Oh Mickey, You Were So Fine

Remembering the early career of Mickey Rourke, this year’s comeback kid.

Possibly no other actor of his generation rose so quickly and brightly, nor fell so precipitously, as Mickey Rourke. An A-list leading man following his breakout performance in 1982′s ensemble drama Diner, Rourke’s smoldering, barely-subdued screen confidence combined with a vaguely sordid ambivalence, as if James Dean had come out of the 1970s having tried a thing or two he probably shouldn’t. In fact, for young male audiences of the era he embodied the kind of restless, anti-authoritarian screen persona John Garfield held in the 50s and Jack Nicholson occupied in the 70s: the surly outsider getting what he wanted by following his own discontented moral compass.

Though it’s hard to pin down where things began to go wrong for him, Rourke’s career was always dogged with controversy and often seemed fueled by hubris. His star continued to rise through the mid- and late-80s, making period landmarks like The Pope of Greenwich Village, 9 1/2 Weeks, and Rumble Fish, while his turn as a Charles Bukowski analogue in 1987′s Barfly single-handedly made the film a minor classic. Still, his reputation for being difficult to direct and quick to anger undermined his career, as did a series of woefully missed opportunities. He’s reported to have turned down starring roles in Top Gun, The Untouchables, and 48 Hrs. in favor of little-seen works such as Francesco and A Prayer For the Dying, smaller and more ambitious films that lacked the widespread appeal of such larger projects. And the partying never helped, or the misbegotten plastic surgery, or the notorious boxing career that often left him looking ridiculous and self-deluded.

Yow! Rourke, Basinger in 9 1/2 Weeks

But ultimately it’s likely the public simply grew bored with him. Never afraid of adult material, the eroticism of 9 1/2 Weeks and Angel Heart (more on that below) linked Rourke in the public mind to “tawdry sex films,” and a starring role in 1989′s stupendously awful Wild Orchid left him typecast in that niche for years. It’s also fair to say, though less fair to him, that by the end of the 80s he seemed merely passe, a relic of his decade best set aside in favor of younger stars. He’s spent much of the last twenty years in supporting parts in A-movies and starring roles in B- and D-movies, often in roles that are little more than cameos.

Now his career is resurgent. Besides his award-winning turn in The Wrestler he’s won a starring role as the villainous Whiplash in Iron Man 2 and a prominent part in the action ensemble The Expendables. And as further proof that all things are cyclical in Hollywood, the recent indie The Informers featured both Rourke and his 9 1/2 Weeks co-star Kim Basinger, onscreen again after twenty three years. Still and nevertheless, the best of his early films stand among the best movies of their era. The five presented below are representative of that body of work, though by no means comprehensive.

Diner (1982): Rourke is so charismatic in Barry Levinson’s boys-will-be-boys remembrance that his costars Kevin Bacon, Daniel Stern, Steve Guttenberg and Paul Reiser often seem trapped in black and white film stock by comparison. The following scene, in which Rourke’s hairdressing law school student Boogie Sheftell tricks his date (Colette Blonigan) into touching him someplace special, is topped only by his oily charm at calming the girl down afterwards. A meandering piece more about time, place, and character than narrative movement, Diner cemented Levinson as a director to watch and made stars of its entire cast, which also included Ellen Barkin and Tim Daly.

The Pope of Greenwich Village (1984): Director Stuart Rosenberg’s (Cool Hand Luke) character study of two cousins in New York’s Little Italy was critically praised but flopped at the box office. Charlie and Paulie (Rourke and Eric Roberts) try to rob a safe so they can bet on a winning racehorse, a desperate and ill-considered scheme that puts them afoul of the local mafia and threatens their lifelong dysfunctional friendship. Rourke is focused and intense beside the all-over-the-place Roberts, allowing  their lost soul characters to forge a kind of New Yawk version of Lenny and George from Of Mice and Men. The following scene, early in the film, comes just as Charlie begins to lose all patience with Paulie’s goofing:  

Angel Heart (1987): Among the most unsettling horror films of the decade, yet probably the most disconertingly erotic, Angel Heart cast Rourke as Harry Angel, a 1950s New York private detective sent to New Orleans to find a missing singer named Johnny Favorite. As he investigates Favorite’s disappearance while courting local girl Epiphany Proudfoot (The Cosby Show‘s Lisa Bonet, a long way from the Huxtable household), he begins to realize his client Mr. Cyphre (Robert DeNiro) is framing him for a series of bloody murders connected to Favorite’s disapperance. Director Alan Parker (Midnight Express) piles on the creepy until even the film itself becomes as grimy and murky as yellowed glass. Rourke and Bonet’s torrid sex scenes were so graphic they were trimmed to get an R-rating but restored to a home video release, making the film one of the ealriest examples of a director’s cut.

Barfly (1987): Proving something of a critical comeback after the poor receptions of Year of the Dragon and 9 1/2 Weeks, Rourke’s turn as a slightly-fictionalized version of legenedary poet/drunk Charles Bukowski also returned Faye Dunaway to the screen after years of osbcurity. Rourke plays Henry Chinaski not as a holy fool or mystic spirit but rather as a shambling, self-destructive asshole who writes poetry sort of as a pastime from getting hammered. The film is a warts-and-all approach to Bukowski’s almost mythic life that doesn’t skimp on grit but also doesn’t back away from showing the dark comedy inherent in many of the situations. In the clip below Henry taunts his nemesis Eddie the Bartender, played by (you guessed it) Frank Stallone.

Homeboy (1989): Rourke wrote and starred in this rough, uncompromising character study of a broken-down boxer carrying an unrequited love for a carnival worker Ruby (Debra Feuer) while nursing a brain injury that might kill him the next time he fights. Christopher Walken, years away from the self-caricature of his 90s work, plays a cheap hood trying to get Rourke’s Johnny Walker to come along on a heist. Reuben Blades and Jon Polito fill out the cast, while Eric Clapton provides the moody soundtrack. Rourke sued to have the film’s release stopped, claiming creative control promised him by the film’s producers was never delivered, and reviews have been mixed over the years. But Rourke and Walken give great performances despite the film’s middling faults, and with Rourke now celebrated for a similar role in The Wrestler it seems time to get this film an American DVD release.

- Michael Kabel

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DVD Review: Pride and Glory

Uneven family cop drama now available on DVD and Blu-Ray.

Not to get too theoretical, and not to oversimplify, but in most cases genre pieces qualify for their genre by exhibiting or implying a certain amount of elements that are recognized as elements, or “forms,” of the genre in question. Identifying these elements, sometimes called “tropes,” is for movie critics and fans often simply an act of intuition. There are also cases where a film carries so many tropes that they’re unmistakably part of their genre and nothing else. By extension, it’s possible to theorize that a film that carries more tropes than any other might be said to be the “most” of its genre.

On that basis, Pride and Glory ought to be recognized as the ultimate family-of-Irish-American-New York-cops-in-moral-quandary genre film. Except there’s a giant difference between “done” and “done well,” and the film manages to successfully pull off almost none of its elements, though pretty much each one evokes memories of better films where they were used with greater grace and less amateurish abandon. A loud, copying, and unconvincing movie with no real point except its own bombast, its combined effect isn’t just bad – it’s actually a discredit to the genre to which it aspires.

 Edward Norton plays Ray Tierney, a NYPD detective lying low in the Missing Persons division because of a sketchily drawn episode two years in his past (The audience is never told exactly what.) When four detectives in the department’s 31rst Precinct – captained by his brother Frances (Noah Emmerich)  – are killed in an arrest gone awry, Ray’s father (Jon Voight) demands Ray join the task force assigned to swiftly catch the drug dealer (Ramon Rodriguez) believed responsible. But the investigation, through a series of coincidences and scenes apparently intended to give the cast something to act about, quickly expands to include the family’s brother-in-law Jimmy Egan (Colin Farrell) and his three squadmates.

What ensues is the kind of plot that’s not so much a story as an amalgamation of other stories blended together without regard for structure. There’s betrayal, and murder, and of course innocent people caught in the middle. But Gavin O’Connor’s (Miracle) direction puts one scene right after the other with little in the way of mounting suspense: one thing happens and then another and another. The plotline is straightforward, even if the tension is thin. And with a 125-minute run time, there’s a lot of scenes, many of which mostly contain people staring laser beams into one another or swearing as if vulgarity was getting outlawed the next morning. Ray and Jimmy’s final confrontation in a deserted Irish bar is laughably forced, as is Jimmy’s death at the hands of an angry mob minutes later.

One thin sliver of beauty arrives about halfway through, when Francis presents his dying wife with a Gaelic band promising “love eternal.” It’s a sweet scene, played expertly and without bathos by Emmerich and actress Jennifer Ehle, that detracts from the rote events happening elsewhere in the plot. In fact, coupled with a later scene of Francis defusing a hostage situation, you might wish the movie was about Francis and starred Emmerich’s perfectly-tuned performance, instead of Norton’s and Farrell’s faux macho histrionics. Emmerich (The Truman Show, Beautiful Girls) has made a career of playing non confrontational beta male types; his performance here is a revealing breath of fresh, unmannered air.

As for the stars, Norton’s performance is no more and no less than adequate to the task at hand. By this point in his career he’s forged a definite screen persona, made from equal parts of his turns in American History X and Fight Club, and now he’s beginning to stick by it. Farrell possibly took the part of Jimmy as an opportunity to play a bad guy; but why, then, is so much of his performance a weird, half-hearted Robert DeNiro impression? Farrell has also become the kind of movie star, it seems, that HAS to have a redemptive death, even when playing the heavy. It also doesn’t help that at least one scene seems shunted into the script by O’Connor and co-writer Joe Carnahan (Narc) in order to give Farrell more screen time. Voight, who should know something about difficult children himself, brings a definite weight to his scenes as the bewildered father, even if his dialogue is relegated to standard plot-facilitating exposition: “I want you on this task force!”; “He was always the thinker, always solving problems.”

I talked a lot at the start of this review about derivation and influence, and to close I’d like to recommend seven films whose influence on Pride And Glory was palpable and immediately obvious. Watching any of these – or watching them all – is certain to be a more rewarding use of time. They’re in no particular order, though I’ve listed three of Sidney Lumet’s films first, for obvious reasons: Serpico (1973); Night Falls On Manhattan (1997); Prince of the City (1981); Fort Apache: The Bronx (1981); Assault On Precinct 13 (1976); Force of Evil (1947); Monument Avenue (1998). I’m sure there’s more, but these came to mind first. And though it’s too contemporaneous to really act as an influence, the far superior We Own The Night, directed by James Gray (Little Odessa), used many of the same forms and the same influences to startling, virtuoso effect. Actually one of 2006′s best dramas, it’s worth looking at just for its own sake.

-Michael Kabel
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(Note: this review originally appeared for the film’s theatrical release.)

DVD Review: Lakeview Terrace

Neil LaBute’s smart thriller debuts on DVD and Blu-Ray tomorrow.

Race divides most Americans, whether in their attitudes to different ethnic groups, the amount of mistrust between those groups, or opinions about how much groups can – or should – celebrate and mimic one another. There’s an old saying that racism begins at home, and the idea that our homes are not only not safe but also the proving ground for many of our failings permeates Lakeview Terrace. It’s a bold and for the most part successful film, even if some thriller movie cliches occasionally allow it to veer into overly familiar territory that weakens its smart intensity.

Samuel L. Jackson, probably America’s most prolific film star, plays veteran LAPD officer Abel Turner, a weary freight train of a man both on the streets and when raising his two teen-aged children in their comfortable suburban home. In previous decades – he explains he bought the house twenty years ago, after grueling years of overtime and extra jobs – such a home probably represented the pinnacle of working class ambition. But unseen and paranoia-fueling troubles (drug dealing, domestic violence, juvenile delinquency) are creeping into the neighborhood, threatening his sense of stability.

When mixed race couple Chris and Lisa Mattson buy the place next door as a “starter house,” Abel is less than pleased. He has his own burning and deep-seated reasons for mistrusting blended couples, fused to a simmering racism that Jackson expresses through controlled, tight body movements. “You don’t see straight,” a white informant tells him early in the film, and the series of hazings he puts the new couple through proves that observation time and again. Abel has a short fuse but tall principles, while the Mattsons are what used to be called Yuppies – impressed with themselves, glib, affluent, confident. They wouldn’t like one another under the best of circumstances. Pressed together, their conflict seems believably unavoidable.

The Mattsons don’t go out of their way to make a good impression, either. They have sex in their pool despite its visibility from neighboring houses. Chris (Patrick Wilson, Hard Candy) flicks cigarette butts into Abel’s yard and leaves his car parked in the street – venial sins in most neighborhoods but not to Abel, whose siege mentality is only reinforced by what he sees on the job. His retaliations are swift but elusive; as a cop, he knows the difference between breaking laws and bending them. The Mattsons, comfortable in their white-collar social bubble, unwisely attempt to communicate with him in the same way they would a peer, not someone from a different walk of life. And the tension escalates even further, growing increasingly violent and acrimonious.

Screenwriters David Loughery and Howard Korder shrewdly stack the script with signs that Chris and Lisa are what’s sometimes euphemistically called “tourists” – people selfishly fascinated with other ethnic groups. Director Neil LaBute (In The Company of Men, The Shape of Things) fleshes out such self-congratulatory “enlightenment” in subtle ways. The Mattsons host a cocktail party for other mixed-race couples, one of whom congratulates Chris for “scoring a black chick.” Lisa designs urban designer clothes for children of all races but cautions her husband that Abel is “a brother.” The young couple doesn’t see anything wrong with their lifestyle – “Society” says it’s okay, and they’re not hurting anyone else. In that respect, they have a valid if only normative point. Abel’s constant and escalating haranguing often seems excessive, but the story and Jackson’s superlative performance always counterbalance that audience reaction with something that makes his behavior understandable if not sympathetic. Good fences make good neighbors, but misunderstandings and wasted opportunities make grudges accumulate.

White light, white heat: Wilson

But all of this has to lead somewhere, and unfortunately the final confrontation between Chris and Abel is nothing that hasn’t been done before – in fact, it’s cliche in any number of ways. The plot twist that establishes the climax is also creaky enough to be heard from your theatre’s lobby. But as with the recent Traitor, the film says something different despite following a well-worn path. LaBute has a long resume of making thought-provoking films that don’t quite have their own ideas sorted out, but here the Gordian Knot of American race relations gives him enough material to provoke without having to comment. A somewhat clumsier exception is the subplot of the wildfires approaching the neighborhood. While an opportunity to provide some breathtaking CGI imagery, the encroaching blaze is pure high school English symbolism, and its use in the climax doesn’t really earn its keep.

Wilson gives a fine performance as Chris, all confused expressions and jangling nerves. With his moist blue eyes and face straight from Greek statuary, he’s the picture of homogeneous Caucasian beauty. Kerry Washington (The Last King of Scotland) makes the most of an underwritten role and comparatively sparse screentime. Ron Glass (Barney Miller, Firefly) is pitch perfect as Lisa’s father, a successful Oakland businessman who’s less than thrilled about his daughter’s provocative marriage. As their benefactor in the house purchase, he’s both resigned but wary: call it Guess Who’s Paying For Dinner? Ultimately, the film’s secret star may be Mychael and Jeff Danna’s haunting, echo-laden score. Sounding both isolated and claustrophobic at the same time, it’s the perfect backdrop for people with virtually nothing in common failing to make peace with one another or even just get along.

- Michael Kabel
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(Note: this review originally appeared for the film’s theatrical release.)

Review: Revolutionary Road

Mendes, Winslet, and DiCaprio drive an award vehicle down a classic American novel.

Sam Mendes’ Revolutionary Road wants you to love it. In fact, it wants you to think it’s a “true masterpiece,” a “searing vision,” and an “instant classic.” It wants you to think its stars are giving the performances of their careers in a heart-wrenching story of a doomed American couple. It especially wants you to think you’re watching a brilliant, Oscar-worthy turn by its star Kate Winslet. The film does everything it possibly can to convince you of as much.

Don’t get suckered. Overlong but tediously paced and embarrassingly staged, it’s the kind of hyperwrought melodrama that, from less celebrated sources, might be dismissed as the earnest thesis of journeymen creators who have read more than actually lived. That’s bitterly ironic for fans of Richard Yates’ original 1961 novel, on which the film is based. Yates’ work was crushingly honest and, like all of his writing, candidly autobiographical. Yet the film is synthetic to its self-satisfied core, all polish and period detail (the gray flannel suits, the big cars, cocktail hours with giant glasses) without once inhabiting the time frame or risking a distraction from its stars’ capital-A acting to consider why such events might have happened the way they unfold. It has atmosphere but no depth, noise but nothing to say.

Most of the pics available online feature DiCaprio and Winslet. Go figure.

Frank (Leonardo DiCaprio) and April (Winslet) Wheeler are a young American couple living in a Connecticut suburb in the mid-1950s. Frank works in the marketing department of an IBM-like business machine company while April raises their two children. She once had dreams of becoming an actress, but those dreams have withered into star performances in a dreary community theatre. Bored with their lives and recognizing that their marriage has begun to curdle, April begins a plan to move the family to Paris. She’ll work at one of the American government agencies there; Frank will have the time to “find himself” and “realize his potential.” As explained in flashback to their bohemian courtship, they both believe Frank is destined for something more meaningful than suburbia and corporate droning. Their plans fall apart as Frank is tempted with a job promotion and April becomes pregnant, a collapse that drags their marriage along with it.

We complained months ago that Mendes’ films often comprise a cluster of aggressively staged scenes rather than a thoroughly successful narrative, and that he readily sacrifices plot and suspense in order to allow his actors room to chew the scenery. Of all his previous films, those faults are nowhere more in evidence than here. Winslet’s performance ramps up to ten in the first scene of dialogue between her and DiCaprio and rarely lets up. Her mannerisms are so broad, her body language so loud and her enunciation so defined, there’s no room left for subtlety or shading. It doesn’t help that Mendes, her husband, frames most of the shots with her as their center, or allows her two Oscar-clip-ready monologues that sound pretty from a writerly standpoint (second-time screenwriter Justin Haythe often quotes Yates’ work without really catching the words’ context, or subtext either) but that come across as artificial and mannered when said aloud.

DiCaprio’s performance is more audacious, though not for good reasons. In creating Frank he chooses to mimic the vocal cadences and body lauguage of Jack Nicholson’s early work, particularly Chinatown and Five Easy Pieces. Failing that, he resorts to his usual screen trick of looking ready to cry, seeming on the verge of tears no less than nine times in two hours. Critics have compared DiCaprio’s turn as favorable to Nicholson’s 1970s performances, but there is a difference between resemblance and derivation, and what DiCaprio performs only amounts to acting karaoke. A more grounded performance might have led to Frank becoming either the sympathetic center or the tragic fault of the Wheelers’ marriage. By cycling between imitation and routine it manages neither.

The supporting actors do what they can amid the roaring of the leads. Michael Shannon (Bug), the cast’s sole recipient of an Oscar nomination, delivers a strong performance as a mentally unbalanced man who both admires and condemns the Wheelers. The temptation to turn the character into a holy fool was likely overwhelming given the surrounding production, but Shannon imbues deep reserve into the part of the damaged John Givings. Jay O. Sanders (Cadillac Records) is effective and understated as Frank’s boss Bart Pollack. The Wheelers’ neighbors are never given enough to bring their characters into full definition, despite solid work by David Harbour (Quantum of Solace) and Kathryn Hahn (Step Brothers). Kathy Bates (Misery) gives a perfunctory performance as the Wheeler’s realtor and social contact Helen Givings, while Elia Kazan’s granddaughter Zoe (Fracture) shows promise as Frank’s occasional dalliance. Every performance implies that with more screen time their characters might bloom into something bigger, more resonant of the book and its themes, but those chances never materialize. The film is simply a vehicle for its stars first and above all.

Yates’ novel has long been considered “unfilmable” because of its meticulous attention to interior monologue and nuances of emotion and character instinct. Not surprisingly, that charge has become the rallying cry of the film’s apologists. But Yates also found his characters’ redemption by mining their entire lives as explanation and pardon for their adult shortcomings. Given the grinding sorrow and loneliness of their impoverished childhoods, Frank and April’s ability to dream or want something better was a triumph in and of itself. Except for a few half-hearted asides from Frank, that material has been stripped. It should also be said that although the film defied our earlier expectation that April’s abortion wouldn’t survive the adaptation, the event is staged and filmed with all the grace of a sledgehammer and minus the flashback that gives it additional dimensions of poignancy. And in a trailer-ready moment, DiCaprio’s Frank goes running down the street, struck with grief, making a bald metaphor for escape as the character’s sole grace note.

Simplistic where it should be profound and talky where it should be thoughtful, Revolutionary Road succeeds neither in provoking thought nor arousing emotion. Unlike even Mendes’ earlier American Beauty, it offers no solution to the characters’ misery, not even the hope for compassion and honesty suggested by its source material. It’s a wine cooler of a film masquerading as champagne, a work that aspires to nothing except to serve as a means of garnering laurels for its principals. With its recent all-but-complete shutout for nominations maybe this time the Academy isn’t fooled. You shouldn’t be, either.

- Michael Kabel
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Preview: Taken

Liam Neeson stars in the latest from action auteur Luc Besson.

Jedi Master, Dark Knight mentor and Scottish freedom fighter Liam Neeson returns to the screen in Taken, a kidnapping/revenge adventure produced and written by 90s action maestro Luc Besson (Leon, The Fifth Element). Neeson plays Bryan Mills, a former CIA black ops commando who tracks down the Albanian criminals that kidnapped his daughter (Lost‘s Maggie Grace) into a sex-slave ring. Bryan travels to France to find his daughter and, like the moody poster implies, exact bloody revenge. Also appearing are Famke Janssem (Goldeneye) as Bryan’s estranged ex-wife and Xander Berkeley (Gattica) as her new husband. Further complicating matters, Mills has just 96 hours to find his daughter or risk losing her forever within the netherworld of international human trafficking.

Though the film is directed by former cinematographer Pierre Morel (The Transporter), judging from the setup and the trailer it’s hard not to see the film as a classic Besson production, from the almost larger-than-life proagonist attempting to rescue a emperiled woman down to the underworld-of-Paris setting. In his early career Besson established himself as a modern Marcel Carne, making gritty films centered on character but that carried enough atmosphere to make their settings crucial in defining the stories told within them. As Carne had in Port of Shadows and Daybreak, Besson manipulated texture and lighting in his films Subway and Nikita, creating environments that embraced American suspense movie tropes without sacrificing a French cinematic voice. Along the way he made international movie stars of his two leading men, Christopher Lambert (Highlander) and Jean Reno (Ronin).

But Besson’s later career making American films was less rewarding. After 1993′s masterful Leon (released in the United States under the bland title The Professional), a series of disappointing but larger budget productions followed throughout the decade, including 1997′s poorly received The Fifth Element and 1999′s flop biopic The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc. A 2001 Jet Li vehicle, Kiss of the Dragon, failed to interest American audiences, and in recent years his career has largely involved writing and producing two successful film franchises involving cars: The French-produced Taxi series and the Jason Statham-starring Transporter trilogy. Though both proved colossally profitable (the Taxi series in France, especially) they also lacked the razor sharp edginess of Leon or even Nikita. (In fairness, the first and third Transporters are giddy lowbrow fun.)

Taken could well signal a return to form. The choice of Neeson to star as the badass (instead of just teaching Batman, Anakin Skywalker, et cetera how to beat people up) feels both overdue and yet  classic. It’s strange to think he hasn’t starred as a dramatic hero since 1998′s Les Miserables, and with Harrison Ford and Clint Eastwood winding down their careers Neeson might grab the title of Senior Action Hero for himself. Of the supporting cast, Grace has always had more potential than Lost‘s fickle creators ever knew what to do with, and Janssen is a competent, relaxed dramatic actress better in character parts (such as 1998′s Monument Avenue) than in bigger ensemble pieces (the X-Men trilogy). Ultimately, like February’s Clive Owen-Naomi Watts suspenser The International, Besson’s Taken seems ready to further establish the European suspense action thriller genre begun by the Bourne trilogy.

Taken opens in wide American release January 30.

- Michael Kabel

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Review: Defiance

Strong performances redeem a shapeless WWII adventure.

In previewing Edward Zwick’s (The Last Samurai) new Defiance last week we mentioned how the director tends to make action movies of more substance than the typical Hollywood special effects dross. There are stories contained within his films, and if an occasional action scene occurs to amp up each one’s bombast and make it more marketable to wider audiences, Zwick seems content to walk that tightrope. If none of his films are necessarily great cinema, they’re not entirely disposable either.

With Defiance the writer-director has potentially the best story material of his career with which to work, and reports that he spent a dozen years getting the true-life World War II story to screen suggests his respect for the source material. Though its performances are always engaging and the story nothing if not compelling, the film almost collapses under its action movie quota and by a script that fails to articulate its ideas past the most obvious conclusions. Though it’s unfair to call the film disappointing, it never achieves its gripping potential, either.

Defiance centers on the story of the four Bielski brothers, Polish Jews who fled into the Naliboki forests after the Nazi advance killed their father. The brothers, including Tuvia (Daniel Craig), Zus (Liev Shreiber), and Asael (Jamie Bell), initially plan to use the forest’s resources to outlast the Nazi advance. But fellow Jewish refugees continue to wander into the forest, defenseless, and the brothers find themselves both their caretakers and protectors. As word of Nazi and Nazi-sympathizer atrocities filter their way to the group’s ramshackle encampment, Zus begins leading others on raids both for food and revenge.

Tuvia and Zus are opposites, and their understated hostility, fueled by Zus’ badgering but agitated by Tuvia’s evasiveness, drives much of the film’s early drama. It’s a neat trick that screen tough guy Craig should play the more inward, methodical brother, the one given more to planning than action. By contrast, Shreiber’s Zus is a snarling bear of a man with percolating Socialist sympathies and a deep resentment of the “pretentious,” wealthier Jews who now need the Bielski’s help. He eventually decamps to join a Soviet partisan band elsewhere in the forest, leaving Tuvia, Aseal, and youngest brother Aron (George MacKay) to help the swelling band of helpless refugees endure a freezing winter, Typhus outbreak, and a constant scarcity of food.

Shreiber won the Best Hat Contest, but Craig was undeterred.

The film runs into trouble when it becomes time for something to happen, and what happens arrives too little or too late to bring the film together into a decisive success. It’s strange that a 137 minute long action film should feel hollow near its center, but the lack of context given to the refugees’ struggle doesn’t ground the film. Other reviews have suggested that the dearth of visible onscreen antagonists – a Nazi villain a la Ralph Fiennes’ Amon Goeth in Schindler’s List, for example – keeps any sense of danger from becoming too palpable. But such absence speaks to co-writer Zwick’s fine intentions but also his struggles as a storyteller. The script confines the struggle to the forest, creating a hyper-reality that should propel the mounting tension; yet the episodic structure (there must be a half-dozen subplots, not all of them necessary) incessantly diffuses forward momentum. Events begin to simmer and then the story shifts to one of the myriad other plot threads.

This lack of concentration also makes the plot and film itself feel longer than they are, which again with a two hour-plus runtime only serves to make the story baggy. Some of the subplots are worthy of greater development: the camp layabouts who bully their weaker neighbors, the tension between the richer Jews and their poorer relations, a touching romance between Asael and a young villager (Mia Wasikowska). Other plots, including Zus’ bonding with his Soviet compatriots and a going-through-the-motions romance between Tuvia and an aristocrat (Alexa Davalos), never get the room they need to develop. It’s not that they’re poorly played – Shrieber, Craig, and Davalos could all probably summon chemistry with a brick wall – but that the storylines themselves are as malnourished as the camp’s inhabitants.

As with Zwick’s The Last Samurai, all the character work leads up to a giant set piece battle climax, this time involving the long-feared full-strength Nazi assault. The two set pieces comprising the third act, a firefight against a tank and a bombing raid on the camp, are effectively staged even if they feel perfunctory arriving so close to the film’s ending. Zus’ cavalry charge rescue is also, unfortunately, Hollywood hokum at its finest. When the postscripts arrive – and make no mistake, this is the kind of film for which postscripts were invented – you almost feel as if the end is finally come, even as the story presented begins to peter out. Movies at their best tell us worthy stories of the human struggle. Defiance does its story justice, even if it doesn’t quite excel at becoming a work of art in and of itself.

- Michael Kabel
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Preview: Defiance

Gritty, true life World War II adventure opens nationwide today.

A lot has been made about the surfeit of movies dealing with Nazis and their evil the last few months, including the Oscar-baiting The Reader and the not-quite-comeback Tom Cruise suspenser Valkyrie. The Viggo Mortensen-led Good also seemingly came and went pretty quickly. Despite the glut, or perhaps because of it, Defiance receives its nationwide release in the middle of January. That’s a shame, because it looks ready to tear those other films a new one.

Directed by Edward Zwick (Blood Diamond) and based on a true story, the film tells the story of the Bielski brothers, Polish Jews who evaded capture during the 1941 Nazi invasion of that country and fled east into the Naliboki Forest (in what is today part of Western Belarus). Often working with irregular Soviet guerrillas soldiers, the brothers and their followers lived in crude bunkers while helping more than 1,200 people (mostly women and children) get to safety and killing almost 400 enemy soldiers, often conducting daring flights through the forest to escape capture or lead others to shelter. In fact, they were never caught: in 1944 the brothers led their refugees out of the forest and towards freedom. Two of the brothers eventually emigrated to the United States; another joined the Soviet military and was killed in the last weeks of the war.

Defiance the film, based on a book by Holocaust scholar Nechama Tec, centers on the three oldest brothers, played by Daniel Craig (Quantum of Solace), Liev Shreiber (The Manchurian Candidate) and Jamie Bell (Flags of Our Fathers). Craig plays the eldest brother Tuvia, a veteran of the Polish army and the group’s leader; Shreiber plays Zus, a left-leaning firebrand ready to dole out bloody vengeance. Also appearing are Alexa Davalos (Feast of Love) and Mia Wasilkowska (HBO’s In Treatment) as Tevia and Asael’s love interests.

With films such as Glory, The Last Samurai, and Legends of the Fall, Zwick has made a career of directing films about war that provoke the viewer’s brain more than the average 90 minute explosion montage but that nevertheless don’t get so weighty that the ideas distract from the action taking place. In other words, if there’s such a thing as a thinking man’s action director, Zwick is probably the guy, and he’s reportedly spent a dozen years getting this story onscreen. Nevertheless, accusations of sweeping creative license and controversy about the brothers have already been leveled against the script, including allegations that the real-life Bielskis participated in a Soviet Partisan-led massacre of more than 120 Polish citizens. (Bielski family members vehemently deny the brothers’ participation.) It’s also worth noting that in actuality Asael Bielski (played by the 23-year old Bell) was the second oldest son, not Zus.

But for all that probably no one goes to a Hollywood action film expecting complete veracity. The film casts deserving light on a little-known episode of the war whose more Western parts are possibly becoming a little too celebrated. Namely, that the Jewish people fought back, and fought valiantly, against the Nazi onslaught.  

We’ll have our review Monday. Have a good weekend.

- Michael Kabel

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Posting Bale

Three between-the-Batman films starring Christian Bale, cinema’s covert leading man

Christian Bale has built a career of taking roles that would scare off most actors and break other, less intrepid leading men in half. Even momentarily ignoring (if such a thing is still possible) his three most famous films – the two Batmans and his turn as serial killer Patrick Bateman in American Psycho- his resume reveals a variety of parts in a swath of films that are connected only by what they’re not: they’re not crowd pleasers. No romantic comedies, no sweeping historical romances, nothing that lets him play to the Oscar highlight reel or get his face on the cover of slick magazines. He’s an actor that acts.

He also apparently likes to work. Between 2005′s Batman Begins and last summer’s The Dark Knight Bale starred or co-starred in six films in virtually as many genres. If not every film was a jewel – 3:10 To Yuma is an abject lesson in how to make every wrong decision when producing a major motion picture – the majority of the work was in accomplished, successful films and under the direction of very disparate creative visions. Perhaps the three best are explained below:

2005′s Harsh Times, written and directed by James Avery (Training Day, Street Kings) casts Bale as Jim Luther Davis, a not-especially-bright Army Ranger returned to his bowels-of-L.A. home turf after years of service in Afghanistan. Davis has two humble goals for the rest of his life: to marry his impoverished Mexican sweetheart and bring her to the states; and to join either the LAPD or “the feds” so as to better enhance his standing among the lower echelons of the city’s crime community.

Bale plays Davis as DeNiro’s Travis Bickle crossed with Martin Sheen’s Kit Carruthers, a slow-boiling psychopath fired up by a can-do optimism that in its own way is boyishly charming. Endlessly rolling through lower-class Los Angeles with his best bro Mike (Freddy Rodriguez) in search of jobs, pot, or booze (whichever they find first), Davis slowly comes unglued as his two dreams align themselves at cross-purposes. The LAPD rejects him after he flunks their psych evaluation; the Department of Homeland Security, represented with opaque paternal cheer by ace character actor J.K. Simmons, has lower expectations. They want Davis on a field exercise in Columbia (“I’ll tell people who to shoot,” he tells Mike) but that means abandoning his fiance in her Mexican tenement. The pressure of choosing, weighed down by his lingering psychological scars, eventually crush him.

Avery’s directorial debut shows his Scorcese-like ambitions still just outside his grasp – it’s not unfair to call the film Mean Streets of L.A. – but he’s adept at making the city shift and groan with texture and nuance. Bale wanders through its environs slightly nervous and a little annoyed at the same time, as if the place itself was too different and too intimidating to reconcile with his expectations.

The prospect of Bale at odds with Hugh Jackman – Batman versus Wolverine! – as Victorian Era magicians in an escalating game of oneupsmanship must have brought thousands of comics fans to see 2006′s The Prestige, based on a novel by British writer Christopher Priest and directed by Batman auteur Christopher Nolan. Rival illusionists once apprenticed to the same master, (Ricky Jay, whose very appearance virtually counts as a pedigree) the two men are disciplined, obsessive, and driven in their quest to outdo one another after a tragedy drives them apart. Nolan frames the movie as a magic trick itself; it’s the kind of film that some guess its big twist halfway through while others need its shell game explained to them in the lobby afterwards.

Bale plays his Alfred Borden as a well of cold fury and restraint, never letting the audience see him moving things “behind the scenes” in his mind. Jackman is warm, charming and personable, qualities that themselves may be an illusion. Michael Caine brings his usual effortlessness to the role of magician’s valet; Scarlett Johansson, David Bowie, Andy Serkis and Roger Rees also appear as men and women caught in the two men’s colliding orbits. Bowie especially is a weird but apt choice to play the mad inventor Tesla, a man worthy of a big-budget biography if ever one lived.

If Bale’s Borden is a character with everything inside, conversely the role of Dieter Dengler in Warner Herzog’s 2006 Rescue Dawn demanded that everything be played on the outside. Or rather, what little of Bale remained after losing fifty-five pounds to play the part of a Navy pilot shot down over Laos in 1965. Written and directed by Werner Herzog and loosely based on events covered in his own 1997 documentary Little Dieter Needs To Fly, the film focuses not on the deprivations that Dengler and the other prisoners receive but instead on the physical and emotional toll their imprisonment inflicted.

There’s a tendency since Midnight Express, almost a tradition, for noble-men-in-prison films to have a grand guignol quality in which the “goody guys’” suffering is played to maximum sensationalist effect as a means of raising the film’s dramatic pitch. For whatever his liberties in rearranging the facts related to the true story, Herzog avoids the pitfall of cheap gore and relies on his actors’ performances to convey their characters’ growing desperation. Bale moves his character from idealistic to determined to resigned, then back to idealistic again once his rescue comes to pass. Herzog follows that parabola by keeping the direction and camera work straightforward (yes, almost documentarian) in style. But he imbues the story with shots of the Laotian jungle, reminiscent of Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line, that depict the countryside itself as a breathing, vaguely malevolent force. “The jungle is the prison,” fellow prisoner Duane (Steve Zahn) explains. It’s actually the jungle standing between the men and freedom, not the malnourished prison guards or the few  rickety rifles they discard at meal time.

The breakout and flight towards Thailand are terrifyingly realistic, not in an artificial Hollywood sense but in the way such things happen in the world: plans go awry for no reason, luck plays as big a factor as valor, and dangers and good fortune alike present themselves when least expected. If the ending is somewhat hokey, it’s at least deserved and fitting for the triumphant individual Bale so perfectly inhabits.

- Michael Kabel

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DVD Review: Appaloosa

Ed Harris’ flawed Western arrives on DVD and Blu-Ray tomorrow.

Actor Ed Harris’ sophomore directorial effort Appaloosa continues the deconstructionist tradition of Western films that began in earnest with Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven.  But even though it lacks the self-indulgence of other, inferior films of the genre, Appaloosa nonetheless remains a disappointing film thanks to a flawed script and poor directing choices.

The story is certainly steeped in vintage Western tradition, at least on the surface: the marshal of the titular town is murdered by Randall Bragg (Jeremy Irons), an amoral rancher with connections reaching to the highest levels of authority. The townspeople hire professional gunmen Virgil Cole (Harris) and his partner/protégé Everett Hitch (Mortensen) to step in and restore law and order. Hot on their heels, a beguiling young widow named Ally French (Renee Zellweger) arrives in town and steals Virgil’s heart. But Ally very quickly proves less than faithful to Virgil and all too willing to trade herself to the alpha male du jour. Despite his repeated humiliations, Virgil cannot bring himself to leave her, prompting Everett to take drastic measures to protect his friend, measures which ultimately tear the partners asunder.  

Harris’s fingerprints are all over this film. Besides starring and directing, he adapted the screenplay with Robert Knott from a book by Spenser and Jesse Stone novelist Robert Parker. In translating Parker’s novel for the screen, Harris and Knott were apparently forced to condense a fair amount of characterization, leaving an economized script that teases plotlines and details without ever really exploring them. An early scene hints at Virgil’s suppressed rage and insecurity, but the matter is never explained or allowed to develop. Similarly, Harris fequently focuses on the fear and anxiety of a gentle-hearted ranch hand (Gabriel Marantz) who testifies against Bragg, then drops the character entirely once he cannot advance the storyline further. These and other tangents produce a schizophrenic effect that is only amplified by bizarre intrusions of inappropriate musical selections.  And in getting only the major story beats, the audience is left with a skeleton that doesn’t quite explain the lure of the story in the first place.

Most troubling, however, is the film’s barely contained misogyny. Except for a couple of nondescript servant women, Appaloosa contains only two female characters: Ally and a prostitute (Ariadna Gil) who seems to enjoy pitting Everett against his friend’s lover.  Both of these women are inherently untrustworthy, if not outright scheming – a sharp contrast to the friendship between Virgil and Everett that is built on mutual admiration and trust. The two men even show unconditional respect to their enemies, including a fellow mercenary (played by a thoroughly unrecognizable Lance Henriksen) who ultimately betrays Virgil for profit. The subtext seems to be that both men and women plot against each other, but men at least can rely on their friends. Harris even punctuates this theme and the film as a whole by singing “You’ll Never Leave My Heart”, a shockingly vitriolic little ditty that plays over the film’s closing credits.

On the other hand, Appaloosa mercifully eschews the cynical brutality characteristic of so many other films of the modern Western genre. The Wild West must have been a period of unimaginable hardship, and many contemporary filmmakers apparently feel that the best way to convey such adversity is by viciously subjecting good people to wanton violence and suffering. (James Mangold’s ghoulish remake of 3:10 to Yuma or, on a somewhat related note, Anthony Minghella’s Cold Mountain).  But Harris smartly avoids such laziness, and instead relies on setting and mood to depict the isolation of the frontier. Andrew Dominik took a similarly classy approach in last year’s The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford; while it’s hard to imagine any film achieving the intensity of that picture’s atmospheric bleakness, Appaloosa‘s windswept locales and grizzled players prove that desperation is more effectively conveyed through subtlety than bombast.  

Not surprisingly, veteran actor Harris coaxes equally subtle and compelling performances from his A-list cast, transferring at least a portion of the characters’ unspoken motivations through nuance. Harris himself portrays Virgil Cole as capable of ruthlessness, but more often amiable, awkward and utterly and embarrassingly powerless before the object of his undeserved affection. In that respect, Virgil shares much more in common with Philip Carey, the protagonist of W. Somerset Maugham’s Of Human Bondage, than with any archetypal Western hero. Such a truly three-dimensional character shows the completion of the evolution of the Western away from the genre’s one-dimensional roots. The script isn’t as generous to Mortensen though, and while it’s a solid performance the King of All Men really doesn’t do very much except stand around and look cool and noble. Zellweger once again plays the sharp point of a romantic triangle, but unlike her character in this spring’s Leatherheads Ally relies on coquetry and flattery to get by rather than wit and moxie. Jeremy Irons is in his element as an oily bastard you can’t help but like, but Marantz’s brief moments of resolve and barely contained terror provide the film’s most memorable performance.

A fair and by no means poorly acted film, Appaloosa perhaps suffers from improbably high expectations over the re-teaming of stars Harris and Mortensen (last seen together in 2005′s A History of Violence).  If the film had starred less distinguished actors, audiences probably wouldn’t think twice, writing it off as a decent yet disposable yarn.  But with two such charismatic actors in the forefront, one expects something more than just “pretty good.”  Given that it’s only Harris’s second time out as a director (after 2000′s Pollock), we’ll hope that he and Mortensen reteam again with a script that challenges them and the audience alike.

- Stephen Kabel
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Miscellaneous Debris, January Edition

Our irregular discussion of matters of passing interest.

So how’s your 2009 going so far? Over the holidays we got to see two of the big holiday releases, and both were letdowns. Of the two, Benjamin Button was the bigger disappointment, if only because the stakes there were much higher; Valkyrie was so close to being good we were cheering for the film to tighten itself up halfway through. We’re going next week to see Revolutionary Road, a use of time we’re pretty sure will count as an act of penance.

January is the traditional dumping ground for films whose studios have very little confidence in their success. Time was, Thanksgiving was the season for such likely bombs, a practice that led to films expected to fail getting the nickname “turkeys.” This week, theatregoers are subjected to Bride Wars and The Unborn, two rigidly formulaic genre flicks perhaps distinguished most clearly by their appearance in a theatre at all instead of heading down the direct-to-DVD chute.  January is also if nothing else a time to catch up on the December prestige releases trickling into wider release – Gran Turino and The Reader both open  nationwide tomorrow.

The following is stuff we thought worth mentioning but not worth blogging about for a whole entry. All opinons and snark are our own.

1. Next week’s big release: Paul Blart: Mall Cop, a “comedy” starring the fat guy from The King of Queens. Did Larry the Cable Guy pass on this project? Previews boast that it’s from Happy Madison, which means it’s for sure a script even Adam Sandler passed on (probably Rob Schneider wanted it though.) If God forbid there’s a sequel, we bet anything it’s set in the Mall of America.

2. The Dark Knight is finally getting some recognition from the various awards-givers. The Director’s Guild of America is nominating Christopher Nolan, along with more celebrated directors David Fincher, Ron Howard, Gus Van Sant and Danny Boyle. The film, and Nolan, undeniably deserve the recognition. Besides raising the bar for a genre that’s become one of the most prevalant and profitable of the decade, Nolan’s masterpiece includes Heath Ledger’s already-legendary turn as the Joker as well as the best work of Christian Bale and Aaron Eckhart’s considerable careers. It’s not the kind of film that usually garners awards, but given the apathy greeting Oscar-bait flicks like Benjamin Button and Changeling maybe it’s time to open the awards to other kinds of films.

3. Speaking of superhero movies, rumors are circulating that Sam Rockwell and this year’s comeback kid Mickey Rourke are in talks to play the heavies in Iron Man 2. According to Reuters News Service, if talks go as planned Rourke would play the superpowered villain Whiplash, though Variety says he’ll appear as The Crimson Dynamo, who in the books was the Soviet Union’s answer to Iron Man. Rockwell would appear as Stark Industries rival billionaire Justin Hammer. As reported earlier, Don Cheadle will replace Terrence Howard as Jim Rhodes, though Robert Downey, Jr. is confirmed and Gwyneth Paltrow reported to return to their roles as Tony Stark and Pepper Pots, respectively.

4.  From the Snowball’s Chance In Hell Department: Hustler magazine publisher Larry Flynt and chief Girls Gone Wild cretin Joe Francis plan to petition Congress for a $5 billion bailout. That’s right, the porn industry wants the government to give them money, saying that it’s only fair given the assistance already sent to banks and to the Big 3 automakers. Whatever, we imagine the hearings will go something like this: CONGRESS: We’re not sure why we should give you any money. PORN INDUSTRY: There must be something we can do to persuade you. We’d do anything. (takes off shirt) Anything. CUE MUSIC: Wonk, chicka chicka wonk wonk… Actually, we think Flynt deserves some kind of recognition for producing Who’s Nailin’ Palin?

5. Is it just us, or has The Office turned into a mean-spirited, slow-moving snore this season? Jim and Pam are treading water following their slapdash engagement, Dwight is an unmitigated asshole (instead of a mitigated asshole, like before) and supporting characters like Creed and Stanley are all but absent from the storylines. This year’s Christmas episode, in which Michael tried in vain to get Meredith into a detox center while Angela provoked Phyllis into revealing her adulterous affair to the whole staff, was about as funny as smog. And while it’s possible writer Paul Leiberstein enjoys bashing his own sad-sack character Toby, the joke itself is getting pretty old.

6. Marley & Me, a film in which two fading celebrities are bullied by their asshole dog, has grossed $106 million in just two weeks. What the hell, America? What the hell.

7. The Christian Science Monitor ran an intriguing article a couple of weeks ago about the resurgent popularity of film noir, and how even the genre’s fans are hard-pressed to define its forms and criteria. The cause for its rediscovery by modern audiences isn’t that difficult to theorize: film noir enjoyed its Golden Age in the late 1940s, a time when America was both tired of war and deeply skeptical about its place in the future of the world. In other words, a time exactly like right now. As a reminder to Hollywood, two of Jame Ellroy’s L.A. Quartet novels have yet to get adapted to film, and no one would mind if The Black Dahlia got a do-over.

8. ABC brings its adaptation of the cult British sci-fi series Life On Mars back to the schedule on January 28, giving it the berth after the network’s “That’s not over yet?” former hit Lost. During its six-episode stretch last year, Life On Mars got better by leaps and bounds with each episode, so if you’re looking to get in on the ground floor of something here’s your chance. Oz and Homicide: Life On The Street fans take note: Lee Tergesen and Dean Winters both carry important recurring roles on the series.

9. An era in 00′s television ends next week with William Petersen’s departure from CBS ratings behemoth CSI:  From his earliest work in gritty 80s neo-noirs like Manhunter and To Live And Die In L.A., Petersen has always been a superb craftsman actor who’s inhabited dozens of characters with perfect modulation and poise without showing off for the camera. You’ve probably never seen him in films such as Kiss The Sky, Gunshy, or The Rat Pack, so with his exit from weekly television this is a good time to look up those worthwhile efforts. (His Jack Kennedy in The Rat Pack is so authentic you’ll get chills.)

10. Not that this should do anything for you – we hope it doesn’t, but do your own thing – last year’s clunkers Righteous Kill, Bangkok Dangerous, Pineapple Express, and Babylon A.D. all arrived on DVD this week. Combined with two weeks of reruns, January is the scrap heap even in home entertainment.

We’ll be back next week with some honest-to-Jeebus film reviews. Have a good weekend.
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