0

Water for Elephants

Posted on May 27, 2011 by Paul

water-for-elephants-01

Stephenie Meyer has a great many things to answer for, but the emergence of Robert Pattison is about the least of them. His starring role in her pervasive Twilight saga have helped them to dizzying revenues just shy of $2 billion, joining a growing band of blockbusters destined for huge numbers no matter how bitterly critics decry them. If it’s fair to say his work had proven a pharos for antipathy and envy in equal measure, then those critics would do well to reconsider Pattison in light of an exemplary showing as a young veterinarian off to join the circus in Water for Elephants.

The film is a charming depression-era tale of an orphan and the travelling show he happens into, so old-worldy that I dare say writer Richard LaGravenese was treated like a pariah upon showing it around Hollywood. Pattison is Jacob Jankowski who, the flashbacks recall, saw his pre-ordained success derailed by tragedy and a train bound for adventure. His finds company among stowaways who offer him work for the Benzini Brothers’ Most Spectacular Show on Earth. We’re introduced to August (Christopher Waltz), who runs the show with his pretty wife Marlena (Reese Witherspoon). Initially impatient to dismiss the new recruit, he changes his mind upon hearing of the boy’s knowledge of animals. They say there’s always a place for a man who can find good use for strong hands, and would you believe he does just that?

A century of movie-making has seen a great many well-mannered girls fall for fellas from across the tracks, and Water for Elephants finds those fated chases a powerful draw. Under the watchful eye of August, Jacob and Marlena begin training an elephant named Rosie. She is playful, and a whole lot cleverer and more stubborn than her new owners realise. You’ve heard the one about leading a horse to water, now apply that to training a 4 tonne African elephant who speaks only Polish. A reticent Jacob is encouraged by August to discipline her, and he leads by graphic example. When Rosie’s disastrous first performance is through, her cruel master has her dragged to an abandoned carriage, and he raises his bullhook high as the door slams shut on her haunting cries. It is, I think, one of the year’s most wicked scenes.

If he is incalculably cold with his animals, then August visits no more kindness upon his staff. The custom of the day was for the crew to be red-lighted (thrown from the train) when the money ran dry, and they pass around toxic bootleg Jamaican Ginger to celebrate another last night in town. As with his breakout performance in Inglorious Basterds, Waltz brings a menacing flavour to August’s assured charisma. His is an effortless and engaging theatre, showing glimpses of a power just barely restrained as he toys with his protégé’s emerging feelings for his wife. “I’ve always know the kind of woman you really are; those little-girl-lost eyes” he spits, Marelna sinking to her knees. “An innocent woman wouldn’t have to get on her knees, but it’s just force of habit for a woman like you”

For almost its entire duration, I was delighted to find a film defying the cynical belief of movies being either for the child or the child-like. If only it had the courage of its convictions: Water for Elephants spectacularly misjudges its narrative scope in an ending utterly out-of-step with the prevailing mood of the film. I cannot for the life of me understand it being the true intent of the filmmakers, but I’m assured it is faithful to the book. Perhaps this is the perfect argument for caution in applying blind devotion to ones source material. Certainly, concluding on a note infinitely more suited to Evan Almighty is simply unforgivable.

Everything up until that point is a rewarding patchwork of ethereal quality, full of sunshine and character that no 3D can match or ruin. I recommend Water for Elephants not as the perfect film, but as a relaxed, mature mainstream drama; the antithesis of a belief that audiences respond only to pictures just as loud and inane as they can serve them. This one isn’t afraid to let simple storytelling do its job, and that almost makes it an anachronism. Without Robert Pattison it’s unlikely it would have been made at all. Perhaps we have something to thank Stephenie Meyer for after all.

0

The Dilemma

Posted on May 23, 2011 by Paul

the-dilemma-01

The Dilemma could be called The Identity Crisis for all its crippling indecision. It’s advertised as a feel-good comedy, but the tone is that of a drama, albeit a remarkably undramatic one. Sometimes it’s played for laughs, while other times it reaches for sadness and goes for broke. There are plots here about love and deceit, about friendships and relationships. There’s a story of two friends trying to make it big in business, and a scene in which Channing Tatum cries over his dead fish. The Dilemma is a movie, certainly, but exactly which one is a whole other question.

Ronny Valentine and Nick Brannen have been best friends since college. Ronny (Vince Vaughn) is the middle-aged paunch to Nick’s (Kevin James) bespectacled genius, and together they pitch Crysler their plan to make the new cars sound just like the old ones. It’s a ridiculous project, and the earnestness with which they approach it is mined to good effect, chiefly in a presentation that co-opts Kurt Russell’s speech from the movie Miracle. ‘If You Believe In Yourself, Anything Can Happen’, says he, as though it were self-evident that stirring hockey rhetoric applies just as readily to making pretty cars go brooooom.

They make a fine business of showboating, but their home lives need some work. Ronny is happy with girlfriend Beth (Jennifer Connelly) but, finding himself the surprise recipient of a committed relationship, begins to envisage a ticking clock looming over his future. Ever the doting couple, Nick and wife Gevena (Winona Ryder) goad him into a lavish proposal before it’s too late. It’s while foraging for a worthy spot at the Botanical Gardens that Ronny sees Geneva with another man. For one horrifying moment the film threatens us with some real drama, before poison ivy and associated burning puts paid to any such notion of this being a weighty meditation.

With the Crysler deal at stake, the titular Dilemma emerges: does Ronny tell his best friend the truth and risk losing the contract, or keep it secret in the hope Nick understands when the truth finally outs? A third option proves more attractive: get some hard evidence, lie to everyone to raise needless suspicion, finally confront Geneva with undeniable proof, and do it all badly enough that director Ron Howard can eek 2 hours of melodramatic farce out of it.

I’ve no doubt The Dilemma seemed like a good idea at some point. Channing Tatum’s revelatory turn as an oversensitive home-wrecker shows a keen eye for playing with our expectations, and it’s a lively, welcome intrusion. Joining him is Connelly – an Oscar winner no less – proffering some gravitas and palpable angst in an otherwise inconsequential role, and a rather surprising Kevin James. In a performance that only once calls for the patented Kevin James Body Pop, a hitherto missing range emerges in his portrait of a man beset by betrayal. If only his role wasn’t so poorly defined: the script too easily falls back on misadventures and massage parlours when far greater resonance is found in James playing it straight.

In contrast, Vince Vaughn and Winona Ryder resonate best in other films altogether. Vaughn has a style I’m usually fond of, but painful miscasting leaves his one strength – beaming like a cynical, twinkling simpleton – overshadowed by a more moderated persona that is plain uninvolved. It’s an anti-performance, if you will, that imparts not a single memorable attribute other than the realisation he once had sex with Jennifer Connelly. And what of poor Winona? Unlikely though it is that any audience could possibly sympathise with a woman as petty and blackmailing as Geneva, that is precisely what the film asks of her. For all her recent troubles, Ryder was once a gifted performer, but her task of generating sympathy from the ugliest of characteristics is an unremittingly thankless one.

Over the course of two saggy hours, events slowly – very slowly – snowball into a final encounter in Ronny’s flat, wherein friends stage his intervention, unaware that the only guy who needs saving has been sitting next to him the whole time. Those who stick around hoping for any perceptible fallout from the night’s revelations will be disappointed by a conclusion that sidelines them in favour of that whole car engine business, which by then seems even less important than ever.

In their defence, with the thunderous purring of a V8 on screen, who can really hear the audience whispering about ‘conclusion’ or ‘satisfying resolution’ anyway? It’s ever such a nice car; it would be a shame to ruin it by looking under the hood.

2

Passion Play

Posted on May 19, 2011 by Paul

passion-play-01

It begins outside a bar with a sucker punch to the face. Nate (Mickey Rourke) is down and out, both metaphorically and literally, living as a lonesome brass player with a habit for a muse. The brawler in question drags him out into the desert to die, but this isn’t Casino and things don’t get to end that badly this early.

Instead, Nate stumbles upon on a small enclave in the clearing over a ridge, the twinkling lights hinting at salvation down in the dustbowl. What he finds there is more travelling peepshow than spiritual redemption: he encounters Sam, a cane-twirling ringmaster who promises riches to a gathering crowd if only they’d step inside his bawdy Bit Top of grandeur. A buck later, and Nate stands face to face with a bejewelled Lily (Megan Fox), illuminated inside a glass box that sees her flowing red dress give way to a sprawling pair of wings. A shackled angel, then: another of the great many literal things about Passion Play, a film that has Nate retire to her gin-serving manger before it figures why shoot for subtlety when you can just pay Megan Fox to take her clothes off?

Sam (Rhys Ifans) and his merry band take none too kindly to this new complication in Lily’s life, and soon the carnie folk are strapping him down for an introduction to a quarrelsome snake. The angel crashes into the tent with her flatbed truck, whisking Nate away into the cool night. They make for a motel of ill repute, wherein Nate ogles his fallen saviour, whose seductive pouring over a juicy apple is as literal as it is forbidden. An enchanted kind of mysticism for sure, paired as it is with the revelation that Lily’s wings are just too weak to carry her away. Maybe it means something and maybe it doesn’t, but right now they’re heavy and a lady’s got to wash.

The Wrestler is a great piece of work, powerful and haunting, but this is Rourke on autopilot to an unremitting disaster. With Lily making a midnight break for the plastic surgeon’s office, Nate pulls on his cowboy boots and rides in to halt the unlikeliest of surgical consults. He might not have the flatbed truck, but he holds her tiny face in his hands, her lip a’quivering; “But I can be like all the other girls!” she whimpers as he tells her to screw being normal. And really: when even Mickey Rourke is warning you off plastic surgery, it’s probably time to listen.

His altruistic streak serves its own ends: Nate has conspired to gift the young Nirvana covergirl to the highest bidder, who in this instance is a murderous pimp by the name of Happy Shannon. Inextricably played by Bill Murray looking more like Gene Hackman circa-Royal Tenenbaums by the day, he’s filled with a sadness that we’d more readily respond to were Murray not sporting a quite remarkable Trump Towers toupee. Having screwed Happy’s wife some years before, Nate finds himself weighing a morning wake-up call that suggests a one-time offer from a guy who doesn’t bargain for much besides Suntory.

Lily is whisked back into the box from whence she came, the prize that fell to earth in a story about the lengths men will go to make her their own. Passion Play isn’t a good film, but it holds a surprise: Megan Fox can act. She’s no thespian, it’s true, but within her lies an intriguing vulnerability that Michael Bay all but airbrushed away for Transformers. One scene in particular hints at some hidden craft: early in their courtship, Nate takes her to a small theatre, where she sits spellbound by her first ocean amidst the abandoned scenery on stage. The unlikely pair take tender steps together in their first dance, and if it’s a cheeseball move to have her wings unfurl as they finally kiss, then you can just go ahead and bill me for the whole platter.

The rest is less fortunate in its conspirings. There’s the inevitable sex scene, for one, which manages to be both clumsily shot and no more sensual an entwining than two Team America puppets doing the Cleveland steamer. If Nate plucking a feather of lost innocence from his Crane Wife isn’t enough, then how about the Lifetime spectacle of pawning his beloved trumpet, or the unwise frisson with a wicked temptress and her tattooed wings? Plainly, Passion Play isn’t wont to sully itself with hidden symbolism when there are far more important matters to tend to.

For a film that need not have tried this hard to be quite this ridiculous, Passion Play leaves you with the gnawing feeling that it must surely have been made with good intentions by a crew who knew what they were letting themselves in for. After all, having concocted a mouth-agape ending that manages to be both cloying and evangelical enough to have even the Trinity Broadcasting Network waving it away, to presume any level of seriousness to proceedings would be a notion too ridiculous even for this preposterous nativity.

Pages ... 1 2