Film

Talent wasted

A Most Violent Year

While the cast and crew do admirable work in A Most Violent Year, the script and pacing render the movie a near miss rather than the solid outing it could’ve been. Considering the talent on hand, that’s a bit of a shame. The film is a shining example of art direction, and one that boasts a firecracker cast with the likes of Oscar Isaac, Albert Brooks and Jessica Chastain. Set in New York in 1981, it certainly has the look of early '80s Manhattan—I lived half an hour outside of Manhattan at the time, so I know—it’s just not a crack example of storytelling. Writer-director J.C. Chandor (All is Lost) takes a slow-burn look at the life of Abel Morales (Isaac), a fuel company owner trying to grow bigger in the face of lawsuits and constant criminal attacks on his truck drivers. The film opens with one driver (Elyes Gabel) getting hijacked outside an NYC tollbooth, and he suffers through a vicious beating. His story becomes one of the threads that run throughout the movie. Abel is on the cusp of becoming one of the city’s biggest oil distributors, but some obstacles stand in his way. On top of his trucks getting hijacked en masse, an assistant D.A. (David Oyelowo) has informed him of impending charges that will threaten the life of his company. This puts Abel’s wife, Anna (Chastain), on edge. She’s the one keeping the books, and she claims everything is on the level. Abel’s business associate Andrew (Brooks) also fears for their business future, while advocating that perhaps their drivers should arm themselves against attackers. It all seems to be going somewhere, but never really does. Chandor gives his film the look of an early Coppola production—that toll booth scene echoes Sonny’s execution in The

Godfather—but the end results are iffy due to what comes off as a lack of depth and character’s behaving inexplicably. There are moments in the movie that, while dramatically effective in their way, I just can’t buy, and they hurt the overall viewing experience. When Anna puts three slugs in an injured deer, she fails to tell her husband before by Bob Grimm firing the shots. She just walks up right next to him and fires a gun a few feet away into bgrimm@ the injured animal. This sort of thing would newsreview.com give a somebody a heart attack. Yes, Anna is a tough hombre, but this particular action seems 2 farfetched in a movie that’s supposed to be grounded in realism. Yes, a moment like that isn’t enough to derail a picture, but Year happens to have a bunch of those moments. Characters often act in a way that their actions make no sense. And, in the case of Brooks, they are present in the film for no real apparent reason. His Andrew winds up providing very little along the lines of plot development. Much of this movie is Isaac, talking really slowly, while sitting at tables trying to work out details for loans. It gets tedious to the point where it’s not enjoyable. While Isaac is almost never anything but fascinating in any role, even he can’t save the movie from becoming boring. It’s appropriate that a substantial aspect of A Most Violent Year involves the robbing of fuel trucks, because the movie is full of talent that has been robbed in the last few years. Isaac should’ve been Oscar-nominated for his performance in Inside Llewyn Davis, and his Year costar Brooks was unbelievably passed over for his performance in Drive (which also happened to costar Isaac). Oyelowo was perhaps this year’s biggest Oscar snub story in that he failed to garner a nod for his remarkable work as MLK in Selma. Chastain is the only one who has actually gotten some Oscar nods (Zero Dark Thirty and The Help). I’ve watched the film twice, and it simply doesn’t stand up well on a second viewing. Despite how real it looks, and some credible moments and performances, the film ultimately comes up a little dull and implausible. You can do a lot worse than watching the likes of Isaac, Brooks and Chastain performing together, but that doesn’t make A Most Violent Year worth your time. Ω

Man, even this photo is boring.

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Very Good 5

3American Sniper While Clint Eastwood’s film has plenty of problems, Bradley Cooper rises above the patchy melodrama and overly slick segments with his portrayal of Navy SEAL Chris Kyle. Kyle holds the American sniper record of 160 confirmed kills, and was killed by a veteran he was trying to mentor on a shooting range. The film works best when depicting Kyle at work in Iraq, constructing some very tense battle scenes and sequences as seen through Kyle’s riflescope. There’s a subplot involving an enemy sniper named Mustafa (Sammy Sheik) that feels like an entirely different movie. For some reason, Eastwood employs a showier style in the scenes involving Mustafa, which feel a bit false and artificial alongside the movie’s grittier moments. Saddled with the film’s worst dialogue, Sienna Miller battles hard in trying to make Kyle’s wife, Taya, an intriguing movie character. Cooper, who physically transformed himself for the role, does an excellent job of conveying the difficulties and stress that Kyle’s job entailed. He’s an actor forever taking risks and challenging himself, and he’s a big reason to see this movie.

1Black or White Kevin Costner plays a widower fighting for the custody of his black granddaughter (Jillian Estell) in this dopey, misguided and frequently offensive movie. Costner gets to be drunk for most of the movie, and it’s unintentionally funny. He and the rest of the cast are forced to play stereotypes in what adds up to a big pile of embarrassing nothing. It sometimes flirts with meaningfulness, but it degenerates into your typical courtroom drama where a bunch of jerks fight for the right to raise a precocious child. The whole thing feels dishonest, even straining for laughter in extremely inappropriate ways. Costner stumbles around, Octavia Spencer shakes her head a lot, and we face palm ourselves for over two hours. By the time the Costner character’s dead wife’s ghost goes for a late night swim, the film has become a complete disaster. It’s surprising to me that anything like this makes it past direct-to-video and actually hits movie screens. The film is as simple-minded as its title.

4Cake Jennifer Aniston personifies seemingly insurmountable emotional and physical pain in Cake. She does such a great job of looking and sounding miserable, it wouldn’t be surprising to hear crew hands were driving nails into her feet out of the camera’s view during takes. The reasons for Claire’s misery are not made clear until well into the film, a wise choice by director Daniel Barnz and screenwriter Patrick Tobin. Not only does it provide the film with a decent mystery, it allows the focus to solely be on Claire in the moment, struggling from second to second with physical back pain and some sort of loss. Aniston somehow manages to make Claire a sympathetic character despite her constant unpleasantness. While we only get glimpses of the Claire that might’ve existed before her back and heart became racked with pain, it’s obvious that Claire was somebody that many people cared for. She’s pushed them away for what is revealed to be solid reasons. The pain of her losses never leaves Aniston’s face, even in the moments when she is smiling. The supporting cast includes Sam Worthington, Adriana Barraza, Anna Kendrick and Felicity Huffman, and they all shine. This is a triumph for Aniston, who delivers a career best performance.

5Foxcatcher Steve Carell disappears into the role of John du Pont, the crazy rich guy who took it upon himself to shoot and kill one of the wrestlers on a team he created. Channing Tatum and Mark Ruffalo are heartbreakingly good as Mark and David Schultz, two Olympic gold medal-winning siblings who, unfortunately, worked for du Pont when he had his breakdown. Down on his luck and living on ramen noodles, Mark gets a call from du Pont inviting him out to his Foxcatcher farm. Mark finds a sense of purpose working with du Pont, and eventually summons his brother and his family to Foxcatcher. What follows is a descent into insanity for the attention-starved du Pont, who lives under the chastising eye of his mother (Vanessa Redgrave) and is obsessed with controlling others. The madness eventually ended with the death of one of the brothers, and du Pont living his final years in prison. Carell is amazingly good here; one only need watch a few minutes of the real du Pont on YouTube to know that he has nailed the characterization. Tatum and Ruffalo are equally good as the confused brothers. Mark Schultz is currently protesting director Bennett Miller’s portrayal of him in the film, and he might be in the right on a few aspects of that portrayal. Still, it’s a great film that leaves an appropriately sick feeling in the stomach.

3The Imitation Game Benedict Cumberbatch plays Alan Turing, who helped win the war against the Nazis when he and others invented a machine capable of breaking the Enigma code. Morten Tyldum’s film, while a tad cumbersome at times, does do a good job of illustrating the impossible odds Turing and his team were up against in trying to decipher the code. Keira Knightley (who had a nice 2014 with this and Begin Again), Matthew Goode and Charles Dance contribute to a strong supporting cast. Cumberbatch portrays Turing as a disagreeable, unlikeable social outcast who just happened to play a huge part in saving the free world thanks to his talent for solving puzzles. The film also delves into some of the more controversial times in Turing’s life, and sometimes the order of things gets a little confusing. Cumberbatch keeps the whole thing afloat with a typically strong performance.

4Inherent Vice Joaquin Phoenix plays Doc, a sloppy private investigator in 1970 Los Angeles who operates, inexplicably, out of a doctor’s office. When an ex-girlfriend (Katherine Waterston) goes missing, he conducts a haphazard investigation into her disappearance that involves dead people who aren’t dead, drug dealers and kidnapped real estate moguls. All of these things are being investigated by a guy who’s seriously high most of the time, and just sort of piecing things together at his own mellow, sometimes clumsy pace. Paul Thomas Anderson’s is a simultaneously goofy and complicated take on the Thomas Pynchon novel that puts the director back on the right track after the relatively disappointing The Master. Phoenix is terrific, as is Josh Brolin as a jar-headed cop with whom he’s constantly butting heads. The likes of Martin Short, Owen Wilson and Reese Witherspoon all make sweet contributions. Those who smoke a lot of pot will probably have an easier time with this intentionally spacey movie. Those who have never indulged might find things confusing the first couple of times around.

3Paddington This one got pushed out of 2014, which had me worried it was worthy of the junk heap. As things turn out, this mixed animation treatment of the character created by Michael Bond is actually cute. Ben Whishaw voices Paddington, a Peruvian bear who travels to England looking for a home. He winds up in the abode of the Browns, where he quickly takes to causing major damage, creating a little marital strife for Mr. and Mrs. Brown (a delightful Hugh Bonneville and Sally Hawkins). Nicole Kidman has a lot of fun as the film’s villain, determined to trap and stuff Paddington. The movie has plenty of British charm, a couple of really good jokes, and the likes of Kidman, Bonneville and Hawkins in top form. As for Paddington himself, he looks pretty good, a solid animated creation mixed in neatly with real actors and actresses.

5Selma David Oyelowo portrays Martin Luther King Jr. in director Ava DuVernay’s stunning depiction of the civil rights march on Selma, Alabama, in 1965. It’s one of 2014’s most accomplished directorial efforts. In an attempt to gain equal voting rights, Martin Luther King, Jr. organized the march despite violent opposition from citizens and law enforcement officers. The film covers everything from MLK’s dealings with President Lyndon B. Johnson (Tom Wilkinson) to the bewildering, despicable actions of then Alabama Governor George Wallace (an evil Tim Roth). Oyelowo delivers a star-making performance as King, while Carmen Ejogo excels in the role of Coretta Scott King for a second time. (She played the role in a 2001 TV movie, Boycott.) The very British Wilkinson and Roth do well with their accents and create memorable characterizations. This is one of those films everybody should see.