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Close encounters

The Wife is one of those OK movies that strikes me as something that would’ve worked better as a play. I enjoyed it on some levels, and I think some of the performances are quite good, especially Glenn Close as the title character. Other performances come off as if they’re for an audience on a stage rather than on camera. I’ve read that members of the cast rehearsed for weeks before cameras rolled. The Wife displays proof that sometimes you can be a little too polished and consequently come off as too melodramatic for a movie.

That melodrama could play well for an Off-Broadway play, but for a movie like this? A little too forced.

Close plays Joan Castleman, wife of newly christened Nobel Prize for Literature winner Joe Castleman (Jonathan Pryce or, as I like to call him, Sam Lowry). The first evidence of what kind of golden work Close will do in this movie is presented during an early moment when she picks up a phone to listen in as her husband is informed of his prize. Close makes an expression that’s a master class in how to act with your face for a camera. It’s breathtaking.

Then, the movie starts to play out, and one character in particular sticks out like a sore thumb. He’s David, their son, played by Noel Gallagher lookalike Max Irons (son of Jeremy). This is not to say Irons delivers an altogether bad performance—I just think it’s the wrong performance. There are moments when he comes off as too petulant and overacting. There are moments when he comes off as quite brilliant.

I was able to accept his performance by pretending he was doing it somewhere in Manhattan for a live audience. It just worked better for me that way. Obviously, we’re not supposed to play these sorts of games while watching a movie. The movie needs to flow as a cohesive piece, and Irons sometimes takes you right out of the film, to the point where you feel like this is not a movie, but a play.

And then there is Close, and her daughter, Annie Starke, playing a younger version of her character, just killing it with their every scene. So much so that you have to dismiss the bad stuff and just enjoy the greatness. The two actresses help to sell a story that’s more symbolic than anything, an age-old tale about repression and insincerity. It’s been told before (this movie shares some DNA with Barton Fink), and it’s been told in better overall fashion before, but Close and Starke make it quite electric at times all the same.

Pryce is equally good as the alternately polite and selfish author battling with major personality flaws that make him a somewhat lousy husband and father. Credit goes to this gifted actor for making Joe a total ass, and somebody you can’t help but feel a little sorry for, at the same time.

As an investigative author hounding the Castlemans, the one and only Christian Slater (Kuffs!) makes his best cinematic impression in many years. His role is as cliché as a role can get, but he makes Nathaniel Bone compellingly persuasive and nasty.

There are some very good cinematic moments constructed by director Bjorn Runge that put The Wife over the top. One of the final shots of Close, with Stockholm snow outside the window behind her, is a stunner. And her final shot, well that’s a keeper for sure.

Moments like those, and some of these performances, help to sort of cancel out the moments that are stagey or a bit too farfetched. The Wife is very much worth seeing for Close, Pryce and Starke. They make you wish they’d take this story to the stage where it probably belongs. Ω

“Hello, tech support? How do i know if my typewriter is WiFi enabled?”

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3Alpha This story of man’s first interaction with a dog turns out to be a winner if 1) you’re a dog person, and 2) you can watch a movie set 20,000 years ago and believe that the inhabitants could have such stylish leather jackets. No way somebody without a sewing machine could’ve put these things together way back then. If so, they were the Versace of their day. Directed by Albert Hughes (From Hell, Menace II Society), this is a sweet hypothetical story about a long-ago boy (Kodi Smit-McPhee), lost in the wilderness after a hunting trip gone awry, befriending a wolf. It’s not a syrupy sweet story; the two go through a sort of hell trying to find the boy’s homeland during the onset of winter. But if you are a dog person, and I am, the gradual warming of their relationship as they rely on one another to survive is nothing short of adorable and powerful. Hughes doesn’t simply rely on his sweet story to score a win with this one. His movie is often gorgeous, featuring majestic landscapes, excellent CGI work, and a damn fine dog as the title character. Smit-McPhee—the boy who cried “Poppa!” in The Road—is on screen for most every scene, relegated to a fake caveman language for his dialogue. All said, he delivers some career best work here and carries the human half of Alpha’s story. Cavemen movies usually suck. So it’s refreshing to see a film set in prehistoric times that actually engages, provides some thrills and warms the heart.

5BlacKKKlansmen The great Spike Lee has returned with what amounts to his best film since Malcolm X 26 years ago. Based on a true story, with some significant tweaking, it centers on Ron Stallworth (John David Washington, son of Denzel), a black police officer in Colorado who, on a whim, decided to infiltrate the Ku Klux Klan by posing as a redneck. It wound up being a two-man sting, with Stallworth pretending to be a white man on the phone while sending in a white partner (depicted here by Adam Driver) to do the face-to-face work. Stallworth’s investigation eventually leads to him being named head of a local chapter of the KKK, and direct dealings with David Duke (Topher Grace), Grand Wizard of the KKK and all-time major asshole. The movie is as crazy as the story was, with Spike balancing intense drama and humor perfectly. Washington is as good as his old man in this movie, and Driver continues to show he’s always a cast MVP. Lee, shooting on celluloid again, makes a fantastic-looking movie; he’s a master of period pieces, with this one set in the ’70s. The film’s conclusion uses current events news footage—including Charlottesville—showing the unfortunate and all too real racism parallels between the events in this film and the current state of America. The movie is a great watch, but it is also a loud, absolutely necessary wakeup call.

1The Happytime Murders So, with the stalling of the Muppets franchise, it seemed like a good time for a former Muppets stalwart Brian Henson (son of Muppets founder Jim) to take puppet humor in a more adult direction. A raunchier band of puppets would seem an OK addition to the Henson legacy. The Happytime Murders is not a Muppets movie—it’s a Brian Henson puppet movie (starring a lost Melissa McCarthy as a hapless human), a product of Henson Alternative, an “adult” branch of the Jim Henson Company. The public will not be hankering for more adult puppet shenanigans after watching this listless, joyless, humorless exercise in how not to make a puppet movie. The film is set up like your standard puppets-interactingwith-humans Muppets movie, but Kermit and company are banned from the set in favor of bland, seriously unfunny puppets that fail to distinguish themselves in any way. Brian Henson directs—his first big-screen directing gig since Muppet Treasure Island—and it’s a lost puppet cause. Henson’s directing chops have not aged like fine wine. They’ve aged like something more akin to a mango that got lost in the back of the fridge six months ago. 1 The Meg It’s been over two decades since author Steve Alten released his big shark story Meg: A Novel of Deep Terror, the first of many Meg books. From the moment the first book hit stands, producers have been attempting to make a movie out of it. Many directors have flirted with making the movie, including Jan de Bont, Guillermo del Toro and, as recently as 2015, Eli Roth. The property eventually ended up under the directorial guidance of one Jon Turtletaub, the guy who made Cool Runnings, the National Treasure movies and, wait for it, 3 Ninjas. The result? A movie as misguided, sloppy and boring as you would expect from the guy who directed 3 Ninjas. Let’s just get the obvious problem out of the way good and early in this review. The Meg is rated PG-13, and probably could’ve pulled a PG. This is not a horror film. It’s an undersea adventure with a big, messy CGI shark and sci-fi twist. Roth left the project because they wouldn’t let him gore it up, and they wouldn’t let him star as deep-sea diver/adventurer Jonas Taylor. Instead, we get Jason Statham as Jonas, and hardly any need for makeup artists on the set due to a supreme lack of bloodletting. Like I said, this thing could be PG. And let’s be very clear, Jaws, the mother of all shark movies—and the greatest movie ever made, thank you very much—had a shit ton of bloodletting, and it was PG.

2Operation Finale The hunt for Holocaust architect Adolf Eichmann is chronicled, albeit blandly, in director Chris Weitz’s lost movie starring Oscar Isaac, Ben Kingsley and Melanie Laurent. When Eichmann (Kingsley) is discovered in Buenos Aires living a modest life working at an automobile plant, secret agents led by Peter Malkin (Isaac) and Hannah Elian (Laurent) set up shop where he resides. They hatch a plot to grab Eichmann and return him to Israel to stand trial for his war crimes. Up until the moment where they grab Eichmann, the movie is pretty good. But when the movie becomes about Malkin and Eichmann chatting in a dark bedroom, it loses its sting. A better movie would’ve had Eichmann standing trial for his crimes, thus educating those of us who haven’t seen his trial on YouTube on that historical event. Too much of this film is spent showing Eichmann trying to persuade Malkin that he was just a normal guy taking orders. Hey, maybe that happened, but cover it in five minutes and stay focused on what a monster this guy was. We already know he’s despicable, and I’m pretty sure the folks who risked their lives to grab him weren’t conflicted about whether or not he was really a nice guy forced to do a bad job. Yes, the movie shows a little bit of his trial, but this is one time where I found myself wishing that more of a movie took place in a courtroom.

2Searching If you’ve read my laments before, you might’ve picked up on the notion that I can’t stand most found-footage films. I also bitch a lot about movies where the whole damn thing happens on a computer screen, with the director finding cute ways to never cut away from Skype, FaceTime, Words with Friends or whatever the hell a character is doing while the plot unfolds. Searching is strange, in that I actually almost like the way director Aneesh Chaganty uses computer screens, apps and news reports to tell his story. I also really like the central performance by John Cho as David Kim, a slightly annoying parent who discovers through a break in technological communication that his daughter Margot (Megan La) has gone missing. What I can’t forgive is the terrible detour the mystery takes into ridiculous, convenient and unimaginative territory. The screenplay really blows it in the end, especially with the help of a stiff and strange performance from Debra Messing as a cop assigned to Margot’s case. It’s not as bad as Unfriended, but Searching is pretty bad all the same. I’m seriously hoping that the existence of films like this doesn’t have some Hollywood scribes dusting off old, rejected TV scripts thinking they can repackage them as computer screen thrillers.