Straight Outta Compton

Disclaimer: This review contains strong language. 

Like so many biopics of late, Straight Outta Compton ignores the complexity of the issues it raises in order to posture an agenda. If you don’t know anything about legendary hip hop group NWA, you’ll likely be taken for a ride by the film Straight Outta Compton, which paints those men in a disturbingly flattering light. This is an instance where a movie should have put the credits at the beginning, not the end, so that we’d see who produced it: Dr. Dre and Ice Cube. Their film, directed by F. Gary Gray, shows how Dre, Cube, Easy E, M.C. Ren, and D.J. Yella took the music world by storm with their incendiary, indignant music. I'm not taking issue with their music or their indignation. The movie nails the racial injustice—aggressive white L.A. cops who frequently trounced young black men in Compton and flagrantly ignored their rights—that spurred NWA to write songs like “Fuck the Police". But the movie doesn’t want to acknowledge any of the flaws of its heroes, such as their rampant misogyny and homophobia, although it’s pretty easy to see the former for ourselves in this film, because women are rarely not referred to as “bitches” and are valued almost exclusively for their sex appeal.

Instead of portraying its heroes honestly, warts and all, Straight Outta Compton revels in their status upgrades and the windfall of money that these guys made as their music became increasingly successful. (NWA's very real and justifiable righteous anger would not have been squelched by a more honest portrait of their own foibles.) 

As money is the most important theme in Straight Outta Compton, Paul Giamatti, playing music producer Jerry Heller, who helped put NWA’s music on the map, ultimately becomes the film’s sleaziest villain, once it’s discovered that he’s been dishonest about their finances. What’s perhaps more distressing is that he presents himself as a forward-thinking man who’s willing to stand up to the white police (although there is one black police officer in this scene, and the film doesn't have to do anything to point out the particular tension that conjures up) when these cops illegally accost the guys as they’re standing outside a recording studio. Jerry shouts back at the ignorantly authoritative cops, and it's clear that he only gets away with this retaliation because he’s white. But Jerry’s commitment to racial equality is merely a façade, and he uses the trust of the NWA boys, not to mention their own ignorance of the legalize of the business world, to take advantage of them. 

The moments when Ice Cube, Dr. Dre, and Easy E discover they've been cheated out of money are treated like the most important revelations of the movie. The love of money becomes a good unto itself, and these characters’ motivations are tainted by that. This is a film which raises some urgently needed questions right now, but whose focus gets shifted by other things, so that the filmmakers lose sight of what made NWA's music relevant. Who cares if you stand up to racist authorities if in the end your only goal is to become rich and famous, as protected and unconcerned about injustices as your oppressors?

What’s disappointing about Straight Outta Compton as a film is that there are many terrific individual scenes. The film thrives on direct and emotionally charged scenes that grab us and refuse to let go. But Compton wants too much to enshrine its heroes, as though it were Selma, without ever earning that right--the way Selma does. And Ava Duvernay, the director of Selma, acknowledges Martin Luther King’s flaws. Her film doesn’t portray King as perfect. You could walk out of Compton thinking that these guys were totally innocent, that they had never really mistreated anyone. They were just having fun. What's with the secrecy? Anyone can find out what they really think about "bitches" by just listening to one of their songs.

As for the age-old criticism that rap isn't art, the movie at least gives us a taste of the sheer artistic genius behind the best that NWA created over the years. The movie doesn’t really want to talk about art, though, except in very brief moments, like when a police officer scoffs at the idea, rejecting rap as something far inferior to any other form of expression. When you listen to the lyrics of a song like "Fuck the Police", you hear the smart, skillful use of language, the unabated anger and frustration being channeled, and you see how much this particular piece tapped into an ire that wasn’t being seen or heard by anyone. Segregation hasn't gone away even in 2015, and this movie effectively reminds people like me—white, middle-class people—that our skin color has protected us from the kind of treatment people experienced in places like Compton. 

The only we way that movies like Straight Outta Compton can really effect positive change is if they’re honest, and we cannot denounce racism while tacitly tolerating misogyny. What’s disturbing is the idea that someone could enjoy a film like this and be proud of his enlightened appreciation for the race problem, while never admitting the filmmakers’ lies about their treatment of women.  Recently, Dr. Dre publicly apologized for his treatment of women, but to what effect? And why did he let a movie like this ignore that same mistreatment? Movies shouldn’t ignore the complexity of their characters all in the name of stirring up the viewers' moral outrage, and they shouldn’t be tidied up in order to package themselves as something morally pure.

Nevertheless, there are moments of greatness and electricity in Straight Outta Compton that make it worth seeing. (It runs on far too long, however, and loses its edge in the final half-hour.) The key performances in this film—Ice Cube’s actual son O’Shea Jackson as Ice Cube, Corey Hawkins as Dr. Dre, and Jason Mitchell as Easy E—are all strong. The screenplay--by Jonathan Herman and Andrea Berloff--is often funny and incisive. But it's disappointing to think that the filmmakers squandered an opportunity in order to worship these rappers as both model citizens fighting for justice, and dutiful capitalists, courageously looking after their bank accounts. It's hard to be counter-culture when you sell out. 

Love & Mercy

Filmmakers take note: Love & Mercy is the way biopics should be made. This study of Brian Wilson, the often unheralded genius behind the unique sound of The Beach Boys, is an exuberant movie about the creative process. It’s not a happy movie—Brian Wilson lived a troubled life from the 1960s to the 1980s (the movie jumps back and forth between the two periods, sort of the beginning and the end of a particularly nightmarish chapter in Wilson’s life)—but it left me feeling giddy about how good movies can be when everything goes right. There’s nothing inherently wrong with trying to tell the sweeping history of a person’s life, but it can often turn a movie into a deadly experience. Director Bill Pohlad rightly zeroes in on a particular chapter and a particular struggle for Brian Wilson, and shapes those moments into a compelling story that feels wonderfully complete and satisfying.

Paul Dano and John Cusack share the role of Brian Wilson. Dano, with his subdued mad-genius quality, is perfect as the Brian Wilson of the 1960s, the guy who had a creative impulse he could not turn off, one which demanded that he stretch outside the admittedly lucrative formula that had served The Beach Boys so well in the first five years of their career. Cusack adds a kind of sharpened depth to the character of Brian Wilson, playing him in the late 80s, when he’s been under the dubious care of an abusive doctor who’s over-medicating him for his schizophrenia.

Love & Mercy achieves a thrilling magnificence during the scenes of Brian Wilson in the recording studio, trying to make Pet Sounds (the 1966 commercially unsuccessful, critical darling that many consider The Beach Boys’ masterpiece) while the rest of the Boys are on tour in Japan. Wilson brings in the Wrecking Crew (the uncredited studio musicians who did most of the instrumentation on The Beach Boys’ albums, as well as a multitude of other records made in the 50s and 60s), and they hammer out the unusual, quirky, rich, vibrant material that, even today, is astonishing.

When I went back and listened to Pet Sounds last fall (after suddenly deciding I wanted to get back into The Beach Boys), I was struck by how evocative this record is. It is the work of someone who’s had his heart broken and then put back together again. It is the work of someone oppressively weighed down by a creative impulse to transcend the glistening, blissfully happy pop ditties from the previous Beach Boys records. And the beautiful thing is, nothing about Pet Sounds or the film Love & Mercy diminishes those great, pure Beach Boys pop songs. If anything, these two pieces deepen that music. When we hear something like “California Girls” or “Surfin’ USA,” we’re hearing the giddy, innocent incantations of an endless summer. The music on Pet Sounds is what happens when that summer does finally end, and the reality of life smacks that previously cherry idealism in the face.

The casting in Love & Mercy is pretty brilliant, too. Not just the casting of Dano and Cusack, who are both terrific and moving in their own distinct ways, but also that of Elizabeth Banks and the guys playing Dennis and Carl Wilson and Mike Love and Al Jardine (Kenny Wormald, Brett Davern, Jake Abel, and Graham Rogers, respectively). Banks plays Melinda Ledbetter, Brian's eventual second wife and the woman who helped rescue Wilson from the clutches of the nutty, controlling Dr. Landy, played to almost too-brilliant perfection by Paul Giamatti. He’s as vile and hate-worthy as the awful jazz conductor in Whiplash played by J.K. Simmons. That kind of voluminous asshole is almost too easy for guys like Giamatti. So you admire it, sure, but you also have to keep in mind the much more challenging subtlety of Banks’s performance, or Dano's or Cusack's. When Dr. Landy is screaming at Melinda through an office door, she just stands there with a smile of superiority, knowing she has gotten him to reveal his true, ugly colors. “Are you okay?” her boss asks, after Landy storms out of the office. “What are you going to do now?” She responds: “I’m going to sell some cars.” What a moment.

Pohlad also keeps a healthy perspective on The Beach Boys’ music and what it represents. There’s a knowing humor throughout the film that their music—especially the early stuff—represented a kind of square, all-American, blissfully-ignorant-of-world-events mindset. There's also the element of savvy, blatantly false marketing attached to the Beach Boys' image. Dennis was the only good-looking Beach Boy. (The rest of them were chubby or balding or just generally not the hunky blond sex idols they were purported to be.) Dennis was also the only one of them who actually surfed. Dennis Wilson was the Beach Boy who actually lived the life of a Beach Boy, only he eschewed the all-American squareness of their early songs for the LSD and sexual liberation that the later half of the 60s provided him so readily. In the movie, Mike Love—or maybe it was Carl—remarks, “Real surfers don’t even like our music!” Brian Wilson never actually surfed until 1976, and only then out of obligation for a piece of reporting being done on him. But even when some of The Beach Boys’ music is pure fluff, it’s incredibly well-done fluff, and those harmonies are heavenly. Love & Mercy gets this complexity: it honors the beauty of music that is essentially pop. It understands that pop music can be complex, and that this music and these lives mattered. This is a story worth telling.

Written by Michael Alan Lerner and Oren Moverman. Based somewhat on the book Heroes and Villains: The True Story of the Beach Boys, by Steven Gaines. 

12 Years A Slave

12 Years A Slave is the most intense movie about slavery that I've ever seen. It's based on the experience of Solomon Northup (played with real power and restraint by Chiwetel Ejiofor), a free black man living in Saratoga, New York with his wife and two children. Northrup is kidnapped and sent to Georgia where he serves multiple masters, ranging from passively kind but cowardly (Benedict Cumberbatch) to downright sadomasochistic (Michael Fassbender).

This film adaptation of Northup's experiences really puts his plight into perspective. You might say he'd been living an easy life up until his captivity, but seeing how the plantations work off the sweat and soul-crushing of other black people transforms him. And then there's the sheer ugly moral ambiguity of being a slave: do you run and abandon your fellow slaves? Do you put the ones who've been subjected to particular cruelty and torture out of their misery? Can you ever trust any white people, ever again? I found myself wanting Django to appear and slaughter all the slave owners, and as slowly and painfully as they had tortured their slaves.

But there's a problem for me with 12 Years a Slave: it's a harrowing, torturous movie, full of lashings and abuses that feel too real to watch. Obviously--they really did happen, and they really were horrifying. Sometimes the camera stops and lingers, forcing us to watch the lashings over and over, or poor Solomon being hanged, but low enough to the ground that he can just barely touch the muddy earth with his feet and keep his neck from breaking. It's like we're marinating in the awfulness of slavery. Is this punishment? Is this "good for us?" Is this real cinema, transcending the superficial limits of entertainment and instead treating us to some kind of moral cleansing? I'm not sure.

Thankfully, the performance of Chiwetel Ejiofor keeps the movie from turning into a total exercise in despair. As the years drag on, Solomon somehow manages to keep his wits about him, and he uses his intellect to stave off some of the abuse that others around him incur. (There is one scene where he beats the shit out of some trashy overseer, played by Paul Dano, and you don't want him to stop. You want him to beat the man into the ground and then start on the next person he sees with the same indignant ferocity.)

But it does mean that 12 Years a Slave often leaves the realm of 'entertainment' for the realm of 'message movie.' This is director Steve McQueen's attempt to demonstrate for us the horrors of slavery. And it is in turn horrific. Is it appropriately horrific? I suppose it is, in the way Schindler's List is appropriately horrific. It's not something I ever need to see again, but I'd refer anyone who wants to have some kind of visceral experience of slavery and how evil it is to this movie. This is a good companion (or should I say contrast?) to Gone With the Wind, with its decidedly rosier appreciation of the South pre- and post-Civil War.

And yes, I cried when he was reunited with his family. It was, again, very intense. Not for the easily disturbed.

With Lupita Nyong'o, Sarah Paulson, Brad Pitt (who co-produced), Adepero Oduye, Paul Giamatti, Garret Dillahunt, Scoot McNairy, Alfre Woodard, and Chris Chalk. Beautiful cinematography by Sean Bobbitt, although the subject matter makes it hard to admire his occasional shots of the loveliness of moss hanging from trees on the banks of lazy Southern rivers. The very landscape feels tainted. Screenplay by John Ridley. ★★½

Cosmopolis

David Cronenberg finds new ways to punish his long-suffering audience with Cosmopolis, based on the book by Don DeLillo. It's about a young New York corporate billionaire (named Eric Packer) who journeys across town (for a haircut) in his fancy, high-tech limousine. This is supposed to be an anti-capitalist odyssey, where Eric discusses life and politics and money and culture with various people, including his cold, distant wife and several sexual partners. He's made a bad business calculation that's costing him millions, and has decided, in a sense, to go down with the ship.

While Cosmopolis throws some interesting ideas at you, the total effect is deadly dull. The ideas are approached in a cerebral, academic way that feels antithetical to movies and the reason we go to them. They may be apropos, especially in today's economic climate, but just being relevant intellectually doesn't make a movie. A movie needs to be experienced on more than a solely intellectual level. Cronenberg may be aiming for some kind of transcendent experience, in which the intellectual becomes visceral. (Many of his films are incredibly visceral, and smart too, so it's more than a little disappointing that he couldn't pull this off with more finesse.) But Cosmopolis doesn't succeed in making that leap. It stagnates within the first 10 minutes: the cars that creep along past the limo, as though in slow motion, might serve as a symbol for this film's sluggish immobility. It's all symbolic of course, but are we supposed to congratulate movies for how literary they can be? 

Robert Pattinson is too bland an actor to give the film much life, but then that's the real problem with this movie: his blandness is perfect for it. It's a movie about the lifelessness of the Super Rich, whose charmed existences aren't overshadowed by the problems of normal people. I kept waiting for something more interesting to happen, for these ideas to develop into a movie rather than a series of hokey dialogues, but that something never came. The big scene at the end between Pattinson and Paul Giamatti, who plays one of his disgruntled former employees (who wants to kill him) is just another drawn-out conversation about philosophy and capitalism, like the many that come before it. The script, by Cronenberg, often feels like the work of a lazy, pretentious creative writing major.

I kept wanting to like this movie, in all honesty, but I was so bored it was hard to see past the flaws mentioned above. So, to end on a semi-positive note, I will say that this may be the kind of film you like more the second time around, once your expectations aren't so high. Cosmopolis clocks in 109 minutes, but feels much longer. With Jay Baruchel, Kevin Durand, Juliette Binoche, Samantha Morton, and Sarah Gadon. 

The Ides of March

The Ides of March is, at its most obvious, about how corruption is unavoidable in politics. It can be inadvertently bumped into, but regardless, it sticks like glue, leaving an indelible impression. The impression is either on the public, when they are made aware of the corruption, or on the corrupt person who chooses to keep one improper act a secret by committing more improper acts: corruption begets corruption.

Beneath the moralistic, cynical representation of the inherent corruptibility of politics and politicians, George Clooney's latest picture is an attempt to burst the balloon of the Idealist, the one who believes that it's possible for a politician to change the world for the better. It's done with a kind of effortless, winsome skill, because Clooney plays the kind of politician, at the surface level, that you know Clooney wishes could really exist; the kind of politician (again, only at the surface) that Clooney wishes he could be, were he to ever step into the political realm himself. As the hip young(ish) presidential candidate, Clooney's Governor Mike Morris is progressive, answers the questions he's asked, and isn't afraid to say what he really thinks, regardless of how it will be received by the media or the public. He plays the ultimate white liberal--stylish, sophisticated, and dedicated to principle. (Of course, we find out pretty soon what his true colors are.)

Ryan Gosling plays Morris's junior campaign adviser, a rising hot shot who seems to be incapable of making a wrong move or a bad judgment. He believes fully in the cause of his boss, who is trying to win the Democratic primary election against a more traditional, less viable candidate who still has a shot of winning because he's willing to play dirty. Morris refuses do get into the mud. This ultimately becomes a test of wills: how long can a politician afford not to play dirty?

The Ides of March has a conspiracy thriller-esque aura about it, but it's just an aura. The film is deliberately paced, which is fine, but after a while you realize it's not really moving toward anything. There aren't any really pulse-pounding moments, the kind of tingling excitement you expect from a political thriller. Even though the title suggests something dramatic on a Shakespearean scale, The Ides of March is tame. You begin to realize that the lack of pulse-pounding is symptomatic of the lack of a pulse. It's a characterological analysis, not a thriller, which would be fine if it added up to more at the end. It's only intermittently compelling, and ultimately forgettable.

The actors make up for the movie. Ryan Gosling's performance is strong: he demonstrates his capability as a leading man. His character undergoes a major moral and idealistic shift in the film, and he adapts to this shift with masterful control of himself. That's the whole point of the movie, that the real political players will make dramatic, character-changing shifts in the blink of an eye without blinking an eye. But The Ides of March leaves you feeling unaffected by its story and its sobering message, probably because it's telling you something you already knew. It's a moderately entertaining reminder of why we are so disenchanted with politics on both sides of the aisle.

Philip Seymour Hoffman, Paul Giamatti, Marisa Tomei, Evan Rachel Wood, Jennifer Ehle, and Max Minghella co-star.