Goodbye Solo

A One-Way Trip

2008 // USA // Ramin Bahrani // May 21, 2009 // Theatrical Print

B+ - With the plaintive, graceful Goodbye Solo, director Ramin Bahrani offers his take on the hoary trope of two outsiders connecting under unusual circumstances, here in the form of Senegalese-American cab driver Solo (Soleymane Sy Savane) and his elderly white passenger, William (Red West). It's an odd choice for Bahrani, given that the filmmaker's two previous feature films—Man Push Cart and Chop Shop—are regarded as masterpieces of contemporary neo-realism, eschewing traditional narrative for immersion in the routines and everyday joys and tragedies of their characters. Solo takes a less oblique approach, urging us forward through a story engineered for melodramatic sparks. The dour William slides into the back of Solo's cab one night on the grubby streets of Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and offers the cabbie $1,000 if, two weeks hence, he will drive him to Blowing Rock, a mountain peak famed for its devilish updrafts. From the germ of this odd transaction, which makes the garrulous Solo uneasy, a lively, troubled relationship sprouts over the course of the following days. Through most of its running time, Goodbye Solo is genuinely engaging in a way that has nothing to do with its plot, which flirts with triteness in places and appears unfortunately shapeless in others. What mesmerizes is the way that Bahrani tells the story, with breathtaking subtlety and a serene astonishment for the particulars of character and place. Despite Solo's ceaseless, probing patter, the film discovers its finest moments in its silences, and in the long, wordless gazes its two protagonists share.

In the days leading up to William's trip to the mountain, Solo shuttles the old coot around as he moves out of his apartment and into a motel, closes his bank accounts, and sees a lot of movies at the local arthouse. To Solo—and the viewer—it's plain that William is wrapping up his final business. Something about this seems to offend Solo morally, albeit in a way that prompts concern and relentless reassurances rather than indignant anger. Perhaps it's just that the cabbie is so passionate about building a successful and happy life in America, he cannot comprehend why a man would wind down every trace of himself. William is taciturn and unpleasant most of the time, so Solo is left to ponder and pose questions. He asks the cab dispatcher—heard on the radio and off-screen, but never glimpsed—what she knows about Blowing Rock. He swipes William's pills and presents them to a pharmacist: Are these the sort of medicines you might take if you were dying?

Meanwhile, Solo has struggles of his own, most of which he tackles with a seemingly unflappable spirit. He works long shifts at all hours, gliding through the city's sad, darkened neighborhoods. He dreams of becoming an airline steward, but his girlfriend, Quiera (Carmen Leyva), who is nine months pregnant with their child, scolds him for studying for the entrance exam. He sees an airline job as a path to greater prosperity, but she only envisions long separations and an absent father. Meanwhile, Solo tries to befriend William, offering him a couch to sleep on and a bit of companionship, daring to hope that he can talk him out of his vague and ominous plans. The older man complains about the cabbie's cloying attentions, but falls asleep on the couch just the same. Solo chisels at the man's frosty edges with kindness, trying to discern the buried devils that torment him, as though somewhere on the other side of William's pain he might discover a salve for his own fears.

The racial angles within Bahrani's story are acknowledged, but they serve primarily to lend realism to its events. Indeed, while Goodbye Solo never forgets the cultural gulf that separates Solo and William, the film shuns cheap odd-couple moments in favor of the more unexpected and affecting dimensions to the story. William serves as a dark reflection of Solo, his joyless, friendless existence contrasting with the cabbie's boisterous demeanor. Yet something about William obviously frightens Solo, prodding the despair and self-doubt that curl like ravenous snakes in his gut. The cabbie can see his own future in William's final weeks: destitute, purposeless, hobbled by a failed marriage, and shuffling about in a feeble form. William's jowls and haunted eyes declare, "As you are now, so once was I, as I am now, so you shall be." In one early scene, William rides along silently while Solo takes another passenger on a shady errand, the old man serving as a kind of living memento mori, suggesting both the treacherous nature of the fare and identity of the proverbial Final Passenger.

Complementing William is Quiera's young daughter, Alex (Diana Franco Galinda), a ruthlessly bright and feisty girl who replenishes Solo with her presence. She seems to thaw William's demeanor as well, but for every step forward the old man takes, he takes another two back into darkness. Solo returns to the calendar in his planner often, counting down the days until the trip to Blowing Rock. If he can somehow convince the old man to abandon his trek to the mountaintop, what then? What does that mean? Would it be salvation for William, or would it be denying him his final act of furious defiance? Bahrani observes the emotional complexities of the situation with stunning delicacy. He attunes the viewer to them not through endless expository dialog, but by focusing on his actors' faces. Savane, so glib and enthusiastic throughout most of the film, slows Solo down to devastating effect in select scenes, his eyes red and tongue thick in his throat. West's ruined visage, all leather pouches, becomes an edifice of testy regret, all misanthropy and directionless rage simmering beneath a lethargic facade.

Nothing particularly surprising happens within Bahrani's tale, and the film's few revelations tumble into view in the slow, heedless manner that poorly kept secrets often do in real life. Goodbye Solo is less concerned with constructing a gripping narrative than in watching its two protagonists react to circumstances both mundane and unconventional, and then watching their reactions to those reactions. Given that a nickel summary of the story carries the reek of awards-bait, it's all the more remarkable then that the tone of the film is so forlorn, removed, and even chilly. Whatever the film lacks in physical intimacy or slice-of-life authenticity, Bahrani and his performers amaze with their attunement to the countless emotional angles in every word and gesture on-screen. It's one of those rare films that invites us to think about the way the characters think, to ponder their anxieties, speculate on their hopes, and confront their fears.

Anvil!: The Story of Anvil

Long-Lived Rock

2008 // USA // Sacha Gervasi // May 13, 2009 // Theatrical Print

B+ - Much of the charm that vibrates in the bones of Sacha Gervasi's amused, melancholy documentary, Anvil!: The Story of Anvil, is premised on the oddly ambiguous definition of success in the rock world. Sure, the eponymous Canadian metal group, now twenty-odd years past its peak in popularity, might be a failure by any yardstick one might select. Financially, they are a broke. Artistically, they're stuck on the cutting edge of 1982. Culturally, their name evokes the response, "Who?" (Though not from metal luminaries such as Slash and Lars Ulrich, who in the film's introduction hold forth on Anvil's key role during the early days of the genre.) Listen carefully, however, to lead guitarist and vocalist Steve "Lips" Kudlow's rambling, armchair philosophical assessment of the setbacks that have bedeviled the band. Simultaneously painfully self-aware and laughably oblivious, Kudlow is relentlessly optimistic about Anvil's success, even though he lacks a coherent conception of what that success might look like. Depending on the moment and his mood, "success" might mean cultural relevance, uncompromised integrity, a packed house, or an honest living. Regardless, one gets the sense that he will know it when he sees it. Despite first-time director Gervasi's gawking at the band's fundamentally kitschy character and its sad predicament, the thematic heart of Anvil! is humane stuff: success is a slippery thing, and the dogged pursuit of such an ineffable goal is rife with dizzying highs and miserable lows.

At one time, Kudlow and drummer Robb Reiner were just a couple of middle-class Jewish kids in Toronto who loved metal. The band that they founded, Anvil, embodied the heavy sound and provocative stage presence that characterized the genre in the early 1980s, amplifying and toying with mainstream pop culture's expectations. (Kudlow was known to appear in bondage gear and play his guitar with a vibrator. 'Nuff said.) For obscure reasons, lasting success never materialized for the band. Gervasi posits that an arena concert in Japan alongside Bon Jovi, the Scorpions, Whitesnake, and other contemporaries constituted the apex of Anvil's fame, to be followed by a steep decline. Original members took their leave, to be replaced by musicians who were Anvil fans themselves in their youth. Now fifty and looking every year of it, Kudlow lugs meals for a children's foodservice company by day, a job he despises with disarming frankness. Anvil is no longer his living, but rather his passion, purpose, and lifeline. (Although, tellingly, Kudlow proudly refers to the band's gigs as "work," and nothing seems to provoke his rage like a swindling club owner.)

Gervasi establishes all of this--both the Then and the Now--to preface a contemporary tale of Anvil's tribulations. The film is ostensibly about a disastrous European tour and the recording of the band's thirteenth album. Perhaps inevitably given the subject matter, Anvil! makes plenty of time for snickering at the sad-sack state of the band, and at Kudlow in particular. The viewer is introduced to a handful of spookily devoted fans, including one who offers Kudlow a repugnant telemarketing job when the frontman needs cash for studio time. We're left to wonder at the band's inexplicable trust in a tour manager they met online, a woman who barely speaks English, screams and sobs relentlessly, and is more interested in hooking up with the bassist than handling travel arrangements. And one can't resist cringing a little when Kudlow, hanging backstage at a Scandinavian rock festival, corners a more celebrated metal guitarist and regales him fanboyishly with the story of their first meeting, even when it's apparent the man hasn't the foggiest recollection.

In tone, then, Anvil! bears some resemblance to The King of Kong, in the sense that it gazes with almost unbearable discomfort at the personalities that dwell on the fringes of a subculture, with all the oddball details and half-baked “personal philosophies” that such a thing entails. Gervasi strives to build a narrative, much as Steve Gordon did for Kong, but that latter film had a natural hero and villain in Steve Weibe and Billy Mitchell, respectively, as well as plenty of ready-made drama. Kudlow is the hero of Anvil!, but there is no villain, other than the fickle nature of fame or perhaps Kudlow himself. Accordingly, Anvil! offers a documentary experience that feels somewhat aimless; which is fine, actually, given that the band's career has been fairly aimless. The result is a film about heavy metal that is surprisingly thoughtful, once the viewer wades through the endless bullshit that the band members use to obfuscate their angst, and that everyone else uses to screw them over. Fundamentally, Gervasi succeeds because he provides the space for this more pensive approach, allowing Kudlow, Reiner, and their families to muse on the nature of dedication, resilience, and accomplishment.

Although Gervasi indulges in a bit of manipulative editing and music, he also finds plenty of genuinely humane and wholly unexpected notes, such as Kudlow playing badminton with his young son in a cramped backyard, or Reiner's low-key pride when showing off his Hopper-inspired paintings. It's these sort of moments that provide a satisfying accent to the film's introspective elements, and a counterpoint to its forceful pathos. In this latter category, one might place Kudlow's elliptical confession of suicidal thoughts, followed by Reiner's blunt statement that he wouldn't permit such a thing, followed in turn by a tearful awkwardness that lingers between the two friends and rivals. What evinces Gervasi's skill more decisively than such reality-TV exchanges, however, is the manner in which he brings the viewer wholly into the band's trials, stirring the very anxiousness that the musicians feel as they approach the stage. How big will the crowd be? How loud will they cheer? How many CDs will we sell? On the most critical question, there is no doubt. Will we rock? Abso-fucking-lutely.

12

2007 // Russia // Nikita Mikhalkov // May 3, 2009 // Theatrical Print

B - Director Nikita Mikhalkov has tackled a "re-imagining" of the archetypal Serious American Drama with verve, slashing up the most conspicuous aspects of Twelve Angry Men, particularly its claustrophobic narrative and staging under Sidney Lumet. While Mikhalkov's 12 is far too graceless to stand at the same podium as Reginald Rose's seminal legal fable, the new film is provocative in its use of expansive flashbacks and long, personal monologues from the jurors. Notably, 12 swaps Henry Fonda's rational, persuasive Juror No. 8 for an anxious second-guesser, whose own experiences prohibit a rash decision about the defendant's fate. One senses that Mikhalkov is both paying tribute to and riffing on Lumet's palatable moralizing, not to mention the American judicial system so routinely fetishized in fiction. While the film takes its facile swipes at apathy and racism, it also poses more probing questions about the limits of speculation, culpability, and civic obligation. For these reasons, 12 is a worthy Russian response film to an iconic work of American drama, despite its often clumsy gestures towards humanizing grit. Never mind his silly flourishes and narrative dead-ends; Mikhalkov deserves praise for reconfiguring a lionized story within a new milieu, adding curiosities and complexity.

Everlasting Moments

In the Eye of the Beholder

2008 // Sweden // Jan Troell // May 2, 2009 // Theatrical Print

B - Fundamentally, I am a sucker for any film that approaches the romantic impulse as an agonizing phenomenon that bears unbearably fragile dividends, when it bears anything at all save tears. For me, there is something unaccountably attractive in the bliss of thwarted love. It's perhaps unsurprising, then, that Everlasting Moments, Jan Troell's scrupulously reverent tale of stifled artistic expression and romance, proved to be emotionally engrossing despite its schematic narrative and discursive character. The relationship between Swedish housewife and amateur photographer Maria Larsson (Maria Heiskanen) and camera shopkeeper Sebastian Pedersen (Jesper Christensen) is tragic, succulent stuff. Their unconsummated love, exquisitely formal yet accented with moments of profound tenderness, is so plainly rife with repressed yearnings and resentments that it's a wonder mere Scandinavian starch can restrain such ache. In part, familial obligations keep the couple apart, but it wouldn't be a textbook romantic tragedy without a violent and jealous spouse, a role played here by Maria's mercurial, monstrous husband Sigfrid (Mikael Persbrandt). It's not sufficient that Sigfrid restrain Maria within a living hell of drunkenness, infidelity, abuse, and murderous threats. He also attempts to quash her blossoming creative longings behind the camera, a desire that serves as both a gateway to and an expression of her feelings for the gentle Sebastian. Love doesn't come much more virtuous—or more doomed—than this.

Maria Larsson was a real photographer to whom Troell's wife is distantly related, and her relatively obscure work served as a source for this film. Maria's daughter Maya (Nellie Almgren as a girl, Callin Öhrvall as young woman) narrates the tale of her mother's middle age, when a hitherto unexplored interest in commercial and artistic photography took hold of her. Emotionally, the film is focused on Maria's entrapment in a situation, place, and time that stifles joy and dishes out endless cruelties. Yet Troell can't resist slathering on all sorts of period digressions, and as a result the film often feels less like a biography and more like an expansive panorama of early twentieth-century Sweden. Disease, accidents, rape, strikes, the Great War, and other calamities intrude on the proceedings, and all are afforded an unusual amount of time given how little they add to Everlasting Moments' core narrative. One suspects that Troell loads the film up with such detail as an act of fidelity to Maria's life story. Thus we get subplots such as Sigfied's short-lived dedication to socialism and his entanglement in a bombing plot targeting British strikebreakers. Some liberal trimming would have lent the film's fundamental tragedy—a woman's discovery of her creative voice late in life—much greater potency.

Still, Troell and cinematographer Mischa Gavrjusjov capture even the film's unwarranted tangents with an indisputable loveliness. Shot on 16 mm and blown up to 35 mm, Everlasting Moments replicates the smudged, grainy look of Maria's playing-card-sized sepia photographic prints. However, the lightning and design are so consistently striking that the film still somehow seems crisp, eschewing the grimy visual muddle that so often afflicts period dramas. The film's title points to the obvious thematic significance of the indelible yet fleeting image within Maria's story, but Troell also demonstrates his own sensitivity to this phenomenon, often in the most unexpected places. Hence, he graces us with the film's most haunting shot: a girl's resolute and baffling march out onto a mist-shrouded and frozen sea. The otherworldly chill of this image visually complements Maria's spying of a distant Sebastian as he ambles through summer greenery. This latter shot is then repeated, reinforcing the story's morbid undercurrents and highlighting the comparable pains of romantic loss and death. Lest the film devolve into a sequence of hideous tragedies (as it often threatens to do), Troell engages in a bit of spirited horsing from time to time, as when Maria and her children smudge ashen Chaplin mustaches on themselves and waddle about like the Little Tramp in a fit of post-cinematic delight.

Many of Everlasting Moments' weaknesses and even some of its bright spots melt away under the sway of Heiskanen and Christensen, who lend the film a humanistic pulse whenever they are on screen together. I hesitate to use the term "erotic" to describe the interactions of two characters that barely have any physical contact and are discomfited by the casualness of first names. The film's most sensual moment, after all, involves Sebastian demonstrating the principle of the camera obscura by projecting the silhouette of a butterfly onto Maria's palm. The eroticism that Everlasting Moments offers is the type that springs from shared joy when the surrounding circumstances are otherwise harsh and loveless. The sort of eroticism, in other words, that we could easily imagine holding two ordinary people hostage in early twentieth century Europe. Heiskanen and Christensen capture this delicate emotional condition marvelously, her with weary apprehension and him with fussy courtesy. Their relationship—and its ultimately squandered potential for happiness—is the emotional core of the film, and all the time Troell devotes to other characters seems like so much noodling. Persbrandt's narcissistic, domineering husband is so cartoonishly dim and two-faced as written that he has no hope of evolving into a coherent character. He serves strictly as a foil to burnish the virtues of the not-quite-lovers. And while Maya might be the story's ostensible narrator, do we really need a subplot about the lascivious brother of her employer? When it can maintain its attention on the flaring and slow guttering of Maria's passions, Everlasting Moments is pure, bittersweet pleasure.

Adventureland

These Are the Best Days of My Life?!​

2009 // USA // Greg Mottola // April 22, 2009 //Theatrical Print

B- - Don't permit the promotional campaign to fool you into supposing that Greg Mottola's wistful, kitschy coming-of-age tale, Adventureland, is in any significant way a successor to the director's superb, bromatic comic odyssey, Superbad. Certainly, the two films share an unexpected curiosity and emotional generosity towards their characters. If one can discern a pattern from just two feature films, then a signature feature of Mottola's work is his oddly humanistic approach to caricature, where he glories in ridiculous characters even as he probes at their inner lives with remarkable affection. If anything, Adventureland, with its rich stable of personalities and the enthusiastic, bittersweet tone of a "That Crazy Summer" anecdote, applies this approach much more generously. What it lacks, however, is Superbad's deliciously crude belly laughs, the poignancy of that film's central narrative of a delayed pubescent leave-taking, and--let's be honest--the presence of Michael Cera and Jonah Hill. That first item is the most conspicuous, as the gags featured in Adventureland's trailer are, more or less, the only gags in the film. Mottola's script, based loosely on his own experiences working in a cruddy amusement park, just isn't that funny. Which is okay, since Adventureland isn't really comedy but a bemused and pleasantly miserable bit of post-collegiate nostalgia.

The film's premise is pretty simple: In the summer of 1987, recent graduate and aspiring journalist James (Jesse Eisenberg) finds himself stuck at home in Pittsburgh when his plans for a pre-Columbia U. jaunt to Europe are foiled by a meltdown in his family's finances. Lacking any "real-world" experience, James is obliged to take the most dismal of summer jobs, a stint at the thoroughly cheerless local amusement park, Adventureland. While Mottola employs his setting to squeeze some theme park-related sight gags and absurdities out of the story, Adventureland the place is utilized primarily to establish a space of squalid despair thinly veiled in merriment. In short, the park serves as a stage for the film's punchy, disposable exploration of dissatisfaction, tawdriness, and cowardice, and also of the ways that one finds small pleasures in lousy circumstances. (Those pleasures consist primarily of sex and weed, in the case of Adventureland's hapless, apathetic teenaged carnies.) Accordingly, Adventureland is not really an enjoyable ride, but it is affecting in its way, not necessarily because the characters are believable, but because their plights are excruciatingly familiar.

Adventureland is not so much the story of James' shitty summer job as it is the story of his friendships and rivalries, especially his romance with painfully cool girl-next-door Em (Kristin Stewart), a fellow hawker in the park's midway. Stewart's acting might be as colorless as window glass, but she does have the sort of effortless prettiness (and adorable overbite) that could easily woo a sexually naïve, over-educated hipster nerd like James. Perhaps unsurprisingly for the director of the haltingly quasi-feminist Superbad, Mottola devotes a sizable chunk of the film to exploring Em's problems from her perspective, particularly her insufferable home life and the married boyfriend she just can't seem to drop. Indeed, this is Adventureland's approach to most of its characters: sketch an easily digestible personality, then crack open the door and permit the viewer to peer into their private pain. Thus, we get characters like James' fellow carnie Joel (Martin Starr), a gloomy nebbish who is painfully apologetic about his affectations and passions. Or Lisa P (Margarita Levieva), the park's obligatory sexpot, a savvy sweetheart with an unfortunate misogynist streak. (In one of the film's unexpected moments, James calls Lisa out for giving an adulterous man a pass while denigrating his mistress as a whore.) Or maintenance stud and moonlighting musician Mike (Ryan Reynolds), whose endless bullshit and too-cool-for-this-job facade start to crumble upon casual scrutiny.

The only notable characters who remain essentially cartoonish are the park's space-cadet owners Bobby (Bill Hader) and Paulette (Kristen Wiig), a pair of blissfully oblivious opportunists who are alternately corrupt (frying up spoiled corndogs) and authoritarian (policing guests for littering with steely eyes). Still, their enthusiasm for their sleazy little enterprise is palpable, and their devotion to each other and their ad hoc family of park employees is non-negotiable. (Just to prove the point, when a customer threatens James, Bobby bursts from his trailer wielding a baseball bat, bellowing like a maniac.) It's hard not to grin whenever they're on screen, not matter how outrageous their behavior, because they are the clowns of this tale, much as Hader and Seth Rogan were in the roles of Superbad's lunatic cops.

Adventureland is quite adept at summoning the post-college ennui that settles over middle class wannabe intellectuals. (Not that I know anything about that...) Certainly, its design and soundtrack seem tailor-made to tap into the brainstem of a thirtysomething demographic that will respond viscerally to the film's despairing tone and pop cultural texture (call it The Graduate Ultra-Lite). It's a charming little achievement in this respect, and fortunately Mottola doesn't overreach by trying to be anything more, which makes its mildly deft emotional touch all the more pleasing. To be sure, the story isn't anything revolutionary: Adventureland is ultimately about James' struggle to overcome self-doubt about his career, sex life, and worldview. As written by Mottola and embodied by Eisenberg, James is amiable, but not nearly compelling enough of a character to enliven such wrung-out themes. The result is that Adventureland feels a little underwhelming, in the manner of any fried confection that gratifies but doesn't truly nourish.

Sin Nombre

Long is the Way, and Hard, That Out of Hell Leads Up to Light

2009 // USA - Mexico // Cary Fukunaga // April 19, 2009 // Theatrical Print

B - Here is a simple story, familiar almost to the point of triteness. A Good Woman searching for a better life in a faraway land and a Bad Man haunted by his past meet by happenstance on the road. They bond, after a fashion, and gradually the fates of these two travelers become entwined. In Sin Nombre, the stark directorial debut from Cary Fukunaga, the Good Woman is a young Honduran named Sayra (Paulina Gaitan), heading across Latin America with her father and uncle to an uncertain, undocumented life in New Jersey. The Bad Man is a Mexican gangster known as Willy (Edgar Flores), who is fleeing the wrath of his gang after having committed the gravest of sins. The road they share is a freight train heading north, towards Estados Unidos. In most reviews, this would be the point where I suggest that the particulars don't really matter, that Sin Nombre plumbs thematic territory that transcends its setting. Yet I can't, in good conscience, make that claim. The Timeless Story that Fukunaga is striving for is modestly successful, hindered by occasional clumsiness and all-too-frequent contrivances. Sin Nombre's principal appeal is firmly grounded in its specifics. The details of his setting—both sulfurous and sweet—lend the film a mythic richness that the creaky story and weakly drawn characters fail to convey.

Sin Nombre's first shots are some of its most fascinating. I hesitate to say that the film goes downhill from there, but it is a mysterious and wondrous bit of cinematic poetry that promises a bit more than Fukunaga eventually delivers. Stretching out before us is a breathtaking autumn forest, positively glowing with scarlet leaves. The Hudson Valley perhaps? Then we see Willy, also known as El Casper, a Mexican street thug, old beyond his years already with teardrop tattoo, a smattering of scars, and a requisite "conflicted tough guy" demeanor. The relationship between Willy and the almost fantastical woodland scene is not immediately apparent. (Is it a dream? A memory?) Then the film unites the two elements: the forest is revealed to be a floor-to-ceiling landscape photo that covers one wall of Willy's bedroom, which the young tough regards with hazy distraction. Then the reverie is broken, and Willy returns to the reality of his barrio existence. His cartel has tasked him to mentor an initiate, an eager-to-please kid named Smiley (Kristian Ferrer) who is still years from his first whiskers. However, Willy's secret liaisons with a Nice Girl on the (literal) other side of the tracks proves to be a distraction, landing him and Smiley in hot water with their diabolical boss, Lil' Mago (Tenoch Huerta).

Meanwhile, in Honduras, Sayra is about to set out on a grueling journey to the United States, accompanied by her uncle and a father she has not seen in ages. She exudes the silent discontent of a young woman weary of following the advice of others, but too diffident to do otherwise. Blunt and anxious, her father makes her repeat a string of numbers out loud as they trudge overland through scorching fields. This is the phone number for his New Wife, the mother of his Other Children, who dwell in distant New Jersey. It's not clear what exactly Sayra thinks of starting over in a foreign land with these people, but she's plainly not thrilled with the notion.

From the outset, there is zero doubt that Sayra and Willy will cross paths eventually, so the only question is whether Fukunaga handles their meeting and the eventual entanglement of their fortunes with skill. The answer is "Sort Of."  Willy stumbles into Sayra and her family on board a freight train, where the gangster saves the woman from a grisly fate, in a character reversal that is both ridiculous and completely understandable. Given that Sin Nombre is, in essence, a romantic tragedy sans eroticism, Sayra is, of course, drawn to this mysterious gangster, contrary to the advice of her father and all common sense. The woman claims that a fortune-teller told her she would reach the United States in the hands of the Devil, and, in her eyes, Willy is obviously that fiend. (Personally, I found this to be an irksome bit of off-screen ex post facto characterization.)

This sort of thing is emblematic of the broader problems that plague Sin Nombre's screenplay. Fukunaga runs afoul of a narrative gracelessness with sufficient regularity that it borders on the off-putting. The film has a distressing tendency to imitate the sort of lazy, evasive plotting that is endemic to bad thrillers. Hence its reliance on reversals and chance encounters that serve no purpose beyond satisfying a particular scene's tension quota, or perhaps providing an escape hatch whenever Fukunaga writes himself into a corner. Characters perish suddenly; traitors are revealed; violence erupts and then peters out without consequence. It's all presented in a fairly rote and inert manner, signifying with dismal resolve that Sin Nombre is not a commentary on the cruel and fickle character of the universe, just an unremarkable adventure tale. Thank goodness, then, that the film invigorates in spite of its sloppy and often silly story.

The film's heart is its ferocious and haunting realization of ancient motifs within a twenty-first century Latin American milieu. Fukunaga adapts forms that will be familiar to any student of Greek tragedy or Renaissance poetry. Sin Nombre evokes both the plutonic visions of an Orphic journey as well as the grotesque geography of Dante and Milton, all without declaring itself the successor of any particular mythical or literary tradition. Though it might echo familiar narrative frameworks, its iconography and spaces are thoroughly its own.

In other words, what Sin Nombre does exceptionally well is conjure an utterly immersive and haunting stage for its essentially feeble story, enlivening that story through sheer style. Fukunaga lures us into the twin tales of Sayra and Willy by creating a world that seems to exist in a moral and cosmological twilight. His Mexico, in particular, seems peopled with lost souls, some aching to move on, some content to rule their twisted little domains as resident demons. One is tempted to simply catalog the mesmerizing and chilling locales that Fukunaga presents. There is a railyard purgatory, mired in garbage, where travelers quake in anticipation whenever the trains lumber in like fuming behemoths. Or the cemetery where tattooed gangsters brew their schemes, looking for all the world like skeletal fiends as their cavort among the graves with their guns. Or the muddy-green waters of the Rio Grande, with death-infested reeds on one side and a dubious Wal-Mart Elysium on the other. This is a film redolent with the odors of a waking Hell: diesel, cordite, blood, broken blisters, shit, ash. However, Fukunaga also lights the path northward with daubs of sunlight: a bouquet of flowers, a warm tortilla wolfed down gratefully, a glimpse of a distant saint on a mountainside.

What's refreshing about Sin Nombre's marvelous texture is that it resists feverish searches for symbolism, of the obvious or obscure variety. Rather, Fukunaga revels in the literal elements of his setting: water, vegetation, metal, plastic, mud, dust, cloth, ink. Here is a director who plainly adores the material he's working with—the wretchedness of it, the beauty of it, and the terror of it—and doesn't need a reason to graft on ponderous layers of connotation. The film rarely gets bogged down in winking allusions, even when it could go for the cheapest of metaphors. A Messiah-like sacrifice late in the film is presented with severity and anguish that derive entirely from its immediate, tragic impact. What it "means" or symbolizes isn't all that fundamental to the potency of Fukunaga's presentation. This is a film that burns its resonant imagery into your mind, like a harrowing dream of escape and deliverance that refuses to fade in the light of day.