The Ides of March (3/5 Stars)

Coach Clooney benches his star athlete.

 I remember this coach from my youth. He taught our 8th grade basketball team. His son was the star of the team. The father seemed to go out of his way to limit the son’s playing time or to scold him for subpar performances. Nobody had a harder time on the team than the best player on it. It was almost if the father was going the extra distance to not play favorites and in the end probably hurt the team by shortchanging the best player on it. The director of the “Ides of March,” is none other than George Clooney and and Coach Clooney has cast himself in a very important role, the candidate in a presidential election. However, the movie is not so interested in the candidate. It is more interested in the Machiavellian machinations of the people behind the candidates: their chiefs of staff, played by Phillip Seymour Hoffman and Paul Giamatti, and a young press secretary, played by Ryan Gosling. Now these other actors are very capable, but the story never sticks because the candidate is not put to good use. What did Machiavelli say? The Ends Justify the Means. Now, both campaigns in this story are playing dirty politics. The question should be for which candidate are the dirty tricks justified.  In other words, would Clooney the candidate make a better president than the other guy. Personally, I didn’t really care whether Clooney was elected or not. He exists in the background of the script giving stereotypical liberal platitudes and talking points. His opponent doesn't have more than a couple lines. They are both unformed characters and not up to the task of caring about. In effect, neither is worth what the other characters would do to help or harm them. Who cares what the means are if the ends aren’t justified? Coach Clooney should have given himself a bigger part.

 The story centers on the Ryan Gosling character, a young upcoming press specialist. Whether he is idealistic is not really established as he is very good at his job of saying things and at the same time not saying them. The movie is concerned not with Republicans or Democrats. It is limited only to the Democratic primary in Ohio. In this way, the movie sidesteps real political debate. Since everyone sort of agrees, the focus is on the dirty tricks that will have one candidate gain an advantage over the other. There is a senator who has about 300 pledged delegates in his pocket and is willing to sell them for a choice cabinet position. There is also shock jocks like Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity who want to impose Operation Chaos upon Ohio. This is a stunt that urges Republicans to vote for the inferior Democratic candidate in hopes that it will help the democrats during the real presidential election. Finally there is the Paul Giamatti character, the chief of staff for the opposing campaign, who asks young Ryan Gosling for a drink in a bar. Ryan knows he shouldn’t go but does anyway. Giamatti asks Gosling to leave the one campaign and join his. This sets off the main storyline about loyalty and idealism and all those good things that will be shattered by the time the movie ends. Of course none of this should take anyone by surprise. Who looks at politics today or anytime before and doesn’t think of men in backroom smoking cigars and hatching schemes. Well, maybe today they don’t smoke cigars anymore.

 This is all done rather competently, but lately I have found that so many of the dramatic movies I see have been sort of ruined by watching HBO. The political scenes in “The Wire,” are far more detailed and involving than what is seen here. That is the difference between a story of a campaign briefly and competently told in two hours and one brilliantly and comprehensively told in twenty. The “Ides of March” Ohio primary is chump change when compared to the Baltimore politics of “The Wire.” 

Another not so great part of “The Ides of March” is perhaps the obligatory young intern who sleeps with people she shouldn’t be sleeping with. Or is it the other way around and she is a victim. It isn’t very clear the way Evan Rachel Wood, a 24-year-old, plays the teenage character. She looks and acts much more older than she is supposed to. In fact, her relationship with the Ryan Gosling character is mainly comprised of her seducing him not the other way around. When things happen, and something rather dramatic does happen to her at the end, it doesn’t seem like something that would really happen to the strong willed and confident character we've seen for most of the movie. Not that I’m an expert on women or anything.

 Overall the movie is good enough and certainly not crap. You’ve got nice familiar faces doing well jobs with decent material. Is the movie all that memorable? Well, no. You’ve probably seen it before and wouldn’t consider storyline all that shocking or new. Is it probably better than most of everything in theaters right now? Sure, but I think that speaks more to the weakness of this years movies. “Take Shelter” was good. You should see that movie, especially for Halloween.
 

Take Shelter (5/5 Stars)

Something Wicked This Way Comes

Have you ever noticed that the easiest way to get a person to talk/confess/give up secrets in a movie is not to beat them up or threaten them? It is instead to bring into the room a loved one and threaten to hurt them instead. The scene usually goes like this.

Bad Guy: You will tell me what the secret code?

Good Guy: What are you going to do, kill me? Go ahead and do it. I’m not afraid of death.

Bad Guy: Oh I’m not that naïve. That’s why I don’t plan on killing you. I plan on killing her.

(Bad guy henchmen bring in abnormally attractive love interest bound and wailing)

Hot Girl: Don’t do it, don’t tell them the secret!

Bad Guy: I will count to three

(He points a gun at the hot girl)

Bad Guy: One….Two… (cocks pistol)

Mr. Bond: Okay okay, I’ll talk, I’ll talk!

Bad Guy: I thought you would, hahaha!

This is a cliché, but as with every cliché, it rubs up against a fundamental truth. Good people (i.e. the heroes of movies) don’t want to see the innocent get hurt. Such a concept scares them even more than themselves getting hurt or even being killed. And it is this truth that “Take Shelter” takes advantage of to great effect. Where most horror movies mine their scares from anatomical dissections, this movie simply presents an ordinary good person and imposes upon him terrible dreams of poison rain, mysterious bad men, vicious animals, and other forces that would harm, perhaps even kill, his loving family. This is a very scary movie and one of the best of the year. 

Curtis, played by Michael Shannon, has a loving family, a beautiful wife, played by Jessica Chastain, and a little daughter. He has a good job in construction. It provides him with a decent enough salary to afford a nice house, a vacation to Myrtle Beach every year, and a medical plan. And then one day Curtis has a vivid nightmare. There are gigantic storm clouds on the horizon. It starts raining a brownish kind of poison water. The family dog goes insane and attacks him. When he wakes up in horror the next morning, he can still feel the bite marks in his arm. What’s more is the sense of dread he feels in his bones. Something bad is coming.

Curtis has reason to worry. His family has had a history of mental illness. His mother was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia when he was ten. She left him in the car at a supermarket and never came back. Such a thing happening to Curtis reasonably frightens the hell out of him. His family needs him. His daughter needs the medical plan. They still have loans on the house. Gas prices are through the roof. Either his dreams are portentous and a huge storm is indeed coming or he is going crazy. Curtis decides to prepare for both. He becomes obsessed with rebuilding the tornado shelter in the backyard and seeks help from a counselor about his nightmares and day delusions. There is a great scene where he walks into the counselor’s office, and calmly explains that he took the quiz in the back of their clinical magazine, and has found that he has 5 of the 12 symptoms of paranoid schizophrenia. All he needs is two more to be diagnosed. Please doctor, what do I need to do to stop this before his wife, his daughter, all his friends, and the whole town figures out what is going on. He doesn’t want his wife to leave him and take his daughter. That would be a reasonable thing to do if they found out he was crazy. Curtis has so much to lose and the coming storm is threatening it all. It is hard to think of anybody conveying this more effectively than Michael Shannon does here. Shannon is not an attractive leading man. He has the height, face, and demeanor of a bouncer, elite soldier, or killer assassin character. To see this type of stoicism fall apart at the seams makes the journey that much more frightening. I’ve said before that it is rare when movies allow men to be brave because being brave requires an acknowledgement of vulnerability and that sort of thing is not considered masculine. This movie is the exception. What a brave man this Curtis is trying to be. Michael Shannon deserves an Oscar Nomination for the performance. 

This movie is the second feature of a young director named Jeff Nichols. Nichols’ first feature, Shotgun Stories, also starred Michael Shannon. It is a very good partnership. “Shotgun Stories” was an impressive movie, like most first movies of great directors, for what it accomplished with a budget of almost nothing. In “Take Shelter,” Nichols is aided with a little bit more funding and it has allowed him to add the special effects necessary for some serious storm clouds. They are threatening but never in an over the top distracting way. This movie is put together with such simplicity in theme, camera style, and plot that it is almost surprising how effective it is. Like a Hemingway novel, its effectiveness comes from the inherent truth within the frame. The fears are universal and the dread is real. We know that gas prices will never go down to what they once were. We worry about our risky home loans. We don’t want to lose our jobs. We need our health and our health care desperately. Freakish weather, due to climate change, is here to stay and only going to get worse. The sense that everything is getting worse and that times may never be as good as they once were is a palpable feeling in the air. If people one hundred years from now wanted to know what it felt like to live in 2011, they could do a lot worse then, “Take Shelter.” It is a movie of our time, told perfectly. It should be nominated for Best Picture.

Try to go and see it in a theater if you can. It should be perfect for Halloween.

Moneyball (4/5 Stars)

The Art of Winning an Unfair Game

One of the main arguments I hear batted around for keeping steroids out of sports is that it makes the game unfair. And the usual retort I always bring up to everyone’s bafflement is that sports aren’t fair anyways, so what’s the difference? And they aren’t fair. They really aren’t. One of the hardest things to do in life is to distance oneself from mass delusions and the idea that sports are somehow fair is one of the most broadly accepted and thankfully rather benign fallacies around. Genetic differences (for instance height in basketball) between opponents are not fair. And neither is a system that allows one professional sports team to have a much bigger budget than others. That difference allows the richer team an unfair advantage in attracting top talent. That is what Billy Beane, the general manager of the Oakland Athletics in this movie based on a true story, must come to grips with. The movie starts with the Athletics coming off one of their best seasons and subsequently losing their three best players in free agency to richer teams like the Yankees. The experienced scouts around the back-room table are talking about rebuilding the team from the ground up with old baseball knowledge and old baseball customs, the same way they did it the last time. No, No, No, Billy says, we cannot do the same thing. More importantly, we cannot do the same old thing because the Yankees are doing the same out thing. If we scout the way the Yankees scout than we will lose because the Yankees will outbid us no matter how well we scout. The game is rigged. We either find a way to play the game differently or we lose. That is Billy Beane’s problem.

How Billy attempts to solve the problem is the main focus of “Moneyball.” Billy Beane, played here by Brad Pitt, essentially disregards most or all of the advice of his experienced scouts and starts listening to a young recent economics major from Yale named Peter Brand, played here by Jonah Hill. The chubby bespectacled Peter Brand is not an athlete, but he does know math and  can use it to spot trends. He tells Beane in confidence his hunch that scouts completely overlook certain things and place way to much emphasis on others. For instance, Peter suggests that a manager’s job shouldn’t be to buy players, but to buy wins, and to buy wins he needs to buy runs. Billy Beane follows this advice. This leads to some rather unorthodox moves, one of the more outrageous things being hiring a life-long catcher to play first base because the guy has a very good getting on first base percentage. Hopefully the runs he will score will offset the plenty of mistakes he will make on defense. The scouts think Beane is crazy. The team manager Art Shaw, played here by Phillip Seymour Hoffman, goes further and refuses to follow the directions. As he explains, he wants to play the team in a way that is defendable in job interviews next October. The A’s start the season with an 11 game losing streak. Beane’s job is on the line. If things don’t turn around he may never be hired as a general manager again.

All of this is very succinctly told with brevity and humor by a great screenplay written by Steve Zaillian and rewritten by Aaron Sorkin. It is impossible to tell which lines are whose but there are several scenes that come off just as well as all those scenes between computer nerds in last year’s “The Social Network.” In fact it can be said that the movies performs much better off the baseball diamond than on it. The backroom dialogue is filled to the brim with smart dialogue that explains things as if it knows what it is talking about. When Brand takes Beane aside and shows him videos of his “hero,” a pudgy little known baseball player who happens to get more walks than anybody but Barry Bonds, we understand exactly why that player is drastically underrated. We also understand why Billy Beane would be willing to take such chances. Through flashbacks we see a young Billy Beane being talked up by scouts who thought he would be the next big thing. They flashed him a huge paycheck and told Billy to skip college and go straight into the big leagues. Billy did and didn’t turn into anything big. The scouts didn’t know what they were talking about and in one of the best scenes in the movie; an older and wiser Billy takes on an especially irate veteran scout. “You don’t know. You say you know, but you don’t,” he tells him. No more of the confidence bullshit for Billy. He is going to trust math from now on. You know, that thing they tried teaching us in school.

This movie is especially satisfying for someone of my generation because we all grew up in the golden age of bullshit sports movies. All that “Just believe in yourself,” horseshit that adults think is okay to foist upon unsuspecting children were heaped onto us in movies like “The Mighty Ducks” and its many ripoff copies. But this movie tells it like it is. Confidence, such a cherished virtue, is shown to be the most useless and overrated of all skill sets. What really counts is doing actual work, crunching numbers, and using deductive reasoning. To show this is not an easy thing for a movie to accomplish. We are after all, an emotional species. But, by and large, “Moneyball,” accomplishes this task. Unfortunately it ultimately falls short due to the same pitfalls that beset everything it is trying to debunk. The last half of the movie veers into melodrama and misplaces an ending that should have been revelatory instead of muted.

What do I mean by that? Well, for one thing, the director Bennet Miller (last movie of his was “Capote,” way back when btw) uses way too much soft focus and slow motion in the climatic scenes. The idea of statistics is to cast clarity on a muddled world. A man like Beane, who has crunched the numbers, should be seeing things more clearly (think Neo finally seeing the matrix at the end of “The Matrix”). Instead, there is a five-ten minute scene near the end of the movie about a very meaningful game in which we see Beane in the weight room, fixed on the television, hoping to all hope that things turn out well on the field. This is not correct. A man who believes in math does not hope or pray for anything. They know what the probabilities are. When so-and-so comes up to the plate they know there is a certain percentage of chance that they will either hit the ball or not. They also know that there is a certain percentage of chance that the game will be won or lost. A man of math is not surprised. They are not brought to disbelieving elation or despair by the occasional impossible miracle. They knew it was possible actually, just unlikely.  Thus, we shouldn’t have out-of-focused shots. We instead should have full-focus shots. The movie should be set in a setting of hyper-awareness. This is not done to the movie’s detriment.

Now, take for instance the ending. It speaks boatloads of the very problem Beane was up against (i.e. human intuition against mathematical reality), but does not exploit it to dramatic effect. Billy Beane ends up turning down a very high offer to manage the Boston Red Sox. Now, if he were using his own philosophy, he would probably determine that access to the Red Sox would mean a greater budget, better players, and thus a better chance to win the World Series Title. In fact, the Red Sox would win the World Series just two years later having adopted some of Billy Beane’s methodology. But Billy didn’t join the Red Sox. He turned down the offer and stayed with the A’s….and he still hasn’t won the World Series. I’m sure the decision felt right though.