“An Education”: Live and learn

Dir. Lone Scherfig
(2009, PG-13, 95 min)
★ ★ ★ ½

I want to be Jenny when I grow up. Set in 1960s England, An Education is built on the character, who is only sixteen, and on the performance of her portrayer, Carey Mulligan, who is twenty-four. As written by Nick Hornby (based on Lynn Barber’s memoir), directed by Lone Scherfig, and acted by Mulligan, Jenny is a singular creation: confident but shy, worldly but naive, cosmopolitan but sheltered, yet she is never a contradiction in terms. She is a blossoming young woman, smart, who recognizes the perils of stepping into an unfamiliar world of adults, considers them, and undertakes them anyway, because she must do something that matters, instead of be churned through school and university and deposited into marriage or one of the limited career options available to women in that day and age.

Jenny is an early feminist, a modern voice in a world that doesn’t know what to do with her yet, and she asks questions no one is yet prepared to answer. She wonders about a woman’s future, finding that her devoted English teacher Miss Stubbs (Olivia Williams) and the severe headmistress (Emma Thompson) are living contradictions to whatever hope they try to give her about toeing the line. Her father, Jack (Alfred Molina), is concerned with her financial security, and quite sincerely does not understand what other pleasure there can be in life; he pushes her hard to achieve so she can go to Oxford, but if she can marry well, there’s no point of schooling, is there?

An alluring older man comes into her life: David (Peter Sarsgaard), who appreciates music, visits France, knows glamorous people, and goes to classical concerts and jazz clubs. He is an all-access pass to everything she wants in life. Is he a creep for his unwholesome interest in a sixteen-year-old girl? Yes, we suspect, and that fact is not lost even on his friends Danny and Helen (Dominic Cooper and Rosamund Pike), who share knowing glances. But their romance is not played as a victimization; that would be unfair to Jenny, who understands, better than her easily smitten parents, what she’s getting into, but abandons caution for the sake of love and discovery. Consider a scene in Paris where she regards lovemaking; she is no victim and no fool.

But she is still a girl, and she learns a lot of things the hard way. Yet she also has a lot to teach. For her befuddled family, teachers, and peers, she is a harbinger of the free-spirit generation that will shape the later ‘60s and ‘70s — a bohemian revolution of girls and boys who will discover that their schools and universities aren’t the only education they need.

“Adventureland”: Love in the time of bumper cars

Dir. Greg Mottola
(2009, R, 107 min)
★ ★ ★ ½

The director of Adventureland is Greg Mottola, who previously presided over Superbad, and thankfully he seems to have mellowed since that venture. The previous, Judd Apatow-produced film was written by Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, and this film Mottola wrote himself, inspired by his own experience working at a Long Island amusement park in his youth. It’s a warmer and more humane film. It doesn’t contain many belly laughs but isn’t aiming for them; it’s a low-key affair in muted, naturalistic tones. It surprises with its maturity.

Jesse Eisenberg (The Squid and the Whale) stars as James Brennan, a recent college grad who takes romance so seriously that he tells people he got his heart broken after he’s dumped by a girl he’d been seeing for eleven days. When plans for a European vacation fall through, the under-qualified James — he majored in comparative literature and Renaissance studies — is forced to take a job at a local amusement park in Pittsburgh, where he meets Em Lewin, a girl more troubled than he thinks she is. Em is played by Kristen Stewart, most famous for Twilight but probably more notable for her strong work in The Cake Eaters and Into the Wild. She is so poised and natural on screen it’s hard to believe she’s only nineteen-years-old — seventeen when Adventureland was filmed. She’s on her way to becoming a major star.

There’s a love triangle of sorts with a cad named Connell, played by Ryan Reynolds. From the point of view of the park’s young employees, he’s a mysterious rock-god, a confident older man who oozes chick-magnet cool. He has a band! He played with Lou Reed (or so he claims)! Pull back from the insulated world of these star-struck kids and reality sets in; we realize he’s something much sadder: an emotionally stunted lech still working as an amusement park mechanic in his 30s and cheating on his wife with whichever teenage girls are naive enough — or damaged enough — to buy what he’s selling. Reynolds, usually cast as loveable goof-balls, acquits himself well as the smarmy Connell, capturing his low-rent suavity and revealing underneath the rudderless loser who would be nothing if he didn’t have these kids to impress. He’s having an affair with Em; that he romances her in his mother’s basement tells you all you need to know about him.

The film takes place in the 1980s and includes abundant period detail. I can’t judge the veracity of the specific details — I didn’t come of age until the ‘90s — but Mottola employs them with a sense of lived-in authenticity. The film feels like it’s of a time, and not just parodying the familiar conventions of an era. It makes us fondly remember times when music not only spoke to us but for us, which all of us have no matter which decade we grew up in. I’m twenty-five, only a few years older than the characters in this film, but still I thought of the good old days.

“Julia”: Blame it on the alcohol

Dir. Erick Zonca
(2009, R, 145 min)
★ ★ ★ ½

Julia isn’t about alcoholism. Or a kidnapping. Or a redemption or a downfall. It’s about watching Julia Harris work. She is an alcoholic and a kidnapper, but what is fascinating about her is how from the very first minute of the film to the very last she seems to have an angle, a stubborn persistence in pursuit of a windfall, and the often delusional belief that no matter what happens she can somehow turn it around in her favor. She is venal, ruthless, and relentlessly single-minded. I couldn’t take my eyes off her.

She’s played by Tilda Swinton in a blazing performance. In the opening scene we see her in her natural habitat: at a bar with a cocktail in hand. The title flashes over an image of her stumbling through with tousled hair, as if to say, this is definitively Julia: sloppy, sloshed, laughing mindlessly, then waking up the next morning in the backseat of someone else’s car. She doesn’t remember how she got there, but she can probably guess. It’s not her first blackout. They’re part of the routine.

She is not a functioning alcoholic. In the very next scene she is being fired from her job, which she got on the recommendation of her friend Mitch (Saul Rubinek), who would have given up on Julia long ago, but he’s been there and back and wants to keep her from making the same mistakes.

At first we think the film will be about her drinking. Yes, but only in part. She’s obligated to attend Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, where she is recognized by her neighbor Elena (Kate del Castillo). Elena has a problem and asks for Julia’s help: her son is being raised by his rich grandfather, and Elena wants to kidnap the boy to raise him alone. She offers Julia money, and Julia agrees. Why Elena trusts this strange woman and why Julia goes along with it we don’t readily understand. Julia’s motivation becomes clearer when she cobbles together a plan of her own, but Elena disappears from the story for long stretches where we wonder what the screenplay has done with her.

The kidnapping goes awry, and more awry, and more awry. Julia isn’t adept at crime. She mostly makes it up as she goes along. But she’s a practiced liar. The thrill of the film is watching her, by sheer force of will, connive her way into and out of situations where she is hopelessly out of her depth. Listen to the way she invents dollar amounts while at gunpoint; even in the gravest of danger, she’s trying to get over.

The young boy is eight-year-old Tom (Aidan Gould). Does Julia have any affection for him? She pretends to. And maybe a little genuine affection seeps in despite herself. For the most part, he is whatever she can use him for: a bargaining chip, a lottery ticket, a prop for sympathy. The film is long at 145 minutes, and sags in the middle portions where Tom’s terror settles into cutesy impertinence and they begin to bond, if you can call it that. It improves again during an exhilarating third act in Mexico, where a man named Diego (Bruno Bichir) warns Julia that Tijuana isn’t a safe place for a pretty American woman. He doesn’t know who he’s dealing with.

“District 9″: Illegal aliens

Dir. Neill Blomkamp
(2009, R, 112 min)
★ ★ ★ ½

The aliens are coming! They will kill us all! Plunder our resources! Invade our bodies! Eat our babies! Make merry sport of our women!

Or … maybe not. When aliens come to Earth in District 9, in a derelict spaceship that hovers inertly over Johannesburg, South Africa, they appear helpless and malnourished. When we bust down the doors of their ship, they don’t fight back, perhaps because they can’t. They have weapons but don’t use them. But mankind, in its reactionary fervor, responds to them with sneering mistrust. Who are they? What do they want? Why have they come here? We project our motives onto them and decide that they are hostile creatures who mean to overthrow us, so we do it to them first. They come in peace. Us … not so much.

I wrote in a recent entry about the BBC miniseries Torchwood: Children of Earth that the movies are increasingly inhospitable to idea-driven science fiction. Here is an exception. Co-written and directed by Neill Blomkamp, a former visual effects artist from South Africa, and produced by Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson, District 9 was produced for a relative pittance of $30 million and in its opening weekend earned $37 million. Given the bloated budgets of most summer CGI extravaganzas, the visual verve and technical elegance of this effort make one wonder where Hollywood’s money is going and why.

Sharlto Copley stars as Wikus Van Der Merwe, a mid-level bureaucrat for MNU (Multinational United), a private company placed in charge of the extraterrestrials, derisively nicknamed “prawns.” MNU isn’t a humanitarian group or relief organization. They’re weapons developers. Their solution is to isolate the aliens in District 9, a makeshift slum in the middle of Johannesburg, while they futz around with their technology.

The aliens are soon to be moved to District 10, far beyond city limits, and from what we’re told it makes District 9 look like the Hamptons. Wikus married the boss’s daughter, so he is put in charge of the evictions. The story and setting are intended to evoke Apartheid. They also recall the deportation of Jews from the ghettos to the concentration camps during the Holocaust. The alien residents are tricked, blackmailed, or strong-armed into signing their illegal eviction notices. Noticing that one alien is cleverer than the others in reading the fine print, Wikus threatens to take his son. How they deal with a nest of unhatched young is depraved and disturbing. Wikus isn’t an evil man, per se. He is ignorant and unquestioning of authority. Just following orders.

I won’t reveal more of the plot. It covers much of the same ground as Children of Earth, examining human nature at a time of uncertainty and finding us all too willing to act out of fear when faced with the unknown. How startling to see the aliens brutalized so casually, by blacks and whites alike, showing us that all human beings are united in our mistrust of the Other and our capacity for cruelty against those we don’t understand.

The film is handicapped by the thin rendering of its villains. There is a wheelchair-bound Nigerian warlord (Eugene Khumbanyiwa) who controls the black market in District 9. There is Koobus Venter (David James), an MNU mercenary who enjoys killing. Finally, there is the father-in-law (Louis Minnaar), who is quick to sell out Wikus for the company’s bottom-line. They’re stock characters, evil without giving us a meaningful idea of evil. Nowhere is a scene like Children of Earth’s secret roundtable, which showed us with gradually building horror how reasoned individuals can talk themselves into atrocity.

The second half boils over into shoot-‘em-up action, most of it heartily satisfying in its high-tech geekery — those aliens sure know their robotics! — though I wish Blomkamp had stuck closer to his themes. There is a late scene that contains the heart of the film: A human, mutated by the alien DNA, is shown with one human eye and one prawn eye, collapsing the distance between Us and Them. If we could see ourselves in the eyes of others, would we treat them the same?

“I Love You, Man”: Guy love between two guys

Dir. John Hamburg
(2009, R, 104 min)
★ ★ ★ ½

“Bromance” is a new Hollywood buzz word, signifying a close emotional bond between straight men and normalizing male-male affection while maintaining a safe hetero-detachment. In the same way “metrosexual” made the world safe for the well-groomed while simultaneously distancing itself from any hint of sexual deviation, “bromance” tells us that men can hug it out too, as long as there’s no funny business below the waist.

In that way it’s a double-edged sword, expanding the accepted definition of love while still pushing homosexuality to the margins. What makes I Love You, Man appealing is its lack of such macho posturing. It recasts the romantic comedy formula with platonic male friends, but doesn’t treat it as hyper-ironic parody. It plays it straight — so to speak.

Peter Klaven (Paul Rudd) is a contented Los Angeles realtor. In the opening scene he proposes to his girlfriend Zooey (Rashida Jones), who calls her closest friends with the good news during the drive home. Peter doesn’t have anyone to call, even his younger brother Robbie (Andy Samberg), with whom he’s never forged a close bond. Peter, we learn, is more of a “girlfriend guy,” and as his wedding approaches he finds himself without a best man.

Enter Sydney Fife, played by Jason Segel, who was so lovable as the sad-sack hero of Forgetting Sarah Marshall. Here he plays a character with more confidence and less restraint — Sydney makes an inappropriate toast at an engagement party and foolishly attacks Lou Ferrigno, playing himself — but retains his endearing, arrested-development charm. He brings the repressed teenager out of Peter, who reacts to Sydney with the wide-eyed eagerness of a boy being invited to the cool kids’ table.

Despite the film’s screwball nature, the three leads are written and acted as adults. Zooey worries that her fiancé lacks a close male friend, and is warm and generous in her encouragement. Peter is awkward, but self-aware, serious about his job and good at it, and Rudd’s thoughtful performance avoids turning his quirks into condescending shtick. They have conversations that feel like people talking about their lives instead of going through the motions of plot. And Sydney, for all his bawdy free-spiritedness, is a good and loyal friend. Segel puts on a knowing grin through Peter’s nervous mumblings; he recognizes Peter’s unease and eases him.

The men have real chemistry, are affectionate, without any of the “But dude, I’m straight!” reaffirmations. The film was co-written and directed by John Hamburg without the cynicism of other male-friendship comedies like Superbad. It demonstrates a depth of sincerity wherein you can stop calling it a bromance and just call it love, man.

“Two Lovers”: Affairs to remember

Dir. James Gray
(2009, R, 109 min)
★ ★ ★ ½

The ending of Two Lovers does not come as a surprise, as might be the intent of other films about love triangles, which seek to divide our sympathies and confound our expectations. Explains writer-director James Gray in the DVD audio commentary, he hopes his film is predictable, but not in the way of formula films. He echoes exactly the feeling I had when watching it for the first time. There’s an inevitability in the fates of its characters, whom the screenplay observes so well that their behavior moves us, but doesn’t surprise us.

Joaquin Phoenix stars as Leonard Kraditor, a troubled New Yorker who has returned to his parents’ home on the heels of a broken engagement. This is the role Phoenix was promoting earlier in the year when he had his supposed breakdown, quitting acting to become a rap singer, growing a beard, and making inexplicable public appearances like his infamous interview with David Letterman. This may prove to be merely fodder for an upcoming mockumentary, which would make it all the more unfortunate that the actor’s public spectacle overshadowed what is a fine film and one of his best performances.

Leonard is drawn to two women: Sandra (Vinessa Shaw), the daughter of a family friend, whom his Jewish immigrant parents approve of, and Michelle (Gwyneth Paltrow), a beguiling upstairs neighbor who is having an affair with a married man and may have had trouble with drugs. Considering the two women, my sympathies were not divided at all. Sandra is the healthier relationship, the more grounded in reality, the more stabilizing for Leonard, who is bipolar and has attempted suicide enough times that his mother (played perfectly by Isabella Rossellini) warns his father, “I think he tried again,” when their son comes home dripping wet from “falling” into Sheepshead Bay. Leonard cannot see how right she is for him because she is bound up in familial pressures and a life path he’s determined to get away from. She tells him she wants to take care of him, when all he wants is to feel like he can take care of himself.

He doesn’t see how wrong Michelle is for him because he wants to fix her, which makes him feel less like someone who needs to be fixed. She draws him in and pushes him away, all the while stumbling through an emotional battlefield largely of her own making. She can scarcely take care of herself, and together they form a bond of co-dependency. I want to yell “No! No! No!” at her when she, perhaps unwittingly, pulls him back into her orbit, and at him when he lets her.

Perhaps you will feel differently. You may bring your biases as I have brought mine and decide that Sandra represents stifling obligation. But Shaw gives a performance that radiates warmth, compassion, and steadiness of character; she plays Sandra as such a force of goodness that if she thinks she can fix you, you hand her a wrench.

Paltrow is just as good as Michelle, who is Sandra’s complete opposite: scattered, ruled by emotions, clouded of judgment. The actress at first seems miscast: too aristocratic to play a naive Brooklynite who believes the promises of her married lover, her edges too clean to play a woman so frayed. I can’t point to precisely the moment where she finally convinces me, but we eventually come to understand her as an unattainable fantasy for Leonard, a beautiful damsel in a high tower waiting for her rescuer. But he is not Prince Charming, and she is not Cinderella. Their scenes together are sad, because we can see through their illusions.

Some films know their characters — just know them, so well that we never need to question it. Gray’s screenplay, co-written by Ric Menello, is one of clear-eyed understanding, simple and direct. Everything is character. Nothing is contrivance. We often grieve at the decisions of the characters, but the heart wants what it wants, even when it should want something else. They say love is blind …

“Up”: Raising the roof

Dir. Pete Docter
(2009, PG, 96 min)
★ ★ ★ ½

My how the standards for American animation have changed! Cartoons — which now seems like an overly reductive term — once a medium for kids’ movies, have developed greater sophistication, richer themes, and more challenging stories than most films intended for adults. Pixar has led the way; the company’s last film, WALL-E, ranked as my favorite film of 2008.

Up opens with a boy, Carl (voiced by Jeremy Leary), in a movie theater staring up with wonder at newsreel footage of Charles Muntz (Christopher Plummer), an explorer and adventurer whose image is tarnished when one of his discoveries is debunked. Upon leaving, Carl comes across Ellie (Elie Docter), a boisterous girl who also idolizes Muntz and develops a fondness for her new friend. “You don’t talk a lot,” she tells Carl. “I like you!”

What follows is a chronicle of their relationship — a montage of scenes from their lives, from childhood, to young adulthood, to marriage, to old age, and finally to Ellie’s death. These brief moments in time give us a fuller sense of love than most films at feature length, and they floor us in ways we don’t expect. Consider the image of Carl and Ellie spotting the shapes of babies in the clouds, followed by a scene of the couple painting a baby’s room, followed by Ellie shedding tears in a hospital. Perhaps younger viewers will not understand that this sequence indicates a miscarriage, but the message will come through to adults. I was struck by the boldness of including such down-to-earth sadness in this pie-in-the-sky fable; it’s a tough dose of reality, but it informs our understanding of Carl and his quest.

In present day, Carl (now voiced by Ed Asner) has withdrawn from the world. He lives in the house he built with Ellie and stubbornly refuses to move out, even as new construction springs up around him. He is targeted by a real estate developer, who is a vivid character in a suit and sunglasses who has no dialogue and hardly any expression other than a faint grin of victory once he has backed Carl into a corner. He is more a shadow than a person.

To avoid having the house taken from him and demolished, Carl sets out to realize his wife’s childhood dream: to bring her house to Paradise Falls in South America, a landmark made famous by their hero Muntz. He raises thousands of helium balloons from his chimney and takes flight, but he has a stowaway: Boy Scout Russell (Jordan Nagai), who came to his door hoping to earn a merit badge for assisting the elderly. Carl imagines a drastic means of getting rid of the boy that rivals the cape sequence from The Incredibles for acid hilarity.

The floating house eventually arrives in South America, a bit off its target, and we are unsurprised when Carl and Russell encounter Muntz himself. From this point I will describe little of the plot and will only say that from the reappearance of Muntz the film’s themes reveal themselves. This is a story of obsessive need, of holding on too tightly. Muntz is determined to redeem his legacy. Carl is determined to keep some part of Ellie alive; he speaks to his floating house as if he is speaking to her, and as the folly of his endeavor becomes clearer, we see it manifested in the toppled furniture, ruptured balloons, and Ellie’s picture falling off the wall. The house is nearly burned, crashes into rocks. He wants to honor’s his wife’s memory, but it is only an excuse to sequester himself in grief, and all the while the symbolic house comes down around his head.

Russell is searching for something too. He shares a touching scene with Carl that subtly describes his family and makes us understand why he really strives for merit badges. The screenplay by Pete Docter and Bob Peterson is gratifying in how it makes time for scenes like that, with dialogue that is mature and revealing, amidst the welcome whimsy of giant tropical birds and talking dogs. The canines speak through specially designed collars; a villainous alpha dog has a loose wire that makes his ruthless declarations sound … well, much less intimidating.

Docter also directs. He received Oscar nominations for co-writing Toy Story and WALL-E as well as for his last feature directing credit, Monsters Inc., and if I call that film one of Pixar’s lesser efforts I only mean that it is simply good and not great. Up is a step, well, up for the filmmaker, in a company that seems to specialize in steps up; every Pixar film sets the bar ever higher, to the point where we can hardly believe they continue to clear it. As for the future, I suppose it would be fitting to say, the sky’s the limit.

On DVD: “Maxed Out”

Dir. James Scurlock
(2006, Not Rated, 87 min)
★ ★ ★ ½

Maxed Out is not an astonishing film in and of itself — it’s a little unfocused at the start — but in conjunction with other recent films it opens my eyes to a hidden world I’m better for having seen, no matter how painful the glare. There is a growing 21st Century canon of documentary film that constitutes a required curriculum for modern American life.

I’m thinking of three films in particular, about money in America: Sicko, about the health care industry; I.O.U.S.A., about the national debt; and now 2006’s Maxed Out, about the credit card industry. Each film, in its own way, goes about explaining how the mass of Americans are at the mercy of money: those who have it, those who owe it, those who demand it, and those who wield it as a political weapon. The problem with our capitalist democracy is that pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps economics is rather an illusion, because if you’re wealthy enough, you can pay a Congressman to pass a law that not only provides your boots but also appoints someone to pull the straps for you. Tax cuts for the wealthy. Exorbitant health care costs that go unchecked. Deregulation of financial markets. All under the guise of capitalist progress. But this isn’t capitalism. It’s plutocracy.

And I haven’t even watched the Enron documentary yet.

According to Maxed Out, credit card companies and their subsidiaries are like bookies. They target the customers who are the most likely to make late payments and then charge obscene interest rates on the debt. It seems counterintuitive, which is probably why I frequently struggle to wrap my head around it. It seems to be a compound paradox; see if you can follow. Credit card companies make the most money from customers least likely to be able to pay. When those debts reach critical mass, they’re sold to other companies. What, you may ask, does a company do with the bad debt it buys? Take it for walks? Display it on the coffee table? Serve it with a white wine sauce? What could possibly compel a business to purchase the lack of money?

I’ve wondered. Maxed Out shows us, and I think I understand. Director James Scurlock takes us inside People First Recoveries, whose only service is to collect money on the bad debts they purchase using every tool at their disposal, and they are not wanting for tools. They leverage your secrets. They harass you, your friends, your family, your neighbors. They squeeze information out of police departments to use against you. As yet they don’t break knee-caps, but that’s only until their knee-cap reform bill passes Congress.

The young entrepreneurs who started People First are shocking, not in what they say so much as how casually they say it. They must not realize how they sound, or else they would have dropped out of the film and filed an injunction to have the footage burned. If they truly believe their message, they may qualify as sociopaths according to the DSM-IV.

MDNA, a bank holding company and George W. Bush’s greatest campaign contributor, wrote a bill that makes it more difficult to file for bankruptcy, which is a debt-holder’s last resort; Bush passed it. A director of Providian Financial, which paid $400 million in fraud settlements from 2001 to 2002, was appointed corporate crime czar by the same president. That’s kind of like hiring Clyde Barrow as head of bank security.

My favorite of the talking heads is Elizabeth Warren, a Harvard Professor and the author of The Two-Income Trap: Why Middle-Class Mothers and Fathers Are Going Broke. When she explains the financial industry, she appears stricken, all at once mortified by what she’s describing as she’s describing it. During her interviews, I feel a kinship; the more I learn, the more I understand how she feels. Warren is currently the chair of the Congressional Oversight Panel to oversee the banking bailout; in an appearance on The Daily Show last month she looked occasionally like a deer in headlights, and while answering Jon Stewart’s questions she seemed about eight steps behind the curve. I was simultaneously angry and sympathetic; if she can barely keep up, what chance does the average consumer have?

Scurlock mixes the expert testimonials with personal horror stories that highlight the human cost of predatory lending. The smaller-scale stories distract from the facts in the early going; I wanted less emotional content and more hard-boiled information. But as they are woven through the film they build to a devastating emotional climax.

Consumers must also be accountable for themselves. There are those who are thrown into debt by a sudden death or illness or bureaucratic error, but others are also the victims of poor choices. Two heartbreaking stories describe the suicides of college students who dug themselves too far into credit card debt and saw no way out. There are two lessons here: (1) Credit card companies recklessly exploit the naivete of eighteen-year-olds who haven’t learned responsibility, and (2) eighteen-year-olds should be more responsible. There’s no such thing as a free lunch, and if a credit card company offers you one, the lunch may be the only thing they leave you with.

“Coraline”

Dir. Henry Selick
(PG) ★ ★ ★ ½

From Henry Selick, the director of The Nightmare Before Christmas, one of the best animated films of the last twenty years, the stop-motion animated film Coraline tells a tale of childhood fears with a Grimm’s Fairy Tales bent, with macabre details, splendidly ghoulish production design by Selick himself, and a story that is whimsical but with sharper edges than you’ll find on most youth-oriented entertainments. Its dangers feel genuine and aren’t sanitized for general consumption. No, it’s not No Country for Old Men, but it ain’t Madagascar either.

The setup is familiar. Coraline (voiced by Dakota Fanning) is a preteen whose inattentive parents move her into a big, spooky house where she is left to her own devices. They’re writing a gardening catalog, but they’re too busy writing to use their garden. They’re too busy for a lot of things, and a lonely Coraline makes do counting windows and doors, including a mysterious door hidden behind the wallpaper. It leads to a parallel world that gives her everything she wants but isn’t what it appears to be.

On the other side of the door, her “Other Mother” cooks gourmet food and gives her affection, but she is a sinister creature whose features become more angular and severe as her true nature is gradually revealed. She and everyone else in this parallel world have buttons for eyes, and she intends for Coraline to join them.

The film’s theme is apparent: be thankful for your family because perfect parents are a dangerous illusion. But the real draw is the imagery, which captures the imagination. It’s the small details that delighted me: stuffed dogs in angel wings hung on a wall, a man composed of rats and women composed of taffy, the peeling of the walls of a false reality, the snapdragons in a mystical garden, a tractor in the shape of a praying mantis, and more. It is a film of great visual invention. It surprises the eyes. Most importantly it respects its young audience; in this age of WALL-E, it recognizes that animation can contain treasures beyond the obligatory demands of a kids’ movie.

NOTE: I saw the film in two dimensions, but it is also being exhibited in 3D, which of course means we’re given the requisite scenes of objects or characters flying towards the camera. I always find such scenes an unnecessary distraction, whether I’m watching in 3D or not. They exist only to get the studio’s money’s worth from the technology. One day Hollywood will produce a film composed entirely of things flying at the camera. Perhaps then it’ll be out of their system.

On DVD: “Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired”

Dir. Marina Zenovich
(Not Rated) ★ ★ ★ ½

What makes the law such popular fodder for film and television is that the adversarial system of justice provides inherent conflict. There’s a prosecutor and a defender arguing their case before the court. One of them is right, and one of them is wrong, and maybe one is even good and the other evil. In the end, there is a verdict, and truth prevails; the guilty are punished or the innocent exonerated … At least, that’s how it’s supposed to work. The fascinating documentary Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired recounts a case where justice was turned sideways. It’s about a guilty defendant and two adversarial lawyers who ended up adversaries not of each other but of the judge.

Of course, Roman Polanski is the famed director of Chinatown and Rosemary’s Baby. In 1977, he was arrested for statutory rape for engaging in sexual intercourse with a thirteen-year-old aspiring actress, Samantha Gailey. In 1978, he fled the United States for Paris and hasn’t been back since, but even the prosecuting attorney, Roger Gunson, admits he can’t blame Polanski for leaving under the circumstances.

The judge was Laurence Rittenband, and if he were a character in a fiction film you wouldn’t believe him. As a Superior Court judge in Santa Barbara, one of California’s busiest districts for celebrity cases, he presided over Elvis Presley’s divorce, Marlon Brando’s child-custody battle, and other sensational trials. He was skilled at self-promotion and kept a scrapbook of press clippings about himself. The lengths to which he manipulated the Polanski case to further his own interests are shocking even if your only experience with jurisprudence is reruns of Law & Order.

It’s disappointing how frequently the opposition is demonized in legal dramas for the purpose of dramatic tension. If the heroes are the prosecutors, the defense attorneys are unscrupulous mercenaries putting criminals back on the street for a buck. If the heroes are the defenders, the prosecutors are ruthless bullies looking for a conviction at any cost. So it’s refreshing that both lawyers on the Polanski case are equally just and right-thinking men. Deputy District Attorney Gunson and Polanski’s representative Douglas Dalton are the film’s most compelling subjects, because their belief in the system supercedes their belief in the specific case, and that allows them both to recognize that Rittenband’s audacity is beyond the pale, no matter the crime being prosecuted.

It isn’t a question of Polanski’s guilt. He is guilty by his own admission. He pled to one count of unlawful sexual conduct and surrendered to the workings of the American legal system, until Rittenband asked him to jump through one hoop too many. Director Marina Zenovich’s real subject is the right to due process. American justice is founded on the principle that all men, from jaywalkers to mass murderers, should be treated with equal fairness under the law. The fact that Polanski is a foreigner who has willfully exiled himself from the country he once regarded with fondness further underlines the point. Today, the parties may have different opinions about the crime, but all of them — including Polanski’s victim, who has publicly forgiven him — agree that he deserved better from the courts. We all do.