WHAT I HAVE SEEN AT THE MOVIES: 11 SHORT FILM REVIEWS

By Joel Johnson

Well, the end of the year has come and gone, and I need to catch up by doing reviews of several films that I have seen over the last few months—basically since fall. There are some fine films in this group, with only one that I would urge you to avoid at all costs. I hope these reviews help you make your choices when you choose what you want to see. Good luck, and here’s wishing that you enjoy all the films you see!

SYRIANA

1/2

Stephen Gaghan, wearing hats of both director and screenwriter, gives the oil business the same treatment he gave the drug business in his script for Traffic. George Clooney, looking like an unmade bed, gives one of his best performances as a disaffected CIA operative who plies his skills in the mysterious and dangerous Middle East. He is just one of the fine actors in this complicated web of power, violence, greed, deceit, and corruption both in this country and throughout the oil producing world (especially read Middle East). Alexander Siddig, Jeffrey Wright, Christopher Plummer, and Matt Damon are the others given a little more of the film’s limelight. Although reminiscent of Traffic in dealing with far-flung interrelated story lines, Syriana lacks the linear narrative thread provided by the circuitous journey taken by drugs from a simple plant to the hands of the user. In Syriana the many story lines converge but never fall into place as one fully integrated story. We are left with an assortment of shadowy characters indulging in a smorgasbord of villainy both petty and grand. This is a dark and disconcerting film that demands repeat viewings. That the subject matter for the film is inextricably linked to the terror war waged by Islamic extremists and to our own counterventure into Iraq gives this film an urgency and poignancy for many filmgoers.

PARADISE NOW

1/2

This powerful film from director Hany Abu-Assad takes the audience to that other tinderbox (besides Iraq) of the Middle East: the long-festering conflict between the Palestinians and the Israelis. We usually don’t think of the people who perpetrate suicide bombings as individual human beings. It is far easier to define them by the monstrous act they commit than to unravel why a person would willfully forgo life in order to indiscriminately kill others. This French-German-Dutch-Israeli coproduction introduces us to two young men who are suddenly confronted with the reality of being suicide bombers after having volunteered months—perhaps even years—earlier. They initially seem like slacker youths more interested in drugs, girls, and easy ways to make a buck than in getting to paradise by blowing themselves up. We get a quick lesson in Palestinian ennui and in the Palestinian resentment of the Israeli’s double standards in seeing themselves as victims while oppressing the Palestinians. We are also treated to the market for copies of the farewell tapes intended for the families of the “martyrs” who blow themselves up killing others, yet the real moneymakers are the confessions of executed traitors who have collaborated with the Israelis. Eerily, the trip into Israel for the suicide-bombing mission goes awry. Will they be captured? Is this “a reprieve from the governor” for the condemned? Will they have a second chance? Will the pleas from the beautiful woman, with whom one of the men is clearly on the brink of falling in love, to find a different means to confront the Palestinians’ situation have any effect? We find that we care very much what happens to these two young men. A very tough film, but one that demands that we never strip even our most ardent enemies of their humanity.

THE SQUID AND THE WHALE



The Squid and the Whale is the better half of my dysfunction double-feature. Writer and director Noah Baumbach uses his own experiences as a child of divorce. Baumbach shows how divorce is not something that just happens to two people whose marriage isn’t working. The ripple effect of a divorce disrupts a wide range of friends and family. His focus is on those most directly affected who have the least developed coping mechanisms to effectively process their feelings: the children of a divorce. Jesse Eisenberg (The Emperor’s Club, Rodger Dodger) plays teenaged Walt, and Owen Kline (son of Kevin Kline and Phoebe Cates in his debut) plays his younger brother Frank. The parents are played by Laura Linney and Jeff Daniels, who are terrific (both nominated for Golden Globe awards). Linney’s Joan, the more stable parent, has violated the marriage through adulterous liaisons. Daniels’s Bernard is a deeply self-involved college professor and stalled novelist whose self-esteem is deflated by his wife outstripping him as a writer and then replacing him. Bernard is so blind to the feelings of others that, despite Joan’s infidelity, audience members will not find him blameless for the failed marriage and may assign him the larger culpability. Intending to share their sons equally, they find the boys choosing sides. Complicating the picture is Bernard’s student Lili (Anna Paquin). Boarding in Bernard’s apartment, she bewitches both Bernard and Frank. Bernard’s ham-fisted effort to seduce Lili is disturbing enough, but Daniels, having played Paquin’s father in Fly Away Home (1996), gives it a quasi-incestuous slant. Needless to say, both boys suffer ill effects, acting out in discomfiting ways. The title won’t make sense until almost the end of the film. I didn’t find all the dysfunctional acting out ringing true, but I would have to defer to Mr. Baumbach’s personal experience. If nothing else, he managed to forge a truly black comedy from the shards of a broken marriage, showing us just how much suffering marital disunion can cause.

WALK THE LINE



Walk the Line follows Taylor Hackford’s Ray, telling the story of Johnny Cash. Like Ray, James Mangold’s Walk the Line shows how losing a brother during childhood was a lifelong scar. The film jumps from this childhood tragedy to his early adulthood. Johnny (Joaquin Phoenix) hastily marries his first wife Vivian (Ginnifer Goodwin) and then tries to break into the music business. Vivian, however, wants a conventional life and has little interest in music. Johnny meets June Carter (Reese Witherspoon), of the famed Carter family, while touring during the mid-50s with amazing legends like Elvis and Jerry Lee Lewis. Despite their early attraction, this relationship will not flower for years. Other relationships—including Cash’s serious relationship with drugs—will play out. Most of the film focuses on Johnny and June’s on-again, off-again relationship. A major difference from Ray is that the actors sing. Ray Charles recordings did the singing for Jamie Foxx. Both Joaquin Phoenix and Reese Witherspoon do their own singing. Reese Witherspoon has a lovely voice, which judging from Johnny and June’s duet during the credits, is more pleasing than June’s nasal voice. Regardless, June’s voice is much less well known. Phoenix has the impossible task of trying to sound like a legend—a voice everyone knows. Phoenix has a fine singing voice, but only intermittently matches the deep bass of Cash’s voice. Phoenix, however, never comes close to Cash’s speaking voice. Despite capturing the angst of Cash’s life, Phoenix never embodies Johnny Cash the way that Oscar-winner Jamie Foxx did with Ray Charles. Witherspoon delivers an Oscar-worthy performance as the clever and spiritual woman needed as the no-nonsense rudder for Johnny Cash to walk the (straight) line. This is an entertaining and engrossing film about one of our best-loved performers and shows a very touching love story.

ELIZABETHTOWN

1/2

Elizabethtown is about ambitious Drew Baylor (Orlando Bloom) coming to terms with colossal failure. There’s an opening meditation distinguishing between garden-variety ordinary failure and the colossal kind. Perhaps the rambling about failure should have been a clue. Writer and director Cameron Crowe (Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Say Anything, Jerry Maguire, Almost Famous) has done outstanding films, but mirroring its travels from California to Kentucky, this film careens all over the map in tone as well. Fired as the designer of the Edsel of footwear, Drew receives a phone call at the brink of killing himself. His father has passed away in Kentucky, and Drew needs to go retrieve his body. Thus begins his recovery, but our prolonged torment. A mysterious stewardess named Claire (Kirsten Dunst) appoints herself his guardian angel. Her insistence seems borderline pathological. Bloom and Dunst are attractive, but with their dialogue often buried by Crowe’s soundtrack, we can’t judge their romantic chemistry. Once Drew reaches his father’s hometown, he meets his irritatingly eccentric relatives. They want dear old Mitch (Tim Devitt), Drew’s father, to be buried in the old family plot in Elizabethtown. Mitch had dumped his hometown sweetie to marry Hollie (Susan Sarandon), precipitating his family’s estrangement from the Elizabethtown relatives despite Mitch maintaining contact. Sarandon delivers a shocking speech at the memorial service about her self-involved, self-improvement plan. Although we see flashback glimpses of Drew’s father, he is never given a voice and is surprisingly irrelevant to his own memorial service. There’s a final travelogue with Claire’s (read Crowe’s) handpicked musical accompaniment. There are some laughs during the film, and the issues of career setbacks and personal loss that the film wants to address deserve cinematic treatment, but this isn’t it. Forget the movie and just concentrate on the soundtrack.

JARHEAD

1/2

Jarhead is Sam Mendes’s film based on Anthony Swofford’s Gulf War memoir. Jake Gyllenhaal is Swoff. This three-part film begins with Swoff adrift, following his Vietnam veteran father’s footsteps by joining the service. Quickly he learns this was a mistake as Mendes duplicates Full Metal Jacket (1987), showing the brutality of military training. The film segues into Swoff’s assignment to Sergeant Sykes’s (Jamie Foxx) unit, where he meets Troy (Peter Sarsgaard), who becomes his sniper partner. We begin hearing solemn meditative voice-overs about the connection between sniper and weapon. Iraq invades Kuwait, placing Swoff in Operation Desert Shield. The waiting is like M*A*S*H with soldiers playing in their own giant sandbox. Then “Dear John” letters appear, including a devastating video taped over one marine’s favorite film. When Swoff’s Kristina (Brianne Davis) writes about a “friend,” he worries. Operation Desert Storm finally begins. Fought by planes and motorized armor—not by foot soldiers and snipers—Swoff and his mates discover modern warfare’s eerie residue of broken machines and scorched bodies. Not able to use their training, they bitterly resent a senior officer preempting their one shot. It is hard to see this as an endorsement of war, yet the eyes through which we see this have a quasispiritual relationship to his weapon that seems quite unhinged. Persisting even years afterward, this makes the narrator’s reliability questionable. Or perhaps this is intended as further evidence of war’s capacity to warp the human psyche. Shocking, amusing, and—at times—very tedious, it is visually striking, showing both the desert’s beauty and the ugly horrors of war. Some have praised this film for its devastating portrait of the soldier’s experience. However, I couldn’t really find any characters that I truly cared about, and, since I’m in the choir on evils of war, the film didn’t tell me anything new.

ICE HARVEST



Ice Harvest is directed by Harold Ramis from a collaborated script by Richard Russo and Robert Benton based on Scott Phillips’s novel. Set in Kansas at Christmastime, no one should ever mistake this for Miracle on 34th Street or It’s a Wonderful Life. Featuring John Cusack, Billy Bob Thornton, Connie Nielsen, Oliver Platt, and Randy Quaid, this is a jet black comedy from the rare genre of Christmas caper movies. John Cusack plays against type as not-too-bright sleazy lawyer Charlie Arglist. Criminal lowlife Vic Cavanaugh (Billy Bob Thornton) has talked Arglist into a scheme to rip off his boss Bill Guerrard (Randy Quaid), Wichita’s big kahuna of crime. This is not about the actual snatch of the cash, which happens as the film opens. It’s about what happens afterward. It’s Christmas Eve, and they have a few hours to kill before heading out of town for a Christmas Day flight from Kansas City. It’s a bitch of an evening in Wichita as a horrible ice storm hits the town. Arglist has nothing better to do than hit his usual whiskey-drenched haunts and worry. Arglist, indeed, has a lot to worry about. There’s one of Guerrard’s muscle guys looking for him and Cavanaugh. He visits strip joint owner Renata (Connie Nielsen), hoping to entreat her into joining him in his getaway. He doesn’t trust Cavanaugh or Renata. He keeps running into the police. His ex-wife’s husband Pete (Oliver Platt) decides to become his evening drinking buddy. It’s the night before Christmas, and all through the town, there’s ice on the roads and bodies all around. This is not a chick flick. The most sympathetic women in the film are the strippers. However, this is a certified guilty pleasure for the same overgrown frat boys who loved Old School.

IN HER SHOES



In Her Shoes gives equal time to the ladies as a certified chick-flick. Directed by Curtis Hanson (L.A. Confidential, Wonder Boys, and 8 Mile), it is based on Susannah Grant’s script of Jennifer Weiner’s novel about two sisters. Toni Collette plays the career-oriented older sister Rose, an attorney in a Philadelphia law firm. Rose’s underachieving, conniving party-girl younger sister Maggie (Cameron Diaz), whom she is always bailing out, shows up just as Rose is starting to get cozy with Jim (Richard Burgi), one of the firm’s partners. Guess who’s head gets turned by Maggie? Guess who gets thrown out of Rose’s apartment? In need of a new support, Maggie heads for Florida in search of a grandmother (Shirley MacLaine) she doesn’t remember. In need of a change, Rose serendipitously seizes an opportunity that comes her way because of Maggie. Eventually, a whole lot of old family laundry will get spilled, and more than just Rose and Maggie’s relationship will get mended. Although all the actors hit their marks and Susannah Grant’s script keeps it lively, the story won’t have many surprises and may stretch more dubious audience members’ willingness to suspend reality. Those would probably be the men—or at least more of them would be men. Still there’s enough truth about relationships and wit to keep most of the audience fully onboard.

THUMBSUCKER



Thumbsucker is the lesser half of my dysfunctional double feature. Lou Taylor Pucci (Empire Falls) is an Oregon high schooler who still sucks his thumb. (Hard to believe a premise like that didn’t draw droves to the multiplexes.) We are treated to a slice of his life. Justin Cobb (Pucci) is the son of mismatched parents Mike (Vincent D’Onofrio) and Audrey (Tilda Swinton). Younger brother Joel (Chase Offerle) has responded to Justin’s weirdness by being the straightest of straight arrows. A chronic underachiever and social misfit, Justin is finally diagnosed as suffering from attention/deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and placed on Ritalin. He becomes the star of the otherwise all-girl debating team. His wait-until-the-school-board-hears-about-this coach is played by Vince Vaughan. Justin plans his life after high school. His parents want him to go to a low-tuition state college in Oregon, but he wants to go to NYU—not that the film tells us why. We never learn about any specific goal best achieved by going to NYU or by being in New York. Justin worries that his mom may be falling in love with a drug-addled TV star (Benjamin Bratt). Keanu Reeves is a psychologizing dentist determined to help Justin cope with his obsession. He contributes the film’s most memorable line—at least for me—about what to rely on when stressed. Kelli Garner plays his would-be high school sweetheart Rebecca. Justin is surprisingly unaffected by her cruelty. The film does maintain your interest, as there are a number of unusual developments, but it simply doesn’t hold together well or add up to very much.

DUMA

1/2

Duma is Carroll Ballard’s first film after a long hiatus. He has focused on the relationship between humans and animals (The Black Stallion, Never Cry Wolf, and Fly Away Home), and he does so again in this one. Duma is a young orphaned Cheetah found by the side of the road by Peter (Campbell Scott) and his son Xan (Alex Michaeletos). He becomes a pet at the farm that Peter and his wife Kristin (Hope Davis) run in rural South Africa. When Peter becomes ill, it becomes clear that Duma needs to be returned to the wild. Unfortunately, Peter dies before he can make good on his plan to set Duma free in a game preserve. Kristin decides to move to the city because she feels she cannot manage the farm. Although Kristin plans to return Duma to the wild, this cannot be done before they move into Aunt Gwen’s apartment and Xan heads off to school. Before you can say this seems like a bad idea, Duma has escaped from the apartment, created a citywide panic, and rescued Xan from bullies. Then, the pair heads off to the wilderness. They run into Rip (Eamonn Walker), who is headed back to his village after spending a stretch in jail. A black man, a white boy, a Cheetah, and a bush baby team up to trek to the game preserve. It is a terrific adventure. British actor Eamonn Walker is superb as Xan’s African guide who helps with more than just getting around in the bush. This is an outstanding family movie that offers incredible scenery and a delightful story. This is a fine addition to Ballard’s oeuvre.

GRIZZLY MAN



Grizzly Man is Werner Herzog’s powerful documentary about self-proclaimed Grizzly Man Timothy Treadwell and his girlfriend Amie Huguenard, who were tragically killed by a bear in 2003. If films like Duma suggest that we could make pets of wild animals, Grizzly Man provides a sobering corrective. Herzog’s film cuts through Treadwell’s own fabrication of his early life and shows where he came from. A failed actor and ne’er-do-well, Treadwell seemed to find his calling as an activist for the grizzly bears, with whom he would spend half a year living in Alaska. Then, Treadwell spent the other half a year telling his story to whoever would listen. He spoke extensively in schools and before civic groups. He also coauthored Among Grizzlies: Living with Wild Bears in Alaska, made numerous films, and maintained a Web site on his experiences. Although Treadwell often expressed his deep love for the bears and seemed a gentle soul, there is evidence that a more unstable and reckless Treadwell also existed. Herzog finds several persuasive voices to support his contention that Treadwell, despite his open acknowledgement of the dangers posed by the grizzlies, violated the boundary between humans and animals of the wild. Although we are spared hearing the audio of the videotape recording the attack on Timothy and Amie, just knowing that such a tape exists certainly provides a chilling reminder of that boundary.

 

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