Welcome back to another edition of my latest Actor Profile, The Marvelous Brie Larson, a monthly series revolving around the silver screen performances of one of my favorite actresses. If you are a newcomer to this series, the idea behind this feature is to bring attention to a specific performer and their skill sets and to see how they contribute to a story.
For the penultimate installment in my Brie Larson spotlight I’m focusing on a black comedy from British director Ben Wheatley. Considering I have seen only two of his seven films — High Rise and Free Fire — I am not what you would call a Ben Wheatley expert. But what I’ve seen of his work so far has been enough for me to consider him a pretty unique director. Again, it’s a small sample size but I’ve really enjoyed how distinctly different these two movies are. Pure, unbridled chaos and pitch-black comedy seem to be the only things these movies from the mid-twenty-teens have in common. Well, that and if getting a lot of high-profile actors to be in your movie is a talent, Wheatley is most definitely talented.
Free Fire is his first movie “set” in America, though the old print factory in Brighton, England makes for a perfect stand-in for a Boston warehouse. It’s an action-driven movie that plays out as if Guy Ritchie directed Reservoir Dogs, where the schadenfreude is in greater abundance than the bullets and the blood. Best of all, in a movie that features a ton of recognizable names, Brie Larson gets to play a significant role in it and she kills it — quite literally.
If you haven’t caught up with the dark pleasures of Free Fire, it’s streaming on Netflix right now.
Brie Larson as Justine in Ben Wheatley’s Free Fire
Role Type: Lead
Genre: Action/comedy/crime
Premise: Set in Boston in 1978, a meeting in a deserted warehouse between two gangs turns into a shoot-out and a game of survival.
Character Background: Justine, a kind of peacekeeper and one-woman coalition for reason and logic, was originally meant to be played by Olivia Wilde, but she ended up dropping out. I think Wilde is a really strong actor but I can’t see anyone else in this role. Larson’s eye-rolls and natural ability to deliver sarcastic quips are real treasures of this movie. Alongside her American, side-burned colleague Ord (Armie Hammer), she’s here to broker a black market arms deal between the IRA (represented primarily by Cillian Murphy) and a South African gun runner (played deliciously over-the-top by Sharlto Copley), one that goes hopelessly and hilariously awry thanks to an unforeseen event.
The screenplay (by Wheatley’s wife Amy Jump) provides her a really interesting arc. Justine is the lone woman amidst a pack of egotistical, volatile and fairly unsympathetic men. Early on she’s predictably dismissed as just a bit of scenery. When she’s not being referred to as “doll,” she’s being asked out to dinner in what has to be one of the least appropriate ask-someone-out-for-dinner situations ever. While her costars are by and large quick to demonstrate their instability and their sexism, Larson is keeping tallies, and her character’s own ulterior motives under wraps, waiting for the right moment to demonstrate her own penchant for opportunistic scheming.
Free Fire is a very simple movie, and that’s one of its great strengths. Larson describes it as “an action movie making fun of action movies.” The plot is easy to follow and while all the gunfire eventually becomes kind of white noise it’s the characters that make it worth sticking around for. They may be here for different reasons but the thing they will all have in common, sooner or later, are bullet wounds and injuries.
Marvel at this Scene:
Rate the Performance (relative to her other work):
***/*****
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Starring: Charlie Plummer; Cory Nichols; Christian Madsen; Daniel Flaherty; Erin Davie; Chloe Levine
Distributor: Well Go USA Entertainment
****/*****
Writer-director Felix Thompson’s first feature KingJackis a prickly little 81-minute production that shuffles through a nameless, shambling suburban block somewhere in the Pacific Northwest. Rather than offering anything in the way of a traditional narrative, it provides a window into the life of a young boy who must contend with neighborhood bullies, summer school and his annoying younger cousin.
Low-key, meditative drama ponders the nature of fate and consequence in small-town America, swamps of socioeconomic stagnation that give rise to trouble-seeking behavior and juvenile delinquency. Thompson’s fascinated in this teen with idle hands named Jack (Charlie Plummer), first seen spraying graffiti on a neighbor’s garage. His home life is far from ideal, what with an absentee father, an oblivious mother (Erin Davie), and an older brother Tom (Christian Madsen) who calls him ‘Scab.’
It’s not just at home where Jack faces conflict. Because his brother was something of a jock back in his high school days, nicknames like ‘Scab’ and ‘King Jack’ have become a part of the language throughout a community where high schoolers never really move on. Thugs like Shane (Danny Flaherty) are intent on perpetuating that tradition. It’s their rite of passage, an inheritance of “duty” not that dissimilar to what you see in popular gangster movies. With Tom having moved on, and now floundering in the real world as a mechanic with a gambling problem, the baton has been passed.
An element of survivalism pervades and is underpinned by gritty solemnity, a toughness that helps King Jack divorce from other troubled teen-centric indies. Events take place over the course of only one weekend, and yet a large chunk of the story finds its beleaguered protagonist wandering the streets rather than hanging around at home. Jack is something of a curiosity. He tries, like most sane people, to avoid confrontation but unlike the majority he also doesn’t do many things to endear himself to others — the way he treats his cousin Ben (Cory Nichols) as a prime example.
King Jack may be slight but its realism is potent. If you find the film speaking to memories of where you grew up it may even be poignant. Flaherty’s performance in particular is outstanding, a damning indictment of the futility of resorting to violence in order to deal with your own internal pain. But it’s Plummer toward whom I was constantly drawn, a solid young actor who plays both the victim and the instigator — often to heartbreaking effect.
Moral of the Story: King Jack probably won’t do much for those who seek closure and finality in their movies but it’s a solid little coming-of-age drama whose events are effectively and often provocatively depicted. King Jack also operates as a powerful anti-bullying PSA and I’d actually recommend it more strongly on that basis rather than on the merits of its cast and up-and-coming writer/director.
Rated: NR
Running Time: 81 mins.
Quoted: “Leave me alone. You’re not my friend. So don’t try to act like it.”
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Starring: Gong Yoo; Jung Yu-mi; Ma Dong-seok; Kim Su-an; Choi Woo-shik; Ahn So-hee; Kim Eui-sung
Distributor: Next Entertainment World
****/*****
Train to Busan is a breathless and brutal South Korean zombie flick that broke a number of records last year, becoming the first Korean feature to breach the $1 million mark at the Singaporean box office. Over the past several months it has taken the world by storm, becoming one of the most commercially and critically successful zombie apocalypses ever.
Yeon Sang-ho’s first live-action feature does for zombies what James Wan’s The Conjuring did for haunted houses. It’s a superlative genre film of uncommon intelligence, exuding all the elements that characterize such films as uniquely entertaining and disturbing, while never really making an attempt to “be different.” Simply put, movies like Train to Busan and The Conjuring prove that tropes are tropes for a reason; they can be powerfully affecting if nurtured properly. It also helps the cause when your actors are this good at selling them.
Train to Busan improves its stock by investing more in human relationships as opposed to obsessing over how many zombies it can overload the frame with. Seok-woo (Gong Yoo) is a divorced hedge fund manager who doesn’t have the time to pay attention to his young daughter, Soo-an (a marvelous Kim Soo-an), evidenced by the fact he has bought her for her upcoming birthday yet another gaming console, identical to the one currently sitting on her TV stand in her bedroom — the one he got her as a recent Children’s Day gift. All she wants is to go stay with her mother in Busan, and she’s determined to go alone so that she doesn’t hassle daddy. But when Soo-an shows him a video of her recent singing recital, which she was unable to finish due to his absence, Seok becomes racked with guilt and decides he will in fact accompany her on the nearly 300-mile train ride.
The next day they board the KTX in Seoul, along with a number of passengers we will become familiar with over the course of this harrowing journey. There’s the surly, working-class Sang-hwa (Dong-seok Ma) and his pregnant wife Seong-kyeong (Yu-mi Jung), a pair of elderly sisters In-gil (Ye Soo-jung) and Jong-gil (Park Myung-sin), a homeless man (Choi Gwi-hwa) whose strange behavior and thoroughly unkempt appearance nearly gets him thrown off, a group of high school baseball players and, last but absolutely not least, the COO of a major corporation, Yon-suk (Kim Eui-sung). While these supporting parts don’t necessarily go beyond archetypes, they’re ably performed and, more crucially, give the story depth.
Joining these travelers as well is a visibly distressed young woman who just manages to board the KTX before it departs the station. Her leg is severely bleeding and something about her just seems off. Writer-director Sang-ho, waiting patiently for just the right time to release his finger from the pin of the grenade, brilliantly sets us on a collision course with chaos as the deadly consequences of an apparent biohazard disaster inadvertently make their way aboard one of the world’s fastest trains. (Achieving speeds upwards of 200 miles an hour, the KTX redefines the excitement of traveling. As does the action forthcoming.)
Train to Busan hurtles along at a breakneck pace with hard-hitting action that can be difficult to watch. I’ve always responded more strongly to those zombie flicks that actually make you dread The Turn — or films like Maggie that focus almost entirely on that transition and use it as an allegory for real people succumbing to real diseases in the real world. Sang-ho’s careful consideration of what it means to become one of the undead invokes the seminal 28 Days Later, if not in terms of atmosphere then in the way hope is slowly stripped away from the living like flesh from the bone.
Sang-ho’s decision to (mostly) isolate the drama within the confines of a moving train exacerbates the terror of being in proximity to the zombie. Mass hysteria combines with claustrophobic tension to form the ideal conditions for the uninfected to begin losing their humanity in other ways. Meanwhile cameras are often found sitting at eye-level with the young and impressionable Soo-an as she bears witness to the atrocities committed. This perspective, of a child trying to understand why people treat each other the way they do, brilliantly reflects Sang-ho’s own despair.
Word is that Train to Busan finds the Korean director tempering his anger a little bit (his previous animated efforts apparently offer the kind of acrimony and villainy that make the vile COO and his wildly selfish acts throughout this film seem innocent by comparison). But the injustices he has experienced, if not directly then through simple observation, manifest themselves in some brutal ways in a film that, historically, has no compulsion to offer anything more profound than icky special and/or practical effects and inventive kills. Train to Busan can sometimes overwhelm with the sense of hopelessness it provides. It’s dark and dangerous and deadly, and it’s just so damn good. Especially for a zombie movie.
Silent AND deadly
Moral of the Story: Powerful and surprisingly hard-hitting, Train to Busan announces itself as a modern classic. It’s a film with something for everyone — the zombie purists and those who just want to have their nerves rattled for a solid two hours. Be sure you check this out on Netflix, unless of course movies about the undead are completely dead to you.
Rated: NR
Running Time: 118 mins.
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Starring: Max Records; Laura Fraser; Christopher Lloyd; Christina Baldwin
Distributor: IFC Midnight
****/*****
It’s a bold move naming your protagonist as a riff on real-life serial killer and rapist John Wayne Gacy, but then this is a bold movie with a bold title, one based on the 2009 novel of the same name written by Dan Wells, the first in a trilogy. It tells of a troubled teenager who encounters a string of grisly murders in his sleepy Midwestern town and becomes obsessed with finding out who is behind them, all while struggling to keep his own demons at bay.
The titular “weird until proven normal” character is an ostracized teen named John Wayne Cleaver played brilliantly by Max Records, a youthful actor seemingly plucked from a Nirvana music video. But the film he stars in doesn’t smell like teen spirit as much as it does carry whiffs of the Duffer brothers’ original hit series Stranger Things. Directed by Billy O’Brien, I Am Not a Serial Killer is both atmospheric and deeply involving, a film that takes viewers to places that are as disturbing as they are fascinating.
There’s something dark consuming John. He demonstrates an unhealthy fascination with death and is antisocial to the point where his therapist (Karl Geary) and his mother (Laura Fraser) have become greatly concerned about his future. Though he exudes some level of altruism by doing odd jobs for elderly neighbor Mr. Crowley (Christopher Lloyd), John spends most of his time embalming corpses with his mother at their family-run funeral parlor. It’s no surprise that when townsfolk start disappearing John finds himself drawn to the mysteries surrounding them, notably the pools of black oil left behind at the scene. One afternoon after following a drifter he suspects to be the murderer, John makes a stunning discovery that only plunges him further into his weird obsessions.
What unfolds is an unsettling exploration of fate and circumstance and how one’s environment — and more specifically, one’s proximity to tragedy — influences psychological and physical behavior. I Am Not a Serial Killer compels through sheer force of atmosphere alone — the chilly No-Name town doing its part to instill a sense of loneliness and isolation that complements the film’s themes and that exacerbates the horror. Steam rising out of a factory offers up a particularly ominous visual motif.
Ultimately the piece manifests as a slow-burning character study that may not offer up much in the way of cheap, easy thrills but it compensates for a lack of action with natural, unforced creepiness and methodical tension-building. It’s also an impressively acted affair. Christopher Lloyd still has great presence and it’s wonderful to see him take part in something as underground as I Am Not a Serial Killer. But the film really belongs to Records, whose intensely cerebral performance finds the humanity buried deep beneath the film’s icy façade. It’s a break-out performance you just have to experience for yourself.
Bored to death
Moral of the Story: A movie that exists on the fringe of humanity and flirts with insanity at every turn, I Am Not a Serial Killer is a bonafide midnight horror gem that offers much to fans of thoughtful, meditative storytelling. And fans of Stranger Things should find much to like here as well.
Rated: NR
Running Time: 104 mins.
Quoted: “I’ve been clinically diagnosed with sociopathy, Rob. To me, you’re an object, you know. You’re a thing. You’re about as important to me as a cardboard box, and the thing about cardboard boxes is that they’re totally boring on the outside, right? But sometimes, if you cut them open, there’ll be something interesting on the inside. So, while you’re saying all these boring things to me, I’m thinking about what it’d be like to cut you open.”
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Richard Bates Jr’s third film revolves around a family you’ll be glad you’re not a part of. That might be the understatement of the year. You’ve never seen family dysfunction like this, unless of course you have seen Psycho.
Not that I’m suggesting the relatively immature Trash Firewakes up the echoes of Hitch’s classic. After all coincidence plays a large part here — that its director shares the surname of one of the most recognizable movie villains of all time compels me to draw comparisons more than anything. However, there is one other element these films share, one that’s harder to ignore, and that’s the influence of a severely troubled matriarch. In Psycho it was mother. In Trash Fire it’s grandma. Dear, sweet old grandma.
The film opens on a sour note, introducing us to miserable Owen (Adrian Grenier) who is unloading on his therapist about how when he was younger he planned to commit suicide after his parents died so he wouldn’t have to feel guilty about it. He literally resents being alive and goes out of his way to make the prospect (of living) a nightmare for those who dare get near him, such as his longtime girlfriend Isabel (Angela Trimbur), whose friends and family he can’t even pretend to tolerate.
When Isabel tells Owen she’s pregnant, the couple is confronted by a life-altering decision. It’s not the one you might expect, given Owen’s toxic cynicism forged in the crucible of an abusive childhood — one that, when finally explained, makes me wonder who really had it worse, Owen or Norman. We are led to believe that in some ironic twist of fate rearing a child might be the best thing for the couple. A second chance for a thoroughly broken man, a ray of hope for his long-suffering concubine.
To feel more comfortable about such a commitment Isabel establishes one condition: They must pay a visit to Owen’s grandmother Violet (Fionnula Flanagan) and sister Pearl (AnnaLynne McCord) so she can meet his family and he can make amends after years of estrangement following a house fire that indeed killed his parents and rendered Pearl an “abomination” and a shut-in.
Trash Fire struggles early despite its bold, frothy opening. The first half is spent building up the “relationship” — necessary toiling for the horror that’s soon to come. Once the story shifts to granny’s house the film really goes to work, endeavoring to strip what little humanity there is from the proceedings. Flanagan, whose age and frail physicality emphasize the film’s gleeful perversion, is legitimately terrifying. She is the quintessential religious zealot, a termagant whose TV is set only to channels vomiting fire-and-brimstone sermons and who instantly takes a dislike to Isabel, for she reminds her of the “whore” that was her own daughter.
Down the back stretch of this 91-minute production you’ll find nods to more well-established horror mythologies — shades of The Ring, Carrie and yes, Psycho, come and go, all while Trash Fire‘s slavish devotion to nihilism is intended to both support the film’s brazen title and separate its familiar content from the pack. And yet, the petulance reminded me of Gaspar Noé’s attempts at being as shocking as possible in Irreversible, where he famously introduced ultra-low-frequency sound in the film’s opening half hour, the intent being to physically yet subtly make viewers feel ill.
All of this is to say that the nastiness employed here works but only when you are susceptible to it, when exposure is minimal. There comes a point in Trash Fire, perhaps when we see Violet pleasuring herself to those televangelists, where the maliciousness diminishes in effect and threatens to undermine Owen’s legitimate problems. On a second viewing, I suspect familiarity will do considerable damage. For a once-through, however, Trash Fire is entertaining in its own weird little way.
Face your worst fears
Moral of the Story: Pitch-black comedy supposedly courses through the veins of this quirky and downright uncomfortable indie horror. As the people over at The AV Club aptly put it, perhaps only the most bitter nihilists will find the film funny. I did find the film amusing in fits and starts but more than anything I admired the bold performances put on by Adrian Grenier and Fionnula Flanagan. But now I want to watch something where the latter plays a nice lady. Maybe a grannie who bakes cookies. Something, anything, to cleanse the palate.
Rated: R
Running Time: 91 mins.
Quoted: “For as long as I can remember I’ve been waiting for my parents to die. And there they were, dead.”
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In Blue Jay, Mark Duplass and Sarah Paulson make a little adventure out of being a couple long since broken up. When the former high school sweethearts bump into each other at a grocery store in their hometown after 20 years, they spend an entire movie — the first in a four-movie deal Duplass has recently inked with Netflix — taking a stroll down memory lane.
It’s actually a wonderful conceit and who better to handle the walking and talking and thick-beard-charmery than Mark Duplass? Looking fresh off the set of a Carhartt commercial (yet well within the definition of a typical mumblecorian protagonist), he stars as a 30-something-year-old blank slate barely named Jim at the beginning of the film. Over the course of a breezy 80 minutes we will come to know more about him through his awkward-then-amazing interactions with co-star Sarah Paulson, who plays his high school girlfriend, Amanda.
The two find themselves back in their native Crestline, California for different reasons. A conversation over coffee soon reveals just how many other things have changed in their lives. But their genuine attraction to one another has clearly endured. They slip right back into roles they have long since vacated as they go about town reminiscing about their youth and “uncool-ness,” enjoying the most romantic not-date anyone has ever experienced.
Throughout we become privy to a series of revelations that intimate a shared past filled with joy but one not devoid of pain. The question looms ever larger despite (or perhaps because of) all the fun being had: what could have possibly caused such kindred spirits to drift apart?
While Duplass has a screenwriting credit, the foggy haze of memory and nostalgia is realized through a combination of improvised dialogue and intuitive performance. As is true for any low-budget indie, well-made or not, the experimental approach carries with it a significant risk of failure. Blue Jay was also shot in black-and-white on a camera originally designed for military use. This would all seem like a tick-list of indie affectations had the film shown no interest in connecting with its audience.
Blue Jay is quite a lot more than artifice. It’s a perpetually enlightening experience chiefly concerned with the way we romanticize the past, particularly past relationships. Jim and Amanda prove that reconciliation is possible if you really want it. (I guess you also have to be a little lucky, too.) I wanted for this to go on longer. Eighty minutes simply isn’t enough when you’re in the company of people who are as (seemingly) good-natured as Mark Duplass and Sarah Paulson.
The dance moves were also improvised.
Moral of the Story: Bittersweet indie film is tailor-made for fans of Mark Duplass’ unique sensibilities. It’s also a great showcase for Sarah Paulson, who steps into a role I don’t think I’ve ever seen her play before. Blue Jay gives us so many different ways of dealing with the pain that inevitably comes with things coming to an end.
Rated: NR
Running Time: 80 mins.
Quoted: “Are you going to be the first female white rapper to open for Public Enemy?”
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Wiener-Dog is a tough film to like. You certainly can’t, or maybe aren’t supposed to, love it. I’m actually pretty sure you’re just supposed to be shocked by it. It’s about a dog who gets shuffled from weirdo to weirdo who in some way or another finds their life affected by its presence.
Put that way, it kind of sounds like Air Bud or any other Disney-like movie about someone befriending a lovable canine. Put that way, it sounds fun. This movie is neither of those things.
Wiener-Dog is an unrelentingly dark, bleak comedy peppered with unlikable characters and some sequences that are just begging for animal rights groups to petition and denounce Todd Solondz’ work. Yes, a dog may be man’s best friend but in Wiener-Dog he is also man’s metaphorical punching bag. The film isn’t interested in subjecting the animal to physical cruelty but it surrounds the poor thing in a world of misery, disappointment, regret and general negativity.
That the dog often serves as our most relatable character says everything about Solondz’ disdain for the human race. He thrusts the dog (the audience) upon the kinds of dysfunctional individuals you only ever encounter in the movies, while insidiously breaking the spirit of dog lovers everywhere who were foolish enough to think this movie might be cute.
The innocence and naivety of animals subservient to man offers a point of view that over time becomes increasingly absurd. You’re meant to be experiencing the film through the eyes of the dog — at various points appellated ‘Wiener-Dog,’ ‘Doody’ and ‘Cancer’ — but it’s confusing because the movie isn’t so much about the day-in-the-life of man’s best friend. It’s more interested in using the dog as a vessel to transport us through the wreckage of these ‘ordinary’ lives.
The dog begins her journey with a wealthy family. Patriarch Danny (Tracy Letts) has brought home a puppy for son Remi who has been battling cancer. Dina (a loathsome Julie Delpy) isn’t a fan of the idea. She goes out of her way to tell her son that spaying a dog is the only way to prevent the dog from suffering various horrible fates. Everyone should have a mom just like her. After some time Remi’s lone source of happiness proves to be a pestilence and Danny decides it’s time to put it down.
Luckily for Wiener-Dog a sympathetic nurse snatches her out of the veterinary clinic. This saint is Dawn Wiener, an introvert to the extreme. Greta Gerwig plays the character who has been reprised from an earlier Solondz film, Welcome to the Dollhouse. She one day runs into an old acquaintance named Brandon (Kieran Culkin) and they embark on a road trip to Ohio to see Brandon’s family, to whom he must deliver some bad news. His brother and his wife — both with Down Syndrome — soon find themselves in possession of the dog when Dawn feels their home is a better place for her briefly beloved ‘Doody.’
Your commitment to oddball black comedies faces its toughest test when the dog inexplicably falls into the lap of depressed screenwriting prof Dave Schmerz (Danny DeVito). This bucket of pure misery epitomizes the film’s agonistic, misanthropic tonality. He is also Solondz’ most obvious middle-finger to his fellow man, in this case, prospective filmmakers who think they have the right stuff to launch a career. “It’s not that easy to be a creative genius. You have to be daring,” Solondz says with a bomb strapped to the titular dachshund in a scene you will have to rewind and watch again to believe.
Last and absolutely least the dog finds its way into the house of elderly Nana (Ellen Burstyn). The poor old thing can’t catch a break! Nana is visited by her awful granddaughter Zoe (Zosia Mamet) who expects her Nana to relieve her bank account of 10 grand so her beau Fantasy (Michael Shaw) can get his latest art exhibit up and running. You’re at a point in the picture where caring is so optional it’s not really even an option.
At the end of the day, Wiener-Dog is meant to inspire us to continue taking life as it comes to us, the good and the bad. If you aren’t as cynical as Solondz and you’re trying to make it to the end of his movie, you might find yourself having to be your own cheerleader. Keep telling yourself it isn’t always going to be this bad. You’ll eventually get to the end.
If dog is man’s best friend, we’ve really let them down here
Moral of the Story: This is apparently Todd Solondz’ eighth feature film, and it’s my first time watching his work. It has a style and tone that gives me the impression he has his own cult following. If you count yourself among those people, you’ll probably lap up Wiener-Dog in all its weirdness.
Rated: R
Running Time: 88 mins.
Quoted: “A dog is not human. It’s an animal. Nature doesn’t care about them. It’s sad, but true. We’re dogs’ only friend.”
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Starring: Dev Patel; Sunny Pawar; Nicole Kidman; Rooney Mara; David Wenham
Distributor: Transmission Films; Pictureworks
****/*****
Lion operates on behalf of non-profit organizations across the globe endeavoring to end the epidemic of child homelessness in developing nations. It is an earnest, emotionally charged exploration of a life less ordinary, simultaneously a delicate and powerful epic that should give hope to others who find themselves similarly mourning the disappearance of a loved one.
This is the story of Saroo Brierley who became separated from his biological mother in Khandwa when he boarded and fell asleep on an empty train that took him nearly a thousand miles across the Indian continent. After months of surviving on the streets of Kolkata — sleeping under anything that fended off downpours and dodging bearded kidnappers — Saroo was taken in by a shelter for lost and missing children before being moved into the Indian Society for Sponsorship and Adoption. Saroo’s fortunes changed when the Brierleys, a middle-class Australian family, took him under their wing and showed him a new life in Hobart, the capital city of the Aussie isle of Tasmania. Twenty-five years later — and this is the part where you might just assume Australian director Garth Davis’ feature debut has finally succumbed to Hollywood formula — mother and son would be reunited.
When you break it down into its three distinctive movements, Lion (adapted from Saroo’s memoir A Long Way Home, published in 2015) really explores two miraculous happenings. His entire adult life may be considered a miracle in itself, but one of the film’s greatest achievements is the way it develops its perspective. It’s a rocky road we start off on to be sure and the obstacles come one after another, at an overwhelming rate. Too young to realize his entire life has effectively changed over the course of a nap, Saroo (portrayed by Sunny Pawar in a breathtaking debut performance) wanders around with wide eyes and tussled hair, calling his brother’s name until he eventually doesn’t have the energy anymore and becomes silenced by his helplessness, adrift in a sea of simultaneous possibility and impossibility.
Lion moves into its second half gracefully as we meet the Brierleys, a kind-hearted couple whose intentions are unquestionably pure. David Wenham plays John and Nicole Kidman plays wife Sue. We want to love them just for being, let alone the fact they rescue Saroo from fates unknown. This family in no time at all burrows deeply into your heart. Kidman made a believer out of me as the loving mother. Sue makes it clear she and her husband picked the boy because they loved him, not out of some sense of guilt or obligation. The Brierleys later adopt a second child, the more volatile and aggressive Mantosh (Keshav Jadhav/Divian Ladwa) whose background isn’t elucidated but as we watch him engage in self-destructive acts as a youngster and continue to alienate himself from his new family as he matures, once more we are reminded that Saroo is one of the lucky ones.
At least he is given the chance to mature into a well-balanced, amiable young adult — though no amount of positive reinforcement can stop him feeling burdened by the mystery of his childhood. No amount of love from his adoptive parents can rid him of this kind of emotional baggage. Even ambitions for a career in hospitality/hotel management aren’t enough to make him feel confident about himself as a person. Dev Patel, in a potentially career best performance, portrays Saroo as a kite without its tether. Despite being surrounded by the hustle and bustle of campus life, he looks as lost as he was as a child fending for himself on the streets. It is in Lion‘s final third where we watch a carefully constructed façade starting to crumble, threatening the future he is considering sharing with fellow student Lucy (Rooney Mara).
Lion is a curio in the sense that it uses product placement as a significant plot device — Google Earth as Saroo’s second savior. The popular geobrowser became instrumental in his quest to (re)discover his roots and here it plays just as crucial a role in the narrative as any human being. Saroo is informed about the program at a party he attends while studying in Melbourne, where he opens up to Lucy and some other close friends about his past. That conversation proves catalytic for Saroo’s own slide into self-destruction as he begins shunning friends, coworkers and even his adoptive parents and begins obsessing to an unhealthy degree about retracing his steps. A friend attempts dissuasion by telling him it would take a lifetime to search through all of the train stations in India. Lucy challenges him to face the reality of making it back there only to find nothing.
Lion is at its weakest when it delves into this phase of self-exile, meanwhile Saroo’s interactions with Lucy feel collectively more like a dalliance than a serious thing. But the movie never reduces the emotional weight or contrives Saroo’s journey such that we struggle to believe what we’re being shown. The whole enterprise rings authentic, and the film saves the biggest gut-punch for last. It’s the kind of ending the cynical have been conditioned not to trust. Lion isn’t afraid of wearing its heart on its sleeve, nor should it be. This is an incredible true story that could empower thousands of others who are similarly bereaved to keep hope alive. Lion is a hugely life-affirming film you do not want to miss, especially if your faith in humanity has started to wane as of late.
Moral of the Story: Exceptional, heartfelt performances complement a too-good-to-be-true story about determination, hope and familial love. The film impresses even more considering it is Garth Davis’ first foray into feature filmmaking. Lion is profound, not so much because of the way it makes you feel but because this is what really happened. An enriching, inspiring cinematic experience.
Rated: PG-13
Running Time: 118 mins.
Quoted: “Do you have any idea what it’s like, how every day my real brother screams my name?”
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Morten Tyldum is a Norwegian director who has been on the fast-track to success ever since bursting on to the world stage in 2011 with his critically acclaimed Headhunters, an action thriller based upon a novel by Norwegian author Jo Nesbø and featuring a Scandinavian cast. He’s never looked back since. From there he made a movie based upon the life and achievements of British mathematician Alan Turing, the 2014 Oscar-nominated The Imitation Game in which Benedict Cumberbatch portrayed the father of what we recognize today as artificial intelligence. Two years later Tyldum finds himself collaborating with two of the world’s most box office-friendly stars in Chris Pratt and Jennifer Lawrence on a romantic/science fiction adventure called Passengers.
With each subsequent venture behind the camera, Tyldum has increasingly found himself surrounded by luxuries filmmakers the world over could only dream of one day having for themselves, if only just for one project. He has a knack for attracting big names and turning profits. There’s little doubt Tyldum has been privileged — so much so that it’s difficult to gauge how deserving he is of his status. His big-budget blueprints are going to endure, despite them lacking personality or any sense of novelty, unlike something produced by the likes of, say, Christopher Nolan, a household name who routinely challenges his audiences to, god forbid, use their brains while rummaging through buckets of popcorn. By comparison, Tyldum’s meteoric rise feels less justified.
Mainstream filmmaking at its most indistinguishable is the best way I know how to describe his oeuvre, and Passengers all but confirms the director has no intention of suppressing the urge to pander to the masses, especially when it is to the tune of $130 million in global receipts in less than three weeks. His new film is essentially Titanic set in space, but with a moral twist (or is that, a twisted sense of morality?) — the only element that differentiates this interstellar adventure from a plethora of other doomed-vessel melodramas. Tyldum’s latest posits that people need people, that we have not been created to exist alone. It’s a theme well worth exploring, but once again I found the same generic, unexciting direction that robbed The Imitation Game of its potential similarly blunting the cutting edges of Passengers‘ would-be high-brow narrative. What could have been thought-provoking is instead estimated as “something audiences should really go for.”
The story is about a mechanical engineer named Jim Preston (Pratt) who wakes up 30 years into a 120-year voyage between Earth and a colonial planet in a distant galaxy. He is among the 5,000 passengers board the starship Avalon, blissfully sleeping away the years until they reach Homestead II, along with another some 200 crew members. A computer glitch causes Jim to awaken from suspended animation and when he realizes what has happened he sets about trying to solve the problem rationally rather than panicking or wallowing in despair, with the faintest aroma of Ridley Scott’s The Martian arising in the opening stanza. A year passes and Jim is unsuccessful in getting back to sleep, although he strikes up a “friendship” with a cyborg bartender named Arthur (Michael Sheen). Unable to share an authentic human relationship with Arthur, Jim starts to slip into the despair he has spent a long time trying to avoid.
That is until he comes across a pod containing an Aurora Lane (Lawrence), whom he learns about via a digital portfolio explaining her background as a writer in New York City. He even becomes familiar with her personality from his investigations. He visits her pod frequently, reading about her and imagining what it would be like to have someone else to share in what will in all likelihood be the remainder of his life on board the Avalon. He struggles mightily with the decision to wake her up, which would necessarily and similarly doom her to a premature death.
The morality play is made fascinating because of the star power Tyldum has been afforded. The leads prove why they are paid what they’re paid as they breathe life into a robotic screenplay. The establishing first third sets the stakes high and Pratt makes it easy for us to buy that Jim really doesn’t want to use his engineering prowess to effectively murder a fellow passenger. And it’s kind of a brave new world watching Pratt embody a character who ultimately isn’t very likable. Lawrence isn’t at her best as Aurora, yet it’s something of a miracle she turns a snobby, self-aggrandizing writer who values prestige over anything else into a person we end up wanting to actually succeed. But for my money, the underrated Michael Sheen makes the most compelling argument for what makes us human, playing the part of some futuristic vision of The Overlook Hotel barkeep in whom a steadily unraveling Jack Torrence frequently confided. Arthur hasn’t been wired to keep secrets. He doesn’t know how to lie or judge. The android offers a contrast that imbues Passengers with the humanity its poorly written flesh-and-blood characters, or at least Jim’s troubling actions, do not.
Unfortunately it’s those sorts of stereotypes and broad statements that could come to define Tyldum as the most recent example of a foreign director making one too many compromises. Six films deep into a directorial career with only a third of them being English-language features, he’s already ‘gone Hollywood.’ He has no distinctive voice. No masterful, inventive way of presenting his Big Movies’ Big Themes. Nor does he frame his stories in ways we have never experienced before. Passengers only gets weaker and more familiar as it plods onward to a thoroughly disappointing action-packed finale, when the Avalon’s technical malfunctions become more frequent and more serious and as Jim and Aurora put aside their differences in order to work to find a solution together.
The destination, such as it is, is so underwhelming (and so expected) it begs the question as to whether the film needed to dive into the morality play at all. Aurora stays mad at Jim for a long time, perhaps even an appropriate amount of time, but the film seems to equate a broken tether with a broken heart. The denouement is not only lazy, it’s disingenuous. It made me long for the pure innocence and the schmaltz of Jack and Rose’s forbidden love. The melodramatics are as damaging to the intellectual constitution of the story as the asteroid is to the ship’s computers and reactors.
Debating the merits of the finale is pointless really because it’s clear Tyldum isn’t in this for the art of storytelling. The Avalon is one of the more visually pleasing spacecraft we’ve seen in some time and the thick ribbons of stars across a canvas of black has rarely looked so beautiful and yet so terrifying. I could write love letters to Passengers‘ production design. There’s a sleekness that cannot be overlooked, that only a film built on this kind of money can provide. The more cynical side of me, the part that enjoys thinking while watching, can’t help but feel Tyldum is making a bid for becoming the most Hollywood-friendly foreign-born director in history. Honestly, that’s not the worst thing in the world. There’s nothing amoral about making a lot of money doing something you love.
Recommendation: I think it says something that the most interesting ‘character’ in the film is the spaceship Avalon. The luxury space liner is a thing of beauty. Passengers is a senses-stimulating film, aggressively so when it comes to the visual elements. It’s a gorgeously rendered production, but it lacks the soul and conviction needed to carry the weight the story deserves. And while I’m not as upset about the implications of the way Jim’s actions are basically excused by film’s end as others have been, I understand where the anger is coming from. This is like Titanic set in space, with Rose suffering from Stockholm Syndrome and instead of Jack being a swell fella, he’s actually a selfish jerk. If you just read that one line and that’s all you knew about the film, then Passengers sounds pretty interesting. And maybe it will be to those who have a stronger tolerance for formulaic blockbusters.
Rated: PG-13
Running Time: 116 mins.
Quoted: “A drowning man will always try to drag you down with him.”
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My biggest gripe with Why Him? It’s actually not that it represents yet another painfully unfunny Christmas comedy. Well, it kind of is. I’m dismayed more because it is a painfully unfunny Christmas comedy starring James Franco and Bryan Cranston.
Bryan Cranston! Also translated as: Walter White, Shannon, Robert Mazur, and of course, Hal Wilkerson.
Now he’s Ned Fleming, a name you won’t be able to remember beyond the parking lot of your local cineplex. It’s always painful to see a great actor slumming it, but for Cranston to star in a vehicle that made me mad at even James Franco — someone whom I actively defend for being unusual and pretentious — it begs the question why do we even try to admonish professional actors for the choices they make in careers that never directly affect us? It’s clear our outrage, pretend or real, never accomplishes anything.
Ned Fleming is the father of Stephanie (Zoey Deutch), and he shares in my pain. When he is invited to California for Christmas, forced to buck family tradition of spending the holiday in Michigan, he becomes dismayed by the man his daughter is currently seeing: James Franco with a shit ton of tattoos! He plays a billionaire game developer named Laird Mayhew, an obnoxious caricature of the actor himself whose own modus vivendi runs counter to just about everyone on the planet because he himself is an art project constantly evolving and expanding.
The Ned-Laird feud could have been played for laughs, but a script co-written by director John Hamburg and Ian Helfer seems to have forgotten to incorporate the jokes. Unless the joke is, of course, ultra-meta: everyone who just bought a ticket hoping for the good times to roll via a decent if disposable new entry into the crowded genre of farcical family/Yuletide comedies has just gotten ripped off. And Bryan Cranston and James Franco are in it — why them?!
Recommendation: Goodness, no. But I will say this: the film at least afforded fans of KISS to watch Paul Stanley and Gene Simmons stoop to a new low by making a totally awkward cameo towards the end of the film. So there is that.
Rated: R
Running Time: 111 mins.
Quoted: “I mean, what in God’s name is a double-dicker?”
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Dedicated to movie nerdom, nostalgia, and the occasional escape. In the late 90s, I worked at Blockbuster Video, where they let me take home two free movies a day. I caught up on the classics and reviewed theatrical releases for Denver 'burbs newspapers and magazines. Please enjoy my ongoing Top 50 Reely Bernie Faves list. Comments and dialogue encouraged!
Recommendation: 
Recommendation: Goodness, no. But I will say this: the film at least afforded fans of KISS to watch Paul Stanley and Gene Simmons stoop to a new low by making a totally awkward cameo towards the end of the film. So there is that.
Thomas J 