The King's Speech

By George, He's Got It!

2010 // UK // Tom Hooper // March 16, 2011 // Theatrical Print (Chase Park Plaza Cinema)

C+ - The King's Speech is a more or less pleasing slice of entertainment, one that snugly fulfills the familiar parameters established by countless portrayals of personalized Struggle Against Adversity. The fact that the protagonist in this instance is the reluctant monarch of a corroding empire--and that his mentor-rival is played by a pithy and unflappable Geoffrey Rush--only amplifies the film's surface allure. As cinema, however, Tom Hooper's film is a distressingly thin and vacant work, undergirded by an implicit and almost snotty presumption that if the beats are recognizable and the ornaments polished, then artistic vitality is a given. Hooper's previous work, The Damned United, likewise suffered from dramatic triteness, but was nonetheless a remarkably nimble and inventive film, persistently surprising with its subversion of sports film conventions and its acerbic thematic grumblings. The King's Speech, by contrast, rests almost entirely on musty appeals to emotion, whether garbed in its distinctly British ethos of duty and perseverance or in the admittedly superb design of its period trappings. Better writers than I have skewered the film's ahistorical flourishes, elisions, and reversals, but this isn't the place for a debate about factual accuracy in narrative features. Even if approached as a work of fiction, The King's Speech is handsome but woefully timid stuff, perhaps the mildest picture to clinch a Best Picture statuette in twenty years.

The story is perhaps familiar to Anglophiles who have followed the travails of the House of Windsor: In the years between the World Wars, Prince Albert (Colin Firth), second son of England's King George V, begins working with speech therapist Lionel Logue (Rush) in order to overcome his life-long stammer. This effort becomes especially crucial after the prince's older brother Edward abdicates the throne, after which Alfred is crowned King George VI, even as Europe lurches towards war. There's not much more to the tale than that, and the film presents the king's September 3, 1939 radio speech to the nation as the dramatic climax of his personal clashes with Logue and his own psychological struggles. It's remarkably slender stuff on which to hang 118 minutes, but it is to Hooper's credit that he manages to keep the proceedings brisk and focused.

Stylistically, the film possesses a rather shameless, preening affection for the grandiose, but the narrative itself is anything but puffy, hewing as it does so firmly and neatly to the framework of the "personal struggle film" sub-genre, complete with a second act rift between teacher and student. Things hum along quite nicely, assisted by the estimable performers, particularly Rush, whose lightning wit and disarming presence serve to leaven all the royal starch with slatherings of modern, populist sarcasm. Helena Bonham Carter weaves a similar spell, humanizing the queen consort Elizabeth as a droll and unfaltering lady, assured in a position that she acknowledges is prestigious but powerless. Firth is game and mainly compelling in a role that demands not only a measure of vocal craft, but also character traits slightly outside his usual purview. Firth presents Albert as a morally upright but altogether weak man, suffused with an unpleasant blend of meekness and hotheadedness, and overlain with a pall of persistent, debilitating terror. The result is that while Albert is hardly appealing as a hero, The King's Speech succeeds in evoking authentic empathy for his plight. Here is a man in an exceptional position who happens to be afflicted with a disability that makes his principal responsibility awkward, if not impossible.

Of course, as with nearly all films about monarchs, Hooper's work is deeply invested in the notion that princes are just Regular People at bottom. The King's Speech flexes this message time and again, revealing it most conspicuously through Logue's obstinate demand for man-to-man equality during his sessions with Albert. This conceit never entirely persuades, but, admittedly, not due to a half-hearted or graceless presentation. Hooper is palpably convinced that his tale has a core of meritorious humanity, and he is an adept enough director to convey that sincerity on the screen. The problem, of course, is not the earnestness of the message, but its glibness, containing as it does no particular insights into the psychological landscape of those suffering form speech impediments, nor into the novel problems associated with even a declawed dynastic monarchy in the modern age.

The building blocks of The King's Speech are overwhelmingly direct and burnished pleasures: an evolving friendship between two men from different worlds, stymied at times by conflict; a man who must overcome his personal demons and lingering daddy complex, as much for himself and his loved ones as for the greater good; and, naturally, luscious design in the sets and costumes that flawlessly evokes Depression-era Britain in all its opulent, chic, and grubby glory (depending on the scene). The film's whole approach is carefully and exasperatingly tasteful, and while this is hardly inexplicable in the current environment of awards-bait prestige films, that doesn't make it any less bothersome. (Heck, even 2009's undeserving Best Picture winner, the unruly, unconvincing, and problematic Slumdog Millionaire, was at least energetic and even formally daring.)

The slightness of The King's Speech is perhaps most disappointing given that there is so much to admire on the surface, from Eve Stewart's production design--which glides effortlessly between sumptuously warm and bleakly cool--to stately work from cinematographer Danny Cohen. Like The Damned United, this film further establishes Cooper's enviable eye for aesthetic composition, especially his potent use of negative space. The film's only flourish is the director's employment of a wide lens for select shots, a perhaps gaudy touch that nonetheless effectively underlines Albert's anxious awareness of the public scrutiny that is continually focused on him. Ultimately, it would be stupidly contrary to dismiss Hooper as an untalented director, or The King's Speech as a poorly-made film. However, one can only wonder why such talent has brought to bear on a tale as conventional and emotionally limp as a Sunday school recital.

True Grit

Possessing a Sharp Tongue and Bountiful Sand

2010 // USA // Joel and Ethan Coen // December 28, 2010 // Theatrical Print (AMC Esquire)​

B+ - True Grit finds the Coen Brothers, those mischievous delvers of American genre, working for the first time within the parameters of the classical Western, a form that they pursue in a curiously straightforward manner, by and large without their customary cocked eye. The Coens have never been deconstructionists, preferring to employ genre as a valid tool to explore their perennial thematic preoccupations. These, of course, include the random preposterousness of the cosmos, the failure of carefully constructed worldviews, the fundamental venality of humanity, and--when relief from such dire considerations is warranted--the glimmers of comfort that are nonetheless attainable from time to time, usually by means of a simple adjustment in outlook. One might expect these typical concerns to be highlighted in the Brothers' adaptation of Charles Portis' novel about a precocious fourteen-year-old girl searching for her father's murderer in mid-nineteenth-century Indian Territory. However, the source material seems to have compelled to Coens to venture into fresh thematic terrain. While their trademark absurdism still rears its head in places, the film is foremost fixated on the problem of moral systems, and how they are developed, hardened, and revealed. True Grit is also, not coincidentally, the Coens' most intently psychological film in years. While it never attains the searing cinematic greatness of their recent existential pictures (No Country For Old Men and A Serious Man), it possesses the undeniable appeal of a work made by two masters operating slightly outside their comfort zone.

In an opening voiceover, young Arkansan Mattie Ross (a heavenly Hailee Steinfeld) explains her unhappy dilemma: a no-good cowardly drunk named Tom Chaney (Josh Brolin, channeling Ted Levine) has shot and killed her father over a perceived slight, and fled into the Territory with the slain man's horse and money. Mattie is a bright, blunt-spoken firecracker in a calico dress and plaits, the sort of girl couldn't be dissuaded from her path by the Devil himself, and who possesses a remarkably ability to size up anyone's character at a glance. She arrives in town and takes charge of the situation, claiming her father's body and settling his unresolved business with a local horse dealer, exhibiting all the savvy of a Marrakesh merchant. She also makes it plain to everyone within earshot that revenge is on her agenda, and her gaze quickly settles on U.S. Marshall Rooster Cogburn (Jeff Bridges), an ornery, drunken, one-eyed grizzly of a lawman with a reputation for ruthlessness. Negotiations and bit of underhandedness ensue, and eventually Mattie and the Marshall set out for the Territory, meanwhile acquiring an ally and rival in the person of preening Texas Ranger LaBoeuf (Matt Damon), who intends to bring Chaney back to Lone Star justice for unrelated crimes. The remainder of the film is occupied with this unlikely trio's trek into the wintery landscape of Arkansas and present-day Oklahoma, where Chaney has allegedly fallen in with a gang led by "Lucky" Ned Pepper (Barry Pepper), a longtime Cogburn nemesis.

The film's dialogue reportedly hews closely to that of the Portis novel, and belongs to the same school of affected cowboy poetics that was flaunted with such phenomenal poise in The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. True Grit approaches its educated hillbilly vernacular from a more congenial place, one less concerned with lush gravity than engaging pop and crackle. Despite the film's sobering subject matter, the dialog is closest kin to the dense, quotable back-and-forth that characterizes the Brothers' overtly comedic ventures: Raising Arizona, The Big Lebowski, and O Brother, Where Art Thou? For a film about bloody vengeance, True Grit summons an unexpected plethora of smiles, almost always due to the manner in which the principals deliver their lines, particularly Steinfeld and Bridges. Oddly enough, although this approach risks painting the film's protagonists as droll cartoons rather than three-dimensional people, it ultimately succeeds in charming rather than distancing, and fits snugly with the film's warm, intimate treatment of its main characters.

The Coens, as is their custom, treat the film's scenario and the tropes that meander through it with affectionate regard, and not a little bit of humor. However, what sets True Grit apart from other works from the Brothers is the level of satirical bite, which has been scaled back significantly here. Mattie, Cogburn, and LaBoeuf are all blemished to one degree or another (the men more so than Mattie), but they're the first Coen protagonists since Fargo's Marge Gunderson who could be said to be genuine classical heroes, as opposed to villains, scoundrels, dupes, or "heroes" whose victories are entirely accidental. When their time comes, all three reveal themselves to be courageous, decisive, and honorable, despite their flaws. This approach to character is of a piece with the earnestness of True Grit's working mode, one that is interested in using Western idioms to unironically probe how our moral codes are tested by unforeseen circumstances, not to mention by the oppositional codes of others. Lying beyond humanity's laws and crawling with natural perils, the frontier setting of the Western is, of course, a fitting arena for such explorations. The Coens use True Grit's gray, slushy, post-Civil War landscape to good effect in this respect, conjuring a realm in which knowledge and values are more essential to survival than the amenities of civilization. Behind the camera as usual is Coen co-conspirator and living legend Roger Deakins, who captures the film's intimate spaces and forlorn vistas with his typically striking eye, and regards the visages of the performers with both familiar ease and a kind of folkloric enchantment.

The film contains abundant references to the filmic mythology of John Wayne--including, of course, the 1969 Henry Hathaway adaptation of the novel--and to a host of older generic clichés. Such allusions run to the acidly critical at times (and not unjustly so), but the Coens are not concerned with excavating the Western tradition so much as acknowledging the plain roots of their film, much as Scorsese did in Shutter Island, though without the latter's effusive cinephilic eagerness. Time and again, the Brothers draw from the customary Western toolbox for the film's narrative and visual language, an approach that preserves the tale's mythic credence and crucial patina of Old Testament murk. It's no mistake that Mattie's prim and forthright Protestantism governs the film's overall tone, and that within that world Cogburn's slovenly vices and LaBoeuf's hotheaded vanity seem particularly transgressive. (The two men are ostensibly Mattie's allies, but also the foes who test her code the most rigorously.)

This being a Coen film, True Grit functions marvelously well within its generic boundaries, reflecting the Brothers' fascination with the potential of established cinematic forms. The film gratifies as a lyrical, rough-edged tale of violent revenge on the frontier, but like any Western of even modest ambition, there's a bit more going on under its dusty surface. The genre's customary musings on race, gender, faith, and the role of violence are all present (sometimes subtly), but the Coens have focused their adaptation most conspicuously on Mattie's moral journey from childhood to adulthood. This is underlined by the camera's frequent assumption of her vantage point, whether in the branches of a tree, perched on a ridge, or lying on the ground. At fourteen, Mattie has already adopted a rigorous moral framework that evidently serves her well, and True Grit is the tale of the bloody testing of that framework in the "real world". (The fallacy of such distinctions being partly revealed by Mattie's gleaming competence in nearly every practical endeavor save gunplay.) Her father's murder thrusts her into a situation that is more treacherous than those to which she is accustomed, and places her in proximity to a variety of men with entrenched moral systems of their own. True Grit therefore represents a kind of moral voyeurism, as we watch a child's code undergo affirmation and adjustment into the code of an adult. In this, the film is revealed as a warmer cousin to the films of Michael Mann, who has long been absorbed with codes of morality and how they collide with circumstance. The film's symbolism can be a bit heavy-handed at times: Mattie's first successful act of violence, for example, plops her into a literal dark pit filled with serpents. However hoary its methods, however, the film's explorations are refreshing and unexpectedly fascinating. True Grit is an uncommonly momentous treatment of the process of moral maturation and of the intersection of inner conviction and outer reality (and from a female perspective, at that). With the Coens, it should no longer be a surprise that such rich veins can be discovered within cinematic forms that are perennially declared exhausted of their potential.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1

No More Pencils, No More Books

2010 // UK - USA // David Yates // November 28, 2010 // Theatrical Print (Regal Biltmore Grande Stadium 15)

B- - The film adaptations of J.K. Rowling’s staggeringly popular fantasy novels have perfected a remarkable, distinctive formula. Once the banal hand of Chris Columbus was pried from the franchise following Chamber of Secrets, every chapter in the saga has exhibited the same characteristics: an ever-burgeoning cast of wizards, monsters, and other sundry characters seemingly destined to encompass every British thespian of note; maddeningly convoluted plots, conveyed so sketchily that only devoted fans of the books can hope to comprehend what the hell is going on; stunning, inspired production design overseen by the invaluable Stuart Craig; and exceedingly game, unfailingly charming performances from series principals Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint, and Emma Watson. The seventh film in the series, the first of a two-part finale, sticks closely to this template, a thoroughly unadventurous and (at this late date) sensible approach. Having shepherded the saga through its previous two chapters, director David Yates has learned that such a formula reliably bestows a patina of epic artistry on the franchise, inoculates it against conventional criticism, and just happens to reap billions of dollars. The films cannot be dismissed as trifling—they represent, for better or worse, the most ambitious work of long-form fantasy cinema in history—but as the series reaches its end, their significance as entertainment to viewers not already hooked on Harry’s adventures is doubtful. Which leads to the most essential question regarding Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1: How good is it, when approached strictly as the penultimate entry in the broader saga? The answer: Exactly as good as it needs to be to bring loyal Potterheads (including yours truly) back for one more outing.

The latest chapter finds Harry (Radcliffe), Ron (Grint), and Hermione (Watson) forsaking their seventh year at Hogwarts for a fugitive life, now that Albus Dumbledore (Michael Gambon) has been slain and the wizarding world has been overrun by the forces of the Dark Lord Voldemort (Ralph Fiennes). Breaking free from the episodic design of the previous films, which were snugly reliant on the discrete Hogwarts school years, Deathly Hallows launches the heroic Trio out into a wider and more perilous world. This, of course, dovetails nicely with Harry’s emergence from adolescence into adulthood, with all the frightening responsibilities and uncertainties that transition entails. Appropriately enough, the world beyond Hogwarts has become forlorn and yawning, an exposed wilderness with a distinctly Northern tinting. Treacherous forays into the urban bustle of the Muggle world provide only brief respite for the Trio, who wander aimlessly through a landscape of wind-battered coasts, gray volcanic plateaus, and dismal winter forests. Beyond the cities, signs of life are scarce, and as our heroes squat under drab concrete overpasses and trudge through desiccated fields, their Britain seems a post-apocalyptic environment.

Lack of direction is one of the film’s dilemmas, for Harry, Ron, and Hermione have no better sense for how to move against the Dark Lord than at the conclusion of the previous chapter. Whether out of prudence or obstinacy, Dumbledore provided only the barest hints as to how Harry was to proceed after his death. One of the primary problems with Rowling’s latter novels is the multiplication of MacGuffins: there are far too many Important Items whizzing through the plot, and an even more unwieldy number of Important People and Places. Deathly Hallows: Part 1 presents the bewildered viewer not only with the seven Horcruxes of Half-Blood Prince (items into which Voldemort has placed fragments of his soul) but also a magical sword necessary to destroy these foul objects, not to mention the three titular Hallows, legendary wizard artifacts that will become crucial to the plot. Even to Potterheads it can be dizzying and needlessly elaborate; to the uninitiated it’s virtually guaranteed to be outright incomprehensible. (At least Tolkein remained resolutely focused on the One Ring.) Yet despite all these Objects of Desire that stud the narrative, Harry and his friends spend much of Deathly Hallows mired in their own imperfect knowledge, uncertain of the next step on their quest. Unfortunately, this means that there is a lot of running and hiding and reading, peppered with spontaneous and ill-advised gambits, which makes for a prolonged, often directionless story. While there’s an undeniably potent correspondence between Harry’s predicament and the often doubtful shift to adulthood, there’s little pleasure in watching the plot inch along stiffly for two and a half hours, especially compared to the relatively lively pacing and drama of Half-Blood Prince. Structurally speaking, these flaws are entirely understandable, given that Rowling’s series has always been presented less as a thrilling Heroes’ Journey than an intense, fantastical allegory for the process of growing up, with a deep debt to the tradition of English boarding school stories. Unfortunately, this route often makes for some exceedingly lifeless “adventure” in what is ostensibly a fantasy adventure series, and never more so than in Deathly Hallows: Part 1.

As with all the post-Chamber Potter adaptations, the latest film compels not by faithfully recreating scenes from the novels, but by its omissions and digressions, and by its sumptuous employment of dazzling design to elaborate on Rowling’s already crowded fantasy universe. Even at a presumed running time of five hours over two films, the seventh chapter elides as much as it dares. Meanwhile, Yates emphasizes not only the despair of fresh responsibility, but also the circuitous, mythic dimension to Rowling’s saga. Everything old is new again: People and places long neglected suddenly snap back into focus, and objects hidden in plain sight take on newfound import. Of all the Potter films, only Prisoner of Azkaban dared to be distinctly cinematic in its sensibilities, but every subsequent film has at least been presented as a genuine story with robust emotional and psychological dimensions, rather than a rote checklist of narrative minutiae. For all its grim shapelessness, Deathly Hallows presents its share of worthwhile humane indulgences, such as Ron’s chilling eagerness to torture one of Voldemort’s Death Eaters, or a moment where Harry and Hermione, situated at an emotional nadir, dance sheepishly to a scratchy tune emanating from a “wizard wireless”. The film has its share of emotional fumbles, however, as in its protracted mourning over the demise of an unappealing, mostly forgotten character.

Consistent with the prior films, the most appealing feature of Deathly Hallows is the manner in which the filmmakers drape earnest adolescent allure over an ornately realized fantasy world. The film doesn’t offer as many fresh sights as its predecessors, save for an entrancing animated sequence dramatizing the legend of the Hallows in silhouettes. That said, Yates’ latest chapter ensnares countless characters, creatures, locales, phenomena, and motifs that we’ve seen before, often presented in a slightly different key. The Ministry of Magic, first glimpsed in Order of the Phoenix, has been transformed from a quirky bureaucratic labyrinth into a fascistic edifice of propaganda and thought-policing, where uncloaked dementors twitch on their leashes and the vile, pink-garbed Dolores Umbridge (Imelda Staunton) is enthroned as a simpering inquisitor. This sort of repurposing privileges the uncanny shock of change over the glint of novelty, echoing the film’s bleak treatment of childhood’s demise.  For all his missteps as a storyteller, Yates has done an admirable job of zeroing in on the emotional nodes at the core of Rowling’s tale, chiefly its mournful, frightening depiction of adulthood, so replete with moral confusion, mortal dread, and sexual anxiety. Deathly Hallows is ultimately a tale about the putting away of childish things, a marathon parable that presents rites of passage as opportunities to revisit the familiar with fresh eyes. In Harry’s dire case, every glance reveals deeper shadows: mentors become peers with all-too-human failings, the banalities of everyday life deny him a comforting refuge, and the temptation of cowardice over righteousness waxes daily.

Dogtooth

Upon the Edge of No Escape

2009 // Greece // Giorgos Lanthimos // October 31, 2010 // Theatrical Print (Webster University Moore Auditorium)

[Dogtooth was featured in a limited engagement on October 29-31, 2010 at the Webster University Film Series.]

A- - Dogtooth leaves an unexpected chill in its wake, a psychological and moral draft capable of coaxing gooseflesh hours after the credits have rolled. With striking compositions and a relentless tone of agonizing apprehension, the third feature from Greek director Giorgos Lanthimos picks at your skull until it finds an opening, and then burrows its way in deep. The film defies easy categorization: part NC-17 parable, part matter-of-fact thriller, part cinema of the absurd, and part pitch-black allegory. It is, without question, one of the most confrontational and exigent works of cinema in the past year, alongside Michael Haneke's similarly brilliant The White Ribbon, with which it shares many themes. That latter film's setting—a Lutheran German village on the eve of the Great War—was fundamental to Haneke's pointed critique of purity myths, but Lanthimos' explorations are broader and more ambivalent. Accordingly, his stage is both more familiar and slightly abstract. Most of Dogtooth takes place in a sprawling, somewhat outdated country domicile with a tall wooden fence, where passing airplanes cast shadows on a verdant, well-trimmed lawn. The building's banal appearance conceals a twisted household whose circumstances the outside world would regard as a waking nightmare. Not that what anyone thinks means a damn to the dictatorial Father (Christos Stergioglou): he's doing everything in his power to keep the world beyond the fence at bay.

It is apparent from the first scene that the abnormal is commonplace within this house, as three young adult siblings (Aggeliki Papoulia, Hristos Passalis, and Mary Tasoni) listen to an educational audio tape that explains illogical rules and presents erroneous vocabulary definitions (e.g., the leather armchair in the living room is a "sea"). Driving home the discomfiting otherness of the household, the children (and that is plainly how we are to think of them, despite their age) then propose scalding themselves as an endurance test. Other strangeness emerges as Lanthimos slowly and fitfully reveals the routine of the household. The Father and obedient Mother (Michele Valley) subject the children to an array of bizarre exercises and tests, encouraging physical fitness and mental discipline, all while scrupulously shielding them from influences of the outside world. The siblings' whole existence begins in their little bedrooms, where the number of cheap stickers on their headboards tracks their "progress," and ends at the property line, beyond which lies a perilous wilderness (or so they are told) inhabited by an invisible Other Brother and ravenous, prowling monsters called "cats". The parents spin peculiar lies and engage in apparently meaningless deceptions: plastic toy jets are presented as real airplanes that have fallen from the sky; wriggling fish are secretly released into the pool for the children to discover, whereupon the Father hunts them with a spear gun and snorkel; an LP of Sinatra crooning "Fly Me to the Moon" is translated to the children as their Grandfather speaking from beyond the grave.

Underneath all this weirdness runs a simmering strain of psycho-sexual dysfunction and terrifying abuse. The children (and Mother) are periodically ordered to get down on all fours and bark like dogs. The Younger Sister offers to lick her family members—on an elbow, shoulder, or finger—in exchange for petty gifts and favors. The Father routinely brings home a security guard (Anna Kalaitzidou) from his workplace and pays her to have perfunctory sex with the Son (the daughters, pointedly, are not afforded such treatment). Everyone seems perpetually anxious, and justly so, as brutal violence flares up without warning. Like Twin Peaks' Sarah Palmer, the viewer is prompted to keen, "What is going on in this house?!"  Are the parents cruel fanatics who have established their own demented home schooling methods? Are they researchers conducting a long-term psychological experiment? Are the Son and Daughters even their biological children, or are they kidnapping victims? None of these questions are clarified within the film, not that they need to be. Lanthimos' approach to the story is restless and murky, but to an alert observer such narrative vagueness serves as a signpost rather than an obscurantist defect. The director renders moot questions about the parents' intentions or the precise origin of this monstrous state of affairs. His interests lie in establishing the absolutism of the parents' eccentric regime, and in documenting the obdurate impulses and fateful missteps that eventually result in the splintering of that regime.

Insofar as Dogtooth has a story, it is a straightforward two-part scenario, lacking the ebb and flow of a more conventional dramatic narrative. In the first part, the specifics of the household's rules and dynamics are established. In the second, a conflict is introduced, one that in due course subverts and annihilates the household's carefully maintained order. That conflict initially manifests as videocassettes brought into the house by the security guard-cum-prostitute, who barters them away to the Older Daughter. The children are familiar with pornography—their parents openly consume it—but these videos are something far more radioactive in their hermetically sealed world: Hollywood movies. In what proves to be Dogtooth's solitary gesture of endearing human warmth, the Older Daughter quickly memorizes every line of dialog from the films, and soon she is spurting juice "blood" from her mouth in imitation of Rocky Balboa, or babbling in her affectless but contented way through a Richard Dreyfuss monologue from Jaws. (In a later, distinctly Wes Anderson-tinged scene, she transforms an awkward dance performance into a muddled homage to Flashdance.) Needless to say, the introduction of a virus as decadent as the Hollywood blockbuster does not bode well for anyone.

Approached purely as a stark thriller about an unconventional captors-and-captives scenario, Dogtooth is potent filmmaking. While the characters and their interactions are frequently disturbing or just downright baffling, the film itself hews to a determined realism in its presentation, lending sickening immediacy and intimacy to the events that unfold. Lanthimos' style is most defined by its absence of style: unadorned, disciplined, and deliberate. His formal flourishes are sparing: the use of shallow focus to signal the trajectory of action, and framing that frequently severs heads and limbs in contravention of the usual rules of cinematography. Such choices harmonize with the film's gnawing tone of fear and sexual unease, prodding the viewer to see the world as an anxious child might, full of threatening vectors and organs with their own frightening agency.

While it is an effective and visceral tale of suspense, the indefinite quality of the film's contours encourages deeper study. As with any fine work of absurdism, the target of Dogtooth's criticism resists easy identification. The film can be described as an attack on any number of norms: the institution of the family, cultural indoctrination, patriarchy, religiously motivated sexual repression, autocratic government, or any system that seeks to control its component-participants. The tyranny on display in Dogtooth is of the most insidious two-pronged type: inflexible, retributive, and violent, and yet able to cunningly employ reward, rivalry, and anticipation for its own malevolent (and typically inscrutable) purposes. The viewer cannot fathom the endpoint of the parents' sick system of child-rearing, but the Father plants a germ of illusory hope as a means of control: when a child's canine tooth (the titular "dogtooth") falls out, he or she is ready to venture beyond the fence.

Despite the film's arid surface, its cinematic antecedents are always squirming just out of sight, their relevance highlighted by the Older Daughter's obsession with the pop-cultural artifacts that fall into her hands. George Orwell's fingerprints are all over the film's thick allegorical slatherings, but so are Patrick McGoohan's. Echoes of The Prisoner are apparent in the oddly arbitrary quality of the household's deceits and rules, its curious linguistic patterns, and its mask of suburban bliss and hopelessly square pleasures (Sing-a-Long Night! Cake Night!). The family's canine braying brings to mind the animalistic fits of David Lynch's characters. Like Blue Velvet's fresh-faced amateur detective, Jeffrey Beaumont, the Other Daughter begins to discern the shadows of a strange world long hidden from her. The family of Dogtooth vibrates to the same pitch as numerous depraved Lynchian families, from those in The Grandmother to Fire Walk With Me, but it also calls back to the misfit tribes of 1970s horror and exploitation cinema. That era was rife with willfully isolated clans of fanatics (The Wicker Man), cannibals (The Texas Chainsaw Massacre), and mutants (The Hills Have Eyes) whose abnormal value systems inevitably shocked and disgusted interlopers. Unlike those films, Dogtooth turns a sympathetic gaze inward. For all its chilliness, Lanthimos' film thus reveals an astonishingly raw and bloody horror at its heart: the horror of being a child who was raised in Hell and told it was Heaven.

Buried

Man in a Box

2010 // Spain // Rodrigo Cortés // October 7, 2010 // Theatrical Print (Wehrenberg Ronnies 20)

B - Now here's a wholly unexpected and welcome shock, if a grim one. Beneath the fiendishly straightforward premise of Rodrigo Cortés' Buried, beneath even the nasty thrill of the claustrophobic agonies inflicted on its hapless protagonist (and the audience) via its 6'x3'x2' setting, lies one of the best films yet made about the Iraq War, second only to the Armando Iannucci's black comic masterstroke, In the Loop. If one expects any word to describe a 95-minute film set entirely inside a coffin and featuring a single on-screen actor, it would be "simple." However, the remarkable thing about Cortés' high-concept tale is that, although it succeeds spectacularly well strictly as a white-knuckle thriller about an unthinkable situation, it possesses a richness of subtext that permits examination from manifold angles. Turn it this way and you can see a stark allegory for America's seven-year embroilment in the Middle East. Flip it that way and you might discover a miserable, sweat-stained absurdism, one part Kafka and one part Coen brothers. However, the film never indulges in sermonizing or surreal digression, and it is Cortés' commitment to Buried's elemental parameters that renders it a triumphant, merciless vice of tension.

Following a title sequence that evokes Saul Bass—and therefore Hitchcock, and not incidentally—the film presents an opening premise that is as austere as they come. Paul Conroy (Ryan Reynolds) awakens in pitch darkness, bound and gagged. At first we can only hear his breathing and sense his dawning awareness that something is very, very wrong. By the flame from the Zippo lighter that has been placed in his hand, he quickly ascertains that he has been sealed into a coffin and buried. In addition to the lighter, he discovers on his person a half-charged cell phone that shows only Arabic characters. For the next hour and a half, Cortés' camera never leaves the coffin, and the scenes are lit only by the light to which Paul himself has access (chiefly, his guttering Zippo and ghostly-green cellphone screen).

Buried contains the seeds for a slightly different film than it turns out to be. Cortes and screenwriter Chris Sparling could have chosen to emphasize the mystery aspect of Paul's horrifying predicament, placing him six feet under without any knowledge of where he is or what has happened to him. That isn't the case. As Paul relates in a panic to any person he can reach on the cell phone, he works a truck driver for a Halliburton analogue in Iraq in 2006. The last thing he recalls is his convoy being attacked by insurgents, and he fairly quickly tumbles to the fact that he is likely being held captive. This becomes crystal clear when his kidnappers call him, whispering in a menacing croak that he has only a few hours to convince the American embassy to pay them $5 million for his life. Buried is therefore primarily a thriller about a seemingly unsolvable problem—a pit sans pendulum, if you will—and is equally fascinated by the tangible details of Paul's captivity and by the psychological toll that his plight wreaks on him.

Despite his fratboy smirk and sculpted abs (or perhaps because of them), Reynolds' charisma functions best in nastier roles, whether he's in Jack Torrance mode in the underrated remake of The Amityville Horror or adding repugnant staining to his too-cool-for-school swagger in Adventureland. While Buried is essentially a one-man show, the film would lose its potency if Paul were too replete with tics and crevasses. The story works by permitting the viewer to lie alongside Paul in the coffin and imagine how they would react to such terrifying circumstances. It's a role that requires a certain Everyman blankness, and it's absolutely not a slap to Reynolds to say that he delivers on this score. His performance is exactly what the film needs: a careful equilibrium between distinctive characterization and receptiveness to audience projection, with his emotions and actions presented as utterly believable. Paul is, in a way, the perfect protagonist for horror-cinema-as-formalist-stunt.

This not to say that what Cortés achieves with Buried is a mere carnival trick, bereft of significance after the curtain falls. While Paul's dire predicament is characterized by a series of escalating physical crises—a knothole that provide access for an unwanted trespasser, sand that seeps in with maddening alacrity—the most resonant aspects of his plight are eerily familiar in our everyday experience. He finds himself stymied by spotty cell reception, pens that won't write, a flashlight that flickers (a horror movie tradition, that), and a succession of clueless, unsympathetic, and misleading voices on the other end of his phone. (When anyone picks up at all; this, more than anything, decisively marks Buried as a creature of its time.) Paul futilely professes his insignificance and neutrality in the Iraq War to his captors ("I'm just a contractor!"), but they're the least of his problems compared to skeptical bureaucrats, shifty government agents, a peeved sister-in-law, and a human resources department that seems determined, even in his present circumstances, to screw him out of his benefits.

Buried therefore serves as a bald-faced commentary on the never-ending neo-colonial clusterfuck in the Middle East, with Paul figuratively and literally entombed by nefarious forces—neoconservative, corporate, and jihadist—that he cannot confront. More broadly, the film rumbles with the horror-cum-hilarity of the modern American experience: the futile search for help in the digital wilderness, our dependence on our technological talismans, and the barrage of casual malice and authoritarian lies that we swallow out of desperation. (Paul might as well be jobless with an underwater mortgage and expiring unemployment benefits, thanks to politicians who self-righteously scold him to just dig himself out.) While such metaphorical approaches to Buried are quite caustic and patently unconcealed, Cortés never elevates such political or cultural statements above the simple, masochistic joys of a brutal thriller. Buried is constructed with a diligence that should come as no shock given the micro scale of his setting, and watching it unfold is like reading a story by Poe, an exercise in swelling dread and looming finality. The unexpected textures that the film offers are merely the cockroach icing on a delectably vicious cake.

The Social Network

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2010 // USA // David Fincher // October 4, 2010 // Theatrical Print (St. Louis Cinemas Moolah Theater)

B+ - The tumultuous story of the founding of the social networking site Facebook is the sort of tale that seems ripe for grandiose declarations about How Everything Is Different Now. Leave it to David Fincher to find a much more fascinating approach, one that acknowledges the revolutionary nature of Web 2.0 while maintaining a plaintive distance (and without striking the pose of a Luddite killjoy). Curiously simple in its broad outlines, but gratifyingly intricate in the particulars of its construction, The Social Network is partly a hoary tragedy of betrayal, and partly a jittery, uncertain assessment of where we find ourselves, culturally speaking, in the twenty-first century. Much like the two works that established the director as an invigorating visual storyteller—Se7en and Fight Club—the new film is firmly grounded within Fincherverse, a (slightly) Bizarro cousin of our contemporary world, awash in the greasy shadows of dissipation and despair. Never mind that The Social Network's environs roam from the burnished walnut and brass of the Harvard campus to the frosted glass and Aeron Chairs of Palo Alto. Fincherverse is conspicuously fast, cheap, and out-of-control, to borrow a phrase. Here, underneath the slick metal casing of a multi-billion-dollar rocket ship of an idea, one finds a toxic cocktail of crass misogyny, petty resentments, class jealously, and jaw-dropping arrogance. And damn if it isn't entertaining to watch that witch's brew roil.

At Harvard in 2003, undergrad computer science whiz kid Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg, magnificently cast), having just been abruptly (and perhaps wisely) dumped by his girlfriend, proceeds to drunkenly slander her on his blog. He then stays up all night coding a crude "Who's Hotter" site that pulls photos off the "facebooks" of the university's houses and clubs, with help from his programmer roommates and his best friend, economics prodigy Eduardo Saverin (Andrew Garfield). The glut of Internet traffic Zuckerberg's trifle generates catches the attention of both the campus IT staff and Harvard's more elite student circles. In the latter category are identical twin rowing stars Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss (Armie Hammer, portraying both brothers) and Divya Narendra (Max Minghella), who offer Zuckerberg a job programming a new college social site called ConnectU. Before you can say "handshake agreement," Zuckerberg has launched his own social site, The Facebook, with seed money from Saverin, all the while running interference against the Winklevosses. The Facebook explodes on the Harvard campus, turning both Zuckerberg and Saverin into small-pond nerd rock stars (complete with groupies), and sending the Winklevosses into gentlemanly fits of apoplectic rage. Dispel any illusions, however, that this is a fist-pumping real-world Revenge of the Nerds story.

Zuckerbeg sets his sights on expanding The Facebook to other campuses while insisting on the necessity of preserving its hip image, even as Saverin frets about the necessity of bringing in advertising dollars. Saverin's fate is sealed, however, with the appearance of Napster creator Sean Parker (Justin Timberlake). Charming, enthusiastic, and slick as owl shit, Parker tells Zuckerberg everything he wants to hear and seduces the undergrad to move Facebook's base of operations to Silicon Valley. Suffice to say that the rest of the tale if full of acrimony and treachery, not so much because the narrative trajectory of The Social Network strongly signals it (although it does), but because the bulk of the story is told in flashback, as Zuckerberg gives deposition in two multi-million dollar lawsuits: one launched by the Winklevosses and one by Saverin himself. This "Tell Us What Happened" structure gives Fincher and editors Kirk Baxter and Angus Wall the space to deliver some of the most exhilarating cross-cut storytelling in the director's oeuvre, surpassing even that of Fight Club and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. To be sure, it's an approach that's chock full of landmines and occasions for uninspired laziness. Exhibit A: In the deposition scenes, a lawyer will ask, "And what did he say?," followed by a cut that reveals what was said. Yet Fincher not only makes such exchanges dramatic, he makes them cinematic. The persuasive performances, the chiaroscuro photography by Fight Club alum Jeff Cronenweth, and the score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Rose all cohere to establish the film's curious aura of electric expectation veined with defeated desolation.

The mode that Fincher has adopted keeps the viewer conscious of the looming fiscal and personal eruptions (whether one knows the Facebook story or not), and of the intrinsic unreliability of the perhaps self-serving recollections that comprise most of the film's action. This is Greek tragedy, sans the cosmic meddling and with a double shot of human hubris, although here the tale ends not in collapse but with billions in assets and nagging questions about what has been (and is being) accomplished. Despite its thrills (and laughs), The Social Network is not an easy film to cozy up to. It is a story that simmers with mistrust, almost to the point of thematic fixation. The Winklevosses and Saverin fail to appreciate Zuckerberg's cold ambition. Saverin is crippled by odd suspicions, but doesn't see the locomotive of perfidy speeding towards him. Zuckerberg constantly parses others' words for slights, even as his vanity and callousness alienate everyone around him. Friendships and relationships erode and then give way like muddy riverbanks, while others explode suddenly in a combustible cloud of duplicity (real and imagined). Zuckerberg asserts that he wants to replicate the social experience of college online, but Facebook's genesis seems to throw everyone involved into a scumpool of high school nastiness. There's nothing smugly celebratory about Fincher's cynical conception of human nature, just resignation and bemusement, coupled with cool uneasiness about how such stories will play out in a future of digital pseudo-connectedness.

The screenplay by Aaron Sorkin overflows with the writer's trademarked high-velocity, fussy dialog, but it's fitting to hear it on the lips of Harvard undergrads and Internet moguls, whose minds seem to be whirring at supersonic speeds. In fact, a few ridiculously on-the-nose lines aside, The Social Network proves to be Sorkin's deftest script since his mostly forgotten Hitchcock homage, Malice. The film's casting is uniformly superb (and even a little sardonic in the case of Timberlake as the man who throttled the life from the recording industry), although the performances themselves mostly range from the smoothly functional to the warmly welcome. The exception is Eisenberg, who gives the best performance of his career, easily surpassing any of his recent comedic roles and even topping his breakout turn in The Squid and the Whale. The "Michael Cera's understudy" cracks—which yours truly has been guilty of voicing—should be put away now. Eisenberg conveys Zuckerberg's essential blend of aspiration, bitterness, social gracelessness, and self-aware brilliance with spooky precision. However, there remains something inscrutable in the portrayal, and it is this elusive glimmer of unsettling genius—the sense that he's thinking three steps ahead of us mere mortals—that makes Eisenberg's performance such a feat. Although The Social Network is decisively an ensemble film, Eisenberg's dominance underscores the centrality of Zuckerberg's intellect and ego to the tale of Facebook. While Fincher glibly and not-so-subtly suggests that the man's drive is rooted in his need to impress the Girl That Got Away, such (fictional) psychological speculation is less compelling than the film's broader (but no less glib) narrative of Nixonian resentment. If Zuckerberg the character has an arc at all, it is one characterized primarily by a sudden revelation: exclusivity is no longer a desirable feature. Without a prayer of getting into Harvard's elite social clubs, Zuckerberg founded his own club, made himself president, and (eventually) let the whole world in the door. Now you'll have to excuse me; I need to post this review on Facebook.