Best Picture #5: ZERO DARK THIRTY (2012)

I’ve been grappling with Zero Dark Thirty for about a week now, trying to figure out just what about it doesn’t seem right. That it is a very good thriller I am sure, but its status as a good film remains questionable.

Like many films that deal with the general topic of terrorism surrounding 9/11 and Al Qaida, Zero Dark Thirty is not about what many people seem to want it to be about.  It's not a screed on torture and its effectiveness, though its early scenes do portray the use of "enhanced interrogation techniques" brutally and unflinchingly.  It's not a criticism of the CIA's inability to catch Osama bin Laden for twelve years, although its lead character does face frustrating roadblocks from her superiors when it comes to following her leads.  And it's not a rah-rah flag-waving celebration of Seal Team Six's brave effort in going into the Abbottabad compound late one night, although the final act does depict their raid in detail.

Rather, Zero Dark Thirty is a play-by-play portrayal of the hunt for bin Laden, a walk-through of every step in the logical puzzle, from a detained low-level Al Qaida operative all the way up to bin Laden himself.

And that’s the film’s major problem. True, it doesn’t purport to be anything other than a straightforward account of what is essentially the party line story of the bin Laden hunt. I’m the first to decry critics who try to shape a movie to their own preconceived notions, but Zero Dark Thirty is maddeningly nonpartisan when it comes to dealing with issues that are immediately politically charged as soon as they’re shown. It wouldn’t have killed the movie to have a point of view.

The movie’s shortfall may be due to the recency of the events it portrays. Director Kathryn Bigelow and writer Mark Boal were developing a movie about the hunt for bin Laden long before he was found and killed; therefore the movie was pretty much reshaped from the bottom up after May 2011, and had to be rewritten on its feet as facts became clear. There was no time for history to judge the events, no time to reflect or ruminate, no time to theorize or analyze or examine the causes or ramifications of America’s quest to find its most wanted killer. Only time to report. And that’s all that Zero Dark Thirty does, albeit very well.

The movie opens with jarring audio footage of the 9/11 attacks, which sets the singular purpose of the characters in the film in motion: get bin Laden. We then go to Afghanistan, where CIA operative "Dan" (Jason Clarke) is interrogating a low-level al Qaida operative (Reda Kateb). At his side is the agent we know only as "Maya" (Jessica Chastain), who will be the movie’s crusader to pin bin Laden down, through every obstacle put in her way.

The torture in the film’s first sequence, including a graphic waterboarding, is depicted plainly, with unflinching brutality. What’s more horrific is that Dan and Maya succeed, and convince the prisoner to give them the information they need. This is the most thought-provoking sequence in the movie, as it reframes the torture debate as not a tactical question but a moral one. The debate has casually morphed into a question of “Does it work?” instead of “Is it right?” In order to convince those who have trouble sympathizing with “enemy combatants,” we’re told not that torture is a crime against humanity, but that it is messy and ineffective. The torture in this film is not messy; rather, it’s meticulously planned and carefully dispensed for maximum effect. A jarring revelation is that Dan  is not a thug, but a psychologist. This is not a barbaric method instituted crudely, but a pointed and organized tactic using horrifically cruel means.

Beyond that, the movie takes no particular position on the torture. It's left up in the air whether or not the necessary information could have been gathered by other means (one plot detail at the halfway mark seems to suggest that it could have). The movie merely acknowledges that enhanced interrogation took place, and that its perpetrators were willing to commit such acts in order to achieve their singular goal of finding bin Laden.

Zero Dark Thirty is at its best when it shows us the inner workings of the hunt: the varying tactics, the obstacles, the dead ends. The movie's details are captivating. A sequence involving the tracking of a man who appears to be bin Laden's courier is gripping.

The actors are all adept at bringing subtle humanity to characters who are tasked with leaving their emotions behind. Chastain's role is not particularly difficult, and far short of the complex and fascinating work she brought to The Help and The Tree of Life. Still, she invests the steadfast Maya with a certain frailty that enhances her dedication: the bin Laden hunt is all she's ever done in her professional career, and all she knows how to concern herself with. (This subtext is made whoppingly clear in the movie's clumsy final shot, which is completely unnecessary and condescending.)

Kyle Chandler is equally good as Maya's boss, who seems to be a bureaucrat but is just as dedicated as she is.  Mark Strong is memorable as another CIA high-up.  Clarke hits the right note as his paradoxical character, who is a brutal torturer one minute, but revealed to be a regular guy. His memorable line upon quitting his job, "I've seen one too many guys naked," has been debated by liberals as evidence of the movie's cavalier attitude toward torture, but is actually a revealing glimpse into the male torturer's fear of femininity and resistance to his own qualms about what he's doing.

The least captivating part of the film is the raid itself, when the Navy Seals (including Joel Edgerton and "Parks and Recreation's" Chris Pratt) burst into the Abbottabad compound and take out bin Laden, which is much less interesting than the puzzle that got them there in the first place.  We know that Bigelow and Boal had planned not to have to include this scene at all, but since no one will accept a bin Laden movie without it (like Lincoln without the theater scene), it's been tacked on.  The raid sequence suffers from the general documentary limits of the rest of the film: it's very well shot, well acted and believable, but has little of substance to say about what happened on that night.  Even the danger the Seals are thrown into is understated; there's very little suspense.

Zero Dark Thirty is foremost a thriller, interested more in depicting a suspenseful story than in making a statement.  The argument could be made that it doesn't need to take sides, but with its depiction of such politically polarizing issues as torture, not to mention the general risky moral ground the CIA finds itself on these days, it would be nice if it had something to say about it all.  Zero Dark Thirty is interested in the mechanics of the operation without giving much thought to the big picture.  I can still recommend it as a good suspense film, but that's about it.

*** out of ****

Best Picture #4: ARGO (2012)

Ben Affleck cements his transformation from unfortunate tabloid feature to A-list director with Argo, which is not only a masterpiece of suspense filmmaking but one of the most entertaining and absurdly funny films of the year. It tells a story that could only be true, and ironically feels a little bit less realistic than Affleck’s two previous features, Gone Baby Gone and The Town.

A brief animated introduction gives us the Cliff’s Notes version of the historical background for the Iranian hostage crisis. We begin at the American embassy in Tehran just as revolutionaries, driven to action by the U.S.’s propping up of a dictator who served their oil interests, storm the front gates and take over. In a gripping suspense sequence that sets the tone for the rest of the film, six Americans escape and hide themselves at the Canadian embassy.

The U.S. government catches word and tasks the CIA with getting the six trapped Americans out. Bereft of sensible ideas, agent Tony Mendez (Affleck) comes up with the only crazy thing that might work: invent a fake Hollywood sci-fi movie, pose the Americans as a Canadian film crew, send them to scout desert locations, and fly them out safely.

This proves to be their “best bad idea,” as labeled by Mendez's supervisor (Bryan Cranston), but it proves just absurd enough to work. Hollywood has always reached across enemy lines; even fascist dictators such as Kim Jong-il have professed their love for the movies. The six escaped hostages (Tate Donovan, Clea Duvall, Scoot McNairy, Rory Cochrane, Christopher Denham, Kerry Bishe) are essentially making a movie themselves: each has to play the part of a crew member on the made-up film, which proves to be tough work, especially under fire and on a deadline.

The making of the fake movie is fascinating. Mendez collaborates with makeup artist John Chambers (John Goodman), who was revealed to be a frequent CIA collaborator, and B-movie producer Lester Siegel (Alan Arkin), to give authenticity to the film. They even set up a staged reading of the script (Mendez and crew settle on a Star Wars knockoff called Argo) with costumes that rival David Lynch's Dune. Arkin is particularly memorable as a Roger Corman-like producer who’s neither rich nor famous but is a veritable king of trash cinema; imagine if Broadway Danny Rose were born on the opposite coast.

With precision, Mendez orchestrates the Americans’ way out of Iran, in a plan in which the slightest deviation could mean their end. A scout through the streets of Tehran, in which Iranian officials request to meet the “Canadian” crew, is brutally tense. Affleck keeps the film going at a rapid pace, and shows us each step of their tenuous escape as it progresses toward each terrifying obstacle.

Only toward the climax do Affleck and his screenwriter, Chris Terrio, step wrong and make the movie, well, too Hollywood. It is not such a problem that they take liberties with the true events for dramatic purposes. In the end, the sum of the story appears to be true, even if some of the parts are exaggerated. Affleck is also sure to avoid the U-571 problem of labeling the rescue a solely “American” effort; he gives due credit to the Canadians for making the rescue possible, providing passports, and putting their own embassy at risk to do so.

For what it's worth, Affleck's character reportedly is not quite as singlehandedly responsible for orchestrating the effort as the movie suggests, and there was at least one Canadian official unmentioned in the film who appeared to put more on the line than Mendez.  Ken Taylor, the ambassador played by Victor Garber in the film, claims that his fellow Canadians could have made the extraction without the Americans getting involved at all.  This muddying of facts would matter more if Argo were a rah-rah trumpet of American exceptionalism, but Affleck's tone is not the slightest bit jingoistic.  It does not present itself as a film about Americans coming to the rescue of some helpless foreigners; I think the movie, being a movie, needed a hero, and Mendez was the one they settled on.

The climactic escape—I hope it’s not a spoiler to reveal the historical truth, that the six Americans did in fact make it out alive—is unfortunately trumped up a little bit too much. The natural tension of the events would have been enough to hold our interest, but the movie introduces too many plot points that seem artificial. We could have done without the phony end-of-act-two shutdown of the operation that’s meant to deify Mendez once he disobeys orders and continues it anyway. Since we know it’s going to happen anyway, it’s a plot turn with no purpose. There's also a needless complication in which the Arkin character is kept from answering a key phone call by a movie shoot in the streets.

Though its status as a docudrama is questionable because of some obviously contrived scenarios and a Hollywoodized lead character, Argo is still a great thriller.  It begins with a seemingly unworkable premise, then walks us through it in an elaborate and compelling way.  For all the tests it fails, it passes this one: it thrills.

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

Best Picture #3: LES MISERABLES
Best Picture #2: SILVER LININGS PLAYBOOK
Best Picture #1: DJANGO UNCHAINED

Best Picture #3: LES MISERABLES (2012)

No matter what anyone has to say about Django Unchained, Les Miserables is sure to be the most polarizing movie of the Oscar season.  For the most part, movie musicals have a niche audience nowadays: there are those who will accept a movie in which the characters sing and dance their way through the plot, and those who won't.  Fans of Victor Hugo's novel may not be terribly pleased with the boiling down of his epic to its essentials (Roger Ebert was not a fan).  Like Joel Schumacher's surprisingly decent-for-what-it-is movie version of The Phantom of the Opera, Les Miserables will probably not interest those who aren't familiar with or fond of the stage musical.  But those who appreciate it will find the musical beautifully transferred to the screen, with a splendid production and an excellent cast.

In early 19th-century France, prisoner Jean Valjean (Hugh Jackman) is released from prison after serving a 19-year sentence for stealing a loaf of bread.  After a kind priest does him a good deed, he assumes a new identity as mayor of a small town and pledges to live a good honest life.  When he overlooks the poor treatment of a seamstress (Anne Hathaway) who works for him, he pledges to devote the rest of his life to caring for her daughter, Cosette.  However, he must be careful to avoid the pursuit of police captain Javert (Russell Crowe), who is after him for breaking parole and is the only man who recognizes him for who he used to be.

Much of the second half of the film takes place against the backdrop of the June Rebellion of 1832, in which Paris Republicans fought royalist soldiers in the streets.  Valjean finds himself in the center of the revolution, fighting at the side of young Marius (Eddie Redmayne), who has fallen head over heels in love with the now-grown Cosette (Amanda Seyfried).

Though the movie gives only a Cliff's Notes version of the historical event at its center, its place in the story is clear.  The musical's theme is of how selflessness can lend meaning to a life; Valjean's life means nothing until he dedicates it to caring for Cosette, and Marius and his soldiers are given purpose with their dedication to the rebellion.  Javert, by contrast, is a man of no compassion and only laws, and his frustration that any criminal could grow to be so kind leads to his downfall.

The major difference between the stage musical and the movie, sure to be debated among fans, is the quality of singing voices.  The stage musical is usually populated by singers who act; the necessary change that director Tom Hooper has made is to cast actors who sing instead.  The actors for the most part do not have Broadway-quality voices.  The exceptions are Jackman, who's a veteran of many musicals, and Samantha Barks, who plays Marius's friend Eponine and delivers a heartbreaking rendition of "On My Own" (and thankfully beat out Taylor Swift for the part).

All the other actors sing like actors, which is perfectly fine.  A movie requires a more intimate vocal interpretation than a stage show does, and the cast all deliver fine vocal performances.  Crowe in particular has taken a lot of flack for his lackluster singing voice; actually, he's very good, and his limitations as a singer don't count against his embodiment of the driven, staunch Javert.  The only players who disappoint are Sacha Baron Cohen and Helena Bonham Carter, who as the "Master of the House" and his wife are not particularly bad, but fail to bring energy to a couple of fairly lamely written comic relief parts.

Hooper's direction of the material is a balance between the epic and the intimate.  The production is grand, the scenery lush, the music gorgeous and sweeping.  But Hooper doesn't take a larger-than-life approach to his characters; he prefers long takes with limited focus (most of the numbers were recorded live on set).  For the key number "I Dreamed a Dream," delivered beautifully by Ms. Hathaway, Hooper never once pulls the camera away from her face as we witness her destruction before our very eyes.

Though it will certainly have its detractors, Les Mis is quite good.  At a time when it couldn't have been easy to make a big-budgeted production of a lavish musical, Tom Hooper has gotten it done.

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

Best Picture #2: SILVER LININGS PLAYBOOK (2012)

It's a risky move to try to make a Hollywood romantic comedy about mental illness, but that is what David O. Russell has done with Silver Linings Playbook.  Movies like this always run the risk of being either too contrived or too maudlin, especially when dealing with something as complex and personal as bipolar disorder.  Russell and his cast have masterfully avoided this pitfall.  Like CrazyStupidLove, it tells a story that's as contrived as any romantic comedy has ever been, but it's better because it takes its subject matter seriously.  And its cast is nothing less than superb.

Pat (Bradley Cooper) is released from a mental institution to the custody of his parents (Jacki Weaver and Robert De Niro).  Relentlessly positive, he hopes to get himself into good mental health right away so he can repair his relationship with his wife Nikki (Brea Bee), who currently has a restraining order against him.  He's an all-too-common case who thinks he has everything figured out, although everyone around him knows he still needs help.  Trouble is, his environment may not be the most conducive to his mental health.  Dad is an obsessive-compulsive bookie and often blames Pat when his football team loses.  Mom is a trooper who's doing her best to keep everything in order, but her control is constantly tested.

Then he meets Tiffany (Jennifer Lawrence), the younger sister of a friend.  Tiffany has also struggled with depression, and has recently lost her husband.  She inserts herself into his life, sometimes by force.  Pat resists, but when Tiffany offers to relay messages to Nikki for him, so long as he agrees to help her in several ways.  This gives him the drive to make himself better, but he soon begins to discover what's really important to him.

We can foresee the movie's conclusion right from the start, and it's to the actors' and director's credit that it doesn't seem forced.  Russell, who is not one to succumb to the Hollywood formula, lends authenticity to the screenplay, even when the plot takes it to some fairly familiar places (key set pieces take place at a football game and, climactically, a dance contest).

Cooper hits just the right note as a likable character with a violent past who we'd like to see get better.  De Niro is perfect as a goodhearted father who just doesn't realize when he's being a bad influence.  As the penitent mom and wife, Weaver exudes maternal nobility.  Chris Tucker is hilarious as a former roommate of Pat's who often turns up unexpected.  Anupam Kher is particularly memorable as Pat's psychiatrist, the kind of person who is a staunch and reliable authority but isn't above painting his face for a football game.

Lawrence steals the show.  The character of Tiffany is risky territory, as characters of this type usually end up as magical pixie girls who exist for no reason other than to rescue the hero.  Thanks to Lawrence's performance, Tiffany is a flesh-and-blood character who is understandably offended and repulsed with Pat at first, but grows to understand and love him.  Because Lawrence and Cooper are believable, we follow them into everything the overwritten plot throws at them.  Still only 22, this is Lawrence's second nomination for Best Actress, and it is the second time she deserves to win.

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

Best Picture #1: DJANGO UNCHAINED (2012)

A rollercoaster of thoughts went through my head while watching Quentin Tarantino's troubling, occasionally brilliant Django Unchained.  His film has not come without its share of controversy, given that it's essentially a comic book movie about slavery directed by a white man.  Many have questioned Tarantino's right to make such a film, and one prominent filmmaker has labeled it disrespectful while refusing to see it.

I think the problem is that we all have expectations for what a Tarantino film will be.  He has dealt mostly in pulp, and most of his films have been near-satirical explorations of genre rather than life.  He makes movies that inhabit a movie universe.  Even his World War II film, the wonderful Inglourious Basterds, was set squarely in the world of the movies.  While the specter of the Holocaust certainly haunted Basterds to an extent, Django is his first film to deal up front with a real-life atrocity.

And so the tone of Django is subtly different from that of his earlier films.  We've grown to expect a Tarantino comedy, but that is not what Django is, though there are several laugh-out-loud moments.  The laughter stops after a while, as it should.  The movie's outright brutality is shocking, because we aren't afforded the usual distance from violence that we expect.  Because we start with Tarantino's cheeky dialogue and are then thrown into a world of horrific violence, Django is often an enraging film.  It takes a while before we notice that Tarantino is actually making a serious movie.

Not a serious film, mind you, but a serious movie.  Django is a comic book movie after all, one with clear-cut heroes and villains, and exaggerated situations with stylized violence.  It also doesn't have much of anything to say about slavery itself, other than that it was a very bad thing that is not far enough in our past.  But Tarantino takes the subject matter seriously, doesn't trivialize slavery, and creates an elaborate and horrific universe around the pre-Civil War South.

What Tarantino hasn't changed is his knack for quirky, odd, memorable characters.  He has created a couple of terrific heroes in his two lead characters, as well as a fine performance from Jamie Foxx and yet another unique character from Christoph Waltz.  This time Waltz is on the heroes' side, playing Dr. King Schultz, a onetime dentist who now works as a bounty hunter.  He raids a couple of slavers in search of one slave, Django (Foxx), who can lead him to the men he's seeking.  Soon the two men decide to become partners in bounty hunting, and Dr. Schultz promises to help Django find and free his long-lost wife, Broomhilda (Kerry Washington).

Broomhilda is currently owned by Calvin Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio), a plantation owner in Mississippi who takes a special interest in Mandingo fighting, in which a couple of strong black men fight to the death for his own entertainment.  Django and Schultz hope to free her by posing as slavers and proposing purchasing one of Candie's fighters.

It's here that Tarantino abandons the usual overplayed silliness and stakes darker territory.  His scenes at Candie's plantation ("Candie-land") contain some of the most brutal and uncompromising violence I've ever seen.  But though Tarantino borrows his style from exploitation films, his movie is not exploitative but honest.  What they witness at Candie-land brings Dr. Schultz to think beyond his personal quest, and to make a decision that leads the film to its technically positive but very sad conclusion.

DiCaprio, as the film's Mississippi equivalent of Waltz's Hans Landa in Inglourious Basterds, finds in Candie a perfectly insidious creature: wicked, amoral, buffoonish, frightening.  Washington fails to make much of an impression as Broomhilda; though she's acceptable as a goal for Django, her role is underwritten and it feels like many of her scenes were left on the cutting room floor.

The most heart-wrenching performance comes from Samuel L. Jackson as Stephen, Candie's loyal house-servant.  Stephen is the most genuine character to ever exist in a Tarantino film: a driven, intelligent, devious man who's done what was necessary to survive.  His status as a house slave grants him certain privileges with his owner--he is allowed to speak out of turn and is treated at the very least as a conversational equal by Candie--but he is feared, reviled, and pitied by his fellow slaves.  He is the picture of a man who is disrespected by everyone, who has traded his dignity for security.  Stephen's is in many ways the saddest story in Django Unchained, and this is Jackson's best performance to date.

There has been much talk of Tarantino's liberal use of a certain word that he admittedly shouldn't be allowed to use.  In the making of a movie about slavery, for a white filmmaker to use the N-word is risky; however, for him not to use it is unconscionable.  To make a film in which slaveowners used nothing but nice words is a step closer to (forgive the term) whitewashing history.

Tarantino's main risk in using the N-word, I suppose, is that he is so good at writing memorable dialogue that he might unwittingly reintroduce it into the vernacular.  This risk is exacerbated by the fact that he is white; if one white director can use it, maybe we can all use it.  But Tarantino does everything he can to mitigate this risk; the N-word, uttered more than 100 times throughout the film, is ugly and clunky every time it's said.  He doesn't spin beautiful, quotable dialogue around it; rather, he cements it as the graceless term it is.  Come to think of it, I can't really think of a quotable line from the film at all, aside from Django's silly, forced "The D is silent."

Strongly written and cleverly acted as it is, Django Unchained is the first Tarantino film which struggles severely with tonal shifts.  The film begins comically, and at times Tarantino appears to be channeling Mel Brooks; a set piece involving Don Johnson as a doofus plantation owner and Jonah Hill as an even dimmer Klansman is hilarious.  Then the film starts to explore its more brutal side, which is jarring at first but increasingly genuine and believable.

But then it tries to have it both ways again, and concludes with a couple of spaghetti western-style shootouts, and an overblown Inglourious Basterds finale, in which the revenge fantasy is completed.  This is less compelling after what we've just witnessed; though the hero gets the girl, we're still left with the overwhelming violence and pervasive sadness of the earlier scenes, which just sort of hangs there unresolved.  Tarantino deals openly and honestly with the infection that was slavery, but he leaves it at that, and brings retribution in the form of grisly gunshots rather than a real resolution.  I suppose there was no way the movie could have ended with Stephen redeeming himself and becoming the hero.  I suppose.

*** out of ****