"The Girl on the Train" fetishizes drab, miserable women, goes nowhere interesting from there.

The best thrillers concern themselves with the lives of women: either women fighting some force of evil—whether man, beast, machine, or self—like Audrey Hepburn in Charade (and Wait Until Dark) or Sigourney Weaver in the Alien movies; or women who embrace evil with reverie, like Barbara Stanwyck in Double Indemnity or the character of Eve Harrington (played by Anne Baxter) in All About Eve (not a true thriller, but in many ways, a psychologically chilling movie about a sociopath who schemes her way to power and fame). Agency is the key, whether it’s used for good or for ill, because agency makes these characters compelling, makes us root for them whether they’re slaying vampires or breaking hearts or betraying someone close to them. Why is it then that the new thriller The Girl on the Train, which is based on the hugely popular novel by Paula Hawkins, cooks up such drab, powerless women and then marinates in their own misery for two hours?

It’s hard to believe that in 2016 we could get stuck with such an anti-feminist thriller about three women who are too obsessed with the men they’re married to—or divorced from, or sleeping with—to see anything of value in themselves. I realize that there are women in real life who struggle with these feelings of worthlessness, women whose lives and desires and ambitions orbit their men like little moons, with no other identity than “wife” to give them meaning. But if real life is so confining and so disempowering for so many women (undoubtedly the largest audience for this book/movie), surely thrillers about women have an even more urgent task to tell stories that empower women, that give actresses juicy, daring, complex characters, and not just depict mopey put-upon, soulless bodies that function dually as sex toys and baby ovens. Because The Girl on the Train essentially fetishizes women as sex objects and mommies. There’s nothing else to see here. 

Emily Blunt plays the main character, Rachel, a woman so wrecked by her divorce from Tom (Justin Theroux) that she rides the train every morning and night, sipping vodka in a water bottle, so that she can pass by the house where she used to live, the house where he lives still, with his new wife (the one he had the affair with) and their baby. Rachel couldn’t conceive, and this “failure” has turned her into a drunk. Through flashbacks, we see that Rachel is at times a violent drunk, smashing mirrors with golf clubs, or throwing a tray of deviled eggs across a room at a party. Rachel, we’re told, is a mess, and this drove Tom to infidelity with Anna (Rebecca Ferguson). 

In fact, Rachel is such a mess that she fantasizes about another couple on the same street (she's never met them), catching faint glimmers of their apparently hot romance as the train rolls by. So when she spies the woman making out with another man—on their back balcony—she’s thrown into despair. How could this woman (whose name is Megan) jeopardize what Rachel assumes is the ideal marriage?* Then Megan (Haley Bennett) goes missing, and her disappearance becomes a new obsession for Rachel, since stalking Tom and his new family is starting to get a little humdrum. Megan, incidentally, was Tom and Anna’s nanny. Megan’s husband Scott (Luke Evans), was hoping that the job would give Megan baby fever, but it did not. In one flashback, Megan quits the nannying position, and she can barely contain her contempt as Anna complains, “I have so much work to do going to the farmer’s market and picking out the right fruits for my baby.” Is this line meant to be a funny dig at self-involved upper-middle-class housewives, or does someone (either Hawkins or the screenwriter, Erin Cressida Wilson) think that schlepping for fruit at a farmer’s market takes hours and hours? It’s hard to say, because director Tate Taylor lets the remark fall flat. I laughed, but most of the other people in the theater did not, so who knows what the intention was.

But even if that line was intended as comic relief, it’s the one solitary intentional joke in the movie. There’s no humor here, just a very particular kind of white upper-class misery, the kind that Charles Dickens exposed in many novels so that poor people could see just how difficult life is for the rich; that way maybe they’d be grateful for what they have (or, don’t have). 

Dripping sarcasm aside, The Girl on the Train is surprisingly Victorian in its treatment of women who reject their traditional roles. (Although it’s not Victorian in other ways: Victorian thrillers—like The Woman in White or Lady Audley’s Secret or Dracula—never let serious matters stand in the way of showing their audience a good time.) Megan, the girl who doesn’t want to be a mommy (flashbacks reveal that she “accidentally” drowned her own infant years ago), is a self-described “whore” who gets murdered. The other two women in the movie desperately want to be wives and mothers, and will do anything (even if it means marrying a complete scumbag) to accomplish this task. So they get to live. 

The Girl on the Train owes quite a bit to Rebecca, the terrific Daphne du Maurier gothic, which Alfred Hitchcock adapted for the screen in 1940. But unlike Megan, Rebecca is a fascinating character, despite the fact that she’s never actually present in the story, because she’s already dead. Du Maurier’s punishment of a transgressive woman is no less disturbing, but it’s far more entertaining because we have grown to deplore Rebecca, who’s a real cad, sleeping around with various men despite being married to the richest elitist in Cornwall and living in his great big house by the sea. People idolize Rebecca, because she puts up a great front, while secretly treating her husband's prestigious family name like a rag. But all of this is the backstory, because Rebecca’s widowed husband, supposedly heartbroken over her death, has remarried, to a gauche 20-year-old girl with no name (du Maurier couldn’t think one up), and this girl begins to be oppressed by (and obsessed with) Rebecca.

The Girl on the Train functions much like a gothic thriller, but it lacks verve and excitement and color. There’s no vitality or visual trickery. There’s hardly anything visually interesting at all, save a moment where the film shows us multiple points-of-view that offer conflicting information. And the whole movie hinges on the fact that Rachel can’t remember an encounter with Megan (because she blacked out during it) on the night Megan was murdered. Rachel’s amnesia then becomes a tired device that strings us along this extended Law and Order episode. And the biggest revelations in The Girl on the Train are nowhere near as exciting as they purport to be. This mopey thriller is drab and gloomy from start to finish.

With Edgar Ramirez (as Megan’s hunky headshrinker), Allison Janney (as a homicide detective), and Lisa Kudrow.

*Edited for clarification/accuracy.

Spy

Four years ago, Melissa McCarthy hit the stratosphere playing the unexpectedly wise misfit Megan in Paul Feig’s Bridesmaids. But the resulting McCarthy vehicles have been largely disappointing until now. The Heat was funny, but totally misshapen, like putting the camera in front of a drunk person at a bar. Letting McCarthy lose it for ten minutes can indeed deliver laughs, but they’re cheap laughs that reduce her to a very limiting kind of crazy-lady “performance.” And the result of this direction has been pretty dismal. (See Identity Thief and Tammy.) Now Paul Feig has returned as director and given us Spy, which is structurally the strongest Melissa McCarthy vehicle thus far. Spy is clever and inventive in ways that her previous films were not, and, happily, this movie lets its star be competent and self-aware. It was so hard to give a damn about Tammy when she was such a heartless moron (quite a needless, even cruel combination for any character). It’s much easier and much more fun to rally for McCarthy’s character in Spy: Susan Cooper, the CIA desk jockey who secretly pines for a more exciting career.  

Cooper plays the virtual wingman to Jude Law’s character, an agent who gets to do all the fun stuff, like infiltrate nuclear arms transactions in Bulgaria. Jude Law feels like perfect casting here: he has a corrupted charmingness about him; you always expect him to be angling for himself even when he’s mostly a good guy. Even as she sits at a computer screen watching Jude Law’s back (“there’s a guy coming down the stairs; there’s three of them coming toward you down the hallway”), Susan Cooper is in command and good at what she does. In terms of characterization, this movie has done a complete 180, because now almost everyone but McCarthy is totally inept. The CIA office is infested with rats, and we keep seeing the little rodents scurrying around the cubicles and climbing up on employees’ shoulders. While Susan repeatedly saves her agent from actual gunshots and bomb explosions, her colleagues sare shooting the shit around the water cooler three feet away from her desk.

But let’s skip ahead, to where McCarthy is unexpectedly pulled into some exciting field work in Paris. She finally gets to be a legit spy, and that’s where the movie gets interesting. Feig’s script actually bothers to surprise us, which is itself a refreshing delight in a world where comedies are too content with mediocrity. Feig stops short of making this Naked Gun 44¼, but he clearly has an affection both for spy movies and spoofs of spy movies. (The opening titles could actually be mistaken for a Bond film; and Spy isn’t afraid to let someone fall flat on his ass for a joke.) I was also surprised by how many people actually get killed in Spy, which is something many comedies are afraid to do, instead taking the Looney Toons “extreme-violence-will-only-temporarily-hurt-you” tack most of the time. But the characters in Spy get beat up and bruised and make fools of themselves and occasionally die.

McCarthy, however, takes everything on her chin, and as her character gets deeper into the film’s loosey-goosey espionage plot, she gets tougher and more comically aggressive. Feig has finally mastered the balancing act of controlling McCarthy while allowing her to pop off just enough to leave us in fits of hysterics. And she’s surrounded by a wonderful ensemble cast, all of whom have been given full characters to play. Jason Statham is particularly appealing as the comically badass agent who’s not nearly as skilled as he thinks he is. Miranda Hart, who may be unfamiliar to American viewers but who has made a name for herself in British television, is a delight as Susan’s co-worker and best friend. When the movie slows and down gives us little bursts of conversation between these two performers, it feels like a gift. McCarthy finally has a full, rich (ish) character to play, and Hart and McCarthy bring out the best in each other. (I did wish that there could have been a little more shaping to their friendship; it doesn’t get quite as deep as it could. But it’s a start.)

And then there’s Rose Byrne. What can I say about Rose Byrne? I am so happy that she is making movies. Byrne is beautiful and glamorous and smart and funny, and it’s always a pleasure when Hollywood actresses get to be all of those things at once. Here she plays the villain, a spoiled, rich Bulgarian woman named Rayna Boyanov who alone knows the location of some nuclear weapon. (It’s the kind of unimportant spy-movie-nonsense that you have to have in these movies.) It’s not evident in the film’s theatrical trailer, but Byrne and McCarthy spend much of the film playing off each other, and their chemistry pops when McCarthy turns up the volume on her aggressiveness, matching Byrne's terrific mean-girl-with-nukes bitchiness.

The best thing about Spy is its shaping. Feig has written an actual story with actual jokes and characters that feel full of life. These qualities allow the humor to grow organically out of the story; it doesn’t feel like someone is just pointing the camera at insanity and hoping for the best. Sometimes that works, sometimes it doesn’t. I’m always grateful when filmmakers take the time to create funny situations and then let their actors breathe life into them. Spy has vitality and spark to it. You have fun with these people who seem like they’re having fun too.

With Allison Janney, Bobby Cannavale, Peter Serafinowicz, and 50 Cent.  

The Duff

The Duff is a high school comedy which purports to be about the arbitrary nature of labels, but isn’t quite ready to exist without them. It’s also a movie about dating and the social hierarchy and bullying and self-image and the nature of beauty and social media. (Because teen comedies can’t just be about friendship, anymore). The film grasps at so many themes and plot elements that its most charming feature—an unlikely, weird friendship between the protagonist Bianca (who’s basically invisible in her high school) and her nemesis, a “jock” named Wes—flounders, only to be given artificial respiration under the guise of an obvious and clichéd romance.

Wes is played by Robbie Amell, whose eyebrows look like perfectly manicured little boomerangs, framing his forehead in a constant furrow. (He looks like a young Louis Jourdan.) His character is more than a bit confounding, probably because the movie, which claims to be anti-labeling, labels him a “jock” and a “man-whore” from the word go, and then tries to humanize him. (It works because Amell has charm to spare even when he’s being sleazy, and despite a contrived effort to give him home-life problems near the end of the film.)

Bianca seems to dislike Wes, even though they grew up together and he is the only guy who pays any attention to her. (Granted, he’s also kind of a jerk to her, unless they’re alone, which is when he actually acts like a friend.) It is Wes who sets the plot into motion, by telling Bianca that in her friendship with beautiful, popular girls Jessica and Casey, Bianca is the “duff” or the “designated ugly fat friend.” Bianca has no reason to suspect Jessica and Casey of such conspiracy, but she dumps them anyway (in a badly staged scene in the school library).

The Duff has a lot of structural problems, and chief among these is the way it loses track of certain plot elements and characters. After Bianca’s friendship with Jessica and Casey goes on the skids, we barely see them until the end of the movie. A film about teenage girls that fails to explore the dynamics of their friendship feels a bit like a copout. The movie awkwardly transitions into a romantic teen comedy about a girl who’s anti-labels trying to change herself so that she can impress a guy.

This is director Ari Sandel’s first feature (he won an Oscar for his 2005 short film West Bank Story), and he is working with a script by Josh A. Cagan from Kody Keplinger’s novel. Sandel doesn’t yet have the knack of shaping a scene and drawing out the humor organically. There are some laughs, but Sandel relies too heavily obvious jokes and mugging from his performers. And, what’s more, he ties everything together with a clumsy narration from his star, Mae Whitman (whom viewers may remember as the girlfriend of Michael Cera’s character on Arrested Development). Whitman’s character, Bianca, often embarrasses herself for a laugh, and while this kind of self-deprecating humor can be charming, it sometimes feels like an act of desperation on the director’s part, as though he weren’t sure why we should like Bianca in the first place.

There’s a scene where Bianca and Wes go to a mall so that Bianca can revamp her wardrobe. Despite the fact that Wes is Bianca’s nemesis (at this point in the film, anyway), she enlists his help because he’s popular and knows what makes a girl look appealing. At least, that’s what Bianca imagines. But Bianca tries on a series of hideous outfits and the scene turns into a big joke. We’re just never sure who the joke is supposed to be on. Bianca makes out with a mannequin (calling him Toby, after the boy on whom she has a crush), while Wes records the scene with his phone so they can “evaluate” her later. This scene is really just a setup for one of the movie’s major plot points: Bianca’s mugging is also recorded by an underling of the high school queen bee and the video goes viral. Bianca becomes the school pariah, and all because the queen bee (played by Madison Morgan, who’s terrific and possesses not just a flare for being conniving and narcissistic, but also a real comic touch that accentuates her performance).

The Duff is an imperfect comedy, but even still, that moment—when the girl and the guy express their love for each other at the school prom— that we’ve been essentially conditioned to expect in a film like this is somehow just as exciting as if it were new. And, even though the film has problems, I appreciate that it has layers to it, despite the fact that those layers aren’t very seamlessly put together.

With Allison Janney (as Bianca’s mom) and Ken Jeong (as her journalism teacher). 

Juno

Watching Juno (2007)--for the first time--reminded me of all the other independent movies I saw during the first decade of the 21st century, and how they all had a kind of disaffected, ironic tone to them. This was a trendy way to make movies in the decade of the 2000s, perhaps as a reaction against Hollywood’s big dramatic escapist gestures of the 90s, like Titanic or Braveheart or Saving Private Ryan. I’m not quite sure what it is that made so many independent films between 2000 and 2009 have this quality of resistance to direct emotion, but suddenly it was not cool for movies to have feelings unless the characters were fully “aware” of what they were feeling and how they were feeling it. Moreover, all of these indie films took on a hipsterish quality, embracing everything that was aesthetically vintage, and indeed the ironic tone of which I speak is pretty hipsterish in and of itself. It made for an interesting if underwhelming spate of films such as Donnie Darko, The Life Aquatic, The Door in the Floor, Garden State, Napoleon Dynamite, Sideways, Junebug, The Squid and the Whale, Away We Go, and (500) Days of Summer. I hated a lot of these movies (and loved a handful of them), and now that we seem to have gotten over this period of disaffectedness in movies (I mean, last year’s The Immigrant was absolutely in touch with its emotions, and 2013’s Frances Ha, which did embody some of these qualities to a degree, wasn’t ashamed of letting you feel for its heroine), it seems like a good time to go back and take stock of them. What was going on in these films? What was it that, despite the fact that independent films are supposed to be known for their stunning originality, made them all feel like slight variations of each other? (I hope to explore more of them in the coming months, but for now I'll focus on Juno.)

Juno absolutely embodies these trendy-indie qualities. The film’s writer-director, Jason Reitman, has created a character who seems almost unreal in her self-awareness. Juno, played by Ellen Page, is a teenager who gets pregnant in high school and then decides to have the baby and give it up for adoption—to a loving, wealthy suburban couple played by Jason Bateman and Jennifer Garner. Juno waltzes through the movie with a cutting, self-deprecating sense of humor, her armor against a world that has presumably proven itself again and again to be a place of disappointment. For the first hour or so I found her incredibly grating. (Chief among my complaints was the dialogue, as Juno says a lot of stupid phrases like “do me a solid” that feel like a middle-aged person trying to write youthful dialogue and missing the mark.) 

Worse yet was the hipster-music soundtrack. Every song was precious and felt like bad folk tunes merged with bad high school band music (ala Sufjan Stevens). These songs are of the cutesy and vintage variety, and this was a particular annoyance to me, because it felt like the movie didn’t want to experience any kind of direct emotion, not even in its music. Instead of having a score that would move the audience (which might be manipulative), the music instead coats every scene in a kind of superficial self-awareness glass cage, like the Pope driving in a motorcade encased in bullet-proof glass. Juno is prickly under the weight of all this armor, and seems unable to have a real conversation without a continuous self-commentary, like someone who berates herself so as to prevent anyone else from doing so. Reitman also can’t resist having his characters (namely Ellen Page and Jason Bateman) argue about their taste in music and movies, name-dropping directors and bands. At one point, they sit down and watch a Herschell Gordon Lewis splatter movie called The Wizard of Gore (on VHS, which is so hipster). There was also the critique of suburbia that is oh so easy for movies to make. But, the movie redeems itself in that area, because Reitman humanizes his characters (most of them), and doesn’t try to make some sweeping statement about all people living in suburbia (or anywhere, for that matter).

Halfway through the movie, my attitude toward Juno shifted because of a realization I had: Despite the “indie”-ness of this film, Jason Reitman does want his characters to feel things directly, and his story is actually quite sentimental and touching. But for some reason he felt compelled to lay all this hipstery independent-movie paraphernalia on top of the story, perhaps to make it feel less like a CBS movie-of-the-week, or one of those low-budget teenage abortion dramas from the 1970s. (Also, watching Juno really improved my feelings about 2014's Obvious Child, starring Jenny Slate. I think it's probably the better film.) So Juno is a faux-clever indie comedy-drama about teenage pregnancy that, underneath all its prickles and irregularities, is a truly affecting, winning study of human drama. The individual emotional crises of all the characters are well-thought-out and proportional; the problems between the married couple feel both believable and believably resolved (or is it unresolved?) at the end of the picture (Jennifer Garner, it should be noted, gives a terrific performance), and Juno’s journey of self-awareness actually achieves something: the too-smart-for-her-own-good protagonist does feel things, and can be affected by the people in her life. (And even though some of Juno's dialogue is irritating, there are many laugh-out-loud funny lines in this movie.)

Also, Juno isn’t nearly as cynical as its top layer would have us believe. Indeed, it’s a movie that wants to hope that people can be better than they are, without cleaning up all the mess in a specious, sitcom-like finale. I liked Juno in spite of itself at times, and if I could just change the soundtrack and some of Juno's inane dialogue, I’d probably be content with it. With J.K. Simmons (as Juno’s dad), Allison Janney (as Juno’s stepmom, who delivers a few good zingers), Michael Cera (as Juno’s best friend and baby daddy), and Olivia Thirlby (as her best girlfriend).

Tammy

Tammy represents quite a lot of missed opportunities. It's a meandering comedy about a woman who would generally be described as "white trash" embarking on a road trip with her alcoholic grandmother. (Using Grandma's car and money.) The film opens with its star, the amiably blunt, unfettered, unashamedly not-all-together Melissa McCarthy, driving her beat-up green sedan down a narrow country road. She reaches in the back for something and careens right into a deer. Tammy gets out and crouches down, lovingly talking to the deer, patting it (dangerously near its impressive antlers) and praying it will get up and scamper off unscathed. When it does, it startles Tammy (laughter from the audience) and she happily watches it indeed walk away, unharmed by the collision. This scene is telling, because McCarthy usually acts like a stick of dynamite, and whenever a comic scene turns chaotic, she explodes. But here, as Tammy, McCarthy uses a little more restraint. She's not quite as profane as she was in The Heat. And she's not as worldly-wise as she was in Bridesmaids. But seeing Melissa McCarthy play a ne'er-do-well is kind of depressing. Perhaps because she's a regular person, so not Hollywood, it's been enjoyably surprising to see her play people who are capable and funny. Here she's funny because she's a putz.

Sadly, Tammy isn't the smashing comedy it could have been. This is almost exclusively the project of Melissa McCarthy and her husband, actor/director Ben Falcone. McCarthy produced the film, and the two of them wrote the screenplay. (Falcone appears here as the manager of a hamburger joint.) But neither of them seems sure of who or what Tammy is supposed to be. Is she the obnoxious perpetual screw-up of the first half of the film? If so, the film seriously errs when suddenly Tammy turns nice and gets cleaned up (thanks to her cousin Lenore, a rich lesbian full of homespun wisdom played by Kathy Bates, whose partner is played by the lovely Sandra Oh). McCarthy has scored a lot of points for being a blowsy wreck with a foul mouth. But I think the reason people fell in love with her as a performer was because she was an endearing oddity in Bridesmaids. She was the only character in that film who was brutally honest. Yet behind her honesty was love, not spite. Tammy is so much a caricature that when we get to the sweet side of her, it feels utterly manufactured. This character is a circus act, a "greatest hits" compilation of McCarthy's somewhat limited--although admittedly very funny at times--schtick.

Perhaps I wouldn't be so irritated with this movie if it weren't for the sheer waste of it. This film has in its cast, among others, Susan Sarandon, Allison Janney, Toni Collette, and Gary Cole. Yet the characters seem poorly thought out, particularly in terms of age. They cast Saradon, who's 67, as Tammy's grandmother (McCarthy is 43), Allison Janney, who's 54, as her mom. That shoddy math bugged me throughout the film because a mother-daughter movie would have worked just as well. Sarandon is too fresh, too strong of an actress, to play the feeble but feisty grandma. It's as if they wanted to go for the short, prunish old grandmother (played by Estelle Getty) from The Golden Girls but cast Bea Arthur to play her instead. Sarandon really doesn't get to do that much of interest here anyway. And despite the fact that she does a lot of immature things (flashing her breasts at a lesbian party, shacking up with a stranger she meets in a bar), it's very difficult to see her as Tammy's mom. They just don't seem remotely related to each other. As for actresses Allison Janney and Toni Collette, I have no idea why they agreed to make this film when they had absolutely nothing funny or interesting to do (especially Collette, who barely speaks). Perhaps it was a favor? Certainly a misuse of their considerable talents.

There's also a tedious love interest, played by Mark Duplass, who's probably the most uninteresting romantic lead I've seen in a long time. The film seems ready and willing to give Tammy a redemptive streak, yet it's not bold enough to give her a hunky Channing Tatum-ish star (or someone with more personality) as a boyfriend. Perhaps they thought a bland character would balance Tammy like mayo on a chili pepper. (I'm not sure that's actually a thing...) Duplass is just too boring, too neutral, too unoffensive. He tells Tammy that he's attracted to her because his life is boring and she's very not boring, and Tammy rightly makes fun of his poor complimenting skills. Why did the filmmakers think this would be good comedy? It's makes for a lot of dreary scenes between them both. Why didn't they just find Tammy some hunky Tab Hunter-esque actor the way John Waters did for Divine in Polyester?

Kathy Bates was the most likable character in this movie, and even Sandra Oh came off well despite her limited screen time and dialogue. She has a lovely talent for facial expressions, and she acts circles around some of the more talkative characters. Dan Aykroyd shows up briefly as Tammy's father, but it's as if they just wanted to say, "hey, we've got Dan Aykroyd in this movie. You haven't seen him in a while! He's funny!" He does get one funny moment when he threatens to murder Tammy's cheating husband (played by Nat Faxon). Yes, Tammy is full of talented people assigned to undercooked roles, which may be the worst crime a comedy can commit.

There are amusing bits. Perhaps the funniest scene in the movie is the one you see in the trailer, when Tammy holds up a fast food restaurant with a greasy paper bag over her head and another one fastened over her hand so she can pretend she's holding a gun. When the film stops being a road trip movie--because Tammy and Grandma are visiting cousin Lenore at her beautiful country house in Kentucky--it feels like a relief from the banal chaos of their journey. But mostly Tammy is a messy movie about the gloriousness of being a mess. I could vouch for the second part if this movie were more put together. That's one mess that does need fixing.

The Way, Way Back

The Way Way Back feels like a missed opportunity at times. It tries to be a profound comedy-drama, but its simple story works against those ambitions, for the better. (Simplicity is so underrated that even the simple movie is trying to complicate itself.) This is an enjoyable comedy-drama that's full of interesting characters, but they never develop beyond the predictable. There's pouty teenager Duncan (Liam James), stuck at a New England beach town with his mother (Toni Collette) and her asinine boyfriend (Steve Carell). Then there's Susanna, a chronically annoyed teenager who lives next door with her mom (played by Allison Janney, who's funny but tries too hard to be endearingly obnoxious) and her little brother, whose lazy eye is a point of amusement for his mother.

The film is about Duncan's finding acceptance. He takes to wandering the town and eventually wanders into a water park run by Sam Rockwell and Maya Rudolph. Rockwell's Owen is a man-child who doesn't take anything seriously. But he tries too hard to be funny, and you feel the effort in every line. (He still manages to be likable much of the time.) Rudolph's part feels under-written. She has what amounts to a glorified cameo, and when she gets annoyed with Owen for being so immature, it's never addressed. She just gets over it and that's that.

I found much of The Way Way Back to be charming and refreshing. The film represents for me a conundrum. It's mostly well-acted, and the cast is appealing, as is the story. (That ending was wonderfully understated and really made up for the stupid water-slide-passing moment.) But I kept wondering why on earth Toni Collete was dating Carell's character--who's such an obvious jerk-- in the first place. She provides some shoddy reasoning: "he said it was too late, we were already in this together." It's the kind of dumb movie-writing that is all to easily relied upon when a writer is running out of credible ideas. With AnnaSophia Robb, Amanda Peet, Rob Corddry, Jim Rash, Nat Faxon, Robert Capron, and River Alexander. Directed and written by Fason and Rash. ★★★

Drop Dead Gorgeous

A small-town beauty pageant in Minnesota is the focus of this dark comedy, filmed in a mockumentary style that's only halfway committed to being a mockumentary. Its characters are the stuff of small-town stereotypes: gun-shooting beauty queens with raging tempers and bloated egos. Kirstie Alley plays the pageant's spokeswoman. She's a former queen herself, and she's vying for the success of her daughter (the always wickedly beautiful Denise Richards) in the upcoming show. But a nice girl (Kirsten Dunst) is in the way because she possesses some actual talent.

Drop Dead Gorgeous (1999) gives you an admittedly fun cajoling of beauty pageants and the obsessive people who participate in them, as contestants, judges, commentators, or spectators. But the story itself isn't sustained the way Best in Show (2000), which may be the best mockumentary ever made, is. Instead, the makers of Drop Dead Gorgeous seem lazily content to rely on their self-perceived cleverness for noticing the outlandish stupidity of their all too easy target.

It's the actors who save this movie from fumbling too badly. Particularly Allison Janney, who plays the best friend of Dunsts's mom (Ellen Barkin). Janney's character is a deliciously uncouth small-town trailer park goddess, and Janney, who is a beautiful, tall, talented comedienne, seems to be having more fun than just about anyone else. Kirstie Alley is good, but somehow frightfully believable. Some of the dark humor is disturbingly dark, and yet, this is what gives the movie its edge. Contestants keep meeting with macabre deaths, and other "accidents" indicate that someone's trying to fix the voting process. But without the black comedy, I don't think this movie would have had any teeth.

Amy Adams shows up in a funny but insubstantial role as a floozy with her eyes on the prize. Also starring Mindy Sterling (another remarkably talented comic actress who doesn't get enough time on the screen in this movie), Sam McMurray, Brittany Murphy (emanating a bubbly, electric, comic energy), Nora Dunn, Mo Gaffney, and Mary Gillis. Directed by Michael Patrick Jann.

Away We Go

I had heard much praise of Sam Mendes's little change of pace, Away We Go, and I wasn't disappointed. It is the story of a couple in their early 30's experiencing the fears and joys of becoming parents for the first time, a change that triggers a deep yearning for roots and some sense of belonging. In a culture of seemingly constant mobility, Away We Go captures the scattered sense of community that so many people have. Amidst their voyage from Arizona to Wisconsin to Montreal to Miami and eventually to her childhood home along the Mississippi River, our weary but persistent heroes (John Krasinski, Maya Rudolph) encounter the struggles of their friends and family, seemingly taking mental notes along the way: of what not to do, what to do better, differently, the same, etc. The little vignettes, divided by location, offer some wonderful performances by such fine character actors as Catherine O'Hara and Jeff Daniels (Krasinki's parents), Allison Janney (Rudolph's outspoken, crazy former boss who enjoys the shock value of her demeanor and calls her own daughter a "dyke"), and a particularly amusing performance by Maggie Gyllenhaal as an old family friend of Krasinki, who is the epitome of the trendy modern-day hippy. I found this movie refreshing in its examination of modern values: it doesn't seem to have an axe to grind, and is instead content to simply let its characters find out things for themselves. ★★½

Primary Colors

Based on the book by Anonymous, Primary Colors (1998) is a roman a clef of the Clintons during their 1992 Whitehouse bid. John Travolta plays Southern governor Jack Stanton, Emma Thompson, his wife, Susan. Travolta dons the Bill Clinton-esque accent and that bullshit twinkle in his eye fairly well, but the supporting cast really makes this film come to life. Emma Thompson is superb--not just in concealing her English accent, but in embodying the aura of Susan Stanton (Hillary Clinton): cold enough to survive the nastiness of politics and the onslaught of scandals, smart enough to channel her ideas through her husband (who's better at connecting with the voters on an emotional level than on an intellectual one). In Short, Primary Colors offers a richly conceived glimpse at (and under) our political landscape. Sure, things have changed since 1992 particularly because of technology, but I think Primary Colors taps into a somewhat universal truth about the necessary cynicism one must have when approaching the subject of politics and politicians. Kathy Bates gives the most poignant--and frequently hilarious--performance as one of the Stantons' campaign advisers, who realizes--for the second time in her career--that ideals are lost in the political spectrum where appearances and behind-the- scenes deals carry more weight. While I was left feeling that this film was a bit of a love note to the Clintons (in spite of its frequently unflattering portrayals of them), I think it also captured the seeming hopelessness of politicians. People are constantly looking for someone to put their hope in, and if you can get that, you can do anything. ★★½