Mr. Wilson Goes to Washington.

At one point in Mike Nichols’ smart, surprisingly enjoyable Charlie Wilson’s War, the freewheeling, fun-loving Representative Charles Wilson (Tom Hanks), he of the Texas 2nd Congressional District, tells his schlubby, foul-mouthed partner at the CIA, Gust Avrakotos (Philip Seymour Hoffman), “You ain’t James Bond.” Deadpans Avrakotos, “You ain’t Thomas Jefferson, so let’s call it even.” True, Bond and Jefferson they’re not, but that’s actually part of the appeal of Nichols’ lively little film. A strangely optimistic, almost Capraesque movie about the covert proxy war in Afghanistan (and, ultimately, the inadvertent role played by the U.S. in fostering the Taliban), Charlie Wilson’s War — adapted by The West Wing‘s Aaron Sorkin from the book by the late George Crile — is no grim, sober-minded edutainment. Moving at a brisk clip and maintaining a light touch — too light, some might argue — throughout, the movie instead depicts how a few (relatively) ordinary, committed people can change the world…provided one of them is sitting on the House Defense Subcommittee, and has stacked up a sizable amount of chits.

When — after a quick flash-forward setup — we first meet Congressman Charlie Wilson (Tom Hanks, eschewing the Pvt. Ryan earnestness for his more sardonic Bachelor Party/Volunteers side), he’s lounging in a Vegas hot tub with a coke-snorting television producer, a Playboy bunny, and two strippers. In short, he seems like a out-and-out cad. But there’s something endearing and even statesmanlike about his piqued interest in a 60 Minutes report, playing in the corner, on the mujahideen in Afghanistan. (Maybe it’s the Dan Rather Texas connection.) Delving further into the issue back in Washington, Wilson — exercising the power of his crucial committee position — singlehandedly doubles U.S. funding of the mujahideen from $5 million to $10 million. This by-all-accounts token gesture draws the attention of the wealthy Houston socialite Joanne Herring (Julia Roberts, solid), a woman with money, connections, and a fervent commitment to anticommunism, and she sends Wilson off to Pakistan to meet with President Zia-ul-Haq about the situation in neighboring Afghanistan. There, Wilson is moved to the cause by the sight of a dismal refugee camp, and soon enough, he’s enlisted an important ally in Avrakotos, a profane Langley veteran (Hoffman, showing yet another side after Before the Devil and The Savages this year, and nearly running away with the movie.) Together, these three — Wilson, Herring, Avrakotos (John Rambo’s unique contributions to the cause of Afghan freedom are sadly overlooked — set in motion a scheme not only to increase funding radically for the war but to funnel Soviet weaponry owned by Israel and Egypt to the freedom fighters there. Of course, some delicate diplomacy is required, and, in any case, giving Afghan youths an arsenal of helicopter-slaying RPGs doesn’t seem like such a great an idea in retrospect…

While nodding to the dismal events that follow American intervention in the region, Charlie Wilson’s War hardly dwells on the blowback, or on anything — a few refugee camp horror stories and a Pavel Lychnikoff cameo notwithstanding — that might interrupt its tone of hearty, back-slapping jocularity. (Supporting turns by Amy Adams, Emily Blunt, Ned Beatty, Denis O’Hare, John Slattery, and Peter Gerety help speed things along in a comfortable groove.) And yet, however feel-good, Wilson ultimately feels more ripped from the headlines than even the filmmakers could’ve guessed. Some lawmakers have trouble distinguishing between Pakistan and Afghanistan at one point, and Herring begins an introduction of Pakistan’s President by saying, “Zia did not kill Bhutto.” (Leavening the chill that follows this now-eerie moment, Rudy Giuliani and John Murtha also come up at various times as punchlines.)

But, its timeliness and prescience aside, what I found most impressive about Charlie Wilson’s War is how aptly it portrays the feel of Washington. This was somewhat surprising to me as, while I liked Sorkin’s The West Wing decently enough as a TV drama and admired its general idealism about politics, the show always felt rather fake to me. But, be it due to Crile or Sorkin or Nichols, Wilson conveys a lot of the telling details of life inside the Beltway quite well — the hallway horse-trading and neverending quid pro quos, the simultaneous meetings, the bland, institutional cafeterias; the bevy of youngish staffers (and inordinately pretty administrative assistants) on Capitol Hill, the deals crafted over dinner or drinks, the conference calls, the memory holes, myopic thinking, and CYA behavior. Outside of The Wire‘s nuanced take on the compromises of Baltimore city politics, it’s hard to think of a more on-target recent portrayal of the (non-campaigning) political process. Sadly, for Congressman Wilson as for today’s legislators, fiddling with the internal dynamics of far-flung nations we barely understand for short-term gain is All in the Game. Still, as Charlie Wilson’s War proves, don’t let it ever be said that nothing gets done in Washington.

Citizen Plain.

In the opening sequence of Paul Thomas Anderson’s passionate but flawed There Will Be Blood, it is 1898, and a man named Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis), alone and driven, casts himself into a dark, dusty hole and hews mineral wealth from the surrounding rock. After suffering a nasty leg injury therein, Plainview hauls himself out of the deep recess through sheer grinding will and, in an act of Herculean exertion rivaling the endgame of Touching the Void, crawls across the sun-baked earth on his back, precious nuggets of silver in hand. This sweating, teeth-gnashing endeavor is an apt metaphor for Anderson’s film. There Will Be Blood looks beautiful, and it has moments of poetry in it. But, like Plainview (and The Assassination of Jesse James, another transplanted 70’s western out this year), it also wears its ambition on its sleeve, and it strains so hard to seem an instant movie classic that it eventually loses its way. (The mostly atonal and distracting Jonny Greenwood score, reminiscent of The Shining, unfortunately doesn’t help.)

Now, in the interest of full disclosure, Paul Thomas Anderson is a director I’ve never warmed to. I thought Boogie Nights was decent but overlong and I had a visceral dislike for both Magnolia and Punch-Drunk Love. (I haven’t seen Hard Eight.) Still, while I think this is Anderson’s best and most accomplished film, and it’s probably worth sitting through for the first third regardless, There Will Be Blood eventually bogs down in some of the usual PTA indulgences. In addition, Daniel Day-Lewis never gives a bad performance and is typically magnetic here, but he also gets more actorly and mannered as the film progresses, and is loonily over-the-top in Blood‘s disastrously misconceived closing moments. (That being said, I wouldn’t be surprised if “I drink YOUR milkshake!” gets some run in the cultural lexicon of useful and memorable movie quotes.) In short, There Will Be Blood is a good film, in some ways even a very good one. But it’s not the landmark masterpiece many reviewers are making it out to be, and it slips into murk well before the end.

Straying rather far from the Upton Sinclair tome that inspired it, Blood is, in effect, a character study about the dehumanizing consequences of naked ambition. (If that sounds like Citizen Kane, you’re on the right track. PTA is borrowing from Welles, Malick, and Kubrick rather than Altman or Scorsese this time ’round.) After the 1898 prologue, we pick up Daniel Plainview’s story a few years later: He’s moved from silver to oil and has been successful enough to hire on a few workers, one of whom has brought his infant child with him on the dig. Alas, tragedy — a pretty common occurrence in the turn-of-the-century oil business, it seems — strikes at the workplace, and the child becomes Plainview’s. By 1911, this now ten-year-old boy (Dillon Freaser) has become a valuable part of the family business — He’s the silent partner Plainview uses to soften his pitch when dealing with locals or landowners. In any event, the oilman (as he prefers to be known) one day gets a tip from a traveler (Paul Dano) about a town where the black gold literally seeps from the ground. Soon, the Plainviews set up shop in this California hamlet, named Little Boston, and start buying up the place. But standing in his way is another ambitious soul, the evangelical preacher Eli Sunday (also Paul Dano), and he doesn’t want a rival for the town’s admiration. There’s only room for one Great Man in Little Boston…but will his symbol be the Derrick or the Cross?

So, as you can see, what we have here is John D. Rockefeller versus Elmer Gantry, commerce versus religion, another virulent intersection of the black gold, texas tea and that old-time fundamentalist religion. But don’t go in expecting Syriana in Progressive Era California just yet. In fact, Blood turns out to be barely political at all. (Somewhere, Sinclair sighs.) Anderson puts several interesting ideas and characters in play, and the first third of the movie is absolutely gripping stuff. But, unfortunately, once all the derricks are in a row, Anderson doesn’t seem to know what to do with them. And so, right around the time Plainview’s first rig goes up in flames, There Will Be Blood begins to stall out. There are some clever reversals in the oilman-churchman balance of power thereafter (the baptism scene, for example), but the movie doesn’t really go anywhere. Instead, for most of the rest of the film, PTA goes back to his well and focuses once again on his pet issue, the meaning and importance of family. (See also Magnolia, Boogie Nights, and, from what I’ve heard, Hard Eight.) He brings a long-lost half-brother (Kevin O’Connor) into the story, has Plainview take extreme umbrage at any suggestion he’s a deadbeat dad, and starts dwelling on the brewing discord and enmity between father and son. (Also a major factor in Oil!, although it’s done rather differently.) Of course, Anderson can be forgiven for concentrating on what most interests him, and plenty of very good directors — maybe even all of ’em — have a tendency to keep ruminating on the same thematic content. Still, given how intriguing There Will Be Blood plays for its first hour, it’s a significant letdown to see PTA fall back into the same old, same old.

Unfortunately, once the spell of Blood is broken, other bad habits of Anderson’s start becoming harder to ignore. Clearly good about giving actors room to breathe (maybe too much room, given DDL’s going off the rails in the final reel here), Anderson can also be distractingly showy (the Scorsese steadicam business in Boogie Nights, for example.) He has a tendency to beat quirky ideas into the ground (Exodus 8:2, the harmonium in Punch-Drunk Love), can hinge a sequence on some really lousy dialogue (“I’m silently judging you“), and often lets scenes meander for several beats too long (anything involving the quiz show in Magnolia.) These tics are more subdued in There Will Be Blood than in any of Anderson’s previous movies, but they become manifest as the film loses focus, and well up with explosive force in the last act. Set in 1927, with Plainview now a wealthy but dissolute drunk in his own Xanadu and Sunday an Aimee Semple McPherson of sorts, the final showdown between our two antagonists is a misfire on multiple levels. Not to give the story away, but the scene relies on far too many suspensions of disbelief. (Why would Sunday come to Plainview, of all people? Would Sunday really not get it beforehand? And, how the heck did he lose money in the stock market in 1927? Note this site: “From 1926 to 1929, the market indices moved up nearly 400%.“) Worse, both Day-Lewis and Dano start blatantly overacting. (Somebody please take that plate of chicken away.) And, what with the bowling alley and milkshakes and whatnot, the last act of There Will Be Blood even comes across as downright silly. It’s an ignominious end for a film that, for its first hour or so, had all the makings of a masterpiece. But, sadly, the gears end up grinding too loudly on this rig, and, just as pride goeth before a fall, it all eventually comes to a crash. Oil is a tricky business.

A Hard Walk’s Run.

Charles, Cash, Curtis, Dylan, Strummer…Given the glut of rock biopics and documentaries we’ve seen in recent years, it’s well past time that influential musical chameleon Dewey Cox got his due. Unfortunately, just as James Mangold’s Walk the Line felt too staid and conventional to capture the true appeal of the Man in Black, Jake Kasdan’s Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story — which I saw in the days before Christmas — never really gets inside the head of the Giant Midget. Sure, it covers most of the important facts about his life — the childhood tragedy, the struggle with smell-blindness, the breakout single, the dark f**king middle period, the LSD decade, the selling out. But, while John C. Reilly does what he can as Cox (and the resemblance is admittedly uncanny), I never felt while watching Walk Hard that Kasdan actually “got” the man or his music…or his monkey or giraffe, for that matter. Given his famous father and his earlier affiliation with Freaks & Geeks, Kasdan seemed like he would be the guy to do Cox justice, but this is sadly a missed opportunity. It’s just too bad Todd Haynes was busy with I’m Not There…Once again, nearly fifty years after the fact, Zimmerman will be walking-hard away with all Dewey’s laurels.

Kasdan’s take on Dewey’s story begins just before Cox’s final performance at the Lifetime Achievement Awards — You may remember Eddie Vedder’s memorable tribute speech, and the Jewel/Lyle Lovett/Jackson Browne/Ghostface Killa mash-up of “Walk Hard” got a lot of radio run over that summer — before flashing back to that defining moment in the White Indian’s life as a boy, the famous accidental cleaving-in-two of his prodigy brother. (“I’m cut in half pretty bad, Dewey.“) Rallying to his brother’s fallen musical standard, the teenage Dewey soon finds himself thrown out of the house, married young (to Edith, as played by SNL’s Kristen Wiig), and working as a busboy at a local black club, where he one day wows the crowd with a version of his early hit, “(Mama) You Got to Love Your Negro Man.” Soon thereafter, he lands a band and a record contract, and after the cutting of “Walk Hard,” the rest is history: Cox buys a monkey, lapses into a vicious drug habit, falls for his voluptuous backup singer Darlene Madison (Jenna Fischer), gets clean, lapses into another vicious drug habit…well, you know the rest.

Ok, ok, let’s go ahead and break the fourth wall. As a played-straight parody of the rock biopic genre, Walk Hard is admittedly uneven most of the time. But, it makes for a relatively amusing two hours if you’re in the mood for it. It’s nowhere near as funny as the original Airplane or Top Secret, but I’d say it holds its own with the Hot Shots flicks, and it’s miles above Scary Movie and its ilk. Yes, the film can be unfocused and scattershot (There’s even a decently funny recurring gag involving the kitchen sink.) A lot of the jokes seem like leftovers from the last Will Ferrell script, and, like Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s Team America, Walk Hard occasionally follows the beats of its object of parody so closely that the movie loses its edge. Still, there are definitely some quality moments therein, from Tim Meadows trying not to seduce a naive Dewey into a marijuana habit to Cox meeting Buddy Holly (Frankie Muniz, inspired casting) and the Fab Four (Surprisingly, Justin “Mac Guy” Long is far and away the funniest as George, while Jack Black’s Paul is woefully bad and Paul Rudd’s John is just…strange.)

At any rate, I’m not going to give all the jokes away here, suffice to say that Cox’s black-and-white Dylan period tickled my funny bone the most. Dewey does two Dylanesque ditties here: The first, “Royal Jelly”, is a gloriously inscrutable poetic epic a la “Desolation Row” (“Mailboxes drip like lampposts from the twisted birth canal of the coliseum, rimjob fairy teapots mask the temper tantrum, O say can you see ’em?“) [See it live.] The other, “Let Me Hold You (Little Man)“, is an un-PC The Times They Are A Changin’ screed directed at the injustice faced by all the, uh, little people. (“Let me hold you, midget man, pretend that you’re flying in space. Let me hold you, little man, so the dog will stop licking your face.“) High art it’s not, and I can’t recommend rushing out and seeing it or anything. But, for a few solid chuckles over the course of two hours, Dewey Cox and Walk Hard deliver the goods decently enough. Someday — perhaps soon, given that Forgetting Sarah Marshall, Pineapple Express, and Drillbit Taylor are all due next year — the helium will probably leak out of the Judd Apatow comedy factory’s balloon. But Cox, thankfully enough, isn’t the canary in the coalmine just yet.

Legend of the Fall.

In Francis Lawrence’s I am Legend, Will Smith wanders the streets of New York City, his only companion his trusty, loyal, and free-spirited canine sidekick. To stave off the despair and dementia that lurks behind interminable loneliness, he dotes on his dog and immerses himself in routine: He watches as many movies as possible, indulges in his music collection, broadcasts his continued existence into the ether, and throws himself into his work, a solitary investigation marked by repetition and feelings of futility, one whose fruits he knows will more than likely go unused and unread. To all of this, I say: Who the hell wants to sit through a movie about the last year and change of grad school? And couldn’t they find a sheltie to play l’il Berk? (As for yours truly, I’d have gone Philip Seymour Hoffman or Paul Bettany — maybe Michael Cera for the flashbacks — but, hey, Will Smith works too.)

Seriously, though, when I first heard word they were doing another take on Richard Matheson’s eerie 1954 novella, and that word was penned by hackmeister Akiva Goldsman and read “We’re blowing up the Brooklyn Bridge!“, I figured this would be a big budget stinker, along the lines of Alex Proyas’ version of I, Robot. And yet, while a action blockbuster has been grafted onto the basic story (and it’s moved from suburban California to the heart of Metropolis), Francis Lawrence’s I am Legend is surprisingly true to the grim feel of the novella. In short, Legend is a much quieter and more melancholy film than I ever expected. And, while it definitely has some problems, it’s probably my favorite big budget blockbuster of the year, with the possible exception of The Bourne Ultimatum. True, Lawrence’s take on Constantine in 2005 turned out better than I figured as well. Still, I’m actually quite surprised by how moody and haunting this film turned out to be. (And, give credit where it’s due. Like Paul Haggis and In the Valley of Elah, I’m forced to concede that Goldsman might not always be the kiss of death.)

I am Legend begins innocuously enough with a sports report — It looks like the Yankees and Cubs in the World Series, although LA has an outside shot at a pennant too. But, in the near future, it ain’t just the ball players injecting experimental serums anymore. As a doctor (Emma Thompson) on the news informs us, scientists have altered the measles to work as the ultimate body-cleansing virus, in effect working as a cure for cancer. (A Cure for Cancer! This follows the baseball scores?) Cut to New York City, three years later. Round the decay of that colossal wreck, nothing beside remains…except one man (Will Smith) and his dog (Abbey), chasing down a herd of deer through the empty steel corridors of a desiccated Manhattan. (Sorta like Llewellyn Moss in No Country for Old Men, except now that country is everywhere, and the deermeat is worth more than the bag of money.) Clearly, something has gone Horribly Wrong. As we come to discover, that heralded cure backfired in dismal fashion, killing 90% of the Earth’s population immediately and turning the rest, a la the rage virus in 28 Days and 28 Weeks Later, into violent, depraved monsters with a taste for blood and a susceptibility to sunlight. This Last Man on Earth is one Robert Neville, an army scientist (blessedly immune to the disease) who spends his days in a Jamesian manse on Washington Square, working on a cure to beat back the infection, and his nights just trying to stay alive. (Put simply, “scientific atrocity, he’s the survivor.”) But, even with Samantha, his German shepherd, by his side, the loneliness and omnipresent danger are taking their toll. And as he succumbs deeper into hopelessness — and the creatures show signs of learning — his coping strategies begin to shift. Forget the cure…Maybe it’s time just to chase these Crazy Baldheads out of town…

Now, as I said, I am Legend does have it share of problems. The movie becomes more of a conventional actioner as it moves along, and the last act in particular feels weaker than the rest of the film. Looking exactly like the cave-dwellers in Neil Marshall’s The Descent, the CGI creatures have an ill-favored and badly-rendered look, and the more you see of them the less scary they become. Also, in complete counterpoint to what Dr. Neville tells us about the infecteds’ “social deevolution,” they eventually seem to get behind a Lurtz/Solomon Grundy of sorts. But his presence or authority is never really explained — he’s just a tacked-on Big Bad. I had trouble believing that somebody could’ve heard of Damien Marley but not his father Bob. (And, since you’re seemingly geared to the teeth, Dr. Neville, may I make some suggestions? 1) Infrared scope. 2) Night-Vision goggles.)

All that being said, for most of I am Legend‘s run it’s a surprisingly rich and nuanced film. Will Smith is invariably an appealing presence, but he doesn’t rely on his easy charisma or “Aw, hell no!” bluster much here. His performance is tinged with melancholy, and he does some great work in some really awful moments. Also, I feared going in that the canine companion bit would come across as a gimmick, just a cute creature for Smith to bounce off expository monologues. But Sam isn’t just Wilson the Volleyball — she’s a living, breathing character of her own. (Nor is she Lassie — she doesn’t seem preternaturally smart, and occasionally does dumb dog things, which seemed all too realistic.) And then there’s New York after the Fall, which in itself is a sort of character in the film. In shot after shot (somewhat akin to, but less showy than, the opening Times Square sequence of Vanilla Sky), Lawrence captures the eeriness of this great city laid low. Other than the aforementioned Brooklyn Bridge, “Ground Zero,” as Neville now calls it, hasn’t been destroyed or ravaged. It’s just empty, an overgrown, city-sized echo chamber for his pangs of isolation. (And as the Marley song goes, “It hurts to be alone.”) But, hey, even in a desolate New York City, with vampires lurking in the dark places, there are still plenty of fun ways to pass the time, and particularly if you have a good dog by your side.

For Whom the Corona Clacks.

When I first saw the trailer for Joe Wright’s version of Ian McEwan’s Atonement, I figured I’d probably give it a pass — It had that staid period piece look to it that screams inert Oscar bait (see also The English Patient), and seemed far too dry and conventional to do justice to Ian McEwan’s powerful, absorbing novel. But, having sat through it several more times, I got Dario Marianelli’s pensive piano-and-typewriter score stuck in my head, and when the reviews came back significantly better than I expected (and, indeed, the film garnered 7 Globe nominations this morning), I figured I’d give it a go. And the verdict…well, it comes out somewhere in-between. Atonement is solid enough entertainment of the Merchant-Ivory sort, and it features break-out performances by The Last King of Scotland‘s James McAvoy (that whooshing sound you hear is all of Ewan MacGregor’s old scripts getting remailed) and newcomer Romola Garai. But, although occasionally you can see director Joe Wright try to stick his head under the water, the movie sadly just skims along the surface of McEwan’s book. And as an adaptation of said book, it must be considered a failure.

Now, admittedly, there’s a pretty tough degree of difficulty here. I hesitate to think any book is inherently unfilmable — just this month we’ve had two excellent adaptations in No Country for Old Men and The Diving Bell and the Butterfly — but McEwan’s dense tome, with its rich inner worlds, abrupt shifts in time, and philosophical musings on the power and moral dangers of writing and imagination, comes pretty darn close. Regardless, Atonement the film never plumbs the depths that McEwan’s novel does, a fact that unfortunately becomes more and more unmistakable as the movie progresses. By the end, all the crisp British diction and sweeping long-takes can’t disguise the fact that Atonement, however pretty, never captures the book’s mordant pulse.

To the story: Atonement begins at an edenic English manor on one of the hottest days of 1935, where an ambitious, headstrong 12-year-old girl named Briony Tallis (Saoirse Roman, a find) has just completed her first full-length play, The Trials of Arabella. (Like many aspiring writers, myself included, Ms. Tallis just loves her some descriptive adjectives.) Young Briony is unsuccessfully trying to convince her bored cousins, visiting on account of a hush-hush impending divorce, to take her magnum opus seriously, when she sees something unexpected. Outside her window, Robbie the housekeeper’s son (McAvoy) appears to be ogling Briony’s soaking wet, nearly-naked sister Cecilia (Keira Knightley) with amusement and maybe even something darker…what’s the word? As Briony tries to piece it together, we discover Cecilia and Robbie are Oxford classmates, although (by Cecilia’s design as well as by class distinctions) they travel in rather different circles. Yet, something flickers between them, and Robbie, while mustering up the nerve to express his affection, types out several different drafts of a love note in his nearby cottage…one of which, composed as a bit of a joke, gets right to the point. (It uses the c-word, and alone gives the film an R-rating. Gasp!) Well, you can then guess which version of the letter mistakenly gets delivered, and by Briony no less, who takes it upon herself to examine it first. Her pre-adolescent confusion mounting, Briony is now seriously distressed by Robbie, on whom she once had a barely understood crush. And when further events that hot summer evening eventually take a turn towards tragedy, she — knowing full well now that he’s a sex maniac — mounts a false accusation against him, one that changes irrevocably the lives of Robbie, Cecilia — and Briony — forever.

Wright’s Atonement does alright by most of this, the first act of McEwan’s book. He cleverly uses the Rashomon device of showing us the same scene several times, and always from Briony’s limited perspective first. But, while Roman seems a gifted and composed actress for her age, the film never really gets across the crucially important fact about Briony: her constant flights of fancy. (It’s not my movie, of course, but I kept thinking what Atonement needed here is something like what Peter Jackson does in Heavenly Creatures, a brief dramatization of her inner fantasy world.) This becomes a constant problem in the film, particularly as it moves on to the fields of Dunkirk and the hospitals of London just before the Blitz — the movie never does a particularly good job of getting into its characters’ heads. As a result, it shows us what happens in the book, but it barely conveys why these events are important or meaningful for our story.

One of the most egregious example of this is an extremely long shot of the chaos at Dunkirk, rivaling the similar extended takes in Alfonso Cuaron’s Children of Men last year: Wounded and dog-tired, Robbie and his two soldier mates wander around the beach, seeing all manner of wartime horror and tomfoolery. But, as it lingers on and on, the shot feels more and more like a stunt, completely dissociated from the tale we’ve theoretically been following. I guess it’d probably play great in a WWII epic that’s actually about Dunkirk, but the important action at that moment for our story is happening within Robbie. Perhaps Wright was trying to make a similar point about film with that exasperating stunt-take as McEwan ultimately does about writing…but, if so, I missed it. (There are other, subtler moments where he comes closer, tho’ — I quite liked Nurse Briony’s red curtain (stage) entrance to her conversation with the French soldier.)

This inherent flaw of Wright’s Atonement — its inability to depict the characters’ interior lives — reaches its nadir in the final moments of the film, when it almost completely botches the final reveal. I won’t give away what happens here, other than to say that, as Matt Zoller Seitz points out, what was a quietly devastating confession to the reader in the book now — because it is voiced in public — instead plays like a tacked-on mea culpa that offers a twist-ending, a saccharine moral, and a few moments of cinema apotheosis, all wrapped up in a Hollywood bow. (Again, not my movie, but having this reveal explained in voiceover over images of the character’s last, lonely days, a la TLJ in No Country, would’ve made a lot more sense.) In a way, Atonement makes exactly the same misstep as Weitz’s Golden Compass: The very last images of the movie are pitched right at the Titanic demographic (and I don’t mean that as a sneer — I loved Titanic.) But they completely sidestep the inherent darkness of McEwan’s ending, and even let the character in question off the hook. Atonement, in McEwan’s world, was never so neat, or easy to come by.

Little Miss Sonshine.

Update 1/7/08: If you’re visiting from Electrolicious, Ypulse, or elsewhere today, welcome. In case you’re interested, the main site is here, and the other collected movie reviews are here (including the best of 2007 list.)

“That ain’t no etch-a-sketch. That’s one doodle that can’t be un-did, homeskillet.” If you find people talking in such overstylized hipster-speak for ninety minutes witty and/or adorable, you’ll probably enjoy Jason Reitman’s Juno quite a bit more than I did. While it’s not a bad film, and it has the advantage of clever repartee and appealing performances across the board, Juno — like everyone’s favorite indy comedy last year, Little Miss Sunshine — is, IMHO, being significantly overpraised. Suffering from dialogue that’s been stylized within an inch of its life, and with every scene festooned with kitschy pop culture bric-a-brac and scored to uber-sensitive indy rock, I came to find Juno cloying to the point of claustrophobia. (And hearing The Kinks (“A Well-Respected Man”) and those overlords of twee, Belle & Sebastien (“Piazza, New York Catcher”), at various points on the soundtrack only confirmed the sensation that I’d somehow wandered into a Wes Anderson after-school special.) Speaking of Wes, I feel about this film much as I did about The Darjeeling Limited — if this is your sort of thing, have at it. But I for one eventually grew exhausted and even somewhat annoyed with Juno, even as I found myself in sympathy with its denouement.

Juno begins with a chair. A recliner at a yard sale, in fact, which is being eyed by a Sunny D-chugging teenager named Juno MacGuff. (Ellen Page of Hard Candy and X3 — This role will no doubt cement her status as the new sassy, quick-witted, adorable-but-approachable brunette that middle-school fanboy types will crush over, a la Princess Leia, Winona Ryder, and Natalie Portman in their day.) As it turns out, this chair has a special meaning for Ms. MacGuff, since it was one quite like it where she and her nerdy best friend Paulie Bleeker (Michael Cera of Arrested Development and Superbad, in his wheelhouse and terrific) lost their virginity in a fit of (what’s being billed as) boredom. And now, two months later, Juno is, as the sayings go, knocked up, preggers, in the family way, with a bun in the oven. (She later memorably deems herself “the cautionary whale.”) What to do?

At first, Juno considers “procuring a hasty abortion,” but something about the waiting room at Women Now! gives her the heebie-jeebies. And so, after some discussion with her best friend (Olivia Thirlby of United 93, an appealing presence), Juno decides to go for it and have the baby. She informs her parents (J.K. Simmons and Allison Janney, both excellent) and finds a baby-craving couple on the right side of the tracks (Jason Bateman and an impressive Jennifer Garner — she and Cera are the best parts of the film) to handle her spawn in its post-born phase. But, of course, it’s never that easy. For one, it turns out the Lorings may not be as ideal a couple as they first appear. (The wedding pics everywhere should be a tip-off, as they were in In Good Company.) For another, Juno slowly comes to discover that certain things — bearing a child, falling in love — are actually much harder than they’re made out to be on the TV and the Internets, and all the clever comebacks in the world aren’t going to protect you when life takes a painful turn.

Now, some caveats. First, Ellen Page’s Juno is basically a pop-culture variant of the hyperliterate teenagers you find in Whit Stillman’s Metropolitan or Wes Anderson’s Rushmore, and, as I’ve said before, I am really not a big fan of that genre. Page is as good as she can be in the role, but the character as written is drowning in self-conscious quirk. Now, as my brother pointed out, so was Ferris Bueller back in the day, so perhaps I’m just getting old. Still, every time Juno emotes wildly over seventies punk rock acts like Iggy and the Stooges or namedrops Dario Argento movies, all I heard was screenwriter Diablo Cody unrealistically foisting her own pop culture bona fides on a sixteen-year-old character. (I had the same problem with Scarlett Johansson karaokeing Roxy Music and The Pretenders in Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation.) To borrow from I’m Not There, “Live your own time, child.“

For another, and as Lauren Wissot pointed out at THND, every character in the film — with the exception of Jennifer Garner’s earnest yuppie mom-wannabe, who is defined mostly by its absence — speaks with the same arch, cynical, highly referential voice, spewing forth peppy bon mots and pop-culture zingers that tend to read a lot better on the page than they sound on screen. “Silencio, old man,” “I have to pee like Seabiscuit,” “The baby looks like a Sea Monkey right now,” “Thundercats are go!” Everyone from Juno’s parents to her girlfriend to her lab partners to Rainn Wilson at the Circle K indulge in this hyperstylized quipping to the point of exhaustion, including the director. (Check out the “jocks really love goth librarians” scene, for example.) Now, this is the exact same problem I have with most of Joss Whedon’s output and particularly Buffy the Vampire Slayer, so undoubtedly fans of the latter may have more of a tolerance for Juno‘s endless string of impeccably-crafted, unrealistic-as-delivered witticisms. Still, Juno eventually reminded me of the exchange in Fight Club when Ed Norton makes the crack about people on planes being “single-serving friends.” Says Pitt: “Oh I get it, it’s very clever. How’s that working out for you? Being clever. Great, keep it up then…“

Now, this reaction posed a bit of a quandary for me, since, as y’all probably know, Juno is not the first unplanned-pregnancy-for-a-hipster-parent comedy to come down the pike this year. And when musing on Knocked Up over the summer, I put its many knowing pop-culture references — jokes involving Matthew Fox and Robin Williams’ knuckles, for example — in the plus column. So why can’t a 16-year-old girl make the same sort of wry cultural asides to her friends as a 23-year-old man-child? I guess the main difference is that I don’t remember Knocked Up being so wall-to-wall with the punchy quips, or the dialogue feeling so writerly or artificial throughout. (For example, there’s nothing that feels as true-to-life in Juno as the automobile argument in Apatow’s film.) Until I see Knocked Up again, that’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

Also, while Juno is being billed in some corners as the female response to Knocked Up, it is and it isn’t. Obviously, the parent drenched in pop-culture irony this time is female, but in other ways the films are rather similar in their gender portrayals: The relationship dynamic between Garner and Bateman for example, plays quite a bit like the one between Leslie Mann and Paul Rudd in Knocked Up — She’s the Voice of Responsiblity, he wants to keep playing with his toys. At any rate, while I prefer the former, Knocked Up and Juno would probably make a quality double-feature in the future. If nothing else, they’ll help pop-culture aficionados of both sexes figure out what to expect when they’re expecting. Just make sure you have insulin or ipecac handy in case the overwritten, indy-pop sentimentalism of Juno proves too sugary-sweet, as it did for me.

Stripped Bear.

“If you was to crack it open, you’d find no living thing in there. No animal nor insect at any rate. There’s a clockwork running in there, and pinned to the spring of it, there’s a bad spirit with a spell through its heart.” So the mentorly Gyptian scholar Farder Coram (Tom Courtenay) tells young Lyra Belacqua (Dakota Blue Richards) of a robotic wasp that’s tracked her down, at the behest of the villainous Mrs. Coulter (Nicole Kidman). Alas, the same could be said of Chris Weitz’s disappointing version of Philip Pullman’s The Golden Compass. The film looks nice enough, but it’s ultimately a plodding and mechanical take on Pullman’s fantasy, one missing its own inner daemon, if you will. And the mischievous, anarchic spirit that drives Pullman’s story has been so thoroughly confined in Hollywood drek and by-the-(Box-Office)-numbers banality that it barely resonates at all.

I was rooting for Weitz here: I quite enjoyed About a Boy and In Good Company (which he produced), and thought his leaving the film for awhile suggested he was aware of the epic scope the project required. And, while Pullman can be a stunningly self-inflated and ungracious sort, I thought the first book of His Dark Materials, before the trilogy bogged down in its own self-importance and anti-religious fervor, was a particularly good fantasy yarn. Alas, the movie as presented — I get the sense we may see another cut of it someday — does Pullman and Compass a severe disservice. All the subversiveness has been drained away from the story, and what we’re left with is virtually indistiguishable from any other B-level Rings clone. It’ll probably just be remembered the one with the polar bears.

Compass establishes its debt to Peter Jackson’s Rings films early — Like The Fellowship of the Ring, Compass begins with a “world as we know it” establishing prologue, setting up the conceits, the McGuffin, the good guys and bad guys, before keying in on one happy-go-lucky youngster who’s the focus of our story. The child in question is one Lyra Belacqua (Richards, good with what she’s given, and she avoids the cute-kid trap very well), an orphan living at Jordan College (i.e. the alternate-dimension version of Oxford). Lyra spends her days frolicing with the town children and getting into trouble with her daemon Pantalamion (Freddy Highmore) — In this world, you see, every person has their own animal-spirit companion which reflects their nature, following them around, sharing their pleasure and pain, and offering advice and conversation as needed. (This is quite different from our world, where my animal companion spends his days chasing his tail, barking at evil, and passing out on the couch.)

But Lyra’s world is about to come undone: Her free-thinking uncle, Lord Asriel (Daniel Craig, also quite good given the circumstances), has upset the ruling order of the Magisterium (Think the Vatican, except with Simon McBurney, Derek Jacobi, and Christopher Lee in tow) by arguing not only that parallel worlds exist, but that they might be accessible through the omnipresent interstellar medium known as Dust. And, when Asriel — now that the whole world looks Dusted — decides to continue his research in the polar North, Lyra herself gets caught up in the great events, particularly after an undercover agent of the Magisterium, one Mrs. Coulter (Kidman, seeming somewhat lost — she was better in Margot last week), takes a shine to her, and it is determined Lyra can read an ancient and powerful device known as an alethiometer, which invariably speaks truth to power. Is Lyra that child, the one prophesied to come by the witches of the North? Well, definitely maybe…

There are some elements of The Golden Compass that work rather well. As I said, Richards is an appealing presence, and it’s hard to imagine a better Lyra than her. Daniel Craig and especially Sam Elliot, as the aeronaut-cowboy Lee Scoresby, breathe much-needed life into the story in their brief moments onscreen. The daemons are for the most part cleverly handled, with particular plaudits for Mrs. Coulter’s vicious golden monkey (It really seems like it leapt off the page.) And most of the polar bear sequences, featuring Ian McKellen as the deposed bear-king Iorek Byrnison and Ian McShane as the evil usurper of the throne, Ragnar Sturlusson, are as good as one could hope for.

But McKellen’s inherently Gandalfian qualities further cement a comparison which doesn’t work in Compass‘s favor. If anything, Weitz’s film proves how important composer Howard Shore (like production designer Alan Lee) was to the success of the Rings trilogy. In Compass, as in Rings, characters are prone to describe places they’ve arrived at with a burst of description and a musical flourish. (“Svalbard, kingdom of the ice bears!“) But Alexandre Desplat’s score is so leaden and overbearing that it makes these bouts of exposition seem like, well, exposition. As a result, there’s much less magic in Compass than there should be — Like Chris Columbus’ first two installments of the Harry Potter series, Weitz’s film at best feels like a book on tape.

Or does it? Daemons and polar bears aside, the thing that made Compass an interesting read was Pullman’s subversive intent. In fact, I’ll admit to being more than a little curious as to how the heck The Subtle Knife and especially The Amber Spyglass, with its overtly Miltonic war against “the Authority” (i.e. God), was ever going to translate into a Christmas blockbuster. The answer the studio suits came up with, it seems, was to disembowel the film almost completely. Perhaps, given his haughty disdain for other authors’ fantasy works, Pullman even deserved to see his Golden Compass turned into an eviscerated Disney ride — Polar bears without the Coke. But fans of the book sure didn’t. Somewhere, somehow, somebody at New Line clearly decided that Compass needed to be more upbeat if it was going to make any money.

As a result, the ending of the movie, which cuts off a few chapters early (despite scenes of the Northern Lights in the trailer), was such a flagrant sucker-punch to the audience that I left completely disgusted with the film. If you’d never read The Golden Compass, you’d be hard-pressed to follow what’s going on anyway, or to give the overarching story the benefit of the doubt when it’s so often drowning in exposition. If you have read The Golden Compass, then you know how it ends, or will remember as it goes along, and don’t expect to see anything different. But, no, in keeping with its resolute ambition throughout not to offend anyone, Compass is (currently) given a syrupy, platitudinous ending before Lyra et al reach the Crack in the World. It’d be as if the Coens transformed the end of No Country for Old Men, or Joe Wright his new version of Ian McEwan’s Atonement, just to make it feel more upbeat and “viewer-friendly” and thus improve the box office. (In fact, if anything, it reminded me of the disrepect George Sluizer showed his audience with the feel-good American version of The Vanishing, which recently came up over at THND.) I was on the fence, leaning negative, about The Golden Compass up to that point. But those closing moments encapsulate most of what’s wrong with this saccharine adaptation. Say what you will about Philip Pullman — He’s definitely more fun with claws.

Savage Love.

Emerging from Julian Schnabel’s Diving Bell, I had all of two or three minutes — basically, as long as the creepy Freelancers’ Union ad shown before every film at the Angelika — to decompress before entering Tamara Jenkins’ The Savages, a dramedy about two siblings confronting the onset of dementia in their estranged dad. And, in the early going, after a rather twee opening and some leaden scenes of Laura Linney writing a grant proposal and kvetching with her married boyfriend, I started to feel like I’d made a tactical error following Schnabel’s ambitious film so quickly with such a conventionally quirky, small-scale indy flick. But The Savages is a grower, and by the last reel, I was very glad I’d made the trip. Admittedly somewhat inconsistent — and I could have done with less Linney and more Hoffman — Savages is also at turns hilarious, bleak, and even rather moving (although I’m guessing I’m more of a sucker for the final moments than others might be.) And, in some ways, it was the perfect nightcap to Diving Bell (and, in its bickering siblings, to Margot at the Wedding the night before.) For Jenkins’ film is a grimly funny reminder that Bauby’s condition isn’t necessarily as exotic as it first seems. Eventually (if we’re even lucky enough to stick around that long), we all sink under the weight of the diving bell — it’s just a matter of time. A grisly insight, to be sure, but you could do worse than contemplating it here with The Savages.

Jenkins’ movie opens with a sun-drenched Broadway-style musical number (Peggy Lee’s “I Don’t Want to Play in your Yard“) in the Retirement Heaven of suburban Arizona, the type of warm, happy, golf-cart-heavy environment one generally expects — given all the conventional portrayals of the Golden Years — to spend one’s waning days. But Lenny Savage (Philip Bosco), who lives therein, is beginning to act erratic (namely by finger-painting with his own feces), and after his aged girlfriend dies, he is cast out of this Grandpa’s Paradise. Enter his children (who haven’t heard from him in years), Wendy and Jon Savage — no relation to Wendy and John Darling of Peter Pan, as people are definitely growing old around these parts. Wendy (Laura Linney) is a failed playwright in Manhattan, working as a temp and sleeping with her married, horndog neighbor (Peter Friedman). Her older brother Jon (Philip Seymour Hoffman) is an obviously miserable academic in wintry Buffalo, working on a tome about Bertolt Brecht and sleeping with his laptop and a small reference library. (This detail rang uncomfortably true, as did the organized chaos of book piles strewn around his apartment.) So, with Lenny increasingly showing unmistakable signs of dementia, it now falls to Wendy and Jon to find a place for him, be it a retirement community, assisted living, or most likely, an institutional-gray nursing home in deepest, darkest Buffalo, and — in the tried-and-true tradition of quirky independent films — maybe learn to get along as a family in the process.

The family-bonding, one-to-grow-on aspects of this project, admittedly, are where a good deal of the clunky stuff in The Savages emerges. The Savages bond over an unlikely neck injury suffered by Jon, all of which feels a little TV movie-ish. (Hoffman almost saves it with some good physical humor, though — watch him put his mail away.) And The Wire‘s Gbenga Akinnagbe shows up as a Nigerian nursing home worker who has a platonic relationship with Wendy, which all felt entirely too “Bagger Vance” for my taste. (i.e. He’s a convenient saintly African-American plot device used to move the white people’s stories forward.) But, other moments work better. There’s a running competition between the siblings over grant money which — having done the grant rigamarole — I thought was pretty funny. And, Hoffman in particular has a few memorable rants (outside the nursing home, for example), which are well worth the price of admission. Since I saw Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead a few weeks ago and Boogie Nights on TV since then, I feared Hoffman might come across as overexposed to me, a la Scarlett Johansson, Owen Wilson, Ben Stiller, or Janeane Garofolo. But he’s really great here, and comes across as a qualitatively different (if equally self-loathing) person than Before the Devil‘s older brother in question.

Perhaps most impressively, The Savages never really attempts to make Lenny all that huggable, or to softpedal his malady. In even his lucid moments, which are few, Lenny is a cantankerous old sort, and you can see why his kids have kept away from him for years. But Bosco brings a pathos to the role that is earned — you can also tell at various points that Lenny has brief inklings of what’s ahead of him — to wit, not much at all. In short, what Six Feet Under is to dying, The Savages is to the final stages of aging. It’s something we don’t really want to think about, but it’s there, somewhere over the last ridge. If we’re going to dwell on this subject, it’s probably best to confront that fact with the mordant humor of The Savages (while keeping in mind that, however inevitable that final end, it’s never too late to teach an old dog some new tricks.)

In the Blink of an Eye.

“Euh ess ahh err eee enn teh veh, ell, oh…” Suffice to say, I’m so glad I’m not writing this entry letter-by-letter (and in French to boot.) The first half of a powerful Saturday afternoon double-feature at the Angelika, Julian Schnabel’s The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, from the painstakingly-crafted memoir by Jean-Dominique Bauby, is an impressive and heartfelt depiction of how one man’s personal Hell becomes, through love, will, memory, and imagination, at least a barely endurable purgatory. At first glance, a film about being almost completely immobilized in a hospital bed for months and years on end may not seem like your cup of tea — I wasn’t sure it would be mine. But, despite the inherent sadness to Bauby’s story, Diving Bell is in fact overflowing with humor and even joie de vivre in the face of horrific tragedy. Yes, it says, you don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone. But, even if you’ve lost everything, including basic motor function…well, all you have to do is dream.

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly begins in a blur. Blue-gray blobs fade in and out of vision, ultimately rectifying into institutional decor and men in white coats. We’re in a hospital room, but we, and our narrator Jean-Do Bauby (Mathieu Amalric, of Munich) don’t know why or how we got there. Worse, while we hear our narrator perfectly fine, nobody else can. It seems Bauby can no longer speak. Nor can he do anything else for that matter, except look around the room in abject horror and blink. Eventually, one of the doctors explains that Bauby has had a stroke, is emerging from a coma after several weeks, and now suffers from a rare medical condition known as “locked-in syndrome,” for which there may not be any cure. If this sounds like a fate worse than death, well, it seems so to Bauby at first too. But, when trapped in yourself, body your holding cell, it definitely helps to have a bevy of French beauties around to look after you, including the estranged mother of Bauby’s children (Emanuelle Seigner) and two therapists at the hospital (One, Olatz Lopez Garmendia, is Schnabel’s real-life wife. The other, Marie Josee-Croze (also of Munich), is the spitting image of Naomi Watts and, needless to say, also very easy on the one working eye.)

With the latter’s help, Bauby eventually grows used to a lengthy but workable system of communication whereby he blinks when the letter he wants to employ is named from a list (from most-used to least-used), thus piecing together words, sentences, and paragraphs after long hours of toil. As he becomes accustomed to his condition and this new system, Bauby, formerly an editor at Elle magazine, dwells on his recent past — say, shaving his elderly father (Max Von Sydow) the week before the incident, or taking a trip to Lourdes with his most recent love (Marina Hands), who is now afraid to visit him. In addition, he starts taking imaginative flights of fancy from his bodily prison (Enter Emma de Caunes of The Science of Sleep), and ultimately decides he’s going to write a book about the entire experience, blink by painstaking blink (thus bringing another beautiful woman into the equation, his new assistant (Anne Consigny). I mean, I know being a completely paralyzed invalid in any hospital is a horrible, horrible experience…but really, aren’t there any unattractive orderlies or assistants in France?)

If you’ve taken an art or film theory class in the past thirty years, somewhere amid viewings of Metropolis, 8 1/2, and/or Blade Runner you more than likely came across the concept of the “male gaze.” Diving Bell‘s clever conceit is to make that concept literal: For much of the film, the camera is Bauby’s POV. We are trapped in Jean-Do’s body for at least the first thirty minutes of the movie and experience everything from his perspective, from the grisly horror of having one’s eye sewn shut to the tantalizing triangle of exposed neck revealed by his lovely therapists. (At one point, around twenty minutes in, I turned to look at the audience, and everybody in the theater (also) had their head cocked uncomfortably to the left.) It is testament to Schnabel’s skill here that this effect, while assuredly feeling claustrophobic, never becomes oppressive to the point of being unwatchable. (There are some great, humorous touches to leaven things, such as when Jean-Do’s new winter cap ends up obscuring some of his/our view.) And, when the camera later forsakes the diving bell world of flesh and frailty for the butterfly realm of memory and imagination, we feel the same exhilarating sense of liberation Bauby describes in voiceover. By finally soaring out of the confines of Bauby’s body and roaming the world with abandon, Diving Bell offers a visceral reminder of the power of film, and of imagination.

There are moments I might quibble with in Diving Bell — The recap of his accident comes rather late in the movie, and feels slightly unnecessary there (I assume this is where it might have fallen in the book — I haven’t read it, although I more than likely will now.) And the film is undeniably slow at times. (But that’s by design, of course. Given the sheer amount of effort Bauby must expend to compose a single word, a faster-moving film would have been untrue and unfair to the proceedings.) Nevertheless, particularly for a film about something as nightmarish as locked-in syndrome, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly is truly transporting. It reminds us that there’s a certain miraculous magic to the power of sight, and that experiencing even the daily mundanities of the world is something we shouldn’t ever take for granted.

Dysfunction Junction.

I’m guessing there must be a lot of awkward silences around the Baumbach household during the holidays. For, if you thought Jeff Daniels’ misfit academic Bernard Berkman was insufferable in The Squid and the Whale, Noah Baumbach’s semi-autobiographical recounting of his famous parents’ divorce, you ain’t seen nothing yet. Margot at the Wedding, which I caught at the Angelika Friday night, is basically a claustrophobic family reunion of damaged, needy, unlikable people, and none more than Nicole Kidman’s monstrous Margot, a brittle, self-absorbed Manhattanite who wreaks emotional havoc on everyone around her despite herself.

I have mixed feelings about Margot. On one hand, as in Squid, Baumbach displays a talent for making sharp, withering observations about people and their foibles, and at its best moments the film captures harsh truths about all of us at our grasping, rationalizing worst. But, these are only moments, and unlike Squid, Margot never really coalesces into a film, playing more as an episodic, occasionally diverting, and mostly repellent string of character observations. More problematic, the tone of the film toward its characters is uneven — some are portrayed as nuanced and multifaceted, but other seem to be around for cheap gags and blunt caricature. While I can’t say I’m sorry I saw Margot — it’s an interesting failure — I also don’t feel like I can recommend it. Hard to sit through in any event, given the people we’re trapped with, Margot ultimately seemed too indulgent and unfocused to warrant paying for. Alas, I thought it might all work out, but the Wedding‘s off. Call it irreconcilable differences.

As the film begins, an androgynous teenager named Claude (Zane Pais) shambles down a crowded train aisle and plops down next to a sour-faced brunette he thinks is his mother Margot (Kidman, solid despite a slipping accent), a successful short-story writer. It’s not — she’s three rows up, much prettier on the outside, and (presumably) much uglier within. Margot and Claude, we soon discover, are headed to the old family homestead somewhere on the Eastern seaboard to attend the wedding of Margot’s estranged sister Pauline (Jennifer Jason Leigh, also Baumbach’s wife) and her new beau Malcolm (Jack Black, which obviously suggests he might not be the best of catches). The trouble ostensibly begins when Margot takes an immediate disliking to Malcolm, an overweight, unemployed schlub with an ironic moustache, a seething jealousy toward U2’s Bono, and an (admittedly somewhat seductive) slacker philosophy. (His advice to Claude on wanting to be famous: “Make sure you can handle rejection. I can’t. For me, expectation just turns to disappointment. So, ultimately I’d rather not try. It’ll all go black for us soon enough anyway.“)

But, Malcolm or no, trouble was inescapable. In effect, Margot is Godzilla in a floppy pink hat, and everyone else is Japan. As her long-suffering son well knows, the only way Margot knows how to express affection is by running people into the ground, and in any case, everyone at the family gathering is damaged, self-diagnosed, and medicated within an inch of their lives. (Pauline’s pre-teen daughter from a previous marriage — which Margot basically destroyed with a revealing short story in The New Yorker — is convinced she suffers from “adult ADD.”) Throw in a few more randoms — Margot’s gallant husband Jim (John Turturro), Margot’s new boyfriend Dick (Ciaran Hinds), his voluptuous teenage daughter Maisy (Halley Feiffer) (who just got into Harvard early — Barnard grad Margot is not impressed), and the next-door neighbors (the Voglers, whom Squid‘s Bernard might charitably call “philistines”) — and simmer. Let’s just say an awkward toast at the nuptials would be the least of this gang’s problems.

At its best, Margot at the Wedding feels both impressively and uncomfortably real. Even if everyone here (as in Squid) treat their children like therapists, which is a tic I’m can’t say I’m accustomed to, Baumbach has a keen sense for the rhythms of innocuous conversation, and how they can suddenly and disastrously go wrong. (I also liked well-observed moments such as when Margot, on a dare, gets stuck in a tree — at first, she’s feeling great about it, and admiring the altered perspective from above, then the bugs start to come out.) And, perhaps due to the semi-autobiographical nature of Squid, there’s some interesting rumination at times about using one’s life to write “fiction.” But, as the film progresses, a divide emerges between the more well-rounded characters (such as Margot and Pauline) and the one-note caricatures, most notably the ridiculously rednecky Voglers next-door, who make Billy Baldwin’s joke of a tennis instructor in Squid seem profound. Their kid in particular comes off as an unholy cross between Cletus the Slack-Jawed Yokel and the green-eyed kid from A Christmas Story.

And then there’s Malcolm, who starts off reasonably enough but becomes little more than a punch line as the movie goes on. (Note the scene of him running down the stairs, for example, or the rather unnecessary nude shot, which basically seemed thrown in to let the audience laugh in disgust at Jack Black’s ass, love handles, and tighty-whities.) Speaking of which, there’s a late turn in the plot involving an indiscretion by Malcolm that threw me out of the film to some extent. His failing is sad, pathetic, and reprehensible, but I also thought the reactions of the other characters seemed so disproportionate to what he was admitting to that I got confused about some Polaroids shown earlier in the film, and had to read the script when I got home to make sure I’d seen things right the first time.

At first, there’s some tension between Margot’s impression of Malcolm (“He’s so coarse, he’s like guys we rejected when we were sixteen“) and the actual character, whom Pauline and Claude seem to like well enough. But he finishes the movie a blubbering, simpering joke. Granted, nobody else in the film is very likable either, but his character in particular reflects Baumbach’s tendency in Margot to get ham-handed and cartoonish at just the wrong time. (See also the rat in the pool, the pig carving, the “family bond” bracelets, any of several Oedipal moments, and other capital-S Symbols that slap you in the face every so often throughout.)

In short, Margot at the Wedding isn’t terrible, but it definitely feels like a misfire for Baumbach after Squid and the Whale (and isn’t much fun to sit through in any event). Hopefully, he won’t have to plumb too deep into his own familial id to get back into form next time ’round.