Love and Mercy (4/5 Stars)

(This has got to be some kind of record for me. I saw this movie a month ago and am only now writing the review. It is lapse of time that does not do the movie justice as I may have simply forgotten much of the movie. I do not think I have but of course if I had forgotten it how would I know I had?)

“Love and Mercy,” is a biopic of the musician and composer Brian Wilson of the “Beach Boys.” The musical biopic has become its own subgenre by now with Ray, Johnny Cash, James Brown, and even N.W.A. amongst others getting their own movie. The formula became so cliche that it was notably parodied in “Walk Hard” with John C. Reilly playing a fake musician called Dewey Cox who, like all the other musicians, struggles with childhood tragedy, crafts a big hit that makes him famous and pulls him out of the poverty, becomes addicted to drugs and overcomes his addiction, and has a back and forth relationship with the woman he will finally come to marry and love. “Love and Mercy” is a welcome innovation to this genre. We are spared the rote genre storylines and instead are presented with two stories that interweave with each other. The first is Brian Wilson’s studio creation of his masterpiece “Pet Sounds,” and his subsequent fall into mental illness amidst the hallucinogenic drugs of the sixties. The second is about how the love of a good woman saved a domineered and overmedicated Brian Wilson from a corrupt psychiatrist.

It is a tribute to this movie that the second story is in ways more interesting than the first even though Brian Wilson is not composing or performing any music in it. It is an odd unsettling scenario of the lash between an overly sensitive musical prodigy and the wildness of the counterculture. I bet the case of Brian Wilson, gone mad after one genius album, was a cautionary tale to the entire industry. The two stories inform each other nicely in a way good times/bad times way until the third act when it turns into bad times/bad times for awhile before settling into a satisfying conclusion of bad times/good times.

Young Brian Wilson is played by Paul Dano. It is an interesting choice given that Dano does not have a classically good voice. However his acting skills aptly demonstrate the notion that emotional control counts more than versatile skill in delivering the goods. The movie, directed by Bill Pohlad, presents the music in an educational way. He does not merely play the hits, he goes into the studio and has the individual musicians play their parts by themselves. Thus the many layered orchestrations of Brian Wilson are deconstructed in a way that better shows their genius. The best example of this is when Dano plays and sings “God Only Knows” on the piano by himself. That song has a really counterintuitive chord progression that I never noticed until now.  Interestingly “Pet Sounds” was composed entirely Brian Wilson in a studio with a studio band called “The Wrecking Crew” while the other Beach Boys were on tour in Japan. So besides the voices of the other Wilson brothers, the actual Beach Boys weren’t really there for it. Which may have been a good thing as Wilson was sensitive and introspective and simply not ready for the craziness that came with the rock band experience. This reality hits home hard when the story cuts to a future Brian Wilson broken down, isolated, and misdiagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia.

John Cusack plays old Brian Wilson. It is a fine unshowy performance which is perfect for a character that is defined by being under the influence of larger characters. That would be his doctor Eugene Landy who is played by Paul Giamatti, a consummate character actor if there ever was one. Landy is at once sweet and then conniving and then very scary. Giamatti is particularly good at all of those things. Against Landy is a Cadillac saleswoman named Melinda Ledbetter (Elizabeth Banks) whom Brian Wilson meets one day as he shops for a new car. The movie hinges on this character. She is presented with a very delicate situation. Brian Wilson asks her out on several dates and they hit it off. She is particularly attracted to his kind and humble manner. And then as the story progresses she slowly realizes that he is being abused in a very real way by his psychiatrist. And so she has a choice. Is she going to insert her life into this other person’s troubles? What exactly is her responsibility here?

I have had the pleasure of reviewing Elizabeth Banks many times in the past decade. I have seen many of her movies and written reviews for eight of them. In fact she was in the first movie I ever reviewed “The 40-Year Old Virgin” even though I did not mention her or much else in that review. This role is the best work yet and coming off her revelatory work in The Hunger Games franchise as Effie Trinket, a character that easily could be played much worse by lesser actresses, she is hitting a stride in her career. The career of Elizabeth Banks is a great example of miscasting and likewise a good example of the shallow amount of good roles for women in the movie industry as a whole. For much of her career, Elizabeth Banks minimum amount of comedic chops and her great looks got her miscast in a lot of comedic roles as neurotic losers or else as the mean/mature girlfriend playing straight man to whatever comedian got the interesting role. Like Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson she is hard to write for because she escapes the cliché’s of the characters she looks like. She is a beautiful blonde but not vapid or conceited. And she can play subtlety, morality, and grace but roles exploring that side are generally lacking. So she is often seen as mean and exasperated or in the other direction lacking self-confidence neither of which give her the ability to show off her acting capacity. She has received much work (a lot of the time at the expense of not as good looking but better comedians) but very few ideal roles. I would confine those to 30 Rock’s Avery Jessup, Hunger Games Effie Trinket, and now this one. It is finely nuanced performance that never misses a beat and I think she should get an Oscar nomination for it. 

Love and Mercy is a fine movie. Interestingly it is the directorial debut of Bill Pohland but he is by no means a newcomer. He has produced many good movies before including ‘Into the Wild’ and ’12 Years a Slave.’ Apparently he thought he was qualified enough to hire himself this time. He was right.

12 Years a Slave (5/5 Stars)

“It was unearthly, and the men were—No, they were not inhuman. Well, you know, that was the worst of it—this suspicion of their not being inhuman.”

- Joseph Conrad, Hearts of Darkness

In Joseph Conrad’s Hearts of Darkness, a young British officer travels up the Congolese river to seek out a renegade Colonel named Kurtz. Africa, and this especially undeveloped part of it, was an entirely different world to the educated officer. It is a given in both the story’s authorial voice and in the character itself that the British with all their clothes and technology are superior to the hunter-gatherer savages of Africa. But as the officer contemplates the natives upon seeing them at the start of his journey he is overtaken with a strange discomfort. It isn’t a discomfort born from a sense of racism. No, on the contrary, he recognizes that there is no difference between him and the “savages.” They are obviously of the same species. And this brief acknowledgement of the native’s humanity unnerves him.   

12 Years a Slave, is the third feature by Director Steve McQueen having previously made Hunger and Shame, both collaborations with actor Michael Fassbender. Fassbender in a DVD Bonus feature once referred to McQueen as a man of great empathy. McQueen’s movies are a witness to the truth of that statement. One of the things that make 12 Years a Slave especially remarkable is its treatment of the white characters who are not portrayed as 100% nasty but are allowed brief moments like the one given to the British officer in Conrad’s Hearts of Darkness where they recognize the humanity of those they consider inferior. Apparently this is true not only of McQueen’s adaptation of Solomon Northup’s autobiography 12 Years a Slave, but of the novel itself. Solomon, born a free man in New York, kidnapped, and sold into slavery, repeatedly put himself in the shoes of his slave masters in his account of the ordeal. (I have said before that Django Unchained treated its slave-owners like the Nazis in Indiana Jones. Here I would argue that 12 Years a Slave treats its slave-owners like the Nazis in Schindler’s List, particularly the Ralph Fiennes character, Amon Goeth) Counter intuitively, this does not make the slave owners look better. In fact, it makes them look far worse. In law, it would be the difference between crimes committed knowingly (like murder) as opposed to unknowingly (mere manslaughter). A character like Leonardo Dicaprio’s deluded and indulgent plantation owner in Django Unchained is not shown making moral choices. He considers only one way of doing things. Here, though, the slave-owners can sense what is morally correct if only in that Huck Finn way of feeling ‘something not quite right in the pit of my stomach.’ Then given the choice of whether or not to recognize the humanity that they sense, they choose not to do it. Their behavior comes off as especially cruel, unnatural, and evil. After all, even if they lived by the moral code of the South, Solomon Northup still deserved to be set free. All he had to do to be released was get a letter to his family back home telling them where he was so they could find him and show the local sheriff his free papers. Even in the South this was all the law needed. What stood in the way was the insidious nature of slavery; an institution that oppresses the slave but also warps the moral constitution of the master. It makes cowards of good men as well as enabling the worst impulses of the evil ones.

Is there anything that Michael Fassbender would not do for Steve McQueen? It is a relationship between actor and director that can only be rivaled by the 70s relationship between De Niro and Scorsese. These are all especially hard performances and it speaks to the enormous amount of trust that Fassbender has in McQueen that he is willing to do them. Fassbender in 12 Years a Slave is taking on one of the most notorious of slave-owners, Edwin Epps, in this role. In a world of systematic cruelty, he somehow stood out as being notably more cruel than usual. One of things that 12 Years a Slave portrays that Django Unchained conveniently sidestepped is the subject of widespread rape. (Not to say Django Unchained was not a brave movie, it just seemed that rape was one too many things to consider. And thus Dicaprio lives with his sister, not a wife.) Rape would be one thing, but as Malcolm X liked to point out, most slave-owners were married. And boy how would you feel as a wife if your husband continually raped his slaves? Could you really bring yourself to think the adultery did not count because the women your husband repeatedly raped were black? And thus is set up the most horrific love triangle in the history of cinema between Master Epps, his wife played by Sarah Paulson, and the slave he is in love with Patsy played by newcomer Lupita Nyong’o.

Patsy is perhaps one of the more remarkable slaves in the world, picking an average rate of 500 pounds of cotton a day. Most men in the field pick around 200 pounds. This among other obvious things captures the attention of Epps, who absolutely hates himself for finding her attractive. He rewards her abilities by continually raping and beating her. His wife, fully aware of his philandering, demands that Epps sell her. He will not do so. The wife, who has no power herself in this ridgidly patriarchal society, responds by making Patsy’s life even more of a living hell. Among other things, she denies her soap for cleaning, cuts her rations, and throws a bottle of hard liquor at her face from point blank range. What can Patsy do about this? Commit suicide? That literally seems to be her only and best option.   

I think it would make sense to go ahead and include 12 Years a Slave within the genre of survival movie that is being exceedingly well represented this year with such movies as Gravity, Captain Phillips, and All is Lost. McQueen’s presentation of slavery Solomon Northup's situation absolutely akin to it. There is an extraordinary scene of Northup, played by Chiwetel Ejiofor, being almost lynched by an overseer named Tibault, played by Paul Dano, after a mild disagreement. The lynching is in mid-swing when a second overseer stops Tibault not because, you know, it’s murder, but because Northup is property of a different man named Ford, played by Benedict Cumberbatch. Mr. Ford is summoned to make the decision himself. Meanwhile Northup waits all day on his tippy-toes, hands still fastened behind his back, neck still hanging in the noose. In the background all the other slaves go about their business, the situation being that if anybody helped Northup they might be killed as well. Northup may as well be in the middle of the ocean like Old Man Redford or up in space like Sandra Bullock. There is no human community bound by law and order here. All is savage, brutal, and uncaring. 

“Why don’t the black people just rise up and kill the whites?” asks Dicaprio in Django Unchained. Perhaps the fate of one of the newly kidnapped slaves, played by Michael K. Williams, in an ingenious choice of casting, may illustrate the answer to that. Michael K. Williams, best known as one of the more badass characters in TV history, Omar from The Wire, brings up the idea of revolt. He is killed within the space of a couple of minutes. If Omar would last only half a scene, how do you think you would fare? 

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.

 

The Hangover: Part II (2/5 Stars)

“10: The author shall make the reader feel a deep interest in the personages of his tale and in their fate; and he shall make the reader love the good people in the tale and hate the bad ones. But the reader of the “Deerslayer” tale dislikes the good people in it, is indifferent to the others, and wishes they would all get drowned together.”

- Mark Twain, Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses

Comedy happens when somebody gets exactly what they deserve. Tragedy happens when bad things befall good people. If you do not have the ability to grasp this very simple basic difference than you might just be one of the makers of “The Hangover: Part 2,” a movie that discards nearly everything that made Part I a superior comedy and leaves behind a mess of awkwardness, unpleasantness, and a story that, if it took place in the real world, would be really sad.

The original conceit of the first Hangover movie was nothing short of brilliant. Four guys go to Vegas for a bachelor party. The next morning, Alan (played by Zach Galifinakis), Stu (played by Ed Helms), and Phil (played by Bradley Cooper) wake up in a trashed hotel room with disastrous hangovers. The groom is missing and nobody can remember where they lost him. But there are several clues around: a hospital band, a receipt from an ATM, a tiger, a chicken, a baby, and a police car. The rest of the movie concerns the three trying to piece together the mystery and meeting many different comic characters along the way. “The Hangover: Part II” follows this formula but in a vastly inferior way. This time it is Stu getting married. The wedding is taking place in Thailand. A couple of nights before the wedding, the four guys plus the bride’s 16-year-old nephew, Terry, have one beer by a campfire. Stu, Alan, and Phil wake-up the next morning with disastrous hangovers in a vagrant apartment in Bangkok and Terry is missing. But instead of a multitude of clues there is but two, a monkey and a severed finger. Both are dead ends and don’t lead to anything. In fact, whenever a clue or lead is finally brought to light it is usually entirely explored in the very next scene. Thus, there is very little mystery to Part II and that is a huge problem both in terms of the movie’s pace and comedy.

One of the more brilliant things about the first movie’s structure was the way it efficiently set up subplots. A clue was shown at the beginning and this gave the movie an excuse to switch tracks from one comic situation to another via some hilarious shock moments. Some good examples are the cops busting into a room, Mike Tyson waiting for the guys in their hotel room, or an Asian gang purposefully ramming the guys’ car. These moments don't exist in Part II because nothing is ever set up. So instead of quick comical transitions we are left with the guys walking around in depressed moods to locations that seem arbitrarily chosen. This movie isn't nearly as intelligent nor as interesting to watch unfold.

But this wouldn’t be nearly as big a problem if the movie were funny. And this is where “The Hangover Part II” inexplicably fails consistently. For one thing, all the characters have turned into jerks. The most notable transformation is Alan. What was a very funny weird but well-meaning oddball in the first movie has turned into a total asshole. He is mean to his parents, his friends, and most notably to Terry, who hasn’t done anything to deserve all the insults. This isn't funny. It's awkward. Generally speaking, a movie should make the audience like the good people in the story and dislike the bad. That way the movie is enjoyable when good stuff happens to the good people and bad stuff happens to the bad. (You would think that this would go without saying). But here there is no difference between the good and bad. They are all assholes. This goes for all the side characters in the sub-plots as well. Where Part I had some variability in the types of people the guys met (like say sweetheart Mike Tyson, heart of gold hooker Heather Graham, macho cop Rob Riggle, the annoyed doctor, etc.) everyone in Part II seems to be slightly different versions of the same jerk. The tattoo guy is a jerk. The Buddhist Monks are jerks. The drug dealers are jerks. The father-in-law is a jerk. The crime boss, played by Paul Giamatti, is a huge snarling screaming jerk. Nobody seems to be having any fun. Even the flashbacks of the night before don't show anybody having fun. The one exception is Mr. Chow, played once again by Ken Jeong, and he’s dead for half the movie. The story takes place almost entirely in a dank cesspool of inner city Bangkok. Everything is the color of puke. The funniest lines are spoken by Alan and these are mostly non-sequitors. You know a comedy is in trouble when the best jokes are funny precisely because they have nothing to do with the storyline.

The director Todd Phillips has always been very skilled at casting groups of comedians with different comic styles (Road Trip, Old School, Starsky and Hutch). In the first Hangover he hit the motherlode with the oddball Galifinakis, the neurotic Helms, and the laid back Bradley Cooper. The three played off each other very well. This was especially true whenever things would get too crazy. At that point the movie could depend on Cooper to be a relaxing agent. They wake up in a trashed hotel room. “Looks like we had a bit of fun last night,” Cooper wryly remarks, hardly worried. A valet brings around a cop car instead of their Rolls Royce. Cooper volunteers to drive it, not missing a beat. In Part II, this dynamic falls apart completely and the main reason is that Cooper can’t realistically be a relaxing agent without sounding like an uncaring asshole. The situations the guys find themselves in are far too serious. Do you understand the comedic difference between getting tasered as a punishment for stealing a cop car as opposed to getting shot for no reason whatsoever? Do you understand the difference between a very bad sunburn and a permanent face tattoo? Or how about the difference between cheating on an unfaithful shrew of a girlfriend by accidentally marrying Heather Graham as opposed to cheating on your faultless fiancé via sodomy with a transvestite prostitute? If you do, then I would argue you have a much keener understanding of what is funny and what is not than the makers of this movie. There is a very telling scene in this movie as far as the audience’s laughter level in the theater with me was concerned. It dealt with Stu’s father-in-law giving a toast. It starts with a couple of insults at Stu’s expense, which the audience definitely laughed at. It goes on for several more insults, each one drawing less laughter than the one before. And then the toast just keeps on going for much longer than the movie needed to make absolutely clear that the father-in-law isn’t telling jokes at all. Instead, he is expressing outright hatred of his son-in-law and maliciously intends to humiliate him in front of his bride to be, his entire family, and all his friends. By the end of the toast, the audience had stopped laughing. It wasn’t funny. It was just really fucking mean. 

The Hangover Part II has made so much money already that I’m sure there is more than enough financial incentive to make Part III. I am of the belief that Part III could still be very funny if it stayed competently faithful to the formula of the first movie. The first step I would think is to hire back the original writers, Jon Lucas and Scott Moore, and fire the hacks they hired to write this one.