Revolutionary Road

Scenes From a Marriage

2008 // USA - UK // Sam Mendes // January 10, 2009 // Theatrical Print

B - With Revolutionary Road, director Sam Mendes once again takes up the spiritual stultification of the middle class. However, where his American Beauty was thematically preoccupied with suburban banality, here Mendes employs it as a plot element and motif in a far more pointed work, one that is part character study and part time capsule of toxic gender dynamics. The script--here adapted by novice Justin Haythe from David Yates' novel--features some teeth-grittingly awful dialog, and yet Mendes' direction is so forceful, and the lead performances from Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio are so enthralling, that it doesn't much matter. Striking in its awareness of emotional details and its eye for potent visual poetry, Revolutionary Road is a fine example of the sort of film whose heady highs linger longer than its clunkier features. In creating a portrait of a love gone gangrenous and insidious misogyny in full flower, Mendes offers a cinematic drug distilled from pure human venom. Damn if it doesn't hurt so good.

Following a brief prelude where we glimpse their fresh-faced first encounter, the film leaps forward by years and plunges neck-deep into the fraying marriage of dissatisfied 1950s suburbanites Frank and April Wheeler. April's swelling sense of entrapment in her dreary housewife routine is highlighted by a wretched performance in a community theater production. Frank, meanwhile, is bored and emasculated (that word will come up a lot) in his colorless city job where he writes marketing materials for a business machine company. Things weren't supposed to be this way. Once, they had ambitions higher than promotions and new appliances. They sneered at greed and middle class conformity. They wanted to "feel things," a gloriously vacant formulation for every morsel of vain restlessness that Frank and April harbor.

Mendes drizzles the film with flashbacks to hint at the vanished optimism and anxious cravings that once characterized the couple. The contrast is stark, but the film's answer to the Wheelers' plaintive question—What happened to us?—is more cutting than a rote condemnation the spatial and cultural environs of suburbia. Therein lies the genius in Yates' selection of his protagonists: Frank and April believe themselves superior to their neighbors and co-workers by virtue of their sensitivity to their own spiritual plight, but that same intelligence makes them cunning manipulators and obfuscators. For all of Revolutionary Road's meticulous design—its hunger for period detail, lit in glowing hues, is almost almost fetishistic—and its occasional snickering at the emotional phoniness of its setting, the film is not truly a screed that targets middle class institutions. Indeed, one senses that Mendes is counting on his audience to have already internalized the facile cultural tongue-clucking of American Beauty, such that Revolutionary Road wallops the viewer all the harder.

The ugly proposition at the heart of the film's narrative—that Frank and April are cowardly, selfish, dimwitted moral cripples—is both pleasingly conventional and remarkably bold after a fashion. The Wheelers are engineered to elicit identification (if not sympathy) from the viewer, which makes it all the more traumatic when their miseries are eventually revealed to be of their own making, rather the product of a monolithic social monster. It's a risky move to lacerate your audience with implicit yet intensely personal indictments, but Mendes succeeds both because of the distance that his historical setting provides and because, frankly, he has our number. The casting of Winslet and DiCaprio proves to be a fascinating metatextual stunt, given the cultural saturation of their previous collaboration in Titanic as a storybook couple ripe for wishful projection. While there is little hint that Frank and April are intended as a direct, cynical refutation of Jack Dawson and Rose Bukater's thwarted life together, the connotations at play in the selection of these particular performers are both deliberate and satisfying.

From a succession of crises and scuttled plans, Mendes manages to sculpt one of the starkest portraits of soured love and sneaky sexism in recent memory. It's Train Wreck interpersonal drama—so horrible you can't look away—but it achieves more than ugly entertainment thanks to DiCaprio and Winslet's searing portrayals. There's also an undeniably compelling novelty in seeing the nasty aspects of the Good Old Days, particularly its misogyny, portrayed without glibness or cartoon villainy within a decidedly soapy plot. Indeed, Revolutionary Road is a brilliantly deft depiction of the nature and ugly consequences of patriarchal norms, if only because it dares to embody them in an ostensibly hip, intelligent man.

Kate Winslet is, well, just fucking fantastic here, undeniably one of the best performances she's ever delivered. There is no other English language actress of her generation who has the ability to invest even the most laughable lines—and Revolutionary Road unfortunately has those in spades--with such dramatic allure and emotional credibility. With his consciously boyish insincerity and emergent flair for scenes of apoplectic rage, DiCaprio proves to be a perfect foil to Winslet's blend of crisp assertiveness and flailing, emotional free-fall. Frank is certainly the most unlikeable and intricate character DiCaprio has ever tackled, and he more than rises to the occasion. Not to be overlooked is the reliably memorable Michael Shannon, whose drill sergeant jaw and nail-head eyes are used to excellent effect as the mentally ill adult son of a neighbor. There's something a little too tidy about the presence of his character in the story--for you see, only an insane man has the courage to speak the rotten truths of 1950s suburbia. Nonetheless, Shannon captivates for every moment he's on screen, and he lays claim to the screenplay's most searing line.

Revolutionary Road is such marvelous meshing of character, theme, and direction, it's all the more unfortunate that the film's dialog is often quite bad. Not consistently so, mind you, but still howlingly bad in its worst moments. It's not clear whether Haythe is attempting to capture a stilted tone that he imagines predominated middle class conversation five decades ago, or whether he just has no idea how human beings talk in private conversation. The dialog is outright distracting in its awfulness in spots, and it takes quite a bit to distract from Kate Winslet. There will likely be countless comparisons between Revolutionary Road and Mad Men, if only due to their similar milieu and concurrent appearance in the cultural zeitgeist, but the crackling dialog in AMC's television series is generally a cut above anything in Haythe's screenplay. The dialog problems and Mendes' childish tittering at all the Better Homes and Gardens banality on display render Revolutionary Road as something substantially less than a triumph. Yet there's no denying the worth of the film as a dose of pure, discomfiting human drama, crowned with a pair of utterly engaging performances.

Slumdog Millionaire

Local Boy Made Good

2008 // UK - USA // Danny Boyle and Loveleen Tandan // November 15, 2008 // Theatrical Print

C - Best approached as a morsel of spun sugar and spice that's easy on both eyes and mind, Danny Boyle and Loveleen Tandan's Slumdog Millionaire is a contemporary fairy tale pitched at a music video tempo. Unfortunately, it's also a work so preoccupied with the sizzle of motion and the cleverness of its structure that it flits heedlessly into the worst offenses of the form. Slumdog's characters never scan as anything but wobbly archetypes, their motivations hastily drawn where the film-makers bother with motivation at all. Boyle and Tandan substitutes ghetto grubbiness and gloss for the shading that would lend the film volume. Consequently, Slumdog is sustained on manic energy and little else. While its shallowness and slipshod nature distract, the film still proves to be a pleasurable tale. In its most engaging moments, it permits the viewer to forget its threadbare credibility, urging us to giggle in delight as it crackles like a string of candy-colored firecrackers.

The film's premise is undeniably compelling: Jamal (Dev Patel), a chai wallah in a Mumbai call center, has reached the final question on the Hindi edition of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. The quiz show breaks for the night, and Jamal is picked up by the police, who surmise that this slum-bred orphan must be cheating. After working Jamal over with beatings and electrical shocks, a detective—Indian veteran Irrfan Khan, as captivating as ever here—demands to know how he climbed his way to the 20 million rupee question. Jamal is not a whiz kid from the wrong side of the tracks; he's just a working stiff with an astonishing story. He walks the police through a tape of his appearance on the show, explaining with the aid of flashbacks how the events of his life supplied him with each answer. And what a thoroughly Dickensian existence Jamal has led: begging and grifting with his brother Salim (Madhur Mittal), narrow escapes, religious riots, monstrous crime lords, and a girl he's never stopped longing for, the ludicrously kind-hearted and gorgeous Lakita (Freida Pinto).

It's a seductive approach, structurally speaking, inviting the viewer to lean hungrily into Jamal's story, each trivia question a puzzle waiting to be unlocked by the unlikely details of his life. Indeed, the police officers themselves pivot from scoffing skepticism to spellbound wonder as Jamal spins his tale. However, it's not clear what remains after the telling other than a cunning contraption studded with Just-So Stories. Boyle and Tandan lean flabbily on Destiny (with a capital "D") as a motif and narrative pillar throughout Slumdog. They are so enamored with its utility as a shortcut that they exhibit virtually no interest in dissecting it thematically. Fine: Jamal is fated to win the quiz show jackpot and he and Lakita are Meant For Each Other. And? There's a frustratingly hollowness to the film once the sparkle of its presentation fades, and beyond the glee that audiences will likely reap from any rags-to-riches tale, Indian garb or not, it's not clear what Boyle and Tandan are striving for. The film's most fascinating potential lies in its scrappy refutation of the Great Man Theory of history, positing that sometimes someone just happens to be in the right place at the right time. Unfortunately, Boyle and Tandan's cloying and insubstantial fixation on Destiny inhibits this more ambitious reading of Slumdog.

The relationship between Jamal and Lakita is emblematic of the film's broader problems. Other than the bare-bones facts of the tribulations that they have shared, Boyle and Tandan offer nothing to establish the allegedly epic, storybook love between the two, and neither Patel nor Pinto do any heavy lifting to convince us of it. They convey characters plucked from a Cliff Notes summary, and that's just not enough in a film that yearns for our affection so desperately. Call me a curmudgeon, but perhaps something stiffer than a mere assertion of love is called for in a film that is fundamentally premised on romance? For all of Slumdog's cinematic bombast, there's a failure of imagination at the intersection of story and character. In at least one scene, it provides for a laughable reversal that is hand-waved away by the need for a pre-ordained resolution. Destiny and all that, I suppose.

All that said, there's no denying that Slumdog is one of the most shamelessly blissed-out films of the year, particularly in its celebration of the excitement and terror of childhood, and to a lesser extent its indulgence of the (seemingly) epic tragedies of adolescence. The film's pulsing energy is suffused with a richly realized and contradictory sense of fragility mated with vigor, one that gets your pulse racing and your toe tapping. Boyle and Tandan don't paper over the miseries of slum life in the developing world, but they also resist working exclusively in a gloomy palette. Kids, after all, can discover joy and thrills even in the shadow of garbage piles. More generally, the film straddles the paradox of contemporary India gracefully, touching on the nation's problems--poverty, crime, fanaticism, pockets of runaway modernization--while never striking a tone of condescension, mean-spiritedness, or self-righteousness. Jamal's Mumbai is not Disneyfied, but neither is it politicized to the detriment of the film's fairy tale tone. With its game shows and movie stars alongside blind urchins and shit piles, the setting conveys both the ugly familiarity and uncanny twinkle (depending on which way you turn it) that the film's fanciful narrative craves.

In the final analysis, I'm compelled to compare Slumdog's merits to those of an amusing anecdote told with substantial flair, and in this respect the film more than satisfies. Like any suspiciously tidy story, however, it starts to unravel once you begin picking at its stray threads. It's probably best to just take the grins that Slumdog offers and leave it at that.

Waltz With Bashir

I Don't Remember, I Don't Recall

2008 // Israel // Ari Folman // November 23, 2008 // Theatrical Print

A - Waltz with Bashir's curious species—an animated documentary—serves to lure the viewer by means of sheer novelty, but it also emerges as a brilliant mating of form and function. Director Ari Folman adeptly employs the elements of a bold, compelling visual style to delve the rank sinkholes of memory and culpability, surfacing with artifacts that run from bizarre to disturbing to appalling. Via color, contrast, and motion, Waltz with Bashir tackles the sheer uncanniness of warfare, the slippery character of recollection, and the sway that remorse holds over our personal narratives. Never mind that such matters have been taken up by numerous film-makers before. Folman brings both a bruised and jittery aura of the personal—the film is, after all, partly the tale of his own experiences from the 1982 Israeli-Lebanon war—and a stunning instinct for the pairing of image and mood. The veterans Folman interviews are haunted by their wartime memories, which are blazing in their intensity but usually bereft of soaring wisdom. In the same way, the film burns vivid moments into the viewer's mind, all while striking a slightly bemused, off-handed tone of hollow-eyed cynicism. Folman rejects the notion of war as a noble construct, plunging with grim familiarity into its surreal, monstrous facility for tangling morality and crystallizing animal instincts.

Folman begins with a terrifying dream as recounted to him by an acquaintance and fellow veteran, in which a pack of slavering hounds marauds through the streets, leaving chaos in its wake. The director's friend, a ex-sniper, explains that the dream relates to a wartime experience where he was tasked to shoot watchdogs, lest they alert their masters of the Israelis' approach. Folman muses on a memory of his own, a persistent vision that haunts the film. He and two other soldiers are skinny-dipping on the beach in bombed-out Beirut, their machine guns slung over their shoulders, the sky illuminated with slowly falling flares. This strange, solitary vision is the only memory that Folman has of the 1982 war, and he is baffled by it. Why was he swimming? Who were the men he was with? The mystery of the beach and the director's exploration of his voided recollections serve as totems for the film's broader examination of the confluence of war and memory.

Goaded by this enigma, Folman talks with numerous veterans (some friends, some not), as well as journalists, scholars, and a psychologist. He lets his interviewees speak freely, occasionally posing a question that hints at his own vexations. One doesn't sense that Folman expects any sudden revelation or even a coherent thesis to emerge from his efforts. Rather, by probing the memories of others, the director seems to be hoping that something in his own mental cellars will rattle loose. The hallucinatory anecdotes that populate Waltz with Bashir—a blend of (mostly) factual memories and weird dreamscapes—share a mood of surreal awe, bloody urgency, and spiritual solitude. Fear and madness are the thematic through-lines that connect the disparate experiences of Folman's subjects, mirroring the director's own memory and lending the film a tone of expectant dread. With striking delicacy given its wild energy, the film murmurs of the horrors to come. Even viewers unfamiliar--as I was--with the 1982 war and its unspeakable fruits will shift in their seats, sensing that Something Bad is approaching. Not unlike a pack of yipping hounds.

I haven't yet mentioned Waltz with Bashir's striking look, which, despite its superficial resemblance to the digital tracing of interpolated rotoscoping, was apparently achieved with original Flash animation. Never mind the technique, however, as the effect is what truly amazes. Folman's masterful control of mood is attained through his animators' wondrous vistas and compelling figures, each a meticulously colored paper-doll composed of of riotous hues and slashes of India ink blackness. "Comic-like" is the descriptor that springs to mind, but this undersells the pivotal role that motion plays in sculpting the film's atmosphere. The "camera" pans, swoops, and spins, defying the film's cut-out aesthetic. Employing both blurred, buzzing speed and the signature sluggishness of nightmares, Folman highlights the contrasts and incongruities that germinate between soldier and civilian, safety and peril, politics and reality. This is the essential triumph of Waltz with Bashir: Folman's discovery of a potent and haunting means to convey themes as old as The Iliad. His approach captures both the bleak simplicity and existential intricacies of warfare in a manner that instills them with the vividness of a bad acid trip, albeit one whose neon grotesqueries eventually dissolve into a newsreel reality that is no less horrifying.

Valkyrie

2008 // USA - Germany // Bryan Singer // January 2, 2009 // Theatrical Print

C - With Valkyrie, Bryan Singer delivers his most artistically unambitious film to date, which isn't to say that this tale of a German plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler is a failure. It vaults neatly over the primary obstacle that confronts all historical dramas about well-known figures and events, in that it summons tension despite the fact that we know how the story ends. Sticking close to the field manual employed by countless WWII dramas—crisp production values, a stable of familiar faces, and a cavalier disregard for linguistic incongruities—Valkyrie tricks the viewer into sweating the outcome with a polished but unremarkable technique. Singer neglects to plumb the thornier moral aspects of his mutinous protagonist, Claus von Stauffenberg, and with Tom Cruise filling his boots, who can blame the director? That said, Cruise's affinity for both rattled desperation and starched poker-faces suits the film's perilous intrigues. The remainder of Valkyrie's cast of heavyweights and recognizable character actors serve primarily as set dressing, putting the viewer at ease amid the swastikas. If the film dodges a bit on the German Resistance's character, it also avoids burnishing its conspirators too much, focusing instead on conjuring a pure mood of subsumed panic.

Let the Right One In

The Girl Next Door

2008 // Sweden // Tomas Alfredson // December 28, 2008 // Theatrical Print

A - Tomas Alfredson's chilly, provocative vampire tale, Let the Right One In, is not for the faint of heart. It spatters blood and gore with the ugly abandon of a child's vengeful dream. It dabbles at the edges of sexual norms, and dares to do so with characters on the cusp of adolescence. It plunges into the icy waters of schoolyard memories that cut to the quick: bullying, humiliation, loneliness, and that first crush, so unbelievably sweet and painful. Although it snuffles in the countless musty corners of the vampire myth and revels in camp horror silliness at times, Let the Right One In is no mere horror paint-by-numbers exercise. Rather, director Alfredson and screenwriter John Ajvide Linqvist—who adapted his own novel—take up the genre for its purest purpose, engaging a host of personal and social anxieties with a quiet, distinctly Scandinavian cunning. Serving as a parable, allegory, and hideously gleeful dose of wish fulfillment all rolled into one, this is an astonishingly powerful vampire film, in that leaves a thousand whirling thoughts in its wake, none of them about vampires.

We begin with a striking twelve-year-old boy, Oskar (Kåre Hedebrant), who dwells with his mother in a sad block of apartments in a lower-rent Stockholm, Sweden suburb. Bookish and retiring, the towheaded Oskar is a tempting target for bullies, but there is a veiled longing for violence coiled in the lad's heart, as evidenced by his scrapbook of lurid news clippings and his knife-punctuated threats (part Taxi Driver, part Deliverance) to a tree trunk. The late-night arrival of new renters in the apartment next door turns Oskar's head, partly due to the cardboard the older father tapes over the windows, but mostly due to his oddly beguiling daughter, who at least appears to be Oskar's age. The girl, Eli (Lina Leandersson), emerges at night, perched on the jungle gym wearing only her pajamas, despite the cold. She is pale and "smells funny," as Oskar says, but he is drawn to her immediately. Apropos of nothing, Eli declares, "We can't be friends," but eventually she warms to Oskar, despite her misgivings and her inability to consume his penny candy without vomiting. At night they tap out Morse code messages on the wall shared by their bedrooms.

Meanwhile, Eli's "father" Håkan (Per Ragnar) trudges through the bleak snows by night, abducting passersby and slitting their throats to collect fresh blood. He's not terribly good at this nocturnal butchery, and is nearly caught on several occasions, perhaps due to his age, or perhaps his heart just isn't in it anymore. Regardless, Eli's hunger is growing, but fortunately Oskar's neighborhood is well-stocked with portly, gregarious Swedes with a preference for stumbling home alone after dark. Fates both ghastly and bizarre befall the film's characters, while Oskar's life rolls on. Admirably for a horror film, Let the Right One In doesn't suspend its protagonist's daily travails once the supernatural enters his life. Even as the bodies and enigmas pile up, Oskar shows up for swimming practice, attends a class field trip, and heads into the country to spend the weekend with his father. His thoughts, however, are always with Eli, with whom he yearns to "go steady."

Alfredson eschews that most obnoxious of genre tropes, Our Vampire Are Different, littering the film with seemingly every morsel of "traditional" cinema folklore to surface since Max Shreck first took up the cape. Eli is burned by the sun, animals shriek at her approach, and she is unable to enter a house uninvited. ("What would happen if you did?" asks Oskar. She shows him.) She is stronger and faster than your average twelve-year-old girl, and can skitter up walls like an arachnid. Only the fangs are absent, and yet their absence is never mentioned. Where Let the Right One In errs, it tends to trace over sins endemic to the genre: some needlessly foreshadowed scares, sketchy makeup and computer effects, campy violence that at times seems ridiculously out of place, and the brutal murder of thinly drawn secondary and tertiary characters. While none of these concerns defeat the film, they are distressingly obvious pitfalls that Alfredson nonetheless cheerfully blunders into.

Quibbling over such matters seems shameful, however, given Let the Right One In's searing cinematic language and startling sensitivity to pre-teen alienation and longing. Summoning a bleak mood of hushed desolation and grubby fear, the film finds a perfect counterpoint to its themes of vengeance, delusion, connection, and revilement. Alfredson masterfully conveys a child's fatalistic resignation in the face bullying, their ritual humiliation (by kids and adults) for the crime of exhibiting intelligence, and most of all the wondrous possibilities that seem to blossom when love first seizes the heart. The director keeps the dialog between Oskar and Eli sparing and frank, tightly framing his actors, ever alert for the marvelous nuances that flicker across their faces. In this way, the bliss and lacerations of an evolving adult relationship are compressed and condensed, realized in one semester of friendship—and then something more—between Oskar and Eli.

Alfredson and Linqvist exhibit no qualms about engaging the sexual components of their story, but their approach is more hormonal and fantastic than strictly erotic. One night Eli enters Oskar's bedroom through the window and slips into his bed, naked. "You don't have any clothes on," he observes, and then they hold hands, tentatively. Such sexualizing of preteens, even in this admittedly sweet context, will likely provoke discomfort among some viewers weaned on Hollywood orthodoxies about what constitutes exploitation. However, Alfredson's gentle, achingly poignant depiction of adolescent loneliness and devotion is unquestionably a finer thing than crassly objectifying teens in the same unfortunate manner as adults. Perhaps more provocative still is Let the Right One In's unabashed gay subtext. Witness: Eli murmuring, "Would you like me if I wasn't a girl?," a man searching for the monster that made his girlfriend "that way," and a dribble of gender-muddling details. A queer reading of the film seems to offer another tantalizing level to its thematic riches.

Near the conclusion of Let the Right One In, the story of Oskar and Eli seems to end, and yet the film rolls on as an unresolved subplot rears it head with nasty results. This final sequence, brilliantly shot and bubbling with terror and gruesome wit, will polarize viewers, some of whom will regard it as a pointless and implausible coda. Not so. Rather, it serves as an exultant and perfectly natural flourish to an all-too-familiar fantasy, whether we are twelve years old or not: the dream of a companion who will accept us, adore us, and above all save us.

Frost/Nixon

2008 // USA // Ron Howard // December 28, 2008 // Theatrical Print

C - It's never been clear to me why the 1977 interviews between talk-show host David Frost and disgraced ex-President Richard Nixon necessitate a dramatic narrative. I haven't seen Peter Morgan's play Frost/Nixon, but Ron Howard's thoroughly unspectacular adaptation does little with the premise. Howard's Frost/Nixon is a determinedly momentous dollop of prestige film confection, surprisingly witty and wistful in the moments when it stops earnestly clenching to its historical crib sheet. Unfortunately, it rarely coalesces into anything more profound than the immediate drama of the dueling journalist and politician. Frank Langella is grandly watchable, as always, as Dick Nixon, although it takes a minute to settle into his deliberately off-center stripe of mimicry. The film is most compelling when it plumbs the shared class resentments in Frost and Nixon, and its finest scene involves a drunken late-night phonecall where all the bad dreams of a decade boil out in one monologue. More often, however, it just plods along, a curious mix of reliable plotting and obscure context. Blessedly, I recently read Rick Perlstein's epic political history, Nixonland. How might another thirtystomething fare with Frost/Nixon's breezy treatment of Watergate's minutia?