January Reviews

The Savages

Director: Tamara Jenkins. Screenplay: Tamara Jenkins. Cinematography: W. Mott Hupfel III. Film editing: Brian A. Kates. Production design: Jane Ann Stewart. Music: Stephen Trask. Producers: Ted Hope, Anne Carey, Erica Westheimer. With:Laura Linney, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Philip Bosco, Peter Friedman, David Zayas, Gbenga Akinnagbe, Cara Seymour, Tonye Patano, Guy Boyd, Debra Monk, Rosemary Murphy, Hal Blankenship, Joan Jaffe, Salem Ludwig, Peter Frechette, Maddie Corman, Margo Martindale, Michael Blackson, Sidné Anderson. USA. 113 min. 2007.

The title is perfect. Laura Linney and Philip Seymour Hoffman play Wendy and Jon, a brother and sister -- she’s an aspiring playwright and practicing temp, he teaches “the theater of social unrest” at a university -- who come together when their elderly father starts sliding into dementia and decline. The only practical course is to put him in a nursing home, which makes them feel like selfish, heartless . . . savages. The film supports that verdict by subtly depicting the locations they move through -- crowded Manhattan, snowbound Buffalo, sunstruck Sun City, Arizona -- as the sites of arcane rituals that seem like second nature to the folks involved but take on subliminal strangeness when viewed with an outsider’s eye.

Tamara Jenkins has directed her funny-sad screenplay with finely tuned sensitivity, vividly catching a wide array of psychological and sociological nuances. The film’s chief virtue, though, is consistently perceptive acting by a superbly chosen cast. Hoffman and Linney take top honors, but Philip Bosco is so desperately convincing as the dad that you hope his Medicare papers are up to date; there hasn’t been a more indelible supporting performance since Martin Landau’s legendary Bela Lugosi in Ed Wood more than a dozen years ago. First-rate work also comes from Peter Friedman as Wendy’s married boyfriend, Gbenga Akinnagbe as a nursing-home attendant, and everyone else. Even the dog is great.

 Judging by the movie’s subject, I half expected a cloying story of family values reembraced in the face of life’s inevitable challenges. While it’s definitely a family-friendly story, there isn’t a sappy or sentimental moment to be seen, nor is it the cutesy comedy suggested by the coming-attractions trailer. It’s both a marvelous piece of genre filmmaking and a one-of-a-kind look at people who’ve rarely been so insightfully portrayed. I’m not sure it’s a picture for many repeat viewings, but I know for certain that it’s among the all-time-best movies of its kind. And it’s even better if you’re following Hoffman’s astonishing streak of inspired acting, which has been going on for what seems like forever. With this and Charlie Wilson’s War and Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead in a single year, he eliminates any possible doubt that he’s a movie actor for the ages.

Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street

Director: Tim Burton. Screenplay: John Logan, based on the stage musical by Stephen Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler. Cinematography: Dariusz Wolski. Film editing: Chris Lebenzon. Production design: Dante Ferretti. Music: Stephen Sondheim.  Producers: Richard D. Zanuck, John Logan, Laurie MacDonald, Walter Parkes. With: Johnny Depp, Helena Bonham Carter, Alan Rickman, Timothy Spall, Sacha Baron Cohen, Jamie Campbell Bower, Laura Michelle Kelly, Jayne Wisener, Ed Sanders, Nick Haverson, Mandy Holliday, Philip Philmar, Harry Taylor. USA/UK. 113 min. 2007.

The story of a demented barber who slices his customers’ throats, then lets his lady love bake them into the meat pies she peddles in her shop -- what could be better material for Tim Burton, who’s built a major reputation on Grand Guignol ghoulishness with a stylish twist?

It sounds great on paper, but the cozy fit leads to trouble, since Burton isn’t challenged to stretch his visual imagination in new directions; instead he dives into his usual bag of tricks, giving us two hours of grisliness by the numbers. The constant parade of musical numbers doesn’t help either -- scenes that would be grimly powerful in a straight-out melodrama become stylized abstractions with little emotional impact. (At least the songs are intermittently interesting; the clamoring in “The Night Before Christmas” and “Corpse Bride” pretty much destroyed those pictures for me.) I didn’t find the original Sweeney Todd on Broadway all that exciting either, and it was a gigantic hit, so maybe Sweeney and I just aren’t destined to get along. But aside from Timothy Spall’s performance (as an evil judge’s henchman) and a few effectively jolting moments -- most notably the final murder, the very last shot, the very first song, and a scene in an insane asylum -- the picture rarely generated much excitement for me.

Footnote: Although the acting is fine, especially by Timothy Spall as an evil judge’s henchman, Sacha Baron Cohen makes little impression in his brief appearance as Sweeney’s main rival, and when the bard of Borat seems wan, you know a movie’s just not making it.

The Great Debaters

Director: Denzel Washington. Screenplay: Robert Eisele, based on an article by Tony Scherman. Cinematography: Philippe Rouselot. Film editing: Hughes Winborne. Production design: David J. Bomba. Music: Peter Golub, James Newton Howard. Producers: Denzel Washington, Oprah Winfrey, Todd Black, Kate Forte, Joe Roth. With: Denzel Washington, Forest Whitaker, Denzel Whitaker, Jurnee Smollett, Nate Parker, Jermaine Williams, Gina Ravera, John Heard, Kimberly Elise, Devyn Tyler, Trenton McClain Boyd, Robert X. Golphin, Justice Leak, Damien Leake, Bonnie Johnson, Charissa Allen, Michael Beasley, George Wilson, Fahnlohnee R. Harris, Harold X. Evans, J.D. Evermore, Sharon Jones, Kelvin Payton. USA. 126 min. 2007.

Based on real events of the 1930s, this earnest human-interest drama tells the story of a Melvin B. Tolson, an African-American poet and professor at a small Texas college, who makes a group of verbally gifted students into a debating team that takes on white competitors and wins, wins, wins, thanks to expert coaching and try-or-die determination. They also confront the challenges of Jim Crow racism, and the movie doesn’t flinch from showing its ugliest, most sickening sides.

The movie’s deck is stacked in favor of the home team: Debates are supposed to test argumentation skills regardless of subject, but these folks always get to defend the right-minded liberal side of the proposition; and there’s no indication of just how Tolson elicits such top-of-the-line work from the small crop of students he has to work with, apart from acknowledging that he’s the one who concocts the victorious arguments that carry the day for them. But the picture has heartwarming moments all the same, and it marks a big advance over Denzel Washington’s previous directorial effort, Antwone Fisher, which was much too sentimental for comfort. Add excellent performances by Denzel, the gifted Forest Whitaker as a young debater’s dad, and all the actors who play the triumphant team, and you have an evening’s entertainment with a telling historical twist. It’s not as charming as the slightly similar Akeelah and the Bee, but all in all it’s the next best thing.

The Water Horse: Legend of the Deep

Director: Jay Russell. Screenplay: Robert Nelson Jacobs, based on a novel by Dick King-Smith. Cinematography: Oliver Stapleton. Film editing: Mark Warner. Production design: Tony Burrough. Music: James Newton Howard. Producers: Robert Bernstein, Charlie Lyons, Barrie M. Osborne, Douglas Rae. With: Alex Etel, Emily Watson, David Morrissey, Brian Cox, Craig Hall, Ben Chaplin, Bruce Allpress, Eddie Campbell, Carl Dixon, Ian Harcourt, William Johnson, Marshall Napier, Edward Newborn, Louis Owen Collins, William Russell, Erroll Shand, Joel Tobeck, Ben Van Lier, Priyanka Xi, Geraldine Brophy. USA/UK. 111 min. 2007.

If you were wondering what the Loch Ness monster really is, this family-friendly fantasy will give you the lowdown. It’s what Scottish legend calls a water horse, raised by a secretive kid from an adorable little monster into an adorable big one that takes up residence its eponymous ness after various adventures with his young foster parent.

If you were wondering whether to see this movie, I’ll give you the lowdown. It’s the kind of picture where the story begins as a long-winded narrative told to a pair of fascinated tourists by an adorable old man who just might be the grownup version of the boy he’s telling about. It’s the kind of picture that begins with the printed words, “A true tale it is … ” It’s the kind of picture with an end credit that reads, “No sea monsters were harmed in the making of this film.” It’s the kind of picture where the great Brian Cox is completely wasted. All of this said, young kids will love it. It’s that kind of picture.

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2007's Films of Uncommon Interest

Here’s a brief retrospective look at three 2007 films of uncommon interest, just to make sure they don’t get overlooked in the year-end fracas of critical picks.

Sicko

Everyone has strong feelings about Michael Moore -- he’s either a pushy polemicist or a courageous fighter for truth –- but it’s possible to applaud his cinematic savvy and the overall thrust of his politics while also acknowledging his weakness for tendentious argument and in-your-face showboating. All these qualities are on display in his most provocative pictures, including this revealing study of the American health-care system, which reached the screen just as liberal-minded voters and politicians were gearing up for a long-overdue effort to inject some fairness and equality into the situation. It’s the year’s most important American domestic-issue documentary.

4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days

At a time when bogus reality shows pass for true-life realism, this wrenching Romanian drama is a hard-hitting reminder that insightfully crafted fiction is still the surest way to probe the deepest, scariest depths of human nature and its discontents. The story couldn’t be simpler -– a woman helps a friend get an illegal abortion in Romania under the communists -– and the cinematic style of writer-director Cristian Mungiu couldn’t be more straightforward, following the moment-to-moment action with clear-eyed objectivity. The result, thanks to razor-sharp camerawork and stunningly honest performances, is psychological drama of the most riveting and imaginative kind.

I Don't Want to Sleep Alone

Alone in Kuala Lumpur, a Chinese visitor is roughed up by street thugs, cared for by a Bangladeshi man, and relocated to the local Chinatown, where a couple of women enter his life. All this is counterpointed by events involving a paralyzed hospital patient, played by the same actor. The characters are fascinating, but as always with Taiwan-based filmmaker Tsai Ming-liang, tones and textures are what matter most. His distinctive trademarks are all here – loneliness, shabbiness, music, passion, and lots and lots of water, an element that no other filmmaker save André Tarkovsky has imbued with such mysterious, even mystical qualities. Tsai is taking cinema to levels it never dreamed of exploring before.

Into Great Silence

In this literally awesome documentary about a Carthusian monastery in the French Alps, filmmaker Philip Gröning captures not only the look, sound, and atmosphere of the place, but also the intimacy of its moods, the textures of its light and shade, and the almost physical quality that time itself acquires in an environment where religious ritual, behavioral regularity, stasis of the body, and inwardness of mind have reigned for centuries. The film has a purity of spirit that, in a profound artistic paradox, further enhances its investment in the bedrock materiality of the perceptible world on which both life and cinema are inevitably grounded. This is one of the rare movies that must be seen to be believed.

Them

Clémentine and Lucas are a French couple who live and work in Romania, where they lead a contented life until the night when a string of strange occurrences -– their car is stolen, odd noises resonate, the phone won’t stop ringing and then goes dead -– alerts them to impending danger in their large, lonely house. Soon they’re in flat-out panic mode, and they have reason to be: They’re under attack by mysterious enemies who clearly won’t rest until they’re dead. And if you think that’s scary, the explanation that emerges is even spookier than the goings-on themselves. Written and directed by David Moreau and Xavier Palud, this fact-based horror tale is guaranteed to get under your skin. See it if you dare.
                                    
                                                            
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The Best of the Best of 2007

Like most of my critical colleagues, I found many good movies and much good moviemaking in 2007. Here are my picks for the year’s best achievements, plus some from-the-hip commentary. My best-10 list is ranked in order of merit; the other lists are ranked more loosely, so while the order carries some weight, I haven’t numbered the items. After my commentary I’ve put a couple of additional lists with slightly different emphases. All this material is collected from critics polls I was invited to participate in by The Village Voice, L.A. Weekly, indieWire, and PopMatters, as well as my preliminary voting list for the National Society of Film Critics annual awards.

Best Picture
1. Michael Clayton
2. There Will Be Blood
3. 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days
4. The Savages
5. Lust, Caution
6. The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford
7. Into Great Silence
8. The Namesake
9. I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone
10. Sicko

Best Director
Tony Gilroy – Michael Clayton
Paul Thomas Anderson – There Will Be Blood
Cristian Mungiu – 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days
Sidney Lumet - Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead
Ang Lee – Lust, Caution
Andrew Dominik – The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford
Noah Baumbach – Margot at the Wedding

Best Actor
Casey Affleck – Gone Baby Gone and The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford
George Clooney – Michael Clayton
Daniel Day Lewis – There Will Be Blood
Tommy Lee Jones – In the Valley of Elah and No Country for Old Men
Philip Seymour Hoffman – The Savages and Before the Devil Knows
You’re Dead and Charlie Wilson’s War
Javier Bardem – No Country for Old Men
Russell Crowe – American Gangster and 3:10 to Yuma
Christian Bale – Rescue Dawn and 3:10 to Yuma
Denzel Washington – American Gangster and The Great Debaters

Best Actress
Marion Cotillard – La vie en rose
Nicole Kidman – Margot at the Wedding
Jennifer Jason Leigh – Margot at the Wedding
Tang Wei – Lust, Caution
Ellen Page - Juno
Julie Christie – Away From Her

Best Supporting Actor
Philip Bosco – The Savages
Philip Seymour Hoffman - Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead and Charlie Wilson’s War
Ed Harris – Gone Baby Gone

Best Supporting Actress
Tilda Swinton – Michael Clayton
Amy Ryan – Gone Baby Gone
Amy Madigan – Gone Baby Gone
Joan Chen – Lust, Caution
Drea de Matteo – Broken English

Best Screenplay
Tony Gilroy – Michael Clayton
Paul Thomas Anderson – There Will Be Blood
Andrew Dominik – The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford
James Schamus, Hui-Ling Wang – Lust, Caution
Kelly Masterson – Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead

Best Foreign-Language Film
Four Months, Three Weeks, and Two Days
I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone
Lust, Caution
Syndromes and a Century

Best Cinematography
There Will Be Blood
No Country for Old Men
Gone Baby Gone
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

Best Documentary
Into Great Silence
Sicko
Terror’s Advocate
Deep Water
The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters

Best Animation
Persepolis
Ratatouille

Best First Film
Michael Clayton – Tony Gilroy
Control – Anton Corbijn
Away From Her – Sarah Polley

Top DVD of 2007
Killer of Sheep

Worst Films of 2007
The Bucket List
Knocked Up
The Brave One

A few from-the-hip comments on 2007 and the motion pictures thereof . . .

A few scenes into There Will Be Blood, my borderline-funny feeling about Daniel Day Lewis’s voice snapped into focus -– hey, it’s John Huston up there declaiming in that grainy, gravely tone! Doing a feature-length Huston imitation is an odd thing for a terrific actor like Day Lewis to do, but then, in Gangs of New York he did a feature-length Robert De Niro imitation. And it certainly takes chutzpah; even try-anything Clint Eastwood steered away from vocal imitation in White Hunter Black Heart, and he was playing Huston there. Go figure.

Day Lewis is still a powerful presence in Paul Thomas Anderson’s most powerful movie to date, and another source of its excellence is Anderson’s screenplay, based on Upton Sinclair’s hyperactive novel. Anderson was smart enough to treat the 1927 book as a malleable source text -– easily done, since Sinclair’s oeuvre relies more on high-octane muckraking than canonical lit’ry excellence -– and to reimagine it from top to bottom. The movie that emerged is one of the year’s two solid literary adaptations. The other is No Country for Old Men, which benefits from fidelity to Cormac McCarthy’s stunning 2005 novel, one of his best works (with The Road and Blood Meridian, Or the Evening Redness in the West, and the first two Border Trilogy novels) in almost every way. That said, the Coen boys’ movie would be even better if they’d retained more of the sheriff’s monologues, which are what give the novel most of its intellectual heft.

Joel and Ethan do better by McCarthy than Christopher Hampton does by Ian McEwan’s amazing Atonement, though. This is one of those novels grounded so completely in language that only the most brilliant auteurs should be allowed to touch them. Joe Wright is not such an auteur, and neither is the perennially overrated Hampton, whose screenplay does most of the damage. Besides losing the all-important textures of the prose, it eliminates so much detail -– the soldiers’ long, torturous march becomes an abbreviated, unpleasant slog; the quasi-fascist rules of the overcrowded hospital become a bit of a bother for our valiant heroine -– that the entire narrative seems slender and unmoored, and melodramatic to boot, since the plot’s Big Incidents now arrive with far too little breathing space between them, undermining the rich intelligence of McEwan’s overall design. The result isn’t a bad movie -– the acting and cinematography are perfectly okay -– but it’s just a shadow of what it could have been. Ditto for Pascale Ferran’s adaptation of an early version of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, which turns a rich meditation on class, industrialization, and sexuality into mere soft-porn romance. Not since A.S. Byatt’s multilayered Possession was eviscerated by the unholy trio of Neil Labute, David Henry Hwang, and Laura Jones has a genuinely inspired novel been quite so thoroughly filleted.

It's been an amazing year for double -- even triple -- achievements. Casey Affleck emerged as his generation's most gifted character actor in Gone Baby Gone and The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, and Tommy Lee Jones gave two of the most deeply etched performances of his career in No Country for Old Men and In the Valley of Elah. Denzel Washington was at the top of his game in American Gangster and his own The Great Debaters, and Russell Crowe rode high in both American Gangster and 3:10 to Yuma. Outdoing everyone, the great Philip Seymour Hoffman continued to refine his usual lumpenbourgeois persona in the excellent Before the Devil Knows You're Dead and The Savages, and then made a brilliant detour into pitch-dark sardonicism in Charlie Wilson's War. Christian Bale almost equalled him by excelling in Rescue Dawn and 3:10 to Yuma, but his showing in the largely disappointing I’m Not There wasn’t quite …there. Javier Bardem also fell a bit short -- his acting was the best thing about Love in the Time of Cholera but still nothing to cheer about; fortunately he followed that clunker of a movie with his best-ever acting in No Country for Old Men. Ditto for Richard Gere, who aced The Hoax but seemed as uncertain as I was about what he was doing in I’m Not There. Et cetera. One more note: The year's happiest surprise was the release of the outstanding Killer of Sheep from 30 years of forced hibernation. Bravo to Charles Burnett, the gang at Milestone Films, and everyone else involved.

The Top English-Language Films of 2007
Michael Clayton
There Will Be Blood
The Savages
The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford
No Country for Old Men
The Namesake
Sicko
In the Valley of Elah
Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead
Deep Water
Margot at the Wedding
Redacted
Gone Baby Gone
1408
Rendition
No End in Sight
The Walker
The Hoax
This Is England

Top Foreign-Language Films of 2007
4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days
Still Life
Lust, Caution
Into Great Silence
I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone
Them