DVD Review: The Adjustment Bureau

Matt Damon and Emily Blunt star in a sophisticated, elegant thriller of predestination.

There’s an old proverb, certainly hundreds of years old and probably British, that begins with a horseshoe losing a nail and ultimately leading, through a cascade of dire consequences, to the collapse of an entire kingdom. Such small twists of fate – seemingly random yet maddeningly well- and ill-timed, holding the potential for disaster or joy – lie at the intelligent heart of The Adjustment Bureau. Helmed by first-time director George Nolfi (who also adapted the Philip K. Dick short story), the film trusts its audience to reach their own conclusions and rewards their patience with genuine suspense and characterization of an elegant, old-school Hollywood flavor. Until its last few moments, when the script veers into a pat ending, it’s one of the year’s best films.

Matt Damon stars as David Norris, a New York congressman whose hard-partying past (which fortunately does not involve Twitter) has cost him a Senate race in a bitter upset. Moments before his concession speech he meets Elise Sellas (Emily Blunt), a free-spirited woman who’s crashed a party elsewhere in the labyrinthine hotel. The two have an immediate, undeniable romantic chemistry, their flirtation relaxed and smart without seeming forced or purely sexual: more than simply attracted, they’re fascinated by one another. Norris has to make that speech, however, and thanks to Elise’s inspiration he gives one that revitalizes his political fortunes.

But forces are literally conspiring to keep them apart: Norris has been watched since childhood by “adjusters,” men in mid-20th Century clothing who periodically fine-tune reality on behalf of a vaguely defined “Chairman” who lays out intricate plans for everyone on Earth. Norris and Elise must not be together, the group’s leader (John Slattery) explains, because their togetherness violates the plan intended for Norris. (The Chairman, we learn later, wants him to be President.) When Norris intrudes on the adjustment team tweaking the venture capital firm where he works, the team makes him swear to not pursue Elise again. Confused and frightened, he agrees.

The film jumps ahead three years, to when a chance encounter brings the two would-be lovers together again. But the adjustment team is right there to intervene, even as one of their number (Anthony Mackie) decides to work on the couple’s behalf. Norris’ attempt to reach Elise through narrow Manhattan streets, while the adjusters manipulate reality and circumstance around him, makes for an unusual but gripping chase sequence that’s breathlessly staged and handsomely photographed.

Comparisons to last year’s far murkier Inception are unavoidable, but where that film sacrificed plot for spectacle Nolfi’s script and direction keep emphasis on character – particularly Norris’, but also allowing Elise ample screen time to develop into something more than the object of Norris’ obsession. She’s a well-rounded character in her own right, deserving of happiness and even sometimes pitiable: suffering without benefit of knowledge of the adjuster’s machinations, much of her life through the story is lonely and frustrated. (How many of us have wondered, sometime in our life, if vast forces weren’t keeping us alone? Elise becomes our proxy for that dilemma.)

The two leads, as mentioned above, deliver performances rich with maturity and depth. Damon the actor has virtually grown up on camera since his earliest appearances in the 1990s, and here he’s able to convey confidence and vulnerability without coming across as showy, and to his and Nolfi’s credit the screenplay never provides him a showy monologue or expressive scene in which – as we can imagine lesser films might – he gets to rage at the heavens. The film is too smart for that.

Can you imagine if the plan for your life included her?

Blunt, without benefit of Damon’s comparatively greater screen time, matches Damon’s restraint while making her character alluring on several levels. In that initial men’s room scene, her dialogue suggests a free-spirited type similar to the over-used and (and perhaps over-celebrated) pixie dream girl trope. Thankfully Elise the character outgrows that shoebox in seconds; she’s too old for the impish behavior suggested by the scene, for one thing; for another, such contrivance would derail the film’s better aspirations. Blunt’s best moment in the film comes later, when Elise confronts Norris for abandoning her: rather than allow herself to sink into bitchiness or spite, her hurt and anger fuel her reasoning with him.

The adjusters, meanwhile, carry frustrations with their job but keep a brusque professionalism with each other. John Slattery, playing the adjuster Richardson, makes an effective foil for Norris’ determination, at once amused by the humans’ resolve but wary of the consequences of defiance. His impatience and disappointment with Mackie’s rebel angel, communicated with impatient gestures and harried asides, speaks volumes without lapsing into bald exposition. “Three years later and I’m still cleaning up your mess,” Richardson tells him bitterly, as they pass in a hallway. You get the sense the adjusters feel as mystified by the Chairman’s plans as anyone else, but their’s isn’t to question why, no matter how much the job drains them.

In turn this only raises larger issues, but they’re the issues that the movie wants to face. Predestination is an old, old subject in art and culture, and here the film’s split-the-difference explanation of determinism grinding against free will might either intrigue or annoy you, depending on how you felt about such matters in the first place. Thompson (Terence Stamp, imperious as ever), the adjuster’s “hammer” sent in to separate Norris and Elise once and for all, explains the rises and falls of human history as a series of interspersed periods of free will and divine engineering. Agree with him or not, his perspective is both smart and chilling. The film’s submerged theme – that there is a plan, but it’s imperfect, and it changes all the time – is also troubling on any number of levels. The film doesn’t provide any answers, but there’s something to say for a mainstream film of this day and age even asking the questions.

With so much done right and most often done very well, it’s almost inevitable that the film underwhelm a little at the ending. It does, but only mildly and only very narrowly. A resolution that allows for – well, a happy ending, honestly – comes along too tidily and too conveniently to earn its place among the scenes preceding it; listen to the dialogue closely and you may even be reminded of The Wizard of Oz, and realistically we can imagine that wasn’t Dick’s or Nolfi’s intent. Until those last moments, however, The Adjustment Bureau is handsome, near-excellent filmmaking.

- Michael Kabel

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Miscellaneous Debris, May 2011

The summer movie season is a swimming pool. This is the diving board.

Winter may have the prestige pictures and springtime has the festivals, but for those of us who love watching movies, summer is the time to go. It’s like a trip to the circus, or an amusement park; the winter prestige releases  are like a classroom excursion to the museum and the festivals a Sunday afternoon trip to the eclectic bookstore Uptown (or Midtown, or whatever your city calls that area.)

Here’s our list of news that didn’t get a full post over the last couple of months, but probably deserved it – our commentary on items worth discussing. All opinions are just that, but as always feel free to post your own in the space provided. Thanks, and have a fun holiday weekend.

1. Terrence Malick’s Tree of Life won the Palme D’Or at the 64th annual Cannes Film Festival on May 22, despite a contentious reception that had some people booing its screening while others cheered. By some accounts, the film – about the meaning of life in the cosmos filtered through the life of a 1950s Texas family – is Malick as his most – well, Malick, and audience’s take on it will likely depend on how well they appreciate the writer-director’s meditative style.

Kirsten Dunst won best actress for her starring role in auteur provacateur Lars Von Trier’s apocalyptic thriller Melancholia. French actor Jean DeJardin won best actor, for his performance in the period romance The Artist.

Tree of Life opens May 27 in selected cities; Melancholia opens November 4. As of press time The Artist has no US release date listed on IMDB.

We hear the beaver did great work.

2. Going from controversial success to almost unmitigated failure, director Jodi Foster’s attempt to resuscitate buddy Mel Gibson’s career with the odd melodrama The Beaver opened to just $107,000 in limited release May 8, with subsequent box office so small that distributor Summit Entertainment has scrapped plans for a wide release. The film earned mixed reviews, alongside the predictable speculation about the state of Gibson’s career moving forward.

As a comeback vehicle, The Beaver is probably just too weird: Gibson ‘s last effort, the far more conventional revenge thriller Edge of Darkness, broke even on its $80 million budget in worldwide release.

We were going to post a trailer for The Beaver but the hell with it. Here’s the drug bust scene from Lethal Weapon instead:

Did Riggs every get that Christmas tree? We’ll never know.

Ulrich on L&O:LA

3. As long as we’re on the subject of failure, here’s a recipe for how to tank one of the year’s most promising television dramas: put it on extended hiatus, release the cast member with the organized, devoted fan base, and then reschedule it behind a drama that was doomed almost from its start, runnning the episodes blatantly out of their production order. That’s what NBC had the brains to do with Law & Order: Los Angeles, the latest incarnation of the aging franchise but a worthy successor to the “mothership” original series that the Peacock Network canned last year.

Had the show continued, its breakout star would likely have been Corey Stoll, whose Detective Tomas “TJ” Jaruszalski gave laid-back California mellow a fresh coat of cool. On that note, NBC’s The Event (the show’s ill-starred lead-in) features Jason Ritter, Ian Anthony Dale, Taylor Cole and Sarah Roemer, whom we see as some of the biggest stars of 2013 or so.

4. From the “we should have reviewed this a while back” desk: A&E’s original drama Breakout Kings continues to surprise with its shrewdly intelligent writing, building all its half-dozen interpersonal tensions to a slow boil week by week. The cast’s chemistry, bumpy in the first episodes, has improved as the show nears the end of its first season (to middling ratings).

Jimmy Simpson, formerly the scene-stealing Liam McPoyle on It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia, brings the best work playing a gambling-addict psychiatrist, and plotlines often pause to let him take center stage with his Hannibal-Lector-gone-geek weirdness. Meanwhile The Wire‘s Domenick Lombardozzi has a beefy intensity that evokes the early work of Gene Hackman, and Laz Alonzo (Avatar) brings retro cool to the center straight-man role.

Breakout Kings‘ season finale airs May 29.

5. Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides had a $90 million opening weekend, the biggest of the year so far, but some analysts wonder if even that amount has Disney shivering its timbers. The studio predicted the film would enjoy a $100 million opener – an amount still less than the openings for the series’ two previous installments – but that analysts likely felt was conservative given the additional revenue from 3-D and IMAX showings.

Already the subject of lukewarm reviews, the film faces stiff competition in the coming weeks for the all-important 18-49 demographic, with The Hangover 2 opening this weekend and X-Men: First Class the week after.

6. A better show than anyone who’s never seen it realizes, FX’s Archer is much more than the genre-spoofing jokes its tame promos would indicate. Not for the faint of heart or gentle of stomach, it’s nevertheless a very smart, very dark comedy that most often recalls the first-season heyday of Arrested Development (partly a small wonder, given the bevy of AD veterans among its voice cast.)

Sterling Archer (H. Jon Benjamin) is the premiere secret agent for the quasi-governmental agency ISIS, run by his domineering, emotionally withholding mother (Jessica Walter) and staffed by a crew of sexual degenerates and deviants (voiced by, among others, Judy Greer and Chris Parnell.) Arrogant but achingly aware that his stunted maturity comes from a miserable childhood, Archer carries out missions with fellow spy and bittersweetheart Lana Kane (Aisha Tyler) while avoiding the machinations of the KGB, rival spy organization ODIN, and pretty much the entire world. Meanwhile the ISIS staff carries on workplace satire that would strip the paint off NBC’s cute/wacky/cute Thursday night sitcoms.

The second season recently concluded, with reruns currently appearing sporadically amid FX’s schedule.

7. With The Dark Knight Rises officially in production as of last week, the film’s official site released this picture of Tom Hardy (Inception) as the monstrous gang boss known as Bane.

In the comics, Bane is a criminal genius who uses a volatile steroid known as Venom to augment his musculature, giving  him incredible strength and terrific rage. Raised from childhood in the Caribbean prison of Pena Dura but eventually dominating its inmates through sheer intimidation, he journeyed to Gotham City to beat that city’s own “ruler by fear” – Batman. In his bid to conquer Gotham’s underworld he fought the hero hand-to-hand in a brutal Batcave-set duel that ended when he snapped Batman’s spine.

Currently reformed, more or less, he works with other villains-for-hire The Secret Six, whose perversely witty book is among the best DC publishes each month. Bane also previously appeared in 1997′s little-loved Batman and Robin, where he was played by the late wrestler Jeep Swenson.

8. Finally, because no one wants to work when the weather is nice, here’s Christian Bale in a clip from the unfairly ignored Harsh Times to help you articulate your workplace frustrations. Just let his words ring through your head when your coworkers annoy or frustrate.

We have a review of this film and several other worth-seeing Bale films in this feature from 2009. Finally, it should go without saying but nothing about his clip is SFW.

We’ll return next week with a review of The Hangover 2. Thanks for reading.

- Michael Kabel

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Review: The Adjustment Bureau

Matt Damon and Emily Blunt star in a sophisticated, elegant thriller of predestination.

There’s an old proverb, certainly hundreds of years old and probably British, that begins with a horseshoe losing a nail and ultimately leading, through a cascade of dire consequences, to the collapse of an entire kingdom. Such small twists of fate – seemingly random yet maddeningly well- and ill-timed alike, holding the potential for disaster or joy - lie at the intelligent heart of The Adjustment Bureau. Helmed by first-time director George Nolfi (who also adapted the Philip K. Dick short story), the film trusts its audience to reach their own conclusions and rewards their patience with genuine suspense and characterization of an elegant, old-school Hollywood flavor. Until its few moments, when the script veers into a pat ending, it’s probably the best new release of the year to date.

Matt Damon plays David Norris, a New York congressman whose hard-partying past has cost him a Senate race that, it’s explained to us, most voters felt certain he’d win. Moments before his concession speech he encounters Elise Sellas (Emily Blunt), a free-spirited woman who’s crashed a party elsewhere in the labyrinthine hotel. The two have an immediate, undeniable romantic chemistry, their flirtation relaxed and smart without seeming forced or purely sexual: more than simply attracted, they’re fascinated by one another. Norris has to make that speech, however, and thanks to Elise’s inspiration he gives one that revitalizes his political fortunes.

But forces are literally conspiring to keep them apart: Norris has been watched since childhood by “adjusters,” men in mid-20th Century clothing who periodically fine-tune reality on behalf of a vaguely defined ”Chairman” who lays out intricate plans for everyone on Earth. Norris and Elise must not be together, the group’s leader (John Slattery) explains, because their togetherness violates the plan intended for Norris. (The Chairman, we learn later, wants him to be President.) When Norris intrudes on the adjustment team tweaking the venture capital firm where he works, the team makes him swear to not pursue Elise again. Confused and frightened, he agrees.

The film jumps ahead three years, to when a chance encounter brings the two would-be lovers together again. But the adjustment team is right there to intervene, even as one of their number (Anthony Mackie) decides to work on their behalf. Norris’ attempt to reach Elise through narrow Manhattan streets, while the adjusters manipulate reality and circumstance around him, makes for an unusual but gripping chase sequence that’s breathlessly staged and handsomely photographed.

Comparisons to last year’s far murkier Inception are unavoidable, probably, but where that film sacrificed plot for spectacle Nolfi’s script and direction keep emphasis on character – particularly Norris’, but also allowing Elise ample screen time to develop into something more than the object of Norris’ obsession. She’s a well-rounded character in her own right, deserving of happiness and even sometimes pitiable: suffering without benefit of knowledge of the adjuster’s machinations, much of her life through the story is lonely and frustrated. (How many of us have wondered, sometime in our life, if vast forces weren’t keeping us alone? Elise becomes our proxy for that dilemma.)

The two leads, as mentioned above, deliver spotless performances rich with maturity and depth. Damon the actor has virtually grown up on camera since his earliest appearances in the 1990s, and here he’s able to convey confidence and vulnerability at the same time. His performance isn’t for a moment showy, and to his and Nolfi’s credit the screenplay never provides him a showy monologue or expressive scene in which – as we can imagine lesser films might – he gets to rage at the heavens. In this way, too, the film is too smart for that.

Can you imagine if the plan for your life included her?

Blunt, without benefit of Damon’s comparatively greater screen time, matches Damon’s restraint while making her character alluring on several levels. In that initial men’s room scene, her dialogue suggests a free-spirited type similar to the over-used and (and perhaps over-celebrated) pixie dream girl trope. Thankfully Elise the character outgrows that shoebox in seconds; she’s too old for the impish behavior suggested by the scene, for one thing; for another, such contrivance would derail the film’s better aspirations. Blunt’s best moment in the film comes later, when Elise confronts Norris for abandoning her: rather than allow herself to sink into bitchiness or spite, her hurt and anger fuel her reasoning with him.

The adjusters, meanwhile, carry frustrations with their job but keep a brusque professionalism with each other. John Slattery, playing the adjuster Richardson, makes an effective foil for Norris’ determination, at once amused by the humans’ resolve but wary of the consequences of defiance. His impatience and disappointment with Mackie’s rebel angel, communicated with impatient gestures and harried asides, speaks volumes without lapsing into bald exposition. “Three years later and I’m still cleaning up your mess,” Richardson tells him bitterly, as they pass in a hallway. You get the sense the adjusters feel as mystified by the Chairman’s plans as anyone else, but their’s isn’t to question why, no matter how much the job drains them.

In turn this only raises larger issues, but they’re the issues that the movie wants to face. Predestination is an old, old subject in art and culture, and here the film’s split-the-difference explanation of determinism grinding against free will might either intrigue or annoy you, depending on how you felt about such matters in the first place. Thompson (Terence Stamp, imperious as ever), the adjuster’s “hammer” sent in to separate Norris and Elise once and for all, explains the rises and falls of human history as a series of interspersed periods of free will and divine engineering. Agree with him or not, his perspective is both smart and chilling. The film’s submerged theme – that there is a plan, but it’s imperfect, and it changes all the time – is also troubling on any number of levels. The film doesn’t provide any answers, but  there’s something to say for a mainstream film of this day and age even asking the questions.

With so much done right and most often done very well, it’s almost inevitable that the film underwhelm a little at the ending. It does, but only mildly and only very narrowly. A resolution that allows for – well, a happy ending, honestly – comes along too tidily and too conveniently to earn its place among the scenes preceding it; listen to the dialogue closely and you may even be reminded of The Wizard of Oz, and realistically we can imagine that wasn’t Dick’s or Nolfi’s intent. Until those last moments, however, The Adjustment Bureau is handsomely excellent filmmaking.

- Michael Kabel

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DVD Review: Inception

Unconvincing leads and too many script problems bring a rude awakening to Christopher Nolan’s latest thriller.

Inception (available December 7 in a variety of gift-ready DVD and Blu-Ray editions) will amaze you only as long as you want to be amazed. If you’re skeptical, you’ll likely feel less so. If you start to think about its mechanics and workings for too long, it might even disappoint. It’s not a film that ages well in the days after viewing, and it requires your more or less unqualified complicity to really work even as you’re viewing it. And like the dreams at the center of its story, logic and internal cohesion sometimes break down, and not everyone within is convincing.

Writer-director Christopher Nolan’s reportedly worked for a decade on its script, moving it through horror and heist movie genres and refining the dream logic and its trip-wired narrative implications. The final product, as with so many of his films, is a combination of several styles and forms, and he makes them fit together seamlessly. Still, a succession of colorless performances and murky internal logic keep the film from gaining the narrative momentum of The Dark Knight or even The Prestige, Nolan’s 2006 similar examination of reality’s slippery surface. Ultimately, Inception is neither a misstep nor a leap forward, but something in-between and something less than its antecedents.

Dominic Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) works in a vaguely suggested near-future as an “extractor,” pulling information out of his targets’ unconscious minds by invading and manipulating their dreams. When he and his cohort Arthur (Joseph Gordon Levitt) fail to extract information by Saito (Ken Watanabe), one of their assignments, they’re compelled to work for him or face the wrath of their previous employer, who it’s said severely punishes unsuccessful operatives. Except Saito doesn’t want information withdrawn from a mind so much as planted into the head of the son (Cillian Murphy) of his business rival, the better to prevent his competitor’s incipient monopoly. This act of imbuing information – the inception of an idea – is much trickier, and one with which Cobb has a complicated and haunting history. Meanwhile, Cobb doesn’t travel into dreams alone: he carries the spectre of his dead wife Mal (Marion Cotillard), a presence that actively works against his efforts in the dreamscapes.

Cobb agrees to the assignment, in part because of Saito’s promise to help him return to the United States, where the children whose faces he literally can’t bear to imagine reside. Cobb is wanted, it seems, as a suspect in Mal’s death. Journeying instead to Paris and elsewhere, he recruits a new team consisting of a forger (Tom Hardy), a chemist (Dileep Rao), and Saito. Cobb also employs a neophyte dream “architect” named Ariadne upon the recommendation of his ex-father-in-law (Michael Caine.) Despite Arthur’s misgivings that Cobb’s guilt and fear will sabotage the mission, the team embarks into the scion’s mind, invading multiple levels of his subconscious to reach the heavily guarded area where Cobb can implant the spore of an idea.

The levels are for the most part exquisitely staged set pieces, with the final level – a snow-capped, mountaintop fortress worthy of a James Bond villain – offering particularly impressive visuals. The crumbling, tide-battered metropolis that represents the underbelly of Cobb’s own consciousness is also spectacular, as much if not more so than the folding streets profiled in the film’s marketing campaign. If only everything worked as well, or with such imagination. For as lovely as they are to look at, there’s a depressing literalism to the elements of the dreams presented: safe places in the mind are castles and fortresses, inner turmoil is depicted as roiling surf, protectors and defenses are presented as soldiers and military hardware. It’s not a bad creative strategy, per se, but it’s not a complicated or original one, either, and serves to lend an air of predictability to the film that it doesn’t deserve. Perhaps that was Nolan’s intention; maybe it wasn’t.

More troubling is Nolan’s in media res approach to the dreamscape idea and to the explanation of its mechanics. The script offers an explanation that the technology was originally developed by the military, and its various drawbacks and pitfalls are explained and at times – such as Arthur’s weightless jaunt through a hotel – imaginatively staged. At other times, the method of presenting information as it becomes necessary for a given character to know gives the impression, somewhat inaccurately, that the script is making up the rules as it goes along. Nolan surely had all his ideas thought out in the decade leading up to the script’s completion; the invitation to wonder otherwise is distracting, and unfortunate. For the film’s many intelligent ideas to work, every idea and every detail has to make sense. This happens most of the time, but not all, and the one’s that don’t work, such as the collapsing bridges and mirrored walls, seem especially conspicuous in contrast.

The production design is exceptional, with interior and exterior spaces alike having a lived-in realism that contributes miles of authenticity to even the most fantastical story elements. As an example of Nolan and his production team’s persuasive savvy: Cobb and his accomplices are attached to their target’s conscious via wires that connect to the wrist, eschewing the visual need for the complicated and often unconvincing headgear featured in similar movies like Brainstorm and Strange Days. It’s a small choice, but a compelling one nevertheless.

Perhaps the biggest problem comes from a cast that most often isn’t up to the material, with DiCaprio especially lacking the dramatic muscle to bring Cobb’s character to its complete potential. Playing a man that’s a fugitive from himself, his country, and his family and who can find solace only in his nightmares, DiCaprio summons only lukewarm pathos, never letting his own box office persona become submerged within his character. Page, too, seems out of her depth as Ariadne, and somewhat lost without the zingy, snark-flavored dialogue of her earlier films. By contrast Cotillard, lovely and fragile without ever seeming weak, gives the film’s best performance. You understand why Cobb couldn’t stand her absence, even if DiCaprio can’t convey as much on his own. Murphy, Levitt, Watanabe, and Hardy are all good, if underused in favor of more face time for DiCaprio and Page.

Ultimately, Inception is a triumph of ambition but not of achievement; it’s unlikely that it would have been made at all had The Dark Knight not made a bazillion dollars, but it speaks to Nolan’s artistic integrity that for his next effort he set his artistic bar even higher. It’s too simple, and unfair, to say he couldn’t have topped The Dark Knight because his whole body of work suggests that he can and that he will. Inception, the epitome of a three-star film, is a narrow miss on the way to that eventual realization. And like any dream if you want it to amaze you it will, but its impact will fade as it recedes into memory.

- Michael Kabel

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Miscellaneous Debris: July 2010 Edition

Our end-of-the-month wrapup of reviews, news, and observations that didn’t get a full post.

Here come the dog days of summer, but it’s not a complete loss. For as blah as the summer has been so far - and it’s been a giant yawn, by and large – the coming weeks show plenty of promise. In the meantime, last weekend’s San Diego Comic-Con and the upcoming fall television season has given probably half the Internet several weeks worth of blogging and complaining fuel.

Some of our own complaints and blogging fuel are listed below. All opinions are our own, and as always they’re presented in no particular order of importance.

1. Actually, first things first: Mad Men‘s fourth season premiere was a virtuoso bit of television, as good if not better than the series’ vaunted pilot and a jump ahead in quality from the season three debut. With its characters entering the post-JFK era – some leaping, some getting pulled along by the undertow of changing times – the show seems at once re-energized and recommitted. Jon Hamm continued to bring new range and depth to Don Draper, as Matthew Weiner’s script stood the character on his handsome head, while Pete Campbell (Vincent Kartheiser) and Peggy Olson (Elisabeth Moss) finally emerged as the confident grown-ups fans have waited for them to become.

Weiner made some comments last spring that the show would only run six seasons, and it’s not hard to see this ep as the halfway point in the story’s evolution. This coming week’s episode reveals – just in time for summer – the first-ever Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce Christmas party.

2. It’s fun to get what we want. After complaining last year that we wished some former A-list leading men deserved and were due for comebacks, two of our picks have movies opening this week and next. Kevin Kline’s indie comedy The Extra Man, co-starring Paul Dano and John C. Reilly, opens in limited release this weekend. Next week’s The Other Guys, starring Mark Wahlberg and Will Ferrell, co-stars Michael Keaton; we’ll mention again that The Merry Gentleman, Keaton’s directing debut, remains one of our favorite films released since this blog began a couple of years ago.

In the meantime, here’s the trailer for The Extra Man:

3. Nothing came out of the San Diego Comic-Con that really amazed us, but a few things surfaced that sort of disappointed. We’ve made the case before that Joss Whedon isn’t the best choice to write or direct the upcoming Avengers movie, but now that he’s confirmed to do both we’ll give him an even chance. Mark Ruffalo (Zodiac) is a trade-up in replacing Edward Norton as the Hulk, and it’s good to see Jeremy Renner finally confirmed as Hawkeye. All the same, it’s still a bummer to hear that Avengers founding member and mainstay Hank Pym will not appear in the film. The full cast list was revealed at the convention’s panel.

For no good reason, here’s an episode of The Avengers: United They Stand cartoon from the late 90s. Actually, it’s so painfully 90′s it might as well be sporting a pair of Doc Marten’s and a Friends haircut.

4. Better late than never: we’re happy to report that The Unusuals, the exceptional police comedy-drama that Renner headlined last year, has been available on DVD for a while now. Co-starring Terry Kinney, Amber Tamblyn, Adam Goldberg and Harold Perrineau, the show mixed black humor with sometimes surreal drama and plot twists, creating something unlike anything else on network television. Naturally, it lasted just ten episodes before ABC pulled the plug. Renner immediately went on to acclaim in The Hurt Locker, so hopefully the network regrets its cancellation. Nine episodes are available for streaming on Netflix.

5. October sees the release of The Social Network, which except for its pedigree might seem cause for suspicion; still, an Aaron Sorkin script directed by David Fincher is too good to pass up, and anyway a film that’s intelligently made about current events is seldom a bad thing, if ever.

Based on Ben Mezrich’s book The Accidental Billionaires and starring Jesse Eisenberg, Andrew Garfield and Justin Timberlake, the film chronicles the rise of Facebook. By the way, please join our Facebook group.

The film opens nationwide October 1.

6. In previous installments of Miscellaneous Debris we chastised both Rescue Me and Leverage for their egregious product placement, devoting too much time to mentioning or in some cases outright singing the praises of their commercial sponsors. Happily, both shows have toned that down quite a bit in their current runs. After a hit-or-miss second season, Leverage seems to have found its legs, with each episode by and large more entertaining than the last. Meanwhile Rescue Me, though too quick once again to fall back on the Tommy Gavin (Denis Leary)-as-human-trainwreck plotlines, has returned to ideas from earlier seasons that worked well before getting abandoned. In particular, the ace comic chemistry between firefighters Sean Garrity (Steven Pasquale) and Mike Silletti (Mike Lombardi) and the reappearance of slain firefighter Jimmy Keefe (James McCaffrey) improve every episode in which they’re used.

7. Ten years ago, Ang Lee’s martial arts epic Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon caused something of a quiet sensation, re-defining how audiences (particularly sci-fi and fantasy audiences) thought about the limits and potential of the action film genre. The  film’s luxurious cinematography and eye-googling special effects, combined with a simple but moving story of revenge and deferred love, made larger Western franchises including the then-popular Matrix and Star Wars prequel trilogy seem instantly cumbersome and outdated. Subsequent imitators and similar wuxia efforts trickled through Western multiplexes for years afterward.

A Blu-Ray edition was released this month (a previous edition was available in a three-film wuxia box set), and though we haven’t seen it yet we can only imagine how Lee’s incredible vision appears in high-definition. If you haven’t seen the film, you should. If you have, it might be time to revisit it.

8.  Criterion has officially announced the Blu-Ray and two-disc DVD release of Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line. Set to debut September 28, Criterion’s edition includes a new digital transfer supervised by Malick, thirteen minutes of outtakes, interviews with cast members, newsreels of the actual fighting on Guadalcanal and the Solomon Islands, and audio tracks of the Melanesian chants heard throughout the film.

To reiterate what we said a couple of months ago: Upon its 1998 release the film was unfairly ignored by a public that preferred the more simplistic jingoism of Saving Private Ryan (released earlier that year) or felt leery of its sorrowful, meditative tone. Nevertheless, Malick’s eye for arresting imagery didn’t dull one bit after an almost twenty year hiatus from filmmaking; the trailer alone is more picturesque than the entirety of most films, and also more moving. 

Our annual summer hiatus runs through next week. We’ll return Tuesday, August 10 with more of what you come here for. Thanks for reading.

- Michael Kabel

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Review: Inception

Christopher Nolan’s intriguing thriller is a dream come true, for better and for worse.

Inception will amaze you as long as you want to be amazed. If you’re skeptical, you’ll likely feel less so. If you start to think about its mechanics and workings for too long, it might even disappoint. It’s not a film that ages well in the days after viewing, needing your more or less unqualified complicity to really work while you’re viewing it. And like the dreams at the center of its story, logic and internal cohesion sometimes break down, and not everyone within is convincing.

Visually gorgeous and packed with suspense throughout its hefty 2 1/2 hour runtime, Christopher Nolan’s follow-up to The Dark Knight arrives in multiplexes as probably the most anticipated movie of the summer, and most people will likely be indeed wowed. Nolan reportedly worked for a decade on the script, moving it through horror and heist movie genres and refining the dream logic and its trip-wired narrative implications. The final product, as with so many of his films, is a combination of several styles and forms, and he makes them fit together seamlessly. Still, a succession of colorless performances and murky internal logic keep the film from gaining the narrative momentum of The Dark Knight or even The Prestige, Nolan’s 2006 similar examination of reality’s slippery surface. Ultimately, the new film is neither a misstep nor a leap forward.

Dominic Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) works in a vaguely suggested near-future as an “extractor,” pulling information out of his targets’ unconscious minds by invading and manipulating their dreams. When he and his cohort Arthur (Joseph Gordon Levitt) fail to extract information by Saito (Ken Watanabe), one of their assignments, they’re compelled to work for him or face the wrath of their previous employer, who its said severely punish unsuccessful operatives. Except Saito doesn’t want information withdrawn from a mind but rather planted into the head of the son (Cillian Murphy) of his business rival, the better to prevent his competitor’s incipient monopoly. This act of imbuing information – the inception of an idea - is much trickier, and one with which Cobb has a complicated and haunting history. Meanwhile, Cobb doesn’t travel into dreams alone: he carries the spectre of his dead wife Mal (Marion Cotillard), a presence that actively works against his efforts in the dreamscapes.

Cobb agrees to the assignment, in part because of Saito’s promise to help him return to the United States, where the children whose faces he literally can’t bear to imagine reside. Cobb is wanted, it seems, as a suspect in Mal’s death. Journeying instead to Paris and elsewhere, he recruits a new team consisting of a forger (Tom Hardy), a chemist (Dileep Rao), and Saito. Cobb also employs a neophyte dream “architect” named Ariadne upon the recommendation of his ex-father-in-law (Michael Caine.) Despite Arthur’s misgivings that Cobb’s guilt and fear will sabotage the mission, the team embarks into the scion’s mind, invading multiple levels of his subconscious to reach the heavily guarded area where Cobb can implant the spore of an idea.

The levels are for the most part exquisitely staged set pieces, with the final level – a snow-capped, mountaintop fortress worthy of a James Bond villain – offering particularly impressive visuals. The crumbling, tide-battered metropolis that represents the underbelly of Cobb’s own consciousness is also specatacular, as much if not more so than the folding streets profiled in the film’s marketing campaign. If only everything worked as well, or with such imagination. For as lovely as they are to look at, there’s a depressing literalism to the elements of the dreams presented: safe places in the mind are castles and fortresses, inner turmoil is depicted as roiling surf, protectors and defenses are presented as soldiers and military hardware. It’s not a bad creative strategy, per se, but it’s not a complicated or original one, either, and serves to lend an air of predictability to the film that it doesn’t deserve. Perhaps that was Nolan’s intention.

More troubling is an in media res approach to the dreamscape idea and to the explanation of its mechanics. The script offers an explanation that the technology was originally developed by the military, and its various drawbacks and pitfalls are explained and at times – such as Arthur’s weightless jaunt through a hotel – imaginatively staged. At other times, the method of presenting information as it becomes necessary for a given character to know gives the impression, somewhat inaccurately, that the script is making up the rules as it goes along. Nolan surely had all his ideas thought out in the decade leading up to the script’s completion; the invitation to wonder otherwise is distracting, and unfortunate. For the film’s many intelligent ideas to work, every idea and every detail has to make sense. This happens most of the time, but not all, and the one’s that don’t work, such as the collapsing bridges and mirrored walls, seem especially conspicuous in contrast.

The production design is nothing short of breathtaking, with interior and exterior spaces alike having a lived-in realism that contributes miles of authenticity to even the most fantastical story elements. As an example of Nolan and his production team’s persuasive savvy: Cobb and his accomplices are attached to their target’s conscious via wires that connect to the wrist, eschewing the visual need for the complicated and often unconvincing headgear featured in similar movies like Brainstorm and Strange Days. It’s a small choice, but a compelling one nevertheless.

Perhaps the biggest problem comes from a cast that most often isn’t up to the material, with DiCaprio especially lacking the dramatic muscle to bring Cobb’s character to its complete potential. Playing a man that’s a fugitive from himself, his country, and his family and who can find solace only in his nightmares, DiCaprio summons only lukewarm pathos, never letting his own box office persona become submerged within his character. Page, too, seems out of her depth as Ariadne, and somewhat lost without the zingy, snark-flavored dialogue of her earlier films. By contrast Cotillard, lovely and fragile without ever seeming weak, gives the film’s best performance. You understand why Cobb couldn’t stand her absence, even if DiCaprio can’t convey as much on his own. Murphy, Levitt, Watanabe, and Hardy are all good, if underused in favor of more face time for DiCaprio and Page.

(A smaller note about the cast: Tom Berenger makes a brief but welcome appearance as the scion’s advisor, marking something of a trend in Nolan’s films: he seems to enjoy hiring 1980s-era leading men for supporting parts, having used Rutger Hauer and Eric Roberts in earlier films. With a third Batman film in pre-production, Michael Pare and Steven Bauer should start polishing their resumes.)

Ultimately, Inception is a triumph of ambition but not of achievement; it’s unlikely that it would have been made at all had The Dark Knight not made a bazillion dollars, but it speaks to Nolan’s artistic integrity that for his next effort he set his artistic bar even higher. It’s too simple, and unfair, to say he couldn’t have topped The Dark Knight because his whole body of work suggests that he can and that he will. Inception, the epitome of a three-star film, is a narrow miss on the way to that eventual realization. And like any dream if you want it to amaze you it will, but its impact will fade as it recedes into memory.

- Michael Kabel

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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

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In Case You’re Just Joining Us…

Links and recaps of our favorite and most popular posts.

Pictured: WordPress

WordPress, benevolent deity that it is, lets its bloggers monitor lots of features about their blogs, including their most popular blog entries. Lately we’ve been getting a lot more traffic than we used to, especially for some of our comic-book related articles. We can’t say that’s especially surprising – character speculation is often the bulk of the fun surrounding a comic book film. A few others are getting noticed around the Intertubes, too, and that’s also great with us.

These are our most popular and also some we think deserve more recognition so, please, pay attention. Presented in no particular order of importance:

1. Since we’re supposed to be an “online journal of dissent,” we should mention some reviews in which we diverge from popular critical response. We bashed Revolutionary Road for the overreaching mess that it was and loathed The Curious Case of Benjamin Button as a formless and largely pointless chick flick in epic film clothing. On the other hand, we liked The X-Files: I Want To Believe and continue to champion the work of writer-director James Gray.

2. We featured seven lesser known comic book adaptations last October. That post includes video of each goofy, inspired, or goofily inspired effort, some of which are cringe-inducing and some are charming in their own weird way. Trust us when we say that until you’ve seen Dr. Strange’s afro in his clip, you can’t truly appreciate the 1970s. We also have David Hasselhoff playing a part recently done by Samuel L. Jackson and Shaquille O’Neal as an ersatz Superman. And if that’s not quality blogging, what truly is?

3. For that matter, our piece in which we give Hollywood a plot, suggest a director, and even cast The Flash’s jump to the big screen is getting a lot of traffic the last couple of weeks. We’re glad for that, since we were  up many a night getting each casting choice just right. And while we’re hijacking story meetings, our picks for ten villains for the third Batman movie has also met with a pretty great response.

4. We did a post about why most films set in and around the Civil War absolutely suck. It’s not our most popular piece, but it’s been getting some attention lately and we’re glad for that. Including it here is a bald attempt to keep that going. Seriously, of all film genres and all of America’s wars, the Civil War seems to get the shortest shrift when it comes time to make a film, despite big budgets and big stars willing to tackle the material. Oh wait, that’s actually sometimes part of the problem.

5. One of the fringe benefits to thinking about movies all… the… damn… time is that you start to remember smaller or less-remembered films that you want to share with friends or, for that matter, anyone who comes to your blog looking for pictures of Hellboy or Leo DiCaprio. (Lots of people do.) Our list of five movies that deserve a DVD release was an effort to get at least a handful of those kinds of movies a little more attention. Last summer’s make Your Own Film Noir box set collection was another. We even made a list of movies for the holidays.

If this if your first visit to the blog, thanks for checking us out. If you’re an old fan, thank you very much and sorry for the delays we sometimes can’t manage to climb over. In either case, please watch more movies. That’s what we plan to do.

- Michael Kabel
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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: Revolutionary Road

DiCaprio, Winslet reunite for Sam Mendes’ adaptation of a classic American novel. Fans of the book should be worried already.

For movie fans that also read literature, adaptations of favorite books are frequently like a Christmas morning where plenty of eagerly-awaited gifts either don’t work or arrive in the wrong size. Hollywood takes its liberties, for the sake of economy or artistic will, and details and nuance inevitably get changed or removed; sometimes worse, parts are miscast. It’s been suggested that movies can never live up to their source material because books are, to some degree, movies that screen within the reader’s mind. How could anything live up to the reader’s own perceptions?

But there are also adaptations whose advance word fills the source material’s fans with cold, suspicious dread, because of the director or the stars or a combination of same. Sam Mendes’ Christmas release Revolutionary Road is such a film and I am such a fan. While I’d be the first to support any of author Richard Yates’ works brought to screen, from the looks of this film’s first trailer his anguished, haunting 1961 debut novel has been ground up into middlebrow melodrama for the Hollywood Oscar trip.

Yates’ stories frequently take place within the business worlds of New York – especially public relations and advertising – and the surrounding suburbs. His characters are restless, resentful, and longing for something deeper than what mid-20th Century American consumerism promises but never provides. Revolutionary Road, his most potent articulation of this theme, relates the demise and fall of Frank and April Wheeler, a young married couple who dream of escaping their white-collar life in the Connecticut suburbs for something more liberated in Europe. April wants to be an actress; Frank just wants out of his button-down workaday routine. But they are unable to escape both the trappings of their surroundings – the children, the social drinking, the lure of adultery – and their seething disappointment in one another.

Mad about you: DiCaprio, Winslet

If that sounds like a certain Emmy-winning cable drama, Yates’ work was essentially Mad Men’s early progenitor, and Paramount has already wisely previewed the film during that show. But when watching the trailer consider how much of the book’s – and Mad Men’s – themes are leadenly shouted to the rooftops or used for close-up Oscar clip-friendly vignettes and you’ll get an idea of what I’m afraid Mendes is up to. Beginning with American Beauty, his direction tends toward having actors emote – to ACT! - rather than inhabit their characters or to assist him in constructing scenes that build a whole film. Yates intended the Wheelers’ story to be an American tragedy, the last puttering out of the American spirit first generated by its revolution (hence the title). The trailer shows DiCaprio and Winslet acting their hearts out and handsomely inhabiting the so-chic-right-now mid-Century setting but doesn’t show much of what the story’s about.

All dressed up: DiCaprio

Mendes’ films are also not above sanitizing their subject material. 2002′s Road To Perdition, based on Max Allan Collins’ superb graphic novel, sacrificed character depth and ethnic identity in favor of standard action movie tropes. The graphic novel’s protagonist was a devoutly Catholic mob hit man in the Midwest; the film removed his faith, changed the locale, added an antagonist, and even altered the main characters’ family name in order to seem less Irish. (Star Tom Hanks won an Oscar playing a homosexual. Were Mendes and the film’s other creators worried American audiences wouldn’t accept him as Irish?) If such topics as heritage and Catholicism are too risque, who knows what will become of Revolutionary Road’s climax, in which (Spoiler Alert) April dies after attempting to give herself an abortion. Yates was the first to scoff at even the idea of a happy ending; at best his resolutions were bittersweet. Will Mendes be willing to leave his lovely co-stars miserable at story’s end? Even American Beauty’s Lester Burnham was left feeling content, despite his own violent murder.

Oscar buzz reportedly already surrounds the film, and as a purely intuitive reaction it seems the type to garner praise from the mainstream critical press as well as fawning word of mouth from moviegoers. As with all films, fans should hope for the best but prepare for the worst – the worst in this case being a lowered-volume adulteration of Yates’ bleak but searing vision, something merely Hollywood wrung from a legacy of great American fiction. Revolutionary Road opens December 26th nationwide.

We’ll be back next Monday. Have a good weekend.

- Michael Kabel

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