MEDIUM-SIZE REVIEWS: DECEMBER, 2015

Because sometimes you blow right past your arbitrarily self-imposed limitation for a "short" review, but don't have the gas in the tank for an equally arbitrary "full-length" review

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Youth (Sorrentino, 2015)

It's of course lazy and arguably bigoted, speaking to a cramped sample set, to suggest that Italian Filmmaker A and Italian Filmmaker B resemble each other in no small part because they are both Italian. But it is a national cinema that particularly favors enormous, lavish spectacle, and there's never been a point since WWII where you could look at an Italian prestige picture and not be able to figure out in seconds where it came from.

More specifically, Paolo Sorrentino's enthusiasm for copying Federico Fellini is pretty fucking unambiguous at this point. His 2013 The Great Beauty was nothing if not La dolce vita for the 2010s; and now we meet up with Youth, which isn't quite as unabashed a clone of 8½, but let's not go insulting everybody by pretending that a story of artists reflecting on the intersection of their art and their lives during a trip to a spa - one of them a film director having a beastly time casting the leading lady of his newest project - doesn't trigger some extremely strong associations.

That being said, Youth is a hell of a remix, possibly the single most luscious movie I saw in 2015. There's a certain level of indulgence on display, and by "a certain level" I mean "an enormous fucking amount", as costume designer Carlo Poggioli, production designer Ludovica Ferrario, and cinematographer Luca Bigazzi labor under Sorrentino's guidance to create a riot of glamorous lines, colors, and textures. It's cinema-as-drug, and while there is certainly a human dimension underlying this, the film's raw pleasure as a surface-level object doesn't necessarily insist on our doing that much digging.

Still, the digging is worth it. While the B-plot is carried by Harvey Keitel's Mick Boyle, a film director, the A-plot - and in both cases "plot" just means "which person we're watching as he weighs the things he's lost in old age, while staring wistfully at natural and constructed beauty" - centers on Fred Ballinger, a conductor played by Michael Caine in the first fully-awake performance he's given in much too long. Sure enough, the film is informed by music as a central organising element. At the risk of getting entirely pretentious (which I think cannot be avoided if one wants to praise this film) Youth is structured, basically, as though it was a symphony. There are motifs pulled in throughout the film, visually and through dialogue - some motifs, in fact, show up first as dialogue and secondly as visuals, an obvious trick that I completely fell for - and the scenes are strung together with a sense of rhythm more than narrative flow. In fact, the points at which the film turns fully towards narrative , primarily in its last quarter, are something of a buzz-kill: Jane Fonda's much-lauded cameo finds her in extraordinary form (clearly, she decided her goal was to win the entire movie in just one scene), but its placement in the movie is so much about the film's frankly unnecessary conflicts and not at all about its feelings, its textures, or its moods, that it can't help but feel like a terrible miscalculation all 'round.

When the film is popping, though, it's as blissfully rewarding as anything Oscar Season '15 has thrown at us. Caine is good, Keitel is better (if only by virtue of gliding more seamlessly into the film's pageant-like aesthetic), and Rachel Weisz is best, playing Fred's daughter as a series of regrets and bursts of inner strengths, but also selling her role as a character, not a chain of concepts. If nothing else, the film is always beautiful, and if you get onto its wavelength - which I concede is not the easiest thing in the world to do - its musicality pushes it right up close to transcendence. At one point, Fred stands in an alpine field, "conducting" the cows and the wind: corny and awful if you're not on the movie's side by then, one of the most stirring moments of the year if you are. I was; God knows it's ultimately a trivial film with obvious observations about life, but pleasure is pleasure, and even in its worst moments, Youth never let go of me.

8/10

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Room (Abrahamson, 2015)

Beware of spoilers below

The tyranny of awards-season chatter is that it reduces interesting movies to uninteresting horse race conversation, so let's get the dull part out of the way: yes, Brie Larson is fantastic in Room. This is only surprising if you haven't been paying attention. Brie Larson is always fantastic. She was fantastic in Don Jon, where she played an almost dialogue-free role built around the most obvious possible gag. Obviously she'll be fantastic when handed a gift-wrapped role like this one. She has been more fantastic in other things - the one time I've seen Room and her in it will do for me, whereas her work in Short Term 12 is something I like to linger on and return to. But if she wins her first of what I pray will be multiple Oscars for Room, no cosmic injustice has been done.

And what of the movie itself? Honestly, reader, I consider myself somewhat unfussed, and that is maybe the worst possible response to a film with such an intensely bleak scenario. Several years ago, as a teenager, a woman whose name is withheld long enough that it's worth ignoring the fact she has one - this is being Larson's role - was kidnapped and thrown in a one-room shed by a man she calls Old Nick (Sean Bridgers). Here he has raped her on a regular basis, impregnating her, and that is how she has come to have a companion in that little room, five-year-old Jack (Jacob Tremblay). Jack will be our identification character for the entire run of the feature, which makes things somehow more ineffably awful: knowing what a vivid hell their crappy little home is and what a psychopathic beast Old Nick truly is is intensified by having all of it transmuted through the guilelessly whimsy of a little boy.

"Whimsey", perversely, is exactly the right word. Jack and Ma have created a robust ecosystem of imagination, personalising everything with nouns functioning as names - Room is the place they live, along with Chair and Toilet and Door and everything else. This is astonishingly gripping, shot through with warped absurdist comedy, a cockeyed fairy tale that Larson's performance darkens with her exceedingly tricky way of playing a sweet optimist for Jack (and, presumably, Ma herself), while being fully aware, in every moment, of her suffering. Credit, too, to screenwriter Emma Donoghue (adapting her own novel), for providing the erratic storybook dialogue that gives this all such a twisted edge, and to director Lenny Abrahamson and cinematographer Danny Cohen, for shooting the interiors with enough angles to give Room a weird vitality all its own.

There comes a point - I won't say when or how, other than to suggest that the bridging sequence is top-flight thriller filmmaking, and Tremblay is astonishing in it - when the captors return to the life Ma left those many years before, and Room shifts into a story of PTSD, of re-building a sense of self after even a very fucking awful form of stability has been removed, and of the difficulties of being around a family that tries and fails to understand oneself. In principle, this is exactly what the film should do. In practice, Room takes a hit here from which it never recovers. The script goes through a great deal of dead wood on its way into the second half, and there's a specific piece of casting that almost kills the whole second half of the movie outright. William H. Macy, an actor whom it is impossible to see without carrying certain expectations and baggage, unless this is the very first indie movie you've ever seen, gets a spear-carrying role as Ma's tense and horrified father who can't deal with thinking about what happened to her, and the lack of proportion between star and role size is distracting in the worst ways. Moreover, his character is set up with really leading dialogue and really telling shots as an alcoholic. The movie totally abandons this plot thread and character with no fanfare at all, leaving a grarled skein of dangling plot thread that never stop getting in the way of the rest of the movie.

Joan Allen, as Ma's own mom, is worked into the movie far more elegantly (giving a lovely, compact performance in her own right, impressively filtering herself twice: it's Jack's impression of Ma's impression of grandma's character that Allen is playing), and once it's clear that Macy and his subplot aren't coming back, and once it's clear that Jack's arc is over and we're now seeing Ma's play out secondhand for the rest of the movie, Room starts to settle into something meaningful again. But there's no excuse for it to be so sloppy in getting to that point, and something very special and important dies out of the movie. Larson tries hard, and she sells a great character, but the movie is at a loss for what to do with that character for a cool 30 minutes; they're 30 minutes that suck all the wind out of what should have been an all-time harrowing character study.

7/10