Eye in the Sky: A contemporary British cross between Alfred Hitchcock’s ‘50s period and Kathryn Bigelow’s war movies

     Though Helen Mirren has been featured as the star and has valiantly promoted the movie, Eye in the Sky depends upon a strong ensemble cast and an impressive script to achieve its goals.  It presents a number of hot button topics:  the geographically expanding Islamic war against the West; drone strikes; first world citizens becoming radicalized; gender equality in all manner of professions; inclusive casting; the Western literary tradition as a blueprint for modern cinema.  That sounds heady, but the movie is a wartime military thriller, a black comedy about indecisiveness at the highest levels, and a small-scale tragedy resulting from international conflict.

Helen Mirren as Colonel Katherine Powell

     Mirren plays a Colonel tracking a radicalized British citizen that she wants to capture.  However, that goal changes as a number of other factors suddenly present themselves and collateral casualties have to be calculated.  Mirren looks to be no older than when she began playing Jane Tennant on Prime Suspect in the early ‘90s.  However, since we have a history with her, there are moments when I felt like telling some of the other characters, “Don’t you know she’s the Queen and Jane Tennison?  Just do what she’s requesting.  We know she’ll be right; she has been for decades.”  We considered whether the character was a metaphorical reflection of Hillary Clinton.

Aaron Paul

     Neil wondered if Aaron Paul will draw a younger audience, especially since he gives a gutsy and sensitive performance as the pilot of the satellite controlled drone bomber.  

Alan Rickman

In one of his last roles, Alan Rickman displays both gravity and an ironic levity in dealing with the highest-level politicians and bureaucrats.  Barkhad Abdi, the chief pirate in Captain Phillips, plays the main spy on the ground, who finds himself in an almost impossibly suspenseful situation.  It’s a variation on Hitchcock’s definition of suspense, but substitutes a missile for a bomb.

Barkhad Abdi

     The British are uncertain and pained to unnecessarily destroy; their American counterparts portrayed by an unrecognizably corpulent Michael O’Keefe and an eager Laila Robbins (wonderful as Masha in John Doyle’s Playhouse production of Three Sisters a few years ago) display no second thoughts whatsoever.  At different points in the movie, 

Lalia Robbins

it’s difficult to know which view is more appropriate. The justification raised a number of times is that many people could be killed in a mall such as what happened in Nairobi in 2013.  Though filmed in South Africa, the setting is an older, shabbier suburb where the modern, westernized downtown can be seen.  Africa looks golden in Haris Zambarloukos’ cinematography whereas Mirren seems to be working out of a high-tech cave – the military version of Batman?  Will the huge crowds attending dreck like Batman vs. Superman attend Eye in the Sky, which presents the actual principal world conflict?

A Drone's Perspective

     Guy Hibbert’s script works on a number of levels simultaneously and it pulled in the small audience with whom we saw it at The Esquire.  People were talking at the screen as well as checking out one another for reactions.  It’s the type of experience that electrified Classical Greek Theatre audiences.  Hibbert uses “In war, truth is the first casualty” by Aeschuylus as an epigraph, referring to the fear of public relations in conducting various rules of engagement.  However, that oversimplifies both the humor and the humanity of the story.  The movie seemed to be a contemporary descendant of the more mercurial Greek dramatist Euripides.  I don’t want to gave away much of the plot, but I think most viewers will want to yell out, “Buy that bread!  Buy that bread!”

Don’s Party

Smart, rude, and relevant

     Bruce Beresford’s Don’s Party (1976) was barely released outside of Australia, but thanks to TCM (and probably Netflix), it’s available.  It’s a party movie that really gets wild.  As the character that becomes the political butt to everyone else, says, “I’ve never met so many university educated people that are uncouth.”  Like Shampoo (1975), Don’s Party takes place during what was an important election.  In this case, it was 1969 and the Labour Party was supposed to narrowly defeat the two-decades incumbent Liberal Party.  

The Cast of Don's Party

     Most of the characters support Labour and met in college fifteen years previously as either students or instructors.  Unlike the American college reunion movies The Return of the Secaucus Seven (1981) or The Big Chill (1983), there’s neither sentimentality nor nostalgia for the past.  Most of their lives haven’t worked out the way they thought they would, but that doesn’t really come out until the end and it’s not the reason they behave the way they do.  The one really successful couple, which has been more recently added to the mix, is cold, narcissistic, and single-minded.

The Pool Scene

     The acting ensemble – stars in Australia, but little known here – possesses a force that reminded me of really good American movie acting from the ‘40s or ‘50s.  The rhythm felt partially improvised and the primary emotions of lust, frustration, and anger roll in waves.  Neil thought it looked like 1969, though I was somewhat unsure.  Director Beresford made more movies in Australia (including the great war tragedy Breaker Morant in 1980) before following Hollywood’s siren call in the 1980s.  

It Follows (veeerrrrrrrrry sloooooooooowly)

     David Robert Mitchell’s It Follows was released to very positive reviews earlier in 2015.  It sounded like an update of a 1980s teen slasher flick with arty overtones.  Neil’s not a fan of horror (cheap ass or art house) so I hoped it would still be on Movies On Demand for when my Mother visited.  Fortunately, it was still available so we watched it on a drizzly afternoon.

Sex Is the Culprit

     If you have sex with someone, then someone you may or may not know, who’s generally only half-dressed, but is still showing too much skin, will follow and kill you unless you can pass this situation on to someone else by having sex.  It’s a great set-up, but it took almost half an hour to get to that being explained.  Instead, we dragged around with Jay, her sister, and her friends.  After she was ‘infected,’ we dragged around some more with her just waiting with dreadful anticipation – the primary emotional response to a horror movie – for someone/something to get her.  

Maika Monroe

     The acting was pretty good.  Maika Monroe, who played Jay, looks and has a manner reminiscent of Chloë Sevigny, but without the sullenness.  The details of the situation didn’t add up.  Though only the infected person could see the force slowly pursuing her, it could still break windows and climb on things, but it couldn’t pass through doors without busting them down first.

     The music was great at setting mood, but then the story didn’t really pay off.  I liked the Detroit setting because we’d just visited there.  Mike Gioulakis’ cinematography had a depth of color, especially in its emerald greens and blues, and clarity of line that was elegant.  It reminded me a little of the color in Antonioni’s Blow-Up (1967); this felt a little like what a teen slasher flick would have been like if he’d directed one.  And it would have had the same funereal pace.

When Will We Get Mad About The Big Short?

     Peter Finch’s Howard Beale proclaimed in the prophetic Network (1976), “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore.”  The Big Short, which was adapted from Michael Lewis’s 2010 book, should make audiences furious – at least the 99% of the population that was screwed over by the top 1% and their investment bankers.  The media’s obsession with celebrities and sports overrides the two major stories of the past decade: our wars with Iraq and Afghanistan and the rising tide of international terrorism; and the continuing financial crisis in this country which exists because of greed, ignorance, and an over-preening sense of entitlement.   

     Director Adam McKay co-wrote the script with Charles Randolph and, though he usually makes comedies, the issues of how working and middle class families have been cheated by the financial industry’s greed, a continued lack of federal oversight, and the minimal punishment of those who ruined millions of lives worldwide were first addressed in his The Other Guys (2010).  The Big Short, however, is anything but a comedy.  It’s fueled by outrage and it never backs off.  McKay and Randolph have laid out the complex elements and history that created the CDO (collateralized debt obligation) bubble in a way that makes it understandable.  Tellingly, they don’t underline that the federal government led by Presidents from both parties were trying to give opportunities for more people to own their homes.

Steve Carell and Ryan Gosling

     The movie’s tone feels like it’s possessed by attention deficit disorder, which reflects the situation where many took their eye off the ball of new investment products and the bizarre ways in which they made then lost money, such as derivatives, and didn’t give it much of a thought thereby initiating the financial crisis.  McKay explains the products through self-serving narration by the most cynical character and celebrities and some experts breaking the fourth wall to instruct the viewer quickly.  It’s clever and funny, but it feels like a leftover idea from one of his Will Ferrell vehicles, though those are much sharper and intelligent than their enormous box office receipts might lead a non-viewer to assume.  That, along with Barry Ackroyd’s surprisingly tacky cinematography – there’s no visual point of view in the Vegas sequence; it looks like the Chamber of Commerce sprang for a second-rate photographer – gives it the sense of a prestigious cable movie as Neil said presenting a serious subject, but also trying to be adventurously satirical, while ending up like a series of smirking sketches (1992’s Barbarians at the Gate and 2008’s Recount immediately come to mind). 

Christian Bale

     It has a Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines (1965) structure with a load of excellent actors in various groupings all after the same thing. Instead of a race to the finish, it’s hold on to the hedge fund investors until the housing market collapses.  Some reviewers have said that spectators will root for the main performers until it understands that the worldwide economy collapses.  How naïve do these reviewers think audiences are?  I felt like everyone got it at the screening we attended and were stunned when they realized from the beginning how this catastrophe – and potential future ones – occurred.  By cutting the real-life Meredith Whitney, who was in the book, the movie feels like a bunch of over-grown white frat boys and former academics jostling for money and validation.  There’s tons of shouting, cursing, and worrying, but none of these characters does anything that seems remotely useful or necessary to society.  However, I bet Ayn Rand would have loved them and she’s probably the only 

Brad Pitt

novelist most of them read.  I was relieved whenever co-producer Brad Pitt showed up because he was the only character that saw how toxic the culture was and realized he could only change it by leaving; he also didn’t yell or preen the way the others do.  Christian Bale’s performance is interesting because the character is on the autism scale, but it’s nothing I haven’t seen Bale do before.  Overall, the subject is fascinating, but the race made me sick, and the results were infuriating because they made me feel powerless.

Youth: Surprisingly Wondrous

     Since Youth is written and directed by Paolo Sorrentino, I expected it to be visually gorgeous and it is; since it stars Michael Caine, Harvey Keitel, Rachel Weisz, Paul Dano, and Jane Fonda, I assumed it would be well acted and it is; what I didn’t bargain for was how funny it is.  Taking place at an exclusive spa in Switzerland and presenting both those that work there and the wealthy, influential patrons visiting, it gives every character her or his due.  

At the Spa

     Taking Fellini’s concentration on the ‘interesting face’ to the next level, Sorrentino shows all types of partly or completely nude bodies.  It’s never done in a prurient way, which already tips the viewer off to the fact that this is not an American director.  The spa setting feels like a tip of a new generation to the master’s fedora in 8 ½ (1963).  Luca Bigazzi’s cinematography is exquisite, but never for the sake of mere beauty; he regards Fonda’s wig and the young masseuse’s videogame dancing with a deadpan wit even as they’re lit perfectly.  David Lang’s music provides the required sense of significance since the main character is a famous composer.  The final scenes when that character, played by Michael Caine, conducts coloratura Sumi Jo are simply magical (and, guess what kids – some of them in the midst of mid-life crises – no special effects)!  As with a number of other contemporary directors, the collaboration between Sorrentino, Bigazzi, and Lang creates a symbiosis that enriches each individual project.

Michael Caine and Harvey Keitel

     Caine and Keitel, as a movie director working on a script with a group of young up-and-coming writers, make a great comic duo as friends, who’ve known each other for decades and who also happen to be in-laws.  The composer has retired, but can hear music everywhere; like it or not, he cannot escape composing.  The director is blocked, but willing to consider every possibility.  The relationship is the linchpin for the movie’s themes and the plot.  There are a couple of very significant lines:  Caine’s “we have a good relationship; we only tell each other the good things” and Keitel’s “all we have are emotions.”  Caine deliberately slows his movements to seem older than his actual age, while Keitel is both physically frisky and as off beat sexy as he was in The Piano (1993).

Rachel Weisz

     Weisz delivers a blistering monologue about her growing up with aplomb, torn between her parents and simultaneously loyal to and betrayed by her husband and father.  It’s great to see her spirited since the last time we viewed her was as the depressing wife in The Deep Blue Sea (2011).  Paul Dano performs as a young actor researching a role he might play and when we see the test make-up, it’s both shocking because of its accuracy, but also hilarious because of the other spa guests’ reactions.  Fonda’s make-up is 

Jane Fonda

also funny and chilling; she nails her scene with Keitel in which she’s imperious, self-serving, and ruthlessly honest.

Orchestra with Sumi Jo

     It’s one of those movies where at the end, when the theatre remained in darkness, as Lang’s music continued, I was so glad.  Well, until I heard the aged suburban couple behind me.  He:  It was good, but I preferred Spotlight.  She:  This was arty, but that was more real.  I hope they don't choke on an apple and an orange.

Trumbo: How Fragile was the First Amendment?

     Trumbo received pretty good reviews, but little business.  Currently playing in the shoebox screen at The Esquire, it may not even be here when this review gets uploaded.  It’s a solid biographical drama about leading Hollywood golden age screenwriter Dalton Trumbo.  Written by John McNamara and directed by Jay Roach in a realistic, straightforward style, it cogently explores how the Hollywood Blacklist of the ‘40s and ‘50s was the highest profile manifestation of HUAC (the House Un-American Activities Committee).  

The Hollywood 10 Protest

     It was fueled by fear of the Russian Soviets, the potential for communist infiltration of American institutions, and the self-interest of a number of ambitious people to keep or increase their power at the expense of others’ careers and lives.  Hollywood moguls were intimidated by their fear of declining box office receipts and their desperation to keep their humble backgrounds discreet.  I felt a wide streak of anti-Semitism on the part of the U.S. Congressmen and those Americans including John Wayne and Hedda Hopper who defended American values by denying some Americans their right to free speech and the opportunity to work.  This was an era where bad publicity could kill literally a performer and her/his career.  Nowadays, most performers including politicians seem to have been crossbred with cockroaches: the only bad publicity is no publicity.  

The Real Trumbos vs. Trumbo's Trumbos

     Although the subject raises my ire, Dalton Trumbo himself maintained an almost Zen-like equanimity in the face of brutal chicanery and cowardice.  He received incredible support from his family, but could be tyrannical in running them as hard as the moguls ran their studio personnel.  The movie answers a question I’ve had for years about what people do to survive when they’ve been labeled as political dissidents and aren’t allowed to pursue their livelihoods.  Trumbo got around it in an extremely creative way by using other writers as fronts for A-list work and writing hack screenplays for the Poverty Row exploitation producers the King brothers.  The Kings displayed real guts in keeping blacklisted writers working.  It was tougher on actors, who couldn’t hide.  Many gave up when they couldn’t find work in the New York theatre.  

Bryan Cranston

     Bryan Cranston gives a powerful land technically accomplished performance as Trumbo.  However, when actual footage of Trumbo is shown during the end credits, it provides a contrast that subtly diminishes Cranston’s work.  Trumbo comes across as feisty and tough, whereas Cranston embodies a patrician, avuncular man.  I can see why the actual Trumbo was such a threat, but with Cranston it’s a little mystifying because he has such good manners.  Diane Lane 

Mirren as Hedda Hopper

and Helen Mirren do their usual exemplary work as, respectively, Trumbo’s quiet wife, who finally comes into her own defending their children and Hedda Hopper, who really was vicious, though the final image of her face cracks through the evil.  John Goodman and Stephen Root are like a middle-aged Katzenjammer Kids as the Kings and Louis C.K. provides heart as a composite of a number of communist screenwriters.  I wish they hadn’t had to depart from the real details when there was so much drama in that era and this subject.  Elle Fanning as Trumbo’s loyal but searching older daughter nails her two big scenes; her performance foretells wonders.

Elle Fanning

Carol: The Dead Cinema

     I loved director Todd Haynes’ Far From Heaven (2002) and I’m Not There (2007), Cate Blanchett is one of the supreme actresses of world cinema, I’ve enjoyed many of Patricia Highsmith’s novels, and Cincinnati-Northern Kentucky is an unheralded, but pretty wonderful place to live; and despite all of that, Carol is a beautiful cinematic corpse.  It reminded me of Antonioni’s L’Eclisse (1962), which as a series of stills or short scenes without dialogue was gorgeous, but had no thematic meaning for me because it didn’t seem to be linked to a plot.  Writers had lauded it for over a quarter century so I thought I was just missing something.  Some have already handed Haynes a backhanded compliment by writing that Carol has the heart his earlier work lacked; I couldn’t disagree more.

Rooney Mara

     For some reason, Rooney Mara is a big deal right now. She resembles Audrey Hepburn in the early Greenwich Village scenes of Funny Face (1957), but she has none of that incandescent star’s expressiveness.  In Highsmith’s The Price of Salt (1952), upon which this is based, the main character Therese is in her early twenties and trying to figure out her

identity.  She does so through a romantic relationship with Carol, a wealthy suburban housewife and mother.  Mara comes across as tentative; by the time she may have decided which emotion(s) to project, the movie has cut to the next

Blanchett's Demeanor

scene.  Blanchett works in a style that seems to merge her own technique with something out of ‘50s MGM, almost as if she’s resurrecting Eleanor Parker with a mellifluous voice, a glamorous, professional demeanor, and discretion about honest feelings.  While an intriguing choice, it doesn’t provide any connection with Mara, which is fatal.  If the lovers don’t spark, then the love story doesn’t work and that’s what happens here.

Cate Blanchett

     Blanchett’s scene with Sarah Paulson as Carol’s long-time friend when their hands meet as they walk downstairs made me wish they’d ended up together.  Kyle Chandler as Carol’s husband Harge also displays a passion that briefly breaks the movie’s placid, elegant demeanor.  He looks a little like John Hodiak, but he’s more powerful and expressive.  Jake Lacy, charming with Jenny Slate in last year’s Obvious Child, has a wide-eyed innocence as Richard, Therese’s boyfriend who cannot emotionally grasp the situation.  Local pros Amy Warner and Michael Haney nail their scene as Harge’s conventional, wealthier parents.  Neil recognized Deb Girdler’s voice as the motel clerk in one significant scene.

Leachman's Cinematography

     Edward Lachman’s cinematography displays the beauty of Cincinnati as well as the automobiles, clothes, and interiors of the post-World War II era, but at times its embarrassment of riches goes against the storytelling.  There’s an extraordinary reflection shot in a motel office’s window that shows an important piece of information, but I found my attention arrested by the shot and how it was done, rather than what was happening.  There are a number of instances where the camera lingers over various objects to a degree that is fetishistic.  Haynes seems more obsessed and aroused by the signifiers of that era, rather than the characters –especially those of Carol and Therese – in the plot.

Jennifer Lawrence embodies JOY

     Joy, directed by David O. Russell and co-written with Annie Mumolo, tells of Joy Mangano and her invention of the Miracle Mop.  It may sound arcane, but Russell continues in his neo-Preston Sturges mode that began with the uproarious Flirting with Disaster (1996), arguably the funniest movie of the mid-‘90s, and was reignited in his works starring Jennifer Lawrence and Bradley Cooper (The Silver Linings Playbook of 2011 and American Hustle in 2013).  Russell has presented the American family as culturally and ethnically variegated and as a unit that both supports and hinders its individual members.  Some might term them as dysfunctional, but that over-used term no longer possesses meaning or validity 80% of the time it’s used.  Instead, it reflects the experiences of many Americans I know.  Russell’s ace in the hole is Jennifer Lawrence; the movie wouldn’t be possible without her because she’s become his muse.

     Though the plot marries a Cinderella tale with an entrepreneurial success docudrama, the story covers four decades in the life of a noted American and her family.  It takes its time.  In fact, Kaylee and Neil thought it was slow.  The TV promos make it look faster and funnier than the actual deeper and darker movie that it is.  It feels like a Holiday movie because of a couple of narrative elements that Russell employs:  narration, long flashbacks, and visual imagery of small-town America in winter.

Lawrence and Cooper Reunite

     Russell tries some directorial touches that tonally work against the screwball comedy audiences may have expected.  The Cinderella motif goes broad with a fairy godmother (Joy’s grandmother), two ugly stepsisters (her mother and older half-sister), her trickster figure of a father, and an evil witch (her dad’s girlfriend).  There’s also Prince Charming, split into the two characters of her ex-husband and a QVC executive, who becomes a business colleague, and a faithful girlhood friend.  Prince Charming does not instigate a romantic relationship and that could decrease the movie’s box office potential.  However, in the strictest sense, this is a Romance because it is about a quest that results in finding one’s self through a search for a specific object.  The stand-in for the Holy Grail, however, is about the successful promotion, production, and patent copyright of a kitchen mop – and yes, it’s in that order.

The Family Matriarchs

     At one point, Joy’s grandmother wishes that Joy would be a matriarch and she ends up presented that way in the final couple of minutes where she looks and behaves like Deborah Kerr in A Woman of Substance (1985).  However, a fake soap opera starring Laura Wright, Susan Lucci, and Donna Mills keeps showing up on Joy’s mother’s TV and in Joy’s dreams with the décor, hair, and costuming changing over the years.  A scene between Joy and her best friend at a kitchen table, drinking coffee and discussing personal issues, looks like something out of Secret Storm or Ryan’s Hope in the ‘70s.  Wright, Lucci, and Mills play tongue in cheek, parodying the genre, but Lawrence and Dascha Polanco perform naturalistically and the disparity doesn’t work.  Is Joy’s life a soap opera?  Isn’t anyone’s over time?  In the final scene, Joy seems superior with a colleague, who first promoted her mop and the interaction leaves a sour note.  Lawrence is styled like a soap opera doyenne, rather than a matriarch, and comes across as stiff and as if she’s playing at being middle-aged.  Wasn’t Joy fighting against a traditional, classist approach to business in her go for broke manner?  Has a feminist entrepreneur become a quasi-patriarchal administrator-tycoon?  Mr. Russell, please don’t turn this generation’s Barbara Stanwyck into Dina Merrill.

Joy Inventing the Miracle Mop

      Otherwise, Lawrence carries the movie by moving believably from a teenager to thirty-four, nailing the accent, and by providing a mixture of optimism, moxie, and sheer grit that enlivens every scene.  Some of the best sequences include Joy moving her Dad back into the basement, selling her mop for the first time on TV, and a wonderful gunfight without guns in a historic boutique hotel in Texas.  I wish the movie had ended right after that scene.  We got that she found her mojo and wouldn’t look back – we didn’t need to have it underlined with a coda that felt like a montage out of a second-rate Broadway musical.  

The Ensemble Cast

     The rest of the acting ensemble is crackerjack from pros like Robert DeNiro, Diane Ladd – she matches up perfectly as Lawrence’s Grandmother, Virginia Madsen as the frightened, agoraphobic mother obsessed with the soaps, and Isabella Rossellini as a misguided, weaker than she appears venture capitalist.  Edgar Ramirez (2011’s Carlos) does charm as Joy’s ex-husband, who is actually looking out for her.  The bilingual aspects of the story indirectly hit a bull’s eye at the xenophobia in the current presidential election warm-ups.  Russell, thankfully, doesn’t include subtitles so any non-Spanish speaking audience members need to pick up the context visually.  Bradley Cooper plays an inverse character arc to Lawrence’s.  He’s on top when she first meets him, but he gets across an air of nervous frustration through his eyes and hair texture in his final scene with her.  Elisabeth Röhm, another Russell stalwart, is a hoot as Joy’s lively, malevolent half-sister.  I wish I knew the name of the little girl playing Joy’s daughter because she doesn’t pull any cutesy or precocious move.  The bond between her and Lawrence is immediate and strong.  The climax is when Joyo melts down and seems as if she’ll give up and her daughter’s face registers that more betrayal more acutely than the others.

     The production design captures the look of the mid ‘70s to the early ‘90s without having to resort to titles.  Like the rest of the movie, it’s achieved in an understated manner.  There wasn’t one car out of period or interior setting that didn’t reflect the times and this was underscored by the hit tunes that actually speak of what’s happening in the scenes

Spotlight: Newspaper Craft

     Thomas McCarthy’s Spotlight is a low-key, character driven study of The Boston Globe’s investigation of the Catholic Church’s cover-up and continuation of priests sexually abusing children.  McCarthy has always focused on complex, ambiguously motivated characters that have an immediate appeal for an audience in his earlier The Station Agent (2003), The Visitor (2008), and Win/Win (2011).  He continues that in this current screenplay collaboration with Josh Singer, but broadens his approach.  Three institutions meant to uphold the safety and ideals of Boston’s citizens have a proverbial dog in the fight that is this cover-up:  the Catholic Church, the legal establishment, and the press.  

The Spotlight Team

     Michael Keaton, Mark Ruffalo, Rachel McAdams, and Brian d’Arcy James portray the Spotlight team members whose continual legwork for over a year proved that the cover-up had gone on for decades.  They are perfect audience stand ins because they are articulate, middle-class, and hard-working.  The Globe team was determined to get the story completely right before publishing, but also trying to scoop The Boston Phoenix.  However, as the story progresses, and where Spotlight goes one step further than All The President’s Men (1976) is when one of the major characters realizes his guilt in the whole affair.  There are shades of Oedipus Rex in that scene and it’s probably the emotional climax of the movie.

    While I think it is a very well made and thought-provoking movie, I don’t think it’s ‘the best of the year’ as many other reviewers have opined.  It’s certainly a step up from the Ron Howard directed The Paper (1994) that also featured Michael Keaton with a plot that went all over the place and a cacophonous tone that swung wildly between sitcom slapstick and investigative melodrama.  There are a number of 

Billy Crudup

extraordinary scenes including one where McAdams’ character finds herself suddenly interviewing a frighteningly childlike defrocked priest and anything involving Billy Crudup.  He’s one of those actors who hasn’t become the star I expected after giving major performances in Without Limits (1998), Almost Famous (2000), and Stage Beauty (2003).  In this smaller role as an ambivalent and easy to misunderstand lawyer, the mask he has to maintain is almost as tragic as the fate that befell so many children because the powerful and the competent actively turned a blind eye. 

Brooklyn: A Great Love Story About Ordinary People

     Brooklyn, adapted by Nick Hornby from Colm Tóibín’s 2009 novel and directed by John Crowley may be the best romantic drama of the past three or four years.  There were times when I found myself holding my breath and wishing it would not end and then that it would end in a very specific way.  Neil heard the tears from other audience members at the end and, as we stood reading the credits, I had a strong urge to sit down and watch it all over again.  Yes, it’s that good.  In fact, to quote Mary Poppins, it’s practically perfect in every way.

At Coney Island

     It’s rare that working class characters are the focus of a major movie, though they regularly featured in New York set movies of the ‘30s through the ‘60s.  In many ways, this looks like a movie made in that period except in color.  That coloring has a legendary quality at times – maybe because some images such as the Manhattan skyline were CGI – but it works in its favor.  There’s a beautiful sequence on Coney Island where a bathing suit (and especially the different manners in which Americans and Europeans layer clothes) and a pair of men’s long pants capture the mood of a decade and the aspirations of a generation.  The rolling fortunes of different ethnic groups – Irish, Italian, and Black are mentioned both in the dialogue and visually; the upward mobility of women; and the migration from the past rural (Ireland) to the present urban (NYC) to the dreamed of future suburbs (Long Island) enrich a potentially simple fable into the profundity of myth.  

Saoirse Ronan in Ireland

     This could be a family creation story told through the generations, but it’s also an adventure story featuring a female protagonist (you’d guess rightly that it wasn’t made or financed by Americans.  Instead, Ireland, the U.K., and Canada made it happen).  A young Irish girl leaves home, sponsored by her older sister and a priest, to pursue greater possibilities in New York in 1951.  She experiences intense homesickness even as various people reach out to her.  She finds fortune in kindness and help by her landlady, her supervisor, and her parish priest in Brooklyn 

Julie Walters as the Landlady

and that generosity by an older generation to ease the way for a younger adult reminded me of Vincente Minnelli’s The Clock (1945), also set in a similar era.  She returns these kindnesses with gratitude, respect, and good humor.  She goes to a church dance and she sees a young man looking at her and in that moment, most viewers will know and begin to hope.  I won’t say anything more because the magic of this movie is in how it looks at the most mundane details of everyday life with a sense of wonder.

An Individual Young Woman

     Saoirse Ronan in the lead has the open face and graceful body in which a viewer can read pure and complex emotions.  She doesn’t need dialogue to express the character, which puts her in a league with Lillian Gish, Anna Magnani, Sophia Loren, Gong Li, and Julianne Moore.  She was perverse and sort of frightening in Atonement (2007) when she was thirteen, but she presents the soul of the immigrant experience here.  My Mother thought she was beautiful.  She is, but it’s because she embodies a character that grows emotionally, intellectually, and even physically before our eyes.  She could be almost any young girl at the beginning, but at the end she is that individual young woman and the light that shines on her in the final frames could be a halo.  

Emory Cohen with Saoirse Ronan

    Emory Cohen carries himself and reproduces the accent of a guy from ‘50s Brooklyn who would have been a featured movie player, but his eyes and facial contours might have entranced Caravaggio.  He has the uncanny ability of making the camera love him from the first shot in which he appears.  Burt Reynolds would instruct the camera to love him daily during a shoot and no performer can be a true star without that connection.  He’s unrecognizable from when he was the teenage son confused by his parents’ split up on TV’s Smash.  His keen vulnerability seemed like a real teenager’s, which made him an anomaly on a show that was almost completely artificial about artifice.

Ronan and Cohen

    Domhnall Gleeson, Julie Walters, Jim Broadbent, and Jessica Paré give performances detailed enough that viewers might want to know more about what’s going on in their characters’ lives beyond what is shared in the plot.  Irish stage actress Brid Brennan stuns as a figure out of a fairytale, a witch who wakes the young heroine.  The lighting, props, and furniture in this scene feel as creepy as Jabba the Hutt’s surroundings and it’s a credit to Crowley’s tonal control that it works perfectly to initiate the plot’s climax without upending the naturalism of the story.  Another instance of a movie working on all levels is when two inexperienced people decide to make love for the first time and it doesn’t quite work right, but the camera captures one of the character’s faces and the look says, “oh, I thought it would be something more, but it’ll get better because I love this person.”  It’s pretty incredible when a performer and a cinematographer (in this case, Yves Bélanger) can capture something so poignant and true.