Michael Clayton

2007 // USA // Tony Gilroy // February 6, 2008 // Theatrical Print

A - Michael Clayton is the finest corporate thriller to emerge from Hollywood since Michael Mann's The Insider. In some ways, Clayton is better, although on the surface its ambitions are more modest. It operates by the conventional genre rules, but in nearly all of its details it burrows deeper, finding gold where I expected only silver or even clay. It helps that the film boasts three compelling lead actors—George Clooney, Tilda Swinton, and Tom Wilkinson—all of whom offer perfectly tuned performances. Michael Clayton might be fiction, but the script and direction from newcomer Tony Gilroy are more forceful and psychologically intricate than that of any recent suit-and-tie thriller inspired by true events.

Clooney portrays Clayton, the "fixer" for Kenner, Bach & Leeden, a white-shoe Manhattan law firm. When a client or a firm member finds themselves in a potentially catastrophic situation, Clayton is dispatched to clean up the mess, or at least mitigate the damage. It is a job that requires an uncommon set of talents; "You have what everybody wants," senior partner Sydney Pollack exclaims, "You have a niche!" Yet Clayton's niche is also his prison. He is too valuable in his "janitorial" role to ever be promoted to partner. His trendy restaurant side venture—and possible financial escape hatch—has gone belly up, and a loan shark is lurking in the shadows. He has a gambling habit, and a young son who puts forth the lion's share of the effort in their relationship.

As the film opens, there is a nocturnal crisis afoot at KBL, whose offices buzz with hundreds of lawyers. Clayton is called away from an underground poker game to Westchester County to assist a client in trouble. Something strange and shocking happens to him in the suburbs in the early morning, and this cues a flashback that plays out for the majority of the film. This reverse-mystery structure fits Michael Clayton comfortably. Director Gilroy returns often to the motif of a crisis that provides stimulus for reflection and reassessment. How did I come to this? What the hell am I doing here? The film rewinds and the mystery unravels, taking us on a groping journey through unseen malice and crippling doubt.

We meet Karen Crowder (Swinton), the tightly wound in-house counsel for biotechnology giant—and Monsanto stand-in—U/North. Crowder has been working for six years with KBL attorney Arthur Edens (Wilkinson) to defend her company against one lawsuit. The plaintiffs claim that U/North's herbicides fatally poisoned their loved ones. During a deposition in Milwaukee, Edens begins ranting and declaring his love for a young female plaintiff, while proceeding to remove his clothes. Edens, it turns out, is a severe manic depressive who has been skipping his medication. Clayton is sent to retrieve him and assuage Crowder and U/North's justified alarm at this development.

Edens confides to Clayton in fierce, sputtering speeches that he has had a revelation, that their corporate client is truthfully a murderous monster. He threatens to "switch sides," to ally with Anna Kaiserson, the young plaintiff with whom he professes a deep connection. In Edens' briefcase is an internal U/North memorandum containing a terrible secret. For her part, Crowder despairs for the billions in damages that are looming over her company, and for her own threatened position. She fears that she is up to her neck in a battle that is far beyond her abilities. The crisis escalates, all while Clayton's own life—his finances, his family, his frailties—threaten to spin out of control.

There's a lot going on in Michael Clayton, both in terms of its story and its themes. It's a credit to Gilroy's formidable talent that it rarely feels cluttered. He mostly eschews exposition, preferring to take a loose, angular approach to the narrative. Characters speak in voice-over while we catch glimpses of them in flashback or flash-forward. In this tale of duplicitous attorneys and babbling madness, what Gilroy shows us is often equally or more significant than the empty words we hear.

The director isn't afraid to let the superfluous details drift a bit out of focus. The minutiae of Clayton's family life and finances aren't really essential. Gilroy is working dramatic voodoo here, and that tends to be impervious to flowcharting. In a less interesting film—or one based on true events—the scientific details of U/North's toxic chemicals would be front-and-center. Here the contents of the secret memo are less vital than their seismic implications. In most thrillers, the MacGuffin is the prize in a chase or battle of wits. Gilroy instead lobs it as a Molotov cocktail, watching his characters scatter and trip over their own notions of decency, loyalty, and control.

Gilroy has been working as a screenwriter for over a decade, producing serviceable thrillers (the Bourne series) and wretched clunkers (Armageddon). Nothing in his previous work hints at the uncommon skill he displays for dialogue in Michael Clayton. As a sample, consider a scene where a character attempts to recruit a murderer-for-hire without actually stating their intentions:

Client: This just...whatever you do...you have to contain this. Hitman: Contain? Client: Right. That's my question. Short of, whatever else...something more. What's the option for something along those lines? Hitman: You're talking about paper? The data? Client: That there's a more limited option, is what I'm asking... Something I'm not thinking of. Hitman: We deal in absolutes. Client: Okay. I understand. I do. Hitman: The materials, I'm not a lawyer, we try. We do what we can. Client: And the other way? Hitman: Is the other way.

Gilroy's writing maintains this fascinating, elliptical approach throughout the film, rendering nearly every scene in unexpected and often moving ways. There is nothing contrived about his characters. They aren't naturalistic, but their reactions have a battered, slightly bewildered quality that is eminently believable.

I had a strong impression that the three lead roles were written—or re-written—explicitly for Clooney, Swinton, and Wilkinson, and yet none of these estimable actors are walking familiar paths. Clooney exhibits flashes of his clipped, confident persona, but for much of the film he portrays a man drowning at the prime of his life. Swinton is in top form. She doesn't explore anything as rich as she did last year in Stephanie Daley, but she lends a crucial and uncharacteristic brittleness to Crowder. And Wilkinson, who is a fine actor with a hammy streak, turns it up to eleven here, to admittedly marvelous effect. His rambling, manic monologues are one part evangelical doom and one part New Age ecstasy.

Gilroy makes the occasional poor choice in places, such as lingering a little too long on supposedly tense action sequences where we already know the outcome. The film is otherwise so densely layered that these moments—When will the explosives detonate?—feel all the more pedestrian.

Michael Clayton is the sort of film that comes from out of nowhere. It's a stunning directorial debut from Gilroy, who previously has given no indication that he was capable of sculpting such mature, razor-sharp drama. The actors, particularly the increasingly impressive Clooney, deliver engrossing performances that heighten the script's fearsome power. Is it possible that the guy who wrote The Devil's Advocate transmuted into the next David Mamet while no one was watching?

There Will Be Blood

2007 // USA // Paul Thomas Anderson // January 23, 2008 // Theatrical Print

A - There Will Be Blood's ambiguous, ominous title is a stroke of poetic genius. It sloshes around in your mind throughout the film's two-and-a-half-hour running time, tainting the images and sounds with biblical vastness and the promise of ruin. I see the title as a succinct statement of the protagonist's ethos, but many other readings are suggested, even demanded. The black magic in those words and the power of this film are undeniable. At different moments, different viewers will likely find themselves nodding in agreement with director Paul Thomas Anderson's declaration: Oh yes, there will be blood.

Anderson has made some very good films—Boogie Nights has long been my favorite—but as with fellow budding auteur David Fincher, 2007 has given us his first great film. There Will Be Blood is not a flawless work, but for the vast majority of its duration it's so goddamn excellent it grinds your teeth and goose-pimples your flesh. It is, in its way, a horror film. Its subject matter is the grotesqueries of American capitalism rather than bodily or psychological perils. But like all horror films it addresses its themes via a monster. Blood's monster is also its protagonist and its anti-hero: a self-made, ruthless, misanthropic oil driller named Daniel Plainview.

In a nearly wordless prologue, we observe Daniel as an independent gold prospector at the end of the nineteenth century. Following an accident that plagues him with a limp for the remainder of his life, Daniel's attention and his destiny are diverted to the grimy, booming world of petroleum drilling. Another accident delivers him an infant orphan, H.W., whom Daniel adopts as his son, although the oil man's motives are plainly mixed. The film then fast-forwards nine years to a more prosperous and savvy Daniel, who is selling his drilling expertise to dusty California hamlets awash in untapped oil. He is approached by a nervous, greasy young man, Paul Sunday, who offers to sell Daniel knowledge of an "ocean of oil" that lies beneath his family's failing ranch. Paul has a halting, gruel-thin way of speaking, but he exhibits canniness and ambition. Daniel doesn't seem to know what to make of him, yet he accepts the offer.

Daniel and H.W. travel to the Sunday ranch, where they encounter the family, including—perhaps unexpectedly—Paul's twin brother, Eli. Eli is a charismatic evangelical preacher, who veers between serene, unsettling platitudes and howling, spittle-flecked exorcisms. Eli seems to sense what Daniel is up to, but avarice is flickering in the young minister's eyes as well. He has ambitions for his church, and he has no intention of allowing Daniel to swindle his family out of their deserved riches.

Blood is essentially a three-act portrait, and the bulk of the film is comprised of the second act. Daniel buys up the town of Little Boston and raises oil derricks that tower over the scrublands. Eli shrewdly attempts to insert himself and his church into the burgeoning enterprise, but Daniel resists. There are triumphs and catastrophes: a gas explosion, the first gusher, the lurking presence of Standard Oil, and the appearance of a man claiming to be Daniel's prodigal half-brother.

If this all sounds a touch dry, I assure you it's not. Anderson goes straight for the thematic throat, and lets us know that he is not, in any way, fucking around. There Will Be Blood alerts us from its opening moments that horrible, traumatic things are going to happen—with its title, its first shots, and its first strains of music. It's a very risky move to employ such relentless cinematic semaphore, but Anderson's remarkable skill as a storyteller has grown with age. For reasons I'm not sure I completely grasp yet, he makes it work. Maybe it's his now-polished photographic artistry, or the oppressive Bernard Herrmann-inspired score from Johnny Greenwood, or the mesmerizing lead performance from Daniel Day-Lewis. As with many great films, it likely works because of how these elements and others come together.

Day-Lewis is, I believe, one of the greatest living English-language actors, partly because he has carved out a thespian niche that no one save him can fill. Indulgent dramatic performances are tiresome when they are created solely to entertain the audience, but Day-Lewis never seems to portray such sideshow oddities. The fame that he garnered from My Left Foot has allowed him to be fussy in choosing his roles. It's hard not to respect how this selectiveness and his private nature have influenced his art for the better. He is always Daniel Day-Lewis when he is on screen, but he is never less than engrossing, always willing to sunder open his characters and root around in their viscera for our enlightenment.

Is Day-Lewis' performance in There Will Be Blood over the top? Of course. It's why he is in the film. There Will Be Blood is a portrait, and the countenance is an ugly one. Daniel Plainview is not particularly believable, but he's not meant to be. He is a self-made Übermensch, capitalism incarnate, the id and Platonic ideal of American business. The casting of the creepy, clay-faced Paul Dano as Eli Sunday is not without purpose. Eli is Daniel's foil, but in the end There Will Be Blood is a character study of one. Eli must remain unsympathetic, inscrutable, and alien, and he does so, right up to the bloody, despoiled conclusion.

Blood does more than tempt allegorical readings; it practically requires them. Although the film echoes Citizen Kane at its edges, especially during the lengthy epilogue, Daniel Plainview doesn't naturally evoke Kane so much as an Ayn Rand hero. Or, more accurately, a personification of capitalism itself. As such, the conflict between Daniel and Eli reflects the tension between two old and powerful currents in American culture. The capitalist and Christian atoms of America seem to find their avatars in Daniel and Eli: often warring, sometimes collaborating, never fully trusting one another.

Like Upton Sinclair, on whose novel Oil! the film is very loosely based, Anderson seems to view capitalism as an inherently repulsive impulse when its pretensions of civility and community are flayed away, as they are in Daniel. It's appropriate that Daniel is an oil driller, an enterprise that is both consumptive and extractive, and one that naturally carries with it an infernal stench. Similarly, the portrayal of Eli Sunday hints at Anderson's deeply cynical view of religion. We see Eli primarily through Daniel's own contemptuous perspective, but a private glimpse of the preacher reveals his greed, rage, and loathing. Anderson is offering America a disturbing self-portrait; the fact that Daniel is a successful maverick does nothing to alleviate its distastefulness. I should add that I quickly tumbled to a more contemporary and specific reading of Daniel and Eli's antagonism as well. Their alliance and tension will strike a strong note of familiarity with anyone who has been watching the evolution of the Republican Party for the past three decades.

Perhaps in different hands, a film such as There Will Be Blood might have been mediocre. It's difficult to envision anyone other than Day-Lewis filling Daniel Plainview's boots, but a different director, perhaps even a younger Anderson, would likely have delivered a perfectly forgettable period drama. As it is, There Will Be Blood is captivating filmmaking, and unquestionably Anderson's best work to date. It gets under your skin and wriggles around like a maggot. That's a recommendation, in case you were wondering.

The Orphanage

2007 //  Spain - Mexico // Juan Antonio Bayona // January 17, 2008 // Theatrical Print

B - It's tempting to compare The Orphanage and Pan's Labyrinth, and not just because both are recent Spanish-language fantasy-horror films that delve into childhood fears. Both films employ a similar tactic for their scares—gnawing dread punctuated by the odd moment of gruesome gore—and both wear the ambiguity of their central mystery as a badge of honor. What's more, The Orphanage's promotional material is aggressively touting Labyrinth director Guillermo del Toro's producer credit. Yet these similarities strike me as only skin-deep. The Orphanage's protagonist is an adult, and director Juan Antonio Bayona is less interested in the perspectives of children than in his heroine's understanding of and relationship to them. In some ways, The Orphanage is the mirror image of Labyrinth. Where del Toro's film examined the ways that children cope with and defeat real horror through fantasy, Bayona addresses how hope and fantasy—or delusion, if your prefer—govern a parent's understanding of and attitude towards their child.

Laura, a surname-less Spanish woman, has returned to the old orphanage where she spent part of her childhood. She has purchased the cavernous, gothic building with the intention of transforming it into a home for disabled children. Laura and husband Carlos have an adopted son of their own, Simón, an aggressively adorable tyke who plays with imaginary friends, unaware of a lethal disease that looms over his future. As Laura prepares an open house celebration for the new charity, Simón's fantasies become more elaborate and disturbing. He speaks at length to an unseen person in a nearby sea cave, and drops a trail of sea shells to lead his "friend" back to the house. He tells his mother about six new friends he has made since their arrival at the old orphanage, one with a burlap sack mask. Simón—or was it his little friends?—sets up an elaborate treasure hunt game for Laura, with the apparent intention of voicing suspicions about his parentage and health.

There are other strange occurrences. An elderly woman shows up, claiming to be a social worker, asking questions about Simón and about Laura's intentions for the old orphanage. Later, Laura catches this strange visitor sneaking around on the grounds in the middle of the night. Then, on the day of the open house, something very, very bad happens. It's challenging to discuss The Orphanage—and these crucial scenes in particular—without tainting the perspective of future viewers, and thereby detracting from the experience of the film's terrors. Although The Orphanage contains many mysteries, what precisely happened on the day in question is the film's fulcrum.

Laura is one of the more absorbing and convoluted horror protagonists in some time. There seems to be something in her maternal nature that draws her to children most in need of physical care and emotional sustenance. This may be a legacy of her time at the orphanage, where many of her friends were disabled in some way. Yet Laura displays flashes of arrogance and neuroticism in her role as a caregiver. We begin to wonder: Is the new children's home an attempt to compensate for her own perceived failings in her relationship with Simón? Ghosts and goblins aside, director Bayona is focused on the story of Laura's actions and reactions to the tragedy that unfolds in the wake of the open house. He seems especially interested in whether Laura's missteps are the result of inherent character defects or merely bad luck, although he is less concerned with providing us with a definitive answer.

The Orphanage is the sort of film that rewards viewers who pay close attention from the very first shot. It's a fine example of how dialogue can be employed to trace over the lines of a film for emphasis and cohesion, without engaging in clumsy foreshadowing. The film establishes its supernatural rules by means of its characters' words, and it sticks to those rules. This isn't to say that The Orphanage doesn't engage in some misdirection. There are plenty of red herrings, and the three—yes, three—secrets that the orphanage holds are woven together so tightly that it can be difficult to perceive where one ends and the other begins. I still have mixed feelings about some of the film's trickery. Its employment of horror movie cliché to fool the viewer seems cheap from a certain perspective, but ingenious from another. Bayona seems to be aiming for ambiguity in select scenes, which elicits a disorienting but intriguing sensation.

Most of The Orphanage's problems lie in its script. I had some nagging concerns about the plot as I left the theater, and I was apparently not alone. Discussion forums are aflame with debate over the apparent gaping holes in the story. I think Bayona's elusive treatment of some of the film's moments is forgivable, even innovative. Less defensible are the perplexing questions and outright improbabilities that start to stack up in Sergio G. Sánchez's script, particularly with respect to the film's backstory. In general, Bayona does his best to paper over these difficulties. It's a credit to Bayona's engrossing treatment that The Orphanage provoked in me a desire for a second viewing rather than exasperation. Where the filmmakers rely on ghost story tropes, it's usually to The Orphanage's benefit. When Laura invites a group of paranormal investigators to the old orphanage, Sánchez and Bayona don't waste our time with tedious exposition. They trust that we've seen Poltergeist, and that we already know what these people are here to do. Rather than layering on pseudo-scientific gobbledygook in an attempt to establish credibility, they concentrate on eliciting nerve-rattling tension in the séance scene that unfolds.

Most of the performances in The Orphanage serve the film's tone well enough, but there are few that are memorable. Belén Rueda essentially carries the film as Laura, and she has a way of evoking the character's conflicting impulses and erratic responses that keeps her believable. Rueda actually manages to make the character's descent a touch understated, and as a result lends her the air of Greek tragedy. Rueda also pulls off one of the best primal screams of anguish and horror I've ever seen in the genre, so for that alone she gets bonus points.

The Orphanage is Juan Bayona's first feature film, and it's both an impressive debut and a commendable entry in a genre that has lately grown anemic and odious. The film takes some gambles with horror conventions, and the result is a tense, gloomy, mature take on the traditional ghost story. There are some troublesome holes in the plot, but Bayona's direction manages to hold the package together by getting the vital components exactly right. The Orphanage is menacing, gripping, and has ambition beyond cheap thrills.

Atonement

2007 // UK - France // Joe Wright // January 7, 2008 // Theatrical Print

C - There's a powerful film about the dimensions of morality somewhere beneath the surface of Atonement, but director Joe Wright doesn't permit that film to fully emerge. Something tantalizing is going on in this adaptation of Ian McEwan's novel, especially in the film's first act, and thereafter whenever Romola Garai is on screen as the eighteen-year-old incarnation of the film's primary narrator, Briony Tallis. Unfortunately, Wright and screenwriter Christopher Hampton seem content to coast on filmic conventions that, while attractively realized, seem misplaced or outright leaden. It's challenging to discuss Atonement in detail without revealing its twist conclusion. Suffice to say that the daring metatextual themes of the source material seem to lose something in the translation to the screen.

Briony is thirteen years old at the film's 1935 opening, set on her family's beautiful estate in the Surrey Hills of England. Briony's adult sister, Cecilia, and Robert Turner, a son in the household's servant family, have recently returned from school at Cambridge. Briony's cousins are staying at the mansion, and her adult brother Leon arrives with a business associate. The film's first thirty to forty minutes take place during one sweltering summer day, as these characters gather at the Tallis estate and a tragedy unfolds. There is a repressed attraction between Cecilia and Robert, but also a tension born from the peculiar fissures of British class. Briony, who aspires to be a writer, sees and reads things on this fateful day that she doesn't fully grasp. She makes some sensational assumptions, tainted with her own resentments and wishful thinking. Eventually, she accuses Robert of a brutal crime.

Atonement then fast-forwards four years. Robert, serving out a sentence in the Army, is separated from his unit in occupied France. Cecilia, estranged from her family, is waiting for his return in London. Briony is training to be a nurse, a penance for the accusation that has dealt Robert and Cecilia so much hardship. The events of that day years ago have continued to fester, their consequences reverberating across oceans and lives.

Atonement is strongest when it blazes directly into this ethical briar patch, and Wright's skills as a storyteller shine during the first act. The film has a stagy quality in these scenes, but it is remarkably effective at conjuring an atmosphere of Old Testament family doom. Wrightâ's direction is taught and ominous; we sense that something foul is unfolding long before anything unpleasant actually occurs on screen. The film's sound design is memorable and relentless, suffusing parlors and gardens with Faustian menace. Wright replays scenes from different perspectives, and leaps between his characters to suggest their thoughts. It's not an original approach, but it thrillingly serves the film's interest in misunderstandings, intentions, and inhibitions. In short, Atonement adeptly addresses the essential thorniness of human relations. The events that occur at the Tallis estate might be implausible, but not distractingly so. The elements that swirl through the story--sex, gender, class, maturity, culpability, narcissism--are sufficiently intriguing that they produce a wicked, enticing brew.

And then... well, things just sort of meander off into the wilderness. Once the story leaps forward to the British retreat from France, Atonement abruptly turns into a turgid World War II drama. It's not a bad film, mind you, but much less interesting than the film that preceded it. Cecilia and Robert pine for one another. Robert trudges across France. Briony tends to the incoming wounded. These sequences are shot and edited well, but they don't offer anything original and their relationship to the film's established themes is tenuous. There is a remarkable continuous shot, nearly five-minutes long, when Robert arrives at the beaches at Dunkirk. The camera pans and pans and just keeps on panning over a stunning tableau of British forces, calling to mind a Pieter Bruegel painting. From an aesthetic and technical perspective, it's an achievement. What purpose it serves is less clear. Wright has apparently admitted that he was just showing off with this sequence. Why bother, then?

I'm not quite sure how to apportion the blame here. McEwan's novel is widely regarded as a modern masterpiece, and Wright's film is apparently a faithful adaptation. I suspect that Wright is too entranced with the epic sweep of history on display in the source material, and as a result neglected the slighter threads that cohere its scenes. Regardless, it's frustrating to watch a bolder film slip right through Wright's fingertips while he lingers mournfully over the devastation of the French countryside by the Nazis.

The final hour or so of Atonement is rescued primarily by Romola Garai, who gives a strong, tormented performance as Briony. Even when her scenes are aimless, Garai manages to find fascinating stripes in Briony, portraying her as earnest and penitent but a little touched. Keira Knightley and James McAvoy exhibit an urgent, torrid chemistry during the first act as Cecilia and Robert. Neither actor has the presence to lend the rest of film much gravity, however. McAvoy in particular seems to be literally wandering through his scenes, where he is granted only the thinnest and most humdrum characterization. Atonement flares to life a bit in the final confrontation between Briony, Cecelia, and Robert, but Wright has already painted himself into a corner by then.

Eventually, Vanessa Redgrave appears as an elderly Briony decades later, and there are jolting revelations. The floor drops out from under us, and fresh strata of meaning are revealed. Unfortunately, the twist feels more obligatory than earned. I have a strong sense that the conclusion is vastly more effective on the printed page.

Atonement begins as an insightful and sharply executed tragedy, only to lose its way in the mire of functional period drama banality. The lean and nasty first act and Garai's engrossing performance just manage to redeem Wright's extravagant missteps, making for a worthwhile, if frustrating, experience, and a glimpse at what might have been.

The Savages

2007 // USA // Tamara Jenkins // January 3, 2008 // Theatrical Print

C - The Savages is, if nothing else, unequivocal in its subject matter. It tackles the admittedly tricky topic of elderly dementia with gusto, exhibiting fearless interest in how such a tragedy can act as a catalyst and a stressor on toxic familial dynamics. The route it takes to this destination is muddled, however. Tamara Jenkins aspires for her second feature film to be both funny and touching, and to that end she traffics simultaneously in affected oddness, excruciating awkwardness, and legitimate human pain. The mixture never quite coagulates into anything particularly revelatory or even into lasting amusement. It's a credit to Jenkins' sharp dialog and the talent of her lead performers, therefore, that The Savages manages to find some absorbing drama in the deepest corners of the black comedy coal bin.

Laura Linney is Wendy Savage, a middle-age office temp and wannabe playwright. Linney has a somewhat inflexible approach to her acting, but she's always mesmerizing to watch, and no less so in The Savages. Wendy is probably the most repulsive character she has ever played, and it's a harsh spectacle to witness, given that age has bestowed me with a tendency for celebrity crushes on older, skillful actresses like Linney. Wendy lies compulsively, often to elicit envy or pity. She steals stacks of office supplies from work, sleeps with a married man, and self-consciously frets that her unproduced plays are too whiny and indulgent. She also clearly hates herself.

Philip Seymour Hoffman is Jon Savage, Wendy's older brother and a professor of drama. Less repugnant but more pathetic than his sibling, Jon is trapped in author's purgatory with an unfinished Bertolt Brecht book looming over him. Hoffman approaches the role with his now-familiar naturalistic style. As the rumpled Jon, he is full of mumbles, long sighs, and thousand-yard stares. He seems to have a significant intellect, but he's so damn lethargic, any scruffy endearment he might have had has long been strangled. He can't even work up the fortitude to marry his Polish girlfriend, despite the fact that her departure—due to an expiring visa—causes him obvious agony.

Given these middle-aged middle-class losers, wouldn't you know there's an unpleasant family history? Wendy and Jon rarely speak to each other, and they never speak to their father, Lenny, now living in Arizona with his ailing girlfriend. When the elder Savage begins descending into dementia, the brother and sister must retrieve him and find him a nursing home. Philip Bosco plays Lenny with alternating volcanic agitation and forlorn distraction, a believable performance that somehow maintains the focus on Wendy and Jon. And, indeed, The Savages is less about Lenny than about how his condition scratches his children's scars until they are raw and bleeding.

Jenkins approaches the drama of these uncomfortable circumstances with admirably stifling realism. She doesn't shy away from the sheer terrible fact of dementia, and she has a good sense for the wretched, absurd nature of its effects. I lost each of my grandfathers to Alzheimer's disease and a Parkinson-plus syndrome, respectively, and The Savages' bleakness struck me as painfully authentic. In one of the film's darkest, slickest moments, Hoffman launches into an arrogant, screaming monologue about the nursing home industry's predatory aim to distract clients from the "horror-show" of aging with group activities and landscaping. Indeed.

Where The Savages falters is in its attempts to inject levity by means of deliberate eccentricity. This tactic is not inherently flawed. Juno, to offer a counterexample, employs slanted characterization and production design to great effect, blending them into an attractive and neatly executed comic whole. In contrast, Jenkins dribbles goofy details into The Savages without much consequence or sense. When Wendy and Jon arrive in Arizona to fetch their father, they inexplicably bring a gaudy, heart-shaped Mylar balloon. Nothing in Wendy or Jon's character suggests this dash of kitsch. Its presence seems due to Jenkins' desire to giggle at the indignity in husky, sulky Hoffman holding onto it. A similar dynamic plagues the broader narrative. When Lenny selects a racist silent film for movie night at his overwhelmingly black-staffed nursing home, the results are awkward, but also flimsy. The scene is unmoored from the rest of the film, and not particularly funny.

The Savages is at its wittiest when the ugliness of Lenny's condition or Wendy and Jon's personalities becomes so pronounced that the film ventures into farce. In other words, its funniest scenes are those that are the least deliberately funny. There's a weird, visceral thrill in watching two gifted actors like Linney and Hoffman bicker, and some intriguing themes ooze through their characters' neuroses. I don't know that the film will hold up well on a second viewing, but Jenkins' script is at its strongest in these moments, suggesting that a superior The Savages might lie in a two-person stage play.

There's enough gleam in the best features of The Savages to recommend it, particularly if you like your comedy pitch-black. It's an acidic pleasure to see Linney and Hoffman play characters like Wendy and Jon, and Jenkins is adept at crafting dialogue and subtly tugging her performers in the right directions. Unfortunately, she cobbles The Savages together without much discipline or significance, such that the result is ultimately aimless. That's a shame. The Savages has an unsentimental view of aging and family that, unlike many comedies about damaged people and awful events, is both caustic and genuine.

Gone Baby Gone

2007 // USA // Ben Affleck // December 27, 2007 // Theatrical Print

B - In a year that gave us Zodiac, I almost feel bad for other crime thrillers. David Fincher's masterpiece is a hard act to follow. Despite the long shadow over the genre in 2007, however, Gone Baby Gone stands as a remarkably effective work, shot through with flashes of genuine virtuosity. It's a sleek slice of noir filmmaking that showcases the flowering talent of Casey Affleck and a captivating, blistered performance from Amy Ryan. Just as interesting is what the film portends for the future work of its director, an Oscar-winning screenwriter who does a bit of acting on the side. You may have heard of him? Ben Affleck?

Set in the multi-ethnic working-class Boston neighborhood of Dorchester, Gone Baby Gone chronicles the efforts of young private investigators Patrick Kenzie and Angie Gennaro, hired to search for Amanda McCready, a missing four-year-old girl. Kenzie and Gennaro are a far cry from the hardboiled gumshoes of a previous era. Skinny local kids, they've built a middle class life in a shabby, crime-plagued urban neighborhood by finding people that the police can't—or won't—find. Kenzie is a deceptively confident and upright guy, but he lives in a shadowy territory where his drug dealer contacts sometimes request his assistance on questionable errands. Gennaro is Kenzie's backup, not quite his equal in their dangerous line of work, but capable of selfless fortitude when it is required of her. Their effectiveness as investigators is rooted in their familiarity and attachment to their neighborhood, but their reputation as local do-gooders has its drawbacks.

Casey Affleck shines for the second time this year, bringing sensitivity and credibility to Kenzie from unlikely angles. It's nothing close to his career-defining turn in The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, but his presence is a haunted, sharply outlined upgrade to nearly every scene. Amy Ryan is sweeping year-end awards left and right for her portrayal of Amanda's mother Helene, a broken, repulsive woman, full of juvenile defiance. I haven't seen many reviewers note the commendable physicality of Ryan's performance, which is entirely believable and never garish. She disappears into the role, but credit is also due to the wonderfully written part itself, which forgoes abrupt character turns for moments of authentic revelation. The casting of Morgan Freeman has lately become a lazy shortcut to paternal credibility. It's therefore a small pleasure to see his police captain evolve into a more complicated character as the film plays out.

Gone Baby Gone is one of five novels by Dorchester native Dennis Lehane that feature Kenzie and Gennaro. In terms of its story and structure, the film is fairly unremarkable, and in more mercenary hands it might have dipped into outright banality. Granted, what Lehane's tale does well, it does extraordinarily well. Namely, it utilizes the ambiguous, gritty conventions of hardboiled fiction to grapple with the place of children in America's urban wastelands (both material and moral). It's a shame, then, that those same conventions drag Gone Baby Gone down in places, rendering it inert whenever the filmmakers and performers go through the obligatory crime drama motions. The truth becomes extremely convoluted as the film progresses. It marches through successive tiers of exposition and flashbacks that border on tiresome in order to reach its resolution. Fortunately, that resolution is ultimately satisfying and vital to Gone Baby Gone's thrust.

First time director Ben Affleck exhibits a steady and oddly seasoned hand in realizing the cruel themes and clear sense of place from the source material. The native Affleck has obvious affection for blue-collar Boston, warts and all, and he focuses his sentimentality to good effect here. It finds resonance in Gone Baby Gone's fascination with locality and its entangling effect on devotion and responsibility. Affleck displays a modest, performer-centered style that echoes that most un-auteur of American auteurs, Clint Eastwood. Affleck is keenly aware that he is sketching a grubby moral rumination. While his private eye protagonists are endangered, often dizzyingly so, he skillfully focuses the tension on Amanda's fate and the nagging ache of unresolved mystery, rather than on Kenzie and Gennaro themselves. Gone Baby Gone's cinematographer and frequent Cameron Crowe collaborator John Toll has some duds on his record, but his bragging rights include visual triumphs such as The Last Samurai and The Thin Red Line. In Gone Baby Gone, Toll blends the tenebrous, greasy-gothic qualities of Fincher with the Michael Mann's cool, pitiless eye for urban landscapes.

The admirable performances and Ben Affleck's confident direction elevate Gone Baby Gone above rote crime drama strictures. It's a refreshing inaugural accomplishment from Affleck, and a tantalizing peek at his talent for empathetic and vigorous storytelling.