Django Unchained

Here’s the thing about Django Unchained, the latest adrenaline-fueled film from genre-savant Quentin Tarantino: it’s a fine time at the movies, as kinetically entertaining and charmingly pulpy as anything its director has done over the past decade.  It stars Jamie Foxx as the titular Django, a slave in pre-Civil War America who is purchased by a German bounty hunter named King Schultz (Christoph Waltz).  Schultz needs Django’s help in identifying some wanted men who mistreated Django in the past, a gig which becomes a full-time job and eventually, after the pair discover that Django’s wife Broomhilda (Kerry Washington) has been purchased by deadly southern dandy Calvin Candy (Leonardo Dicaprio), a rescue operation.  For fans of Tarantino’s work, the rhythms are familiar: there are lengthy dialogue sequences where characters are built one idiosyncrasy at a time, followed by bursts of carefully choreographed violence where all the tension is gloriously released.  It’s slick, it’s smooth, it’s funny, it’s fun.

It’s also touchy, and weird, and maybe a bit offensive, because Django Unchained isn’t just a stylishly irreverent reworking of the Western, it’s a stylishly irreverent reworking of the Western that happens to be about slavery, a serious subject if there ever was one.  Hanging over the film is always this question: should a movie about such an ugly part of American history be this much fun?

It would be different if Django Unchained was just some piece of genre fluff, if it was cheap and looked cheap, if it glossed over the characters and got straight to the violence.  But like all Tarantino films, it’s built with too much care to just write off.  Take the scene where Schultz, with Django in tow, walks into a dusty western backwater and casually shoots the local lawman, who we shortly learn had a price on his head.  While waiting for the fallout, Django and Scultz sit down and share a beer in the local tavern.  As they chat, we learn how Scultz feels about the institution of slavery, how Django feels about his potential future as a bounty hunter, and sense the growing respect between the two men, all while the tension over how the townsfolk will respond to the shooting bubbles underneath.  It’s a rich scene, and one of many.

The movie reaches its high point after Django and Schultz track down Django’s wife to an opulent cotton plantation.  There they meet Stephen (Samuel L. Jackson), a house slave who has so thoroughly absorbed the racist beliefs of his owner that he now forces them upon others.  Stephen is a nasty piece of work, the most interesting character in the film, and an excellent showcase for the talents of Samuel L. Jackson.  He is also the most problematic character in the movie.  The ideas concerning racial self-hatred he embodies are potent, and perhaps best left to a film willing to really take the time to dig into them.

Because although Django Unchained is probably the most mature, substantive film Tarantino has made yet, it’s still ultimately a celebration of style, more interested in movies about slavery than in slavery itself.  The Stephen character, in particular, is very deftly written.  He’s a sycophantic clown when entertaining his master’s guests, an iron-hearted sadist when dealing with those who displease him, and something like an equal when giving private counsel to his owner.  There’s a lot of depth to him, but because the movie is in the final estimation a simple revenge tale as pure as Kill Bill before it, those elements aren’t given enough space.

The film climaxes with a thrilling shootout set to anachronistic music and featuring Django as a duel-wielding whirling dervish of revenge.  It’s impeccably shot and inventively staged- Tarantino continues to grow as an action director- but at this point such a scene is expected, and not entirely worthy of the carefully crafted script.  It’s been gratifying to watch Quentin Tarantino inch toward taking himself more seriously film by film, year by year, but Django Unchained is a length of the journey, not journey’s end.

Amour

Amour is about what happens when the passage of time rips your life a new one.  Georges (Jean-
Louis Trintignant) and Anne (Emmanuelle Riva) are in their eighties.  They spent their long lives writing and teaching music.  Now they live their golden years leafing through the Sunday paper and keeping up with old pupils from within a spacious, tastefully apportioned Parisian apartment.  One day, over breakfast, Anne stares into space for several minutes, showing no sign that she is aware of the world around her.  The rest of the movie depicts her slow slide into bodily degeneration, mental collapse, and eventual death.

It’s harrowing drama as only the French can do it.  I occasionally wonder about the point of movies like this.  It’s not the kind of show people see to enjoy themselves or so they can chat about it the next day over toasted bagels in the break room.  It’s a realistic depiction of the aging process, which means that it’s slow, painful, and sometimes uncomfortable to watch, so why watch it?

Part of the reason, surely, is to appreciate the craft of the filmmakers involved.  Amour was directed by Michael Hanake, known for making movies full of uncomfortable silences pregnant with sadness and dread.  He’s unobtrusive here, moving the camera little, placing it close to or far away from his actors so as to maximize the effect of their performances.  Amour is, at base, a two-person show, and both actors do great work.  Emmanuelle Riva is particularly impressive, especially in later scenes when Anne has lost the ability to speak but uses her eyes to convey her anger over the situation in which she finds herself.  Trintignant gives a very subtle performance.  He never states outright how much his wife’s condition is affecting him, but we can tell in the offhand comments he makes to those who question him about it, in how to stoops to put together a specialized bed for his wife in their room, in how he stands over her as she gets worse and worse and worse and worse.

But excellent craft alone cannot be enough of a reason to put oneself through a wrenching watching experience such as this.  Perhaps people see a movie like Amour because they recognize their own situation in it.  I will admit that, while watching Amour, I had a hard time not thinking of my grandmother, who slipped, like Anne, deeper and deeper into disease until there was nothing left.  Different people can surely see their mothers, their wives, and their children in it, and might appreciate having a collective record of a subject about which few are willing to make a feature film.

And yet getting back in touch with memories of dying loved ones is painful in and of itself, so why do it?  I don’t know.  Maybe making and watching the movie are small acts of defiance against the process it depicts.  Amour opens with a squad of firefighters bursting into Georges and Anne’s apartment to find Anne’s body laid out on her bed, a shower of flower petals sprinkled around her.  We know she is going to die within the first minute of the movie, and still we watch the train come slowly down the tunnel, and stick around for the inevitable crunch.  Then we get to walk away.

Les Miserables

Les Miserables, the musical based on Victor Hugo’s epic novel, is not subtle.  It’s all pomp and bombast, every song rising to an explosive crescendo, every performer spilling their soul all over the stage, every theme shouted out in swooping, cacophonous leitmotif.  That earnestness has served it well, as the stage show has been consistently popular since its debut in 1985.  Without the benefit of a live setting, it’s harder to give oneself over to this screen version, but director Tom Hooper tries his damndest to show the audience a good, thoroughly miserable time.

The time is the early 19th century, the place post-Napoleonic France, by most accounts a seriously sucky point at which to be alive.  The story follows recently paroled criminal Jean Valjean (Hugh Jackman) over a span of years, starting immediately after his release from prison for stealing a loaf of bread, tracing his rise to an honest job as the mayor of a provincial village, and concluding with his involvement in one of France’s many failed bids for revolution.  It’s sweeping stuff, the kind of material that would seem well-suited for musical adaptation, and the songs do not let it down.  They are big.  Really big, and there are a lot of them, each one an upwards curve leading to a series of glory notes designed to catapult viewers from their seats in spasms of inspiration.  There are no small songs in Les Miserables, only small singers.

Unfortunately, the movie has a couple of those.  As Valjean, Broadway-trained Jackman acquits himself well, providing the movie with the closest thing it has to an anchor.  As penniless prostitute Fantine, co-star Anne Hathaway gets the movie’s biggest moment, a raggedly affecting rendition of self-pitying power balled ‘I Dreamed A Dream,’ filmed in an almost uncomfortably close close-up.  In a musical made up of big damn moments, it doesn’t get bigger than that.  Others don’t fare as well.  Amanda Seyfried, who plays Valjean’s adopted daughter Cosette, has a tinny voice pitched below the intensity her songs require.  Russell Crowe has already taken a lot of flack for his performance as the relentlessly principled police office Javert.  The flack is justified.  His voice is thin and soft without much texture, and whenever he sings it brings whatever emotional momentum the movie has managed to build up to a stop.

And Les Miserables, both as a stage musical and a movie, depends on that momentum to survive.  There are no great insights here: it is terrible to be poor, life is hard but rewarding, and to love is a wonderful thing.  The stage version of this show has been successful by pounding these messages relentlessly into its audience by way of soaring vocal pyrotechnics until they are too overcome to resist.  The movie strips much of that away, opting for quieter, more intimate performances shot as often as not in intense close-ups.  Sometimes, as in Fantine’s number, this works, but at others it seems like Hooper is searching for a subtlety that, despite the best efforts of his case and crew, is just not present.

Les Miserables, then, works or doesn’t depending on the song being sung that minute, without much in the way of connective tissue.  It soars, it drops, and ultimately it becomes a that-was-good, that-wasn’t, that-was-fun-what-else-is-on kind of historical epic.

Life of Pi

Life of Pi sets itself up for a fall early-on.  The movie uses a framing device: a novelist looking for an idea for his next book speaks to Pi, an Indian man living in Canada who claims to have a story that “will make you believe in God.”  That’s a tall order, and one that the movie can’t quite fill.  What it does do is deliver a colorful, impeccably photographed tale that effectively mixes action and adventure with basic philosophy.

As the movie begins, the middle-aged Pi (Irrfan Khan) talks about his whimsical upbringing in India.  The son of a zoo-owner, Pi developed an interest in world religions at an early age, cobbling together aspects of Hinduism, Christianity, and Islam into his own spiritual belief system.  His conceptual interests are at odds with his business-minded father, who would prefer he focus on more practical pursuits.  Life of Pi is based on a book by Yann Martel, and the early passages of the movie display the slow-burning attention to detail one expects from a novel.  The characters describe their unhurried existence, director Ang Lee lingers on elements he finds interesting, and the audience is allowed to relax into the story.

When Pi’s father stumbles upon a business opportunity in Canada, the family and their menagerie of animals pile into a freighter and set out across the Pacific Ocean.  They are beset by a storm.  Their ship sinks in a visually spectacular and emotionally stirring sequence, and Pi ends up adrift on a lifeboat with a hyena, an orangutan, a wounded zebra, and a very hungry, very dangerous Bengal tiger, his family dead and his hope for rescue slim.

A teenager and a tiger, together on a lifeboat, forced to not kill each other long enough to find dry land: it’s a set-up for a tense adventure story, and the movie makes the most of it.  The tiger, who thanks to a paperwork mix-up is amusingly named Richard Parker, is not treated as a pet or a person with fur; it’s a wild animal more interested in eating Pi than befriending him, and the story’s refusal to sentimentalize him keeps things exciting.  Still, the most thrilling thing about the sea-bound sections of the movie is the photography.  As remembered by the poetically-inclined Pi, the voyage across the Pacific is presented in deep, piercing colors of ethereal beauty.  There are scenes set at night, the waters stuffed with translucent Jellyfish or massive whales, that are eerily wonderful to behold.  The visuals become wilder and weirder as the movie goes on, until at last everything is opaque symbolism, painted with tender detail by the visual effects team.

The narrative, too, eventually leaves behind the adventure thread and wafts into symbolic allegory, this time to less impressive effect.  The slow, rhythmic presentation of the visuals creates a distinct mood, strange and haunting, but by the time the movie starts to try and live up to its boast about making the audience believe in God I felt it had overreached.  It doesn’t really matter.  The movie will enthrall children because it has a tiger.  The visuals will entertain their parents, and although the promised philosophical denouncement never quite comes, the mood lingers after it’s over.

Stoker

Stoker is a slasher movie for the art-house crowd.  A mother and daughter live alone in an opulent mansion somewhere in the northeastern United States.  A long-lost relative comes to live with them, and after more than a few mysterious disappearances it becomes clear he is hiding a sinister secret.  It’s a messy, morbid tale, the kind of the material that could come across as schlocky, but the moody photography and steady, slow-burning script elevate it above the average serial killer story, if only just.

India (Mia Wasikowska) is a teenager: smart, moody, and distant.  The movie opens shortly after the death of her father, from a car accident.  When her uncle Charlie (Matthew Goode), a man she never knew existed, shows up at her father’s funeral, there is an immediate and mutual fascination.  Charlie is suave, smoldering and very odd.  The way he looks at India, you get the feeling his interest goes beyond the bounds of the traditional uncle-niece relationship.

Guessing just what Charlie is after takes up about the first half of the movie, but director Chan-wook Park lays on enough atmosphere to keep things entertaining.  There are a lot of surreal, almost self-consciously artistic shots peppered throughout the film- India descends into the basement of her impeccably apportioned home to fetch some ice cream from the downstairs freezer and finds herself in a shadowy underworld of craggy corners and shifting spotlights, a close-up of a brush running through a head of hair fades seamlessly into a shot of a wheat field, etc...  These are ostentatious touches, designed to set the mood and show off in about in equal measure, but they are certainly treats for the eye.

Perhaps the artsy touches are needed because the meat of the story itself is a bit undercooked.  That uncle Charlie knows more than he is letting on is clear from the start, and the revelations about just who he is and just what he has done are, while entertaining, a bit predictable.  Of course the man is a murderer; we’ve seen too many shots of him glaring purposefully into the camera while a tide of foreboding music rises to think anything else.

Goode might have been a bit too bland and fresh-faced a choice for the character: the script requires Charlie to be a cipher for too long, and Goode doesn't do enough to suggest there is real violence lurking beneath the surface.  Mia Wasikowska, however, does fine work as a girl torn between the ordinary concerns of teenage life- boys, school, clashes with her mother (Nicole Kidman)- and the darker impulses she taps into after meeting Charlie.  The bloody concluding scenes are bold and disturbing, and suggest that India be doomed to take up her uncle’s mantle as one seriously screwed up individual.

And yet there’s an air of ennui hanging over the whole production.  Serial killers are no less icons of the American cinema than are cowboys, gangsters, and soldiers, and if a filmmaker is going to use them they’re going to have to do so in a way that they haven’t been done before.  I don’t think that Stoker quite accomplishes this.  It’s flashy, seductive, even hypnotic, but after it’s over it fades quickly away.

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey

When director Peter Jackson first pitched his idea to adapt the sprawling, three-book Lord of the Rings series for the big screen, he intended to make two movies at a cost of 75 million dollars.  Somewhere along the line, the lineup rose from two movies to three and the budget from 75 million to amounts beyond the count of mortal men.  It was worth it, though. The Lord of the Rings movies debuted to massive critical acclaim, enormous box office receipts, and went on to inspire the kind of devotion usually reserved for Star Wars devotees and those in thrall to the heavier doomsday cults.

When it was announced that Jackson would be directing an adaptation of The Hobbit, a lighter, smaller book set before events of the Lord of the Rings but within the same sword-and-sorcery universe, fans watched this process happen in reverse.  Plans for one movie became two, then three, and soon all were wondering how the filmmakers would manage to stretch the shortest book in the set to last for three movies.

They manage about as well as can be expected, which is to say not particularly well, although the film is not a disaster. It is well-made, with sumptuous visuals, a strong cast, and careful attention to detail, but the pace is stretched out and it feels stretched out.  Despite some moments of grandeur, the most interesting thing about The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey is the story behind how it came to be adapted and what that says about big-budget movie-making today.

The plot: unassuming hobbit Bilbo Baggins (Martin Freeman) lives a pleasantly sedate life in The Shire, that most bucolic of fantasy backwaters.  Adventure comes knocking in the form of gray-garbed wizard Gandalf (Ian McKellan) and a small host of nomadic dwarves led by Thorin Oakensheild (Richard Armitage) who enlist Bilbo’s help in traveling to their faraway ancestral homeland and reclaiming it from a very big, very angry, very dangerous dragon named Smaug.

That synopsis probably didn’t take long to read, but the movie takes its sweet time setting it up.  By flashback and speech, by show and by tell, Jackson and his screenwriters make sure the audience is filled in on every detail of the why and the how and the where and the what of the quest before it gets blessedly underway, occasionally taking the time to repeat themselves for those who may have missed it.

That said, there are parts of the movie that are as exciting and charming as anything from The Lord of the Rings movies or, better yet, from The Hobbit.  The best scene in the movie is a leisurely battle of wits between Bilbo, who has gotten lost in a dark, foreboding cave, and Gollum, a loathsome, bug-eyed creature who will show Bilbo the way out if he can best him in a riddle contest.  If Bilbo loses, Gollum will eat him.  The Lord of the Rings movies subsisted on spectacular battle scenes involving thousands of combatants and pyrotechnics aplenty.  An Unexpected Journey has a few of those, most of them embellished far beyond the space they occupied in the book, but they have less meaning here because the stakes are so much lower.  But in the riddle scene, we know exactly what the stakes are, and we can relax and enjoy the maze of wordplay built up as the two characters slowly circle each other.  It’s a highlight.

But Jackson, or more likely the studio executives hoping for another trilogy-sized windfall, do not or cannot stop at that.  The script pulls in additional material from all kinds of sources, including extraneous text from The Lord of the Rings novels, author J.R.R. Tolkien’s copious notes, and Peter Jackson’s imagination, to fill us in on details of the story about which we simply do not care.  Whenever the movie strays from Bilbo’s little big adventuring, it loses focus and slows down.  Maybe it couldn’t have happened any other way.  The pile of gold amassed by The Lord of the Rings movies proved too tempting, and what should have been an intimate performance has been set on a stage three times too big.