Gone Girl

GONE GIRL               C                    

USA  (149 mi)  2014  ‘Scope  d:  David Fincher                      Official Site

—Cool Girl speech from the novel Gone Girl, by Gillian Flynn, 2012

That night at the Brooklyn party, I was playing the girl who was in style, the girl a man like Nick wants: the Cool Girl. Men always say that as the defining compliment, don’t they? She’s a cool girl. Being the Cool Girl means I am a hot, brilliant, funny woman who adores football, poker, dirty jokes, and burping, who plays video games, drinks cheap beer, loves threesomes and anal sex, and jams hot dogs and hamburgers into her mouth like she’s hosting the world’s biggest culinary gang bang while somehow maintaining a size 2, because Cool Girls are above all hot. Hot and understanding. Cool Girls never get angry; they only smile in a chagrined, loving manner and let their men do whatever they want. Go ahead, shit on me, I don’t mind, I’m the Cool Girl.

Men actually think this girl exists. Maybe they’re fooled because so many women are willing to pretend to be this girl…Oh, and if you’re not a Cool Girl, I beg you not to believe that your man doesn’t want the Cool Girl. It may be a slightly different version—maybe he’s vegetarian, so Cool Girl loves seitan and is great with dogs; or maybe he’s a hipster artist, so Cool Girl is a tattooed, bespectacled nerd who loves comics. There are variations to the window dressing, but believe me, he wants Cool Girl, who is basically the girl who likes every f***ing thing he likes and doesn’t ever complain. (How do you know you’re not Cool Girl? Because he says things like “I like strong women.” If he says that to you, he will at some point f*** someone else. Because “I like strong women” is code for “I hate strong women.”

One of the more cynical movies seen in awhile, ugly and calculating, a horrible comment on the vapid emptiness of American society, painting a cruel portrait of a soulless age, yet it’s a dark satiric comedy that actually pokes fun of just how clueless the public remains of the hidden truths taking place in their midst, caught up in the windstorm of the latest political hysteria that leaves them blind by the filtered bullshit that passes for news these days, where they become numbed beyond hope, like walking zombies taking the place of what were once human beings.  Fincher’s film is as infuriatingly hopeless as anything Béla Tarr ever concocted, but instead of dreary black and white social realism, it’s a trashy best selling book becoming an equally trashy best selling movie, where the Hollywood production machine is in high gear, pumping out artificiality with great relish.  It’s another marriage on the rocks movie that veers out of control into Mary Harron’s American Psycho (2000), where Ben Affleck as Nick Dunne, pilloried by the public after being suspected of killing his missing wife Amy (Rosamund Pike), is no Christian Bale, where the exaggerated absurdity of the lynch mob public out for blood never compares to the heightened excess on display from Wall Street’s impeccably stylish Me Generation, jump started by Reaganomics opening the doors for unscrupulous business entrepreneurs in the 1980’s to rake in the money like the actual thieves they were.  The difference is the 1991 Bret Easton Ellis novel is actually a hilariously clever critique of the consumer culture of the 80’s, while this unraveling marital thriller exposing the beast that lies within is more like mixing the wildly popular Jacqueline Susann books with a dose of Stephen King, as Gillian Flynn’s airport novel spent more than 71 weeks on the New York Times hardcover best-seller list, and sold more than 6 million copies before it even came out in paperback.  The book (and subsequent movie) is a pale comparison to the shattering portrait of the idealized 1950’s marriage depicted in the excruciatingly personal 1961 Richard Yates novel Revolutionary Road, seemingly the perfect couple to all outsiders, played by the idyllic TITANIC (1997) couple Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio in the 2008 Sam Mendes film version, living in their wonderful dream house in the suburbs, where clearly the foundation of their success was the male-centric world of America in the 1950’s, a deluded American Dream that quickly disintegrates into marital dysfunction, as it denies the aspirations of women. 

In pointed contrast, the superficiality on display in Fincher’s film may turn off many viewers, as it thrives on the artificiality of the surface, literally mocking the shallowness of society while the unhappy lives of the featured couple takes a turn into the dark side, even delving into horror as Fincher’s vision seems designed to make the audience feel as uncomfortable as possible and then leave them in the lurch by providing few answers.  The offensiveness of the smug, overly detached tone, however, may hit everyone differently, where it’s reminiscent of the exaggerated sarcasm of von Trier’s DOGVILLE (2003), which couldn’t be more irritating.  Using a back and forth dual narrative scheme of he said, she said, where we’re privy to his interior narration and also what she writes in her diary, including flashback sequences that reveal her perspective on a crumbling romance, what’s immediately clear is that both narrators are consummate liars and cannot be trusted to convey the truth about their own stories.  Their home is a house of mirrors where they continually pretend to be something they’re not, fuming with displeasure underneath while both playing the part in public of a perfect marriage.  Whatever love or attraction may have been there at the outset has been twisted and contorted into a marriage that is a big lie, where the original romance was a con job, and once their guard has been let down what’s exposed are the frayed nerves, where these two have little use for one another except for keeping up appearances.  While there’s plenty of glib back and forth conversation when they first meet, each trying to be more clever than the other, they are apparently easily charmed, where Nick proposes as if on cue, and the next thing you know they’re married, moving away from their beloved New York to Missouri to be near Nick’s seriously ill mother who dies of cancer, leaving them alone in a gigantic house that feels unlived in and empty most of the time.  While Nick is more comfortable in the Midwest, having grown up there with friends and acquaintances, he runs a non-descript neighborhood bar with his twin sister Margo (Carrie Coon) that gives him an excuse to get away from Amy as much as possible, while she scribbles in her diary (with perfect penmanship) aimless thoughts that barely touch on the extent of her growing resentment. 

Amy’s parents “plagiarized” her life, actually improving upon it in a popular series of children’s books called Amazing Amy, leaving her unsure of her real identity, but always struggling to be better than the rest, where she has become an ice princess that continually speaks in a calm, reassuring, overly breathy voice that feels very much like an over-controlled robotic Stepford wife from THE STEPFORD WIVES (1975), where she has to emote perfection with every spoken word.  Certainly that would drive any man crazy after awhile, especially when used in a patronizing manner of never-ending superiority, where Nick is contemplating walking out on the marriage.  A clue for the audience is the sound of Blue Öyster Cult on the radio singing “(Don't Fear) The Reaper” (Don't Fear) Halloween You Tube (5:11), which figures so prominently in John Carpenter’s slasher horror film HALLOWEEN (1978).  On their 5th wedding anniversary, the date of his planned breakup announcement, he returns home from work in the early afternoon and finds his house broken into, a coffee table smashed, a few blood stains on the wall, and his wife missing.  Within days, he’s the chief suspect, where the investigative team of Detective Boney (Kim Dickens) and Officer Gilpin (Patrick Fugit) keep unearthing new evidence, much of which Nick has no knowledge about.  His sense of indifference to his wife’s life and subsequent absence is more reflective of his lazy and distant self, but once the cameras are parked outside his door, it opens the floodgates to media speculation, where he is raked over the coals in the tabloids and on a FOX TV style station run by a vicious rumor mill host (Missi Pyle) hellbent on using him to avenge all wronged women, where her continual diatribes run endlessly on the neverending TV news cycle, playing even in the local police precinct.  This lynch mob mentality has convicted the guy in public, plastering his face all over the airwaves, destroying his character, calling him a wife killer, reminiscent of the blanket national coverage surrounding Drew Peterson, who was alleged to have killed his third and fourth wives, where the body of the latter has never been found.  A 30-year police veteran, Peterson was familiar with forensic evidence, wasn’t bashful with reporters, and seemed to thrive on all the attention he was receiving in the national spotlight.  

To a large extent, this is a film about character assassination juxtaposed against a murderous assassination, where the impact of the first is a whole lot more damning than the second (where you actually have a day in court), which is a dangerous comment on a society that overlooks reality in order to exist in a self-induced fantasy, continually blaming the other guys for all of society’s woes, while refusing to look in the mirror and take any responsibility.  It has pretensions to Gus van Sant’s To Die For (1995), veering into the crazy psychopathic territory of Tuesday Weld in Pretty Poison (1968), as it plays with this seemingly fixated need for attention, where you’re willing to do anything to get it, which will leave at least some viewers literally refusing to be scammed and manipulated once again by Hollywood’s pretend version of reality.  It ends up being an exaggerated murder farce where the act of murder doesn’t remotely match the damage done by outright lies and misinformation produced by the made-up hypotheses of so-called experts in creating a whirlwind of mass hysteria generated by the media, usually in attack mode smearing someone’s character, for which they take no responsibility, hiding behind 1st amendment rights that it’s only freedom of speech, where people have the right to say anything they please.  Nick is caught up in an illusionary maze of deceit, a puzzle-like trap where he’s left trying to figure out why all this is happening to him and how he can escape.  Turning to an ace defense attorney Tanner Bolt (Tyler Perry) with an expertise in representing maligned offenders who are perceived as being the most vile and contemptible creatures on the planet, he slowly tries to gather some semblance of his life back as the noose is tightened around his neck by this continuing police investigation fed by malicious rumors.  Bolt delivers perhaps the sanest line in the film:  “You two are the most fucked up people I've ever met and I deal with fucked up people for a living.”  Reminiscent of Rolf de Heer’s ALEXANDRA’S PROJECT (2003), another film that turns the tables on an the idea of male idealization, this $61 million dollar Hollywood fiasco feels more like a B-movie where The Stepford Wives meets The Twilight Zone through a wretchedly overwrought Scarlett O’Hara style melodrama that veers into sci-fi territory where aliens are the species pretending to be human, as people have already lost all semblance of their humanity.  While this is obviously the work of a control freak who delights in conniving and manipulating the lives of others, where every film is a variation of PANIC ROOM (2002), Fincher has a reputation as being a perfectionist, where according to producer Ceán Chaffin, Fincher took, on average, as many as 50 takes for each scene, where it should also be pointed out that on the first day on the set, Ben Affleck changed the lens setting on the camera by the slightest degree, betting the crew Fincher wouldn’t notice, only to have Fincher take a look through the lens and exclaim, “Why does the camera look a little dim?” 

Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury
Signifying nothing.

—Shakespeare’s Macbeth, Act 5, Scene 5, 1606

The Monuments Men

George Stout, George Clooney in The Monuments Men

James Rorimer, Matt Damon in The Monuments Men

Rose Valland, Cate Blanchett in The Monuments Men

THE MONUMENTS MEN                 C                    

USA  Germany  (118 mi)  2014  ‘Scope  d:  George Clooney               Official site

A rousing World War II adventure drama that emulates the spirit of 1960’s movies like THE GREAT ESCAPE (1963) and THE DIRTY DOZEN (1967), though hardly living up to the action level of either one, which were fun WWII war movie that kids loved because they featured all those cool stars with plenty of personality, who personified courage and heroicism, where many didn’t survive to make it home afterwards.  Similarly, George Clooney has assembled a cast of a bunch of his friends, where this has a bit of the party feel of Soderbergh’s OCEAN’S ELEVEN (2001, 2004, 2007) series, where this group clearly has a good time together while making movies.  While the overall premise is interesting, inspired by Robert M Edsel and Bret Witter’s 2009 book The Monuments Men: Allied Heroes, Nazi Thieves, and the Greatest Hunt in History, which documents a small group of American and British (there were no French included) experts on art sent to the Allied front to rescue artworks stolen by the Nazi’s, while Edsel also co-produced THE RAPE OF EUROPA (2006), an important documentary work that explores the Nazi plunder of art treasures from German-occupied territories.  But there are other equally valid historical sources, such as The Monuments Men: Rescuing Art Plundered by the Nazis, an article by Ronald H. Bailey from World War Two magazine, May 2007, The Rape of Europa: The Fate of Europe’s Treasures in the Third Reich and the Second World War, by Lynn H. Nicholas in 1995, and The Venus Fixers: The Remarkable Story of the Allied Soldiers Who Saved Italy's Art During World War II, by Ilaria Dagnini Brey in 2010.  Hollywood, once again, embellishes the truth, as they did in the Academy Award winning Argo (2012), where the script by George Clooney and Grant Heslov takes major artistic license in its depictions of the mission, giving director George Clooney as Lieutenant George L. Stout, a World War I veteran and art conservationist at Harvard, responsibility for forming the group, passionately making his case to President Roosevelt about saving the value of artwork from Nazi looting and destruction from Allied bombing campaigns, while in reality the formation of what would become Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives (MFAA) was created without Stout’s input.  The idea originated in Europe where British archaeologist and Lieutenant Colonel Sir Robert Eric Mortimer Wheeler grew concerned that remnants of ancient Roman ruins in Libya, the Leptis Magna, would be destroyed by tank warfare.  Wheeler was joined by Lieutenant Colonel John Bryan Ward-Perkins and a civil support team to reroute traffic, photograph the damage, post guards, and organize repair efforts at the site, none of which is shown in the movie. 

This action to minimize damage to ancient relics inspired a collective effort by Roosevelt and Winston Churchill to inspect historical shrines and artifacts as part of the war occupation, where the first man sent in, American Captain Mason Hammond, felt the mission was “utterly foolish and a waste of time,” while Clooney and his men remain undaunted by the initial military resistance to their ideas.  Fogg Art Museum’s associate director Paul Sachs is also not depicted in the movie, though he was one of the earliest voices advocating a protection of art during wartime, initially proposing the idea of “special workmen” to implement the protection.  Sachs was appointed to the Roberts Commission, a Presidential commission designed to consolidate earlier efforts with the U.S. Army to help protect Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives (MFAA) in war zones, eventually taken over by the State department after the war.  It was Sachs that selected Lieutenant Stout (George Clooney as Frank Stokes, who would eventually become the curator of the Fogg Museum, the Worcester Art Museum, and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museums in Boston), to join an elite officer corps, while also choosing James Rorimer (Matt Damon as James Granger, the eventual director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art), his former professor at Harvard, who had already been drafted into the Army.  Rorimer inspected buildings in Normandy, Paris, and the surrounding countryside, eventually discovering an official Nazi looting operation of French private collections that were sent to the Neuschwanstein Castle in Germany.  While Rorimer did develop a crucial relationship with Rose Valland (Cate Blanchett as Claire Simone), an employee at the Jeu de Paume Museum in Paris, the central transport station used by the Nazi’s, who secretly recorded the whereabouts of the artifacts stolen by the Nazi’s in France, who in real life is actually the unsung hero of this entire operation, the movie turns her into a romantic femme fatale love interest for Matt Damon, thereby diminishing her legacy, though she eventually shared her information with Rorimer, who also discovered the Heilbron salt mines which stored art from German museums, something he was able to ascertain without support from the military.  Rather than six or seven men, as depicted in the movie, the group of assigned MFAA officers originally consisted of eleven men, seven Americans and four British, but they lead a team of closer to 350 men and women, most of whom volunteered from 13 different nations, where many had expertise as museum directors, curators, art historians, artists, architects, and educators.  In the last year of the war, they tracked, located, and in the years that followed returned more than five million artistic and cultural items stolen by Hitler and the Nazi’s.  Their role in preserving cultural treasures was without precedent.

The film also distorts the historical accuracy of Hitler’s Nero Decree issued near the end of the war when most of the conquered territories had been liberated or recaptured, but was a desperate attempt to prevent Allied forces from using resources against the Reich during the war.  In the decree, Hitler ordered that “all military, transportation, communications, industrial, and food supply facilities” be destroyed, but it never explicitly included art.  In the movie, however, when Stokes reads the decree aloud, he lists “archives and art” among the things set to be destroyed.  Hitler’s will specified that his art should go to German museums, suggesting he never wanted art to be destroyed, though the Nazi’s had a way of condemning certain “degenerate” works, either Jewish or Impressionist for example, which they burned by the thousands.  The prized 12-panel Ghent Altarpiece depicted in the film, a Flemish 15th century masterpiece and one of the first major oil paintings, described as the ultimate Catholic artifact, was beloved by Hitler as an example of “Aryan genius,” while Michelangelo's white marble sculpture of the Madonna and Child on display in Bruges, created around 1504, is the only sculpture of Michelangelo's outside of Italy.  There was no mention, by the way, of the more than 50,000 artifacts stolen from The National Museum of Baghdad during the first days of the American occupation of Iraq during the 2003 invasion, containing relics of past civilizations dating back 5,000 years, and the largest collection of archeological and historical artifacts in the entire Middle East.  This little footnote in history might have brought home the notion that those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it, as history has shown through modern acts of ethnic cleansing and genocide that in a few short years, all physical and cultural evidence of targeted groups can be wiped away and completely destroyed, where Stokes can be heard saying “If you destroy their achievements and their history, it’s like they never existed.”  So while the intent of the movie is noble, where Hitler, in what is perceived as “the greatest theft in history,” stole more than 5 million cultural objects, what we have in this Hollywood version is filled with stereotypes and cliché’s, featuring a good old boy’s portrayal of American ingenuity and know-how, where if you believe this version, it was these seven guys that actually ended the war by discovering Germany’s hidden gold reserves, as they were tucked away in mine shafts along with all the stolen works of art.  The film also recalls John Frankenheimer’s THE TRAIN (1964), a Black and White historical thriller featuring a French resistance stationmaster (Burt Lancaster) pitted against an art-obsessed Nazi officer (Paul Scofield) trying to get a train filled with stolen art into Germany.  In contrast, this film pales by comparison, offering a meandering pace, an indifference to history, and a lack of dramatic conflict throughout, where the stellar cast barely ever engages one another, but are seen off on their own explorations, where it simply feels like an imitation of better films that were made during the 60’s.  One hopes it is not these inaccurate and streamlined Hollywood Cliff Notes version of history that people remember instead of the real individuals involved who actually made history, because as viewers we deserve better, especially from someone as intelligent and talented as this director, where it wouldn’t hurt if Hollywood historical movies “inspired by real events” actually told the truth for a change, as their value is diminished otherwise.   

To the Wonder

TO THE WONDER                B+  
USA  (112 mi)  2012  ‘Scope  d:  Terrence Malick            Official site

Why must a film explain everything? Why must every motivation be spelled out? Aren’t many films fundamentally the same film, with only the specifics changed? Aren’t many of them telling the same story? Seeking perfection, we see what our dreams and hopes might look like. We realize they come as a gift through no power of our own, and if we lose them, isn’t that almost worse than never having had them in the first place? 
—Roger Ebert, final film review Chicago Sun-Times [Roger Ebert]

No one but Terrence Malick makes films like this, and if anyone else but Malick made this film, we’d all be thinking of it as a breakthrough work.  But from this director we expect so much more, as he simply works and operates at a different artistic level than other mortal humans.  Perhaps David Gordon Green early in his career could fill the screen with luminescent, wordless sequences that are equally breathtaking, but his films had dialogue and a more recognizable narrative sweep to them.  This film continues an artistic design originating with 2011 Top Ten Films of the Year #1 The Tree of Life (2011), filling the screen with a blitzkrieg of non-narrative, abstract images underlined by gloriously chosen classical music, while at the same time asking the transcendental questions that search for life’s meaning.  Not everyone responds to this kind of personalized, philosophic inquiry, some rejecting it out of hand for not telling a recognizable story, others finding it interesting to a degree, but overly pretentious and too arty, while still others would like to appreciate it, but get lost in the ever elusive grandiosity of the filmmaking.  Suffice it to say, while it’s a more simplistic film, this *is* the film Malick intended to make, despite feeling at times like an offshoot of his previous film, perhaps a smaller and more perfectly concise work, as it’s largely an agonizing and soul searching stare into the existential void, asking whether or not love exists?  Unlike all his other films except for brief moments in The Tree of Life, this is Malick’s first contemporary film, contrasting the immensity of the natural world around us with the tiny, claustrophobic space we actually inhabit, even featuring a Sonic Drive-in and an Econo Lodge, living lives of routine, literally walking the very same steps each day.  Malick always loves to show an overpowering presence that exists both in the beauty of nature and in the unseen forces of either God or the mysteries of the universe, where each of us must find our way.  While other films have transcendent moments, this entire film is about that transcendence, wondering if love can sustain the crush of human disappointment and misery.  Using multiple storylines that are advanced through voiceover narration, the film opens with the maternal love of a mother for her child, a kind of universal expression of the permanence of love that exists throughout all cultures and societies, much like the all encompassing love of the Blessed Virgin Mary or Holy Mother in Christian theology.     

While the entire story is told with a near wordless expression, Marina (Olga Kurylenko) is a Ukrainian divorcée raising her 10-year old daughter Tatiana (Tatiana Chiline) in Paris, which is where she meets a traveling American, Neil (Ben Affleck).  They fall in love while basking in the glow of Mont-Saint-Michel, an abbey rising out of the sea, like an apparition, on a rocky tidal island just off the Normandy coast.  It is this Edenesque perfection, where the buildings on the northern side are known as “La Merveille,” the French word for “the Wonder,” that gives the film its title.  He invites them to come live with him in his Oklahoma home where Neil works as an environmental inspector, finding poisonous traces in the soil located close to local industry, where the poorest residents continue to live in close proximity.  Though Neil lives in a boxed house with a boundary dividing fence located in a subdivision of tract housing, the two are initially excited to be there, continuously seen dancing and almost floating through air, where both Marina and Tatiana seem to adore the taciturn Neil, who barely utters a word throughout the entire film, and often his head is not even in the picture.  In a Tarkovsky film, expect an absent father and a loving, over-affectionate mother, while in a Malick film the father is present, but silent and uncommunicative, usually angry or frustrated by the stifling effects of the relationship, while the mother is again the nurturing provider.  Kurylenko is lovely and quite charming, a free spirit balancing her time and affection with her daughter and Neil, but she grows impatient when Neil is unable to express his feelings or hold any longterm interest, and seems content to leave her hanging, even as Marina’s visa is about to expire.  When they have fights, Tatiana quickly loses interest in Neil, or any man who disrespects her mother, so they quietly exit the country, leaving the house an empty shell of what it once was, one of the truly sad moments of the film.  On a similar tract, Javier Bardem plays Father Quintana, most likely a stand-in for the director, a Catholic priest undergoing a crisis of faith, where he finds it hard to feel the presence of God’s spirit with such troubled parishioners, preaching to a more than half-empty church, catering to the most poor and dispossessed, while also making visits to those serving prison sentences, one of the more chilling sequences in the film, but certainly an eloquent expression of how utterly lost and alone certain individuals can become. 

Neil rekindles his lost love with Jane (Rachel McAdams), a childhood sweetheart, now a divorced rancher who acknowledges she lost a child and is looking to fill that void.  Again, her needs outweigh his, as in each segment the women are the aggressors, and the camera finds them both in resplendent beauty, where it’s hard to understand what’s holding him back.  One of the best transition shots is a moment of intimacy followed by Jane in a bright red dress running through the wheat fields, where the red color just takes one’s breath away.  But when he receives word that Marina is unhappy in Paris, that Tatiana is living with her father and she’s now alone, he mysteriously agrees to marry her, perhaps to offer her legal resident status, where the church witnesses are, humorously enough, prison inmates wearing their uniforms, like something you’d see in a Coen brothers movie.  But she’s suffocating being locked up in the house all day with nothing to do, where the two of them are miserable together, often seen bitterly furious.  An unfamiliarly strange and unusual sequence shows an Italian girlfriend (Romina Mondello) calling herself a gypsy urging Marina to run away with her, as this two-bit town is dead and has nothing to offer, screaming for all to hear, but instead Marina allows herself to be lured into a cheap affair with a local guy, where the motel room is just a smaller box than the house, where the sense of confinement is overwhelming, as is her sense of disorientation afterwards.  This is a film of only fleeting moments of happiness, where Kurylenko and McAdams are archetypal women shown with sun-drenched faces, where their beauty and sensuality are aglow in the light, but by the end the light goes out in the world and humans appear lost without it.  The crisis of faith shows itself throughout in both Affleck and Bardem, afflicted spirits in the modern world, where with a priest it’s the absence of faith, seen in a religious context, unable to find hope in the wretched lives of the rural poor, as how does one preach divine forgiveness for those dying of industrial poisoning?  But to his credit, the priest keeps searching.  With Affleck, what’s missing is the ability to place any trust or faith in love, as he continually squanders his opportunities, usually appearing small and petty and unforgiving, where all around him are spectacular images of beauty, as Malick shows him the way and the light, but he remains an empty vessel living in an existential wasteland, a prisoner of his own human ineptitude. 

Gone Baby Gone

GONE BABY GONE           B            

USA  (114 mi)  2007  d:  Ben Affleck 

I always thought it was the things you don’t choose that makes you who you are. 

—Patrick Kenzie (Casey Affleck)

A surprisingly complex film that isn’t over when it’s over, that leaves you wondering how you got from point A to point B when so much in between seemed ridiculously contrived, almost defying belief, yet somehow in the end, there’s still plenty to like about this film, much of it from going against the grain.  First of all there’s Casey Affleck (Patrick Kenzie), absolutely nobody’s version of a hero, especially fresh off his performance where the title of the film outright calls his character a coward, THE ASSASSINATION OF JESSE JAMES BY THE COWARD ROBERT FORD (2007), recalled awhile back as one of the crazy lunkheads in Gus van Sant’s GERRY (2002), who now appears as one of the strangest leading characters, as he could just as easily be anyone, the kind of guy who disappears unnoticed in a crowd.  But here he’s Patrick Kenzie, a private eye with a gun and a beautiful babe (Michelle Monaghan), a short-fused badass who stands up to punks on the street as well as thugs in all walks of life, keeping his brain on alert while the world is spinning out of control all around him.  This is as improbable as Elliot Gould playing a mumbling Philip Marlowe in a sun tinged take on Raymond Chandler’s film noir world in Robert Altman’s THE LONG GOODBYE (1973), which by the way also caught us off guard, but worked.  Second of all there’s the man behind the camera, a former tabloid king whose acting career and reputation have fizzled to record lows, as he’s become an easy target, routine fodder for jokes condemning him as a lamebrain to the second hand bin.  What’s he trying to do here, take on the persona of George Clooney as a clever mastermind behind the camera?  And third there’s Morgan Freeman, a man whose reputation is rock solid in his role as chief of police, a man’s man, a leader of men, the kind of guy you would want to have in your corner in a time of trouble, as he’s wise enough to pass for several men.  And finally there’s Amy Ryan (at the time of the release, who?), as unsympathetic a character as the screen has seen in ages, and yet it is this director who remains undaunted by her scandalous behavior, who by the end of this film makes us all question ourselves, like who are we to judge?  Yet judgments are made throughout this film, most with enormous consequences, which makes this a highly provocative crime thriller about a stolen baby, where a private eye and his good looking partner are called upon to look through the cracks and scour the dregs of what the police usually overlook or can’t see. 

Opening in first person narration, this initially has the feel of a literary warhorse like SOPHIE’S CHOICE (1982), where the poetic thoughts invoke something outside our comprehension, beyond our grasp, yet then veers into the working class neighborhoods of Boston in a completely unpretentious view of the world, where a baby has gone missing and a distraught family is on the news begging for her safe return.  Suspicious of the police, the family hires this improbable young couple, hoping they know people who don’t talk to the police.  Into the seedy underworld they go, with the beautiful girl following his every move into the gutter, through back room bars, into the homes of crack dealers, where we learn that the foul-mouthed crackhead mother (Amy Ryan) with the missing girl moves within these circles, a mother who may have put her own daughter at risk just for a chance to get high.  Eventually the private eyes team up with a couple of veteran detectives (Ed Harris and Nick Poole), an unsavory relationship from the outset, each openly suspicious of the other, where Kenzie is told to “Go back to your Harry Potter books.”  What’s most surprising perhaps to the viewer is Affleck’s immediate ascension to lead man on the case, where he appears more like a cop than a cop, yet he’s not supposed to be a cop, just a guy from the neighborhood.  This is the first of a series of improbable occurrences that stretch one’s credulity, but Affleck makes it work with his profanity laced chutzpah, standing up to thugs and hoods like he’s been doing it all his life, showing the kind of balls that gains immediate acceptance into a cop’s world.  As the danger mounts, so do the unsavory characters.  The division between male and female is tested, as they’re challenged in very different ways.  The tense atmosphere makes it hard to separate the good guys from the bad, as they’re continuously interwoven into each other’s lives, mirror reflections of this kind of sick underworld where intense flare ups are routine, where staring down the barrel of a gun becomes the measure of a man, not the kind of world most of us would choose to enter, which makes it all the more intriguing when we witness moral leaps of faith.

This brooding contemplative thriller is a series of mood swings that moves like a chessboard across this murky landscape, where every action causes an unexpected reaction, with inexplicable consequences that only grow darker as the film progresses.  Monaghan is overly pretty and never feels right when the going gets rough, but the rest of the cast has a hard edge that’s been through tough times.  Written by MYSTIC RIVER (2003) novelist Dennis Lehane, we’re once again asked to examine modern day morals under siege, where there’s a thick layer of grime like quicksand just under the surface pulling us all too easily into this morass of moral ambiguity where it’s much simpler to look the other way, and righteous indignity has a youthful, idealist resemblance to Crusader Rabbit with a witty arcane charm that feels instantly outdated and out of place.  Despite some off-the-rails plot twists, this is a film of ideas where the believability of the actors makes all the difference in the world and the strong performances are supported by the weight of the film, a surprisingly strong effort that never bows to the outsider money interests of happy endings commercialism and maintains its integrity right through to the end in a shot that visually recalls the final shot of Ryan Gosling in HALF NELSON (2006), but offers a bleaker ray of hope.      

The Town

THE TOWN                B                     

USA  (123 mi)  2010  ‘Scope  d:  Ben Affleck

A film that seems to be an anthem to Charlestown, a Boston neighborhood known for its generational proclivity for armed robbery and car thieves, that is told with such a solemn tone that is bears a resemblance to Spike Lee’s 25th HOUR (2002), which became an homage to 9/11 in New York City, as in both films, there’s an underlying acknowledgement of the terrible price of lives lost, yet there’s also a lyrical upswing, as both feature oddly poetic gestures of hope, of a world that could somehow be just a little bit better.  First and foremost, the film is beautifully immersed in Affleck’s home town, his one true love, the working class neighborhoods of Boston, which is such a prominent element of the film that it’s significant that they got it right, that it doesn’t in any way look glamorized.  This provides the film with needed authenticity, as everything else that happens is from within this structure.  Affleck’s got his house in order here, and so too are his actors, which amazingly includes a first rate performance by the director himself, probably the best in his career, but also his supporting cast, where the most suspenseful scene in the film is an otherwise uneventful lunch with his partner in crime Jeremy Renner, who is so completely unpredictable and close to beserk that he channels the manic energy of James Cagney, a psychotic hoodlum with a sadistic streak.  The twist here is that the film is a profile of a group of professional bank robbers and thieves, whose intimate portrait is usually reserved for the good guys, but here the cops and the FBI are the so-called bad guys, as the real bad guys are given such favorable onscreen treatment.  There’s a precedent set for this by Matt Damon in the BOURNE TRILOGY (2002 – 2007), but the set-up there is that he’s a trained assassin who can’t recollect his past, but discovers the secret service from his own country is trying to kill him, creating a razzle dazzle of action sequences where one needs a scorecard to tell the good guys from the bad.  Here Jon Hamm plays the malicious FBI agent in charge who comes across as the heavy, as he’s continually twisting arms in an attempt to crack the solidarity among thieves who continuously look out for one another, using less than subtle techniques in order to make his arrest.  Early on he knows who the crooks are, which he figures out pretty easily, but he hasn’t a shred of evidence to nail anyone.  

This is a white knuckles bank heist thriller that moves with electrifying energy, that shows with meticulous precision how heavy weapons can prevail in a bank robbery, how people are compliant when a gun gets stuck in their faces, as the overriding concern under the immediate circumstances is not the bank, but that no one wants to die.  This film shows how easily one arrives at that heart pumping moment when you’d do anything to comply.  In a well executed heist, this takes about ten seconds, at which point it’s up to the robber’s sophistication to find out how to get the maximum reward in the least amount of time.  This particular crew is shrewd at covering their tracks, confident they are leaving no evidence behind, as their skill set in their profession is near brilliant.  All throughout though we’re expected to believe these are just a couple of boys from the block.  There are more changes of professional uniforms shown here in the course of their dirty business that by the end, one wonders where the telephone booth is that Clark Kent uses to change into Superman.  Any team this good would probably have mob connections, but this appears to be a ragtag bunch of guys from the old neighborhood who just happen to have grown up together.  Chris Cooper excels in a scene as Affleck’s father in prison, where the generational ties run deep, yet he exudes a fatherly anger and despair at his helplessness to change his circumstances.  In one of the best scenes, the police pull them all in for questioning, where Affleck recognizes a local cop from the neighborhood, asking that cop what he would call someone who grew up in a poor but close-knit neighborhood where everyone knew everyone else’s secrets and then used that information to put away as many of them behind bars as possible?  This is followed by macho maneuvering by the FBI where Affleck instantly realizes they have nothing on him.  But this is the heart of the film, as neighborhoods are comprised of friends with well kept secrets, which is why they remain friends.  In Charlestown, everyone has secrets, as everyone knows somebody that’s affiliated with crime. 

While this is a character study of a criminal group psychology, it also shows Affleck as a conflicted and unwilling participant, as after awhile he wants out, where there’s something of a hugely contrived love story at the center of all this with Rebecca Hall, where he envisions a different life for himself through his connection with her, where thoughts run through his mind similar to Brian Cox’s dream sequence spoken to his son Monty (Ed Norton) at the end of 25th HOUR, where a single decision could affect the rest of his lifetime, as it could literally reconnect an entirely new set of possibilities.  Much of this turns out to be Affleck fighting as much with his own partners, who don’t want him to leave, as with his condemned soul, where he’s trying to find a redemptive path.  This doesn’t have nearly the punch or the redemptive poetry of the Spike Lee film, one of his best, especially coming so soon after 9/11, but Affleck does generate astonishing suspense, as these guys are always on the alert for getting caught, always living on the edge where something could go wrong at any moment, yet the audience is mesmerized by the brilliantly well executed heist sequences and the frantic car chases which are among the best on celluloid, though in typical Hollywood fashion one notices for all the bullets flying, few people get shot.  It’s a surprisingly well-paced film throughout, entertaining as hell, leaving an ambiguity at the end which may be challenging for the audience, as it can be a bit confusing telling the good guys from the bad.  Even with Johnny Depp playing John Dillinger in PUBLIC ENEMIES (2009), we knew he was a bad guy, a crook with a heartless soul, but Affleck’s character is still left struggling for his, as if there’s the slightest possibility that he could turn into a decent guy, even when all the evidence points otherwise.  This sleight of hand trick may work for some, as a good lead performance can charm the pants off of anyone, but the real talent here is not in any real character development, as in the much superior Australian film ANIMAL KINGDOM (2010), but in the kinetic energy displayed in the chase sequences mixed in with the suspense of some daredevil heists.

Argo

ARGO             B-                   

USA  (120 mi)  2012  ‘Scope  d:  Ben Affleck              Official site

Every one of Affleck’s three directed films have contained a contrived and heavy handed plot twist which dramatically elevate the theatrical material, where the viewer must suspend belief as the direction instead goes for Hollywood melodrama, oversaturating the screen with a kind of hyper-tense reality that exists only in fiction, where he simply takes poetic license to supercharge his movies.  Some may find the amped up suspense entertaining, where he often matches it with excellent musical choices, such as Dire Straits and Led Zeppelin here, but there’s also an underlying deceit going on in the relationship with viewers, where the director is not being straightforward or honest, as instead he’s exaggerating for the Hollywood cinematic effect he’s looking for.  It’s this manipulative dishonesty that some might find suspect, as it taints his prodigal talents as a director.    

Affleck’s exaggerated lie here is the Americanization of history, as told through a Hollywood perspective, using the familiar tagline, based by real events.  Focusing on a story as if it is an American example of heroism and courage, left out in the process is the heroism and courage of the Canadian Embassy who secretly sheltered the Americans for 79 days, at great risk to themselves, and helped them escape, where Ken Taylor, the Canadian Ambassador, received the Congressional Gold Medal, the highest civilian honor, in 1981.  The Hollywood version, of course, credits the CIA, but according to President Ronald Reagan in his medal award speech to Taylor, Remarks on Presenting the Congressional Gold Medal to Kenneth ...  “The Canadian Government in Ottawa and the Embassy began the ingenious preparations for an escape. The Canadian Government agreed to issue fictitious passports to the Americans. The Canadian Embassy staff began making flights in and out of Tehran to establish a travel pattern and to learn airport procedures.”  Canada was praised in the American press at the time, where Canadian flags were flown all over the United States, and songs were even written thanking Canada, but former Ambassador Taylor was incensed when he saw the movie premiere at the Toronto Film festival, where Ben Affleck stars as a heroic CIA agent responsible for facilitating the escape of six Americans from Iran during the same period as the Iran Hostage Crisis of 1979 where 52 hostages were held for 444 days, when in reality it was just as much the Canadian Ambassador who enabled the escape, viewing the original movie postscript that suggests the citations he received were unwarranted due to the CIA’s clandestine efforts.  Meeting with Affleck afterwards, the postscript was changed (Ben Affleck Changes 'Argo' to appease ex-diplomat) to note the CIA “complemented efforts by the Canadian Embassy,” but Affleck remains the sole Hollywood American hero.  It is exactly this kind of blur of truth and fiction that passes for the truth nowadays, literally revising history to suit American jingoist purposes.  When viewed in this light, this is little more than the continued shamelessness of using movies to present a mythical view of the American West with the Hollywood cavalry riding to the rescue.  One can imagine Mad magazine having a field day doing a satiric slant on this depiction. 

That said, with Argo: Too Good To Be True, Because It Isn’t, Affleck largely draws from the accounts of Antonio Mendez’s 1999 memoir, The Master of Disguise: My Secret Life in the CIA, events that were kept classified until President Clinton declassified them in 1997, and Joshuah Bearman’s 2007 article from Wired magazine (Wired article).  Affleck plays Mendez, who won the CIA's Intelligence Star of Valor for his role in engineering the escape of six Americans from Tehran in 1980, and the film is largely based from his self-serving viewpoint.  The irony, of course, is that it was the CIA’s idea to invent a Hollywood style escape, using a fictitious movie company scouting locations for a sci-fi movie in Tehran, using an actual script and drawing storyboards, where the six Americans were given fake Canadian passports, suggesting they are all part of a Canadian movie production team scouting Iranian locations before all leaving the country shortly afterwards.  The U.S. government was knee deep in a state of demoralization and utter paralysis during the hostage crisis, as there was little they could do to counter the negative publicity of Americans being held hostage and gas prices suddenly skyrocketing, as if the perpetrators were actually being financially rewarded for this outrageous act.  But there is jubilation in the streets of Iran and the seeds of revolution, as they get rid of the Shah, an iron-handed tyrannical despot who was installed by the CIA in 1953 at the American Embassy against a democratically elected, but Soviet backed Prime Minister, so their liberty is gained, at least in their eyes, by standing up to the “Great Satan.”  Traitors and collaborators are strung up on the streets as a message to citizens that the last vestiges of the old ways have been severed and a new day has begun.  The real untold story, which remains secretly classified to this day, is how newly elected President Ronald Reagan orchestrated an Algiers Accords, which many suspect was an arms for hostages deal with the Iranians, where on the day of his inauguration all the hostages were mysteriously released.  But of course, that history hasn’t been written yet.  So instead we get this smaller version of a feel good story, where Hollywood embellishes the daring American initiative, all but leaving the Canadians silent.  In this topsy turvy world of real intelligence and fabricated identities and scenarios, embellishing the storyline *is* what Hollywood does best, even in its real life spy capers, so watching this movie does produce a bit of an unintended smile.    

Perhaps the best part of the movie is the daring escape sequence, which is another example of the great fictionalization of history, turning it into an homage to DIE HARD (1988), but despite the seemingly overwhelming odds, where every possible obstacle must be overcome and everything that can go wrong does go wrong, all ratcheting up the intense pressure of the moment, that tension was generated with more believability and suspense than the fake film crew’s location inspection.  The team is quickly swallowed up by the streets of Tehran which are literally teeming with hostile demonstrators, where the portrayal of blood curdling anger and hatred all seemingly projected at them is a perfect example of Hollywood hysteria, using stereotypes and demonizing images to depict a near surreal world of fanaticized hatred when they are surrounded by an angry mob, a dreamlike nightmare that is in every respect an unmitigating disaster.  The Arab world (including Arab-Americans) has never recovered from this kind of hostile depiction in the movies, remaining fodder for racial profiling, as they will forever be portrayed as the fanatics, even as there are homegrown American fanatics like Timothy McVeigh, John Allen Muhammad, or Charles Whitman.  It would be hard to imagine an Arab-American love story coming out of the current Hollywood culture, which makes no attempt to understand or appreciate Islamic culture either in television or the movies, reflecting the prevailing hostile culture of the times, much like the 50’s never portrayed gays or blacks or married couples sleeping together on television.  Unfortunately it takes generations before these kinds of negative depictions are overcome.  While it should be understood that the initial security breach in 1979 allowed a swarm of Islamic students and militants to overrun the American Embassy, much like recent events where the American Ambassador to Libya was murdered, where in each situation the nation’s long-term tyrannical leader was deposed in disgrace, where pent-up street turbulence fills the void of an absent leadership or authority, where at least in Iran, that legitimate authority was replaced not by a democratically elected leader, but by a Supreme Leader of Iran, a theocratic leader who is the highest ranking political and religious authority in the land.  Despite the passing of more than 30 years, little is known about the nation of Iran in the United States, or their way of life, even after a long-term military occupation of neighboring Iraq, as nothing but a constant stream of stereotypes and negative depictions are ever seen in the movies or in the newspaper reports.  This film, though thoroughly entertaining, will do nothing to alter that depiction in the eyes of Americans.