Re-View: Capote (2005)

Twenty years ago, in my one-paragraph review of “Capote”, I summarized the conflict of this story in this one sentence: “[Capote] needs two men to die, so he can finish a book about their death.”

Looking back, I think my summary of the movie is also a window into the dubious nature of Truman Capote’s mission in writing his non-fiction bestseller “In Cold Blood.” After all, the movie is about Capote’s struggle in writing and finishing a book. The book itself is about two men who committed an awful quadruple murder and were tried and executed for it. Neither the book nor this movie is about the family that was murdered or the community they were a part of, the town of Holcomb, Kansas. And that reality, I now have realized after twenty years, is an awful thing. The family and community experienced a horrible crime and this dilettante from New York breezed into town to write a scandalous book about it as if the topic was fit for his urbane cocktail parties. I read that book and was struck how after the first few chapters that led up to the murder, the vast majority of it was about the criminals, and in particular Perry Smith, a man that seems to have captivated Capote (played here by Phillip Seymour Hoffman) for various reasons.

Capote’s first remarks to the lead detective Alvin Dewey (played here by Chris Cooper) include the unnecessary revelation that he doesn’t care if the perpetrators are ever caught. Alvin Dewey makes a point to inform Truman that he along with the general community care quite a lot about whether the perpetrators are caught. Truman has a generally hard time with getting people in the neighborhood to talk to him. He needs to use his research assistant Harper Lee (played by Catherine Keener and soon to be of To Kill a Mockingbird fame) to break the ice with people. It isn’t just that Truman has the affectation of a carefree homosexual that puts people off. In general, he doesn’t seem to understand that people may not be as interested in him as he is in himself. There is a good quote that is in every trailer to this movie in which Truman says “Ever since I was a child, folks have had me pegged because of how the way I talk, and they are always wrong.” Put in context of the scene in which is uttered though, this is a faux pas because he happens to be talking to the friend of the murdered teenage girl when he says it and the subject of the conversation was the murdered teenage girl. It simply was not the time to start talking about himself. The friend and Harper Lee look uncomfortable but politely refrain from commenting on his behavior.

There is a lot of disturbing subtext in this movie that I did not quite catch the first time around. There is far more nuance in the performance of Phillip Seymour Hoffman then I remember. It really is a great performance. First, it is so against type for Phillip Seymour Hoffman who had made his name before and after playing either far looser or far more authoritative characters. If this was the only movie you had seen of this actor, you would have a dramatically wrong idea of his normal range. Second, the way he plays Truman fits into the ambiguous way the movie itself shows his actions. The movie is directed by Bennett Miller who appears to take stances on Capote’s behavior in dribs and drabs, never really playing his hand as to whether he is sympathetic to him or not. It isn’t all that clear whether or not Capote should be helping the criminals. Or whether or not he is helping the criminals sincerely or to just help the dramatic unfolding of his book. Did he fall in love with Perry Smith (Clifton Collins Jr.), or simply identify with him as someone from a similar background, or is he simply using him. He is never directly confronted about his motivations. Ultimately, the men are scheduled for execution and the end (their lives, his book) is finally in sight. There is this extraordinary scene where Truman Capote visits the men immediately before they are hanged and experiences a very tightly wound emotional breakdown. The situation at that point is so complicated that it is impossible to unwind all of the contradictory elements of it. And yet it is emotionally real. All explanations can be found in the choices of the actor. Phillip Seymour Hoffman would go on to win the Oscar for this movie, and as I recall, it wasn’t really a contest. This is arguably the best performance of Hoffman who was arguably the best actor of his time (say 1995-2015). I still miss him.

The Director Bennett Miller is himself a bit of a cypher. Capote was his first feature film and he would go on to direct two others, 2011’s Moneyball and 2014’s Foxcatcher. Then apparently he decided he didn’t want to make movies anymore. It is rare that a person makes three feature films, all of which garner multiple Oscar nominations, and then doesn’t work again. His style doesn’t draw attention to the man behind the camera, instead it focuses on the acting which is allowed to breathe and develop. His movies are notable in that they feature some of the best acting in the careers of the actors in them, Hoffman in Capote, Jonah Hill and Brad Pitt in Moneyball, and Steve Carell and Channing Tatum in Foxcatcher.

When I first saw this movie in 2005, I didn’t quite get the scene near the mid-part of the movie where Alvin Dewey sits across from Truman and takes an understated midwestern umbrage to Truman’s efforts to help the criminals appeal their sentence on the grounds of inadequate counsel. If these men are freed because of his meddling, the Dewey informs Capote, “I’m going to go to Brooklyn and hunt you down.” I think I get it now. 

The utility of the death penalty does not lie in deterrence. Counterintuitively, people do not fear death. Instead they fear suffering. (This is what was learned by the many policy attempts to stop people from smoking. By far, it was more effective to show an alive person dealing with a hole in their throat than showing statistics about deaths from lung cancer.) And suffering, at least the cruel and unusual kind, is unconstitutional. No, the utility of the death penalty lies in its finality. It allows the community to move on and assuages the very natural impulse of human beings towards retribution and revenge. The state takes on that responsibility so the individual does not have to. Here we see Truman Capote suffer because it takes years for the two men's appeals to be exhausted before their execution. Imagine for a moment, how that same stay of execution affected the people who knew the murdered family and mourned their deaths. For that reason, it should remain, but used sparingly only for the commission of shocking crimes and only if there is no doubt at all as to guilt of the perpetrators.

Unfortunately this is not how the death penalty is used. Instead, it is used as leverage for negotiation (i.e. a criminal will escape the penalty if they plead guilty) making its general application only in those cases where the facts are hotly contested (i.e. the suspects plead innocent) and which require a trial. I say, if you need a trial to figure out what happened and who was responsible, then you shouldn’t apply the death penalty regardless of the outcome. And if there is no doubt that these two particular men decided to break into a house and murder a family of four for no particular reason, then they shouldn’t be allowed to plead guilty to avoid the death penalty. Any argument that we shouldn’t have a death penalty because we are too civilized for it seems to me to be an argument from vanity which doesn’t take into account the details of the crime in question nor its effects on the larger community. But I digress. This movie isn’t about the victims.

Here is link to my original review:

https://maxsminimoviemagazine.blogspot.com/2010/10/capote-112005.html

A Most Wanted Man (4/5 Stars)

“A Most Wanted Man,’’ the last film of actor Philip Seymour Hoffman, is not a spy thriller. ‘Mission Impossible’ is a spy thriller. This is an entirely different animal. It is a spy procedural. Such an explanation is necessary because the movie concept is novel. A procedural is a type of movie that drums up its suspense by curtailing to the Aristotelian ideal of making the representation as real as possible. Among other things, they are great stories for the curious type of person who wants to learn how things work. The most common procedurals are police procedurals (‘True Detective’) and journalist procedurals (‘All the President’s Men’). I do not think I have ever seen a spy procedural. Spies are generally portraryed by the likes of James Bond, Jason Bourne, and Ethan Hunt and they spend far more time seducing, fighting, and stealing secrets than anything else. In this movie we have Philip Seymour Hoffman looking tired, disheveled, and overweight, going about the real business of a spy, that is to find informants through persuasions of incentive or coercion and slowly but surely work up the ladder. “It takes a minnow to catch a barracuda. A barracuda to catch a shark,” he explains. In this movie based on a Le Carre novel and directed with patience by Anton Corbijn we see exactly how it works. Don’t expect gunfights. It lacks in that respect, but as I’ve said, it should be interesting to those curious as to how things work.

The “Most Wanted Man” in the title refers to a Muslim refugee from Russia who shows up in the port of Hamburg, Germany. He may or may not be a terrorist. The Russians say he confessed but that was during a torturous investigation so take it with a grain of salt. He has come to Hamburg for a particular reason. He stands to gain an inheritance from the man who raped and impregnated his mother when she was fifteen. The inheritance is in the millions of dollars. What this refugee, perhaps terrorist, will do with that huge windfall of cash is of most concern to the several intelligence apparati in Hamburg, especially since the most wanted man considers the money unclean and doesn’t want to keep any of it. “You have nothing,” his lawyer (played by Rachel McAdams) reminds him. “I have God,” he explains.

This is an interesting movie for an American audience because it is not our jurisdiction the story takes place in. It takes place in Hamburg and the main spy played by Hoffman is German. The Americans are on the sidelines portrayed by Robin Wright, an intelligence agent stationed in the American embassy in Berlin. Robin Wright has achieved a gender bending feat in transitioning from romantic leads in her early career (The Princess Bride, Forrest Gump) to really dark and interesting character parts that have very little to do with being a woman (House of Cards, A Most Wanted Man). She has a great knack for showing up in a scene and immediately putting on the impression that she is not only better looking and more fashionable than you are but also more effective, capable, and informed. Then there is the late great Philip Seymour Hoffman who more effectively than any actor still alive creates vivid characters for the rest of us. Of great note is his German accent in this movie, which seems less like an exercise in diction but more of a character choice. That is to say it not only denotes the character as German but it also sounds like a tired bueruacrat caught between deadly extremists on one side and the assholes in charge on the other. The most effective scenes are the ones Wright and Hoffman have with each other. Hoffman tries to explain that he knows what he is doing and then there is Wright on the other side. Sure she is polite and hears Hoffman out, but also makes it clear that she doesn’t have to. She’s American and what America wants, America gets. Hoffman brings up that point himself in relation to the most wanted man. She says something about respecting German sovereignty and not acting to capture him on her own initiative. ‘That never stopped you before,’ says Hoffman. ‘We don’t do that anymore,’ smiles Wright. The subtext being of course, ‘unless we wanted to.’ The conclusion of the movie reminded me of watching the paranoid political thrillers of the 1970s. It’s a pessimistic view of American power to say the least.

Hoffman’s death affects the experience of this movie in the same way that Heath Ledger’s death affected watching ‘The Dark Knight.’ Hoffman here looks close to death. He is wan and sickly. He chain smokes. He is more overweight than any other point in his career. His character is disgraced. He has been demoted to Hamburg from Beirut where, through no fault of his own, the Americans blew his network and lot of people who trusted him were killed. As far as swan songs go, this is decent way to go out. It is appropriate for Philip Seymour Hoffman. Both the actor and the character end in a tragedy that only by hindsight seems possible because it is so maddeningly and infuriatingly unjustifiable. It was bullshit. He got a raw deal.

Rest in Peace.

The Hunger Games: Catching Fire (3/5 Stars)

There was always something about Harry Potter that I found disturbing. It was always just a little bit off. Here you had a story about an innocent unassuming boy blessed with magical powers and a supremely important mission. They were imposed on him through no actions of his own. He would assume through accident of birth a unique status greater than all in the land. At the same time the hero rejects his unwon fame. He miserates on his unlucky situation and all it means. I am just a normal run-of-the-mill boy he asserts. All I want is the simple things in life like all the good ordinary men and women. In fact, in these stories those who seek fame and fortune above the simple things are looked down upon. In many cases they are the villains. In this way the book has its cake and eats it too. It allows the reader to vicariously live in fame, fortune, and violent glory while assuring themselves that what they really want is simply good friends, family, and love. By reading a book that abdicates the responsibility for all the superficial qualities forced upon the hero the audience earns plausible deniability for their own consciences. A reader can identify with a hero that can handle the fast times but is not defined by them. Or one that can state with a straight face: I could be the greatest most famous most successful person ever but I choose to be one of the people because you know that’s what’s important in life. It works of course just as long as one ignores the insidious subtext: “Please Please Please don’t forget I could have fame, fortune, and glory if I wanted it!” Because, seriously, who would have read Harry Potter if he was just a guy who wanted friends and family. He also has to be something extra. He has to be a wizard and not just any wizard, the best one. (Full Disclosure: I don’t particularly care for Harry Potter).

There is an incredible undercurrent of narcissim in my least favorite genres of storytelling Fantasy and Science Fiction. The Hunger Games a well written, competently acted, and brilliantly produced beauty of a movie is no exception. It stars Jennifer Lawrence as Katniss Everdeen, the blank slate everygirl who is the best archer in the land and has two good-looking men she feels so very guilty for having to choose between. Katniss Everdeen loves her family. Particularly she is fond of her little sister the exquisitely named Primrose Everdeen. To save Primrose and not for fame and glory she volunteered for the annual Hunger Games in the first movie. The Hunger Games is a ‘Battle Royale’-esque gladiator tournament between the thirteen impoverished districts of a futuristic dystopian society that has the totalitarian Captitol city at the head of it. It is a winner-take-all competition, kill or be killed. So Katniss killed everyone (quite honorably I would say) in the first movie, gaining in the process fame and fortune, though she really did not want to because you know she is so ordinary in the ways that count.

So Hunger Games: Catching Fire starts off with the rising celebrity of Katniss Everdeen presenting a problem to the totalitarian government headed by President Snow, played by Donald Sutherland. He intends to discredit her by various means that only encourage the population to revere her in even more rebellious fashion. Because this takes place in the genre of Science Fiction/Fantasy the movie can ignore many many things. For instance, the entire oppressive government seems to be entirely comprised in only one person, President Snow. In the real world, you would need some sort of bureaucracy to oppress a people. This is generally overlooked. Secondly we can overlook the realistic notion that celebrities that gain fame through reality TV contests don’t have any political power. As far as I can tell power (if you choose to distill it down to its essential essence) comes from the ability to hire or fire people, i.e. control over jobs. Think about that definition and see where it can get you. But as this is the future, a TV celebrity can move the world. And please try to forget what the economy of the extravagant Captitol is comprised of given that it has no commercial class or trading partners. Or what it really takes to not only stoke a rebellion but also to competently carry it to realization, see Battle of Algiers. In the real world, inspiration is the least of all problems. In Hunger Games, it seems to be the only thing that’s missing. But because this takes place in some fantastical land (or a long time ago in a galaxy far far away, or on Middle Earth) we can set up a story whose plot functions can rely almost entirely on character whims for better or worse. If you wanted to do that in a realistic genre, you would have to confine all the characters to a house and make the story take place within a day. But you can have interpersonal opera on a grand scale with world changing consequences in fantasy/science fiction because once again, you can pretend that reality does not apply in this far distant land.

We can be very glad that Hunger Games: Catching Fire is not a preachy metaphor designed to make us think about the problems of everyday life. Some movies within this genre do just this and become horribly insufferable monstrosities. Instead Hunger Games is far more concerned with costumes, hair, and makeup. I suppose we will just have to get used to this as studios start paying due attention to the other half of the population. If Hunger Games is a portent of the future of blockbusters though we should be seeing much to appreciate. For instance take a look at these names: Katniss Everdeen, Primrose Everdeen, Effie Trinket, Ceasar Flickerman, Claudius Templesmith, Plutarch Heavensbee, Haymitch Abernathy. Don’t those just roll off the tongue in some perfect mosaic of sound and diction? Or take a look at the great flair in hair of the game show host Ceasar Flickerman (playbed by Stanley Tucci) and his sidekick Claudius Templesmith (Toby Jones). Or consider the Girl on Fire costumes of Katniss Everdeen and her counterpart Peeta Mellark that catch fire during a chariot parade to the delight of the crowd. Or the even more impressive bride/mockingjay costume that not only makes Jennifer Lawrence look great but is also imbued with important story revealing symbology. This is the first blockbuster I know of that gives the hero/heroine a stylist in a major role. Lenny Kravitz does the job here doling out wisdom the way Obi Wan Kenobi would tutor Luke Skywalker in swordplay. The most impressive creature in all of this superficial exuberance is the presence of Effie Trinket, a woman who changes elaborate costumes and hairdos in every single scene. She is played by Elizabeth Banks and in the most markedly superior aspect of this sequel compared to the first movie, we get some depth to the character peeking out of the ditzy cheerleader persona in a way that very surprisingly doesn’t undercut all we have previously seen from her. I haven’t seen anything else quite like her in movies. Effie Trinket is an original.  

Oh and look we have several notable new castmembers. Phillip Seymour Hoffman is the new gamemaster and a fairly competent and entertaining one as we see in the final third of the movie. And there is Jena Malone, who I have spoken good graces of before. She tends to pop her head up from indie stardom in character roles in bigger movies every now and again. She plays Johanna Mason, the warrior woman Katniss Everdeen would be if she wasn’t so like the rest of us. The movie’s third act in a new series of Hunger Games does not dissapoint and ends in a very satisfying way. I am a little interested in seeing the next one.

Here’s another curiousity. Michael Arndt co-wrote this screenplay with Simon Beaufoy (also very good). Michael once won an Oscar for writing one of my favorite movies, Little Miss Sunshine. That movie had an entirely opposite take on the world compared to these types of narcissistic tales. But since then, his career trajectory since then has been almost entirey focused on big budget sequels in the realm of fantasy science fiction (Toy Story 3, Hunger Games, Oblivion, Star Wars). Et tu, Arndt?

The Master (4/5 Stars)

Good luck trying to brainwash a crazy person.

Suppose you were a charlatan, somebody who falsely claims to have special skills or expertise. Now suppose you were a very ambitious charlatan, not just an ordinary con man peddling nonexistent charity or selling used cars as new, but someone who with the gall to claim access to the divine. Let’s go even further now and head into L. Ron Hubbard territory. Suppose you had the chutzpah to start your own religion and suppose you had the personality and intelligence to actually pull it off on a grand scale. We have gotten this far so we must assume that one of two things is true. One: you are correct about the secrets of the universe. Or two: You’ve got to be some sort of megalomaniacal psychotic sociopath.

This is an important thing to keep in mind as one watches “The Master,” mainly because the sociopath in question, Lancaster Dodd played by Phillip Seymour Hoffman in another brilliant characterization, is such a nice, friendly, and warm fellow. He likes singing. He likes dancing and he loves giving speeches. It is easy to forget that he spends the vast majority of his day lying, cheating, and stealing from those who follow him. Lancaster Dodd, modeled after the founder of Scientology L. Ron Hubbard, is an evil person. His entire demeanor is a well-rehearsed act played to disarm the senses, gain trust, and to ultimately control his followers. I believe the common term is brainwashing, although how Dodd works is more like hypnosis (don’t tell him that!). The to remember about someone under hypnosis is not that they do not know the truth. They just don’t care. They have intentionally submitted themselves to a fantasy.

In that view it does not actually matter what is the fantasy. A cursory study of the beliefs of Scientology reveal an absolutely ridiculous plethora of science fiction looniness. It boggles the rational mind. Given that Hubbard was not insane, why would he base a religion on something so unbelievable? Think about it this way: What if the ridiculousness of it all was simply a byproduct of an enormous ego. Perhaps the next step in self-glorification from creating a religion that men will follow blindly, is creating an absolutely absurd religion that men will follow blindly. The absurdity grotesquely emphasizes the personal magnetism of the leader. If the Pope can get priests and nuns to give up family and sex for a life of service to God, if Napoleon could get men to die for ribbons and medals and country, what does it say about Hubbard if he can get bank accounts for thetans and other like rubbish? Perhaps that is what makes him truly a Master of men.

The religion in this movie does not actually encompass any of the tenets of “Scientology.” It doesn’t need to; the actual belief system is arbitrary in front of the central conflict between the master's cult of personality and his would-be followers. In particular, one relationship between Dodd and ex-Navy man Freddie Quell, played in erratic fashion by real life crazy man Joaquin Phoenix, is the central driving force of the story.

Freddie Quell is an animal. Possibly suffering PTSD from his service in WWII or simply just crazy, he is an aimless drifter with no friends, family, or money. He starts fights with innocent bystanders, mixes death-defying cocktails with intoxicants such as rocket fuel and paint thinner, and thinks sex in an uninhibited fashion. The man is a walking id. Lancaster Dodd has many bullshit reasons of why he would seek the company of Freddie Quell as a protégé, plenty going under the guise of “helping him.” What this relationship really amounts to however is a vanity project. Lancaster Dodd has successfully brainwashed old rich ladies, several ex-wives, and a small legion of believers, and now he is aiming for bigger game. He wants to be able to control a man who is uncontrollable. Freddie Quell could be the Great White Whale for charlatans. Here is a man who will not join the following for all the usual reasons. He has no family or friends in the group. He does not seek influence over other people. He has no interest in making money (unlike for instance the oilman submitting to a baptism in order to build his pipeline in Paul Thomas Anderson’s last movie, “There Will Be Blood.”) And lastly, he is certainly not affected by peer pressure in any conventional sense. If Freddie Quell joins the following and stays put it will be because he truly believes and that in turn glorifies the controlling power of the Master. Quell may be deranged but he has no lying in him, (which is perhaps what makes him so deranged.)

Boy does Lancaster Dodd throw the book at Quell and gives the man everything he has got. Every scene they have together is a mind-battle between two heavyweights. Perhaps one of the best scenes involves a Dianetics inspired interrogation where Dodd peppers Quell with a multitude of intensely private questions. Notice how Dodd gains the upper hand. Mind control works like ju-jitsu. You can’t win by getting the other person to fight against himself.

Paul Thomas Anderson’s writing is on a level far above the average movie. A character like Lancaster Dodd is so hard to pull off. Take a scene that takes place in a high society party. Dodd is explaining how people have had past lives and are repeatedly incarnated. When they go through “processing” they can recall their past lives and gain insight into their present and future lives. “Processing” can even solve certain types of Leukemia. A man at the party intends to confront Dodd on this point. I think we can all agree that “processing” cannot cure Leukemia and that professing such a belief is absurd if not downright odious. Would it surprise you that Lancaster Dodd wins this argument and wins it handily, leaving the man speechless and embarrassed? It is not movie magic with unrealistic dialogue happening here. The time-travel man wins the debate against the skeptic because he is such an intelligent speaker that he is able to run logical circles around ordinary men on even the most absurd of topics.

Combine that with another strange musical score from Jonny Greenwood (who also did “There Will Be Blood”) and you have one of the most fiercely original movies of the year. Here is to hoping it does not take Paul Thomas Anderson another five years to make his next movie. 

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.

 

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.

Doubt (4/5 Stars) 12/12/08

Required viewing before you see this movie is the superb documentary 'Deliver Us From Evil.' It is about five years old and concerns itself with a Catholic priest named Father O'Grady who was one of the most notorious pedophiles in the church. He had maybe over a hundred victims. Whenever anybody complained, he was promoted. 

'Doubt' takes place in 1964 about a year after the Kennedy Assassination and during the great 'freshening up' of the Catholic Church. It is important to note though that it was adapted from a 2005 Pulitzer prize winning play. So although it takes place in the sixties, it is very much of today's time. Everything you have heard about priests in the last decade bears down on the edges of this story. But far be it from this movie to only have one Big Issue. It throws in a couple more like the alleged child victim being the first black kid to be desegregated into the school, a conflict between the old Catholic Church and the new one, and an unflattering view of church hierarchy and sexism. The mere fact that this movie can get through two hours without dodging any of the issues and without directly offending everybody is probably the reason it got the Pulitzer. I think it deserved it. (Sort of, I mean if the Pulitzers wanted to be respectable they would start giving out awards to the most substantial art-form in the world right now. Need I say the word 'movies.' If they did that I could give out a list of more deserving titles. But I have no doubt that this would make one hell of a play.) 
Like a play there more talk than walk, but I don't think it will bore anyone without Attention Deficit Disorder. There is a trio of very good performances. Leading the pack is Meryl Streep who always seems to get the best roles. She will definitely get an Oscar Nomination. If she hadn't already won so many they would probably throw the Oscar at her for this one. Her character is one of her best. A very stern, strong, and disciplined nun. The type little kids would fear as they walked to the principals office. But this is no caricature. Streep infuses into the character much to admire. For instance she takes on the parish priest she suspects with very little evidence and absolutely no authority. Love her or hate her, this woman has a lot of guts. If the priest were guilty, and he might be, Sister Aloysious is the type of person you would want around. 
The priest is played righteously by Phillip Seymour Hoffman. I don't care if this guy is innocent, he's still an asshole. He might be really nice to the black kid, but he's a complete jerk to the nuns. He sits in Meryl Streep's chair, he uses his sermons to get back at Amy Adams, he seems to completely disregard the sacrifice the sisters make every day. I've got a problem with the Catholic Church in general and how it treats its woman, and I think this movie makes it quite clear what is wrong. The nuns get up at five am to pray. They eat in silence. The men eat with music playing and laughter in the air. The nuns teach history and discipline the students. The priest teaches gym. The women wear the most constrictive and ugly black cassocks. The men dress in flowing gowns and get the fame of preaching sermons. What makes Meryl Streep's performance so great is that it captures that torn conviction of a true believer who knows that her superiors are not as saintly as she is. She is like many of us, forced into dead end jobs and seeing younger less experienced people rise through the ranks to be the boss. No wonder she is such a bitch. 
Rounding out the trio of great performances is Amy Adams who does a terrible job at not being beautiful. She is the shy type of nun. (Nuns come in two types: shy and mean. Over time the shy become mean.) There is some talk of giving an Oscar Nomination to the mother of the black kid who only has one scene in this movie. I do not understand this sort of thing. Every year the Academy will pull a stunt like this, give a nomination to an old veteran that does a big boo-hoo with a tiny unsubstantial role that nobody will ever remember (Ruby Dee, anyone?). It would be a real travesty if they gave it to this woman because a much better, much more important performance is staring them right in the face. And that is the one by Amy Adams. Her character is important because it is the middle ground between the two fighters. We see most of the story through her eyes. Both Meryl and Philip try to win her to her side. and it is Amy's reaction to them that sways our point of view back and forth between them. 
In the end we are not very sure if it happened or didn't happen. This doesn't make the movie any less suspenseful. In addition to gripping my coat the entire length of the movie I was looking fervently into the corners of the screen to glimpse any extra evidence of what actually went on. Both sides are plausible, both sides are realistic, both can't be right. This movie is not big enough to get serious Oscar treatment, but it should be enough for an acting nomination for Meryl Streep and an Adapted Screenplay Nomination for John Patrick Shanley. The cinematographer is the great Roger Deakins who is perhaps the most unduly snubbed cameraman Hollywood has ever produced. Like all of his movies, this one has a very original, crisp and beautiful look to it. The way it is shot makes us feel the cold winter breezes. I don't know enough about cinematography to justify a prediction but I would say its about time that the Academy started throwing Oscars at Deakins. He's the only cinematographer I know by name and for good reason. (For examples of his work look at No Country for Old Men, Jarhead, A Beautiful Mind, O Brother Where Art Thou, Fargo, and The Shawshank Redemption.)

Synecdoche, New York 10/26/08

It struck me as odd that I walked out of this movie wondering whether it was just good or one of the best movies ever made. The problem, like all of Charlie Kaufman's stories, is that there is nothing to compare it to. So I can't say that it is like this movie or that one. I can't say if you liked this movie, than you're bound to like Synecdoche, or if you disliked such and such then you will really hate it. Reviews are at their best comparative. I watch a film and decide whether it fits, shorthands, or supersedes its genres and rules. I pass on that knowledge to help others decide whether they want to spend $12 and two hours of their time watching it. But what can I do when a movie stands alone? I can honestly say that I have never seen anything like it. That even Kaufman's previous incredibly original works (Being John Malkovich, Adaptation, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) are only vaguely similar, and still only in matters that are coincidental. (i.e. They all take place in New York). I can say this, I cannot imagine the movie being any better. I cannot conceive of any wrong choices. Each scene was something I had never seen before. I can describe what I felt. I laughed at many parts. I wore a grin through many supposedly depressing scenes. I felt a terrible sadness at certain points. And during the final scenes my mouth was held open by awe at what I was witnessing. I have no idea how long the movie was. I completely lost track of time. 
I suppose now I should try to explain it, although I fear the entire point of the movie was to present something beyond explaining. Synecdoche is defined as "a part representing the whole or the whole representing a part." The movie is about the ambitious folly of a play director named Caden, played brilliantly by Philip Seymour Hoffman. Caden deals with synecdoche's as a career. A stage is a synecdoche of a life just like a movie based on actual events is a synecdoche of those events. Caden may be a synecdoche of Kaufman. The women in this movie may be synecdoche's of women in Kaufman's life. This review is a synecdoche of the movie. It may be argued that no matter how hard I try I will not be able to capture the true essence of the movie in this review. Much like how Caden will not be able to capture the true essence of life in his plays. Even if, like in this movie, he built a life-size version of New York inside a warehouse, had tens of thousands of extras, and a budget that apparently has no bounds. 
At the same time, Caden is dying. He doesn't know how but he is. Organs fail on him mysteriously. He suffers a seizure. His body revolts in humiliating and painful ways. He wants to do something of significance. Something that is true and right before he leaves this world.
Moreover, Caden has trouble with his 1st marriage (Catherine Keener). He has trouble with his second marriage (Michelle Williams). He has an unrequited love affair with a third woman (Samantha Morton). And he loses his daughter, who he forever remembers as a four year old, to devious people in a faraway land. Everything is slowly slipping away. He's waging several losing wars on several different fronts. The film is mired in depression and there is much talk about death. We witness no less than four or five funeral scenes. Years evaporate between scenes. Slowly everybody Caden knows dies. 
The film starts off in reality but somewhere near the middle the line starts getting blurry. About two thirds of the way through we can no longer tell what's going on. Scenes repeat themselves once, then get played again in the warehouse. They never seem exactly right. Caden throws great effort around. He has an endless sea of post-it notes. At one point he muses 'I don't know why I make it so complicated.' In the end he no longer has the ability to keep the play alive on his own. He casts somebody to be him and then goes off and takes the role of an extra. A war somehow breaks out on the set. Caden walks down the New York streets he built. Bodies are strewn everywhere. All the extras have died. My God what have I done?
Why on earth would anyone like a film described like this? Because every scene, every exchange, every line of dialogue, every performance belies the somber mood and depressing atmosphere. Caden can't seem to make a perfect play, but Charlie Kaufman can make a perfect movie. I have never seen a more ambitious, epic, or original film about failure. It is hard to tell how people will take this movie. I picture everyone exiting the theater stunned, not knowing what they have just witnessed. Maybe they will nitpick about certain degrading elements that are true to every life. Maybe they will give up and say 'that can't happen. What am I watching?' These are good questions and totally defensible arguments. I myself am at a loss of what to think at times. Even Charlie Kaufman has refused to discuss what the movie 'means.' 
This movie should get nods for Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Original Screenplay, Best Supporting Actress (Take your pick from Samantha Morton, Catherine Keener, Emily Watson, Dianne Wiest, etc.) Best Production Design, Best Editing, Best Sound Editing, etc. Having said that, I would not be surprised, and I wouldn't blame anyone, if it received no nominations at all. I can only assume it is going to take ten to fifteen years for this movie to sink into mass consciousness. Somebody out there is going to have to write a synecdoche that describes concisely what the movie means and put forth an argument that allows it to gain mass appeal. That might take awhile. It might never happen.

Charlie Wilson's War 01/19/08

This year we have had a slew of movies about the current situation in the middle east. I have only seen one of them, 'In the Valley of Elah." but there was also 'Redacted, 'Lions for Lambs,' 'Rendition,' and 'The Kite Runner.' All of these movie garnered minor praise and little box office. The Kite Runner being the exception, getting good praise but still no box office. Based on my viewing of 'In The Valley of Elah' I don't think it was because people just didn't want see movies about the war. These movies, made in the midst of the war just weren't that good. They talked in circles and lacked focus. We should keep in mind that the best war movies (Apocalypse Now, Platoon, Saving Private Ryan) were made many years after the war. Those years are required, I think, to give the story much needed clarity. There is something called the fog of war. If we are to produce a great movie about the Iraq war, I believe it won't be coming to theaters any time soon. For that reason 'Charlie Wilson's War' which takes place in the late 1980's is probably the most informative movie about the current war than all the otherwise mentioned movies in this review. It provides a clear background to how the situation got so screwed up in the first place. 

Charlie Wilson's War is about the American response to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and by American I mean Texas Congressman Charlie Wilson (Tom Hanks), a really rich reactionary Joanne Herring (Julia Roberts), and about four guys from the CIA (Headed by Phillip Seymour Hoffman). This small group of people managed to get 1 billion dollars in military aid to the Afghanis via Pakistan, Egypt, and Israel. How they did it constitutes this very detailed and specific movie.

It can be offputting sometimes to recognize that the people portrayed on the movie screen are more intelligent, powerful, richer, and better looking than yourself. Sometimes as I watched this movie I felt out of touch and stupid. Everyone in this movie is at least five to ten times more experienced in everything than I am, they go places I haven't been and they have the balls to do shit I wouldn't imagine. That isn't the movie being egotistical, it's just the story being true to itself. Only extraordinary people could pull this off, and in real life it was pulled off by extraordinary people. Aaron Sorkin, a very gifted screenwriter, does a splendid job of writing a very intelligent and funny script.

Hanks and Roberts are very good as always but Phillip Seymour Hoffman gives the best performance I think. I have seen this guy in numerous films. Each time he's a completely different person. Looking at this movie I am left wondering how many people he has left in him. When you take this role as a gruff CIA officer and compare it with the likes of Capote, or the gay dude in Boogie Nights, or even Brad in The Big Lebowski, it is apparent that Hoffman has extraordinary range. Probably the most out of any actor alive today. 

The last thing I want to commend is the ending of this film that still resonates with me as I write this review. It amazes me that the US would fund a 1 billion dollar war but then wouldn't spare 1 million to rebuild the school system of war ravaged Afghanistan. This oversight of course would lead to the Taliban and Osama Bin Laden and could be said as the direct cause that we are in that country today. Unlike the other war movies this year, Charlie Wilson's War excels because it knows the ending of the tale. Therefore it can give us a moral to the story direct from Charlie himself: "What was done were glorious achievements...and then we fucked up the end game." Another lesson to be learned: An ounce of prevention is worth a pound in cure.

Capote 11/20/05

This movie doesn't waste time with subplots. It's all about Capote. In a way that's refreshing, because he is, after all, the most interesting character. Played by Phillip Seymour Hoffman in a performance that's bound to garner attention, Capote is a small, high pitched man. He is strong in many ways, and weak in many others. During this story he will come into a crisis, that he never recovered from. He needs two men to die, so he can finish a book about their death. He also is in love with one of them. He can save them if he tries, but he doesn't. The book becomes a best seller, and he becomes a wreck. The tragedy is real in this story. I'm seriously thinking about reading his book "IN Cold Blood" now. The movie has me curiously hooked.