“The Reader”

Dir. Stephen Daldry
(R) ★ ★

Perhaps I am easily distracted; I spent an inordinate amount of The Reader wondering what time it was. An intertitle at the start of the film identifies that we are in Berlin, Germany, but it does not tell us when. Consequently, as the screenplay tosses us about the 20th Century, I attentively watch the wrinkles: wondering why Kate Winslet looks so old in one scene, and why Ralph Fiennes looks so young in others, and why young David Kross still looks sixteen even when he should have aged ten years or so from one point of the film to the next. Later on, Winslet’s character is in her mid-sixties, but the makeup artist went a little nuts with the prosthetics so instead she looks like the creature from The Mummy Returns.

Winslet plays Hanna Schmidt, who in 1950s Germany — yes, it is the 1950s, so I’ve learned — aids young Michael Berg (Kross) when he falls ill with scarlet fever. When he recovers, he returns to her to thank her, but the adolescent boy is transfixed by her, infatuated, and the two begin an affair that lasts throughout the summer, until without warning she leaves.

Michael does not see her again until he is a law student attending the trial of SS guards accused of murders at the Auschwitz concentration camp during the Holocaust. Hanna is one of the defendants. (Apparently, the trial ends in the mid-‘60s, but I could have sworn the trial started in the mid-‘50s — oh, never mind.)

The above storylines are intercut with later scenes involving an adult Michael, played by Fiennes at various points from the 1970s to the 1990s. He has a daughter whom he has been distant from, a wife he is divorced from, and he has never come to terms with his feelings for Hanna — the love he felt for her as an adolescent, and his hatred for her participation in the evil of the death camps.

So now we have the time line sorted out. The film is directed by Stephen Daldry, and the screenplay is written by David Hare, based on the book by Bernhard Schlink. The last collaboration between Daldry and Hare was 2002’s The Hours, a film much more elegant in its balancing of multiple time periods.

The most interesting part of the story is the trial, which examines one small cog in the wheel of one of mankind’s greatest atrocities. Hanna and her fellow guards are guilty of selecting prisoners to be killed, because there was no longer room for them when new prisoners arrived. That’s how it worked. “What would you have done?” Hanna asks her inquisitor, and he doesn’t have an answer. If she had not been the one to choose, it would have been someone else.

In-between these scenes, Michael and a small group of fellow law students discuss the implications of the trial with their professor (Bruno Ganz), but these conversations are less interesting. They play like Hare interrupting his screenplay for a self-conscious workshop on the movie’s themes — “Don’t forget, class, your papers on complicity in Holocaust-era Oscar bait are due next Thursday.”

Daldry’s direction is effective, though overly sentimental. This quality was well suited to the more subjective material of The Hours, which coupled with an evocative score by Philip Glass created a nearly dreamlike effect. For this film, however, it is sometimes a burden. Reading is an essential part of Michael’s relationship with Hanna, and there are late scenes in which they communicate via audio tapes — the film cuts between them underneath an ostentatious score by Nico Muhly — that feel a bit like an Afterschool Special about literacy. Daldry shows a conspicuous interest in nude bodies; his intent early on may be to convey the budding sexuality of Michael’s adolescent mind, which is excited by encounters with an older, more sophisticated woman, but there are moments where it is an unnecessary distraction. Consider the scene where Winslet rises out of the water while swimming, and the focus, perhaps unintentional and almost comic in its effect, is on her prominent nipples under her wet bra.

There is a great scene that is distinguished by its relative simplicity. The older Michael visits a Holocaust victim whose mother was a witness at Hanna’s trial. She is Ilana Mather, played by Lena Olin. The reason for his visit provides inherent dramatic tension, and the actors are excellent in the way they show their characters feeling their way through, especially Olin, who expresses suspicion mixed with sympathy.

The film is well acted, particularly by Winslet, who in addition to the role’s emotional demands must contend with the oppressive makeup. She plays Hanna as neither a villain nor an innocent victim, but rather as a woman who doesn’t know what other decisions she could have made and only gradually comes to understand their consequences.

There are few bad scenes in The Reader. Several good ones. Many that don’t quite work. And the persistent feeling throughout that you should be getting more out of them than you are, that you should be focused on character and story but instead are preoccupied by nagging problems in narrative structure, strange distractions in its style, and telling the time.

On DVD: “The Edge of Heaven”

Dir. Fatih Akin
(NR) ★ ★ ★ ★

The Edge of Heaven is the movie Babel was trying to be. It’s one of those intersecting-stories dramas contingent on coincidences and the hidden connections of its characters. Done well, such a narrative is more than contrivance; it can express an idea of human existence, about how we do not exist in a vacuum and may touch other lives in ways imperceptible to us. Babel’s aim was more specific: It wanted to show us the effects of global culture and tried to shoehorn its stories to fit the theme, but the stories didn’t jibe. Compare that to Heaven, which in two simple, paralleled images says more about the consequences of globalization than all of Babel: the image of a casket being exported from Germany to Turkey, and later another, being exported from Turkey back to Germany — exchanging death across borders.

But it is not a cynical film. Also exchanged across the borders are compassion and forgiveness. Writer-director Fatih Akin, a German-born filmmaker of Turkish descent, is tough but tender in considering his subject, observing that the culturally intermingled world is rife with conflict, but also contains the potential for reconciliation.

The stories are set into motion by two characters, a mother and daughter who do not know the life the other leads. The mother is Yeter (Nursel Köse), a prostitute in Germany whose daughter thinks she works in a shoe shop. The daughter is Ayten (Nurgül Yesilçay), a political radical in Turkey whose mother thinks she is a student.

The film is divided into three sections. The first tells Yeter’s story. An old man hires her for the night and would like to hire her permanently, offering to match her monthly earnings if she will live with him and service him exclusively. It is an advantageous offer for Yeter, a woman of Turkish descent who one day is threatened by two fellow Turks if she does not repent for her sins. The old man, Ali (Tuncel Kurtiz), is a heavy drinker with a lust for life and the father of a college professor, Nejat (Baki Davrak), who does not approve of him. It is not a spoiler to reveal that this story ends in Yeter’s death; the film announces it in the title of the first act. How she dies you should see for yourself.

The second act begins with Ayten. After escaping arrest in Turkey, she travels to Germany illegally and searches for her mother. Along the way she is taken in by Lotte (Patrycia Ziolkowska), whose generosity seems unusual at first, and naive, but then we recognize their mutual attraction; they become lovers. This story too will end in tragedy.

I hesitate to reveal more, not because the film deals in fancy plot mechanics but because it develops in ways you don’t expect and it should be experienced, not summarized. What matters are the characters, whom we observe through the eye of God, knowing better than they do the fateful symmetry of their relationships.

There is a sixth character, Lotte’s mother Susanne, who disapproves of Lotte’s relationship, not because of her daughter’s sexuality, but because she puts herself at risk for someone she barely knows. In the third act, which deals with the consequences of the first two, Susanne becomes a key figure; played by Hanna Schygulla in the film’s most affecting performance, she unites the story’s disparate elements and provides an emotional center. In her face Schygulla articulates ideas about grace and redemption. In her decisions we are surprised. In the connections she makes we are uplifted. All roads converge here, at a place where despair turns to understanding. The film ends with a beautifully composed shot overlooking the ocean; there is such hope in it.

“The Wrestler”

Dir. Darren Aronofsky
(R) ★ ★ ★ ★

Reportedly, Vince McMahon, the chairman of World Wrestling Entertainment, isn’t a fan of The Wrestler. If I were him, I wouldn’t be either. Consider one of the film’s most lacerating scenes: washed up grappler Randy “The Ram” Robinson (Mickey Rourke), who in the ‘80s was a superstar not unlike Hulk Hogan, attends a fan event with his fellow old-timers, and the camera observes them pointedly. They occupy wheelchairs, or wear braces for body parts that don’t work like they used to. One has a colostomy bag on his ankle — Peter O’Toole wore one of those in Venus in 2006; is there a more conspicuous indignity than to have your body fluids drained in such a way, for all to see? This is hardly the retirement plan of champions.

Consider another scene, in which Randy participates in a particularly violent brand of hardcore wrestling that involves shattered window panes, barbed wire, and staple guns. The film cuts between the bout and its aftermath, during which Randy’s wounds are treated; director Darren Aronofsky (Requiem for a Dream) focuses on the physical, rotating the camera around Randy’s battered torso, not shying away from closeups of the minute carnage. An earlier scene compares his battle scars to The Passion of the Christ, and though Aronofsky is as attentive to suffering as Mel Gibson was, Randy ain’t no Christ — he suffers alone in a dingy locker room, and there’s no great redemption to be found there. This is a remarkable sequence, our first indication that we are in the midst of a great film.

I do not believe the WWE is like this; they have too much money. But this is what your career might look like if you don’t make it to the WWE, or if you make it there but don’t last. Vince McMahon doesn’t want you to see this film because you can’t look at wrestling the same way once you’ve seen it, and if you can, you should see it again. Major League Baseball recruits its players from farm teams — pro wrestling gets them from the slaughterhouse.

But The Wrestler isn’t set up as an exposé. That’s just what happens in the process of telling its story. Written by Robert D. Siegel and directed by Aronofsky with gritty realism, it’s a character study about a man at the end of a career he loves and unprepared for the next stage of his life. After an event, he collapses, and when he wakes up the doctors tell him he had a near-fatal heart attack and bypass surgery. He’ll never wrestle again. But what will he do instead?

He frequents a strip club, where one of the dancers, Cassidy (Marisa Tomei), is kind to him. He pays for her company, but he means more to her than the time he pays for. They have something in common: When we first meet her, Cassidy is entertaining a group of twentysomethings who make cruel jokes about her age; like Randy she peddles her flesh, is past her prime, and knows it. There is a touching scene where Cassidy offers a lap dance to the club’s patrons, and upon being rejected she makes a date with Randy. These two characters have found in each other the only person left who’s buying what they’re selling.

Randy has a daughter, Stephanie (Evan Rachel Wood, the fierce young actress from Thirteen), whom he abandoned as a child. She hates him, perhaps rightly so, but he attempts to make amends. It may be his last chance to be a father to her. He has a job stocking a supermarket. One day he is promoted to the deli counter — that may be the limit of his career mobility.

Aronofsky frequently shoots Randy from behind, the way you might follow a prize fighter before he emerges in an arena to thunderous applause. There’s a scene like that here: Randy walks through corridors, while on the soundtrack we hear the distant cheers of the crowd. When he emerges through the plastic curtain leading to a grimy kitchen, instead of applause the cheering dissipates and reality sets in — this is his life now, and Aronofsky subverts the visual language of sports films to underline its sadness.

The film is revealing about the behind-the-scenes workings of wrestling shows. I like the detail of early scenes, where combatants are assigned their matches and then discuss choreography. A funny moment shows the wrestlers from two different matches discussing which team would do the neck move and which would do the leg move. Wrestlers communicate secretly in the ring, choreographing on the spot or just bantering. Randy seems to enjoy the small-circuit camaraderie; he was once like those young up-and-comers and knows their dreams by heart.

I have yet to discuss the performance of Mickey Rourke — saving the best for last. I did not know his personal history before seeing the film, only that it was quite a history. According to Wikipedia, he suffered his share of legal troubles — more than his share, I suppose — including an arrest for spousal abuse in 1994 and DUI as recently as 2007. He was trained as a boxer and left acting in the early 1990s to pursue a career. He suffered myriad injuries and perhaps drew from those experiences for his scenes in the ring and in the locker room, to which he brings great physical authenticity. He carries himself heavily, wearily, expressing the weight of physical and emotional damage through sad, distant eyes and revealing a fragile soul in scenes with Tomei and Wood. Working from Siegel’s deeply penetrating script, he presents Randy as a man on the razor’s edge of self-destruction and never quite sure which way he wants to fall. This is a performance that merits comparisons to Robert De Niro in Raging Bull.

Three years ago, Rourke appeared in the film that set the stage for his comeback: Sin City, in which he played a boozing ex-con seeking vengeance for the death of a prostitute who showed him affection. It was the first in the trend of movies replicating the visual aesthetic of their comic book antecedents, and it remains the gold standard. It takes a strong actor to compete with such aggressive stylization, and Rourke’s performance did just that; he elevated his storyline from comic book pulp to a mournful ode to a man with one thing left to fight for. He won the supporting-actor award from the Chicago Film Critics and Online Film Critics. He’ll get an Oscar nomination for The Wrestler, playing another man fighting to salvage the remains of his life. It’s one of the best performances of the year in one of the best films of the year.

On DVD: “In Bruges”

Dir. Martin McDonagh
(R) ★ ★ ★

In Bruges contains scenes that are utterly perfect in their writing, acting, and directing, and others that don’t work at all. It’s a black comedy that works when it’s black but not so much when it’s trying to be a comedy. Self-conscious, ersatz-Tarantino dialogue is a burden to scenes like the one where picking up a murder weapon turns into a conversation about the proper use of the word “alcoves.” Racial jokes abound, perhaps to underline that this is not a film about nice people, but there’s a relish to it that is off-putting, as if writer-director Martin McDonagh is enjoying himself too much.

But then there’s a scene like the phone call between Ken (Brendan Gleeson) and his boss Harry (Ralph Fiennes), shown in a single take, where we sense that at the end of the conversation will be something dire, and we’re right. And a scene in the clock tower between Ken and Harry about morality and what they mean to each other. And several scenes between Ken and his partner Ray (Colin Farrell) about a crime Ray has committed that he cannot cope with. And a beautiful finale that repeats a judgment day motif through a foggy, dreamlike film set. Scenes like these are extraordinary, considering the ethical codes of career killers, their hope and hopelessness, and it all comes down to a moral choice about the best way to right a wrong.

And there’s a performance like Gleeson’s, which is one of the best of the year. His paternal warmth mixed with hardened pragmatism keeps the balance between the story’s darkness (Harry) and its wounded innocence (Ray). His conflict is the heart of the film, and his decisions point to an alternative to violence and cynicism. I can’t give a film with a character and performance like this a negative review. About half of In Bruges warrants four-stars. The other half deserves little more than two. I’ll split the difference.

On DVD: “The X-Files: I Want to Believe”

Dir. Chris Carter
(PG-13) ★ ★ ★

Ten years after the first big-screen adaptation of the cult hit FOX series and a full six years after the series ended, this summer’s follow-up The X-Files: I Want to Believe came later than most fans had hoped for — perhaps too late. Upon its release in July, it was greeted with a shrug from audiences and derision from critics, scoring a mere 32% on Rotten Tomatoes and a 47 on MetaCritic. It deserves better.

It is neither a great film nor a great addition to the X-Files canon, but it is effective, well acted, and contains richer themes than one can expect from most Hollywood films. Show me another mainstream thriller that unleashes its monsters to pose questions of redemption and faith.

The story reunites Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) and Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson), no longer with the FBI but asked by the bureau to consult on an investigation into the disappearance of an agent. They formerly specialized in cases involving the paranormal and are needed to evaluate the credibility of a man who claims to have a psychic connection to the case.

The psychic is Father Joseph Crissman (Billy Connolly), who claims the visions are a gift from God, an opportunity for him to repent for his sins — he is a convicted pedophile. Scully, a Catholic and a medical doctor, doesn’t believe him, but something he tells her hits close to home and she is not sure what to believe.

A subplot involves Scully’s treatment of a young boy with an untreatable neurological disease. This storyline has no connection to the film’s central mystery and is a bit of a narrative sore thumb, jutting in awkwardly. Its purpose is to further the film’s theme: Scully develops a painful, experimental treatment for her patient that is opposed by her colleagues and the hospital’s administrative priests — “I have taken it up with the highest authority,” Father Ybarra (Adam Godley) warns her, “as should you.” But she believes that a message from God has told her to risk the procedure to save the child: a cryptic message from the pedophile priest.

Would God choose to speak through such a disreputable man? Has He spoken to her as she believes He has? Chris Carter’s direction and screenplay (co-written by Frank Spotnitz) lean towards overwrought sentimentality, but Anderson’s performance makes the hospital story work; she gives it the necessary weight and conviction.

Mulder has a different kind of faith: He believes in the paranormal, in the existence of extraterrestrials. Scully is empirical, a scientist, and believes what she can see, but in her religious faith she has more in common with her partner than she perhaps realizes. Though they argue about the truth, they both believe that it’s out there.

The story shapes up as a grisly case of surgical experimentation — I won’t go into the details. It’s the kind of ghoulish plot you’d find in an about-average episode of the X-Files series, though by divorcing itself from the unwieldy alien mythology that devoured the program over its nine seasons on the air the film gets the chance to breathe, to focus on its characters and themes. It gives us an interesting supporting cast, including Connolly as the disgraced priest and Amanda Peet as an open-minded FBI agent, though I could have done without Agent Mosley Drummy, who as played by rapper Alvin “Xzibit” Joiner does little more than scowl.

The film was more successful in foreign markets than in domestic ones, and its worldwide box office gross of $68 million more than doubles its modest production budget. In addition, I suspect many fans of the series who passed on the film in theaters will come to it on DVD, as I did, giving perhaps some meager hope that a third X-Files film isn’t out of the question. Unlikely, but I want to believe.

Note: The X-Files: I Want to Believe is rated PG-13. It includes multiple decapitations, an impalement, assaults, murders, kidnappings, and disturbing, graphic depictions of forced surgery. Frost/Nixon is rated R. According to the website Kids-In-Mind.com, it includes a grand total of five F-words. The MPAA thinks the X-Files movie is more suitable for young teenagers. Let your sanity guide you; the MPAA’s has gone astray.

“Frost/Nixon”

Dir. Ron Howard
(R) ★ ★ ★ ½

There’s truth and there’s fiction, objective quantities, but then there’s the interview, where anything can be made to mean anything else, depending on who is asking the questions and who is giving the answers. Those are the stakes of Frost/Nixon, a fascinating film about verbal combat and the clash of two outsize personalities; the Richard Nixon legacy, at the time still engulfed by the fallout of Watergate, could have been recorded by the history books as that of a common crook or a misunderstood hero, depending on how he performed.

At the time of the Watergate scandal, David Frost (Michael Sheen) is a grinning television personality and a playboy, happily hosting talk shows in England and Australia in-between industry parties and skirt-chasing. He watches footage of Nixon leaving the White House, but he’s always thinking in terms of television; his first impulse is to ask for the ratings.

He brings his idea to producer John Birt (Matthew Macfadyen), describing the “big fish” interview with a schoolboy smile on his face. He is not a man of political conviction, only personal ambition. Nixon is a world leader, a disgraced one at that, and the biggest news story of the decade; getting access to him would be a coup, and that may be more important to Frost than actually talking to him. Only gradually does he come to understand the gravity of the assignment, beginning with a meeting with author James Reston Jr. (Sam Rockwell), who explains that an unwitting exoneration of Nixon would be worse than no interview at all.

Nixon is obviously the more storied figure, but the screenplay — by Peter Morgan (The Queen, The Last King of Scotland), based on his stage play — is equally interested in Frost, if not more. He is a more complex man than we first expect; his outward presentation is frivolous, and thus the news media and even his colleagues write him off as a buffoon, but he’s savvier than he appears, tougher, more determined.

What makes him compelling is the contrast between his persona and his personality. He never lets you see him sweat, even if you’re on the same team, and he projects success at all costs. This is confused for laziness and complacency by his research team, as in the scene where he invites them to a celebration after Nixon has made mincemeat of him. As played in a very effective performance by Sheen, Frost is always smiling on the outside, but we can tell when it’s genuine and when he’s saving face. To conduct a successful interview is important to him, but even more vital is not to be seen as a failure — he’s fighting for his pride and his livelihood.

Nixon is doing the same. Humiliated by the Watergate scandal, he wants to rehabilitate his image and perhaps reenter politics, and he hopes to use the inexperienced Frost as a stepping stone. He is played by Frank Langella, who won a Tony Award for the stage version and will rightly receive an Oscar nomination for the film. Beyond his convincing replication of Nixon’s voice and mannerisms, Langella channels pride and a deep, bitter anger for the enemies of his past and present, demonstrated most powerfully during a drunken phone call in which he delivers a tirade about those who claimed he would never succeed.

The film feels diffuse in the early going, perhaps too much so; often the supporting characters directly address the camera to provide analysis, like talking heads in a documentary, and the effect is self-conscious and distracting. The film improves the more closely it focuses on its main characters. Director Ron Howard does an excellent job during the last and most important interview, discussing Watergate. He cuts away the cameras, the crew, and the backstage quarterbacks from both camps. Intense closeups keep the characters on the hook, especially Nixon, whose artifice can be seen crumbling as he walks into questions he has no way out of.

That’s the power of television, explains Reston in one of the talking-head segments. It betrayed Nixon during his debate with Kennedy, and it betrays him with Frost. He can talk circles around anyone, but when the camera catches his face, etched with fatigue and defeat, it gives him away. It doesn’t lie.

Academy Awards 2009: For Your Consideration

As the late-year Oscar rush continues, here are a few of the year’s worthiest contenders the Motion Picture Academy has probably missed.

THE FALL — Picture, Director (Tarsem Singh), Actor (Lee Pace), Actress (Catinca Untaru), Cinematography, Score, Costume Design, Film Editing

Well on its way to becoming this decade’s Dark City: a visionary achievement the Academy has never heard of, let alone honored. Singh’s thrilling work of visual art is a testament to what the movies can be; its exquisite location shoots put green screens to shame. You could watch it with the sound off and still be filled with a certain childlike wonder for the possibilities of the cinema. It features a career-vaulting performance by Lee Pace (TV’s Pushing Daisies), and one by young Catinca Untaru that is perhaps the finest youth performance I’ve seen this generation. It’s one of the best films of the year.

TAKE — Actress (Minnie Driver), Original Screenplay (Charles Oliver)

Go figure. My favorite film from 2007’s Tribeca Film Festival is finally released to theaters and it disappears without a trace. What’s more, it receives a drubbing from most critics. Consider me the minority report: The emotional continuity of Oliver’s screenplay improves upon the often self-conscious time-shifting of Alejandro González Iñárritu and Guillermo Arriaga’s films (21 Grams, Babel). And the performance of Driver, playing a mother seeking closure after the death of her young son, is remarkable.

IN BRUGES — Actor (Brendan Gleeson)

Gleeson plays Ken, one of a pair of hit men forced to lay low in Belgium after a job. There, he must make a decision between a man he is loyal to and one who has hope for a better future. Gleeson expresses the weariness of a man eroded by a painful and violent past, but with enough of his soul intact to imagine a different way to live.

MISS PETTIGREW LIVES FOR A DAY — Actress (Amy Adams and Frances McDormand), Adapted Screenplay (David Magee, Simon Beaufoy)

An unexpected gem. Magee and Beaufoy add the subtext of war to a story adapted from Winifred Watson’s novel, adding a somber gravitas to an otherwise delightful farce about the transformations of women in 1939 London. Adams and McDormand, as a vain actress and her overwhelmed social secretary respectively, give performances that work on two levels: as delirious comedy, and as a study of women who survive in an inhospitable era.

HAMLET 2 — Actor (Steve Coogan), Original Song (“Rock Me Sexy Jesus”)

British comic icon Coogan is the glue that holds together a freewheeling comedy that at every instant threatens to fly off the rails. He plays hapless drama teacher Dana Marschz as an artist of such pure creative abandon that he draws us in despite his obvious lack of talent. Finally, he puts on his titular masterpiece, an uproariously inappropriate mishmash of styles and subjects whose highlight is “Rock Me Sexy Jesus,” the year’s most audacious original song. If the Academy had the courage to nominate South Park, they should nominate this one too.

THE VISITOR — Actor (Richard Jenkins)

It’s easy to overlook Jenkins, just as it’s easy to overlook his character, Walter Vale. The actor uses eloquent body language to express the loneliness and isolation of the college professor, whose life starts to gradually open up again as the result of a newfound friendship with immigrants illegally subletting his New York City apartment. But don’t mistake subtlety for ease. The veteran character actor inhabits this tortured man from the inside out.

IN SEARCH OF A MIDNIGHT KISS — Original Screenplay (Alex Holdridge)

Owing its inspiration to Before Sunrise and Before Sunset, this indie comedy follows a young man and woman (Scoot McNairy and Sara Simmonds) who arrange a meeting through Craig’s List so they won’t be alone at midnight on New Year’s. We follow them on a Los Angeles adventure that neither will ever forget, and we get to know and love them through dialogue so sublime that we hardly want the night to end.

HAPPY-GO-LUCKY — Supporting Actor (Eddie Marsan)

Marsan’s irascible driving instructor Scott serves as the counterpoint for the effervescence of star Sally Hawkins’s Poppy, but soon he explodes in a scene of such profound hurt that we, like Poppy, are taken aback. In this climactic scene, he shows us Scott’s raw soul, and in his quivering lip we see the deep, deep sadness of a man exposing his most personal wounds.

TRANSSIBERIAN — Original Screenplay (Brad Anderson and Will Conroy)

A study in suspense writing. Director Anderson and his co-writer Conroy have Hitchcock’s understanding of how to make an effective thriller. Their wily misdirections and psychological perceptiveness (star Emily Mortimer plays a reformed bad girl falling back on old habits) expertly engage and manipulate us. They play us like a fiddle.

“Gran Torino”

Dir. Clint Eastwood
(R) ★ ★ ★ ½

Walt Kowalski is one of the year’s most interesting characters. He is hard and misanthropic, but not impenetrable. If he acknowledges you without a loaded gun pointed at your face, you’ve got something. If he pronounces your name properly, it’s because you’ve earned it. If he tolerates your presence for any amount of time, you’ve got a friend.

To call his relationship with his family strained would be generous. He disapproves of them, and they hate him for it. Watching scenes with his sons Mitch (Brian Haley) and Steve (Brian Howe) is like watching The Savages from the father’s point of view: bitterness all around, old childhood wounds that never healed. We can sympathize with his boys. Walt has a glare that could reduce a grown man to tears; a lifetime of it would entitle you to hazard pay. However, it’s tough to side against a character played by Clint Eastwood, and even harder to side with his sons, one of whom allows his daughter to wear a skimpy, belly-baring outfit to their mother’s funeral.

Walt is a Korean War veteran. His neighborhood is increasingly inhabited by a community of Hmong, an ethnic group indigenous to Southeast Asia. He sneers at the sight of the family now living next door, especially a grandmother who wishes he would leave like all the other white people have. The neighborhood is terrorized by an Asian gang. One day he chases them off with his rifle and becomes an unwilling hero. He wakes up to a porch covered with gifts of gratitude. He throws them away; being left alone would be gift enough for him.

The ads for Gran Torino suggest a straightforward, Dirty Harry-style vigilante thriller, but the film bears a striking resemblance to Eastwood’s 2004 masterpiece Million Dollar Baby, suggesting themes of special interest to the filmmaker. Frankie Dunn, his character from the previous film, was also estranged from his family and forged new bonds despite himself. Both characters show a disdain for the church. Both make impossible decisions for those they love. And in both films, Eastwood demonstrates a somber optimism for a reconciliation of the generation and culture gaps.

The performances of the young actors are worthy of note, thought not always for good reasons. As neighbor Sue Lor, Ahney Her exhibits a spirited, firecracker personality that distinguishes her scenes with Walt; she isn’t afraid of him and doesn’t back down, and this earns her a small measure of his admiration, which is about as much of his admiration as most could hope for. In their best scene, he calls the Hmong “jungle people,” and without missing a beat, she corrects him: “We were hill people, not jungle people.” However, Her has a lack of polish that leaves some scenes feeling forced.

Bee Vang plays her brother Thao, whose attempted theft of Walt’s 1972 Gran Torino drives the story. After Eastwood, he has the film’s most pivotal role, and he is admirably earnest, but sadly it cannot compensate for a lack of consistency. He plays Thao’s meekness effectively, and sincerity isn’t a problem. However, as the emotional demands of the role increase, his performance wavers. Set against the natural grit of Eastwood’s performance, he comes off as self-conscious, mannered. We notice him trying very hard, and that’s the problem.

Eastwood as a director has an exemplary track record with actors. (Four of his stars have won Oscars this decade, and two others were nominated, including himself.) He cast Her and Vang for a reason. This is their feature debut. I look forward to seeing them develop in future projects.

To call Eastwood a prolific director is like calling water a little wet. What is impressive is not the frequency of his output, but his consistency. Since 2003: Mystic River, Million Dollar Baby, Flags of Our Fathers, Letters from Iwo Jima, Changeling, and now this. Three nominees for Best Picture. One winner. I have given positive reviews to all of them, and even though Changeling, released less than two months ago, is one of his lesser works, it is still made with beauty and elegance. (He can be forgiven for 2000’s Space Cowboys; nobody’s perfect.)

Gran Torino is one of his finer works, and only occasionally does he seem to repeat himself — the scenes with stubborn Father Janovich (Christopher Carley) seem overly familiar after Million Dollar Baby. From an insightful screenplay by Nick Schenk, he has formed another beautifully restrained character study about moral compromise, moral consequence, and redemption that is hard to come by.

“Doubt”

Dir. John Patrick Shanley
(PG-13) ★ ★ ★ ½

John Patrick Shanley’s Doubt, based on his Tony and Pulitzer Prize winning play, develops powerful subtext without having to call attention to it. There are hidden truths under the surface of what the characters say and do. We can see the shadows lurking in the nuances of the screenplay and in the performances of the fine ensemble. Father Brendan Flynn (Philip Seymour Hoffman) doesn’t seem innocent; he is too cagey and indirect in his denials of wrongdoing. Sister Aloysius (Meryl Streep) is certain that he is a child molester, and she is certain because she saw him grab a boy by the wrist. Such slight evidence for such a serious charge — for her as well, there is more than meets the eye.

Shanley’s provocative screenplay doesn’t provide clear answers. It’s all about the questions. In 1964 at St. Nicholas Parish in the Bronx, NY, Sister Aloysius is principal and leads her school with an iron fist. “That’s how it works,” she explains to her subordinate, Sister James (Amy Adams), whom she enlists in her campaign to expose Father Flynn. He is her superior and hopes to soften the church’s image. Aloysius disapproves of his brand of change and asks Sister James to keep her eyes open for signs of misconduct.

Shanley’s camera takes a point of view sympathetic with Sister James, observing with a keen eye but lacking the details to understand it all. This is especially effective with the pivotal student characters. The screenplay focuses on one: Donald Miller (Joseph Foster II), the first black student at the recently desegregated school, in whom Flynn takes special interest. But the camera catches glimpses of two others: Jimmy Hurley (Lloyd Clay Brown) and William London (Michael Roukis) — a barely perceptible grin, a look more knowing or troubled than it should be. We suspect that there are more secrets in the faces of these boys, but we are left to wonder.

I have described pieces of the puzzle. No matter how we put them together, we find there are always pieces missing. Aloysius responds by taking steps away from God in acts of cynicism and mistrust — in His service, she says, but distance from God is distance just the same, and we see the toll it takes. James does not know how to respond, to be trustful or embrace the darkness of suspicion, and is caught in the torrent. Father Flynn knows the truth one way or another, but he too is lost in a crisis of the soul. Doubt can unite us at times of public upheaval, Flynn says in a sermon that opens the film. But how terrible is the isolation for characters such as these, who endure their doubt alone.

The film’s success hinges on what Shanley chooses to reveal and not to reveal to the audience. This makes for a tantalizing mystery, but more importantly forces us to share the characters’ uncertainty. As a director, he opts for visual simplicity, his only noticeable flourish being a tilt in the camera to convey imbalance, a lack of order. Otherwise, the focus remains on his screenplay, and he leaves his actors room to plumb depths that go beyond the words on the page; Streep and Hoffman, in their bitter confrontation scenes, evoke internal turmoil the source of which we can only imagine, but which reverberates through the screen.

There is a pivotal scene involving Donald’s mother that comes down to a decision about what knowledge to accept and what knowledge to ignore, for the sake of survival. She is played by the great character actress Viola Davis, who is long overdue the attention she is now receiving. She was a highlight of the 2002 remake of Solaris and had a single devastating scene in World Trade Center that stood head and shoulders above the rest of the film. I was fortunate enough to see her Tony Award-winning performance in August Wilson’s King Hedley II, where she summoned volcanic emotions. She’s a contender for an Oscar nomination for this role. Better late than never.

On DVD: “Mongol”

Dir. Sergei Bodrov
(R) ★ ★ ★ ½

A 2008 Academy Award-nominee for Best Foreign Language Film, Mongol is a visually arresting motion picture. Directed by Sergei Bodrov, it has a lush visual style that elevates its material to appropriately mythic proportions. It tells the story of the rise of Genghis Khan and incorporates such large themes as destiny, ascendancy to power, and brotherly betrayal in a manner that is equal to their scope. This, I think, is the movie 300 was trying to be. Zack Snyder made the video game; Bodrov makes the movie.

Genghis Khan was born Temudjin in 12th Century Mongolia. When we meet him, he is nine years old, guided by his father the khan to select a bride. His father would like to use the occasion to reconcile with a tribe he offended, the Merkits, but at a stop along the way Temudjin becomes enamored with a girl named Borte and chooses her instead. He and his father leave, and he vows to return; he will make this promise to her many times throughout their lives.

Soon thereafter, Temudjin’s father is killed by poisoning. Thus begins a storied life of poverty, slavery, brotherhood, and bloodshed. The story will yield few surprises for viewers familiar with historical epics. Upon his father’s death, Temudjin is hunted by a rival, Targutai (Amadu Mamadakov), who is threatened by Temudjin’s status as the son of the khan. From his youth well into adulthood, he suffers at the hands of his enemies, but is destined for greatness. He has two refuges: Jamukha (Honglei Sun), a friend who saved him and whom he considers his blood brother, and Borte (played as an adult by Khulan Chuluun), whose love is patient and unconditional.

The most compelling aspect of the film is the rift that forms between Temudjin and Jamukha as the result of a serious infraction committed by one’s tribe against the other’s. Their relationship develops with Shakespearean grandeur, as fraternal love morphs into bitter antipathy, though not with Shakespearean richness. The film is not interested in psychology and treats its characters always as broad archetypes: the great hero, the devoted wife, the power-hungry rival, and the brother-turned-enemy.

The strength of the film isn’t in its characterizations or story, but in its visual luster. It is a mythic story, shot with great beauty by cinematographers Rogier Stoffers and Sergei Trofimov. For instance, note the memorable shots where Temudjin occupies the center of the frame, including one in which his head is locked in a wooden restraint as the rain begins to fall, and another of him as an imprisoned slave, where we see his dry, cracked skin behind iron bars. Though visualizing him in hardship, these shots exalt Temudjin, whose suffering becomes for us the trials of a great hero.

Bodrov directs battle scenes with lusty verve — perhaps too lusty. Blood sprays from soldiers on the battlefield in a manner that reminded me of Quentin Taranino’s arterial geysers in the Kill Bill films. At times, the graphic nature of the violence distracts from the beauty of the staging, as when an army of Merkits springs up all at once from hiding to ambush their enemies, or the aerial POV shot that follows an arrow from Temudjin’s archer to the very foot of Jamukha. Bodrov’s film tells the story of Genghis Khan’s early life as the stuff of legend. Scenes like these convince us.