Dir. Asghar Farhadi
Score: 8.3
The sound of the heavy glass door closing shut in the main characters’ Tehran apartment is final and thunderous, like an echoing clap of permanence every time someone leaves. Ironic, then, that no matter how many times characters leave the apartment, angry, insulted, or thrown out with conviction, they don’t stay gone long.
The film begins with a POV camera staring at an attractive middle-set couple. Simin (Leila Hatami) is petitioning for divorce from her husband, Nader (Peyman Moadi) not because he’s cruel or unfaithful to her, but because he refuses to take advantage of the visa they have obtained to leave the country with his wife and 11-year-old daughter. As with nearly every element of this brilliantly complex and compelling film from Asghar Farhadi, his explanation for not wanting to leave is absolutely as valid as his wife’s is for wanting to leave and make a better life for their daughter. Nader’s father is old and infirm with Alzheimer’s, you see, which makes it impossible for him to leave without feeling as if he’s betraying his family.
Instead, the couple comes around to a kind of compromise: She will leave and live with her parents for a while, and he will hire someone to watch after his father while he’s at work. Hastily, he hires Razieh (Sareh Bayat), a woman faintly known to his wife, but quickly the job proves overwhelming to her, partly because of her devotion to Islam (in one telling scene, she feels she has to call a religious figure to ask about whether or not she can clean Nader’s soiled father without causing sin) and partly because she is five months pregnant when she takes the job. Things get increasingly complicated when she has to leave suddenly for a doctor’s appointment one afternoon, leaving Nader’s father locked in his room and tied to his bed. When Nader comes home early and finds his father, he snaps, and becomes even more agitated when he thinks she also stole money from his office. Incensed, he throws her out of his apartment, and the resulting tragedy powers the film through its tumultuous final act.
Like Yimou Zhang (whose 1994 film To Live strikes similarly poignant and resonant chords), Farhadi is nothing if not a careful observer of human behavior. His meticulous screenplay also works extremely hard to give everyone a fair shake. There are never any easy answers in the film, never a point you can safely point the finger and assign blame for the entangled mess the characters work themselves into. At the beginning, we assume the “separation” of the title refers to the married couple and their differences, but, in fact, it’s far more microcosmic: We all lead our lives separate from everyone else, connected by blood, or proximity or tragedy, but never, ever truly sharing space with anyone else in our lives.
Dir. Joe Carnahan
Score: 5.4
Clearly, the short stories of Jack London still retain a powerful hold on the collective male consciousness in Hollywood. Something about the primal inhumanity of London’s best known works, which generally involve a lone man against the elements under harsh conditions, affixes to the adolescent brain, man v. nature reduced to a simplified core of savage logic. Part of the appeal is no doubt the essential drama of a life and death struggle, but the rest involves a complicated relationship to our younger selves and our daydream fantasies of heroism and courage in the face of an evil and uncaring natural world.
The latest entry in this genre involves a pitiless account of a group of Alaskan oil workers who survive a brutal plane crash only to find the remote area in which they’ve landed beset by a pack of bloodthirsty wolves (the “grey” of the title might well refer to moral ambiguity or the relentlessly colorless mountains upon which the survivors make their way, but I suppose we’re meant to assume it’s for the wolves themselves). Liam Neeson plays a man named Ottway, a wolf-sniper, as it happens, who takes on the chore of leading the remaining survivors through the open fields and into possible safety in the woods off in the distance. Ottway has various problems of his own, including suicidal tendencies, but when the chips are down, he immediately takes the Alpha position amongst the others, to the badgering dismay of Ruiz (Frank Grillo), an ex-con with a bad attitude. The others, including a sweet, bespectacled father (Dermot Mulroney), a loose cannon (Joe Anderson) and a philosophical man of strong faith (James Badge Dale), we assume, are more or less primed to die one way or another before the credits roll.
And die they do. Carnahan’s vision of the project takes some peculiar risks, some of which work surprisingly well (the airplane crash, for one thing, which eschews exterior shots entirely, creates a palpable, claustrophobic tension) and others not so much (the wolves themselves, with glowing devil eyes and snarling sabretooth roars, are like something out of Lord of the Rings, and betray the film’s otherwise naturalist pretensions). What we end up with is a rare bedfellow; a would-be adventure yarn for the art house crowd. Appreciative as we may be of Carnahan’s ambitiousness, it’s still a lot to ask of the actual material, with the screenplay’s easy emotional manipulations and surface characters: You’ll long tire of the Breakfast Club-like device of characters endlessly revealing themselves while huddled around the campfire. The film is at its best when it sticks to the basics, wounded and fearful men, trapped in an unrelentingly oppressive environment, when it strives to do more, as well-placed as its intentions might be, it declaws itself.
Dir. Rodrigo Garcia
Score: 4.0
A well-regarded actor, known for working both in film and theater, once remarked about the difference between the two mediums by dismissing acting for the silver screen as being done entirely through your eyes. If so, Glenn Close’s sunken marble orbs, set against a plain of pale forehead, are some of the more expressive in the business, and in playing a woman in turn-of-the-century Ireland who has to pass as a man in order to stay employed in a well-to-do hotel in Dublin, her eyes — drifting to the side in far reaching fantasy or widened in astonishment — are the only thing that give hint to her true self.
Nobbs (Close) works as a waiter in the hotel, always attired in a formal black suit and high waistcoat, quiet as a church mouse and wrapped in a binding to flatten her breasts, she is nothing if not self-oppressed. When, by chance, she meets another such female renegade, Mr. Page (Janet McTeer), working at the hotel as a housepainter, she is nearly speechless. More so, when she finds that Page isn’t just passing as a man, she’s actually married to wonderfully loving woman (Bronagh Gallagher). To the introverted and timid Nobbs — a woman who saves every pence and farthing and keeps a meticulous ledger of all her savings — the possibility of sharing her planned-for future happiness with another caring person is almost inconceivable, but intoxicating. Emboldened, she begins to court a young maid, Helen (Mia Wasikowska), who has already made an unfortunate dalliance with a young vagabond (Aaron Johnson), leaving her with child.
Rodrigo Garcia’s film is an odd mixture of elements — at times, especially in a scene that involves Nobbs and Page wearing dresses and walking the beach, it seems outright comedic (two women as men, dressed in female drag) — other times, the weight of the silent anguish of Nobbs is drearily oppressive. The trouble is we’re given only very small glimpses of the inner lives of any of the characters, and not enough, frankly, to support the film’s more melodramatic leanings. It is a common problem of the cinematic medium and one way in which novels tend to be far more successful: The representation of the inner life of a character. Here, despite several intonations to the contrary, we rarely go beyond skin deep.
Dir. Stephen Daldry
Score: 6.5
Symbols can take any form, but the bigger they are, the more irrepressible they become: You want to represent an alcoholic’s descent? Try an ice cube; you want to tackle mortality? Look for an ice berg to hit the Titanic. In this way the horror of 9/11 is almost too easy to emulate. You had two of the largest, most signature buildings in the world reduced to crumbling dust within one excruciatingly bad morning, with an enormous cost of human life and, more universally for Americans, our sense of psychic well-being. To writers everywhere, it was like a bank of ripe flowers to a starving colony of bees. The problem then, is to find a way to scale the terror and misery down to a human level without dampening the genuine dreadfulness of the event. Jonathan Safran-Foer’s novel found an elegant solution by placing the full impact of that “worst day” on the tender psyche of a young, intellectual boy named Oskar, whose beloved father was lost in the towers, resulting in a cataclysm of the highest order.
Cinematically, it’s always difficult to translate a novel’s deep-seeded inner monologue — of which much of Safran-Foer’s book is composed — to the far more exterior sublimations and requirements of the big screen, but director Stephen Daldry and screenwriter Eric Roth have done an admirable job. Oskar (played by dynamite newcomer Thomas Horn) is prone to lengthy scientific discourse to explain his feelings — if the sun blew up this second, Earth would still bask in its light for 8 minutes he explains at one point, a connection he makes between his father’s death and the time it will take before Oskar’s memory of him will begin to fade out.
After his father’s dies, Oskar hoards all the artifacts about him he can, including the answering machine that contains his father’s last frantic phone calls home before the collapse of the tower, and keeps them as a makeshift shrine hidden away up in a cupboard in his room. Searching for more such items, he discovers a mysterious envelope containing a key and a single name, “black,” which leads him to methodically track down everyone in the city named “Black” in an attempt to track down the significance of the key, which he is convinced his father left him as a final quest. Oskar — borderline Aspergers, as he tells one adult — is terrified of many things, including loud noises, trains, bridges and crooked teeth, but such is the nature of his obsessive nature, he vows to disregard his assortment of terrors in order to solve the mystery. En route, he encounters many helpful and sympathetic adults, including the mysterious renter (Max von Sydow) who lives in the back room of his grandmother’s apartment, a man who only communicates via a small notepad he carries with him at all times.
The set up is certainly capable of being precious, but Oskar’s fierce intellectualism and the film’s reverence for its small protagonist’s intractability keeps it from becoming maudlin or unearned. In the film’s terrific first third, it feels as if Oskar’s unapproachable grief will be able to power the entire narrative, but, alas, it begins to second-guess itself, providing more and more stacked-up elements with which to propel itself forward. It never approaches the simple-minded hokiness of similar kid-on-a-quest film’s like North or Shyamalan’s Wide Awake, but it loses some of its power nonetheless. Still, the film features gutty performances, from Hanks and Horn, to von Sydow and Sandra Bullock, who plays Oskar’s grief-stricken mother with purposeful understatement. By the end, it might seem as if the film were merely dipping its toes into the giant ocean of grief that it started with, but it’s still a relief to see Oskar safely on the shore.
Dir. Steven Soderbergh
Score: 5.6
Steven Soderbergh, who seems to threaten retirement after every new film he makes, must be getting bored. Tired of shooting glossy, A-list capers like the Ocean’s series, and weary of making big-deal ensemble dramas like Contagion, Soderbergh gets a rush from trying odd combinations of things just to see what might happen. Like a small boy bored of his toys and mashing them all together into some other kind of contraption, Soderbergh fuses together elements of avant-garde techniques, non-professional actors, non-lineal storytelling, digital film, whatever seems to tickle his fancy at a given time. That many of these experiments might be considered failures is entirely beside the point: It’s his way of staying interested in the form.
Which brings us to his latest madcap mishmash: He takes a pretty standard-issue international double-crossed assassin storyline, adds a bunch of high-ranking Hollywood males to go along with a breathless whirlwind of international locations, and then utilizes a non-professional actress, known previously for her work in MMA cage matches as his heroine, and shoots the whole thing on lo-fi digital media so that at times it looks like a Mexican soap opera, replete with awkward hand-to-hand combat scenes that are unlike any you’ve seen before, but not in the way you might think. When we first meet the heroine in question, the esteemed agent-for-hire Mallory Kane (Gina Carano), she’s already on the lamb from her former boss and lover, Kenneth, played by Ewan McGregor (one of curious affectations of the film is all the male characters are identified solely by their first names), who has betrayed her for unknown reasons shortly after completing a successful extraction in Barcelona. As a target for Kenneth and his multitude of shady connections, Mallory has worked her way back into the U.S. after a near-miss in Dublin, by another one of Kenneth’s men, Paul (Michael Fassbender). Along the way, she has to contend with Aaron (Channing Tatum), another agent hot on her trail, and try to track down the mysterious circumstances of her double-crossing.
For all her lack of cinematic experience, Carano certainly doesn’t lack for physical ability; in fact, her purposeful physicality roots the character in a kind of verisimilitude that you won’t find from the smugly sleek Angelina Jolie-types who usually populate these kinds of affairs. Her acting, while not professional, is reasonable, though you get the sense her range would be on the limited side. Where the film truly gets weird is with the bread-and-butter scenes for a typical action fest: the fights. Beat down after beat down, Mallory puts the wood on her myriad of male attackers, crushing them between her thighs, choking them out under her bulging biceps or getting repeatedly kicked in the head, but the scenes have a curious, choppy quality to them which Soderbergh seems to relish. The choreography is herky-jerk and stagey; the movements broad and unfocussed, like watching two six-year-olds pretend to karate chop one another. The narrative, which gets lopped from one timeline to the next (Soderbergh and screenwriter Lem Dobbs have never met a jumbled structure they didn’t like), rushes us all over the country and Europe, but almost never stays in one place long enough for the scenes to separate themselves. Short of the house of Mallory’s father (Bill Paxton), whose stunning New Mexico abode is straight out of “Architectural Digest,” the film never wants us to get terribly comfortable with where we’re setting.
Marketed as a straight-up piece of boom-boom, I suspect the action/adventure crowd won’t really know what to make of this curious amalgamation, but as scores of A-list male actors go down to the furious fists and feet of this super-agent, there’s at least a decent possibility they won’t much care.
Dir. Dee Rees
Score: 7.3
After a night at a sweaty club, a young Brooklyn woman changes her clothes on the bus before having to face her mother at home. But rather than changing out of something skimpy and too-revealing, she instead changes from city-tough lesbian to high school casual. This isn’t the only common trope Dee Rees plays off of in her fearless feature debut, in fact, the film itself is a slight inversion of the coming-of-age story in which the child distances themselves from their parents. In Rees’ world of young lesbians, the common theme is the manner in which their parents turn them out.
Alike (Adepero Oduye) is a shy woman, going to dyke clubs with her best friend Laura (Pernell Walker) at night, and trying her best to avoid her mother’s over-protective wrath in the morning. Close with her father, Arthur (Charles Parnell), a detective, Alike clashes with her mother, Audrey (Kim Wayans), over the usual sorts of teen-parent disputes, but the underlying thread of their angst is her mother’s suspicion of her sexual identity, which she identifies as being compromised by her relationship with Laura. In an attempt to get her daughter back in the fold, Audrey introduces Alike to the daughter of a friend at church, Bina (Aasha Davis), but unbeknownst to her, Bina has designs on Alike herself. To make matters worse, Arthur may or may not be having an affair during his late-night work sessions, a fact that strains the family meridian even further.
With this kind of a set-up, the film has no choice but to build to a shattering climax, but to Rees’ considerable credit, it never settles for brassy melodrama. Instead it rises and falls on small, understated moments (“I know God doesn’t make mistakes,” Audrey hisses to her daughter midway through the film, a sentence Alike returns in kind towards the end), and contents itself with staying true to its well-realized characters: It doesn’t stack the deck to achieve its ends. Alike might be a sweetly sympathetic character most of the time, but that doesn’t absolve her of her bouts of petulance and selfishness; as neurotic and overbearing as Audrey may seem, many of her fears are entirely justified by her oldest daughter and husband, whom, she points out correctly, are remarkably similar in nature; Arthur, for his part, might be cheating on his wife and seem a stern taskmaster with his family, but he’s the one who remains devoted to his daughter no matter what.
It’s a very assured and ambitious debut, a small but potent story that examines the well-honed powder keg relations of mothers and teen daughters with a fresh eye, undaunted by the many such stories that have come before. The question implicit in the film’s title is never cleanly explained: as a testament to how even-handed and carefully put together the final piece is, by the end it’s impossible to know exactly to whom its referring.
Dir. Phyllida Lloyd
Score: 6.5
The lioness in winter. The story of Maggie Thatcher’s rise from shy grocer’s daughter to leader of the Tories and first female Prime Minister of Britain throughout the ’80s would be compelling enough in of itself for a biopic treatment, but Phyllida Lloyd’s film goes much further than that. In its depiction of a half-mad and hallucinating elderly Maggie, played perfectly by Meryl Streep, conversing with her late husband (played by Jim Broadbent) and trying like hell to hold onto the ever-smaller tatters of her previously whip-smart mind, the film becomes an aching portrayal of all that we lose when we dare to grow old.
In fact, as much as audiences might keen for more of the old Maggie, unconscionable as she might have been, rising past the inherent sexism of her time and taking power by fighting back at the unctuous men of parliament smirking all around her, the film reflexively returns us to the well-appointed but lonely flat in which the old woman now resides, presiding over glossy dinners with her daughter Carol (Olivia Colman) and assorted other dignitaries, and trying to reconcile being alone again after many decades of marriage. We see snippets of her early years at Oxford and finally winning her first MP election in 1959, but the majority of the film focuses on her time as the Prime Minister, taking over a country ravaged by an economic slump, badgered by union shut downs, and a population whose morale was in serious need of rejuvenating. Much as Ronald Reagan swept into office and instigated his trickle-down economics that created a sudden thrush of a young middle class with too much money and even greater hardships for the poor, Thatcher’s England was locked in a battle for its soul, either as an empathetic socialist-tinged society or a hard-luck, boot-strapped fiefdom.
It says something about the film that it can take a rancorous and largely unpopular public figure and put a human enough face on her that we are forced almost against our will to recalibrate our convictions, if only slightly (though I shudder in anticipation of the first Reagan bio-pic film to offer us that same opportunity), and mostly because of her wretchedness in the face of her old age. It also helps the film a great deal to have the brilliant Streep as its main focus; not only does she faithfully reproduce the high-pitched Victorian lilt that so defined Thatcher, she peers deeply into the woman’s soul, and damned if she doesn’t find a great deal to respect in her reportage.
It’s not that the film avoids Thatcher’s many warts — not the least of which is her arrogant desire for power in lieu of properly taking her family into account — including the ridiculous Falkland Islands war with Argentina that resulted in nearly 1000 deaths for a set of rocks off the coast of South America that could hardly be deemed worth the fuss, but it takes them in deference to the many things she did accomplish, even as a proto-feminist, she seemed to delight in ramming her conservative values and harshness down the throats of the bedraggled British underclasses. And yet, the visage of her alone in her bedroom, surrounded by the empty suits of her late husband still brings us a pang of sympathy. She might have been a monster as a leader, but in the end, she’s gotten old and frail just like everyone else.
Dir. Michel Hazanavicius
Score: 7.6
In a nearly flawless example of artistic synchronicity, director Michel Hazanavicius’s audacious film asks its audience to engage with a ’20s style silent drama about a movie star of the silent era facing the impending career doom of the rise of the talkies. But that’s not even all Hazanavicius adds to the film’s degree of difficulty. Not only is the film 99 percent silent, it’s also shot in the boxy ratio (1.33:1) of the era, and, naturally, is in B&W — and not the high-contrast, gorgeous Scorsese type of B&W, either; the shades are off-puttingly muted and grey. With so much to overcome, then, how is the film able to garner our rapt attention and earn a Palme d’Or nomination at this year’s Cannes festival? By utilizing the basis of successful films since before there was even a silent era: a hell of a story populated by characters we care about.
When we first meet George Valentin (Jean Dujardin), the silent star in question, he’s riding high on the strength of yet another well-received action picture featuring his debonair good looks, his devil-may-care attitude and his trusty Jack Russell terrier. Egotistic and fully engorged with celebrity, he enjoys the lavish praise of an adoring public, and all of the subsequent niceties of fame. It’s not that George is a bad man — in fact, he helps out a young wanna-be starlet, Peppy Miller (Bérénice Bejo), on the set of his new picture when he gallantly defends her from his pugnacious producer, Al Zimmer (John Goodman) — he’s just vain, and filled with his own sense of invincibility. Thus it is when Zimmer shows Valentin an early screen test with audio (which for us remains silent), he laughs it off as a passing fad. Soon after, when his fortunes collapse, and his pride keeps him from making the transition to the new talkie era, we see just how far he intends to go to make his point to an uncaring society.
The film features transfixing performances from Dujardin and Bejo, who manage the difficult task of conveying the story without resorting to preening, and a sure-footed script that teases out a well-worn story with wit and conviction. Beyond all that, though, Hazanavicius has cannily crafted a potent metaphor of our time: Our leaps of technological know-how always leave older versions in the dust, creating a never ending parade of has-beens whose expiration date of fame and efficacy have long since been exceeded. At one point, Valentin is quoted to say he stands by his decision to refuse the new Hollywood because he is “an artist,” and, therefore, will not yield in the face of public sentiment, which begs a significant question: Are artists made by not accepting that which feels untrue to them, or are they just attempting to hide from the inexorable march of their era?
Dir. Tomas Andersen
Score: 7.4
If you want to catch the real difference between this epic British adaptation of John LeCarré’s gripping international espionage drama, and what schlock typically passes for ‘spy thriller’ in this country look no further than the toast. Twice within the first fifteen minutes of Tomas Andersen’s well-appointed cat-and-mouse game, characters munch very notably on the most humble of British breakfast appointments. It’s not much to look at, but the dry, rasping tone of the stuff heavily implies the slick fatuousness of its consumers. It’s a small detail to be sure, but, in keeping with a film composed largely of just such details, it speaks volumes to the care and precision with which this film was conceived.
This largesse also goes far beyond the breakfast table with a stunning cast of British thespians — including Gary Oldham, Tom Hardy, Benedict Cumberbatch, and others — chosen to populate one of LeCarré’s most densely satisfying works. The plot is heavy and strong as a glass of 80-year-old scotch. We’re in the early ’70s in Cold War London, with British intelligence playing a constant game of switcheroo with the Soviets, determining spies, torturing them for any intel they might provide and then quickly returning them back to the enemy side in exchange for the return of their own counterparts. Following a power play by Percy Alleline (Toby Jones), the former head of a supremely powerful counter-intelligence unit, Control (John Hurt) and his right-hand man, George Smiley (Oldham), are forced into retirement, but not before confronting continued rumors of having a mole in the top of their former organization. In order to ferret out the suspect, Smiley is brought back into the fold with a small team lead by Peter Guillam (Cumberbatch) and given a green light to do whatever necessary to ID the perpetrator, which leads to elaborate gamesmanship on all fronts.
Rich with period detail — from the reliance on teletypes for the transmission of coded messages to Smiley’s preferred brand of breath mint, and all amidst the ever-swirling smoky haze of agents’ cigarettes and dim office track lighting — Andersen’s film does justice to LeCarré’s elegantly refined prose. Despite its subject matter, the film is anything but an action picture — even the climax is bloodless and primarily cordial — but that doesn’t for a second suggest that its turgid. It avoids standard action set pieces and replaces them with a keenly observant, paranoid atmosphere that generates more than enough disquiet and trepidation to keep you intrigued. It is also decidedly not dumbed down, to the point where, if you are unfamiliar with the novel, you might find yourself swimming in a brisk sea of confusion, especially in the film’s first half-hour, where the myriad of characters are spread out before you like an assortment of misplaced puzzle pieces.
But a good deal of the joy behind these kinds of films is derived precisely at the moment all these pieces finally coalesce into satisfying whole. For a film about counter intelligence and high-stakes political poker, there is a very low body count, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t a lot of blood spilled by both sides before it’s over.
