Hokum, Contempt, and Disdain

There is probably a movie to be made about the early days of the Civil War. You have young men leaving for a great war, confident in their ability to whip the other side and return trailing clouds of glory. You have longtime regular Army comrades going their separate ways, North and South, and breaking longtime friendships and loyalties. You have brother against brother, father against son, America against itself. It is the stuff of a great movie, but that movie is not Gods and Generals.

There is probably a movie to be made about the Battle of Fredericksburg. Strategically, it was inconsequential; it blunted a Northern invasion that would be successful in later years, with U.S. Grant leading the way. Tactically, it was the great rout of the death-or-glory charge, the end of a way of conducting civilized warfare. The Army of the Potomac crossed a large, open field south of the town of Fredericksburg, charging toward entrenched Confederate positions on Marye’s Heights, with the leading elements of the Army of Northern Virginia crouched behind a stone wall. The initial Northern assault was shot all to pieces, but bungling Union generals kept sending men into the killing fields, unaware of the magnitude of the disaster. It is the stuff of a great movie, but that movie is not Gods and Generals.

There is probably a movie to be made about the life and character of Stonewall Jackson. The model here is, of course, Patton, a grand epic with a great and polarizing figure at its epicenter. They don’t make them much more polarizing than General Thomas Jackson. Down South, he is the great Confederate might-have-been, the martyred Achilles of the War of Northern Aggression, the stainless paladin of the Stonewall Brigade. Up North, he is something else, a madman, a rebel, a hard-driving eccentric fighting his way through a succession of weak Northern generals to further the cause of slavery and human oppression. It is the stuff of a great movie, but that movie is not Gods and Generals.

Gods and Generals tries to tell these stories, and others beside, but is hampered throughout by its general mediocrity, lack of focus, and utter narrative clumsiness. It is not quite the worst movie of 2003, not yet, but as it clocks in at just under four hours, it is by far the longest bad movie of the year. And it’s an expensive failure, too. Although it gets the period details right — the gaudy battle flags, the armies of Civil War reenactors, the wrecked city streets of Fredericksburg — the movie is flat, unengaging, and wretched. At best, Gods and Generals is an ode to that dangerous sentiment, “rebel pride”, but it has nothing else to be proud of.

Gods and Generals was, of course, doomed to failure from its very first breath. The movie springs from a book by literary grave robber Jeff Shaara. His father, Michael Shaara, wrote The Killer Angels, one of the great novels of the Twentieth Century, a balanced and sad disquisition of the Battle of Gettysburg and the manifold follies and cruelties on both sides, mixed in with the towering heroism of the 20th Maine on Little Round Top and Pickett’s Virginia Brigade on Cemetery Ridge. Jeff Shaara has a tithe of his father’s talent, but was able to parlay this into a career of his own writing big, bloated period epics. The movie of Gods and Generals has all the weaknesses of Shaara’s work — a devotion to Civil War iconography for its own sake, a reverent, almost sappy tone, and a committment to mediocrity — and builds on them.

The first act of the movie, the preparation for war, is slushy and weak but not unwatchable. (It also features a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it cameo from my old boss Phil Gramm, which is mostly why I went to see the movie.) Robert Duvall plays R.E. Lee, and his only good scene is his first one, where he explains to an overfed and overbearing Union official that he cannot lead an invasion of his native state. (Duvall is almost wholly wasted here; he shows up from time to time to deliver his famous one-liners — “It is well that war is so terrible, else we should grow fond of it”, for example — and disappears.

But there isn’t any depth to any of it, not any heartbreak about the ending of the Union. The best scenes in Shaara’s book are those involving the relationship between Winfield Scott Hancock and Lewis Armistead, friends in the old army separated by geography and loyalty; the movie reduces both characters to little more than walk-ons. There’s one worthwhile scene where a son runs off to join the Stonewall Brigade over his father’s objections, but this is outweighed by the vast number of scenes that are pure hokum and little more.

The battle scenes are what sells the movie, and bright and vibrant they are, and meticulously created. But Gods and Generals, here, as everywhere else, badly needs an editor. The Fredericksburg scenes are incredibly drawn out, especially an incredibly long and baroque speech by Jeff Daniels about the Roman legions or some other nonsense. (Plus, there’s a set of “Zouave” soldiers in one of the scenes that look just like Santa and his elves.) The Bull Run scenes don’t give the audience a sense of what is going on; the soldiers pretty much wander around the battlefield. Only the Chancellorsville scenes have any sort of coherence, but they are near the tail end of a very long and dull movie.

(Of course, nobody’s perfect; the Internet Movie Database merely notes that “There are a number of geographical, historical and factual errors in the representation of the details of the American Civil War,” and leaves it at that. Sharp-eyed viewers will notice that the Peninsular Campaign and the Battle of Antetiam seem to happen in an alternate universe; General McClellan’s name is not mentioned at all, and Lincoln is mentioned exactly once.)

The problem here is that there’s a serious imbalance between the battlefield and its consequences. The battlefield scenes are nice and heroic and all that, and the sight of the brave men carrying the banners into conflict (yes, and even the ones with the St. Andrew’s cross, you know what I mean) lift the heart in a way that not even the most pedestrian script or shallow acting can diminish. But when the action changes to the field hospitals and the freezing killing grounds of Fredericksburg, the attention to period detail sort of falls off. The field hospital features one discrete drop of blood falling onto the keys of a piano. The wounded men on the battlefield lie quietly and politely, because a tortured scream would hurt the movie’s chances of a PG-13 rating. And nobody crosses the Southern lines to scavenge shoes or ammunition from the dead, because that wouldn’t be nice.

However, the aspect of the movie that most misses the mark is that which details the life of Stonewall Jackson. First, Gods and Generals completely ignores the general’s Shenandoah Valley campaign, which is like a biography of Babe Ruth that never shows him hitting a home run. Second, Stonewall Jackson knew how to ride a horse; the fact that actor Stephen Lang does not should have been corrected. Third…

Rather than get into the “third”, let me provide you with one piece of advice here. If you see the movie in the theater, when the intermission starts, leave. I could not be more serious about this. Everything after the intermission is horrible; mind-killingly bad. Those of you with DVD players know how deleted scenes are sometimes included; almost all the post-intermission scenes should have been deleted. You have some prosy Jeff Daniels speechifying about slavery — more about this in a minute — and a couple of other time-wasters. But you primarily have an incredibly long and drawn-out sequence involving the friendship between Stonewall Jackson and a five-year-old girl.

Now, this may have happened. It may have happened. It may have happened in real life just as it happened in the movie. I don’t care. I have never, ever in my life wanted to throw popcorn at the movie screen more than during these wretched scenes. There has never been a movie child as annoyingly cute as this one, or a moment so cloyingly horrid as the one where Stonewall Jackson gives her a piggyback ride. That these scenes exist in a movie that is well over three hours long is proof of the appalling contempt of all concerned for the good of the audience and the spirit of moviemaking. Shame on everyone involved.

Oh, and what about slavery?

Slavery is such an afterthought in this movie that it ought to be an afterthought in the review. But that wouldn’t be right, or fair. The final, crowning touch of awfulness in the steaming mass of offal that is Gods and Generals is the movie’s disdain for the issue of slavery. The African-American characters that appear are servile and humble and irrelevant. The horror of slavery is completely elided; there’s no sense of what any of these people in blue or gray are fighting to eradicate or protect.

The focus of Gods and Generals is on Lee and Jackson, which is fine as far as it goes. But we never, ever, not even once hear Lee (a slaveholder himself) on the subject; the one time we hear Jackson talk about it, it is in direct conversation with the Almighty, on such piously hypocritical terms that it calls out for ridicule and invective on the grand scale. (Speaking of that, if Ted Turner says one word, one single word on the threatened Georgia referendum about the state flag, he ought to be hung by his toes after ponying up $60m for this Confederate revisionist atrocity.)

Now, there might have been a good movie about the struggles of good and honorable men like Lee and Jackson and their role in choosing to support the insupportable mechanisms of slavery, and their decision to turn their backs on the Union to fight for a Southern Confederacy that was of the slaveholders, by the slaveholders, and for the slaveholders. But that movie is not Gods and Generals. Not even close.

Holdin’ On To Nothin’ But The Wheel

The scene in Gone In 60 Seconds that really hooked me was a disquisition on contract law, of all things. Bad guy Christopher Eccleston has a contract with car thief Giovanni Ribisi. Ribisi must deliver 50 primo stolen cars by 8 a.m. Monday in order to earn $200,000. Ribisi gets a $10,000 advance to help him along. Unfortunately, while stealing a Porsche from a showroom floor, Ribisi attracts the attention of the police. He escapes arrest, but the cops capture and impound the cars he’s stolen so far.

In walks Nicolas Cage, Ribisi’s big brother and retired master car thief. Cage recognizes that the contract is in breach. He offers the equitable remedy of recission. In recission, the parties revert to status quo ante, and Cage offers Eccleston his $10,000 back. Eccleston rejects the offer, instead requiring specific performance. Cage must complete the terms of the contract and deliver the cars in four days. Contract law generally doesn’t require specific performance, you understand, but Eccleston has some leverage; if Cage doesn’t come through, his brother will be killed.

(I hate to use the word “leverage” after what Travolta did to it in Battlefield Earth, but it was appropriate. Sorry.)

As a way to open a movie, this isn’t as snappy as Tom Cruise standing on a big rock and throwing his sunglasses away before they explode. That is of no consequence. Gone In 60 Seconds is the movie that Mission Impossible 2 should have been. You have an impossible mission, a master criminal, a gang of experts, an evil, preening bad guy, and an action-filled climax worthy of the great Jerry Bruckheimer.

The mission is harder than it looks. Cage and his cohorts are given a list of 50 cars to steal, all of them honeys. This is vitally important to the movie. Cage and his merry band aren’t just stealing Honda Accords and Toyota Tercels and Chevy Cavaliers for parts. Cage and his crew have to be likeable, and there’s nothing likeable about your average, run-of-the-mill car thief. Car thieves hurt people and drive up all our auto insurance premiums. Cage, however, is stealing expensive toys from rich people; often, toys that the rich people aren’t even playing with. All of us, in a place deep down in our hearts, can’t help but smile when we see someone stealing a symbol of conspicuous consumption like a Cadillac SUV or a new Ferrari. (Gone In 60 Seconds handles this so well that, when I got out of the theater, it was all I could do to keep from stealing the Lexus SUV parked next to me, or at least keying the paint.)

After three huge duds — the mind-blowingly awful Snake Eyes, the Schumacheresque 8MM, and Scorcese’s Bringing Out The Dead — Cage needs a huge hit here, and he scores big-time. He’s got the black leather jacket and the black designer T-shirt and when he sits behind the wheel of a classic car, he’s the epitome of cool. My guess is that Cage figured that he needed to do a movie that was less about acting and more about style; and in that, he succeeds brilliantly.

The only problem with Gone In 60 Seconds is that there’s a long takeoff for a short flight. The movie spends a little too long on the problems of recruiting assistant car thieves, with both Robert Duvall and Angelina Jolie appearing in scenes where they initially decline to get involved, but show up later anyway. (This is too bad, really, because neither one of them is actually featured much in the movie. The real showstopper of the car thieves is the hilarious Chi McBride, seen most prominently on the John Larroquette TV show.) There’s a lot of time spent on Delroy Lindo’s policeman character, and his attempts to thwart the mission. There’s a lot of time spent riding around, taking pictures of cars that the gang is planning to steal. (And a good thing, too, as it turns out.)

Most of the car thefts go off smoothly, with more emphasis on gadgets than action. That is, at least, until Cage steps behind the wheel of his beloved Shelby GT 500 Mustang and launches one of the damndest chase scenes since the hallowed Speed. Everything about this movie is about that chase, which involves Cage chasing both the cops and the clock to deliver the last of the stolen cars to the pier on time.

There’s a perfectly awful Standard Hollywood Ending following the chase scene that involves a deserted factory and a high catwalk, but you can ignore that. You can ignore lots about this movie, but you can’t ignore its final distillation; a man driving a car really, really fast, with people chasing him. Gone In 60 Seconds is, to paraphrase the Patti Loveless song, about nothin’ but the wheel. That’s plenty.

True Romance

We are fortunate to live in a country with so many different romantic ideas; the one in The Good Girl is pretty typical. Just go. Drop everything. Take off with the one you love and leave your life behind. Hit the road, drive from town to town, until you can make a new start somewhere where nobody knows you, where you’re a stranger, where the past is something that’s disappeared with the 8-track player and the Memorial Day doubleheader.

But like so many romantic ideas, the idea of romantic escape is pretty impractical. I mean, first of all you have to pack, and if you leave quickly, you’re going to make a mess. And you have to leave your job behind; even if you hate it, it still pays the bills. And what if leaving — no matter how depressing your circumstances are now — is an even bigger mistake than staying? Taking off, leaving, escaping sounds so romantic, but if you really thought about it, weighed the consequences, would you do it? Could you do it?

This is Jennifer Aniston’s dilemma, and it takes her more or less the entire movie to figure it out. She is in a tough spot. She’s just turned thirty, she wants a child, but hasn’t been successful in conceiving with her husband (John C. Reilly). And he’s a piece of work, too. He’s a housepainter, and a slob, and a pothead. Worse, he’s joined at the hip to Bubba (Tim Blake Nelson), his housepainting partner, and a man too dumb to display the Texas flag properly.

Things don’t get any better at work, where she is trapped behind the cosmetics counter of Retail Rodeo, doing makeovers for the fashion victims of the greater Southwest. Her co-workers range from the overtly religious to the nosy to the tragically hip. (The latter is played to the hilt by Zooey Deschnanel from Almost Famous, who is largely, but not quite, wasted as the comic relief.) Aniston is bored and blue, dreaming of escape, but loaded down with care.

It’s not too much longer before Jake Gyllenhaal finds her. Gyllenhaal (Moonlight Mile) is Holden Caufield-lite, a weedy young cashier at the Retail Rodeo, with pretensions of being a novelist, and a charming way with words. Aniston doesn’t know him ten minutes before she’s venting; her husband is a pig, and she’s depressed and unhappy about it. True romances have started with less.

They fall for each other right away — and along the way, it’s important to note, they run a veritable little clinic on how not to handle a sleazy affair in a small Texas town. But in the midst of sneaking around, and furtive groping in the Retail Rodeo storeroom, and long lunches together, something horrible happens. Aniston’s character develops a conscience.

Conscience, as it turns out, is inimical to the entire spirit of romantic escape. Escaping involves forgetting your own life, but conscience remembers, conscience won’t let you forget, conscience keeps pulling you back in no matter how badly you want to get out. Jennifer Aniston’s (quite extraordinary, really) acting performance derives from understanding how her character’s conscience is twisting her around like a pretzel, piling lie on top of lie, betrayal on top of betrayal.

The Good Girl, unfortunately, never got the credit it deserved; the “Cast of Friends Kiss of Death” principle doomed it from the beginning. But the movie is thoughtful, and honest, and sympathetic to Aniston’s plight and her desires. And if, at the end, she is rewarded unduly for her choices, one can’t help but still wish the best for her.

Toffee-Nosed Cakesniffers and Horrible Old Bats

Gosford Park features Maggie Smith as the Countess of Trentham, and seldom, if ever, has one character so completely encapsulated a movie. Smith’s character is a horrible old bat. She is selfish and demanding and hateful. She is consistently annoying and intentionally rude. She is obsessed with what people wear and table settings and marmalade and gossip. She is mean-spirited and vicious, in a polite sort of way. Worst of all, she is a tiresome old bore.

Robert Altman - who is getting to be a horrible old bat himself - is the director of Gosford Park, and he has created a long, pointless, pretentious meandering tale about a 1932 hunting party in the British countryside that culminates in the murder of an obnoxious aristocrat. Gosford Park is filled to the rafters with loathsome highbinders, insufferable butlers, toffee-nosed sycophants, abhorrent poseurs, and downtrodden servants. It is riddled with class and status and rank, preoccupied with wealth and titles and fame. It has a sharp eye for jewelry and costumes and period cars and the way that people can use class distinctions to belittle others.

The world of Gosford Park - with its ornate table settings, its small army of household staff, its Edwardian splendor and Victorian snootiness - is designed to evoke one reaction in an American middle-class audience, and that reaction is resentment. It’s present in the very first scenes of the movie, which features poor Scottish lady’s maid Kelly Macdonald standing out in the freezing rain in order to help Maggie Smith open a Thermos of coffee. How inconsiderate, we think. Later, we meet Claudie Blakely as the middle-class wife driven to tears by the catty comments of the other guests. How thoughtless, we think. But that’s the least of it. The whole movie is based on arrogant la-de-dah blue-bloods treating their servants like dogs, and the head servants passing on their poor treatment to the kitchen staff and lady’s maids. Gosford Park is a cavalcade of resentments, large and small, spaced out over 137 endless, everlasting minutes. There’s nothing inherently wrong with exploring the themes of resentment and class antipathy and snobbishness, but the constant harping on these themes makes Gosford Park an unpleasant, tiresome, wearying ordeal.

Having said that, it’s impossible to entirely hate and despise Gosford Park. Despite being overlong, poorly paced, and essentially pointless, and cursed with weak characterization and an incomprehensibly large cast, Gosford Park is not completely horrible and wretched throughout. That it is not is testament not to any residual skill Altman may have left but to the overall excellence and talent of its large and sprawling ensemble of skilled British actors.

There are great performances here both from the haughty “upstairs” aristocrats and the humble “downstairs” servants. Maggie Smith has the showiest part amongst the blue-blood set, and does an admirable job; she almost redefines what it is to be a horrible old bat. Kristen Scott Thomas looks smashing draped all over a succession of sofas, although she’s not given nearly enough of an opportunity to be nasty. Camilla Rutherford makes the most of her underwritten role as a dewy-eyed innocent. Jeremy Northam is appropriately dishy as the heartthrob movie star. Bob Balaban does a brave job as the token American, but he’s almost forgotten halfway through the movie.

Most of the real talent is “downstairs” though, and there’s enough good acting that one almost doesn’t notice Derek Jacobi, which tells you something. Emily Watson steals the movie as the saucy housemaid; she’s the one character in the movie that you’d like to spend more time with. Helen Mirren and Eileen Atkins are marvelous as the feuding housekeepers. Alan Bates is priceless as the stiff-upper-lip butler. Stephen Fry, as the clueless police inspector, brings the closest thing to comedy in the whole dreary mess. (Fry does a very good job, but his character is so close to his part in the fourth Blackadder series that one wonders why Altman just didn’t bring in Rowan Atkinson and Miranda Richardson and have done with it.)

Gosford Park is almost worth seeing for its performances but not quite. There is some good acting work here, but overall it is wasted by the pointless, humorless, endless aspects of the movie. Altman does an excellent job of capturing the unpleasant atmosphere of being trapped in a rambling English country mansion with a collection of unspeakable cakesniffers. Why anyone in his right mind would want to relive that experience, though, is another question.

I Like It Like That

She asked me what kind of movies I liked, and I couldn’t answer. “All sorts of movies,” would have been true, but it wouldn’t have been an answer. Say “action movies” and she’ll think you’re just some typical guy who would drag her to Jean Claude Van Damme kickboxer movies. Say “science fiction movies” and she’ll think you’re a member of the geekhood, some sort of inane loser who can’t match his socks. Saying “Quentin Tarantino movies” or, God help you, “Jackie Chan movies” wouldn’t help matters on that front, either. “Independent movies?” Please.

It’s not any better to go the other way, either. Say “gushy romantic movies”, and there’s not telling what she’ll think of that, probably not anything good. (I think I ended up saying something about how I didn’t see a lot of foreign movies, and changing the conversation to how good Being John Malkovich was.)

Of course, at that time, I hadn’t seen The Green Mile. I wish I had. That way, I’d have a ready-made answer: “I like movies like The Green Mile.” And I liked The Green Mile for… oh, well, for several reasons.

I like movies with Gary Sinise in them. Nitpickers will point out that Sinise is in The Green Mile for only a moment, and his performance is hardly the most stirring in the picture. Fine. I like Gary Sinise. I especially like it when he hooks up with Tom Hanks. The Green Mile isn’t quite in the same neighborhood as Forrest Gump or Apollo 13, but the caliber of acting is just as high.

And, you know, when you think about it, there are a lot of actors in this movie who have the same high acting ethic as Sinise. Consider the work of David Morse and James Cromwell, two talented actors who have spent a lot of time lately playing heavies. They’re both here in second-banana roles, as a prison guard and a prison warden, respectively. Fortunately, instead of playing the bad guy, both Morse and Cromwell get roles where their inner decency gets to shine through. It’s fun to see tough-guy actors play vulnerable for a bit — the same tough-but-vulnerable style that makes Sinise such a great actor. (Hanks, of course, has perfected tough-but-vulnerable, and gets another shot at playing Henry Fonda here. And the lumbering, humongous Michael Duncan has the archetypical tough-but-vulnerable role as inmate John Coffey.)

I like movies with realistic Bad Guys in them. I’m sure you’ve noticed that, lately, every Bad Guy in the movies is some kind of supergenius. This trend reached its culmination not too long ago with Con Air, featuring an all-star cast of supersmart crooks. (Perhaps, given the recent advances in law enforcement, you have to be pretty smart to get away with crimes.)

But evil wears a thousand faces, and the supergenius villain is just one. One of the things I liked about The Green Mile is how we get to see a lot of those faces.

You’d expect to see a lot of facets of evil in a prison movie, anyway. Most of The Green Mile takes place in Cellblock E of the Louisiana State Penitentiary, known as the “green mile” partially because of the green linoleum floors and partially because it’s the death row, the “last mile” before execution. It’s not a homelike place, but it’s not a brutal, evil place, either. (Morse’s character is nicknamed “Brutal”, but that’s just irony.) The guards have the attitude that the death house is more of a long-term intensive care ward, and are treated well in return by the prisoners. Graham Greene plays a silent-but-proud inmate. Harry Dean Stanton shuffles through the movie as a prison trusty. Michael Jeter makes a strong impression as a pathetic, broken-down Cajun lifer. (Jeter usually annoys me a great deal, but it’s nice to see him in a good role.)

The banality of evil is illustrated by Sam Rockwell as new prisoner “Wild Bill” So and So. Rockwell gets to chew up nearly as much scenery here as he did as the red-shirted crew member in Galaxy Quest. His antics liven up the soggy midpart of the movie — especially when he gets into a.. er… contest with the guards — but one believes that, if he stays on the Green Mile long enough, that he’ll get just as broken-down as the rest of the cellblock.

But the real evil inside the prison walls isn’t in a cell. The real bad guy on the Green Mile is a guard, one Percy Wetmore (Doug Hutchison). Percy, you see, just happens to be the Governor’s nephew, which means in Depression Louisiana that he can get away with about pretty much anything he pleases. He is vain, petulant, and casually cruel, both to the inmates and to his fellow guards. Not only does Percy have the best personality in the movie, it is he — far more than Hanks’s bland prison guard or the inarticulate John Coffey — that keeps the motor of the movie humming along during its three-hour length. It’s his character that shows the true subtle face of evil. Percy manages to commit the most evil act of the year in movies, but even this act is subtle and understated. More than anything else, The Green Mile reminds us that evil isn’t always over-the-top.

I like smart storytelling. Finally, the best thing about The Green Mile is the story. Frank Darabont pulls off another bravura performance in his second adaptation of a Stephen King prison novel.

The Green Mile is nowhere near the movie that The Shawshank Redemption was, of course, and it would be unfair to make such comparisons anyway were they not inevitable. (My theory is that Shawshank is rooted much more strongly in the problems of the heart and the triumph of the spirit than The Green Mile, with its emphasis on the supernatural, can be.) What both films share, though, is a great story expertly told. Shawshank is a better story, but it depends on one shattering moment that changes our perception about the movie. The Green Mile is the lesser tale, but it is told more artistically, with the story threads carefully stacked up one by one.

My boss does these three-dimensional jigsaw puzzles, and she brought one into the office the other day that was a representation of Mount Rushmore. The puzzle is just some irregularly shaped pieces of cardboard, none of which look like much of anything. Instead of locking together, these pieces stack one on top of the other, and a shape forms around the contours of the edges. The Green Mile is built in much the same way. One piece stacks on top of another piece with artistic precision. And even if you think you know what piece is next, there are lots of other pieces that have to be put in place first — with the final result looking quite different than what you might expect at first glance. Instead of one big surprise, The Green Mile has lots of little surprises that add up in time. (The original novel, as you may recollect, was published in serial form, which could account for the Dickensian structure of the screenplay.)

Of course, there are things I didn’t like about The Green Mile (namely, the bookend structure of the beginning and ending which apes the structure of Saving Private Ryan) and things that I liked, but not well enough to include in the review (the Barry Pepper performance, let’s say, as long as we’re on the topic of Saving Private Ryan). There will be things about the movie that, should you see it, you will like more than the things I have enumerated here. And that, finally, is the best recommendation I can give for The Green Mile. If this is the kind of movie you like, you should go and discover its good points for yourself.

All We Still Have Time To Regain

One of the old theater stories is about the bad German actor who was booed when he was playing Hamlet. He turned to the audience, and said, “Don’t blame me; I didn’t write this crap.”

Ron Howard’s version of The Grinch Who Stole Christmas is not Shakespeare, but it draws from the work of five other spectacular talents. The story itself is derived from the greatest English short story, Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, fused with the work of the great American poet and illustrator Thomas Nast, creator of The Night Before Christmas. The two stories were refined and cast into deathless rhyme by the legendary Dr. Seuss. Then, all the elements found their highest expression in the Chuck Jones cartoon, as narrated by Boris Karloff.

This is a lot for Howard to live up to; imagine bringing dessert to a potluck dinner at Julia Child’s, or picking out paint chips for a Frank Lloyd Wright house, or choosing the cover art for a Larry McMurtry novel. No matter how good a job Howard did in directing the live-action version of The Grinch, or how good a job that Jim Carrey did in playing the part, the film version was bound to be a disappointment at some level.

The Grinch excels to the extent that it is faithful to the source material, and fails badly when it departs from it. The most successful aspect of the movie is its visual design, which is as faithful to the Seuss drawings as it is possible to be. Every bangle, every bauble, every car and every Who and every present is translated from the static two-dimensional page to vibrant, glowing three-dimensional life. Both the teeming streets of Whoville and the lonely squalor of the Grinch’s lair atop Mount Crumpit are masterpieces of the lively art of set design, and are by far the best thing about the transition to live-action.

Most of the movie’s failings can be evenly divided between the weaknesses in Carrey’s performance and the holes in the plot. Carrey has obviously — and wrongly — taken Robin Williams’s bravura performance in Aladdin too much to heart, throwing most of his lines over the heads of the youngsters in the audience in an attempt to draw some cynical, postmodern laughs out of the adults. Combine this with the characteristic Carrey exaggerated physical comedy, and a snarly, grinding delivery, and the Grinch is hard to take, hard to watch.

Furthermore, we’re with the Grinch for far longer than the original cartoon, and the first hour of the movie covers ground outside the original story. The new material covers the Grinch’s origins, almost as if he were one of the X-Men, and it’s pretty awful. The lowest points come from veteran sitcom actors Jeffrey Tambor and Christine Baranski, who play two completely extraneous Whoville denizens. (Oh, and there’s Clint “I Really Need A Job, Ron” Howard as Tambor’s weasel of an aide.) Nothing they do — other than Baranski’s wielding of a fantastic Seuss contraption — advances the plot or is worthy of the audience’s time and interest.

Although the first half of the movie is just awfully acted and awfully written, the one thing it does well is satirize the overcommercialized nature of Christmas. (Which satire, of course, the movie itself betrays by its countless commercial tie-ins, but that’s another story.) The Grinch counterparts the relentless hustle and bustle of a Whoville Christmas with the sad-eyed musings of Cindy Lou Who (Taylor Momsen), who wonders if the real meaning of Christmas is being lost among the presents and the ribbons and the bows.

It’s a resonant phrase in the movie, and in countless others, this “real meaning of Christmas”, and it’s always assumed that the audience knows what it is without being told. It’s worthwhile, though, to explore it. The Christian conception of Christmas is the beginning of the process of redemption and reconciliation that ends with Calvary and the Resurrection. Is it any wonder, then, that the most often-told stories at Christmas — those of Ebenezer Scrooge, George Bailey, Charlie Brown, and even Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer — are stories of hope and reconciliation? It is that story that the The Grinch tells, and the true measure of the movie is how well it tells it.

As everyone should know, the pivotal moment of the movie occurs with the Grinch triumphant on top of Mount Crumpit, preparing to dump the Whoville Christmas presents to the valley below, but hearing the sounds of the Christmas carols echoing from the town. The Grinch hears the song and it touches him in a way he doesn’t fully understand. The movie can only be successful if that same song touches the audience, brings us back to a spirit of reconciliation, reminds us of who we were before and all we’ve lost and all we still have time to regain.

The Grinch is a mediocre movie at best, with poor acting from much of the principals balanced out against expert and gorgeous set design. But no amount of Carrey mugging, no amount of extraneous plot points, no amount of Hollywood claptrap can hide the subtle power of the great Seuss story or the awesome promise of redemption and reconciliation. That The Grinch succeeds despite the obstacles it places in its own path may be the closest thing to a Christmas miracle we can expect this season.

Comeuppance

There’s every chance in the world that you won’t ever see this movie, but I wanted to tell you about the first two scenes. The first scene takes place in a bar somewhere in Montreal; a guy and a girl are chatting. The girl is telling the guy all her secrets; the guy is listening and nodding intently. The second scene is in the girl’s bedroom after the guy has talked her into having sex. The guy is getting ready to leave; the girl asks him to stay. The guy — and you really have to see this to believe it — turns on her, sneering, making fun of her performance in bed, and generally behaving in a completely selfish, insensitive, and ill-mannered way.

Well, you can’t get away with that.

In an American movie, you really can’t do something like that at all outside of a Neil LaBute movie; main characters in American movies and television shows characters have to be, at bottom, likable. You can call this the “Hannibal Lecter Rule” if you like, but it’s true. (One of the few people to really break this rule was Paul Reiser in Aliens, and he had people hooting at him in the street for years.)

Vincent (Simon Boisvert), the jerk in Guys, Girls and a Jerk gets away with this, at least for awhile, because the movie is a French Canadian movie — in French, with English subtitles — and therefore not subject to the Hannibal Lecter Rule. This allows Vincent to slink through the entire movie, seeking who he might devour, lying to his faithful girlfriend, corrupting twelve-year-old boys, and generally acting in as sleazy and dishonest a manner as possible. Boisvert — who did the screenplay — does an excellent acting job here, making Vincent charismatic and charming without ever once making him likable.

Unfortunately, that’s pretty much the entire movie right there. Guys, Girls and a Jerk is an ultra-low-budget foreign independent flick, and consequently has all the production values of an old Three’s Company rerun. The movie is a series of conversations in cheap apartments and bars that either involve Vincent talking to someone in the large ensemble cast or members of the large ensemble cast talking about Vincent. (Fortunately, some of these conversations move into the bedroom, where you see considerably more skin than you ever got to see on Three’s Company.)

Guys, Girls and a Jerk even has the kind of plot you’d expect from a cheesy 70’s sitcom. Vincent comes up with the bright idea to start a dating service; he interviews the men, and lets a flunky interview the women - and then shows up as the first date for all the women. But its sensibility is much more modern and much more perverse; think of it as a two-hour episode of Friends where Ross sleeps with Monica. (Or better yet, don’t.)

The only thing - other than the bedroom scenes - that keep Guys, Girls and a Jerk going is the thought that somewhere, down the line, Vincent will get his comeuppance. That is what happens to jerks in movies; that is what we expect to happen. And it is largely what has to happen because Vincent is, really, asking for it, and in the best tradition of such movies, he helps engineer his own comeuppance.

This takes awhile, and since not much else happens, Guys, Girls and a Jerk is more than a little slow. Given that the scenery never changes much (don’t any of these people go outside?), it’s more than a little tedious, too. And since — despite its sitcom look and feel — it’s never that funny, the film turns out to be a dreary, dull experience.

Assuming that Guys, Girls and a Jerk ever shows up at a theater near you — and that’s a huge assumption — you might want to take a flyer on it. Not so much to see a jerk get his comeuppance, but to see a jerk in his natural habitat. It’s not something you get to see much in American film, and it’s certainly different. And it’s not any worse than, say, Gods and Generals, which at least is something.

Everyone’s A Cynic

Sometimes, the best part of the movie is the part when you walk out of the movie theater.

I am not talking here about bad movies, necessarily, although it is a pleasure to walk out of a truly bad movie; a sheer, pure act of defiance with no attendant consequences can be a beautiful thing. No, sometimes the best part of a good movie is the way you feel after the movie is done. A really good movie plucks at your chest, and when you’re walking out, you can sometimes feel those reverberations stirring your heart, over and over again. I felt it when I walked out of the Cineplex Odeon on Valley Mills Drive in Waco after seeing The Princess Bride for the first time, luxuriating in the warm, happy glow of a perfect moviegoing experience. I felt it with a near-explosive force on the 183 flyover coming back from the Arbor in north Austin after seeing Rushmore, and how the movie hit me like a delayed-action bomb. I felt it most recently like bubbles in my chest coming out of the old Paramount Theater in downtown Austin after seeing State and Main, with the giddy pleasure of the audience lifting me up.

And I remember walking out of Silence of the Lambs at the brand-new Cinemark multiplex in South Grand Prairie, noticing that the rain had just stopped, and taking note of the famous poster for that movie, which now made much more sense. “Disturbing,” I thought then, and I continue to think now. Silence of the Lambs was a groundbreaking movie, setting the tone for the thrillers and chillers of the next decade. None of its successor movies, though, would have characters as interesting, as compelling as Clarice Starling and Hannibal Lecter, or would have such a deep supporting cast (Scott Glenn, particularly) or would be as well and as honestly shot. It was a special movie, and still is.

I walked out of Hannibal a little less than an hour ago; I doubt if that memory will stick with me very long at all.

If I felt anything walking out of Hannibal, it was a sense of appreciation of the sheer artistry of it all. I speak not of the artistry of Anthony Hopkins and Julianne Moore, although both do creditable jobs. I speak not of the artistry of director Ridley Scott, although he doesn’t add much for ill or for good, in my book. I speak not of the artistry of author Thomas Harris, whose grisly and masterfully detailed book is the basis for the movie.

No, if artistry there be in Hannibal, it is supplied by the able hands of David Mamet and Steven Zallian, who have worked hard to plane away the extraneous material in the book, to sand down the rough edges, to remove the splinters with deft handiwork. After reading the novel, I suspected that Harris didn’t really want the third Hannibal Lecter novel made into a movie. It was too gruesome, too evil, with an ending that all but foreclosed the possibility of ever making a film appearance. Adapting Hannibal for the screen was a challenge, and I don’t know of anyone outside of Mamet or Zallian who could have met that challenge.

The script succeeds most beautifully in modifying the book’s bloodcurdling conclusion, but I am honor-bound not to reveal the ending of neither the book or the movie, so I will present another example. In the book, Clarice Starling tracks down Hannibal Lecter through his love for certain gourmet items; wine, caviar, etc. It’s a device that worked well in the novel, but not so well onscreen. Mamet and Zallian instead devised a charmingly goofy little scene where perfume company testers identified Lecter’s location through sniffing out the traces of the unique scent of his hand cream that lingered on a letter.

There are quite a few other clever touches that drew my admiration; a segue where the sound of an Italian fountain turns into the sound of typing keys, a transition from a recording of one of the great Lecter lines from Silence of the Lambs to a sweeping view of Florence, a photograph on the walls of Starling’s office that is lifted not from Silence of the Lambs but from Harris’s first Lecter book, Red Dragon, the way that the pigeons line up in the opening credits. Students of the adapted screenplay should read the book carefully before watching the movie, but anyone else shouldn’t bother; the movie does a much better, more compact, more believable job of telling the story.

The story, though, is the problem. The beating heart of Silence of the Lambs was not Lecter or Starling but the character of Catherine Martin, the plucky Senator’s daughter, stuck in the bottom of the well in Buffalo Bill’s nightmare basement. There are no innocent lives at stake here. Everyone’s a cynic, everyone is playing a game. Even Starling’s mission to capture Lecter has the feel of an academic exercise, there’s no passion in the way that her part is written. There’s no intensity, no surprises, no suspense in Hannibal, it has none of the things that made Silence of the Lambs so great.

Hannibal is not a bad film, though, but a disappointing one. There is a lot to like outside of the Mamet/Zallian screenplay, most notably the work of Giancarlo Giannini (an Oscar nominee in 1976, would you believe?) as a corrupt Italian police inspector. The makeup job on Lecter’s nemesis is very good, so is the way that his ultimate fate is decided. Julianne Moore is superb as a disappointed, brittle Clarice Starling; one imagines that (to borrow a line from my main man Scott Turow) that if you were to lick her skin, the taste would be bitter. And then there is Hopkins.

I don’t know how you’ll feel or what you’ll say when you talk about Hannibal. I don’t think you’ll feel disturbed, bothered, or shocked. I also don’t think you’ll feel surprised or elated or even entertained. I can say this, though; however you feel, you won’t remember that feeling or this movie for any great length of time.

A Work of Studied Mediocrity

I never tell people not to see a movie.

Well, hardly ever. I think I told people to go to the library instead of seeing Pleasantville. I think I suggested that all remaining Swordfish DVDs should be crushed under a convenient steamroller. However, most of the time, I try to stop short of saying that people should not see any given movie. Thankfully, there aren’t that many movies that are so bad that they won’t appeal to someone, sometime. (There are a few such movies, and an alarming number of them feature Bruce Willis.)

Hart’s War is not a bad movie, on the order of North or Hudson Hawk or anything like that. Its snowy vision of the battlefields of the Ardennes and the prison camps of central Europe is precise. The acting, mostly by Willis and newcomer Colin Farrell, is solid if unspectacular. The story manages to hang together for most of the movie, which is about as good of an average as you get nowadays. However, none of this matters. As a result, I am going to do something I (almost) never do.

Do not see this movie.

My basic objection to Hart’s War is a simple one, and a near-universal one. It is not as good as the book. John Katzenbach wrote the book, a competent murder mystery and legal thriller based in a World War II prisoner of war camp. The twist was that the accused was a Tuskegee Airman, an African-American pilot shot down while protecting a bomber crew. The resulting book was somewhere between Stalag 17 and To Kill A Mockingbird. The book itself was just average, but anyone could see that it had the makings of an exceptional movie. Everyone, that is, but screenwriters Billy Ray (”Earth 2″) and Terry George (In The Name of the Father, if you can believe it).

Of course, saying that “the book was better” doesn’t in and of itself amount to movie criticism; you can say that about just about any book that ever got turned into a movie. (There are exceptions. Die Hard, for one, was better than the airport novel that inspired it, and there’s that pesky Bruce Willis again.) Saying that “the book was better” generally just means that you’ve read the book; it does nothing to help the frustrated moviegoer figure out what to go see on Friday night. And spending a lot of time explaining just how the book is different is a pointless, academic exercise. Pointing out that the Tommy Hart (Farrell) character was a poor-but-proud Harvard Law student in the book but a born-to-privilege Yale Law student in the movie doesn’t do anything for anybody.

However, the problem with the movie is not that it doesn’t follow the book more closely but that it wastes our time. The initial incident that sparks the events of both the movie and the book is the arrival of the Tuskegee Airman (Airmen, in the movie) into the all-white world of the prisoner-of-war camp. In the book, this happens in the third chapter or so. In the movie, it doesn’t happen until almost an hour in. Instead of kicking off the intrigue and suspense and mystery of the whole thing, Hart’s War, like the St. Louis Rams in the Super Bowl, waits until after halftime to get started.

The first part of the movie just screws around with extraneous plot twists. There’s a long scene showing how Hart was captured in the first place that exists mostly to show bloodshed and mayhem. There’s entirely too much time spent on the essentially unimportant details of Hart’s interrogation, and another long scene is spent showing the strafing of a German railroad station for the sake of shoehorning some explosives into the story.

It’s not so much that the movie has too many explosions as it is that there isn’t enough time spent on the potentially explosive relationships between the prisoners. The character of Lincoln Scott, the African-American prisoner accused of murdering an abusive racist fellow prisoner, is curiously circumscribed in the movie. In the book, Scott is touchy, angry, and bitter at his treatment. In the movie, he is played by Terrence Dashon Howard as being noble and resigned and courageous in a way that is admirable but doesn’t set off any sparks. Howard has the key role in the movie, but he doesn’t seem to realize it, or do anything special with it.

To make matters worse, Colin Farrell was chosen to play young law student Tommy Hart, and it’s not a part that suits him. (If he were allowed to switch roles with Ben Affleck in Pearl Harbor, both movies would have been infinitely better off.) Farrell is something of a cut-rate George Clooney, darkly handsome with big, bushy eyebrows and a five o’clock shadow, but he doesn’t have much more than that to go on. He doesn’t do a horrible acting job, and he’s presentable in a uniform, but he doesn’t do anything to help the movie. It needs a lot of help, too.

Hart’s War is advertised as a Bruce Willis movie, which may be its worst flaw. Willis was actually a good choice for the icy camp commander, but he ends up dominating the movie by default. Instead of a battle of wits in the courtroom, Hart’s War becomes a battle of wills between Willis and everyone else in the movie, and everyone else is destined to lose.

There’s nothing that is so terribly wrong with Hart’s War to make it not worth seeing. But don’t see it anyway. Any entertainment you might gain will, and should, be outweighed by the knowledge that the movie could have been much better in any of a dozen different ways. It’s enough work to denounce the horrible badness of too many movies to bother with a work of studied mediocrity like Hart’s War, and I beseech you to find something else to see instead.

Spiders and Snakes

Well, in every life a little rain must fall, and it’s been raining here in Atlanta for weeks now. Friday evening, a little before seven, UA Midtown, a day in the life. No line for the 6:45 screening of Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets; everyone else having got there before me, apparently. Nobody’s idea of good seats in nobody’s idea of a good theater, fifth row, far right. Worse, there is this guy sitting behind me. You know the one.

The guy I am talking about is not the worst offender in your modern movie theater — he did not have a cell phone, he was not a pack of giggling teenage girls, he was not three years old and kicking the back of my seat — but he was bad enough. He is the know-it-all, the spoilsport, the kind who must open up his mouth to give away every salient plot point. Let, say, Draco Malfoy hiss the dreaded word “Mudblood” to poor Hermione Granger, along comes our friend to announce — to no one in particular — “That means her parents aren’t wizards.” As though no one could figure it out from the context, or as though no one hadn’t read the books, or could possibly interpret the movie, at any level, without his personal and expert and unwanted help.

It says something admirable about Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets that it can conquer not only the dark forces of wizardry surrounding Hogwarts School but that it can also overcome rainy weather and rude theatergoers. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets is a delightful film, delightful enough that the reviewer is tempted to hang back, to not over-praise the film, to let audiences discover it on its own merits (as if they wouldn’t anyway). Every element of the movie works, and nearly every scene works. The sly humor and the magical tale and the fast-paced action all work together to create a movie that can both please every audience and stand up to any critical blow.

First, there is the story, which is as faithful to the text of the J.K. Rowling book as was Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, although the latest movie is perhaps more in sync with the spirit of the books. That should, of course, be enough for everybody; it is certainly what the Harry Potter fans in the audience want. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets succeeds primarily because it is faithful to the story, while throwing in the odd wrinkle here and there to keep its fan base slightly off kilter. However, the movie is utterly unconcerned about trifles like plot exposition and character development; if you haven’t read any of the books or didn’t see the first movie, you may have very little idea of who the characters are and what all the funny words mean. If Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets has a fault it is that, like Hogwarts School itself (or, say, the University of Virginia Law School, or the Augusta National Golf Club), it is not sufficiently inclusive in its outlook.

However, exclusivity often connotes excellence, and everything about Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets is excellent. The visuals, of course, the look of the thing, are simply outstanding; everything from Harry’s spartan bedroom to the sumptuous hallways of Hogwarts to the damp horrors of the Chamber of Secrets itself is just right, just as it should look. The costumes are fabulous, especially Kenneth Branagh’s 1890’s fashion-plate garb (which proves, if nothing else, that he would have been better suited to play Artemus Gordon than the villain in the horrid Wild Wild West remake). The special effects are a revelation, easily outpassing anything that George Lucas put forth for Attack of the Clones.

Of course, all of these are the things that big-budget Hollywood studio movies usually do well. Even horrid movies, like The Majestic, tend to have unimpeachable production values nowadays. With the amount of money that the Harry Potter franchise earns for the greedheads at AOL Time Warner, one would expect that no expense would be spared in making sure that Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets would look as good as it possibly could. That this mission is accomplished so well is important, but insufficient. The greatness of the story and the wonder of the special effects must be buttressed by the skill of the actors. Without them, without their ability to bring the movie alive with a beating, magical heart, the movie would be an empty vessel, signifying nothing.

So you have the grownups, first of all, who are consistently outstanding in their small, but telling roles. The universe at Hogwarts is filled with so many characters that everyone other than Harry Potter gets short shrift in the film treatments; all the adult parts are underwritten to an extent. (The same is true with the other students; Fred and George Weasley, for example, are almost invisible in this installment.) However, the performaces are so excellent, so completely in line with how they are portrayed in the books, and so perfectly cast that it almost doesn’t matter. Robbie Coltrane, magically enhanced to play Hagrid the gamekeeper, has a less showy role here but still incarnates his giant-size character fully. He has just enough humor and goodwill to make Hagrid, who otherwise might be scary and intimidating, a delight. The late Richard Harris (RIP) is wheezily effective as Albus Dumbledore, the headmaster of Hogwarts; he combines dignity and power with a certain frailty that is very effective. Maggie Smith is invaluable as the tart-tongued Professor McGonagall. Alan Rickman is perhaps the most chronically shortchanged of the current cast, but he is sneeringly effective as Professor Snape, and squeezes every drop of nastiness out of his limited screen time.

Even with this stellar supporting cast, the two best performances in the movie are turned in by two newcomers. Kenneth Branagh plays the vain and conceited Professor Gilderoy Lockhart as though he were some undiscovered Shakesperian character, a comic fop suffused with self-importance. Branagh is undeniably brilliant, but his best work (Henry V and Dead Again) is ten years in the past, and he has been spending an inordinate amount of time doing voice-overs for documentaries lately. It is wonderful to see him on the screen again, in a really juicy role, doing a stellar job. Equally as good is Jason Isaacs, best known in this country as the evil Colonel Tavington from The Patriot. Here, he is handed the meaty role of Lucius Malfoy, dark wizard, and he all but uses those dark arts to steal the movie.

Then there are the younger set; Daniel Radcliffe as Harry Potter, Rupert Grint as Ron Weasley, and Emma Watson as Hermione Granger. Watson is the most restrained of the three; she keeps a stiff upper lip most of the way through. This removes a lot of the elements that make Hermione Granger both so endearing and so annoying at times, and the movie could have been better by showing off a little more range from Watson. But she’s so adorable that it’s hard to knock her, entirely. Grint has been getting terrible reviews, which I blame completely on director Chris Columbus. Grint appears at times as though he is auditioning for Rowan Atkinson’s old Rubber-Face Revue; he engages in an astonishing level of mugging that a good director should have taken pains to correct. He is otherwise a stalwart sidekick to Harry, and an occasional good comic relief, but the pained facial expressions detract from the movie.

Then there is Radcliffe, who has the toughest job on the set. The people at Microsoft’s Slate online rag described poor Harry Potter as a “fraud”, a “glory hog”, someone who “skates through school by taking advantage of his inherited wealth and his establishment connections.” (One detects a little bit of envy on the part of the author; and maybe an unseemly spillover of bile from the Microsoft/AOL battles.) It is to Radcliffe’s credit that he doesn’t portray Harry this way; except for one mysterious moment in a wizard’s duel, Harry never appears anything but honorable, stalwart, and true to himself. In the books, Harry is often filled with self-doubt and fear; qualities that Radcliffe never lets show. He turns in a fine, understated performance, for which he will get much less credit than he deserves.

Outside of a few odd flaws here and there (the homage to the third Alien movie, of all things, and the self-congratulatory nature of the final scene), Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets is a masterful work, full of dry wit and magic and Quidditch, along with some exciting, creepy scenes featuring snakes, spiders, and Dark wizards, and all sorts of mayhem and mischief. It is that rarity; a movie that can be enjoyed (if not fully understood) by all audience members. (And, yes, even the loudmouth jerk in the row behind me seemed to be having a good time, for what that’s worth.)