Milk

Another (Gay) Biopic

2008 // USA // Gus Van Sant // December 15, 2008 // Theatrical Print

C - There's a frustrating ordinariness at work in Gus Van Sant's Milk. Hewing to the narrative conventions and rhythms of a thousand undemanding, "uplifting" biographical films that have gone before, it invites a viewer sympathetic to the struggle for gay rights to mutter in outrage and nod appreciatively at the right moments. Excepting Sean Penn's riveting performance as activist, politician, and martyr Harvey Milk, as well as Van Sant's modest but invigorating visual daubings, Milk rarely strays from pedestrian biopic territory. The faux-shocks of male-on-male kissing and tastefully lit intimacies aside, this is easily Van Sant's most determinedly accessible film in years, surpassing even Good Will Hunting. It's a touch disappointing that Van Sant--one of the boldest and most sensitive living American auteurs, and an openly gay one at that--has created a work mostly indistinguishable from any other biopic. Forgoing thematic richness for simplistic, feel-good messaging, Milk asks merely that we follow along and shed a tear or two.

This isn't to say that San Francisco city supervisor Harvey Milk or the American gay rights struggle aren't worthy of examination via cinema's lens. Indeed, in the sense that it sets out to tell a neglected story from a neglected viewpoint, Milk succeeds admirably. This is the energy that animates the film's otherwise limp biopic tropes in its best moments: the signature vigor of a tale told by those to whom it mattered most. Milk captures the events of 1970s San Francisco not only as its namesake saw them, but also as the Castro neighborhood, the broader gay community, and gay Americans dwelling in the wilderness of Flyover Country saw them. Strictly speaking, Milk may not belong to the subset of Van Sant's queer films, but nearly every principal character is a gay man or woman, and that's something in a film that otherwise is so earnest about embracing an appealing, familiar dramatic formula. The sexuality of the characters is somewhat incidental, which is strange given that their sexuality is also at the heart of the film's conflict. The straight sore thumb is Milk's fellow supervisor and assassin Dan White (Josh Brolin), who loiters menacingly around the film's periphery like a polyester-clad Robert Ford.

For those not familiar with the story of Harvey Milk, Van Sant reveals his bloody fate in the first few minutes, via archival news footage of Dianne Feinstein announcing the murder of Milk and Mayor George Moscone. It's the footage that unspools with the opening credits, however, that proffers the film's crispest connection between dramatized fact and cruel reality. In soundless black-and-white, anonymous men are hauled out of bars and nightclubs during police raids, their shame palpable across the decades. This, Van Sant suggests, is the not-so-vanished context for Milk's story, a civil rights nightmare that steeped a hidden swath of America in terror and self-loathing.

The film that follows, unfortunately, is never as thematically provocative as the mere existence of homosexuality once was. While it personalizes gay rights in the persona of Harvey Milk and and evinces undeniably empathy for all of its gay characters, Milk shies away from exploring the complexities and contradictions in the slain man's storied life. Thus, Van Sant and screenwriter Dustin Lance Black focus with misty-eyed adoration on Milk's uncompromising passion and optimism. The man's sheer ardor somewhat obfuscates the film's simplistic treatment of him. There is little suggestion of how Milk saw himself, beyond some mumbled statements about opera (naturally) that prove laughably crude. (Milk is fond of opera because it's grandiose, just like him!) Penn portrays the man as a scrappy archetype, furious and mesmerizing, but still merely an archetype. Milk's preference for expediency summons a parade of biopic clichés dressed up in queer regalia, embodied in the film's obligatory Griping Spouse, Scott (James Franco). Apparently rendering relatable gay characters requires hackneyed portrayals of their film relationships to rival the hackneyed film relationships of straights.

All the expected notes are present and accounted for: trials and tribulations framed for smooth digestion, clashes of personality, lessons learned and passed on, the death of a secondary character, and sinister hints of the tragic fate we know is looming. Despite the dishearteningly typical character to its components, Milk nonetheless stands as a superior specimen of the tired biopic species. Van Sant's deliciously audacious tendencies have largely been subsumed, but here and there he enlivens the film with an engaging use of framing, editing, music, or a bit of spliced archival footage. This modest current of cinematic jazz—focused and playful while still maintaining the film's grave yet fiery tone—is sufficient to elevate Milk beyond either the lifeless high-gloss or the ugly television aesthetic it might have featured under another director's hand.

However, the true heavy lifting in Milk is tackled by Sean Penn, an actor whose supposedly mythic talents have long eluded me. Here, however, Penn delivers a performance that enthralls despite the burdens of a deeply rutted narrative road and a spotty script. Properly attired and coifed, the actor bears an uncanny resemblance to Harvey Milk. What Penn crafts, however, is not mimicry, but a fierce and humane vision of a bruised and bloody fighter with fire in his belly. Penn sails through the film on pure charisma, lending spark to scenes that might otherwise be leaden. During Milk's seduction of nubile cruiser Cleve Jones (a bespectacled and afro-ed Emile Hirsch) to a life of activism, it's Penn's sharp sense for how to modulate the scene's volume, tone, and silences that lend it the electricity of destiny. Even Milk's bullhorn-amplified monologes--filled with greeting card platitudes about hope and change--are lively and downright watchable as delivered by Penn.

Perhaps it's not fundamentally fair to critique Milk in the context of the rest of Van Sant's filmography. Nonetheless, it's hard to resist contrasting what is on balance a thoroughly unremarkable biopic with the director's Paranoid Park from earlier this year. That film, with its stunning visual and aural feats, its daring, jumbled structure, and its uncommonly rich understanding of the adolescent mindscape, emerged as an absorbing psychological study and one of the best films of 2008. In comparison, despite Penn's bold command of the screen, Milk proves to be merely satisfactory. It is everything that is expected in the quality biopic of a slain crusader: affirming, warmly righteous without being smug, and a little hasty. Although it addresses a social issue I personally champion, I can't say I will remember it after Penn's award acceptance speeches have faded.

Quantum of Solace

Questing for a Quota of Quality

2008 // UK - USA // Marc Forster // December 3, 2008 // Theatrical Print

C - Quantum of Solace is not the sequel that the refreshing, gripping Casino Royale deserved. Director Marc Forster has created a routine whoosh-boom contraption that reflects the bruised dazzle of CR, but unfortunately doesn't generate much glint of its own. As a action film generically and a Bond film specifically, it's serviceable. There are elaborate action sequences, a couple of beautiful women, a little bleeding-edge gadgetry, and a global conspiracy. However, Forster is merely spattering the Bond signifiers onto the screen without much grace or consideration for the quality of the components. The script—mangled by a committee of writers—is just wretched, so it's a blessing that Daniel Craig carries on the pitch-perfect, smoldering portrayal he delivered in Casino Royale. His Bond is just as watchable in Quantum, despite the ludicrous lines he and his fellow performers are saddled with. It's revealing that while the action in this twenty-second Bond film is mindless and colorless, Craig's almost rebellious need for both evocative nuance and ferocity seduces us once again.

Eschewing the standalone character of the venerable franchise's prior chapters, Quantum refers directly to the events of Casino Royale, literally picking up exactly where the previous film left off. Bond produces the nefarious Mr. White from the boot of his Aston Martin for interrogation by MI6. By means of an admittedly shocking reversal, White reveals that the secret group behind Casino Royale's Le Chiffre is far more powerful and widespread than British intelligence suspects. Bond, still simmering with concealed rage over the death of Vesper Lynd, follows a trail of clues to Haiti, Austria, Bolivia, Italy and other locales of globe-spanning intrigue. Eventually, it is revealed that White's master, an organization called Quantum, is organizing a military coup in order to secure the privatization of Bolivia's water supply. It's not an implausible scheme, as it turns out, but the matter is handled with clumsy simplicity and more than a little nauseating condescension. (Forster even treats us to the sight of poor rural Bolivians staring vacantly at a dry spigot with empty water jugs in hand. Ugh.)

The specifics of the awkwardly conveyed story don't really matter. The central pleasure of Quantum of Solace is Craig's determination to carry the character he sculpted in Casino Royale through the proceedings with as much dignity as possible. What makes Craig such a satisfying avatar for 007—easily Connery's equal, although their approaches to the character are worlds apart—is his facility for striking a mesmerizing balance between Bond's volatility and almost serene focus under pressure. The writers don't permit our secret agent much personal evolution in Quantum, but that's because the film explores Bond via a doubling. Our protagonist finds his twin in Camille (Olga Kurylenko), a Bond Girl only in the sense that she is the female lead in a Bond film. In a neat twist on the usual formula, Bond and Camille subsume their mutual attraction—brushing up against it but nothing more—in the service of vengeance. Like 007, Camille is consumed with a need for retribution on behalf of a slain loved one. She emerges as little more than a tanned, leggy sounding board for Bond's own ruminations on revenge, and in this respect she's a thin character with a shamefully simple arc. Still, she offers a refreshing change of pace from Bond's usual sexual conquests, and while Kurylenko can't match Craig's battered, molten qualities, she conveys an acuity and spurred energy that the underwritten part doesn't deserve.

Thankfully, many of the series' assets have returned from the previous outing: Judi Dench is back as M, Giancarlo Giannini as rogue agent Rene Mathis, and Jeffrey Wright as the franchise's CIA punching bag, Felix Leiter. Unfortunately, the film's tremendous disappointment is the wasted Mathieu Amalric as villainous Quantum billionaire Dominic Greene. Amalric's performance is a mess, an odd blend of sweaty desperation and clownish goggling for a role that demands a rumpled, slightly diabolic Gallic quality. Amalric is an evocative and witty performer, and to force him into such a glumly crude sketch of a villain defies all reason. There's no satisfaction to seeing Bond take Greene down by Quantum's end, because the man's operatic villainy derives solely from what we're told about his monstrous plots. There's no connection between this wormy, two-faced fool and the criminal mastermind he's supposed to be.

Craig's performance aside, Quantum is in most respects an enjoyable action film, with little to recommend it above most other competent fare. For the first half of the film we get a succession of chases, by auto, by speedboat, and on foot over rooftops. Then the film offers up an aerial dogfight and a guns-blazing confrontation at a desert resort constructed (apparently) entirely out of explosive hydrogen fuel cells. None of these sequences are connected to the film's story or themes; Bond enters and exits them like amusement park rides. Much as in Casino Royale, it's the slower thriller sequences that truly engage, such as Bond engaging in skulduggery around a succession of squalid and glamorous hotel rooms. The standout set piece involves a clandestine Quantum convocation that occurs in plain sight during a performance of Puccini's Tosca. The villains conduct their business via tiny headsets during the opera; in a cunning move, Bond provokes them into standing up at once, permitting MI6 to pinpoint them.

Quantum boasts some flourishes that enrich its otherwise straightforward endeavor, particularly a memorable design blending grubby realism and cool modernism, and some eye-catching titles for the establishing shots. Even Forster, whose approach is overall distressingly plodding and atonal, discovers a sharper sensibility now and then. Witness Bond's frantic flight from the opera, cross-cut in a flurry with the performance's crescendo, or a fiery echo of a particular despairing, drenched embrace from Casino Royale. Ultimately, however, it's Craig, not Forster, that salvages Quantum from its wince-worthy dialog and explosion-laced staleness. In maintaining his icy hold on the genre's most fascinating portrayal in a generation, he coaxes us to return for the next film in the reboot's introductory trilogy.

Synecdoche, New York

Turtles All the Way Down

2008 // USA // Charlie Kaufman // November 9, 2008 // Theatrical Print

A - Screenwriter Charlie Kaufman's directorial debut, the maddening, devastating Synecdoche, New York, wanders in the twilight world usually reserved for the bleakest of existential novels. It reflects a disquieting comfort with the folding of reality and mind within the dark whorls of creative frenzy, as well as a gluttony for morbidity that borders on the obscene. This is a film that has no use for reason. However, its nightmarish illogic is so powerfully rendered and so robustly intuitive that it demands our attention, devours it even. With Synecdoche, Kaufman has created his densest and most sublime film to date, striking a dizzying balance between conventional romantic tragedy and unabashedly grave philosophical conundrums. This film has perplexed me, but I cannot stop marveling at it. Much like Tarsem Singh's phantasmagorical hymn to storytelling, The Fall, Synecdoche hums with the electricity of a novel form of cinematic life, a grand work teetering on folly. It must be seen to be believed.

How does one begin to describe a dream? Philip Seymour Hoffman, in what is most assuredly the performance of his career, portrays Caden Cotard, a sad-sack theater director in upstate New York. Caden is deeply unhappy, perpetually on the verge of a complete physical and emotional breakdown. He is obsessed with his own mortality, and seems to offer nothing positive to his wife Adele (Catherine Keener) or his young daughter Olive (Sadie Goldstein). In the film's early scenes, there are hints that not all is as it seems in Caden's ugly existence. He glimpses himself in the cartoons and prescription drug advertisements on television, and time proceeds oddly. Adele, an artist whose canvases are no bigger than postage stamps, declares that she is moving to Germany, and taking their daughter with her. Caden is emotionally ruined, but he's also concerned about his teeth, his eyes, his urine, and the pustules on his face and legs. His wide-eyed, somewhat demented therapist (Hope Davis) is occupied solely with hawking her self-help books. The gorgeous lead actress in Caden's production of Death of a Salesman (Michelle Williams) seems to have eyes for him, but his fixation is the box-office clerk, a radiant redhead named Hazel (Samantha Morton). Women seem to fill every corner of Caden's life, and every female encounter seems to promise another path to misery. Hazel, by the way, lives in a house that is on fire, but never seems to burn down. (In a superb delayed reaction, she tours the house with a realtor, chatting about her finances and the property's qualities, before finally admitting, "I'm sort of concerned about the fire.")

When a MacArthur genius grant improbably arrives in Caden's lap, he envisions an epic work of original theater, something "true." (Are unknown Schenectady theater directors typically so honored?) He rents an enormous warehouse--a hanger, really--in New York City and begins to assemble his magnum opus. His cast includes dozens of actors at first, then hundreds, then thousands. Within the warehouse a colossal set takes shape, an artificial city. Months of development turn into years. Caden's vast production begins to encompass events from his own life, eventually boasting recreations of scenes that we have already witnessed. To play himself, Caden casts Sammy (Tom Noonan), an actor who has been stalking him for two decades. Sammy is an eager study who follows Caden everywhere and dutifully notes the color of his stool. (This isn't as outlandish as it sounds, as Caden himself is fixated on his excreta.) Meanwhile, Adele and Olive have disappeared into the avant-garde German art scene, where Caden's attempts to communicate with his daughter--now a tattooed muse under the wing of a female lover (Jennifer Jason Leigh)--are cruelly rebuffed.

I could go on forever recounting the swollen details of Synecdoche's essentially baffling story, but to do so would not convey the addictive sense of the unmoored that Kaufman sculpts. He conjures an aura of demented connection and significance that can only be described as dream-like, treading the paths of Cronenberg at his most determinedly surreal (e.g. Naked Lunch) or Lynch on any given night. Synecdoche recalls Kaufman's own Being John Malkovich in its taste for hallucinatory desperation and outrageous metaphor. The latter doesn't always succeed as well a Kaufman imagines. Late in the film, Hoffman speaks to his grown daughter by means of an electronic translator, as she only understands German. Get it? They don't speak the same language anymore. This sort of daft literalism preoccupies Kaufman to the point of distraction, but it never truly irritates, perhaps because his performers are so absorbed into the film's fabric of uncanny gloom. There is no winking acknowledgment of Synecdoche's silliness or strangeness. This is part of the film's curious magic: Its ability to convey absolute sincerity while giggling madly.

Synecdoche's fascination with identity and Möbius narrative echoes not only Lynch's late masterworks, but also Polanski's The Tenant. The whole world seems to conspire in the utter disintegration of Caden Cotard. Kaufman suggests that Caden creates art not for the benefit of others but in order to unlock the mystery of his own life. However, even the play eventually turns on him. Sammy casts another "Sammy" in a play within the play, as well as other "Hazels," and everyone becomes confused about their role in the production (read: universe). Family members and strangers call Caden's sexuality and gender into question, and when he casts an actress (Dianne Wiest) in a pivotal role, the two seem to switch places. Time and place roil and ooze together, with Olive's childhood diary seeming to prophecy the future and New York blending into Germany blending into Fake New York. Eventually, Caden notices a map of his set showing a series of warehouses, nested like matryoshka dolls: Warehouse 1 contains Warehouse 2 contains Warehouse 3 contains... How far down does it go? Does this fractal-reality provide illumination somewhere within its depths, or is it obfuscating Caden's understanding of his nature? Is the play itself a hallucination or deathbed fugue, an attempt by a lucid dreamer to organize his desires and fears? Kaufman doesn't provide a definitive answer. However, in Synecdoche's final scenes he suggests that our path might be scripted and end in ashes, but the final enlightenment is no less potent and no less sweet.

Happy-Go-Lucky

​Manic Pixie Dream-Girl

2008 // UK // Mike Leigh // November 11, 2008 // Theatrical Print

B - Mike Leigh's Happy-Go-Lucky is a slippery little film, a work that appears—at first glance—to rest on the spritely shoulders of one Poppy Cross, as portrayed with rabbit-punch wit and astonishing texture by Sally Hawkins. Indeed, Hawkins is undeniably the blazing celestial orb of positivity of this slice-of-life dramatic comedy. Making Sally Hawkins charming is an amateur's trick, demanding nothing more than attiring her in "crazy" outfits and letting her goggle and guffaw through a flurry of sitcom scenarios. (Driving lessons! Visiting her sister! Flamenco class!) However, Leigh's magic lies in the way he shifts our attention from Poppy to the world around her, never mind how enchanting a heroine she might be. Quite improbably—and in spite of her saccharine eccentricities—Poppy emerges as a rounded character, one who permits us a bit of projection for our own everyday tribulations. Shock of shocks, before long we realize that Happy-Go-Lucky is not merely touting the power of optimism, but calling our attention to the ley-lines of misery that flow between annoyances, social ugliness, and outright tragedies.

Poppy is a middle-school teacher in London, a thirtysomething who takes pleasure in her job and her small circle of acerbic chums. Inventorying Poppy's spirited, not-quite-oddball lifestyle reveals a bit about her: weekends spent brainstorming projects for her class, drinking and dressing on nightclub crawls as if it's 1985, and bouncing on a trampoline to stay in shape. Thanks to Hawkins' overwhelming, remarkably delicate portrayal, what seems at first like an overdose of affected quirk evolves into a moving role that invites both adoration and reflection. Director Leigh evinces a sharp awareness of the sad, sexist cinematic trope of women like Poppy "rescuing" starched shirts far beneath their worth, if only in the sense that Happy-Go-Lucky is distinctly not such a film. It is Poppy's tale, and therefore about how she responds to a world of cruddy luck and hostile asses. She eventually encounters a man who she could be content with, but he—like all the other characters of Happy-Go-Lucky—dwells a little outside the camera's focal point. We can see what makes these people alluring or distressing in Poppy's eyes, but they also appear to have lives off-screen. It's refreshing to watch a film-maker build a convincing comedic landscape around a protagonist with such assurance and social perceptiveness.

There isn't much of a plot to Happy-Go-Lucky, strictly speaking. We follow Poppy for several weeks, and stuff happens to her, with some events entangling in a manner that exhibits Leigh's sensitivity to life's rhythms and uncanny juxtapositions. The film thrusts no climactic crises on Poppy, at least in the conventional screenwriting sense, nor any oh-so-convenient triggers for a seismic shift in her outlook. She confronts problems and has a couple of scary moments, but these eventually reveal themselves to be frightening for what they suggest about the world, not for any lasting harm they might do to our plucky protagonist. Poppy essentially remains the same from opening credits to final shot. The narrative motion of Happy-Go-Lucky occurs in the world outside her door, revealing a landscape far more unpleasant than she (or us) could have envisioned, a world choking on its own anger. Perhaps this is why Leigh conjures for us a Pollyanna of such determined sparkle. Only with her as our bouncing beacon could we ever break through the thick haze of stupidity, heartbreak, and bigotry that blankets modern life. Much of the cunning appeal of Hawkins' performance is that she never attracts our envy or resentment. Her performance is not in any sense one-note or grating, although it seems for all the world as though it should be. Hawkins and Leigh offer a Poppy that is at times terrified, confused, or melancholy, almost always in the right dose to establish her authenticity.

In short, this is a film that is all about a performance, and what the director does with that performance. There's nothing particularly head-turning in Happy-Go-Lucky's visual language, and the film admittedly suffers from some uneven pacing and editing that unnecessarily clouds the passage of time. These problems don't seem particularly bothersome, however, given how Hawkins so deftly orients the viewer from scene to scene with her portrayal. Leigh, notorious for evolving his films through improvisation, captures golden moments that play out with both naturalism and precision. Hawkins and her fellow performers—particularly Aleixs Zegerman as roommate Zoe and Samuel Roukin as school counselor Tim—find a witty, endearing rhythm. These social wonderments are Happy-Go-Lucky's most conspicuous ornaments, but the dramatic potency of the film lies in Leigh's determination to make a film featuring a happy protagonist that is primarily about unhappiness. Rather than yanking Poppy to and fro with a locomotive story, Leigh relies on her as a resilient observer, one whom we don't mind dawdling with. With us peering over her shoulder, Poppy takes a hard look at her own understanding of the origins of fear, anger, and despair. She comes to no grand revelations, but she discovers a world more rotten than she expected. How tragic! How much more essential, then, that Poppy fill her life with laughter instead of bitterness. Now that I'm at the end, I can see why the appeal of Happy-Go-Lucky is so simple: It states the obvious with glorious warmth.

Changeling

Motherhood, Interrupted

2008 // USA // Clint Eastwood // November 5, 2008 // Theatrical Print

C - The most rote film that Clint Eastwood has directed in at least a decade, Changeling is a grim, sprawling, fairly unremarkable period drama. It's not a bad film by any means: gloriously detailed, solidly acted, and shot with a cool, painterly eye. It's also maddeningly predictable to the point of tedium, and at least forty-five minutes too long given the absence of any narrative shakeups. Is is really possible that the man behind the Olympian deconstruction of Unforgiven and the bleak soul-searching of Million Dollar Baby could create a film bloated on such uninspired to-and-fro? The term "well-made" as backhanded compliment never seemed more appropriate: Changeling is a film that cues its required quota of approving nods and gasps of outrage, an archetypal Serious Adult Drama. Again, not a bad film by any means, but I can't shake the impression that it's a step backwards for the veteran American un-auteur.

In 1928 Los Angeles, telephone technician and single mom Christine Collins (Angelia Jolie) lives with her young son, Walter (Gattlin Griffith) in a modest bungalow. After working late one day, Christine returns to an empty house. Walter has vanished, and Christine is shocked to discover that the police won't even begin looking for her son until 24 hours have passed. (If only she had lived in the era of Law & Order, she would have known this.) Christine's interactions with the notoriously corrupt Los Angeles police department only go downhill from there, particularly with respect to the imperious, condescending Captain Jones (Jeffrey Donovan). Eventually, miracle of miracles, the LAPD presents Christine with Walter, alive and well. Except: "That's not my son!," Christine exclaims for the first of several hundred times. In the glare of the press' flashbulbs, Captain Jones grimaces and quietly pleads with Christine to take the strange boy home, "on a trial basis."

Case closed, the police declare cheerfully, for they need the public relations coup of a reunited mother and son. Christine, however, will not be dissuaded. Her insistence that "Walter" is not her Walter eventually leads to a personal crusade against the LAPD, wherein she joins forces with a local activist minister and radio host (John Malkovich). When Christine goes public with her accusations, Jones waves his hand and she is hauled off—er, "escorted"—to a mental hospital, where casual misogyny gives way to clinical sadism. Fortunately, Christine's salvation and vindication are set in motion when the no-nonsense Detective Yberra (Michael Kelly) heads off into the desert for a routine deportation. His search leads him into the ugly heart of one of the most notorious crimes of the early twentieth century, and therein may lie the answer to Christine's ultimate, aching question: Where is my son?

Changeling provides a rare, harrowing glimpse of a fading (but not vanished) nightmare-America, where the police behave like cruel potentates and women are little more than bothersome children to be dismissed and punished. The film's moral and social commentary, while admirable, is scraped too thinly over too vast a landscape. Changeling aspires to tackle sexism, psychiatry, police corruption, the treatment of children, criminal guilt, and the death penalty. However, Eastwood and screenwriter J. Michael Straczynski are just nibbling at a Serious Issues buffet. Earnest and decidedly unambitious, Changeling is so aggressively Sociology 101 in its tone that one can envision the Discussion Questions: "How does the LAPD's treatment of Christine reflect society's perception of women in 1928?" The film's shallow approach to such matters undercuts their novelty and necessity.

Happily, Jolie is a comfortable fit for the material and the era. Smokey-eyed and crimson-lipped beneath her flapper hats, she captures the doggedness and vulnerability that a credible mother-in-peril role demands. Still, it's essentially a serviceable portrayal, as are most of Changeling's performances (Malkovich in particular seems to be phoning it in). Only Michael Kelly manages to engage, especially in the film's pivotal and unquestionably finest scene, where Yberra's interrogation of a child suspect is swept along on a tide of shock and swelling dread. While Changeling's drama might be merely competent, its period trappings are wondrous, a landscape to truly savor. Rich in 1920s and 30s detail, it's the sort of feature that production designers live and die for. Fiercely meticulous without ever exhibiting an indulgent streak, Deadwood alum James Murakami's Los Angeles commands our attention in every shot.

I feel as though I'm underselling Changeling's strengths, so let me clear: It's a fine film, an effective slice of drama that marches along from Points A to B to C with nary a hitch. Provided one is comfortable with the plodding pace and engaged in the scenery passing by, there's not much to actively dislike here. Eastwood offers us exactly the sort of straight-arrow storytelling and bland righteousness that's endemic to late autumn prestige pictures. So why do I feel a little bit cheated?

W.

Can't Get Fooled Again

2008 // USA // Oliver Stone // November 4, 2008 // Theatrical Print

D - A schizophrenic, lumbering cartoon, Oliver Stone's W. is not the biopic George W. Bush deserves. Regardless of how much I might loathe the (now lame duck) President and everything he stands for, a figure of such geopolitical and cultural significance begs for evaluation and synthesis. Ideally, a comprehensive and articulate cinematic examination of Dubya will one day emerge. Sadly, what Stone delivers, in the twilight of Bush's presidency, is an aimless, tone-deaf, patchwork greatest-hits compilation with virtually no insight save the most facile. (Did you know Dubya hates his Poppy?) There's a sense of sheepish playfulness in Josh Brolin's lead performance, but it's consciously a part of the performance, and never a facet of the Dubya that Stone aims to present. Brolin's most engaging scenes are little more than party tricks, and surrounding him are two shapeless, pointless hours, eight years of bad dreams squashed into a Play-Doh blob.

There are no shortage of fascinating questions swirling around the personage of George W. Bush. Stone might have approached his subject from a historical or sociological angle, wrestling with how an alcoholic C-student and perpetual fuck-up could become the leader of the Free World. Instead, Stone tackles Bush as a psychological puzzle, striving to discern what makes the man tick. Unfortunately, the director renders Bush in such shallow strokes—and with such a yearning for smug chuckles—that W.'s gestures toward complexity create only disconnected caricatures. When Bush loses his Congressional race to an evangelical good-ol'-boy, he fumes, petulant and weepy, vowing that no one will "out-Christian" him again. Okay: Bush the cynical, entitled power-monger. Then Stone gives us an earnest scene of religious rapture as Bush prays fervently with his minister, complete with beatific light streaming through the stained-glass windows. Now: Bush the vulnerable religious seeker. Which is it? Both, of course, but Stone makes zero attempt to syncretize these personas. He simply exhibits them, like freaks in formaldehyde, and then moves on to new grotesque wonders. Granted, there's often a cleverness to the presentation. During his hazing at Yale, Bush dazzles his fraternity by remembering the names of forty brothers by sight, a feat that hints at his famed affection for nicknames and offers the throwaway line: "Look at the brain on this one!" However, the scene reveals nothing about Bush's character. It's just another patch on the crazy quilt that Stone is feverishly stitching.

The only narrative that emerges is frustratingly simplistic: Dubya covets the attention that his father showers on younger brother Jeb. On this score W. at least presents some lithe drama, as when Stone captures a notorious drunken quarrel between father and son. Elsewhere, the film's more fanciful approach to Bush's Oedipal problems seem downright ludicrous, as in Dubya's nightmares about catching a fly ball or—I kid you not—boxing his father in the Oval Office. It's Bush biopic as envisioned by a high school creative writing class. Most vexing of all, W. simply doesn't seem to have any strong feelings about Bush, and in late 2008 that's just not credible. The most divisive figure of the twenty-first century demands something more than gentle mockery and sympathy. To his credit, Brolin's performance is skillful, the sort of loose mimicry (rather than an impersonation) that the portrayal of a sitting President demands. His Bush is all drawling charm and slumping scoffs, punctuated with flashes of desperation and pure scorpion mean. We can see that Brolin is having fun, and that's part of the problem: He's not portraying Bush so much as he's an actor in a Bush suit. This winking remove crushes any pathos that might have emerged, leaving Brolin to stand around and try to salvage some satirical guffaws.

Stone fails to enforce on his cast a unified approach to their portrayals, a disastrous abdication that proves utterly disorienting and emblematic of W.'s unstable tone. Example: The lanky, flint-faced James Cromwell portrays George H.W. Bush as if he were, well, James Cromwell. Thandie Newton, meanwhile, grimaces through a Condoleezza Rice impersonation that might have walked out of a Saturday Night Live sketch. Either approach might have been tenable--well, maybe the former--but both? The juxtaposition just invites tittering. It's like watching David Mamet and Seth MacFarlane collaborate on a stage adaptation of the Bush home movies. Predictably, the result is neither serious nor funny. In a sea of mostly opaque and silly performances, only Elizabeth Banks as Laura Bush and Richard Dreyfuss as Dick Cheney stand out. Banks delivers a low-key, credible portrayal, one that convinces us of the First Lady's natural affinity for compassion and grace behind the Stepford mask. Dreyfuss, meanwhile—perhaps sensing that he's been cast in a ensemble nightmare—goes for the throat and gives us Darth Cheney. Menacing and ruthless, he draws the eye and the ear whenever on-screen, speaking openly about American empire with the hungry look of a Luciferian colonial despoiler. (There is no good in him, I can feel it.)

Due to its focus on Bush's relationship to his father, W. skips over vast swathes of Bush's life: the Air National Guard, his governorship, the presidential elections, 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, and on and on. These exclusions might be necessary given Stone's approach, and W. doesn't claim to be a definitive George W. Bush biopic. Nonetheless, the gnawing absence of so many significant elements reminded me of a student's haphazard class notes, spotted with blanks and misspellings (literally in this case). This in turn lends an awkward, half-assed aura to the story, like a last-minute history project. Add to this the flimsiness of Stone's thesis—familial angst explains the trajectory of Bush's life—and one gets the unfortunate sense that someone should have razed W. to the ground and started over.