Miscellaneous Debris, January 2011 Edition

Our monthly roundup of news and analysis that didn’t get a full post.

And the award for coldest winter ever goes to…  Old Man Winter’s giving an Oscar-caliber performance this year for much of the United States, freezing millions in place and slowing life to a standstill. And just like us, we imagine plenty of those people are staying inside as much as possible and killing time by watching lots of movies.

With the awards season in full swing and the Academy Awards just around the corner, there’s plenty of movie and television news to go around just now, even there’s not enough time to capture all of it in blog form. Yet, despite and nevertheless, here’s some of it.

1. Speaking of the reliably unreliable Academy Awards, we were disappointed that the list of nominations announced this week failed to include Mark Wahlberg’s starring turn in The Fighter for Best Actor, especially considering all three of his principal cast mates – Christian Bale, Amy Adams, and Melissa Leo – secured nominations, as well as director David O. Russell and the film itself for Best Picture.

With all respect to his castmates, Wahlberg’s low-key, lived-in turn as hard-fighting boxer Mickey Ward isn’t the kind of performance that wins the Oscar. Like Kurt Russell or Dennis Quaid, his craftsmanlike acting style is the kind seldom appreciated mid-career but instead gets the lion’s share of its respect in retrospect. On the flip side, we hope The Fighter and The Other Guys (which has had us laughing our asses off for weeks) helps reverse the recent career doldrums of The Happening, Shooter, and Max Payne.

2. It won’t win any Oscars, but contrary to plenty of industry expectations it’s making plenty of money. Michael Gondry’s  The Green Hornet, delayed for months while Sony reprogrammed its schedule and retrofitted 3D effects, has quietly made more than $100 million dollars in its first ten days of worldwide release, opening at number and falling the following week just behind the Ashton Kutcher-Natalie Portman sex drivel No Strings Attached.

Industry analysts expect the film to perform even better in Asian markets, where Jay Chou, who plays the Hornet’s partner Kato, is already a popular singer. It’s a reasonable bet: Asian fans of the 1960s television series co-starring Bruce Lee in the role reportedly called the program “The Kato Show.”

3.  Possibly not a sound strategy to improve ratings, but you have to applaud the ballsiness: this week’s episode of TNT’s ratings-challenged Southland depicted the shocking, senseless beating death of (SPOILERS) gang task force detective Nate Moretta (Kevin Alejandro) following an encounter with drunken gang members. We say shocking because Alejandro was probably the best looking member of the cast, and also one of the most charismatic. The scenes depicting the event and its aftermath were a series highlight.

The episode drew about 2.2 million viewers, about half the third season average of Alejandro’s other series True Blood. Meanwhile Southland remains one of the best shows on television, and it’s continuing failure to find an audience (despite dedicated support from adoptive parent TNT) remains a mysterious shame.

It's a crime: Ulrich leaving LO:LA

4. Another departure from Los Angeles based police procedural television was even more disappointing: longtime SBR favorite Skeet Ulrich is leaving the cast of Law & Order: Los Angeles as part of NBC and show creator Dick Wolf’s extensive reworking of the show’s cast and profile.

Ratings for the eight episodes aired last fall sagged following a strong premiere, but what’s wrong with the show – more specifically, how it might draw a larger audience – has nothing to do with Ulrich’s performance. As of this writing the show remains on indefinite hiatus.

Hello! Greer

5. Turning from departures to arrivals, we’re happy to see the return of the ridiculously sexy Judy Greer to live-action television with next month’s Mad Love, even if the show itself looks suspiciously like another rehash of Friends. Greer, Sarah Chalke, Tyler Labine and Jason Biggs star as a quartet of New Yorkers looking for love with the help of their pals; Chalke and Biggs’ characters are getting close while Greer and Labine’s singles despise one another. The preview below shows its additional resemblance to CBS’s How I Met Your Mother:

The show premieres February 14. (Aww…)

6. Similarly lovely, underrated star Sarah Shahi returned to television last week in USA’s new legal comedy/drama Fairly Legal. Shahi (Life) plays Kate Reed, an attorney turned legal mediator working at the law of her deceased father but now run by her stepmother (Virginia Willams). Also included in the regular cast are Battlestar Galactica‘s Michael Trucco as Reed’s prosecutor ex-husband and Baron Vaughn as her assistant.

The pilot episode was edgier than we expected, with more substance than some of USA Network’s fluffy promos (such as the one below) might suggest.

The Bane of our existence: Hardy

7. Casting announcements for the third and probable final installment in Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy The Dark Knight Rises brought a couple of surprises this month: Anne Hathaway is signed to play Selina Kyle, the jewel thief better known as the Catwoman, and Inception co-star Tom Hardy will play Bane, the steroid-powered muscleman that in the comics once broke Batman’s back.

We were slightly more intrigued by rumors appearing just previous to these announcements, rumors that included Eva Green (Casino Royale) playing the daughter of Ra’s Al Ghul and Naomi Watts appearing as reporter Vicki Vale (played long ago by Kim Basinger in Tim Burton’s Batman.) But as with Bale himself and then Heath Ledger in The Dark Knight, Hathaway and Hardy represent intriguing, unexpected choices for their roles that carry tremendous potential nonetheless.

8. The Dark Knight star Aaron Eckhart won’t return as Two-Face, but he’s busy elsewhere. March sees the release of Battle: Los Angeles, starring he and Bridget Moynahan in an action film that from the trailer below looks like a cross between Black Hawk Down and… well, pretty much every alien invasion film made. Yet if the film keeps the emphasis on realistic action dynamics – in other words, if it remembers the Black Hawk Down side of its hybrid – it could make for thrilling B-movie fun. We missed Eckhart the last couple of years and it’s good to see him back in this and last year’s Rabbit Hole (Love Happens kinda doesn’t count.) If only we could get him into Joss Whedon’s The Avengers as Dr. Hank “Giant-Man” Pym.

Battle: Los Angeles opens nationwide March 11.

We’ll be back next week. Thanks for reading.

- Michael Kabel

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TV Reviews: Lights Out

Gritty new FX drama comes out swinging.

FX has developed into the dark horse, macho basic cable network. While AMC’s shows  have their critical laurels, TNT’s originals have their marquis name power and USA Network’s dramas serve their quirkiness by the wheelbarrowfull, FX probably delivers the most overall quality while consistently slipping beneath the critical and awards radar. The net’s new drama, Lights Out, looks to continue the tradition of Rescue Me, Justified and The Shield of delivering potent, intelligent hours of programming for an ostensibly male audience. It also has all the making of a damn fine television series, just two episodes into its first season.

Holt McCallany stars as Patrick “Lights” Leary, a former heavyweight boxing champion who lost his title belt by decision five years ago. His wife Theresa (Catherine McCormack) begs him to quit the sport, and Leary settles down to a boring if healthy existence raising their daughters and developing business deals with his brother Johnny (Pablo Shreiber) while their father (Stacy Keach) runs the family gym. But five years is a longtime out of the limelight, and as the show begins Leary’s growing increasingly desperate for cash; the show mines grim humor and sympathy by showing him stooping to emceeing bingo games, engaging in bar fights and shilling mattresses on television to help support his family’s lavish lifestyle. Meanwhile Johnny’s business dealings look increasingly shaky, with their long-dreamed of office development foundering.

On top of all that, in the pilot episode Leary is diagnosed with “pugilistic dementia,” meaning his damaged brain could collapse at any time. When his former opponent (and usurper) “Death Row” Reynolds (Billy Brown) challenges him to a rematch, Leary has almost no choice but agree, the better to get at the reported $10 million purse and lay to rest nagging suspicions their first match was fixed. The alternative is even darker: in the pilot Leary agrees to a money-collection job on behalf of a gambling boss, an errand whose consequences play out at least through the second episode.

McCallany keeps his world-weary, determined underdog champ likable without allowing him to seem stale or derivative. Lights is smarter and cannier by nature than, say, Rocky Balboa, owing more to the champ played by Robert Ryan  The Set-Up than to any modern ideas of champions undone by their own shortcomings. Instead, Leary becomes almost tragic for wanting to please everyone around him. He values family to a fault – a fault that could kill him.

So far the show’s biggest obstacle is that the people around him don’t overcome their rough, cliche-bordering sketches. The performers all handle their parts credibly, but there’s little to distinguish them from character types that fans of all kinds of sports movies will recognize: the concerned wife who just doesn’t understand, the gruff father, the shifty-eyed brother/money man with plans of his own. Shreiber is fascinating to watch even with an underwritten part, and Keach – star of Fat City, arguably the greatest boxing movie ever – demands more screen time just by standing in frame.

But such complaints may only prove to be second-guessing. Theresa is much more well-rounded in the second episode, and Johnny’s shady qualities will likely take the full season to ripen and emerge. The show has already established McCallany as a leading man (a position he’s deserved for years already), and laid the groundwork for at least one season’s worth of spiraling storylines and corkscrewing plot twists. Full of potential and carrying the immediate bravado of FX’s similarly exceptional Terriers and Justified, it’s definitely worth checking out.

Lights Out airs Tuesdays at 10/9 PM on FX.

- Michael Kabel

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DVD Review: The Social Network

David Fincher’s Facebook saga is the gripping story of an era that’s already over.

A front-runner for most best-picture awards virtually since the moment of its release last October – and already the winner of several Golden Globes – David Fincher’s The Social Network might one day prove a more fascinating snapshot of its place and time than a gripping study of some very smart, very rich people behaving very badly to one another.  It’s a film that, in the tradition of topically released social dramas including The China Syndrome or All The President’s Men, is almost impossible to appreciate on an emotional rather than intellectual level, which is to say it wants to inform and stimulate thought more than entertain. It does both anyway, capably, becoming a must-see for anyone who enjoys Facebook and especially the millions of us who almost feel obligated to maintain a page on its mammoth roster.

Constructed from Ben Mezrich’s 2009 book The Accidental Billionaires, TV auteur Aaron Sorkin’s script deliberately, willfully plays for dramatic effect over cold truth, the better to recreate the heady wealth and swaggering entitlement of BushCo-era Ivy League campuses and venture capital boardrooms. As the film begins in 2003, Harvard computer geek Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg) aches to get into one of the university’s elite final clubs, though his motivations remain opaque: does he want social acceptance? Job networking access? Exclusivity?

It’s probably the exclusivity. After his Boston University coed girlfriend (Rooney Mara) dumps him for his arrogance, Zuckerberg returns to his dorm for a night of drunken blogging and petty revenge. That payback swells to include hacking the “facebooks” – online picture albums of Harvard’s social clubs and fraternities – and building a voting site where users can choose the more attractive of two randomly grouped women. Overnight, the site proves so popular it crashes the university’s computer network.

The stunt draws the fire of a disciplinary committee but also potential employers. The aristocratic Wynklevoss twins (both played by Armie Hammer) and their partner Divya Narendra (Max Minghella) approach Zuckerberg to complete a social networking site, similar to Friendster or MySpace, that trades on the exclusivity of the Harvard name. Though impressed by their membership in the elite Porcellian final club, Zuckerberg treats them with the same casual, edgy arrogance he wielded against his disciplinarians.  Eisenberg is smart enough to communicate a nervous twitch beneath Zuckerberg’s abrasiveness that hints at a paralyzing insecurity beneath its brittle veneer.

Zuckerberg agrees to the job but begins work on a similar project with financial support from his roommate Eduardo Savarin (Andrew Garfield). Their fledgling site grows rapidly among the Harvard student body, soon spreading out to other Atlantic Seaboard schools. Meanwhile, the spurned Narendra and Winklevoss brothers debate whether to file a lawsuit or to resolve the matter “like Harvard gentlemen.”

Fincher and Sorkin achieve the improbable feat of making website coding and intellectual property regulations more suspenseful than you might expect. The actors, Eisenberg and Garfield especially, don’t condescend to show their characters as social misfits or “geeks” so much as highly talented people whose intelligence and expertise frequently leave them at a communicative loss; they seem to spend a lot of the movie waiting for others to catch up with their thinking. In the framing sequence of conferences to depose Zuckerberg in two lawsuits, that scraping to make social contact offers some of the film’s most piquant irony: two men who created a means to socialize can’t speak to one another, or very well to many people else.

Facebook’s explosive growth attracts the attention of Sean Parker (Justin Timberlake), the founder of Napster who’s since taken to living a rock star lifestyle far beyond his means. The awkward, nebbishy Zuckerberg sees Parker’s social graces and charm – he’s dating a Victoria’s Secret model –  as a glimpse of what’s possible; Saverin is more skeptical, leery of Parker’s business failures since Napster collapsed under an avalanche of record industry lawsuits. As Parker lines up venture capitalists to help bring Facebook within reach of its ecommerce potential, Saverin finds himself edged out of the fledgling company, culminating in a lawsuit of his own against his former friend. Parker’s party-hard lifestyle gets him in legal trouble via a cocaine bust, even as Facebook reaches  one million users on several continents.

The film offers several theories to explain the site’s popularity – it’s exclusive, it offers the sexier aspects of the college experience online, it helps people see the lifestyles of others – but offers none of them as more plausible than the other. Seven years since its inception, attempting such perspective would be unwise. Instead, Fincher and Sorkin concentrate on the growth and its aftermath, including the acrimony and petty jealousies that repeatedly almost killed the site in its infancy. There’s a human story to be told beneath the anonymity of building an online behemoth, and if the story fails anywhere its in giving anyone much human warmth. Savarin comes out looking the best of the various personalities involved, but not by much and not especially. Zuckerberg frequently plays, despite Eisenberg’s remarkably modulated performance, as a child attempting to act grown up.

Much like his 2006 masterpiece Zodiac – still his best film, though now only narrowly – Fincher creates a world of shadows and dusty, earth-colored hues to depict a bygone era. Sometimes the color palette strains against the subject matter, such as showing the semi-gratuitous Phoenix Club debauch early in the film; other times it widens the impersonal space between characters that, at least in some points of the narrative, ought to be understood as friends. That’s very possibly a deliberate choice, though on a subjective level it may also be confusing for those wishing to understand characters’ relations to one another. But at the risk of repetition, to make computer coding and website building a thing of suspense is a bravura feat all by itself.

Fans of Sorkin’s The West Wing and his too-brief Studio 60 On the Sunset Strip will recognize the screenwriter’s personal touches throughout, including barbs of dialogue with weapons-grade wit - “Dating you is like dating a Stairmaster”, “If you guys were the inventors of Facebook, you’d have invented Facebook.” It also includes pronouncements that, because of their self-awareness, sometimes don’t quite earn their keep: “Every Creation has its Devil.” But throughout the dialogue is intelligent and stimulating for the viewer, and never pandering to laymen of the Internet Era. The cast, Eisenberg especially, make the most of each sentence.

Movies such as this aren’t truly over until the postscripts roll, and as the final damages play out in type across the screen it’s difficult to see just eight years ago as something like another age, full of possibility without consequence and laden with vast fortunes waiting to be made on the turn of an idea. For a recession-battered America entertaining themselves with free services – such as Facebook not least of all – revisiting the very elite of society without resentment will prove difficult. Not a time to reminisce about, if you didn’t make your fortunes then. The rest of us just have to get by with help from our friends.

- Michael Kabel

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Noir Cinema: Human Desire, Pushover

Inspecting two low-key, razor-sharp thrillers from Columbia’s Film Noir Classics II.

Though by the 1950s the popular appeal of film noir cinema continued to warrant big-budget productions including Sunset Boulevard and Ace In The Hole, its broken heart and weary soul remained in smaller-budget, smaller-scale efforts that commonly made up for in story and performance what they lacked in production costs. As Paul Shrader pointed out in his seminal 1972 essay “Notes On Film Noir,” by the 1950s noir had grown self-aware, the films’ characters realizing the despair and “disintegration” of their lives and acting through their end-of-the-line existential contempt.

The second volume of Columbia Pictures’ Film Noir Classics series contains five films from this end stage of the genre’s development, and the best two films contained in its set almost seem to groan under the weight of that ennui. Nevertheless both sets have been shrewdly compiled – perhaps better than their competitor’s offerings – providing noir fans obscure works that nevertheless can satisfy the casual observer as well.

The best of Volume II‘s set, Human Desire, reunites director Fritz Lang with Glenn Ford and Gloria Grahame in an adaptation of Emile Zola’s 1890 novel La Bete Humaine. Lang had previously and famously directed Ford and Grahame in The Big Heat the previous year, but where that gangland revenge saga prided itself on muscular dramatics and an almost grotesquely heated tone, the focus this time rests on despair and self-recrimination. It’s a smaller, quieter effort, but that shouldn’t be confused in any event with a less worthwhile result. Quite the contrary: that anyone attempted such a uncompromising look at working class squalor during the artificial sunshine of the Eisenhower Era cuts to the heart of noir’s lasting contrarian value, and all three principal actors are at the top of their game.

Railroad engineer Jeff Warren (Ford) returns from years of service in the Korean War to the exact same job he left in the exact same dreary Pacific Northwest town. He’s even boarding with the same family, though their teenage daughter Ellen (Kathleen Case) has matured enough to pursue him with wide-eyed splendor. Ellen wants to give Warren the stable life of fishing trips and evenings at the movie theatre he says he wants, but in short order he’s distracted by Vicky Buckley (Grahame), the sultry wife of his boozy, irascible yard boss Carl (Broderick Crawford.)

When Carl blows his cool and gets sacked, he devises a scheme to use Vicky’s wiles on a local businessman in order to regain his position. But Vicky and the big shot have a sordid past, and Carl realizes too late he’s cuckolded by their affair. Enraged, he beats Vicky and plots the businessman’s murder on the return train from the city. Warren, wandering the train’s corridors, sees a shell shocked post-crime Vicky and, after some introductory kissing, lets himself get used for her alibi.

The two fall in love in short order, holding an illicit romance in some of the least romantic locales imaginable – the railroad break yard, a sleazy apartment in the city, Vicky and Carl’s drab cottage. Nevertheless, Warren gets hooked on Vicky’s charm full throttle. Vicky, an archetypal femme fatale is ever one was put on film, wants Warren to murder her husband so that they can be together, the local gossip be damned, the better to get from beneath Carl’s blackmailing heel.

Warren is tempted, for reasons beyond Vicky’s charms. He’s bitter about his wartime experience, not just the rigors of combat but also the division of wealth and status among the troops. Asked about girls overseas, he bitterly remarks that the officers got all the pretty ones before he arrived. His affection for Vicky reflects that class envy: he doesn’t kiss her so much as try to swallow her whole.

But double crosses and treachery abound, and deciding if Vicky has been completely forthcoming all along is part of the film’s snaky allure. Lang and cinematographer Burnett Guffey fully deploy the rich potential of the trains’ visuals, showing their quick swerves and sudden jerks as lucid metaphors for fate and random twists of circumstance. Moreover, the still locations of indifferent taverns, rustically furnished tract houses and cheap apartments seem ephemeral, ready to be packed up or discarded at a moment’s notice. Human desire is fleeting, the film suggests, and fraught with disaster at a moment’s lapse of judgment.

Similarly, director Richard Quine uses tight, enclosed spaces to structure his enthralling suspenser Pushover, elevating the routine setup promised by Roy Huggins’ script into something else altogether. It’s a sharp suspense film that rests disaster on the timing of an elevator or the turn of a hallway, and makes you feel each tick of the clock along the way. It manages all this thanks in no small part to the precision of Fred MacMurray’s performance as (shades of Double Indemnity a decade previous) a previously straight arrow getting pulled into crooked acts by an irresistible blond (Kim Novak, in her debut role.)

When the early morning bank heist by a ruthless thief (Paul Richards) results in the murder of a security guard, Los Angeles detective Paul Sherman (MacMurray) cozies up to the thief’s girlfriend Lona (Novak) to help set up a stake out of her apartment. Teamed with his cynical partner (Philip Carey) and a veteran (Allen Nourse) with both feet dangling off the wagon, Sheridan finds staying away from Lona harder to do when she’s under his constant inspection. The two slink around the corners of her fortress-like apartment building to see one another, avoiding Sheridan’s colleagues and planning to murder her boyfriend once he shows up with the $200,000 taken from the heist.

Sheridan’s plan to distract his teammates seems foolproof (has anything good ever come after the phrase “seems foolproof”?), but in short order one twist and circumstance happens after another to bring the lovers’ hopes crashing down. The alcoholic detective steps inside a corner bar for a quick nip, missing his cue in Sheridan’s plan; the nurse that lives next door (Dorothy Malone) spots Sheridan coming out of Lona’s apartment. The thief gets caught, but Sheridan impulsively shoots him dead, casting suspicious doubt on his motivations that results in compels him to kill one of his fellow detectives and face the ire of their commanding officer (E.G. Marshall).

It’s the biggest treat of the movie that so much happens so quickly, and with such precision staging that the events never for a moment seem forced. Rather, Quine milks each character’s turn down a hallway or glance at the right moment to be fraught with peril, as indeed it is. In many ways all the characters, in true noir fashion, are trapped in a maze of manipulation and deceit in which each decision plays directly into the last. Cinematographer Lester White makes full use of the noir tropes of wet, glistening city streets but also takes advantage of the small sets and empty spaces of an L.A. that’s still expanding with post-war prosperity. Perhaps most chillingly, the empty darkness of a vacant lot seems to hover constantly on the horizon of every external shot, as if an abyss waiting just in the near distance. Overall, the production looks small-scale and modestly budgeted, but doesn’t look cheap, either.

MacMurray is effortlessly charismatic and repulsive at the same time, coolly planning betrayal with a minimum of moral conflict. Sheridan is something of a stock role, but he and Novak both invest their characters with a strange quality, not entirely unlike sympathy, that brings them the viewer’s support. Malone is perky and all-American, and perhaps reveals the film’s odd comment on gender roles: the women live in comfortable apartments, while the men sit in cold, wet exteriors or hunker in abandoned living rooms, watching them and imagining the happiness and comfort they promise. Carey, Marshall and Nourse are competent in largely stock roles, but their very anonymity works to give them a calm, unassuming universality that for genre fans will work firmly in its favor.

The second half of this compilation’s reviews includes coverage of The Brothers Rico, Nightfall, and City of Fear.

- Michael Kabel

DVD Review: The American

Anton Corbijn’s stylish hitman melodrama is a misfire.

Just when The Girl Who Played With Fire seemed like a lock for worst thriller of 2010, Anton Corbijn’s The American gives it a run for its shopworn money. Though also a mishmash of genre clichés hampered by bleak, blank performances and sluggish direction concealed beneath a sleek European veneer, The American at least offers a couple of upgrades over its Swedish counterpart: the beauty of the Italian countryside and a competent, if not exactly winning, performance by George Clooney.

To make a point perfectly clear: Clooney can’t save the film from its trite story and formulaic plot twists – probably no one could – but he does his best. Corbijn, in the director’s chair for the second time following the similarly flawed Control, sometimes creates beautiful pictures but forgets to include any substance to make them more than two-dimensional. The story was adapted by Rowan Joffe (28 Weeks Later) from British author Martin Booth’s A Very Private Gentleman. Having not read the novel I can’t comment on what was gained or lost in adaptation, but there is a sense throughout of something important sacrificed in translation. What’s left instead is surface material and impossible-to-miss “deeper” meanings writ even larger so as to become inescapable.

Clooney plays Jack, a mercenary on vacation at a lakeside cabin in Sweden. Dour and ostensibly rueful, he’s ambushed by gunmen as he and his female companion (girlfriend? conquest? prostitute?) make their way across a frozen lake. Jack shoots the girl (Irina Bjorklund) in the back while dispatching the attackers, maybe to complete an assignment, maybe to protect his identity. Liker her role in his life, the exact whys are left ambiguous.

Fleeing to Rome, Jack is exiled by his business manager Pavel (Johan Leysen) to the remote and mountainous Abruzzo region of central Italy. Pavel is weary of Jack’s mistakes, but Jack is smart enough to realize Pavel is less than forthcoming, and decamps one village over from his assigned waiting point.

Sitting tight proves easier said than done, and in short order Jack’s keeping wildly different company: a priest (Paolo Bonacelli) who harbors a guilty secret located just outside town; and a prostitute (Violante Placido) with whom Jack feels an instant bond and mutual lust. (It’s a sign of the script’s Freshman Literature level of complexity that one character is drawn to Jack’s body, the other to his soul.) Rather than flesh out the stock characters – the guilty priest, the hooker with a heart of gold – the script has them all mutter stock or supercilious phrases. “You don’t have to pretend with me,” Jack tells the prostitute Clara. “You cannot deny the existence of hell,” Father Benedetto explains. “You live in it. It is a place without love.” Though he’s apparently lived a life of violence and ruthlessness, what Jack needs more than anything in order to find redemption is love. Sure.

Meanwhile Pavel commissions Jack to build a sniper rifle for another assassin (Thekla Reuten) ready to carry out an assignment of her own. While too derivative by half of The Day of the Jackal, the scenes in which Jack and Mathilde test the rifle in a clump of riverside reeds provide the plot with some of its most intense moments. Reuten is icy calm in a smooth turn as the killer for hire, appearing behind multiple hairstyles and with just enough seductive allure to tweak Jack’s already dissipating self-discipline. If she’s never quite believable as an assassin, she’s at least a genuinely mysterious presence amid all the ensuing predictability.

Jack builds the rifle with the same eyes-front, poker-faced resolve he apparently applies, or used to apply, to every other part of his life. Of course the rifle has a purpose, but you’ll have figured it out long before Jack does, even while his response to the situation is somewhat inventive if not entirely satisfying. Overcoming Mathilde and her employer (it’s who you suspect it is all along) proves harder than it seems, leading to a bittersweet ending similarly demonstrated by, among others before it, The Asphalt Jungle, Midnight Cowboy, Leon, Homeboy, and Thunderbolt and Lightfoot.

Performances can sometimes lift a film above its genre limitations, but that’s sadly not the case here. Clooney imbues Jack with reserve built upon reserve, recalling in his best moments the same ambiguous intensity of Steve McQueen and Lee Marvin in their 60s and 70s heydays. A natural temptation, especially given the legacy of those screen legends, is to equate that placidity with hidden depth, and by extension to mistake this film’s lack of action for a more refined attention to characterization. Except there’s not enough of either to steer the film one way or the other, with the plot collapsing barely into its third act as a direct consequence. Clooney can carry a movie, but he can’t build something out of thin air, try as he might. The rest of the performances are flat and uninspired, but given the listless movement of the narrative maybe that’s to be expected. Bonacelli and Placido are respectively soulful and sensual, but not any more than they ever have to be.

Corbijn sometimes seems strained to assemble a coherent, suspense-building narrative out of his lovely pictures. He does best in capturing the handsome quaintness of the Abruzzo region; less well with conveying the loneliness of cities and villages. Much of the second act is composed of scenes that could be shuffled into a different order with little narrative confusion as a result, and the prologue in Sweden feels rushed and unfocused. The ending, which should serve as the culmination of Jack’s life of mistakes, instead plays out straightforward, even romantic, with a groan-inducing visual metaphor that recalls Grahame Greene at his least subtle. (as a point of interest, Joffe has written and directed a new adaptation of Greene’s novel Brighton Rock.) The metaphor is so obvious, so telegraphed throughout the film, that you believe until its last second resolution that its use must constitute a red herring. No such luck; it really is that graceless.

The American is, finally and disappointingly, two kinds of bad films at once. Not the action movie promised by its previews and with too little weight to qualify as a character study or meditation on human emotion, it’s a disappointing entry into Clooney’s varied body of work and another miss for Corbijn as director. Of course it was a box office smash, however, with industry commentators celebrating the return of adult fare to multiplexes for much of its theatrical run. That’s something to cheer about in theory, but simply being grown up shouldn’t mean having to settle for things you’ve seen before.

- Michael Kabel

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Review: The Fighter

Intense performances and a winning true story combine into one of the year’s best films.

Boxing fascinates filmmakers probably more than any other sport, and the list of great boxing films reads like an honor roll of career-best performances. In the 1940′s Robert Ryan and John Garfield played embattled fighters in, respectively, The Set-Up and Body and Soul. Later, Stacey Keach did arguably his best work in John Huston’s Fat City (1973), and likewise Robert DeNiro’s turn as Jake LaMotta in Raging Bull (1980) was probably his masterpiece. Sylvester Stallone, obviously, will be remembered best for Rocky Balboa, if only for the quality of that franchise’s first two installments.

With David O. Russell’s The Fighter Mark Wahlberg joins that impressive company, creating the best performance of his thirty-film career. It’s his bad luck that he’s surrounded by a trio of white-hot co-stars. Christian Bale, Melissa Leo, and Amy Adams are all formidable talents alone, and while it’s inaccurate to say any of them chew the scenery or steal their scenes, too often they threaten to eclipse Wahlberg’s disciplined and craftsmanlike approach to the true-life part of hardscrabble welterweight Mickey Ward. The movie is too long, and too often loses focus, but in the end the film is all about performance and character anyway, and at worst it never capsizes as a result.

As a story The Fighter goes several rounds with severe structural problems. Much of its first hour is split – unevenly, arrythmically - between Ward’s bleak life of training and paving roads in Lowell, Massachusetts and depicting the descent of Ward’s half-brother Dicky Eklund (Bale) into crack addiction and self-loathing. Eklund was once a fighter himself, even at one time entering the ring with Sugar Ray Leonard, but those days are long behind him, and he knows it. A HBO camera crew follows the brothers, with Eklund bragging of a comeback to the Lowell townspeople. The script (six writers are given credit for screenplay and story) drifts back and forth between the two, illustrating their lives in rust-belt Lowell in all its dreary meanness.  As a result the main character is frequently hard to identify – Bale is so forceful, and given so much screen time, that his part strains against supporting character status.

Ward keeps his head down preparing for low-end fights and working to repair his reputation as a “stepping stone” – a fighter that true contenders advance over on their way to a title shot. He’s spun his wheels for years, it seems, thanks to the arrogant incompetence of his mother and manager Alice Eklund (Leo). Alice, blindly favoring Eklund, bungles Ward’s chances again and again; Micky, too loyal by half to his half-brother and mother, follows their flawed guidance.

Things pick up as the HBO crew dogs Eklund’s debauched existence and Ward’s struggle to assert himself as a person, even after a fight with an opponent twenty pounds heavier leaves him half-demolished. Hope arrives in the form of bartender Charlene Fleming (Adams), a woman tough enough to stand up for Ward against his mother. She’s so self-assured, in fact, that you often wonder if perhaps in forsaking his mother for Charlene’s guidance Ward didn’t simply trade one virago for another. It’s a credit to the film, and to Adams, that Charlene is never reduced to the “woman as life-giving force” trope common in underdog stories; she remains a character in her own right throughout, with an individual story that’s worth watching.

Of course all of this character building has to lead somewhere. After Eklund heads to jail after a lurid, hare-brained scheme to raise money for Ward’s training the film centers firmly on Ward’s struggle to train seriously for the first time in his life, aided not just by Charlene but by his father (Jack McGee) and a local police sergeant (Ward’s real-life trainer Mickey O’Keefe, playing himself.) Eklund stews in prison as Ward climbs the boxing ladder, especially after the HBO special reveals the squalor of his drug-fueled existence. He leaves prison detoxed and ready to help his half-brother in an upcoming title bout with brutal opponent Shea Neary (Anthony Molinari).

As a fighter Ward is neither prodigy nor hopeless cause, lacking the potential for greatness one might expect from such underdog stories but not suffering from a complete dearth of talent, either. He’s a journeyman, mediocre fighter with easily identifiable flaws and weaknesses in and out of the ring. It’s arguable that Eklund was the more naturally gifted fighter, but the film avoids any such speculation in favor or this-is-now immediacy, which keeps it from sinking into family melodrama. Wahlberg wisely modulates his performance to show Ward’s plod-through-it workhorse attitude, a winning counterpoint to the hot air of Eklund and their mother. Ward walks the walk while Eklund talks the talk, and (almost subtly) wins audience sympathy as a sly result.

Russell is canny enough as a director to allow his actors room to move within scenes, zeroing in facial expressions when important but careful to give Bale plenty of room to convey Eklund’s outsized, narcissistic charm. Not for nothing, but the film begins with Bale perched on the edge of a couch, full and center frame, as if ready to pounce on the audience. It’s a fitting image of what’s to come, even if it does help create the “who’s the main character” confusion complained about above. The director sometimes runs into problems knowing when to cut a scene, and when to break away from a shot or trim establishing sequences that don’t earn their keep within the storylines. It’s a small detail, but with so much story to tell everything that’s included ought to carry its weight. The parts that don’t seem especially out of place by comparison.

But like Russell’s earlier Three Kings and Flirting With Disaster, sharp supporting performances help to fill in the gaps created by the bumpy dramaturgy. Besides the practically flawless Leo (who ought to get the Oscar for this she deserved for Frozen River two years ago), veteran character actor McGee creates a warm, almost nurturing presence within the half-brothers’ lives. McGee has made a career of playing characters named “Chief” and “Sarge,” most recently on FX’s Rescue Me. To see him expand his talents in a fully written part is true fun, and rewarding besides. As a whole The Fighter isn’t perfect, but it’s a great film in a year of mediocre ones, and deserves its place among the champions of boxing cinema.

- Michael Kabel

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