"Nocturnal Animals": A cautionary tale about the dangers of marrying bad writers

At first, Nocturnal Animals feels like a riff on movie thrillers: It’s set in Los Angeles, where Amy Adams plays Susan Morrow, the owner of a hip (and bankrupt) L.A. art gallery, and the opening sequence features various, nude, obese middle-aged and elderly women, dancing and flaunting their jiggly bodies with audacious confidence: Edith Massey on the outside and Marilyn Monroe on the inside. (Edith Massey was the snaggletoothed, ditzy, delightfully mad older woman who appeared in many of John Waters’ early films, including Pink Flamingos and Polyester). During the show’s after-party, Susan makes conversation, spilling her guts (about her frustrated marriage) to a funky-looking artist-friend, whose big curly hair and long, flowing dress and big earrings seem pickled in the 1970s: she looks like the kind of gaudy woman who’d end up stabbing someone to death in a Dario Argento horror film. There are shades of Brian De Palma, and even whispers of that delightfully awful 1994 film Color of Night, the worst erotic thriller ever made (one that is incredibly watchable in all its glorious badness). 

These impressions might spell a derivative but lewdly entertaining movie, especially in the hands of writer-director Tom Ford, who first worked as a production designer and whose eye for beauty is so keen in the not-entirely-successful but gorgeous 2009 film A Single Man. But Nocturnal Animals makes a number of disappointing structural blunders. Much of the film dramatizes the novel Susan is reading, a manuscript she receives from her ex-husband, Edward, played by Jake Gyllenhaal. Susan’s marriage ended badly, because she cheated on Edward (with her current husband, played by Armie Hammer), and the movie emits a grim energy, as though this novel, which is violent and disturbing and clearly borrows from Edward’s past with Susan, is some kind of revenge fantasy. (He even dedicated it to her.)

The novel and its dramatization are nasty and unappealing to Susan, and to us. The story involves a family being accosted by three psychopaths in an isolated part of Texas in the dead of night. The husband, Tony (also played by Gyllenhaal), is left for dead, his wife and daughter are raped and murdered, and the killers vanish without a trace, until a dogged, lung cancer-afflicted investigator (Michael Shannon), helps Tony track them down. 

Because she has nothing to do but read a book, Susan's only active participation in the story must occur in flashbacks, where we see Susan and Edward, once childhood friends, falling in love, against the will of Susan’s Southern-belle mama, played by Laura Linney, with her hair all poofed up and a delightful Blanche Devereaux-esque accent that I could listen to for days. (Tom Ford clearly has an affinity for brassy, bossy women, yet Linney’s character gets minimal screen time, and Susan Morrow is practically a blank.) Mama didn’t approve of Edward because he was poor and sensitive, but Susan married him anyway, and now, everything her mother said would happen has happened: “The things you love about him now are the things you will hate about him in a few years,” she says softly, her threatening prophecy steeped in matronly tenderness. 

When a movie makes its main character passive, it better have a darn good reason. Jimmy Stewart, confined to a wheelchair in Rear Window, turns into a neighborhood snoop, out of boredom, and when he witnesses a murder, enlists his girlfriend Grace Kelly and his physical therapist Thelma Ritter to help him prove it. Thus, Alfred Hitchcock made Stewart’s character active by proxy. But Nocturnal Animals doesn’t know what to do with Amy Adams’ character. There’s nothing compelling about Susan, which makes her passiveness all the more dull. Thus, for Susan, everything hinges on the narrative revealed to us in flashbacks, but those aren’t compelling either. She essentially becomes unhappy with her current husband, and ditches him for another one. 

And so Nocturnal Animals alternates between blandness and nastiness. Laura Linney’s performance, as well as the performances of Shannon and of Aaron-Taylor Johnson (as one of the killers), give the film some vitality, but it’s not enough to save the film from its own bad plot. The final scene, when Susan goes to meet Edward for dinner and he stands her up, should be an emotionally powerful moment. But Susan hasn’t been enough of a cold bitch to warrant our hate, and she’s not sympathetic enough for us to care about her. Moreover, Susan’s judgment has really gone downhill: She criticized Edward’s writing when they were together, but now she raves about this crappy novel in an email she sends him. Then again, she agreed to meet with Edward for drinks in the first place, another sign that her judgment is not to be trusted. Anyone who dedicates a novel like this to you, should be avoided at all costs. 

'Arrival' emerges as a great science fiction movie, and it comes just in time.

Arrival, a new alien-encounter drama starring Amy Adams and Jeremy Renner, could not have arrived at a better moment. As the nation both writhes in despairing agony and luxuriates in triumphant glee (depending on your politics), Arrival, which unsentimentally champions global unity, offers a balm, a glimmer of light in the morass of darkness and ugliness that has hovered over the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election. In the film, Adams plays Louise Banks, a linguistics professor who lives in Seattle (or what appears to be Seattle). One day she walks into her classroom and begins a lecture on Portuguese, despite a surprisingly low turnout of students, but is interrupted by frantic news reports of an alien invasion: Twelve “spaceships” have landed in various parts of the world, the nearest one somewhere in Montana. 

But these aren’t the spaceships of War of the Worlds or any schlocky 1950s sci-fi classic. They’re enormous, monolithic, Stonehengey shell-like vessels that silently, stoically hover over the ground. As the military might of various empires reacts with knee-jerk panic and paranoia, Louise becomes a pawn in the U.S. government’s attempt to communicate with our visitors. (Forest Whitaker shows up as a grim but sympathetic colonel, trying to appease his superiors but also trying to listen to Louise’s theories about how to communicate with these alien beings.)

But these tall, grey aliens, which stand on four rail-thin legs and have long, tendril-like tentacles on their heads, use a language no one understands, and Louise, who teams up with a scientist named Ian (played by Jeremy Renner), must slowly figure out a few words and teach them some of her own. Meanwhile, various other world powers scramble to do the same, and become increasingly afraid when they do begin to understand the language of these other-worldly creatures.

Arrival opens with a  gloomy shot of Louise’s living room, perhaps at dusk, because we see two wine glasses and a half-empty bottle on a little table in the corner. Her house overlooks what appears to be the Puget Sound, and the shot is remarkably silent, until the music—an elegy of sustained strings—ushers in feelings of sadness we do not yet understand. 

The movie ends in that room too, yet now the image swells with meaning because of what’s happened in between. And everything that happens in Arrival feels right, nearly flawless, from the images of the humans making contact, to the global tension that builds as widespread fear takes hold. Arrival emerges as a great science fiction movie: a big, smart, mass appeal kind of film that succeeds marvelously as a genre piece, as a meditation on life and death and time and the nature of language, and as a movie that plays with time in surprising ways. 

The director, Denis Villeneuve (Sicario) and the scenarist, Eric Heisserer, don’t use time manipulation as a gimmick. Rather, they question the nature of time and how we understand it, without getting bogged down in overcomplicated language. Arrival is more poetry than theory. The movie builds toward something powerful, inevitable, and shattering: that’s the kind of grand emotion, which comes from the careful accumulation of smaller, subtler emotions, that we should expect from and delight in particularly from major films. 

Perhaps Arrival will be too slow-moving and thoughtful for some who might be expecting a more action-packed movie. But Arrival isn’t Independence Day. This is not a movie about malicious creatures from outer space: it’s a movie about the malicious pervasiveness of bad information, and how assumptions and breakdowns in communication not only paralyze us, but pit us against one another, often with grave consequences. This is The Day the Earth Stood Still for the 21st century, but it’s also Solaris (1972), Tarkovsky’s pensive, somnambulant masterpiece about space and time and death. 

Like the scientist Kris in Solaris, who has lost his wife but keeps seeing her on the spacecraft, Louise is haunted by tragedy too: the death of her daughter. We see mother and daughter in flashback, shards of a happier life that we know is doomed: them playing in the backyard, wading in a pond, the little girl doing her homework, the little girl becoming a teenager and wondering about why her parents split, the teenager receiving a shattering diagnosis, and then, the agony of the hospital bed, and Louise bending over her daughter’s lifeless body in despair. 

Amy Adams immediately draws us in as someone who’s suffered the kind of loss you don’t really get over. And unlike the Sandra Bullock-vehicle Gravity, which was a sumptuous but indulgently sappy entertainment, Arrival doesn’t withhold this dead-child information to be used against us later. Louise’s loss is known to us virtually from the start, and while it certainly shapes her character, it is not a plot device on which the emotional beats of the movie hang. Nevertheless, as Louise throws herself into her daunting linguistic project, the recollections of her child keep breaking through, sometimes in dreams that are increasingly affected by her interactions with the aliens, whom Ian has nicknamed Abbot and Costello. 

Some science fiction movies grasp for greatness and, against all odds, become masterpieces (like 2001: A Space Odyssey, which is simultaneously pretentious and brilliant). Others fail, like Interstellar, which is an expertly made but overblown film, one that tries very, very hard. When we can feel the effort, and when the results are so earnest yet incomprehensible, our reaction (or mine at least) is to pull away. Even at its most ponderous moments, a movie like Close Encounters of the Third Kind reaches into us and pulls us out of ourselves. 

That’s the work that great science fiction can do, and Arrival indeed makes that kind of personal contact with its viewers. We are breathlessly pulled into the story; we delight in the ways this movie surprises us; we feel the emotions as palpably as if the stories were our own. And in the darkened theater, this story belongs to us.

Big Eyes

Tim Burton’s film Big Eyes is an account of the artist Margaret Keane (played in the film by Amy Adams), whose signature mark was the wide, exaggerated-looking eyes of her subjects, most of which were children. In the 1960s, Keane’s then-husband Walter (played by Christoph Waltz) took credit for her work until Keane divorced him and took him to court, finally revealing to the world that she was the real artist behind the paintings rather than her slick, salesman-like husband.

The film opens in suburban California, where Margaret Ulbrich (later Keane) is hurriedly packing her belongings and fleeing her banal existence with her young daughter in tow. She divorces her husband (we’re never sure why), and mother and daughter find themselves virtually alone in San Francisco, where making a living as a single mom—in 1958—appears to be almost impossible. That’s when Margaret meets a fellow artist named Walter Keane. They’re both trying to sell paintings at an art show, and Keane makes a move by complimenting the naïve, unconfident Margaret on the quality of her work.

Big Eyes has a kitschy feel to it. Of course, this was the 1950s and early 60s, when America—at least as it’s realized in our collective nostalgia and imagination—seemed to be in love with kitsch, with artificiality, and the veneer of the starched, clean-cut American family was just that: a veneer. Tim Burton has always loved kitsch, but now it feels forced and hollow, where films like Edward Scissorhands and Ed Wood had something underneath the kitsch: real personal filmmaking. Unfortunately, Big Eyes misses that personal touch.

Margaret Keane is in many ways an ideal choice for Burton’s continuing “exploration” of American kitsch. (Which is why it’s so disappointing that he completely misses the mark in this movie about her.) Keane’s work—according to the film at least—was constantly being scrutinized by critics as faux art, appealing to the masses because of its crudeness. But Burton isn’t interested in exploring this aspect of the story. He uses these negative assessments of Keane’s work to take the all-too easy shot at critics. Actually, Terence Stamp, playing the oldest and snootiest art critic in the movie, does get an amusing line when Walter Keane screams at him in public that critics are incapable of creating art: “That musty chestnut?” (Perhaps Burton fixates on critics so doggedly because his own work has been met with so much negative response over the last fifteen or so years). Burton engages with the negative criticism merely to enshrine his subject, Margaret Keane, in a museum exhibition of victimhood. There’s no doubt how the director feels about this art, and yet there’s no vitality to his passion, no real proof of what makes him love it so much. This is a treatise on the fact that Margaret Keane originated the paintings, not a defense of their value or why these paintings deserve to be remembered.

Whether or not the movie is absolutely truthful, it turns Margaret Keane into a passive wimp. (And it forces Amy Adams into a muted, restrained performance that feels like a real disservice to her as an actress, especially when she’s one of the best actresses working in movies today.) Yes, the film opens with Margaret as an active agent: She leaves a marriage that is apparently unhappy (and perhaps unhealthy) and starts a new life for her daughter and herself. She gets a job. She pursues her love of painting. Good so far. But once she meets Walter Keane, she turns into a devoted, silently-suffering Stepford wife, going along with a scheme that hurts her tremendously, even though she’s smart enough and strong enough not to cower so willingly.

As Margaret’s “Big Eyes” art becomes astronomically successful, the lie she’s living begins to weigh her down. But the film is so set on Margaret Keane as victim that even when she starts standing up for herself it feels hollow and unsatisfying. Burton occasionally applies some tiresome narration to round out the plot for us, such as at the beginning, when the narrator reminds us of the plight of women in the 50s, as though this were an excuse for Margaret’s prolonged cooperation in fraud. The film never makes a convincing case for why she’s quiet about her husband’s deception for so long, when it seems that there are numerous opportunities for Margaret to reveal the truth and improve her own situation.

Big Eyes does become more interesting in the last round, but only because we’ve invested so much time in hating Walter Keane for being such a pompous, manipulative ass. Christoph Waltz seems to be having fun playing such a slimy individual, but he becomes downright cartoonish in the big courtroom scene where the judge demands that both he and his ex-wife paint to see who’s actually telling the truth.

In his love for this artist (Burton apparently even commissioned a Keane painting back in the 90s), Tim Burton has lost sight of making a convincing movie. The film is incredibly uneven. It’s by turns a very conventional biopic, a creepy study of public manipulation, and a weird courtroom farce. These tonal shifts feel utterly surprising and even chaotic, especially one scene where a drunken Walter chases Margaret and her daughter into the art studio and then begins tossing lit matches inside through a very wide keyhole, eventually igniting the carpet thanks to some conveniently placed turpentine—which the feeble Margaret herself knocks over. If this is supposed to be a movie about the dignity of women and the unfairness of their plight in times past, it hardly feels worth the trouble.

With Danny Huston, Jon Polito, Krysten Ritter, Jason Schwartzman (who plays a snooty gallery owner and who utters the film’s funniest line), Terence Stamp, Madeleine Arthur, and Delaney Raye. Written by Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski.

American Hustle

Watching American Hustle is like watching three different train wrecks happen at once, and yet there is an element of control involved that would distinguish it from an actual train wreck. First and foremost, it's a comic film that yearns to have been made in the late 70s, which is when it's set. The period detail is as conspicuous as the hair of the women in the movie, from the carefully chosen music to the glossy retro Columbia Pictures logo that plays at the beginning of the movie. That's part of the trouble: American Hustle feels too manufactured, and as such the story falters a lot. The script by Eric Warren Singer and David O. Russell (he also directed) is self-consciously a crime-comedy. Movies of this kind from the actual 70s weren't self-conscious. They just were. You begin to miss this element in American Hustle, because it always feels like a put-on.

But there are redeeming qualities, such as the magnificent cast: Christian Bale as a con artist with a deluxe comb-over and a striking little gut that compliments his even more striking fashion sense; Amy Adams as his mistress/cohort, a gal who affects an English accent in order to dupe clients; Bradley Cooper as a cop who's looking to get a promotion; Jennifer Lawrence as Bale's hard-drinking, hilariously out-of-control wife, who has a big nest of hair atop her head; and Jeremy Renner, a naive, well-intentioned mayor from New Jersey, who unwittingly becomes part of the cop's plan to entrap a bunch of politicians and mobsters.

David O. Russell's brand of comedy is hard to take sometimes. He's big on letting his characters ramble their way to a point, and you really miss clever, quick, flashy dialogue when that happens. On the other hand, there are some pretty funny lines in American Hustle, and many of them fall out of Lawrence's mouth like little flecks of verbal dynamite. Half the time you aren't aware of how funny they are, and just how loopy her character is. She really colors the film.

Bale is appropriately pathetic-looking as a lifelong scammer, he of the hyper-real performance. (I'm quite prepared to believe that he put on weight so he could have a real belly.) The movie doesn't take him too seriously, but it also doesn't completely dismiss him, which feels like loyalty on its own terms. Bradley Cooper, on the other hand, is always some degree of Bradley Cooper. (His character wears curlers at night, which is a good example of how the film can be uproariously funny when it wants to be.) They do play off each other well.

The overall results for me, were mixed. There were moments I laughed loud and long, and moments where I felt bored by what seemed like deliberate chaos. It's a whirlwind of a movie, and admittedly a well-made one. Linus Sandgren was the director of photography. His work is solid: American Hustle has panache and charm and sexy camera angles to spare. But there is something hollow inside of it, like director David Russell was grasping at becoming the next Coppola or Scorcese, and not quite hard enough. With Elisabeth Röhm, Robert De Niro, Jack Huston, Louis C.K., Alessandro Nivola, and Colleen Camp. ★★½

Man of Steel

After about twenty minutes of listening to several children squirming in their seats near me (as well as talking intermittently and running up and down the aisles of the theater), it occurred to me that it was possible that children were not getting more disruptive in public. This may have been normal, accepted behavior from them, only I hadn't been to a movie that kids would see in years, with a few exceptions. (I did go with my students--for a field trip--to see The Hunger Games and Oz.) The movie was Man of Steel, and the children were apparently bored out of their minds during all the parts when I was riveted by what was happening on screen. (In other words, all the "non-action" parts.)

Of course, one would expect director Zach Snyder's take on Superman to have a lot of inane action sequences. And it does. These scenes, for me, hampered my enjoyment of the film. The human story of Man of Steel remains as enchanting as it was in the 1978 version: Kal-El (played by Henry Cavill, who seems perfectly cast) leaves the doomed planet of Krypton (sent by his parents, played by Russell Crowe and Ayelet Zurer) and finds a new home on earth, with new parents (Kevin Costner and Diane Lane). And what's more, David S. Goyer, who wrote the script, manages to rehash this story in a fresh way. Much of it is scene in flashback at important points during the present, and the story of how Kal-El/Clark Kent travels North to his fortress of solitude feels more vibrant here: he basically works his way North, taking whatever jobs he can find, and of course finds it difficult to avoid stepping in to save the day when catastrophes strike (such as a burning oil rig that traps its crew).

But the action scenes are intense and it's hard to get your bearings during them. This is a continuing problem in these kinds of movies. I often just check out during those moments. It's hard to be emotionally invested when you can't even tell what's going on. The glimpses I do get reveal to me that the computer effects, while useful for creating impressive vistas and many other designs that would be astronomically expensive to do for real, aren't all that hot. I kept getting the feeling I was watching someone play Halo. (This may be just a reverential nod to the 1978 Superman, which did have pretty crummy effects.) The plot thickens when General Zod (Michael Shannon), a Krypton rebel who managed to survive when Krypton imploded and now wants revenge against Jor-El's son, threatens to destroy the earth if Kal-El is not handed over to him. (This way, Man of Steel jumbles together the plots of Superman I and II.) 

One of the movie's biggest assets is Amy Adams, who plays a different kind of Lois Lane than Margot Kidder did. Kidder's Lane always had a quip to dish out. She was also written at a time when the world seemed to idolize the single career woman. Lois Lane, hot-shot reporter for the Daily Planet, had it all. Except Superman stole her heart and she was reduced to a gushy, sentimental girl at times (performing a corny mind poem in that scene when Superman takes her out flying one evening). In the latest Superman film, Lois isn't bearing the feminist cross. So she can be vulnerable without losing her humanity. And she's also more involved in the action of the plot, which may not be totally believable, but certainly succeeds in making her character more vital. (To be fair, I always enjoyed Margot Kidder's performance as LL.) Amy Adams is a fine actress, and she's thoroughly enjoyable in Man of Steel.

Goyer has really laid on the Jesus-imagery thick, right down to having Clark Kent be 33 years old. (Comic book fans: was that how it was originally?) It may be that the studio executives have noticed what a large market there is for "Christian" entertainment, so now they're pandering to yet another demographic. Perhaps they're hoping ministers will show clips from Man of Steel during sermons. I sincerely hope nobody confuses Jesus of Nazareth with a super-hero. 

With Laurence Fishburne as Perry White, the editor of the Daily Planet; Christopher Meloni, Antje Traue, Harry Lennix, Richard Schiff, and Dylan Sprayberry (as teenage Clark Kent). 143 min. ★★

The Master

Paul Thomas Anderson's darkly funny film not based on Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard. You see, his name has been changed to Lancaster Dodd, so it's clearly not about L. Ron Hubbard, I repeat, not about L. Ron Hubbard. Indeed, Anderson has denied that The Master is a roman a clef for Hubbard and his kooky celebrity cult, but it's pretty obvious who was the inspiration for this bizarre little movie, which features two powerful performances: from Joaquin Phoenix as an alcoholic, severely emotionally troubled WW2 veteran, and Philip Seymour Hoffman, as the magnetic personality and self-appointed religious leader who's trying to redirect people to their past selves, which he claims have been imprisoned by the negative thinking of culture. Or something like that.

The movie itself is beautifully crafted but aloof, in a way that There Will Be Blood, Anderson's last film, was not. You're frequently feeling like you don't know who to trust, and perhaps that's what was intended here. It's certainly trying to look cinematic, and Anderson takes much time to plot his narrative visually. At times, The Master feels like a Modernist novel on the big screen: Time doesn't always move in a chronological order, and characters don't always do things that make perfect logical sense. Plus there are moments when it's pretty clear we're seeing things from the skewed perspective of Phoenix's character, who in one scene, which takes place at the Philadelphia home of one of Dodd's most devoted followers (played by Laura Dern), imagines that all the women in the room are stark naked.

Anderson is not giving us the traditional "biopic," (such a detestable word, and a sub-genre that frequently produces detestable movies), for which we can all be more than a little grateful. Instead of giving us the sweeping account of L. Ron Hubbard's rise to prominence, Anderson zooms in on a few years in Hubbard's/Dodd's life (the film is set mostly in 1950), and more particularly, on the relationship between Dodd and Freddie Quell, Phoenix's character, which resembles both master and servant and psychiatrist and patient.

Because Anderson picks a particular moment in his character Dodd's career as a cult figure, he eschews much of the criticism he might have acquired for doing a full-fledged biographical tale. As obvious as the allusion to L. Ron Hubbard is, we're not getting a bunch of historical facts and most importantly the big dramatic ending that climaxes with Hubbard's death after years in exile. Instead we're watching the tension of the overly devoted relationships between Dodd and his family and between Dodd and Quell. The Master seems perfectly content to be suggestive, and resists making too many judgments either way when it comes to its main character's pop psych-religion. This resistance of Anderson's becomes a fun gimmick: we can relax and enjoy a weird movie that we know has to be based on this bizarre religion, and yet the movie doesn't really take sides. It's not offering a pronouncement about Scientology, but a window into the unusual relationship between the two main characters.

There are things in The Master that don't quite click, however. The movie is so carefully calculated to be and look cinematic that at times it ceases to be entertainment. And you can only be impressed with the art of the cinema for so long before you become bored. The strength of the performances bolsters the movie, even if the characters themselves seem to further the alienation between film and audience. It's worth seeing, though.

Written by the director. With Amy Adams, Ambyr Childers, Jesse Plemons, Rami Malek, Lena Endre, Madisen Beaty, Kevin J. O'Connor, Joshua Close, and Patty McCormack. 137 minutes.

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.

The Fighter

For me, boxing is about as uninteresting as good taste is to Kathy Griffin. I liked Cinderella Man but it's such a bland subject to me that much more is needed than the back and forth of the two prizefighters and the ever popular theme of an underdog triumphing over insurmountable odds. Apparently entire cities of people can rally behind a boxer as though he's a symbol of all their hard work, blood, sweat, values, etc., but how many times do we have to sit through a movie that's made of such subject matter before we're asleep with boredom? Director David O. Russell makes The Fighter less about boxing and more about the family of sleazy, opportunistic worms and their selfish investment in the career of son/brother Micky Ward, whose brother Dick had his time in the limelight in the 1970s against a fighter named Sugar Ray. Dick is now a crack addict, and the addiction keeps pulling him apart from his brother as both a friend and a trainer and mentor. Nevertheless, Dick's mom Alice, who manages Micky's boxing career, is blinded by Dick's past glory and is convinced that he's necessary to Micky's success. She's waiting for Dick to make his big comeback, and biding her time with Micky's boxing campaign. They're thrilled that HBO is doing a documentary on Dick until they discover it's a documentary about the horrors of cocaine addiction.

As Micky, Mark Wahlberg does a formidable job playing the emotional center of the movie. Wahlberg will probably not get the recognition he deserves for initiating The Fighter and for his performance, but he's quite good. The problem is he's not really playing anything new for himself as an actor. He's basically a nice guy. We feel confident that he can do what is needed to win, and we trust Wahlberg as an actor to carry the film. Christian Bale, as Dick, has the more extreme character. His glassy-eyed stares and wobbling swagger make him seem a bit nightmarish--he's trying to show us the ravages of addiction and in the process becomes something increasingly hideous. I wasn't even particularly sympathetic towards him. He seemed like a leech sucking away his younger brother's potential, urged on by the Mama Leach, Alice (Melissa Leo), whose part is probably the most delicious one in the movie (along with the parts of her seven dried-up, spaced-out daughters, who do pretty much whatever Mama tells them).

 This is probably one of the funniest movies of the year. Russell gives us such a bleakly comic look at this royally f***ed up family that it has the effect of watching an episode of Jersey Shore. They revel in the gutter as though it were lined with satin and roses, and their opportunism is so unveiled that you can't help but laugh at their efforts to protect their turgid family unit from outside invasion. Amy Adams, as Micky's girlfriend, represents the first real threat to the family's shell. She sees how much they're ruining Micky's chances to really succeed as a prizefighter, and she has the audacity to stand up to their "us verses the world" act.

The relationship between Dick and Micky is truly what drives the film's story. Without Micky's fear of letting go of his brother--of essentially betraying him by realizing how destructive Dick is to Micky's career and his life--he could easily move on to brighter pastures and recognize his potential. However, it's not as simple as Dick being a useless leach. He's got instincts that can't be ignored when it comes to boxing, and Micky realizes that he does still need his brother's help. Perhaps the dramatic tension is a bit predictable, but the movie's comic realism helps to lighten the load of the drama. We're already enjoying the juicy scenes of the family in-fighting more than the boxing anyway.

Overall I'd say The Fighter exceeded my expectations because it went so much against the grind of the typical boxing movie, and I was very thankful that David Russell and everyone else involved in making the movie took the care to be funny and realistic in their approach. With Jack McGee and Frank Renzulli. Written by Scott Silver, Paul Tamasy, and Eric Johnson.

Julie and Julia

Julie and Julia is probably the warmest film of the year, and Amy Adams is quickly becoming one of my favorite actresses. Meryl Streep was terrific as the famous cooking expert Julia Childs, but I found Adams's story much more enthralling while Streep's half of the movie seemed sort of breezy. Indeed, the fun of watching Meryl Streep and Stanley Tucci was enough to propel their portion of a film which is split into into separate stories of women in 1949 and 2002 respectively: one, a burgeoning culinary icon studying the art of French cooking in Paris, the other a devoted follower living with her husband in Queens, who decides to cook her way through Childs's French cookbook in one year--which she documents on her blog--and which soon becomes an obsession.
It went on a bit longer than it should have, but it was definitely a feel-good kind of movie, an ode to food (what's not to like about that, after all?) ★★½

Sunshine Cleaning

I would like to congratulate the movie Sunshine Cleaning for being the best movie I've seen this year so far. (Let me clarify, I have seen very few movies in 2009, ranging from good to awful: The Proposal, pretty good, Zombieland, highly entertaining Star Trek, good, The Blind Side, good, Night at the Museum 2, unbearable, Observe and Report, bad).

Up to now there was nothing I wanted to elevate to a "best of" type list, but I think Sunshine Cleaning qualifies. It has the performances (two great ones by Amy Adams and Emily Blunt as sisters who decide to go into the crime scene/post-decomp cleaning business), the sharp sense of humor, and the truthfulness, of a very good picture. It's very well-rounded, I would say (offering humorous and sad moments--and some icky ones too-- in equal measure).

I was asking myself what the "job" of a good movie is...and I answered (is there medication I can take to avoid these types of conversations?) that the "job" of a good movie is to tell a story well, reflecting with honesty some glimpse of the human experience. In that sense, Sunshine Cleaning works because it's true (or is it true because it works?) ★★★