Forced: The New Adventures of Old Star Wars

Note: I have made no attempts to conceal spoilers in this review, so read at your own risk.

After the last three films in the Star Wars franchise, The Force Awakens had nowhere to go but up. While all the superfans were still basking in their space opera reverie from opening weekend, I managed to see an afternoon showing of the latest Star Wars. Here’s my history regarding this franchise, in a nutshell: I resisted them until 4th grade because everyone else was so into them; then I really loved them for a few years, until one of my best friends—a Star Wars devotee if ever there was one, who made Star Wars home movies with his brother—scared me straight. I wasn’t going to be that cultish about it. (There were so many other things to be cultish about.) The Force Awakens is a relatively clever and entertaining jaunt into space opera, but it hits all its predictable beats with such self-satisfaction that you know what’s coming before it happens. This is pure nostaglic giddiness on the part of director J.J. Abrams, pure “Look-at-me-getting-to-direct-a-Star-Wars-movie!” 

Nostalgia is the wind in the sails of The Force Awakens. J.J. Abrams has genuine affection for these movies, and he deftly adheres to all their idiosyncrasies. Force mirrors Star Wars (as in A New Hope) in a number of ways: it establishes new, young heroes Rey (Daisy Ridley), Finn (John Boyega) and Poe (Oscar Isaac), a new (old) threat in the form of Han and Leia’s corrupted Jedi son Kylo Ren (Adam Driver). And now Luke Skywalker has taken on the Ben Kenobi aura of mystery, having fled civilization in despair. (His attempts to train his nephew backfired, and he feels responsible for Kylo Ren’s conversion to the Dark Side.)

Rey is essentially the new Luke Skywalker, although Finn may sort of share that credit. Rey is a scavenger living on a bleak desert planet called Jakku, where she awaits the return of her family. (It's not quite clear what happened to them.) Her existence is very Mad Max. We see her trading machine parts for food and sitting with watchful yearning (like Luke did in A New Hope) for something better to happen to her. She's pulled into the drama of Star Wars via an adorable droid named BB-8, who's carrying important information regarding Luke Skywalker's whereabouts. (Another mirror-plot checkpoint.)

Let’s remember that the original Star Wars was itself a nostalgia trip, culled by George Lucas from serials he remembered watching on Saturday mornings as a child. That makes The Force Awakens a nostalgia trip within a nostalgia trip; add to that the fact that the kids who grew up on the originals have now lived long enough to spawn their very own Star Wars-loving progeny, and you’ve essentially got third-hand mythology. That was why, about an hour into the movie, I began to pull away from it. The new characters’ stories are compelling, but Abrams cannot fully overcome the ring of familiarity. And he’s too much in love with the series to really want to, try as he might.

There are little moments of humor that really pop, and the performances of the three young leads are winning. Acting has improved so much over the years that they’re leagues ahead of Harrison Ford, Carrie Fisher, and Mark Hamill when they first debuted in 1977. Those three, naturally, return for this new installment, with varying degrees of screen time. (Hamill seemed like a no show for most of the film, but Abrams pays it off smartly at the end.) 

J.J. Abrams has a knack for tweaking pop culture iconography into his own re-packaged product. But I’m not sure that qualifies him as a storyteller. It’s perhaps good enough that Abrams is better than George Lucas. But as a director—of movies, particularly—Abrams is erratic. Some of the action (meaning plot development, not merely fight scenes and explosions) is well-structured, like the climactic lightsaber showdown between Rey and Kylo Ren. At other times, Abrams fails to fully set up a scene. When Rey is attacked by some stormtroopers in a marketplace, we see it from afar through the perspective of Finn. The scene doesn't really work unless we're up close, watching Rey's reaction, watching her fend off the stormtroopers, rooting for her. Of course, the purpose of putting it from Finn's perspective is to have him rush to save her, only to get there after Rey has dispensed with her attackers on her own. She doesn't need his help. It's a cool, enlightened moment for a Star Wars movie, and yet the scene doesn't totally work as structured.

Likewise, the dialogue fluctuates in quality. Abrams wisely goes for silence in two key dramatic scenes: when Rey and Leia embrace after the death of Han Solo, and when Rey hands Luke Skywalker his lightsaber at the end. It’s hard to imagine any dialogue that wouldn’t have sounded cheesy in those moments. But in other scenes, the dialogue is laboriously clunky, like a laughably bad moment when Han Solo and Leia discuss their son’s temptation to the dark side, like they’re expounding on the ingredients of a chicken soup recipe. It’s some of the worst dialogue in the movie: utterly lacking in emotional truth, and utterly functional. (Perhaps it’s an ode to George Lucas’s hackneyed dialogue.)

Pauline Kael once said that Star Wars was like a box of Cracker Jacks that was all prizes. J.J. Abrams has adopted a similar storytelling method. He doesn’t have the patience to let the weighty moments in the story be earned. They’re revealed quickly and haphazardly—like when Kylo Ren removes his mask. (Remember it took us three movies to see Darth Vador’s face.) And when the young man kills his father—the beloved Han Solo—it feels both too late and too soon. (Harrison Ford apparently wanted Lucas to kill his character off in Return of the Jedi, but Lucas balked at shooting such a dark ending.) It’s the right choice, but a misplaced one. Perhaps it should have happened in Part Two, but without Solo’s death, The Force Awakens would have no dramatic weight to it.

But despite all my quibbles, I basically enjoyed The Force Awakens, even if I was expecting more from it. It's certainly better than the previous three installments, although that's not saying much, and Abrams has potentially laid the groundwork for a really first-rate middle section just like the original trilogy did with/for Empire Strikes Back. We'll have to wait and see.

With Peter Mayhew, Anthony Daniels, Lupita Nyong’o, Domnhall Gleeson, Andy Serkis, Max Von Sydow.

This Is Where I Leave You

Although there are moments when This Is Where I Leave You is charming, funny, interesting, even poignant, it’s generally a mess. In fact the movie is such a mess that it's tempting to think that the makers confused narrative drama with dramatic structure, and therefore found it perfectly natural to let the structure be as loose as everything else in the movie. There are insane things that happen in this movie, and they seem to be happening for the sheer insanity of it. It’s about four adult siblings who come together after the death of their father. The matriarch—played by Jane Fonda—gathers them together in her large New England home for Shiva, the seven-day period in the Jewish faith during which family members officially mourn the passing of a loved one.

The film has an attractive cast: Jason Bateman, Tina Fey, Adam Driver, Rose Byrne, Corey Stoll, Connie Britton, Timothy Olyphant, Dax Shepard, Ben Schwartz, and of course the great Jane Fonda. But in order to have so many big names and big stars, you need a lot of big parts. And that’s probably where This Is Where I Leave You loses its way. It has too many characters, all of whom are required to have multiple scenes of inner-crises spilling out into the open.

For instance, Jason Bateman’s character, Judd, who walks in on his wife and his boss during a vigorous round of love-making in his own bed. (The wife later finds out she’s pregnant, but that it’s Judd’s baby, not the boss’s.) Wendy (Fey) is the bossy big sister who possesses a sometimes charming, sometimes grating, know-it-all quality. She too has problems: namely a husband who’s too busy with work to pay attention to his wife and children. Paul (Stoll) is the responsible eldest sibling. He and his wife Anne (Kathryn Hahn) are having trouble conceiving. And then there’s Philip (Driver), the baby sibling who never grew up. The actors are adept enough to make it work at least half the time, but these are pretty tried-and-true character types torn right out of the pages of a sitcom script.

That’s another problem. This is a sitcom comedy-drama movie, and it represents an increasingly distinct genre of films that typically have mixed results. They do give traditionally comedic actors a chance to cry on screen and look puffy and unattractive. And, like any well-behaved sitcom, the serious moments are always punctuated with something funny. It’s not wrong to do that, but it also seems sort of cheap to stifle every dramatic moment with an easy laugh (frequently derived from Jane Fonda’s enormous breast implants, which trigger intense anxiety in all of her children, especially as she presses their faces against her plastic bosoms while consoling them, as she is wont to do). Then again, these dramatic moments aren’t so important or revealing or original that they can’t be improved with a little comedy.

Actually, the saving grace in this film is the dippy character played by Rose Byrne. She’s a girl from Judd’s past, and their relationship is rekindled in the usual ways you expect from this kind of thing: boy meets girl, boy remembers girl from adolescent years, boy and girl have good memories of each other, boy shows up at girl’s work—a skating rink—where they skate and talk while Cyndi Lauper’s “Time After Time” spills over them from the speakers above. It’s not a particularly original romance, but it’s sort of enchanting to see Jason Bateman and Rose Byrne just hanging out, especially when the rest of the movie feels like a competition to see how many problems can be crammed into two hours of film.

This Is Where I Leave You isn’t really offensive in its quest to be the latest dramedy (or a light-hearted version of August Osage County), but it is disappointing. The director, Shawn Levy, and the screenwriter, Jonathan Tropper (who adapted his own novel), seem to be clutching at fragments of two different genres and then cramming them onto the same canvas. It helps if you’re a fan of Jason Bateman and Tina Fey, although it may not help to see them wasted in middling material. But Bateman carries the film well, and Fey is capable of real pathos. It’s perhaps most depressing to see Jane Fonda turning such tricks in a movie theater. She’s funny, but she hardly gets to do anything that isn’t surface-level, lowest common denominator humor.

Adam Driver has probably the most appealing part, but then that makes sense: he’s the stereotypical fun-loving youngest sibling, the one who’s also a perpetual screw-up. And of course, he’s vested with lots of unintentional bits of wisdom, all of them obliviously aimed at teaching the other siblings that their lives are just as messy as his. But if the film weren’t so careful in its adherence to certain character types, it might be funnier, more inventive. As it is, it’s a predictable, sometimes even boring, family drama that’s bolstered by the appeal of its considerable talent.

Frances Ha

Frances Ha is a delight, alternately heartbreaking and funny, about one of the worst things in the whole world: people in their 20s. There are moments and lines of dialogue in writer-director Noah Baumbach's script that are so subtly clever you have only a vague idea that they might be little hidden diamonds awaiting re-discovery.

The titular character, Frances, is played with daffy aplomb by the lovely, tall, tentative looking Greta Gerwig (the 'Ha' is short for her last name, Halladay). Frances is a girl who, for all intents and purposes, cannot get her shit together. She has no filter on her speech, and she doesn't have a knack for reading social cues. Frances lives in New York with her best friend from college, Sophie (Mickey Sumner), but Sophie wants to move to an apartment in Tribeca and Frances can't afford it. Also, Sophie has a boyfriend nicknamed Patch (Patrick Heusinger), and they make fun of him but Sophie likes him more than she's willing to let on. Frances meanwhile, is in a stilted relationship that's on its last leg. She's also struggling to maintain her dream of being a professional dancer, as the company she's aspiring to has only admitted her as an apprentice.

Yes, there's a point in Frances Ha where you think: this may be the most depressing movie I've chosen to watch in a long time. And it's in black-and-white. Is there anything more disgustingly hipster than a black-and-white movie about New York City in 2013?  But it's not! It's a movie that makes you feel that even in the worst of circumstances, even when you're such a total screw-up that you seem to be clueless to your own self-sabotaging, there is hope. Things can get better. I really loved it. The performances were lovely, and it was nice to see a movie that didn't treat its down-on-her-luck heroine with contempt. (There are moments when you want to cry for Frances, or smack her, or both. But you always root for her.)

With Charlotte d'Amboise (who I think resembles Betty Buckley), Michael Zegen, Adam Driver, Michael Esper, Grace Grummer, Josh Hamilton, Justine Lupe, Maya Kazan, and Britta Phillips. 86 min. ★★★½