The Great Gatsby

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby may be the most strongly Hollywood-flavored of the Great American Novels — its ready-made visual symbols (the green light on the dock, the all-seeing eyes of Dr. T.J. Eckleburg), its unabashedly melodramatic plot, the noisy dazzlement of its parties — but it has never blossomed like a flower at the lips’ touch of cinema. It’s a tricky novel, staunchly interior, a tale told by a simple man about a fool — Jay Gatsby, who built a fortune so he could possess his long-lost love Daisy. What Gatsby doesn’t understand about himself — that a man who runs away from love out of shame at his poverty, then spends five years constructing a hollow shrine to his new status as a great catch, has deeper problems than money — is what powers the novel. The Great Gatsby is, among many other things, a prescient pre-Depression portrait of a bubble that had to pop and did.

That’s hard to get across in a movie, even with narration that spells everything out and often infantilizes Fitzgerald’s meanings. The new Great Gatsby rides a rainbow wave of 3D and hip-hop, straining mightily to seem relevant in the era of Jay-Z and Iron Man 3. (Gatsby is the original Iron Man, sheathed in the armor of privilege but with a wounded and vulnerable heart.) But all it can be, like every other attempt at the book, is a flip-page visualization. The 3D lends spatial depth to the sets, but the people in them are two-dimensional. This was to be expected from Baz Luhrmann, who has been drawn again and again to lushly doomed romances (Romeo + Juliet, Moulin Rouge) only to litter them with lurid images. His Great Gatsby may be his most solid work (at least its structure holds his carny-barker instincts in check) but it’s still as aggressively opulent as his other films. The camera goes on being wowed by the signifiers of vast wealth long after the party’s over. Luhrmann is a guest who doesn’t know when to leave.

The film does offer a pleasantly bombastic intro to Gatsby (Leonardo DiCaprio), who has invited the story’s narrator, Nick Carraway (Tobey Maguire), to one of his epic shindigs. DiCaprio is a little old for Gatsby but still looks young, and he does everything he can to nail the different sides of the former James Gatz. He works up a posh Oxford accent that amusingly drops the T from such words as “start” and, of course, “old sport.” He’s touchingly childlike when waiting impatiently for the now-married Daisy (Carey Mulligan) to arrive at Nick’s modest house for tea. DiCaprio seems to have read, understood and internalized the book; aside from gothy newcomer Elizabeth Dabicki as the extravagantly bored golf champion Jordan Baker, who exactly matches the Jordan I envisioned in the book, DiCaprio is the best at bringing the novel to the screen.

Luhrmann throws great colorful parties. But with anything that doesn’t involve spectacle or dazzle, he’s hopeless. An intractable problem may not be Luhrmann’s fault: Daisy is as dull as she was in the book. But in Fitzgerald she’s dull for thematic reasons — Gatsby knocks himself out to be worthy of a woman who isn’t all that interesting. His version of the American Dream is premised on self-delusion, wanting what he can’t have. In a movie we at least expect the camera to show us some of what attracted Gatsby to Daisy, but Luhrmann is too busy tossing confetti. To illustrate a greater failing — and I suppose this is a spoiler alert for a story most of you should have read by now — Luhrmann’s depiction of Gatsby’s fate is offensively pictorial, turning the elliptically-told tragedy in the book into a faux-poetic visual. Forget about Dr. T.J. Eckleburg; the eyes of Baz Luhrmann are all that matter here.

It’s not impossible to make a great movie out of material like this. The closest cinema has come to what Fitzgerald achieved was, of course, Citizen Kane, and Gatsby and Charles Foster Kane have been compared and contrasted endlessly by university students over the decades. (From some angles, DiCaprio, whose face has filled out in his post-heartthrob career, could pass for Kane here. Don’t give Luhrmann any ideas.) Orson Welles used every technique at his disposal to shed light on the inner turmoil of a man devoted to surfaces. Luhrmann is quite content to stay on the surface, to rub elbows with tuxedoed gents and bewitching flappers. (If the movie brings back the flapper look, it will have justified itself in at least one regard.) Even the book’s final line, perhaps the most famous last line in all of American literature, is given a bland and uncomprehending reading by the morose Maguire and accompanied by shiny text on the screen. Teenagers who rent this movie in lieu of reading the book deserve to flunk their summer-reading tests next September.

Warm Bodies

A young man in a hoodie shambles aimlessly through an airport. He can’t remember his name, but he thinks it begins with an R. The R may as well stand for Romeo, because he soon finds his Juliet, though he has to eat her boyfriend’s brains first. Warm Bodies is a “zomromcom,” a term inaugurated by 2004’s witty modern classic Shaun of the Dead, and while this film isn’t as funny, it’s more romantic and has some intriguing twists on the zombie theme. R (Nicholas Hoult) is a relatively thoughtful and sensitive zombie — he provides self-deprecating narration, and he collects things that remind him of when he was alive. He stumbles across Julie (Teresa Palmer) when she’s on a run for medicine in the city. He seems taken with her even before he consumes her boyfriend Perry’s gray matter and experiences Perry’s memories of — and feelings for — Julie.

In 1985’s Return of the Living Dead, we were told that zombies eat brains because it alleviates “the pain of being dead.” Warm Bodies pushes that notion further towards an emotional anodyne: eating brains takes a zombie out of his listless existence for a while, like a drug. R and a few other zombies of his acquaintance (including Rob Corddry) may be zombies, and they may kill and eat humans because they have to, but they’re not as far gone yet as another kind of zombie. “Bonies,” these others are called — skeletal ghouls who “gave up” and have become true anti-life monsters. Compared to them, R looks pretty decent, and Julie (who doesn’t know R ate her sweetie’s skull meat) allows R to look after her after he rescues her. Eventually she develops feelings for him, which is unfortunate, because her father (John Malkovich) is the gung-ho leader of a militaristic band of zombie-killing survivalists.

Warm Bodies isn’t a romantic twist on the zombie movie so much as a zombie twist on the romance movie. There’s a nicely fragile rapport between Hoult (who’s delivered on the promise he showed in About a Boy a decade ago) and Palmer (who resembles Kristen Stewart but has more verve and humor). R and Julie look good and feel good together. We’re asked to believe that their love not only slowly heals R but inspires his fellow zombies to do likewise. Mostly we do. We can take or leave the implied message that we must embrace life to avoid being dead — literally, in this case — but R and Julie are a strange enough couple to make the bromide go down easy. The movie also appealingly suggests that if you were a bit of an outcast in life, you’ll manage to resist becoming one of the Bonies — you’ll try to find ways to make death interesting, like piling up snow globes or listening to Guns ‘n Roses.

This is director Jonathan Levine’s second horror-themed film, after his debut, the slasher flick All the Boys Love Mandy Lane; some might also count 50/50, with cancer as the remorseless serial killer. Levine’s work here is amiably rumpled, relaxing into the scenes of R playing his old ’80s vinyl records for Julie or haltingly trying to converse with her. The movie doesn’t stand out much in memory — nothing in it really pops — but it’s enjoyable while it lasts. It provides a surprisingly nuanced showcase for Rob Corddry, who is often pretty funny but too often lapses into a cartoon of himself. Here he gives us an amusingly polite zombie, and his first non-conversation with R strikes the tone the movie needs. They could be just two regular guys mumbling at each other at an airport.

Warm Bodies is not anything like the Twilight of zombie movies — for one thing, it doesn’t take itself stupidly seriously enough for that — though some horror fans offended by the softening (and sparkle-fication) of vampires in that series may likewise bristle at this film’s apparent thesis that even if you’re a zombie, all you need is love. Zombies, such people may say, eat people; that’s all. (The villain of the piece, the gun-happy Malkovich character, agrees with them.) Some of us horror fans, though, get tired of the binary us-vs.-them formula and welcome some shading, especially in a subgenre as exhausted lately as the zombie film. When World War Z opens this summer, it’s possible I’ll be looking at some of the zombies slaughtered by the heroes and thinking “Wait, one of them could be R.”

Batman: The Dark Knight Returns – Part 2

Frank Miller’s original series Batman: The Dark Knight Returns was plenty violent, but it was also strangely bloodless. There was a bit of bloodshed, but mostly the wounds and gashes were sanitized, as they probably had to be back in 1986 in a medium still widely considered kiddie stuff. The second part of DC’s animated adaptation of the series, however, is decidedly not for kids. It’s rated PG-13, as was its predecessor, but it’s full of gore and pain and trauma. (It also has a streak of hope, and faith in the social contract reasserting itself in times of crisis, that the young and cynical Miller possibly couldn’t quite bring himself to emphasize too much.) The final showdown between the aged Batman and the knife-wielding Joker (who doesn’t seem to have lost a step despite having been locked away for a decade) is thick with splatter and agony in a way Miller’s linework wasn’t.

I razzed Part 1 a bit for feeling rushed and anticlimactic, but Part 2 delivers the goods. It picks up directly where Part 1 left off, so you need to have seen the previous 77 minutes before sitting down for this one (or have the Miller comics committed to memory, as I do); there’s no “Previously, in…” stuff. Batman is still a fugitive, chased by new Gotham police commissioner Ellen Yindel and shadowed by Superman, who’s been reduced to being government muscle — we see ol’ Supes fighting in a skirmish the U.S. is involved in, casually killing hundreds of Russian soldiers. This annoys the USSR, which fires a nuke and causes a nationwide blackout. Miller anticipated not only the chaos of Katrina but the community spirit in the wake of Sandy, and the adaptation leans a little more towards the latter (though I’m sure Part 2 was in the can before Sandy struck).

It all leads to the big face-off between Batman and Superman, and the adaptation expands on the battle considerably, as though the animators couldn’t resist pulling out all the stops (Batman using barrels on the ends of his arms to batter Superman, for instance). What this approach gains in kick-ass energy, it loses a little in the sad gravitas Miller brought to the fight; the original half-a-page image of Batman punching Superman (seen below) is rightly iconic, and on the page you can linger over it and feel its power, but as animation it flashes by in a second. In terms of plot, the adaptation is mostly faithful, right down to the guest appearance by a one-armed Oliver Queen (aka Green Arrow), who helps Batman at a crucial moment with kryptonite-tipped arrows. Oliver is an old-school government-hating lefty who throws in with libertarian Batman against thoughtlessly fascist Superman.

The politics are a little weird (that was a feature of a lot of ’80s escapism, as in Rambo and Red Dawn); the story yearns for manly, incorruptible authority to challenge weak, corrupt authority. On the other hand, Miller welcomed the shift of power from male to female, as witness the newly female Robin and the noble if misguided Yindel. The Joker seems to have a gay thing for Batman, though, like Javier Bardem stroking 007 in Skyfall, Joker might only be playing that up in order to bug his adversary. Then there’s Bruno, a pre-op, post-op, or possibly non-op transgendered thief working for the Joker; she packs a big gun and has swastikas tattooed on her large silicon breasts where her nipples should be. I should remind you, this is rated PG-13.

A sequence in which the Joker massacres a theater full of people (at The David Endochrine Show, with the Letterman stand-in voiced, in a witty bit of casting, by Conan O’Brien) may pull some viewers up short post-Aurora. Later, when the Joker is loose at a carnival, he doesn’t get to kill a bunch of kids in the adaptation as he did in the comics, a mercy for which post-Newtown viewers may be grateful. Miller anticipated a lot of national traumas (a plane hitting a building in the wake of the nuclear blackout chillingly prefigures 9/11), and in the DVD’s extra feature some of the adaptation’s makers correctly describe the epic story as “heavy.” This second part does pack on the darkness and grotesqueries in a way that feels more, well, Milleresque than the first part did.

In the end, taken together, you have a 153-minute version of what many consider the ultimate Batman tale. It neither improves on nor disgraces what Miller achieved; it is, I suppose, a workable supplement, and by the very nature of its source it’s probably the wildest, messiest Batman story yet to be told in the animated medium — at least until someone gets around to Miller’s All-Star Batman & Robin, which is a whole other kettle of crazy fish.

Les Miserables

In the first reel or so of Les Miserables, we may be reminded that we don’t often see something like this at the movies these days — big, lavish, epic, period musicals, the kind with ornate and expensive sets. Sadly, we’re still not seeing something like that; the musicals of old used to take time to drink in the set decoration (hey, a lot of money went into it, might as well point a camera at it), but Les Miserables, under the shaky direction of Tom Hooper, gives us a few perfunctory backdrops and then takes the camera right up into the actors’ faces. Hooper is going for a more intimate rendition of the beloved stage musical, and this works only up to a point, that point being when Anne Hathaway is on the screen. Beyond that point, it’s Hugh Jackman or Russell Crowe or various other guys belting right in our faces, and it’s sort of assaultive, emphasizing the sausage-fest that this material (as adapted for song, anyway) always was.

As Fantine, musical theater’s favorite emo chick, Hathaway blows away whatever else is supposed to be going on. She’s out of the movie quickly, but she haunts the rest of it (though her absence is sorely felt). Hathaway’s Fantine is in a different movie about how 19th-century France grinds women down, makes a mockery of their dreams and denies them even the slimmest dignity. Hooper’s only wise choice here is to move in close for Fantine’s show-stopper “I Dreamed a Dream” and let Hathaway’s undiluted anguish burn the screen down. This segment of the film, right down to Hathaway’s shorn hair, is a tribute not to stagecraft but to the legendary Maria Falconetti in Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc; it’s no easy burden to bear comparison to cinema’s greatest acting work, but Hathaway shoulders it. Between this and The Dark Knight Rises (another big Occupy-flavored epic she walked away with) and the recent, hilarious Funny or Die “sad-off” she did with Samuel L. Jackson, Hathaway’s had quite the year. Les Miserables — or its first half hour, anyway — is worth sitting through just to see the performance that’s probably going to send Hathaway home with the gold next year.

The rest of this thing is a rather slack battle of wills between ex-con turned mayor Jean Valjean (Jackman) and his adversary, rigid Inspector Javert (Crowe). It’s supposed to be Valjean’s story, how he redeems himself by raising Fantine’s daughter Cosette (Amanda Seyfried) in safety while dodging Javert and joining in the June Rebellion. But after a while we’re following some colorless rebels, including the drippy Marius (Eddie Redmayne), who falls in love with Cosette at first sight, breaking the heart of poor Eponine (Samantha Barks), who loves him. Far too much of our time is taken up by this weak triangle, and I came to resent that Samantha Barks has more singing time than Anne Hathaway or even Amanda Seyfried; Barks has a fine voice, but she can’t act the songs the way Hathaway or Seyfried do. In any event, the women in this story are only there for the men to protect or mourn or long for.

I pity newcomers to Les Miz, who haven’t seen the musical on stage and might not know (because the movie doesn’t bend over backward to establish it) that Eponine and the bold young Gavroche (destined to be shot by a French soldier) are the children of the scroungy innkeepers the Thenardiers (Helena Bonham Carter and Sacha Baron Cohen, providing welcome comic relief, though their presence turns their scenes into what seem to be Sweeney Todd outtakes). If the Thenardiers have any emotional response to the deaths of their children, we’re not briefed on it. The few action scenes are loud and incoherently staged, and that includes the sword-and-song duel between Valjean and Javert. Tom Hooper might be the worst living director who has previously won an Oscar for directing (The King’s Speech); when he isn’t jamming the camera in his cast’s nostrils, or letting the corner of a building block Samantha Barks’ face for half her dialogue in a scene, he’s making us queasy with handheld shots or, on a few occasions, framing someone off to the side with way too much head room. Hooper’s artsy pomp made me wish for the relatively straightforward pomp and clarity of old Hollywood musicals.

Jackman suffers and endures heroically, and performs with passion, though as the role is conceived he can’t bring any spark or wit to it. Essentially, Valjean is a wind-up good guy. Crowe is, as always, an imposing presence, and he hits the notes, but it seems as though hitting the notes takes all his energy, with none left over for the moral shading Javert probably should have. With mostly cardboard male characters (really, they’ve got one thing they want — freedom or justice), this Les Miz needed the spirit of wronged and seething femaleness to drive it, but once Fantine gives up the ghost so does the movie. I have no doubt that Les Miz is a powerhouse on the stage, but it hasn’t been configured in a way that makes it explode as a movie. Despite the face-invader camerawork, the material feels as remote from us as if we were sitting in the nosebleed seats. It will probably delight worshipers of the musical, but I can’t see it converting any agnostics.

Breaking Dawn – Part 2

During the long goodbye at the end of Breaking Dawn Part 2, the last film in the Twilight franchise, we see images of, apparently, everyone who has ever been in a Twilight film, even if they weren’t in this one. It was nice to see good ol’ Graham Greene again; I’m sure he would’ve rather had the money, or at least a walk-on, even in a flashback (his character died in the second movie). This end-credits tribute makes it seem as though everyone in the world — well, except for those nasty Volturi — joins us in wishing an eternal happily-ever-after for the pretty vampire couple Bella Swan (Kristen Stewart) and Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson). I suppose this is one of the few romantic films that actually can offer a literal happily-ever-after — for many centuries, long after the rest of us are dead.

But will The Twilight Saga live forever? Teenage girls are notoriously fickle, and if you were, say, fourteen when the first of Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight books came out, you’re well into college age now. Still, this series probably represents the closest thing to long-form romance the movies have seen since the Thin Man films closed their doors, and that’s worth noting in an era when mostly sexless boys’-toys stories get all the franchise attention. Despite the trappings of lite horror — vampires, werewolves — Twilight has always been about how Bella and Edward would hurdle the many obstacles to their True Love. It’s been a sappy and largely uneventful ride, and I welcome The Hunger Games taking its place in girls’ hearts, but let’s not pretend there haven’t been far worse film series.

The big drama here follows up on Breaking Dawn Part 1, in which the still-human Bella gave birth to Edward’s daughter, almost died, and was saved by getting vampirized. The daughter, Renesmee (a name widely mocked in and out of the fanbase), grows rapidly and communicates by touching people’s faces. Bella and Edward have been given their own charming little house out in the forest, and Jacob the soulful werewolf (Taylor Lautner) has “imprinted” on Renesmee, which basically means he’ll hang around her with puppy-dog eyes platonically for the rest of his life, perhaps hoping for the occasional biscuit or bouncy ball outside. All seems sparkly until the dread Volturi, the elite vampire coven that controls all bloodsuckers, hear about Renesmee and think she’s a human child who’s been vampirized.

This leads to a big fake climax, which is nonetheless the highlight of the series, in which we get to see the Cullen clan, plus the werewolves and whatever other vampires they can summon, face off against the Volturi in an epic battle in the snow. Filmmakers, take note: you can get away with pretty much any level of carnage in a PG-13 movie as long as you don’t show any blood. Many heads and limbs are liberated from their bodies. Reportedly, this battle did not appear in the book, and appears here only because psychic vampire Alice (Ashley Greene) wants to show Volturi leader Aro (Michael Sheen) what exactly would happen if the opposing sides did throw down. Well, that and because director Bill Condon and screenwriter Melissa Rosenberg didn’t want to end a five-film series with a polite chat between good and evil.

As always, I have to say the proceedings were painless, if uninvolving. Stewart and Pattinson, perhaps because they were aware their Twilight ordeal was almost over, show more spark here than before; Stewart actually becomes interesting to watch when Bella is a new vampire learning the ropes, and she manages an impressive I-will-kill-you scowl directed at anyone who threatens Renesmee. This series has always cribbed from classical archetypes without quite feeling archetypal itself; it’s Epic Romance Lite, and everything else about it has been lite, too. Aside from the occasional “hmm” moment arising from our knowledge of its author’s Mormonism, The Twilight Saga hasn’t offered very much to chew on or digest, no subtext or connection to where we’re at today — these films and books could’ve been written in the ’70s. I presume it has been an introduction to star-crossed romance for a generation of girls too young to remember Titanic (much less Romeo and Juliet, even the DiCaprio version), but for the rest of us it’s been a mildly diverting sidebar, not central to any discussion outside the tabloids and the fanbase. That the movies haven’t been as embarrassingly terrible as they could’ve been is a small bonus, I guess, though embarrassingly terrible movies might have performed the dual public service of bringing Howard the Duck-level shame to the books’ fanbase and laughter to the rest of us.

See also:
Twilight
New Moon
Breaking Dawn – Part 1
(I watched on DVD, but did not review, Eclipse.)

Cloud Atlas

If the massive, vaultingly ambitious Cloud Atlas could be whittled down to one old-Hollywood concern, it might be this: At the end of the picture, do the guy and the girl get together? This is a tricky proposition in this case, because there are six guys and six girls, in six different times and places, all of whom, we are led to surmise, are the same guy and girl in different stages, and sometimes they don’t even meet each other for so much as a how-do-you-do. Cloud Atlas, based on a widely cherished cult novel by David Mitchell, spans centuries and the globe without breaking its stride, intercutting between each of its sextet of tales and arriving, finally, at its big takeaway: Love is good. Freedom is good. Truth is good. The opposites of those things are bad, and the pursuits of those things are the only constant in an ever-changing, ever-hostile world.

Well. Yes. It would take a preternaturally grumpy viewer to object too strongly to this life-medicine, though, because it’s administered so skillfully and passionately, with a complete disregard for the cynics in the balcony. I think the tipping point in Cloud Atlas determining whether you will love it or hoot at it is a top-hatted imaginary demon with greenish skin, exhorting a character to do vile things in the name of self-preservation. I grew to look forward to that fellow, and I sighed a little and became restless when the movie flicked over to the futuristic “Neo-Seoul” segments, which feel the most like a dystopian fantasia by the Wachowski siblings (of The Matrix). Sure enough, they directed those segments, as well as another futuristic story and one set in the 19th century, while Tom Tykwer (Run Lola Run) handled the ’30s, the ’70s, and 2012. Which shows, I guess, that Andy and Lana Wachowski are uncomfortable with present day, present reality, and Tykwer can work quite well without spaceships and laser blasts.

Taken all in one two-hour-and-52-minute lump, Cloud Atlas is never boring; I checked the time at one point, saw that we had about an hour to go, and settled back, relaxed and happy to get more. As pure cinema — a term I overuse, but can’t avoid when discussing this thing — the movie is a vast banquet table stretching to the vanishing point, though we’re never allowed to linger over any one tasty dish before it’s removed and replaced with an entirely dissimilar platter. Mitchell’s novel was structured symmetrically, or palindromically (it’s a word now), the first story leading into and appearing in the next, and so on, and then the narrative doubled back on itself. The movie shuffles the deck — the effect is simultaneity, not continuity. Each reality the film shows us — a notary on a ship, a rent boy working as an amanuensis to a composer, a journalist uncovering shenanigans at a nuclear power plant, a publisher trapped in a nursing home, a clone seeking freedom in futuristic Korea, a post-apocalyptic tribesman in Hawaii — unfolds, for us, at the same “movie time,” in apparently different dimensions.

The fun part, despite clucking from the politically correct, is watching the same actors — Tom Hanks, Halle Berry, Hugo Weaving, Jim Sturgess, Jim Broadbent, Hugh Grant — appearing as different characters of sometimes different races. Hanks gets to be heroic (or at least morally conflicted) in some segments and diabolical in others; my favorite of his incarnations was “Dermot Hoggins,” a pugnacious Irish writer who chucks his least favorite literary critic off a roof. Hanks and Halle Berry appear to be destined for love — the “guy and the girl” who get together at the end of the picture — though in a couple of the stories they make no more than a nodding acquaintance, perhaps because in those realities Hanks isn’t worthy of love yet. Karma seems to be one of the many ideas bubbling to the surface here. In his six identities, Hanks starts out rotten, becomes merely sleazy, then conflicted, then violent, then an inadvertent motivator of freedom fighters, and then, after many visitations from Hugo Weaving as the aforementioned top-hat demon, finally a hero deserving of Halle Berry’s hand.

Again, most of this is shuffled together so smoothly that it never confuses and nearly always engages. As photographed by Frank Griebe and John Toll, it’s a gift for the eyes, and though Cloud Atlas is perhaps not the intellectual/emotional one-two punch it seems to want to be, it’s nonetheless made for endless replaying on Blu-ray and at midnight screenings (the few still extant). In isolated bits it feels major; other bits force us to agree to go along with them (the makeup department kept very busy here, and sometimes it’s like playing spot-the-actor in something like The List of Adrian Messenger). The cast and the filmmakers are committed at the highest level, and good old Hugo Weaving gets to chew scenery as a variety of evildoers, including a forbidding nurse (yes, a female nurse). Given that this is the first major film co-directed by a transgendered woman (Lana Wachowski), it ends its gay love story less cheerily than some will like, while others will shrug and blame it on the repressive time period. The Magical Negro trope pops up in a couple of the segments, too, which may, for all I know, reflect as much on the book as on the filmmakers. Cloud Atlas is too earnest and overarching to be perfect in any way — the literal-minded will gather dozens of flaws to cackle over. But in such a timid time for entertainment in general and movies in particular, I have to respect the beauty of the attempt. It isn’t a masterpiece but it sure has masterful pieces.

Batman: The Dark Knight Returns – Part 1

Ever since it debuted in 1986, some of us have been eagerly awaiting a film version of Frank Miller’s seminal comics series Batman: The Dark Knight Returns. Set in a hellish near-future where a 55-year-old Batman has been retired for ten years, the series redefined the character not only for its generation but for every generation thereafter. Taking Batman back to his grim, dark roots, Miller wiped away any traces of the campy ’60s TV show. Almost every Batman movie, from Tim Burton’s 1989 effort right up to Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight Rises last summer, found inspiration in Miller’s interpretation. It’s almost as if we’ve gotten a Dark Knight Returns adaptation piecemeal over the years; to cite just one example, an older and weaker Batman’s emerging from an eight-year retirement to blunder over-confidently into a fight with a physically more powerful foe in Dark Knight Rises comes right from the Miller playbook. So at this point, an actual adaptation seems redundant, and yet here we are with the first of a two-part animated take on Miller’s material (the DVD and Blu-ray hit stores next week; part 2 is promised next spring).

Director Jay Oliva and screenwriter Bob Goodman stick very close to Miller’s narrative, in which Batman comes out of retirement first to deal with a resurgent Two-Face (plastic surgery to fix his acid-scarred face hasn’t helped his psyche), then to fight the gigantic, razor-toothed leader of the large and remorseless “Mutant Gang.” Miller’s series ran for four 48-page issues — the third and fourth issues pit Batman against the Joker and Superman, respectively — so this first half is essentially throat-clearing before the operatic finale. The pacing seems abrupt and rapid (the film crosses the finish line at just 77 minutes, including end credits), so that Batman’s conflict with Two-Face — which is supposed to emphasize that Batman can no more escape the demons that drive him than Two-Face can escape his own — seems like almost a prologue.

Whenever possible, the animators have stayed true to Miller’s sometimes idiosyncratic character design, though the figures in motion have an unavoidable rushed, Saturday-morning-cartoon cheesiness at times. The opening scene, which introduces Batman’s daytime persona Bruce Wayne in the middle of a stock-car race, doesn’t inspire confidence: the animators clearly saved money on the stiff movement of the cars. Elsewhere, more money and time obviously go into Batman’s various fight scenes, particularly his final showdown with the Mutant Leader. In general, though, Miller’s linework and compositions were so cinematic that they unfolded before our eyes as a breathless yet epic action movie, something the animation here can’t hope to duplicate.

The voicework is uneven; Peter Weller makes an imposing if monotonous Batman, while Ariel Winter adds some much-needed snark as Carrie Kelley, a bored teenage girl who becomes Batman’s new Robin. The filmmakers give Robin a much more active presence in this first half than she had in the corresponding Miller issues, and there’s even an added scene in which she saves a couple from a mugger. The other major female character is Ellen Yindel, who’s taking over the job of police commissioner from the retiring James Gordon. Carrie gets the importance of Batman, Yindel doesn’t, but she’ll learn.

Since the filmmakers also include all of the debate that raged around Batman in Miller’s story, it lays bare Miller’s mildly fascist leaning (for which some members of the comics press took him to task). Everyone pro-Batman is smart and brave, everyone anti-Batman weak and hypocritical; the film even includes the guy in the man-on-the-street interview who says we must be patient with criminals, then adds that of course he would never live in the city. For Miller, city life — constant co-existing with the violent underclass — equals a sort of bitter conservative pragmatism. In the comic, this could be enjoyed on the level of satiric caricature, and the different viewpoints could be argued, but in the movie a pro-Batman commentator’s views are toned down to be less offensive (“Hope he goes after the homos next” becomes “Hope he goes after my landlord next”). Miller at least acknowledged that some people could support Batman for the wrong reasons.

The comic could be admired as one medium striving to be another — a summer-blockbuster thriller (something like Nolan’s films). The film reduces the comic to, well, a cartoon. Yet I’m interested in what they do with the second half, which is even darker and more ambiguous in its politics. Maybe they’ll stick the landing, but they’re off to a bumpy start.

The Bourne Legacy

Though it’s not a terribly memorable or distinguished film, I’m rooting for The Bourne Legacy to do well for one reason: Jeremy Renner. In movies since 1995, Renner first got on my radar with 2002’s Dahmer, in which he turned in a strangely affecting performance as the Milwaukee Cannibal. It took him a few more years, but Renner finally grabbed another lead — and an Oscar nomination — with 2009’s The Hurt Locker. After a couple of support gigs in blockbusters (Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol and The Avengers), is Renner ready for his close-up? I certainly hope so. Renner has a quiet alertness, a sense of serenity, and a general air of mystery; he gets us to lean forward a bit to access him. He’s physically convincing in action scenes, emotionally persuasive elsewhere. Unless America is really that stuck on Matt Damon in the Bourne franchise, I see no reason that Renner’s work here shouldn’t make him a star.

The movie he’s in needs him badly but just barely deserves him. Directed by Tony Gilroy, who had a hand in the other Bourne screenplays, The Bourne Legacy follows Renner as another super-agent, Aaron Cross, who is marked for death along with several other agents when Jason Bourne (in The Bourne Ultimatum) blows the whistle on the CIA. Cross goes on the run, scooping up scientist Dr. Marta Shearing (Rachel Weisz), who narrowly escaped assassination herself. Cross takes green and blue “chems” to keep his physical and mental abilities at peak efficiency; he’s almost out of chems, and he thinks Dr. Shearing can get him more.

The first half hour or so is intriguing, with Cross hiking and climbing in Alaska and not speaking until well into the movie. After a while, though, The Bourne Legacy turns into an extended chase sequence; Cross and Dr. Shearing make a beeline for Manila, where the chems are, while various CIA goons, headed by an increasingly frantic Edward Norton, try to track them down. I don’t know that I buy Norton as a retired Air Force general turned CIA black-op supervisor — he just seems too young — but he brings clarity and urgency to his role, never letting us catch him playing evil. He’s a guy trying to keep a lid on a boiling-over pot.

The action is comfortably small-scaled and tastefully staged, though the climactic motorcycle chase drones on for so long it becomes an irritant — past a certain point I just wanted Cross’s stoic pursuer to drive off a cliff, or suddenly convert to pacifism and give up, or anything that would make it stop. Gilroy, who also directed Michael Clayton and Duplicity, is better with mood and performance than with action; as if to compensate for not having a big special-effects moment, he lets the set pieces overstay their welcome. The style is a lot calmer than that of Paul Greengrass, who directed the two previous Bourne films with a jittery camera that evoked immediacy but also provoked headaches. Gilroy’s action has more solidity — it’s better centered — but it lumbers a bit.

None of this can be blamed on Renner, or Weisz either — she’s quite convincing in her post-traumatic scenes following the first of many attempts on Dr. Shearing’s life. The Bourne Legacy has an interesting if underused supporting cast, including Scott Glenn, Stacy Keach, Zeljko Ivanek, and various leftovers from previous films, like David Strathairn, Joan Allen, and Albert Finney (all of whom may only be represented by recycled footage — I’m not sure, since I haven’t watched any of the other films again since they first came out). A lot of acting firepower is in service of a side story, the story of what was happening during Bourne Ultimatum, which led me to think: Did Jason Bourne know he was dooming various other operatives when he outed Operation Blackbriar and the Treadstone Project? If so, did he care? I can imagine a fifth film in which a vengeful Aaron Cross goes looking for the guy who consigned him to a life on the run.

Total Recall (2012)

The most entertaining moment in Total Recall, the latest needless remake, is the screen logo of the film’s production company, Original Film. Ah, irony. We went down this am-I-really-me rabbit hole 22 years ago, with Arnold Schwarzenegger as a futuristic construction worker who doesn’t remember his past as a secret agent. Crudely but vigorously directed by Paul Verhoeven, the movie had its goofball charms, including cartoonishly fun effects by Rob Bottin and a literally eye-popping trip to Mars. The new Total Recall doesn’t go to Mars, and there’s no cartoonish fun (aside from an obligatory rehash of the prior film’s three-breasted prostitute). It’s a grim actioner, full of deep-bass noise and flashing lights and gunfire and bloodless PG-13 violence.

Few would argue that Colin Farrell is not a better actor than Arnold Schwarzenegger. But as Douglas Quaid, a bored worker who visits the memory-implant outfit Rekall to take a mental espionage vacation and finds himself embroiled in the real thing, Farrell doesn’t get to do anything he does best, which is to be quick and profane and sly and sexual. I don’t think he laughs once in the movie or even smiles much (except ruefully at the featureless drudge that is Quaid’s life); it’s a real waste of a vibrant performer. There’s no time for levity here anyway, hardly even time to breathe before the movie lumbers into its next endless and expensive action set-piece. There is a nice bit when Quaid, who earlier commented idly that he wished he’d learned to play piano, sits down at the ivories at his secret-agent apartment and starts tickling them expertly. It just leads to yet another info-dump (this is who you are and this is what you must do), but it’s a pleasant respite while it lasts.

Vaguely following the 1990 film’s blueprint, Total Recall tries to keep us guessing whether Quaid, in his past life, was an agent working for the repressive government or an agent who threw in with the resistance. Either way doesn’t seem like much of a party: if Quaid was a government man, he was working for Bryan Cranston (a long way from Breaking Bad, in his “I’d better do as many crappy movies as I can while the iron’s still hot” mode, last seen in Rock of Ages); if he was a rebel, he was reporting to Bill Nighy, doing his usual dour turn in his third film for director Len Wiseman (after two Underworld movies). I find, with some surprise, that I have somehow seen all four of Wiseman’s films (including Live Free or Die Hard), and I wonder if four films over a nine-year career is enough evidence to declare a director essentially worthless. Wiseman makes mildly pretty films, full of blues and grays and lens flares, but they’re the definition of bland. Certainly they never risk camp or bad taste, as Verhoeven triumphantly did.

As in the original, Quaid escapes from the government agent he thought was his wife (Kate Beckinsale) and joins up with a resistance fighter (Jessica Biel) he has tucked away in his subconscious. I had heard encouraging things about a take-no-prisoners fight between Beckinsale and Biel, but it takes place in an elevator and Wiseman, who’s hopeless when slow motion or big special effects aren’t involved, loses track of the action. The elevators themselves are interesting, whooshing vertically and horizontally, but they’re part of a massive yet impersonal production design whose best elements are cribbed shamelessly from Blade Runner. There’s even a shot where Quaid leans against his balcony and looks out on his ruined city, just like a similar shot with Harrison Ford in the 1982 classic, except this time the camera does a 180-degree spin, which wasn’t possible in 1982. The point seems not to be Quaid’s ruminations on his surroundings but rather “Look what we can do with computer effects now!”

Both versions of Total Recall are based loosely on a story by the late sci-fi mystic Philip K. Dick (as was Blade Runner). The man cooked up mind-twisting ideas that seem unfilmable without a lot of visual garlic sprinkled on. Every few years someone tries to put Philip Dick on the screen, but the paranoid questions at the heart of his work get smothered by state-of-the-art technology; even A Scanner Darkly was literally coated by rotoscope animation. At least the first Total Recall used its premise for absurdist jollies; it was a loopy chunk of Saturday-night escapism, and it looks better than it did in 1990, compared to the passionless, glum-faced adventures we get now. The new Total Recall seems fanatically dedicated to the chase scene, the shootout, the big bang, and forgets entirely about the who-am-I query at its core. Verhoeven sealed his movie with a certain ambiguity — was the whole movie just Schwarzenegger experiencing a false memory from Rekall? — but there’s no ambiguity here. I never thought I’d say that a Schwarzenegger flick was more provocative and subversive than a film made 22 years later, but here we are.

The Dark Knight Rises

These days, if you want to make an epic film, it had better have some element of fantasy. The Dark Knight Rises, which weighs in at sixteen minutes shy of three hours, is the Monolith of the summer — huge and loud, massive in scope, every elegant shot bearing the aroma of very serious money. Logically it won’t hold much water; that’s the price of hitching a big movie with pensive themes to a comic-book-superhero plot — something has to give. But, if I may quote my review of The Amazing Spider-Man from a few weeks back, “we don’t look to Spider-Man for verisimilitude” — nor do we seek it at a movie about a man who dresses up as a bat and fights crime.

Director Christopher Nolan, here finishing the trilogy he started with Batman Begins and continued with The Dark Knight, has been praised for giving us a Batman grounded in “the real world.” Essentially, this means Nolan doesn’t camp it up, though the image of a billionaire orphan — Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale) — climbing into a hard rubber suit with pointy ears and pounding on criminals is inherently campy, or at least pulpy. The Dark Knight Rises doesn’t hold back on the pulp. Batman’s adversary this time is a masked beast calling himself Bane (Tom Hardy), who plans to “liberate” Gotham City by triggering mass destruction, entrapping most of the police force in the sewers, and freeing all the criminals. This threat is dire enough to pull Batman, in mopey hibernation for the past eight years, out of mothballs.

I will leave to surgeons and chiropractors the question of whether a man as grievously wounded as Batman is at Bane’s hands could recover so quickly and definitively, with crude second-hand help from a kindly inmate out in the middle of nowhere. It’s all about will power, I guess. Due to recent events, The Dark Knight Rises will probably gather a patina of spooky nihilist darkness it doesn’t deserve; the hero at one point growls “No guns!,” and he clearly stands foursquare against chaos and destruction. Batman’s other adversary and sometimes ally, Selina Kyle (Anne Hathaway), has no such compunctions about guns, but uses one in a key moment in a way pretty much anyone could support. Hathaway, fortunately not saddled with the nickname Catwoman anywhere in the film, is the best thing about it — slinky, sardonic, bitterly pragmatic but harboring some sliver of hope.

The movie will eat up half your afternoon, but will do it so smoothly and at such a flawless pace you likely won’t notice. Nolan gives us and the studio our money’s worth, putting it all up on the screen. He and his brother/cowriter Jonathan jam enough material for three movies into one; we don’t come out hungry for more — we emerge thoroughly sated, as we do after Thanksgiving dinner, but with our senses quickened a bit. Nolan sticks the landing and hasn’t botched the trilogy, and that in itself is satisfying, though the obvious element missing is the freakily memorable Joker of The Dark Knight. Bane is sportively evil, but the masked Tom Hardy works under a terrible handicap Heath Ledger didn’t have. He can use only his eyes and his heavily processed voice, which, despite the sound editors jacking Hardy’s and everyone else’s dialogue up to 11, is comprehensible only some of the time.

Technically, The Dark Knight Rises is a thick leatherbound volume with gilded pages, though flipping through it yields a story about a big bad bald man doing eeevil things until a vigilante with pointy ears comes to the rescue. The movie is and probably always will be the ultimate expression of the comic-book fanboy’s need to have his passion vindicated, solemnized, given the gravitas of a classic. I enjoyed handling the volume and drinking in the gorgeous pictures, but I wouldn’t recommend a close read of it. As pure cinema, this is a rich banquet, and Nolan does his damnedest to make it move and sparkle and awe. The sound design rattles your ribs; it’s like being at a fireworks show where the grand finale booms so hard it takes out some nearby windows. Hundreds of people clog the streets of Gotham City, desperate to restore order or maintain chaos. Nolan paints on a vast and glittering canvas. I just wish it meant more.