Room

If you’ve got a hankering for Oscar-bait misery porn but your stomach rebels against the grue in The Revenant, you might want to know about Room. Those who haven’t read Emma Donoghue’s source novel (she’s also credited with the screenplay) may sit through the first few minutes in a state of alarm as the premise is set up: A young woman, Joy Newsome (Brie Larson), resides in a one-room shed along with her five-year-old son Jack (Jacob Tremblay); she has been held captive there for seven years, he since birth. So the viewer might exclaim, “Holy crap, are we going to be trapped in this room with Joy and Jack for the entire movie?” No; thankfully, we escape (along with them) slightly less than halfway through. In a further mercy, the film is chaste about showing us the nature of Joy’s relationship to her shaggy captor, known as Old Nick (Sean Bridgers). She is his sex slave, and he is Jack’s bio-dad, but we don’t have to look at the rapes or even hear much of it.

Is that a badge of honor, though? Room dabbles in tough stuff, but holds a lot of its details at a remove. It’s not really about the literal imprisonment anyway; it’s more about the mental incarceration Joy and Jack suffer once they have escaped Room. (Joy has built a whole world out of the tiny, shabby surroundings, and the shed is called Room, because to Jack it is Room, the only one.) The second half of the film, wherein mother and son try to adjust to life outside Room, verges on being interesting. But — perverse as it may seem to say so — it suffers in comparison to Tina Fey’s Netflix comedy The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, which finds dark humor as well as genuine, hard-won insight in the similar premise of a recently freed captive woman. Room is too busy milking its situation for tears and tension to lower itself to anything so crass as levity. It’s serious, so very serious.

Larson is considered the favorite to take home Best Actress later this month, and I can’t begrudge her that. She takes a juicy part and squeezes it till it’s dry; the real protagonist, though, is Jack (the book was told through his eyes), and Tremblay makes him credibly damaged until the script calls for him to be a tribute to human resilience. There’s an unavoidable strain of snobbishness in the set-up: Old Nick is jobless and has trouble buying supplies for his prisoners, but once Joy and Jack get away from him and into the warm house of her well-to-do mom (Joan Allen) and her boyfriend, the moneyed milieu assures us that all will be well. Joy just needs a little more time to adjust, that’s all. But she’s also understandably lost a large chunk of her humanity during her seven-year captivity, something the movie doesn’t really have the resources to explore. All she needs, it turns out, is some of Jack’s hair.

The film sort of handwaves the fate of Old Nick; we don’t even see him arrested, though we assume he has been. This reticence to show revenge against aggressors (a trait it shares with The Revenant and Spotlight this Oscar season) establishes Room, I guess, as a drama that aspires to be deeper than the usual weepie. Meanwhile, we’re left with such questions as why Jack doesn’t react more strongly to a doctor who, like Old Nick, has a bushy dark beard, or why Jack goes in the yard to play with a boy we’ve never met, or what kind of nightmarishly overprotective parenting Jack can expect from Joy from now on. In Kimmy Schmidt, the bubbliness of Ellie Kemper’s brilliant performance always has a bleak, scary undertone that tells us her experience has made her different from everyone else. Kimmy’s chipper demeanor seems millimeters away from hysteria, and that’s the tension of the comedy. Joy and Jack, realistically, would not ever be okay again. Jack’s bidding farewell to the only world he knew for most of his short life should move us more, dig into our soft spots harder. Room isn’t a flatulent botch like Peter Jackson’s The Lovely Bones, but they coexist in the small subgenre of stories about a child’s suffering that probably should have stayed on the page.

Spotlight

Various representatives of the Catholic Church have given a thumbs-up to Spotlight, a docudrama about Boston Globe reporters breaking the story of the Church’s cover-up of scores of abuses by Boston priests. Well, how else is the Church going to react to it? Condemning the film would be fantastic free publicity; praising it is brilliant tactical aikido against possible new detractors of the Church. Anyway, I happen to agree with the fine film critics at the Vatican and the Boston Archdiocese. Spotlight is an undemonstrative journalistic almost-thriller with an even but urgent heartbeat, driven as much by reporters’ need for their paper to be first to crack the story as by actual concern for truth, justice, and the American way. We are, for example, asked to be horrified at the idea of the Herald getting its sulfurous, tabloidy claws into this once-in-a-generation scoop.

The movie takes its name from the Globe’s elite investigative team, instituted in 1970, known for its devotion to going deep on afflicting-the-powerful stories and taking its sweet time getting there. Here, they don’t have much sweet time. The new editor, Marty Baron (Liev Schreiber), makes a pitch to Spotlight commander Walter “Robby” Robinson (Michael Keaton): why not look into this business about Father John Geoghan abusing children and Cardinal Law dealing with it by reassigning Geoghan and keeping silent? The team — rounded out by passionate Mike Rezendes (Mark Ruffalo), compassionate Sacha Pfeiffer (Rachel McAdams), and dogged Matt Carroll (Brian D’Arcy James) — swings into action, soon finding that the story extends far more broadly than only one priest playing Musical Parishes.

A welcoming round of applause for the return of director/cowriter Tom McCarthy, who emerges unbloodied from his prior experience on the Adam Sandler flop The Cobbler. This is indeed the kind of “small” (well, $20 million is small these days) mid-budget drama for adults that seems so endangered now; technically, it’s an indie production, distributed by Open Road, owned by theatrical giants AMC and Regal. McCarthy, who has roots in indie comedy-drama, gives us a film that looks like television without really feeling like it; the conflicts feel major even as McCarthy and writing partner Josh Singer mostly avoid melodrama. The few encounters with victims, now grown, of pedophile priests are handled with tact but with a steady eye for relevant detail; one man shows us, almost too quickly to catch, needle tracks on his arm. The men look haunted, mutilated in their souls; they stare inward into hell.

It was a hell that few knew or cared to know about. The Spotlight team has an unwilling ally in abrupt, irascible lawyer Mitchell Garabedian (Stanley Tucci), who has zero patience for adults but, we discover in a late scene, all the affectionate patience in the world for his young clients who have suffered abuse. Muddying the moral waters a bit is a meeting with a molesting priest who cheerfully admits to his crimes, because he doesn’t consider what he did to be rape; rape is what happened to him. The movie doesn’t clarify whether he, too, was a boyhood victim of a priest, and whether some victims of abuse become tireless advocates for justice while others, their souls incinerated, continue the cycle of abuse themselves. A psychologist and ex-priest, played as a phone-voice of authority by an unbilled Richard Jenkins, suggests that the problem with the Church stems from psychosexual deformity caused by celibacy — or does the priesthood, and other positions of trust like school coaches, attract the psychosexually deformed? Spotlight gets us thinking about that, but ultimately leaves the answer to other movies (I recommend, for starters, the two-part powerhouse The Boys of St. Vincent). Decently, it focuses on the victims, and why there continued to be victims for so long.

The Revenant

For all the stark realism and ballyhooed “natural light” cinematography of The Revenant, the movie tips its true hand as an aggressively directorial film when the hero, Hugh Glass (Leonardo DiCaprio), is so close to the camera that his anguished, halting breath fogs the lens. You see, this is a deathlessly significant work about man’s inhumanity to man against a backdrop of unforgiving nature, but there is a man behind it all — a man of vision and integrity, you serfs — and you’d better appreciate his hard, crucifying labor, and Leo’s, too. See, there he is, suffering before you, steaming up the damn camera lens. Well, which is it? Is this a spiritual document of peerless verisimilitude, or is it filmmaker preening, reminding you that, above all else, this is a movie?

Based on his debut Amores Perros, I’ve been loyal to director Alejandro González Iñárritu for years, but after one bummer after another, as well as last year’s well-acted but show-offy Oscar winner Birdman, it’s probably time to admit that Iñárritu has a loud voice but not much to say with it. At its core, The Revenant is a simple story about Glass, a fur-trappers’ scout left for dead after a bear tears him up. He survives, and spends the rest of the long and winding movie trying to catch up with his chief betrayer, John Fitzgerald (Tom Hardy), and presumably put serious hurt on him. By the end, Glass rejects the idea of revenge, though he’s already brutalized Fitzgerald so much — in an ugly, endless brawl — that the movie gets to have its gory cake and eat it too.

Sitting through The Revenant, I kept recognizing other movies in it. The natural-lighting gimmick was done better by Kubrick in Barry Lyndon; the basic story was told before in 1971’s Man in the Wilderness, which took up nearly an hour less of our time; the sometimes discordant score (by Ryuichi Sakamoto among others) recalls Neil Young’s fuzzbox music for Jim Jarmusch’s acid western Dead Man (and this film’s dependence on an Indian helping an ailing white man was already parodied nicely by Jarmusch); and the symbolic heaviness of man against nature got some play in Joe Carnahan’s underrated existential drama The Grey. No grey here; this is strictly black and white, with the half-scalped Tom Hardy practically twirling his mustache as he refers to Indians as “tree n—–s” — one of the few things he growls through his Brillo beard that you can understand. (At times, I thought I could discern phrases like “kung fu” and “jolly brisket” in that mop-spatter of sad, orphaned syllables.) Hardy’s Fitzgerald also gets a monologue about how he met a man who thought a squirrel was God; then Fitzgerald killed and ate the squirrel. So he’s not only the Devil, he’s a god-devourer, like Galactus or Darkseid in the comic books.

In contrast to the racist, mutilated Fitzgerald, the thick-maned Glass (he even has all his teeth) has a dearly departed Indian wife and a half-breed son. He’s spiritually an Indian himself, just like Jack Crabb and John Dunbar. Despite that, we are shown that there are good Indians (the Pawnee) and there are “savage” Indians (the Arikara, responsible for the Saving Private Ryan massacre that kicks off the movie, though they too come in handy for the white man later on). Can it be that the critics’ dartboard The Lone Ranger actually boasted a more nuanced vision of indigenous Americans than this lionized sadomasochistic trip offers?

Iñárritu was already working on The Revenant when he won the Oscar for Birdman, otherwise I’d call this the classic post-Oscar folly. Now that it has twelve nominations of its own and is favored to take the big win in a month or so, it seems ready to become a folly atop a folly. There are a lot of elements yanking us out of possible absorption in this supposedly realistic film — a bear that doesn’t look quite real, other shots and sequences with obvious CGI doctoring. And yet the movie doesn’t even get as gnarly as the real story did — the actual Hugh Glass let maggots feast on his bearclaw wounds to prevent gangrene, and Indians sewed a bear hide to his back to cover the gashes. If you’re waiting to see that happen to Leonardo DiCaprio in a $130 million motion picture, keep waiting.

The Big Short

Who is the hero of The Big Short, the semi-comedic semi-drama about the implosion of the housing market and the rise of those who profited from it? Is it “Dr.” Michael Burry (Christian Bale), the hedge-fund manager who first noticed the subprime mortgages’ soft underbelly? Is it Mark Baum (Steve Carell), another hedge-fund manager who carries around deep fury about the state of the system and the suicide of his brother? Is it Ben Rickert (Brad Pitt), former Wall Street wolf turned retired Jedi of finance? To me, the hero of this bulging package of facts and jokes is its film editor, Hank Corwin. Since his baptism of fire on such teeming Oliver Stone hornets’ nests as JFK and Natural Born Killers, Corwin has worked selectively, adding two Terrence Malick epics to his resumé, and he cuts The Big Short with his usual instinct for allusive, propulsive storytelling, moving us along at a clip yet not too fast to process everything.

Clarity is needed with a dense story like this one, as well as an unfailing eye for the telling detail and the amusing sidebar. The director, Adam McKay, is a veteran of several Will Ferrell comedies, but he showed in The Other Guys that he had things to say about the rich soaking the poor with Ponzi schemes, and here he sharpens his blade anew. I don’t know that McKay should go on being Hollywood’s fiduciary moralist, but he’s clearly on the side of the angels and of the entertainers. On a few occasions, he recruits a random celeb to explain something or another to us, such as when collateralized debt obligations are likened to seafood stew. Like Stone’s two Wall Street sermons, The Big Short has been made for “the average people” who, says the irked Mark Baum, will be the ones paying for the banks’ fraudulence and hubris, even if we didn’t then (in 2008, when Michael Burry’s predictions came to pass) know how, or why.

We find out how and why, with the help of a cast gnawing hungrily on cynical, profane dialogue. Rageaholic Baum gets all the wounded humanity Steve Carell can bring to him, and Christian Bale makes Burry the awkward, blinkered loner that Patrick Bateman or Bruce Wayne would be in real life. Ryan Gosling swoops in as our narrator, a trader who hears about Burry’s calculations and gets Baum and his firm in on the scavenging. Gosling’s usual smugness works for the role; he sometimes addresses the camera and acknowledges what a prick we must think he is. This is primarily a male-id movie, though Marisa Tomei (as Baum’s wife) and Melissa Leo (as a banker who grudgingly drops some truth on Baum) brighten things. The film is, I admit, too busy working out how to explain why a man who pays his rent ends up living in his car to bother much with gender parity. Maybe next time.

The Big Short starts out antic and satirical (though it doesn’t reach the Homeric excesses of Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street) but eventually spirals down into a spun-out sigh of resignation. Brad Pitt — more Robert Redford-like than ever in his tousled hairdo and salt-and-pepper beard — at one point turns to two ecstatic young investors and reminds them that their fortune will be built on the backs of real, suffering people who, if the economy tanks, will lose their jobs, their homes, maybe their lives. It’s a sobering reality blast, and we see Mark Baum almost horizontal with despair and Michael Burry lamenting that “nobody will talk to me, except through lawyers,” both much, much richer but that much less happy. An additional chilling piece of information: at the end, we’re told that Burry, the man who against all accepted wisdom bet against the economy and prospered, is now investing primarily in water. Is Burry betting that we’re headed for a grim meathook future á la Mad Max? A bit of research shows his reasoning is less ominous and more optimistic than that, but the factoid still leaves us with a shudder. Who else out there knows important, disquieting things and isn’t being listened to?

The Hateful Eight

Quentin Tarantino’s justifiably cocky new film The Hateful Eight unfolds on a wide, wide canvas — enormously wide, epically wide. Yet most of the action plays out either inside a moving stagecoach or inside a tavern during a blizzard, and most of that action is talk — ruminations about who can be trusted, or disquisitions on such topics as the ignominious last moments of a hapless bounty hunter or the taste of stew relative to its maker. This stew certainly tastes like Tarantino cooked it, and viewers whose palates have adjusted to the loquacious maestro’s style will sigh with pleasure. The hellfire-in-mahogany images (shot in 70mm Ultra Panavision by Robert Richardson) and knife-edge sound design ground us in a stark reality that Tarantino eventually gleefully stomps on.

The people onscreen may be hateful but the movie, like all Tarantino’s films, is a work of love, a grindhouse-deluxe act of devotion. The timbre of a seasoned actor’s growl, the authoritative clunk of a gun hitting a wooden floor, the creak of a heavy boot on a stagecoach step — all of these elements get such lavish attention that The Hateful Eight could almost be a radio play. But the sounds consort beautifully with the Jackson Pollock blood spatters and the white hell of snow-torn Wyoming and the chafing left on a woman’s wrist by handcuffs. The woman, Daisy Domergue (Jennifer Jason Leigh), is being taken to the town of Red Rock by bounty hunter John Ruth (Kurt Russell), called “the Hangman” because he sees that all his prisoners dangle. Ruth wants to deliver Daisy alive, but he isn’t above bashing her with a gun butt or an elbow.

Misogynist? Not the movie — Tarantino hands the film to Jennifer Jason Leigh, who hungrily bites into the patented Tarantino Comeback Role, nasally drawing out the syllables of her trashy dialogue like a razor across a strop. Daisy is as much a cackling agent of chaos as the Joker was, and in a way the harsh treatment of her is anti-sexist. I was reminded of the mobster in Ghost Dog who shoots a female cop; when his partner blurts “You just shot a broad,” the mobster ripostes, “I shot a cop. They wanna be equal, I made her equal,” and so Daisy, who can take as well as mastermind hard punishment, is equal.

The same can’t be said for black people, not in the movie’s timeline some years after the Civil War, and not now, either, Tarantino is saying. Samuel L. Jackson’s Major Marquis Warren (probably a nod to western writer/director Charles Marquis Warren) is a former Union soldier turned bounty hunter, a complicated and perhaps not very noble man, someone possibly as deformed by the racism of his time as Jackson’s character Stephen was in Django Unchained. The “N-word” is, as in that prior racially charged Tarantino western, said maliciously or casually or merely descriptively, even by a Union veteran like John Ruth. The people in this movie aren’t yet over the Civil War. Tarantino doesn’t think we in the 21st century are, either.

Warren is brought into Ruth and Daisy’s sphere by the weather, and together Ruth and Warren must figure out who in Minnie’s Haberdashery — everyone’s stopover destination to ride the storm out — has conspired with Daisy to free her and leave however many corpses to harden in the snow. This aspect of the story has been likened to Agatha Christie, but it’s less a whodunit than a who’s-gonna-do-it. Among the many ironies is that the most innocent one in this situation may be a foul old Confederate general, although his past is far from innocent. Whose is? Nobody’s, says Tarantino. Yet The Hateful Eight, for all its heavy negativity, is not a nihilist work. There’s too much life in the execution, too much irrepressible affection for the snowy milieu, which, like Kurt Russell’s slyly distrustful performance and Ennio Morricone’s score, harks back to John Carpenter’s The Thing.

Jackson’s bitter gaiety in the face of white hypocrisy holds this long, strange trip together right up to the end, when heads are blown off, an arm hacked off, blood gushing and puddling on the floor. He’s eventually matched by the great character actor Walton Goggins, whose Chris Mannix claims he’s to be the new sheriff in Red Rock. We never find out for sure; perhaps Mannix is using his position to fuel his hatred the way Warren fuels his. The other actors — including Tim Roth, Demián Bichir, Bruce Dern, and Michael Madsen, who’s aging to look and sound like Nick Nolte — are more two-dimensional, and give somewhat one-note performances, but their characters are conceived as pieces on a chessboard. Ruth, Daisy, Warren and Mannix take turns believing they can win the game, but in the end two opposite numbers on either side of the racial divide are united over shared contempt for lies — life-saving ones as well as death-dealing ones. I don’t know if The Hateful Eight has much to offer the uninitiated, but for me the worst news about Tarantino’s gorgeous and gory “8th film” is that there are only, according to him, two more to go. I hope not.