Men and Women at War: The Hurt Locker and Inglourious Basterds

I like war films. I might as well admit that right off. I find combat represented on the screen compelling to watch, and I don't suppose I'm alone, which is why the war film has been around so long. I saw two interesting war films this summer, very different from one another, but both fascinating in their own ways. Below I've tried to discuss their similarities and differences, and speculate on what the war film might have to say to us all.


MEN AND WOMEN AT WAR

The war film—what is it good for? The human planet seems to live in a perpetual state of aggression, so if war is around constantly it’s no surprise that stories about it follow closely behind. I won’t speculate on whether war is the natural state of the species or learned social behavior, but the war film, as a product of popular culture, is most definitely learned--learned, preserved, and passed down from one generation to the next by the rules of genre. This past summer saw the release of two war films so different from one another in every way that taken together they provide a course of instruction on how flexible those genre rules are, and how rich a field for character development and narrative invention the war film can be.

Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker was released in June to critical acclaim, most of it deserved. An austere character study set in contemporary Iraq, her film focuses on Sgt. William James (Jeremy Renner), leader of an elite bomb disposal squad who likes his job a little too much. James takes over the unit after the well-liked former leader is killed, and he immediately begins to alienate his new crew (Anthony Mackie and Brian Geraghty) by taking unnecessary risks and acting impulsively instead of doing things by the book. On his first assignment, he rashly removes his protective gear (a concussion suit that makes him look like a deep sea diver), as his two subordinates watch in horror. Though it ultimately serves his purpose--the bulky suit impedes his efforts at disarming a complex car bomb--his actions place not only himself but his teammates at risk, since they do not know how to react to the unorthodox situation he creates. Afterward, they express their displeasure, but James is unimpressed. His entire attitude says, “I do things my way, get used to it.” But how can his men rely on a leader who seems indifferent to danger, theirs as well as his?

This conflict threads its way through Locker, an episodic film held together mainly by Renner’s quiet but forceful characterization of the unpredictable James. As each new threat presents itself, James approaches it in a way that is unexpected and personal, while his confused men try to decide if he knows what he’s doing or he’s crazy. The answer may be a bit of both, although the film gives us only a couple of tantalizing glimpses into James’s psyche. In one of them, he forms a bond with an Iraqi boy who sells bootleg dvds to soldiers. Later, in one of the film’s grisliest sequences, he and his team are called to dismantle a bomb that’s been placed inside the body of a murdered young boy, and James becomes convinced it’s the one he has befriended. Angry and seeking revenge, the normally cool James slips into occupied territory at night to discover the ones responsible. The result of his actions—reckless even by his standards—almost leads to greater tragedy.

Because the film maintains such a restricted focus, its depiction of the war is filtered almost entirely through James’ experience of it; as a consequence, the meaning of what we see depends largely on the emotional impact it has on him. But the detached and enigmatic James is never easy to read, and Renner’s understated performance deliberately keeps the viewer at a distance, guessing at what’s going on behind his squinting eyes. What is clear is that James’ fight is never one about politics or mere survival. For him, unlike the others, the disarming of bombs is a personal challenge that feeds his need for excitement: he’s hooked on the danger, addicted to the feeling of being one false move away from obliteration. Amid the chaos of battle, James pits himself against time and the ingenuity of the saboteurs, and lives for the rush that comes when he overcomes both. The outcome of the combat around him is relevant only insofar as it enables him to play and win this deadly game.

The Hurt Locker is disenchanted about its war, but it’s not exactly an anti-war film. War doesn’t seem to be the problem here; rather, it’s the personality that succumbs to the lure of its violence, the man for whom war is a drug. The reckless devotion to risk-taking is an expression of individuality that threatens the safety of his team, the social unit whose survival depends on each member performing his duty responsibly. Bigelow’s film features many of the horrors of combat, and makes effective use of the aridity and bleakness of the Iraqi war’s setting to comment metaphorically on its purpose, but lurking behind the rubble of the ruined cityscapes and countryside is a somewhat conservative message about military conduct. The war itself is never directly examined.

Every big war is made up of a lot of little wars, and The Hurt Locker takes an unflinching look at a particularly troubling one. The renegade soldier is not a new figure in the war film by any means. One could identify a whole subgenre devoted to his exploits, and certain films have given themselves over entirely to the debate surrounding individual needs vs. group rights in wartime. Because combat involves a social unit under extreme duress, maybe that is the central question of all war films, whether they explicitly address it or not. Films as different as Air Force (1943) and The War Lover (1962) consider it soberly, others like The Dirty Dozen (1967) have guilty fun with it, and still others such as Sylvester Stallone’s cartoonish Rambo films exploit it so irresponsibly they abandon the war film’s moral field of vision altogether. I do not mind violence as self-expression in action movies, but in the context of war I’m troubled by the message such abandonment to unilateral action can send. The Hurt Locker neither condones nor condemns James’ behavior, but clearly observes it with concern: this is why war might exist, it is thinking, because too many men can’t live any other way.

Which brings us to the summer’s other foray into the combat zone, writer-director Quentin Tarantino’s bizarre World War II fantasy, Inglourious Basterds. Tarantino’s films are populated with people who can’t live any other way than through violence—criminals, cops, hitmen/women, martial artists. Now he adds soldiers to their ranks. Basterds is appropriately titled: the film could be the love child of The Dirty Dozen and To Be or Not to Be (1942), Ernst Lubitsch’s famous wartime “Nazi comedy.” If you can imagine such a thing. Fortunately, you don’t have to, because that’s QT’s job, creating films of odd parentage--visually stunning, narratively daring, and frequently exasperating mélanges of differing styles and influences drawn from his favorite movies, genres, pulp novels, comic books, popular music, and maybe even breakfast cereals. His films are eclectic, to say the least. Inglourious Basterds does not break the mold.

But it damn near blows it up. Basterds features a typical Tarantino story filled with multiple plotlines and characters crossing each others’ paths in ways that seem both random and fated. The chaos is carefully orchestrated, however, around two revenge tales taking place in Occupied France. The first concerns the French side of the war. In a grim and moving prologue, a Jewish family is discovered hiding in a farmhouse and brutally executed by SS troops under the command of Col. Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz). The lone survivor is a teenage girl who runs away once the shooting starts. She runs all the way to Paris, where the film finds her a few years later operating a cinema. Now an attractive young woman, Shosanna (Melanie Laurent) catches the eye of a German private (Daniel Bruhl) who shares her interest in films. In fact, he has just finished starring in one himself, a propaganda picture based on his own wartime exploits, which have made him the darling of the Third Reich. The Reich badly needs heroes like him because the war is not going well (it is 1944, shortly after D Day), so the German High Command decides to boost morale with a gala premiere of the film in Paris. The lovestruck private insists it be held in Shosanna’s theater as a way to curry favor with her. Shosanna has so far managed to fend off his advances, and he sees this as the final maneuver in his campaign to get her into bed. It is a very big mistake.

Meanwhile, in another part of Occupied France, a group of Americans is fighting a different, but still very personal, kind of war. Lt. Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt) is in charge of the “Basterds,” a special unit of Jewish-American soldiers trained to fight commando style behind enemy lines. They have been recruited for this task specifically because of their Jewish heritage: Raine is counting on their desire for revenge against the Nazis to make them ruthless killing machines. Nicknamed the “Apache,” he demands that they not only kill as many Nazi soldiers as they can but scalp them as well. His intent is to create a reputation for his band so fearsome that its very name will strike terror into German soldiers’ hearts. To this end, the Basterds always leave one soldier alive to spread the word of their savagery and seeming invincibility. It's safe to say their strategy works: in addition to killing all his comrades, they carve a swastika into the survivor’s forehead so he will carry the mark of his Nazi past the rest of his life.

These two storylines are eventually brought together by a third: British intelligence learns that the film premiere will be attended by all the top members of the Nazi Party-- Goering, Goebbels, Bormann, even der Fuehrer himself. An opportunity to wipe out the upper echelon of Nazi power in one blow is too valuable to pass up, so they send one of their agents to Germany to lead the Basterds in an assault on the cinema. The choice of agent is wholly indicative of Tarantino’s sly sense of humor and adroit manipulation of the absurd. Lt. Archie Hicox (Michael Fassbender) is an erudite gentleman spy, but he’s also a former film critic, and for this reason is considered—by no less than Winston Churchill himself!—the perfect man to lead an attack on a movie theater. Maybe Tarantino has felt so manhandled by critics over the years he imagines they want to destroy the theaters in which his films are showing and assault his audiences. Or maybe he’s mocking the inadequacy of critics to judge the kinds of movies he’s making. Whatever the underlying joke might be, Hicox, though earnest, proves not to be the right man for the job after all. Before their plans are finalized, the Basterds are on their own in the plot to take out Hitler and his inner circle.

But they will get help nonetheless. Unknown to everyone else, Shosanna is planning a reception of her own for the Nazi elite. Consumed by the desire for revenge, she decides to burn the theater down while the audience is engrossed in watching the film. Her plan is to bar the doors from the outside to keep anyone from escaping, then ignite a stack of film reels behind the theater’s screen. The highly combustible nitrate stock will spread the fire quickly, and almost before they know what is happening to them, the Nazi audience will be immolated. But before this happens, her vengeance demands something more. She makes a short film in which she indicts the Nazis for their crimes against her people and her nation, and then informs them of the horrible fate that awaits them at her hands. Splicing this piece of film into the movie’s final reel, it provides the cue for the conflagration to begin. The revenge Shosanna seeks is both historical and personal in nature: seated in the audience alongside Hitler and company is her nemesis, Col. Hans Landa, perpetrator of her family’s murder.

This, then, is the set-up for the cataclysmic and provocative end to Tarantino’s strange and violent daydream about the Second World War. Because Tarantino likes to take risks, the denouement of his film both fulfills our expectations and shocks us by doing so. Set in an Occupied France that could exist only in one of his fever dreams, Basterds provides rather far-fetched Alternative History, taking the “What if?” exploration of its subject to an extreme at once comical and disturbing. But also emotionally fulfilling: the film is, after all, a revenge fantasy for two populations horrifically wronged by the Nazis, Jewish victims of the Holocaust and the conquered French people. These populations come together in Shosanna, the French Jewish girl, who achieves a kind of apotheosis in her final moments, her oversize image staring down from the movie screen engulfed in flames like a fiery Avenging Angel. For the Jews and French who suffered, this is a moment of long overdue, if purely cinematic, triumph.

As war films, The Hurt Locker and Inglourious Basterds are comrades in arms, but stylistically they belong to opposite camps. Locker is a study in understatement, from Renner’s internalized acting to the cinematography’s bland palette of desert tans and grays, and Bigelow’s handheld camera makes frequent forays into the streets to capture the look and feel of the Iraqi conflict with an immediacy that gives the illusion of being unplanned. By contrast, everything in Basterds is designed to show the craft at work. Photographed in rich, vibrant colors to invoke Hollywood’s bygone Technicolor era, each shot is artfully composed and framed for maximum movie effect. The complicated story veers between low black comedy and high melodrama, and the performances follow suit, ranging from the sublimely ridiculous (Pitt, superb as the macabre Raine) to the introspective and tragic (Laurent, unfortunately far too passive as Shosanna). Falling somewhere between these extremes are Fassbender’s elegant but twitty Archie Hicox, and a delightfully droll turn by Diane Kruger as a Marlene Dietrich-like German movie actress who is spying for the Allies. The film belongs, however, to Waltz as the sardonic, manipulative, ultra-polished Col. Landa, the character who bridges the two “halves” of the movie (his encounter with Raine at the doomed premiere leads to the film’s amusing and cynical coda). Landa insinuates himself into every corner of the plot, his presence signifying the fate that links all the players together, and Waltz’s charming, suave portrayal is so convincing it manages to make Landa’s detestable presence welcome.

Despite their considerable differences, the two films do share a core belief: the awareness that our fascination with violence and danger is what makes war addictive and the war film compelling to watch. And herein lies the most interesting contrast of all: whereas Locker views the addiction to violence as a threat to the group, in Basterds it’s what holds it together. The over-indulgence in violent, risk-taking behavior is the bond the Nazi-hunting soldiers share—it gives their band the cohesiveness it needs to carry out its bloody work. Tarantino’s film, like so many of his others, inhabits a mostly absurd world where institutions are faulty and corrupt and human relations destructive--it’s only the violence that makes sense. Basterds revels in its depiction of war as an irresistible opportunity to indulge the urge for destruction--war as the will to chaos. But in this contradictory world, war can also be a purifying agent, like the flames that burn away the evil of Nazi Germany during the film’s climax.

This view of war could have troubling implications, if Tarantino’s film weren’t basically smoke and mirrors. The movie-within-a-movie plot showcases the self-reflexivity Tarantino loves to tease his audiences with. Referencing other films and inventing genre pastiches remind us constantly we are watching a movie, so Tarantino is not seriously advocating war as either beneficial to the human race or a bloody good time. Not even his harshest critics would accuse him of that. But it’s worth taking a moment to consider his portrayal of World War II, which still commands respect as America’s last Good War. So what does it mean that QT has detonated a bomb right in the middle of this perception of it? The savagery and black comedy of his cloak-and-bayonet tale presents an image of the U.S. military that is closer to Dr. Strangelove (1964) than to The Longest Day (1962), Saving Private Ryan (1998), or any number of other serious-minded WWII films. The Basterds’ bloodthirsty behavior, urged on by Raine’s screwy orders, seriously taints their mission, however great the crimes they are avenging. As for the historical villains, Hitler and Goebbels, they are presented as caricatures that would fit right into Lubitsch’s To Be or Not to Be, and are perhaps just one campy gesture away from Mel Brooks’ The Producers (1968). In other words, this is not your grandfather’s Second World War.

There have been other World War II comedies, of course, but I can think of no other film that so radically alters the way the Allies’ fighting of that war is represented. In addition to the basic formula of Good vs. Evil, Tarantino gives us Crazy vs. Crazier, with your choice of which side is which. The movie cheerfully writes its own history as well, as if to say the version of the war you’ve been taught up to now is irrelevant, a fiction to be revised as easily as this film does it, or eradicated, like the make-believe architecture of a cinema palace consigned to the flames. The fire that purges history of evil can also burn away its most cherished truths.

As must be the case in all war films, the central conflicts of The Hurt Locker and Inglourious Basterds are conflicts on the world stage, and it’s the different ways they conceive of and utilize their wars in developing story and character that accounts for their divergent personalities. Locker collapses its world conflict into the psyche of one soldier, who serves as a microcosm for the relation between war and the human race. Basterds is more concerned with the internal tensions that define genre, and rewrites its particular war’s history in order to stretch the war film’s boundaries. But they meet on the common ground of one truth that can’t be rewritten: war helps define us, and for that reason each new one is, inevitably, a continuation of the last.

Appaloosa

I wrote this review back in 2008, after seeing this film in the theater. I never got around to posting it here, but I just rewatched the film on dvd and so I thought I would add it now. I would probably change a few things if I were to write it now--my second viewing leads me to believe that Allie isn't quite as mysterious to the people around her as I first thought--but for the most part, I stand by what I wrote over year ago. And, as I said in my Best Films of 2008 roundup, I still think it's the best American western since Unforgiven.


APPALOOSA

Once upon a time in the American cinema, the western was king. Between the silent era and the late 1970’s, the U.S. film industry churned out thousands of western movies, most of them toward the end of that time starring Clint Eastwood. Not so today, when fans like me have to content ourselves with maybe one or two a year, if we’re lucky. Why did the western fade away? Perhaps the very historical process that saw the West itself vanish finally caught up with the stories told about it. This may not be entirely bad. Now that the western is a rarer thing, it’s often treated with greater care and purpose. Contemporary filmmakers may be interested in reexamining, if not reinventing, the genre, or perhaps using it to say something that will appear fresh or different when spoken through its familiar form.

For instance, two recent films have pondered the role of women in American society by investigating their place in the western’s traditionally male-dominated world. Kevin Costner’s Open Range (2003) introduced a poignant subplot that examined the dilemma of spinster Annette Bening, trapped in a forlorn fronteir town with few prospects for happiness. The recently released Appaloosa, co-written, directed by, and starring Ed Harris, goes it one better by moving the heroine to the very center of the film and making her the axis around which the main story revolves. This is a remarkable thing to do in a film that looks at first like a standard though taut action movie devoted to the friendship between two lawmen, longtime partners Virgil Cole (Harris) and Everett Hitch (Viggo Mortensen). Summoned to the town of Appaloosa in New Mexico Territory to rescue it from an egotistical, power-hungry rancher aptly named Randall Bragg (Jeremy Irons), Cole and Hitch begin their assignment with an obligatory showdown in a saloon with three of Bragg’s men. A terse exchange between the unsmiling lawmen and the drunken, contemptuous cowpokes, some lightning-fast gunplay, and the three baddies lie dead, the town leaders know they’ve hired the right men for the job, and we know we’re watching a western.

Except it’s not so clear-cut after that. Just when it looks like the film has settled down to an extended battle of bullets and nerves between Bragg’s gunhands and the two cool but seriously outnumbered lawmen, the train pulls into the station and out steps the fetching Allie French (Renee Zellweger). She immediately catches the eye of both Hitch and Cole, but it’s Marshall Cole she sets her cap for, and almost before you can say “Appaloosa,” they’re setting up house together. Hitch doesn’t know what to make of the rough-and-tumble Cole’s newfound domesticity. Neither does Cole, nor do we. Allie doesn’t seem to fit anywhere into the scenario of violence and frontier justice that we thought we were going to witness.

And it’s precisely because she doesn’t fit that Appaloosa becomes a fascinating exercise in genre reconstruction. Allie introduces a strange, troubling element into the men’s world, not simply because she’s a domesticating female in an undomesticated environment but because she’s at heart undomesticated herself, uncertain of who she is or what she wants. Zellweger’s Allie defies the western’s normal duality of Woman–virgin or whore, schoolmistress or saloon gal. Dressed like a lady but with only a dollar to her name when she alights from the train, she is so out of place that a bemused Cole asks her point blank at their first meeting if she is a whore. Her answer is no, and it’s truthful as far as it goes–which is not the same as the truth.

But the disrupting influence Allie brings to town has only begun. The feud with Bragg eventually leads to his arrest, trial, and conviction for murder, but two of his hired guns kidnap Allie and force Cole to set Bragg free in exchange for her life. They flee, with her as hostage, Cole and Hitch following close behind. But as the two friends track Bragg’s small party through the desert, Allie’s status as hostage and her role in the escape become increasingly clouded by doubt in their minds, and the rescuers ultimately turn into the ones needing rescue.

As the protagonists struggle to decide what to do, and how to feel, about Allie, the film mirrors their confusion in its attempts to figure out her place in the narrative. She is the mystery at the core of a film that by all normal expectations should not have a mystery. Harris’s and Robert Knott’s intelligent screenplay bends genre rules around her to accommodate her troubling presence, her peculiar character changing from scene to scene not from inconsistency in writing but from the changing perceptions of the men about her, as well as those of the audience. Nothing is ever seen from her point-of-view, nor is the story of why and how she came to Appaloosa ever revealed—she is seen and defined only by the shifting points-of-view and attitudes of others. Allie—her name parsing into “A lie”–resides defiantly unknown and unknowable at the still center of the film’s male-storm of emotions.

The performances are uniformly excellent. Harris is wonderfully convincing as the tough, sternly professional lawman who crumbles into a giggling schoolboy upon finding unexpected love, and he and Zellweger have great chemistry, ironically, as the mismatched lovers. Zellweger’s Allie is an ingenious composition of conflicting impulses—coquettish, restless, romantic, defiant, fearful, and utterly lonely in her struggle to choose the right man to protect her, and her resentment that the world she lives in makes that choice impossible to avoid. It's an extremely touching performance. On the other side, Jeremy Irons brings an unexpected dash of effeteness to Bragg, which turns out to be appropriate for a character who, though introduced through a cold-blooded act that marks him as properly ruthless, thereafter expresses his villainy less through brutal intimidation than serpentine charm, emitting the aura of an irresistible opportunist. Since male bonding is still very much at the forefront of Appaloosa’s purpose, however, the film stands or falls on the relationship between Harris and Mortensen. Reteamed after their fine work together in 2005’s A History of Violence, they are letter perfect as violence-weary men so used to each others’ ways and moods that they communicate chiefly through looks and nearly invisible gestures. Mortensen hides his boyish looks behind a Buffalo Bill-like goatee and mustache, which only enhance the deceptively lazy manner and the wise half-smile he’s perfected over the years, the latter slyly hinting that he knows a secret both amusing and dangerous not to know.

And the last act belongs to him. Having eluded his pursuers, Bragg returns to Appaloosa to establish himself in the good graces of the townspeople he once terrorized by opening a plush hotel that brings in business. Sadly watching past associations threaten his friend’s happiness, Hitch makes a desperate decision that tests both his courage and the very friendship his act is meant to honor. Harris’s direction, lean and spare throughout, comes the closest to melodrama in these final scenes, but it’s a forgivable lapse since it’s emotionally right and manages not to disturb the delicate tone of the rueful ending.

That this film can be at once so laconic in form and so emotionally convoluted certainly owes much to its source novel’s author, crime novelist Robert B. Parker (best known for the Spenser mysteries), who also contributes the last act’s atmosphere of big-city corruption and the mysterious femme fatale at the center of events. Could Appaloosa be called a feminist western? Most likely not, but it’s a western any feminist should find interesting. Or anyone, for that matter, who appreciates movies that can look at familiar terrain with a fresh understanding of what it means. The western is one of the American cinema’s most ritualistic forms, but Harris and his crew have stretched its horizons–not outward but inward, into the emotional landscapes of its recognizable but mysterious people.

Julie and Julia

The most delightful film of the summer, Julie and Julia, takes a subject I sadly know little about (cooking) and manages to make it fascinating to me. Inspiring, even. Not that I'm going to rush to the kitchen to try any of this myself, but it's still a delight to see a film that treats cooking with this level of seriousness and passion. Any form of endeavor that becomes a means of self-expression is worthy of such treatment, of course, but American movies generally favor action over character, and cooking-as-creative expression is definitely more for the character-driven kind. This movie is in luck, then, because it has two compelling characters at its center, and two exceptional performers to bring them to life. Following last year's Doubt, in which they went head to head with powerful performances, Meryl Streep and Amy Adams now look like Hollywood's foremost tag-team of actresses. I certainly hope they work together again.


JULIE AND JULIA
　
There aren’t too many films about cooking or enjoying food—go ahead, name one—and certainly not many good ones. Ratatouille, Waitress (pies), the cooking school sequence in Billy Wilder’s Sabrina (1953) are the first that come to my mind. But there’s a new chef in town with the release of Nora Ephron’s Julie and Julia, a marvelously entertaining film about cooking, life, and the enduring legacy of one of TV’s best-loved celebrity chefs, the late Julia Child.

At just a pinch over two hours, this is a remarkably compact film, dishing up two stories side by side and developing each one fully despite cutting their screen times in half. Inspired by Julie Powell’s 2005 bestseller about the year she spent cooking her way through Child’s groundbreaking book Mastering the Art of French Cooking, the film ingeniously expands this limited subject by delving into Child’s own past and dramatizing the events which led to her writing the book that changed not only her life but the way America experienced food.

At thirty, Julie Powell (Amy Adams) is deeply dissatisfied with her life, if not exactly convinced she’s a failure. An aspiring writer with an unfinished novel tucked away in her desk drawer, she toils thanklessly for a company that settles insurance claims for the families of 9/11 victims. Numbed by the heartbreak of her job, and envious of her successful friends, Julie escapes each night into the kitchen where she for once has mastery of something. At the suggestion of her slightly bemused husband, Eric (Chris Messina), she outlines a bold project to help her take more control of her life: make all 524 recipes in Child’s cookbook in a year’s time, and write about her experiences in a blog.

Flash back to fifty years earlier, and Julia Child (Meryl Streep) is about to embark on the adventure that will define who she is. Just arrived in Paris with her diplomat husband, Paul Child (Stanley Tucci), she is enthralled by everything she sees and everyone she meets. But sightseeing, shopping, and eating out are not enough to keep the energetic Julia fully engaged, and she longs for something meaningful to do with her life. She decides that because she loves to eat French food so much, she’d like to learn how to cook it herself. So she enrolls in a prestigious cooking class—and finds her calling. Her success there is followed by an offer to join a pair of French society women in their cooking school and eventually to collaborate with them on their dream project--writing a French cookbook for Americans. The ups and downs of this history-making enterprise occupy the remainder of Child’s half of the film.

No dual-narrative movie worth its salt would fold two stories together without making them complement each other in meaningful ways. Julie/a performs this step effortlessly, comparing and contrasting events, images, and emotions from the two heroines’ lives like perfectly blended ingredients. It is Julie, of course, who imagines the deep connections between her and her fantasy mentor, whom she dreams of meeting but sadly never does (Child died in 2004). The film acknowledges these connections through its ambitious cutting scheme: jumping back and forth through time every few minutes, it broadly parallels Child’s search for the identity everyone knows with Powell’s blossoming into the person the film helps us discover. But the side-by-side progress of the two stories also highlights the important differences between the two women, sometimes humorously and sometimes poignantly.

They are definitely a study in contrasts. The zesty and adventurous Julia adores travel and embraces the exciting new world of Paris, while the less secure Julie stresses over moving from Brooklyn to Queens and beginning life in a new apartment. Child also takes her failures in stride—an amusing montage shows her trying and abandoning various pursuits, such as hat-making and bridge—whereas Powell has regular meltdowns when her cooking project does not go according to plan. And their relationships with their spouses are significantly different, too. Julia and her husband Paul adore each other, and experience no onscreen moments of rancor in what seems to be a marriage of unconditional love and support. Julie and Eric, on the other hand, are not nearly as simpatico. Although clearly in love, their union is contentious at times, due to Julie’s obsessive attention to her pursuit and Eric’s growing jealousy of it, since it seems to be replacing him in her affections.

Easily the film’s most appealing characteristic is how comfortable it is with itself. Its breezy but confident approach to storytelling allows each half to develop on its own terms, with (and around) its own personality, and it never insists on linking the two together for some higher purpose or exalted theme. And yet it’s no creampuff either. Child has her own demons--insecurity about her size and looks, hints of deep hurt at not being able to bear children--and neither half of the film ignores the world in which it takes place. The Childs served together in the O.S.S. during World War II, a fact mentioned more than once, and they are ambushed by the anti-Communist witchhunt of the 1950s. And, of course, the shadow of the fallen World Trade towers hangs over Julie Powell’s life, giving it a melancholy tone and connecting her personal edginess to the time’s deep unease.

This is a performance-rich film, but of course the movie belongs heart and soul to Meryl Streep, who has often been as good but never more engaging. Streep’s evocation of the ebullient Child is simply too wonderful for words. The vocal characterization, with its Child-like cadences and intonations, is dead on, and her body movements—the stiff-backed walk, the way she tosses her head impulsively from one side to the other when struck by a new thought--are a constant delight to watch. But more than just an expert impression, Streep captures Child’s infectious joi de vivre, overabundant enthusiasm, and conviction that every moment in the kitchen is one of both discovery and immense fun. Her performance is damn near perfect.

Adams is left with the difficult task of trying to make the less sympathetic Powell equal in dramatic weight, if not likeability. The latter is impossible, so Adams wisely explores the compulsive underside of her character’s drive to succeed, and the self-doubt that fuels her self-absorption. In her attempt to fulfill her life, Powell almost wrecks it by allowing ambition to endanger her marriage, her job, and a key friendship, but Adams’ heartfelt performance turns this often exasperating character into a winning one, and more importantly produces a sensitive portrait of a flawed but sincere woman struggling to find herself. There’s a cautionary tale tucked neatly into the pages of Powell’s cookbook for life: releasing your ego on the world in blog form is fine if you understand its limits and know how to keep it under control. Otherwise, it’s a recipe for disaster.

In support of these two divas, Stanley Tucci is a standout as the quiet, infatuated Paul, and Jane Lynch does an amusing turn as Julia’s flirtatious (and similarly sized) sister Dorothy. The weakest link is probably Messina as Eric, Julie’s underappreciated spouse. Never quite sure of his role in his wife’s blog-o-drama, Eric understandably sends contradictory messages of support and impatience, depending on his changing moods. But what determines those moods is never explained—all we learn about him is that he writes for an archaeology magazine—and Messina is so complacent about his background role that we never wonder for a moment about his character. His reactions to Julie seem based mainly on whether he feels more hungry or horny at any given moment, and it’s a shame Messina didn’t increase his efforts at either, because that at least would have made Eric more interesting.

Screenwriter-director Ephron demonstrates once again that she has mastered the dual-narrative film. In an up-and-down directorial career that has produced only eight films, the ones that stand out are all patterned on dual stories and/or parallel lives that intersect in unconventional ways. Sleepless in Seattle (1993) and You’ve Got Mail (1998) are romantic-comedies devoted to the pleasant business of bringing Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan together, either by getting them to meet (Sleepless, where they share only the final scene together) or revealing they secretly love one another (Mail, in which they’re unfriendly business rivals anonymously carrying on an internet romance). Julie/a carries the separate lives idea much further, of course, since the two lives are intertwined only in the mind of one of the characters, although the title cleverly suggests the connection is much closer and that Julie and Julia are two sides of the same personality. Which is what imaginary friends really are.

The real Julia Child learned of Powell’s project and dismissed it as “disrespectful,” but despite the hurt this causes Powell (a nicely played scene between Adams and Messina), her last spoken words in the film are “I love you, Julia.” It is a testament to her sense of connectedness to the Child she imagined as her friend and mentor, rather than the real person, and it is this identification that allows her to accept herself at last: she’s become not only the writer, but also the person, she has always wanted to be. Gazing at a portrait of Julia Child hanging in the Smithsonian as she utters these words, Powell is really looking into a mirror and finally liking what she sees. And so should we, musing perhaps over how easily a film about cooking and the love of food has revealed itself to be about how food can be the way to find love itself.

Sita Sings the Blues

I've already seen this film twice this year, the second time at the Hardacre Film Festival in Tipton, IA, the first weekend of August. I simply love it. Nina Paley, the film's creator, finds what is universal in an ancient poem, The Ramayana, and relates it effortlessly to her own life--and by extension, our lives. Apparently, it's been criticized for disrespect to Indian culture, but I think that's a pretty narrow view. To me it seems obvious that she found the core of the epic's humanity, connected to it powerfully, and wanted to make it accessible to contemporary audiences. It's a cartoon, so it's fun as well. Humor is not automatically disrespectful--this film enjoys its subject and plays with it, but never mocks it. To draw an old distinction, it isn't solemn, but it is serious--and by that I mean it's a real work of art.



SITA SINGS THE BLUES

　
Sita Sings the Blues is unlike any animated movie you’ve ever seen, or probably ever will see. It is utterly unique, and altogether amazing. Creator Nina Paley—who writes, directs, animates, and provides one of the main voices—has concocted something very special in this sumptuous blend of fantasy, satire, and sex.

The film follows two basic storylines, the breakdown of Paley’s marriage and the tragic tale of the warrior god Ram and his wife Sita (as told in the ancient poem The Ramayana, one of India’s great epics), whose marriage ends badly as well. In the autobiographical half, Paley and her husband Dave live happily in San Francisco until he accepts a job in India, which distances him from her emotionally as well as physically. Although he asks her to visit him, he’s obviously lost interest when she arrives, and when she travels back to the States, he loses no time in sending her an email announcing the marriage is over. Alone and miserable in New York City, Paley begins reading The Ramayana, and is inspired to tell the story of the spurned wife Sita, for whom she feels an understandable sympathy.

Sita, Paley’s heroic counterpart, is the virtuous and faithful wife of Ram, a prince who has been banished from his father’s court because of his stepmother’s jealousy. He and Sita make the most of their exile, however, by enjoying an idyllic life in the forest, living only for each other’s love. Unfortunately, tales of Sita’s renowned beauty reach the ears of the demon king Ravana, who rules a faraway island. Consumed by lust, he kidnaps her and takes her to his palace, where she virtuously resists his advances and professes her undying love for Ram. Meanwhile, Ram searches for her, aided by Hanuman, leader of a band of monkey warriors. When he finally finds her, he attacks the palace with his simian troops, destroys Ravana and his demonic army, and rescues Sita. But Ram is suspicious of Sita’s fidelity during her captivity, and after inheriting his kingdom, he feels he cannot command the respect of his people by allowing Sita to remain his wife. So he banishes her back to the same forest, where she raises their two sons and pines for her hardhearted husband.

Personal, epic, satirical by turns, Sita is both a celebration of unbridled romantic love and a caustic rumination on the cruelty of unequal gender roles in a patriarchal society. But this doesn’t mean it isn’t really, really funny. Judging by this film, Paley’s take on the entire universe is ironic, and neither the excesses of heroic narrative nor the pettiness of modern relationships escape her witty and irreverent point-of-view. To begin with, the two stories are cleverly interwoven, matching similar stages in the decline and fall of each relationship. Nina and Dave in bed in their studio apartment in Frisco mirrors the bliss of Ram and Sita’s early marriage; Dave’s journey to India becomes the exile, with the faithful wife following behind; Dave’s crude dumping of Nina is the moral equivalent of Ram’s unjust suspicion and banishment of his innocent wife, etc. Somewhere Joseph Campbell is applauding.

But it’s the film’s audacious and inventive artistic design that makes it so unique. To watch Paley’s film is to experience the way imagination can take what seems like straightforward narrative elements and turn them into something not only magical but kind of crazy as well. The autobiographical tale is pictured in simple black-and-white line drawings, while the epic explodes across the screen in a riot of brilliant colors and contrasting animation styles, some taken directly from traditional Indian artwork. The cartoon Ramayana’s energy and scope highlights the paucity of excitement and adventure in today’s urban lifestyle; conversely, the contemporary story brings the high-flying passions and exotic atmosphere of the ancient tale down to earth and into the 21st century where anyone can relate to it. Separated by centuries, civilizations, and mythologies, people are still people and some things never change: a troubled marriage still hurts, and a selfish lout of a husband is still a prime source of complaint for a discarded woman.

And what better way to express that complaint than through the blues? By far the most distinctive and entertaining parts of the film are the musical numbers that Paley inserts into Sita’s tale of love gone wrong--numbers which not only provide the film’s highlights but also slyly spoof the Bollywood tradition of elaborate songs and choreography. In these sequences, Sita--drawn like an exotic Betty Boop, all round eyes and long lashes, her hourglass figure with its bared midriff gyrating seductively--sings blues and torch songs from the 1920s (“Mean to Me,” “Moanin’ Low” et al.) to highlight her emotional ups and downs. The voice is that of Annette Hanshaw, a popular jazz singer of the time who retired in the 1930s and unfortunately is little known today (she died in 1985). Paley had to take out a loan to pay the licensing fees for many of the songs, and the movie put her seriously in debt.

The self-reflexive nature of the film--it is, after all, a movie that documents its own origin--is hilariously mirrored by a trio of narrators, two men and a woman (represented onscreen by traditional Indian shadow puppets), who frequently interrupt the telling of Ram’s and Sita's adventures to offer their commentary, which most often ends in disagreement about the meaning of events, or even what events actually took place (like many ancient literary works, The Ramayana exists in more than one version). Their good-natured squabbling exposes the tenuous nature of story-telling in general, as well as the inherent difficulties in interpreting stories across generations and cultures. Despite the obviousness of the device, it never becomes heavy-handed, but instead communicates the charm of a bedtime story interrupted by a child’s innocent questions.

How did Paley do it? Pretty much alone, that’s how. Over the course of six years (2002-2008), she created this amazing work on her home computer. And she’s “distributing” it in a non-traditional way by making it available for anyone to view or download from the internet (it’s also out on dvd). In short, there’s little about this film that isn’t surprising. These days it feels like we’re living in a new golden age of animation, but however inventive, original, and moving many recent animated films have been, they pale when compared to the artistic bravado and emotional resonance of this film. Sita/Nina may both sing the blues, but after watching their tales unfold in such remarkable style, I predict you’ll be singing their praises.
　
　
　
　

Public Enemies

Here's my dilemma: I really enjoyed watching this film because I love gangster films. The cars, the hats, the tommy guns--I can't get enough of that stuff. But Public Enemies really isn't a very good film. In fact, it's the biggest disappointment of the summer for me (so far), because I had such high hopes for it. A terrific subject, a talented director, one of the most interesting actors on the screen today--how could it miss? It missed. It missed because its aim was off. Its aim was off because...well, see below. Sigh.


PUBLIC ENEMIES

The gangster film is more connected to the American psyche than any other movie genre, with the exception of the western. Together, these two genres explore opposing sides of the myth of America as the land of opportunity. The western celebrates the openness of America as wilderness waiting to be explored, tamed, and settled by law-abiding citizens: opportunity beckons in the spread of civilization west and the suppression of those elements opposed to it (outlaws, Native American tribes). The gangster film examines the consequences of that civilization several generations later, as wide open prairies and equal opportunity have been replaced by cities teeming with poverty, corruption, and a class structure that denies the promise of the American Dream to many. Opportunity exists for the latter chiefly in the form of crime: attacking the social order that has trapped them in the lower depths. One might almost consider the gangster film an inverted form of the western, in this regard.

The great virtue of Public Enemies, director Michael Mann’s new biopic of Depression-era bank robber John Dillinger (Johnny Depp), is that his film is aware of this intersection of mythologies and has the good sense to exploit it. Unfortunately, that is one of its only virtues, for in nearly every other way Enemies is a misfire. There is certainly nothing wrong with the project itself. Dillinger is one of America’s great criminal figures, and a new treatment of his life for a new generation of moviegoers is definitely wanted, especially since previous film biographies (1945, 1973) have seriously missed the mark. But Mann, who co-wrote the screenplay with Ronan Bennett and Ann Biderman, takes a strangely diffident approach to his colorful subject, with the result that Dillinger once again eludes capture.

The film recounts the familiar highlights of his storied 1933-1934 crime spree, robbing banks throughout the Midwest with astonishing ease. Along the way, he falls in love with Billie Frechette (Marion Cotillard), a coat check girl he meets in a Chicago nightclub, and catches the attention of the Bureau of Investigations in Washington, D.C. Its young, ambitious director, J. Edgar Hoover (Billy Crudup), commits his crime-fighting unit (soon to be the F.B.I.) to hunting down Dillinger by appointing special agent Melvin Purvis (Christian Bale) head of its Chicago office. As a result, Dillinger, named Public Enemy No.1, finds it increasingly difficult to operate. He engineers a daring break from an Indiana jail but is so hot afterward that former allies abandon him, leaving him few places to hide out. After an especially bloody bank job, he holes up at the Little Bohemia resort in Wisconsin with his gang, but Purvis tracks him there and what follows is one of the most famous, and widely imitated, shoot-outs in American criminal history. Despite having his cabin surrounded by G-men, Dillinger shoots his way free and escapes, humiliating Purvis and increasing his determination to catch him. That occurs one night outside the Biograph Theater in Chicago, when Dillinger is gunned down by Purvis’s men after leaving a showing of Manhattan Melodrama, a gangster picture in which Clark Gable portrays a figure loosely based on Dillinger himself. He was betrayed, of course, by the “woman in red,” Anna Sage, a brothel madam facing deportation if she didn’t give him up to the feds.

Some of this stuff is factual, much of it isn’t—gleaned from legend, past movie fictions, or the current screenwriters’ imaginations—but all of it is highly romanticized and bathed in the glow of nostalgia. This tone is very much at odds with the film’s photographic style, which relies heavily on imagery drained of color, giving it a muted, near black-and-white look at times--a touch of Depression bleakness. In addition, Mann shoots many scenes with hand-held cameras that weave around and between the actors, catching them at odd, sometimes uncomfortable angles, and framing the action at very close range, so that the viewer is plunged into the midst of what’s going on rather than allowed to stand back and study it from a safe distance. This approach gives the film an immediacy and an off-guard quality that would work well with gritty, raw story matter--but Enemies is anything but gritty or raw, despite the violence of its subject. From the romantic plotline to the meticulous costuming—the clothes are chic, tailored to perfection, and seemingly unperspired-on—to the gleaming cars and spotless set interiors, Public Enemies is a showcase for a world that exists only in an art director’s imagination, a world every bit as make-believe as those in the Hollywood melodramas Dillinger liked a bit too much.

This clash of styles produces artistic confusion: the film has a strangely detached feeling, despite the camera’s closeness to the people onscreen. The star-crossed love affair between Dillinger and his moll, Billie, is so hopelessly retro, so out of touch with modern sensibility about criminals and their lives, that it renders the naturalistic effects of the documentary-style shooting irrelevant, actually distancing us further from the characters instead of forging the intimate connection desired. It doesn’t help that most of the dialogue is banal, often unintelligible, and so lacking in personality that supporting characters never clearly define themselves. Most of Dillinger’s gang members are interchangeable; when one gets shot we feel little or no loss--they’ve never emerged from the surroundings to become distinct individuals we care about. The film puts us in the odd position of eavesdropping on conversations but never learning anything worth knowing because nothing worth knowing is ever said. The camera gets inside the action but not inside the story; a more traditional, aloof method of filming would have penetrated deeper and uncovered more of its emotional life. I find this rather ironic.

But the main problem with the film is Johnny Depp’s Dillinger. Depp is one of the cleverest, most watchable actors on the screen today, equally adept at carefully nuanced and over-the-top performances, but he is less than arresting as America’s Most Wanted. Dillinger, by most accounts, was a humorous, cocky, charming extrovert—notoriously oversexed as well. Depp’s version is moody, closemouthed, introspective, and seemingly monogamous--a romantic who longs more for time spent with the woman he loves than the excitement of his daring robberies and whorehouse lifestyle. Much of Public Enemies’ chilliness radiates from him, and this miscalculated and inaccurate performance is as much a surprise as it is a disappointment.

Which is not to say he doesn’t have some good moments. A jailhouse confrontation with Purvis late in the film—Depp’s and Bale’s only scene together—crackles with tension and humor, Depp finally showing some of Dillinger’s spark as he baits the strait-laced lawman from behind bars. And he captures the bank robber’s on-camera insolence pretty well, too, smirking cagily for photographers like a rock star who digs the press swooning over him but pretends take it all in stride. Dillinger seemed to attract that kind of attention in his day, which might explain the most interesting side of Depp’s impersonation: there are moments when the soft, slurring drawl he affects sounds a bit like Elvis. It’s been Depp’s modus operandi of late to channel a pop idol for some of his more grandiose characters: Keith Richards for Captain Jack Sparrow in the Pirates of the Caribbean series, and the late Michael Jackson for Willie Wonka in 2005’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Now comes Dillinger as Elvis, which makes sense in a weird kind of way: both were charismatic bad boys, media darlings in life, folk heroes in death—which came early to each--whose statures continue to grow as the years go by. But fascinating as this is to think about afterward, Depp just doesn’t give “Dillvis” enough swagger to make him fun to watch while the film is rolling.

The other principals don’t fare very well, either. Bale, sadly, shoots blanks as Purvis. Who this G-man is or why he’s so driven are mysteries the film makes no effort to solve. The script gives the actor virtually nothing to work with, and he responds by giving nothing back. His terse, monotonic portrayal of Dillinger‘s nemesis is a flat-out bore. Marion Cotillard, fresh off her Oscar-winning role in La Vie en Rose, glows as the ill-fortuned Billie, but is adrift in a script that can’t keep her busy, which proves a sorry waste of her talent. Only Crudup as a feisty, politicking Hoover and Stephen Lang as Charles Winstead, a weathered western lawman recruited by Purvis to help corral Dillinger, give off any heat, but neither commands much screen time.

Lang’s character does provide the point where Public Enemies intersects with the western, however. Purvis and the Bureau represent the future of law enforcement: bureaucratic in organization, scientific in method, urban in setting. But Dillinger’s wildness poses a challenge to their new order because he is a throwback to the days of the rural outlaw, the train robbers and bank robbers of the vanished West. Dillinger is Jesse James in a fedora hat, wielding a tommy gun instead of a revolver. Recognizing that he can’t catch him because he doesn’t understand him, Purvis calls in Winstead and two of his cowboy companions; their arrival is captured in an iconic moment as they step off the train in Chicago, ten gallon hats on their heads, bedrolls and rifles in their hands. The genre that symbolizes the triumph of law over disorder has entered the gangster film‘s sphere of social chaos, announcing an epic clash. What follows soon after is just that, the shootout at Little Bohemia, the movie’s big action set-piece, and the sequence where gangster picture and western most completely overlap. It's the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, but in reverse: the bad guy gets away, the sheriff is defeated.

Dillinger’s death makes it obvious that by the end of the film Mann has become more interested in the western’s mythmaking potential than the gangster film’s implied social criticism. It’s an elaborate sequence, prolonged and poeticized by slow motion and intricate cutting between Dillinger strolling down the sidewalk and lawmen stalking him from behind, drawing their guns, taking careful aim… It’s not the violent, ugly depiction of death that awaits the protagonist in most gangster films, but a lyrical restaging of it: an elegy for a romantic figure from America‘s past, and for the era that he's come to represent. A late western such as The Wild Bunch (1969)--a long, slow meditation on the closing of the west and the death of its heroic individualism--is closer to what Mann has in mind here than the stern warning issued to society by James Cagney’s brutal end in The Public Enemy (1931). Though the name of the current film is obviously an homage to that genre-defining classic, their underlying philosophies couldn’t be farther apart.

America’s fascination with violence, and with films that glorify its violent past, seems to be endless. Part of their appeal might be to help us process, even escape, the violence of the present. But because the gangster and western genres are historical in nature, they also provide ways for us to reinvent the past, or to understand it differently over time. The gangster film was once a contemporary social problem film, angry and direct in nature. A film like Public Enemies has left criticism behind and crossed into the mythologizing realm of the western. It’s not the first to do so, of course--Bonnie and Clyde and The Godfather saga broke this ground years ago. But it reminds us how far the gangster film has traveled, and why a bank robber who died 75 years ago is still at large and will never lack pursuers.
　

Up

This is a delightful film, another triumph for Pixar, but probably its darkest one yet. I can't say enough about the stunning visuals, or the vocal acting, especially by Christopher Plummer as the villain, Charles Muntz, a charming but truly malevolent character. Several people have pointed out to me that the figure of Carl, the hero, looks like a puppet version of Spencer Tracy in his final movie role, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner? And it's true--the flat head, short white hair, the oversized black glasses, it's all there. What an obscure and brilliant allusion! Those people at Pixar know their stuff.



UP

Much of Up, the new animated film from Pixar and Disney, is a real downer. Consider these subjects for a “children’s” movie: aging, death, care of the elderly, the loss of parental love, the death of youthful ideals. Ouch. But Up is ultimately what its title claims it to be: an uplifting film that carries one away from all those cares and woes. How it does that just might make the movie more rewarding for viewers in middle life and beyond than for the kids who would seem at first glance to be its audience. But that’s why you can never completely trust the way films are marketed, and why surprise is still such an important part of the movie-going experience.

The opening scenes of the film chronicle the life of Carl Fredricksen (voiced as an adult by the wonderful Ed Asner), from his Depression-era childhood to the present day. A shy, lonely boy who spends his afternoons at the movies, Carl’s world is turned upside down when he meets Ellie, a hyperactive young girl who shares his hero worship of world-renowned explorer and adventurer Charles Muntz (Christopher Plummer at his suavest) and has started a club in his honor in an old, abandoned house. Carl becomes the club’s second--and only other--member, and a touching montage traces his relationship with Ellie as it moves from friendship into courtship, marriage, and their life growing old together in the clubhouse that's become their home. The couple, unable to have children, are devoted to each other, as well as to the memory of Muntz, who disappeared years earlier while piloting his dirigible over a remote region in South America called Paradise Falls. They put money aside to one day make the trip to Paradise Falls themselves, but one emergency after another drains their savings and the trip never materializes. On her deathbed, Ellie makes Carl promise that he will still try, but her death leaves him lonely and heartbroken, and there seems little chance of his keeping that promise.

So what is this movie up to? So far it does not seem calculated to entertain anyone who can’t already vote. And for awhile things only get worse. In addition to grief and loneliness, Carl must contend with urban renewal, which surrounds his tiny home with modern building developments. He stubbornly refuses to sell his property and leave, but one day he clashes with a construction worker and hits him with his cane. Ordered by the court to be placed in a retirement home, Carl’s life seems at its lowest point—until he comes up with a brilliant solution. During the night, he inflates thousands of balloons with helium and attaches them to his house. The next morning, just as the medical attendants are coming to collect him, he releases the balloons and they pull his house from its foundations and carry it up, up and away, his destination the long-desired Paradise Falls.

The film undergoes an extreme makeover at this point. The fantastic was hinted at earlier in old newsreel footage of a young, reckless Charles Muntz, but now Up literally becomes a flight of fancy. The picturization of the house soaring above and through clouds is simply amazing, real enough to send acrophobes under their seats. In a nod to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Paradise Falls turns out to be a kind of Lost World inhabited by strange creatures, most notably a prehistoric bird that resembles a cross between a giant dodo and a toucan. And then there are those talking dogs….

But despite the outlandish elements, Up never completely loses touch with solid ground. Carl’s emotional connection to Ellie only deepens the closer he gets to their life’s goal, and his journey is complicated by an interesting stowaway: an 8-year-old Wilderness Explorer (i.e. Boy Scout) named Russell (Jordan Nagai), who was on Carl’s porch about to ring the doorbell when he got the surprise of his life. Russell understands nothing of the more serious implications of this flight from reality--he’s simply thrilled by the Boy’s Adventure aspect of it, and is eager to become a crew member of the unusual flight craft. But Russell has a story of his own, which comes out slowly as the film unfolds: only child, divorced parents, a father whose business travels keep him away from home so much he has little time for his son. Russell’s loneliness clearly echoes Carl’s, and though the curmudgeonly senior is initially resistant to Russell’s presence, he softens over time as the two share the hardships of the journey, eventually bonding with the boy over their mutual need for friendship.

As its name suggests, Paradise Falls, once found, is a source of disillusionment. There, Carl and Russell find the aged, but surprisingly spry, Charles Muntz living in splendid exile, like Robinson Crusoe on Charles Foster Kane’s income. The most charismatic and complex character in the film, Muntz dominates the movie’s third act. In person he's something very different from the romantic hero of Carl’s memory. Isolation, and the totalitarian authority he exercises over his corps of trained watchdogs (hilariously fitted with devices that translate their barks into human speech) has turned the idealistic explorer into a shadowy, menacing figure, something along the lines of the renegade Kurtz in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (their names are even similar). Muntz’s purpose for living in seclusion, allowing the world to think he’s dead, is a dark one: he wants to hunt down a prehistoric bird so that he can prove its existence to a scientific community that doubted and humiliated him years before. Crazed to the point of megalomania, he dispatches anyone who stands in his way—which now includes Carl and Russell, who have found the bird in the jungle and grown attached to it.

Conrad, Paradise lost, megalomania—this is a children’s film, right? The colorful giant bird (which Russell names “Kevin,” before he discovers it’s a mother) and the talking dogs do provide many lighter, kid-friendly moments. Dug, a misfit among Muntz's stormpoochers--he eventually switches sides to help Carl and Russell--is especially funny, the kind of comic relief the film needs to give it ballast (he's voiced by co-writer/director Bob Peterson). But Paradise Falls is a gloomy place overall, befitting the film’s melancholy understanding of aging and the abandonment of dreams. Tots won’t get it, of course, but their parents and grandparents will—which makes the exciting climax much more meaningful than the usual Hollywood action finale. Muntz finally succeeds in capturing Kevin, so Russell dashes off to save him, and Carl—after some initial reluctance and a moving farewell to the life he spent with Ellie—chases after him to fulfill his hero’s destiny. And to begin his life anew.

He pilots the house to intercept Muntz’s dirigible, where both Kevin and Russell are imprisoned; when Muntz catches him on board, the two antiquated warriors face off with “swords” for a classic swashbuckling denouement. If Errol Flynn and Basil Rathbone had reunited onscreen in their 80s, their final duel might have looked like this. The sequence is one of the film’s real treats, heightened by the superb vocal work of Asner and Plummer. But after the movie heroics are over--and Russell and Kevin rescued--this Paradise False must be left behind. The story returns home, to its beginnings, where real heroism is displayed in ordinary daily life--accepting reality, shouldering responsibility, engaging with the world. Carl and Russell--friends and fellow adventurers--are now each other’s family as well.

Is the middle section of the movie in actuality a dream? It could be--it functions like one, helping Carl work through his problems (making peace with his disappointments, accepting his losses) and move on with his life. This should sound familiar. When it comes to fantasy adventure films purportedly made for younger audiences, is The Wizard of Oz ever very far away? With regard to Up, it’s no farther than its own front yard. Let’s see, a troubled protagonist running away from his problems escapes to a fantastic world--in a flying house, no less--where he’s helped by unlikely companions to defeat a mysterious oppressor, who is something of a wizard (inventor, flyer) but with the murderous impulses of a wicked witch. Renewed by his victory, he returns home, having gained both a greater appreciation of his life there and a better understanding of how to live it well.

The sudden, sharp changes in the film’s direction and visual style also suggest that something extraordinary is happening in these middle scenes. Carl and Ellie’s sweet, real-life story is displayed in mostly muted tones and two-dimensional compositions within the enclosed spaces of their house. Up’s switch to the fantasy-adventure genre introduces eye-popping visuals and the three-dimensional depth of the world at large, especially the vertigo-inducing shots from the air. The film concludes with a series of photographs of Carl and Russell hanging out back home, enjoying their new friendship--happy images but completely flat ones, emphasizing the return to the two-dimensional space of the beginning.

Carl’s journey to Paradise Falls could therefore be another version of Dorothy’s dream. The lines between reality and fantasy having been blurred by the narrative’s liberties, there is no confirming what actually takes place or doesn’t. Up doesn’t directly make this claim, but it plays with the kind of ambiguity and surreal logic that admits of the possibility. And isn’t that the possibility underlying all fairy tales, in a way? Once Up-on a time, there was a little old man living by himself in a funny-looking house…



　
　
　
　
　
　
　

Angels and Demons

Probably many will disagree with the first sentence of my review, but I really disliked the film version of The Da Vinci Code. I enjoyed the book, and I simply couldn't find it anywhere in the movie. Now a confession: I haven't read Angels and Demons, and I have no plans to. Perhaps this influences my assessment of the film; but if so, so what? For whatever reason, I liked it a lot. I enjoyed seeing Hanks in the role of Robert Langdon this time, Ayelet Zurer taught me a new respect for particle physics, and Ewan McGregor (one of my favorite actors) turned in a terrific performance. The Rome locations were well used, and there was an amazing scene toward the end in St. Peter's Square involving a helicopter. For a blockbuster summer picture, this one has some brains to go along with the brawn. I say unto you it's worth seeing. Amen.


ANGELS AND DEMONS

Angels and Demons is about 100 times better than The Da Vinci Code. Director Ron Howard’s puzzling 2006 adaptation of Code, Dan Brown’s monster bestseller about a secret Catholic organization’s attempt to suppress the “true” history of Jesus, turned a superior potboiler into an inferior one with depressing ease. Code still raked in enough money to make the Vatican envious, but fans worldwide felt sinned against. Now comes the expected sequel, drawn from Brown’s other novel about cover-ups in the Catholic Church, and lo, like water turned into wine, it’s a refreshing surprise.

Angels and Demons is, at its best, an expert genre film. Strip away all the arcane church lore and the End-of-Days portents and you find an old-fashioned race-against-time thriller, executed with confidence and skill. Thankfully, it’s more of an action pic than its stultifying predecessor, and a pretty good mystery into the bargain. Red herrings are scattered about like loaves and fishes, so the audience has plenty to chew on while waiting for the plot’s final revelations.

A beloved pope has died and the conclave of cardinals is gathering in Rome to choose his successor. While they are preparing to sequester themselves in the Vatican, however, four of them are kidnapped—the four favorites to become the next pope, or “preferitti”—and an ominous message is sent to Vatican officials, warning of their deaths and the ultimate destruction of the Church. Meanwhile, in a research facility elsewhere in Italy, a team of physicists achieves a scientific breakthrough by creating antimatter in a massive collider. No sooner have they succeeded than a mysterious intruder infiltrates the facility and steals a critical portion of it, killing one of the scientists in the process. When the missing vial of antimatter turns up in Rome as part of the threat against the Church, the Vatican has a problem worthy of Hollywood’s attention.

And Robert Langdon’s. Langdon (portrayed once again by Tom Hanks) is the Harvard professor of religion and “symbology” expert who, despite having embarrassed the Catholic Church in his previous adventure, possesses skills so uniquely suited to helping the Vatican in its current crisis that they have no choice but to turn to him. It’s the kind of antagonistic partnership that thrillers have thrived on since Alfred Hitchcock’s formula-making The 39 Steps (1935), and Howard and his screenwriters (David Koepp, Akiva Goldsman) demonstrate they are attentive students of the Master.

The key to the plot is a secret society known as the “Illuminati,” free-thinking intellectuals from centuries past who questioned Church doctrine and were severely persecuted (think Galileo), many even put to death. It seems some remnants of the Illuminati still exist, and they have regrouped for their long-awaited vengeance. Each of the kidnapped cardinals will be executed in a public place one hour apart, according to their plan, which will culminate in their release of the antimatter, producing an explosion forceful enough to destroy Vatican City and half of Rome. Langdon has his work cut out for him, since he has only a few hours to interpret clues in the kidnappers’ messages that will lead him to the various locations where the cardinals are to die, and eventually to the hiding place of the antimatter. As if this weren’t enough, Langdon has to do it all while contending with a suspicious Vatican security chief (Stellan Skarsgard), who may or may not be undercutting his efforts, and the enigmatic Camerlengo Patrick McKenna (Ewan McGregor), the Vatican official who temporarily wields the late pope’s authority. Fortunately, the Hitchcock formula provides him with the able assistance of a beautiful woman, Dr. Vittoria Vetra (Israeli actress Ayelet Zurer), the physicist in charge of the antimatter project. She has been called to Rome to help find the missing vial and keep it from detonating. Other duties include looking great in a trim black dress and making flirtatious eye contact with Hanks. I’m assuming he appreciated it.

This is pulpy, improbable stuff, kept alive by faith, I guess, but also by works: a breakneck pace and razor-sharp timing. It doesn’t hurt that Hanks’ Langdon can make deductions so quickly it would put Sherlock Holmes to shame; this ability keeps the audience off balance and willing to accept anything he says just so they don’t get left behind. Well, and why not? What I especially liked about this movie is that at least Hanks and Howard are having fun this time. The dour Da Vinci Code felt joyless, afraid to breathe--the current film exhales noisily, and it’s a blessing. Hanks will probably never be anyone’s ideal Robert Langdon, but he’s settled into the role and seems much more comfortable the second time around. He’s even relaxed enough to flash traces of the wiseass humor that’s been his trademark since he began his illustrious film career two decades ago in Splash (also directed by Howard), and before that on TV in Bosom Buddies.

Angels definitely qualifies as a summer action blockbuster, but it has a spiritual side to it as well. Nestled behind the elaborate rituals of the suspense thriller is a sober study (though I assume a highly fictionalized one) of Vatican politics and protocol surrounding the election of a new pope. The central conflict in this embedded story is between the Camerlengo and Cardinal Strauss (Armin Mueller-Stahl), leader of the conclave. Theirs is a quiet, and one suspects, longstanding duel over control of the papacy, the future of the Church, and even the nature of the God they both serve. While Langdon and company race around Rome trying to protect the body of the Church, these two men struggle to save its soul, speaking feelingly to each other about how it can survive the destruction set to occur. But their views are opposed, the aged cardinal insisting on the necessity of tradition and the young priest arguing for the inevitability of change, and it is this debate that gives a deeper urgency to the film than the kind supplied by narrow escapes and last-minute rescues. A parable of faith woven into a tale of worldly intrigue, Mueller-Stahl’s and McGregor’s soft-spoken but intense exchanges provide the film’s emotional core. Both actors are excellent, giving subtly veiled performances that lend voice to their characters’ convictions while masking the motives behind them. As our perception of those motives changes throughout the course of the film, it becomes apparent that their dialogue has more to do with the events unfolding around them than we first supposed. And it is through the twists and turns of their evolving relationship that the meaning of the film’s title is finally revealed.

Through the plot’s many convolutions, Howard’s direction displays more than its usual serviceability, guiding the activity with enough assurance to make one believe at times the film has style, although it's really just bravado. He’s a successful but rather ordinary filmmaker who has achieved stature in Hollywood by constantly overreaching, tackling subjects complex enough to pull him out of his comfort zone and elevate the level of his achievement. I admire him for it, but only occasionally do I find one of his films truly satisfying--Cocoon comes to mind, and Parenthood, the underrated Cinderella Man, and certainly Apollo 13, his greatest artistic success to date. The angels are on his side with this current choice—let us pray that Da Vinci’s demons are at last safely behind him.

Sunshine Cleaning

I liked this film a lot, although I recognize its limitations. Never as funny as the oddball premise would lead you to expect, it also seems to pull up a bit short as a drama about two sisters trying to heal their damaged lives and relationship. In a way, it kind of suffers from an identity crisis, but since I do, too, I'm willing to forgive it. Amy Adams and Emily Blunt are terrific as the sisters, and that simply may be enough for a strong recommendation. Ditto Alan Arkin, one of my favorite actors. No, it's not Little Miss Sunshine Redux, although it's certainly guilty of swiping a bit of that film's mojo. It stands on its own, however, and I actually like it better. Heresy, I know. It won't be the last time I'm guilty of it.


SUNSHINE CLEANING

What I like most about Sunshine Cleaning is that it’s the kind of story that isn’t immediately obvious. There’s no direct, predictable path from the beginning to the end, and the characters never do quite what you expect them to do. But neither are there any truly big surprises along the way. Outfitted with a genial group of eccentrics and an offbeat premise, Sunshine settles for a sweet, mildly unconventional outcome, rather than pushing the audience toward anything too dark or disturbing. The film could have taken some risks, but instead stays safely within the boundaries of its rather modest goals. This is not entirely a bad thing. But I couldn’t help feeling a slight bit of disappointment at the end, as with a promise left partially unfulfilled.

Unfulfilled promise is the theme with which the story opens. Two sisters, Rose (Amy Adams) and Norah (Emily Blunt), lead lives of quiet desperation in their home town of Albuquerque, New Mexico. Rose, the eldest, toils for a maid service and does her best as a single mom to raise her son, Oscar. The mostly out-of-work Norah still lives at home and seems to care for little besides babysitting Oscar, whom she entertains with hilariously awful bedtime stories about serial killers. It’s through Oscar that these two moribund lives are given a chance at revival. A precocious, sweet-tempered boy suffering from ADD, he is expelled from school for constantly disrupting his classroom. In order to send him to a private school where he will receive the special attention he needs, Rose looks around for ways to make more money. She decides to try her hand at cleaning up crime scenes, especially those of murders and suicides, a lucrative field because of the high cost of wiping away blood and other biohazards. With the reluctant Norah in tow, Rose creates “Sunshine Cleaning” and embarks on a seriocomic journey into the messy aftermath of violent death.

A quirky set-up and down-on-their-luck characters generally mean that a movie is going to spend its quality time exploring relationships and character, rather than building plot. Sunshine Cleaning treats these expectations as earnestly as a moral duty. Episodic and deliberate, the film unveils its plan slowly and cautiously, like sunlight advancing across a room. The focus of the story is the relationship between the two sisters, whose lives prior to their business partnership present a study in contrasts, as well as unresolved tensions. Rose, a former high school golden girl--head cheerleader, dated the quarterback--gamely tries to project a positive attitude despite confronting the specter of failure and unfulfilled potential behind every thankless task of her daily life. Self-administered pep talks (“You are strong, you are a winner”) temporarily prop up her hopes for a better future, but her heart isn’t in it when called upon to make a real effort at self-improvement. Instead, she treads water by sleeping with her ex-quarterback boyfriend (Steve Zahn), now married and a cop. Norah, sullen and rebellious, pursues a Loser lifestyle of oversleeping, wearing too much black eyeliner, and getting fired from crappy jobs she never wanted in the first place. “Pursues” might be putting it too aggressively—it’s more like she sits still and waits for failure to catch up with her. But she seems to welcome it when it arrives. Surprisingly sensitive for her tough chick look, Norah is more hurt than angry—her rebellion is half-hearted, literally a mask of make-up behind which crouches a sad, irresolute child.

Rose’s and Norah’s dead-end lives conflict in many ways yet are so closely intertwined they make no sense without each other. The reason is revealed through uneasy flashbacks as the film unfolds: their low self-esteem and lack of ambition are rooted in their mother’s mysterious suicide when they were children (a trauma made worse by their discovery of her body). Although raised by their loving father, a well-meaning but hapless salesman (the always wonderful Alan Arkin), they are stuck on hold, their futures blocked by the confusion and pain of this event. As is their relationship: it’s the different paths this tragedy has sent them down that form the basis of the ongoing, silent quarrel between them. Neither is happy with the other’s choices, or weaknesses, or mistakes.

The main business of the story, then, is to help each woman find her way back to a sense of purpose in her life, and to each other. Adams and Blunt make this business worth investing in: each inhabits her half of the damaged pair with the right proportions of whimsy and soulfulness. Adams, an actress whose nervous intensity sometimes proves distracting, tempers it here with low-key humor and a rueful self-awareness. As a result, she offers a touching portrait of a once-shallow woman, uncomfortable with introspection, who learns to believe in her own resolve. But it’s Blunt who gives the film its edge. While Adams blossoms as Rose, Blunt’s Norah sinks further into the depths of her despair, until she touches bottom. Norah perpetrates the film’s two worst events--deeply hurting a friend and causing a near fatal crisis for the burgeoning business, which almost severs her relationship with Rose completely. Blunt avoids all the possible clichés in portraying this damned soul: Norah has a genius for self-destruction and a taste for self-pity, but Blunt makes her warm, empathetic, and engaging throughout, without ever compromising the volatility or unpredictability that make Norah dangerous. It’s a performance of great skill and subtlety from an actress who needs more exposure.

Sunshine is not completely dark, however. Arkin delivers another comic gem in his turn as the family patriarch, strongly reminiscent of his Oscar-winning role in Little Miss Sunshine (2006). This film has been accused of over-emulating the earlier one, and writer Megan Holley and director Christine Jeffs may indeed have had their eyes on the prize of that unexpected hit--Arkin is once again paired with a winning child actor (Jason Spevack), and a family of mismatched members once more learns to pull together in a crisis--but if it starts out copying the formula for the first Sunshine, it ends by mixing the elements very differently. The current film is not the ensemble piece the earlier one was, since it’s basically a sister act, and its humor is far less raucous, much more attuned to the troubling undercurrents of lives haunted by loss and wounded love.

What Holley and Jeffs have actually created in Sunshine Cleaning is an elaborate metaphor for healing: cleaning up other people’s messes, the bloody remains of others’ broken lives, is the surest way for Rose and Norah to put themselves right at last, and restore the emotional order that finding their mother’s blood-soaked body blasted apart. By running her own business, Rose discovers a mature sense of self-worth that is far more satisfying than what the extrovert life of a high school celebrity provided her. Norah’s fate is more open-ended. She finally leaves home at the film’s conclusion and takes to the road, searching for an identity beyond the limits of the grief that for years has defined her.

Sunshine’s final revelation comes quietly but inevitably, the result, I believe, of Jeffs’ leisurely pacing and understated direction: these two women--whose disappointing, interrupted lives were not the causes of their unhappiness but symptoms of it--are two halves of one person, finally completed and made whole in the film’s climactic scene, a beautifully played moment of reconciliation between Adams and Blunt. If Sunshine Cleaning isn’t the inspired or beguiling film it could have been, neither is it a film which fails to warm and illuminate in many small but important ways.

Duplicity

There isn't much to say about this film. It's enjoyable but almost instantly forgettable. If you like heist or crime caper movies, or movies about elaborate con jobs, with beautiful people in beautiful locations doing dishonest things, then it's worth a couple of hours in the theater. But it won't make you forget the classics it's based on--most particularly, Charade, which I was reminded of several times. I went to it, I watched it, I liked it, next month I won't remember a thing about it. Too bad, because the cast has some heavy hitters--Julia Roberts, Clive Owen, Paul Giametti. I especially worry about Owen, one of my favorite actors. He seems intent on making mostly films like this one these days--can't be good for his career. At least it isn't Shoot 'Em Up (shudder).


DUPLICITY
　

Duplicity is one of those films that knows it doesn’t matter, but it does its not mattering with so much style that it makes you want it to matter more. A throwback to the sophisticated crime caper films of the 1960s (Topkapi, The Thomas Crown Affair, The Italian Job, etc.), Duplicity attempts to get by on charm, pretty locations (Dubai, Rome, Zurich), and charismatic stars, and for the most part pulls it off. This is a film of flourishes rather than substance, of pleasures for the eye and ear that fade so quickly there’s little left to think about once they’re gone.

Like many of its predecessors, Duplicity’s plot is both breezy and cynical. Just ask yourself what might happen when a suave British secret service agent (Clive Owen) meets up with a cool CIA operative who just happens to look like Julia Roberts. They might, say, be attracted to one another. And since they work for different governments, they might be rivals of a sort. Which means love and gamesmanship might be on the agenda. The answers, of course, are yes, yes, and yes--rather predictable, ironically, for a movie whose name means deception. The British agent, Ray Koval (Owen), is on assignment in Dubai for MI-6 when he meets Claire Stenwick (Roberts) at a party, hits on her and enjoys her company for a night, only to discover when he wakes that she’s Mata Hari’d him: slept with him so she can steal some top secret papers in his possession. Some years later, they meet again, and although Ray wants a reckoning for a career that was almost derailed by Claire’s double-cross, he settles for picking up where they left off in bed. The results are presumably more satisfying this time, because they spend a lot of time in bed over the next two hours, where, between bouts of lovemaking, they hatch an ingenious plot to make themselves very, very rich.

It would be unfair to summarize too much of the story that follows. What happens isn’t all that important, but there are surprises in how a lot of it is revealed. The film’s whats and whys take a back seat to its whens and hows. Suffice it to say, the lovers quit their government spying jobs to go undercover in the private sector. Their scheme has them land jobs in the security divisions of two rival skin care corporations locked in a bitter war over a new product. The object: larceny on a grand scale. And so the fun begins, which for the audience means trying to figure out, first, exactly what Ray and Claire are doing, and second, if they are actually doing it together. The lovers spar over commitment issues in between arguing over details of the elaborate con they are working on the two companies—and, perhaps, each other, judging from the little amount of trust between them. The model here is Stanley Donen’s comedy thriller Charade (1963), in which another impossibly handsome couple (Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn) chase each other through gorgeous locations around the globe while trying to decide if they can trust each other enough to fall in love. Duplicity can’t match the Donen classic for chic, but it gamely emulates its mentor’s playfulness, ultra-sophisticated thievery, and travelogue approach to storytelling.

Writer-director Tony Gilroy was responsible for 2007’s superb thriller Michael Clayton, which also took place among the boardrooms of Corporate America. That film was a trenchant indictment of criminality in the upper echelons of the business world, but this time he obviously goes for a lighter mood, combining white-collar mischief with romance instead of murder. His newfound sense of fun finds expression in the use of split screen images and multiple flashbacks, techniques that add to the film’s general air of trickery, in addition to recalling the pop language of 1960s cinema.

The high-end crime genre should be very familiar to contemporary audiences, of course, because of the number of examples, both serious and tongue-in-cheek, still being produced. The genre got a creative shot in the arm a few years ago when George Clooney and his crew revived the heist film in the Ocean’s 11/12/13 series (inspired by the Frank Sinatra original from 1960). Other key films of that era have been remade in recent years as well (The Italian Job, The Thomas Crown Affair). Apparently, America is nostalgic for its swashbuckling crooks of yesteryear. They are certainly more fun to watch than the parade of gray-faced corporate felons on the nightly news.

The actors certainly seem to be enjoying their flashy roles. Roberts, a veteran of the Ocean movies, is right at home. She has carved out quite a niche for herself in this retro genre. Surprisingly restrained, given some of her past performances in light-hearted fare, Roberts invests Claire with more warmth and sensuality than she could have gotten by with. Her reteaming with Closer co-star Owen is pretty successful, as he already knows the right tone to take with her in a battle of wits and sexual wills. The problem is that Claire and Ray are mainly props in the story rather than full-fledged identities. The energy of each performer radiates from deep within, but their characters are too shallow and lacking in fiber to hold it all. Owen, a ferocious actor by nature, is way too powerful at times for the frothy part he is asked to play. Still, the chemistry between the two is there, and it makes the movie what it is, an enjoyable romp with two attractive and well-matched people.

What’s most intriguing about this film, perhaps, is how it slyly introduces a weightier thought into the proceedings: the by now familiar word trust. Not satisfied with merely playing with that issue, Duplicity decides to make it into its theme. Deceit and constant suspicion are endemic to a life of spying, so what changes does one’s personality undergo after long exposure to that kind of lifestyle? What is the impact on human relationships, most particularly on love? These become the film’s central questions, in a way. Beneath the glossy surface of scheming, double-crossing, and intrigue lies a story that wonders aloud how love can survive a life devoted to scheming, double-crossing, and lots and lots of lying. Can it? Will it? It matters, during occasional pauses in the action, to Claire and Ray, but despite the number of times these questions are asked, in the end I’m not convinced the movie makes it completely matter to us—not about these one-dimensional characters, at least. Worth a try, though.

Taken

This movie was a pleasant surprise. I wasn't planning on seeing it until a friend recommended it to me. It's not great, but it's certainly entertaining, and there is a surprising amount of heart behind the physical action. But it is thrills that it was made for, and in that category it delivers. Liam Neeson's debut as an action hero (I believe) is pretty successful. He's a gifted, intelligent actor, so his world-weariness looks like wisdom most of the time. And it's just good to watch someone who isn't a muscle-flexing dumbass run, jump, and hit people. Does that sound elitist? So be it. I had some problems with the politics of the film, but that's often the case, so I just tried to sit back, relax, and let the movie take me in. For the most part, it did.

TAKEN

The title of this film describes, in effect, the experience of watching it. Taken takes hold of you and moves you right along for nearly all of its 93 jam-packed minutes. It’s a thriller that depends less on mood, character, or suspense than on sheer speed and relentless forward motion. It’s like a train on an express route: arriving at its destination is its paramount goal, which leaves little time to admire the scenery along the way.

The plot is succinct. A divorced ex-government agent, Bryan Mills (Liam Neeson), has retired early so that he can live near his 17-year-old daughter Kim (Maggie Grace) and try to build the relationship with her that he had sacrificed to his career while she was growing up. His ex-wife (Famke Janssen) has remarried into serious wealth, which makes this task all the harder. When Kim asks his permission to vacation in France with a friend, he reluctantly gives it; his fatherly worry reawakens all the old fears that went with his spying job. But Bryan’s “paranoia” proves instead to be prescience: no sooner have the two girls landed in Paris than they are abducted by a gang of Albanian thugs who are running an international sex slavery ring. Kim’s heartrending phone call to her father moments before she is dragged out the door of her apartment provides the film’s first real jolt of emotion, as well as the adrenalin needed to start the plot racing. From this point on, Mills is a man with a single mission: to find his daughter and bring her home.

Despite its many improbabilities, I rather liked Taken. Directed with zeal by former cinematographer Pierre Morel, the film concerns itself not with testing the limits of the action thriller genre but with staying safely inside its comfort zone and fulfilling our expectations. For the most part, it does this with enough energy to compensate for its lack of originality. Anyone who has watched the TV series 24 knows roughly what to expect: a headlong race against time, a tightly forged chain of events which are absorbing because of their speed and intensity, but which would never stand up to the scrutiny of logical analysis or exposition. Mills is even given his own time limit. A former associate tells him that after 96 hours, any hope of finding Kim will have vanished. Apparently, it takes that long for women to disappear completely into the sex trade underworld. So Bryan has four days to revive his skills as a spy—or, as he calls himself, someone who “prevented bad things from happening”—and rescue his beloved daughter.

What is most welcome about this film is that beneath the formulaic activity is a deeper layer, a substratum of emotion that is surprisingly powerful. This is entirely due to the presence of Neeson, who brings gravity and credibility to his farfetched role. Ten years ago, this movie would probably have been a routine Steven Seagal vehicle, but Neeson gives the obligatory heroics psychological depth and an urgency of purpose that distracts from the bareness of the mechanics. The anguish his suffering father experiences is not only believable in and of itself, it fuels the pace of the action. His performance is stronger than the thin premise deserves, but it’s what makes this film into something more than just a series of action set pieces. Supporting performers are generally effective--Grace is winning and vulnerable in the thankless part of victim, and Arben Bajraktaraj, as Albanian gang leader Marko, does some admirable snarling--but this is really a one-man show. Without Neeson at the center, the movie would stall in its tracks.

This seems to be the time for movies about rescuing heroines from prostitution. Recent Oscar-winner Slumdog Millionaire involved a quest of this kind, with references to the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, but Taken’s version comes from closer to home. It’s pressed from the mold of John Ford’s classic western The Searchers, in which John Wayne spends years trying to retrieve his niece from a band of Comanches, and two modern equivalents written, as tributes to Ford‘s film, by Paul Schrader: Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (with Robert De Niro’s famous descent into the hell of New York City to bring back teenage prostitute Jodie Foster), and Schrader’s own Hardcore, in which another distraught father (George C. Scott) searches for his runaway daughter, who has become an actress in porn films.

All these films are obsessed with saving a young woman from sexual “defilement’ and cleansing her of that perceived shame, whether or not she's been a willing party to it. In the three earlier versions, rescue comes “too late”: the daughter has been initiated into sexual experience with undesirables (Indians, pimps, johns, pornographers) and the possibility of her redemption/purification and reentry into her former society is left up to the viewer. But in keeping with the times, and the need for contemporary American films to have happier endings, Taken takes no chances with ambivalence: it won’t be giving much away to reveal that Mills is successful, and Kim is spared everything he fears. Taken is the fairy tale version of the virgin/whore paradigm for women in American movies--the heroine’s virginity is preserved, and like a princess she is restored unambiguously to her former place, seemingly untouched by the entire ordeal.

Taken isn’t just a rescue fantasy, however, it’s a revenge fantasy as well, and here the script by Luc Besson (of La Femme Nikita fame) and Robert Mark Kamen takes a darker turn. It’s not just the delight the movie takes in dispatching bad guys--Mills kills a lot of men in a very short time, many of them brutally--it’s also the revenge it wreaks on the mother who opposes his view of parenting. In several early scenes, Mills spars with his former wife, Lenore, about his protectiveness towards Kim. Lenore accuses him of smothering their daughter, of trying to prevent her from growing up and learning about life; Mills insists he just wants to keep her safe, because he knows the world and the dangers that lurk there. He permits Kim’s trip to France at Lenore’s urging, against his better judgment. His judgment proves correct, of course, and his attempts to keep his daughter close by, and forever his little girl--his smothering behavior--is validated by the movie’s turn of events. This is a reactionary view, to say the least, and a solidly conservative take on the world as a dangerous place in need of swift, violent action to keep its evils at bay. The more liberal-minded mother is ineffectual and wrong, and the suffering she endures when she learns of Kim’s disappearance becomes her justified, almost self-willed, punishment.

Taken never presents much of a challenge to the viewer, and of course never aims to. It’s not built on surprises but on predictable solutions to familiar screen problems. Bring a willing suspension of disbelief and a passing familiarity with movie logic and heroics to the theater, and you'll find it’s a pretty easy film to take. But the standard action scenario does have a twist, and the twist is the humanity of its characters—in particular, the unexpected strength behind a movie father’s love.