Children of Men

Children of Men (2006), directed by Alfonso Cuarón and based on the novel by P.D. James, is a murky slog through the wastelands of dystopian future England, which, in the year 2027, is the only country that hasn't completely collapsed due to war and disease. The planet is also enduring a new kind of crisis: infertility. No babies have been born for nearly twenty years, so when a radical group of activists finds a pregnant Fuji woman named Kee (Clare-Hope Ashitey), her safe transport to a humanist group--where her baby won't be exploited as some kind of marvelous new savior--becomes of vital importance. Enter Clive Owen, a British government worker who has ties with the radical group's leader, Julian (played by Julianne Moore). He's enlisted to give them some help in getting papers for Kee so that she can get where she needs to go. Of course, there are complications.

This is a movie full of dreary--and mostly unoriginal--predictions about the future. Cuarón lets loose with the mayhem, and uses impressive camera-work to exhibit the constant chaos of bombs going off, guns firing, bodies broken by glass and bullets and crumbling buildings, towns destroyed, and thick clouds of fog and smoke obscuring the vision of the protagonists. It's a world that becomes increasingly unwatchable as the movie winds on.

Dystopian fiction isn't exactly a new thing, but it's certainly experienced a new wave of enthusiasm in the last ten years or so. The British experienced a parallel kind of anxiety about their security at the turn of the twentieth century, which gave us Dracula, The Time Machine, and lots of other literature about the deterioration--social, moral, and biological--of society. H.G. Wells imagined England in somewhat more banal, yet far more accurate, terms in Tono-Bungay (1909), which chronicled the disruptions in the English social structure and the rise of urban civilizations. People were afraid of all the changes that were happening, which of course preceded the very big and grim change affected by World War I.

It's the same recipe bubbling up now in 2014. We live in a world of uncertainties, and the grim futuristic novels and books are glutting the market to exploit/ameliorate/fuel that anxiety. Children of Men is simply a more artful and adult version of the same thing young people love about The Hunger Games: this is a world where man's brutality has been unleashed in an uninhibited and obvious fashion, and this kind of sheer inhumanity has always grabbed people's attention. Perhaps people respond to these kinds of movies because they want confirmation that we're not so brutal here and now. Things may be bad, but they aren't that bad at least. But the people in Children of Men have the news on 24/7, which isn't much different from people now who always have the television tuned to Fox News or CNN, which are more Orwellian than people want to believe. They're the ones who feed the dystopian imaginations, and give credence to movies like Children of Men.

I found it too depressing and chaotic to care about Children of Men, and what's more, frustrating, much like Caurón's Gravity frustrated me. Here there were little things--the jarring sound of someone pounding on a door and Clive Owen taking forever to open it; that stupid little yippy dog sniffing the blanket covering the baby, whose identity Kee is trying to keep secret; the way the characters plod through bomb-riddled streets and stairways and are constantly impeded by some irritating obstruction. I suppose this is Caurón's attempt to be realistic, but it pulled me out of the movie and built up a kind of resistance in me. After a while, all patience was gone.

Clive Owen is a likable actor, and his presence bolsters Children of Men considerably. But he--like everyone in this movie--is a function of the plot, not a real character. We care about his safety mainly because he's Clive Owen. You can imagine that the author of the novel, P.D. James, had the idea about the infertility first." Suppose women just stopped being able to give birth?" Obviously, what once mattered to society would no longer matter. But the problem with these kinds of conceits is that by definition they make characters incidental and subordinate to the story. Everything must flow from that little nucleus of an idea about infertility, and while it's an interesting idea, it's very Twilight Zone-y, except Children of Men is bigger and glossier and gritter than The Twilight Zone.

Michael Caine has a small part as an aging hippy with John Lennon's hair--if Lennon had lived long enough to turn grey--and glasses. He tries very obviously to be a quirky old man, and his comic relief never really works. It always seems forced and naively at odds with the rest of the movie's grim march toward a kind of shriveled, bleak self-importance. With five writers, you'd expect something better from Children of Men. Or maybe that was the trouble. Along with the director, the script was pounded out by Timothy J. Sexton, David Arata, Mark Fergus, and Hawk Ostby. With Chiwetel Ejiofor, Pam Ferris, and Danny Huston.

The Queen

Helen Mirren acts with a lot of restraint and good judgment as Queen Elizabeth II, whose refusal to react publicly to the death of Princess Diana in 1997 caused a public outcry. The Queen (2006) is an intriguing little political drama, particularly because it manages to be both critical and sympathetic toward the Queen, whose decision not to make any kind of public statement about Diana's death is based in her belief that part of the job of being Queen is maintaining oneself publicly. Only after the persistent encouragement of the newly elected Prime Minister, Tony Blair (Michael Sheen), does she finally relent, conceding to the overwhelming evidence that the world has changed, and the world she knows and operates in no longer exists.

The script by Peter Morgan manages to avoid cheap sentiment, and director Stephen Frears doesn't cave in either: the tabloid aspects of this story (Princess Diana herself being the chief one) are not played up. Rather, this film is interested in looking at the political life of a country that has one foot in the past and one in the future: a monarch performing a lot of ceremonial duties (such as offering a formal invitation to the Prime Minister, which seals his election) that mean something, but not much. The old institutions are suspect to the new generation that would rather have a Queen relate to them on a kind of gooey, feel-good emotional level. Essentially, they want an Oprah, not a queen. You end up sympathizing with Elizabeth more and more.

With James Cromwell as Prince Phillip, Helen McCroy as Cherie Blair, Alex Jennings as Prince Charles, Sylvia Syms as the Queen Mother, Tim McMullan, Mark Bazeley (who offers up an enjoyably wry performance as Blair's strategic assistant). The film uses real news footage more adeptly than you might think, and manages to create a vivid sense of realism without sensationalizing a story that was (and still is) sensationalized in real life. 103 min. ★★★

For Your Consideration

Of all Christopher Guest's comedies, For Your Consideration (2006) emerges as the most uncanny in its portrayals, this time of Hollywood. (Perhaps this is because I'm more familiar with movies than I am with folk musicians, dog trainers, and local theater.) Guest co-wrote the script with Eugene Levy, both of whom appear, along with the usual suspects, playing various members of the Hollywood community, from actors to crew members to publicists and talk show hosts.

If there is a central character, it's Marilyn Hack (played with stunning, hallucinatory, grotesque perfection by the great Catherine O'Hara). Marilyn is a virtual has-been actress who is finally returning to the silver screen in an over-the-top soaper that's part Tennessee Williams, part From Here to Eternity. It's a turbulent drama about a Jewish family's frosty reunion during the Purim holiday season, aptly titled Home For Purim. Marilyn hears rumors, via the internet, about an Oscar nomination coming her way, and inflates the rumors into Oscar buzz, some fake fairy dust that soon sprinkles onto the heads of her co-stars, played by Harry Shearer, Parker Posey, and Christopher Moynihan.

It's tragically funny to watch all the bees working their industry, all of them vying for queenhood, some of them with expert precision, others with an astonishing lack of self-awareness. You can only emerge from this movie feeling you've looked directly into the tortured, ironic, narcissistic soul of Hollywood itself, as though this least-documentary of all Guest's films is the one actual documentary: a record as exact and untouched by narrative intention as C-SPAN.

The supporting cast includes scene-stealing Fred Willard as the co-host of a movie talk show. He's really on fire in this movie, whipping out little throwaway lines with stunning ease and subtlety: his character seems like a complete moron, yet he's also brimming with ironic hostility, aimed at the Hollywood types that make his show. Jane Lynch plays his co-star. She's a delight, but she is a overshadowed by Willard's hammy deviousness. Jennifer Coolidge plays a dippy producer who appears to be constantly drunk. Coolidge never gets as much screen time as you'd want, considering how funny she is. With John Michael Higgins, Ed Begley, Jr., Bob Balaban, Michael McKean, and Carrie Aizley; and in cameo appearances: Ricky Gervais, Sandra Oh, John Krasinski, Paul Dooley, Hart Bochner, and Claire Forlani.

Slither

Slither (2006) is writer-director James Gunn's pastiche of every horror and science fiction film you can imagine (Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Blob, Night of the Living Dead, Alien, etc). It's a slick, sick movie that brings new meaning to the word "icky," as a parasitic alien creature generates thousands of slimy slug-creatures that implant themselves into people's brains and turn their hosts into mindless zombies, subservient to their other-worldly master. Watching Slither is like playing connect the dots. It's kind of fun to see just how much bad-movie pop culture, which is deeply embedded into James Gunn's artistic sensibilities, manifests itself in this movie, which is alternately funny and revolting.

Nathan Fillion and Elizabeth Banks head the cast. He's the newly appointed police chief of the small town of Wheelsy, South Carolina, and she's a local schoolteacher whose husband (Michael Rooker) becomes the host of the alien creature when it descends upon the town like a shooting star from a 1950's alien invasion flick. Gregg Henry plays the foul-mouthed mayor, who tries to snatch every scene he's in by playing a terrible human being (and succeeds much of the time). Tania Saulnier plays a teenage girl whose family falls prey to the fast-moving slug-creatures. She's sprightly enough to escape them, and winds up with the police chief and his group as they attempt to ward off their zombified neighbors.

I was surprised by how horrified I was by this movie, especially since I'd seen it a couple times before. It's funny but disturbing. The slug-things look like condoms full of purply jelly, and, like the slugs in Night of the Creeps, they enter through your mouth, which suggests all kinds of horrifying things. Gunn is having a good time being suggestive here, but his movie, while amusing and suspenseful, doesn't do enough to distinguish itself. It's expected these days for horror films to be transparently parasitic, but with Slither you feel almost exhausted by the film's lack of originality. And yet it's a fun popcorn kind of movie, although it paradoxically relieves you of any appetite you might have had.

Gunn's warped sense of humor courses through the movie like a kind of anti-body to the appropriately off-putting visuals. Still, Slither is the nastier (albeit funnier) version of everything it spoofs/mimics/pays homage to. But Nathan Fillion and Elizabeth Banks add some panache to the proceedings, even if their natural charms are subordinate to the movie's slimy weirdness. Fillion goes through the entire movie with a sort of comic disbelief, and Banks is at her most engaging when she's smart and resourceful. With Jennifer Copping, Don Thompson, and Jenna Fischer, in a small role as a dispatcher.

Casino Royale

Daniel Craig adds new layers to the James Bond character without sacrificing the allure of 007, the man's man who keeps himself in shape and the villains in check. The difference between Casino Royale and pretty much every Bond film prior is one of temperament. This is a serious movie that tries to be realistic and character-driven. Casino Royale has a sense of humor that compliments its serious plot, rather than the cartoonish quirkiness that so often helped implode the previous Bond movies. (Not that some of the other Bond movies aren't a great deal of fun. Some of them are classics, or at least have classic moments, such as the wonderful Egyptian section of The Spy Who Loved Me).

It's also nice to see a plot that isn't Cold War-driven. After seeing enough of them from Connery to Brosnan, you start to wonder if these movies aren't anything more than sugar-coated propaganda pieces trying to make Western culture appear virile and tough.


Instead, Casino Royale tackles the next soon-to-be-exhausted (if it hasn't been already) criminal activity du jour, terrorism. There are plenty of action sequences to sate the palate of any James Bond junkie. What's more fun are the poker scenes at the casino where Bond matches wits with a seedy terrorist investor, and the interplay between Bond and a fellow secret agent (Eva Green), although Green herself isn't all that memorable, and is at times far too fragile. You start to yearn for a tougher heroine. (There have been a few in the past, if memory serves).  

Casino Royale has its weak points, too, however. It rumbles along for nearly two hours and thirty minutes, and while there are memorable scenes, by the end you feel you've been pommeled just as much as the hero, who incurs a considerable amount of physical damage. But Craig's performance and the movie as a whole are strong, seeing this series off to a successful and hopeful reboot when it appeared nothing fresh could be offered.

It was written by Neal Purvis, Robert Wade, and Paul Haggis, and based on the novel by Ian Fleming. Directed by Martin With Judi Dench, Giancarlo Giannini, Mads Mikkelsen, Jeffrey Wright, and Simon Abkarian.

Infamous

Infamous (2006) is the story of Truman Capote's experiences researching and writing In Cold Blood (1966), a novelistic account of the brutal murder of the Clutter Family in Kansas in 1959. As Capote, Toby Jones gets pretty close to a perfect imitation of that unforgettably sissified voice of Capote's. He exudes the enigmatic mixture of gaudy, flamboyant, brashness and furtive shame and vulnerability that characterizes our perception of Capote. The movie portrays essentially two Capotes: the one who held the attention of any social gathering with his gossip about celebrities, and the one who poured himself into his work, a book which made him and destroyed him simultaneously.

As Harper Lee (called Nelle by friends), Sandra Bullock is good. (Most people probably know that Harper Lee and Truman Capote were childhood friends, and that Lee based the character of Dill in To Kill A Mockingbird on Capote.) The trouble with Sandra Bullock is that she's a big star, which is okay if all you want from her is Miss Congeniality, but her persona, the fact that she's so well-known, gets in the way of of her more serious performances. There's a sort of barrier between the audience and her. She managed to break the barrier with a blonde wig and a Southern accent in The Blind Side, and in Infamous she just about decimates it with a subtler Southern woman performance. She's humble and plain in Infamous; she's centered and quiet and careful when it comes to what she says and how she says it: the polar opposite of Capote, who possesses a keen ability to turn a phrase or sling a sarcastic retort; his advantage is being able to win people over with his cleverness. Hers is her lack of pretension.

One of the most interesting things about Infamous isn't its exploration of a possible attraction between Capote and one of the killers, Perry Smith (portrayed by Daniel Craig, who didn't seem to me to look right for the part, but who turned in a convincing performance nonetheless). Rather, what's fascinating is the understated way the movie glimpses into Harper Lee's career. She never wrote another novel after To Kill A Mockingbird, although she did start one, eventually putting it away out of frustration. Her success, I think, eclipsed Capote's in the long run (probably because her novel was far less morally ambiguous), even though he had a more prolific career than her. And we get a sense of the things Harper Lee might have been thinking about such sudden and dramatic success upon a first novel, and about the subject of a writing career in general. In fact, those moments in which Infamous examines the whole world of writing are when it shines the brightest. It's got some maudlin, made-for-TV sentiments that it pulls off with measured success, but those moments are cheap compared to its portrayal of the loneliness of writing. It's a striking movie, one that captures the precariousness of human security, the prisons people put themselves in, and the shams people enact to avoid whatever is painful in their lives.

Capote's New York entourage includes Sigourney Weaver, Hope Davis, Isabella Rossellini, Juliet Stevenson, Peter Bogdanovich, Michael Panes (as Gore Vidal), and John Benjamin Hickey. The other killer, Dick Hickock, is played by Lee Pace, and Jeff Daniels plays the the lead investigator in the small Kansas town where the murders occurred. There's also a stunning opener with Jones and Weaver at a night club where Gwyneth Paltrow performs a snazzy love song with a backdrop of stars that feels positively dreamy, in a manufactured sort of way, the way those old romantic comedies from the 1950s feel. It doesn't exactly fit with the rest of the movie, which alternates between drab and dusty Kansas and the swinging Manhattan social world, but tips in favor of gloominess rather than glamour.

Directed by Douglas McGrath.

The Black Dahlia

The murder of Elizabeth Short in Los Angeles in January of 1947 still fascinates people today, including James Ellroy, whose novel this was based on. However, this 2006 crime-thriller, which promises to be akin to the knockout noir L.A. Confidential (1997), is a freaking mess. Brian De Palma directed, without the kinky excitement he brought to his early thrillers (Dressed to Kill and Carrie come to mind). The cinematography by Vilmos Zsigmond is first-rate. He captures beautifully the fact that there's nothing going on in this movie that you should care about. As luridly tingling as the Black Dahlia case is, this movie should have been an easy success. Instead, The Black Dahlia looks the other way, on purpose, as a matter of "style." Rather than focusing on the Elizabeth Short murder, it veers into other, fabricated directions.

Why, I'll never know.

Everything is contrived. If you come to this movie expecting an absorbing retelling of a scintillating true crime tale (even with the knowledge that Hollywood typically tinkers with historical fact), you've come to the wrong movie. If you've come looking for even a whisper of narrative logic, you'll also be left wanting. It's nonsensical. Big dramatic scenes are inflated and unexpected even. When they unfold, we laugh because they're so poorly conceived. (In one scene, Josh Hartnett, as one of the detectives investigating the Dahlia murders, pulls a table cloth off a table in a fit of passion with Scarlet Johansson. It seems a pity to make such a mess with a movie that's so carefully dull.)

De Palma has always been a manipulative little cheat of a director, playing with the audience in obvious ways, but in The Black Dahlia he doesn't even do that. We're supposed to sit back in awe of the "master" at work, but he isn't working, and neither is the movie. The blame should probably go also to the screenwriter, Scott Friedman, as well as James Ellroy (assuming his book is akin to Friedman's adaptation).

The main characters, two LAPD detectives (Hartnett and Aaron Eckhart) are involved in a love triangle with the boring, flirtatious Scarlet Johansson. Johansson was best in Woody Allen's Scoop. He brought out the passion in her, and the curious little pixie that she can turn into, the one who wooed Hugh Jackman, the handsome killer. But she tends to be uninteresting without a good director, and in The Black Dahlia, De Palma doesn't know what to do with her. Perhaps to him, her beauty is enough to maintain the audience's interest in her acting. But for anyone looking beyond the surface, there's little satisfaction.

De Palma is at a loss with the other actors, too. Eckhart's character becomes obsessed with the Dahlia case (he's the only aspect of this movie that stays focused on the Elizabeth Short murder, when the entire film should be reveling in Black Dahlia mania). And so quickly does he go bananas that we as an audience don't feel invested in his transformation. We can only jeer and laugh at a performance that falls flat and looks out of place. He's in the wrong movie. He's in the movie about the Black Dahlia murder, not the movie that pretends to be about the Black Dahlia murder.

As for Hartnett, he's never been that compelling of an actor, and using him in the lead is a miscalculation. He narrates clumsily the clumsy narration (not to mention the clumsy dialogue), and he's so scrawny and young that you don't really buy him as a detective--or as a contender in a boxing match that occurs early in the film (and feels just as out of place as everything else in this misfired movie).

There are some scenes where the police view screen tests of Elizabeth Short. They're meant to humanize the disfigured corpse left in grisly exhibition in an overgrown lot, but instead they just turn her into a bimbo who told fairy tells to get what she wanted. And maybe that's true of the real Elizabeth Short, but for a movie that gives little attention to the subject of its title, this adds yet another nail in the coffin. And Hilary Swank, who's desperately in need of a meal, shows up as another bimbo, someone for Josh Hartnett's character to sleep with in lieu of Johnasson, from whom he feels an obligation to abstain (since she's living with his partner).

Fiona Shaw gives the most overwrought performance as Swank's hopped up mother, a society woman who knows more than a bit about the Short murder. In fact, her performance is so hysterically bad, that I recommend watching this movie now. It was earth-shattering. The always exciting Rose McGowan has a cameo as one of Elizabeth Short's roommates. It's a pity that she had such a small part. She's far more interesting an actress than either Scarlet or Swank.

If only The Black Dahlia were as exciting as L.A. Confidential, or any of the old 1940's film noirs that it was modeled after. Instead, we're left with a labyrinthine mess of a movie that's shooting blanks after promising a bang.

The Prestige

100th Review
 

The Prestige (2006) is about two magicians in London at the end of the 19th century, both vying for the public's attention and acclaim. It's an interesting idea that was bungled, possibly before Christopher Nolan, the director and co-writer (along with his brother, Jonathan), ever began working on it. As a director, Nolan tends to inflate his movies. He enjoys hatching labyrinthine plots, and tinkering with time and manipulating the viewer's emotions. That's all fine and dandy, but the problem with most of his work has been a certain hollowness that may naturally proliferate as a result of his best intentions to be clever and grandly mysterious.

This is a movie about magic that's absolutely lacking in any sense of wonder or excitement. I didn't care about any of the characters, despite the interesting cast that was assembled (including Michael Caine, Rebecca Hall, Scarlet Johansson, David Bowie, and Andy Serkis). It was all lifeless, uninvolving. Christian Bale does his usual thing as one of the magicians, the darker, more obsessive one. Bale acts with his facial expressions, or should I say, expression. He rarely shows more than the one. He frequently plays dark, deeply disturbed characters, to the point that everything he does blends into something indistinguishable. There's not much difference between this and Batman Begins or even American Psycho, except that he laughed more in American Psycho. He was a certifiable sociopath there. Here he's just a mad genius.

Hugh Jackman plays his American rival and nemesis, and he's the more commercial of the two. Jackman has an engaging quality about him, but he's played as the heavy. He's in it for the money, and even admits, readily, that Bale is the better magician. Their careers and their lives mirror those of certain Hollywood directors: say, Orson Welles in the place of Bale's character, and Steven Spielberg in the place of Jackman's. One a masterfully intuitive filmmaker and the other a master, epic-scale showman. Welles's entire career was troubled because of studio tampering, financial turmoil, and inner-conflict. Spielberg has always been the darling of the studios because he's always been able to make a lot of money with his films, some of which are genuinely marvelous, and some of which are shamefully commercial and uninteresting.

The two magicians develop a deep and mutual rivalry, and the movie is full of the tricks they play on each other. The idea of The Prestige reminded me of Sleuth (1972), which was directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz and starred an aging Laurence Olivier and a youngish Michael Caine. Olivier played a respected English mystery writer living in a beautiful, ornate mansion in the English countryside, and Caine was the young Italian immigrant (there's a great line where Olivier assures Caine's character that he could never become English) sleeping with Olivier's wife. The movie was mainly a series of elaborate tricks designed to titillate and terrorize the audience, and it worked. Sleuth was a fascinating entertainment. It wasn't inflated into some large scale dramatic epic, complete with courtroom scenes and a wife hanging herself in the attic. The Prestige wants to be all things to all people, and I suspect this is Christopher Nolan's temperament as a director seeping into the movie. He's certainly got it all, except for the kind of kinetic excitement this move requires. This is a soap opera between two magicians, and it's too stilted to generate any real movie magic.

Nolan continues to get hung up on big ideas to satisfy his baser cinematic instincts and passions. He clearly likes pulp, but doesn't approach it in the right way. He dresses it up with superficial sophistication. The thing that people enjoy about a Quentin Tarantino movie is its unashamed dedication to that low pulp entertainment. When I watch Nolan's movies, I sense the desire to deliver that kind of true enjoyment, but it's tainted by a need to be the smartest director in Hollywood, the one who "really makes you think," as more than one person has said to me about him.

Friends With Money

Jennifer Aniston is a good actress but she seldom seems to get THE part. Usually we see her in a romantic comedy, in which she's clearly comfortable--and likable. But occasionally she gets to demonstrate her dramatic chops, like in this movie, Friends With Money. I found it in the comedy section of the video store, but I thought the categorization misleading. It's one of those movies where you feel like you're being a told a story completely objectively, just watching the lives of four women and their husbands unfold in a small splash of time. Aniston's character, Olivia, is single and has become a maid after quitting a teaching position she hated. Her three friends (played by Catherine Keener, Joan Cusack, and Frances McDormand), are all married and financially well-off. Olivia is, in many ways, their pet project. She's the one they're "a little worried about."
This is the kind of movie where conflict resolutions aren't necessarily inevitable, in that it's a movie that tries to be realistic. If you hate that sort of thing, you might not enjoy this, but if you do enjoy it, like I did, you'll find a very clever, honest, sympathetic picture that's about the intricate, unstable, chaotic, and familiar nature of relationships. ★★★

Little Children

Kate Winslet and Patrick Wilson as upscale suburbanites who initiate an affair with each other after meeting at a local park where they take their children to play. As the audience, we become complicit in their bad behavior, and we perhaps feel guiltier for them than they do for themselves, at first. Wilson's character is struggling to pass the Bar exam while his condescending wife (Jennifer Connelly) serves as the sole provider. She's also happy to take the Favorite Parent Award from her two-year-old son, and you can see the feeling of betrayal in Wilson's face when she comes home from work and their son runs to her as though his father never even existed (let alone spent the entire day amusing him). Winslet's character feels equally alienated from her family life. Her husband lures himself into a kinky internet world behind her back, but the distance between them is anything but concealed. 

In the midst of the suburban turmoil of deep sighs and passive aggressive statements made under the breath is the story of Ronnie McGorvey (Jackie Earle Haley), a recently released sex offender who becomes the town's scapegoat. Unlike Winslet and Wilson's characters, Ronnie's sins are plastered all over the paper and embedded into the psyches of everyone in the community. He is the one who makes their immorality seem less problematic, less underhanded or seething with guilt. Another neighbor, played by Noah Emmerich, makes it his campaign to torment Ronnie, whose sympathy wavers from scene to scene. He's clearly not making it in the social scene (as evidenced by a blind date that takes a horrendous turn by his own doing), and yet by the end of it the movie is asking once again for us to pity him, when he's mutilated himself. 

Winslet and Wilson are both terrific actors. They make the drabness of suburbia and their characters a little less bland. However, the redemption story at the end is too calculated. We're expecting some kind of life-altering crisis and what we get instead is the "what the hell are we doing" moment from Wilson and Winslet. (In the sense that the ending works against our expectations, the movie succeeds.) The main characters return to their boring, sedated existences with their repellent spouses. Emmerich's character tries to save Haley's, after spending the entire movie vilifying him. On one level, the movie shows us the reality of having to settle for the less appealing life because it may be the right thing to do. Perhaps the movie doesn't have the strength of its convictions, or maybe possibly it's the characters who don't. They want their little fling, and they're not wanting to put an expiration date on it. They simply know that it could be terminated at any time, and they'll deal with the repercussions when the time comes.

Based on the book by Tom Perotta. Directed by Todd Field. ★★★½