Queue It Up: In The Valley Of Elah

[The Cooler offers the following review, written upon the film’s release in the author’s pre-blog era.]

In The Valley Of Elah is about a man in the process of discovery. Tommy Lee Jones plays Hank Deerfield, a retired military policeman who springs into action after his son, Mike, an infantryman just back from a tour in Iraq, goes AWOL from a U.S. base. One of the things Hank learns while investigating his son’s disappearance is that Mike’s fellow soldiers nicknamed him “Doc” for his habit of playing medic with Iraqi prisoners. As one soldier explains, Mike would put his finger into a prisoner’s open wound and ask, “Does that hurt?” And then, after the affirmative scream, he’d stick his finger back in the same spot. “How about that? Does that hurt?”

The sequence where Hank uncovers the origin of his son’s sarcastic handle isn’t especially memorable, but it’s a good place to start, because it unintentionally manages to encapsulate the entire film. On the positive side, there’s the performance of Jones, who acts with a surgeon’s precision, making not one false move in the entire picture. When Hank hears the “Doc” story, the former military man’s expression isn’t one of pride or shame but one of befuddlement, from a parent who can’t reconcile the soldier in the story with the young man he raised. Yet while this is one of many instances in which Jones gets it right, it also stands as a metaphor for what filmmaker Paul Haggis all too frequently does wrong: In his Elah screenplay, as in others before it, Haggis can’t resist playing doctor and poking us once too often where we were already sore.

We’ll get to that last part later, but the good news this time around is that Haggis doesn’t sensationalize his story until the very end, and by then he’s already done enough to win us over. At the most basic level, Elah works as an All The President’s Men-paced investigative procedural, with Jones’ Hank paired alongside Charlize Theron’s Detective Emily Sanders, trying get to the bottom of what happened to Mike and why. Haggis’ script is based on a true story, as profiled in an article for Playboy by Mark Boal called “Death and Dishonor,” and it at least gets the crime mostly right. Elah also nails the Army’s attempts at stonewalling in the aftermath. Still, I think we can assume that the actual investigation was a little more complicated than what we see here, with Hank acting as the grizzled Sherlock Holmes to Emily’s awestruck witnessing Watson.

Haggis reportedly wrote the part of Hank with friend and collaborator Clint Eastwood in mind, but Jones is the ideal choice to carry this film. It helps that Haggis’ screenplay provides Hank with some investigative credibility thanks to his background as a military policeman, but it sure doesn’t hurt that most of us instinctively associate Jones with his Marshal Gerard from The Fugitive. Ultimately, though, we buy into Hank’s detective smarts because we buy into Hank. Jones rarely raises his voice in this movie, yet he plays Hank as a man so determined to prevail that we know he won’t be stopped.

And he isn’t. Over the course of the film, Hank learns what happened to his son. More importantly, he gets a feeling for why things happened. In Elah, there are no clear-cut good guys and bad guys (even the victimizers are victims), which will feel refreshingly astute to most of us even as it drives right-wing spin doctors up the wall. In the Fox News camp, remember, opposing the war in Iraq means “not supporting the troops,” even though many of us would love to see our military out of Iraq just to get the troops out of harm’s way. To guys like Bill O’Reilly, Haggis’ anti-war film depicting military members committing a crime (based on a true story, though it is) is anti-soldier too. In actuality, it’s the opposite.

In addition to its whodunit hook, Elah is a meditation on the debilitating effects of the horrors of war. It could be any war, understand – moral or not, popular or not. Iraq is the battleground in question because (beyond remaining faithful to the real-life source material) that’s where we are currently engaged and have been since March 2003. As of November 2006, the Iraq War has gone on longer than U.S. involvement in World War II, which means it’s become a pretty vibrant piece of patchwork on the quilt of American history. With that established, Haggis has every right to use Iraq as a thread of his story’s fabric, and he can do so without being anti-Iraq or anti-soldier. In fact, he can do so without being political at all.

That’s pretty much what he’s done here. In Elah, war itself is demonized for the casualties it produces that stretch beyond the official statistics of dead and wounded, but the so-called War on Terror is ignored. Right-wingers will deride it for a perceived anti-military bent while left-wingers will bash Elah for not being political enough, and for instead telling us what we already know, that “war is hell” and blah, blah, blah. Much as I loath O’Reilly, it’s this latter angle of attack that offends me most, because it implies that filmmakers can’t approach controversial topics without having a partisan bloodlust. There might not be any “new” lessons to be learned from Elah, but it’s an original nonetheless, telling the story of one man’s journey through loss, pain and disenchantment. It never requires that Hank’s conclusions match our own.

Still, if folks come to the movie expecting to see a boldface message, it’s Haggis’ own fault. Crash, the previous movie for which Haggis served as both writer and director, is adored by many, but it’s widely loathed, too, by some who find it too didactic to bear. And that’s not to forget that Haggis also wrote Million Dollar Baby, which has all the subtlety of a jackhammer. Make no mistake, Haggis isn’t as outspoken as Oliver Stone, but he’s proven himself more than willing to beat us over the head with a life lesson.

Which bring us to the movie’s final scene involving an American flag. Viewed in the context of Haggis’ resume, it’s offensively moralizing, and with Annie Lennox singing in the background (an ill-advised decision perhaps related to the new rule requiring that songs be used within a movie itself in order to be Oscar-eligible) it’s sappy to boot. My contention is that Haggis is attempting to reflect his main character’s emotions here, not an entire nation’s. But there’s too much room for doubt. Either way, Hank, like his son, deserved a more honorable fate.

[“Queue It Up” is a series of sporadic recommendations of often overlooked movies for your Netflix queue.]

Queue It Up: Half Nelson

[The Class and Half Nelson are stories about struggling teachers. That’s where their similarities end. The Cooler offers the following review, written upon the film’s release in the author’s pre-blog era.]

“One thing doesn’t make a man.” That’s what Dan Dunne, a teacher and basketball coach at a Brooklyn middle school, says one night to Drey, one of his students and players. A short while ago, Dan was ejected from a game for arguing with an official, but that isn’t what he’s referring to. The incident on Dan’s mind happened several weeks ago, when Drey found her teacher in the women’s bathroom getting high – a crack pipe in his hand, a dazed look on his face. At the time Dan and Drey exchanged apologies and pretended not to notice the elephant in the room as it stomped around them. But now, in the silence of the car, the elephant begins to trumpet words unsaid, and Dan can’t ignore it any longer. As he searches for the words to express how he feels, it’s difficult to tell whether Dan is attempting to justify his previous behavior to Drey or to himself. Probably both.

This is Half Nelson, a wonderful film by newcomers Ryan Fleck and Anne Boden that takes a hotshot young white teacher, Ryan Gosling’s Dan, and a tough black student, Shareeka Epps’ Drey, and pits them against one another in a battle of wills. If that overview makes Half Nelson sound like too many other schoolhouse dramas you’ve seen before, rest assured that it isn’t. This isn’t Dangerous Minds or Stand And Deliver. This isn’t the story of a dedicated teacher who turns slackers into scholars. Dan is often motivated, but there’s no evidence to suggest that he’s an outstanding instructor. Straying from the school curriculum, he attempts to teach dialectics to eighth-graders who would struggle just to spell it. In the students’ blank expressions we can see that they don’t quite understand, and yet Dan’s energy piques their curiosity. They can tell he cares, and so they sit quietly and listen.

Drey is among these taciturn souls. She is average. At least, she seems to be. If Drey is especially gifted in class or on the basketball court, the movie never reveals it. Her unlikely friendship with Dan is the product of chance (the bathroom incident) and a broken home. Drey’s father is absent. Her brother is in jail for dealing drugs. Her mom works long hours as an EMT. That’s why Drey is drifting through the school that night when the other girls have gone home. She has nowhere to go, and no one to help her get there. Dan can relate. His addiction renders him equally alone and adrift. Dan and Drey are two people who never knew how much they needed a friend until they got one.

Their relationship takes on the tenets of dialectics. Dan and Drey are opposites, pushing against one another. Dan is supposed to be the leader, the guiding light, order among chaos, but his addiction neuters his ability to be a role model. Drey, who is being looked after by her brother’s drug-dealing friend Frank (Anthony Mackie), is supposed to be the one perilously on the edge, desperately in need of help, and yet she’s as grounded as a rock. Pushing against one another – by what they stand for more so than what they say – their friendship leads to turning points: the night Drey questions Dan at his apartment; the night Dan objects to Frank taking Drey home; and other moments I won’t reveal. Slowly their lives change, not in circles but in spirals. The question is: are Dan and Drey spiraling upward or down?

Half Nelson isn’t something you’d categorize as a “surprising” movie, but you never know where it’s going. It’s positively alive, moving in a direction but without direction. The cinematography, consisting largely of close-ups, features a camera that is often on the move, occasionally losing focus to illustrate Dan’s turbulent mental state. Twice the film employs parallel editing to tremendous effect. First, when Dan has dinner with a fellow teacher (Monique Curnen’s Isabel) while Drey digs into her mother’s cosmetics to explore her femininity. Later, when Dan’s wine-chugging upper-class family demonstrates the ills of substance abuse while Drey, fast becoming Frank’s apprentice, explores the gains.

This film doesn’t glorify substance abuse, nor does it vilify its victims. In one of the film’s most poignant scenes, Dan meets his ex-girlfriend in a park. Back when they dated, they used drugs together. Now she’s clean and moving on with her life. In his ex, Dan sees someone he loves and used to be close with. He also sees someone he can no longer understand. Like his ex, Dan has tried rehab, but it doesn’t work for him. At least, that’s what he tells himself. When you’re an addict, excuses are everywhere, and Dan is all too eager to buy into his illusions. The only time he struggles to validate his habit is around Drey. Leading her to drugs would be as inconceivable to Dan as giving them up himself.

Such honesty of character is the Half Nelson’s beauty – owed to brilliant performances from Gosling, Epps and Mackie. This picture serves as my introduction to Gosling, and the experience of watching him was akin to an awakening, reminding me of the first time I saw Russell Crowe in L.A. Confidential. Gosling is nothing short of mesmerizing. He doesn’t chew the scenery, he is the scenery. Introverted or extroverted, Gosling’s Dan overwhelms us with this presence. It’s a cliché to say that a stunning new actor reminds of a young Marlon Brando, but here it’s true. As with Brando’s Terry Malloy in On The Waterfront, it’s as if I can a hear Dan thinking – as if a narrator were whispering voice-over monologues into my ear.

Epps’ performance doesn’t have the complexity of Gosling’s, but it’s similarly satisfying and unforced. Take note of the ease with which Drey breaks from her trademark scowl into a blinding smile. Then ask yourself: Which of those expressions is “acting”? Epps’ Drey comes off like a real schoolgirl who had a movie constructed around her. In such a fantasy, Frank would be the heavy, unequivocally evil. Instead, Mackie brings so much compassion to his performance that we can never quite vilify him. Frank is the stranger on the street corner looking at you with a gentle smile: we can’t tell whether he’s sinister or a softie. Maybe he can’t either.

Half Nelson’s final scene is a bit ambiguous, and for some it might seem downright incongruous. But I found it to be precise and fulfilling. Once again, Dan and Drey sit in the silence, this time at opposite ends of a couch, looking for the right words to bridge the gap. The message of this scene isn’t that things will change, it’s that things go on. Life keeps spiraling. Dan and Drey have encountered turning points. They have acted as one another’s opposing force. Maybe now they can just be friends.

[“Queue It Up” is a series of sporadic recommendations of often overlooked movies for your Netflix queue.]

Queue It Up: Sunshine

[In the aftermath of the Oscar romp by Slumdog Millionaire, The Cooler offers the following review of Danny Boyle’s previous film, written upon the film’s release in the author’s pre-blog era.]

Danny Boyle’s Sunshine puts the science back in science fiction. That’s not to say that this movie about a team of astronauts on a mission to jump-start the sun is realistic. It’s just to note that the movie has a kinda-sorta plausibility about it, which is to say that it doesn’t include aliens, droids, or robots that transform into cars. Thank goodness. Space in its pure form is still a playground of dramatic possibility. It needs no embellishment. By looking up to the heavens and taking what our solar system has to provide, Boyle and screenwriter Alex Garland have created a wonderfully engrossing adventure that thrives on the credibility and tangibility of its not-quite-out-of-this-world setting.

For so many sci-fi movies, “space” is just another way of saying “magic land.” Setting a story in some far off galaxy, in some distant age, gives filmmakers a blank check to create their own rules. Han Solo famously told Luke Skywalker that “traveling through hyperspace ain’t like dusting crops,” but in the movies space adventuring is usually much easier than that – about as difficult as mowing the lawn. Yet in Sunshine, set only 50 years in our future, some present-day laws of physics still apply. Rather than blasting from planet to planet at light-speed, this story’s sun-bound voyage is one in which length is defined by years and in which navigating space requires consideration of the gravitational pull of other planets. In this respect, Sunshine is remarkably more like Apollo 13 than Star Wars.

Make no mistake, Sunshine has some Jetsons qualities, too. Traveling in a mushroom-shaped spacecraft called Icarus 2 – a curious name that suggests either a future ignorance of Greek mythology or a stunning lack of faith in the mission – our crew of eight is mothered by an all-knowing voice that is the female equivalent of HAL 9000. More than just the ninth crewmember, the computer brain of Icarus 2 can measure how much oxygen the crew is using, provide the location of each astronaut onboard and take outright control of the ship if the humans do anything that might threaten the mission. All of which is enough to make you wonder why Icarus 2 needs a crew in the first place.

To fuck things up, of course! That’s what humans do best. This crew better than most. Charged with delivering to the sun a Manhattan-sized bomb that might reignite the fading star, Icarus 2’s astronauts hold in their hands mankind’s fate, but not necessarily its confidence. Palpable in Sunshine is the sense that this operation is considered impossible, futile and fatal. (There was an Icarus 1, after all, and it disappeared without a trace.) So instead of sending the best and the brightest, Earth appears to have sent a ragtag group more befitting a suicide mission. Oh, the Icarus 2 crew is capable. Rose Byrne is the pilot, Cassie. Michelle Yeoh is the horticulturalist, Corazon, tending to lush garden (one of the film’s many triumphs in art direction) that provides food and oxygen. Cliff Curtis is the shrink, Searle, whose fascination with the sun suggests the he’ll be the first one in need of therapy. Etcetera. And somehow Cillian Murphy’s Capa is the only one who knows how to deliver the “payload,” the explosive package upon which the entire mission is based. Cross-training, it seems, was never considered.

Or maybe someone figured Capa needed company on the trip. Regardless, with that many rather useless souls gathered together, it’s only a matter of time before Icarus 2 finds trouble, even if trouble wasn’t out to find it. And, sure enough, that’s what happens. With one faulty human decision that demonstrates a stunning lack of priority, Icarus 2 wanders from its course and the carefully scripted mission turns into a deadly improv. Predictable? Yeah. Professionally indefensible? Of course. Unrealistic? Certainly. Entertaining? You bet your ass!

That’s the thing about Sunshine. You can poke holes into it all day. But many of the film’s less probable moments stand out only because some much of the action rings true. It starts with the ship: basic metal corridors on the interior, a giant power-conducting sunshield on the outside made up of numerous plates that can be adjusted to provide maximum protection (when three of these panels are damaged, evoking memories of the Space Shuttle Columbia tragedy, we know it means trouble). Icarus 2 is at once basic enough to seem functional in the here-and-now and fantastic enough to convince us that it could accomplish this unparalleled mission. Meanwhile, what the crew lacks in universal knowledge it makes up for with conviction. This octet might not be the one you’d choose to save the world, yet you’ll never doubt the enormity of their assignment. The Icarus 2 must complete its mission … or else!

Over the last hour of this 108-minute film, that “or else” – that feeling of consequence – reigns supreme. What begins as a rather cerebral science-fiction film, in the mold of 2001: A Space Odyssey or Solaris, morphs into one of the most mesmerizing, pulse-pounding movies of the year. The tonal shift is so gradual that it initially goes unnoticed, though the mounting intensity of the outstanding score gives us a clue. By the end, Sunshine reaches into full-throttle, going so far as to adopt some horror techniques with a shocking twist that thrills with its arrival but does little to impress after that. If I had a vote, Boyle and Garland would have wrapped their story differently, but I can’t complain too much. For me, Sunshine was literally a gripping experience: I spent the latter half of the film clenching a fistful of my T-shirt without even realizing it.

Danger is magnified in space. In many respects, Sunshine reminds of James Cameron’s equally claustrophobic underwater adventure The Abyss, which also features a determined and resourceful crew operating in an environment in which the smallest mistake could lead to death. Few films are so effortlessly bound by such ominous peril. Blockbusters like this year’s Transformers spend millions on thrills alone but aren’t half this affecting. Sunshine has rich visuals and impressively realistic CGI, but it’s the plot that dazzles. Crammed with suspense and action, Boyle’s film delivers the most out-of-this-world adventure of the summer because it sticks to the world we know. A world that by itself has the capacity to fill us with awe.

[“Queue It Up” is a series of sporadic recommendations of often overlooked movies for your Netflix queue.]

Queue It Up: Brick

[For no timely reason whatsoever, The Cooler offers the following review, written upon the film’s release in the author’s pre-blog era.]

One of the cleverest films in years begins with the dead body of a teenage girl lying in an irrigation ditch. Her ex-boyfriend crouches beside the corpse, taking in the scene. And if this were most movies, what would come next would be a cell phone call to the police and the unrolling of a lot of yellow tape. But this isn’t most movies, not by a long shot. This is Brick, the feature film debut of writer/director Rian Johnson. And so, without thinking twice, the ex-boyfriend picks up the body and hides it. Not because he’s trying to cover up the girl’s death. Because he’s trying to solve it.

The ex-boyfriend is Brendan. Played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt, he has moppish hair that falls over the top of his glasses and he wears a white T-shirt that’s often covered up by an equally featureless gray jacket. Brendan appears completely unremarkable, but look closer and you’ll notice that he casts a shadow reminiscent of guys like Sam Spade and Jake Gittes. Guys who have tight hairdos topped by fedoras. Guys with crisp clean suits and rough knuckles. Guys with a cigarette ever-dangling from their lips. Cool guys.

The difference is that Spade and Gittes operated in the 1930s, an era in which we imagine that all gumshoes walked and talked like Humphrey Bogart. Brendan is a typical teen in the concrete jungle of modern day Southern California. In such an unromantic time and place, we hardly expect Brendan to finish his sentences, let alone keep from punctuating every other fragment with the word “dude.” Yet Brendan fires off paragraphs of dialogue with the speed and pop of a machine gun, just like fast-talking Sam Spade. And he mixes it up with hoodlums just like Spade. And he draws dangerous women to him just like Spade. And all of a sudden it hits us that he is Sam Spade, or at least what Sam Spade would have been as a 21st Century teenager in San Clemente, Calif.

Don’t misread this. This isn’t a movie where Gordon-Levitt hams it up with silly Bogart impressions. Not at all. Instead, Gordon-Levitt becomes Bogart. And it makes sense that Brendan should live and breathe this film noir existence, because he’s surrounded by characters who drink from the same punch bowl. His nerdy friend with the knowledge and the plastic-rimmed glasses is “The Brain” (Matt O’Leary). The twentysomething drug dealer who might be behind the death of the girl in the ditch is “The Pin” (Lukas Haas). And there’s a heavy named Tug (Noah Fleiss), a shifty outsider named Dode (Noah Segan), a femme fatale named Laura (Nora Zehetner) and of course the dead girl – who comes alive in flashbacks as the damsel in distress – named Emily (Emilie de Ravin).

All of these characters are played with complete conviction, which is a tribute to the actors and to Johnson, who led his pledges through this tricky terrain. Brick operates at the very edge of credibility. One false step and Brendan isn’t the teenage incarnation of Sam Spade, he’s a teen actor mimicking Spade like a prep student playing dress-up for the high school play. The latter is fine and good, but this is shrewd. Drama teachers everywhere will leave this movie with bruised shins from kicking themselves for not coming up with this idea first, because at no time do these teens stop being teens. To the contrary, they exist in a world where all these iconic film noir theatrics are perfectly normal. Just like singing and dancing is natural to West Side Story. Just like iambic pentameter is natural to Romeo & Juliet.

And it works. Oh, how it works! One of the wittiest scenes takes place between Brendan and the assistant vice principal, played by Richard Roundtree. The assistant VP knows that Brendan is involved in something unseemly, and that he’s working out of bounds of the law (school and city). So in the real world Brendan would be suspended on the spot. But in this film noir translation, Brendan is the private dick laughing at empty threats from a lame duck police chief who knows he’s better off with a contact in the underworld rather than behind bars. Thus Brendan takes control of the meeting and tells the assistant VP how things are going to break down. Then leaves his interrogation before he’s dismissed – the old “either arrest me or watch me walk out of here” bit – topped with a “See you at the parent-teacher conference.”

Such references to actual teenage life are few – because do you imagine that Sam Spade did all his homework and ran home to mommy when he was 16? – but they are bright. Notes are slipped into lockers instead of office-door mail slots. Brendan can’t be tracked down at his favorite bar, but everyone knows that he eats lunch behind the school. And The Pin still lives at home with his mom, who doesn’t seem to have a clue that drugs and thugs go in and out her front door. This isn’t average high school life, clearly. But it’s closer to authentic than Jerry Bruckheimer ever gets.

The mystery of Emily’s death injects the film with consistent urgency. Brendan won’t stop until he finds out what happened to his old flame, and to solve the crime he’ll have to take significant risks. But the dense layering of the plot is only a fraction of the fun. Most of the enjoyment comes from watching Brick play with its form, and from picking out its influences. The Sam Spade spirit obviously reminds of The Maltese Falcon and crime writer Dashiell Hammett in general. Meanwhile, the setting evokes Chinatown, as do significant portions of the score and the fact that Brendan finds a body in an irrigation ditch and spends part of the film with a wounded nose.

Johnson adds some visual treats as well, highlighted by a scene in which Brendan reflects light off a mirror to examine the contents of a dark basement. But the dialogue is the brightest star. The film is 110 minutes long and it throbs with words, words, words. Sadly, some of them go by too quickly for our ears and brain to register, but no bother. You don’t go to the symphony to hear individual notes. You go to be moved by the crescendo. Brick plays songs we know by heart with such youthful sincerity that they feel new again.

[“Queue It Up” is a series of sporadic recommendations of often overlooked movies for your Netflix queue.]

Queue It Up: The Fountain

[In anticipation of Darren Aronofsky’s The Wrestler, The Cooler offers the following review, written upon the film’s release in the author’s pre-blog era.]

In the 16th Century a Spanish conquistador in the jungles of Guatemala climbs the precipitous steps of a Mayan temple. In the 21st Century a doctor throws himself into radical medical research that he hopes will save his dying wife. In the 26th Century a celestial explorer ascends toward the heavens in a bubble protecting a withered tree. And in the present we try to make sense of it all.

The Fountain, the third film by Darren Aronofsky, is a paradox. It’s a film that spans a millennium and yet exists always in the present. It’s a movie that unfolds over three continents, and in outer space, that almost never leaves the soundstage. It’s a story of losing love and finding it – of tragedy and triumph – that’s epic and yet elemental. And even though the tale’s three stanzas often lack literal coherence, the mood of this cinematic poem is never in doubt.

I’ve seen the movie twice now and I’m crazy about it, though let me caution you from the beginning: it isn’t for everyone. While I left the theater with goose bumps of excitement, I was also keenly aware of the deep loathing of others in the audience. It was palpable. And understandably so, I guess, because most filmmakers today wouldn’t be so audacious with material that is so rudimentary at its base. The Fountain is like an extensive scavenger hunt leading to a bouquet of roses, and some audience members will leave the movie like disappointed wannabe brides who would rather have been delivered greater goods for significantly less effort (“Just get down on your knee and give me a ring, dammit!”).

But for me and others – because I think this film will have some passionate devotees – that’s the beauty of The Fountain. Through its twists, turns and daring leaps, it restores the extravagance of issues and emotions that are too often oversimplified in movies: life, death, love and eternity. It is, I’m confident in saying, the most romantic film of 2006. And it makes me recall 2002, when I had the same feeling about Steven Soderbergh’s Solaris – another movie that alienated many moviegoers unable to embrace romantic themes in a science fiction setting.

This time there’s some irony to that (and since there’s pleasure to be found in cracking this movie’s code, it’s time I issue a serious spoiler warning for the rest of this paragraph). The Fountain, ultimately, is about how reality is shaped by perception. The trunk of the movie’s narrative tree is the 21st Century tale of Dr. Tommy Creo and his tumor-afflicted wife Izzi. The tales unfolding 500 years before and after are the branches, stretching out on their own but existing only because of the trunk. The yarn of Tomas the Conquistador, sent halfway across the world by Spain’s Queen Isabel to find the Tree of Life, is one dreamt up by Izzi in the present as a way to rationalize why her husband spends more time in a lab searching for an unlikely cure than at home with her in their final earthy days together. Meanwhile, the episode in 26th Century space is concocted by Tommy to grapple with what it means to lose his beloved.

The male leads are played by Hugh Jackman: Tomas, the bearded and weathered conquistador; Tommy, the scruffy and determined doctor; and Tom, the entirely clean-shaven cosmos-politan. Rachel Weisz plays his love: Isabel, the extravagantly gowned queen in the past; and Izzi, the ailing writer in the present who also appears as a vision to Tom in the future. The duo’s acting is committed. Jackman sporadically slips into melodrama in the present-day chapter, but he nicely captures the insatiable determination of Tommy’s three incarnations, and Weisz is alluring throughout, giving a performance even more heartfelt than her Oscar-winning turn from The Constant Gardener.

Aronofsky, Weisz’s real-life mate, hardly made it easy on his actors. Though the writer/director is a master of visual verse, his dialogue has the grace of a drunken goose. When Weisz is in control of the language we hardly notice, but when Ellen Burstyn, as Tommy’s boss, is handed the jackass’s share of hackneyed lines (calling her breaking-the-rules doctor “reckless” and all but threatening to make him turn in is stethoscope, for example), it’s enough to make you hide your eyes.

But picking at the dialogue seems petty considering the degree to which The Fountain functions without words. Providing far more truth than any verbal discourse is a positively outstanding score by Clint Mansell – performed by the Kronos Quartet (three violins and a cello) and Mogwai (piano, guitar, bass and drums) – that propels us onward, onward, onward to echo Tommy’s unrelenting quest to save his wife by whatever means necessary. If after the movie’s first 30 minutes you were to shut your eyes and just listen to the music, you might follow the story with greater ease.

But don’t be so foolish. To close you eyes would be to miss out on the lyrical visuals of a director who’d better not wait six more years to release his next movie. Save an exterior shot in a snowy field, it doesn’t appear that Aronofsky ever left the Warner Bros. backlot to make this galaxy-trotting picture. But he didn’t need to. Just like the Wizard of Oz was meant to unfold in fishbowl-esque pseudo-reality, The Fountain belongs in its plastic-makes-perfect world. The Mayan ruins have the fantasy qualities of a Disneyland ride, and the futuristic bubble looks like a neglected arboretum. The sets feel as if they were stitched together from threads of dreams, which is precisely right.

But for those who find it difficult to ping-pong between Aronofsky’s worlds of light and dark, this experience will be a nightmare. Jumping forward and backward in time and moving in and out of reality, The Fountain takes the long road to find its little peace of mind. Yet it could be no other way. For a film about the courage required to make a leap of faith, it’s only appropriate that a conquistador’s spirit is required. Amidst the vast cinema landscape of been-there, done-thats, this movie springs up majestically like a temple in dense rainforests – incongruous but grand. To achieve its nirvana you’ll have to trust, let go and move toward the light. So do so. Behold!

[“Queue It Up” is a series of sporadic recommendations of often overlooked movies for your Netflix queue.]

Queue It Up: Conversations With Other Women

[In celebration of a favorite film femme, The Cooler offers the following review, written upon the film’s release in the author’s pre-blog era.]

He sidles up to her with the too-charming-to-be-trustworthy swagger that is fast becoming Aaron Eckhart’s trademark. She takes him in with the dark, haunting eyes that could only belong to Helena Bonham Carter. He advances relentlessly, like a guy who knows that bridesmaids are supposed to be easy targets. She plays defense effortlessly, like a woman who has been a bridesmaid before. He sees her almost-40 figure for the twentysomething she used to be. She sees both of them for what they are: too old for this sort of thing.

In Conversations With Other Women the Man and Woman characters – we never learn their names – meet again and for the first time. Instantly they recognize one another’s type, and soon we learn that they might know each other even better than that. But there are rituals to be followed, a certain level of etiquette to be respected. And so even if they know immediately that they will go to bed together – attending a wedding reception in the banquet hall of a New York hotel they are tantalizingly close to so many empty rooms – they dance the dance. Quickly we realize that it isn’t the horizontal mambo they’re craving, it’s the waltz.

With a running time of 84 minutes, Conversations unfolds more or less in real time over the course of one late night. Written by Gabrielle Zevin, the screenplay is almost nothing but talk and reminds of the Richard Linklater films Before Sunrise and Before Sunset, encapsulating a full relationship from birth to death in a matter of hours. Yet these characters are more pragmatic than the philosophizing, love-drunk pair played so touchingly by Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy. They are jaded, a bit cynical and experienced enough to know that the excitement they feel in one another’s presence will go flat along with the champagne bubbles.

The bond that they share is merely illusionary. Then again, what is love without magic, and what is magic without illusion? In a pair of marvelous performances Eckhart and Bonham Carter defy what should be possible. Their characters are entirely foreign to one another and yet as close as family at the same time. Zevin’s script provides a treasure trove of superb dialogue, but it’s the actors who make the lines sparkle like polished gemstones. This is as confidently-acted a film as you’ll come across, starring a pair of veterans who are wound up and then unleashed to fantastic results.

Seeing Bonham Carter on the screen is a joy. The actress appears in at least a movie a year but recently she’s been obscured by heavy makeup and hideous wigs in the films of her director husband Tim Burton. In Planet Of The Apes, Bonham Carter made for a surprisingly sexy simian, but this is so much better. Here she seems nothing but human: her lower eyelids a little wrinkly, her hair done up and yet a bit disheveled, her abdominals hidden by a beautiful bit of tummy. Tucked into her pink dress Bonham Carter is a stunning almost-40 bridesmaid, though you get the sense that her character isn’t just waxing poetic when she notes that “the illusion of effortlessness takes quite a bit of effort indeed.”

At the other end of the spectrum, Eckhart makes it look all too easy. His turn might be just as good as Bonham Carter’s, but his performance is so relaxed that it doesn’t feel like acting. More like playing. Armed with a politician’s smile and a schoolboy’s charm it’s as if he’s always a moment away from trying to sell us something. And though he’s dressed sharply in a suit, he’s as relaxed as if in pajamas – so comfortable that it’s difficult to imagine him wearing anything else.

While Bonham Carter’s character drags her heels to make her pursuer work for his spoils, Eckhart glides an inch above the floor, unaffected by gravity. Recognizing the brilliance of these heartfelt performances is easy, but enjoying them requires that we adapt to their unusual presentation: Director Hans Canosa lets the entire film play out in split-screen, Eckhart in one frame, Bonham Carter in the other, even when they’re so close together that the frames overlap. The result is what I imagine the world looks like to those lizards with independently moving eyes, and it takes some getting used to, especially because in early scenes Canosa doesn’t balk at having other wedding attendees walk across each frame.

In the end though, it works. I wouldn’t go so far as to call it a brilliant technique, but the technique is brilliantly applied. Sometimes one of the images is used to show a character’s memories. Other times it’s used to portray a character’s hopes and desires. But mostly the split-screen reminds us that the two characters come to each other with walls built around them. Getting physically close is easy. But truly letting someone else in? That’s much harder.

(Spoiler warning) It’s no accident then that the one scene where the line between Eckhart and Bonham Carter essentially disappears comes just after their characters part ways. Riding away from one another in their own taxis, the split-screen images are lined up so perfectly that Eckhart and Bonham Carter appear to be in the back of the same cab. The message is clear: for the first time this night and morning the man and woman are truly experiencing the same emotion. For the first time they are free to drop their fortifications. But all too late.

Could Conversations work without split-screen? Most definitely. The writing and the performances would impress regardless. But the atypical approach provides more than a break from the norm. By underlining the distance between the two characters, the chasm becomes a character in itself. It reminded me of standing at the south rim of the Grand Canyon and gazing toward a north rim: close enough to see, but a long, difficult journey to reach. The things keeping these two characters apart are just as daunting. But that doesn’t stop them from enjoying the view.

[“Queue It Up” is a series of sporadic recommendations of often overlooked movies for your Netflix queue.]

Queue It Up: The Road To Guantanamo

[In contribution to Politics & Movies Blog-a-thon, The Cooler offers the following review, written upon the film’s release in the author’s pre-blog era.]

"Son, we live in a world that has walls, and those walls have to be guarded by men with guns. Who’s gonna do it? You? You, Lt. Weinburg? I have a greater responsibility than you could possibly fathom. You weep for Santiago, and you curse the Marines. You have that luxury. You have the luxury of not knowing what I know – that Santiago's death, while tragic, probably saved lives. And my existence, while grotesque and incomprehensible to you, saves lives. You don't want the truth because deep down in places you don't talk about at parties, you want me on that wall, you need me on that wall." – Col. Jessep, A Few Good Men

The thing I’ve always appreciated about Aaron Sorkin’s A Few Good Men is that it refuses to pretend we live in a world where every problem has an easy answer. After watching the movie, all of us would hopefully agree that the killing of Pvt. William Santiago in a hazing ritual gone wrong is indefensible by any interpretation. But that doesn’t change the fact that, in a wider view, the crazed Col. Jessep has it right. Our world has walls. And until peace, love and understanding sweep the globe, those walls need to be guarded. By people (men or women) with guns. By unflinching people. By people willing to do the grotesque and incomprehensible. To save lives.

I kept that in mind as I watched Michael Winterbottom’s docu-drama The Road To Guantanamo, which tells the true story of three British Muslims who were imprisoned, harassed and – depending on your definition – tortured for more than two years for a crime that amounts to being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Not all of the trio’s mistreatment came at the hands of our military. Nor was it entirely unjustified. But the story of Ruhal Ahmed, Asif Iqbal and Shafiq Rasul, often called the Tipton Three in reference to the area of England from which they hailed, is eye-opening. And upon hearing their tale in this measured and unsettling film, the luxury of ignorance is lost.

Told through dramatic reenactments and authentic interviews with the Tipton Three – a style reminiscent of the mountain-climbing film Touching The Void – Guantanamo begins with the three friends gathering in Pakistan to celebrate Iqbal’s forthcoming arranged marriage. It is October 2001, in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of September 11, and tensions are mounting in neighboring Afghanistan, where American retaliatory strikes are looming. Knowing this, the Tipton Three, and a fourth man who wouldn’t live to tell his version of the events, decide to cross the border into Afghanistan.

Their motivation is unclear. Implications are made that they want to capitalize on the favorable exchange rate to provide aid to innocent Afghans. More than anything, thogh, these four men – ranging at the time from 20 to 24 – seem hungry for adventure, like frat boys on spring break. Yet their decision to go into Afghanistan is as short-sighted as it is ill-advised. By walking into a war zone, the men not only put themselves in harm’s way, but in the aftermath provide an angle of attack for anyone intent on incriminating them in a not-entirely-wild conspiracy theory.

If you believe the trio’s story, you sense their ignorance. The men go from Kandahar to Kabul and wind up by mistake in Kunduz, where Allied Forces capture them with fleeing Taliban fighters. By that point, the group of four vigorous friends has been reduced to three shattered souls lucky to have survived a long night of shelling that introduced them to the wail of pain and the stench of blood. The worst is still to come, starting with a heinous journey in a tractor-trailer that causes dozens to die from suffocation, heat exhaustion or, when the conscientious soldiers create air holes in the metal container, machinegun fire.

After making it through that ordeal, the men are relieved to be turned over to U.S. Marines, and they presume their release is imminent. But the story is still beginning. First at a detention camp in Kandahar and then at Camps Delta and X-Ray in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, the men are imprisoned for 26 months despite a lack of official charges. In that span they are shaved, cavity searched, forced to squat in uncomfortable positions, woken every hour for headcounts, held in solitary confinement, blindfolded, demeaned and beaten. Oh, and questioned. Over and over again, for hours at a time, they are questioned.

Is anyone surprised? Or, perhaps more importantly, are we offended? Keep in mind the time and place this unfolds. Keep in mind the absurdity of the idea that a group of friends would travel into a war zone in essence for the fun of it. Keep in mind that these are just three possible links to al Qaeda that must be investigated. Is it still too unconscionable for you? Would it help to imagine the year as 1944 and these men as Nazi POWs? Might you then be willing to agree that not everyone deserves a mint on their pillow, or even a pillow?

Point is, there is a degree to which we must give a nod to Col. Jessep. We might find it grotesque and beneath the lowest level of human decency to force men to defecate on themselves while squatting for the entire length of a 22-hour flight. But can’t we agree that what happened at the World Trade Center was worse? Can’t we agree that our very freedom to be repulsed by the actions of our military is protected by those willing to do the repugnant?

I make all those arguments in defense of the unsettling, to prove that I recognize at least its potential purpose, and to try and convince you that I’ve considered all the angles when saying the following: There are things that happen to the Tipton Three at the hands of their U.S. captors that are entirely indefensible. I’m thinking specifically of instances well into the men’s detention when interrogators insist that they have documents proving the men’s allegiance to the Taliban, even though they don’t; or when they insist that they have video showing the men at an al Qaeda rally, even though they don’t; or when they insist that they are positive the men are allied with the Taliban, even though by that point the opposite is obvious.

Why do the interrogators do this? It can’t be to protect Americans, because once it becomes clear that the men aren't a threat, it’s a waste of time and thus a disservice to citizens in need of protection to continue to berate the innocent. Thus the only possible motivation for bullying men into knowingly false confessions is to avoid admitting a mistake, to save face, to validate questionable behavior. How spineless! How unforgivable! How immoral!

The movie doesn’t mention this, but then-Secretary of State Colin Powell said of Guantanamo Bay and the issue of the Geneva Conventions, “Because we are Americans, we do not abuse people who are in our care.” Interesting. So what does it mean then when Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld says, in news footage replayed in the movie, that Guantanamo Bay follows the Geneva Conventions “for the most part”? Am I to assume there are multiple acceptable interpretations? Am I to assume that our government would be content with other nations treating American POWs according to the rules only “for the most part”?

All of these issues have nothing and everything to do with the film itself. Nothing in the sense that Road To Guantanamo brings forth no wild theories about the Tipton Three or Guantanamo Bay (to my knowledge, no part of the Tipton Three’s story has been refuted, and much of it has been substantiated by authoritative sources). Everything in the sense that Winterbottom’s film isn’t something one could or should casually dismiss. Working with Mat Whitecross, Winterbottom constructs a spellbinding re-creation of the Tipton Three’s grueling journey from Pakistan through Afghanistan to Cuba. But by incorporating the talking-heads approach, the filmmakers demonstrate that while they want you to feel the experience of the subjects, above all they want you to acknowledge the story’s reality.

Part of that reality is this: No matter how unpleasant or unreasonable their treatment, the Tipton Three are lucky. At least they got out. As of the film’s release in July 2006, there are approximately 480 detainees at Guantanamo Bay, only 10 of which have been charged before military commissions. The rest sit and wait, presumably answering the same old questions, as U.S. interrogators look not for admissions of guilt but confessions of despair. Days before the Tipton Three were released in March 2004, the FBI, in utter desperation, tried one last time to coerce the men into signing documents falsely proclaiming their allegiance to al Qaeda.

What does that do for your patriotism? Like the fictional A Few Good Men, Winterbottom’s film doesn’t suggest there’s an easy answer to Guantanamo Bay, but the picture makes a point: When it comes to the protection of this country there are some truths we avoid because it’s easier that way and there are others kept hidden from us because they have no justification. In times like these, it would be easy to foist the blame on the military. But we shouldn’t do that until we’ve looked at the situation honestly and figured out exactly where we stand and where the line should be drawn. Guantanamo gets that conversation started.

[“Queue It Up” is a series of sporadic recommendations of often overlooked movies for your Netflix queue.]

Queue It Up: The Descent

[Queue It Up is supposed to be for mostly overlooked films. I’m not sure this one classifies. And then again it does, because I nearly overlooked it myself. The blood-and-guts genre just ain’t my tub of popcorn. That said, horror fans are likely to tell me that this movie isn’t horror at all, and maybe that’s the point. Perhaps this is a bridge film. In any case, it went down as one of my top five films of 2006. In celebration of Halloween, The Cooler offers the following review, written upon the film’s release in the author’s pre-blog era.]

When you grow up on the West Coast like I did, you tend to view the 2,000-plus-mile Appalachian Range as a parade of cute, wee bluffs. Out toward the Pacific, we have the mighty Rocky Mountains, not to mention the slighter yet striking Cascade and Sierra Nevada ranges. By comparison, the Appalachians aren’t just underwhelming, they’re, well, a bit sissy – the one series of undulations in a landscape so otherwise flat that without them someone standing on the hood of their car in New York could see all the way to Kansas.

That’s why I couldn’t help but elicit a tiny, politically-incorrect chuckle as I realized that The Descent’s all-girl fright-fest would unfold within the belly of America’s weak little sister of a mountain range; all too appropriate, I thought, for a movie void of men. But the joke, it turns out, was on me. Stuffed with action and bathed in blood, The Descent may be full of sisters, but it’s neither weak nor little. Instead it’s gory and ghastly and second to none. It’s also so packed with girl power that it made me think I might need an intravenous drip of estrogen just to survive it.

Lest I be misunderstood, I mean that as a compliment. The Descent tells the story of six female friends who gather together on the one-year anniversary of a tragedy to bond on a spelunking expedition in a remote part of Appalachia (so remote that it has a nearby cabin and a clearly well-used road, but never mind). They are led by the gung-ho Juno (Natalie Mendoza), who believes in safety but not maps, and Rebecca (Saskia Mulder), an expert climber who does everything by the book. The rest of the girls aren’t quite so practiced, but they’re hardly novices. They strap into their harnesses and attach their descenders without effort, and none of them even thinks to complain about what a helmet will do to their hair.

Seasoned adventures, they take the plunge with gusto. Yet as soon as the girls rope down into the massive cave system, there’s a sense that their expedition won’t go as planned. Maybe because Sarah (Shauna Macdonald) is still haunted by the deaths of her husband and young daughter and hears voices. Maybe because a flashlight reveals red scratches on the cave walls that make it appear as if someone before them tried to claw their way out. Maybe because there’s an obligatory surge of bats that startles the girls (and us) before exiting the cave in an embarrassingly pathetic CGI shot that takes special effects backward about 15 years. Maybe.

But for sure we know something will go wrong because of the way the movie begins, with Sarah’s husband dying in a car crash when a metal rod perforates his skull, sending blood and brain matter oozing out the back of the headrest. A scene like that is a promise. It says, “Get ready, folks, this movie is gonna get messy!” And it will. But not right away. Writer/director Neil Marshall believes in foreplay, and so for I-won’t-tell-you-how-long he just sets the mood of impending doom. The girls go deeper and deeper into the cave, and the claustrophobia and suspense increase in time. Whenever one of the girls turns a corner or reaches out into the darkness we wonder, “Is this it? Is this when it arrives?”

Which of course brings us to the question that the not-so-legendary band Faith No More asked so epically (and repetitively) in 1990: “What is it?” Skip the rest of this paragraph if you don’t want to know, but after a few near encounters the girls eventually come face-to-revolting-face with predatory creatures that climb the subterranean walls like spiders. Hairless and pasty in complexion, these mostly-humanesque dwellers of the dark look like the byproduct of Lord Of The Rings’ Gollum mating with Harry Potter’s Voldemort. Only less sexy.

Yet grotesque as they are, my first reaction upon getting a good peek at one of the creatures is that they aren’t much to look at. Not when you compare them to those classic creepy-crawlies from the Alien movies, which are all spine and tail and skull and teeth. Now those creatures leave an impression! But the demons of The Descent are memorable in their own right, not so much for their appearance but their implementation. Breaking away from the usually-accurate convention that says horror film thrills come from the anticipation of an encounter rather than the realization of one, Marshall lays all his cards on the table and says, “Let’s get it on.”

Once the monsters are revealed, the final act is non-stop action, a babalicious butt-kicking brouhaha. And this time it’s the encounters that thrill. Marshall is so confident in his girl-ghoul showdowns that sometimes he even warns us when the creatures are approaching. And still the movie terrifies! The Descent’s format succeeds because there’s something undeniably exciting about watching athletically-sexy girls kick ass. In the past, the horror genre has always been fond of female characters because – as extraordinary screamers who tend to undo their bras just before evil descends upon them – they make good prey. But that’s another rule that’s reversed in The Descent.

These chicks are fighters. They use their bare hands, rocks, pieces of bone and a few moves they might have picked up in self-defense classes. Were I not so busy covering my eyes at the punishment they inflict, I would have applauded regularly. Their tenacity is so inspirationally thrilling that at one point – maybe when Juno plunges her ice axe into the skull of one of the creatures – I actually thought, ‘If I had a daughter, I’d hope she’d grow up to be like one of these girls.’ No kidding!

But The Descent will hardly warm everyone’s cockles. In fact, I’m surprised it warmed mine. Given the nausea it creates, I wouldn’t recommend seeing it before eating, or after eating, or really at all. On principle, I have a hard time advocating a film in which one of the characters emulates Martin Sheen in Apocalypse Now with a slow, steady rise out of a pool of blood. But that’s the nature of The Descent and there’s no way around it: one way in, one way out, lots of blood, sweat and cheers in between. Pretty much in that order. I couldn’t always watch, but I never closed my eyes. Well, almost never.

[“Queue It Up” is a series of sporadic recommendations of often overlooked movies for your Netflix queue.]

Queue It Up: An Unreasonable Man

[With politics dominating our conversations, The Cooler offers the following review, written upon the film’s release in the author’s pre-blog era.]

You see him as the gallant superhero for the average American consumer. Or you see him as the megalomaniac whose unrealistic presidential bid landed George W Bush in the White House. Or maybe you don’t see him at all. But whatever image you have of Ralph Nader today, figure that it will change as you’re watching the engaging profile smartly titled An Unreasonable Man. Heck, figure that it will change a few times.

That’s this documentary’s beauty. Directed and edited in frequently fawning tones by Henriette Mantel and Steve Skrovon, Unreasonable is the product of Nader supporters. That much is clear. Yet the profile is peppered with dissent. It’s not a balanced portrayal, but it is most definitely fair, which is all we can ask and more than we can expect from a political film. Here, Nader’s critics never get the last word, but they’re neither ignored nor restrained. One detractor goes so far as to call Nader a Leninst, and his charge – harsh though it is – is allowed to resonate.

That Mantel and Skrovon are so willing to embrace this anti-Nader vitriol without resorting to itemized rebuttals demonstrates their assurance in both their filmmaking and their subject. And it’s equally telling that Unreasonable refrains from cheap-shot innuendo. Today the doors to America’s public debate forum are open as wide as ever, what with the Internet, cable news proliferation and the recent documentary boom. Yet the end sum doesn’t seem to be an increase in open-minded discussion so much as a surplus of open-mouthed yelling. Unreasonable bucks that trend with its simple civility.

This film is passionate, measured and convinced, much like its subject. One could easily be put off by Nader’s smug self-assurance, but at the same time it’s refreshing to see someone so willing to live in the line of fire. If Bush is Queen Isabella, sending others into unknown lands, ready to take credit for success or blame failure on poor intelligence, Nader is Christopher Columbus: where his ideas go, his ass follows. That doesn’t make Nader perfect (though he might argue the point), but it at least makes him respectable.

Should you find it difficult to embrace Nader today, you ought to be able to appreciate some of his past achievements. The first half of Unreasonable details Nader’s long career as a consumer advocate, including his daring fight with General Motors in the mid-1960s, which led to significant auto safety reform. A lesser man would have rested on those laurels. A lesser film would have done the same. But the latter half of Unreasonable bravely treads into muddier ground, examining Nader’s role – real or imagined – as “spoiler” in the 2000 presidential election.

On this subject, there is no simple interpretation, though mine finds Nader culpable of nearsightedness, if innocent of Al Gore’s demise. Others see it differently. That they get to say so on camera says something impressive about this film. By broadening the conversation, Unreasonable gives Nader more depth in two hours than Bush has suggested in two terms.

[“Queue It Up” is a series of sporadic recommendations of often overlooked movies for your Netflix queue.]

Queue It Up: United 93

[In recognition of today’s anniversary, The Cooler offers the following review, written upon the film’s release in the author’s pre-blog era.]

Writer/director Paul Greengrass can talk all he wants about the importance of his latest film, and about how it comes with the support of its subjects’ families. But the truth of the matter is that there are a lot of reasons to be skeptical about the first Hollywood feature based around the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and the movie’s timing – hitting theaters just over four-and-a-half years after the tragic events it chronicles – is only one of them.

Given the unusually fast turnaround from suffering to screen, United 93 brings with it an odor of shameless profiteering – the sense that it’s trying to capitalize on one of the saddest days in our nation’s history. If your gut resembles mine, it’s telling you that this is too much too soon. Especially considering that we spent the first year after 9/11 inundated by its devastating imagery. Especially considering that our president still refers to the attacks on an almost weekly basis. Especially since so many wounds are still healing, even those of Americans like me who were about as removed from the tragedy as possible.

To be sure, United 93 is being released now not because audiences are clamoring for the dramatization of real-life events they haven’t had time to forget but because the filmmakers (including Universal Pictures) want to benefit from being first: either artistically or financially, or both. But if your stomach turns with cynicism, your brain should remind you that if it wasn’t United 93 in late April 2006, it would have been Oliver Stone’s World Trade Center in August, or who knows what else after that. Eventually someone would go here, and here we are.

So for a moment let’s ignore all that surrounds the film and concentrate on what’s inside it. Any movie deserves that, but this one more than most. Because while I have many objections about when United 93 was made, I have few criticisms about how it was made. Gripping, touching, honest and fair, Greengrass’ film is a triumph, almost more because of what it doesn’t do than what it does. Wearing fragile wings of wax, United 93 learns from Icarus and opts for reserve in all the places that Hollywood usually shoots for the stratosphere.

It starts with star power. In this film, there is none. Just about wherever possible, characters are played by their real-life inspirations: air-traffic controllers, military personnel, airline employees. The rest of the time United 93 looks to have been cast using castoffs from History Channel reenactments. There isn’t a single big-name actor to be found, and nothing happens in this movie that suggests that it will launch careers. That’s significant, because it’s one thing for a studio to back a picture that’s without celebrities, but it’s another thing to greenlight a script that doesn’t create any stars either.

With astounding consistency, Greengrass selects nearly-anonymous group storytelling over individual exaltation. Naturally, some characters get a little more face time than others, but Greengrass patently refuses to perpetuate the mainstream media mythmaking that made Todd “Let’s roll” Beamer posthumously famous. United 93 has no handsome superman, no wise guru, no quirky sidekick who delivers witty one-liners. There are no flashbacks or even back-stories to flash back to. Instead, Greengrass treats all the players as equals: no one any more important than the rest, which is as it should be.

That treatment is even extended to the movie’s villains, the four al Qaeda terrorists who highjack the titular flight destined for San Francisco and redirect it toward Washington, DC, with the intent to crash the Boeing 757 into the US Capitol. It might be going a bit too far to suggest that the terrorists are treated sympathetically in this picture, but they are certainly portrayed sincerely: as individuals who firmly believe they are glorifying their god, even if their bloodthirsty methods suggest a more demonic inspiration.

Judging these characters would have been easy. Greengrass resists at every opportunity. Before the terrorists take control of the plane, their leader is shown to be reluctant to begin the assault. Is he scared? Questioning his decision to take the lives of others? Doubting his decision to sacrifice himself? Or merely waiting for the opportune moment? It’s one of many mysteries that the film doesn’t attempt to answer. The in-air events of Flight 93 – which crashed short of its goal in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, after a passenger uprising – were written based on in-flight phone calls and cockpit recordings, so Greengrass is forced to approximate quite a bit. But this film succeeds where other historical pictures before it have failed because Greengrass approximates as minimally as possible and as understatedly as possible.

While the media made a hero out of Beamer, Greengrass makes him just another passenger: a guy named Todd, who acts no more heroically than at least half a dozen others. Beamer’s famous “Let’s roll” urging isn’t even issued as some climactic “Remember the Alamo” war cry, just as a snippet of one rambling urging – “Come on, let’s roll, let’s go” – that’s uttered just a bit louder than a whisper to passengers already poised to strike. Whether Beamer actually delivered it that way, I haven’t a clue. Nor does Greengrass. But appreciate that United 93 doesn’t make Beamer any braver an individual – simply because he had a wife to call and a phone with which to call her – than the other 39 people who died unjustly on that flight and might have done as much or more in the fracas to assume control of the plane. (That Beamer’s name appears first among the passengers in the closing credits, I’ll attribute to a boneheaded studio blunder.)

Equally refreshing is the film’s lack of jingoism. You would have allowed a degree of flag-waving, but United 93 engages in almost none. Greengrass recognizes that even though the 9/11 strikes did indeed target Americans, the attacks were, first and foremost, crimes against humanity. That said, it was the triumph of the human spirit rather than anything American that willed passengers and crew on Flight 93 to revolt. However, my pleasure in seeing that recognized is offset by my disappointment that the one dissenting passenger urging nonviolence happens to have a European accent.

But few movies are perfect and this one certainly isn’t. Greengrass’ script is strong but his direction leaves something to be desired. Much of the film looks like it was lit with a flashlight and most of the scenes are shot from behind the heads and over the shoulders of the actors, making it appear that Greengrass is promoting dandruff shampoo when actually he’s trying to keep from glamorizing his subjects. He succeeds at the latter, perhaps all too well: the film works best in its moments of chaos, but it limps in the few occasions when the actors are required to, you know, act.

Still, the collective whole of this movie’s high-powered engine is far greater than the sum of its parts. United 93 works mostly without a score, and it doesn’t need one. The events are heart-pounding enough on their own. Just like a good reporter knows when to get out of the way and let a subject’s quotes tell the story, Greengrass steps back and plays the roll of observer. There are no surprises here. No cliffhanger scenes. No memorable lines of dialogue. No never-before-seen authentic footage. The September 11 that you see here is the one you probably remember. Yet it still feels new.

Or maybe the better word would be fresh. Perhaps it was in part due to seeing the movie on a Friday evening at the end of a long week, but United 93 took every bit of energy I had. The film isn’t bloody or especially violent. It isn’t even all that horrific, considering all the carnage that could have been put to screen and wasn’t. Yet I can’t think of any moviegoing experience that was so difficult for me. Not one. For example, when I walked out of Schindler’s List with tear-stained cheeks in 1993, I was spent. But I admired the filmmaking so much that I knew I’d want to see it again, and I have since, a handful of times. In this case, I’m not so sure. United 93 made me so nauseous that midway through, and for more than 30 minutes afterward, I was craving an air-sickness bag.

It wasn’t even the plane footage that got to me. It was the scenes set in dark rooms illuminated by green flashing lights where air-traffic controllers try desperately to determine why four flights suddenly break radio contact and divert from their original course. At first there is confusion, which is followed by dismay, then panic, then sickening realization and then overwhelming helplessness as one by one the flights just disappear from the radar. Gone. Just like that.

What comes next is shock. And if you’ve moved on with your life since 9/11, this film will make you feel like you haven’t left the events too far behind. Nor should you. Better than anything else, United 93 captures our country’s lack of preparedness for such attacks, not from a military standpoint (although, that too) but an emotional one. We just never thought such large-scale attacks could happen to us. Not here. But in just a few hours, our world image changed. United 93 records history happening.

[“Queue It Up” is a series of sporadic recommendations of often overlooked movies for your Netflix queue.]

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Addendum: I have seen United 93 again. Once. It was equally powerful. And, curiously enough, surprisingly so. I’d already written the above review, but somehow I didn’t believe it. Soured by the way 9/11 became a political tool for fear and warmongering, I felt I’d built a wall around myself that would preclude me from emotional investment in a 9/11-based film. The barrier is probably there, but United 93 overcomes it. It was and remains my pick for 2006’s best film.

Queue It Up: Lust, Caution

[In relation to the “Sex & Cinema” post, The Cooler offers the following review, written upon the film’s release in the author’s pre-blog era.]

The movie megaset has been around since D.W. Griffith ordered the replication of the Great Wall of Babylon for his 1916 epic Intolerance. But in the little more than a decade since James Cameron’s Titanic took set construction to greater heights (not to mention depths) than it had ever known, brick-and-mortar set creation has become something of a lost art, at least on the large scale. Massive sets these days are done on computer. It’s cheaper, more forgiving and, in the minds of some moviemakers, it’s more magnificent too. But in his latest film, set in Japanese-occupied China during World War II, director Ang Lee revitalizes the old-school megaset to brilliant effect. Lust, Caution frequently unfolds in the smallest of spaces, but many of its exteriors were shot amidst a full-scale reconstructed neighborhood reported to be three blocks long, with more than 180 storefronts.

I mention this not to compare Lee’s small though lengthy film with any recent or distant epics. At a reported budget of $15 million, Lust, Caution was $185 million cheaper to produce than Titanic; financially they aren’t in the same ocean. But like a designer on the home-improvement show Trading Spaces, Lee knows how to make his money count, because cinematically Lust, Caution is extravagant. The movie’s Shanghai set isn’t just big, it’s actually grand. And that’s what distinguishes Lust, Caution from so many other films these days that look expensive but not experienced. Lee’s sets feel lived-in and are the main reason his film is so transportive – because unlike shots of Manhattan’s Five Points in Martin Scorsese’s 2002 bloodbath Gangs Of New York, for example, you don’t have to squint your eyes to make believe.

The miraculous thing though isn’t the Shanghai set itself but that Lee went to such extraordinary lengths for a movie that by no means required them. Lust, Caution is based on a story by Eileen Chang that was adapted for the screen by James Schamus. It tells the tale of Wong Chia Chi (Tang Wei), a Chinese college girl from peasant stock who becomes an undercover agent in a revolutionist attempt to assassinate an officer named Yee (Tony Leung). To get close to Yee, Wong will assume the alias of Mrs. Mak and endure countless mah-jongg games in a gossipy circle of officers’ wives. She will also learn – the hard and unpleasant way – the art of pleasing a man (the theory being that the only way to get close enough to kill Yee is to let him get as close to Mak as he wants). A financially-strapped or lazy filmmaker would be content with these interiors and make this picture without the plot ever venturing outdoors. But to our delight, the thoughtful Lee recognizes that the relationship between Yee and Mak is as much about the world they run from as the place the run to.

Still, it’s difficult to talk about this movie any further without going indoors. The nucleus of Lust, Caution is the privacy of the bedroom, where Lee’s film earns an NC-17 rating for a collection of sex scenes that are forceful by more than one definition of the word. Long in length and short on shyness, these sweaty amorous interludes don’t show us everything, but they show so much that what we don’t see is somewhat distracting. (Put it this way: if these actors aren’t in fact having sex, Mr. Leung can teach David Copperfield a thing or two about the art of making stuff disappear.) The knee-jerk reaction to scenes like these, which if you spotted on Cinemax at midnight you’d dismiss as soft porn, is to assume their function is to shock or titillate. But here the frankness and duration of the sex sequences serves a deeper purpose: advancing the plot.

Truth be told, the sex scenes are the plot. Lust, Caution unfolds in an era where, despite what the song says, there’s no such thing as “just a kiss” and where a sigh is never just a sigh. And so, appropriately enough, this film stands in direct contrast with movies released in the era it portrays – Casablanca (1942) or Double Indemnity (1944), for example – that were all lust and no thrust. Here, Mak and Yee barely say a word to one another outside the bedroom and say even less under, or more often over, the sheets. But that doesn’t mean they don’t communicate. Far from it. In unblinking gazes, caresses, grips and moans, Mak and Yee participate in pages of wordless dialogue. And reading between the lines is rarely such a thrill.

To all those who see it, Lust, Caution will be remembered less for its eroticism than for its intensity, though admittedly those elements often overlap. Leung is brooding, mysterious, tender, dangerous and vulnerable. It’s a tremendous performance. And yet it’s eclipsed by that of Wei, who is beyond phenomenal. Hers is a role that requires a complete transformation from an uncertain child to an unusually confident young woman, and Wei makes this maturation with the utmost grace. When near the end of the film Lee flashes back from the hardened covert agent to a shot of the naïve college student she was before, the full scope of the metamorphosis is so overwhelming that I momentarily doubted that one actress had handled the entire part. But it’s Wei through and through.

Sadly, I suspect Lust, Caution will put many moviegoers through and through too much. The story spans just four years but the movie takes almost 160 minutes, and that’s a lot of mah-jongg. If you thought Brokeback Mountain was overly patient, Lust, Caution will make Lee’s previous film feel like Speed. But what’s the rush? There isn’t a single scene from the frontlines of any battleground and yet Lust, Caution immerses us into its World War II setting as well any vast historical epic, with Alexandre Desplat’s score rising and falling in all the right places. In moments, this is filmmaking at its finest and most unflinching, whether probing the psychology of its characters through sex or revealing the horror of violence through a brawl that’s as visceral as any I’ve ever seen.

It’s a shame that many who won’t see this movie will call it Lee’s “soft porn” picture, a term that’s as insultingly reductive as categorizing Brokeback Mountain as the “gay cowboy” movie. What these films have in common, beyond the outrage they instill in prudes, is an astute awareness of the emotional complexity of sex. If all you see in these sex scenes is intercourse, you’re not watching closely enough. The good news is, you get to watch again.

[“Queue It Up” is a series of sporadic recommendations of often overlooked movies for your Netflix queue.]

Queue It Up: The Up Series

Tarsem’s The Fall, about a girl who gets lost in a world of imagination, will strike a lot of people who catch it on the art house circuit as a bright-and-blue version of the grim-and-gray Pan’s Labyrinth. Thus it might interest you to know that the latter didn’t influence the former. According to its website and a recent profile of Tarsem by Roger Ebert, The Fall was shot in 18 countries over a whopping four years. But this post isn’t about creative originality (heck, The Fall is said to be based on a 1981 Bulgarian film called Yo Ho Ho). Instead, it’s about that unusually lengthy shooting time, which allows for The Fall’s greatest magic trick: the performance of Catinca Untaru.

Playing Alexandria, Untaru delivers what must be the most amazing performance by a child actor that I have ever seen. A Romanian who memorized her English dialogue on the spot, Untaru essentially plays two parts: Alexandria the 4-year-old hospital patient with a broken arm and Alexandria the imaginary adventurer. In the first role, Alexandria is mind-bogglingly childlike yet refined. Her delivery of dialogue seems both spontaneously discovered and carefully plotted. It’s a wonder to behold. As for the second role: that Alexandria seems a little more assured, a little more direct, a little more mature. And that’s because she is. Tarsem shot all of the young Alexandria scenes when Untaru was 4-years-old. He shot the other Alexandria scenes about three years later.

Given the financial realities and pressures of making movies, few filmmakers would ever be so bold as to attempt this strategy. The effect, however, is stunning, because you just can’t fake the difference between 4 and 7 – a three-year gap that at that developmental stage might as well be three decades. As I was reflecting on The Fall, I tried to think of any films that offered a similar effect. And that’s when I started thinking about the Up documentary series.

To be clear: that gap between shoots is the only thing that the Up series has in common with The Fall. There are seven Up films, each shot seven years apart. Taken as a whole, it’s an extraordinary achievement in filmmaking, one that I suspect is the result of a combination of initial naiveté, subsequent earnest effort and, in between, lots of luck. If you’ve never ventured down the series’ rabbit hole, I suggest you do so at least once. What you’ll find is a diverse documentary portrait that’s made memorable as much by the time spent not shooting as by the footage compiled.

My original 2006 review of 49 Up, the most recent installment in the documentary series, follows. If you're new to the Up series, The Cooler recommends that you start with 42 Up or 35 Up, giving yourself the chance to move forward with the experience, which is half the fun.


49 Up
By the time I saw my first Up episode in 1999, Roger Ebert had already proclaimed that the documentary series was on his list of the “10 greatest films of all time.” Watching 42 Up, I didn’t feel like I was in the presence of something that historically stupendous, but I called the film “remarkable” and listed it among my eight favorite movies of that year. Now though, having just seen 49 Up, I’m inclined to side with Ebert. The reason for my change of opinion has nothing to do with the latest chapter being in any way superior to its immediate predecessor – in fact I’m partial to the twists and turns of 42 Up – but for me to truly appreciate the series’ genius it took seeing two episodes seven years apart. That’s the way the series is filmed and, it turns out, the way it is best viewed.

The Up series was born with the 1964 television broadcast of 7 Up, in which a dozen children from different backgrounds and social spheres in Britain were asked to talk about their present lives and visions of the future. That film, the first step of a revolutionary social experiment, was a response to two things: Britain’s vast class system and a Jesuit saying that goes, “Give me the child until he is 7, and I will show you the man.” The filmmakers, led by producer Tim Hewat, hoped to explore whether these children’s lives were predetermined by their backgrounds. To do that, they planned to check in on their subjects every seven years.

And so it has gone, from ages 7 to 14 to 21 to 28 to 35 to 42 and now 49, and, in the process, from 1964 to 2006. Michael Apted, who got his first film job working as a researcher on 7 Up, has been the director and principal interviewer of the series since the 21 episode. The project’s survival owes not just to his dedication but especially to that of the documentary’s cast, ordinary people who were selected to participate by their teachers a half-century ago and now return every seven years to continue a narrative that they never volunteered for but that can’t survive without them.

That the Up series is still upright is a triumph in itself. Over the years a few of the subjects have bowed out completely, and others have skipped an episode or two only to return later. But in large part the irreplaceable cast remains. Their commitment is both inspiring and touching. Throughout the course of their lives they’ve opened up with broken hearts and after broken marriages. They’ve persevered through career disasters and crushed dreams. Some have moved far away. Some have stayed close to home. Some have turned out almost exactly like they predicted at 7. Others, at 49, are enjoying lives that they couldn’t have imagined at 42. And all the while we’ve been allowed to watch, as life genuinely unfolds right in front of our eyes.

It struck me during 49 Up that these documentaries put the reality in reality entertainment, though the series was born long before the current fad. These days “reality” programming comes in the form of celebrity profiles, talent contests, dating shows and home/life improvement programs, yet even when 42 Up hit theaters in 1999 the reality movement as we know it today was merely poised for invasion. MTV’s Real World series had been on the air since 1992, but Survivor didn’t debut until 2000, and two more years went by after that before much-talked about programs like The Bachelor, The Osbournes and American Idol were beamed into our living rooms.

The subjects of the Up documentaries didn’t join to be stars. In fact, for many of them the moderate fame that has resulted from their participation has been an inconvenience or an outright embarrassment. Taking part in the interviews can be understandably painful: just imagine if you had to re-live your entire life every seven years – first through the question-and-answer segments, which have a way of digging up the past, and then through the resulting films, which show archival clips as part of the examination. It can’t be easy. But as children, teens and adults, the Up subjects have shown a forthrightness and bravery that deserves our respect.

Beyond that they also deserve our understanding. In 49 Up, one of the women complains that her life hasn’t been accurately represented by the films. We see Apted’s view of her, she claims. And it’s true that even with a running time of 135 minutes we can’t get to know everything there is to know about each one of them. But Apted’s approach is as fair as can be expected. He and editor Kim Horton allow for lengthy takes when appropriate and often let us be privy to the questions, so that even though we can never appreciate the complete context of a response, we can be assured that – unlike most reality TV shows – nothing is taken entirely out of context and mashed up in the editing room for dramatic effect.

If you’ve never seen one of the Up documentaries, you could start with 49 Up and not feel left behind. Apted and Horton are masterful at cutting through the crap and getting to the core of the cast. To see the latest Up is to watch lives develop in forward and reverse. We might see someone at 49, then at 7, then at 35, then at 14; it all depends on the person and the topic. Often what these men and women once were is as surprising as what they’ve become, and the series’ unique gift is that it gets richer with age. It’s so fitting that 7 Up was filmed in black and white and 49 Up was shot in digital. From the sweet and simple absolutes of childhood we now see adults in their full color, and in sometimes painful detail.

Amazingly, 49 Up has a way of looking back without feeling redundant. Some of the clips of the wide-eyed kids at 7 are in their seventh running now. But we see those clips differently as they apply to the 49-year-old than we do at, say, 35. My fear going into 49 Up was that too many of the subjects would have quit the project, having grown weary of its demands. But to my pleasant surprise attendance is almost complete. Nearly 50, they seem as comfortable in their own skin as at any time since they were 7. And maybe it’s because I’m staring at 30, but I was overwhelmed by their bountiful youth. Though heavier, slower and frailer, these don’t look like people at midlife. They like people transitioning into a new life. This time with decades of experience to help guide the way.

[“Queue It Up” is a series of sporadic recommendations of often overlooked movies for your Netflix queue.]

Queue It Up: Deliver Us From Evil

A few weeks ago, Major League Baseball commissioner Bud Selig called Washington, D.C.’s new Nationals Ballpark a “cathedral.” Tomorrow he’ll be right. As you no doubt know, the pope is in town here in the nation’s capital, with Mass at the ballpark to come tomorrow, leading to lots of inner-Beltway buzz and even more concern from local residents about how the man-in-white’s visit will affect auto and Metro commutes for the next few days.

But Pope Benedict XVI started making headlines before he reached American soil. Yesterday, from his Alitalia jet, the pope said he was “deeply ashamed” of the clergy sex-abuse scandals that have rocked the U.S. Catholic Church in recent years. “We will do what is possible that this cannot happen in the future,” he said, sounding like a guy who got Wi-Fi at the Vatican only last week and just learned of the atrocities that corrupt Church officials took pains to keep underground for decades.

Nice try, your pontiffness.

As someone who grew up going to Mass every Sunday and who attended a Catholic high school, I know firsthand that the Catholic Church isn’t entirely monstrous. But these sex-abuse scandals weren’t limited to a few black sheep. They were also the result of fraudulence at the shepherd-level, and there’s a big difference. Which brings us to today’s rental recommendation.

If all the news coverage of the past decade hasn’t convinced you that the Catholic Church knowingly ignored problem priests while attempting to avoid responsibility in these sex-abuse cases until it ran out of other options, I urge you to watch the documentary Deliver Us From Evil, which was one of my top-15 films of 2006.

At its most basic level, the documentary is a story of one flawed priest. But thanks in large part to some shocking deposition footage in which Church officials eagerly hide behind their lawyers – something tells me that’s not what Jesus would do – it’s also an unsettling glimpse under the hood of a broken organizational machine.

My original 2006 review follows:


Deliver Us From Evil
I believe it was comedian Damon Wayans who observed, “I like the idea of people, but people always ruin it for me.” For the past 15 years that’s the way I’ve felt about organized religion. It’s a wonderful idea, with the potential to bring out the best in humanity, but the price of unity is that such goodness can be tainted by a few Pat Robertsons and Jerry Falwells. And it can be completely undone by the likes of Oliver O’Grady and Roger Mahoney.

The latter two men are at the center of Amy Berg’s spellbinding documentary Deliver Us From Evil. O’Grady is a non-practicing former Roman Catholic priest living in Ireland, and Mahoney is the active Archbishop of Los Angeles. Twenty-five years ago, both men were in Stockton, Calif., where O’Grady did more preying than praying, abusing the trust of his position to sexually assault several children, while Mahoney, the local bishop in charge, overlooked his flock instead of overseeing it.

Berg doesn’t use these men to undermine Catholicism specifically or religion as a whole, but what she does do is explore their sins with more honesty and depth than the Catholic Church seems intent to employ. Relying on superb journalistic instincts, Berg uses an inside-out approach that in a mere 111 minutes goes from depicting O’Grady as a single, despicable falling star to demonstrating his place in a Catholic solar system filled with pedophilic meteors (shocking statistic: over the past decade, hundreds of abuse-against-minors charges have been issued against priests in California alone).

Berg accomplishes all of this without relying on sensationalism or grandstanding (minus perhaps the Vatican trip, which smells of Michael Moore). Her film is heartbreaking, revolting and sometimes – like when the oh-so-pleasant O’Grady reflects on his decades of abuse with a twinkle in his eye – just plain creepy. Yet all the while it’s respectful. And when O’Grady’s victims (including hoodwinked parents) detail their abuse, they do so willingly, bravely and, one hopes, cathartically – their trust in the filmmaker unmistakable.

That O’Grady served a paltry seven years for his abhorrent crimes, and that Mahoney has managed to avoid conviction, demonstrates how difficult it is to crack the Catholic ranks. Watching police interrogations in which Mahoney and other men of the cloth hide behind lawyers, it’s evident that many high-ranking Catholic officials may never be legally condemned. But it’s worth believing in heaven and hell just to imagine the sentence St. Peter will hand down when these wretches reach the Pearly gates.

Still, future damnation isn’t a substitute for action in the present. Thus, Berg’s film is a public service, forcing us to face the truth not only about O’Grady and Mahoney but religion as a whole. Watching the movie, I thought of Michael Caine’s memorable lines in The Prestige: “You’re looking for the secret,” he says, “but you won’t find it – because you want to be fooled.” Deliver Us From Evil reminds us that illusions can be dangerous.

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Addendum:
In July 2007, Cardinal Roger Mahony issued an apology after 508 victims (508!) reached a deal worth a reported $660 million. "I have come to understand far more deeply than I ever could the impact of this terrible sin and crime that has affected their lives ... I apologize to anyone who has been offended, who has been abused ... It should not have happened and should not ever happen again."

[“Queue It Up” is a series of sporadic recommendations of often overlooked movies for your Netflix queue.]