2 x Spielberg: The Adventures Of Tintin & War Horse

Separated in their theatrical releases by just four days last December, Steven Spielberg’s The Adventures Of Tintin and War Horse now bow to Blu-Ray several weeks apart.  Though it seems strange for a director like Spielberg to have two films come out at virtually the same time, box office competitiveness being what it is, for him it is nothing new, having released both Munich and War Of The Worlds in 2005, Catch Me If You Can and Minority Report in 2002, Amistad and The Lost World in 1997, Schindler’s List and Jurassic Park in 1993, and Always and Indiana Jones And The Last Crusade in 1989. Unfortunately with each of those pairs there is a great divide in quality, one being far superior to the other, and while his 2011 films seem to be in keeping with his cinematic rhythms, the traditional divide is also present, though to a much greater degree than ever before.  Tintin, Spielberg’s first foray into motion capture animation, provides a wealth of opportunities for him to rekindle an imagination I haven’t seen in over two decades, and the film wins hands down over War Horse, which follows a horse from owner to owner, and provides Spielberg a wealth of opportunities to abuse both the camera and his audience by indulging all of his weakest tendencies.  Considering Spielberg’s trend, and several visual similarities between the two films, reviewing them together seems a fair turnabout.


The Adventures Of Tintin was the first comic book, excuse me, graphic novel, series that I fell in love with, discovering it way back in grade school. Belgian creator Herge was so skilled at crafting the easily read, globe-trotting, pocket mysteries, brimming with imagination, and populated with a wild, and occasionally hilarious cast of characters, with Tintin at the center, a young, open-minded and intelligent British journalist who never fails to get embroiled in the endlessly fantastic narratives. Tintin is a perfect foil, and audience surrogate, a role model for intellectually curious, globally-minded youngsters, and to this day very few artists have been able to trump Herge's elegant clarity of vision through such economic and humble line drawings and ink dot facial expressions. I hunted every issue down and purchased them all, bagged them, and stuck them in the attic, out of sight and out of mind until now.  Though I will admit trepidation at the notion of Spielberg assuming the reins of such a treasured series, it makes perfect sense actually, even discounting Herge's supposed personal belief that Spielberg was the only director who could do Tintin effectively, watching Raiders Of The Lost Ark it's nearly impossible not to see the character of Indiana Jones as basically only one career and one body of water removed from Tintin. And watching The Adventures Of Tintin, it's hard not to agree with Herge, as Spielberg pulls it off for the most part. Despite a few missteps, The Adventures Of Tintin is a rousing return to this particular form for the director, and an adequate introduction for a whole new generation to one of fiction's greatest characters.


The film is adapted from three Tintin books, The Crab With The Golden Claws, The Secret Of The Unicorn, and Red Rackham's Treasure, but previous familiarity with those installments is not necessary. Screenwriters Edgar Wright (Shaun Of The Dead, Hot Fuzz), Steven Moffat (Doctor Who), and Joe Cornish (Attack The Block) do an adequate job of weaving the three plots into a cohesive narrative; a feature length adaptation of any single book would involve considerable extrapolation and invention on the part of any writer. The story concerns news reporter Tintin, who purchases a model ship at a flea market which conceals part of a treasure map within its mast. His apartment later ransacked, and the map ultimately stolen from his possession, Tintin is soon propelled into an international adventure over land and sea in a quest for the treasure. Forever accompanied by his dog Snowy, his impromptu adventure soon teams him up with series regular, Captain Haddock, a crusty, alcoholic old salt, so in love with drink, there is barely a sobering scene to speak of, a characteristic belabored in the books to a degree that more than likely caused many a restless night with modern producers hoping for a PG rating. The three of them, along with the Thompson Twins, a bungling detective duo from Scotland Yard responsible for most of the books's comic relief, comprise the entirety of the "good guys," and everyone else, from henchmen to pickpockets to criminal masterminds is out to get them at every turn, just like in the old serials, exemplified in Spielberg's Indiana Jones films.


The film is non-stop action, which can be, and in this case is, a double-edged sword.  True, the nature of the source material doesn’t really allow for strenuous exposition, or character motivations beyond one level below the surface, and the screenwriters respond in kind with nearly continuous scenes of swashbuckling excitement, but films like this require moments of downtime, benchmarks upon which to hang the last set piece and prepare for the next, opportunities for the audience to catch up emotionally and sort out where everyone stands in relation to everything that has been going on.  The Indiana Jones films know the importance of these scenes, the ones that usually appear before the bee-line dot connecting on an atlas that help develop character, or establish sexual tension, while presenting necessary information; they are basically the scenes that people who have previously seen the films use as opportunities to run out for bathroom breaks.  Tintin has only two types of scenes, those that convey plot information, and those that are packed with action, but neither of them really succeeds at breathing life into the characters.  Alas, no sexual tension between Tintin and the Captain.  Perhaps aware of the holes this leaves, Spielberg directs these scenes with gusto, maximizing the potential of motion-capture, of which this film has made me a fan, with incredibly choreographed, elaborate showdowns, and a constant eye for the cinematic, connecting many scenes with rather inventive graphic-match editing.  For example, in one scene Spielberg pulls back from a boat lost at sea  to show it floating in the center of a puddle, which almost immediately turns to ripples as a pedestrian steps in it, splashing the water out.  These kinds of things are acceptable in Tintin for their own sake because entertainment is the sole purpose of the film, and Spielberg does not neglect a moment to keep his audience in amazement.  My biggest complaint about motion capture has always been in not understanding why filmmakers who choose to use it don’t just do live action, but after watching The Adventures Of Tintin, it becomes clear this film would have cost several hundred million dollars to do as live action, and since it barely cleared one hundred million at the box office, from a production standpoint it had to be motion capture or no film at all.  Hearing whispers of a trilogy, with a second installment to be directed by none other than Peter Jackson, bodes very well for Tintin’s future, and based on what I remember about the other tales in the series, people haven’t seen anything yet.

War Horse, on the other hand, fails for some of the same reasons Tintin succeeds. The plot takes place around the time of World War I in England.  A farmer, behind on his mortgage, goes into town to bid on a plough horse and ends up spending an exorbitant amount of money on a horse unfit for the plough.  The horse just catches his eye because he has that certain something that seems all too often to take the place of actual story development in Hollywood screenplays.  Ashamed of himself, and in the midst of a drunken bender, he runs into the stable one day to kill the horse after an initial failed show at the plough.  His son is there and stops him, himself determined to train the horse to do what their family so desperately needs.  It is in this scene that Spielberg overdoes it, showing an extreme close-up of the horse's eye, on which can be seen a reflection of the father's impending assault, calling attention to itself with an extreme formalism when the film should be subtly resonating with its audience.  This moment took me out of the film, and I was never able to get back into it.  Not even when the horse ploughs the field.  Not even when the father sells the horse.  Not even when the horse falls under the care of an English soldier during the beginning of World War I.  Not even when a French man and his granddaughter find the horse and it becomes the one thing she wants more than anything in the world.  Not even when the horse is stolen by the Germans.  And not even when the horse is used as a metaphor for the horrific wages of war itself, though not too horrific so as to cost the film its PG-13 rating.

War Horse is a film that is very episodic in nature, more so than any other Best Picture nominee I can recall.  Its main character is the horse, and the film follows him throughout World War I, showing his various owners and caretakers over the years.  Human characters come and go for different reasons, and never stick around long enough to generate any actual human interest.  The problem with this approach is that every fifteen to twenty minutes the story resets itself, with new main human characters, who have different desires and motivations that need to be conveyed, and the screenplay is unable to spend any significant amount of time on them to develop them beyond simple cliches.  Emotions are always broad, and come off as cloying, which when coupled with Spielberg's heavy-handed, overly visual directing style, the whole thing just becomes one huge manipulative bore.  The only thing the audience is able to care about is the horse.  But it's a horse.  It can't talk.  It can't act.  And yes, Spielberg does go there.  The director who cannot seem to avoid injecting human qualities into everything he touches (even between the boy and his robot in last year's lackluster Real Steel, which he executive produced) just cannot avoid a scene where the horse saves another horse's life by volunteering skills he learned earlier as a plough horse.  Falling back on his own cliches here is ironic, considering the fact that in the Tintin books the dog snowy actually talks, to himself, and Spielberg completely abandons that detail in the film.

Watching War Horse, I was constantly reminded of Richard Linklater's Slacker and Robert Zemeckis's Forrest Gump.  Released in 1991, Slacker followed one character for a little while, and then would switch to another character when their paths crossed, and then another character, and so on, through the entire film.  While also episodic in nature, the film is so consistent in theme and tone that each piece becomes part of a whole.  There is no such consistency in War Horse, its collection of vignettes completely arbitrary, and disconnected from each other, save for an assumed common purpose of making the audience cry.  It's cliche enough that the film is a boy and his horse movie, the fact that it tries to be five different people and their horse movies is just too much.  And the horse is not an effective substitute for a human being.  Forrest Gump, released in 1994, is also episodic, following one man through just about every major event in the 1960's, but at least Forrest Gump was a person, and not just any person, but Tom Hanks.  And despite its rather naive, conservative streamlining of the most potent and vital events of recent American history, something War Horse desperately tries to covet, at least Gump was somebody worth rooting for.  The fact that Spielberg presupposes that a horse could have the same effect on an audience connection to the material should quite frankly be offensive to even the most casual moviegoers.

There is one scene in War Horse that could justify sitting through the whole thing, and could very well be an entire film unto itself.  Our horse just cannot stand the violence and horrors of war anymore (sigh) and takes off through the field separating English and German soldiers, getting tangled up in barbed wire in the process.  Each side, both England and Germany, sends one soldier out to investigate and the two of them bond while mutually assisting in freeing the horse.  They make idle chatter, toss a coin to decide who keeps the horse, and then return to their bunkers so the war can resume, and through all this Spielberg makes his most effective and pointed criticism of war.  I kept thinking of how Kubrick, or Bergman, or Clouzot would handle the scene, and how they could have blown it up to feature length, squeezing out every last drop of irony instead of just settling on the jovial banter of what Spielberg was forced to work with.  But after already having seen four different beginnings, middles, and ends, and with several more to come, ten minutes out of one-hundred-and-forty is all War Horse can spare, even when it is showing the audience something they haven't seen before.

There is no doubt that Steven Spielberg is one of America's greatest directors.  There is however an unfortunate duality that he is rarely able to avoid which creeps into nearly every one of his films, especially over the last few decades, that finds him either wallowing in melodrama, or over-directing.  Occasionally this has the effect of threatening the credibility of his better films, such as when Liam Neeson breaks down at the end of Schindler's List, sobbing about how he could have saved more, or crafting moments of tension certain screenplays have no right to, remember the ingenious cracking glass scene in the otherwise atrocious Lost World?  Spielberg is a filmmaker of tremendous visual prowess, heavily influenced by the French New Wave, and Francois Truffaut specifically, and in the beginning of his career he was successfully able to marry subtle formalism with emotionally resonant storytelling, like in his masterpiece Jaws, where deep focus photography and intellectual montage helped create a singular experience. We don't need a close-up of Quint's eye reflecting the shark to make the film more effective, all we need is Robert Shaw and a rocking boat.  If Spielberg plans on continuing this haphazard unevenness in his films, I would much rather he stay in the tone of The Adventures Of Tintin, rather than just give more of the same as he does in War Horse, the cinematic equivalent of a major refusal.

The Adventures of Tintin: **** out of *****
War Horse ** out of *****

In Time

Occasionally a film’s success can be predicted by reading the front page of the newspaper, or by watching the national news.  Our insatiable need for stories ripped from current headlines is exemplified, not only at the box office, but also in the music we listen to, and the television shows we watch, both scripted and reality-based.  A much quicker progression from script to screen makes television the ideal medium for this, as last minute tweaking can maximize verisimilitude.  For films, taking sometimes a year or more to produce, they tend to paint a more general picture, broadening the strokes so much that many times all that remains is a mere riff on a currently popular belief.  In Time is a perfect example of such a film.  Benefiting immensely from a release date during the height of the Occupy Wall Street Movement, and from production a year earlier, when economic woes were beginning to highlight the divide between the haves and have-nots as the issue of the moment, the film capitalizes immensely on the idea that money is the root of all evil, but plays it as safe as possible, never straying beyond a most blunt interpretation of the idea, and outright refusing to weave any of society’s complexities into its narrative.  In Time is nothing more than an aphorism in search of an ideology, a parable in search of a meaning, a self-congratulatory, myopic, and willfully insulting and misogynistic excuse for a film, and one of the most repellent examples of Hollywood at its most careless.

Set in the year 2161, genetics allows for people to stop aging at twenty-five, the trade-off being that they only have one more year to live.  At that age, a digital clock display appears on their wrists and a countdown begins, so they can virtually see every second tick past.  Money has been eliminated as a commodity, replaced by time itself, which is now salary at work and the price of a cup of coffee on break; citizens place their wrists under a glowing green light where time is either added or subtracted.  At this point it is important to acknowledge the extent to which the filmmakers show that time has become the new currency, from bus fare costing a few hours, to payday loan stores that deal in time, all in place of money.  Society is divided into zones, which costs an increasing increment of years and decades just to cross from one into the other, and of course our story begins in the poorest of zones, where everyone is living paycheck to paycheck, or day to day, one of the film’s many attempts at overt parallels to real life. 

Justin Timberlake plays Will Salas, a factory worker who rescues a man with more than a century of time from a bar fight, and is rewarded with a confession that in the wealthiest zone there is more than enough time for everyone to be able to live forever.  He then tells Will that living forever is boring, gives him all his remaining time, and commits suicide before Will can stop him.  Armed, no pun intended, with more than a hundred years, Will decides to make a better life for himself and his mother.  But unfortunately that night, a bus driver refuses service to his mother because she does not have enough time to pay the fare, and it takes her just the amount of time she has left to run home, and in the film’s only clever scene, Will and his mom run toward each other as the seconds count down, expiring just close enough to him that she dies in his arms.  Angry at the way of the world, Will decides to cross over into the wealthiest zone and upset the balance that is constantly oppressing the people he lives among.  From this point the film is just a bunch of scenes from other, much better films.  Will gets chased by a Timekeeper, Cillian Murphy, the only actor who actually gives a performance in the film, who believes Will’s influx of time must have been stolen.  Will meets Weiss, a man with an infinity of time who happens to own the loan offices in the slum, and wins several hundred years from him in a poker game before kidnapping and holding hostage his daughter to escape capture by the Timekeeper.  He teaches her wonderfully enlightening things like how to hold a gun, and what it means to go hungry and of course she falls in love with him, and not only helps him elude the Timekeeper, but also rob time banks so they can spread the wealth around to everybody.

The glaring problem in all of this is the filmmakers’ inconsistent use of time as a commodity.  Half way through they hope we will forget how specifically they compared time to money, and instead view time as an abstract when Salas begins stealing it.  In Time draws all of its narrative direction from an idea of class warfare, and then proceeds to glorify it, while at the same time running amok with its own ideology.  We are meant to identify with Salas and Weiss’s daughter (a completely vacant Amanda Seyfried) as some sort of heroic Bonnie and Clyde, and rally behind their Robin Hood antics as they take time from the wealthy and disperse it amongst the population.  We are supposed to cheer them on despite the fact that if the same thing were to happen with all the money in the world the global economy would come to a grinding halt as everything would become worthless.  Much time is wasted in the film tracking down a single bracelet that holds one million years.  Weiss (a wasted Vincent Kartheiser, from Mad Men), a sorry excuse for a villain in a film that truly believes its audience will accept money as the ultimate bad guy, asks Salas if he gave one year to a million different people what purpose would it serve.  The screenplay is so one-note, so hell bent on seeing itself through that it doesn’t even bother to respond to such a perfectly salient and logical question.  More concerning is the fact that people are watching this and swallowing it whole. 

Written and directed by Andrew Niccol, the man behind 1997’s brilliantly understated Gattaca, 1998’s critically acclaimed Truman Show, and a bunch of garbage since that has helped his career nosedive to rock bottom, finally achieves that with In Time.  Justin Timberlake, perfect in past roles that required him to lift weights shirtless in the background and let the occasional “what up?” fall from his lips, has in Will Salas his superstar breakthrough role, and he has absolutely no idea what he’s doing.  Niccol is content to have him and Seyfried run around mugging for the camera, while delivering some of the most unbelievable lines of dialogue I’ve heard all year.  In fact, Timberlake’s reading of his lines makes it seem like the film was written by a twenty-something trust-fund-baby who is insecure around women and mad at his rich daddy for making him wait for his inheritance.  It is not enough to borrow Hollywood’s oft-used cliché of the Stockholm Syndrome to fill the screenplay’s gaps in developing the relationship between Salas and Weiss, character actions must still be germane to the story, and I submit that their roll in the hay, coming immediately after a random display of bravado on the part of Salas, and her subsequent googly eyes in his direction is much more indicative of the occasional reprehensible misogyny that plagues many contemporary Hollywood productions.  If there were any subtext in the film, any lines that required connecting in the audience’s mind, any complexity to the narrative, perhaps every aspect of this film would not be rendered so completely obvious.

In my head I hear a friend at the water cooler rolling his eyes and telling me that I should just suspend my disbelief and enjoy the film for what it is worth.  To that friend I would say In Time was worth exactly what I paid for it, the two hours of my life it robbed, and nothing more.  If only it were the year 2161, I could demand the two hours be added back on.  ZERO out of *****

Carnage

A wide-angle lens looks on from a distance at a high school exterior while teenagers mill about, in an opening scene that immediately reminded me of Cache, a brilliant meditation on perception and the act of seeing from ten years ago.  No conversations can be heard, only ambient sounds and faint chatter, and soon enough one child strikes another child with a stick.  What did I actually see?  Did I see what I thought I saw?  How coded was that single long take?  Such was the dramatic set-up in my mind, and I immediately began applauding director Roman Polanski for establishing quite visually any preconceived notions I had about the material.  Adapted from the Tony Award winning play God Of Carnage, by Yasmina Reza, with a story concerning four people, two sets of parents together in a room discussing the incident, one of the boy wielding the stick, and one of the boy who was struck, the restrictions in blowing it up theatre-size were quite obvious, and required a director able to overcome them.  Unfortunately, the parallels with Michael Haneke and Cache ended soon after they began, and any initial interest and audience good will becomes cashed in very early as Polanski succumbs to every one of those restrictions, and Carnage degenerates into four people screaming at each other in an extremely flat two dimensions.

Kate Winslet and Christoph Waltz play the assailant’s parents, an investment banker and a corporate lawyer respectively.  She mostly wants to keep the peace, but becomes increasingly, physically ill depending on the tenor of their arguments, and he, quick to dismiss the incident as boys being boys, is continuously interrupted by his cell phone, the caller updating him by the minute of the progress of a lawsuit.  Jodie Foster and John C. Reilly play the victim’s parents, an insecure bohemian who is currently writing a book about tragedies in Darfur, and a metal hardware salesman concealing a seething nihilism respectively.  She wants their son to apologize to her son, and he subconsciously does everything he can to keep the meeting going, as a reprieve from the monotony of his life.  Set inside Foster and Reilly’s apartment, the film’s rather long seventy-five minutes progress, and each character’s primary flaws are revealed and derided by everyone else, alliances form among all combinations of two, and each person gets his/her turn name calling and making everyone else feel miserable, as thematically, brace yourself now, the parents reduce themselves to mere children at a school playground.

But isn’t that what happens in the play, one might ask?  It takes about an hour to read the play to find out for oneself, but yes, I submit that it does, and also that theatre and film are such completely different mediums that what works in one will most certainly not work in another, that is to say without some actual thought put into the adaptation.  Film is a much more patent art form than theatre.  Audiences are guided to exactly what the director wants them to see, and emotions play out mostly on faces, which is why faces for radio are rarely seen on the big screen.  Theatre is more tolerant, as 99% of the audience cannot even see faces, so body language and stage choreography, not to mention booming voices, the dynamic of which becomes muted with film's volume control knob, are relied upon to convey meaning and connect emotionally with the crowd.  Film is a constant manipulation of spatial relations, from wide-angle to close-up, and when a character says something provocative, we expect to be told which character’s reaction is most important, while with theatre it is much easier to react ourselves, and as a logical extension, become more invested in what is going on.  Polanski robs us of that investment repeatedly.  This is material that places four people in one room for the duration, constantly talking over one another.  We are meant to see them all, all the time.  Usually arguments are between two people, so close-ups and shot/reverse shot are adequate conveyors of meaning for these situations.  The cinematic equivalent of God Of Carnage, however, to capture everything, would require a fixed perspective from one of the four walls, perfectly fine for a film like Paranormal Activity, but incredibly dull for Carnage.  The nature of film demands that editing take place, and the nature of film actors demands close-ups, and so Polanski needed to find other ways to make up for the film’s deficiency, like for example toning down the rather broad and theatrical strokes of hysteria the characters are prone to, which he also fails at.  In a film adaptation, it isn’t just the image that is blown up, but meaning as well, which means the projectile vomiting, the flower throwing, and the fits of seizure-level whining telegraphs the film’s subtext almost immediately, leaving the audience thoroughly irritated by the time the film ends when they realize it has gone nowhere else.  With everything superficial, and nothing more to grab hold of, no visual codes to decipher, my mind was free to pick apart everything I was seeing, and Carnage is full of moments that took me out of the story, until I no longer cared for any of the characters, bad news for a film, even worse news for a play adaptation.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in the first few minutes of the film when Winslet and Waltz are attempting to leave the apartment.  A mutual agreement had been reached regarding their child coming over later to apologize to Foster and Reilly’s child, and Winslet certainly wants to avoid further confrontation, and Waltz needs to get back to his litigation.  End of story, right there.  But with over an hour left, somehow they need to stop pushing the elevator call button and get back in the apartment.  How about a cup of coffee?  Sure, why not?  This simple exchange is wrong for two reasons.  First, inherent in the act of watching a play in a theatre is a subconscious benefit of the doubt constantly at work; we don’t expect to see skylines, or running water, let alone multiple locations.  We want the characters to stay in the same room, and so we conspire with the play to keep them together; in other words, our tolerance for implausibility is greater.  In a film we want people to leave the room, we want to see where they go and how they get there, and what problems they face along the way.  This leads to the second reason, the betrayal of a main principle of drama regarding character motivations.  Waltz and Winslet want desperately to leave, and we also want them to leave, so whatever makes them stay must trump that incredibly strong desire of which the audience is now complicit.  Accepting a spot of tea might work in England, or France where this play was written, but in New York City it wouldn’t get the time of day, let alone another hour of confrontation.  It is a near fatal misread that the film never quite recovers from.

There are moments in Carnage that are almost worth the price of admission.  Of all the actors, John C. Reilly fares the best, and there is a certain sadistic glee in watching him wave a drink around, and attack his wife for writing a book that she couldn’t possibly know anything about from her elitist, upper East side perspective.  And Waltz has a great time snaking his way through several moments where he dissects Jodie Foster’s choice of words with the precise language of his profession.  But for every one of these moments there is an appalling amount of juvenilia, mostly in what is arguably the worst performance of Jodie Foster’s career.  Ridiculously over-the-top, she is an insufferable creature, and Polanski destroys any redeeming qualities with his relentless close-ups of her constantly furrowed brow.  And Winslet?  Well, she never quite manages to conceal the fact that she is acting the entire time.

The final shot returns us to the schoolyard as a hamster scurries through the grass, and it is meant to signify Polanski’s attempt at another layer of meaning, that renders an earlier, precipitous argument moot.  But it’s too little too late.  With the film’s characters reduced to shouting heads, and the film’s desire to hold a mirror up to so-called authority figures an abject failure, Polanski has no claim upon which to stake his pretensions.  Carnage is Polanski’s worst film in decades, and the best argument I have seen in quite some time, for the continued support of community theatre.  ** out of *****

The Ides Of March

Old-style Hollywood meets old-world politics in The Ides of March, George Clooney’s compulsively entertaining fourth effort behind the director’s chair.  Adapted from the play “Farragut North,” Clooney opens the story up to multiple locations, and keeps the pacing brisk, cleverly balancing the demands of the story with the desires of an audience in the mood for more than talking heads.  The result is a remarkably adept, textbook example of classic Hollywood storytelling and subtle formalism that recalls Sidney Lumet and Orson Welles in equal measure, capturing some of the best ensemble acting seen all year.

The film takes place during the week leading up to the Ohio Democratic Presidential Primary, and follows the campaign of Governor Mike Morris, played by a subdued, elegant Clooney, in a supporting role here.  Ryan Gosling plays his campaign manager, Stephen Meyers, a role which, along with Driver in last year’s terrific Drive, makes for a career year for the actor.  This is his film through and through, as early scenes establish a wide-eyed optimism and genuine belief in a system which will ultimately become the age-old test and transformation of his character.  He idealizes Governor Morris and everything he stands for, and outlines this motivation in an early scene with Marissa Tomei’s New York Times journalist Ida Horowicz and Philip Seymour Hoffman’s Paul Zara, Stephen’s boss.  Naturally something comes along to shake things up, and a phone call from rival Democratic nominee campaign manager Paul Duffy, played by Paul Giamatti, precipitates much of the drama of The Ides Of March, which will ultimately involve Morris campaign intern Molly Stearns, played by Evan Rachel Wood.

The entire film plays out as people in rooms talking, but Clooney does not get restricted by his source material.  True to form, the film’s action is all in the acting and dialogue, as the narrative throws Stephen Meyers against the other characters like a pinball, where each of the supporting actors gets to deliver a pivotal scene that crackles with intensity.  Veterans of the campaign game, they are masters of their environment, trained to go in and win over a room quite easily.  Their personal opinions and feelings don’t matter, if they exist at all, and without any emotional or inspirational ties their experience makes them ciphers, attack dogs that only have to rely on their steely confidence when the rare occasion comes they find themselves losing their audience.  A scene between Paul Zara and Ohio senator Thompson, played by Jeffrey Wright, illustrates this as Zara lays out with precision how Thompson’s delegates will put Governor Morris over the top, but then words like “we need” begin to creep into the conversation when Zara realizes this meeting was lost before he even entered the room.  In The Ides Of March, and the campaign trail, it's not enough to just be confident, and personal belief becomes something your enemies can use to pull the floor out from under you.  Meyers’s babe-in-the-woods doesn’t stand a chance when he has to work against bears like this, instead of with them, where out in the private sector his passion and charm are bastions of hope and progress and worthy of inspiration and adulation, in these rooms, which decades ago would have been smoke-filled, his passion becomes gauche and irrelevant, and allows him to be continuously blindsided by politicians who win so they can play, and play with a stacked deck.  Stripped of this optimism he is rendered a mere boy amongst wolves.  Even intern Molly Stearns easily controls him, seducing him by playing to his ego.  It’s a classic conceit of man against society, and in this case the society is the political landscape, and considering the current temper of the country, most of Clooney’s work is already done for him, as shadiness among politicians does not require much in the way of a leap of faith from the average moviegoer. 

Clooney handles all of this with considerable aplomb, both behind the camera and in front of it.  This is not a democrat or republican film, details of political platforms are kept to a minimum and used only to establish Governor Morris as a viable candidate, and great care is placed so that they do not color a perception of him as anything other than believable.  His party affiliation correlates with the fact that most candidates who run on change and are prone to scandal happen to be democrat, and aside from a moment of partisan self-deprecation, when Duffy tells Meyers how the democrats can learn a lot from the way the republicans play the game, it is not essential to enjoyment of the film.  Clooney has a mostly transparent visual style, classic in the sense of establishing shots followed by close-ups, and shot-reverse shot editing that helps you to forget you are watching a film.  But he does not neglect when the story allows for more dramatic staging, such as Zara and Meyers in silhouette, arguing in front of a giant American flag, or capturing harsh shadows on the faces sharing a clandestine stairwell revelation, or a tracking shot as Meyers approaches a final showdown with his mentor.  It’s these moments that highlight this adaptation, and make it something special.  Clooney continues the tradition of actors who make pretty fine directors, from Warren Beatty to Clint Eastwood.  They usually produce films that actors love to star in, because they thoroughly understand what it is like to be in front of the camera, any preoccupation with the visual nature of the film is solely at the behest of the story, and what will help make the acting most effective, which most of the time is just knowing how to trust the screenplay and let it tell the story. 

One glaring issue I had with the film is that a huge plot twist about half way through hinges on Governor Morris’s campaign having no idea that the state of Ohio holds open primaries, where anyone can vote, not just those of party affiliation.  I do not believe they would be ignorant of this fact.  Call it dramatic license, or compressed time, but enough emphasis is placed on the fact that they had no idea, that it might take you out of the story for a while.  I do not know how it is handled in the play, but overall it is of slight consequence.  In the end the nature of this film as character study wins the day.  With first rate acting, and a director who knows how to accentuate it, The Ides of March gives audiences a glimpse into the life of a campaign, a story of a boy becoming a man, and ultimately a gripping potential back story of any of the talking heads that increasingly populate our televisions as this election year draws closer and closer to crunch time.

****1/2 out of *****

Moneyball

One could assume that Brad Pitt would fit like a hand in a batting glove into the great lineage of superstar actors who have taken their turn at bat in a film of America’s favorite pastime.  Robert Redford, Kevin Costner, John Cusack, and Robert De Niro to name a few, have lead films both good and great, while undeniably allowing passion for the game, perhaps a wishful thinking of a different career path, to seep from the constraints of their characters.  Brad Pitt certainly has the stature, and armed with the words of heavyweight screenwriters Steven Zaillian and Aaron Sorkin, it would seem that Moneyball has everything it needs to stand proudly alongside its homerun predecessors.  Unfortunately the screenplay is but an illusion of great writing, a superficial meditation on the logistics of baseball that plays out a little too close to the field in terms of audience investment, both intellectually and dramatically. 

It doesn’t take long to begin rooting for Brad Pitt as Billy Beane, the Oakland A’s general manager, introduced to us after yet another losing season, and currently embroiled in behind-the-dugout negotiations, and pressures to assemble a new team with the potential to actually win for a change.  Before we even know anything about him we like him, because he is Brad Pitt.  Hollywood banks on audience recognition and emulation all too often to insulate a screenplay otherwise lacking in substance.  But if that doesn’t do it for you, Beane also has an ex-wife, a daughter, and gosh darn it, he wants to change baseball.  See, baseball used to be about the game, and now it is all about money, and Beane’s anguish over this fact puts him in the same cinematic world as Tom Cruise’s Jerry Maguire.  You go Brad; you change baseball.  And that’s exactly what he sets out to do, enlisting the help of composite character Peter Brand, a Yale economics graduate who believes the secret to a winning team lies in statistics and probability.  Reducing the game to the percentages of time players get on base, Brand’s sabermetric approach is just what Beane needs to shake things up, and as might be expected, telegraphs clear opportunities in the script for drama as team dynamics are stretched to the breaking point through his building a team from a bunch of miscreants and minor league write-offs.  But surprisingly, for a Hollywood film, none of this material, however cliché, is ever mined for a dramatic payoff, and that’s where Moneyball fails to hit it out of the park.

An expected narrative trajectory for this type of film, which also happens to be found in actual Oakland A’s history, would be for the team to lose at first and then start winning, and that’s exactly what happens.  Early and often scenes between Beane and his team captain Art Howe, a usually great Philip Seymour Hoffman, make no attempt to hide the film’s belief that initial losses are due to Hoffman’s refusal to position the team in the correct manner to maximize statistical advantage.  Armed with barely an overview of Peter Brand’s methodology, the audience is left with no other reason to side with Beane than star power.  Beane is far too passive a character, storming out of the room in scene after scene, refusing to take action until the film’s running time dictates he finally trade-off some players so Hoffman has no choice but to do what he wants.  Throughout these scenes we dislike Howe's stubbornness; with a less recognizable actor in Beane’s shoes I’m not so sure that would be the case.  But the sheer number of these scenes still builds tension, and we long for the confrontation between these two characters once the team starts winning and Beane is proven correct all along.  But it never comes.  There is no such scene, and no release for the tension that, as a result, quickly begins to morph into dissatisfaction.  And that is Moneyball’s problem; in every conceivable area it consciously avoids subplots, populated by a cast of characters that are reduced to nothing more than local color for our Billy Beane.  His ex-wife is there, Robin Wright, an explicit tension between him and her new husband is there, and his daughter is there, but as Gertrude Stein famously said about Oakland itself, “there is no there there.”  Nothing ever comes of it.  It would take a matter of seconds to concoct any number of subplots with these characters, yet Steven Zaillian’s script defiantly avoids all of them.

One could applaud this approach I suppose, but it’s not hard to avoid all manner of clichés and pitfalls when you avoid all manner of storytelling altogether.  And it’s refusal to get too complicated with regards to sabermetrics means that while it turns away from a more traditional Hollywood blockbuster like Jerry Maguire, it doesn’t really turn toward anything.  Consequently, it is no accident that fictional Peter Brand, wonderfully played by Jonah Hill, who is a revelation here, all stoicism with a hint of underlying baseball fever, is Moneyball’s greatest asset.  His character delivers the film’s only original contribution to the pantheon of baseball films, but even he suffers, as being a foil to a character that barely evolves makes him seem like just an employee, not allowed to shine, when I would easily watch an entire film with him as the main character.  Moneyball would have benefited from a more detailed analysis of Brand’s revolutionary ideas.  It needed a few more scenes early on that were not afraid to completely lose the audience in baseball and mathematical jargon.  If the characters are real, and they believe what they are saying, then I will believe them.  Moneyball is too busy dumbing-down its subject matter while at the same time ramping up unfulfilled dramatic expectations.  ¾ of the way through the film it suddenly becomes about Beane’s desire to win, a final justification for his methodology, and a leftfield character arc that just seems grafted on, because the film’s lack of subplots don’t allow for Beane’s evolution.  The final exchange between Beane and the owner of the Red Sox is the greatest scene in the film, and has to have been written by Sorkin (The Social Network), who was called in for a rewrite after inital director Steven Soderbergh was fired, and who has an ear for dialogue that usually leads to great scenes because his characters talk the way we all secretly wish we did.  Here the entire film is summed up, and Brad Pitt’s hero status comes full circle, but no amount of million dollar dialogue can conceal the fact that Beane did not arrive at this moment, despite the film's belief to the contrary.  

Steven Zaillian’s career in the nearly twenty years since writing Schindler’s List overflows with material suited for a great writer.  But covering great material doesn’t automatically make it great, and it is this illusion that makes Moneyball completely transparent and unworthy of comparisons to The Natural, Bull Durham or Field Of Dreams, each in their own right exemplars of story first and ideology second.  Moneyball is minor league at best, a no-hitter that decided to be about numbers instead of characters, but then refused to let them all add up.  **1/2 out of *****

Contagion

Early in Steven Soderbergh’s star-studded, defiantly unglamorous Contagion, a doctor tells Matt Damon of his wife, Gwyneth Paltrow’s death.  Fortunately I have never experienced such a thing, but the strictly informational tone of his delivery struck me as authentic, and serves a good analogy to the approach of the filmmakers in crafting a quasi-art-house Outbreak.  The “storyline,” follows a deadly new disease, from cause to cure, through epidemic status, with a similar bedside manner, and for the first hour at least, uses this strategy effectively to build tension with each chilling scene.  Ultimately though, Contagion’s vision proves inconsistent, and its preoccupation with resolution becomes an infection that undermines its credibility, as the final act trades on its surgical precision with forced character arcs and unearned maudlin displays designed to tug at the heartstrings.

It is a shame, really, because the first half of Contagion is so smart, and so engaging.  Undeniably watchable, it’s hard not to imagine indie-giant Soderbergh relishing an opportunity to throw the pretty faces of Hollywood against a wall of inevitability; Gwyneth Paltrow’s autopsy, where her vacant, colorless, death-stare accompanies off-screen sounds of a saw cutting into her skull is the film’s iconic shot, a meta-moment where the director of Traffic and Oceans Twelve gets to be one and the same.  Never a stranger to multiple plotlines, Soderbergh doesn’t so much weave together stories, as he does situations.  He parallels scenes of Damon trying to protect his potentially-immune daughter, the CDC’s search for an antidote, the global government response, a doctor’s quest for patient zero, and escalating fears and repercussions at the community level, each populated by the Hollywood gene pool, and edited together as they would unfold in time, rather than by narrative cliffhangers, an all-to-common docudrama approach.  For my money, Kate Winslet’s epidemic intelligence officer dominates this part of the film, and not necessarily because of her acting ability, everyone in this film is first-rate.  The success of Contagion lies in its seemingly effortless transparency, without any overtly “acted” roles, the audience is able to take sides with whatever behind-the-scenes element they find the most interesting.  Soderbergh deftly manages to ask the question, would you rather watch what happens to a community through an epidemic or how the CDC responds to it, instead of would you rather watch Matt Damon save his daughter or Kate Winslet track down patient zero.  Soderbergh maintains that ethos throughout the film, but once Winslet’s situation is concluded, he simply cannot disguise the pull, and forced trajectory of Scott Z. Burns’s script towards a more character-centered, emotional resolution.

A good film could certainly have been told where Matt Damon re-creates a prom night for his quarantined daughter, or where the plight of the entire human race is boiled down to one small Hong Kong village, or where a government agent accused of nepotism gives away his personal antidote; it’s just this is not the same film with which we started.  Perhaps screenwriter Burns did not trust his audience.  More likely, Contagion was written for any potential outlet; but once Soderbergh became attached the Lifetime Network plot twists should have been jettisoned.  First on the list, Jude Law’s ridiculously overwritten conspiracy-theorist internet blogger, who capitalizes on the epidemic to level accusations of government and CDC collusion, where in his mind, money and nepotism rules the day, even in the face of the annihilation of ten percent of the world’s population.  I get what Burns is going after.  The problem is that it rings completely false through its manipulation of an obvious trigger-point.  The suggestion that Sanjay Gupta would lend credence to this braggart by having him a guest on his CNN show after the deaths of 12 million people is an insult to the audience.  He is completely overdrawn.  Of course people like that exist in the world, but how many conspiracy theorists garnered national attention after 9/11?  Even giving the film the benefit of the doubt with respect to compressed time, which I’m not inclined to do since every few minutes Soderbergh reminds us just how much time has passed, that sort of dissent is just button-pushing, and creates an agenda that conflicts with the film’s tone.

Contagion is an occasionally fascinating examination of a global crisis, an elevated disease-of-the-week docudrama by an A-list director that unfortunately turns into parable.  Ironically, a lesser director could have probably made a better film by surrendering to the melodrama.  Let’s face it, Outbreak IS that better film.  But in this case I’d rather prefer the parts to the whole, especially when seeing something in a different way, and for much of the time, Contagion is firmly in the hot zone.   ***1/2 out of *****