Where in the World is Sandra Bullock: Our Brand Is Crisis

Our Brand Is Crisis is like those lost presidential candidates who aren’t sure if they even want to be President, who soldier on as if by force, operating disinterested campaigns. Our Brand Is Crisis isn’t very sure of what it’s selling either. This film’s problem is every bit a structural one. Director David Gordon Green doesn’t know what this movie is, what it wants to be, or what it needs to be, to work. Green has a trump card—Sandra Bullock—but keeps her at bay as if afraid to overuse her star power. Considering how bland and forgettable this movie is, a little star power would have helped.  

Our Brand Is Crisis, which is based on the 2005 documentary of the same name, purports to show us the dastardly tactics of political strategists like James Carville, famous campaign manager for Bill Clinton. Carville is the closest thing to a pop political advisor, one who is almost as famous for his bald head, his Cajun accent (beautifully self-parodied in 30 Rock), his acerbic wit, and the fact that he’s a left-winger married to a right-winger, Mary Matalin. While James Carville is a fascinating character for a movie, this film is utterly un-fascinating. Carville—renamed Pat Candy for the film—is played by Billy Bob Thornton, who’s the perfect-looking choice. But Thornton is, like Sandra Bullock, kept in check by the director, so he doesn’t project the same brassy, larger-than-life image as the real Carville. Pat Candy is more of a comic foil for the main character, campaign strategist Jane Bodine, who’s played by Bullock.

Jane Bodine has acquired the nickname “Calamity Jane” during her long tenure as a campaign strategist. She’s propelled many politicians into a blaze of glory, and plunged just as many into the ground. Now, Bodine lives in voluntary exile in the mountains, trying to get over the last painful election, when she’s enlisted by the campaign managers of a Bolivian senator named Pedro Castillo. Castillo’s presidential run is barely viable: He was President years before and earned nothing but disdain from the Bolivian people; so Jane Bodine is tasked with transforming Castillo from a frog to a prince. Meanwhile, Jane’s arch nemesis Pat Candy happens to be working for Castillo’s opponent, the frontrunner. Candy and Bodine have a history fraught with dirty tricks, and the election becomes a stage to enact their personal vendettas against each other. (Of course, it’s not quite as serious as all that: there’s a semi-good-natured rivalry at the heart of their despicable mug-slinging tactics.)

The trouble is, Our Brand Is Crisis never rises above the level of a conventional political drama. David Gordon Green gets lost in developing a plot that doesn’t feel particularly urgent or interesting. That leaves us with the film’s perceptions about corruption in campaigns. But its perceptions are myopic and obvious: Crisis deals in generalities (the system as we know it is fundamentally broken and corrupt) and as such says nothing we don’t already know. And when he senses the movie has gotten away from him, Green throws in a few random scenes of comic lunacy to enliven things, unsuccessfully. Two examples: 1) When Bodine befriends some young Bolivian men and brings them back to her hotel room for a night of drunken reverie. After multiple rounds of drinks, they turn her bed sheet into a catapult, which they aim at Candy’s hotel room across the balcony. 2) When Castillo’s campaign bus tries to race the bus of the frontrunner, Rivera, and Bodine moons them. These scenes reek of desperation, and clash with the film’s naturally high-minded tone.  

When Sandra Bullock is allowed to command the screen and appear competent and in-control of herself, the movie improves; but Green keeps her on a tight leash. For the first twenty minutes after Jane arrives in Le Paz, she has intense nausea from the elevation, and so her character sits on a couch quietly while the others argue about how to resuscitate Castillo’s future. At times, Bullock is noticeably absent from a scene, or confined to the background until she suddenly and violently draws our attention to her, does something outlandish, and exits. During a campaign rally, a masked spectator smashes a raw egg on Castillo’s forehead, and Castillo decks him in front of the crowd and the news cameras. Green uses Sandra Bullock much like this egg-lobbing heckler. She is all shock value, and when the movie gets back to unraveling its plot, she returns to the foreground.

Why did David Gordon Green decide to keep his star at bay? The answer may be in Green’s intentions. It is conceivable that he wanted to make an insightful movie about the corruption of political campaigns, not just another Sandra Bullock vehicle. But without Sandra Bullock, the film is genuinely dull. None of the other characters develop into interesting people, except for Anthony Mackie, who transcends his role with his natural charm (he’s given no other tools to humanize his character). The characters in Crisis begin and end as the jaded, cynical worker bees of a miscarried political campaign.

Moreover, the film doesn’t make good on its attempts at criticizing the status quo. It waffles—like a politician finagling for votes—between high-minded drama and witty satire. Because none of the characters except Bodine has any life or humanity to them, it’s hard for us to care about the drama, and the film’s satire fizzles out from sheer laziness. We all know that politicians are liars, don’t we? Our Brand Is Crisis bandies that argument about as though it were a truly shocking exposé. As though that alone made for sharp satire.

On top of everything else, Green wants redemption for a world that is inherently unredeemable. In the end, Jane Bodine experiences a crisis of conscience that pushes her into a new career—the non-profit industry. I found it inspiring that Bodine had such a change of heart, but this did nothing for the movie, which emerges as a lackluster critique of politics in a world inundated with smart polemics about political corruption. I’m especially reminded of the 2009 film In the Loop and the HBO show Veep (both helmed by Armando Ianucci). In terms of incisive satire, Veep comes to the table brandishing a machete, where Our Brand Is Crisis is left wielding a butter knife. 

Written by Peter Straughan, who presumably shares some of the blame for the lackluster results. With Scott McNairy, Ann Dowd, Joaquim de Almeida, and Zoe Kazan.

Gone Girl

How well do we really know the people we live with? What little disappointments or changes, what dashed hopes buried within, turn into something big, something dangerous, and when does that terrifying transformation begin? David Fincher’s latest film, Gone Girl, which was adapted to the screen by Gillian Flynn from her novel, peers into the darkness of the glass, into the inner-lives of two people living side by side as perfect strangers to each other. 

Gone Girl has all the trappings of the great “novel of sensation,” Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White, which was published in 1860 to something like an exhilarated obsession among the reading public. It was all the rage in Victorian London--there was even Woman in White perfume-- and became something of a touchstone for the mystery novel. Collins would later write what is considered the first English detective novel (The Moonstone) and we can trace every modern murder mystery in literature and film to these two seminal works. The Woman in White (and all the imitations that followed it) had wonderfully, delectably sinister ingredients like murder and madness and forged wills and people being held prisoner by their own relatives. Collins had tapped into the inner-workings of the British social sphere and shown it for all the darkness it contained (or could contain under the right circumstances), and right at a time when social issues such as murder and divorce were being widely publicized by the increasingly popular newspapers to the increasingly literate populace. (This was also right around the time that an official police force was established.)

In its own way, the film adaptation of Gone Girl is a piece of sensation fiction, and moreover, a savvy commentary on the sensationalism that our current news media dishes out with giddy, morbid fervor. Gone Girl  is ostensibly about a man named Nick Dunne (played by Ben Affleck) whose wife Amy (played by Rosamund Pike) disappears without a trace from their quiet suburban Missouri home one perfectly un-sinister morning. Naturally, Nick becomes the prime suspect when investigators thoroughly search the house and find suspicious things like blood spatter, a recent fire in the fireplace (in July), and signs of struggle that appear to have been staged. Soon the media waltzes in and pounces on Nick, questioning his apparent non-grief, diagnosing him as a sociopath, and turning him into the most hated man of the hour.

But that’s just the beginning.

The movie interacts with the missing wife in flashback. We see the two of them meet. In that scene the dialogue is maddeningly difficult to discern. But the music and the camera are in sync and the exchange between Affleck and Pike is lovely. Their chemistry is so good that you find yourself thinking, “How could this have happened? When was the day that he suddenly became able to kill her?” There’s a wistful feeling about those early years in their relationship, and the camera feeds it to us. Their conversations are of two charming, intelligent people, perhaps too self-aware for their own good. When they both purchase the same gift for each other for their anniversary, Pike’s character jokingly mocks them for being too cute. They comment on their own lives as though they were on camera, perhaps some inane reality show but one featuring clever people saying witty things. Many of those flashback scenes involve Pike writing in her diary, and her style is personal, funny, again very self-aware. She writes in an offhand way so as not to be accused of being overly sentimental or unaware. And when the problems start—after two layoffs and a dying parent happen in rapid succession—they become obsessed with not resorting to any of the common defense mechanisms of struggling married couples. “We’re not going to be the couple that has a baby to save the marriage,” they keep telling each other (and themselves).

David Fincher should have earned our respect as a filmmaker by now. His 2007 Zodiac may be the great film of the previous decade. (At the very least, it’s in the top five.) And more recently, Fincher impressed with both the Facebook biopic The Social Network and the thrilling American version of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. So we should expect nothing less than good work from him (and from Gillian Flynn, who deserves so much credit for spinning such a fascinating, disturbing, riveting story.) In the previews, Gone Girl is packaged as an upscale version of a Law and Order episode. And the film wants you to see the Scott Peterson resemblance in Ben Affleck’s character and let your mind do the rest. But there’s much more to Gone Girl than any previews might suggest. There will be no spoilers here. This is too good a movie to ruin. The pleasures of this kind of well-crafted potboiler are so rare in movies these days, that anytime we do get something this good, it feels almost miraculous.

Ben Affleck may have the hardest role in this film. His character is quite tricky: he’s an imperfect man to be sure, possibly a truly evil man, and Affleck manages a delicate balancing act. When he goes before the press (and the public), people read his inability to display credible signs of grief as a big guilty sign. (It’s a startling commentary on how news stories are disseminated and how public opinion can be shaped—quite arbitrarily—by appearances.) Yet we find ourselves torn between wanting to crucify him and wanting to save him from his own inability to package himself in an appealing way. Indeed, so much of what we see in Gone Girl is reflected through the eyes of people or events that are open to interpretation. That is where once again this film truly echoes those novels of old, many of which were organized as a series of documents (letters, diary entries, newspaper articles, police reports, etc), organized (and possibly edited) by a supposedly objective party.

Who is truly reliable? Is the media really trustworthy in its alleged pursuit of truth? Or is it simply chasing a story that it invents in the process? Gone Girl adeptly aims its arrows at this very process of taking an ongoing story and turning it into the trashiest kind of grisly entertainment, heightened by a network news talk show host named Ellen Abbott (played masterfully by Missi Pyle) who goes after Nick with the boldness of a shark and worries little about actual tangible evidence.

Kim Dickens plays the unwavering detective, a scrappy, smart, modern-day version of the Sergeant Cuff in Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone. Dickens gives her a sense of humor and a sense of proportion: She seems to be the only one who’s interested in looking at facts. Tyler Perry is dead-on as Nick’s lawyer, Tanner Bolt, who’s notorious for defending the obviously guilty husbands of the world, and Carrie Coon delivers an at times stunning performance as Nick’s sister Margo, the only one who believes in Nick’s innocence. Because of her somewhat thankless role as Nick’s protector and champion, she may not get the credit she deserves for her fine work. But then, everyone in this movie is good.

And Rosamund Pike seals the fate of this film with her performance. As we delve into this couple’s complicated relationship, we begin to see new sides to Amy. Pike is an actress who hasn’t gotten the notice she deserves, despite a number of good performances, including her part in 2009’s An Education. She is a true chameleon as an actress: by turns glamorous and cool, sexy, smart, manipulative, pathetic. In parts of the film she looks like a movie star, and in others, like someone who walked out of a Flannery O’Connor short story: a forlorn, dowdy nobody with a scar or a limp or some other classic O’Connor deformity.

Gone Girl leaves you with questions. The film is certainly satisfying, but its characters are complex enough, its plot bizarre enough (yet somehow truthful too), that you can’t help but feel obsessively curious about every minute detail. Fincher is a director who successfully layers his movies with the minutia of human existence without losing sight of the grander story being told. And the details always add to the story. His movies have, since Zodiac at least, almost always felt in touch with the human emotions and inner-conflicts at work under the surface. There’s nothing cheap or obvious about Gone Girl, and while the many lurid revelations of this film’s plot may at times feel overwhelming, it’s hard not to be taken in by such a fascinating, thrilling piece of entertainment. It leaves you thinking, “Is anyone really safe?” Indeed, the problems that this movie explores and the questions it asks may be answered, but never totally understood, never completely solved. Do we really know another human heart? We fear the interiority of each other because it puts us on the outside, completely void of control, and Gone Girl is ultimately about the politics of control. Who gets to tell the story? And how do you know whom to believe?

With Neil Patrick Harris, Patrick Fugit, Casey Wilson, Sela Ward, Lisa Banes, David Clennon, and Scoot McNairy. Music by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross. Cinematography by Jeff Cronenweth.

Non-Stop

For about seventy-five minutes, Non-Stop is a tense, pleasing thriller about an alcoholic, clearly unstable U.S. air marshal (Liam Neeson) who's being taunted via cell phone by an unknown passenger aboard a plane bound for London. The creeping texter claims that every twenty minutes someone aboard the plane is going to die until 150 million big ones are wired to some mysterious bank account with lots of numbers.

As the put-upon hero whom almost nobody on the plane trusts, Neeson is powerfully grim yet heartfelt. He has qualities reminiscent of George C. Scott: the same kind of subtle command tinged with pathos is present in Neeson's facial expressions, particularly in his eyes. In the movie, he's unable to get over a personal tragedy. (Always the impetus for this kind of character's motivation. Cue eye roll.) And of course this predictably becomes a way for the villain to goad him and a way for him to find what Hollywood thinks of as redemption. (I'll give you a hint: he feels guilty about being an uninvolved dad and there's an innocent little girl aboard the plane who reminds him of his daughter.)

But after operating like an exciting modern-day Agatha Christie movie--Murder on the Transatlantic Airways--that left me quite giddy with happiness, Non-Stop veers into the nether-regions of a truly craptacular plot twist from which it never rebounds fully. Yes, I was happy with the movie overall, but the twist is so lame that it's a huge let-down, because the movie has shown us such a good time until then. It feels like lazy writing on the part of the three people who hashed out this sky-thriller. And maybe it was the best they could do--I promise not to reveal any big spoilers--with a premise like this. But if Agatha Christie could churn out like 90 of these thriller type novels, couldn't they get one script right all the way? (Granted, hers weren't all great either, but she nailed enough of them in the right places.)

But I cherished those seventy-five solid minutes. And I still think if you go out and see Non-Stop (which, given what else is available this weekend, is not a bad choice), you'll agree that the movie delivers a lot of fun suspense, even after the big dumb reveal. One more quibble: the passengers begin communicating with loved ones with their phones, which causes the story to leak, and soon they're watching live news coverage of their own hijacking (some kind of weird thrill) on the screens in front of them. This is supposed to be a jab at the bad reporting that can come of a 24-hour-news cycle, but Non-Stop is such a conventional thriller (in many ways, and despite being likable) that such commentary hardly registers.

As always, it's really great to see the lovely Julianne Moore, even if she's relegated to playing the den mother, standing by Neeson's character and helping out in his feeble investigation of the suspicious and understandably rattled fellow passengers. She does get some good moments though, and the chemistry between the two of them is nice and easy. I wish there had been more.

The supporting cast, which does a fine job, includes Michelle Dockery, Scoot McNairy, and Nate Parker. Directed by Jaume Collet-Serra.

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

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