By Santa Monica Reporter, Dan Cohen
While the rest of the country struggles through the deep freeze of winter, Los Angeles basks in the growing heat of “red carpet” season, the time of year when a handful of quality films receive the kind of attention that puts them on an even footing with the otherwise dominant blockbusters.
Casual observers take the prize chatter in the press as references to the Academy Awards or the Golden Globes, but there’s much more to this lengthy and costly debacle than its two best publicized media events. A hail of screenings, the major industry guilds, a handful of influential critics’ groups, boosters like Film Independent (sponsors of the Independent Spirit Awards) and the box office, all converge at this point in time to raise or lower the profiles of movies they consider award worthy. And the bounties to winners are significant, often the difference between profits and losses.
There’s no question that fall and early winter releases get the lion share of attention, which puts those that came out earlier in the year, like “Mud” and “Blue Jasmine” at a distinct disadvantage. But then most distributors wait until mid-October to release their prestige items.
Like every other year in recent memory, 2013 has been back-loaded with interesting English language titles. So many of them have debuted in the last two months that I have resorted to the following laundry-style list to cover the ones I’ve seen thus far. This is only part one.
As occurs far too often, some have been wildly over-rated. Studios have used the heated superlatives of second rate critics to entice viewers to promise life altering experiences. This is almost never true.
With that in mind, here is my sensible guide to the season’s high end, in no particular order.
American Hustle
The main characters in this richly stylized comedy about con artists in the go-go 70s, rebound off each other like pinballs. But instead of following the conventions of plot, their behavior generates from within, which adds immeasurably to the fun. Since the four leads are engaged in conning one another and the FBI at the same time, the rapid fire turnarounds can seem exhausting at key moments. We’re not used to seeing a handful of characters with different agendas move to separate drum beats, so the movie often threatens to implode from all the conflict. But writer/director David O. Russell, who scored an impressive hit with “Silver Linings Playbook,” is too clever for lose control of his story, and he’s contrived a structure that is true to itself and its players.
I’ll admit, right at the top, to enjoying this movie more than most this year, to some extent because it frustrated my attempts (as a viewer) to get ahead of it. As soon as the story seemed to settle into a familiar glide path, fresh moments arose, almost like magic. Russell grants his four con artists, played by Christian Bale, Amy Adams, Bradley Cooper, and Jennifer Lawrence, the space to deliver pitch perfect performances. But he’s also generous with Jeremy Renner, Louis CK, and Robert De Niro in important supporting roles.
Because it’s such a tight rope act and because I was in such awe of Russell’s confident direction, I’d probably throw the movie a best picture award, although I doubt the Academy will share my enthusiasm. “American Hustle” is too knowing to pander to sentiment and too sure of its objectives to satisfy middlebrow taste. And yet at the end, its characters somehow find a place of quiet repose. Bravos to all involved!
All is Lost
I wanted this serious and somber adventure to amount to more than a tribute to the endless appeal of its beloved star, Robert Redford. But in choosing fury over sound in an almost wordless parable of man against the elements, director JC Chandor forgoes all but the suggestion of an inner life that might have better endeared us to “our man,” (as he’s called in the credits) and his fight to stay alive.
Chandor, who made such a strong showing as the writer director of the dialogue driven “Margin Call”– one of the best rigged movies of 2011–has taken a complete about face by electing to go nearly wordless in “All is Lost.” It’s a huge gamble—the movie adheres strictly to its agenda like an eight-day cleanse diet—but our admiration yields to impatience as the story fails to get below the chiseled lines of Redford’s monument-quality features.
One problem is that viewers chew up and digest visual information as fast as it’s thrown at them, an issue that’s bedeviled other distinguished filmmakers who have taken up the challenges of minimalism, from Ingmar Bergman to Robert Bresson. For classic examples of when the strategy worked, look to the Bergman of “The Virgin Spring,” “Winter Light,” or “The Silence.” The Bresson of “Diary of a Country Priest,” or “The Trial of Joan of Arc,” exercises the utmost discipline in terms of dialogue, with powerful results. But “All is Lost” doesn’t quite hit those highs, mainly because it remains at sea for its entire running time.
Chandor the writer has saddled Chandor the director with a serious challenge. As landscape, the vast ocean is almost unvarying. Storms punctuate the lone man’s debacle, but the setting inclines to monotony. As much as I admired the writer/directors’ discipline, and his attempt to wring a larger truth from striking images of Redford against the sea, I found it hard to remain engaged past the midpoint.
Inside Llewyn Davis
The most surprising aspect of this lovingly detailed portrait of a folk singer on the decline is the way critics have fallen all over one another to heap praise on it. The Coen’s are craftsmen of the highest rank, but here they’ve created a miniature with the narrowest scope of any of their more recent films.
Llewyn Davis, a talented artist with an incorrigible attitude, stumbles through four days of soul numbing misadventures that take him from the café scene in downtown Manhattan to the frigid cold of Chicago and then back again to the same small clubs in New York… With little to show for it.
A lot of this brief odyssey is bracingly funny, like the protracted road trip Davis takes with another musician (the marvelous John Goodman) and his hipster caretaker/driver. But nothing along the way makes enough of a difference to raise the stakes; to the end the movie remains a series of amusing anecdotes. Because the period is so well realized and the storytelling so lucid, Llewyn Davis never becomes truly dull. But at two hours it flirts with tedium.
Early on the folk singer, played with total conviction by Oscar Isaac, gets a vitriolic reception from a colleague who finds herself pregnant after a brief fling with the singer. Davis occasionally appears on the same bill with the woman and her husband, (smartly played by Carrie Mulligan and Justin Timberlake,) and during lean times he has often crashed on their sofa. So you have to assume that the three are friends. But the vicious tongue lashings Carrie Mulligan delivers every time she lays eyes on her one-time lover makes us wonder what compelled her to sleep with him in the first place.
As writers, the Coen brothers seem little concerned with consequences. They like to set up messy encounters then let them diffuse as others materialize. This strategy makes sense from the standpoint of flow, but it begins to catch up to them in the last act, as we become more frustrated with the movie’s shapelessness. The opening repeats itself in the last reel, but only the scantest details have been added, and they fail to offer more than a coda to the two hours that have gone before.
The Wolf of Wall Street
Movies are all about vicarious experience. They lure us in with promises of intrigue, spectacle, exotic sex and all manner of human behaviors. The memorable ones bait us with one thing, then deliver more or different of what we expected.
Maritin Scorcese, a great American master, made his mark by going deep inside his characters and illustrating their inner lives through vivid action and inspired dialogue. He almost always relies heavily on explicit violence, salacious sex, and dark impulses, mostly of the criminal type. But he usually has ulterior motives, evident just below the surface.
Scorcese’s latest, “The Wolf of Wall Street,” a wallow in excess that goes on a full three hours, follows a familiar trajectory, but without much of a blueprint to support it. And while the pace is sometimes break-neck, and much of the movie is funny, the moments of revelation are few and far between. What we get is a bright and shiny window on some very bad people, too much of which is redundant.
The copious nudity and sex, which many have complained about, is mainly vanilla and highly sanitized, like Playboy spreads of thirty years ago. It’s nothing we haven’t seen before. The most excessive doping is played at a level that comes close to the Warner Brothers cartoons of the 50s.
While Scorsese’s moment to moment direction is forceful, it’s not as consistently inspired as it was in “Goodfellas” or “Casino.” So, finally, it’s up to the cast to keep it alive. Fortunately the leads, Leonardo DiCaprio, playing the real-life Jordan Belfort, and Jonah Hill as his closest partner, accept the challenge with gusto. At points where incidents repeat, DiCaprio summons new levels of energy to keep them lively . Hill, just off to one side, adds amusing shades to a character who could have been just plain loathsome.
Probably because so many key scenes play with that cartoonish energy, the young audience I saw the film with seemed to embrace it. The mild comeuppance in the last half hour hardly dampened their enthusiasm for the debauchery and deception that came before. They didn’t seem to care that at bottom, the protagonists were heartless and mean spirited predators. Did the 30ish audience fail to realize that they could easily have been a party to the same, collateral but off-screen damage? Was Scorcese’s approach all that far removed from their reality?
The way the Belfort and his crew are depicted, casually, with little of the intimate detail that made the con artists in “American Hustle” so compelling, made me wonder what, if anything, Scorcese thought about them. The movie simply is unclear.
But here’s what I found really interesting. A week or so after the movie’s release, the LA Weekly printed an “open letter” to the movie’s makers by Christina McDowell, whose father was a long-time associate of the real Julian Belfort. The body of her account detailed the serial betrayals her father visited on his entire family, which included signing their names to many of his most heinous scams. According to Ms. McDowell, her father’s deceptions poisoned both her private and public life. Ironically, her one page account of his obsessive criminality was more dramatic and disturbing than the whole three hours of “Wolf of Wall Street.” Beyond that, it indicated that after short jail stays, her father and Belfort have continued on similar paths of deception and fraud. In failing to delve into the casual subjugation of family, the movie missed a real opportunity.
Next week, more of the same.
