“State of Play”: Conspiracy queries

Dir. Kevin Macdonald
(2009, PG-13, 128 min)
★ ★ ½

I have an affection for State of Play that makes me want to bump it up that extra half star, but nagging reservations that won’t let me. It starts as an intelligent, unpretentious, straight-ahead thriller about the kind of hard-boiled investigative journalist who Gets Too Close To The Story, and its gradually unraveling conspiracy is exciting, but over time it starts to give in to laziness, and its plot undergoes one back flip too many before I’ve just lost interest.

Russell Crowe, soft in the middle and bedraggled with long hair, stars as Cal McAffrey, an old-fashioned investigative reporter for The Washington Globe who has been using the same computer for eighteen years and driving the same car for just as long. He’s unkempt; in his opening scene he’s driving to the scene of a homicide, munching on Cheetos and tossing the wrapper into his rat’s nest of a backseat. He has a friendly/adversarial relationship with the detective on the scene, Donald Bell (Harry Lennix), and we can guess pretty well their roles in this story: Cal is the veteran journalist resisting the changing times, and Donald will complain that Cal is getting in the way of his case.

In much the same way, we can peg pretty much every character on screen, and that’s one of the film’s problems. There’s Rachel McAdams as Della Frye, who blogs for the newspaper but may as well be writing for Tiger Beat as far as Cal is concerned; she’s the young, ambitious, but lightweight cub who finally gets her hands dirty on real investigative work. There’s Helen Mirren as Cameron Lynne, the officious newspaper editor, who of course stands in Cal’s way at every turn and complains about deadlines and diminished circulation and beating other papers to the story even if it means crippling the story. And there’s Ben Affleck as crusading Congressman Stephen Collins; he has the most dimension of any character, but that just means he’s subject to the most plot twists.

The film is based on a six-hour British miniseries from 2003. I haven’t seen it. Perhaps in that amount of time these characters would have had room to grow beyond their respective archetypes, but compressed into a 128-minute feature, they stay mostly confined to their boxes.

Stephen was college roommates with Cal, which strikes me as odd because Crowe is eight years older than Affleck and looks it; Stephen must have skipped some grades. The congressman is married to Anne (Robin Wright Penn); there is an underdeveloped love triangle between them and Cal that stretches back to their college days and contributes nothing to the story; trimming it from the screenplay might have left room to expand some of those hurried investigative montages — knocking on doors, making phone calls, hitting dead ends — into actual scenes.

Stephen comes under scrutiny when his top aide, Sonia Baker, winds up dead; the details of the investigation are slick and paranoid and cool. Were they having an affair? Did she commit suicide? Did it have something to do with a committee investigation Stephen was spearheading? The story leads us to PointCorp, a private defense contractor that may have greater ambitions than just hiring out for foreign conflicts. A few fragments of investigations that seem unrelated at the outset (though of course we know they’re not) start to dovetail, and I liked the accumulation of evidence that suggests deeper and deeper and deeper corruption. But the details are many, and they come fast in a narrative that often feels overly truncated. It holds interest up until that last wonky twist, which I suppose is as plausible as all the other ones but feels like a twist for twist’s sake. Maybe it would feel less so if the characters felt like characters and not just extensions of the plot.

“Watchmen”: Unhappy the land that is in need of heroes

Dir. Zack Snyder
(2009, R, 162 min)
★ ★ ½

Watchmen is gorgeous, fascinating, but ultimately unsuccessful. At 162 minutes, it’s chock-full of ideas, but doesn’t settle on any one idea for long enough to make sense of them. What results is a mash-up of conflicting philosophies — mostly bottled in the purple prose of character voice-overs and speeches — without a unifying focus.

The director is Zack Snyder, and I admit I was fully prepared to dislike this film, as I disliked his previous film 300, that brawny box office hit about Spartan warriors with abs and pectorals better developed than the characters sporting them, and hermetically sealed in green-screen effects much too faithful to the aesthetic of their source material. Watchmen is a marked improvement for the director, who shows greater maturity and emotional connection to his material, though I think lacking clarity on what his film is really about. I’m not so sure either.

The story opens with the murder of a superhero known as the Comedian (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), followed by a main title sequence that made me sit up and think, maybe Snyder is on to something this time. It’s a stirring montage of revisionist 20th Century history, with superheroes taking part in crucial events, from World War II, to Vietnam, to the moon landing, and even the Kennedy assassination, accompanied by Bob Dylan’s “The Times They Are A-Changin’” on the soundtrack. It’s a terrific opener, immediately setting us up for a caped-crusader story with a sociopolitical bent. When the story picks up in the fall of 1985, Richard Nixon is in the third term of his presidency and the Cold War is on the verge of escalating into a hot one; Russia stockpiles nuclear weapons, and global annihilation seems imminent.

We meet the other superheroes, members of a crime-fighting team called the Watchmen, who have been forced into retirement by the government. Rorschach (Jackie Earle Haley) is violently unstable. He hides his face behind a mask stained with a continually morphing ink blot. Ozymandias (Matthew Goode) is considered the smartest man in the world and also one of the richest. He markets his own line of action figures, which seems redundant; with his stiffly coifed Ken-doll hair and rigid countenance, he’s already his own action figure.

There are two second-generation heroes. The role of Night Owl was passed down from Greatest Generation-era Hollis Mason (Stephen McHattie) to baby boomer Dan Dreiberg (Patrick Wilson). The latter has become doughy and meek since hanging up his cape, but he hasn’t put it behind him entirely; he still keeps his equipment in his basement, including a flying vehicle shaped like an owl. The Silk Spectre persona was passed down from Sally Jupiter (Carla Gugino) to her daughter Laurie (Malin Ackerman). Despite all she has seen, Laurie still has hope for the world and serves more or less as the conscience of the film.

The most interesting of the heroes is Dr. Manhattan (Billy Crudup), who is an utterly original creation, both visually and psychologically. Born Jon Osterman, he was a young physicist in the 1950s who was trapped during a science experiment and had his molecules ripped apart. He soon found himself reassembled in the form of a blue man who can see into the past and future and bend matter to his will. He is as close to a god as mankind has seen, and he feels so detached from humanity that at one point he leaves Earth and sets up residence on Mars. He is naked in most of his scenes, not for the purpose of gratuitous sexuality but to highlight how removed he is from human concerns like modesty or propriety. He perceives mankind from such a distance and with such scope that he cannot withstand it. He is sad and lonely. The film is at its best when the focus is on him.

Other characters — not so much. Rorschach and the Comedian are cynical nihilists, but neither persona is very interesting. Compared to other violence- and chaos-driven characters like The Dark Knight’s Joker and No Country for Old Men’s Anton Chigurh, their world views come off like so much facile bellyaching. Much more interesting is when Rorschach loses his mask and we get to know the tortured soul underneath; he is Walter Kovacs, and when not obscured by the mask actor Jackie Earle Haley is able to convey the angry, disturbed, despairing man behind all that world-is-a-cesspool posturing.

Zack Snyder should cease directing sex scenes. There is no way to segue into the subject and no way to segue out of it, but there you have it. I could go this entire review without addressing it, but this is the second consecutive film in which a Snyder-directed sex scene has inspired an unintended fit of laughter, and it demands comment. Of the Leonidas-Gorgo liaison in 300 I wrote, “… it’s absurd, like a Greek tragedy interrupted by the most pretentious film Cinemax never made.” In Watchmen is an equally preposterous encounter, between Dan and Laurie. It’s set to Leonard Cohen’s song “Hallelujah,” shot in overwrought slow-motion, and is thoroughly ridiculous.

The film drifts during its last thirty minutes or so. The big reveal — who is targeting the former Watchmen and why? — produces a lot of exposition about the kind of convoluted crackpot scheme Lex Luther might have come up with on an off day. The ultimate solution is audacious, but it’s overly simplistic and comes to a conclusion about human nature I didn’t buy. Perhaps that is to be expected. The screenplay by David Hayter and Alex Tse, based on Alan Moore’s acclaimed graphic novel, entertains a lot of opinions about the state of the world but doesn’t express a clear opinion of its own, so by the time it reaches its endgame it’s hard to understand by what logic it got there. It’s the culmination of a film whose pieces don’t quite fit together, but in its ambition it fails in more interesting ways than most movies succeed.

“Star Trek”: To boldly go where several have gone before

Dir. J.J. Abrams
(2009, PG-13, 127 min)
★ ★ ½

I’m a Trekkie — er, Trekker — or whatever we’re calling ourselves these days. Trek-American? But as the series entered a fifth cycle on television in 2001 and a ninth sequel in theaters in 2002, it was clear that the franchise needed a significant reboot; there are only so many stories you can generate from following a captain and his crew through space on variations of the same ship, and I think the makeup department was running out of ideas for alien species. So I was excited when I learned that J.J. Abrams, geek-auteur of the television gems Alias and Lost, would take the reins. I’m no purist. When new ideas are needed, I’ll take them from all comers; imagine how much better the Star Wars prequels might have been if George Lucas had collaborated with Buffy the Vampire Slayer creator Joss Whedon, or Ronald D. Moore, who triumphantly re-imagined another beloved science fiction antiquity: Battlestar Galactica.

If only Abrams had written the screenplay — or Whedon or Moore. That job went instead to frequent Abrams collaborators Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman, who wrote the passable Mission: Impossible III for the director, as well as Michael Bay’s The Island and Transformers and the TV series Fringe, of which I am not a fan. Their Trek script, which brings the franchise back to its birthplace, onboard the original Enterprise with Captain Kirk, Mr. Spock, and company, has met with critical acclaim and commercial success: a whopping score of 83 on Metacritic and an opening weekend gross that nearly doubled the entire domestic take of the previous Trek film, Nemesis. But I’m not sure what the fuss is about.

Orci and Kurtzman’s script is effective, frequently clever, gets the job done in a workmanlike sort of way, but it’s short on imagination — it doesn’t boldly go anywhere we haven’t been already. This new version of Kirk, played by Chris Pine, is even cockier and more flamboyant than William Shatner’s version, but he’s an archetype of devil-may-care heroism we’ve seen a thousand times before. There are action set pieces that owe no small credit to the original Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back. And the principal villain is the evil Romulan Nero (Eric Bana), who is hellbent on a familiar brand of revenge.

The plot is founded on a time-travel premise, but it’s a clever one. I’ll describe precious little of it, lest I reveal crucial details, but it involves Nero, Spock (Zachary Quinto), and a black hole. Nero possesses something called “Red Matter,” which produces spontaneous black holes. It takes the form of a suspended red orb of liquid, which may be a nod to a similar object Abrams created for Alias; the previous orb produced zombies, not black holes, but I suppose in this economy floating red orbs need to diversify.

We meet the crew, though the film only leaves itself enough time to loosely sketch them and reference their former personas: Dr. McCoy says, “Dammit Jim, I’m a doctor, not a physicist!” and engineer Scotty repeats his catchphrase, “Ah’m givin’ her all she’s got, cap’n!” But we get a sense of the actors in their new roles. The wonderful comic actor Simon Pegg (Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz) is a joy as Scotty, while Karl Urban’s McCoy and Anton Yelchin’s Chekhov in their limited screen-time are restricted to gimmicky character quirks; their performances play more like impressions, though I’ll confess a laugh when the ship’s computer failed to recognize Chekhov’s Russian-accented English.

The production values are a mixed bag. The visual effects have been upgraded to 21st Century specs, but Abrams shoots in that irritating way where incessant edits and shaky cameras make the action all but unintelligible; why do filmmakers throw so much money at the screen only to make it impossible to appreciate? The production design by Scott Chambliss is a curious blend of the futuristic and the retro: Engineering, with its orange, man-sized hydro-tubes, looks like a water park designed by Willy Wonka. Michael Kaplan’s costume design is troubling: while Abrams was updating the franchise, he should have swapped out those undignified women’s uniforms for something with pants.

Every once and a while, the camera slows down enough to enchant us. When Kirk and McCoy approach the Enterprise on a transport vessel, they look through the window at a beautifully designed space dock: a spherical station branching out into satellites. I wanted to spend time on the station, find out how it runs. What is the day-to-day life of these 24th Century people as Abrams envisions them? I wanted more of the human detail that distinguished the director’s television work — and while we’re at it, a Steadicam wouldn’t hurt.

“W.”

Dir. Oliver Stone
(PG-13) ★ ★ ½

There’s one great scene in Oliver Stone’s W., a controversial biopic in theory but tame in execution: In the War Room, George W. Bush discusses plans for the Iraq War with his staff: Colin Powell (Jeffrey Wright), Condoleezza Rice (Thandie Newton), Dick Cheney (Richard Dreyfus), Donald Rumsfeld (Scott Glenn), and Paul Wolfowitz (Dennis Boutsikaris) — Karl Rove (Toby Jones) glowers ominously in the background.

The discussion moves from justifications to timetables — has to start in March, or else it gets too hot — and finally to oil — says Cheney with unsettling resolve, if the US controls the oil supply in the Middle East, they will be an invulnerable empire. We’re stunned upon the escalating realization that they’re serious; it’s like Dr. Strangelove without the irony. As played by Wright, Powell regards the room with near disbelief and delivers a stirring, sobering speech about “changing the way we do business.” Upon accepting the Secretary of State position for the Bush administration, I think he mustn’t have known what he was getting himself into. Perhaps he is the only one in the room who has seen Dr. Strangelove.

The rest of the film is an interesting but ultimately underachieving effort to give our widely reviled president the benefit of the doubt, which in itself is a novel approach, especially from such a vociferous liberal as Stone. According to his film, George W. Bush was a troubled young man who could never live up to the standard set by his disapproving father, his predecessor in the White House and namesake George Herbert Walker Bush (James Cromwell). He drank too much, couldn’t hold a job, and was always in the shadow of his brother Jeb (Jason Ritter). Eventually, he found God, found politics, and worked through his daddy issues by entering us into a catastrophic five-year campaign for the purpose of doing what his father couldn’t — or rather, wouldn’t: getting Saddam Hussein.

But Bush isn’t evil or callous. No, he has merely been the genial packaging for the ideas of his neoconservative advisors, whose slash-and-burn approach to foreign policy sounds a lot better through the aw-shucks patois of good ol’ Dubya. It all comes down to who the voters want to have a beer with, explains Karl Rove, and I think even Rove would agree that no one would want to have a beer with him.

It’s an intriguing hypothesis. Unfortunately, Stone’s film, written by Stanley Weiser, is a thin analysis of a complicated man and an infinitely confounding presidency. Thousands of pages and hours of footage and analysis have been devoted to the subject in the last eight years, to the point where even the First Dog ought to have a biography in the works. W. reduces it to two hours, and boils it down so drastically that all the meat has been stripped from the bone. What’s left is a film that skips along the surface without diving into the deeper waters. We get the requisite scenes — his most famous gaffes, a meeting about “advanced interrogation,” embarrassment over the lack of WMDs, and of course the infamous pretzel — but nothing substantial. For the real meat and potatoes, you’re better off renting No End in Sight or Taxi to the Dark Side, or watching The Daily Show on Comedy Central.

The scenes of Bush’s youth are more enlightening, but if the subject weren’t the leader of the free world, would this material be worthy of our consideration? Subtract the name Bush and the story is a conventional one: Spoiled rich kid does poorly in school, spends an unsettled youth bouncing between ideas of who he is supposed to be, rebels against his parents, and becomes an alcoholic before finally settling down with a good woman and going into the family business.

The screenplay includes such familiar scenes as the delinquent son returning home after a bender to tell his father he doesn’t want to go to business school, and the son questioning why his dad is more supportive of his brother’s ambitions. At one point, a reporter asks Bush what his place in history will be; if this overly reductive film is any indication, the answer will be, “Less than meets the eye.”

The film is distinguished by its performances, from an impressive ensemble that could have taken a richer screenplay and run with it. Brolin anchors the film, capturing the Texas swagger and roguish charm that makes Bush such a polarizing figure, along with shades of sincerity, trepidation, and self-doubt that we don’t see in his public persona, but which Stone envisions here. As the women in his life, Elizabeth Banks gives a sly edge to his prim wife Laura, and conversely Ellen Burstyn frays the edges of Barbara Bush, revealing a headstrong battleaxe of a mother.

This time around, Stone’s usual stylistic bombast is limited to a few dream sequences and pointed insert shots — a close-up of a belt buckle with a Christian cross comes as Bush decides to run for President. In a recurring motif, Bush is in the outfield of Rangers Ballpark waiting to make a heroic catch. In one of the dreams the ball doesn’t come. Stone leaves us similarly hanging, announcing “The End” although the story seems incomplete. I think he has made his film prematurely. Bush still has two months until he moves out of White House, at which point he might reach the realization that the ball has already come to the outfield, and he dropped it.

On DVD: “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull”

Dir. Steven Spielberg
(PG-13) ★ ★ ½

Of course, there’s no reason Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull needed to be made. The job of Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, and company is to convince us why we should want one. They succeed some and they fail some. Considering the favorable but not rapturous reviews, I set my expectations low, and it met them.

The plot is more or less immaterial; Indiana Jones and the Bedazzled Port-O-Potty would sell as many tickets. What matters is Harrison Ford’s return as the adventuring archaeologist and Karen Allen’s as his former flame Marion Ravenwood. This is a success. The actors have a playful, undiminished chemistry, and despite their advancing years are still robust action heroes. We’re happy to see them and their well-cast companions who include such stalwart character actors as Ray Winstone and John Hurt. Joining them also is Shia LaBeouf; the studio’s publicity machine labored so greatly to obscure his character that they practically spelled it out on his forehead. I won’t say it here, but you’re already thinking it.

But then there is the plot, which may be immaterial but it’s necessary to move these characters from point A to B to C. It’s the plot that gums up the works. The story is front-loaded with exposition, and screenwriter David Koepp is bad at hiding the seams. Egregious is an early scene where Indy explains how closely the government guarded its secrets when Indiana inspected a mysterious crash at Roswell — hint, hint. Everyone in the room already knows everything he’s saying, so this dialogue can only be for our benefit — it may as well be spoken into the camera.

The rest of the plot involves a skull that may or may not be crystal, from a creature who may or may not be an alien. It has mysterious powers and holds the secret to a lost city of gold, and — I find myself no longer interested in writing about it. It’s all a bit daft, and the creatures, their powers, their identities, and their lost city remain vague despite being over-explained. I wish they had kept it simple, and left more room for the cast to settle into their characters and interact.

Another problem — and I never thought I’d say this about a film — is Cate Blanchett. I never completely believe her as underwritten Soviet operative Irina Spalco, and a large part of it is the accent. Blanchett, who rivals Meryl Streep in her talent for mimicry and accents, may very well be speaking in a technically proficient Eastern Ukranian dialect — I wouldn’t know — but what is it about affecting a Russian accent that makes actors sound like Boris and Natasha? Perhaps Spielberg and Blanchett are in on the joke — how preposterous this entire enterprise would be if they took themselves too seriously. Still, once we reach the finale, we wish they had at least given it more thought.

On DVD: “Teeth”

Dir. Mitchell Lichtenstein
(R) ★ ★ ½

Writer-director Mitchell Lichtenstein’s Teeth is ostensibly a horror film, but its intent is satirical. Inspired by B-movies, this comedy — a black, black, black, black, black comedy — is built on a great premise: A teenage girl must cope with the fact that she has developed a mythical deformity, vagina dentata, meaning “toothed vagina.” But where the myth dictates that a male hero must defeat the creature, Lichtenstein levels his cold, hard indictment against the male gender, as well as the patriarchal film industry, which frequently casts women as victims. He reserves his sympathy for the girl, who is not a monster but the product of evolution; she represents womankind’s biological response to a culture that fears and represses female sexuality.

Unfortunately, despite Lichtenstein’s unabashedly feminist point of view, he loses sight of his main character. He settles into ironic detachment so deeply that he confuses her for himself. Would she be so glib so soon after being traumatized? Would she weild her sexuality so confidently after hiding for her entire life behind chastity and Christian idealism? I don’t buy it, and so I regard the rest of the film with an ambivalent shrug. It’s a put-on.

Dawn (Jess Weixler) gives an inspirational speech about virginity. She represents a group called the Promise and wears a red promise ring that she will wear until she trades it in for “that other ring.” As Lichtenstein explains on the DVD audio commentary, Dawn — aptly named, to imply a new beginning — grew up with a subconscious understanding of her unusual anatomy and chose a chaste lifestyle to avoid a knowledge of herself. But it also represents a societal standard that demands its women be virginal, objects of purity, undefiled by sexual thoughts, sexual feelings, or sexual acts. The suppression of femininity is also evident during health class, where not only can the teacher not bear to utter the word “vagina,” but where even the textbook is censored: the female diagram is covered by a gold sticker, while the male diagram is exposed, as if to say that male sexuality is acceptable and female sexuality is not.

The story is set in an idyllic Texas suburb, with a nuclear plant’s cooling towers standing ominously in the background. Could these be the source of Dawn’s mutation? Probably, but of greater import is how they come to resemble a pair of breasts, yet another symbol of feminine sexuality. How fitting that these should be the source of her new feminine power.

Weixler is the highlight of the film. Her performance, which won a Special Jury Prize from the Sundance Film Festival, grounds all this strangeness in emotional reality. The warmth of her first scene, explaining the Promise with a sureness of purpose, dissolves into self-doubt and self-loathing upon her awakening. The meeting is echoed later in the film’s finest scene, where she addresses a second Promise group. Lichtenstein re-establishes this setting with severe lighting and extreme close-ups of Weixler, while her audience stands rigidly, chanting about the evil inside her, the serpent. The scene is dream-like, and Weixler is astonishing in the way she expresses Dawn’s terror, dazed, unsteady, standing under the unsparing light of her peers’ judgment — God’s judgment.

But then it goes off the rails. After a series of traumas, Dawn seeks solace with her classmate Ryan, and her behavior becomes inconsistent. Her reaction to that behavior is even stranger. I wonder if Lichtenstein even remembers the girl who addressed those Promise-keepers with such dread. I imagine what Quentin Tarantino might have done with this story; he has a singular gift for turning pulp genre material into high art with a feminist bent (Death Proof, Kill Bill, Jackie Brown). He knows good camp, has a terrific ear for dialogue, and a stronger sense of character than Lichtenstein demonstrates, despite his obvious talent for subversive humor. There are raucously funny scenes that delight in the absurdity of the concept — a gynecological exam gone wrong is my personal favorite — but in the end, it’s the character who gets compromised.

The DVD includes scant extras: trailer and TV spots, and a thirty-minute making-of featurette. The feature-length commentary from Lichtenstein is mildly satisfying but doesn’t offer much more insight than can be gleaned from the film itself.