THE PLACE BEYOND THE PINES

Writer-director Derek Cianfrance follows up his critically acclaimed, intimate, raw portrait of an unraveling marriage, BLUE VALENTINE, with what he describes with a male melodrama about fathers and sons.  Both movies are an unflinching examination of real people making bad decisions for the best of reasons. But where VALENTINE feels brutally real, PINES has a self-conscious symmetry - a deliberate interweaving of plot points and characters that lifts us out of the real and into the archetypal.  This is a movie that is architectural - whose structural underpinnings are it's point - and that willingness to put the whale-bones outside of the flesh almost, but not quite, threaten to obscure our emotional response to the material. That it doesn't, speaks to the fine performances at the heart of the movie.

As the movie opens, we see a bravura tracking shot of Ryan Gosling's motorcycle stuntman, Luke, walking through the back-alleys of a circus, his small-town fans cheering him as he enters the tent. Three stuntmen will ride bikes over and around each other in the tight confines of a rotating metal framed ball  - an elaborate metaphor for the feat that Cianfrance is trying to pull of with this film.  

The first act of the film is Luke's story.  He rolls back into town to find he fathered a baby after a one night stand with Eva Mendes' Romina. She's living with Kofi (Mahershala Ali) - an archetypal good father who can provide everything Luke can't - a house, stability, commitment.  Somewhat predictably, Luke falls into bank robbery, tutored by Ben Mendelson's Robin, with immediate success but ultimately catastrophic results.   The hackneyed tale of a heist gone wrong is elevated by Ryan Gosling's absolute commitment to the role, the high-energy cinematography, the creeping sense of foreboding and, perhaps surprisingly, Eva Mendes.  There's a scene where Romina is asking Luke how he's going to take care of her, and Luke begs her not to talk down to him, not to assume he's as worthless as everyone else thinks he is, that is absolutely heartbreaking.  It's heartbreaking because we see how desperate Luke is to break the cycle of absence and neglect that he lived through, and heartbreaking because we know that Romina loves Luke, but that she loves her son, and his future, more.  

In the second act of the film we focus on Avery (Bradley Cooper) - the cop that gets shot in an altercation with Luke.  He's also a young father, also trying to do right but caught up in nefarious shit. His story is also mired in predictability - Ray Liotta cast as a corrupt cop - and the pace is much slower.  I have always thought Bradley Cooper a good actor, but at first I thought his performance in this segment fell rather flat. I just wasn't convinced he'd found the character. And then I realised that this was exactly what we were meant to be falling, because Avery hasn't found his character.  He's a guy constantly defining himself against other's expectations.  His father, a judge, wants him to be a lawyer. The police chief wants him to be a hero.  The rozzers want him to take the cash. And he thinks he wants to just be a good dad.  Turns out, he wants more. It's a subtle performance, and one that's nicely complemented by Rose Byrne as his wife.

In the final act of the movie, we fast forward to the present day, where Luke and Avery's sons are now teenagers at the same public school, although from radically different economic backgrounds. Indeed, Avery is now a man of some power and complacency, and his son  AJ (Emory Cohen) is a sinister, drug-fuelled bully.  Already exploited by AJ, when Luke's son Jason (Dale DeHaan) figures out their fathers' relationship he flips into a spiral that brings Avery face to face with his past in a lurid, melodramatic denouement that is at once utterly unrealistic and majestic.  Bradley Cooper is masterful in his final scene.

What should we make of this film? Clearly, it's macro structure forces it into highly stylised pairings and plot points, but this is not a weakness.  It gives colour and provocation, and doesn't alienate us because each section is so filled with deep emotion and finely shaded moral dilemmas.  In other words, this movie has heart as well as style.  In fact, it's something of a tour de force. 

THE PLACE BEYOND THE PINES played Toronto 2012 and is already on release in the USA, France, Denmark, Finland and Spain. It opens this weekend in Belgium, Italy, the Netherlands, Singapore, Norway, and Sweden. It opens on April 12th in the UK, Ireland, Greece and Lithuania.  It opens on April 18th in Russia. It opens on May 2nd in Croatia; on May 9th in Australia; on May 24th in Poland, Taiwan and Japan; on June 14th in Turkey; on June 20th in Germany and on June 28th in Mexico.

The film has a running time of 140 minutes and is rated R in the USA.

KILLING THEM SOFTLY

KILLING THEM SOFTLY is an unrelentingly bleak and cynical examination of mid-level criminals in a bad economy.  It chronicles an America bloated and decayed, with a soft belly and a smack addiction, where "hope you can believe in" is just a pathetic fairytale.  America is a business not a democracy, and this movie is about getting paid.  To that end, it is fitting that nothing that happens in this film is a surprise.  The wheels of capitalism, whether on Wall Street or trashy motels, grind on regardless.

The first act sees ex-con idiots Frankie (Scoot McNairy - IN SEARCH OF A MIDNIGHT KISS) and Russell (Ben Mendelsohn - ANIMAL KINGDOM) hired by The Squirrel (Vincent Curatola - THE SOPRANOS) to knock off a card game.  The twist is that because the host of the game, Markie Trattman, (Ray Liotta) is known to have held up his own card game once before, the suspicion will fall on him and they'll get away scott free.  The second act sees a dull bureaucrat (Richard Jenkins) hiring muscle to kill not just the guilty trio but also Trattman.  For confidence to be restored to the "market", justice must be seen to be done, even if the underworld have gotten the wrong end of the stick. The bureaucrat hires Brad Pitt's hitman, Jackie Cogan, who in turn brings in James Gandolfini's Mickey, only to realise that Mickey is not fit for purpose. The final act sees Cogan resigned to the task at hand.

There is a grim inevitability to the crime and punishment narrative. But that doesn't mean that the film has no dramatic tension.  The initial heist is painfully, terrifyingly drawn out.  And the final execution is expected but unbearably tense.  I've never seen a punishment beating look so visceral as when Trattman is beaten by two goons.  I've never seen an execution look simultaneously so beautiful and so desperately anonymous as when Trattman is off'ed. I've never seen a smack addict getting high so imaginatively depicted than when DP Greig Fraser (SNOW WHITE AND THE HUNTSMAN) photographs the perceptions of Russell.

But we all know that director Andrew Dominik is the master of the technically brilliant set-up - the unbearable tense pregnant pause.  That's partly what made THE ASSASSINATION OF JESSE JAMES BY THE COWARD ROBERT FORD an instant pantheon movie - and probably the best film I've ever seen at the London Film Festival.   That film coupled stunning visuals and a foreboding mood with a sickening, fascinating obsessive love story.  It had heart  - a twisted heart, admittedly - but an emotional centre for us to hold on to.  Similarly, Dominik's first film CHOPPER had audacious visuals and superlative editing, but it's success hinged on the charisma and horror of the central character.

The problem with KILLING THEM SOFTLY is that it works at an intellectual but not an emotional level. This is quite deliberate.  Dominik is making an intellectual point - about the decadence and squalor of the USA  - the bad economy - falling wages, rising bureaucracy - that it's just about getting paid, and getting paid is getting harder.  I didn't find the political analogy over-bearing as I know some critics have. I found it not just valid, but urgent.  The problem is that the cynicism of the film is alienating - almost unbearably so.  Dominik just doesn't give us anything to hold on to. And as a result, his latest film is less than the sum of  its parts.

KILLING THEM SOFTLY played Cannes 2012 and opened this weekend in Ireland, Spain and the UK. It opens next weekend in Slovenia. It opens on October 11th in Australia, Hong Kong, Italy and Argentina; on October 18th in Argentina, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Russia, Estonia and Lithuania; on October 25th in Greece; on November 1st in Portugal and Norway; on November 9th in Mexico; on November 16th in Poland; on November 23rd in Bulgaria; on November 29th in Germany and the USA; and on December 5th in Belgium, France and Denmark. 

A ruminative essay on THE DARK KNIGHT RISES - Spoilers replete

I respect Christopher Nolan as a film-maker. He applies an unusual degree of intelligence to genre films and he is not unafraid of radically rethinking a franchise.   At a technical level, I admire Nolan's unabashed commitment to delivering the highest quality, most immersive images to the movie-going audience.  That means that Nolan still shoots on film rather than digitally, with a preference for IMAX.  He does not shoot 3D movies because he understands that 3D technology, as it currently stands, cannot rationalise the point of convergence and the point of focus, and that this subconsciously brings us out of the movie.  Nolan is thus a man of integrity when it comes to his technical approach to film-making and is to be applauded.

All of which is pre-amble to the fact that despite going into this film with high hopes (though not over-hyped), I left disappointed.  It's by no means a bad movie - I loved the thematic material.  But as entertainment goes, the set piece action sequences were impressive technically but didn't set my pulse racing.  There were too many characters and story arcs - too many plot developments that felt unearned.  Ultimately I just didn't care.  

THEMATIC MATERIAL

To begin with the thematic material - which I found to be insightful and thought-provoking - the first major discussion was about the MORAL AMBIGUITY OF BENEVOLENT INTERVENTION.

The Gotham of THE DARK KNIGHT RISES is a peaceful, almost banal place, in which the peace has been bought with a lie and repression.  Batman has taken the fall for Harvey Dent's death, allowing Commissioner Gordon to create support for the repressive Dent Act.  Running through the film is an intelligent discussion about how far with-holding choice from ordinary people can ever be a good thing.  Even if born of benevolence, were Batman and Gordon right to assume that they had to manufacture a "White Knight" to corral public opinion toward crime-fighting?  Shouldn't they have had faith in the public? And even if that faith were misplaced, what right did they have to distort the truth?  They certainly pay a harsh price for their machinations.  In the first hour of the movie we see that Gordon has driven away his family, is about to be sacked, and is lying severely wounded in hospital.  Batman's body has also failed him - his joints wrecked by ill-use and  prior injury.  Their bodies are symbols of moral decay - the literal manifestation of the corrosive impact of living a lie. Ultimately, their lie will be exposed by Bane, but it is welcomed as a liberation.  In a sense, Bane, Gordon and Batman are in agreement.  Founding a repressive peace on a lie was patronising and condescending.  The people deserved more respect.  Gordon and Wayne, agents of a standard patrician comic book world in which an elite makes interventions for the "ordinaries" do not have sufficient radical courage to say it out loud. But once the truth is out, they are all the more liberated for it. 

The theme of questioning the morality of benevolent intervention is further echoed in the use of weaponry in the film.  Wayne/Lucius Fox have developed an array of high spec machines to protect Gotham, as well as buying up inventions that could be harmful, such as the Clean Slate programme that Selina Kyle covets.  They've even mothballed a potential clean energy source because it could be used for military purposes at great cost to their company, and to the horror of do-gooding entrepreneur/militant terrorist Miranda Tate.  But it's those very machines that are used by Bane/Talia to wreak havoc on Gotham, with a particularly superb scene in which Bane literally blasts through into Lucius Fox's so-called secret R&D warehouse from his own under-ground lair.  

A radical question raised by this is whether Batman is himself the true antihero of this movie.  If Wayne/Batman hadn't developed/amassed these tools, would Gotham have been put in such danger?  In other words, just as its better for Wayne to leave his Batman identity behind (whether through death or through a daring autopilot assisted escape to Tuscany), is it also better for Gotham that Batman has left? To paraphrase Monty Python, what have superheroes ever done for us?  This, of course, brings us back to the plot arc that sees Batman ultimately confront the new head of The League of Shadows, Talia al Ghul. The League is basically an elite force of warriors who assume that their elite status gives them the right to direct history so as to "restore balance".  We do well to remember that Wayne was also a member of the League, and while he rejected it, he has kept many of their assumptions about the strong intervening in the lives of the ordinary to put them back on the right track.  The only difference is that he is benevolent rather than malevolent.  The discussion reminds me a bit of A CLOCKWORK ORANGE.  Maybe it's just bad to intervene whether with good or bad intentions.  Maybe freedom from crime - whether organised in the case of Gotham and the Dent Act - or individual in the case of Alex - is only legitimate if it is engineered by legitimate democratic means. 

The second major theme in the movie is ECONOMIC INEQUALITY. That theme is refracted in different ways by each of the three purported villians.  The trio of villains begins with Daggett - a caricature greedy capitalist bastard who wants to take over Wayne Enterprises.  He is utterly conventional in his view of society and inequality.  He takes it for granted that capitalism distributes material wealth unequally and will play whatever game is necessary to make sure he comes out on top.He never questions the ultimately sustainability of the social order in Gotham, even as he disrupts the social order in minor African nations. Daggett hires the catburgler, Selina Kyle, to steal Bruce Wayne's fingerprints so that he can place fictitious trades that bankrupt Wayne and force him from the board.  He also hires Bane - a super-strong mercenary associated with African coups and mythical stories of having escaped a hellish prison - to make the trades in at attack on the stock market. Of course, as history proves, capitalists who think they can control political zealots always lose control to them, and Bane quickly dispatches Daggett as casually as Daggett might initiate a mass lay-off.  

But Daggett's most significant hire, as far as I'm concerned, is his sidekick Stryver, played by the marvelous Burn Gorman (just watch him as Guppy in the BBC's recent Bleak House).  Stryver is to me the most authentic character in the whole movie - symbolic of most City workers I know, who do their jobs well, fulfil their briefs, never once questioning the morality of the entire system they are part of. They're the aggressively upwardly mobile investment banking analysts who perform their tasks with absolute efficiency and dexterity in bonus maximisation - meanwhile the economy is crashing down around their ears.  Stryver, clumsily named, symbolises that faith in the capitalist system, where if we all work that bit harder, get a better degree, kiss-ass for promotion, we too can ascend to the elite. 

Selina Kyle is a more conflicted villain. She portrays herself as a kind of Robin Hood, only robbing the rich to feed herself - never taking from people who can't afford it.  She is seen to have the most insight into the corrosive nature of extreme material inequality and is also, on a tangent, insightful about the impossibility of getting a clean slate in a digital world. There's a lot to like about her character, not least that the Nolan's have not written her as a typical quasi-comedic fetishistic sex-kitten.  She has clear purpose, no self-delusion, and provides the only "zingers" in the film.  And in a three-hour film that often feels ponderous, ill-paced, and ill-plotted, Selina's wit is a valuable commodity indeed. 

In the middle section of the film it is Bane who emerges as the true match for Batman and Wayne - with his militant anti-capitalist forced "liberation" of the masses inside their new prison-Gotham.  Wayne becomes financially, as well as physically crippled: Batman is intellectually and physically broken by Bane - the broken mask and broken back.  In that sense, Bane is (in this middle section at least) the complete inverse of The Joker.  The Joker was petrifying because had no back story, no motivation, no logic. How was one to negotiate with such a man? How was one to out-think him, when his every action was seemingly anarchic, random, impossible to predict?  By contrast, Bane is a rather conventional, if particularly well-armed left-wing militant, complete with almost anarchic redistribution of wealth and kangaroo courts trying the former elite.  A lot of the footage reminded me of documentaries and history books about the Russia after the 1917, with luxurious houses occupied by multiple families, arbitrary judgments - the revenge of the oppressed. Only Selina voices the fact that these are people too - these apartments used to belong to people.* 

The only thing that doesn't make since, given Bane's stated anti-capitalist popular protest, is the fact that he arms a device that will explode in five months no matter what.  There is a contradiction in his liberating the people only to destroy them which is unsatisfactorily resolved when we realise that he is really a stooge for Talia's nihilistic destruction. To that end, I felt that Bane's project, character and force as a super-villain had been blunted by turning him into, essentially, a pussy-whipped patsy.  All of which brings us nicely to what I perceive to be the major problems with the films narrative arcs, character development, plot twists and pacing.

NARRATIVE PROBLEMS

So here's my problem with THE DARK KNIGHT RISES: I didn't care. And I didn't care because there were too many characters doing too much stuff that was either illogical or unearned.  Let's start with Bruce Wayne.  Wayne starts as a broken man, mourning for the future he could have had with Rachel Dawes.  He meets earnest entrepreneur Miranda Tate at a charity ball, then she comes to his house, and within about three lines of dialogue he tumbles into bed with her, despite the whole Rachel-brooding-thing.  I didn't buy it.  And then Selina Kyle is suddenly magically in love with Bruce, just because he "believes in her", kissing him passionately before he flies off with a bomb.  We're meant to be massively moved by this but come on - when did this love triangle have time to be established?  When did we, as an audience, get time to buy into this? And when did Selina  and Bruce fall sufficiently in love to end up together in Tuscany?!  

I came to the end of the film with the strong impression that this would've been a far better movie if Miranda/Talia simply hadn't been a character. This would've prevented the inclusion of a forced rom-com cheesy, unearned love triangle. It would also not have undermined the logical purity of Bane's mission as well as cutting of his metaphorical balls. It just didn't sit right with me that this hulking intellect - the first real match for Wayne/Batman - would basically be a love-sick pup, although I acknowledge that his tears at the end could've been because his pain meds were cut off as the mask was ripped, rather than an emotional response to Talia/Miranda rehearsing her back story.

Next problem - why are we introduced to so many small characters who have no bearing on the plot, distract attention and bloat the run-time?  Do we really need to see Stryver pushed out onto the ice? Do we really need to see the Scarecrow sitting in judgment?  Do we really need to see Matthew Modine's incompetent cop turn coward?  Do we really need the little orphan Robin story - and what a completely obvious and facile plot twist THAT was -  for any reason other than as franchise-fodder for Warner Brothers? All of these digressions took time away from Gordon and Fox. I wanted to see more of Gordon suffering for his part in the Dent lie. I wanted to see more establishment of the Love Triangle storyline if that was indeed the direction they were going in.

Final problem, so many micro choices didn't make sense.  If you invent a massively powerful energy source you have to be an idiot not to realise that any power source can be used for good and evil.  Why act all surprised when some scientist creates the trigger?  And if you have all this stuff that's dangerous why not just destroy it. Why keep it hanging around just in case you might at some unspecified future date be able to use it safely.  How come Bruce Wayne can strap on a super knee brace and suddenly run around like everything's all okay? (As I'm recovering from a fractured ankle right now - that really rubbed me up the wrong way).  How come Bruce can reach peak physical fitness in one training montage and then hop, skip and jump back from Jodhpur to North America and penetrate a locked down island, all the while secretly plotting to fake his own death (and falling in love with Selina)?  You get my drift....

TECHNICAL PROBLEMS

Perhaps the best thing about THE DARK KNIGHT RISES is that it is technically accomplished.  Wally Pfister's IMAX photography is superb.  But there are still two problems. I hated Hans Zimmer's over-bearing score.  And I found Bane's mask problematic.  His speech was too indistinct and it unfairly turned Tom Hardy into a Vader parody.  Poor chap.

THE DARK KNIGHT RISES is on global release.

*Of course, many commentators have drawn the obvious contemporary analogy between Bane's radical condemnation of capitalism and the Occupy Movement.  All I can say to that is that I respect the logic of Bane's argument, but I've  never seen anything like such a cogent programme from Occupy. 

ANIMAL KINGDOM

ANIMAL KINGDOM is a fascinating but not flawless Australian crime thriller that has garnered critical acclaim, not least in a Best Supporting Actress nod for Jacki Weaver. The feature debut of writer-diretor, David Michod, it's the kind of movie that has so much ambition, and has so many individual moments of brilliance, that you can't wait to see what the director does next, even though the product before you is fairly raw. 

The movie is loosely based on a true story of armed robbers in late 80s Melbourne. As we meet the characters, that era of armed robbers and corrupt police is coming to a close. The criminal Cody family is being hunted by the police, and once cornered, turn on each other. The film watches their disintegration and the shifting allegiances and power positions within the familial set-up. We see the weak killed; the under-estimated rise to the top; the old order removed and the so-called establishment side-lined. The nominal paterfamilias is "Pope" Cody (Ben Mendelsohn) - a man who we must assume was to be feared but who know, though still capable of extreme acts of violence - seems lost - uprooted - almost tragic. He is a man out of time. The world is moving on but he doesn't know what to do. His brothers are similarly adrift. Darren (Luke Ford) is scared and parasitical, just looking for another leader to cling to. Craig (Sullivan Stapleton) takes refuge in drugs. And into this mix comes "J" - their teenage nephew whose mum OD'ed and who looks brainless, comatose, and like a patsy in the making. But the REAL power in the family is the creepily over-emotionally involved mother, played by Jacki Weaver. A woman who'll call you "darling" and "love" while arranging your murder - a woman who epitomises the maternal survival instinct. It's a chilling and often blackly funny performance. 

ANIMAL KINGDOM is at its best when it's documenting the shifting power-structure within the family and watching these apparently fearsome robbers looking ineffectual. I love that David Michod has the confidence NOT to turn this into a courtroom drama, even though the final third of the movie is all about a big case. Rather, he cares about the "before" and "after". The scheming, the prep, the digesting of the results. In that way, this becomes a movie that constantly pulls the rug out from under your expectations. It feels satisfyingly dense and hangs on several highly impressive performances - Jacki Weaver, Ben Mendelsohn and Guy Pearce as the cop. But the movie has its flaws. I regretted never seeing the family at the height of its power against which to contrast its fall. Sometimes, when the guys were being completely ineffectual, it felt implausible that they had ever committed the crimes they were accused of. At times, the plot felt too messy - too hard to disentangle. Sure, it's great for a director to trust his audience and introduce ambiguity - especially regarding the final scene. But earlier on, some of the exposition seemed murky to me. And finally, a lot of the film just seemed plain implausible. I didn't buy that the girlfriend's family would let her hang out with "J". I didn't buy how she exited the film. And I really didn't buy the transformation of "J" at the end of the film. Major problems. Still, for all that, this is a brave movie containing powerful performances, and I can't wait to see what David Michod does next. 

ANIMAL KINGDOM played Sundance 2010 where it won the Grand Jury Prize for World Cinema - Dramatic. It opened last year in the USA, Canada and Poland. It opened earlier this year in Spain and Finland and is currently on release in Denmark and the UK. It opens in France on April 27th. Jacki Weaver was nominated for Best Supporting Actress at the Oscars and Golden Globes but lost to Melissa Leo for THE FIGHTER. She did however win at the National Board of Review awards.