REVIEWS IN BRIEF: AUTUMN, 2015

Being a collection of capsule reviews of some of the films watched by the blogger in recent months

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Goodnight Mommy (Fiala & Franz, 2014)

Dress a punishing Austrian art film up like cat-and-mouse thriller, it's still Austrian, and anybody who's been following world cinema for the past decade or so knows what nihilistic vivacity that means. But I'll spare a kindly word for Goodnight Mommy, for cruel though it is, it's not just cruel. The genre trappings help out with that a lot; unlike e.g. the films of producer Ulrich Seidl, or some of the other usual suspects of the world's bleakest national cinema, writer-directors Severin Fiala & Veronika Franz aren't obviously trying to punish us for wanting our movies to be exciting and tense. And it is, at times, very exciting and tense.

It is also very clichéd, with a climactic twist so easy to out that I'm pretty close to certain that we're meant to have it figured out long in advance. At any rate, the way the film plays out when we know what it's up to is, I think, more subtle and rewarding than if we don't; it has an added dimension of horrifying, inescapable tragedy in its depiction of how the relationship between twin boys (Lukas & Elias Schwarz) and their mother (Susanne Wuest) goes to some alarmingly curdled extremes. The basic hook of the movie is scary and intense - what if you were a child and your mother came home a psychopath, her face all covered in bandages? - but foreknowledge turns it into something weirder and far more unsettling.

Still, this is not fresh material, and it has been done better: everything about it plays like a very similar and less effective remake of A Tale of Two Sisters. Not that this is in any way bad: the three actors who make up very nearly the entire human cast of the movie are superlative in their roles, Wuest imbuing her role with a mercurial rage that gives the Schwarz boys plenty of dark energy to play off of. And the young actors are, in turn, the driving engine of the whole movie, without whom the whole edifice would collapse. They bear the weight well: one of the commonest gestures the film makes is to fixedly train its attention on their faces, whether in close-up or frightfully isolated within the middle of a wide frame, and simply watch as they panic silently for the length of a nervily protracted long take.

There are many long takes, of course: this is a contemporary European art film. An Austrian film no less, which makes the austerity just that much more austere. It is a film in which the camera (under the care of cinematographer Martin Gschlacht) tends to set itself up to take in whole rooms, chilly ones and uncomfortably over-white. Even in high tension, this is relentlessly downbeat, which rather makes the tension more profound. It's not "fun", but it's the most addictive, watchable Austrian export in quite a long while, with a wicked precision about its depiction of family dysfunction that gives it some intelligence to go with its emaciating chills.

7/10

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Goosebumps (Letterman, 2015)

It's lazy criticism, but sometimes it really is that hard to figure out who in the hell they thought a movie was made for. Why, in 2015, a Goosebumps movie? Is it for nostalgic 20-but-closing-on-30somethings? The 10 and 12-year-olds of today? Some unsustainable hybrid of the both of them?

But even that's missing the forest for the trees: whatever audience is likely to think that a film adapting R.L. Stine's occasionally-revived mid-'90s series of light horror for children is the most terrific idea that ever came down the pike, surely nobody wanted that film to take the form of a romantic comedy about a gawky teen boy pining after a girl. Whose father, in an astonishing twist worthy of light horror for children, is none other than R.L. Stine! And it turns out that his books aren't just a profitable self-sustaining franchise, they're actually the way that he traps the demons of his imagination in leatherbound manuscripts, safe from doing the world harm. And I will confess that it was an unexpected twist that the story (credited to Scott Alexander & Larry Karaszewski, a pair of biopic specialists, which kind of makes perfect sense) would draw down in any capacity from Wes Craven's New Nightmare.

Stine is played by an especially campy Jack Black, who resembles the author not at all, but it's hard to say that it matters - apologies to the real-life Stine, but I don't suppose that any of us have a truly insistent vision of what he looks or acts like. And Black at least injects the role with a delirious note of cartoonish unpredictability that works to its extreme benefit - when he's around, the whole thing becomes weirder. Not necessarily funnier (it's a pretty ropey comedy, even worse in that genre than in horror, where it's family-friendly tone necessarily sucks away its potential for real terror or even suspense), but at least more kinetic and brittle. I didn't know till I watched it that I wanted to know what Jack Black playing heterosexual Truman Capote in a kids' movie might look like, and I'm glad to have had the experience.

The problem is - and what a big problem, too - Black is barely present for the film's first half, during which time we have nobody to keep us company but Zach (Dylan Minnette), the new next-door neighbor to Stine and his pretty daughter Hannah (Odeya Rush), who emerges as a co-protagonist mostly by accident. And also Zach's comic relief friend Champ (Ryan Lee). Amy Ryan shows up just long enough for us to feel very angry that these are the roles offered to her. In Zach, we find a faultlessly dull teenybopper protagonist, performed without distinction - but then, what could Minnette have possibly done with the role? It's generic tween tosh, devoid of anything interesting or insightful, and the chintzy visual effects of the monsters that eventually intersect with the movie don't alter the impression that this is one notch above direct-to-video.

5/10

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Iris (Maysles, 2014)

The last films of great directors inherently come with an unfair amount of baggage, and the notion that the late Albert Maysles - who, with his even later brother David, did much to help define the new genre of documentary film known as direct cinema in the '60s - would end his career with a puff piece about a fashionista is, on the surface, odd and perhaps disappointing. But Iris, a snapshot in the life of nonogenarion Iris Apfel, is hardly a trivial celebrity profile. Or, for that matter, much of a study of the fashion industry.

Instead, it's a celebration of doing what the hell you want to in old age, because at that point you've earned it. Apfel gained prominence in the 1950s with her husband Carl (who also appears in the film, surviving until August 2015), scouring the weirdest corners of the world to find interesting and delightful things to assemble into highly idiosyncratic but imaginative statements of personal style, both in clothing and interior design, and into her senior years - the film was shot when she was 90, she still pursues that goal with more vigor than many of us a fraction of her age can summon for our own passion projects. The approximate context for the film is a retrospective of Apfel's work held at the Museum of Modern Art, but she doesn't stand still to be memorialsed and stuffed; she takes an active role in helping to shape the exhibit, choosing how to define and present her life's work to best effect.

All of this would add up to a charming and thoroughly slight "aren't charming old people just, well, charming!" lark - the 79-minute running time encourages us to think of it that way, too - except for one thing. Iris Apfel, of course, isn't the only person in the film doing what they love to do long past retirement age; Maysles himself, well along into his 80s, fits that bill as well. The film doesn't let you forget that fact, either. Considering that his aesthetic was built on the rock of "the filmmaker must disappear invisibly into the background of his film", it's astonishing how much Iris draws him in, mostly because Iris, herself, draws him in, constantly gesturing to the offscreen director & cameraman, talking about how she's the subject of the movie. It's a startling departure, but it works; it even feels necessary, perhaps.

The way that Apfel inveigles Maysles into acknowledging himself in his own film feels unforced and friendly; perhaps in spotting another old fogey who won't give up, she regards him as just one more of the friends she always has encircling her, a natural part of her life in this moment. It's unexpected, but completely authentic, and it gives Iris a sense of familiarity with both its subject and its creator that make it feel like an especially realistic portrait of human life even by the standards of an inherently realistic genre.

8/10

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Brooklyn (Crowley, 2015)

If I describe Brooklyn as the nicest movie to take your grandma to over the holidays, hopefully that implies two things. One of them, of course, is that the film has been carefully buffed and sanded by director John Crowley and screenwriter Nick Hornby (adapting a novel by Colm Tóibín) to make certain that it contains not a single challenging idea, character, plot development, or image. A more tastefully distilled, photogenic portrait of The American Immigrant Experience you'll be hard-pressed to find; this is plush enough to make In America look like an Abel Ferrara picture.

But the other thing I hope to imply is that the film is eerily, aggressively likable, and I mean that with none of the sardonic irony that could easily be implied. This is an old-fashioned kind of drama in the best way, where the filmmakers espouse a full and abiding affection for all of their characters, even the ones who in the context of the narrative are "wrong". To flesh out its wide range of humanity, from small town Ireland to the messy possibilities of 1950s New York, the film has assembled what surely must be the best ensemble cast of 2015, and at the top of the pile is Saoirse Ronan as Eilis, the young woman who leaves the stultifying comfort of her homeland to find terrors and liveliness (and sex - tastefully unerotic sex, but sex) across the Atlantic. It's a wonderfully retiring and interior performance Ronan gives, exuding mountains of unspoken thoughts through the simplest gestures and the lilt in her voice, and eight years after her astounding coming-out party with Atonement, it's the payoff for those of us who have been anxiously awaiting her first All-Time Great performance.

The only thing that holds it back is that it has to take place in a movie that is magnificently unwilling to make any demands of its protagonist. We get to know Eilis too well to think of her as a passive vessel, but that's basically all the script asks her to be. She simply floats from one minute, instantly-resolved conflict to the next, never having to fight, never having to make a hard choice; this is particularly galling in the film's last third, when it tries to stake life in America against life in Ireland, and then gives up pretending that it has anything there.

Beyond its pleasantly insubstantial narrative, Brooklyn has the kind of aesthetic that's exactly what you would suppose a story of a young immigrant in Brooklyn would end up with; though the film is explicitly set in 1952, as attested to by the presence of The Quiet Man in theaters (it's not clear if that's meant to be ironic; that film hardly has a more candy-coated idea of Irish life than this one), it looks like it should be forty years earlier than that. Crowley and cinematographer Yves Bélanger have put a great deal of effort into giving the film a specific texture and visual relationship to its characters, but it's so indifferently pretty, with such clichéd "faded photographs" colors, that it feels far more impersonal than it deserves to. That's the best way to sum up the whole movie, really: a lot of energy and personality devoted to making something that is utterly generic and devoid of insight. Ah well.

7/10

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(T)error (Cabral & Sutcliffe, 2015)

Something feels distinctly not right about having one's response to a documentary study about the grotesque abuses made by the FBI in pursuing potential terror suspects be that it feels like a great '70s paranoia thriller, but I think that (T)error understands that there's something feistier going on than just cataloging the moral depravity of the War on Terror in its second decade. The film makes for a natural double-feature with last year's Citizenfour: both of them are stories about how the documentarians themselves become part of the story they're telling, and how scary and exhilarating that can be when it involves playing mind games with the U.S. government. (T)error is the better film, though; it lacks Citizenfour's regard for its own self-worth, instead viewing the spiral of madness that we'd call "farcical" if it was at all funny with an objective detachment that finds directors Lyric R. Cabral & David Felix Sutcliffe all but asking out loud, "what the fuck is wrong with us?"

The backstory: Saeed Torres was a friend of Cabral's, who one day told her an unusual secret. Seems that he's spent much of his life as an FBI mole, using his connections to the Black Muslim communities in America to hunt down targets the FBI selects and try to entrap them. Why he would tell her this is anybody's guess, as is why he'd agree to let her and Sutcliffe make a movie about his latest attempt to track down possible terrorist Khalifah Al-Akili, who has been making some pro-Taliban posts on the internet. Whatever cat-and-mouse tension the film might conceivably generate evaporates when we meet Al-Akili, a pudgy white American nerd who can't understand why this grumpy old black man keeps pestering him about trying to overthrow the government.

It couldn't be clearer that everyone involved understands this to be entirely bullshit: Torres is an extravagantly awkward spy, and Al-Akili is more pathetic than threatening and kens almost immediately that Torres, using the name "Shareef", is a narc. And yet they grind along, as do Cabral and Sutcliffe, who make some decisions in the film's second half that are half brilliant journalism, half reckless irresponsibility, and which add to the general sense that we're watching a dress rehearsal for a spy thriller going terribly wrong.

It all makes the case more elegantly than words ever could: the way the FBI runs counter-terrorism operations is criminally absurd and unethical. The film doesn't editorialise on this point, but it doesn't have to: in showing Al-Akili's utterly boring little life, or listening to Torres wearily recounting the series of mistakes that led him to this point, it captures a sense of smallness brilliantly. These are regular if eccentric people, and they deserve much better than being forced into the center of this cartoonish nonsense. The film is both angry and resigned about this point, but the argument lingers less than the humanity of the subjects, and the unfairness that they were trapped in this brilliantly oddball document.

8/10

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Reviews I've written for other sites
Kahlil Gibran's The Prophet (Allers, 2014) - The Film Experience
Paranormal Activity: The Ghost Dimension (Plotkin, 2015 - The Film Experience
Last Days of Coney Island (Bakshi, 2015) - The Film Experience
Pather Panchali (Ray, 1955) - UW Cinematheque blog
Moomins on the Riviera (Picard, 2014) - The Film Experience
Aparajito (Ray, 1956) - UW Cinematheque blog
Boy and the World (Abreu, 2013) - The Film Experience