My review of Tomas Alfredson’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is up at Look/Listen. Check it out.
Posts Tagged ‘Mystery’
Look/Listen: Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
Friday, December 23rd, 2011Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows
Thursday, December 15th, 20112011 (USA)
Director: Guy Ritchie
Viewed: December 12, 2011
Format: Digital Theatrical Projection (Wehrenberg Chesterfield Galaxy 14)
Guy Ritchie’s 2009 re-imagining of the Great Detective and his adventures in Victorian London proved to be a luscious guilty pleasure. To be sure, Sherlock Holmes is overstuffed with garishly rendered action sequences and rushed-over plot twists, but the past two years have been unexpectedly kind to the film. Robert Downey, Jr.’s portrayal of Holmes is fittingly charming, while also conveying a man who is supercilious, unpredictable, and deeply unhappy. It’s a performance that never fails to elicit a smile, while revealing the actor’s ability to convey nuanced characterization beneath his trademark rapid-fire witticisms. Moreover, repeat viewings have strengthened the triumph of Sherlock Holmes’ other pleasures: the staggeringly rich production design, the cunning nods to the Holmes Canon, and the sneaky strength of the performances from Jude Law as John Watson and—yes—Rachel McAdams as Irene Adler.
Unfortunately, the new sequel, Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows, doesn’t possess the same spark as its predecessor, for reasons that are somewhat slippery. The banter between Holmes and Watson is a little slacker, the humor is a little more cartoonish, and returning director Ritchie doubles down on the over-long action sequences that groan under his heedless employment of showy techniques. These include stuttering shifts in speed, smudged and distorted images, CGI zooms on slamming firing pins, and the like. Such flourishes aren’t irksome in isolation, but A Game of Shadows employs them with wearisome consistency. The whole film feels somewhat undernourished and ungainly, especially the script, which is surprising given that Sherlock Holmes’ gaggle of writers (usually an ill omen) has been replaced by a mere duo for A Game of Shadows (Michele and Kieran Mulroney). None of these flaws is glaring, but together they make for a film that doesn’t live up to its potential.
Despite this catalog of gripes, A Game of Shadows works gratifyingly well as an honest-to-goodness sequel. It advances its predecessor’s story in appealing ways, changing the stakes while mostly preserving the inimitable snap-and-crackle tone. (In this, the film recalls, of all things, this year’s Kung Fu Panda 2.) Like the first Sherlock Holmes film, A Game of Shadows takes a peculiar approach to its source material. It cheerfully disregards the Canon while also weaving in a dizzying number of references and allusions to Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories. In particular, the film borrows some of its narrative turns and window dressing from the Holmes tale “The Final Problem”. (If you’re a Holmes purist, it’s probably appalling. If you’re a fan of Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill’s The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, it will seem familiar.) The new film likewise recreates the style and ground rules of its predecessor. Although it is set in an anachronism-laden and steampunk-tinged England in 1891, A Game of Shadows is nonetheless firmly rooted in the twisted, secular world of cold-blooded criminality. Ghosts and goblins need not apply.
Indeed, the first Sherlock Holmes succeeded in part due to its nimble treatment of the villainous Lord Blackwood (Mark Strong). That film plays Blackwood’s B-movie menace for maximum effect, while also allowing the Great Detective to scoff at the man’s occult-draped theatrics and promise a rational explanation for everything (dutifully delivered by the end). In contrast, A Game of Shadows dispenses with the supernatural trappings altogether, presenting a grim tale of diplomacy, terrorism, and global conflict. It’s almost prosaic stuff compared to black magic and diabolic scions, but fortunately A Game of Shadows features the Canon’s most notorious villain, the esteemed mathematics professor and secret criminal mastermind Professor James Moriarty (Jared Harris, an inspired choice). Moriarty makes a brief appearance in the first film, but for this outing the man Holmes calls the “Napoleon of Crime” is front-and-center.
A Game of Shadows presents Moriarty as a dark reflection of Holmes, an intellectual equal who possesses the respected public persona and daunting political clout that the Great Detective lacks. Moriarty’s reach is seemingly limitless. In one of the film’s most chilling moments, the fiendish professor clears a crowded restaurant simply by clinking his glass. (How does that work? Is every Londoner but Holmes and his allies on the underworld payroll?) A Game of Shadows opens with Holmes and Moriarty already locked in conflict, despite the fact that they have not met face-to-face. Taking place several months after the events of the first film, the sequel finds Holmes more unbalanced than ever, obsessed with the web of crime that he sees radiating out from the professor. Moriarty’s master plan alights on simmering Franco-German antagonism, Continental anarchist plots, and a caravan of French gypsies—including Noomi Rapace as a fortune-teller in search of her missing brother—but the details matter less than the archvillain’s persona.
Harris portrays the professor as unassuming and unflappable on the outside, but vain and sadistic within. It’s no mistake that Moriarty emerges just as Holmes’ loneliness begins to prick him, nor that the professor seems to take pleasure in his crimes on a visceral level, much as Holmes views each case as a personal challenge. Both men seem self-aware that their rivalry is one for the ages, which allows the film to set up some delicious scenes between Downey and Harris. Most memorably, the crescendo of Moriarty’s plot takes place off-screen as he and the Great Detective play chess, with each man narrating the events in the adjacent room. (This also permits Watson, bless his mustache, to play the part of both sleuth and man of action as he unravels Moriarty’s scheme without Holmes’ lead.) It’s a gripping scene, crisply edited and directed by Ritchie with more restraint than elsewhere. And it ends bleakly, in a manner that echoes Yimou Zhang’s martial arts epic Hero. Even as Holmes’ ability to peer into the future with his vaunted logic sidesteps the need for a brawl, it ultimately leads him to one final, inescapable conclusion. It’s a good thing that Ritchie’s playfulness wins out before the credits roll, lest the film be saddled with a discordantly glum ending.
StLIFF 2011: Shuffle
Tuesday, November 22nd, 20112011 (USA)
Director: Kurt Kuenne
Viewed: November 20, 2011
Format: Theatrical Blu-ray (Landmark Tivoli Theater)
The core narrative conceit of Shuffle is inventive, but nonetheless disposed to invite comparisons to other works: Quantum Leap, Jacob’s Ladder, Dark City, A Christmas Carol, Twelve Monkeys, Memento, and, most crucially, It’s a Wonderful Life. The film’s aesthetic and tone, meanwhile, are presented with an affectionate nod to the original Twilight Zone series. Writer, composer, and director Kurt Kuenne has submitted, for the viewer’s approval, one Lovell Milo (T.J. Thyne), a man who is living his life out of sequence. Each morning he awakens to a day plucked seemingly randomly from the catalog of his experiences. These days gradually reveal a life riddled with dissatisfaction and heartbreak, from his stymied ambitions to become an art photographer to his tragic romance with the girl next door, Grace (the marvelously pixie-voiced Paula Rhodes). The vaguely amnesiac Lovell cannot recall exactly when this temporal scrambling first began, although (with a little prodding) he eventually begins paying close attention to everything he sees and hears, in the hopes of unraveling his private, jumbled Hell. Gradually, patterns begin to emerge within the chronological chaos, as clusters of significant event appear around particular ages (8, 26, and 30) and the pivotal role of Lovell’s domineering father (Chris Stone) becomes increasingly clear.
Shuffle’s narrative gimmickry and deep pedigree in genre filmmaking would seem to place it far afield from Kuenne’s previous feature-length effort, the raw and unnervingly personal documentary Dear Zachary: A Letter to a Son About His Father. Both films, however, advocate acceptance and fortitude in the face of the cosmos’ fundamental unfairness, and both lionize the principle that the Greek philosophers termed eudaemonia, a balanced existence of virtue and happiness. Shuffle’s novel structure and recurring playing card motif both underline the entangled character of chance and control in the human experience. The film poses that, like a game of poker, life’s outcomes are partly out of our hands and partly dependent on our choices. However, the simple-mindedness of the underlying story and the abundant heart-tugging melodrama suggest that the film doesn’t have particularly cerebral ambitions. Shuffle’s affinity for gooey sentimentality often grows grating, appearing as it does without Capra’s often-overlooked dark edge. Similarly, the film’s reliance on theistic mumbo-jumbo for its twists lends a hollow, desperate note to what is otherwise an earnest tale of personal liberation.
StLIFF 2011: 9:06
Wednesday, November 16th, 20112009 (Slovenia)
Director: Igor Sterk
Viewed: November 15, 2011
Format: Theatrical DVD (Landmark Plaza Frontenac Cinema)
The bloody fingerprints of The Tenant cover the Slovenian psychological mystery 9:06, which shares the suffocating fatalism and crumbling sense of self that characterize Roman Polanski’s unnerving 1976 film. However, where Polanski’s Trelkovsky is bullied and manipulated into becoming a gender-bending double of the deceased woman who once owned his Parisian flat, the protagonist of 9:06 plunges into the enveloping identity of a dead man for reasons that remain his own. This is no creepshow feature of urban paranoia, but a somber tale about the mysterious authority of guilt, despair, and self-loathing.
Police detective Dusan (Igor Samobor) is at a shaky crossroads in his personal life, as he tries to juggle a spiteful ex-wife whom he hates, an adopted daughter whom he loves, and a young girlfriend who is growing dissatisfied with his phantom comings and goings. Foremost on his mind, however, is a perplexing suicide case, in which a reclusive young pianist stopped his car on a bridge and leapt into the gorge below. The odd details of the case intrigue Dusan: The complete absence of hair on the victim’s body; logs of bizarre online activities; associates who seem unaware that the pianist is dead; and the possibly significant recurrence of the time 9:06. The detective snoops around the deceased man’s vacant apartment for breadcrumbs, and—for reasons that he does not entirely understand—eventually begins sleeping there. The suicide case gradually starts to devour Dusan’s waking hours, feeding on his remorse from a past sin. The detective barely seems aware that he has silently passed out of the realms of an official investigation and deep into the outlands of obsessive madness.
The film presents Dusan’s disintegration with an intense, moody restraint. The script is sparing, rarely stating outright what can more gracefully be implied with cool offhandedness. The film observes the detective’s movements with an ominous care, leaving the viewer to discern what they can from the garish cracks in his otherwise sphinx-like manner. Underneath its arid surface, 9:06 proffers a disconcerting depiction of oblivion’s squirming allure. The personal effects of the pianist—neatly folded clothes, car keys, shaving utensils—become compass needles that all orient the detective in the same dread direction. However, Dusan is no Hamlet: Far from seething in the shadow of death, he seems to shuffle towards it with the blank resignation of a volcano’s sacrificial victim. Chilling stuff.
StLIFF 2011: 23 Minutes to Sunrise
Tuesday, November 15th, 20112012 (USA)
Director: Jay Kanzler
Viewed: November 14, 2011
Format: Theatrical DVD (Landmark Tivoli Theater)
The film-makers who were on hand to introduce the StLIFF screening of St. Louis-based mini-indie 23 Minutes to Sunrise cheerfully conceded that the cut about to be shown was still a little rough around the edges. However, the film’s crudity has less to do with its incomplete color and sound than with the more fundamental flaws in its assembly. While Leonard Cohen growls his way through “Everybody Knows” over the opening credits, four couples slowly converge on a greasy spoon during the wee hours of the night. (The musical selection recalls the same song’s prominent use in Exotica, a film with which 23 Minutes shares a forlorn aura and equitable regard for its characters.) The film is, at bottom, a kind of ensemble Dark Night of the Soul story, and the archetypes that gather at the diner are well-worn: a weary husband and wife (Bob Zany and Nia Peeples) who talk in circles about their flailing relationship; an anxious, hot-headed criminal (Tom Sandoval) and his reluctant girlfriend (Kristen Doute); a sweet-as-molasses waitress (Jilanne Klaus) with a ungrateful lout of a husband at home; and a veteran-turned-cook (Dingani Beza) whose rambling voice-over ruminations on life and God mark him as the doubtful hero of this tale. To these players the film adds its wild cards in the form of an eerie young woman (Haley Busch) and her menacing older companion (Eric Roberts), a pair whose elliptical conversations mark them as unquestionably not-from-around-here.
There is no way around that reality that 23 Minutes is amateurish stuff, a fact betrayed by profuse continuity goofs and often confused editing. The soapy dialog and musical cues wander into snicker-worthy territory at times, and the film lacks the pacing and rhythm necessary to keep a single-location story such as this moving along. Most unforgivably for a film that makes significant narrative hay over a deadline, its presentation of time is absurdly slipshod: seconds seem to last minutes, and minutes seem to last seconds, depending on the scene in question. Despite these problems, there is much to commend in the small details of 23 Minutes to Sunrise. The hesitant romance between Beza’s and Klaus’ characters is touching and naturalistic, and admirably disregards the racial and age dimensions without making a show of its disregard. Excepting the Mystery Couple of Busch and Roberts, the characters are well-drawn and all markedly pitiable in differing ways, even if they are not all sympathetic. Most intriguing of all, 23 Minutes is defiantly resistant to generic categorization. Coiled underneath its veneer of stale melodrama, crime-thriller tension, and mild comic business is a kind of feature-length Twilight Zone episode sans a big reveal. The supernatural eventually rears its head, but never in a manner that definitively places the story within a particular family of fictional conventions. The film lacks a verbose Explanation Scene, and never clarifies exactly why Roberts’ sinister stranger seems to be the dark pole star around which the story’s events rotate. Far from being a maddening fatal flaw, this ambiguity is arguably the most innovative thing 23 Minutes to Sunrise has going for it.
StLIFF 2011: Pig
Monday, November 14th, 20112011 (USA)
Director: Henry Barrial
Viewed: November 13, 2011
Format: Theatrical HDCAM (Landmark Tivoli Theater)
The intrinsic grittiness of low-budget independent film-making ultimately contributes to the uncanny mood of the conceptually ambitious thriller Pig. Writer-director Henry Barrial’s script lays out a scenario with echoes of other noir-tinted puzzle-box films such as The Game, Oldboy, and Memento. However, in its cinematic execution, the story discovers a disorienting, dream-like aura that places it in the hinterlands of David Lynch country. A Man (Rudolph Martin) awakens hooded and bound in the desert with no memory of his identity. He carries only a scrap of paper scrawled with a name: “Manny Elder.” After collapsing from exhaustion, he finds himself in the care of a beautiful widow, Isabel (Heather Ankeny), who entices him to stay with her and her young son at their remote desert home. However, the confounding visions that flash through the Man’s mind compel him to search for his identity, leading him into Los Angeles and through a succession of strange encounters. By the end of the first act, the story has undergone a drastic realignment that deepens the narrative mystery even as it narrows the film’s potential. From that moment on, it’s apparent that Pig’s story must necessarily rest on a dream, a science-fiction conceit, or a malevolent conspiracy of epic proportions. (Or all three).
There’s a streak of faintly dissatisfying conservatism to Pig’s final scenes, but it has less to do with the film’s message or style than with the inherent limitations of genre storytelling. No explanation that the film might offer for its strange events could realistically maintain the narrative’s internal integrity and also preserve the unsettling mood that pervades the bulk of its scenes. A splendidly crafted but radically different style is on display in a particular film-within-the-film sequence, suggesting that the atmosphere that pervades Pig elsewhere represents an adroit utilization of the baseline indie aesthetic. The Los Angeles of the film is kin to the weird, diabolical metropolis of Lynch’s doppelganger triptych (Lost Highway, Mulholland Drive, and INLAND EMPIRE). It’s a sunny-yet-ominous place full of offhandedly eccentric moments, vaguely sinister spaces, and banal and often anachronistic objects that seem to roil with significance. In the final analysis, the film is more invested in presenting a story that glistens with philosophical relevance for our current age than in exploiting the horrifying potential of its disorienting atmospherics. Still, while it lasts, Pig is disarming stuff, the kind of sly little genre experiment that reveals the parched cinematic imagination that characterizes most studio thrillers.
The Vanishing
Wednesday, September 7th, 20111988 (Netherlands / France)
Director: George Sluizer
Viewed: September 6, 2011
Format: Hulu Plus via Playstation 3
[Vague Spoilers] George Sluizer’s disturbing 1988 thriller is a kind of “daylight nightmare,” wherein a sunny holiday trip changes into something abnormal and terrifying, all in plain view of scores of witnesses. It doesn’t end there, however: The film’s protagonist Rex (Gene Bervoets) spends three years thrashing about in this nightmare, where even charming little cafes and quiet country roads take on a fractured and ominous aspect. Thematically, the film zeroes in on the nature of obsession and the destabilizing character of an unresolved mystery, and in this respect it is kin to works as diverse as Picnic at Hanging Rock, The Sweet Hereafter, Zodiac, and The White Ribbon. Unlike those films, which generally assume a more sociological or philosophical approach to the aforementioned themes, The Vanishing is an intensely psychological film. Sluizer approaches the story as two distinct journeys through personal conflict and catharsis. The first concerns Rex, whose anguish over his girlfriend’s inexplicable disappearance demands an answer that may not be forthcoming. The second journey is that of Raymond Lemorne (Bernard-Pierre Donnadieu), a sociopath in the guise of a mild-mannered chemistry teacher and family man, who feels that he must act on his homicidal impulses in order to prove something to himself or the cosmos. Eventually, the two men meet and confront one another, but they don’t so much interact as ricochet off another, fatefully altering each man’s ultimate destination.
The film contains just enough oddness to keep the viewer ever so slightly off-balance about what they are witnessing. Events occur which may or may not be “real,” but are presented in such a way that they hint at deeper truths rustling just out of sight. Henny Vrienten’s score recalls Howard Shore’s early work with David Cronenberg in its reliance on synthesizers that moan and squeal with sinister import. For a film that is essentially bloodless, there is a palpable aura of unsettling sexual and physical peril lurking in nearly every crevice. The fact that Rex is carelessly misogynistic and Lemorne malevolently so subtly colors the film’s events, and only adds to the viewer’s sense of discomfort. Sluizer cunningly uses his performers and his frame, establishing an uneasiness that silently shrieks a symphony of warning. The much-discussed conclusion, while hardly a “twist ending,” is the sort of confounding anti-resolution that adds to the film’s pitiless aura of authentic mortal and moral despair.
Point Blank
Wednesday, August 3rd, 20112010 (France)
Director: Fred Cavayé
Viewed: August 2, 2011
Format: Theatrical Print (Landmark Theaters Tivoli Theater)
It’s challenging to find anything to actively dislike about a work as functional and ably presented as Fred Cavayé’s breathless crime thriller, Point Blank. The film blends a noir-tinted story with the sort of frenetic Continental chases and standoffs that will likely have viewers searching in vain for Liam Neeson’s stern visage. In his absence, we have Gilles Lolouche portraying stanch Everyman Samuel, a nurse ensnared by pure happenstance into a world of violent fugitives, murdered millionaires, and corrupt officials. Clocking in at an agreeably brisk 84 minutes, the film boasts a trim unfussiness that expunges unnecessary scenes and dialogue. That said, Point Blank is so rigorously unadventurous in its narrative that one can’t help but feel a touch dissatisfied. Almost every set piece and plot twist that Cavayé and co-writer Guillaume Lemans employ has been presented elsewhere with far more verve and style, and the script’s hackneyed tendencies have a troublesome habit of short-circuiting tension. Case in point: The opening scenes of domestic contentment between Samuel and his pregnant wife Nadia (Elena Anaya) virtually guarantee that she will soon be placed in mortal peril, and will eventually emerge unscathed. Capable action sequences can’t elevate a film this formulaic above mere utilitarian genre escapism. Fortunately, even within this context, there are modest pleasures, such as an enticing turn from Roschdy Zem as an unruffled safe-cracker, or a nerve-jangling climactic scene in a bustling police station.
The Chameleon
Monday, July 18th, 20112010 (France)
Director: Jean-Paul Salomé
Viewed: July 14, 2011
Format: Theatrical Print (Landmark Theaters Plaza Frontenac Cinema)
Jean-Paul Salomé’s fictionalized tale of notorious French imposter Frédéric Bourdin might have been a more satisfactory and engaging film had the director and co-writer Natalie Carter allowed their bolder proclivities to run wild. Instead, The Chameleon is just graceless and drowsy, albeit oddly aware of the psychologically probative potential in Bourdin’s attempt to pass himself off as missing American teenager Nicholas Randall. There are rumblings that the film was taken away from Salomé to be sliced-and-diced by the producers, a rumor supported by the often jarring editing. However, there are plenty of other factors working against the film: a thin budget revealed by visibly shoddy set design; a flat, indifferent movie-of-the-week visual aesthetic; and a meandering script peppered with sophomoric dialog. In places, the ugly, run-down quality to the film’s look works in its favor, providing a dose of corroded and sun-faded verisimilitude to the Louisiana setting. (Shades of Bad Lieutenant - Port of Call: New Orleans there.) However, most of the time, the film’s look is just dull.
The actors don’t help the proceedings, as they all seem to exist in different films. Ellen Barkin and Nick Stahl go for Southern-fried grotesque, while Famke Janssen plays things straight as an FBI agent with a laughably hackneyed backstory. Emilie de Ravin is, well, Emilie de Ravin, which means most of her acting consists of grimacing so that the spot where her eyebrows meet crinkles in alleged confusion or anger. Marc-André Grondin’s approach to Bourdin is to veer arbitrarily between cringing doofus–fanny-pack and all–and delinquent hothead, while throwing a creepy leer here and there to reassure the viewer that Bourdin is, in fact, a globe-trotting conman. This all-over-the-map aspect to the performances is fitting, given how much trouble Salomé has handling the vague narrative. He is clearly fascinated with Bourdin’s craving for love (or, less charitably, attention), rather than the money or adrenaline that drives other imposters, and the script plainly wants to utilize the probable murder of the real Nicholas to wedge open Bourdin’s mercurial mind and expose it for examination. Except that these two components–the con and the murder–just end up slipping past each other most of the time. What we get is an annoyingly bland story about an international conman, into which a Faulkner-tinted tale of wickedness and secrets frequently intrudes. It’s a flimsy patchwork, and ultimately forgettable.
Look/Listen: Incendies
Friday, May 20th, 2011
My review of Denis Villeneuve’s Incendies is up at Look/Listen. Check it out.