Fences (4/5 Stars)

 “Fences” is obviously adapted from a play. It helps to keep reminding yourself of this as you watch. That way you can get past the long speeches in confined areas without succumbing to the unreality of all. People act differently within the confines of a play and when they are brought into the wide open of movies it can seem weird. So it is best to come into this movie with that expectation.

The biggest choice any adapter of a play needs to make is how much of the talking of the play should be ditched for scenes of action. Director Denzel Washington ditches so little of the lines that it hardly makes sense for to see “Fences” as a movie. If you can see it as a play, do that instead, the immediacy of the live medium will make it more exciting and easy to follow. Not that “Fences” is a bad adaptation. Denzel’s directs in long takes and makes everyone speak very quickly. This helps move the whole thing along even if it must as designed stay in a backyard for the most part.

Denzel stars as Troy Maxson, an arrogant man who bitterly notices that his life was unfair and that he is too old to get a better one. He is a garbage truck hauler with ambitions to be a garbage truck driver. He also wants to turn back the clock about thirty years and play baseball in the major leagues. He once was a very good ball player., but as the play goes along it becomes clearer and clearer that he didn’t really have a chance to make it. Everything went against him: racism, non-existent parents, his own character. It is hard to tell where societies ills end and where his weaknesses start. This blinds him to the promise of his children, his relatively good life, and his own faults. There are several dramatic scenes that start with this man being on the high road talking a lot and end with his moral grandstanding backfiring. A good example is when his grown son, a musician, asks to borrow ten dollars. He makes a big scene about how his son should get a real job and not mooch. Then it turns out that Denzel was in prison for his son’s childhood and really does owe his son ten dollars every now and again no matter how old he is.

His wife, played by Viola Davis, is a standard long suffering wife. She is an upstanding reasonable woman, the sort of character whose personality is sacrificed to provide a foil to more complex and interesting people. Someday someone might make a story about a guy like Denzel, (“which has happened many times before think “Death of a Salesman”) about a woman instead. Maybe once the 60s roll around again.

All in all, there is great acting in “Fences.” There is almost nothing else and no potential for anything else. And I’m not sure if anyone else noticed, but there is only one fence in “Fences.” This movie should really be called “Fence.”

The Founder (3/5 Stars)

This movie never really makes up its mind about what it thinks about Ray Croc, the man who franchised McDonald’s, a small family owned chain in Southern California, into a global company. Is he a hero or a villain in this story? Does he represent good things like ambition, persistence, and work ethic? Or does he represent bad things like bullying, cutting corners, and unfair dealing? Or is he half-good or half-bad? I actually think the last one may be closer to the truth, but the movie is ambiguous.

Now the creators of the movie may have felt that keeping the movie ambiguous is a way of portraying Ray Croc in a half-good/half-bad way. But saying nothing about either thing isn’t the same about saying something about both things. “The Founder” would have been a much better movie if its creators were more insistent on having more of a point of view. A much better movie with a very similar plot is David Fincher’s great movie “The Social Network.” That too told the story of a small business that grew into a giant and the collateral damage of early partners it left in its wake. That movie is superior to this one because it was explained to the audience why it was necessary that the collateral partners were pushed aside and explained why that wasn't completely fair, whereas “The Founder” never quite makes the argument that Ray Croc was wrong in how he expanded McDonald’s (he is shown maintaining a great product and giving business opportunites to many hardworking normal people) and never quite makes the argument that Ray Croc was right in how he cut out the original founders, the McDonald’s brothers (Ray Croc’s real estate deals are shown in a slippery manner and the movie blatantly shows the infamous hand shake deal that courts later said couldn’t be proved.)

The lynchpin of the whole thing was a milkshake that didn’t need a freezer. It was an insta-mix. You put it into a glass of cold water and stirred it for a couple minutes. The McDonald’s brothers (played by the perfectly cast Nick Offerman and John Carrol Lynch) balk at this even though Ray Croc and all the other franchisees prove that it will save them a lot of money. What does the movie think? Did the McDonald’s brothers have the right to stop all the other franchisees from saving money with insta-milkshakes? Are the original standards of McDonald’s sacrosanct and not worth the expansion of the franchise? This could be clearer.

Another thing mixed up in this could be clearer. Ray Croc was married to a woman who didn’t share his ambitions. The woman who came up with the Insta-milkshake became his later wife after he divorced the first one. What does the movie think about this? It kind of waffles here too. It is under the impression that the first divorce is not a good thing. But it can’t admit (because I don’t think the evidence is there) that the second marriage was a bad thing. When I watched the “Social Network,” I felt it was making an argument that the company, Facebook, and its success was important enough to warrant hurt feelings and disloyalty to members that weren’t on board with the program of making it the biggest and best thing ever. “The Founder” is in the same position, but doesn’t make the argument. I’m not entirely sure what “The Founder” thinks of McDonald’s. Does it think it should have stayed in San Bernadino? Or does it think it should have expanded across the world? This is an important question because Ray Croc was responsible for the second scenario and he could not have done it with the McDonald’s brothers as his business partners.

Ray Croc is played by Michael Keaton, one of those actors that is sort of beyond definition. He looks white-bread neutral and yet the man has played Beetlejuice, Batman, Birdman, and a police sergeant that moonlights at Bed, Bath, and Beyond and quotes TLC lyrics. He is an off-kilter surreal actor playing in a boring white man’s body. He is perfect for Ray Croc, whose weird enthusiasm and persistence, renders him borderline uncanny valley. That is he looks human but there is something not quite right. Like L. Ron Hubbard, he seems to have brainwashed himself. Early scene of him as a traveling milk-shake salesman has him alone in his hotel room listening to self-motivation records on a loop. It would be nice if the movie had an opinion about that.

The first McDonald’s in San Bernadino looks and feels like a great restaurant. In fact, it reminds me of the best fast food restaurant I’ve ever been to: In-N-Out. The menu is only burgers, fries, and soda/shakes. The quality of the food is great. The people working there are clean cut and well paid. As a mainly Southern California restaurant, the restaurant is airy and people can easily eat outside. Contrast this with your average McDonald’s today. A depressing conglomeration of colors and menu options, all of which contain substandard ingredients, and a general aura of uncleanliness confined in the commercial space of a crowded urban area (at least in NYC). Of course we don’t see what McDonald’s became in “The Founder,” and I really don’t know what the makers feel about what happened.

Silence (4/5 Stars)

“Silence” is an outlier in movies. It was adapted from a book of the same name by Japanese author Shusako Endo. That book is a fictionalized account of a historical occurrence. The persecution of Christians in mid-17th Century Japan. The Christian evangelists are Portugese Jesuits. (This movie substitutes English for Portugese but the Japanese stays the same.) Persecution and even martyrdom do not faze the Jesuits. As one states in the movie, “the blood of martyrs are the seed of the church.” And yes, the Japanese shogunate starts realizing this. So instead of making martyrs out of priests for not apostatizing (renouncing God’s name publicly) they start torturing and killing innocent Christian Japanese civilians, mostly just poor fisherman, whether or not they apostatize until the priests apostatize. This is a much harder choice for the Jesuit missionaries. They were ready to give up their lives for God, but they weren’t so ready to watch other men do it when an apostasy by the priest would save them.

There is much pain and cruelty and heavy theological talk in this movie. Almost immediately it becomes apparent why it took the director Martin Scorsese twenty years to get funding to make the movie. There are no commercial reasons for making the film. But that in itself is a reason to go see it. For it is a good movie and a good movie about this subject matter is something you probably haven't seen before.

The movie starts in Portugal with more bad news. The persecutions have been off and on in Japan for fifty years now and all the Christians have resorted to practicing in secret. But this latest news is the most dire yet. Father Ferrera has been reported to have apostasized in public, changed his name and taken a Japanese wife. Two young Jesuit missionaries in Lisbon do not believe it. After all, Ferrara was their teacher. These two men are Father Rodrigues (played by Andrew Garfield) and Father Garupe (played by Adam Driver). Over the concerns of their monsignor, they set off to Japan to find the truth and Ferrara. They are told that theirs will be the last mission the Jesuits take to Japan as it is now too dangerous for any Christians there.

Indeed it is too dangerous for Christians there. Rodrigues and Garupe succeed in finding a poor fishing village inhabited by secret Christians. They say mass and give absolution under dark of night. But sooner or later, simply by being there, they draw the attention to the authorities somehow. And the authorities start cruelly torturing to death all the poor men, women, and children that look up to Rodrigues and Garupe for solace.

At this point, Rodrigues and Garupe split up as Rodrigues goes further to look for Ferrara. And giving meaning to the title of the movie, he starts to have a crisis of faith. Where is God when his faithful are going through unimaginable tortures? Good question.

“Silence” is a good complementary film with Scorsese's last sincere exploration of Christianity, 1987’s “The Last Temptation of Christ.” (Fun fact: That movie was one of the reasons why there weren’t all that many blatantly religious movies between 1987 and 2004’s ‘The Passion of the Christ.’ It turns out when certain Christians don’t like how Christ is portrayed (in that movie 100% human and 100% divine) they denounce and picket. Movie studios wanted none of that.) It reflects the sincere interest of a Roman Catholic and what it means to have faith in the most trying of times. I heard that he held a screening for Papa Frank, another Jesuit. I’m not surprised by Papa Frank's openness.

The movie falters somewhat in its casting of Andrew Garfield. Try as I might, I had hard time seeing him as someone who would have lived in the 17^th Century. He seems too smooth in the face for that. I actually think this movie could have been more effective if Andrew and Adam Driver had switched roles. Adam Driver doesn’t really look normal and that I feel is what these characters require.

The Japanese in the movie, unknown unless I’m betraying my lack of knowledge of Japanese movies, are cast perfectly. Shin’ya Tsumakato plays Mokichi and really looks like he has been living hard in a dirt poor fishing village all his life. Yosuke Kubozuka plays the interpreter Kichijiro. This is a rather pathetic person who ultimately draws less of the audience’s contempt as it does its pity. Finally, the big bad inquisitor Inoue is played by Issei Ogata as not big and bad and not even particularly intimidating. Actually he’s rather polite and goes out of his way to reason with Father Rodrigues about the futility of spreading Christianity to Japan. Of course he’s also evil, anyone who tortures and kills innocent people always is, but like all well written characters, his stance is explained well and understood, which makes Father Rodrigues’s reaction to it all the more meaningful.

“Silence” is a good movie. For its kind of movie, it's one of the best. All too easy a thing to accomplish given there are so few movies like it.