For almost a decade now, a Great Cinematic Question has plagued me, fermented endlessly in the wine cellars of my mind--why oh why does everyone love Sideways so damn much? Yes, the picture had a reasonably clever screenplay, some gorgeous location photography, and a real live-wire in Paul Giamatti's maladjusted wine snob Miles, but Alexander Payne's road-trip picture wasn't just praised--it was enshrined, hoisted up like a trophy by critics and audiences alike and placed on a pedestal beside that ultimate achievement in contemporary dramedy, Annie Hall. Perhaps it was our hunger for movies like Hall that cued the Hallelujah chorus; maybe we were so desperate for a motion picture that treated us like smart, discerning adults that to us a well-prepared appetizer tasted like a five-course feast. And so it goes with Payne's latest offering The Descendants. Once again, I left the theater reasonably satisfied, and once again, it seems that everyone else left the theater in a state of religious ecstasy that'd make the Pope blush. It's not a bad picture, but the absence of mediocrity does not indicate the presence of greatness.
George Clooney stars as Matt, a Hawaiian businessman with a comatose wife and a pair of rumpus-raising daughters, Alexandra and Scottie (Shailene Woodley, Amanda Miller). Matt knows his wife Elizabeth (Patricia Hastie) isn't long for this world, but what he doesn't know is this; the past few years, she'd been conducted an on-again-off-again affair with a hotshot realtor (Matthew Lillard) and was working up the courage to ask for a divorce. Ever the chivalrous alpha male, Matt sets out to sets out on a road trip, dragging his kids and Alexandra's boyfriend Sid (Nick Krause) across the coast in attempt to track down the Other Man and give him both the bad news and a piece of his mind. Lovesick dope on a long, winding road-trip--sound familiar? It should--at the most skeletal storytelling level, this picture follows the blueprints of Payne's previous two pictures, About Schmidt and The Overrated-Flick-Which-Must-Not-Be-Named. And once again, Payne does a great deal right. If nothing else, he is a masterful assessor of local color--wherever his movies are set, we feel that setting in our bones. His Hawaii is a state furiously and fascinatingly divided, struggling to reconcile the mythical power of its history with the chintzy palm-tree reality of its present. It's a struggle between what once was and what now incontrovertibly is, as is Matt's search for his wife's lover. It's a search rooted in both nostalgia and deep-seated anguish, emotions which Clooney conveys subtly and accurately. He's always had a knack for King-of-The-Road suavity, but in recent years, his craft has deepened; pictures like Up In the Air and Michael Clayton showed a rawer, realer Clooney, a man capable of charming the pants off of anyone, yes, but also a man whose smooth-operator glibness masks a keening moral anger and a mounting list of regrets; a man haunted by the silence of things unsaid and deafened by the noise of lies told, a man whose fury is never obvious but always present. In The Descendants, Clooney's exploration of the Boastful But Broken American Male reaches something of an apotheosis--his work here is resonant, sensitive, and true. The pair of passive-aggressive monologues he hurls at his catatonic wife are the movie's hilarious and heart-breaking highlights, but his looks speak volumes as well; to watch Matt run down the street in flip-flops and a flowery polo after he's hit with the knowledge of his wife's infidelity is to watch a man wrestle with his inner demons and lose. He's a messy, wonderfully complex character; I wish I could say the same for the rest of the ensemble. It's not that the other characters are one dimensional; they're intriguingly multi-dimensional, but never all at once. For example: Alexandra isn't rebellious but kind; she's a nuisance until the script requires her not to be. Sid isn't a jerk with the potential for goodness; he's a stereotypical jerk until some awkwardly imparted information changes our view of him, because the Bad Kid has to turn Good in a movie like this. And then there's Matt's cousin (Beau Bridges) as cartoony a token asshole as I've seen on screen this year. Admittedly, the strength of the cast goes a long way towards nullifying these flaws--Woodley in particular fleshes out her character in ways the script simply refuses to. Still, when you've got a walking grey zone like Matt at the center of a story, it just doesn't do to surround him with black-and-white boilerplates.
It occurs to me that, in this Age of Irony, it probably seems like I'm try to damn the film with faint praise. I'd say what I'm really getting at is praising the thing with faint damning. The Descendants is not a great film, but just because it doesn't deserve a shelf full of statuettes doesn't mean it's not worth your time. The film is never boring, never anything less than totally genuine in it's desire to tell a story well. More often that not, it succeeds. Those who see it will enjoy it. Some will probably love it. The great critic Jonathan Rosenbaum often advises filmgoers to be explorers, not conquistadors, to search for every film's redeeming qualities instead of looking for artistic trophies to claim. Here's a film worth the exploration. However, I will say this; when Oscar comes calling, as I'm sure it will, I'll come complaining. B.
J. Edgar
Oh what a beautiful mess. What a gorgeous, insipid, deeply moving, persistently frustrating holy wreck of a movie. J. Edgar is as good a cinematic portrait of it's title character as we could ever hope for. But it tries to be more. Not content with scraping the sky, the picture, belly glutted with dreams, swings for the moon and misses. But what a miss it is.
To tell J. Edgar Hoover's life story in a linear fashion wouldn't just be wrong, it'd be impossible, an affront to a man whose contradictory nature drew him into the midst of a heated love-hate affair with an entire nation. Clint Eastwood and screenwriter Dustin Lance Black know this and plot their picture accordingly--structurally speaking, the picture is less What's Love Got To Do With It and more La Vie En Rose. Edgar's (Leonard Di Caprio) personal life--his closeted homosexuality, his Oedipal mess of a relationship with his mother (Judi Dench)--was not separate from his work; his torturous insecurities bled over into his business dealings as well, re-shaping both his Bureau of Investigation and American government as a whole. What Lance Black's script does brilliantly is convey just how inextricable Edgar's private pains were from his public actions. As Edgar dictates his autobiography, unleashing a string of seemingly random anecdotes and slowly connecting them, history and memory ricochet off of each other with an almost Faulknerian intensity. As Edgar listens to a purported tape of President Kennedy committing acts of infidelity, he struggles in the dark with his own sexual insecurities, listening with a mix of revulsion and curiosity until he's interrupted by a phone call--Kennedy's been shot. Scenes like these, with the past and present colliding at strange angles and striking sparks, are a dime a dozen in this picture. There's an ingenuity to this approach, and it's one that's revitalized Eastwood's filmmaking. If his recent pictures showed him resting on his laurels, indulging in genre posturing (Gran Torino), hagiographic hokum (Invictus) and spiritual silliness (Hereafter), then J. Edgar presents an Eastwood whose got his balls back, who's willing to dive headfirst into a daring project with that old Dirty Harry glint in his eye. He comes at this story with a lean efficiency and sharp sense of scope; the historical scenes, particularly those involving Hoover's war on Dillinger-era crime, pop with a taste-the-gunpowder immediacy, and he shapes the film's more intimate moments--the scenes with Dench and with Hoover's unrequited love Clyde Tolson (Armie Hammer) with a quiet, solid efficacy that pays emotional dividends. This is his best work since Million Dollar Baby. DiCaprio responds with a performance full of the sort of surpassing intensity and commitment that are quickly becoming his hallmark. Instead of attempting the impossible task of building a waxworks replica of the man--his stentorian tones and statuesque posturing, he does a sort of riff on the Edgar we know, a performance that accurately conveys the enigma that was Hoover while commenting on it as well. The man who once proclaimed himself King of The World is now heir to Throne of the Modern Actor. Hammer's work here is equally heart-wrenching, and Dench's Shakespearean training helps her avoid the all-too-easy-trap of playing the villain. Naomi Watts and Josh Lucas prove strong supporting performers, playing Edgar's secretary and Charles Lindbergh, respectively. Here's a movie with all the right players.
What goes wrong, then? What's the problem with J. Edgar? For most of the movie, there isn't one, unless you count the duo of cut-rate impersonators hired to cameo as Kennedys. That aside, the first hour and a half of J. Edgar is as good as any biopic released in the past couple of years. The trouble comes in the film's final act, when Lance Black and Eastwood ditch the biography and start pushing for iconography. As DiCaprio's Hoover inches closer towards death, face sinking under the weight of some truly awful old-age makeup, the filmmakers start using his misery as a metaphor, sneaking in monologue after monologue, keeping the wording just vague enough so that it Relates To What's Going On Now. By the time Hoover is roasting Tolson for suggesting that he surrender his considerable power, you half-expect some stock footage of Dick Cheney. Furthermore, Black, who so successfully pressed for gay rights in Milk, lets his activism interfere with the plot, and, at the film's end, nearly forfeits his hand with a truly ludicrous bit of speculative fiction. J.Edgar Hoover cannot and should not be objectified into a symbol. He is not the Pain of All Powerful Men, The Struggle of All Gay Men, The Bane of All Brilliant Men. He was and is a wholly unique individual, whose sufferings and successes were all his own. Still, in terms of Stephen Sondheim's famous dictum that content dictates form, J. Edgar's flaws are what make it work; a flawed but great man deserves a flawed but great movie. Perfection wouldn't have been merely inappropriate--it would've been an insult. You can love it or hate it, but you can't shake the power of its vision--and isn't that a perfect description of Edgar himself? A-.
It occurs to me that, in this Age of Irony, it probably seems like I'm try to damn the film with faint praise. I'd say what I'm really getting at is praising the thing with faint damning. The Descendants is not a great film, but just because it doesn't deserve a shelf full of statuettes doesn't mean it's not worth your time. The film is never boring, never anything less than totally genuine in it's desire to tell a story well. More often that not, it succeeds. Those who see it will enjoy it. Some will probably love it. The great critic Jonathan Rosenbaum often advises filmgoers to be explorers, not conquistadors, to search for every film's redeeming qualities instead of looking for artistic trophies to claim. Here's a film worth the exploration. However, I will say this; when Oscar comes calling, as I'm sure it will, I'll come complaining. B.
J. Edgar
Oh what a beautiful mess. What a gorgeous, insipid, deeply moving, persistently frustrating holy wreck of a movie. J. Edgar is as good a cinematic portrait of it's title character as we could ever hope for. But it tries to be more. Not content with scraping the sky, the picture, belly glutted with dreams, swings for the moon and misses. But what a miss it is.
To tell J. Edgar Hoover's life story in a linear fashion wouldn't just be wrong, it'd be impossible, an affront to a man whose contradictory nature drew him into the midst of a heated love-hate affair with an entire nation. Clint Eastwood and screenwriter Dustin Lance Black know this and plot their picture accordingly--structurally speaking, the picture is less What's Love Got To Do With It and more La Vie En Rose. Edgar's (Leonard Di Caprio) personal life--his closeted homosexuality, his Oedipal mess of a relationship with his mother (Judi Dench)--was not separate from his work; his torturous insecurities bled over into his business dealings as well, re-shaping both his Bureau of Investigation and American government as a whole. What Lance Black's script does brilliantly is convey just how inextricable Edgar's private pains were from his public actions. As Edgar dictates his autobiography, unleashing a string of seemingly random anecdotes and slowly connecting them, history and memory ricochet off of each other with an almost Faulknerian intensity. As Edgar listens to a purported tape of President Kennedy committing acts of infidelity, he struggles in the dark with his own sexual insecurities, listening with a mix of revulsion and curiosity until he's interrupted by a phone call--Kennedy's been shot. Scenes like these, with the past and present colliding at strange angles and striking sparks, are a dime a dozen in this picture. There's an ingenuity to this approach, and it's one that's revitalized Eastwood's filmmaking. If his recent pictures showed him resting on his laurels, indulging in genre posturing (Gran Torino), hagiographic hokum (Invictus) and spiritual silliness (Hereafter), then J. Edgar presents an Eastwood whose got his balls back, who's willing to dive headfirst into a daring project with that old Dirty Harry glint in his eye. He comes at this story with a lean efficiency and sharp sense of scope; the historical scenes, particularly those involving Hoover's war on Dillinger-era crime, pop with a taste-the-gunpowder immediacy, and he shapes the film's more intimate moments--the scenes with Dench and with Hoover's unrequited love Clyde Tolson (Armie Hammer) with a quiet, solid efficacy that pays emotional dividends. This is his best work since Million Dollar Baby. DiCaprio responds with a performance full of the sort of surpassing intensity and commitment that are quickly becoming his hallmark. Instead of attempting the impossible task of building a waxworks replica of the man--his stentorian tones and statuesque posturing, he does a sort of riff on the Edgar we know, a performance that accurately conveys the enigma that was Hoover while commenting on it as well. The man who once proclaimed himself King of The World is now heir to Throne of the Modern Actor. Hammer's work here is equally heart-wrenching, and Dench's Shakespearean training helps her avoid the all-too-easy-trap of playing the villain. Naomi Watts and Josh Lucas prove strong supporting performers, playing Edgar's secretary and Charles Lindbergh, respectively. Here's a movie with all the right players.
What goes wrong, then? What's the problem with J. Edgar? For most of the movie, there isn't one, unless you count the duo of cut-rate impersonators hired to cameo as Kennedys. That aside, the first hour and a half of J. Edgar is as good as any biopic released in the past couple of years. The trouble comes in the film's final act, when Lance Black and Eastwood ditch the biography and start pushing for iconography. As DiCaprio's Hoover inches closer towards death, face sinking under the weight of some truly awful old-age makeup, the filmmakers start using his misery as a metaphor, sneaking in monologue after monologue, keeping the wording just vague enough so that it Relates To What's Going On Now. By the time Hoover is roasting Tolson for suggesting that he surrender his considerable power, you half-expect some stock footage of Dick Cheney. Furthermore, Black, who so successfully pressed for gay rights in Milk, lets his activism interfere with the plot, and, at the film's end, nearly forfeits his hand with a truly ludicrous bit of speculative fiction. J.Edgar Hoover cannot and should not be objectified into a symbol. He is not the Pain of All Powerful Men, The Struggle of All Gay Men, The Bane of All Brilliant Men. He was and is a wholly unique individual, whose sufferings and successes were all his own. Still, in terms of Stephen Sondheim's famous dictum that content dictates form, J. Edgar's flaws are what make it work; a flawed but great man deserves a flawed but great movie. Perfection wouldn't have been merely inappropriate--it would've been an insult. You can love it or hate it, but you can't shake the power of its vision--and isn't that a perfect description of Edgar himself? A-.
