Interiors

Interiors (1978) feels like Woody Allen wanting us to take him seriously, as though making groundbreaking comedies wasn’t good enough. It’s an incredibly conscientious film, shot with skill by Gordon Willis and laden with somber qualities, but it’s also incredibly underwhelming. And not even that original. The problems of the characters have been explored in Allen’s films for his entire career: artistic frustration, fear of commitment, fear of death, etc. Allen has always managed to steal from himself. Some critics would argue that he’s developing several themes over the course of his long career; and if you watch an older Allen film out of context with the rest of his body of work--as I have done, seeing them in a fairly haphazard fashion, starting with, I think, 1993’s Manhattan Murder Mystery and basically working backwards--you do get an unfair advantage. I was, for instance, comparing the three sisters of Interiors (played by Diane Keaton, Mary Beth Hurt, and Kristin Griffith) to the three sisters of Hannah and Her Sisters (1986), and I kept thinking that Allen had done better with his material in that considerably lighter movie.

My mind also drifted to the comparably recent Cassandra’s Dream (2007), another of Woody Allen’s serious pieces, which I detest. Some people adore his dramas, and that’s fine. Allen obviously wants to remind us that he’s scene Bergman’s films, that he’s a well-rounded cinephile, but it’s this need to prove himself that makes Interiors so disengaging. The icy Wasp-mother, played to a kind of heartless, horrifying perfection by Geraldine Page, is so awful that it’s a relief when she drowns herself at the end, except that we know she died a martyr in her own mind. If her neglected daughter Joey (Hurt) can experience some kind of relief in the death of her unfeeling, self-involved mother, it seems somehow trite that Allen turns the event into a device, allowing Joey, the middle sibling who could never express herself like her older sister Renata, the writer (Keaton) or her gorgeous younger sister Flyn, the actress (Griffith), to finally create something fulfilling: a diary. (I must confess I’m guessing on the birth order here; I don’t know that the film makes it very clear, except that Flyn is obviously the youngest.)

With E.G. Marshall as the doctor-father who leaves his wife after 30-plus years of marriage, Maureen Stapleton as the new woman in his life (who has some good moments, the only real air in the whole movie), Sam Waterston, and Richard Jordan.

Mad Max: Fury Road

Walking out of the theater after seeing Mad Max: Fury Road, I felt as though I’d been hit over the head. It is one of the few times I could describe a movie as jaw-dropping and actually mean it. The movie pummels you for two hours with exquisite violence in the form of car crashes, bloody knock-down-drag-out fights (of fist and sword and gun etc), and various other acts of carnage that add up to a two-hour-long chase scene. The director, George Miller (who also directed all three of the previous Mad Max films) is almost afraid to slow down, and the few fleeting moments of relative calm that we get, where characters are able to talk to each other or simply catch their breath, are like little oases in the desert.

But as exhausting as Fury Road is, the film is incredibly well-staged and impressively mounted. Miller isn’t showing any signs of the hardening which can befall directors later in their careers; the world of Fury Road is urgent and spare and terrifying, a world overcome by drought in which the humans have become monstrous, parched, shriveled creatures desperate for water. All of the Mad Max movies have tapped into a kind of Hills Have Eyes meets Escape From New York meets The Warriors feel. They have the look and mood of cult movies, and they exude the pleasures derived from the best kind of cinematic trash. (Trash in the most uplifting, happy sense of the word.) 

Miller’s latest film is maybe too big-budget and polished to look like those smaller efforts, and far too big, but it does retain that sense of grimy, rusted, dirty, freakish rot seeping into the world. The idea of physical wholeness has been thrown out the window; or maybe it has been redefined; likewise, our obsession with cleanliness and manners and decorum has been abandoned out of necessity. (There are lots of scenes involving people siphoning gas with their mouths, or directly spraying silver paint onto their faces, or taking savage bites out of their attackers or, as in one instance, to free themselves from mutual shackles.) Miller has reduced humanity to its fearsome skeletal remains, and what a fascinating thing it is to watch what the human body will endure or forsake in order to survive.

Tom Hardy heads the cast as Max, the tough-as-nails hero in George Miller’s desert wasteland, who becomes the prisoner of Immortan Joe, a powerful, cultish figure who has total control of the very limited water supply, and doles it out in criminally minute amounts to the parched masses who slavishly serve him. His cult has its own religion, and his devoted followers—the War Boys—believe that dying for him in battle is its own glorious reward. He’s also got a little harem of young women that he keeps pregnant, and it is their rescue and removal from the clutches of Immortan Joe with which the movie concerns itself. The plot is wonderfully simple, which may be one of the reasons that—despite everything operating on full force for so much of the time—we actually develop some feeling for the characters and their plight.

Tom Hardy is a terrific Max. He’s gruff and intense, but capable of softness as we see in a few moments in this film. He’s also a commanding presence on screen, even though he has relatively little dialogue, which comes out of him in quiet grunts and very low-range responses. Hardy is an exceedingly likable performer. He possesses the dumb lovableness of a young Marlon Brando (circa On the Waterfront), minus the arrogance; and he isn't dumb at all. Hardy is so imposing that we’re maybe tempted to think of him as simple-minded, when really he’s strategic and minimalistic in his movements and his speech. When called upon, he can deliver big dramatic touches that pull us into whatever he’s going through. (When he finally tells Theron's character his name, there's something very human and likable in his demeanor; he's clearly tender beneath all the necessary armor and battle scars.)

In so many ways, though, this is not Tom Hardy’s Mad Max. This is Charlize Theron’s Mad Max. Theron plays Furiosa, a woman who’s risking her life to save Immortan Joe’s harem girls. She hides them in a rig and then, during a routine trek, diverts from the route. Theron looks like the daughter of Sigourney Weaver’s Ellen Ripley. She is the human core of the film, although Theron, like everyone else, has little time to flesh out her character. When she leads the girls (joined by Max and another man played by Nicolas Hoult) to what she thinks is a green promised land, only to discover that it to has been encroached by drought, her despair is powerful.

I’ve never been a huge fan of Mad Max as a series, and I’m certainly not a huge fan of the bigness of movies like this. But despite this, I recommend Fury Road (with some reservations) because it’s a smart movie, a generally well-crafted movie, and because it gives its characters ambiguity and integrity and vitality. (One particularly strong example: Nicholas Hoult’s character, a demonic War Boy who turns good, perhaps because he has no choice.) There are so many interesting characters in this movie that I wish I could have gotten to know better. They are not the inane characters we usually get in summer movies. It was a weird and unexpected pleasure to have spent a couple hours with them. 

Ex Machina

Alex Garland’s directing debut, Ex Machina, is an immersive experience. It’s set in the sleek, up-to-date-with-a-vengeance compound of an eccentric young tech tycoon named Nathan Bateman. Nathan is the creator of the world’s most popular search engine (Bluebook, or, by very little twist of the imagination, Google); he’s played by Oscar Isaac. Nathan is working on something new and exciting: a sentient robot named Ava (Alicia Vikander), and he has picked one of the grunts from his company, a coder named Caleb (Domhnall Gleeson) to test Ava's abilities in a series of sessions. 

Ex Machina is incredibly well-crafted. The set design is elegant yet spare, and sinister in its minimalism because it has the air of futurism, like something from a Stanley Kubrick film. When Caleb wanders through the seemingly endless corridors of Nathan's home-cum-research bunker, it’s like he’s been invited into Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory, where any minute a strange creature may emerge, totally at home with the inner-workings of the facility. The entire place is under surveillance and engineered with sophisticated security devices; and in order to travel from room to room, you need a specialized card that knows which rooms you can and cannot enter.

The conversations between Caleb and Ava are also well-dramatized. Garland has figured out how to make us gradually accept the humanity of an automaton, and even as you can hear the film’s frightening warning—that the actualization and immersion of AI into our culture is an inevitability with potentially startling consequences—you can find yourself bowled over, mesmerized, by the sheer achievement, the amazing simulation of humanity that Ava represents.

Garland also keeps the true intentions of his characters ambiguous. We never know if Nathan is pulling one over on Caleb or not, and as the film develops (and this is pretty evident in the film’s trailer), the proceedings become increasingly tense and dark. The film is predictably suspicious of young techie millionaires. Nathan's isolationism seems like a pretty good sign that he’s gone off the deep end: an arrogant, dangerous concoction of his own power, wealth, and genius. Caleb gushes at the beginning of the film that Nathan's achievement is the sign of gods at work, and Nathan later twists these words: “You said I was a god.” This is a luxury that the very wealthy can afford.

Unfortunately, Ex Machina beats to a rhythm of dread which never quite crescendos the way you want it to. The final revelations of the plot are satisfying thematically but cruel and in some sense deeply unsatisfying. Even though everything that happens feels well-thought-out and credible (I’m trying very hard to dance around spoilers for those of you who have not seen it yet), I was mad at the movie when it was all over. And yet, I believe Garland has hit on something very unnervingly honest about our obsession with machines and how easily we trust them to do what we tell them to do, how vulnerable we are to their corruption or malfunction. Even something as slight as a power failure becomes a serious problem at Nathan’s compound, because when the power fails, all the doors are sealed, trapping a person inside. 

But Ex Machina succeeds overall because it is an elegant, deliberately paced thriller and we so seldom get movies like this anymore. Perhaps it could have been a little more exciting, but I think viewers with patience will enjoy the totally immersive experience that Alex Garland has crafted. The actors of course help shape the drama, and Oscar Isaac is the most magnetic of the three. He has a terrific knack for balancing the playful and the devious, keeping us always on alert, but never sure, about what he may or may not being up to. As Ava, Alicia Vikander is quiet, graceful, pensive. I'm not sure what I would expect from a performance for this type of character, but Vikander's certainly works and adds its own level of depth--and ambiguity--to the dramatics. Gleeson, as Caleb, works too. He's got the right blend of nerdy tech kid in hoodie and competent, resourceful hero/romantic, one who may be falling in love with a robot.  

Ex Machina actually feels just a little connected to, of all things, Halloween III: Season of the Witch, the one that wasn’t about Michael Myers, but instead showed us a mad Irish toymaker who had murderous robots running his factory. And here, we may as well throw Westworld and The Stepford Wives into the conversation. There's a scene later in the film of a robot stabbing a human, and my mind immediately returned to Stacey Nelkin--whose character has been turned into a robot, or maybe was a robot all along--attacking Tom Atkins in the car at the end of Halloween III. As sophisticated as Ex Machina is on the surface, it espouses the same fundamental distrust of technology which all of these previous films dramatized and turned into extremely literal horror pieces. Ex Machina manages more subtlety, more panache, and yet it's not really any more sophisticated essentially. It ultimately resorts to the admonition, “The robots will kill us all.”