Film review: THE SAVAGES

THE SAVAGES is a touching, moving film, that starts with a great bang and then slows down to a fizzle. The film tells the story of Jon and Wendy Savage (Philip Seymour Hoffman and Laura Linney), who have to take care of their estranged father when he is diagnosed with dementia and moved into a nursing home in upstate New York. But there are lots of issues simmering under the surface, and the intellectual Savages (he is a Brecht scholar, she is an unproduced playwright after a Guggenheim Fellowship) buckle under the strain.

The first half-hour of the film is funny, fairly fast-paced, moving, and clever. Both leads are on top of their game, and Philip Bosco, who plays their dad, is very good throughout. But once Lenny Savage is moved into his nursing home, the film slows down to a much more lethargic pace, and instead of building into anything new, just wrings the issues set up in the first half-hour, only in a way that's not especially funny, moving, or insightful anymore. The characters become just a tad too self-involved, in a boring kind of way, and none of the promised "issues", when revealed, seem anything that bad, but more like middle-class whining (which Laura Linney's character at one point actually comments on, as if mentioning the elephant in the room exorcises it).

If you're into your existential indie films, you'll like it, if not, still try and rent it - because it starts off great, and almost manages to cross over.

***

Film review: NEW YORK, I LOVE YOU

PARIS, JE T'AIME, released in 2006, was a lovely umbrella movie, a varied, colorful love song to the French capital, with segments directed by such diverse helmers as Gurinder Chadha, Wes Craven, the Coen brothers, Alfonso Cuaron, Tom Tykwer, Gus van Sant, Alexander Payne, and Walter Salles; and featuring a varied international cast ranging from Elijah Wood and Natalie Portman to Miranda Richardson, Bob Hoskins, Willem Dafoe, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Steve Buscemi and Gena Rowlands. It had a distinctive cosmopolitan feel, a distinctive indie feel, and a huge variety of genres and tones, which meant uneven quality but never, ever, boredom and complacency.

NEW YORK, I LOVE YOU is a "sequel" that loses all of those qualities. The directors are fewer, and are either obvious, if second-tier or unexperienced, New York choices (Natalie Portman, Mira Nair, Joshua Marston, Brett Ratner) or a mixed bag of independent names (Yvan Attal, Fatih Akin, Shekhar Kapur); and the cast is more deliberately star-studded, boasting hot-at-the-moment names such as Shia LaBoeuf, Natalie Portman, Bradley Cooper, Orlando Bloom, Hayden Christensen, Anton Yelchin, Blake Lively and Rachel Bilson.

One painful thing to say about a film about New York is that it is, well, too white. It's a disgrace that the filmmakers are given the greatest, most cosmopolitan city in the world to film love in, and most of them just come up with middle-class white people smoking outside bars. The short pieces are also too narrowly defined, and where PARIS was full of inventive, random moments (Alexander Payne's ode to a lonely American tourist, Vincenzo Natali's tale of vampires, and so on), all the shorts in NEW YORK are about moment in time chance encounters, or pretend chance encounters, and as a result the film is nothing more than a succession of talky, repetitive vignettes with clumsy twists pasted on, the film school equivalent of a portmanteau movie, but with big name stars in it.

For some reason the producers also thought that making all the stories superficially intersect, as if this was the chill-out, red wine, Richard Curtis version of CRASH, would be a good idea, and so we get half-smart transitions that make New York feel small, boring, and stale, and in most of them the characters are found talking about New York and how great it is, desperately trying to explain to the audience why the film is so cool when it fails so miserably to make its own case.

There are a couple fun moments - there's a funny short opener with Bradley Cooper and Justin Bartha arguing in a cab, and Yvan Attal's segment is hilarious, carried off beautifully by Ethan Hawke and Maggie Q and the one truly brilliant twist present here. Anton Yelchin is a screen-grabbingly likeable presence in Brett Ratner's otherwise rushed segment, and Eli Wallach and Cloris Leachmann do a good job of the obligatory "funny grumpy old people" bit. But that's about it, and halfway through you'll be itching to just pick up, leave the cinema, and carry on with your own, much more exciting, life.

**

Film review: I AM A FUGITIVE FROM A CHAIN GANG

Mervyn LeRoy's I AM A FUGITIVE FROM A CHAIN GANG is a 1930s classic, a politically-minded film noir in which a World War I veteran and hero, James Allen (Paul Muni), is wrongfully accused of a crime and sent to work on a prison chain gang. There he encounters barbaric violence against the prisoners, who are made to work relentlessly and beaten if they take a break to wipe the sweat off their face, and are lashed and whipped at night if the guards and warden are unhappy with their work. Allen manages to escape, and makes his way out of the state and to Chicago, where he starts life anew in construction, working his way from the bottom to planner and surveyor. But the law is still on his trail, and his new wife (Glenda Farrell) is threatening to give him up if he doesn't keep on paying out...

Social commentary wasn't done much in 1930s studio pictures, and Warner Bros. took a huge chance on the film, based on a true story, which ended up being a huge success both commercially and critically. It was nominated for three Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Actor, and even today stands up as a brave, intelligent film, a kind of SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION for the Depression era.

There is the odd moment of exaggerated melodrama, and many of the characters (including Allen's brother the reverend, and everyone involved in the chain-gang prison system) feel like arguments on feet rather than people, but they help move the story along in a moving way. Despite clocking in at only 93 minutes, the film also has its moments of sluggishness, especially during Allen's first few days on the chain gang.

But the film is generally powerful and efficient, well directed by LeRoy who cleverly keeps the social commentary running through as a general theme of the little-man-pushed-down-in-hard-times even before Allen encounters the chain gang, as he returns from WWI unable to find any work despite his ethic, reliability, and war hero background. LeRoy, who also directed LITTLE CAESAR, is at his best with the twists, turns, and action scenes, and the movie is rarely less than entertaining.

It's also carried by an oft-talked about Paul Muni, who unfortunately, to the modern eye, is one of the weak links in the film. Muni was a great actor, and in most of his scenes here he carries himself wonderfully, in a way that's almost ahead of its time. He's also great casting in that he doesn't have the lightness of a James Cagney, or the weariness of a Humphrey Bogart, and so you're not always liking him - he's sometimes cruel, sometimes mocking, and his smile often comes off as a smirk, and it's those shadings that make James Allen feel like a real person rather than a simple martyr. But in many of the most important scenes to the story, Muni just plain tries too hard, and you can see himself taking the part too seriously, working in too many grimaces and tears and tragedy in moments that would have been best served underplayed (or at least not so obviously overplayed).

Still, I AM A FUGITIVE FROM A CHAIN GANG is a powerful, intelligent movie, in many ways ahead of its time, and it's worth seeing if only for the brilliant last scene and last line, which are now part of famous Hollywood canon, but best enjoyed if you don't see them coming.

***1/2

Film review: ZOMBIELAND

ZOMBIELAND is, to call a cat a cat, one of the most overrated films of this year. The premise is pretty simple: mad cow disease has turned the whole world into zombies, and a young kid, known as Columbus (Jesse Eisenberg), is running around trying to survive and make his way back from Texas to his hometown of Columbus, Ohio. On his way, he meets a big, scary-ass zombie killer, Tallahassee (Woody Harrelson), as well as a hot chick, Wichita (Emma Stone) and her grown-up-too-fast little sister Little Rock (Abigail Breslin), whose goal it is to make it to Pacific Playland in California, meant to be the last zombie-free bastion in America. What follows is a road trip full of colorful zombie killing and the occasional one-liner.

The problem is, that's all that follows. This is one of those cases of "if you've seen the trailer, you've seen the film", with the exception of one brilliant surprise cameo that helps the film take a fun left turn for 10 minutes. There's no plot other than the above, there's no depth, there's no subtext, there's not much inventivity, and after the first 20 minutes you've seen all the creative zombie killings you're going to see. It doesn't help that the comedy of zombies genre already has a few greats in the canon, foremost of them SHAUN OF THE DEAD, an avowed inspiration here.

Jesse Eisenberg is all right at doing Michael Cera light, even though his voice-over is one of the most irritating shortcuts on an already short trip you'll hear all year, and Woody Harrelson is great as Tallahassee, a Looney Tune character that fits him like a glove. Past the original surprise, Abigail Breslin just blends into the background, and poor Emma Stone, despite looking fantastically hot and having a captivating voice (seriously - listen to it) isn't all that much in the acting department and doesn't really manage to make Eisenberg's infatuation with her feel like it should be love rather than just horniness. Amber Heard pops up in a great gross-out short appearance early on, and oozes sexiness in ways Stone doesn't quite.

It's 90 minutes that will literally feel like 300, and let you feel talked down to and shallow when you leave. So enjoy those few zombie kills when they happen.

**

Film review: AN EDUCATION

AN EDUCATION is one of the most talked-about films of the year, and deservedly so. Based on a true story, it tells the story of Jenny (Carey Mulligan), a 16-year-old student in early 60s London, who is swept off her feet and out of her humdrum life by a dashing older man, David (Peter Sarsgaard). The luxurious life of nightclubs, dinners, and trips to Paris she finds with him gets in the way of her studies to go to Oxford, much to the dismay of her teacher (Olivia Williams) and parents (Alfred Molina and Cara Seymour).

AN EDUCATION has often been reviewed so far as an average film propped up by a breathtaking central performance, and where the reviews have been right in the latter case, they are definitely shortchanging the film in the former. EDUCATION is a lovely, heartfelt, intelligent film about growing up and being a woman, and with the exception of a cringing open titles sequence and a saccharine last couple of scenes, lives up to any other coming of age drama you'll ever see.

The era (1961 Britain, before the 60s were the 60s but were still kind of the 50s instead) is perfectly chosen and beautifully depicted, be it by the costumes, sets, locations, moods, or accents. Nick Hornby's script is a simple, beautiful thing, never talking down to the audience while moving at a breezy clip, and addressing the question every teenager today asks themselves twelve times a day: I get that I need an education, but what exactly is an education, and why do I need one anyway? It's gently feministic in the specifics, which is long overdue for a genre that usually serves up male bonding stories, and intelligently sidesteps easy answers, preachy speeches, and the trap of character-as-thesis that too often bogs down similar stories.

The main reason to see the film, however, is the acting, which is what elevates it above a well-made period drama and into memorable territory. Much has been said of Carey Mulligan's performance, and the fact is, no matter how many raves you'll have read and heard, you'll still leave the cinema breathless and impressed. She's subtle, genuine, real, fascinating, charming, beautiful, irritating, adorable, intelligent, naive, and eight million different other things with such a lightness and grace that makes you unable to take your eyes off her, and very well might see you walk off smitten.

The rest of the cast has either been overlooked or deviled, and it's a shame, as they're uniformly terrific, starting with Peter Sarsgaard, who's received a lot of stick for his performance but is actually - dare I say it - brilliant. His accent is solid if not top-notch, and his persona suits the character of David perfectly: someone who's a hustler, slick, but not too slick, someone you can understand having a fancy car and a fancy lifestyle and a fast mouth but also someone you can understand being sexually awkward, insecure, self-loathing, someone who needs to date 16-year-olds to actually feel impressive. It's his best turn since GARDEN STATE, and indeed much better than that as well.

Alfred Molina is heartbreakingly funny and moving as Jenny's dad, a beautiful portrayal of a certain type of dad and a certain type of Englishman, and Cara Seymour absolutely shines in her handful of moments as Jenny's mom. Dominic Cooper is terrific as David's friend, a too-slick-to-be-true dandy with long black eyelashes and a wet pout who needs to surround himself with material belongings to feel good, and he's an absolute upgrade from Orlando Bloom, who was originally meant to play the part, but would have been far too wimpy and monotone instead. Rosamund Pike is great as well as Cooper's airhead girlfriend - most of the script's throwaway one-liners are hers, and she giggles them out with panache, beautiful, stupid and practical, and most of the laughs in the cinema came thanks to her and her timing. Olivia Williams is also very good in her scenes, despite almost cartoony hair and wardrobe that beats you over the head with the fact that she's a dowdy unglamorous teacher, in case you hadn't noticed; and Emma Thompson does what Emma Thompson does, stealing the film in three scenes, strong, withering, and passionate, highlighting with every stern look the difference between a girl and a woman.

It's hard to tell how much Lone Scherfig should be credited for the film working so well - she does extremely well at holding dramatic moments and editing comedic pace, but the few set-pieces where she actually has any serious directing to do are all turned into over-the-top montages of the kind you'd expect from Beeban Kidron, who ironically was the first person attached to direct. She's very much supported by a cinematographer, John de Borman, who can capture both lush and Englishness like anyone else (see his work on LAST CHANCE HARVEY, MISS PETTIGREW LIVES FOR A DAY, or THE FULL MONTY), and by Britain's most remarkable young casting director Lucy Bevan, who in addition to this film put together the casts of ST. TRINIAN'S, ME AND ORSON WELLES and THE DUCHESS, all of which feature one or more breakout turns.

In any case, AN EDUCATION is a film you'll remember fondly for a long time, which will make you feel young and wide-eyed again.

****

Film review: STATE OF PLAY

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Film review: MOON

MOON is one of those films I've been looking forward to ever since it started being written about during production. A great lead actor, a small budget resourcefully spent, a great-looking 70s retro vibe, and a promising young director with a quirky take and a (fairly) entertaining Twitter account. The problem is, MOON isn't actually a great movie. It's a reheated Twilight Zone episode with a tired twist, that serves more as an acting showcase than anything else. The problem is, we all already know that Sam Rockwell is a great actor, and this isn't even close to his best performance - it's showy, sure, and the whole "playing two parts" things is an obvious standout, but the dual role is done in such an 80s style you never really get taken on by the illusion.

Duncan Jones's direction is also slow and self-serving, confusing "nothing happening" for tension, and is badly served by Clint Mansell's pounding ARMAGEDDON-style score and a script in which every single plot twist and turn can be seen coming fifteen minutes early, and feels like something you already saw on a William Shatner TV show growing up.

**