DVD Review: Iron Man 2

Overstuffed, top-heavy sequel arrives on DVD and Blu-Ray September 28.

If sequels to successful films rarely live up to their fan bases’ expectations, then sequels to films that surprised audiences have twice as much work cut out for them. The surprise of discovery and the thrill of infatuation clear away, and the hard work of earning an audience’s respect – while justifying their initial enthusiasm – settles over the sequel like a heavy cloth from which the story has to emerge.

The first Iron Man surprised almost everyone a couple of years ago by presenting better entertainment than even fans of the Marvel Comics superhero likely anticipated. Its sequel, arriving barely two years later into theatres but atop a crest of eager audience expectation, feels rushed and over-reaching for much of its wall-to-wall, action-packed proceedings. Luckily an enviable ensemble of actors, including most especially Robert Downey, Jr., work to keep the whole project from dissolving into noise and chaos. But it takes their combined efforts, and they succeed just barely.

Following Tony Stark’s (Downey, Jr.) revelation to the world that he is in fact the armored hero, his use of the suit has rankled his competitors and lawmakers alike, especially his bumbling rival Justin Hammer (Sam Rockwell) and a pompous senator (Garry Shandling) who would like the armor’s secrets for, respectively, themselves and for the government. But the maverick Stark ain’t having it, insisting he has “successfully privatized world peace” and that he serves the people at his own pleasure. “You can always count on me to pleasure myself,” he quips.

But pride goeth before a fall, and when Russian physicist Ivan Vanko (Mickey Rourke) attacks Stark during the Monaco Grand Prix, it sets off a domino chain of events that crash Stark’s world down around him. “All I have to do is sit here and watch,” Vankdo taunts from a jail cell, “as the world will consume you.” Hammer later recruits him to perfect his own flawed armor technology, while the U.S. military exerts increasing pressure through Stark’s buddy Colonel James Rhodes (Don Cheadle, replacing Terrence Howard) to cooperate with their own agendas. Making matters worse, the palladium that powers the reactor in Stark’s chest is slowly poisoning his blood, provoking increasingly erratic and self-indulgent behavior that alienates him from Rhodes as well as secretary/love interest Pepper Pots (Gwyneth Paltrow).

Relief and assistance come from directions both expected but welcome and unexpected and disappointing. The spies of SHIELD, led by the eyepatch-wearing Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) have the means to treat the blood poisoning but want Stark’s cooperation in their own efforts; to that end, they’ve had a sexy agent (Scarlett Johansson) posing as a legal assistant within his company for weeks. Stark also learns his father Howard (John Slattery) was a founding member of the organization, and that an old filmstrip contains the aloof elder Stark’s vision for his son’s greatness and salvation. At this point the film comes closest to coming completely off the rails: to see the individualist Stark reduced to daddy issues, and to have a solution handed to him, is probably the film’s greatest and cheapest fault.

All of this and more is compressed into a two-hour runtime, with the result that the script often bulges at its seams. The first hour is a flurry of exposition and explanation that sometimes loses its coherence, and for audiences not already well-steeped in the comic mythology the confusion is likely to be compounded. The translation from comic book to screen is almost never without a few bumps, but here a persistent sense of something going unsaid, something taken for granted, permeates the characters’ dialogue and interaction. Little is done with the new characters to establish their connections to one another, save for some brief explanation by way of tossed-off speech. Typically, that speech is Stark making a wise crack about them.

The hurried sense of chaos unfortunately takes its toll on the performers. Rourke’s casting was heavily publicized, but his role remains opaque and largely devoid of nuance. He’s a bad guy, evil and driven by revenge, with little else complicating him. For as entertaining as Cheadle and Johansson are in their parts, there’s no compelling reason for their participation except that their characters are mainstays of the source comic; in a telling sign, none of the new characters are ever called by their comic code names: Stark dubs Cheadle “War Machine” out of context, Johansson’s Natasha Romanoff is never referred to as “The Black Widow,” Vanko is never called “Whiplash.” To be fair, Johansson’s fight sequences have an exciting fluidity in contrast to the high-tech armor everywhere else while Cheadle, the consummate actor’s actor, manages to seem completely at home in what’s essentially a fighter jet worn as a suit.

Rockwell does his best with an underwritten part, but Hammer is too self-sabotaguing to ever seem a credible threat to Stark’s genius; if ever a villain performance actually needed more mustache twirling, this may be the case. John Slattery plays Howard Stark as an unmistakable riff on Walt Disney in the 1960′s, when the animator had turned his energies towards a utopian futurism that likely seemed naive even then. (It’s a weird counterpoint to his normal role as the cynical Roger Sterling of Mad Men.) Of the returning characters, Downey Jr. is excellent yet again, building on Stark’s less endearing qualities while undercutting them with vulnerabilities and needs he has no idea how to express. Paltrow is exactly the same as she was last time, no more and no less; Jackson is fine but looks somewhat less than convincing marching around in a leather trench coat and riding boots in broad daylight.

The Marvel Universe is nothing if not interconnected, and all the superfluous characters and story threads piled over one another are all leading to 2012′s The Avengers. Like last time, fans will want to stick around after the credits for a brief scene that teases the ongoing build-up to that film. In the meantime, this flm feels too rushed, too ambitious, and preoccupied to match the giddy revelation of its predecessor. But it’s still entertaining thanks primarily to what was right with the first film, even while introducing some new elements that stand on their own. It’s an above average sequel to a superior action film, not great but pretty good, moving the ongoing story forward while only sacrificing some momentum.

- Michael Kabel

:: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: ::

Review: Iron Man 2

Robert Downey, Jr. and an ace supporting cast hustle to keep an overloaded script aloft. 

If sequels to successful films rarely live up to their fan bases’ expectations, then sequels to films that surprised audiences have twice as much work cut out for them. The surprise of discovery and the thrill of infatuation clear away, and the hard work of earning an audience’s respect – while justifying their initial enthusiasm – settles over the sequel like a heavy cloth from which the story has to emerge.

The first Iron Man surprised almost everyone a couple of years ago by presenting better entertainment than even fans of the Marvel Comics superhero likely anticipated. Its sequel, arriving barely two years later, feels rushed and over-reaching for much of its wall-to-wall, action-packed proceedings. Luckily an enviable ensemble of actors, including most especially Robert Downey, Jr., work to keep the whole project from dissolving into noise and chaos. But it takes their combined efforts, and they succeed just barely.

Following Tony Stark’s (Downey, Jr.) revelation to the world that he is in fact the armored hero, his use of the suit has rankled his competitors and lawmakers alike, especially his bumbling rival Justin Hammer (Sam Rockwell) and a pompous senator (Garry Shandling) who would like the armor’s secrets for, respectively, themselves and for the government. But the maverick Stark ain’t having it, insisting he has “successfully privatized world peace” and that he serves the people at his own pleasure. “You can always count on me to pleasure myself,” he quips.

But pride goeth before a fall, and when Russian physicist Ivan Vanko (Mickey Rourke) attacks Stark during the Monaco Grand Prix, it sets off a domino chain of events that crash Stark’s world down around him. “All I have to do is sit here and watch,” Vankdo taunts from a jail cell, “as the world will consume you.” Hammer later recruits him to perfect his own flawed armor technology, while the U.S. military exerts increasing pressure through Stark’s buddy Colonel James Rhodes (Don Cheadle, replacing Terrence Howard) to cooperate with their own agendas. Making matters worse, the palladium that powers the reactor in Stark’s chest is slowly poisoning his blood, provoking increasingly erratic and self-indulgent behavior that alienates him from Rhodes as well as secretary/love interest Pepper Pots (Gwyneth Paltrow).

Relief and assistance come from directions both expected but welcome and unexpected and disappointing. The spies of SHIELD, led by the eyepatch-wearing Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) have the means to treat the blood poisoning but want Stark’s cooperation in their own efforts; to that end, they’ve had a sexy agent (Scarlett Johansson) posing as a legal assistant within his company for weeks. Stark also learns his father Howard (John Slattery) was a founding member of the organization, and that an old filmstrip contains the aloof elder Stark’s vision for his son’s greatness and salvation. At this point the film comes closest to coming completely off the rails: to see the individualist Stark reduced to daddy issues, and to have a solution handed to him, is probably the film’s greatest and cheapest fault.

All of this and more is compressed into a two-hour runtime, with the result that the script often bulges at its seams.  The first hour is a flurry of exposition and explanation that sometimes loses its coherence, and for audiences no already well-steeped in the comic mythology the confusion is likely to be moreso. The translation from comic book to screen is almost never without a few bumps, but here a persistent sense of something going unsaid, something taken for granted, permeates the characters’ dialogue and interaction. Little is done with the new characters to establish their connections to one another, save for some brief explanation by way of tossed-off speech. Typically, that speech is Stark making a wise crack about them.

The hurried sense of chaos unfortunately takes its toll on the performers. Rourke’s casting was heavily publicized, but his role remains opaque and largely devoid of nuance. He’s a bad guy, evil and driven by revenge, with little else complicating him. For as entertaining as Cheadle and Johansson are in their parts, there’s no compelling reason for their participation except that their characters are mainstays of the source comic; in a telling sign, none of the new characters are ever called by their comic code names: Stark dubs Cheadle “War Machine” out of context, Johansson’s Natasha Romanoff is never referred to as “The Black Widow,” Vanko is never called “Whiplash.” To be fair, Johansson’s fight sequences have an exciting fluidity in contrast to the high-tech armor everywhere else while Cheadle, the consummate actor’s actor, manages to seem completely at home in what’s essentially a fighter jet worn as a suit.

Rockwell does his best with an underwritten part, but Hammer is too self-sabotaguing to ever seem a credible threat to Stark’s genius; if ever a villain performance actually needed more mustache twirling, this may be the case. John Slattery plays Howard Stark as an unmistakable riff on Walt Disney in the 1960′s, when the animator had turned his energies towards a utopian futurism that likely seemed naive even then. It’s a weird counterpoint to his normal role as the cynical Roger Sterling of Mad Men. Of the returning characters, Downey Jr. is excellent yet again, building on Stark’s less endearing qualities while undercutting them with vulnerabilities and needs he has no idea how to express. Paltrow is exactly the same as she was last time, no more and no less; Jackson is fine but looks somewhat less than convincing marching around in a leather trenchcoat and riding boots in broad daylight.

But the Marvel Universe is nothing if not interconnected, and all the superfluous characters and story threads piled over one another are all leading to 2012′s The Avengers. Like last time, fans will want to stick around after the credits for a brief scene that teases the ongoing build-up to that film. In the meantime, this flm feels too rushed, too ambitious, and preoccupied to match the giddy revelation of its predecessor. But it’s still entertaining thanks primarily to what was right with the first film, even while introducing some new elements that stand on their own. It’s an above average sequel to a superior action film, not great but pretty good, moving the ongoing story forward while only sacrificing some momentum.

- Michael Kabel

:: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: ::

The Life of Reilly

Chronicling the screen career of the ever-versatile John C. Reilly.

For most people, John C. Reilly broke through as Reed Rothchild, the dim, affable sidekick to Mark Wahlberg’s Dirk Diggler in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Boogie Nights. Yet the versatile character actor, with his bartender’s face and imposing but not especially frightening physique, had by that point been working in mainstream and independent film for close to a decade. Working steadily, at that, flying below the radar in films with flashier performances by Johnny Depp, Leonardo DiCaprio, Sean Penn, and many others.

Revisiting those early films today - including State of Grace (1990), Hoffa (1992), and Georgia (1995) – it’s hard to miss Reilly honing his screen presence while going through the motions of playing the second or third supporting role. He was typically the sad sack friend or dim loser in those early films, but managed to give his parts unexpected depth, fleshing them out as distinct personalities that buzzed in the viewer’s mind even as the camera focused on the films’ glamorous stars.

The seven films below don’t make a comprehensive list, but they show some main points on his career timeline. Each is available on DVD.

Casualties of War (1989): America was already at its tipping point with Vietnam remembrance and director Brian DePalma alike when this overcooked wartime rape/murder story hit theatres, obscuring Reilly’s big-screen debut. Penn leads a group of U.S. soldiers, including a lankier Reilly than usual, that kidnap a Vietnamese girl above the objections of their squadmate (Michael J. Fox). Reilly is essentially a speaking extra for much of the film, somewhat lost behind Penn’s hamming and Fox’s earnest attempts to keep up. He’d go unnoticed, a character actor in a character role, largely because the film met with thunderous indifference from audiences.

What’s Eating Gilbert Grape (1993): A film that couldn’t be farther from Casualties of War if it tried, Lasse Halstrom’s (The Cider House Rules) light melodrama cast Reilly as Tucker Van Dyke, the blue-collar buddy to titular suffering soul Grape (Depp). Reilly’s charm starts to bubble up through the stock role about halfway through the plot, when Van Dyke’s enthusiasm for the milkshake of a new-in-town fast food franchise – “That’s real milk!” – fills him with giddy hope for the future. A cult favorite, it’s a sweet movie full of well-pitched performances and slice-of-life grace, thanks to a supporting cast that also includes Mary Steenburgen and Crispin Glover.

Sydney/Hard Eight (1996): Reilly’s three films with Anderson began with the writer-director’s Sundance-fueled debut, a grim neo-noir about losers circling one another between drinking and gambling in Las Vegas and Reno. The film turns on Reilly’s performance as a sweet-natured journeyman gambler caught between loyalty to his mentor (Philip Baker Hall) and his love for a tinsel-like cocktail waitress (Gwyneth Paltrow) who’s not quite sure what to make of his sincerity or how to exploit it. All three stars are excellent, as is Samuel L. Jackson as a thug who sees opportunity in the safe haven the trio create for themselves. The ending is a rare Hollywood example of a finale that makes sense. Anderson would get better – and worse – as a director, but his debut let Reilly and the undervalued Hall do some of their finest work. 

Magnolia (1999) Depending on who you ask, Anderson’s third film was either a work of genius by a brilliant talent or the first warning flare that the young auteur doesn’t know his limitations. We say it’s kind of both, but amid a broad collection of career-best performances (including Tom Cruise and William H. Macy) Reilly stands out as a lovesick, lovestruck LAPD patrol officer not quite callous enough for his job. An early collection of moments showing Reilly’s Officer Jim Kurring greeting the day alone (his wife has left him, taking their child) are propelled by tiny gestures that speak volumes, as is a later scene in which he approaches the drug addict that might present a chance at happiness (Melora Walters).

The Perfect Storm (2000): Besides the ambitious Anderson films and a part in Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line, Reilly also spent the late 90s cashing in on his growing star power, appearing in high-profile but disposable studio fluff like Never Been Kissed and For Love of the Game (both 1999). The two extremes came together, in a sense, with Wolfgang Petersen’s The Perfect Storm, based on the true story of a fishing boat caught in the worst oceanic storm of the 20th Century. Reilly sinks into the role of fisherman Dale Murphy like putting on an old flannel shirt, all windblown squint and cheap cigar ameliorated only by love for his young son. A rivalry subplot with a crewmate (William Fichtner) becomes as interesting as the here-comes-the-storm main plotline (Reilly and Fichtner had recently completed The Settlement, a micro-budget indie about life insurance con men.) until it’s resolved with a too-familiar twist. Still, the film is entertaining while remaining just smart enough to avoid making mature audiences feel like they’re slumming.

Chicago (2002): Rob Marshall’s adaptation of the caustic Bob Fosse Broadway musical has its flaws, oft-debated and often valid as they are: it didn’t deserve the Best Picture Oscar, Richard Gere has a tin ear, Rene Zellweger was miscast, and so on. Yet, despite, and nevertheless, Reilly’s song and dance as Roxie Hart’s (Zellweger) cuckolded, cluess husband Amos showed his formidable music hall chops. The film had the same heart of chrome as the musical, but Reilly’s number is all emotion. That same year he appeared as another scorned spouse, this time opposite Jennifer Aniston, in the pseudo-indie The Good Girl. 

 

The Promotion (2008): After years spent as a foil to Will Ferrell and starring in Judd Apatow’s unfairly ignored Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story (2007), Reilly returned to familiar ground with writer director Steve Conrad’s (The Weather Man) indie dramedy about two assistant grocery store managers vying for the promotion that could bring either of them financial security. Reilly plays Richard Wehlner, a recovering drug addict and family man still rattled enough by a misspent youth to rely on cheap motivational tapes and the occasional joint to get himself through the work day. The script is derivative of any number of earlier films, including Tin Men (1987), Changing Lanes (2002) and Office Space (1999) but gets carried along by Reilly, Lili Taylor as his wife and an unusually strong performance by Seann William Scott as his rival.

- Michael Kabel

:: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: ::

DVD Review: Two Lovers

One of the year’s best dramas arrives on DVD and Blu-Ray tomorrow.

Writer-director James Gray’s Two Lovers opens, as his previous We Own The Night began, with a succinct visual metaphor of what’s to come. Leonard Kraditor (Joaquin Phoenix), a deeply troubled young man draped in heavy winter clothes, throws himself off a pier into an icy body of water. Pulled to safety by passers-by who witnessed his plunge, he remains dumbstruck, unable to express gratitude for their efforts to save his life. Those themes of hopes rejected and stalled self-destruction form the backbone of the film’s searing character study and help establish it as one of the past year.

Skittish and sorrowful, Leonard stands on shaky ground both in his head and in his life. Diagnosed with bi-polar disorder and numbly devastated by an engagement that ended with ruthless logic by his lover’s family, he’s returned to the Brighton Beach home of his parents (Moni Moshonov and Isabella Rossellini) with nothing more ambitious in mind than working for their dry cleaning business and keeping to himself. The Kraditors are moving ahead, however, on the verge of merging their business with that of the neighboring and prosperous Cohen family. As a way of cementing the union, both sets of parents wouldn’t mind if Leonard struck up a romance with the Cohen’s smart, sensitive daughter Sandra (Vinessa Shaw).

Leonard and Sandra’s early flirtation is tentative, halting, almost childlike, and you get the sense that such gentle charm uses about all the energy Leonard can manage. That ennui changes once he meets his fiery upstairs neighbor Michelle (Gwyneth Paltrow), who’s come to live in their fortress-like Brooklyn apartment house as a kind of voluntary exile rendered by her boss and lover Ronald Blatt (Elias Koteas). Leonard is instantly transfixed by Michelle, who’s a beauty in the most painfully Daisy Buchanan-esque sense: always promising, in an elusive way, something great in return for love and devotion. Leonard pursues her to the best of his ability but finds his attentions first gently ignored and then rebuked. Disappointed, he pulls Sandra further into his orbit, settling into a comfortable relationship with her until the opportunity to win Michelle rears its dangerous head once again.

Gray co-wrote the script (with Ric Minello) based on the Fyodor Dostoevsky novella “White Nights,” and that author’s thoroughly downbeat worldview is well-suited to Gray’s visual vocabulary, which interprets Brooklyn and Manhattan alike as vast mazes of dreary buildings occasionally brought to ephemeral life by splashes of light and color. Gray’s films are always romantic in tone if not in attitude, and their characters are kept in almost chiaroscuro proportion to the urban megaliths surrounding them. That Two Lovers is set largely near the steely Atlantic during wintertime only heightens the sense of lifelessness surrounding the human drama. But unlike his earliest films (Little Odessa and The Yards) here Gray is getting more proficient at achieving a balance between the two contrasts. With Two Lovers the setting works in service to the characters, not the other way around.

Those characters, for their part, are played well and without ostentation, though some cast members inhabit their roles more than others. Phoenix gives Leonard a fragility that makes his vacillation between Michelle and Sandra not just believable but tightly suspenseful. The scenes in which Leonard attempts to fit in with Michelle’s group of clubbing friends is almost heart-rending to watch. Likewise Sandra’s futile attempt to convey her tenderness to Leonard, especially with a third-act gift that’s symbolic on probably a half-dozen different levels while simultaneously thumbnailing her character. Shaw is an underrated actress capable of showing great volume of emotion with the simplest of body movements, and here she takes a part that in lesser hands would have been irretrievably bland and makes a fleshed-out character worth liking – even loving, as we come to hope Leonard will.

Paltrow’s career has been dogged by skepticism for years, and in making Michelle both attractive and then repulsive she has in some ways the heaviest load to bear. By and large she succeeds, though in some scenes – as in her moments alone on the wind-swept rooftop with Phoenix – she seems to hold too much back; there’s a sense of a missing depth that might bring both characters into greater clarity. Of course that might be the fault of the script, but as everything else is planned and executed with clockwork precision such an oversight seems unlikely. Michelle is a woman who can’t get past her own selfishness to believe in anyone else’s sincerity. She’s a time bomb, one probably everyone but Leonard can recognize as such. Paltrow never quite lets that danger materialize.

Rossellini, regal even when talking on the phone, gives perhaps the film’s most poignant dialogue late in the film. Without spoiling anything, anybody who’s ever left home will recognize what she says as exactly the words you want to hear upon departure. It also arrives just as the events of the story collapse in on themselves, making what’s still to come seem as bitter as the winter wind howling around Leonard as he returns to the waterfront. 

The ending is raw, uncompromising, and multi-faceted. Everyone – almost everyone – gets what they want, which in the finest Russian literary tradition only seems charged with the potential for more misery. Whether you approve or agree with Leonard’s final decision, you can’t argue with its logic or question its unconventional contrast to most Hollywood dramas. You’ll definitely have an opinion about it, though, one way or another. Two Lovers is a movie audacious enough to make you think.

-Michael Kabel

:: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: ::

(Note: An earlier version of this review originally ran for the film’s theatrical release.)

Review: Two Lovers

An exquisite romantic drama from burgeoning master craftsman James Gray.

James Gray’s Two Lovers opens, as his previous We Own The Night began, with a succinct visual metaphor of what’s to come. Leonard Kraditor (Joaquin Phoenix), a deeply troubled young man draped in heavy winter clothes, throws himself off a pier into an icy body of water. Pulled to safety by passers-by who witnessed his plunge, he remains dumbstruck, unable to express gratitude for their efforts on his behalf. Those themes of hopes rejected and self-destruction stalled form the backbone of its searing character study and help establish the film as one of the year’s best so far.

Skittish and sorrowful, Leonard’s on shaky ground both in his head and in his life. Diagnosed with bi-polar disorder and quietly devastated by an engagement ended with ruthless logic by his lover’s family, he’s returned to the Brighton Beach home of his parents (Moni Moshonov and Isabella Rossellini) with nothing more ambitious in mind than working for their dry cleaning business and keeping to himself. The Kraditors are moving ahead, however, on the verge of merging their business with that of the prosperous Cohen family. As a way of cementing the union, they wouldn’t mind if Leonard struck up a romance with the Cohen’s smart, sensitive daughter Sandra (Vinessa Shaw).

Leonard and Sandra’s early flirtation is tentative, halting, almost childlike, and you get the sense that such gentle charm is about all Leonard can manage. That changes, however, once he meets his upstairs neighbor Michelle (Gwyneth Paltrow), a charming but needy young woman who’s come to live in their fortress-like Brooklyn apartment house as a kind of voluntary exile rendered by her boss/lover Ronald Blatt (Elias Koteas). Leonard is instantly transfixed by Michelle, a beauty in the most painfully Daisy Buchanan-esque sense, the kind that’s always promising, in an elusive way, something great in return for love and devotion. Leonard pursues her to the best of his ability but finds his attentions first gently ignored and then rebuked. Disappointed, he pulls Sandra further into his orbit, settling into a comfortable relationship with her until the opportunity to win Michelle rears its head again.

Gray co-wrote the script (with Ric Minello) based on the Fyodor Dostoevsky novella “White Nights,” and that author’s thoroughly downbeat worldview is well-suited to Gray’s visual vocabulary, which interprets Brooklyn and Manhattan alike as vast mazes of dreary buildings occasionally brought to ephemeral life by vivid splashes of light and color. Gray’s films are always romantic in tone if not in attitude, so that their characters are kept in almost chiaroscuro proportion to the urban megaliths surrounding them. That Two Lovers is set largely near the steely Atlantic during wintertime only heightens the sense of lifelessness surrounding the human drama. But unlike his earliest films (Little Odessa and The Yards) here Gray is getting more proficient at achieving a balance between the two contrasts. With Two Lovers the setting works in service to the characters, not the other way around.

Those characters, for their part, are played comfortably and without ostentation, though some cast members inhabit their roles more than others. Phoenix, his recent over-publicized eccentricities notwithstanding, gives Leonard a fragility that makes his vacillation between Michelle and Sandra not just believable but tightly suspenseful. The scenes in which Leonard attempts to fit in with Michelle’s group of clubbing friends is almost heart-rending to watch. Likewise Sandra’s futile attempt to convey her tenderness to Leonard, especially with a third-act gift that’s symbolic on probably a half-dozen different levels while simultaneously thumbnailing her character. Shaw is an underrated actress capable of showing great volume of emotion with the simplest of body movements, and here she takes a part that in lesser hands would have been irretrievably bland and makes a fleshed-out character worth liking – even loving, as we come to hope Leonard will.

Paltrow’s career has been dogged by skepticism for years, and in making Michelle both attractive and then repulsive she has in some ways the heaviest load to bear. By and large she succeeds, though in some scenes – as in her moments alone on the wind-swept rooftop with Phoenix – she seems to hold too much back; there’s a sense of a missing depth that might bring both characters into greater clarity. Of course that might be the fault of the script, but as everything else is planned and executed with clockwork precision such an oversight seems unlikely. Michelle is a woman who can’t get past her own selfishness to believe in anyone else’s sincerity. She’s a time bomb, one probably everyone but Leonard can recognize as such. Paltrow never quite lets that danger materialize.

Rossellini, regal and commanding even when talking on the phone, gives perhaps the film’s most poignant dialogue late in the film. Without spoiling anything, anybody who’s ever left home will recognize what she says as exactly the words you want to hear upon departure. It also arrives just as the events of the story collapse in on themselves, making what’s still to come seem as bitter as the winter wind howling around Leonard as he returns to the waterfront. 

The ending is raw, uncompromising, and multi-faceted. Everyone – almost everyone – gets what they want, which in the finest Russian literary tradition only seems rife with the potential for more misery. Whether you approve or agree with Leonard’s final decision or not, you can’t argue with its logic or question its unconventional contrast to most Hollywood dramas. You’ll definitely have an opinion about it, though, one way or the other.

-Michael Kabel
:: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: ::

Preview: Two Lovers

Crime auteur James Gray shifts gears with new romantic drama.

Having previously worked exclusively in the New York crime film sub-genre, writer-director James Gray shifts creative gears with the new ensemble romantic drama Two Lovers. If that sounds like an unusual change of course, fans of his previous films – Little Odessa, The Yards, 2006′s under-appreciated We Own The Night- will recognize the budding auteur’s trademark color palette and visual vocabulary right away in the trailer below. And of course there’s also the presence of Joaquin Phoenix, Gray’s designated leading man.

Two Lovers, loosely based on among other sources the Dostoevsky novella “White Nights,” also reveals a growing ambition for the upstart filmmaker, as it’s potentially the most emotionally complex work of his career. Leonard Kraditor (Phoenix) returns to his Brooklyn home after getting diagnosed with bipolar disorder. His parents (Isabella Rossellini and Moni Monoshov) are preparing to sell their dry cleaning business to their neighbors the Cohens, and suggest to that end that Leonard begin a courtship with the family’s daughter (Vinessa Shaw). That budding romance, built on tenderness and compassion, is set against Leonard’s rising passion for his energetic neighbor Michelle (Gwyneth Paltrow), the kept woman of a businessman (Elias Koteas) who misuses her affections. Obviously, much of the dramatic tension turns on Leonard’s choice of women.

Gray’s films often frustrate film goers and critics alike. His bleak visual style, in which endless shades of grays, browns, and blacks surround the characters and only sometimes reveal bursts of color, is admittedly something of an acquired taste. His actors, Phoenix especially, give low-key performances, and combined with the dreary settings his films’ end results are routinely dismissed as leaden or ponderous. Nevertheless, his confidence and his proficiency in conveying emotional complexity have grown by leaps and bounds with each film, and there is a distinct, if not exactly welcoming, narrative voice taking shape throughout. Gray is primarily interested in the unspoken distance between his characters, and a recurring theme in his work suggests that freedom of choice is often only illusory because circumstances (like the monolithic cityscapes surrounding them) confine them past the point of any real hope of action. 

All of which makes him an apt fit to bring anything by famously miserable Russian literature patriarch Dostoevsky to the screen. Gray’s also assembled his best cast yet to tackle the material. Phoenix has grown impressively as an actor throughout his career (His best performance to date, not coincidentally, was in We Own The Night.) Paltrow has labored for years in projects unworthy of her screen presence, while Rossellini and Koteas improve any film in which they participate. Shaw was memorable in her brief turn in 2007′s 3:10 To Yuma; a standout performance could likely present a breakout.

Finally, depending on the accuracy of some reports Phoenix is quitting acting, part of a larger ongoing story that actually doesn’t merit elaboration. But some early reviews point to his turn here becoming a perfect career coda if those rumors are true. Two Lovers opens in limited release this Friday.

-Michael Kabel

:: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: ::

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.
:: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: ::