REVIEWS IN BRIEF: DECEMBER, 2015

Being a collection of capsule reviews of some of the films watched by the blogger in the last month

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Mr. Holmes (Condon, 2015)

There are certain casting choices that are so ineffably perfect that it's impossible for the reality to match up to the fantasy one concocts upon learning of them. "Ian McKellen as a geriatric Sherlock Holmes in 1947" is, for me, one such bit of casting, and sure enough, Mr. Holmes (for that is the movie in which that marriage of actor and character takes place) turns out to be far less exciting in practice than in theory. This is at least in part because it's not really the "old Holmes solves one last case, despite being a long-retired country gentleman" scenario that one might hope for, but the bigger part is what replaced it: "an old man fighting hard against the loss of his memory painfully, and with only some success, reconstructs a series of not particularly interesting events that transpired decades earlier, while being somewhat annoying to the people responsible for taking care of his 93-year-old ass".

This is, if nothing else, not a tremendously difficult challenge for McKellen to meet. Sure enough, his portrayal of a cantankerous, doddering old man is flawlessly done, but also somewhat generic. This is for McKellen exactly the same kind of exercise that The Last Station was for Helen Mirren or Philomena was for Judi Dench: a slightly complicated but basically standard-issue role that doesn't require much from the British acting legend who needs to do little more than recite lines in a sufficiently prickly tone to win loving applause from the kind of audience that can be relied upon to watch these movies.

It's even less of a challenge for Laura Linney, heartbreakingly underused and damnably ineffective as the put-upon housekeeper, Mrs. Munro, irritated by Holmes's behavior while her young son Roger (Milo Parker) falls under the old man's spell. Stuck with no arc and a terrible accent, Linney is an active detriment to the film, throwing cold water on the pleasant momentum it's sometimes able to build up. It doesn't help that her character has a tendency to force the movie into its most uninteresting directions; it's the very definition of a thankless role, and Linney sinks to its level.

Still, Mr. Holmes ends up being at least a little bit charming. Bill Condon's direction (in what is, for all intents and purposes, a remake of his McKellen-starring Gods and Monsters) is lighthearted in ways that Jeffrey Hatcher's solemn adaptation of Mitch Cullin's novel isn't, particularly in the flashback segments set in the '20s - not that the film makes particularly good use of either of its time periods. Watching McKellen play-act dementia could quickly turn into a dreary exercise, but Condon is exactly the director to keep the actor focused on creating a truthful character without it becoming a grim agony. It's the perfect movie to watch on cable with your dad with only minor regret; worse fates have befallen Sherlock Holmes, though I'd much rather watch the campy '40s-style Holmes picture that puts in a cameo appearance.

6/10

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By the Sea (Jolie Pitt, 2015)

What we have here, ladies and gentlemen, might truly be the most narcissistic vanity project of all time. By the Sea finds Angeline Jolie Pitt (I'm thoroughly discombobulated by her new surname, incidentally) writing and directing the story of an unhappily married, couple played by herself and Brad Pitt, grousing around the French Riviera, and in the process teaching us Stuff About Life, or something along those lines. It is the exact movie that one would expect a superstar actor, detached from from any sort of real-life concerns, to make as her first directorial effort, and yet Jolie managed to avoid those traps, at least, with her first two films behind the camera, In the Land of Blood and Honey and Unbroken. They're both pretty dodgy movies, but they come out of a seeming good-faith effort to understand the wide world and the people living in it. By the Sea is rich people porn - quite literally, the plot revolves around how Vanessa and Roland (the characters played by the Jolie-Pitts) spy on a younger married couple fucking, courtesy of a hole in the hotel wall, and decide to manipulate them as a result - and tone-deaf in all the very worst ways.

The film is such a throwback to 1970s European arthouse cinema that it's damn near a parody. The costumes (designed by Ellen Mirojnick) working overtime to cloud our sense of when the film takes place certainly helps with that impression. By the Sea is, for a large part of its running time, concerned solely with lifeless, glossy images of beautiful people staring leadenly at nothing, with gorgeous Mediterranean backgrounds shot by Christian Berger in the style of a coffee table book. The vigor with which nothing happens is quite impressive, as is the listless languor of Jolie and Pitt's performances (it is quite possibly the most wholly uncharismatic that Pitt has ever been in anything).

Glaciers recede and empires fall as we watch the upscale ennui waft off the screen along with the omnipresent cigarette smoke, and the longer we spend with the awful, awful people in the film's center (to her credit, Jolie Pitt isn't apparently trying to pretend that they're not that awful), the harder it is to figure out why. The actors are too bad for there to be any sort of real insight into the characters or the nature of married life; the images are too blandly pretty and conventionally framed for this to be some kind of Antonioniesque study of place, as has been gamely suggested by some critics, positive and hostile alike. If it's meant to be an Antonioni riff, it's an illiterate one.

Credit where it is barely due: Mélanie Laurent and Melvil Poupaud bring a remarkable and desperately needed influx of life and psychological acuity as the young marrieds whose vitality intrigues and then arouses the bitter old protagonists. When the movie is just about them and how they cope with the toxicity of the middle-aged people staring them down, it's almost even interesting and exciting. That's hardly sufficient to make By the Sea worthwhile at any level, but at least it keeps the film from the totally enervating experience that the first half-hour promises.

3/10

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Legend (Helgeland, 2015)

There are movies that are showcases for a bravura performance, and then there are bravura performances in search of a movie, and in the case of the bafflingly bad Legend, we see the latter. Tom Hardy is great - it would be disingenuous and stupid to deny that he's not terrific as gangster twins Reggie and Ronnie Kray, who became celebrities on the backs of their criminal infamy in '60s London. Playing twins, of course, is like the actor's cheat code: it's an easy way to win adulatory reviews no matter how vanishingly subtle or cartoonishly broad the different personalities are drawn, and there's unmistakable movie magic joy to be wrung from seeing the same person on, like, two sides of the same frame.

It's disappointing to see Hardy, who absolutely can do better, settling in for such gimcrackery, but like I said: he's mechanically superb, whatever else we might think of him. And that's far more than we can say for Legend itself, which is an alarming botch of a biopic on top of being an all-round cheesy gangster movie that never met a dopey cliché it didn't want to dry hump in a back alley. It's a British production starring an all-Brit cast, but writer-director Brian Helgeland is a born Yank, which is maybe why the the film is so lousy with "Oi! Wot's dis about, bruv?"-type dialogue, part of the overall sense that we're watching a knockoff of Guy Ritchie's sometimes-lively, often-incohoate gangster pictures. That's when it isn't simply re-running Goodfellas and Casino down to some extraordinarily specific details (especially in the way the film uses narration).

The over-familiarity would be less of a problem if Legend wasn't so appallingly unexceptional. Helgeland's work as a director has been largely dominated by films that use a lot of style but not particularly interesting style, just a bunch of flash and flair that sits on screen like a twitching corpse. There's no distinction among the overqualified faces in the supporting cast, spearheaded by Emily Browning, flopsweating all over everything in the truly inert role of Reggie's wife Frances, the film's snappy, ironic narrator, responsible for injecting it with all the snazzy energy it doesn't actually possess. The plot is a snarl of criminal politics that Helgeland doesn't put any effort into clarifying, and if anything tries to make more daunting and faux-epic than it actually is. It's a deadly mixture of confusing, tedious, and trite, and long before the wheels rattle off the Krays' criminal empire, there's nothing interesting left in the ride.

Except for Hardy, sure. He plays both Krays - calculating Reggie, psychopathic Ronnie - with clear delineations between how they talk, move, think, wear clothes, and it's impressive as hell. But it's simply not enough to excuse how flat, trivial, and boring the rest of Legend proves to be. You can catch a great Tom Hardy performance anywhere; why not do it in the form of a movie that has anything on its mind?

4/10

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Southpaw (Fuqua, 2015)

Southpaw is a boxing picture with Jake Gyllenhaal. I can save us all a bunch of time, because everything else - every damn thing - is just wallpaper. I suppose I could specify that it is primarily a The Champ-model boxing picture, about the boxer's relationship to his family, far more than it is a Rocky-model boxing picture, about the boxer's sense of self-worth.

Billy Hope is the boxer - even the characters in the movie seem to recognise what a bullshit made-up name that is - and he's living a good life in the film's first quarter, finally giving in to his wife Maureen's (Rachel McAdams) constant hounding that he needs to retire. There's just one wrinkle, in the form of hungry young boxer "Magic" Escobar (Miguel Gomez), who won't be content until he's fought Billy. The two have an ugly public spar, during which time a member of Escobar's crew accidentally fires a gun that inadvertently kills Maureen, and leaves Billy in a rageaholic funk. It's because of his intemperate behavior that the government intervenes, judging him an unfit parent to his darling moppet of a daughter, Leila (Oona Laurence). So she's plucked up by Child Protective Services, and he has to start from the ground up to prove he can provide financially, by taking a job at the gym run by "Tick" Willis (Forest Whitaker), who will eventually train him how to be a more sophisticated boxer, just in time for his fight against Escobar.

That kind of groaning pileup of highly predictable clichés can be redeemed a lot of different ways: the writing can be particularly incisive, the filmmaking highly dynamic and inventive, the acting especially nuanced and honest. Southpaw has a cloying, aphorism-heavy script by Kurt Sutter, of TV's Sons of Anarchy; direction by Antonine Fuqua, a filmmaker so one-note in his thick macho aesthetic that he saw fit to make a King Arthur movie and a Los Angeles cop thriller in broadly the same style; but the acting, now there's just about something there.

Primarily, there's how obvious it is that Gyllenhaal is hellbent on winning an Oscar, and he's pushing himself hard to be the most interesting performer he can manage to see that goal come true. This is by all means a less interesting performance than he gave in Nightcrawler, with its erratic, nervy frayed edges, but he commits as hard as he can to the film's melodramatic touches and flings himself into selling the relationship between father and daughter - not aided in the slightest by the script's hairpin-turn contrivances concerning Leila's behavior, which a veteran grown-up actor would have had a hard time making sense of, meaning that Laurence is completely out to sea, but Gyllenhaal at least rages and weeps convincingly. It's an unsurprising portrayal of an obvious part, but at least he executes it terribly well, something that cannot be said for the remainder of an equally unsurprising, obvious motion picture.

5/10

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Magic Mike XXL (Jacobs, 2015)

Magic Mike was one of the great surprises in 2010s cinema: a shaggy tale of male strippers starring an army of beefcake with limited (at best) acting skills that turned out to be a piercing, hurtfully insightful examination of personal financial stability in the wake of the 2008 economic collapse. It is a party movie only if you have unusually bad taste in parties. So on the face of it, it makes sense that the film would kick off a sequel that would be closer to what was promised the first time, and Magic Mike XXL can certainly claim this for itself: it does not have an opinion on the state of the national or world economies. Your mileage may vary on whether this is to be praised or not.

It's adorably shaggy, at any rate. This is a particularly chill hang-out film, content to sit around enjoying the characters as they bullshit and make ambling plans to leave Miami for a stripper convention in Myrtle Beach, SC, and it's to the absolute credit of everybody involved that not one person between writer Reid Carolin, director Gregory Jacobs, and producer-star Channing Tatum, director Gregory Jacobs, nor anyone else involved in making the thing, seems to have labored under the illusion that "stripper convention" was anything but an enormously silly idea. It's a movie all about having a good time and not thinking too hard about it, whether that's cracking dirty jokes with your guy buddies, or cracking dirty jokes with your gal buddies, as the film starts to shift POV smoothly and pleasantly from the strippers to their eager female clientele (this is, among its charms, 2015's most unfussily post-gender, post-sexuality wide release movie).

It's endlessly friendly, though perhaps surprisingly, given how transparently it aims to be the more partying, goofy half of the Magic Mike dyad, it's considerably less erotically charged, and less invested in ogling the male bodies onscreen, than its sociopolitically-minded predecessor. This is a bubbly vacation film, not a sweaty sexploitation picture, and that works out awfully well for it. There's a loose, appealing quality to how it feels tossed together, with frayed music cues trailing into each other, the fragments of choreography and unrushed lingering on reaction shots in Steven Soderbergh's editing (the first time he's cut a movie without directing it) all giving it the feeling of a particularly well-heeled home movie. And it's hard not to be intoxicated by the bright colors in Soderbergh's cinematography (the first time he's shot a movie without directing it), resembling a sun-tan lotion bottle.

The very real downside to all this is that it's a singularly anti-urgent movie, and has a tendency to meander in ways that become somewhat annoying: not one scene in the second half doesn't go on beyond its natural expiration point, even the film's most thoroughly engaging scene, which finds Andie MacDowell leading a bevy of middle-aged women enjoying the sight of strippers accidentally showing up on their doorstep. It's a shapeless film, and while that's enjoyable for a while, by the third time Jada Pinkett Smith delivers essentially the same monologue in essentially the same passionate tones, or any time Amber Heard appears as the completely vacant romantic lead, it's hard not to wish that there was maybe just a little less hanging out, and a little more nudging things along.

8/10

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Reviews I've written for other sites
The World of Apu - UW Cinematheque blog
Regular Show: The Movie - The Film Experience