REVIEWS IN BRIEF: MEDIOCRE FILMS GAINING AWARDS TRACTION

If Captain Fantastic had come out nine years earlier, you'd suppose it was a minimally inspired Little Miss Sunshine knock-off: a colorfully eccentric family travels across These United States in a vehicle unapologetically nostalgic for the 1960s (a refurbished school bus named "Steve", decked out in hippie decor, in this case), with a misfit teenager (George MacKay even looks like an ersatz Paul Dano) and cute little moppets behaving a bit too much like adults without having a clue what they're actually saying. Instead, it premiered at Sundance a whole ten years and three days later than Little Miss Sunshine, and thus rather than feeling like a halfway-adequate trend-hopper, it more resembles some kind of misplaced archaism, a Quirky Indie Crowdpleaser™ that's years too late for the party.

The quirk about this particular family is that the dad, Ben Cash (Viggo Mortensen), and the mom, Leslie (a barely-seen Trin Miller), were so invested in the anti-capitalist, anti-consumerist words of the great left-wing philosophers that they decided to raise their brood of six children in the woods of the Pacific Northwest, living off the land and eschewing every last trapping of modern American culture, like television or prepared food. But Leslie suffered from bipolar disorder, not helped out by her isolation from the world, and she had to leave the family behind for a time. While out in the world, she committed suicide. Now, Ben and the kids, ranging from 18-year-old Bo (MacKay) down to little Nai (Charlie Shotwell), are off on a road trip to attend Leslie's funeral, where they shall enforce her last wishes (to be cremated in a no-big-deal ceremony) against the wishes of her normie Christian parents (Frank Langella and Ann Dowd).

The script, by second-time writer-director Matt Ross, plays around with a lot of big words and famous leftist names, but it's strictly an affectation ("Trotskyist" qualifies as a deep cut), mostly so for the ostensible pleasure of watching little children mouth boilerplate anti-capitalist sentiment. But the film isn't terribly interesting in exploring the ramifications of its ideas at all, nor digging into politics in more than the most superficial way: the ultra-famous (by the standards of academic philosophers) Noam Chomsky is the only living writer to be so much as named-dropped. And it's certainly not interested in hosting a debate, propping up Traditional Values in the form of Langella, or Ben's dopey suburban brother and sister-in-law (played by Steve Zahn and Kathryn Hahn), only long enough for them to be smugly shown-up, or outright ignored.

No, the name of the game here is strictly "watch as the free-spirited dad defends his kids, then realises he's possibly fucking his kids up, then decides that nope, everything is aces", with the usual artificial and quickly-resolved roadblocks that provide the least-possible obstacle to the audience's ability to enjoy the characters being their adorable selves. It's all slightly intolerable, salvaged minimally by cinematographer Stéphane Fontaine's beautiful shots of the Washington woods, and given a far-too-committed performance by Mortensen, who has decided to treat his role with respect and gravity that make the whole movie feel much more serious and consequential (the same is even more true of Langella, who is so earnest in his portrayal of a concerned grandfather that almost threatens to make this a genuine discussion of the moral dimension of child-rearing), though I'm honestly not sure if the film is better off because of it or not. Otherwise, this is all forced whimsy that did something I wasn't aware could happen: it made me want to slap people upside the head for how much they like Chomsky.

5/10

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The trailer for Hidden Figures included a line of dialogue so utterly wretched in its flat-footed expository gracelessness that I maintained some hope it was one of those things that was only ever shot to give maximum possible clarity to the ads. Silly me. In fact, the version of the line that shows up in the first seven minutes of the film is even worse: "Three Negro women are chasing a white police office down the highway in Hampton, Virginia, 1961. Ladies, that there is a God-ordained miracle." I would dearly love to report that this is as bad as gets, but no, that's pretty much the level at which the entire screenplay by Allison Schroeder and Theodore Melfi (the latter also directs) operates. Anything that can be explained to the audience in tin-eared, hyper-literal dialogue will be, usually twice.

In other words, it's the end of December and we're getting a painfully earnest paint-by-numbers biopic about people who were almost beyond a shadow of a doubt more interesting than the film ever suggests. Same as it ever was, with the not-incidental detail that in this case, the film's subjects were three African-American women, which was a double strike against their prospects for showing their exemplary skills with math and engineering the halls of white male enclave NASA, in the early days of the space race. If we're going to be subjected to the milquetoast-to-shitty likes of A Beautiful Mind (which the film strongly evokes in its opening scene, earning my immediate ire) and The Imitation Game every autumn, we might as well ask that they represent a fully diverse cross-section of humanity, but equality in mediocrity is hardly the stuff of inspirational cinema.

The real-life story is pretty damn great, at least. The chief among our hidden figures was Katherine Johnson (Taraji P. Henson), one of the critical math geniuses who was instrumental in calculating flight trajectories for the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs, and was considered to be the best of the best to such a degree that John Glenn, at least, refused to launch until he'd been assured that she had personally okayed the figures for his flights. The others were Dorothy Vaughan (Octavia Spencer), who was primarily responsible for integrating digital computers into the NASA workflow, and Mary Jackson (Janelle Monáe), who became the first African-American to complete the training required for high-level engineering work at the agency. The trio of actors are generally very good at inhabiting these people, with Henson especially standing out at combining the vaguely distracted look that connotes "knows math" in movies with a barely-visible but omnipresent anger at the unfair, bigoted world she has to inhabit; as the comic relief in a generally comic film, Monáe is even better here than in Moonlight (with a substantially easier part, to be fair), and between the two films has officially established herself as an interesting movie actor. Spencer is, basically, just playing the Octavia Spencer Character, but she does so well.

The issue is not the characters, then, but the fact that the characters don't really do anything. Their historical achievements are more about who they were than the specific actions they performed, which is a common enough problem with biopics; the bigger problem still is that their achievements were all math-related, and I think we've more or less proven by this point that math is boring in movies (the opening scene of Werckmeister Harmonies notwithstanding). Hidden Figures has enough of a sense of humor, and a strong enough bench of supporting players - Mahershala Ali, Kirsten Dunst, Kevin Costner as the increasingly stock "Kevin Costner is the Good White Guy" boss - that at least it's more entertaining than The Imitation Game, which really had no damn excuse to be as tepid and tedious as it was. The core problem is the same, though: people working figures isn't visually interesting, and there's nothing in Melfi's dreary, center-punched compositions to compensate for that. Every year needs its suffocating middlebrow Oscarbait, and Hidden Figures is 2016's; I hope the internet is right that this will be of some social benefit, because it sure as hell hasn't got any artistic merit.

6/10

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The opening credits of Nocturnal Animals feature several obese women, naked but for drum majorette hats, dancing in slow motion. Nothing that resembles this ever happens anywhere else in the whole movie. I can think of a few different explanations for why director Tom Ford would have seen fit to include this, none of which reflect well on him, most of which involve the assumption that slow-motion naked fat women are ipso facto repulsive beyond the means of language to describe it.

That's probably right, then; Nocturnal Animals is animated by a largely morbid revulsion at human beings that has disguised itself in a thick lacquer of outlandishly beautiful Seamus McGarvey cinematography. And it is a beautiful movie, with a lengthy nighttime sequence about a quarter of the way through that keeps providing one powerhouse frame after another. There is, mind you, absolutely no connection between the beauty of these images and anything else in the movie; they are pretty for the sake of being pretty. Compared to this, The Neon Demon is a model for thematically tight, narratively-motivated imagery.

We are, in short, right back in the territory of The Fashion Designer Who Wanted to Direct, seven years after Ford demonstrated a virtually complete lack of any understanding of how human beings think or feel in A Single Man. Nocturnal Animals does the job of erasing that "virtually"; A Single Man at least had convincing homoeroticism, while this film about a sexless straight woman has nothing at all. The layers-upon-layers plot finds book editor Susan Morrow (Amy Adams, choking to death), bored with the high-class New York art scene and barely on speaking terms with her asshole husband Hutton (Armie Hammer, fully a decade too young for the demands of the part), receiving the manuscript to her ex-husband's novel, Nocturnal Animals. Reading it, she discovers that he's based the material on their relationship, or maybe that's just how she interprets it: we see in great detail the imagery she conjures up as she reads the grotty tale of Tony Hastings (Jake Gyllenhaal), whose wife Laura (Isla Fisher, looking enormously like Adams) and daughter India (Ellie Bamber) are raped and killed by a redneck drifter, Ray Marcus (Aaron Taylor-Johnson, playing Yosemite Sam). This drives him to revenge, with the aid of the increasingly lawless lawman Bobby Andes (Michael Shannon). While growing increasingly entangled with the narrative, Susan starts to flash back to her happier days with Edward, her ex, who is also played by Gyllenhaal.

There's something in this, though less than Ford (who also adapted the screenplay from Austin Wright's novel Tony and Susan) thinks there is - the "character reads themselves into a work of art" thing isn't exactly new (for a more sustained and prettier incarnation of mostly the same idea, I'd point you all to the wonderful and criminally underrated The Fall) It's been decades since "ennui of the idle rich" movies have had any real meat on their bones, and Nocturnal Animals is additionally hobbled by the generally inert performances - an Antonioni film this ain't, though it's crying out for that kind of icy control. Shannon is the solitary bright spot in the cast, and to be clear, he's really great, playing his Western-ish sheriff with a kind of helpless morbid curiosity about the sordid affair he's gotten involved with, driven less by a sense of justice than a sense of repulsed fascination. Which is exactly the correct attitude to adopt to the narrative within the book, which feels less like literary fiction and more like a particularly tawdry attempt to ape Cormac McCarthy.

Still, credit where it's due: Ford turns out to be kind of an outstanding thriller director, and the parts of the movie where it is the most focused on boilerplate genre theatrics are easily the most entertaining, exciting, and all-around well-made. If only the film wasn't so way the hell up its own ass with metanarrative shenanigans that are only fitfully interesting and never emotionally resonant, and just committed to celebrating the tacky viciousness of the story-within-the-story, this might even be a fun, stylish, disreputable thriller. Ford sure as hell knows how to assemble a striking frame, after all. Damn pity he can't pace a story or dissect a character worth a damn.

3/10