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The Great Beauty ★★★★★
W
hen you think of the protagonists of the past year’s best films, aren’t you really thinking less about them than about what happened to them? Played to perfection by Toni Servillo, the central figure in the latest from writer-director Paolo Sorrentino (Il Divo) is a famous magazine writer and bon vivant named Jep Gambardella. He doesn’t get lost in space, contract HIV, face arrest for fraud or come under attack by pirates. From the moment you join the conga line that is The Great Beauty, you’re immersed in the extraordinary experience of observing the world through the eyes of a character engaged in nothing more extraordinary than the act of living. For two and a half hours, we’re Gambardella’s plus one as he goes about the business of his privileged, pleasure-seeking existence. A permanent fixture in a city that’s eternal — Rome, of course — he’s the intellectual and sensual life of every party he attends in an endless night of salons and bacchanals. From Jep’s entrance 10 minutes into the film, waving, smiling and, as always, smoking while gyrating partygoers pay homage at his 65th birthday bash, you’re likely to find him among the year’s most fascinating creations.
Only thousands of miles from Hollywood could such a creature come into being. A playboy and professional reveler, Jep made his reputation with an acclaimed novel in his twenties and subsequently turned his energies toward becoming the emperor of Rome’s leisure class. “I didn’t want to simply be a socialite,” he reflects one evening, “I wanted to become YOUR YOUR the king of socialites. And I succeeded. I SCAN THIS PAGE WHEN IN ROME In Sorrentino’s visually ravishing Oscar winner, didn’t just want to attend parties. I wanted WITH TEXT TEXT LAYAR Servillo acts as the audience’s guide through a side of the Eternal the power to make them fail.” CityPROGRAM inaccessible toCOVER visitors. HERE HERE SEE We accompany Jep to innumerable happenings, from a soirée kicked off The visuals are ravishing, the mots by a knife-throwing act that’s part art epilogue follows. “Instead of acting performance to an elegant Botox-injection superior,” Jep suggests wearily, “you should are bon and, here and there, the audience ceremony. Because filmmaker Sorrentino is look at us with affection. We’re all on the may even detect the odd trace of wisdom a direct stylistic descendant of Fellini, we’re brink of despair. All we can do is look each (something I thought went out about the not at all surprised when spooky nuns, a other in the face, keep each other company, same time as animatronics — who knew?). Sorrentino’s Oscar winner literally does not blue-haired dwarf or a giraffe shows up on joke a little. Don’t you agree?” Keeping him company is one of the most have a dull or meaningless moment. The the guest list. In addition to the picture’s sublime phantasmagoria, its rewards include unforgettable pleasures you’ll have at the picture’s asides, its incidental vignettes, say watching Jep act as uncontested master of multiplex for some time, I promise you. more than most entire movies. It’s La Dolce Things deepen with a melancholy detour Vita for the 21st century, of course. But, more saturnalian ceremonies. In one of the movie’s most illuminating in the final act. But the party never pauses, than that, it’s the rare work that not only tips scenes, he politely eviscerates a member the music — an inspired mash-up of Italian its hat to a masterpiece but sort of shockingly of his circle who suggests that, unlike Jep, techno, sacred classics and Robert Burns tops it. she’s tried to change the world with her lyrics, seriously — plays on, and Rome’s RI C K KI S O N AK writing. While his takedown is as withering nocturnals drink, drug and dance like the as it is hysterical, an unexpectedly poignant world would come to an end if they stopped.
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80 MOVIES
SEVEN DAYS
03.05.14-03.12.14
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Non-Stop ★★★★ Liam Neeson is punching people again. Yet, all appearances to the contrary, NonStop is not an attempt to clone Taken, the film that turned Neeson punching people into an annual reason for male baby boomers to leave the couch. That movie was a gleeful, nonstop kill fest; this one, despite its name, is a far more restrained film, an old-fashioned suspense thriller. When the punches arrive, they matter. Non-Stop’s tight efficiency is a surprise, given that Neeson’s last team-up with director Jaume Collet-Serra was the soporific “thriller” Unknown (2011). Perhaps claustrophobia does good things for this filmmaker. Set almost entirely inside an airliner on a trans-Atlantic flight, NonStop uses enclosure to jack up the tension, keeping the audience guessing about who’s going to deserve a punch next. Neeson plays Bill Marks, whom we first spy swigging a preflight whiskey, the shallow focus bringing us into his hungover tunnel vision. The on-the-ground scenes hint at Marks’ reason for flying. But not until he starts receiving threatening texts in midair does the script confirm that this loser who’s been sneaking smokes in the can is the air marshal. Marks’ initial anonymity is a clever way to set up the film’s conflict, which hinges on his awareness that the texting terrorist could be anyone on the plane, from the captain to the helpful flight attendant (Michelle Dockery)
BRUISING ALTITUDE Neeson searches for a texting terrorist in Collet-Serra’s thriller.
to his fussy seatmate (Julianne Moore). The culprit promises that a passenger will die if he or she doesn’t receive $150 million in 20 minutes. But if Marks calls out the wrong person at the wrong time, he himself could be the one who ignites close-quarters violence. “How many people are you going to kill?” the texter asks him, in a neat little meta allusion to Neeson’s rep. The film gives about 45 minutes to this silent duel between our hero and a villain
who manifests only as text bubbles popping up on the screen — and, amazingly, it works. It takes a believably weathered and weary actor like Neeson to pull off this one-sided conflict. His reactions carry the drama as Marks slowly realizes that the hijacker is trying to frame him for the crime. He’s well assisted by the character players in the cast — including Corey Stoll, Scoot McNairy and Anson Mount — who all manifest convincing degrees of shadiness.
Paranoia mounts in the viewer, too, as ColletSerra uses a long tracking shot from the cabin to the cockpit and back to emphasize their confinement. Because this is still a B-movie, three things are virtually inevitable: 1. Havoc will be wreaked; 2. Marks will redeem himself and 3. the villain’s reveal will cause eyerolls. Having created an invisible antagonist so insidious that he or she almost seems to inhabit the protagonist’s head, the writers (John W. Richardson, Christopher Roach and Ryan Engle) are headed for a crash when they finally have to pit those parties against each other in a physical showdown. All these things come to pass in the final half hour, when Non-Stop succumbs to action-movie formula. Punches are thrown, fighter jets are deployed, heartfelt Psychology 101 confessions are made and there’s even a teddy-bear-clutching little girl for Marks to see safely to the ground. (Aww.) In its best moments, though, NonStop draws genuine tension from the scenario of strangers forced into proximity, each vulnerable to the risks of flight and simultaneously endowed with the power of instant, silent communication implied by a smartphone. Death still arrives in this movie by punch — and other, more colorful means. But it’s technology that’s truly creepy. MARGO T HARRI S O N