Well I Wouldn't Want to Live There

Avatar

Directed by James Cameron

Three and One Half Stars

Much like Peter Jackson’s “Lord of the Rings” Trilogy earlier this decade, James Cameron has created with “Avatar” a world that I would like to experience first hand.  I want to stand on the road-like branches of these mountainous trees.  I want to see the moist glossy fauna of the forest floor illuminate under my bare feet and swim in the stainless crystal springs.  I want to emerge from the cover of the canopy and the heavy fog and see the Hallelujah Mountains floating in the sky above me.  More than anything else in “Avatar”, the lush and ethereally beautiful planet of Pandora is Cameron’s crowning achievement.

The Prodigal Son Defamed

Brothers

Directed by Jim Sheridan

Three Stars

Jim Sheridan’s “Brothers” comes out focused and prepared. It takes a strong warm-up lap, properly does its stretching and calisthenics, steps up to the blocks, and hits the showers. It is an excellent first two-thirds of a film.

Sheridan based this film of postwar trauma on a Danish film of the same name, in which a prodigal son is sent to war while his delinquent brother is saved from the battlefield by his own delinquency. Toby Maguire plays the prodigal son, Capt. Sam Cahill, in an intensely over-the-top performance. He has a wife, Grace (Natalie Portman) and two daughters, and they are, of course, quite happy.

Jake Gyllenhaal plays the delinquent brother, Tommy, who houses a quaint shyness that makes it hard to picture him as someone who just got out of prison for armed robbery. The two men share a relationship that is respectful but under duress. Expectations, both failed and surpassed, have formed a wall between them, and their father (Sam Shepard) has laid the mortar.

Of the general plot, I will not go into extreme detail. The whole of the story is explained in the trailers, and if you’re like me, you felt like the trailer had only revealed the establishing sequences of the film.

Sam goes to war and is presumed dead after a helicopter crash. Grace is distraught, and Tommy, fresh out of prison, eases into her and her daughters’ lives as a surrogate father.

But Sam emerges alive and returns to his family, strung out, traumatized and paranoid. He senses a relationship between his wife and his brother and punishes himself for a life-changing decision he made while imprisoned in Afghanistan by allowing his paranoia to snowball into violence.

“Brothers” is, in many ways, a story that Michael Cimino told with “The Deer Hunter” in 1978, which was a far superior film. Both films deal with the psychological and emotional losses that soldiers face when returning from war.

Cimino’s film was more about the soldiers, though, and the emptiness that they felt at home after returning from Vietnam. “Brothers” assumes the reverse perspective of Grace and Tommy and how they attempt to recreate a family that was destroyed overseas.

Grace goes through the motions of the loving marriage she had with Sam before he left, but he is a different man now and their love seems one-sided. Grace is clinging to an idea more than a person, and her daughters respond to the new-found distance in their father with a growing fondness for their uncle Tommy.

Sheridan observes this family drama with great detail. The project is a bit too glossy to become completely involving, but the performances, particularly Maguire’s manic, bug-eyed intensity and Gyllenhaal’s gruff shy-guy warmth, bring gravity to the film and its themes.

Most importantly, though, the film ends far too soon, cutting itself off when it is only beginning to break into something genuine. Sheridan seems afraid to make the leap. He cuts his emotional ark short by mistaking the firing of a gun for the climax of the film, and tidies up to such an extent that he jeopardizes the very commentary he was threatening to make.

“Brothers” is a good film. Make no mistake. If I seem harsh it is because it got off a station too soon and, in so doing, amplified many of its other shortcomings. Consider simply that if it were not a good film, I would certainly not be complaining that it ended sooner rather than later. “The Deer Hunter” was more than three hours long.

Rollan Schott

December 15, 2009

Originally Featured in the Daily Nebraskan

Are You Cussin' with Me?

Fantastic Mr. Fox

Directed by Wes Anderson

Three and One Half Stars

There is a moment late in Wes Anderson’s “Fantastic Mr. Fox” when Mr. Fox (George Clooney) and Company pause to recognize a moment of serene beauty, a majestic(ish) wolf on an elevated stone before the backdrop of snowcapped mountains. 

It seems like an ambiguous moment, or at least it seems like it’s meant to be ambiguous.  What’s strange is that it isn’t.  It’s a flat moment, relatively void of meaning.  I was frustrated with this at first, but quickly realized that this moment isn’t about mysterious themes or hidden meanings.  It’s a send-up of those same moments in other films.

Understanding this conceit is central to appreciating “Fantastic Mr. Fox” which relies on flat compositions and deliberate actions to achieve a dry and wildly audacious style of humor that Anderson has made all his own.

He occupies his films with characters who are either bored stiff with the roles they are meant to play or relish them with the enthusiastic thrill of classical theater.  Consider the way two relatively similar characters inhabit this world. 

Kristofferson (Eric Anderson), a wildly talented white fox with speed, brains, and a budding romance, trudges through the film with relative disinterest.  It’s not that he’s bitter, he’s just, I don’t know, indifferent?

Mr. Fox, on the other hand, has the same athleticism and smarts, and a loving and devoted wife, and he walks upright and speaks in an assertive matter-of-fact enthusiasm that is most certainly on the smug side.  His suave confidence lends the film much of its wit.

Mr. Fox, having sworn off chicken thievery at the request of his wife, Mrs. Fox (Meryl Streep), moves his wife and son Ash (Jason Schwartzmann) out of their lowly hole-in-the-ground hole in the ground and into a lavish tree after assuming an occupation as a newspaper journalist (who nobody reads).

But his identity cannot be denied.  He is a fox, after all, and foxes steal chickens.  Mr. Fox plots to rob the three heavyweight famers nearby, Boggis and Bunce and Bean.  He succeeds, of course, and the three outraged farmers plot to steal his hide in return.

Fox and his family burrow deep beneath their tree, meeting up with other members of the local animal population.  Their misfortune is held against Mr. Fox, who seems unfazed, and tensions mount as the farmers try first to blow them out then to starve them out then to wash them out then…

Much of the humor in “Fantastic Mr. Fox” comes from moments outside the narrative, or at least moments that exist within the narrative that are not well-suited to its continuity.  I can think of no better example than the poor bloke playing his banjo and improvising a song.  The song itself is funny, but the response it garners is one of the biggest laughs of the year.

And what a deliberate movie this is.  When the camera races in on a face you can almost hear Anderson somewhere off screen shouting “Aaand CLOSEUP!” The characters all say their lines matter-of-factly, their expressions artificial but strangely human.  It’s almost as if they’re trying to slip the jokes past us.

But that moment with the wolf is still haunting me.  It is a funny moment, over the top and obvious in its intentions, so what’s with the staying power?  The secret to the film can be found here.  That secret may well be that there is no secret at all, that the movie is what it is and should not shy away from its clichés, a theme that digs deeper than it seems.


Rollan Schott
December 2, 2009
Originally Featured in the Daily Nebraskan