The Beguiled

"Bring me the anatomy book" has to be the greatest line from a movie in 2017. It comes from Sofia Coppola's The Beguiled (and I have no idea if it's originally from the novel, or the first film adaptation of this material, from 1971), and uttered with cold precision by Nicole Kidman's character, who's about to execute her very first amputation. The film is set at a girls' school in Virginia, during the seemingly endless slog of the Civil War. Several of the girls have remained at the school, under the care of its very proper headmistress (Kidman) and the one remaining teacher (Kirsten Dunst). This is essentially a finishing school, where girls learned how to be young ladies. While they do make time for academics, the real teaching that goes on is about the domestic sphere, a woman's primary place of influence and identity during this period. The film explores the ways in which the unexpected arrival of a man (a wounded Union soldier played by Colin Farrell) upsets the very carefully constructed world of these women and girls, and how their own desires come into direct conflict with the lessons they're trying to teach (or learn). The Beguiled is fueled by a subtle, unflinching irony, which may be the reason I felt a degree of cold admiration for the film, rather than genuine pleasure. It's impeccably made (Sofia Coppola continues to prove herself a truly talented and original filmmaker) and acted. The ways that Kidman and Dunst exert control over each other, and over Farrell's character (a man whose moral compass we're never quite sure about), is its own kind of mesmerizing puzzle, and these actors bring out the intricacies of sexual desire and sexual politics in the very repressed 19th century. (Farrell flirts with both of the women, and several of the students; his affection creates a tension between all of them, who have suddenly realized a desire they didn't know they had.) But The Beguiled didn't affect me on a visceral level, which may have been what I was expecting from it, and so the movie left me somewhat unmoved, despite all of its many fine elements.

It may be smart satire, but 'The Lobster' left me feeling cold.

The Lobster imagines a world in which single people are sent to a posh hotel in the English countryside where they must pair up or be turned into animals. Once guests arrive at the hotel, they have 45 days to find a mate. But they can earn extra days, by hunting each other—with “tranquilizers”—in the woods at night: the more people you shoot, the more days you accumulate. The hotel has strict rules discouraging anything done solo, and they even stage dull little one-act plays, showing people the danger and, nay, the immorality of being alone. The hotel’s manager is a severe and matter-of-fact schoolmistress of a woman (Olivia Colman); in the evenings, she and her husband entertain the guests with songs, which are sung as monotone as their everyday speech. The movie follows one guest named David (Colin Farrell), recently widowed, who eventually flees the hotel and his society’s totalitarian dating policy, only to fall in love with a fellow rebel (Rachel Weisz), who lives in the woods with a secret group of like-minded marriage holdouts. 

The Lobster is a canny satire of our militantly pro-marriage culture, directed by Yorgos Lanthimos (who co-wrote the script, with Efthymis Filippou). His conception is like something out of The Hunger Games, if it had been written for adults: a dystopian world that has been fragmented into little groups of underlings struggling for power. The hotel staff, apparently, have more power than the residents (at least those who don’t end up with a significant other by the end of their stay); and there’s a grim awareness that some kind of death (even if being transformed into an animal isn't really dying) awaits, like a vague specter. Talk about pressure to mate for life. 

Visually speaking, The Lobster reminds me of Stanley Kubrick’s films, perhaps because Kubrick was always trying to be English, and since this film takes place mostly in an expansive, antiseptic-looking English hotel, The Lobster feels like The Shining during tourist season: the Overlook Hotel is open for business, and OK Cupid is in charge of recreation. And, like every Stanley Kubrick movie, The Lobster is somber and arty and more than a little pretentious. But unlike the best of Kubrick’s films, The Lobster doesn’t grab hold of you. It’s so deadpan and uninvolved that it doesn’t even sell itself. 

Call this artistic integrity on the part of the director. Apparently, the only way Yorgos Lanthimos knows how to make his point—that marriage is a hegemonic institution— is to create a world as drab and tedious as the deadest mausoleum-marriage. Everyone speaks in monotonous, emotionless tones like the pod people from Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and likewise the dialogue is mindlessly ordinary and stiff: “I got you a rabbit; thank you very much; I like rabbits; I knew you did; that’s why I got you one.” (I’m paraphrasing, but that’s pretty close to reality.) The whole world of this movie has been lacquered in the beige of banality in order to advance The Lobster’s thesis. And I agree with the argument, but this brand of cultivated, polished satire leaves me enervated and completely checked out. 

It’s particularly frustrating to see good performers reduced to merely reciting their lines. At his best, Colin Farrell can be exuberantly pathetic or commanding, as in his performances in In Bruges and the Fright Night remake (where he played the sexy vampire-next-door). But here, both he and Rachel Weisz (also capable of real feeling and empathy) are hollowed out for the joke. The Lobster is a hipster’s version of satire: it lacks vivacity and madness, two things you need for a movie like this. And while its premise may be daring, the movie isn't. When John Waters was making all of his truly insane movies against the establishment, he at least was having a good time, even if those movies didn’t always hang together. (And of course, LSD was involved.) The Lobster hangs together too perfectly, like a stilted photograph of a dreary London factory, all its satire meticulously thought out and orchestrated. I felt nothing. 

With John C. Reilly, Ben Whishaw, Jessica Barden, and Ashley Jensen. 

Dead Man Down

I was surprised by how much I enjoyed Dead Man Down, which stars Colin Farrell and Noomi Rapace as two strangers, both looking for revenge. Farrell plays Victor, whose wife and daughter were killed by gangster Terrence Howard's underlings, who left Victor for dead. Aided by the fact that none of them recognize his face, Victor joins their criminal operation as part of his elaborate plan to carry out vengeance. Rapace plays Beatrice, Victor's neighbor whose apartment parallels his; they meet on their balconies, and eventually she explains that she saw him killing someone, and needs him to kill the man who injured her in a car crash that ruined her face.

The screenplay by J.H. Wyman deserves much credit for making Dead Man Down a deliberately paced, exciting, intelligent thriller. I was expecting nonstop violence and carnage. (There are a few brutal scenes that feel gratuitous, but they're not as bad as you might have been expecting from the theatrical trailers.) Instead, this is a movie that seeks to actually explore a character's deep-set motives to kill. It's not a morality tale about the pitfalls of revenge, though. Much to its credit, this film sticks to telling its lurid crime tale.

Watching Victor's labyrinthine scheme unfold is a pleasure, even if the movie tends to be deadly serious at all times. (A little more humor would have lightened the mood considerably, but we seem to be living in an age where humor mustn't interfere with the ferociousness of the modern thriller, which seems impenetrable to anything that doesn't add to its moroseness.) Part of Victor's plan involves sending creepy packages to Howard in the mail, which include cryptic messages and small pieces of a photograph cut up like a puzzle. He's calculated his mind game to play out right down to the wire, and it's this aspect of Dead Man Down that makes it stand out from the usual drek.

Colin Farrell isn't particularly magnetic in Dead Man Down, but his dark eyes give him that jaded puppy dog look. He doesn't have to do much to elicit our sympathy. Dominic Cooper really shines as his buddy, a fellow new recruit to Howard's operation, who is himself a family man. Cooper's character seems a bit naive about the world into which he's entered, but he's determined to make a good impression with his boss, by doing everything he can to track down the person who's sending Howard those creepy messages. Noomi Rapace continues to exude a sort of enigmatic wistfulness. She's got some fire in her blood, though, and she lets a little of that come through her performance as Beatrice.

With Isabelle Huppert (as Beatrice's mother), Luis Da Silva, Wade Barrett, Franky G, F. Murray Abraham, and Armand Assente. Directed by Niels Arden Oplev (who helmed the Swedish Girl With the Dragon Tattoo). 115 min. ★★★

Seven Psychopaths

Seven Psychopaths is equal parts clever and insipid, from writer-director Martin McDonagh, whose 2008 film In Bruges turned death into something poetically transcendent and darkly funny. Lightning doesn't exactly strike twice. This is one of those movies that wants desperately to be more clever than it is. It's not as blatantly philosophical as Cronenberg's recent disappointment, Cosmopolis. But it reaches for things outside of its grasp. Deep, cosmic ironies perhaps. This overreaching tends to derail the movie, which is actually quite good when it isn't being hopelessly opaque. Thankfully, McDonagh can't resist pushing our buttons. So there are a lot of wonderfully funny moments involving a handful of truly astonishingly bad people and a few others who aren't all that bad, just mixed up with the wrong crowd.

Colin Farrell plays an alcoholic writer who's struggling to start a script. His buddy, played by Sam Rockwell, works with an aging crook (played by Christopher Walken) who snatches rich people's dogs and then returns them for the reward money. Meanwhile, a serial killer is picking off mafiosos with shrewd efficiency. The dognappers steal the poodle of one of the mob bosses (Woody Harrelson), thus turning themselves into targets of his rage.

This is really Sam Rockwell's movie. He's Farrell's unassuming chum, good-naturedly picking on him for being a drunk and busting his chops for not finishing the screenplay (he's trying to motivate him to make something of himself). But he's hiding a dark secret. We soon realize that Rockwell's character is manipulating events so that they will unwind in a cinematic fashion, with the aim of giving his buddy some poetic inspiration. I haven't seen Rockwell play this kind of a part before, and he does it marvelously. He exists in some kind cinematic limbo: part real, part fictional. Rockwell looks like he's having fun with his part. He exudes a certain casual perverseness, and as an actor, Rockwell continually reconstructs what we think is fixed about his character. He's not exactly a blank slate, but he's certainly a layered one, and he continues to surprise.

All the same, Psychopaths is considerably uneven. McDonagh was apparently trying to fashion a sort of living-nightmare vision of Hollywood, in which the all-too-typical weirdness of the golden-tinged Los Angeles neighborhoods constructs the psychotic within: the result is either lived or imagined violence. The flippancy with which McDonagh approaches his subject matter saves it from being heavy-handed. But when he shoots for ironic profundity he misses (unlike In Bruges). Happily, about two-thirds of the movie (intermittently) is still quite good.

The performances certainly bolster the movie's weakness. Farrell, who utilizes the things which made his performance stand out in In Bruges, plays a whining pacifist who's content with his ineptitude. Rockwell's high-functioning psychotic personality makes him a sort of madman-therapist to Farrell's law abiding screw-up. Walken is his usual mock-charismatic self, always providing substance to his scenes. But nothing gels as cohesively as you'd like it to. Beware: It has some incredibly violent scenes, so take that into consideration if you're horrified by horrible things. With Olga Kurylenko, Abbie Cornish, Gabourney Sidibe, Kevin Corrigan, Harry Dean Stanton, and Linda Bright Clay as Walken's hospitalized wife. 110 mins.

Cassandra's Dream

In Cassandra's Dream (2007) writer-director Woody Allen aims for something along the lines of Greek tragedy in the modern world: Two brothers (Ewan McGregor and Colin Farrell) are hired by their rich uncle (Tom Wilkinson) to rub out one of his business associates who's going to testify in court against some apparently damning illegal activity. But the consequences are far graver than they imagined.


A feeling of dread comes over you about midway, when the brothers' choices start to develop into their repercussions. McGregor's character, Ian, becomes corrupted (almost entirely but not quite) by his own ambitions, and Farrell's, Terry, begins to fall apart because he can't live with the guilt, and moreover, the sense that he has upset some kind of moral balance for which he must atone.

Cassandra's Dream makes a point of giving us an insightful look into human drama, the irony of life. Ian's girlfriend (Hayley Atwell) is an actress, and once while she's performing on stage, her character says this, that life is ironic. Of course the play is not accidentally talking about the theme which runs throughout this movie, and of course the reference to the Greek character Cassandra is important as well. But I'm wondering at what cost.

This movie was just depressing. The performances are all delivered by competent, effective actors. Sally Hawkins is remarkable as Farrell's girlfriend Kate. Farrel; may resort to the same tricks to convey his angst (twisting his face, raising his voice up an octive, all the things that made him really stand out in In Bruges), but he's good. Surely no actor was better when looking panicked and guilty.
 You feel for Terry much more than Ian, McGregor's character.

McGregor maintains his usual level of poise and self-assurance. I'm not sure exactly, but I believe one of the reasons I enjoy Ewan McGregor is for his banality. There's something consistently measured, controlled, calculated, in his performances. He's always a calming agent, and this makes for a contrast and a foil to Terry's weak, unstable constitution.

But the movie doesn't give you much enjoyment for all its important-ness and its references to stock literary conceits and characters. It's too much like life to be an entertainment. How long can you admire good acting when you're depressed, and part of you regrets starting the movie in the first place because you were in the mood for something else? Woody Allen is certainly not expected to confine himself to romantic comedies (his comedies have always been so much darker anyway, dwelling on the ironies of life as they do), but in the case of Cassandra's Dream, I felt ready for it to be over well before it was.

In Bruges

Two hit men await orders from their boss about their next job, in Bruges, Belgium. Writer-director Martin McDonagh maintains a droll sense of humor that sustains the movie through its dark subject matter, and turns it into something remarkably like Shakespeare. Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson play the hit men. Gleeson is cultured, wise, measured, and careful, and Farrell is cocky, questioning, and bored with the sights of Bruges. In fact, it becomes a running joke that he will be stuck in Bruges forever.

The supporting cast is eclectic and gives the movie a trippy other-worldliness: there's the live-wire of a boss, played by Ralph Fiennes, who turns swearing into art. There's an American dwarf actor (Jordan Prentice) who's filming a movie there, as well as a duo of crooks (Clemence Poesy and Jeremie Renier) who specialize in stealing money from tourists after luring them into their apartment.

Farrell has perhaps never been more appealing than in this role, because his cocky facade is easily shattered to reveal a weak, scared man who isn't really up to the line of work he's chosen. And Gleeson becomes oddly philosophical as events turn toward the fatalistic. But it's the humor that really works for In Bruges. It would have been a maudlin piece of camp otherwise. Instead, we get something really quite stunning; a smashingly twisted crime serio-comedy that refuses to stay within the boundaries of clearly defined genres. ★★★★

Fright Night

The original Fright Night (1985) was a celebration and a send-up of camp. The movie opens to a dimly lit suburban neighborhood around midnight, and the audio of a late-nite horror movie program leads us into the bedroom of our hero, Charlie Brewster, who's too busy making out with his girlfriend to notice what's going on at his new neighbor's house, at first. Fright Night 1985 is something special to me, so I felt ambivalent toward the idea of a remake.

The 2011 remake gives Fright Night a contemporary make-over. It would seem like a refreshing antidote to the banality of Twilight, which is pure drivel as romance or as gothic horror.

We'll start with the good things: Anton Yelchin makes for a convincing Charlie Brewster, the put-upon boy-who-cried-wolf of the movie, who's unwilling to accept his nerdy friend Ed's claim that Charlie's new neighbor, the dashing Jerry Dandrige, is a bloodsucking vampire. As Dandrige, Colin Farrell is wonderfully ominous. He's so enjoyable as the vampire that you have a hard time sympathizing with the would-be victims. Dandrige likes screwing with his prey, playing darkly funny little mind games with them. Unfortunately, the scenes of Dandrige attacking his victims fall flat. There's something unconvincing about the way he tears open their necks (and their deaths seem meaningless the way they do in slasher movies). Only the satisfaction in Jerry's face works for those scenes--his insatiable appetite for blood is momentarily soothed, and he reminds you that the vampire is the ultimate junky.

The Peter Vincent character, played as a doddering old coward by Roddy McDowall in the 1985 version, has been altered for humorous affect to be a Las Vegas hack occultist with a nightly horror show. David Tennant plays him, and he invests some momentary comic relief, but his part never gets knitted into the story with any real panache. He and Charlie don't really mesh as a duo--they aren't given enough time.

Which brings me to the not-so-good stuff. The movie plays all its cards too soon. Characters aren't developed, relationships either, with the right pacing or momentum. We're meant to assume a lot about these relationships that, without experiencing them in the right ways and amounts of time, end up hurting the movie. It's harder to care about the characters let alone be scared for them. The humor in the movie is good because it keeps things light and helps avoid heavy-handedness, but at the same time no one seems very invested in what's happening. And there isn't that affection for the genre that makes a good horror-comedy click and resonate the way it should.

The rest of the cast includes Toni Collete as Charlie's mom (well-played for more comic effect), Imogen Poots as his girlfriend Amy, and Christopher Mintz-Plasse as Ed. He doesn't even come close to the off-the-wall performance of Stephen Geoffreys in the first film. He's too subdued, too nerdy to be frightening when he inevitably turns into an enemy. And that's the real problem with the remake: it's not all that scary. But it's good for a laugh, and probably worth seeing for Colin Farrell's performance alone.

The scene at the end with all the vampires is another problem. It reminded me of the part in Salem's Lot when they stumble upon Barlow's coffin under the house but are accosted by all his vampire henchmen. It's also mildly reminiscent of that wonderfully giddy moment in Re-Animator when all the corpses shoot up out of their gurneys in unison. Unfortunately, director Craig Gillespie doesn't seem to know how to make that scene pop the way it should. It feels deflated. The only other thing I'll say about the ending is that its kind to the viewer in not subjecting us to twelve phony climaxes the way so many action and horror movies feel obliged to do---the finale is nicely compact.

Horrible Bosses

What's most fun about this movie is seeing Kevin Spacey, Jennifer Aniston, and Colin Farrell playing audaciously horrible human beings who drive their subordinates (Jason Bateman, Charlie Day, and Jason Sudeikis, respectively) to want to murder them. Aniston hasn't been this much fun in years, and you probably already knew Spacey was made for this kind of live-wire psychotic CEO part. Farrell is the least recognizable (physically), and yet you get the feeling he's had some experience playing the "tool" before.

Horrible Bosses may not score any points for originality (it acknowledges its plot similarities to Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train and ignores its similarities to the Jane Fonda-Lily Tomlin-Dolly Parton workplace comedy Nine to Five), but at least it treats us to some moderately dark humor delivered with nothing but fervent zeal from its cast. Most of them seem delighted to be playing such over-the-top characters for once. Bateman and Sudeikis pretty much do their usual schtick. Charlie Day scores highly as an easily agitated dental assistant whose boss (Aniston) has been sexually harassing him with impunity.

Midway through, the movie takes an unexpected turn that changes it from a darker version of Office Space to a darker version of the afore-mentioned Nine to Five, which was about three women kidnapping their sexist boss so that they could make some worker-friendly changes in the office. It's the kind of wish fulfillment fantasy employees will cheer for, and yet there's always a bitter feeling in the back of your mind that you're rooting for three would-be killers.

Horrible Bosses ties things up too conveniently at the end, but it's a diverting enough hour and a half. Directed by Seth Gordon. With Jamie Foxx and, in a bit performance, Donald Sutherland.