Category: Reviews

Bernie

Most of us have something of a bullshit detector when it comes to judging people. If they seem too good to be true, they probably are. “Bernie” is a film that always teeters on the edge of self-parody and cynicism, but it carefully tries to prove in its 98 minutes that its title character is as good and noble as he seems.

It tells the true story of a mortician (sorry, Funeral Director. Sorry again, Assistant Funeral Director) in Carthage, Texas who is one of the most loved people in town. Bernie Tiede (Jack Black) makes his work into an art, revealing his care, eloquence and theatrics in an opening scene where Bernie demonstrates to a classroom the procedure to preparing a body for casketing. Director Richard Linklater gets documentary style testimonials from Carthage townspeople, some character actors and some people who really knew Bernie, but you wouldn’t know the difference, to say just how wonderful he was.

“He had the ability to make the world feel good,” says one local. These people are essential to the portrayal of Bernie. One guy explains the difference between the regions of Texas, how you have the Dallas snobs, Austin liberals, San Antonio Tex Mex, West Texas hicks and finally the good hearted simple folk of the small town of Carthage. “In a small town, we always expect the worst, but also expect the best,” says another.

And Bernie was the best of them. The way they talk about him is so optimistically glossy, so disarming and so near ridiculous in Bernie’s humanitarian capabilities, including showing his love for the DLOL’s (Dear Little Old Ladies) and singing in church. For a while you think you’re watching a Christopher Guest movie about simpletons in the Deep South, and Linklater intentionally keeps you guessing.

Because before long, Bernie starts a relationship with Marjorie Nugent (Shirley MacLaine), a bitter, wealthy widow who is hated in town and eventually makes Bernie her servant. “She’d rip you a brand new, three bed, two bath asshole,” says one townsperson, a line so good that if it didn’t actually come from a real townsperson you wish it was.

She proves so controlling of Bernie that he suffers an out-of-body moment and shoots and kills Marjorie with an air rifle. He takes her money and begins donating around the community, and no one seems to notice she’s gone because she’s so disliked. Eventually Bernie is caught, and a District Attorney, Danny Buck (Matthew McConaughey), begins to raise all of our old questions about Bernie as soon as we start to see him as a loveable saint.

Is he gay? Is he evil? Is he putting on an act? Is he a serial killer? Is he driven crazy by his religion? Why doesn’t he have any greed, vices or flaws? Why would he hang out with Marjorie otherwise? Why does he dress and act the way he does, with a lilting voice, colorful polo shirts and a tidy haircut beneath a silly hat?

The beauty of Jack Black’s performance here is that he is disarming, innocent and likeable, and yet he’s never a caricature. This is a character ripe for satire, and the movie is always on that fine line, but Black delivers a very sincere performance.

Similarly, McConaughey has a field day with his role. His haircut and glasses belong to another decade, and here he’s even showing a touch of gray. He’s sincere in not mocking or judging Bernie either, but he makes clear he has his suspicions and his own morals to uphold. What’s one of the tipoffs in assuming Bernie’s sexuality? “And the kicker is, he always wore sandals.”

Linklater has told a really special story here by making it about character, not story at all. His blend of docu-realism and theatrical vitality in a few surprise song and dance numbers keeps us in tow, always wondering what we’re missing about Bernie but ultimately content in showing that this guy is as good as can be.

3 ½ stars

CIFF Review: Silver Linings Playbook

David O. Russell described the Led Zeppelin song “What Is and What Should Never Be,” a song used in his new film “Silver Linings Playbook,” as bipolar.

“And if I say to you, tomorrow…” Robert Plant croons smoothly, honestly and calmly, all before a big explosion. “And catch the wind, see us spin/Sail away, leave the day/Way up high in the sky,” he screams.

“Silver Linings Playbook” is just as exciting, surprising and stylish as that Zeppelin song. It’s a crowd pleasing rom-com about two people struggling with bipolar disorder who learn to love, stay positive and enjoy family in the face of lots of hardship.

Pat Solitano (Bradley Cooper) is just being released from a psychiatric ward. Eight months earlier, he caught his wife cheating on him and beat her lover half to death, but because he was found to have undiagnosed bipolar disorder, he was able to spend his sentence in a mental institution rather than in prison.

It’s no wonder his disorder would go undiagnosed. Pat is part Italian and living in Philadelphia, and their loud, argumentative family dynamic blends perfectly with Pat’s honest, blunt and high-spirited speaking brought on by his disability. His father, Pat Sr. (Robert De Niro), also has a case of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder when rooting for the Eagles, adjusting remotes and holding lucky handkerchiefs to ensure an Eagles victory. But O. Russell realizes that all these nervous ticks just come naturally as being part of a family. Continue reading “CIFF Review: Silver Linings Playbook”

Margaret

Kenneth Lonergan’s “Margaret” has the same emotional resonance and poetic understanding of a post 9/11 New York City as Spike Lee’s “25th Hour.” Yet unlike Lee’s intensely literal depiction of race and omnipresent anxieties in the tragedy’s immediate aftermath, “Margaret’s” virtues are contained within deep, complex metaphors that engulf Lonergan’s stirring character drama.

Meant to be released over five years ago but delayed due to legal battles between Lonergan and distributor Fox Searchlight Pictures over the film’s final cut (the edit I watched is the shortened, 2 ½ hour version edited by Martin Scorsese and Thelma Schoonmaker, but the extended Director’s Cut exists on the DVD), “Margaret” is a flawed masterpiece.

This version’s editing is a mishmash of vignettes, arguments and moments out of time all surrounding one teenage girl. The movie’s length, the web of subplots and the film’s rich cast and numerous characters for me paint a lush portrait of a whole city full of grief, regrets and anxieties. If it seems to never approach a rational ending, what could sum up this new mentality we’ve lived with for 11 years now?

“Margaret’s” central character is Lisa Cohen (Anna Paquin), a smugly confident high school student giving off an attitude that she knows just how phony she is. On the street one day, she distracts a bus driver (Mark Ruffalo), causing him to run a red light and hit a pedestrian named Monica (Allison Janney). Lisa cradles her in her last moments and feels devastated. But fearing the bus driver will be in trouble for something she caused, Lisa lies to the police and claims it was an accident free of negligence.

But this is just in the film’s first 15 minutes. For the next two-plus hours, Lisa will go through life trying to find closure and solace in battling her parents, losing her virginity, arguing with classmates and pursuing a lawsuit against the bus driver. Continue reading “Margaret”

CIFF Review: Lay the Favorite

I still don’t know what the title “Lay the Favorite” means. It’s a term used by bookies and gamblers to bet against the odds, but it doesn’t make any sense. It’s empty fast-talking, it’s not memorable and it’s not funny. I keep thinking the movie is called “Pay it Forward” or something because everything about this movie is generic, forgettable and tepid.

It’s a disappointing, personality-less comedy from the otherwise interesting Stephen Frears and this dynamic cast. Rebecca Hall, who is usually womanly and relatable, here plays Beth, an air-headed stripper from Tallahassee with ambitions to be a cocktail waitress in Vegas. Her talents include twirling her hair, being chipper and wide-eyed and wearing Daisy Dukes, but in an instant she lands a folksy and wise best friend with a Southern accent and a job at Dink Inc.

The company is called Dink Inc. because Dink sounds like dick and it allows the movie to repeatedly say Dink Inc. The owner of Dink Inc. is of course Dink (Bruce Willis), a professional gambler who briefly explains the ropes to Beth and offers her $20 an hour.

The movie is about always being trustworthy in an untrustworthy business, and so she is. Willis acts sunny around her and she falls in love with him as a father figure, but she’s fired when Dink’s wife Tulip (Catherine Zeta-Jones) gets jealous.

Beth goes to New York with a boy toy (Joshua Jackson) she met hours earlier, makes it big with another bookie (Vince Vaughn), gets into some trouble and later lives happily ever after.

It’s a movie without stakes, which is bad for a movie about gambling. There’s no chemistry, nothing interesting about these characters, no reason to care for them and nothing funny about their dialogue. The Vegas gamblers all have this dopey mobster mentality and thick accent, as if talking fast and tough makes it so.

“Lay the Favorite” is an empty, lightweight film that could’ve come from anyone. What makes me so disappointed by it was that it was the secret screening at the Chicago International Film Festival. Anticipating “Lincoln,” “Life of Pi,” “Les Miserables” or even just “Skyfall,” I can’t even express how much of a let down this was.

2 stars

Another Earth

“Another Earth” is an ingenious mix between indie drama and sci-fi that explores the many depths of a very simple concept: If you could meet yourself, what would you say?

Rhoda (Brit Marling) is a bright teenager about to head off to college until she causes a drunk driving accident when a report on the radio distracts her. A planet like ours that could sustain life is very close to Earth and is visible in the sky. She looks for too long and kills the wife and child of John Burroughs (William Mapother).

Four years later after her prison stint, the world has changed significantly. The planet thought to sustain life looks near identical to Earth and is even larger than the Moon in the night sky. We call it “Earth 2,” naturally, implying we’re “Earth 1.” Scientists eventually contact the planet and in a simple scene has a gigantic, exciting twist that made me leap out of my seat and say “WOAH!”

The people on “Earth 2” are identical to us. They’ve lived the same lives, met the same friends and made the same choices. They’re us, but they’re not.

Immediately the movie asks existential questions, but the important thing is that the movie considers all these themes secondary to the strong character drama at the center. Most sci-fis are wrapped in their science, but here we get an understandable depiction of human nature. We discover new places and ideas, but our tendencies and our perspective on the world don’t change.

John is now living in squalor. He’s given up on his job and his life. Rhoda too is virtually broken, and in a desperate move for understanding, tracks down John to confess she was the one responsible for his family’s death. But upon seeing him, she can’t bring herself to do it and poses as a maid offering a free trial service. She helps clean up his home and the two proceed to repair each other’s lives.

Mike Cahill’s film is exactly how intimate character dramas should look and feel. The movie indulges in artful staging, handheld camera close-ups and philosophical themes told simply in voiceover monologue. But “Another Earth” earns all of its gravity and self-importance. Rhoda and John share deep, important conversations about love, human nature and the paradoxes of the story.

If Earth 2 is an exact mirror and you tried to meet yourself, wouldn’t your duplicate do the same? What “Another Earth” points out is that we’re always looking at ourselves, but from within. Sometimes it takes someone externally to hold up a mirror so we can ask what we’re doing with our lives.

“Another Earth” is all about big ideas and big moments. And yet for such big emotions and truths to come out of a film with a simple idea, from small, understated performances and from a movie that doesn’t overdo style or visuals is no small feat indeed.

4 stars

CIFF Review: The Sessions

On paper, “The Sessions” is kind of an icky topic. How do you make a feel-good comedy about a paraplegic trying to lose his virginity and not make it completely gross, if not exploitative?

Well, you have to make the lead character relatable, and John Hawkes as Mark O’Brien displays a congenial sense of humor, emotional range with very little movement and always seems natural, never “constantly acting” like he’s Daniel-Day Lewis in “My Left Foot.”

So “The Sessions” is warm, relatable, funny and well acted, but it deigns to only be a crowd pleaser when it could be an insightful look at disabilities.

It’s about a guy who contracted polio at a young age and now has no control over any of his muscles below his neck. He lives in an iron lung and can only go out for four hours a day, but he managed to graduate college and become a poet. This is all a true story by the way.

After firing an aide and being heartbroken by a new one, Mark confides in a priest (William H. Macy) to ask if it would be alright if he had sex with a sex therapist before marriage. The sex surrogate, as she is called, is the lovely Cheryl (Helen Hunt), and her prescription is six, two hour sessions in which she helps him explore the feelings of his body, control his ability to ejaculate and ultimately achieve, ahem, “full penetration” and “simultaneous orgasm.”

Although Mark has a major, physical disability, the thing that really cripples him is his fear of sex, intimacy and ultimately being alone. “I love you, but I’m not in love with you,” he says to his priest, parroting the answer he usually gets from women. He expresses thoughts that will make his plight very accessible to both men and women. His worries are brought out by his religion, his childhood trauma of dealing with polio and his bookish interpretation of sex.

Do these traits make him unique? Maybe not. He’s not defined by his physical disability, always a no-no in terms of movie characters portrayed with them, but we don’t get the insight we get in something like “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly,” another film about a writer trapped in his own body who also has a wicked sense of humor. That film takes us inside the head of its character and doesn’t just paint him as an average Joe afraid of sex.

Part of this theme of romantic anxieties is strengthened by the presence of Cheryl. “The Sessions” is as much about her as it is about Mark. It paints her as a woman in a sexless, unexciting marriage and charts her own coming-of-age to overcome her fears of commitment to Mark. You’ll notice that when she’s helping Mark, he’s always on the right side of the bed, she on the left. When she returns home, it’s the opposite. She too is in a position of need.

It might all work a little better if the movie weren’t so awkward about sex. Most of the supporting characters have bad experiences with it, treating it with disdain and dry humor. Mark’s new aide Vera (Moon Bloodgood) uses the word “dick” instead of “penis.” “Why do you call it a dick,” Mark asks. “Because penis sounds like a vegetable you don’t want to eat.” And every reaction to a smutty comment is always granted the same blank look of uncertainty that Mark would return.

Hawkes is the best part of “The Sessions.” He has a way of striking the pose of strain, veins popping, head looking up and away, and still we know when he’s joking, confused or nervous. He doesn’t suddenly show unreasonable amounts of expressiveness. And for a disabled performance, Hawkes is fairly understated and doesn’t have a real “money moment,” which is a plus in the believability department.

The believability is exactly what makes “The Sessions” such a crowd pleaser. It’s not about disability, but in avoiding that it finds likely characters with understandable flaws. It’s as charming as its stars.

3 stars

CIFF Review: Leviathan

In “Leviathan,” the water is stained blood red, guts and debris fly past our eyes, alien pods tower in outer space, chains and the sounds of a hacking machete engulf us and suddenly as we look up away from all this horror, white demons fill the darkened sky.

“Leviathan” is the most disgusting, terrifying horror movie of the year, but it’s an experimental documentary that haunts and enchants in its otherworldly images, sanctimonious tone and Earth-shattering noises.

It’s unlike any documentary I’ve seen, a gruesome look at the fishing industry that creates moods only and does not make a point. The screening I saw at the Chicago International Film Festival had many walkouts. Does it indulge in its terror? Yes, but only because it is mesmerizing.

By using miniature Go-Pro cameras that can attach to helmets, clothing or be tossed around and jostled wherever, “Leviathan” achieves fish-eye perspectives that no human could. The images it sees would not be thought possible on Earth. David Bordwell calls it “the camera as flotsam.” In our line of sight we can spot a mutilated fish head, a bird so close we can make out the expression on its face as it tries to climb into a barrel holding some stray fish parts, hands grappling at chains in otherwise pitch black vistas or buried beneath mounds of fish in a fresh catch.

Before long we’re hurled overboard, not just sloshing around in the water but swimming furiously. The camera sees water rushing past as though we were a fish, then leaping out from beneath the waves to see a swarm of gulls descending on the ocean for a meal.

Except we wouldn’t know what we’re seeing or how to feel if not for the over-powering sound mixing that cues us in. The images and sounds are actually sped-up to appear absolutely cataclysmic, and the blurring of the film’s edits behind this wall of noise and darkness gives the film an eerily trance like quality. David Bordwell again compares “Leviathan” to the Russian, avant-garde silent film from 1927, “The Man with a Movie Camera,” rendering “the action hallucinatory” and putting “the very boundary between one shot and another” into question.

What makes “Leviathan” work above all is that it operates purely on this metaphorical level. We see fisherman hacking the fins off sting rays with a machete, then disposing the bodies through portholes dribbling out blood into the water. What’s the purpose of this gruesome stuff? The movie doesn’t say; it just exists. There are no people identified here, but we get a sense of how next-to-normal this work is when one man is glimpsed dozing in front of a TV as we hear a commercial singing, “877-CASH-NOW!”

“Leviathan” is a cinephile’s movie. It is impressive in the notion that such a film can even be made. It does not make a statement. It is not educational. It is not easy to watch. It is even in love with all these ghastly images. But it is remarkable.

4 stars

CIFF Review: The Impossible

You see a giant tidal wave hurtling toward you and your family one second, and the next, you’re gripping a tree, water rapidly flooding everywhere. You’re alone. A destroyed car floats by. You’re searching for some way to make it stop, and without warning, you feel a searing pain. The water seems to beat you senseless in an incoherent blur. You don’t see other people. You don’t see other bodies. You only hear the scream of your son. You have nothing but fear and uncertainty.

Uncertainty is that most important aspect of “The Impossible,” a moving, epic tearjerker about a deadly tsunami that hit Thailand in 2004. It concerns itself only with the idea of unknown consequences, the idea of failure and the pain of being unable to help more. These are the natural parts of survival. It’s not a message movie. It’s a human film.

One of the families caught up in this natural disaster are the Bennett’s, a British family from Japan on vacation in Thailand. Henry and Maria (Ewan McGregor and Naomi Watts) have three boys aged 10, 7 and 5, and the five of them will spend the next few days searching for one another after this tragedy.

The oldest son, Lucas (Tom Holland), is split up with his mom, who is severely injured and needs her son’s help every step of the way. His struggle to lift his mother into a tree is as harrowing and intense as even the tumultuous rapids themselves.

He proves himself to be the true lead of the film. We see Lucas on his own, learning to be responsible and seeing the pain of the world around him the most broadly. Lucas takes on a very noble task of wandering the hospital trying to pair patients with family members. It’s an overwhelming task for anyone, least of all for someone his age. But he succeeds, and our hearts just seem to swell up at the sign of such human decency.

And yet what director Juan Antonio Bayona (“The Orphanage”) recognizes is that this reunion, nor the reunion of his own family, is fully a victory. As their plane leaves for home, the civilization is still in ruins, and that ocean seems mighty lonely.

“The Impossible” calls itself “a beautiful mystery” in this way. It’s at times a disgusting film of people vomiting blood, screeching in agony and looking absolutely decrepit, and yet its simple acts of charity and good fortune go a long way. It finds action in its lonely chases through vast, empty landscapes and crowded, noisy areas where no one can be found. Only at the beginning does it employ the disaster movie tropes.

Part of its success stems from the absolutely stunning visual effects and lifelike makeup. Opting out of digital effects, “The Impossible” incorporated one of the largest water tanks in the world to shoot the opening disaster, and it pays off by looking leaps and bounds better than Clint Eastwood’s “Hereafter.”

Whereas Watts’s role throughout the film is to lie in agonizing pain, and McGregor is reduced to a weeping wreck, “The Impossible’s” real star is Holland. He demonstrates range that allows him to recognize that he’s about to become an orphan or that he’s not yet strong enough to make it on his own. Holland is a first time screen actor, but he’s been playing the title role in “Billy Elliot” on stage in London for years.

If there’s one big gripe about “The Impossible,” it’s that the film is whitewashed. Where are all the native Thai? Bayona claims that in this particular area where the family was located, the victims were about half tourists. The non-whites we see here are typically the ones helping the whites or not getting a word in because they’re not provided subtitles. Other travelling Europeans are missing their families, and we even hear some of their stories, but never of a local. In fact, the Bennett tragedy quite literally becomes the focal point of many people’s concerns in one pivotal scene when Henry makes a quick call home to say he’s unsure where Maria and Lucas are.

Despite this, I think audiences will take away that “The Impossible” is a beautiful, inclusive film about all human suffering and survival. But from a Spanish director and shot on-location in Thailand, I just wish it was more universal.

3 ½ stars

Chico & Rita

Jazz is all about the rough edges. It’s smooth, seductive music but comes from the body, not from the mind, revealing color, improvisation and imagination.

So I should to be kinder to “Chico and Rita,” an Oscar nominee and animated musical that has all the style and class of a good jazz number but plays all the wrong notes.

It’s about a piano player and a nightclub singer in Havana who fall in love, work together briefly, but then split up as they make the big time in New York. The problem is that Chico (Eman Xor Ona) is a womanizing scamp and Rita (Limara Meneses) is an empty-headed broad with a great voice. They’re constantly on-again, off-again as these one-dimensional figures can’t go 10 minutes without cheating on each other, getting jealous and leaving in a huff. It’s the only real thing providing drama throughout the story, and all the political and racial discourse is shoed into the movie at the last minute.

The movie’s style has that jagged, amateurish aesthetic to it as well. It’s very simple cel shading, hard lines and no figurative depth within the frame, looking very colorful but very simplistic. You wish the whole movie looked like the stencil drawn dream sequence that references “Casablanca” and “On the Town.”

So the music is what drives the excitement, and “Chico and Rita” takes great pains at capturing the authentic Havana sound of the ‘40s, even paying attention to tiny cultural details to provide a little more life.

But if you wanted a fun musical that didn’t wallow in romantic clichés and melodrama, you could try something like “Sita Sings the Blues” and really learn a thing or two about culture. This is just more like elevator music.

2 ½ stars

Note: The movie is distributed by GKids, but this is not a kids movie, as it features drug use, swearing and nudity. Cartoon nudity, admittedly, but full frontal, sexually charged cartoon nudity all the same.

CIFF Review: Something in the Air

“Something in the Air” is a rousing coming of age drama set in a time when personal rebellion took a back seat to all the political upheaval in the world. It’s 1971 in France, and for these kids its politics meets teen angst. It’s about finding yourself and what you believe in as the global stage itself, not just the lunch room table, asks you to pick a side.

Gilles (Clement Metayer) is a young outspoken political activist selling underground newspapers by day and vandalizing the high school by night. He and his classmates have honest lives and talents, but perhaps because of social pressure, they’ve wrapped themselves in these political conspiracies.

He begins exploring books and poetry, and yet he has beatniks telling him to watch what he reads. He is a talented and growing artist, and yet he has American hippies his age spewing philosophy about how he needs to find convictions. He starts a lovely relationship with the equally adventurous Christine (Lola Creton), but she thinks he’s more in love with his ex, Laure (Carole Combes), another free-spirit and drug addict who has more “freedom.”

What we see in Gilles is that his art, his love and his interests are all more noble and sincere than his politics. Without bending to melodrama or genre clichés, “Something in the Air” is a film about how this kid juggles all these conflicting ideas, finds his passion and maintains his voice.

It’s masterfully directed by Olivier Assayas (“Summer Hours,” “Carlos”), who has a way of capturing the energy, sexuality and mystique of the time period without dipping into a pop culture playbook. Usually he does it in long takes that don’t reveal themselves thanks to the film’s colorful and animated aesthetic. One of the best scenes takes place inside a rambunctious villa house party, with Assayas surveying elegantly. The motion of the camera and the activity on screen are on fire, and before long the scene quite literally ignites. It’s just one of the film’s many beautiful moments out of time.

3 ½ stars