Julia

Julia (1977) explores the dubious friendship of playwright Lillian Hellman (Jane Fonda) and her eponymous childhood friend Julia (Vanessa Redgrave). (It's disputed that Julia even existed.) According to Hellman, Julia fought against the Nazis, and even roped Hellman into her cause by having her smuggle money from Paris to Berlin (in a drawn-out but tense sequence on a train). It’s hard to imagine this is the same actress that gave such a groundbreaking performance as the worldly wise call girl Brie in 1971’s Klute. It’s not that Fonda is bad, but she spends most of the time taking orders from other people and acting mildly nervous. The only life in her performance comes when we see her as Hellman the tormented playwright, pounding away at the typewriter to no avail. (In one scene she even chucks it out the window in a fury of writer’s block.) She's also pretty good in the last act, when she's given a little bit more of an active role in her movie. (It's not called Lillian for a reason: this movie is about one person's obsession with another person. But I don't mean to use that word in a suggestive or sensationalistic way. And the film dances around suggesting that Julia and Lillian's friendship was something deeper.) Fonda gives the same tense, uptight performance she would later reuse in 9 to 5, when she was clearly upstaged by the sharp Lily Tomlin and the bubbly Dolly Parton. In Julia there’s no one to upstage her. Everyone is deadly serious because this is a serious movie about a lot of serious themes. The tasteful direction of Fred Zinneman—from a script by Alvin Sargent—is fine, but nothing in Julia really stands out. Fonda narrates, breathing mournful intonations over Zinneman's camera. The scenes, which are well-constructed, aren’t vivid or powerful, and given the subject matter, Julia should have been more affecting. It’s also not particularly strong as a study of a friendship, as it purports to be. We’re never sure why Lillian and Julia are friends: Julia seems to put up with Lillian, whose worship of Julia doesn’t transcend to the level of an equal. And Vanessa Redgrave, who’s a fine actress, doesn’t do much to warrant the Academy Award she got from this. Some of the flashback scenes of the girls wandering the English countryside are attractively done, even haunting, but they don’t linger either. The film is haunting too, but it feels incomplete, dramatically undercooked. With Jason Robards as Dashiell Hammett (Hellman’s long-time beau), Maximilian Schell, Hal Holbrook, Rosemary Murphy, John Glover, and, in her first film, Meryl Streep.

Promised Land

Promised Land is the pet project of screenwriters Matt Damon and John Krasinski, both of whom star in the film, which was directed by Gus Van Sant. Damon plays Steve Butler, who works for a big natural gas conglomerate. His job is to travel to small towns and convince people to sell their land to his company for fracking (extracting natural gas from shale beneath the soil). Steve and his partner, Sue (Frances McDormand), encounter a nemesis: a guy from a small, grassroots environmental agency (Krasinski), who's trying to persuade people not to sell, because of the potentially detrimental environmental effects of this process.

In Promised Land, we see that age-old tension between the smug urbanites and the suspicious small-town farmers. In movies and pop culture in general, they appear to exist in altogether separate universes, encountering each other rarely, deliberately standoffish toward one another when they do. But the agenda of Promised Land has less to do with understanding the rift between these two ways of living (and the perceptions each has of the other), and more to do with a moral message about big business swooping in on pristine Mother Earth to usurp all its resources. Here, the writers achieve their intent by showing us the twinkling eyes of people who've been promised millions if they'll only sign away their farms.

Promised Land is a bit too conventional to be a totally convincing movie. The characters operate in fairly predictable ways, filling all the expected slots: there's the wise old science teacher (Hal Holbrook), who warns of the dangers of fracking; the love interest (Rosemary DeWitt), and the opportunistic local politician (Ken Strunk), who is totally fine with the possible destruction of his town as long as the price is right. These characters don't do much outside what we expect them to. It's all part of the formula for a movie like this, which does have important things to say, but tries to avoid saying them outright to avoid sounding too preachy.

We're meant to take our moral medicine vicariously, through the conversion of Matt Damon, whom we expect will go green, marry the single, 30-something teacher (DeWitt) who left the city to maintain the family farm, and raise chickens--and children. It's a little hard to buy. Perhaps this suggested scenario is wish fulfillment on the part of the screenwriters, who obviously want to strike up a national conversation about how we treat the earth on which we, you know, live, but were unable to conjure up anything beyond imitation-Frank Capra.

I think the message of Promised Land is important, but I don't think Promised Land is a great movie. It's not a bad movie, by any means. It's reasonably entertaining, and the cast is enjoyable even if the characters are obvious. (McDormand has some funny quips here and there; I wish she'd had a bigger part in the drama of the story, even though she was present throughout the film in a sort of here-but-not-here way). It's of course very tricky for Hollywood to ever do a serious message movie, because the message it's pitching may very well undermine the values of Hollywood itself. Presumably, Matt Damon's and John Krasinski's values are outside Hollywood's, to a point. They have worthy intentions and perhaps their movie will elevate the discussion of our obsession with money and riches--often to the detriment of our backyards, our water, our animals, and ourselves. It would be nice if movies could be both socially conscious and inventive, but that may be asking too much.

With Scott McNairy, Titus Welliver, and Terry Kinney. 106 min. ★★½

Lincoln

Lincoln isn't a bad movie, but it's hardly the masterpiece we've been waiting for (or not waiting for), for the better part of a decade. 

Spielberg's latest important film, once again showing that his better work was done on the unimportant movies like E.T. I suspect people with clout in the movie industry will whip themselves into a frenzy of self-satisfaction at their moral enlightenment for liking Lincoln and bestow upon it many awards. But the movie is turgid and talky, and as clever as some of the writing is (it was scripted by Tony Kushner, who adapted an excerpt of Doris Kearns Goodwin's book Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln), the language, and ultimately the movie itself, seems to be lost in its own ramblings.

The worst thing about Lincoln being ultimately dissatisfying is that people will overpraise the good things in it, and laud it all the more for its noble intentions, and the admittedly astonishing performance of Daniel Day-Lewis. His voice sounds a little like Ronald Reagan's, but more high-pitched. The look is as close to perfection as we're likely to get. And there isn't a better casting choice I can think of. Certainly Day-Lewis adds much to what is good about Lincoln.

Spielberg goes for the cerebral pleasure of a courtroom drama, full of candid, forceful discussions about law and morality in dimly lit rooms, then juxtaposed with scenes of political figures pontificating about the pros and cons of black people being considered human. And it's perhaps deliciously amusing to think of Lincoln strong-arming the House members into voting for the 13th Amendment. But the movie lacks the power I wanted it to have. The big Congressional vote scene at the end of the movie is fairly well-done: a moderately exciting finale to a movie that lumbers through its material, taking too much pleasure in its own mediocrity. And the assassination is tastefully handled, not mired in sentiment. But it's also not completely detached.

Sally Field, who reportedly had to convince Spielberg to cast her as Mrs. Lincoln, is right for the role, but it's a thankless role. She's playing a depressed woman who had more than her fair share of demons (including the loss of one son at this point in the story; her youngest, Tad, later died in 1871 at age 18). Mary, often maligned as crazy, and perpetually about to be "dragged off screaming to the snake pit" (to quote Bette Davis), comes off as the grating housewife. She utters a sadly prescient line near the end of the film, that she'll be remembered for her madness and for being a source of grief and pain for the President. She's best when she's allowed to match wits with some of the fatuous politicians who have stood in her husband's way.  Field's got the look down too, and her performance adheres itself to the vague impressions most of us have of Mrs. Lincoln.

There are a few colorful performances that add some spark, including Tommy Lee Jones as Congressman Thadeus Stevens, who's been working for thirty years to end slavery. Hal Holbrook, the lovable bullfrog, plays Francis Preston Blair, an aging Republican who also felt that slavery needed to die. David Strathairn plays Lincoln's Secretary of State, William Seward. Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays Robert Lincoln, the eldest Lincoln son, who's determined to fight for the Union despite the wishes of his parents, afraid they'll have to bury another son. With James Spader, John Hawkes, Jackie Earle Haley, Lee Pace, Gloria Reuben, Bill Raymond, David Costabile, Julie White, Joseph Cross, Jared Harris (as General Grant), Peter McRobbie, Gulliver McGrath (as Tad Lincoln), and Boris McGiver.

The biggest problem with movies like Lincoln is that we tell ourselves they are important so therefore they must be good movies. I suppose it's possible that someone sat through this movie completely enthralled in the dialogue (I've enjoyed many a chatty movie before), but for me it was only half as good as I was hoping it to be. ★★

(This review was written while listening exclusively to music by The Civil Wars.)

The Fog

John Carpenter's The Fog (1980) may be ludicrous as a thriller, but as an exercise in creepiness, it's wonderful fun. Carpenter and co-conspirator Debra Hill had just come off the phenomenal success of their low-budget thriller Halloween (1978), so by comparison The Fog seemed tame to audiences who were by now growing accustomed to more shocks and splatter, and less patient with an atmospheric, deliberately paced ghost story.

The plot involves a cadre of vengeful spirits bent on doling out vengeance (and murky weather) to a small California town on its 100th anniversary. The founding fathers of the community apparently betrayed a group of lepers, leading them to their deaths at the bottom of the sea. Now the lepers have come back to celebrate.

Carpenter relies too much on plodding slasher-film death sequences as the film progresses, but overall it's still one of his best mood-pieces. You find yourself enjoying all the little stories being weaved together throughout the film.

Carpenter imitates two masters in The Fog: Alfred Hitchcock and Howard Hawks. The movie feels like a noirish, supernatural re-imagining of The Birds (the setting reminds you of that film's coastal locale, Bodega Bay, and the fog serves as a stand-in for the birds, creating a similar feeling of apocalyptic doom). Simultaneously, Carpenter invests his scenes with a Hawks-esque film noir feel. That feel is best developed in the scenes of the main character, a local deejay named Stevie Wayne (played by Adrienne Barbeau). Stevie sits solitarily perched in a lighthouse, from which she runs a radio station that plays old jazz standards. From the lighthouse, she has a bird's-eye-view of the whole town. As she observes the fog and begins linking it to a series of deaths, Stevie becomes a voice of warning to the community. Barbeau is perfectly cast as the heroine: she's gutsy and smart, and carries the film well, especially since she's hardly on screen with any other actors.

The Fog deflates a little at the end. The whole movie is a big buildup, layering the scary atmosphere with relish, but there's not a whole lot beneath the atmosphere. Evidently, there were attempts to punch things up by adding a little more violence to the movie after the first cut was finished, but the movie's problem isn't lack of violence but lack of a genuinely scary threat. Fog almost always adds to a horror film, but when the things in the fog are only moderately scary, fog ceases to be effective.

Most of the cast members compensate for the movie's lack of follow-through. Janet Leigh makes a good impression as a local busybody who's spearheading the town's centennial anniversary gala. Jamie Lee Curtis (Leigh's daughter in real life) returns to Carpenter-land, this time not quite as helpless as Laurie Strode was in Halloween. However, she's not memorable in this movie. Her part feels unnecessary to the story, and because there are stronger female characters around her, she fails to stand out. She's even overshadowed by fellow Halloween co-star Nancy Loomis, who plays Leigh's droll assistant in this. The two have an endearingly irritated-with-each-other relationship. With Tom Atkins, Hal Holbrook as an alcoholic priest, Charles Cyphers, and John Houseman, in a creepy bit at the beginning, giving us the town's dark secret in perfect ghost-story fashion.

It might be thinking too deeply to call The Fog an indictment of colonialism, but it certainly points out the irony of celebrating people who murdered and stole to get what they wanted.