his girlfriend, one of Cousins’ victims) so completely that the psychological tug of war between the two collapses under its own lopsided weight. The original film understood how to build ambient dread out of the unknown, and the fear of knowing something you have no choice but to learn; The Vanishing telegraphs everything rather than take its time or risk boring its audience, then changes the script to give the story a happy ending. Ah, Hollywood.
Threesome (1994)Like the similarly false Reality Bites released the same year, writer-director Andrew Fleming’s (Hamlet 2) romantic comedy attempted to cash in on Generation X’s coming of age with this pretentious soap opera about three Gen X’ers – two guys and a girl – sharing a college dorm suite. The script contains every indie trope beaten to death throughout the decade: the world-weary voiceover narration, the superficial sex, the self-consciously “witty” vulgarity, the abrupt and unearned emotional reversals. Stars Josh Hamilton, Stephen Baldwin, and Lara Flynn Boyle are good-looking, vacant, and stiffly deliberate, as if they’re aware they’re in a movie “with a message.” Gen X’ers stayed away in droves, even while the demographic-targeted soundtrack became a hit on college radio stations.
Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1992 and 94) We mention these two together because they were part of the era’s trend towards high-budget monster movies made by the era’s top talent. Francis Ford Coppola helmed the lush Dracula version, starring the reliably fearless Gary Oldman (The Dark Knight) as the titular count and Anthony Hopkins as his nemesis Van Helsing. Winona Ryder and Keanu Reeves are as flat as ever portraying doomed lovers Jonathan Harker and Mina Murray, and critics and fans of the novel took umbrage to the script’s liberal additions of sex and bloody violence. Coppola’s direction and production design are bloated, unconvincing, and pompous. Hopkins hams away as usual while Oldman, in a scrotum-shaped wig and old lady nightgown, tries to keep up with the increasingly overheated proceedings.
Still, the film made money, and two years later Coppola produced a Frankenstein film directed by rising triple threat Kenneth Branagh, who cast himself as the mad doctor and Robert DeNiro as his creation. The result, somewhat surprisingly, was bleak, turgid, and opaque while struggling with the same sense of middlebrow overreach that doomed Dracula. None of the actors are really bad, though DeNiro often seems at a loss playing the doomed monster – partly because Branagh and co-star Helena Bonham-Carter (Fight Club) always seemed to be in movies about Victorian England. Critics at the time wondered if Branagh was out of his element or in over his head, and the film’s box-office failure delivered his until-then wunderkind career trajectory a punishing blow.
Jade (1995) Another film seemingly built in studio committee for box office success, William Friedkin’s (The French Connection) Jade aimed to recreate the kinky titilitation success of screenwriter Joe Eszterhaus’ previous Basic Instinct. Casting emerging leading men David Caruso and Chazz Palminteri alongside screen vamps Linda Fiorentino and Angie Everhart, the story of a gruesome murder linked to a sex club among San Francisco’s political elite was muddled, hard to follow, and surprisingly light on sex appeal. Friedkin, known for his gritty ultra-realism, was a poor choice to realize the story’s stylish affluence, and Caruso and Palminteri failed to generate chemistry with their gorgeous co-stars. The result was a film about dirty sex that was uncomfortable with itself.
Exit To Eden (1994) A notorious bomb about an island of dominatrices and the love slaves they love,the film inexplicably stars Dan Aykroyd and Rosie O’Donnell as New Orleans cops going undercover there to catch a gang of jewel smugglers, and – and! – it’s directed by Gary Marshall, the creator of Happy Days. Not funny and aggressively unsexy despite Dana Delaney’s (Desperate Housewives) warm turn as a mistress learning to soften up, the all-over-the-place vibe isn’t helped by O’Donnell’s smarmy narration or the smutty jokes that seemed a cop-out from the issues that Anne Rice’s original novel eagerly confronted. Even today, it’s hard to imagine the film’s target audience. Was it people who thought Julia Roberts should have worn more studded leather in Pretty Woman? Those who thought Aykroyd was sexy? Bondage enthusiasts who wanted to laugh at themselves? (Note that the clip below has low audio.)
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The Merry Gentleman is a film that will frustrate you. You will sometimes wish it moved faster and that it would open itself more, and reveal something besides only the tantalizing amount of information that its very shrewd and deliberate script wants to divulge. The ending will likely haunt you, not in a satisfying sense but rather in a way that compels you to make sense of its painstakingly-wrought ambiguity. And you might actually love the film for all of those reasons.
Their solitary existences bring them together at Christmastime, which anyone with depression can tell you is the cruelest time of the year by far. After shooting someone in Kate’s office building, Frank attempts to throw himself off a neighboring rooftop, after glimpsing her in a wonderfully-constructed moment of grace. But she sees him and screams, stopping his suicide. Later, the two formally meet as Frank shows her a small kindness. Kate is the type of person you suspect would rather not risk inconveniencing anyone with her friendship. She’s strong but vulnerable to even the basic ruthlessness that most people take for granted, and her attempts at isolation only draw other lonely souls into her path, including a emotionally needy co-worker (Darlene Hunt) and Dave Murcheson, the police detective (Tom Bastounes) investigating the shooting.
But she’s drawn to Frank, probably as much because he asks nothing of her and doesn’t seem prepared to offer anything for which he might expect gratitude down the line. “I think we’re good for one another,” Kate tells him, and when minutes later she explains, “You’re possibly the sweetest man I’ve ever met” you get a sense of how bad her life must have been to that point. The script moves ahead in time, cleverly, and there’s a sense as spring rolls around that the two are making progress helping one another. Then of course their respective pasts close in on them. Kate’s husband (Bobby Cannavale) tracks her down, spouting born-again Christian rhetoric that, not surprisingly, makes the skittish Kate even more terrified. Meanwhile Murcheson and his partner dog the shooting investigation as well as the apparent suicide of one of Frank’s associates. Frank is unafraid, permanently removing Kate’s husband from her life and continuing his tailoring business.
The pivotal scenes arrive as Murcheson visits Frank’s store. The two men size each other up, instant dislike getting submerged by going-through-the-motions polite conversation. “I tend to see the suit, not the person inside it,” Frank tells him, a pretty unsubtle way of explaining that life is often meaningless to him. Murchison ambles off, ready to confront Kate – the object of his affection as well as a potential witness and accomplice alike – of his concerns. His clumsy, well-intentioned effort pushes Kate and Frank into a confrontation that’s minimal on dialogue but no less emotionally resonant. Kate is ready for them to admit the truth about each other but Frank’s not there yet, setting up an ending that leaves more questions then it’s prepared to answer.
But these complains are petty grievances. Keaton knows how to direct himself and (with one exception) his actors, mining fascinating complexities out of virtually every role. MacDonald gives Kate layers of anxiety and innocence, letting her be paranoid in one scene and carefree the next. Bastounes is exceptional as the self-sabotaging Murheson, a man at once reaching out for someone’s warmth but retreating into his police authority whenever challenged. He’s the third part of Frank and Kate’s lonely constellation, dimmer by comparison but no less sincere despite his lack of self-awareness. Only Cannavale fails to impress, bringing too much ham to his rambling fire-and-brimstone monologue. We understand that his character is a petty and vile man because Kate has already sold us on the idea. Cannavale’s overacting only sets her own work back.
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Posted by Screaming Blue Reviews 
Posted by Screaming Blue Reviews 
Posted by Screaming Blue Reviews 
