Crazy Heart

Play It Loud Enough to Keep the Demons at Bay

2009 // USA // Scott Cooper // February 3, 2010 // Theatrical Print (St. Louis Cinemas Moolah Theater)

B - When you strip Scott Cooper's directorial debut, Crazy Heart, down to its skeleton, there's not much that's original about it from a story standpoint. Stop me if you've heard this one before: a broken-down musician must come to terms with his personal demons before he can rise from the ashes and regain some of his former fame and fortune. Alas, Cooper doesn't bring anything especially cinematic to these deeply rutted roads. Sure, Crazy Heart was filmed on location in the American Southwest, and that lends it an agreeable sun-beaten texture, but Cooper's direction is undistinguished.  Based purely on the look of the thing, Crazy Heart could pass for a television movie-of-the-week rather than a limited theatrical release boasting high-profile actors. Fortunately, those actors are all in fine form, especially Jeff Bridges, who portrays the aforementioned broken-down musician, a grizzled country veteran named Bad Blake. The glib cynic in me would like to believe that the movie's genesis lies some anonymous individual's observation, "You know, put the Dude from The Big Lebowski in a cowboy hat and he could pass for the lost brother of Kris Kristofferson..." Blessedly, Bridges' performance amounts to much more than canny casting. He and Cooper turn a familiar story, executed with rote efficiency, into something haunted and ultimately worth watching.

Bad Blake is a going-on-sixty former giant of the outlaw country movement, now reduced to schlepping himself around the desert in an old truck and playing gigs at bowling alleys. Perpetually drunk, creatively stymied, and flat broke, Blake is keenly aware of just how low he's sunk, but seems unwilling to do anything about it. Into his sad life of bourbon and fleabag motels comes Jean (Maggie Gyllenhaal), a Santa Fe music reporter and single mom. He warms to her beauty and interest, she warms to his legend and folksy charm, and into bed they tumble. It's around this time that Blake is strong-armed into opening for his old protégé, Tommy Sweet (Colin Farrell), despite the older man's palpable envy and resentment of Tommy's country superstar status.

Bridges is a cunning choice to play Blake, in part because he's such an affable on-screen presence. Cooper, who adapted the film from a novel by Thomas Cobb, does a marvelous job of using his leading man to fake us out, pressing his case strongly at first that Blake is a pitiable fallen talent and just a kind-hearted crooner at bottom. The story of Crazy Heart—about Blake's romance with Jean and his attempts to re-start his career—isn't especially compelling in and of itself, but it's fascinating for what it reveals about Blake. What Cooper uncovers, gradually at first, and then with heart-breaking swiftness, is that Blake is a stupid, selfish fuckup, and his genius as a songwriter and performer doesn't mitigate that one lick. The drama of what happens in Crazy Heart is less essential than the drama of this dialogue between the viewer and the film-makers. The revelation that Blake is ultimately the antagonist of the tale is a potent one, made all the more affecting because the people in Blake's life—Jean, Tommy, and Houston barkeep Wayne (Robert Duvall)—treat him far kinder than he deserves. To her credit, Jean hustles out of Blake's life as fast as she can once it becomes obvious that he can't or won't change, irrespective of all his professions of devotion and his sweet, easy manner with her son.

Without overstating its case, Crazy Heart eventually stands up and claims its mantle as an Addiction Story, one that ultimately ends in recovery and redemption of a sorts, although not in the tidy fashion that a more wobbly film might have attempted. Despite the film's striving for the authentic grit of country-fried Western life, its message extends to all artistic spheres. Cooper's aim is to annihilate the Hemingway Myth, the idea that an artist—especially a male artist—needs to habitually abuse alcohol or drugs to achieve greatness. Crazy Heart presents a sorrowful and wrenching contravention of this notion, illustrating that addiction turns creative talent into selfishness, negligence, and destruction. The casting of Colin Farrell highlights the film's slyness in presenting this theme. Before we even meet Tommy Sweet, we have been taught to loathe him, because Blake is seething with distrust and antipathy for the man. When Tommy shows up, we think, "Hey, Colin Farrell. Now I know Tommy's going to be a dick." But wait: Tommy is shown to be generous, respectful, and affectionate towards Blake. The latter man's animosity is revealed as the self-absorption and bitterness of an old drunk who screwed up his own career and can't stand to see a younger talent succeed.

As a character study, Crazy Heart is captivating stuff. By maintaining the focus on the audience's perceptions of his lead rather than the narrative, Cooper subtly alters the parameters of a well-worn template and lends the story resonance. As cinema, Crazy Heart is nothing special. It's not inept, certainly, but Cooper makes little effort to put his own spin on the visual language of the film, and cinematographer Barry Markowtiz—who once lent Sling Blade such a sticky, gothic-Southern look—doesn't do much that's memorable here. Pure utility need not be the standard in a low-key, character-driven film such as this, but one gets the sense that Cooper favors the writing process over direction. This is a film-maker who plainly adores actors, and privileges story because of what it can tell us about human behavior. Crazy Heart is just the sort of first feature that one expects from these impulses: fascinating to think about, but never truly exciting to watch. Thankfully, the former is more than enough, especially with the force of Bridges' scruffy humanity behind it.

The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus

Smoke and Mirrors

2009 // UK - Canada - France // Terry Gilliam // January 17, 2009 // Theatrical Print (Landmark Theaters Tivoli Theater)

C- - When it comes to Terry Gilliam films, I wouldn't say that the only attraction is their design, but I'd be kidding myself if I denied that the essential allure of a new Gilliam feature is the look of the thing. Those occasions when Gilliam has mated his distinctive mode of fantasy—part Victorian / Edwardian stagecraft, part comic strip zaniness—to a compelling set of characters, the result is tongue-in-cheek gold, as in Time Bandits and The Adventures of Baron Munchausen. (His two dystopian science-fiction films, Brazil and Twelve Monkeys, are equally great, but vibrate to an entirely different frequency.) Gilliam's new feature, The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, is a weird bauble that fits snugly into his oeuvre, yet like all of the director's weaker efforts, it's also a mess from a storytelling perspective. It's debatable how much of that can be blamed on the regrettable death of his leading man, Heath Ledger, and how much on Gilliam's own hand, but it's also telling that Imaginarium is disjointed tonally and narratively. At its worst, Imaginarium plays out less like a film and more like a book of concept art that has been inelegantly cobbled together into a film. There's something more than a little perverse about a film-maker with such palpable thematic interest in myth-making but who nonetheless has a hard time finding a foothold in his own tale.

The plot is a convoluted thing. Many centuries ago, the titular Doctor Parnassus (Chistopher Plummer) was a Buddhist monk of great mystical power who made a bet with the infernal Mr. Nick (Tom Waits, ingenuously cast). Parnassus prevailed and won immortality by coercing more souls than Mr. Nick with a message of enlightenment. However, Mr. Nick, always more interested in the game than actually winning, offers yet another deal: Parnassus can have the woman he loves, provided any children sired by their union become Mr. Nick's upon their sixteenth birthday. You and I might call this a sucker's deal, but Parnassus takes it. Fast-forward to the present: the now-widowed doctor and his just-shy-of-sixteen daughter, Valentina (the oddly doll-like Lily Cole), are wandering London in a precarious horse-drawn wagon that converts into a gaudy theater. With the help of stagehands Anton (Andrew Garfield) and Percy (Verne Troyer), they offer curious onlookers an opportunity—for a small fee, of course—to journey into a magic mirror that links with the mind of the meditating Doctor. Within the mirror, the interloper discovers a dreamscape fashioned out of their own desires, and there they are eventually offered a choice between the virtue of Parnassus and the vice of Mr. Nick. (The original bet is long concluded, but Parnassus seems to be out to prove something about the inherent goodness of humanity. Or something.)

Although her birthday is only days away, Parnassus hasn't got around to breaking it to his daughter that she will soon become a bride of Satan. For her part, Valentina just wants to leave her father's odd little sideshow and lead a normal life, while Anton just wants Valentina to notice him. Into this mix comes a wild card in the form of mystery man Tony (Ledger), whom the troupe finds hanging from a noose under a bridge, just barely alive thanks to a old rogue's trick. Improbably enough, the amnesiac Tony agrees to assist Parnassus with his show for the time being, at least until he sorts out his past, which has something to do with a children's charity and the Russian mob. It's around this time that Mr. Nick appears and suggests an escape hatch to his previous deal with Parnassus: the first man to collect five souls before the sweet sixteen deadline will win Valentina. Fortunately, Tony proves to be a charismatic pitchman for Parnassus' show, turning Valentina's head and prompting the Doctor to suspect a Mr. Nick double-cross.

Predictably enough, this elaborate story is really just a vessel to get different characters into the magic mirror, so that Gilliam can indulge his own fascination with bizarre vistas and screwball logic. And for the most part, the forays into the mirror do indeed work as loopy set-pieces, filled with memorable sight-gags and surrealist flourishes. Gilliam, who was once known for his fascination with practical effects and traditional animation, adopts computer wizardry whole-heartedly here, but he employs it in the service of his own self-consciously kooky sensibility, rather than attempting modern slickness. While his peculiar digital landscapes have a flat, cartoonish quality, I'm inclined to regard this as a feature rather than a bug, given that it fits so neatly into Gilliam's own animation legacy. Indeed, some of the scenes within Parnassus' mirror resemble nothing so much as Monty Python cartoon shorts brought to life, with Gilliam privileging detail and motion over realism. (In this, the look of Imaginarium inclines towards the Wachowskis' vastly underrated Speed Racer, although its aesthetic is nowhere as cohesive and successful as in that film.)

The fatal flaw is that the movie surrounding these demented cartoon shorts is comparatively dreary, drifting, and vaguely conveyed. The problem is partly structural: by lashing his film to the magic mirror conceit, Gilliam has essentially thrown out the Long Journey aspect that has made his most successful fantasy features jitter with storybook energy. Granted, the stories in Time Bandits and Baron Munchausen often don't make a lick of sense, but they at least are honest-to-gods adventures that involve the heroes galloping from Points A to B to C. (Indeed, dallying too long in one place or another is frequently treated as a crises in both films.) Imaginarium breaks this mold, but the result is dismal rather than daring. No matter how amazing the sights within Parnassus' dreamscapes, we eventually have to pop back into murky London and its confusing real-world story.

It doesn't help that Gilliam neglects to provide a clear, appealing protagonist, which is sort of a necessity when you dabble in settings with elaborate fantasy rules. The negligent Parnassus, vain Valentina, and whiny Anton are all too vaguely drawn and distasteful in one way or another to be the hero of the tale, and Tony deliberately remains a cipher until the third act. Gilliam seems to have forgotten to give us a truly interesting character to grasp amid all the weirdness. Waits' performance is ticklish fun, but Mr. Nick is never as enthralling or as menacing as, say, David Warner's Absolute Evil in Time Bandits. I hesitate to speak ill of Ledger's last performance, but suffice to say that it just doesn't leave an impression. Gilliam worked around his star's death with a little fudging: when he ventures into the mirror, Tony's appearance changes to match the aspect of the personality that is dominant in the current fantasy, whether suave object of desire (Johnny Depp), ambitious golden boy (Jude Law), or celebrity asshole (Colin Farrell). To Gilliam's credit, the casting plays subtly off each star's public persona to nice effect, but the game of Musical Actors only highlights the story's conspicuous seams (perhaps unavoidable given Ledger's passing) and the essential colorlessness of Tony as he is written.

While Imaginarium, like any Gilliam feature, has its pleasures, the outlandish visuals and funny-pages silliness can't hide the careless nature of the film's fundamentals. In neglecting story and character, Gilliam leaves us with little more than a few whimsical doses of hallucinatory distraction, surrounded by a distressingly sloppy film.

Up in the Air

Plenty of Memberships, Few Privileges

2009 // USA // Jason Reitman // January 16, 2010 // Theatrical Print (St. Louis Cinemas Moolah Theater)

C- - Back in May 2008, I observed after a second viewing of the backlash-savaged Juno that Jason Reitman's crisp, understated direction plays a crucial role the film's success, and that it in fact called to mind the comedic work of Sydney Pollack. I still stand by that statement, and by the film's place as one of the most perfectly realized ensemble comedies of the decade, which I will readily defend with knife clutched firmly in teeth. However, Reitman's latest film, Up in the Air, serves primarily to highlight the bottled lightning quality of Juno, solidifying its status as a fortuitous confluence of direction, writing, and performance that may never again be approached by the parties involved. Up in the Air boasts none of the focused, superbly paced comedic storytelling that characterized Reitman's previous effort. In fact, the characteristics that most define his direction here are a distressing lack of understanding regarding his audience's sympathies, and a clumsy attempt to fuse two or three stories that do not function together as well as he imagines. To be sure, George Clooney's unfailingly magnetic presence renders the proceedings more tolerable than they would otherwise be, and the central romantic drama of the film is compelling stuff. Yet these caveats only highlight the ill-advised and even insulting aspects of Up in the Air.

Clooney plays Ryan Bingham, a middle-aged, white-collar workhorse who approaches modern business travel as not just a science, but a lifestyle. Ryan craves mobility, and the phony warmth and paltry, shrink-wrapped conveniences of airlines, rental car companies, and mid-tier hotels are like oxygen to him. This is a man who actually likes the things that provoked Jack's schizoid rebellion in Fight Club. Ryan spends over ninety percent of his life on the road, and it shows: his home is a nearly unfurnished little studio apartment in Omaha. He even moonlights as a self-help speaker, holding forth on the benefits of traveling light, in terms of both luggage and human relationships. Disengaged from his family, who are baffled by his rootless way of life, Ryan has no interest in settling down, and his Holy Grail is the essentially abstract goal of accruing ten million frequent flier miles.

Ryan is an admittedly fascinating character. He's hopelessly cynical and petty, forthright about what he wants out of life, and utterly unapologetic about it. He clearly imagines himself as a better breed of human, one with the skills to survive with a minimum of hassle and heartbreak in a perilous, lightning-paced modern world. And yet quite early in the film, Reitman throws a monkey wrench into this man's smoothly whirring approach to his surroundings, in the form of Alex (Vera Farmiga). She's a road warrior too, one just as absorbed with rewards programs, hospitality suites, and bonus miles. She's also witty, attractive, and filthy-minded, which makes her an ideal fuck-buddy for a guy like Ryan. Shortly after they tumble into bed, they start planning their next rendezvous by searching their respective schedules for any overlap in time and place amid all the cross-country travel.

In a more conventional romantic drama, Ryan would hook up with someone who wasn't his type at all, a woman who would teach him the value of slowing down and cultivating relationships. Instead, Ryan discovers a woman who shares his values and, initially at least, seems to want the same thing: namely, zesty sex and lots of perks. At first, Up in the Air seems to validate a stalwart approach to romance: Don't settle, because eventually a good match will come along. Naturally, stumbling upon his female clone starts to make the narcissistic Ryan a little drunk with infatuation, and he ironically finds himself longing for something like a relationship. (As if to drive home the point that his affection for Alex is one step removed from self-love, she cracks, "Just think of me as yourself. Only with a vagina.") As you might guess, there is romantic disillusionment down the road, but I'll leave it at that.

Clooney is always a potent screen presence, but he isn't quite right for this role. While Ryan is an asshole as written, and the actor delivers assholish lines, the assholishness in never wholly believable, because, well, it's George Clooney, and in Lovable Scamp mode at that. Sure, there's a bit more misanthropy and shallowness there than usual, but Ryan isn't too far from the archetypal Clooney role: a man who has a particular way of life all figured out and knows it. The actor is capable of deforming and exploiting his persona to powerful effect—witness his captivating portrayal of an attorney mid-immolation in Michael Clayton, or the creepy inversion of the Clooney charm in Burning After Reading—but Reitman fails to demand anything so ambitious from his leading man.

The fundamental dilemma with Up in the Air is that this movie, about a shallow man living an odd lifestyle and the kindred spirit who tests his assumptions, is grafted to another movie. I haven't yet mentioned what Ryan does for a living yet because, contrary to what Reitman and co-writer Sheldon Turner suppose, the man's career really isn't essential to the romantic drama, which is the most appealing aspect of the film. Ryan, you see, works for a consulting firm that fires people for other companies. He criss-crosses the nation visiting corporations he's never heard of, laying off people he's never met, and then flying off to his next destination. He tries to make the process as quick, painless, and shooting-spree-free as possible, but there's no way around the reality that Ryan's firm thrives on collapse. His boss (Jason Bateman) even gloats, without a glimmer of self-awareness or pity, about how good the current economic recession has been for their company.

The ridiculously fresh-faced Anna Kendrick has a substantial role in the film as Natalie, an Ivy League hotshot who wants to transition the company to "virtual firings" via a computer terminal, a shift that threatens Ryan's preferred airport-hopping lifestyle. In a contrivance that makes little sense, Ryan is assigned to show Natalie the ropes during the final weeks of the company's face-to-face style of termination.cUp in the Air is therefore also a Mentor-Pupil film, as Ryan teaches Natalie—who is, of course, uptight and brilliant, but also emotionally vulnerable and lacking in wisdom—how to survive in his world of premium memberships and complimentary cookies.

Now, I understand what Reitman is doing here in drawing a parallel between Ryan's unfettered existence and the fact that he lays people off for a living. The problem is that it it's an awkward and aimless connection whose meaning is unclear. Running through the film is the mildly offensive notion that losing your job is just a wake-up call to a better life, an opening for reassessment and a fresh trajectory. While there may be some validity to this for some people, Up in the Air's presentation of it as a universal tenet is both myopic and repugnant. By implicitly linking such a sentiment to Ryan's mobile lifestyle, it becomes almost Orwellian, as though chronic joblessness—and, apparently, bankruptcy, eviction, hunger, and humiliation—were the secret to America's success. Fired working people are this generation's pioneers, dontchya know!

Any admiration we might feel towards Ryan due to his elite traveling skills are demolished by his utterly unsympathetic career. We're apparently supposed to feel for a guy who fires people for a living, and glories in all the trivial perks he gets while jetting around the country to do it. Reitman muddles things by failing to clarify how Ryan feels about his job: at times he appears to believe the platitudes his company espouses to devastated employees, and at other times he seems to cynically dismiss them as so much nonsense. He grouses about the lack of human touch in Natalie's computer-based firings, but seems more concerned about becoming sedentary than the devastation he wreaks on the lives of workers. There's the outline of another film buried deep in Up in the Air, one constructed along a recognizable template: a bottom-feeder has a crisis of conscience and resolves to set out on a new path. However, Reitman isn't making that film. He inelegantly grafts the story of Ryan's professional pseudo-crisis onto the much more interesting story of his curious lifestyle and emerging relationship with Alex, never permitting these elements to interact save in the most underwritten and irksome ways. There is a significant subplot about the marriage of Ryan's sister, but although the film's treatment of such is effective at times—one scene, concerning a wall of photographs, handles a potent moment of self-realization with distinct gentleness—it feels frustratingly extraneous. The small-town Wisconsin setting and the presence of Danny McBride as Ryan's lackwit brother-in-law-to-be also lend this storyline an aura of superciliousness that doesn't mesh with the film's alleged sympathies.

Everything that rankles about Up in the Air is summed up in its concluding message, which seems to be that being laid off doesn't really matter as long as you have people who love you. It's not just that this kind of glib, feel-good moralizing is questionable amid the worst economic devastation since the Great Depression. It's that Reitman fails to capitalize on his premises in any way to deliver something more substantial. Ryan isn't redeemed in any meaningful sense by the end of the film. His frequent flier ethos is honored in almost surreal fashion, and yet drained of any value whatsoever. If anything, by the film's conclusion, Ryan's cynicism towards other people is validated. This is perplexingly at odds with the earnest and frankly condescending message to the audience: cultivate your personal relationships, because your company will almost certainly screw you.

Avatar

Mr. Cameron Wants You to Be Comfortable While He Does His Thing

2009 // USA // James Cameron // December 22, 2009 // 3D Digital Theatrical Projection (AMC West Olive)

B+ - I was only one year old when Star Wars was released in 1977, which means that for all practical purposes, I've always lived in a post-Star Wars world.  While I later participated quite enthusiastically in the broader consumer phenomenon often summed up as simply "Star Wars,"--encompassing sequels, toys, comics, and card games, to name just the few products I personally devoured--I was too young to catch Star Wars: A New Hope in its original theatrical release. Even if I had been a few years older at the time, I obviously wouldn't have been able to appreciate it as anything other than an entertaining tale of adventure. Accordingly, when older generations speak of the revolutionary nature of Star Wars as cinema, of how it blew their minds and opened up previously undreamed possibilities in terms of the places movies could take us, I've always nodded along without ever truly understanding what they were saying. How could I? Subsequent cinema has been irrecoverably altered--or tainted, depending on your point of view--by the existence of Star Wars and is phenomenal commercial success.

Perhaps the highest praise I can bestow on James Cameron's mind-bogglingly expensive 3D science-fiction epic, Avatar, is that I can now understand how my forebears felt when they first settled in to let Star Wars wash over them. There's nothing particularly nuanced about Avatar, which is essentially a standard science-fiction adventure, straight up, no chaser. Thematically, emotionally, and structurally, its ambitions are modest, even pedestrian. However, like Star Wars before it, Avatar is a revolutionary film. You've heard it a hundred times before, but this time is indisputably true: This Is Like Nothing I Have Ever Seen. It is fitting that it has been birthed by James Cameron, a technophilic film-maker whose finest works tell simple stories with relentless energy and discreet intelligence. It's a cliché to insist that a movie must be seen in the theaters to be appreciated, but Avatar is the first film in memory than positively demands that it be experienced in its full glory, and that means 3D digital theatrical projection. This is a film that will be a shadow of its former self on even the most elaborate home theater system. Trust me on this: cough up the funds for that overpriced multiplex ticket, and prepare to see a new world unfold before your eyes.

One element that sets Cameron's blockbuster science-fiction films--The Terminator, Aliens, The Abyss, and Terminator 2--apart from similar genre works is the extent to which the exposition necessary for all futurist stories is effortlessly integrated into the film, often via a vigorous blend of showing and telling. Despite his Master of the Universe reputation as a writer-director, Cameron has always been first and foremost a storyteller. The masturbatory pleasures of world-building for its own sake seem to have little attraction for him. His visions of the future are densely furnished with vivid technologies, but these are invariably placed into his films for the purpose of story, rather than "merely" to create a seamless setting. (This leads to the Cameron corollary to Chekov's gun: If more than a few seconds are spent depicting or describing a technology, that technology will play a crucial role in the plot before the credits roll.) To be sure, Cameron loves his world-building--witness the notorious tales of his fanatical attention to historical detail in Titanic--but in his science-fiction films the details always matter.

Avatar is no exception to this trend. One of the storytelling achievements of the film is the extent to which the director considerably ups the ante in terms of his setting's complexity, and still manages to convey all the information with speed and precision. Part of Avatar's futurist vision is indebted to elements that Cameron himself has previously presented, especially the hardened space marines and nefarious, planet-plundering corporation of Aliens. However, on top of the mechanized armor and slimy bureaucrats that have since become staples of space-based science-fiction films, Cameron adds a layer of New Age wonder. Avatar is set almost wholly on the lush moon of Pandora, where an interstellar mining company has established a colony to extract a rare, valuable mineral. Needless to say, this doesn't sit well with the planet's inhabitants: giant, lanky blue humanoids called Na'vi, who lead an Edenic hunter-gatherer existence in the moon's phosphorescent jungles. The Company employs both the carrot and the stick in its dealings with the Na'vi. The former approach is exemplified by Grace Augustine (Sigourney Weaver), a scientist who advocates a kind of benevolent paternalism towards the natives (complete with colonial schools for the young), and who is absorbed with the unique qualities of the Na'vi and their world. Grace's kinder, gentler brand of exploitation doesn't sit well with the colony's security officer, Colonel Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang), who would just as soon burn the forest to the ground and exterminate the "savages" to the last.

To aid in her team's study of Pandora's ecology and the culture of the Navi, Grace has developed the extraordinary avatar technology. Na'vi genetic material is mixed with a dash of DNA from an "operator" trained in biology and anthropology, and the result is a vat-grown, mindless organism that looks for all the world like a Na'vi, but must be mentally "driven" by the operator from an MRI machine on steroids. The avatars make exploration of the moon much easier for humans, who would otherwise be asphyxiated by its atmosphere or easily gobbled up by the seemingly endless hostile animal species. For their part, the Na'vi seem to be wise to Grace's trick, even if they don't understand exactly how it is achieved, and they generally regard the avatars as mentally ill or demonically possessed members of their race.

Ah, but let me back up. This elaborate setting is conveyed to us through the eyes of Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), a paraplegic marine who happens to be the identical twin brother of an avatar operator who was recently killed. It seems that avatars are only usable by the operator who shares their genetic fingerprint. Since the Company has already sunk untold millions into growing Jake's brother's avatar, it reasons: why not recruit the crippled twin to come out to Pandora and give it a shot? Grace is acidly skeptical, since Jake has no training whatsoever, and his military background means that he is susceptible to Colonel Quaritch's influence. Indeed, Jake is almost immediately recruited by the Colonel to ferret out the weaknesses of the Na'vi and the colossal tree where they dwell, which just happens to stand on top of the richest mineral deposits on the moon.

Thus Cameron sets up a familiar story arc: a soldier comes to the frontier to help control or exterminate the natives, only to find his sympathies for them growing as he lives among them. In this case, Jake sees, hears, smells, and touches everything his avatar does, all from the relative safety of a remote laboratory. Call it Dances with Virtual Aliens, right down to the archetypes: the warrior-princess love interest, Neytiri (Zoe Saldana); the suspicious hothead, Tsu'tey (Laz Alonso); and the wise elders, Eytukan (Wed Studi) and Moat (CCH Pounder). Will Jake fall in love with the simple beauty of the Na'vi lifestyle and come to see the error of humanity's rapacious, world-despoiling ways? Is there any doubt? There's not a drop of originality to the bare bones story here, but that's not necessarily a flaw when the setting itself is the hook. (Star Wars, after all, was just a rejiggered The Hidden Fortress in space opera clothing.) Accusations of mush-headed liberal preachiness will no doubt be lobbed at Cameron with contemptuous abandon in the weeks to come, but such critics fail to appreciate the extent which ecological and cultural concerns can now serve a primarily narrative function, particularly in genre adventure film. Certainly, "It's Wrong to Indiscriminately Murder and Steal for Personal Gain" is not a bold moral declaration, any more than "There Is No Fate But What We Make" is a penetrating philosophical insight. What's the conclusion? Not that Cameron is indulging in infantile ethical messaging, but that his use of now-stock archetypes--the hero turned from indifference to sympathy by immersion in an unfamiliar culture; the insightful and unjustly sidelined scientist; the bloodthirsty military commander--is about economy of storytelling.

It's hard to conclude that Avatar's Shake-n'-Bake characterization is a sign of authorial laziness, when the film is elsewhere so manifestly a work of stunning imagination. Cameron doesn't want to waste his time or the viewer's. The purpose of the simplistic drama is to sweep us along and provide a point of entry for the film's entire raison d'être, which is, quite simply, to show us jaw-dropping vistas that do not exist. It's pure escapism, but the purity of it is luxurious and downright searing. Almost everything in Avatar is apparently computer-generated, save the actors playing human characters and select props and set components. Yet the film lacks the aura of cheerless sterility that has characterized effects-heavy science fiction and fantasy films for nearly two decades now. Nothing about Avatar feels slipshod. Every drop of water, every hair, and every glowing mushroom is so carefully crafted with an eye towards the visual whole that the result never feels crafted at all. It is a marvelously convincing film, not only in the sense that it is easy to suspend one's sense of disbelief, but that it is so easy to forget that one is essentially watching an animated film with some live-action elements. The 3D projection serves to heighten the illusion, convincing us that we what are seeing is not a fiction fashioned of images and sound, but rather a window beyond which fantastic events are taking place. It is in all respects a dazzlingly immersive experience.

I shall resist cataloging the film's marvels, if only because a mere description cannot adequately convey the effect of seeing them. That's a trite statement, perhaps, but it's never felt more accurate than as applied to this film. I could describe the floating mountains clad in tropical greenery and wisps cloud, but it's no substitute for seeing them for yourself, preferably while soaring between them in digital 3D. One facet of the film's setting that deserves particular praise is the alien biology of Pandora, which boasts a level of conceptual innovation that science-fiction film has not exhibited in a generation. The plants glow with an eerie luminescence and respond to physical contact with movement and pulses of color. The air swarms with buzzing insects and floating seed pods. The species that lurch, stalk, slither, and soar through the jungles are all unique, yet they also are all manifestly the inhabitants of the same world. Most of the moon's megafauna bear a stalked, flower-like organ, as do the Na'vi themselves. By linking together the tips of their organs with those of the various animals, the Na'vi can telepathically control them. The level of thought that went into this conceit, from both a design and a narrative perspective, puts most genre films to shame.

Budget isn't everything. Most great films like, say, The Third Man, Taxi Driver, or No Country For Old Men, would not have been demonstrably improved had another $100 million been spent on them. Yet Avatar achieves success because of the confluence of three factors: the staggering imagination of James Cameron, the technology to create any thing or place he can conceive, and the budget to make it happen. Every dollar of Avatar's absurd $300+ million price tag is visible. It's less a movie than an art project that whisks us to a place far, far away. And there's a majesty in that, however warmed-over the story, however familiar the tropes, however corny the dialog. It's what "going to the movies" was all about, once upon a time.

The Princess and the Frog

Once Upon a Time, In a Place Called "Crescent City"...​

2009 // USA // Ron Clements and John Musker // December 13, 2009 // Theatrical Print (AMC West Olive)

B - It's been five years since Disney Animation Studios has produced a narrative feature that was at least partly hand-drawn, and longer than that since the venerable House of Mouse's roughly annual doses of animated cheer could be regarded as unique cinematic events. (1999's Tarzan being the last triumph by my reckoning.) It's not surprising, then, that The Princess and the Frog is being trumpeted by the studio itself as a kind of overdue return to form. In the wake of forgettable computer-generated mediocrities such a Chicken Little and Meet the Robinsons, there is a steely logic in Disney's decision to abandon its anemic Pixar apings and instead pursue films created according to the template of its successful Renaissance features. Indeed, TPatF possesses all the hallmarks of the studio's 1990s films: hand-drawn animation embellished with dazzling visual effects; Broadway-style musical storytelling; a young, appealing protagonist; goofy comic relief characters; and simplistic moral lessons. Perhaps it's the long absence of that Disney Magic(TM)—benign, kid-friendly entertainment executed with stunning visual achievement—that makes that familiarity work so well in The Princess and the Frog. Certainly, there's very little that's unexpected in Ron Clements and John Musker's Jazz Age fairy tale. However, there's also nothing wrong with following a formula when the result is so gorgeous. Just as Pixar has established itself as preeminent purveyor of children's fare that is thematically richer and more downright cinematic than most "adult" features, Disney Animation Studio once made unbearably lovely moving picture books, far lovelier than their often crude stories or questionable politics warranted. Perhaps the highest praise one can offer The Princess in the Frog is that it reignites that latent tradition with enthusiasm and boundless affection for its forebears.

The original Frog Prince fairy tale, as told by the Brothers Grimm, is thin gruel for a feature-length film. (It doesn't even include a kiss!) Accordingly, Clements, Musker, and co-writer Rob Edwards have taken the story's popularly understood premise—a prince is cursed with the form of a frog until he is freed by a princess' kiss—and transformed it into a brisk, voodoo-touched tale of 1920s New Orleans. While Disney has previously shaded their fantastical settings in different ways, TPatF is the closest the studio has ever come to attempting a "modern dress" version of a fairy or folk tale. And, truth be told, it works astonishingly well, partly because the film-makers exhibit such obvious adoration for the city's unique sights, sounds, and tastes, partly because they ground every inch of their story in the New Orleans' unique milieu (even if it is ultimately a Disneyfied version of the city). Far from serving as arbitrary window dressing, Clements and Musker's selection of time and place is woven into the narrative quite adroitly, right down to a cunning little conceit regarding a princess (of sorts) and a midnight deadline.

As a feature explicitly designed to fit into Disney's "Princess film" stream—a cynically retroactive bit of branding if there ever was one—TPatF accordingly boasts a young, beautiful, female protagonist, but she is without a doubt one of the most well-rounded such characters in Disney history. She is also black, a fact that has been difficult to miss given the past year's worth of hubbub about the film, some of it no doubt of the self-congratulatory sort. No matter. Whether Tiana (Anika Noni Rose) originated as a bit of niche marketing or not, she is a wholly appealing character on the screen, treated with the sort of care and warmth that few Disney heroes are afforded. To be sure, the film tiptoes gingerly around matters of race, as much as any fantasy set in early twentieth century American South can. The closest the film gets to stepping directly on that particular hornet's nest is a lawyer's comment to Tiana about "someone of your background." Still, to this white viewer, TPatF threads the race needle quite well, acknowledging racial disparities while maintaining an appropriately storybook tone, and giving black characters prominence without resorting to caricature. The film does sometimes shy away from context a bit too determinedly—there's no hint as to why Tiana and her family live in a shack while her white friend Charlotte (Jennifer Cody) lives in a mansion—but this is an animated children's musical, and perhaps we can only ask so much.

More refreshing than its respectful yet velveteen approach to race is the film's treatment of gender, for here we have the culmination of the self-critique that Disney began and fumbled somewhat in Enchanted. Charlotte, for all that she is presented as a lovable and loyal friend to Tiana, is unmistakably a buffoonish character, and it's therefore notable that her most dominant personality trait is her obsession with living out the dream of a fairy tale princess, especially the part about marrying a prince. Indeed, Charlotte is for all practical purposes a joke at the expense of the very same pig-tailed mini-consumers that Disney itself has nurtured. Whether one finds this cheaply reflexive is a matter of taste, but it's notable that Charlotte, for all her spoiled, dimwitted vanity, is never presented as a bad person. She serves mainly to contrast with Tiana, a young woman defined by her strong work ethic and independence. Tiana's fondest dream is to open an elegant restaurant in the Big Easy; finding a man isn't even on her radar. Remarkably, Clements and Musker present a fairly grounded rebuke to Disney's own ethos of effortless miracles. In a gentle prologue, young Tiana's father (Terrence Howard) explains that wishing for something is all well and good, but you have to apply yourself to achieve what you want. These gestures add up to make TPatF the most enlightened Disney animated feature in decades, perhaps ever. That's faint praise given the studio's conservatism, but it's nonetheless an invigorating thing to see it unfold.

The prince of this tale is Naveen (Bruno Campos), the arrogant, shiftless, but generally good-natured scion of a fictional Mediterranean kingdom. Besotted with women and American jazz, Naveen has been cut off from his parents' fortunes, and is on the prowl for a rich socialite. Naturally, Charlotte, as the only daughter of the fabulously wealthy Big Daddy La Bouff (John Goodman), fits the bill nicely. Unfortunately, Naveen falls into the clutches of a malevolent voodoo priest, Dr. Facilier (an exquisite Keith David), who transforms the prince into a frog and Naveen's venal porter Lawrence (Peter Bartlett) into the prince's double, putting into motion a plan to seize Big Daddy's millions. Things go from bad to worse at a costume gala in the prince's honor, where Naveen, having escaped from Facilier's clutches but still trapped in his amphibious form, runs into Tiana. Mistaking her for a princess and presuming that the famous fairy tale had things right, Naveen coerces a kiss from her. Unfortunately, Tiana discovers that kissing a cursed prince when you aren't a princess only spreads the curse like a virus, and she too finds herself green and web-footed. The pair escape into the bayou and from there the film takes on a familiar shape, as they pick up a couple of comic relief companions and make their way to the voodoo priestess Mama Odie (Jenifer Lewis) in search of a cure.

The character designs are all distinctive and pleasing, especially Tiana herself, who is easily the most appealingly drawn and animated Disney female since Beauty and Beast's Belle. Rose's performance fits the character snugly, lending an authenticity to her sharp personality and slightly restrained emotions that few animated characters can boast. In frog form, Tiana and Naveen are much more simply designed, but the simplification works well, especially for Naveen, who roguish qualities actually seem enhanced by the transformation. The film-makers utilize a much more cartoonish look for Louis (Miachel-Leon Wooley), an alligator with ambitions as a jazz trumpeter, and Ray (Jim Cummings), a Cajun lightning bug, but this is to be expected given that they are the film's designated comic relief. However, in any Disney animated feature the standout character is inevitably the villain, and Dr. Facilier is no exception. The lanky, silken Facilier is not an overtly comic nasty like Aladdin's Jafar, but neither is he so manifestly lethal as, say, Sleeping Beauty's Malificent. With his skull-and-bones-bedecked top hat and handful of tarot cards, he's every inch the Hollywood conception of a vodoun bokor, but it's the little details of his design that stick, such as his white spats, conspicuous tooth gap, or the stray curl of oiled hair. Veteran screen and voice performer David delivers a marvelous turn, and the writers cunningly emphasize the curiously transactional nature of Facilier's black magic.

Strictly as a example of contemporary "traditional" animation, TPatF is stuffed to bursting with wondrous sights. Every inch of the film drips with dazzling design, lovingly rendered landscapes, and sumptuous lighting. It's simply a drop-dead gorgeous film, and if that only counts for so much in cinema, it counts for quite enough when it's done as well as this. Clements and Musker can boast at having delivered the most beautiful work of hand-drawn feature animation since, well, Tarzan, which I suppose means that TPatF does indeed signal a Second Renaissance for the House of Mouse. The musical numbers in particular showcase some of the film's best moments: the dizzying whorls of fireflies in "Gonna Take You There"; the day-glo voodoo nightmare of "Friends on the Other Side"; and, most memorably, an art deco cut-out fantasy in "Almost There". Randy Newman's songs, which appropriately sample jazz, gospel, and zydeco influences, aren't particularly memorable, in that you don't come out of the theater humming them. Yet if there's no obvious "Be Our Guest" or "Hakuna Matata," neither is there a clunker in the bunch, and for a notoriously musical-phobic viewer such as myself, that's saying something.

The Princess and the Frog is, in most ways, a utterly benign and conservative piece of film-making. It hews closely to the conventions of every animated musical fairy tale that has gone before, and in those places where it shyly steps into the twenty-first century, the move has been long overdue. What sets it apart from the junk food that passes for much children's animation is the absence of anything disposable or perfunctory about it. Clements and Musker and the dozens of animators and writers that labored on it have delivered a straight-up beautiful thing within a mode of film-making that has suffered devastating erosion in the past decade. To be sure, TPatF isn't thematically ambitious, but it is plainly a work of deep love, and it wants us to love it too. The film succeeds in this endeavor by mating exquisite visual artistry with the warm, undemanding fuzziness of a fairy tale. That, more than anything, was what characterized Disney Magic(TM), and it's what makes The Princess and the Frog such a delectable comeback.

The Road

Here at the End of All Things

2009 // USA // John Hillcoat // December 3, 2009 // Theatrical Print (Landmark Tivoli Theater)

B - Much of the unexpected power of No Country For Old Men arrives in its final fifteen minutes or so, as an arguably perfect thriller evolves into a profoundly moving rumination on justice, ethics, and, most devastatingly, the role of parents as surrogate gods in a cold, empty world. These themes are front-and-center in The Road, based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by No Country author Cormac McCarthy. The film adaptation of The Road veritably howls the despairing thoughts that Sheriff Ed Tom Bell only murmured. I'm reluctant to criticize director John Hillcoat—whose previous film was the spit-and-gristle Aussie Western The Proposition—for the film's bracingly straightforward treatment of its central concern: namely, the deity-mortal corollaries in the parent-child relationship. Bracingly straightforward, after all, is McCarthy's preferred approach in his novel, and Hillcoat's film is nothing if not a remarkably faithful preservation of both the letter and spirit of the source material. Accordingly, what The Road delivers is one of the grimmest, bleakest, most emotionally draining stories in contemporary narrative fiction. It is not, needless to say, a corking good time at the movies. It is, however, a poignant, sharply realized work that starkly tackles moral dilemmas that have troubled humanity for millennia.

The potency of The Road lies within its central visual: a man (Viggo Mortensen) and a boy (Kodi Smith-McPhee), bedraggled and malnourished, trudge through an ashen wasteland pushing a shopping cart that contains their meager possessions. The Man and Boy (they are never given names) are nomads in a lifeless wilderness that was once the United States of America. Ten years ago, there were booming sounds, a flash of light, and fires that burned through the night. The precise nature of this apocalypse doesn't really matter, either to the scattered survivors or to the story that Hillcoat is striving to tell. For a decade, the world has slowly been dying. The sky is perpetually overcast, plant and animal life have nearly vanished, and most of the remaining humans have turned to roaming the highways in armed, cannibalistic gangs. The Boy, who was born shortly after the world changed, has known only this benighted existence. His mother, the Man's wife (Charlize Theron) is gone now, her despair prompting her to choose death in the darkness over rape and murder at the hands of others.

Despite appearances, The Road is not any sort of dystopian action-adventure film. Most of its narrative is occupied with the quiet banalities of the Man and Boy's search for food, and occasionally with their evasion of other survivors. Yet Hillcoat nonetheless maintains a sense of urgency and desperation, calling to mind the tone of a gritty escape picture... except in this case there is nowhere to escape to. There is only the Man's anxious need to keep moving, always south and towards the coast, for no particular reason other than to avoid the risks of remaining in one place for too long. Even in such unremittingly desolate circumstances, the Man believes it is vital to teach his son something like a moral code, to distinguish the Good Guys like themselves from the Bad Guys that wander the wastes with minds full of hunger and murder. The ethical dialog between Man and Boy, and how it ricochets off the people and situations that they encounter, comprises both the film's character development and its out-in-the-open exploration of theme.

The apocalypse that The Road envisions is admittedly contrivance. It sweeps away the accumulated bullshit of civilization by, well, just sweeping it away, and then poses fundamental questions of human morality in the most visceral terms possible. What does it mean to be good? How much do suspicion and cynicism limit our opportunity to help others? How do our words and actions convey our values to the next generation? This frankness to the film's purpose might have been off-putting, especially given that the scenario it presents is one that is utterly without hope. (Give it a moment's consideration and it becomes apparent that humanity will necessarily go extinct as the last morsels of preserved food are scavenged.) Hillcoat, however, discovers the invigoration and sorrowful fascination inherent in a story stripped down to its most elemental components. And narratives don't get more elemental than A Father and Son Try to Survive.

The Road is not really a science-fiction film, if only because the nitty-gritty details of its apocalyptic event are completely ignored. Yet it fulfills one of the essential criteria of speculative visions of the future, in that it uses its setting to explore contemporary mores. It's readily apparent that Hillcoat, absorbing and utilizing the creased cynicism of McCarthy's novel, intends that The Road not really be taken as a story of The Future at all, but as a timeless tale of the struggle against moral darkness and the essential role of the parent-child relationship in that struggle. The not-so-subtle implication is that The Road's nightmare world of blight and brutality is only a slight exaggeration of the world we are dwelling in right now. This notion lurks in the picture, but it never presses itself upon the viewer, partly because the Man and Boy's plight is so immediate, partly because Hillcoat paints such a dire landscape with such believability. It's a world of perpetual, ash-flecked winter, the miserable punchline to civilization. The blasted environs of Mount St. Helens and the Hurricane Katrina-lashed Gulf Coast stand in for this crumbling world, but you'd never know it. It's in the obvious computer-generated shots that the illusion frays.

The Man is the sort of role that Viggo Mortenson excels at, and it's difficult to imagine the film, for all of Hillcoat's capable craftsmanship, functioning even remotely as well without him. Mortenson is able to hold resolve and self-doubt in a character at the same time, and here he puts that skill to great effect. He has the ability to portray paternal devotion with unashamed white-hot purity, without rendering it schmaltzy. When he whispers to another traveler of uncertain intentions, "This boy is my god," we don't doubt him for a second. One can't blame Mortensen for the slightness that clings to the film, its searing emotional content notwithstanding. It's not that Hillcoat's treatment of the story is precisely perfunctory, but that he doesn't enliven its dismal and straightforward parameters with the artistic deftness necessary to lend it a a greater thematic or psychological intricacy. The Road's success thus rests primarily on its precisely drawn premise and the uncluttered and emotionally forthright execution of that premise.