FILM REVIEWS
IN CINEMAS NOW: BY M. FAUST & GEORGE SAX
PREMIERES AMERICAN SNIPER—Clint Eastwood’s drama adapted from the memoir of Chris Kyle (Bradley Cooper), who as a Navy SEAL sniper killed between 160 and 250 targets in Iraq. With Sienna Miller, Jake McDorman, and Luke Grimes. Reviewed this issue. BLACKHAT—Cyber-crime drama directed by Michael Mann, who is due for a hit after two consecutive snoozers (Miami Vice, Public Enemies). Starring Chris Hemsworth, Viola Davis, Wei Tang, and John Ortiz. PADDINGTON—The talking bear named after the British tube station comes to life in an unpreviewed movie whose supporting cast (after Nicole Kidman) is an Anglophile’s dream: Peter Capaldi, Julie Walters, Sally Hawkins, Hugh Bonneville, Jim Broadbent, and Geoffrey Palmer. Directed by Paul King (the cult TV comedy The Mighty Boosh). THE WEDDING RINGER—The ubiquitous Kevin Hart as a wedding planner who specializes as posing as a hip best man for nerdy grooms. Co-starring Josh Gad and Kaley Cuoco. Directed by Jeremy Garelick.
ALTERNATIVE CINEMA
David Oyelowo in Selma.
THE ARC OF HISTORY SELMA BY GEORGE SAX Recently out on the publicity trail on behalf of her movie Selma, about Martin Luther King, Jr. and the drive a half-century ago to gain voting rights for blacks in the American southland, director Ava DuVernay has told a story about one person’s reaction to it. According to DuVernay, one of the movie’s producers was approached by an African-American youth who told him that Selma had made clear to the boy what “MLK” meant. “You mean what he meant to the nation?” the producer asked. No, the young man replied, what these initials he’d so often encountered stood for. This little story, apocryphal or not, does point to the real educational potential of her movie (particularly given the sad lack of historical and political knowledge in America, especially among the young, black and white). Selma can only have an enlightening effect, generally. It’s a solidly, often compellingly achieved recreation of a crucial period in King’s life and this country’s history. The picture is devoted to the events leading up to the 1965 march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, the capital, to protest the denial of the vote to the great majority of the state’s African-American residents. DuVernay’s movie is thus not just a portrait of King (David Oyelowo), it’s about a prime movement and a critical, volatile historical moment. King is at the center of Selma, both the great public leader and symbol and the private man, but he’s presented as part of an increasingly diverse and populist campaign in this movie’s unusually clear and sophisticated narrative. DuVernay and her co-writer Paul Webb (she’s uncredited for the script) keep a focus on King’s crucial leadership, but they haven’t slighted the scope, details and difficulties the drive for voting rights entailed. Selma has a rather refined and conscientious approach to the historical record—with one significant lapse—even as it necessarily edits and condenses it. The tensions between King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee, which had started the voting initiative in Selma, is given a fair and lucid part in the storyline. Selma even paus-
es at a couple points to give recognition to the deep-rooted social and economic inferiority of America’s black citizens in the 1960s, a plight, King tells the Rev. Ralph Abernathy (Coleman Domingo), that won’t be much alleviated just by access to the ballot. Where DuVernay and her movie stumble is in starkly exaggerating President Lyndon Johnson’s (Tom Wilkinson) resistance to sending a voting rights bill to Congress. Selma manages to push its Johnson nearer the opposition and to King’s enemies, including the odious FBI director J. Edgar Hoover. In one brief scene it even seems as if he might be about to collude with Hoover in sending Coretta Scott King (a fine Carmen Ejogo) recordings of her husband’s alleged trysts with women in bugged hotel rooms. As Selma somewhat inadequately acknowledges, Johnson’s reluctance was based upon his assessment of the timing and political opposition. Selma’s distortions aren’t anything like Oliver Stone’s demagogically irresponsible accusations against Johnson in his wretched assassination conspiracy movie JFK, but they’re out of sync with the movie’s otherwise even-handed and dramatically convincing storytelling. DuVernay’s direction is assured and incisive. The movie’s large-scale centerpiece, the confrontation of state troopers with the marchers on Selma’s Edmund Pettus Bridge, and the violent dispersal of them is dynamically riveting and frightening, a triumph of staging, camera work and editing. Oyelowo’s King is a measured, subtle performance. His resounding speech making is in pointed contrast with the private, quietly troubled King. (The speeches aren’t in King’s actual words because his litigious, quarrelsome children wouldn’t permit their use.) Wilkinson, however, doesn’t seem to quite have got the hang of his role; his Johnson’s delivery is a little awkward and inconsistent in his Texas accent, surprising from such an accomplished actor. Selma has earned a place among the very few respectable and involving American movie treatments of historical characters, forces and events.
20 THE PUBLIC / JANUARY 14, 2015 / DAILYPUBLIC.COM
THE DARK MIRROR (1946)—Noir thriller starring Olivia de Havilland as a woman implicated in the murder of her husband—but was it her witnesses saw leaving the apartment or her twin sister? With Lew Ayres, Thomas Mitchell, and Richard Long. Directed by Robert Siodmak (The Killers). Fri-Sun, Tues 7:30pm. The Screening Room L’ELISIR D’AMORE—From the Royal Opera House in London, Laurent Pelly’s production of Donizetti’s comic opera about the romance between dim-witted Nemorino and flirtatious Adina, who tries to make him jealous by flirting with Belcore, an army sergeant. Starring Vittorio Grigolo, Lucy Crowe, Levente Molnár, and Bryn Terfel. Conducted by Daniele Rustioni, Sun 11am. Amherst Theater THE RETURN OF THE PINK PANTHER (1975)—Peter Sellers’ return to the role of the bumbling Inspector Clouseau in an effort revive his career after five years of flops. With Christopher Plummer, Catherine Schell, and Herbert Lom. Directed by Blake Edwards (The Great Race). Sat-Sun 11:30am. North Park
IN BRIEF: ANNIE—Latest remake of the musical adaptation of the 1930s comic strip—or was it a radio serial first? It’s been a long run. Starring Quvenzhané Wallis, Jamie Foxx, Rose Byrne, and Bobby Cannavale. Directed by Will Gluck (Friends with Benefits). BIG EYES—Tim Burton’s biopic about Walter Keane (Christoph Waltz), the artist whose kitschy portraits of distressed children were a national sensation in the early 1960s. In the days before Andy Warhol, he turned the art world on its ears, earning a fortune (mostly from prints and posters) even though critics loathed his work. Except, as the film tells it, the paintings were actually made by his wife Margaret (Amy Adams). It’s as close to a mainstream film as Burton has ever made; he confines his visual interest to recreating the hipster paradise of San Francisco in the late 1950s (where the Keanes lived) and in such other flourishes as a visit to Hawaii awash in blue and pink pastels. The first half is an enjoyable lark as the Keanes enjoy their unexpected success, but it turns sour with the couple’s break-up and ensuing legal battles. The paintings themselves are a weird artifact of the time, but there’s no real story in them: They’re only a MacGuffin for a story about two sad people. With Krysten Ritter, Terence Stamp, Jason Schwartzman, and Danny Huston. -MF BIRDMAN—Too much and not enough. Alejandro Gonzalez Iñárritu’s “meta-movie” stars Michael Keaton as Riggan Thomson, a once famous actor whose career took a downturn after he stopped playing the superhero character he was famed for. In need of a comeback vehicle and artistic validation, Thomson mounts a Broadway play as a vehicle for himself, a troubled production that forms the basis of this film’s increasingly wild proceedings. It’s certainly challenging, dynamic, and technically fluid. But it’s also erratic, lurching from scenes of banal domestic confrontation and confession to deliberate comic excess to surreal flights. In the end it’s too much structural
complexity for one film to handle. Co-starring Zach Galifianakis, Edward Norton, and Andrea Riseborough. –GS EXODUS: GODS AND KINGS—Christian Bale as Moses leading his people out of Egypt. With Joel Edgerton, Aaron Paul, Sigourney Weaver, and Golshifteh Farahani. Directed by Ridley Scott, who, after Prometheus and The Counselor, is not exactly on a hot streak. FOXCATCHER—Another biopic from director Bennett Miller (Capote, Moneyball), this time based on the relationship between millionaire John du Pont, of the du Pont chemical family, and brothers Mark and Dave Schultz, both Olympic gold medalists for wrestling. You may want to read up on the case before you see the movie, which seems to go out of its way not to offer any explanations for what happened. Stars Steve Carell, Channing Tatum, and Mark Ruffalo perform under daunting amounts of facial prosthetics, a somewhat odd decision given that few in the audience are likely to know what these people looked like in the first place. The clinically observational tone is fascinating, but in the end all of the cool weirdness leaves you more than a little frustrated. With Vanessa Redgrave, Sienna Miller, and Anthony Michael Hall. –MF FURY—War has seldom been portrayed more hellishly than in writer-director David Ayer’s (Training Day) film that follows an American tank crew in the very last days of the Second World War’s European Theatre operations. Brad Pitt plays the sergeant leading this crew as a quasi-mythic figure, a profane but all-American warrior-saint. His philosophy is presented as he trains a green kid (Logan Lerman in a sensitive, persuasive performance) in the cynicism and savagery that are natural consequences of war. The theme of brothersin-arms fades under all the juvenile pulp-fiction fantasy, and by the last overblown, drawn-out, catastrophic battle scene, it has become impossible to take seriously. With Shia LaBeouf, Michael Peña, and Jason Isaacs. -GS THE GAMBLER— Even if you haven’t seen the 1974 film on which this is based, this glossy remake is a facile waste of time, retaining most of the macho posturing from the original but none of the plausibility. Done up like a slumming rock star, Mark Wahlberg is hard to take seriously as a literature professor (his self-aggrandizing lectures are hilarious) with a gambling addiction that seems born of a death wish. The script by William Monahan (The Departed) is ripe with writerly dialogue, much of which is entertaining, especially as delivered by Michael Kenneth Williams and John Goodman (who has a classic speech on earning the right to say “fuck you” is almost as good as Monahan thinks it is). But director Rupert Wyatt (Rise of the Planet of the Apes) gives it a superficial sheen that doesn’t make any sense. And its treatment of gambling is shameful—any virtues the film has are negated by a bullshit ending. With Jessica Lange, Brie Larson and George Kennedy. -MF THE HOBBIT: THE BATTLE OF THE FIVE ARMIES— The last of Peter Jackson’s six J. R. R. Tolkien’s adaptations is the shortest but feels like the longest. After perfunctorily dispensing with the dragon Smaug, the remainder of the film becomes a sword and sorcery take on The Treasure of Sierra Madre, with dwarf leader Thorin Oakenshield (Richard Armitage) refusing to share the treasure with his now homeless Middle Earth neighbors. A subplot inspired by references in other Tolkein work finds the White Council (Gandalf, elf king Elrond, Lady Galadriel, wizard Saruman) on a parallel quest to solve the mystery of the Necromancer, setting up the reign of evil Sauron in Lord of the Rings. This padding out of The Hobbit’s relatively simple storyline is the equivalent of George Lucas’s Star Wars prequels, though fans are less likely to mind its inclusion. At the end of the day, Jackson and his army of collaborators have achieved something remarkable with this series, but I’m glad it’s over and Jackson can concentrate on other endeavors. This final entry feels like the last half hour of a traditional feature, stretched out to five times the length. Starring Martin Freeman, Orlando Bloom, Richard Armitage, Cate Blanchett, Ian McKellen, and Christopher Lee. –Greg Lamberson INHERENT VICE— Whether or not the densely contrived novels of Thomas Pynchon provide proper material for the movies, this first attempt to do so shows that Paul Thomas Anderson isn’t the guy to do so. Anderson is certainly fond of rambling, overstuffed narratives, but he has trouble bringing them into focus (which is why his best films are the ones with the fewest characters—There Will Be Blood, The Master). Pynchon’s 2009 book, a private eye homage set in Los Angeles at the end of the 60s, is his most broadly appealing novel, but it still features a story that comes apart instead of congealing, which brings out the