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Helen Mirren and James McAvoy
in The Last Station
Michael Hoffman's
The Last Station
Opens December 4, 2009
Written By: Michael Hoffman, from Jay Parini’s novel
Starring: Helen Mirren; Christopher Plummer; Paul Giamatti;
and James McAvoy
Sony Pictures Classics
Reviewed for New York Cool by Harvey Karten
Bear with me because this is not a digression…Liberals
want money to be distributed more equitably and often
support tax increases on the rich, with revenue diverted
to programs that will help the poor or the community as
a whole. Socialists are liberals with a vengeance: the
most radical want more than simply government takeover
of the means of production, but rather a redistribution
of income to all according to need. There are different
kinds of socialists. One group, the well-to-do, like to
talk a good game because socialism is fashionable, but
they would be horrified to lose more than a pittance.
Another are the poor, those who have nothing to fear from
a redistribution since they do not have money or land
in the first place. The third group, the true believers,
do indeed possess wealth but have demonstrated with action
their willingness to give it up to “the community,”
if not while they’re alive, at least when they are
dead and have willed their estate to all. Lev Tolstoy
was in the third group, the ones with the integrity, but
wait: there are others who are true believers but will
use force of will if not of guns to get that money into
mass circulation. Those are the ones who became the dreaded
communist leaders like Stalin, Lenin, and Mao.
The Last Station may not be primarily a political
movie, but politics is the thrust that motivates all the
players, even though the film can be sold to the public
as a love story—which it is as well. And it’s
a love-story-cum-politics that boasts one tour de force
performance (what else do we expect from Helen Mirren?)
and fine performances indeed from Christopher Plummer,
Paul Giamatti, and James McAvoy, all playing political
roles during the final year of Tolstoy’s life. The
title of the movie has a double meaning: that of Tolstoy’s
exit from the world and that of the railway station to
which he had traveled as though emulating the exodus of
animals who, somehow aware that they are on the way out,
go off into the woods to pass away.
With an assist from Jay Parini’s
novel (available from Amazon for $10.20 but not yet on
Kindle) and live advice from some of Tolstoy’s descendants,
writer-director Hoffman takes advantage of some lovely
settings in Leipzig and some smaller towns in Germany
to stand in for Russian locales. The conflicts are many.
Tolstoy (Christopher Plummer) is in conflict with himself
between his vow of poverty and his extreme wealth. He
has taken a vow of celibacy, not a great sacrifice considering
his advancing age and his fathering of thirteen children
with his wife of forty-eight years, Sofya (Helen Mirren).
He is in conflict with his wife, even evoking a love-hate
relationship with her, because he is considering a testament
that would grant his copyright and attendant money for
“War and Peace,” “Anna Karenina”
and other novels to the Russian people rather than to
his own large family. Sofya is likewise bitterly opposed
to the manipulations of Chertkov (Paul Giamatti), Tolstoy’s
best friend, a true believer who puts enormous pressure
on the novelist to re-write his will so that the Russian
people will have the wealth from the copyright.
To further his aims, Chertkov hires
a young secretary for Tolstoy, the naïve Valentin
(James McAvoy), with instructions to report back on all
the people who visit the great man and who might persuade
him to rejoin the Church and give up his socialist ideals.
For his part, Valentin, having taken a vow of celibacy
(at his age!), finds it most difficult to keep that vow,
given the seductions of Masha (Kerry Condon), who works
on the collective that Tolstoy has fashioned from his
land.
Some critics have praised the story
but have had problems with its telling. The film has even
been compared (gasp) to Masterpiece Theater, a TV series
that has often presented classics with a stultifying lack
of drama. This appears not to be at issue here, as Helen
Mirren in particular displays her talent for shifting
from blissful affection for her husband to the emotions
of an enraged harridan, one who’d appear to have
no problem shooting Chertkov just after she put a few
bullets in the man’s picture. She has already done
more than almost anyone to boost her husband’s career,
having copied “War and Peace” in longhand,
six times over. If her attempt at suicide by drowning
is not dramatic enough for viewers, consider the credible
performance she delivers on Tolstoy’s deathbed.
All is in the service of paraphrasing the old saw about
women by announcing perhaps the principal theme, “Love:
can’t live with it, can’t do without it.”
Unrated. 112 minutes. © 2009 by
Harvey Karten Member: NY Film Critics Online
Peter Jackson's
The Lovely Bones
Opens December 11, 2009
Written By: Fran Walsh and Philippa
Boyens, from Alice Sebold’s novel
Starring: Mark Wahlberg; Rachel Weisz; Susan Sarandon;
Stanley Tucci; Saoirse Ronan; and Michael Imperioli
Paramount Pictures
Reviewed for New York Cool by Harvey Karten
The rape and murder of a
young girl is among the most atrocious and sordid of all
crimes, though when you watch scenes of Peter Jackson’s
victim looking beatifically down on earth against a background
of limitless beauty, you might be tempted to say: hey,
maybe there is some salvation for those whose lives are
taken from them just as they are beginning to bloom. There
is a considerable amount of emotion in Alice Sebold’s
novel of the same name, but Peter Jackson, known to moviegoers
for his momentous Lord of the Rings trilogy,
turns the story into a tale or horror, the need for vengeance
supplying the motivation for most of the film’s
overlong tenure.
Jackson’s best movie, perhaps,
is not any of the Lord of the
Rings trilogy, but rather Heavenly Creatures,
which was based on the true story of Juliet Hulme and
Pauline Parker, two close friends who share a love of
fantasy and literature and who conspire to kill Pauline's
mother after she tries to end the girls' intense and obsessive
relationship. The visuals in that film heightened the
emotional involvement of the two closely knit girls, who
recognized that they were different from others in their
circle. In Bones, the dreamlike sequences that
take place in heaven and some scenes of earth appearing
as though presented as a stage play, simply distract from
the passion of the characters. (In a similar vein, Vincent
Ward’s What Dreams May Come, about a man
who dies to find himself in a heaven more amazing than
he could have ever dreamed of, is also loaded with dreamy
effects, which also work against the passion that drives
Chris Nielsen to hell, risking all to find his wife.)
The Lovely Bones is anchored
by a fine performance from the beautiful, New York born
fifteen-year-old actress Saorise (pronounced SEER shee)
Ronan who plays the role of fourteen-year-old Susie Salmon.
Susis is a kid who is just beginning to see herself as
a woman and is attracted to a boy in her school, Ray Singh
(Reece Ritchie). Susis makes the mistake of trusting George
Harvey (Stanley Tucci), a single man who lives in a nearby
house in their Pennsylvania village. Harvey coaxes Susie
into an elaborate underground room where he kills her,
after presumably raping the poor girl. Though Susie is
trapped in heaven, she is determined to obtain justice,
but even more obsessed with allowing her grieving parents,
Jack Salmon (Mark Wahlberg) and his wife Abigail (Rachel
Weisz) a chance to heal. Jack, whose love for his daughter
is unconditional, becomes so preoccupied with personally
killing whoever has done the deed that his wife leaves
him, allowing Susie’s grandma Lynn (Susan Sarandon)
to take charge of the household. Sarandon's character
is a a chain-smoking alcoholic who provides the movie’s
occasional comic relief.
One of the touches provided by Jackson
is a tree whose leaves blow away and turn into birds.
All heavenly scenes take place within a wide area surrounded
by cliffs, grassy hills and friendly dead people, who
exhort Susie to be free. In much the way that the Greeks
and Elizabethans believed that a soul cannot be truly
released until justice is served, Susie must continue
to use her will to help bring about a healing of her beloved
parents.
Stanley Tucci, almost unrecognized under his Waspish makeup
of blond rug and mustache, sees his prey through the wide-framed
glasses fashionable during the 1970s. He represents the
banality of evil, covering his inner torments and compulsions
with a bland but friendly exterior, which can lead history
buffs in the audience to recall how Hannah Arendt referred
to the Nazi killers with perfectly natural home lives
as “the banality of evil.”
The picture could have been more by
being less—stripping away the CGI bells and whistles
to develop its characters, particularly the grieving parents—allowing
us genuinely to feel the torment that leads them to fall
apart.
Rated PG-13. 139 minutes. © 2009
by Harvey Karten Member: NY Film Critics Online
Richard Linklater's
Me And Orson Welles
Opens November 25, 2009
Written By: Holly Gent Palmo,
Vince Palmo, from Robert Kaplow’s novel
Starring: Zac Efron; Claire Danes; Christian McKay; Zoe
Kazan; James Tupper; Leo Bill; Eddie Marsan; and Ben Chaplin.
Freestyle Releasing
Reviewed for New York Cool by Harvey Karten
You might expect a low-budget recreation
of Orson Welles’s New York stage production of Julius
Caesar to be typical Sundance fare: amusing, but instantly
forgettable. Lo and behold, Me and Orson Welles,
directed by Richard Linklater (Before Sunset,
Dazed and Confused), is a sensation blessed with
remarkable acting, authentic-looking production values,
and enough energy to power a Cadillac on a freeway full
of hybrids. To travel from Roland Emmerich’s bloated,
$260 million 2012 to Linklater’s Me
and Orson Welles is to go from the ridiculous to
the sublime. While some would say that Me and Orson
Welles is targeted to lovers of theater, it’s
nice to have faith that a regular audience with broad
but sensitive tastes, would gobble the movie up. It doesn’t
hurt that the poster-perfect Greek-godlike Zac Efron stars.
Efron (the High School Musicals) is a guy who
rivals the Twilight Series's Robert Pattinson
as a teen heartthrob.
However, the real acting honors of the
film go to Christian McKay, who does a spot-on impersonation
of Orson Welles when that great actor-director was in
his early twenties. McKay looks quite a bit older, but
who cares when the man’s theatrical delivery is
enough to make one cut back on movies and devote some
time—and lots of money—to Broadway theater.
Adapting Robert Kaplow’s novel,
Holly Gent Palmo and Vince Palmo create some fiction within
the framework of Welles’s actual directing of Shakespeare’s
Caesar, which Welles made contemporary by suiting
the actors in the style of the Fascist Rome of the twenties
and thirties. If you want to know what rehearsals are
like for professional stage productions, the madness,
the ersatz heart attacks of scared performers, the bellowing
of the director, this is the film to see. Though photographed
not in New York’s 41st Street where the original
Mercury Theater stood (now an office building without
even a plaque to mark the historic place), Linklater makes
good use of the restored Gaiety Theatre in Douglas, the
capital of the Isle of Man. Outdoor scenes are set in
constructed sets at Pinewood Studios, which devised a
replica of New York of seventy-two years ago. The British
Museum stands in for the Metropolitan Museum in New York,
where a Grecian Urn and a young couple standing before
it in admiration, form a classy near-conclusion.
Richard Samuels (Zac Efron), a bored
17-year-old high-school student, gets the chance to rise
well beyond his years on a chance encounter with Orson
Welles on a street outside the Mercury theater. While
Richard prepares for a small role as Lucius in the Shakespeare
play—which every middle school student used to know
—he attracts the affection of the theater's assistant
manager, Sonja (Claire Danes). Richard is cautioned about
Welles’s prima donna status and is advised to never
to criticize the man.
During the hectic weeks of preparation
when everything does wrong, Welles surveys the kingdom
like a pampered prince, enjoying assignations with actresses
and assistants who do not get paid, but look upon this
experience as a way to jump-start their careers. By becoming
attracted to Sonja, Richard sets himself up to compete
with Welles, who believes that all starlets must be willing
to head to his apartment at any time. The the big, expected
showdown then occurs. This showdown is witnessed by Mercury
Theater co-founder John Houseman (Eddie Marsan) and George
Coulouris (Ben Chaplin), who plays the key role of Marc
Antony on Caesar.
As strikingly handsome and assertive
as Efron’s character, Richard Samuels comes across,
the show belongs to Christian MacKay who delivers a stellar
performance that could well be the talk of the guilds
during this awards season.
Unrated. 107 minutes. © 2009 by
Harvey Karten Member: NY Film Critics Online
Michael Shannon and Amy Ryan in
The Missing Person
Noah Buschel's
The Missing Person
Opens November 20, 2009
Written By: Noah Buschel
Starring: Michael Shannon; Frank Wood; Amy Ryan; and Margaret
Colin
Strand Releasing
Reviewed for New York Cool by Harvey Karten
Going from a screening of 2012,
which cost $260 million into a showing of The Missing
Person, that seems to be made from pocket change,
leads to cognitive dissonance. Here again is an exception
to the rule that you get what you pay for. This is not
to say that The Missing Person has much to write
home about, but we can allow that this picture is the
preferable one to see if you have to choose.
A cop picture without so much as a siren,
The Missing Person comes at you as an intellectual,
noirish production, its desaturated colors even more unattractive
than black-and-white, all presumably for the purpose of
announcing itself as unreconstructed noir. The labyrinthine
plot may become clear, or may not, by its conclusion.
The best thing about the film is that it stars Michael
Shannon, who turned in a terrific role as the psychotic
John Givings in Sam Mendes’s Revolutionary Road
and earned my humble vote for best supporting actor at
my annual meeting of New York Film Critics Online. Here
he is the principal attraction, which is not to say that
he mesmerizes in any way as he did in this previous work.
He does, however, know how to overdo
drunkenness, getting his inspiration, for all we know,
from Ray Milland’s job as Don Birnam in Billy Wilder’s
1945 film The Lost Weekend. In the role of private
detective John Rosow he looks lost every day of the week,
having lost his wife to the Twin Towers inferno 9/11,
at which point he became a friend of the bottle. His daily
drunk does not help his business as a private eye much,
a fact taken into account by the lawyer who phones him
at 5:11 one morning, asking him to trail one Harold Fullmer
(Frank Wood) on the latter's voyage from Chicago to L.A.
on the Zephyr (which actually goes to Oakland in real
life and not L.A.), offering a neat sum of money to do
so. On the train he notes that Harold leaves his compartment
door open although he suspiciously has the company of
a young Mexican youth, making us all suspect that the
man is a pederast.
Things are not what they seem. Not only
is Harold not a pederast: he himself is employed by an
orphanage in Mexico that is not simply an orphanage. Here
the plot thickens and includes two women that Rosow meets:
one femme fatale, Lana (Margaret Colin), who tries to
seduce him at a bar, the other, a Miss Charlie (Amy Ryan),
who works for the lawyer who hired Rosow and who may prove
to be more to him than simply a job.
The Missing Person seems more
like a picture to project the acting ability of Michael
Shannon than a story that rivets audience attention. Shannon’s
drunkenness at times seems like a parody of the noir genre,
though director Noah Buschel may consider his script a
straightforward, Hitchcockian melodrama. Special mention
should be made of John Ventimiglia’s character-actor
bit as Hero Furillo, a cab driver who bonds with Rosow
when the two discover they grew up in the same Greenwich
Village neighborhood.
Unrated. 95 minutes. © 2009 by
Harvey Karten Member: NY Film Critics Online
Cheryl Hines's
Serious Moonlight
Opens December 4, 2009
Written By: Adrienne Shelly
Starrung: Meg Ryan; Timothy Hutton; Kristen Bell and ,
Justin Long
Magnolia Pictures
Reviewed for New York Cool by Harvey Karten
It's not unusual for a long-term spouse
casts an eye on others, particularly younger others. That
syndrome was codified into hilarious celluloid by Billy
Wilder’s 1955 film The Seven Year Itch.
The question posed by Serious Moonlight is what
to do if your husband has been flirting with another and
you suspect that he plans to leave you forever (the passion
just died) and go with his mistress to Paris on a romantic
pre-honeymoon. Louise (Meg Ryan) is faced with that situation,
if you can believe that anyone would want to leave Ms
Ryan (strangely enough, it happened in real life). She
hits on an idea to get her husband (Ian played by Timothy
Hutton), back, despite his growing relationship with much
younger Sara (played by Kristen Bell), whose blank good
looks belie her alleged smarts.
If you’re thinking of what to
do to bring back your lover and you have not yet seen
Cheryl Hines’s “Serious Moonlight,”
written by the late Adrienne Shelly, consider Michael
Haneke’s Funny Games, a terrific thriller
that finds two psychotic youths in tennis outfits working
their way into the home of a wealthy couple, tying them
up and planning to kill them—though more out of
envy than for money. In a broadly similar vein, when Ian
announces his plan to leave Louise for good, she knocks
him out, binds him with duct tape, and threatens to leave
him in that condition until he regains his senses and
declares his love for her.
This is a pretty wacko idea that would
appear to have no chance of working, in fact one that
could convince Ian that his wife belongs in the loony
bin, but leave it to the movies to find a way, a situation
that involves the incursion into the household of a burglar
in the guise of a gardener (Justin Long).
Meg Ryan is the one to watch in this
combination crime/romance/horror tale that provides a
stage for her enormous thespian talents. The key word
is “stage.” Moonlight is a claustrophobic
adventure that takes place almost exclusively in a bathroom,
with the man attached to the toilet, Serious Moonlight
would have a better platform on one of New York’s
office-Broadway stages. Timothy Hutton, whose role calls
for him to scream his lungs out at times, lacks the optimum
ambience to test his own acting chops. Hutton is almost
completely upstaged by Ryan, while the burglar, played
by the now ubiquitous, 31-year-old Justin Long (Youth
in Revolt, Funny People, He’s
Just Not that Into You, Drag Me to Hell),
has scant opportunity to steal the show.
Aside from the claustrophobic setting,
Serious Moonlight has a script that cannot be
favorably compared to that of writer-director Adrienne
Shelly’s Waitress, which also deals as
well with an affair, that affair involving a married doctor
who becomes the heartthrob of a pie-baking coffee-shop
server. In contrast to Serious Moonlight, Waitress
is chock-full of wit, both caustic and homespun.
Rated R. 84 minutes. © 2009 by
Harvey Karten Member: NY Film Critics Online
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