2010 (USA)
Director: John Cameron Mitchell
Viewed: January 26, 2011
Format: Theatrical Print (Landmark Theaters Frontenac Cinema)
B- - Everything that occurs within Rabbit Hole revolves around a personal cataclysm that is only hinted at for the first twenty minutes or so of the film, a stratagem that proves wholly consistent with the work’s interest in the phenomena of emotional evasion and suppression. The young son of polished upper-middle-class strivers Becca (Nicole Kidman) and Howie (Aaron Eckhart) perished eight months ago in a car accident, and although their life is not necessarily in tatters, the couple’s unresolved grief crouches in the room, mocking their hollow gestures towards normalcy. John Cameron Mitchell–creator of brash and bratty indie gambits like Hedwig and Angry Inch and Shortbus–isn’t the obvious choice to helm David Lindsay-Abaire’s adaptation of his own play. While Mitchell’s direction is assured and sensitive to the nuances and diversity of human emotion, Rabbit Hole too often feels like a grimly dutiful exploration of a character blueprint, rather than an authentic tale of sorrow. For a story about unthinkable loss, it exhibits a curious lack of poignancy, one that cannot be explained entirely by Becca’s ruthless shuttering of her emotional landscape. It’s a distinguished film, but frigidly so, and rarely distinctive, apart from its embrace of a curious, scientific sort of solace befitting a faithless world.
B- - There’s little that’s ground-breaking in The Fighter, David O. Russell’s grimy, amusing worm’s-eye portrait of light welterweight boxing champion Mickey “Irish” Ward (an appropriately bulked and vulnerable Mark Wahlberg). The story sticks to the tropes of countless tales about working-class kids who escapes their dismal surroundings through excellence in one sphere or another. Meanwhile, the film’s 1990s Lowell, Massachusetts setting is saturated with the sort of affectionately misshapen blue-collar Bay State characters and locales that now serve as stock cinematic fodder. This isn’t to say that Russell’s film is without its appealing features, chief among them the director’s facility for rendering his boxing sequences with enviable vitality and sensational drama. Christian Bale, as Ward’s crack-addicted, ex-fighter brother (and sometimes trainer) Dick-Eklund, undergoes yet another astonishing physical transformation, here into a sweaty, bug-eyed heap of deceit and cloying reassurances. While the lack of ambition in Russell’s approach to the material is often unsatisfactory, the film proffers its share of lingering elements. These range from the garish, as in Mickey’s assemblage of dog-faced, sailor-mouthed older sisters, to the reserved, as in the smears of bright blue icing on a character’s skin and clothes. There are just enough of these memorable particulars to save The Fighter from dismissal.
B - Outsider art seems to provide ripe opportunity for documentary film-making, with results ranging from ache-laden portraiture (The Cats of Mirikitani) to knotty explorations of the vagaries of the art world (My Kid Could Paint That). Although it rarely demonstrates any real cinematic liveliness and relies overmuch on the compelling character of its subject’s work, Marwencol admirably balances the personal and sociopolitical dimensions of its tale. First-time director Jeff Malmberg quickly zeroes in on the questions raised by the work of miniaturist and photographer Mark Hogancamp, a traumatic brain injury survivor who has constructed an elaborate fantasy narrative about a fictional World War II-era Belgian town, populating it with dolls that stand in for his family, friends, and fears. Much of the thrill of Marwencol stems from the manner in which it sumptuously steeps us in Hogancamp’s art, which evinces an astonishingly intuitive facility for both the emotional and the technical aspects of figure photography. Predictably enough, Hogancamp is eventually discovered by New York City bohemians, and tension surfaces between the comforts of fantasy and the demands of reality. While the narrative pattern Malmberg relies upon feels a bit too familiar, he nonetheless studs his film with unexpected revelations, all while maintaining a palpable wonderment at his subject’s talents and resilience.
C - Given that 1982’s Tron was intended primarily as a vehicle for bleeding-edge animation technology, it’s perhaps unsurprising that its belated sequel, Tron: Legacy, is so fixated on one-upping the original’s distinctive neon-detailed action sequences with all the eye-popping computer wizardry the twenty-first century can muster. While the sequel features appropriately gorgeous design and credible visuals—save for a creepy de-aging effect—almost every other component is dispiritingly slack or garishly off-key. This unfortunately encompasses Jeff Bridges’ performance, which presents fiftysomething, computer-entrapped Kevin Flynn as a cross between Obi-Wan Kenobi and the Dude. Garrett Hedlund, meanwhile, fits the textbook definition of the handsome cipher as Flynn’s restless, resentful son, Sam. (Do I smell a reconciliation coming? I think I do!) To its credit, the sequel presents a thoughtful thematic nucleus that legitimately builds upon the original film’s conceits: the Programs, having established the existence of Users, have now advanced to open rebellion against them, transforming their binary Eden into a terrifying Babel. However, Tron: Legacy is so preoccupied with overpowering, showy action set pieces that it doesn’t bother to properly explicate is baffling tale of virtual prisons and spontaneous digital life, or even to answer the most elementary questions raised by its wooly, convoluted science-fiction systems (see also: The Matrix Trilogy).
B- - Compared to the narrative eccentricity and mournful pose of his striking directorial debut, Gone Baby Gone, Ben Affleck’s sophomore effort adheres strictly to cops-and-robbers boilerplate, albeit with generous sprinklings of “Bah-stahn” Irish grit. Less arresting and ambitious than its predecessor, The Town spins a cheerless and familiar tale: a golden-hearted bank robber is beset with a loose cannon partner who stymies his efforts to go straight. In this case, the roles are filled by Affleck as a tender, teetotaling lunk and Jeremy Renner as his live-wire, bloody-minded childhood friend. Naturally, there’s also a crusading FBI agent (John Hamm) and a gorgeously blank love interest (Rebecca Hall) on hand. The snag is that Affleck’s romantic pursuit of the latter occurs after her stint as his blindfolded hostage. The schematic character of the story doesn’t seem to register for Affleck, but he nonetheless keeps the class and cultural lines therein gratifyingly stark. The Town grinds down the Beantown romanticism of the director’s past projects, with the marvelously unstudied production design conveying an unflattering urban grubbiness without resorting to the grotesque. The look of the thing—and Affleck’s facility for tense getaway sequences—are enough to render The Town a worthwhile macho melodrama.
B- - Memory, culpability, and above all forgiveness snake with python-scale brazenness through Todd Solondz’s Life During Wartime, a sequel (of sorts) to Happiness, his 1998 pitch-black slice of middle-class disillusionment (and, memorably, pedophilia). Recasting all of the characters from that film, Solondz revisits the frayed, stymied lives of middle-aged sisters Joy, Trish, and Helen Jordan (here played by Shirley Henderson, Allison Janney, and Ally Sheedy) as they attempt to forget, move on, and start over. Building upon its predecessor’s single-minded theme—You Hardly Ever Get What You Want—Life During Wartime gazes on the tangled, habitually dysfunctional lives of the Jordan clan and pointedly asks who we should blame for our miseries, and whether our offenders should (or can be) forgiven. Solondz’s approach is his customary swirl of jarring frankness and comical anguish. The forthrightness of the film’s aims lend it the aura of a morality play, as does its curious structure, which forgoes conventional narrative for a succession of linked set pieces, each one amusing and aching in its way, and each something of a self-contained short film. Solondz’s despairing yet earnest sensibility remains an acquired taste. Yet while Life During Wartime is unmistakably slighter and less bracing than its forebears, it also reveals a more disciplined and adroit filmmaker.
B - Jan Kounen’s speculative (and frequently downright fictional) film about an affair between two artistic titans sumptuously affirms that not every tale of erotic craving need address romantic love. Years after witnessing the notorious 1913 premiere of The Rite of Spring, Coco Chanel (Anna Mouglalis) invites a hard-luck Igor Stravinksy (Mads Mikkelsen) to her chalet, with his wife and kids in tow. The designer desires to give the composer the freedom to create, but before you can say “kindred spirits,” the pair are engaged in a sweaty, desperate, but oddly chilly affair. British writer Chris Greenhalgh adapted his own novel for the film, and both he and Kounen emphasize the white-hot obsessive knots—and inevitable implosion—that can occur when two like-minded souls collide. Both the Rite, which serves as a recurring musical motif, and the dramatization of Chanel No. 5’s creation underline the film’s fascination with mystery, whether that of the artistic mind itself or the process of inspiration. These themes prove far more compelling than a flimsy notion of fumbled True Love. In Kounen’s expressive hands, what might have been a slight (albeit sexy) slice of biopic achieves something finer, a more cerebral cousin to Jane Campion’s poetic ruminations on emotional states.
B - It’s too much to assert that Nic (Annette Benning) and Jules’ (Julianne Moore) lesbianism is incidental to the emotional vigor of The Kids Are All Right, given that sexual and gender anxiety undergird many of the story’s conflicts, not to mention that the plot depends on it. However, writer-director Cholodenko uses the upheaval generated when Nice and Jules’ teenaged kids seek out their biological father Paul (Mark Ruffalo) for the purposes of highlighting the universal qualities of middle-class, middle-aged families. The message seems to be, contra Anna Karenina (which the film alludes to), unhappy families all share the same gremlins: resentment, frustration, shame, jealousy, and emotional befuddlement. There’s nothing especially cinematic about Cholodenko’s approach here, aside from one long, devastating close-up of Benning during a moment of traumatic revelation. Fortunately, the nuanced performances carry the film, elevating dialogue that sometime strays into clumsy satire. It is Cholodenko’s talent for finding the wry humor in the strangest places that is most endearing, particularly when it comes to human sexuality, which the film acknowledges is rarely explicable or neat. It’s enough to make one forgive the faintly schematic character to the film’s narrative arc, or its mean-spirited racial digs and hippie-bashing.
B+ - The chilly Ozark landscape of Winter’s Bone is a skuzzy nightmare version of backwoods Middle America, where every family is linked through tangled blood relations and everyone cooks crystal meth. This city boy can’t attest to the authenticity of the rural Missouri portrayed in Debra Granik’s film, but the tone of her direction is such that realism takes a back seat to the mythic resonance of seventeen-year-old Ree’s (Jennifer Lawrence) journey. The film’s depiction of Ree’s materially urgent yet emotionally ambivalent search for her bail-bond-skipping father owes much to noir conventions and the chthonic forays of Greek legend. In this tale, however, the Hero wanders in despairing circles, and her dragons are an empty fridge, a corrupt sheriff, and rotten-toothed relations who value secrecy more than kinship. Lawrence shines, and the estimable John Hawkes’ turn as Ree’s reckless uncle provides jolts of wiry menace and righteous wrath. The script is both frank and admirably subtle, and Granick’s bracingly confident hand relies on expressive touches that lend this regional melodrama the feel of real cinema. Certainly, the ending is garish and absurdly tidy, but there is also unease there, as well as a quiet lamentation for a fallen world.
B - Raw and curiously engrossing, Sweetgrass is unwavering in its sparing, hard-edged appraisal of a vanishing way of life. While Barbash and Castaing-Taylor are palpably fascinated by the Allestad sheep ranch, where men on horseback still graze their herds in the high country of Montana, the film aims for something far more lyrical than a mere anthropological treatise on the West. Spiritually urgent and yet possessing a bittersweet lassitude, Sweetgrass bears witness to uncommonly cruel pastoral patterns that once characterized America’s proud self-conception, but are now forgotten, withered, and nearly vanished. Nocturnal visits from hungry grizzlies and other daunting challenges lend the story a dose of drama, but the film-makers are more assured when they are simply observing the sensory character of herding life with reverent diligence. The enduring sights and sounds are sustained, pensive, and faintly abstract, whether the dirty-white blur of hundreds of sheep picking their way through a stream, or the uncanny hush of men who are comfortable sitting in silence. Sweetgrass might be an essentially American portrait, but the film’s closest kin might be Yung Chang’s Up the Yangtze, as both share a quiet attentiveness borne of equal parts absorption and gentle sorrow.