Gangster Squad

Gangster Squad is a less exciting variation on L.A. Confidential.

It's 1949, and in Los Angeles, everything runs on mobster Mickey Cohen's watch. L.A.'s police chief (Nick Nolte) creates a special, secret task force to go after Cohen's capital and bring him down. Considering the story, and the cast--which includes Josh Brolin, Ryan Gosling, Anthony Mackie, Giovanni Ribisi, Michael Peña, and Robert Patrick, as cops, Sean Penn as Cohen, and Emma Stone as Cohen's moll, Gangster Squad should have been a lot better than it is. It's marred by clumsy writing and conventional plotting. The script is by Will Beall, and the film was directed by Ruben Fleischer. Both of them seem preoccupied with making Gangster Squad as gruesome and brutal as possible--without sacrificing their love of cheap sentiment: [Spoiler ahead] Brolin's pregnant wife survives after two of Cohen's men riddle her house with bullets, and when Brolin arrives, he follows the trail of blood into the bathroom only to find that she isn't dead; she has given birth. A cheap shot, the kind of trickery that outs an incompetent director faster than you can say "give me a break."

As ridiculous as it is--and it is quite ridiculous--Gangster Sqaud is compulsively watchable in its badness, and it has a sleek, colorful, shallow charm to it. The casting is intriguing, and yet somehow unlikely: Brolin is never convincing as a would-be family man, and Gosling is little more than a comic book character (he's still very enjoyable); Emma Stone, who is always likable, somehow feels miscast, although she isn't bad; meanwhile, Sean Penn turns into Freddy Kreuger, chewing up the scenery like a psychotic pair of scissors. ★★

The Tree of Life

Terrence Malick's latest, The Tree of Life, is like 2001: A Space Odyssey and The Wonder Years on acid. I left the theater with mixed emotions. It was a haunting movie with the kind of breathtaking visual lyricism you expect from a Malick film. He is known for his visual patchworks like Days of Heaven (1978), for which cinematographer Nestor Almendros won an Oscar. But Days of Heaven had problems. Malick emphasized the imagery over the story, which was a love triangle set in the turn-of-the-century wheatfields of Texas. The film was shot in 1976 in Alberta, Canada, and when the actors (Richard Gere, Brooke Adams, Sam Shepard, and Linda Manz) finally saw the movie in 1978, they were shocked at how unrecognizable it seemed. Malick had cut whole scenes of dialogue and what was left was a visual pastiche, beautiful, yes, but also vacant, almost muted. Pauline Kael quipped that it was "an empty Christmas tree" on which "you can hang all your dumb metaphors."  More importantly, Kael observed that "what is unspoken in this picture weighs heavily upon us, but we're not quite sure what it is." Most of the other New York and California critics were more adoring of the movie. However, Malick disappeared from movie-making for twenty years, returning to direct a remake of The Thin Red Line, released in 1998, and then the Christopher Columbus opus, The New World, released in 2005.

I found moments of The Tree of Life completely in sync with Pauline Kael's observations of Days of Heaven. On the other hand, having seen Days of Heaven several times, I was able to compare the two. Malick latched onto a story somewhat more dexterously in The Tree of Life than he did in Days of Heaven. He's always been something of a poetic director, and I think you can only appreciate the kind of image-saturated heaviness he does on a large screen. Watching this or Days of Heaven on your TV will probably kill the movie experience altogether. He's also got a need to be pretentiously philosophical, and show-offy, the way Kubrick was in 2001. The only difference is that Malick's pretentiousness is more out of reverence for the beauty of nature (or perhaps reverence for his appreciation of the beauty of nature) and in 2001 Kubrick seemed to be daring us to be bored/in awe of his technical achievements. He was turning film into opera and demanding that we applaud with reverential deference. Malick might be doing the same thing with nature. Sometimes you think you're watching a National Geographic documentary sans narrator.

But then, about thirty or forty minutes into the movie, Malick calmed down with all the floaty, emotionally manipulative nature imagery (it's beautiful, yes, but it does go on and on) and the visually maneuvered philosophical pontificating about the beginning of the universe and the dawn of life. He zooms in on this middle class, 1950's Texas family headed by the stern, hard-ass dad played by Brad Pitt. He's a proud, stiff-upper-lipped father of three boys. Their mother (played by Jessica Chastain) is all elegance and passivity. She's beautiful and mysterious and genuinely loving, but her spirit is mastered by her rigid husband. He's not without love or kindness, but he seems so afraid of losing his family that he resorts to being a control freak to avoid loss. And so, he alienates them with his domineering temperament. It made you understand all fathers in a fresh way: all at once trying to be brave and tough, tender and buoyant, never really sure of themselves. The boys are trying to figure things out themselves, and the oldest one (Hunter McCracken as a child and Sean Penn as an adult) experiences a loss of innocence that comes with growing up. He learns what death is, he learns the fluid give-and-take of faith when he's told about God and then experiences tragedy for the first time.

Malick can't resist himself though, and he goes back to being cuckoo at the end. By then, though, we're more willing to accept his directorial idiosyncrasies. Besides that, I appreciated the movie's attempt to tell the story visually, relying less on dialogue. And while this technique brings the movie into sometimes new and strange ground, it also made The Tree of Life refreshingly lyrical and offbeat. Sean Penn's presence is virtually a cameo as the oldest son, grown up, trying to make sense of life in the New York business world. He's mourning the loss of his youth, and there's also a heartbreaking story about one of his brothers.

Maybe it's triter than we think. Perhaps The Tree of Life might just be a gag on the audience, trying to whip us up into an ecstatic frenzy. I can hear the pretentious film-goers praising the movie's more esoteric moments as something only the enlightened could understand. I don't think even the director knew what was going on in some of those parts. This would have probably made more sense during the era of sex, drugs, and rock-n-roll. It's a good film and a bad film, moment-by-moment.

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