Spectre

The new James Bond, Spectre, is an enthralling good time, one of the most exciting big movies to come out this year. It has one major flaw: a wrong-headed need to understand and reform its hero; but this I can forgive for a movie as entertaining and well-made as Spectre. Daniel Craig, who has talked recently of exiting the role of 007, has sometimes been criticized for being an overly serious Bond. There is something shell-shocked about Daniel Craig’s appearance: He always looks to me like he’s just returned from a tour of duty in Iraq. But he’s a remarkably fit actor, and he’s subtly funny, cautious never to venture into Roger Moore territory. Craig himself exudes a kind of enigmatic persona that works for the character.

Spectre opens with a sweeping shot of Mexico City on El Dia de los Muertos. We watch a man and a woman—both wearing masks—make their way through a crowded street, into a hotel, to their room, where they embrace. Then the man takes off his mask: It’s James Bond. Bond is always ready for a bedroom scene, if only the lady will wait a moment while he shoots someone. “Excuse me for a moment,” he says, and with sniper rifle in hand, climbs out the window of the hotel room. We follow, looking down on him from above as he maneuvers from rooftop to rooftop until he finds his perch and takes aim.

The scene is visually thrilling, in part because director Sam Mendes cares about craftsmanship, and in part because all this precision and attention to Bond’s spatial geography builds the tension: By the time Bond pulls the trigger, we’re totally invested in what he’s doing. The building that subsequently explodes (not because of the gun shot) would otherwise have been another numbing moment of cinematic destruction. When Bond, unable to escape the debris and the enveloping cloud of smoke and gas, falls down, down, down, he plops right onto a couch. This punctuating bit of humor sealed the deal for me. The rest of the film (until the end) is pure delight.

One of the most interesting parts about Spectre is its fascination with/anxiety about surveillance. Surveillance is the chief bogey of this movie, the thing the villains treasure because it begets them unadulterated power. But it’s also a fact of life, especially in Europe, where counter-terrorism measures have increased the number of cameras in public places, and, we assume, the number of phone conversations being listened-in-on. In the film, the 00 program is threatened by a new intelligence division, headed by Max Denbigh (Andrew Scott), who sees data collection as the wave of the future, and agents like Bond as relics of the past. The movie opens with the text, “THE DEAD ARE ALIVE,” and insinuates that indeed James Bond himself is a kind of ghost who visits us in our pop culture fantasies. Perhaps this explains our fascination with him, and why the current iteration of the series so desperately wants to “solve” James Bond, to know the unknowable.

Sam Mendes seems aware of our culture’s current need to psychoanalyze movie heroes to death. He makes light of this in a scene in which Bond is being evaluated by a shrink (Dr. Madeleine Swann). She doesn’t know that he’s actually there to save her from an assassin. But her questions are the questions we may have found ourselves asking—against our better judgment—over time: We want to know what makes James Bond tick, yet to understand the mystery is to take the fun of the mystery away. Unfortunately, the film can’t resist its own urges to investigate and domesticate its hero. It's a symptom of a larger pop cultural urge, this need to know everything, to fix everything, this inability to accept flaws as somehow fundamental and unchangeable and, sometimes, desirably human.

One of my favorite things about these movies is when they turn into a North By Northwest-style world geography tour. Spectre does not disappoint in this arena: We go from Mexico City to London to Austria to Tangier. Sam Mendes, with help from cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema, captures the lushness of these disparate venues for the usual James Bond spy-movie hijinks, and lets the camera linger on them enough for us to savor the image. And the chase scenes, which are generally very well-choreographed, have been carefully wrought in conjunction with their locations. Probably the best one is the fight between Bond and Mr. Hinx (Dave Bautista), the great, hulking moose of a henchman who is this movie’s Jaws. Their tussle on a train somewhere near Tangier (if memory serves) is tense and exciting, and again, capped with a bit of throwaway humor (that doesn't work quite as well as one would hope). 

As the chief villain, Blofeld, Christoph Waltz is appropriately creepy. Waltz, like Javier Bardem before him, seems made for these kinds of megalomaniacal characters. He reminds me of that great, sinister character actor Henry Gibson. But there’s something too easy about Waltz as a villain. It’s as expected as having Paul Giamatti play a weasel. And though I don’t mean to damn him with faint praise (because Waltz is really great at what he does), there’s so much else to look at and love about Spectre that the villain pales in comparison. 

Perhaps the one truly lackluster note in characterization is the Bond girl, played by Léa Seydoux, Dr. Madeleine Swann. Her father was part of the ignominious SPECTRE ring, and now she’s a walking target, whom Bond has vowed to protect. Seydoux is a lovely mousy thing, and even gets to partake in the action during the extensive train fight scene. But James Bond is always more interesting when he’s being sexually one-upped by his female counterpart. Madeleine Swann is too mopey and soft, and in the end, she’s little more than a pawn (in the film’s needless final act). This is where the movie’s project to reform James Bond—by domesticating him—seems particularly idiotic. I’m not necessarily in favor of the more disposable Bond women; I just prefer Bond girls who hold their own. When Bond looks at the disarmed Blofeld at the very end and says, “I have something more important to do [than killing you],” I laughed at what until now would have been a bad sexual pun in a Bond movie. Now it’s a thesis defending Bond’s new stance on marriage as he walks off into the night with his uncharismatic lover. (He and Seydoux do generate some heat, however brief: When they engage in a passionate kiss, earlier in the film, Daniel Craig’s lips take on a life of their own.)

With Naomie Harris, Ralph Fiennes, Ben Wishaw, Rory Kinnear, and, briefly, Dame Judi Dench. 

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.

Horrible Bosses 2

Surprisingly, I liked Horrible Bosses 2 better than Horrible Bosses 1. At its core, the set-up is basically the same, but the laughs are more sustained and the comedy fresher. The three leads—Jason Bateman, Jason Sudeikis, and Charlie Day—manage to transcend the one-dimensionality of their characters and at times create great comedy. There’s a wonderful moment when they’re hiding in Chris Pine’s closet (with plans to kidnap him and hold him for ransom so they can retaliate against his father, a businessman who burned them in a deal) and his maid is absent-mindedly hanging clothes on the rack. She slides a bunch of slacks to the left, revealing terror-stricken Charlie Day, who had been hiding behind them. He moves to the left too, to re-conceal himself. Then the maid, still completely unaware, slides the pants to the right, adding another pair of slacks to the rack. Rinse and repeat. It’s hysterically funny, and it’s the kind of ingenious, silly, wonderful thing you’d see in the Marx Brothers or the Three Stooges.

The timing in this movie is absolutely perfect. Jason Sudeikis, whose character is the man-whoriest of the three, diverts his easily distracted attention at always just the right moment. Charlie Day hones his skills at being the last one to get the joke. Only Jason Bateman seems to have stagnated, playing the perpetually annoyed straight man that he hasn’t had to perfect since Arrested Development. (The only change is that he unexpectedly falls in love with Jennifer Anistion’s character and dotes on her without reciprocation. But this little nugget is barely utilized.)

As for Jennifer Aniston, she’s even deadlier (and more delightful) than she was in Part 1. She and Kevin Spacey reprise their roles as the horrible bosses from the first movie, only their parts are secondary now. But their characterizations have also improved the second time around. Spacey is now behind bars, but manages to send the boys with their tails between their legs on multiple occasions. (He seems to be having a wonderful time playing such a detestable man, and yet, there comes a point in the movie when you’re on his side more than that of the protagonists.) Aniston, who you may remember was cast as a nymphomaniac dentist, is now attending sex addiction group therapy sessions. But she’s not particularly committed to beating her sexual problems, and she inserts herself into the kidnapping scheme of the three heroes as a kind of naughty foil. The guys break into her office in order to steal nitrous, only to be derailed when Aniston and her group therapy group arrive unexpectedly. Bateman, who’s supposed to be playing watch dog, is forced to interact with the group, and there are some genuinely horrifying lines of dialogue exchanged between him and Aniston. Horrifying and funny, of course. I was surprised no one walked out of the theater.

I looked back at my review of the first film, and was reminded that the movie seemed slightly off-kilter, and not always in a good way. Yes, it was funny, but with the sequel now in mind, it’s obvious the actors had not yet hit their stride. They find a rhythm in Horrible Bosses 2 that really sells the humor, from the cheap shots to the overly gross sexual innuendoes to the purely insane moments that only work out of pure luck, or maybe pure talent. My only problem with the sequel was that the heroes began to annoy me with their constant stupidity. Charlie Day and Jason Sudeikis reminded me of every annoying kid I grew up with who couldn’t shut up, and I found myself, like Jason Bateman’s character, wanting to smack them both repeatedly. But their performances were terrific even if they grated on the nerves at times.

With Christoph Waltz, Jamie Foxx and Jonathan Banks. Directed by Sean Anders. Written by Anders and John Morris.