Hot Pursuit

A lousy Rotten Tomatoes score should not keep us from seeing Hot Pursuit. Its dismal 5% rating on the Tomatometer once again proves that consensus is not everything. Consensus certainly should never be the deciding factor in how we experience a movie, because lots of people can be wrong. Hot Pursuit may be flawed, but it is comedy dynamite that gets the “buddy movie” right and provides plumb roles for its two stars, Reese Witherspoon and Sofía Vergara. The film isn’t perfect structurally, but it’s bursting with well-crafted scenes that build on the relationship between the two leads, it’s finely tuned and generous and light and often laugh-out-loud funny.

Reese Witherspoon conjures up memories of Holly Hunter’s plucky police woman in Raising Arizona, as well as Amy Poehler’s indefatigable Leslie Knope in Parks and Recreation. Witherspoon plays Officer Rose Cooper, an exceedingly literal-minded, by-the-book San Antonio cop with a Texas twang. Cooper has memorized all the police codes and spouts them out like a mantra when she’s stressed; she can recite the law and the statutes from memory; her uniform is impeccably neat and shiny. But no one respects her, because she cares too much.

It is this intense, totally authentic dedication to her job and the overflow of passion she has for it which bind her to Leslie Knope from Parks and Rec. The difference between them is that Leslie Knope has a team of supporters balancing her bubbly, singular insanity, while Officer Cooper is basically a loner, alienated from the rest of the world because of her intense personality. In the opening scene of the film, we see her chasing a fleeing man because he ran out on a date; she’s possibly the scariest thing an insecure heterosexual man will ever encounter: a confident woman with a gun and a badge.

However, Officer Cooper (or just, Cooper) really scares people off because she isn’t a smooth operator; she doesn’t know how to bullshit, and fluffy conversation—the stuff so many of us rely on in order to gradually get to know other people—is not her forte. She is too focused on tasks for small talk. When riding in the car with a big, tall U.S. marshal who tells her to try not to fall in love with him, she responds: “10-4. Oh. That was a joke, wasn’t it.”

Reese Witherspoon is an actress who has often played the dumb blond in lackluster Hollywood comedies; there’s nothing wrong with playing a dumb blond unless you get stuck in that role forever. Fortunately, Witherspoon has shown us a wider range of acting chops, and now she’s playing a more complex kind of comic character, one who is smart and good and honest but also kind of ridiculous and even annoying, and it’s a much more engaging, physical, and hilarious performance we get as a result. Witherspoon maintains the integrity of her character while happily letting herself look silly, sometimes being left out of a joke because she’s so serious, so tense, so committed to giving 150%.

The plot is standard Hollywood comedy formula: Officer Cooper is sent to escort jewel-encrusted Columbian diva Danielle Riva (Sofía Vergara), the wife of a drug lord, to Dallas so she can testify against the leader of a large drug cartel who is currently in jail. But things go wrong, as they tend to do in these movies, and Witherspoon and Vergara take it on the lam with both drug lords and police chasing after them.

Sofía Vergara’s performance is delicious. She sounds like a Columbian Fran Drescher (which may grate on some people’s nerves); she’s like a Redwood standing next to the petite Cooper, especially because she’s sporting a pair of wedges that are worth more than a suburban house. Vergara apes the stereotypes aimed at Hispanic women and rich women: she’s a tall, curvy, stylish, materialistic woman on the outside; but she’s also intuitive and smart, and uses the stereotypes to her advantage, maintaining a subtle control over the various insane situations the movie throws at her. Vergara is also impressively in command of herself as a physical performer. She doesn’t resort to klutziness for comedy, and she gets great mileage out of picking on poor, diminutive Reese Witherspoon. “Get down!” Cooper yells when they’re being shot at; “It is farther for me!” Mrs. Riva retorts.

The interplay between these two women is often delightful. The director, Anne Fletcher, takes time to fashion scenes so that the gags build on each other. In one scene, the ladies are trying on clothes at a gas station, and Vergara puts Witherspoon in a sexy red number that utterly clashes with her character. Officer Cooper groans, “I feel like the cheese fell off my cracker.” Despite the fact that the movie does not always hold up around them, these two actresses take command of the screen and make the movie work for them. I can forgive a lot for such terrific comic performances. I can only hope that this movie finds the audience it deserves.

With Matthew Del Negro, Michael Mosley, Robert Kazinsky, John Carroll Lynch, Richard T. Jones, and Jim Gaffigan (in a funny bit as a farmer). Written by David Feeney and John Quaintance.

Inherent Vice

A tagline for Thomas Pynchon’s novel Inherent Vice theorizes, “if you can remember the 60s, you weren’t there.” That’s the project of Paul Thomas Anderson’s film adaptation: to dramatize the disembodied, drug-addled incoherence of an entire decade. The film takes place in 1970, and its star, Joaquin Phoenix, plays a private investigator named Doc Sportello (no stranger to recreational drug use himself). Doc is hired by his ex-girlfriend to check out her wealthy current lover’s wife, who may be plotting against him with her boyfriend. Doc’s investigation quickly gets derailed by all sorts of problems and strange encounters, and it isn’t long before he’s pitted against a conservative, hippie-despising L.A. detective played by Josh Brolin.

The plot—which is constantly being subordinated by the mood and the tone Anderson has worked so very hard to convey—sounds like a promising film noir, particularly one of the 1970s noirs, such as Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye. The Long Goodbye is a cynical revision of the 1940s detective thrillers, showing us a Philip Marlowe who wasn’t the knight in shining armor, unless he was maybe a Don Quixote, oblivious to the reality that he no longer mattered. In a sense, this film may be Paul Thomas Anderson’s attempt to ape the style of Altman. But he isn’t as precise. Perhaps the film is too successful at what it wants to do: Its loose structure will either charm you or put you to sleep. (I fell into the latter category.)

I can only admire the craft and the intentions of a film like Inherent Vice for so long. Once that initial feeling of appreciation faded away, I began to look around the theater, check the time, and wonder how much longer my imprisonment would last. (The film runs two hours and 30 minutes.) But it’s not just the fact that Inherent Vice turns out to be a colossal bore of a movie. It’s also pretty dismally unfunny, and Anderson tries very hard to be funny at times. (There are a few minor laughs, but far too many scenes attempting comedy completely misfire.) Phoenix gets knocked around a good bit, and there are moments of outlandish chaos filtered through the relaxed vibe of people too zonked out on mind-altering dope to actually be as zany as Anderson would like. The director possesses an exuberant love of hippy culture, a culture he clearly aims to defend by showing us the moral decay of its enemies. But, in order to remain true to the overall feeling of Pynchon’s novel (one which I am guessing can be summed up in that earlier quote about not remembering the 1960s), Anderson has to ultimately hold himself a kind of hostage to nonsense. He takes a few cues from The Big Sleep there, because nothing in that movie made much sense either. But damn if it wasn’t entertaining and fun from beginning to end.  

Part of the problem is the film’s tendency to dump information on the viewer while doing so in a lulling sort of way. Characters appear and divulge more and more apparently unimportant information, as none of it ever really adds up. When Doc visits a mental institution—where his ex-girlfriend’s lover has been spirited away by his greedy wife and her boy toy—there’s not a feeling of discovery, of revelation. It’s just one more speed bump on a hazy drug trip. The scenes that Anderson shapes are calculated to appear crazy, weird, and disjointed, but nothing in this movie amounts to anything, and Anderson seems to be defying us to challenge him on this, since aimlessness is his raison d'etre. But who cares if the movie's no good?

I really liked Anderson’s 2007 film There Will Be Blood. I felt admiring of The Master—and more interested in it because it seemed to be about something more than this—but Inherent Vice’s lackadaisical structure just doesn’t work for me. Now, there’s always the possibility that such a structure will appeal to some viewers, especially those who aren’t expecting some kind of rip-roaring pot-boiler ala L.A. Confidential (which is a much more exciting, plot-driven L.A. noir.) Then again, there are loosely structured movies that I really adore, such as Jim Jarmusch’s Only Lovers Left Alive. But that film had a mood that was much more effective. It takes place in the perpetual night world of two vampires, and is set to a lot of silky, pulsating rock music. Jarmusch captured a mood with absolute precision. Anderson is going for a similar “nothing-is-happening-everything-is- happening” feel here, but he can’t quite achieve it. Anderson is in many ways a stronger director when his material is about something. He needs an idea to shape that is more concrete than what he gets from Thomas Pynchon. And yet, Inherent Vice has the distinction of being far less self-important than either There Will Be Blood or The Master.

I will say that one day I’d like to revisit Inherent Vice, and see if the movie doesn’t improve with a second viewing, free of the tyranny of expectations. But for now, I’m not only unconvinced, but hugely disappointed in a movie to which I was looking forward for months. (Also, I really hated the narrator's childlike, twangy, fake-serious, extraordinarily grating voice.)

With Owen Wilson, Reese Witherspoon, Jena Malone, Martin Short, Benicio Del Toro, and Maya Rudolph. Written by the director.

Wild

In 1995, Cheryl Strayed (whose last name is itself a piece of hand-picked autobiography) embarked on a thousand-mile hike along the Pacific Crest Trail, which begins at the border of the U.S. and Mexico and ends at the border of the U.S. and Canada. She later wrote about her experiences in Wild, and it was adapted for the screen by Nick Hornby and directed by Jean-Marc Vallée (Dallas Buyers Club).  Playing Cheryl Strayed, Reese Witherspoon (who also helped produce the film) is quite good, reminding us of the performer who did such excellent work in films like Election and Walk the Line. The film, especially given its weighty, emotionally raw subject matter, is surprisingly light on its feet. I haven’t read Strayed’s memoir, but it’s pretty clear that her own take on her life is at least somewhat ironic (especially given that last name, which she picked for herself after getting divorced).

I’ve been backpacking twice, in the mountains of North Georgia and the mountains of Tennessee. Both times, I was filled with self-hatred during, but proud of myself afterward. I remember the exhaustion and the pain and the fact that I ate an apple during one of those hikes that tasted like candy. It was truly the best apple I will ever taste in my life. In the film, Strayed comes to a check point where other hikers are camping and where there’s shelter and food. She asks for a Snapple and a bag of potato chips, and then gratefully partakes in them. Oh, the little things we miss when we isolate ourselves from the creature comforts.

Cheryl Strayed has a reason for this extreme, demanding, exhausting, long hike. In the wake of her mother’s death from cancer, Cheryl’s personal life took a self-destructive turn. She became addicted to heroin and began sleeping with any man she met, which—as one might expect—destroyed her once happy marriage. (Her husband is played by Thomas Sadoski.) Cheryl sees this thousand-mile journey as a kind of quest for healing, although she isn’t sure she wants to be healed.

We watch as Cheryl’s memory winds back through the events of her life, and tries to make sense of them, as she’s struggling to survive in the wilderness with an extremely overstuffed backpack. (Finally, someone pulls her aside and helps her prune the pack, in one of the movie’s funnier moments.) Cheryl’s flashbacks provide little glimmers into her life and the painful experiences that have brought her to the Pacific Crest Trail, from her abusive father to her dead mother to her descent into drug abuse.

A lesser director would have used Strayed’s emotional baggage as a device, erecting its heroine as an untouchably noble piñata of tragedy, beaten into the dust by her life. Instead, Vallée lets the memories of Cheryl’s trauma drift in and out of her head, the way memories do in real life, and they feel organically connected to her story rather than obviously calculated for dramatic effect. Cheryl is never completely sold on fixing herself, and yet she longs for more time with her now dead mother (played beautifully by the iridescent Laura Dern) and some kind of reconciliation with her ex-husband (Thomas Sadoski).  

Obviously, Wild is a movie that wants to tackle big emotions. But it rarely resorts to cheap ploys. Cheryl Strayed becomes a person we relate to. The kind of heartache she bears is the same kind of heartache we all suffer from in our lives, and instead of saddling the film with meaninglessly cheerful Hallmark-ish resolutions or contrived happy endings, Wild lets the wounds bleed and the hurts hurt.

Reese Witherspoon’s performance is terrific. She’s plucky, but also disarmingly honest, especially when it comes to her status as a hiking novice. Because Witherspoon is blonde and beautiful, she’s had to fight the impression—perhaps self-imposed thanks to movies like Legally Blonde—that she’s a Barbie doll first and an actress second. Actually, she’s a fine performer, and Wild reminds us of the complexities of which Witherspoon is capable of showing on the screen.

What makes Wild work are the numerous encounters Cheryl Strayed has during her journey with fellow hikers and also with people who give her the occasional ride, or the people working at the check-points, where Strayed has care packages sent (containing clean clothes, food, books, and money, among other things). And of course, the movie is bolstered even more by its beautiful landscapes. It’s like National Geographic and Eat Pray Love had a baby. But my suspicion is that Wild is much more emotionally honest than Eat Pray Love (which I haven’t seen).

Wild may be a calculated end-of-the-year release, but it’s also funny, powerful, moving, and rough around the edges in a way that truly works for it. The human brokenness it depicts is as honest as the terrain Cheryl Strayed travels is gorgeous. Jean-Marc Vallée, who seemed too distant from his characters in Dallas Buyers Club, finds a vision for Wild that is compassionate without being overly sentimental or maudlin. It may be catharsis at the movies, but it’s also a vital piece of filmmaking.

With Gaby Hoffman, Keane McRae, Michiel Huisman, W. Earl Brown, and Kevin Rankin. Cinematography by Yves Bélanger.

American Psycho

Have you ever thought about the fact that Norman Bates was actually a pretty likable character? Aside from the grisly truth of what Bates was doing with his nights, Alfred Hitchcock managed to make him endearing for much of the film. (Well, Anthony Perkins, the actor who played him, deserves a lot of the credit, thanks to his boyish face and the way he makes Bates charmingly awkward.) We feel bad that he has to live with that crotchety mother of his, running that depressing motel, wasting away like a hermit. And then, when we find out the truth, we feel bad that Norman Bates was raised under decidedly horrible circumstances. This doesn't mitigate his crimes or his guilt, but it certainly humanizes him.

Now prepare yourself for a movie that is extravagant in its desire to dehumanize its main character (it seems unfitting to call him a protagonist) and alienate its audience in the process. American Psycho (2000) is about a sociopathic yuppie who gets his jollies killing people. It's from a novel by Brad Easton Ellis, and his heavy ideas weigh the movie down with nothing to relieve them from their own stifling self-importance. The script was written by the director, Mary Harron, and Guinevere Turner. So one of these three is to blame for the line, "They don't have a good bathroom to do coke in." It happens early in the film: four Wall Street businessmen are sitting at some fancy schmancy restaurant that serves unappetizing yet pretentious-sounding food that only the rich could afford to eat and pretend to enjoy. Then another member of their pack returns to the table and says it: "They don't have a good bathroom to do coke in."

My problem with the line was this: He reports his findings as though he were doing a commercial, perhaps telling a friend--and the viewer--that "this new cream really rejuvenates your saggy skin." He should have said something more vague, if we're trying to be realistic. You may think I'm splitting hairs, but actually this little bit of detail underscores a much bigger problem in American Psycho. The line is meant for shock value, realism or good writing be damned. It's part of an overarching--and failed-- attempt to satirize the 1980s and all those alpha-male, coke-snorting frat boys-turned executives, who whip out business cards and compare them to see whose is the nicest. I wonder: are the business cards a euphemism for anything? This is one line of dialogue in a script that feels incredibly contrived, as though the writers were saying, "are you getting how cleverly we're satirizing yuppie culture? We're trying to make it as obvious as possible."

Aside from some beautiful shots of New York City, American Psycho lacks any sense of elegance. And yet it's made with skillful good taste: the lavish yet sterile apartment of Christian Bale is lavish and sterile in a calculated way: it's all designed in order to bring out the blood stains that frequently cover his floors and his bed sheets. The overly familiar 80s music that layers the film (Phil Collins, Robert Palmer, Huey Lewis and the News) reminds us--as if we needed it--that this movie very specifically wants to capture the insanity of that decade. But I see no evidence that the movie has anything deeper or more authentic or interesting going on in it than the most banal, expensive yuppie films that actually came out of the 80s. Like The Wolf of Wall Street, American Psycho may be secretly in love with the things it wants to critique. (Although I'm not sure how secretive this love affair really is.)

The film drifts along with humorless precision, as bad as many a David Cronenberg movie, and the whole time I yearned for some Brian De Palma. The difference between American Psycho and any number of De Palma's ridiculous thrillers is manifold: With De Palma we get some kind of freakish, manic, titillating, tricky joke. All of his movies between Sisters and Blow Out captured this feeling to one degree or another (even if not all of them were entirely good or successful). You see a Brian De Palma thriller and you're blissfully aware that you're at a movie directed by someone who wants to show you a good time. You see American Psycho and you feel the deadening pulse of a bad sermon.

Christian Bale obviously got himself in impeccable shape to play the character of Patrick Bateman. Bale is of course famous for "becoming" his characters. There's no denying that the man has talent. But I'm convinced more than ever that he is an overrated actor. He seems hellbent on playing characters that require basically the same kind of performance: one comprised entirely of alternations between very serious scowls and a sunken-faced deadpan expression. (It's what made the Batman movies such enormous box office hits.) I guess we've stopped expecting anything more from our "serious" leading men. They're certainly not going to be accused of having fun or letting us have fun. Bale aficionados can look forward to seeing his chiseled body, but are you okay with it being covered in blood? Are you okay with Christian Bale running through the halls of his high-rise apartment building naked with a chainsaw? (I know...It's the universal good time.) His performances often feel overly perfected and somehow never alive.

Some will likely argue that the point of American Psycho is to show the heart of not-aliveness. The problem is that a corporate thriller without any life in it starts to feel like a corporate snuff movie, and even if there weren't scenes of Christian Bale's house of horrors (bodies in closets propped up like trophies, and various other horrors) and his bizarre sexual trysts and his deviant inner-thoughts and psychotic dream journal, we'd still have the film's snuff-like devotion to 80s corporate greed. If the makers of American Psycho wanted to make a movie that is believably about a sociopath, they have done it. (Is there anything weirder than the way Patrick Bateman talks about music? As if he were reading the reviews of albums?) But they haven't given us any reason to care one bit.

With Willem Defoe, Josh Lewis, Reese Witherspoon, Chloe Sevigny, Justin Theroux, Jared Leto, Samantha Mathis, and Matt Ross. ★

Mud

Grit with heart. Mud feels very Mark Twainish: it takes place in De Witt, Arkansas, along the Mississippi River, and the two boys at the heart of this film could be Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn: one wants to view the world with romantic eyes--despite the fact that his parents are splitting up--and the other is a realist, an orphan being raised by his uncle. Their names are Ellis (Tye Sheridan) and Neckbone (Jacob Lofland), and they spend their free time roaming the river and exploring all the little islands that populate it. (Twain made these islands central sites of adventure in his books, and they were indeed very much a part of his own childhood.)

On one of these islands, the boys run into Mud (Matthew McConaughey), a man on the run. He becomes endearing to them, and they help him rebuild a junked up boat by procuring spare parts from various junkyards across town. But the police and some bounty hunters are looking for Mud, and there's a girl named Juniper (Reese Witherspoon) who's waiting in a motel room for word from him so that they can run away together.

We're never exactly sure how much of Mud's story is being left out, and yet there's really nothing embellished about him. He speaks plainly. The problem is his own perceptions: Is he unable to see that Juniper isn't all she's cracked up to be? The mission of reuniting two lovers fills Ellis with a particular sense of purpose, seeing as his own parents' marriage is falling apart, and he's scorned in love by a girl himself. (The movie doesn't offer much in the way of good female role models: women are mostly disappointing in Mud.)

But the story is a powerful one, and the performances of McConaughey and the two young men are compelling. Writer-director Jeff Nichols eyes them with compassion without turning Mud into something sentimental. And he doesn't cheapen it by going for easy solutions to the various conflicts that arise. The characters in Mud feel very much a part of the world Nichols has created, or more accurately, procured: he adds to the mystique and the mythos of American life on the Mississippi. It's a wonderful film, and one of the most underrated this year.

With Sam Shepard, Sarah Paulson, Ray McKinnon, Michael Shannon, Joe Don Baker, and Bonnie Sturdivant. ★★★½