movies The Past ★★
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see screenwriting as a bit like a math equation which I have to solve,” Asghar Farhadi has explained. Because he’s an Iranian filmmaker — the first to win an Oscar (for 2011’s A Separation) — he’s under tremendous pressure to get that solution right, artistically and politically. If you screw up here, you get a Razzie. Over there you vanish into the twilight zone of the penal system. Or worse. The same year A Separation was winning awards, for example, Iranian poet Hashem Shaabani was sentenced to death because authorities didn’t approve of his views. He was hanged last month. This may have something to do with the pains Farhadi takes to make his characters relatable to Western audiences. Urban, dressed like us, driving cars like ours and obsessed with their smartphones, they’re an advertisement for the Iran its government wants the world to believe is the norm. Where they differ from actual human beings, though, is the way they rarely talk about politics or religion. Farhadi knows what can come of that. His friend, filmmaker Jafar Panahi, is still serving a 2010 sentence. So is it any wonder the writer-director tends to make the same movie over and over? It’s the movie Farhadi understands he’s per-
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mitted to make. As did A Separation and Dancing in the Dust (2003) and Fireworks Wednesday (2006) and Canaan (2008), The Past regards the messy business of divorce in the context of a shifting cultural landscape. For someone who professes to enjoy a happy family life, the dude’s got breaking up on the brain. In the words of the philosopher Neil Sedaka, it’s hard to do. This is the universal thread running through his work. What sets it apart is his proclivity for establishing a compelling premise, bringing well-defined characters to life and then piling on plot twists and sensational revelations until we realize what we’re watching is soap opera packaged as art. The Past starts as the story of a Parisian played by The Artist’s Bérénice Bejo (looking spectacular in color). She’s asked her estranged husband (Ali Mosaffa) to return from Iran so they can finalize their divorce and so he can crash at her place at the same time her current boyfriend (Tahar Rahim) is there. The film initially offers a restrained portrait of alternative domestic life. The home is filled with kids — Rahim’s son and Bejo’s two daughters by a third man. Mosaffa has an easy rapport with all of them. The one sign that things aren’t as idyllic as
LOOK BACK IN LANGUOR Farhadi has pretty much exhausted the subject of divorce Iranian-style. His latest variation on the theme is likely to have viewers feeling a little exhausted, too.
YOUR YOUR SCAN THIS PAGE WITH LAYAR cleaning business factor into TEXT the mystery, they seem: The older daughter (Pauline Bur-TEXT though in ways that feel arbitrary. It’s not let) is strangely uncomfortable around herHERE HERE SEE PROGRAM COVER mother’s lover. At this point, the film morphs into a detective story, with Mosaffa tracking down the cause of her discomfort. The movie is long, which regrettably allows Farhadi time to pile on even more melodramatic twists and revelations than usual. The string of surprises is all the narrative has to offer, so I won’t comment on them except to say that five or 10 minutes into hour three, the film reaches a critical mass of preposterousness. Love, betrayal, grief, tragedy, regret, suspicion, guilt, cruelty, a coma, even the dry-
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RoboCop ★★★
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ack when Paul Verhoeven’s RoboCop (1987) hit theater screens, ads described its robot enforcer as a “stainless steel unstoppable Clint Eastwood.” But the action flick wasn’t just Dirty Harry with a robot. Rather, as original cowriter Edward Neumeier noted in a recent interview, it was a “stealth satire.” The filmmakers used comic-book hyperbole to depict a near-future urbanscape ruled by corporations — which own the police — and entertained by vacuous infotainment. It feels more prescient all the time. The surprising news about the RoboCop remake is that Brazilian director José Padilha and writer Joshua Zetumer have embraced that satire. They could have simply retold the crowd-pleasing tale of a Detroit cop who dies in the line of duty and gets resurrected in a metal body to kill bad guys. Instead, they’ve brought the original’s anticorporate tendency to the fore and made it topical. What gets lost in the process, unfortunately, is a strong narrative with compelling characters. Set in 2028, the film opens with an O’Reilly-esque TV demagogue (Samuel L. Jackson) extolling a new generation of humanoid drones that the U.S. uses to subdue its enemies around the world. Why, he demands, won’t legislators allow these peacekeeping machines on American soil? Raymond Sellars (Michael Keaton), CEO of OmniCorp, is equally keen on reconciling
BODY ELECTRIC Kinnaman finds out he’s mostly metal in Padilha’s remake of the beloved sci-fi action flick.
Americans to permanent occupation by his crime-fighting robots. But voters have silly issues with heavily armed machines making life-and-death decisions. So Sellars and his biotech expert (Gary Oldman) plan a compromise: a machine controlled by the resident brain of a real, live cop. Maimed by a drug lord’s attack, detective Alex Murphy (Joel Kinnaman) is the perfect candidate. But he isn’t given a choice about rising from the near-dead as a “product.” In the film’s most memorable scene, Murphy
sees what’s left of his human body inside the hardware. He begs for death. Concerned about those messy human emotions, OmniCorp gradually curtails Murphy’s free will, leaving him a semblance of autonomy for PR purposes. While it’s not enough to fool his wife (Abbie Cornish), everyone else likes the way RoboCop cleans up the city just fine. This new RoboCop isn’t really about the mean streets of Detroit — which come across far cleaner and less mean than they did in the
clear what the filmmaker is trying to say, but it’s entirely conceivable he’s making a point of not making a point, of not saying the wrong thing by not saying anything. As an attempt to solve a math equation, The Past is a glacially paced and overwrought miscalculation. As an attempt to avoid controversy in a country where bad reviews can be bad for your health, though, it’s the picture of success. RI C K KI S O N AK
REVIEWS original. It’s not as profane, bloody or funny, either. The action feels perfunctory; Murphy’s partner, boss and drug-lord nemesis are hazy, ill-formed characters. Oddly, the movie comes most alive in the sections dealing with OmniCorp’s internal politics, where Oldman’s modern-day Dr. Frankenstein negotiates between the demands of his boss and his empathy for Murphy. We’re encouraged to feel that empathy, too, yet by the film’s midpoint, Murphy’s head has been messed with so thoroughly that we don’t know who or what is inside that helmet. Kinnaman has more use of his face than Peter Weller did in the original, and he’s expressive enough to compensate for his clumping metal body. The problem is that, having set up RoboCop as a drone whose humanity has been ruthlessly programmed out, Padilha and Zetumer can’t figure out how to give him back the meaningful agency their plot demands, or how to restore the audience’s connection with him. They get to the denouement only by cheating. It’s rare to see a remake that takes chances or has ideas, and for that, RoboCop deserves credit. By the midpoint, in fact, its ideas have swamped its story, leaving the actors to struggle through an incoherent third act. On the upside, at least we know it wasn’t written by a script-bot — only humans can screw up this creatively. MARGO T HARRI S O N