Fairhaven

Fairhaven’s a beautiful town, especially in winter. That much we learn from Fairhaven, though not much else. The movie tracks the vague disappointments of three friends who grew up together in southcoastal Massachusetts. Jon (Tom O’Brien) works on a fishing boat but wants to be a writer. Sam (Rich Sommer) sells real estate and is having a hard time getting back in the romance game after his divorce. Dave (Chris Messina), the one who left town, is back home for his father’s funeral. Dave is the kind of scabrously honest guy built to kick out the underpinnings of complacency in his buddies. We watch as the guys, in pairs or in trio, wander around trying to distract themselves with women who never get to say much. That’s essentially the movie.

Fairhaven is a wee, almost microscopic character study whose characters, and their issues, seem imported from similar movies. I kept reflecting on 1996’s Beautiful Girls, which had a larger cast, a more authentically New England flavor (though most of it was shot in Minnesota), and more vivid female characters. Fairhaven could’ve used a Rosie O’Donnell figure, loudly barging through the fog of white male weltschmerz. The movie feels intimate and therapy-bound yet aesthetically remote; whenever we’re looking at tasty footage of Fort Phoenix at dusk we can understand why cinematographer Peter Simonite broke out the wide canvas, but inside cramped houses with two people talking the wide frame almost mocks the unimportance of what’s going on, or not going on.

I usually give movies like this the benefit of the doubt up to a point, that point generally being the moment I feel I’ve apprehended everything the movie has to say, and it’s not fixing to do anything else but amplify or reiterate what it’s said. That moment came fairly early in Fairhaven, when Jon and Dave are at a strip club and Dave confesses an affair with Sam’s ex-wife Kate (Sarah Paulson). I grumbled to myself, “This scene had maybe six lines of relevant dialogue and could’ve been set anywhere, and they had to stage it in a strip club?” Not that I’m a prude, but in a movie so disinterested in what women have to say, it sort of matters. Anyway, the scene leads to a flat-out unbelievable bit in which a stripper takes Jon and Dave home for a coke-dusted threesome, which Jon skips out on because he has a girlfriend, though she’s been making earnest noises about open relationships, and somehow she doesn’t get mad when he drops in on her in the middle of the night and tells her where he’s been. She’s just a sounding board, like every other woman in town.

Fairhaven was directed by its star, Tom O’Brien, and written by him and his co-star Chris Messina, and it has that Good Will Hunting whiff about it — an actors’ script, written to its actors’ strengths to show off what they can do. The drama burns with such a low flame, though, that the most the talented stars can do is brood and pose and perform “act what isn’t said” exercises. The latter part makes Fairhaven obliquely interesting — we feel as though there are dozens of backstories to what we’re seeing. We don’t really get to know the guys, though. Each gets one or two traits. Jon is haunted by superstar quarterback Tom Brady’s averral that he still feels unfulfilled, and this Peggy Lee-esque “is that all there is” lament runs through Jon’s character arc. Generally, in a film like this, Jon would be advised to get out of Fairhaven and go be a writer. But that advice is placed in the foul mouth of Dave, who only fled town because he slept with his buddy’s wife anyway. And the town is made to look so gorgeous and restful that it seems the movie doesn’t want to pull the trigger on Fairhaven as a go-nowhere burg.

Which it isn’t. I liked that Promised Land made a case for its rural setting, and I like the case visually made for the town here. But you’d never know from Fairhaven that the actual town has a rich literary pedigree — Mark Twain liked to hang around there, chumming it up with oilman and town benefactor Henry Huttleston Rogers. But what is Jon going to write about? What kinds of things will he write? A novel set in Fairhaven about three overgrown boys who can’t figure out underwritten women? They can’t figure out the women because there’s nothing in them to figure out, and nothing in the guys, either. Fairhaven is one of those self-consciously low-key indie films that come around every couple of years — the kind of drama that actively avoids Hollywood clichés (tearful confrontations and revelations) but has nothing to replace them with except indie-film clichés (off-the-cuff confrontations and revelations). There’s no passion, no spark. It’s an actor’s workshop with intermittent slide shows of Fairhaven, but Fairhaven bats its eyelashes becomingly, ready for its close-up.

To the Wonder

The throughline of To the Wonder is quite simple, as many romantic movies are. An American man in France falls in love with a French woman. He invites her and her daughter back to America. It doesn’t work out, and the woman and her daughter leave. The man strikes up a relationship with another woman he once knew years ago. That doesn’t work out, either. Then the man invites the French woman back to America. They get married. This doesn’t make things much easier. Meanwhile, a priest is having trouble with his faith. He and the man wander around a bit, comforting the sick and elderly. The end, I think.

That sort of synopsis doesn’t nearly grapple with To the Wonder, but then no synopsis could pin Terrence Malick to the ground. This is Malick’s sixth film in a 40-year career; he has been working at a positively blistering clip lately, relative to his output, because his previous film, The Tree of Life, only came out two years ago, and he’s working on another. Malick, who once taught philosophy and translated Heidegger, is perhaps the lone acolyte of the American sublime; he is preoccupied with the ineffable, the primordial, the ecstatic. To this end, he makes hushed and meditative films with painfully beautiful photography and lots of solemn, whispered voice-overs. Not a Team Malick member myself, I thought that Tree of Life was gaseous yet movingly inchoate, the work of a true seeker, and that it probably represented the purest expression of what he’s getting at.

And what is he getting at? In To the Wonder, the man (Ben Affleck) and the French woman (Olga Kurylenko) seem to represent The Man and The Woman. There are no people in a Terrence Malick film; instead there are abstracted avatars standing in for ideas. In Tree of Life, Brad Pitt was Nature — red in tooth and claw — and Jessica Chastain was Grace, spinning about free-spiritedly. And we see the same dynamic here. Men, weighted to the earth, must contend with its despoliation (Affleck’s character literally measures how much we’re poisoning the soil). Women, if this film and its predecessor are to be believed, fling their arms to the heavens at every opportunity and dance among the fireflies, the buffalo, the waves at the beach. If Tree of Life was about the son who felt pulled between the forces of Nature and Grace, To the Wonder is a kind of prequel-in-spirit in which we see how uneasily Nature and Grace live together.

So you see, it’s not really a romantic movie after all. Well, not lowly human romance, anyway. The priest (Javier Bardem) is there for a very significant thematic reason: to remind us how far we’ve fallen from the Grace of God. (This movie and Tree of Life feel intensely spiritual but don’t seem to show specific allegiance to any creed. God here is, as AA puts it, “as we understand him.” Or her. With Malick, we can’t be sure.) A little has been made of the way some of the plot seems to mirror Malick’s own romantic past, but I’d say he’s just writing what he knows as an on-ramp onto the highway of higher mysteries. Nature and Grace are mutually infatuated but can never reconcile; their aims are too different. Affleck, who sees daily what his species has done to the planet, cannot love. Kurylenko seeks companionship but cannot, will not, be tied down.

Your response to all this depends extremely heavily on how much philosophizing and pretty pictures you’re willing to accept in lieu of a story. I seem to have grown tired in recent years of the stuff Hollywood expects me to accept as stories, and so I have moved a little closer to the Malick camp, without quite being sold on the Master a hundred percent. Tree of Life and To the Wonder both fall into the “interesting, yet boring” category, ravishing but at an aesthetic remove dramatically. For instance, we see Affleck and Kurylenko arguing but never hear what they’re fighting about; we see the end of Affleck’s relationship with the second woman (Rachel McAdams) but have no idea why or how it ended. (In voice-over, McAdams whispers dejectedly that Affleck “made it into nothing” with his “lust.” Okay.) Again, I think we’re supposed to take these love affairs as Love Affairs, which in turn signify not mere matters of the heart but the titans of creation and destruction at war within all of us. Or something.

Also, I could be wrong but I believe this is the first Terrence Malick film that’s ever seen the inside of a supermarket. He finds beauty and ecstasy even there. But we don’t find out what groceries the characters buy or why they eat them, and I think that’s a useful thing to keep in mind when approaching this or any Malick film. They’re just in the supermarket.

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.

Promised Land

As message movies go, the anti-fracking Promised Land (opening December 28) is neither a firebrand nor a puppyish Oscar-chaser. It’s becalmed, downright mellow at times. Unlike other position-paper films like Traffic and Syriana, which packed so many characters and subplots they seemed more like agenda delivery systems than like drama, Promised Land is relatively underpopulated and simple. Steve Taylor (Matt Damon) is a hotshot sales rep from a massive natural-gas company. He swings into rural Pennsylvania, accompanied by senior rep Sue Thomason (Frances McDormand), to get the townspeople to sign off on drilling on their land. Steve waves lots of (potential) money around: these down-on-their-luck farmers need the cash injection. Things look good for Steve and Sue until an environmentalist, Dustin Noble (John Krasinski), wheels into town. Dustin brings stories of other farms, such as his own, that said yes to fracking and sealed their own doom.

Damon and Krasinski wrote the screenplay (based on a story Krasinski worked up with novelist Dave Eggers), and it’s consciously non-insulting. The rural people are never hung out to dry as naïve clods or rednecks; many of them, like local teacher Alice (Rosemarie DeWitt) and gun-shop owner Rob (Titus Welliver), speak with a quick, sardonic wit. We’re never made to feel that the farmers and homeowners need to be protected from their own stupidity by crusading liberals. Steve and Sue are damn good salespeople, making their offer sound like the only sensible thing to do. Some folks, like science teacher Frank (Hal Holbrook), aren’t so sure about that.

The movie is also careful to humanize Steve and Sue, who are not nefarious villains twirling their mustaches but people trying to close a sale. They lie, or at least misrepresent the truth, but so do most salespeople, especially those working for major corporations. I’m not excusing what real-life Steves and Sues do and the human cost of what they do; my point is that the movie isn’t structured to give us someone easy to hate, so there’s some complexity involved. The film allows surprisingly little time for anti-fracking chat; it’s more interested in the community and what’s at stake, and we meet and get to know a number of the people. Director Gus Van Sant and his cinematographer Linus Sandgren dwell on the beauty of the landscapes. We see for ourselves what might be ruined, feel for ourselves the generational ties to the soil. The filmmaking is smooth, unhurried, unassertive. The message isn’t crammed down our throats; it sneaks up on us.

Promised Land is good drama at a time when good drama is scarce at the movies (generally these days we look to TV for that). It’s rarely grim; it flows with the easy-going humor of smart people talking to each other, and that sets the movie’s rhythm, too. The tempo is very rural, laid-back. Steve’s crisis of conscience is established mostly wordlessly. He and Sue both find attractive, funny people to spend time with (when they’d only planned to be in and out of town in a few days). Damon and Krasinski get a lot of comic mileage out of their scenes together; Dustin Noble (the name is a bit much, and is probably meant to be) approaches activism as prankish performance art, like Jim from The Office needling Dwight. But if Steve has unexpected layers to him, so does Dustin. Something he says to Steve — “Do you have what it takes?” — reverberates darkly later on.

I came to Promised Land with a bit of a dutiful heavy step: oh, man, an earnest Hollywood-liberal drama. I’m a lefty myself, but as I’ve said before, I don’t enjoy feeling as if I were in a choir being preached to. I want to be told a good story, spend time with well-written and interesting characters, be surprised. Promised Land checks off all those boxes. It ends up saying nothing more radical than that natural gas may be a decent alternative to oil and coal, but that fracking for it can be a brutal and destructive way to go about getting it, and that short-term windfalls of cash won’t make up for ruining the soil that gives you what’s left of your livelihood. At its base it really only advocates for looking very closely at any offers made to you and anything given to you to sign, and also looking very closely at the people making the offers and handing you the papers, and the corporations behind the people.

This Is 40

Who thought it was a good idea to take the two most irritating characters in Knocked Up and devote a two-hour-and-thirteen-minute movie to them? This Is 40, the new dramedy written and directed by Judd Apatow (opening on December 21), follows the squabbling and problems of Pete (Paul Rudd) and Debbie (Leslie Mann), miserably married with two daughters (played by the real-life daughters of Apatow and Mann). Pete’s small record label is tanking, and Debbie’s clothes shop isn’t doing much better. If you think the movie is going to be about the reality of financial hardship in a shaky economy, though, you’re wrong: The couple apparently can still afford iPads, iPhones, and miscellaneous other iProducts for themselves and their kids. I’m a Mac user, but there are times when the film seems like an Apple commercial.

They can also presumably afford to go out to clubs, take a vacation at a fancy hotel, plan a catered 40th birthday party for Pete, and snipe at each other in the comfort of their too-spacious home — all while they’re in the hole for $80,000. But none of this is the point of the movie, which hammers the point that this technology-addicted family can’t communicate. The older daughter spends too much time on Facebook. Pete hides in the bathroom playing Bejeweled on his iPad. The couple also have problems with their fathers: Pete keeps lending money he can ill afford to lend to his dad (Albert Brooks), while Debbie hardly knows her father (John Lithgow), who left when she was eight. Also, Debbie’s sister Alison, one of the leads in Knocked Up, is absent here and never mentioned (however, Ben, Seth Rogen’s character, is referenced); maybe they had a falling out.

Judd Apatow enjoys a reputation for smart, closely observed comedy, a rep I think he earned with The 40 Year Old Virgin and Funny People (I wasn’t as taken with Knocked Up as many). Here, though, he draws out tiresome arguments, with everyone in the house screaming — the movie is shrill. There’s no surprise in any of the conflicts, no shock of recognition, and the occasional reconciliations feel unearned because the rancor that precedes them is so bilious. At many points we feel we’re seeing the end of a marriage, but Apatow keeps shoving the couple away from divorce, perhaps because a Christmastime release with a bummer ending would get fatal word of mouth. Realistically, we don’t see much reason for these two to be together, even for the sake of the kids, who are also irritating to us and to their parents.

Apatow’s films are generally well-cast, and this is no exception; Melissa McCarthy steals the movie as the mother of one of the daughters’ classmates (stick around during the end credits for some primo McCarthy outtakes), and Megan Fox comes through with a warm and human performance as a staffer at Debbie’s shop. I did think it was weird that the only two non-white characters with speaking parts are scam artists of various natures — Apatow’s universe is as white as Woody Allen’s. And the way poor old Graham Parker is used in this movie — a past-it rocker who can barely sell 600-something downloads of his new album, and who finds himself playing to a sparse club crowd and at a birthday party — struck me as insensitive, though maybe Parker enjoyed poking fun at himself, or enjoyed the paycheck.

This Is 40 is about pretty people with pretty problems; this used to be the province of James L. Brooks, who seems to have passed the torch to Apatow. It remains to be seen, though, whether Apatow can write women as compassionately as he can write men — Debbie comes off as a shrew much of the time, and the only halfway likable female character in the movie works part-time as an escort. Pete is no prize himself, nor are any of the other men, so I guess it’s equal-opportunity misanthropy, but 133 minutes is a long time to sit with people you don’t like. In the final reel, the revelations and reconciliations arrive like clockwork, and the couple prepare for a considerable additional financial burden without, apparently, worrying about how they’ll be able to swing it; indeed, the movie ends with them going to see Ryan Adams at a club, which, unless I miss my guess, is not a free event. To quote Selina Kyle in The Dark Knight Rises: “The rich don’t even go broke like the rest of us.”

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.

Looper

A word to the wise: Don’t think too much about the time-travel element of Looper. For that matter, don’t think too much about the plot, which kind of amounts to the same thing. Looper’s being sold as a slam-bang sci-fi actioner, but that’s not the story that writer-director Rian Johnson is interested in. It’s a bit like 12 Monkeys stood on its head: In both, Bruce Willis travels back in time to stop something bad from happening. But 12 Monkeys wasn’t only about how the past affects the future and how the future can change the past, and neither is Looper. It’s more of a melancholy drama about people having touching faith in the notion that changing one small thing can change everything for the better, even if it means killing innocent people. The movie is morally murky, to put it lightly, and that’s a bit refreshing; we’re made to think about why we want the protagonists to achieve their goals — because they’re at the center of the movie?

There are two protagonists, who are the same person at different stages of his life. Younger Joe (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) kills people for the mob; his victims are sent back in time from thirty years in his future, and he kills them and disposes of their bodies (the body disposal isn’t as easy in the future, where everyone is “tagged”). Assassins like Joe are known as “loopers,” and sometimes the future mob sends a thirty-years-older version of the looper himself, so that he has to kill his future self (“closing the loop”). This is what happens, apparently, when Joe finds himself pointing his blunderbuss at older Joe (Bruce Willis), who escapes and takes off on a mission to make his (and younger Joe’s) life better.

All of the futuristic stuff is window dressing — especially since the “now” scenes, younger Joe’s scenes, are set in 2044, though I’m not sure why. There is another major character, Sara (Emily Blunt), who lives on a farm and looks after a little boy whose continued survival and stable upbringing are important for a lot of reasons. The plotting gets a little “wait a minute.” But the centerpiece of Looper finds younger and older Joe sitting across from each other in younger Joe’s favorite diner, and that scene — quiet, skillfully acted, bringing out Gordon-Levitt’s itchy impatience and Willis’ wounded soulfulness — is really the whole movie, the reason, I think, that Rian Johnson (as well as Gordon-Levitt, reuniting with Johnson after the superb Brick) wanted to make the film.

Neither younger Joe nor older Joe is entirely good or bad; they have heavy shadings of gray. Each is responsible for the deaths of innocents; younger Joe never asks what his victims did to be sent to him for execution, and we never find out. But the movie successfully expands on an intriguing concept introduced earlier in the film, when a hapless looper (Paul Dano) is expected to kill his older self and can’t do it. The difference between the two Joes is something like the difference between Clint Eastwood’s Man With No Name and Eastwood’s Will Munny in Unforgiven. Younger Joe is cold, nihilistic, drugging himself away from awareness of what he does for a living; older Joe has passed through the flames and, improbably, in later life, found love. There’s real weight in older Joe’s passionate defense of the life he’s managed to build; younger Joe’s dismissal of that life seems inhumanly offensive to us.

There’s a lot of other window dressing, or “world-building” if you will, and some of it adds texture and some doesn’t. Jeff Daniels is amusing as Abe, a guy from the future who runs the looper organization. Younger Joe tells Abe about his plan to retire eventually and move to France; “Move to China,” Abe insists, “I’m a guy from the future — trust me, move to China.” Abe is interesting, and an idiotic looper (Noah Segan) who puts too much trust in his long-barreled “gat” affords some comic relief. Other stuff wasn’t terribly clear to me: If, in the future, you can’t hide the body of someone you’ve killed, why can’t you just kill someone and ship the corpse back in time, instead of shipping a living victim and running the risk that he escapes or the looper chokes?¹ But like I said (and like Abe says), don’t dwell too much on the window dressing. Look through the window and into the diner; that’s where the real movie is.

¹According to Rian Johnson, this is because people have trackers implanted in them, and if they die, the authorities immediately know. The movie doesn’t bend over backwards to clarify this, though. 

Moonrise Kingdom

Since at least Rushmore, Wes Anderson has not made movies so much as storybooks in motion, and Moonrise Kingdom may be his purest storybook yet. The movie teems with characters yet is modestly scaled; like Anderson’s previous film, Fantastic Mr. Fox, it doesn’t employ the super-wide compositions that had been Anderson’s trademark. It looks boxier, homier, warmer. Everything is at a slight, sly remove, indicating that this isn’t serious business — it’s storytime, nobody’s in real danger, and things will end as they should. Anderson and co-writer Roman Coppola construct a story about true love, and because that love is between two 12-year-olds, it’s not complicated, which it usually is in Anderson’s films — it’s innocent, optimistic, almost anarchic. These kids aren’t tragic lovers, though; we feel that they’re in benevolent hands.

Sam Shakusky (Jared Gilman) ditches his Khaki Scout troop to be with Suzy Bishop (Kara Hayward), who likewise runs away from home. They meet in a field and take off for the woods, pursued by various worried adults: policeman Captain Sharp (Bruce Willis), who keeps the order on the island of New Penzance; Scout Master Ward (Edward Norton); and Suzy’s parents, Walt and Linda (Bill Murray and Frances McDormand). There is some complicated love here: Captain Sharp and Linda are uneasily ending an affair. But they don’t see themselves in Sam and Suzy, which is a relief — Anderson isn’t that obvious. The adults just want the kids to be safe back home — although Sam, an orphan whose most recent foster family has decided not to invite him back, doesn’t really have a home.

Sam and Suzy are described as “disturbed children,” though they may simply be responding to their environments. Suzy’s parents are troubled (and she has three brothers to contend with); Sam’s parents are dead. Moonrise Kingdom is set in 1965, when the generation impacted by Dr. Spock had kids of their own and sought to understand them via pop psychology. As the movie presents it, though, it’s simple: Sam and Suzy are unhappy alone and happy with each other. They sit in a tent while Suzy reads aloud from various storybooks; they dance on a beach and have their first kiss. Their journey is quietly idyllic, and the young actors play the kids deadpan enough that they’re never insufferable. Anderson never oversells the beauty; his regular cinematographer Robert Yeoman provides his usual immaculate symmetrical compositions, with characters always framed dead center, surrounded by the retro tackiness of the mid-’60s.

Moonrise Kingdom works up to an apocalypse of sorts — a hurricane approaching New Penzance. Its arrival coincides with that of a lady from Social Services (Tilda Swinton), amusingly named only Social Services, who wants to put Sam in an orphanage. Social Services is this storybook’s villain, worshiping rules and bureaucracy, ready to ruin Sam’s life without even having met him. Swinton is in let’s-have-fun mode here, and the others in the cast — especially Willis and Norton — seem relieved to be a part of something with some substance, something childlike but not childish. Like Spike Jonze’ Where the Wild Things Are, the film is about kids but is not really a kids’ movie.

In the summer of big, expensive superhero flicks, Moonrise Kingdom evokes awe, wonder and the magic of escapism in a much smaller and more precious way. It does Wes Anderson good to get outside: filming around Narragansett Bay, he inhales some fresh air and gets out of the rectangular confines of his past work. If Anderson’s films have been about anything, it’s the importance of breaking out of damaging routines: unhappy adults come to a crossroads and decide a change is needed. Here, in the first scenes, we see what it might be like to grow up inside a Wes Anderson film. Like their earlier adult counterparts, the kids grow to embrace mess, feeling, life outside the manicured interiors. They also have their whole lives ahead of them, which makes this Anderson’s most honestly hopeful work yet.

Seeking a Friend for the End of the World

Before the world does in fact end, you might want to track down a copy of 1998’s Last Night. The perfect Canadian retort to the bombastic Deep Impact and Armageddon of the same year, it was a relatively calm and, well, very Canadian ensemble piece about how various people responded to imminent global doom. If you haven’t seen it, you can be sure Lorene Scafaria has. She wrote and directed Seeking a Friend for the End of the World, an American companion to Last Night, and addresses many of the same issues as the earlier film. People rioting? Check. People diving into desperate orgies? Check (in both films, this is presented as less erotic or explicit than pathetic). People trying to decide whether to spend their last days alone or with loved ones? Check. I’m glad Lorene Scafaria seems to have watched and enjoyed Last Night, but most of her own film is a sweet but dithering road trip involving sad sack Dodge Petersen (Steve Carell) and flighty life force Penny Lockhart (Keira Knightley) as they Learn What Really Matters.

Despite Carell’s presence, this isn’t a comedy. He handles himself elegantly in drama, as always, though he seems an odd match for Knightley, who seems to be visiting from a different movie. She’s not bad, but her character is unformed, defined almost entirely by commitmentphobia. These two meet on the rebound — Dodge’s wife has left him, Penny has dumped her boyfriend — and, with planetary death by asteroid less than a month away, decide to leave New York so that he can reconnect with a lost love and she can catch a plane to her parents in England. With an abandoned dog named Sorry in tow, they hit the road, rather unconvincingly escaping a riot-torn New York unscathed. Almost every scene in which they encounter strangers or old friends feels synthetic, except for a bit in a restaurant called Friendsy’s where the waitstaff are so rabidly convivial they seem insane.

Fortunately, Scafaria has cast the supporting roles deftly; in an early party scene we get Connie Britton, Rob Corddry, Patton Oswalt, and Melanie Lynskey, all unhinged to a greater or lesser extent by what’s coming. We’re happy to see them, but they know they’re not going to be in the movie very long, so they lunge at their moments aggressively, resulting in an atypically coarse and cartoonish turn from the usually dependable Oswalt. Community’s Gillian Jacobs turns up in the Friendsy’s bit, and Derek Luke appears in the movie’s falsest scene as a survivalist who just hands Penny (an ex of his) the keys to one of his cars. Often, the film seems to tiptoe up to something potentially scary or disturbing and then backs away fast.

I don’t have to tell you Last Night did this smarter and better, do I? There’s even a bit in which Dodge, an insurance salesman, talks to a client on the phone about “the armageddon premium,” and all I could think of was a scene from Last Night in which David Cronenberg played a power-company owner who kept calling his customers to assure them the heat wouldn’t go off. Anyway, why is anyone bothering to call insurance companies? As Tom Lehrer put it in his classic nuclear-apocalypse ditty “We Will All Go Together When We Go”: “No one will have the endurance/To collect on his insurance/Lloyd’s of London will be loaded when they go.” Dodge’s phone should be silent, not ringing off the hook as we see here. The bit in Last Night, with Cronenberg’s gentle words of reassurance, fleshed out an idea we wouldn’t necessarily have thought of. In Seeking a Friend you have panicky idiots calling an insurance company for … what?

“And we will all go together when we go,” Lehrer also sang; “What a comforting fact that is to know.” That’s an idea more sophisticated than anything in this movie: that there’s some solace in the fact that in the end we are all paper in fire, ashes, extinguished, all equal finally. Rob Corddry does get a line about how nobody’s going to die alone because we’re all going to bite it at once. For the most part, though, Seeking a Friend could as well be a seize-the-day bucket-list flick about two dying people on the road, learning belatedly to embrace life. And, of all things, the plot device of the dog made me mad (especially since he’s more or less ignored for most of the film, and doesn’t have any bearing on the story other than to give the characters a cute dog to cart around). Who would abandon a dog at such a time? If that were my dog I’d fatten him on whatever food he wanted and play ball in the yard with him until the asteroid hit.

Dark Shadows

If there’s anything remotely goth-flavored in our culture untouched by Tim Burton and Johnny Depp, just wait a while; they’ll get around to it. Their latest collaboration, Dark Shadows, checks off “vampire” on the Burton/Depp wish list, a mild disappointment for those of us who’d hoped to see them remaking London After Midnight someday. (People remake well-loved films all the time; why not remake one few living souls have ever seen?) Following the lead of its forebear, the 1966-1971 supernatural soap opera, Dark Shadows doesn’t stop at bloodsuckers; it also throws in a witch and — rather randomly, I thought, and with little explanation — a werewolf. It is not the loosey-goosey fish-out-of-water farce the ads lead you to expect, though it’s far from serious — this may be the only live-action film I can recall in which a climactic explosion is a perky magenta.

Indeed, the look of Dark Shadows is intriguing; it’s the strangest-toned mainstream film out there right now. The stock appears slightly faded, as if it were aping both the left-out-in-the-sun graininess of ’70s cinema and the wretched video quality of the old show. It all coalesces into a uniquely anti-goth palette (and the opening credits, too, are bland enough to be part of the joke). Into the tackiness of 1972 comes Barnabas Collins (Depp), cursed to vampirehood by scorned witch Angelique (Eva Green) two hundred years ago. Freed from his coffin/prison, Barnabas shows up at Collinwood Manor, now occupied by a dysfunctional family headed by disdainful matriarch Elizabeth (Michelle Pfeiffer).

Burton and screenwriter Seth Grahame-Smith (Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter) shoehorn as much melodrama and as many subplots into Dark Shadows as an hour and fifty-three minutes can hold. I suppose they’re trying to get as much of the original show into the movie as they can. Too young to have been one of the fabled kids running home from school to catch Dark Shadows on ABC, I prepared by popping in a DVD of nine “fan-favorite” episodes. After the first one, which introduced Jonathan Frid as Barnabas a year into the show’s run, my attention wandered elsewhere. You had to be there at the time, I guess. Frid played Barnabas as a melancholy romantic anti-hero, and Depp — looking like a cross between Count Orlok in Nosferatu and Conrad Veidt in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari — follows suit; though the script makes the new Barnabas boggle his eyes at the trappings of 1972, Depp mostly stays away from easy laughs (he gets them anyway, largely with his sly inflections). He brings out the tragedy and anger of Barnabas’ situation.

Barnabas’ main antagonist is Angelique, who’s stayed around all these years to put the Collins fishing cannery out of business. I can’t quite decide if Eva Green’s scenery-gnashing performance is great or terrible or both, but whatever it is, it’s memorable. Aside from Green, this is one of the more eclectic casts in a Burton film in a while, the standout for me being Helena Bonham Carter as the live-in shrink for the troubled little David Collins. She seems to be channeling an unholy combo of Jacqueline Susann and Fran Lebowitz, with a pre-punk orange wig topping everything off. Burton certainly has found his muse.

Dark Shadows isn’t top-tier Burton, but he remains a classical director who trusts the image (some would say to the exclusion of anything else). It’s a pleasure to watch a film that isn’t over-edited, that basks in elegance. The blood, as in Burton’s Sleepy Hollow and Sweeney Todd, is bright Hammer red. The movie is more or less what you’d expect a Burton Dark Shadows to be, only with less emphasis on the purple-on-black color scheme and a lot of Super Sounds of the ’70s — including Alice Cooper as himself, performing two songs at a Collins mirrorball party — fighting Danny Elfman for dominance on the soundtrack. It turns into a bit of a mess towards the finish line, but at least it’s a fun mess, and if you’re looking to Tim Burton for narrative tidiness you must be thinking of another Tim Burton.