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Contagion

Posted on December 21, 2011 by Paul

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I have a confession to make: I wash my hands more than is strictly practical. During my more neurotic moments – themselves, growing more frequent with time – I can be found indulging the most impractical of measures to avoid the parliament of horrors that lie on my door handle. In availing myself of the only safeguard we have against the common cold, I can, with some degree of smug superiority, be reasonably sure of escaping the season unscathed. Contagion is proof I haven’t gone nearly far enough.

What it demonstrates more than anything is our insignificance. That, try as we might, we are not insulated from the hopelessly compromised chain with which we co-exist. Though we may wash our hands and studiously read the label, others will not. The food we lovingly serve one another comes from condemned factories, staffed by line workers who aren’t paid enough to care. All around us are handshakes and warm bodies, riding on public transport with the handrail every last one of them touched getting on.

Contagion begins with one death, and becomes concerned with many more. The first victim is a young mother, whose death would have been more shocking had her celebrity not been used as a publicity vehicle. Others follow. It tracks the progress of an unidentified disease that kills indiscriminately. We watch it spread from Hong Kong to Chicago, then on to Boston and Los Angeles. The Centre for Disease Control is ground zero, at which scientists gather world leaders to project the millions of fatalities onto a map slowly being coloured in. 1918 saw a flu pandemic that killed 3% of the world’s population. Prior to a widespread vaccination program, Polio could be expected to spread to 4 people for every 1 infected. Against even those dire statistics, the film’s chosen vector, MEV-1, does not appear deficient.

The struggle for any such movie is to balance the science with the human stories that give it context. Steven Soderbergh thusly stacks the deck with an Oceans Eleven of stars: Matt Damon and Gwyneth Paltrow as one family, Laurence Fishburne and Kate Winslet as a pair of doctors working for the CDC. Jude Law is even on hand as an intrepid blogger, complete with the requisite jabs at his exclusion from the journalistic members-club. It most obviously resembles 1995′s equally star struck Outbreak, to which Contagion owes many of its plot points: the now traditional montage of transmission making a repeat appearance, complete with a tracking shot that highlights the sick who walk among us. How Soderbergh resisted the urge to leave luminescent handprints on everything is beyond me.

What Contagion lacks in originality, it makes up for in sheer professionalism. It is also notably more subdued than Petersen’s film, which tended towards large set-pieces over real detective work. Such traits do, on occasion, make an appearance here – witness Marion Cotillard’s investigations turning into a strange piece of crime theatre – yet they are rare lapses in an otherwise dauntingly plausible movie. Fishburne and Damon carry themselves with reserve, playing characters that were conceived as calm realists rather than those given to grandstanding. Jude Law is alone in striking the wrong note, and even then you have to wonder whether there was a right note for his conspiracist blogger gone-rouge.

Stylish to the last and, if you’ll excuse the term, rather sanitised. The conclusion comes in a neat package that leaves the audience with a vague sense of unease, but nothing more troubling than that. The film’s pursuit of real science is laudable, while also representing something of a global best case. Contagion is Soderbergh’s big war movie, only his is an unseen enemy with no flag, colour or creed. What it shares instead is that same jingoism, and the unwavering belief that everything will be fine just so long as they keep the mounting dead off the screen.

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Beginners

Posted on December 17, 2011 by Paul

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Flushed down the toilet, bagged and left for disposal; these are the fates that wait for us all, the possessions that once marked our lives seen finally as impositions to be packed away in dusty boxes marked – if we are lucky – ‘Dad’.

“You’ll be able to go home” is the nicest way a doctor can give the worst possible news. “You don’t have to come in for any more treatments” is another. Here is a love story, principally of a son, entwined with reflections of an undiscovered father. Hal was married for 44 years, then widowed, only to emerge from the closet a 75 year-old gay man. He returns home from a nightclub, a stranger in foreign lands, and excitedly phones his son to ask what the dum-tsch dum-tsch music was. “House music? Ahh”, he smiles, making himself a note.

This is all in the past, because Hal is dead. The present concerns itself with his son, Oliver, and Anna. They meet by chance at a costume party. He comes as Sigmund Freud; she drapes herself onto his makeshift couch, the most adorable Chaplin you ever saw. Perhaps it’s her eyes, or that she has laryngitis and can’t talk, so has to write everything down. The light flickers over her delicate features as she lifts her head. “Why are you at a party if you’re sad?” the scribble on her notepad reads. It sounds twee, and it is. It’s also silly and fun and everything Chaplin himself would have applauded.

Young love is no time for cynicism. It’s a time for interlocked fingers and long walks through the autumn leaves. Oliver and Anna so conduct themselves, primarily in the hotel rooms she frequents for work. The young actress soon regains the power of speech, and they begin to talk of the past and how it brought them here. For Oliver, that means his father, to whom Beginners returns frequently. Flashbacks alternate between memories of his childhood, in which Hal was an absent figure, and the years just gone, in which he was not. Newly awoken, he had no desire to be merely “theoretically gay”, and thus took to a new wardrobe and the crafting of a personal ad. “I’m an old senior guy, 78, but I’m attractive and horny. I have a nice house with food, drinks, friends and me. Let’s meet and see what happens”. A much-younger love, Andy, soon arrived, and was adored with a passion not wholly returned.

Director Mike Mills, best known for the intermittent Thumbsucker, places these relationships within a greater timeline. Images of the sun, of the people, of the news of the day. The death of Harvey Milk is set alongside 1950s housewives, or the golden era of the automobile. His show-and-tell of a bygone era is compared to our own fascinations, and such moments see Beginners try to understand our parents, and their parents, and parents before them, as just another fucked-up speck in an ever-expanding context.

Beginners is well-crafted in its use of repetition that draws us finally to a completed circle, in which characters are mirrored to one another, their lives compared and, finally, realised. Stage four cancer is no fit for the carefree adventurer Hal embodies, nor the thunder with which he approaches his new horizons. His son is witness to him finding love for the first time, which seems a strange thing to visit upon your grown child. Oliver’s own relationship ebbs and flows, and only his dog stays true, with eyes that go on forever and love him despite everything. He and Anna skate across a marble floor with that dog in-tow, his little legs all a blur, on their way to adventures of the independent kind, in which they must grow and discover in the most unassuming of ways. That’s okay: Beginners makes that routine seem thrilling, modestly.

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30 Minutes or Less

Posted on December 15, 2011 by Paul

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A pizza boy’s lot is not a happy one. No sooner are you out of pocket over some impossible delivery promise, than you wind up having two hillbillies strap a homemade bomb to your chest. A burgeoning career built on a house of tics, poor Jesse Eisenberg has never looked quite so ill-at-ease.

The filmmakers might claim otherwise, but 30 Minutes or Less is a ripped-from-the-headlines tale of extortion in middle America. In 2003, Brian Douglas Wells walked into a Pennsylvania bank and demanded $250,000 in cash. When the police moved to apprehend him, his bomb-vest exploded. Strange enough on its own, Wells’ death only grows more bizarre upon hearing the finer details: how a prostitute lured him into an elaborate plot to kill an accomplice’s father and secure his sizeable inheritance. How Wells sat for fittings of the bomb, believing it to be a fake right up until it blew a hole in his chest.

That plot is reproduced with few noteworthy changes. The prostitute is now a stripper, and Eisenberg’s burdened protagonist is less the stiffed abettor than a sad-sack playing fetch. Otherwise, the changes are strictly tonal – it being hard to imagine the real conspirators excusing their actions through a succinct citation of fatalism. “Sometimes,” Dwayne (Danny McBride) reflects, his shorn perm blowing in the breeze, “fate pulls out its big old cock and slaps you right in the face”.

10 hours in an explosives vest spells trouble. Under the constant watch of bumpkin duo Dwayne and Travis, Nick Flanning sets about finding himself a partner in crime. Lifelong friend – loosely speaking – Chet is teaching a high school class when Nick shows up sporting a pregnant overcoat. Aghast, he speaks for the audience. “Your first thought was to come to a school, filled with young children?”. Nick scrunches up his beetroot features and crumbles into an arms-aloft panic, while Chet considers the possibilities. Dismissing an early suggestion to simply remove the patient’s arms as impractical, he turns instead to the wisdom of the crowd. “All these web sites have different shit. There’s not a lot of consensus in the bomb-disarming community. What did they do in the Hurt Locker?”

Suffice to say, it didn’t involve holding up a bank with toy guns, fake names, and absurd pleasantries, but that’s 30 Minutes for you. Its unmistakable star is Aziz Ansari. Appearing opposite an easily flustered co-star affords him the opportunity to revive that Parks and Recreation swagger, liberally deployed in scenes that mesh seamlessly with a style once described as ‘the Kayne West of local government’. He brings a truckload of enthusiasm to a spirited caper which, critically, seems like it was as fun to film as it is to watch. Eisenberg’s nervous energy makes for a perfect foil, and the pair romp from rooftop declarations through to a tick-tock finale with nary a breath between.

At that pace, something was always going to give; how unfortunate it had to be the ending. What amounts to a teenage rendition of Crank is puffed past bursting point by a clumsily manufactured third-act that sees the story swerving down another, almost fatal, avenue. The sudden appearance of a hitherto unseen character is not only a sure sign of a story that lacks planning, but evidence of terrible judgement. When you have pairings as great as Eisenberg/Ansari and McBride/Swardson, the last thing you need is to switch focus to a gummy stereotype both squeaky and nonsensical. His appearance heralds the passing of a streamlined fun machine, and the arrival of stumbling gun-porn. I get that these kids are supposed to have spent their extended adolescence absorbing the wisdom of Nakatomi Plaza, but their transformation into actual – if self-effacing – John McClane figures is, dare I say, unrealistic.

Everything before that is still an effective mix of the gun-for-hire and hostage genres, with pace and style the match of any of its pleasantly deranged contemporaries. It ends up in a bad place, but, even there, Anzari saves the day.

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