The Right Stuff

As three-hour-long epics go, The Right Stuff (1983) is a pretty good one, bolstered by the humanized performances of a slew of talented actors portraying the men and women involved in America's race against the Russians to get outer space. The film--which was written and directed by Philip Kaufman and adapted from Tom Wolfe's best-selling book--finds a surprising balance in a story so charged with cultish nationalism. I've never been particularly interested in planes or pilots, and when I lived in Orlando, was always blasé about the goings-on at NASA just forty-five minutes away at Cape Canaveral. When people would talk excitedly about the latest rocket launch, I felt bored. This film shows exactly how exciting and meaningful it was to be a part of the space race.

As a director, Kaufman is one of the best to come out of the 70s, and The Right Stuff should probably have been his piéce de résistance, except that it wasn't successful at the box office, barely breaking even (or not) depending on which budget calculation you go with. (It was made for around 20 million, and grossed around 20 million.) Kaufman had already established himself as a fine director with the impressive 1978 remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. The Right Stuff isn't as canny as that film, but it's certainly as well-made and well-acted, and tries very hard to show us the many perspectives at play during this little chunk of big history. And it has a sense of humor. The grandiosity that Kaufman puts on the screen is always accompanied by a wink.

The film begins in 1947 at a military air base in the California desert, where Chuck Yeager (Sam Shepard) determines to break the "sound barrier," a phrase that essentially meant doom for an aircraft once it reached a certain altitude. Yeager's accomplishment (spoiler alert: he breaks it) sets in motion the events of the film which take place into the 1960s when the seven "chosen" astronauts make their various orbits into space. One of Kaufman's most adept accomplishments as director is his seamless merging of actual documentary footage of news coverage with fictionalized footage of the actors. In that sense, The Right Stuff often feels like a plucky documentary about the space age. It would have been propaganda in the hands of a less literate filmmaker. 

One of Kaufman's best instincts as director is to consider the point-of-view of the pilot's wives. On one hand, this story is every bit a tale of male achievement in a very traditional power structure, but Kaufman has a sense of realism--not to mention compassion--for the "women behind the men." Is the film accurate in its portrayal of the men and their wives? That isn't for me to say. But as a piece of narrative, The Right Stuff succeeds in multitudinous ways at being both honest and insightful about marital relations in the military and the American obsession with a kind of mythologized machismo. What's so genius is that the film mixes its criticism with its reverence in a way that feels genuine. And yet it's always sure-footed. Kaufman wants to give us a ra-ra American epic, but he wants us to think about it too, and layers his criticisms in subtle ways that allow us to come across them on our own. Otherwise it would be preachy or condescending.

As John Glenn, Ed Harris--plucked from cameo roles and TV by George Romero in the 1981 knights-on-motorcycles indie film Knightriders--shows what he's made of as an actor here. Harris is the kind of all-American actor who's very easy to root for, and his performance as Glenn paints him as a thoughtful man who took very seriously his unexpected new role as a public figure. The equally fine supporting cast includes: Dennis Quaid, Lance Henriksen, Barbara Hershey, Scott Glenn, Fred Ward, Veronica Cartwright, Pamela Reed, Charles Frank (as Scott Carpenter), David Clennon, and Donald Moffat (as Lyndon Johnson).

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

Killing Them Softly

Killing Them Softly feels gloomy and vacant, humorless. It's a hollow crime drama. I suppose that's an appropriately realistic way for a crime drama to be. But I was wanting something more fun. Brad Pitt is a talented actor when he's given the right material. He's not bad here, and yet he's not entirely right for this role. His character, an apparently talented hitman who doesn't like to put his victims through any emotional or physical torment, preferring instead a quick and painless assassination, is uninteresting. He's not flashy or cool in the way a Brad Pitt character needs to be to make him truly come alive as a performer. His name is Jackie Cogan (the source material, by author George V. Higgins, is the novel Cogan's Trade), and his services are enlisted by a bunch of mobster-looking corporate guys who were robbed during a poker game.

The perpetrators of this robbery are two ne'er-do-well types: a drugged out Aussie named Russell (Ben Mendelsohn) and a chatty career criminal named Frankie (Scoot McNairy). They don't have much finesse when it comes to holding people up, but they manage to pull off the job anyway. There's a bit of a hole in the plot: the sort of 'master-of-ceremonies' of the poker game, played by Ray Liotta, had already gotten away with robbing the game several years back. He eventually admitted this, and by then was laughed at, good-naturedly, and tentatively forgiven. Knowing that he would be blamed for any subsequent robberies, the two hoods feel confident they can get away with it scott-free. The fact that Liotta wasn't rubbed out after his admission seems like a weak point in the script, and the entire movie hinges on it, loosely.

Not only does the film seem to rest on a fuzzy, poorly worked out detail, but it's relentlessly talkative, and not in the Quentin Tarantino isn't-it-great-how-clever-the-script-is kind of way. Mostly it's a bunch of scenes of has-been criminals hashing out the details of how they're planning to perform an upcoming job, but revealing more about their own insecurities and failings in the process. It's a bit like seeing someone's father cry. And the talkiness feels like padding, not entertainment.

There's some artfulness to director Andrew Dominik's imagining of all this. (Take note of a spoiler here.) He turns one scene--in which Pitt shoots Liotta while he's at a red light--into an almost scientific display of the bullet exiting the gun, torpedoing through the window glass, through Liotta's hand raised in self-defense, into his face and out the back (all in slow motion, of course). But that's not really impressive. It's just a little better than having to sit through another brutal killing scene. (Liotta already figures in a particularly unwatchable sequence where two hired men beat the hell out of him. It's quite distasteful to look at it.)

There's an obvious political agenda in Killing Them Softly that doesn't quite take. Throughout the movie, anywhere there's a radio or a television, we hear or see clips of President Bush and President-Elect Obama (the movie is set at the end of 2008) talking about the financial crisis. Is this some kind of ironic explanation of the motivations of hit men? Apparently it's an indictment of American morality, as Pitt confirms in his rant at the end of the movie, closing the film out with an admittedly funny line: "America's not a country. It's just a business. Now f***ing pay me."

With Richard Jenkins, James Gandolfini, Sam Shepard, Slaine, Vincent Curatola, and Max Casella. ★★

Days of Heaven

--> I once loaned my copy of Days of Heaven (1978) to some friends, and when they returned it, one of them dubbed it, “the movie that wouldn’t end.” Indeed, a Terrence Malick hour-and-a-half feels much longer than a Francis Ford Coppola three-hours, because, for all its beautiful imagery, Days of Heaven is a bore. People who talk favorably about it never mention the plot, because Malick, the writer-director, doesn’t care very much about plot: instead, supporters of Malick’s work talk rapturously about its rich, Academy Award-winning cinematography (by Nestor Almendros). It’s a simple love triangle-story, set in Texas (but filmed in Alberta), in which an opportunistic drifter (Richard Gere) pairs off his girlfriend (Brooke Adams) with a shy sharecropper (Sam Shepard) who’s got less than a year to live. 

The story isn’t bad, but Malick wants the nature imagery to envelop it (and us). He enjoys de-emphasizing human stories in favor of natural imagery. (He's almost righteously anti-plot, which may explain why he uses such a tired one. We’ve already seen it before, and Malick prefers that we fill in all the gaps for ourselves, with bits of dialogue and parts of other movies we’ve seen. That way Malick can focus on art.) Like 2011’s The Tree of Life, Days of Heaven isn’t terrible, necessarily, and there are certain images that remain in your head, particularly the scene where locusts invade the wheat fields. But it all boils down to something pretentiously antithetical to the enjoyment of movies, as much as it tries for some kind of vapid “pure cinema” look and feel. The worst part is that so many people have been fooled into thinking it's great cinema. It's technically well-made, but it's difficult to respond to the characters when they feel so muted, so undernourished, as though their own creator had nothing but contempt--or worse, disinterest, which grows out of contempt--for them. Linda Manz plays Gere’s kid-sister, who narrates the film with her distractingly ugly New York accent. Malick wants her childish observations to sound philosophical, but they’re really just cant. 

Note: the picture that has long adorned the title page of this blog was from Days of Heaven. Now that I've reviewed the movie, I think I'm going to retire it. See if you can identify the next one.

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford

An elegiac Western, brooding with grim death, about the life and death of Jesse James, played by Brad Pitt. Director Andrew Dominik and cinematographer Richard Deakins capture the vastness of the Midwestern terrain which serves as the stage for the countless train robberies and stand-offs and meandering conversations in breezy meadows. It's vacuous like a Terrence Malick film, and while its subject has a certain dramatic pull, watching it lumber along for nearly three hours reminded me why Westerns are so utterly unappealing, with a few exceptions. They're either gratuitously unrealistic to the point of being macho right-wing fantasies or they're so grimly realistic that you can't get an inkling of enjoyment out of them (much like Meek's Cutoff). It's quiet and ponderous like There Will Be Blood, which is a better movie. It had a poetic energy to it while Jesse James feels torpid and unimaginative.

Brad Pitt tries to layer a philosophical undercurrent into his performance as Jesse James, and Casey Affleck, as the calculating Robert Ford in the title, turns squeaky-voiced weaselly-ness into an art form--an undignified, desperately unappealing one. Pitt registers. He's an actor who hasn't really gotten his due. But the movie is unsustained--parts are better than the whole--and so his performance and his staying power are rendered somewhat less effective. The supporting cast is populated with good actors who are bogged down by a boring script and the shackles of self-important filmmaking: Sam Rockwell, Jeremy Renner, Paul Schneider, Mary-Louise Parker, Sam Shepard, and Zooey Deschanel.

Fair Game

Fair Game is a political expose first and a movie second. It's a documentary thinly masked as narrative, and director/cinematographer Doug Liman doesn't seem too care in which form the viewer receives his film as far as that goes. He does seem rather concerned with the image of his main characters. How does one evaluate a movie that's so politically charged? It deals with Valerie Plame, a CIA agent whose identity was outed in a column by writer Robert Novak in 2003. The issue was Joe Wilson, Plame's husband, who claimed to know for a fact that Iraq did not purchase uranium from Niger. And of course that all has much to do with whether or not Hussein had WMD's. Since Wilson's article, "What I Didn't Find In Africa" threw suspicion on the President's campaign against Hussein, conflict arose. In an effort to stop Wilson, his wife, Plame, became a target of Vice Presidential aid Lewis "Scooter" Libby.

If it sounds complicated, that's because it is. And the movie is based on books by both Plame and Wilson--drastically different from the way the media reported the scandal, often referred to as "Plamegate." In the lead role, Naomi Watts is surefooted and strong and poised and noble. She's accused by the media of being a nothing desk agent who stunk at her job, and she takes it all in stride while her blowhard husband (played effectively with that lovable loose cannon Sean Penn) whores himself out to the media in an effort to fight back. Whether you believe in Valerie Plame the Sacrificial Lamb or Valerie Plame the Incompetent depends very much on how much homework you've done outside of the film.

As entertainment, Fair Game is at its best when it deals with the story of an Iraqi doctor (played by Liraz Charhi), who is tapped by the U.S. to funnel information from her brother, a high-ranking scientist working directly under the Iraqi government.  Plame is spearheading the operative to get this information--using Charhi's character as a tool--and the whole deal goes bad when Plame is revealed as a CIA agent. That portion of the story is abruptly dismembered from the rest of the movie (perhaps this is in line with the real events, but it's frustrating regardless). The politics of war run deeply through the movie, and it's difficult to divorce such a vital strand from Plame's story of inner-torment as she copes with her worlds (marriage, career and social relationships) careening out of control.

There's a lot of real news footage in Fair Game that further takes us out of the narrative and into the documentary. Actors playing political officials like Libby and Fleischer and Rove cannot compete with the real footage of Bush and Cheney and Rice, et. al. It's fascinating, but you wonder why Liman didn't just go straight for a documentary format. Maybe he's hoping to collect some Oscars on his mantel (the Academy does love important work, and Fair Game reeks of importance). Watts may even land herself an Oscar, although Penn's bombastic performance is the one that really leaves you on edge. He's positively frightening in one turbulent scene after another, and when he's not losing his temper, he's a live wire waiting to do so, grinning like a prophet and a politician roled into one.

Liman's camerawork, by the way, is more than a little dizzying at times. Perhaps he was trying to create camerawork that was as fuzzy and convoluted and headache-inducing as this whole scandal.

With Ty Burrell, Sam Shepard, Bruce McGill, Brooke Smith, David Andrews, Noah Emmerich, David Denman, Polly Holliday, Geoffrey Cantor, and Adam LeFevre. 108 min. ★★½