White God

White God 

Imagine Lassie Come Home rewritten with Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds and the Roman slave epic Spartacus in mind and you’ll get the basic notion behind White God, an ingenious thriller from Hungary about the revolt of mistreated street dogs in contemporary Budapest.  This movie isn’t recommended for the most sensitive dog lovers, as it’s filled with scenes of brutality.  But graphic realism is a necessary part of the film’s power.  Though it definitely pulls at the heartstrings, White God eschews obvious sentiment for subtle commentary, turning a good dog tale into a cunning allegory about societal abuse of “undesirable” populations. 

The action revolves around 13-year-old Lili (Zsofia Psotta), whose devotion to her mixed-breed dog, Hagen, causes trouble between her and her divorced father (Sandor Zsoter).  In a dystopian take on current Hungarian society, only purebred (“Hungarian” bred) dogs are tolerated; mixed breeds are heavily taxed when owned, which means most are left to roam the streets, prey to the city’s army of dog-catchers and unscrupulous hustlers looking to exploit them for a variety of awful purposes.  Lili‘s father abandons Hagen on the street rather than pay the tax, causing a separation between him and his daughter greater than that between her and her lost dog.  The film then moves in parallel story tracks, the lives of the human and canine soul mates mirroring each other as they adjust to their mutual loss and to the newfound cruelties of their decaying and corrupt world.  Hagen searches for Lili and a way home but finds only garbage-strewn streets and foul empty lots where gangs of unwanted mutts gather at night after long days of hunting for food and evading capture.  Eventually he is caught by a trainer for the illegal dog fighting industry; a series of brutal scenes in which he's transformed into a canine gladiator follow.  At her own school, Lili, a trumpeter, is cruelly treated by an authoritarian music teacher.  In a symbolic act of solidarity, she repeatedly runs away from home, skipping school, prowling the streets, hanging out in unsavory parts of town, only to be caught by authorities and returned to the confines of her father’s cramped, cage-like apartment (as well as the overcrowded rehearsal room, a pound of sorts for kids).  Hagen’s introductory fight with another dog in a bloodstained pit is intercut with Lili’s attempts to jumpstart adulthood by accompanying an older classmate to a hellishly lit basement club where alcohol and drugs are exchanged to the apocalyptic beat of a punk band.  Badly bruised from these degrading experiences, both survive relatively intact; nevertheless, we witness innocence being lost.

Hagen’s journey eventually leads to the pound, but only momentarily: rising to hero status (he’s prophetically named for a warrior in Norse mythology), he triggers a mass escape of mixed-breeds.  Under his leadership, they become a marauding force, bringing the city to a standstill (much as Spartacus and his gladiator army challenged Rome).  It is here that the film becomes  more fanciful, and director Kornel Mundruczo and his screenwriters mix moments of sly humor in with the terror.  Trotting out a number of horror film clichés, they have Hagen and his troops hunt down the people who’ve abused them one by one in order to exact a bloody revenge.  One particularly striking scene has the victim enter a darkened room where two dogs hide behind an old-style sofa.  The camera pans at floor level to reveal their paws as they stand quietly waiting to attack—ironically, less conspicuous than human feet would be since their paws are similar in shape to the furniture’s curved legs.  The visual joke contains a philosophical question: when the oppressed turn on their oppressors, does “objectification” suddenly become an advantage?  Whether or not that’s stretching a point, I imagine this scene would have brought a smile to Alfred Hitchcock’s face.

Lili’s stature grows along with Hagen’s, but by rising above rebellion instead of surrendering to it.  Her brush with delinquency behind her, she reconciles with her father, becoming the parent to his tantrum-throwing child (she comforts him when he cries).  His development has been arrested, perhaps, by the frustrations of a failed marriage and career (an ex-professor, he now inspects meat in a slaughterhouse, though no explanation for his fall from grace is ever given).  At the film’s climax, when their intertwined fates bring Hagen and Lili face to face again, she discovers her own destiny as a leader by becoming peacemaker between the human and animal worlds.  In a scene of visual bravado, she pacifies the dog pack with a beautiful solo on her horn; one by one they lie down until she is surrounded by hundreds of submissive dogs in a ragged heart-shaped formation.  When Lili and her father lie down with them, the stunning shot has dogs and humans literally on the same level (and roughly the same size), equalized in their relationship to each other and to the world they share as defined by the space of the screen.  But beyond the screen’s edges, tragedy is still looming—this moment of peace and equality will almost certainly be short-lived.  The frailty, if not absolute impossibility, of humane relations between the species makes for a heartbreaking finale, eloquently stated in this closing image.

Despite some playful use of tropes from the pet adventure, thriller, and horror genres, White God is a serious, occasionally grim, parable about human responsibility toward all species, including our own.  Its cautionary nature exposes the peril society faces from discriminating against weaker, minority populations.  There's clever irony in casting dogs in that role: whatever human-like intelligence or “moral” behavior they display has been taught them by their human masters.  And what the mixed breeds learn from humans is chiefly terror and violence.  Is it any wonder, the film asks its audience, that they respond in kind?  They are what we have made them.

White God establishes this premise in two ways.  First, and most obviously, by presenting an alternative to a relationship based on dominance in the loving, respectful connection between Lili and Hagen that precedes—and ultimately triumphs over—his transformation into a vicious killer.  But, more slyly, it enters through some subtle anthropomorphism in the second half of the film.  Left to survive on their own, the outcast dogs don’t act like we might expect them to, as hardened brutes.  They don’t fight for territory on meeting—in truth, they barely even growl at each other.  Their attempts to find food and shelter are marked less by rivalry than by teamwork between tribe members.  It’s not exactly Disney, but isn’t a nature documentary either.  The dogs descend into savagery only when they begin to display human cunning.  After Hagen takes charge of the escapees, they band together to perform the complex business of targeted revenge, using sophisticated behaviors like decoying and surprise.  Human intelligence is the source of their savagery—it’s a dog-eat-dog world out there only when dogs act like people.

Which raises the question of the provocative title.  White “God”?  Of course it’s a play on words (doG), but more important, it underscores the film’s boldest idea--that there is a moral correlation between discarded animals and marginalized people.  The film’s God is “White,” likening a city that discriminates against mixed-breed dogs to a society whose laws and attitudes discriminate against non-white peoples.  The dogs’ rampage through the corroded back streets of Budapest could be violence that explodes among minority populations in the slums of any modern city.  But “God” also suggests a religious component to this violence—specifically, acts of terror by radical religious groups.  The pound, the brutal dog-catchers, the pervasive criminal element—all the repressive conditions the movie’s “racially” profiled dogs are forced to live under have their corollaries in the real world of the politically excluded and religiously suspect.  Harrassed by authority and exploited by ruthless, self-serving men, this underclass is understandably an easy breeding ground for radicalization and rebellion.  The mayhem committed by the film’s trained-to-be-a-killer dog and his followers mirrors the acts of murder and destruction we’ve become all too familiar with in recent years.  The title White God therefore has a deeply ironic meaning, bringing together the ideas of racial and religious authority with their historical abuse, and the continuing societal violence that is the tragic consequence.

The film’s inventiveness isn’t confined to such bold comparisons, however.  First and last, this movie is about the dogs.  And they are truly amazing.  Remarkably well trained, the dogs make the fantastic events--particularly in the film’s second half--frighteningly real.  Suspension of disbelief is never a problem. The filmmakers worked closely with trainers who rounded up street dogs and rescued others from pounds.  After filming was over, they helped them all get adopted, practicing what their film so movingly preaches.  Hagen is portrayed by two brothers, Luke and Body, and they are both so skillfully directed that their combined performance as the film’s central and most complex character actually seems nuanced.  That may be the ultimate testament to the level of commitment the filmmakers brought to this harrowing and insightful film.

 

 

 

 

 

God's Pocket

God’s Pocket is a small Philadelphia neighborhood suffering from all sorts of urban ailments, but don’t tell that to the people who live there because they don’t like to hear it.  This film adaptation of Pete Dexter’s novel by Mad Men star, and first-time director, John Slattery examines the intersecting lives of several characters stuck in “the Pocket,” as they call the area with defensive, chip-on-the-shoulder pride.  The late Philip Seymour Hoffman plays Mickey Scarpato, an independent meat vendor whose downtrodden existence reflects the depressed area he inhabits.  Married to Jeanie (Christina Hendricks), a divorcee with a troubled teenage son, Mickey spends his days half-heartedly canvassing for customers, but more enthusiastically conspiring with cronies to hijack truckloads of beef.  When not pursuing larceny, he hangs out at the corner tap with a cast of barflies who appear to have stumbled in from Eugene O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh by way of Cheers.  But when his step-son Leon is killed at a construction site, Mickey becomes enmeshed in pursuing his grief-stricken wife’s wishes to have her son buried in style.  His plans quickly go awry, with some grimly farcical consequences. 

For her part, Jeanie refuses to accept the official version that Leon’s death was an accident and pushes for an investigation, which catches the attention of jaded columnist Richard Shellburn (Richard Jenkins).  His mild interest in the story changes to ardent pursuit after interviewing the attractive Jeanie—pursuit of her, that is, not of the truth.   Throw in a couple of bumbling underworld figures and a gun-toting flower shop owner and you have the formula for what might have been a sharp, quirky comedy with dark overtones of social commentary.  Unfortunately, the raw slice of blue-collar life atmosphere and the comic plot of mix-ups and mayhem aren’t blended well.  The surprisingly lackadaisical script—by Dexter himself, along with Slattery and Alex Metcalf—is just occasionally amusing, and Slattery’s blase direction does nothing to make up for it.  The results are a rather melancholy mélange--mopey but never moving, dopey instead of truly funny.  

The interesting cast, which could have injected novel energy into the film, instead seems dispirited--none more so than Hoffman.  Mumbling his dialogue and looking like he’d just rolled out of bed and hadn’t had his first cup of coffee yet, Hoffman plays Mickey in a manner so self-effacing he almost detaches from the story.  Hoffman was a gifted actor and could live inside a character like few of his contemporaries could, but in this role he’s emotionally absent and as a result Mickey, a character with lots of rough edges, comes out flat.  You can’t engage the viewer’s sympathy when you refuse to engage the viewer at all.  This late-career stumble is sad to witness.  

As Jeanie, Slattery’s Mad Men cast mate Christina Hendricks gets to emote more than the sultry secretary she plays on that show, but she’s still stuck in sexpot mode.  This is a disservice to both actress and character, since Jeanie’s grief is the emotional heart of the film.  Hendricks gamely tries to convey the suffering and the inner strength of a working class mother at an emotional crossroads but is hampered by an ungenerous script and conflicted direction.  The movie needs her to be alluring since that is an important point in the plot but like so much of American cinema, or cinema in general, it fails to integrate her physical attractiveness into her humanity.  Despite frumpy dresses and a dearth of make-up, she’s simply too glamorous for the part, and the attempts to downgrade her looks while at the same time exploiting them are rather absurd.   

Fortunately, Richard Jenkins has a much better time of it with the star-crossed journalist Shellburn.  It’s chiefly in his scenes that the film finds its tone since he alone of the principle actors taps into the story’s sub-current of irony.  Despite working with similar emotive constraints as Hoffman--like Mickey, Shellburn is sleep-walking through life—he’s not hampered by them but instead uses them to explore the at once comic and sad limitations of his character.  The reawakening of erotic longing brings Shellburn out of his shell just far enough to realize he still has a job to do, and something to write about.  Sadly, he blows the opportunity.  Myopic, self-serving, frequently off-putting, this ill-fated character provides the second half of film with some much-needed focus.  The culmination of his story arc pulls the people of God’s Pocket together for a disturbing, ironic finale, a devastating scene that, despite the futility it depicts, saves the movie itself from feeling futile.  

But God’s Pocket is still a mostly inarticulate film, uncertain of what it’s trying to say about life in its particular part of the world.  On top of that it’s unpleasant to look at.   Lance Acord‘s muddy cinematography gives many of its interiors a yellowish brown tinge, rendering images only partially visible, but without artistic effect as compensation.  There’s no art here, just obscurity, as if we're watching the action through a dirty window.  The grimy look may match the depressed spirits of the surroundings, but it adds no layer of expression to what we’re shown--it just strains our eyesight.  In fact, the muddled visuals reflect the film’s major shortcomings: the inconsistency of tone, the obscurity of motive, the lack of genuine urgency to any of the events.  The poverty of God’s Pocket never seems like a social problem worth solving.  The fumblings of the characters never transform comedy (tepid, at best) into viable satire of society or the human condition.  The desperate characters never seem desperate enough for any of that.  The Lower Depths this is not.  It's not that good a neighborhood. 

Life Itself

Life Itself celebrates the life of influential film critic Roger Ebert, who died of cancer in 2013.  The intellectual half of the famous Siskel & Ebert TV team of the 1980s and 1990s (with rival Chicago film reviewer Gene Siskel), Ebert had an encyclopedic knowledge of movies and the moviemaking industry, and an ability to write reviews that explained complex ideas in simple, elegant, and very entertaining language.   He was a born writer with a natural, effortless style which he infused with his genuine passion for films and prescient grasp of their central place in our culture.  An English major at the University of Illinois, he was editor of the student newspaper and began his long association with the Chicago Sun-Times soon after graduation.  His editor asked him to write movie reviews when the current reviewer quit and he never looked back.  For the next fifty years, he wrote thousands of reviews and articles, now archived on his website, www.rogerebert.com, a major resource for anyone studying movies in the last half century. 

 

For many, he was the voice of film criticism in this country, and this became a source of controversy.  He won a Pulitzer Prize in 1975, the first film critic to be so honored, but this didn’t keep his own critics from sniping at his growing profile, which overshadowed nearly everyone else after his hugely successful series of television shows with Siskel began in 1975.  Many academics also regarded him with scorn.  There’s an important difference between academic film scholarship and popular reviewing for the news media, but the fascinating thing about Ebert is that his knowledge was so vast and his writing so good he often straddled that divide.  Scholars can’t easily dismiss him.  This wonderful documentary by Steve James (Hoop Dreams) shows us why, as well as giving us a candid behind-the-scenes look at his horrific battle with throat and jaw cancer and his relationship with his marvelous wife Chaz, which sustained both of them  until the end.  Ebert acted the prima donna in his prime, but when he finally became the star of his own movie, his gratitude for the ways in which his life had been graced by others is genuine and moving.  Two thumbs way, way up.

Saving Mr. Banks

No matter what you think of Walt Disney’s elaborate musical fantasy Mary Poppins (1964), the Disney company is determined you believe it was a milestone in filmmaking.  Which it very well may be--for Disney, and for baby boomers like me who remember with great fondness the first time they saw it in the theater.  You can judge for yourself if it deserves more than nostalgic affection by checking out the 50^th anniversary dvd/blueray released last December.  But before that happened, Disney provided an ingenious bit of pre-release publicity to indulge in with Saving Mr. Banks, a film that purports to be a behind-the-scenes, tell-all tale about the making of the film, specifically the trials Walt and his creative team went through collaborating with the enigmatic author of the Mary Poppins books, P. L. (Pamela Lyndon) Travers.  Turns out the collaboration wasn't practically perfect in every way.  Neither is the movie, but it's filled with enough intriguing notions and expert performances to make it more than just a superior confection--and it very well may represent a new milestone in Disney's unique brand of self-mythologizing.

The film combines two storylines--in the first, the adult Travers (Emma Thompson, in a terrific performance) visits California to work on the script of the proposed movie, and in the second, her difficult childhood on a farm in Australia is unveiled in a series of flashbacks.  Travers resisted Disney's overtures to bring her beloved character to the screen for nearly twenty years.  But in need of money, she considers signing a contract with the persistent film mogul.  The resulting trip to California to meet with Disney and his staff is an unpleasant duty to her, not a promising opportunity, and unsurprisingly is filled with physical and emotional discomforts.  Sitting in a cramped airplane seat, she begins to remember another reluctant journey, one she took with her family as a young girl.  Due to her father's (Colin Farrell) drinking and declining fortunes, she, her wary but unprotesting mother, and two younger sisters, leave a comfortable home in town for a ramshackle farm in a remote part of Australia.  Highly personable and extroverted by nature, her father escapes from reality in flights of fancy that become more elaborate as his drinking worsens.  He turns to his eldest daughter for solace--he sees in her a kindred spirit and he tries to instill in her his love of imagination and dreaming.  When he collapses while giving a drunken speech at a local fair, the family is thrown into turmoil until a stern but kindly aunt (who provides the template for Mary Poppins) arrives from England to take charge of the family and help them through the crisis.  These memories haunt the adult Travers as she tries to come to terms with the current situation, with its similar themes of isolation and financial ruin. 

Banks is the latest in what has emerged in recent years as an intriguing sub-genre of “behind-the-scenes” movies, films about the making of beloved films or other works of popular art.  The last decade and a half, for instance, has produced My Week with Marilyn (2011),  Me and Orson Welles (2008), Finding Neverland (2004), Topsy-Turvy (1999), and Becoming Jane (covering the pre-novel-writing life of Jane Austen, 2007).  Accurate or not, most of them have been pretty good films.  The creation of entertainment is definitely entertaining. Of course, Hollywood has always loved to gaze at itself in its own mirror—stories about moviemaking  are nearly as old as the movies themselves.  Call it self-reflexivity but obsessive self-regard is more like it—Hollywood has never been shy about showing off its Narcissus complex.    

But Saving Mr. Banks is interested in a different kind of complex. Not content to tell how it all happened, Banks delves into why it happened.  Its seriousness is a surprise, given the light-hearted nature of the film behind the film.  Perhaps Saving Mr. Banks should be retitled Rescuing Sigmund Freud because Thompson’s Travers suffers from an unresolved Electra Complex the size of Australia. Underlying her struggles with Disney for control of her "character" lies the conflict in her feelings for her charming but errant father.  They've been waiting years to be worked through, and now, despite or because of, the painful encounters with Disney, the healing begins to take place.

The "Mr. Banks" of the title is the patriarch of the family Mary Poppins serves in Travers' novels.  In the film, she's appalled that the studio's script has changed her mild-mannered banker into a cold, imperious bank manager who ignores his children and cares only for making money.  After battling Disney on this and other critical matters--she objects to the film's being a musical, for starters--he wins her over by making her see that Mr. Banks has to be mean in order for the movie make its point--his transformation into a nice guy is central to the story.  In their view, Mary Poppins has come to the Banks house not so much to take charge of the children, Michael and Jane, as to rehabilitate the father and teach how to be a better husband and father.  By saving him, the entire family is saved.  Through a process of transference, Travers identifies Banks' redemption with her own attempts to reclaim her father, salvaging the memory of his innate goodness and genuine love for his family from the misery of their lives and his failures as a parent. 

There's more than one instance of transference going on, however.  As it turns out, much of this back story about Travers' father isn't accurate.  Travers substituted a romanticized version of her childhood for the equally grim but less dramatic facts.  There was no farm in Australia, to begin with--the family lived in the town of Allora, Queensland.  Her father was not a handsome Irish rogue dying of dissipation but an Englishman of Irish background who succumbed to influenza at 42.  The movie's "real story" behind the making of Mary Poppins is therefore another story, one that Travers herself composed.  The “truth” is based on one more piece of her’ fiction, her own about herself, which adds another layer of myth-making to the film. 
 

It also underscores the complicated relationship between Travers and her adapters.  In a sense, they're doing to her book what she did to her past--reimagining it--and the distress she feels witnessing the former is perhaps an echo of the distress that led her to do the latter.  It's no coincidence, of course, that both of Travers' stories center on her complicated relationship with a commanding male authority figure: collaborating with Walt Disney  doesn't just reawaken the memory of her father, it virtually brings him back to life.  With his fantastic tales and beguiling ways, her father is the original Walt Disney, and in order to reconcile Travers with her father, Disney in a way becomes him.  Wooing her with honeyed words, Hanks' Disney is the successful businessman version of her father--even to the point of having a secret vice.  Instead of drinking himself to death, Disney smokes in private, not wanting to tarnish his public image but laying the groundwork for his death from lung cancer a few years later. 

But the parallels don't stop there, for Travers herself is a version of her father, as well as of the fictional counterpart she created for him, Mr. Banks.  In fact, she's really more Mr. Banks than her father is, for she's the one who needs "saving."  Prim, prickly, and patronizing, as resistant to Disney's brand of fantasy as to the fun of creation collaboration as Mr. Banks is to the charm of his children and Mary Poppins' magic, Travers undergoes a character make-over as crucial to the plot as the flinty banker's is to Mary Poppins. When she finally becomes engaged in the work on that movie, her frosty personality begins to thaw a bit.  This is illustrated by the warm relationship she develops with her studio driver, Ralph (Paul Giamatti), a sweet-natured family man who gushes her worship of "Mr. Disney."  Listening to Ralph talk adoringly about his handicapped daughter, Travers is drawn toward a feeling of familial love (and unconditional acceptance?) she hasn't experienced since childhood.  It's certainly significant  that it is while riding with Ralph that Travers comments on the beauty of the Southern California landscape, evoking another memory from her childhood in the similar looking Australian countryside. 

At the center of this hall of mirrors, and reflected in every one, is the mythic figure of Walt Disney himself.  Fittingly, Saving Mr. Banks saves its nimblest form of salvation for him.  Revered by earlier generations, Disney's reputation has taken a beating since his death in 1966, two years after Mary Poppins premiered.  Persistent rumors of anti-Semitism and racism, his cooperation with the House Un-American Activities Committee during the Communist witch hunt in Hollywood in the 1950s, and the bizarre (and long since discredited) story about  his body being cryonically frozen for future revival have made him seem less than the saintly, avuncular figure he tried so hard to be during his lifetime.  Reintroducing him to contemporary audiences as a character in one of his own studio’s movies is a clever way reverse that course—but reanimating him as Tom Hanks, America’s Mr. Nice Guy, is an ingenious bit of image restoration worthy of the Old Master himself.  

Not that Hanks’ portrayal is a whitewash.  Too sly an actor for that, he makes sure we remain aware of his earlier screen persona, the cool smart-aleck with the tongue-in-cheek charm, which still lurks beneath the surface of his more heroic characters.  Hanks’ Disney is no idealistic dreamer, he just loves to talk like one, but continued success seems to have merged sales pitch and self-image in his head: he acts less frustrated by Travers’ refusal to compromise on her story than upset by her ability to resist his appeal.  Cautious and doggedly courteous, the Great Man’s patience burns away like a slow fuse (or one of his concealed cigarettes) faced with Travers’ stubbornness.  Hanks’ clever, and wisely understated, performance offers an amusing but admirably restrained portrait of this consummate showman who expects his celebrated place in American popular culture to get him what he wants, and isn’t quite prepared for when it doesn’t. 

But this love letter from Disney’s World to itself is ultimately not about the man but the vision that gave the world a celebrated film, which might make it seem above question.  (The one who initially does question it,  Travers herself, has all her objections and misgivings brushed away.)  From a construction point-of-view, it’s appropriate that a film showcasing the glories of the studio’s past fashions its plot around the past of the main character.  It’s as if the movie is saying, just by looking into the past we will find the truth.  But uncovering the truth is never a simple task, which, ironically, the film also demonstrates because it’s not a straightforward biography but a complex psychological mystery, a riddle about identity and the interdependence of memory and fact--a problematic relationship at best. 

Whether or not such ambiguity was the studio's intention when they green-lighted this project, it's what has resulted, and this inevitably has implications for the story Disney is telling about itself.  Any account of an historical event obfuscates as much if not more than it reveals.  Telling the "story behind the story" just places another story in front of the original one.  It peels nothing back--it adds another layer separating us from the truth.  On top of which, the story of Saving Mr. Banks is revealed partially in flashbacks, which form another level of story-telling inside.  The premise of film is that this inner story functions as its core of "truth"--the key to the enigma of P. L. Travers' personality and the origin of Mary Poppins.  Only It happens to also be fiction, a self--embellished version of the author's childhood.  Perhaps the filmmakers were unaware of this, but it doesn't matter.  Disney may have told Travers' beloved story his way--but she's having the final say.

Nebraska

Nebraska, Alexander Payne’s latest film set in his home state, is the best one so far.  It tells the story of Woody Grant, an aging ne’er-do-well who becomes convinced he’s won a million dollars in a mail-order Sweepstakes contest.  Despite his family’s attempts to convince him otherwise, he insists on making the trip from his home in Billings, Montana, to Lincoln, Nebraska, headquarters of the company that sent him the “winning” letter.  Too old to drive himself, he enlists his youngest son,  David (Will Forte), who reluctantly agrees to take him at least part of the way in the hope his father will come to his senses long before they get to Lincoln.

Midway, they stop in the small Nebraska town of Hawthorne, where Woody grew up and where his surviving brothers and their families still live.  It’s not an entirely happy reunion because Woody’s lifelong alcoholism and wayward behavior as a young man had strained relations between them even before he moved away.  But nevertheless the family gathers to celebrate Woody’s good fortune, to the increasing exasperation of David, who is still trying to convince his father he hasn’t really won anything.  Despite his efforts to keep the story from spreading further, word that Woody is a millionaire quickly gets around town, and old friends and acquaintances come out of the woodwork to congratulate him, in particular his old business partner (Stacy Keach), who has a very personal reason for doing so.

Spare and laconic in style, much like the people it depicts, Nebraska might strike one at first as a short story stretched beyond its limits.  But the slightness of the premise is deceptive—Nebraska is more ambitious than it first appears, just as the seemingly one-dimensional lives of its characters are more complicated and nuanced than we might expect.  As a comedy-drama about the Midwest, Nebraska indulges in its share of easy jokes about the boredom of small town life among its conversation-challenged inhabitants.  But as much enjoyment as the film gets from  stereotypes of taciturn family gatherings and old-timers hunkered over bottomless glasses of beer at the local tavern, it’s also part of Payne’s purpose to upend those patronizing images and expose the complex humanity beneath them.  

When Woody’s wife Kate (a hilariously cranky and profane June Squibb) and elder son Ross (Bob Odenkirk) join the clan in Hawthorne, the stage is set for the airing of grievances and pent-up emotions that’s been a lifetime in coming.  The consequences of Woody’s hard drinking, financial irresponsibility, and indifferent parenting rise to the surface in a series of scenes remarkable for the easy way they sustain a natural sense of humor through the moments of greatest tension.  Bob Nelson‘s script walks a tightrope between these competing moods to perfection, and the results are gentler and sweeter than most family-showdown dramas. 

Payne’s look at the Midwestern landscape is pretty affectionate overall, so it’s interesting that he chose to shoot his film in black and white.  Filmmakers often eliminate color from the image to represent dreariness or sterility, and certainly Woody’s world must appear colorless to him much of the time, drained of hope by age, and by sorrow.  But cinematographer  Phedon Papamichael‘s subdued compositions, while occasionally stark in outline, are never bleak in expression.  The camera‘s lingering gaze at empty fields and idle main streets never conveys Nothingness—on the contrary, the richness of detail and subtle play of light and shade that are uncovered hint at a variegated experience often missing from portrayals of rural and small town life.  

“Black and white” is a misnomer, anyway, failing to take into account the infinite range of grays between those two extremes.  Nebraska is a film of extremes only at first glance.  In black and white, the world can appear at its harshest and least forgiving, but it also can yield up form and pattern often obscured by the distractions of a brighter palette.  Most significantly, the lack of external color focuses our awareness on the film’s interiority.  Nebraska contains little action--the drama is mainly inside the characters, most of whom have never learned to verbalize their internal conflicts and desires very clearly.   Stripped of color, the film's sparse exteriors become transparent to the dimensions of feeling and complicated understanding hidden behind their ordinariness.
 

The black-and-white look also brings Bruce Dern full circle, back to the beginning of his career.  A dependably nasty presence in TV shows and low-budget movies of the early 1960s, Dern haunts many Baby Boomers’ b & w nightmares.  Here his unkempt appearance and surly behavior hark back to his early screen persona as bad guy and ultimate creep.  A later attempt to move into leading-man roles failed, and Dern’s career has been on Hollywood’s back burner for the past two decades.  Now something of a cult figure, Dern turns Woody into the very definition of a comeback role.  He doesn’t do anything particularly extraordinary—he’s always been this good—but his focus on defining his character is so intense it gives the leisurely, episodic narrative an almost relentless drive.   Other geezer-on-a-life-defining-odyssey films are usually more relaxed and folksy—think The Straight Story or Harry and Tonto.   But Nebraska burns with the fuel of Dern’s whole career behind it, and the film’s weird nostalgia owes as much to the actor’s bruised reputation as it does to the ups and downs of Woody’s own life--and probably more.  With his face as furrowed as the landscape around him, his unbrushed mane of white hair standing goofily on end, Dern often looks like a tree bent sideways in the wind.  He and Woody remain standing at film’s end, though.  For both of them, Nebraska is a successful journey home.

The Great Gatsby

The Great Gatsby

 

Finally, a Gatsby that gets it.  Film adaptations of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s venerable novel have a history of falling embarrassingly wide of the mark.  I’ve seen three before Baz Luhrman’s recent version: an undistinguished 1949 release with Alan Ladd badly miscast as Gatsby, the infamous 1974 flop with Robert Redford and Mia Farrow (both miscast, Farrow very badly), and a rather good TV version from 2000 with Mia Sorvino quite engaging as Daisy but Toby Stephens so reserved as Gatsby that, like the shy millionaire avoiding one of his own parties, he hardly makes his presence known. 

 

It’s crucial that Gatsby be cast well because character is paramount to the story—it’s the combustible interaction of personalities that drives the book, not a rip-roaring plot.  The story is simple, the people complex--and elusive, given that they are presented to us through the haunted memory of narrator Nick Carraway, whose brief friendship with Gatsby forms the heart of Fitzgerald’s tragic story.  It’s his version of events and people that we are supposed to see, not easily captured in a third-person medium like film.  In the novel, Nick’s finely contoured portraits of his friends are woven into a blistering satire of New York society at the height of the Roaring ‘20s, the infamous decade of reckless economic growth and even more reckless personal behavior.  Doing justice to Fitzgerald’s complex and unique vision is a challenge only someone of Gatsby-size optimism should take on.

 

Baz Luhrman (who co-wrote the script with Craig Pearce) doesn’t hesitate to dream big with his film projects.  The director of Moulin Rouge and Australia loves expressing himself through size and spectacle, and Gatsby gives him plenty of opportunities for both.  The novel lends itself easily to epic treatment because its legendary era is filled with gangsters, millionaires, flappers, and orgiastic parties, all driven by a spendthrift economy that ends in a spectacular Crash, the influence of which is still being felt today.  Hollywood has expended a lot of energy over the years--inventing whole genres even—to glamorize the easy wealth, bootleg booze, and no-holds-barred sex of the Roaring ‘20s.  A world spinning drunkenly out of control is strangely compelling, and temptingly photogenic.

 

Reportedly based on an earlier, darker draft of the novel than the one published in 1922, the film follows the coming-of-age story of Nick Carraway (Tobey Maguire), a young man from the Midwest trying to make his fortune as a bonds salesman in New York City.  Experiencing independence for the first time, Nick is captivated by the energy and excitement he sees all around him, particularly at the neighboring mansion of enigmatic millionaire Jay Gatsby (Leonardo DiCaprio), who throws lavish parties that everyone comes to but whom no one seems to know.  When they finally meet, Nick is fascinated by Gatsby’s earnest but seemingly innocent nature and quickly becomes his confidante and friend.  Gatsby longs to meet Nick’s cousin, the beautiful and capricious Daisy (Carey Mulligan), wife of polo-playing aristocrat Tom Buchanan (Joel Edgerton).  The tea that Nick arranges to bring them together turns into a tryst of sorts, for Gatsby and Daisy already know each other.  They met and fell in love years before during the war but were separated when Gatsby was shipped overseas.  Afterwards, Daisy married Tom, a society match, and the memory of Gatsby faded.  But Gatsby never forgot Daisy, and he plans now to rekindle their romance and win her back, fulfilling a dream that has sustained him through the intervening years.  Unhappily married to a philandering, hard-drinking husband, Daisy succumbs to his persistence and his charm and seems for a time to share his dream.  

 

It is short-lived.  Tom learns of the affair and digs into Gatsby’s past, uncovering the unsavory facts behind his fabulous wealth.  Gatsby’s business partners are known gamblers and bootleggers, and possibly stock swindlers.  His money is dirty, his gilded image a lie, a front for the criminal activity that underscores the money-making madness of the age.  A party in a New York hotel room turns ugly when Tom confronts Gatsby in front of Daisy, and Gatsby reacts violently.  As he and a shaken Daisy drive home, they are involved in a hit-and-run accident that kills Myrtle Wilson (Isla Fisher ), the wife of a roadside gas station owner (Jason Clarke).  Unknown to them both, the woman is Tom’s mistress, and when he learns whose car killed his lover, he tells the grief-stricken husband Gatsby’s name.  Betrayal and tragedy follow in a seemingly inexorable course of events, leaving Nick emotionally broken and disillusioned with his friends and the world around him.  He winds up in a sanatorium, recovering from alcoholism and depression, trying to piece both his story and his life back together, searching for a meaning that will give him the resolve to go on.

 

Despite his affinity for spectacle, Luhrman’s is the first film version of the novel to successfully engage the intimate dimension of its story-- the changeable inner lives of the characters and the intricate dynamics of their relationships.  It’s also the first to capture the book’s lyricism, the poetry of Fitzgerald’s language.  Gatsby is a very writerly novel, self-consciously eloquent in its analysis of events and characters and its meditation on the contradictions of the American experience.   Nick’s by turns rhapsodic and sardonic portrait of the world of wealth and class privilege in the America of the 1920s is a requiem to human folly and shattered ideals.  Fitzgerald’s highly colored prose sings and stings by turns, and Luhrman’s film, alternately extroverted and introspective, deftly translates both qualities into cinematic form.

 

The sanatorium is an invention—it does not appear in the published version of the book—but an inspired one.   Nick’s doctor suggests that Nick purge his inner demons by writing about them.  The narration of the film becomes the writing of the novel and Fitzgerald’s authorship is recast as Nick’s in seamless self-referentiality.  The implications are far-reaching.  What begins as a conventional framing device--the flashback structure--changes into something subtler, more evanescent: the act of impressing memory on film.  All that is “unfilmable”—memory, consciousness, writing--is woven into the visual fabric of the movie.  As images dissolve into one another, and Nick’s voice-over quietly pronounces some of Fitzgerald’s most celebrated sentences, fragments of them flash across the screen in handwritten form, as if appearing just as the author thinks and records them.  In those moments of literary unfolding, image and sound combine to create a complex and fluid subjectivity:  screen, page, and the author’s mind meld together, illuminated by the same ephemeral light.

 

In this inventive way, Luhrman’s film puts the book on display and within the spectator’s grasp without sacrificing its cinematic essence.  The “interiority” is wrapped in a dazzling exterior, a fantasmagoric background of near-Expressionistic set and costume design.  Luhrman is in full Moulin Rouge mode during the gaudy party scenes, highly choreographed set pieces that pour on the glam and pulse to the beat of rapper Jay Z’s modern take on the exuberance and abandon of 20s-style ragtime and jazz.  Contemporizing the music is one of Gatsby’s riskiest and most controversial choices, but it makes a fascinating kind of sense.  Rap shares outlaw status with the jazz of the 1920s, the aggressive infusion of black culture into white society.  The two cultures both revel in hedonistic lifestyles devoted to displaying the material trappings of success, the conspicuous consumption that makes bling-crazy “cribs” contemporaneous in spirit to Gatsby’s glittering mansion.  No mere reproduction, however imaginative, of crowds of jazz babies wildly dancing the Charleston would have the same impact or convey the brash and rebellious style of an anarchic party scene the way Luhrman’s anachronistic musical numbers do.  It would more than likely appear quaint and amusing instead of shocking to the sensibilities and sense of propriety that Gatsby’s riotous parties were to his guests from the staid world outside.  We are presented with a modern-day equivalent of that shock: convention is defied, expectations violated by the inappropriateness of a rap beat and nouveau Broadway glitz in the context of an era long past.  Ingeniously, the film allows the viewer to live through something of Nick’s experience, feeling the surprise and discomfort of his disorientation in a world whose rules are so different than the ones he’s used to and expected.

 

Gatsby is not, after all, a documentary but a stylized rendering of the past as it appears in a work of fiction.  Luhrman’s use of exaggeration and excess intensifies our experience of the story’s literariness as well as its cinematic-ness.  Crowd-pleasing thrills like 3D aside, Gatsby ensconces the viewer in a visual hyper-reality not just to make the haunts of the rich sumptuous looking but to capture the colorful, at times hallucinatory aspect of the book’s prose.  That prose’s written-ness is given its corollary in the film’s visual overabundance.   Luhrman takes the book’s famous images—the powdery gray landscape of the Valley of Ashes, the weathered billboard with the giant eyes inside a pair of glasses, the green dock light marking the end of Daisy’s property—and renders them as dream-like as Fitzgerald’s descriptions by showing them over and over from varying angles and distances and in different contexts, pushing them past literary symbols into the immediate experience of Fitzgerald’s vision: a world blind to its contradictions and verging on madness.

 

That madness finds its way into Gatsby’s driven and misguided character, and no film version before this one has seriously looked at the disordered soul inside his perfectly groomed and tailored figure.  Ladd and Redford were stoic, stalwart men of the world, too sane in manner to hint at either the naïve idealism or the emotional instability behind Gatsby’s impossible dream.  Thankfully, Luhrman and Di Caprio choose differently and give us—at long last--a complicated Gatsby.  A career of playing troubled youths and powerful but insecure men such as Howard Hughes and J. Edgar Hoover provides DiCaprio with an extraordinary resume for the part.  He perfectly embodies both sides of Gatsby’s charisma--the easy charm and GQ-style cool, and the aching vulnerability behind their protective wall.  More important, he makes the erosion of Gatsby’s confidence and composure more than just a lover’s disappointed hopes, but a slow-motion fall from grace.  Gatsby’s film fate is finally depicted as the tragedy Nick has all along been telling us it is.  Beyond his incisive words is the screen evidence of DiCaprio’s impassioned performance, which makes us feel at once both the elation Gatsby feels at the heights he attains and his heart-rending bewilderment and emotional collapse upon discovering their illusory nature.

 

When Nick first encounters his cousin Daisy in the novel, he writes “[she] began to ask me questions in her low, thrilling voice.  It was the kind of voice that the ear follows up and down, as if each speech is an arrangement of notes that will never be played again.  Her face was sad and lovely with bright things in it, bright eyes and a bright passionate mouth, but there was an excitement in her voice that men who had cared for her found difficult to forget; a singing compulsion, a whispered "Listen," a promise that she had done gay, exciting things just a while since and that there were gay, exciting things hovering in the next hour.”  It would be hard for any actress to live up to that description, but it’s nice to see someone finally try.  Carey Mulligan’s winsome appeal falls a bit short of thrilling, but it does promise much.  Petite and pretty, she deftly provides many of the right grace notes for Daisy—lively and languid by turns, capricious, flirty, fragile--but somehow never captures her character’s most essential quality, her irresistibleness. Why would Gatsby sacrifice everything for her?  She’s an ideal but an ideal with flesh and blood behind it--Daisy has sex appeal, she promises “gay, exciting things.”  Mulligan is dressed for allure but never exudes it—she never asserts herself and takes command of the screen the way Daisy commands the attention of her admirers.  Much of the blame lies with Luhrman, who displays a rare timidity with regard to his film’s heroine.  He lovingly places Mulligan in the frame but never hands it over to her—he keeps her a shade to the side, an eye-catching but still subordinate part of the décor.  (In the scene where she and Gatsby are reunited, where she should absolutely shine, she is visually smothered by the flowers he’s comically overfilled the room with—playing straight man to a gag.)  The result is often lovely, but inconclusive—once again Daisy remains maddeningly out of reach, her promise unfulfilled. 

 

Good support is offered by a number of others, despite some slight casting miscues.   Tobey Maguire gives an earnest performance as Nick, although he’s too callow for the part, especially when contrasted to an overly vampish Elizabeth Debicki as his potential love interest, professional golfer Jordan Baker.   The film wisely downplays the romance Fitzgerald imagined for their two characters in favor of a more plausible friendship.   The biggest surprise of the movie is Joel Edgerton’s canny turn as the loutish Tom.  Brusque, humorless, and speaking in monotone for the first two thirds of the film, Edgerton’s performance dramatically shifts gears once Tom realizes Daisy has fallen for Gatsby.  His fierce and unexpectedly cunning response to this crisis in his home galvanizes the final part of the movie.  The scene in which he and Gatsby have it out in front of Daisy and the others blisters with tension.   No stock jealous husband bellowing his outrage, Edgerton’s Tom boldly takes the moral high ground with a conviction that’s hard to fault.  Gatsby and Daisy are stunned, and the viewer most likely is, too.  Like Tom, who appeared to have ceded his marriage to his rival, Edgerton has been holding back: suddenly the dramatic center of the film, he doesn’t just accept the spotlight, he yanks it away from the film’s better known stars.  

 

It’s an unlooked-for coup, and brilliantly illustrates another facet of the ingenuity which Luhrman and his creative team have adaptrf this book that, despite its 90 years, still feels very modern.   Not content just to dramatize the events of the story, they try to duplicate them in the viewer’s emotional experience.   We have not been prepared for the revelation of Tom’s other side—nothing in Edgerton’s performance has hinted at its existence up to this point.  As a consequence, we are forced to experience, along with Gatsby and the others, the shock of its sudden appearance and its devastating impact: Gatsby’s romantic status is diminished, Daisy’s connection to him strained, and the plot is sent spinning in another direction entirely.  For the audience, the surprise is compounded by a violent redirection of their identification from Gatsby to the heretofore unsympathetic Tom.  These twin disorientations, narrative and psychological, reflect and reinforce each other in powerful fashion.  We can’t help but feel Gatsby’s dismay--momentarily it’s ours, too.

 

That sense of dismay lies at the heart of why Gatsby still matters—dreams falling short of their promise remains a profoundly human tragedy, universally meaningful to us.  In both personal and cultural terms,  Gatsby presents the inversion of an archetype, a reverse fairy tale, an anti-myth: the hero fails not only to complete his quest but even to understand what it is to begin with.  From the outset, its object is an illusion, a fiction--his imagined heroine was never in need of rescue, his goal always unattainable because it was never necessary. 

 

Gatsby also marks a particular moment in the souring of the American Dream, a theme always timely to a people whose history depends on the continued belief in the promise of that Dream, despite innumerable disappointments and betrayals.  Ironically, the moment of disenchantment Gatsby depicts is overshadowed by the mythology of its historical era, an era so romanticized for its excitement and energy and brazen expression of individualism that its most lawless figures are among its most celebrated.  Gatsby both capitalized on and helped perpetuate this mythology, and much of the book’s continuing fascination for us has to do with the popular culture that developed around it--and which has now produced another telling of its story. 

 

The Great Gatsby is, ultimately, a quintessentially American story, and it keeps coming back to us because the stories that belong to us as a nation and a people always do.  Perhaps the next time the story will end the way we want it to, its promise fully realized at last.  Luhrman’s achievement renews one’s hope in that possibility.  Yes, his Gatsby is all right at the end.  Thank goodness the project was given the green light.

 

 

 

Thor

Here's something worth thinking about: if you could be any movie superhero, which one would you choose? Would you like to have actual super powers, such as Superman (alien living on earth), the X-Men (genetic mutation), or Spiderman (radioactivity, spider)? Or would you prefer to remain completely human and be aided by science and technology, like Batman or Iron Man? There's a third alternative, too--superherodom by way of being a god. The world's religions are filled with interesting deities, and the movies have a comfortable history with a few of them. Jesus has been a star of the screen since the silent era. Greek gods and goddesses have kept busy in supporting roles over the years (Jason and the Argonauts, Clash of the Titans). But for the rest of the almighty spirits out there, cinematic work has been hard to find--at least in Hollywood. Good news for them all, therefore, that Thor, the first of the summer's intended blockbusters, is a blockbuster.

Based on another of Marvel Comics' seemingly endless line of costumed crimefighters, Thor is the latest to make a splashy big screen debut in theaters (following closely on his heels, Captain America is set for a July release). Although we officially honor this god every Thursday, he really isn't very familiar to American viewers. A few Norse gods have had illustrious careers on the world's opera stages, thanks to Richard Wagner, but the God of Thunder makes only a brief appearance in The Ring of the Nibelung, and under a different name at that. Fortunately, Stan Lee and his associates at Marvel saw something Wagner didn't, and beginning in 1962 signed him to a long-term contract.

The story, according to the Gospel of Marvel Comics, tells of Thor (Chris Hemsworth), prince of Asgard--heavenly stronghold of the gods--and heir to the throne of his father, Odin (who else but Anthony Hopkins?). Thor is handsome and strong, but incredibly rash, a source of worry to his aged father, who is nearing the end of his life but hesitates to hand over power to his reckless son. To safeguard the cosmos, Odin must be sure that after his death peace will continue between the gods and their mortal enemies, the inhabitants of Bifrost, a forbidding world of ice and perpetual darkness. The malevolent Bifrostians are monstrous ice-men bent on destroying the gods and turning the entire universe into the same kind of frozen wasteland they inhabit, but they're held in check by Odin's authority. It's an uneasy truce, however, and when Thor defies his father and leads a raid on Bifrost, it threatens to result in all-out war. To preserve order in the universe, therefore, Odin banishes his beloved son to earth, where he loses his supernatural powers. Confused and heartbroken, Thor must adapt to a strange new world and learn to accept his fate.

Fortunately, he meets a girl--no less a one than beautiful astrophysicist Jane Foster (Natalie Portman), leader of a team studying the heavens in a remote part of New Mexico where Thor falls to earth, and literally into her life. Disoriented and raging like the angry god he is, Thor doesn't try to make friends with his rescuers, but Jane likes him anyway. Something about his tousled blond hair, granite jaw, and steely blue eyes, quite possibly. He may be mad, babbling about his powers and saying quaint things like "What realm is this?", but he's different, and brilliant but boyfriend-challenged Jane can't resist wondering if he holds the key to many things in her life, including her understanding of the universe (it involves space-time configurations called wormholes--more about them later). Her research partner and surrogate father, Erik (Stellan Skarsgard), warns her that Thor could be dangerous, but even so he helps him escape the police and find a mysterious crater in the desert that's crawling with operatives of a shadowy government agency called S.H.I.E.L.D. (Fans of the Marvel series have already encountered this agency in Iron Man and The Incredible Hulk.) They are investigating something that fell to earth around the same time Thor did--the great hammer of Odin, Mjollnir, Thor's weapon in his glory days in Asgard. Odin cast it out after him, perhaps to serve as a reminder of all he's lost. Now it lies partially buried in rock, where it resists the efforts of all who try to remove it. Thor is confident that once he holds the weapon in his hand again, he will regain his powers. But he also fails to free the hammer, and the realization that he is now a mere mortal nearly breaks his spirit.

To parallel Thor's suffering, events in Asgard take a serious turn for the worse. Banishing his favored son is too much for Odin's failing strength, and he falls into a coma, leaving a power vacuum around the throne. Filling it is Thor's half-brother Loki, an enigmatic figure whose true nature is only gradually revealed during the course of the film. While it should come as no surprise that Loki covets the kingship once meant for his older brother, the why and the how of it make the film's web of intrigue genuinely intriguing. Loki is no black-hearted villain but a frustrated younger son living in the shadow of a more popular sibling, one whose arrogance and irresponsible nature make him less qualified for the throne than Loki knows himself to be. His ambition grows from a tragic seed of justified grievance, watered with the poison of envy. But this is melodrama, not Shakespeare, and before too much plot goes by, Loki is doing and saying everything a superhero's nemesis ought to--we watch his soul grow dark in front of us. It's a predictable change, of course, but Tom Hiddleston's fine, shaded performance as Loki makes his inevitable transformation into baddie arresting enough to become the movie's most potent dramatic arc. Loki is not the first supervillain to usurp the hero's place in his own film.

The storyline is fleshed out with the expected elements: a love story, heroic sidekicks, a final showdown between hero and villain, and the promise of a sequel. It's the superhero action formula we've grown accustomed to, and obviously like, given the continued success of these movies. Thor doesn't vary it much, but a spirited tone, imaginative imagery, and appealing performances make it seem refreshing despite the familiarity. Hemsworth has the muscle tone of a displaced god, if not quite the awe-inspiring presence, but under Kenneth Branagh's attentive direction, he makes that presence felt when it counts, particularly during the energetic climax. Even better, Hemsworth's Thor, while appropriately humbled by his ordeal, retains just enough pride at the end to suggest that arrogance tempered with wisdom is the quality not just of a god but of a great leader. Portman--still decompressing from Black Swan, perhaps--gets to display her sense of humor as the smitten scientist, a welcome tonic to the implausibility of her character's romance with an ancient deity. "Awkward" and "nerdy" are not adjectives one usually associates with the chic actress, and fortunately Branagh doesn't ask her to push Jane too far in that direction, or the results would be harder to believe than Viking warriors walking down a 21st century street. But she gives Jane enough of those qualities to lend credence to her confusion around a hunky male, as well as a touch of sweetness to the growth of her shy attraction into love.

It must have been tempting for director Branagh to view this film chiefly through the wide angle lens of epic--Homeric, Shakespearian, Wagnerian, George Lucasian. It's filled with themes that epics love: good vs. evil, brother against brother, the intermingling of divine and mortal worlds, love crossing the barriers of space and time. The New Testament contributes a father god sending his son to earth in mortal form (perhaps Odin knows all along Thor will be humanity's salvation). Even Arthurian legend makes a cameo--the hammer in the rock that can't be moved until the Right One tries is a chivalrous nod to the Sword in the Stone.

But these aspirations to epic are wisely kept under control. Branagh's resume is rife with overblown versions of classics such as Hamlet and Frankenstein, so it's something of a marvel he's able to exercise restraint at the helm of this muscular hero tale. Much credit goes to the even-tempered screenplay by Ashley Miller, Zack Stentz, and Don Payne. Despite an angst-ridden background filled with family conflict and betrayal, there's a loose, often playful feel to the script, which packs a lot of material into 115 minutes so economically the film never feels crowded. Branagh's straightforward, uncluttered direction perfectly complements the writers' thrift, guiding the dual storylines at an animated but never hurried pace, and keeping things in sensible perspective: no scene is overdone, no moment overstuffed with emotion. As a consequence, the movement to the movie's climax feels effortless, which gives it a greater impact than a noisier, more deliberate build-up would have. Like the best of the recent spate of superhero flicks, Thor is a comic book made by and for adults.

The movie's knowledge of classical literature is matched by its skill in mixing film genres. Genre and myth are closely related anyway, but superhero movies bring them even closer together by merging the archetypal stoies of myth with the iconography of popular culture. When filmmakers display a command of both the cinematic geneology and the cultural roots of their pop stories, as they do in Thor, the combination strikes sparks. Thor's master plan is ambitious, crossing adventure epic with science fiction and fantasy--the hero's journey takes him across time and space, from 900 A.D. Asgard to the present-day American Southwest. The aforementioned wormholes allow Thor and his friends to travel almost instantly between two epochs and two distant corners of the universe, but this quasi-scientific explanation is given a mythological correlative in the film's most spectacular creation, the dazzling Rainbow Bridge of Asgard, which according to legend connects the gods to the far reaches of the cosmos--as well as ancient religious beliefs to contemporary scientific inquiry.

Just as successfully, Thor bridges the gap between action spectacle and intimate drama. Relationships are central to the dynamics of the story, not incidental, and the care with which the film treats the domestic and romantic entanglements of the characters makes their actions emotionally credible, despite their comic book origins. The warfare between the kingdoms of Asgard and Bifrost has epic scope but is viewed through the prism of family drama, lending it a touch of Greek tragedy. If this association seems a bit high-toned for action fare, the film earns it--it's not forced on us in any self-congratulatory kind of way, but rises unpretentiously from the logic of the story.

Though Thor is clearly not the type of male who enjoys bantering with the opposite sex, the film's romantic angle has enough deft touches to recall classic Hollywood romanti-comedy as well. This lifts the movie's spirits considerably. Portman plays the game nicely, as noted before, and when Thor finally tumbles to Jane's attraction to him, Hemsworth seems to be flexing his muscles a bit more self-consciously. But there's another model behind their mismatched courtship, a more deeply embedded narrative--the romance between two people of unequal class backgrounds, in this case between a wealthy or well-bred lady and an unsophisticated working man. The love-across-class-lines formula pops up everywhere: in classic romanti-comedies such as It Happened One Night (1934), westerns like The Virginian (1931) or My Darling Clementine (1946), even thrillers (Alfred Hitchcock's 1953 masterpiece, Rear Window). Tennessee Williams memorably enshrined it in the lethal flirtation between Blanche Du Bois and Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire. And Disney did it with dogs in The Lady and the Tramp (1955).

Thor borrows most heavily from one of the more unlikely tales in this collection: Tarzan. Like the legendary hero of the jungle, Thor is a Natural Man, an unspoiled alpha male from a "less civilized" world, whose unpolished manners and elementary outlook are in stark contrast to those of his more refined and articulate mate--who, interestingly enough, is also named Jane. The cult figure of Tarzan is a potent nexus of popular culture and classical mythology, as well as a movie franchise that is practically its own genre. In a way, nothing better reflects how mythology is created for consumption in America, which absorbs hero tales from all cultures and turns them into easily digestible cine-fables, stamped with the American brand, that are fed continuously to the world's entertainment markets.

We have the industrial and cultural machinery to do this, of course. The "Hollywood" film is a recognized commodity worldwide, and an important part of it right now is the Marvel brand with its successful product line of superhero sagas. Thor is just the latest to make the hero's journey to the heights of popular mythology by way of cinematic fame. And the latest, and of course not the last, to reflect the underlying irony of these resurrected hero tales. No simple throwbacks or odes to nostalgia, they are instead somewhat uneasy explorations of what we're nostalgic for. Good still battles evil, as of old, but now the struggle takes place in the ambiguous moral landscape shaped by our modern sensibility, which renders every outcome--and its meaning--a little less certain than it once seemed to be.