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| Marcus Carl Franklin, Cate Blanchett, Christian Bale, Ben Whishaw, Heath Ledger, and Richard Gere in I'm Not There |
Cast: Christian Bale, Cate Blanchett, Marcus Carl Franklin, Ben Whishaw, Heath Ledger, Richard Gere, Kris Kristofferson (voice), Charlotte Gainsbourg, Bruce Greenwood, Julianne Moore, Michelle Williams. Screenplay: Todd Haynes, Oren Moverman. Cinematography: Edward Lachman. Production design: Judy Becker. Film editing: Jay Rabinowitz. Music: Bob Dylan.
Cast: Christian Bale, Cate Blanchett, Natalie Portman, Brian Dennehy, Antonio Banderas, Frieda Pinto, Wes Bentley, Isabel Lucas, Teresa Palmer, Imogen Poots, Ben Kingsley (voice). Screenplay: Terrence Malick. Cinematography: Emmanuel Lubezki. Production design: Jack Fisk. Film editing: A.J. Edwards, Keith Fraase, Geoffrey Richman, Mark Yoshikawa. Music: Hanan Townshend.
Two films kept coming to mind as I watched Terrence Malick's Knight of Cups: Federico Fellini's La Dolce Vita (1960) and Andrei Tarkovsky's Mirror (1975). Fellini's film because the journey of Malick's protagonist, Rick (Christian Bale), through the decadence of Hollywood and Las Vegas echoes that of Marcello's (Marchello Mastroianni) explorations of Rome. Tarkovsky's because Malick's exploration of Rick's life exhibits a similar steadfast refusal to adhere to a strict linear narrative. Most of us go to movies to have stories told to us. Our lives are a web of stories, told to us by history and religion and science and society, and most explicitly by art. We tend to prefer the old linear progression of storytelling: beginning, middle, end, or the familiar five-act structure of situation, complication, crisis, struggle, and resolution. But artists tend to get weary of the straightforward approach; they like to mix things up, to find new ways of storytelling. The modernist novelists like Joyce and Woolf and Faulkner eschewed linearity, and filmmakers have tried to take a similar course. They have the advantage of working with images as well as words. So Malick, like Tarkovsky and Fellini and others, experiments with editing and montage to meld images with language and gesture to probe the psychological depths of human character and experience. The problem with experimentation is that experiments fail more often than they succeed. Some think that Knight of Cups is a successful experiment, but most critics and much of the film's audience seem to disagree, to judge from, for example, a 5.6 rating on IMDb. Knight of Cups spent two years in post-production and there are four credited film editors, which suggests that Malick over-reached himself. For me, what was lost in the process of making the film was a clarity of vision. Granted, the lives of human beings are messy, loose-ended things, but what do we depend on artists to do but try to make sense of them. I think Malick lost sight of his protagonist, Rick, in trying to interpret his life and loves through the film's odd amalgamation of John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress and the Major Arcana of the tarot pack and then overlaying it with a collage of images provided by Emmanuel Lubezki's camera. We glimpse Rick through filters, grasping for moments that will resolve into something substantial about him, his problems with his family and with women. And for all the casting of fine actors like Bale and Cate Blanchett and Natalie Portman, the production negates their attempts to create characters. In fact, their starriness works against them: Instead of being drawn into the character of Rick or Nancy or Elizabeth, we're removed from them by the familiarity of the actor playing them. I understand what admirers of the film like Matt Zoller Seitz are saying when they proclaim, "The sheer freedom of it is intoxicating if you meet the film on its own level, and accept that it's unfinished, open-ended, by design, because it's at least partly concerned with the impossibility of imposing meaningful order on experience, whether through religion, occult symbolism, mass-produced images and stories, or family lore." But I wonder if that's enough to make an experiment successful. I came away from Knight of Cups knowing nothing more about its characters than I did before I met them.
Vice (Adam McKay, 2018)
Cast: Christian Bale, Amy Adams, Steve Carell, Sam Rockwell, Alison Pill, Eddie Marsan, Justin Kirk, LisaGay Hamilton, Jesse Plemons, Bill Camp, Don McManus, Lily Rabe, Shea Whigham, Stephen Adly Guirgis, Tyler Perry. Screenplay: Adam McKay. Cinematography: Greig Fraser. Production design: Patrice Vermette. Film editing: Hank Corwin. Music: Nicholas Britell.
Vice got me to thinking that maybe Hannah Arendt got it wrong: It’s not the banality of evil but the mediocrity of evil. Dick Cheney, at least as Adam McKay’s screenplay and Christian Bale’s performance present him, was initially a vehicle for the varying ambitions of others: his wife, Lynne (Amy Adams), his mentor, Donald Rumsfeld (Steve Carell), and George W. Bush (Sam Rockwell). Cheney was like a liquid that flowed into the channels they provided him, helping create the Republican Party that would be shaped into its current form by Fox News and Donald Trump. Bale portrays Cheney as the silent menace we know from newsreels, ready to snap at any plausible idea, from redefining presidential power to making war on Saddam Hussein to sanctioning torture. But he begins as something of a naïf, not even sure which party he belongs to, and even asking Rumsfeld what the Republicans are for, which provokes gales of laughter from Rumsfeld. The problem with McKay’s film, however, is that despite Bale’s remarkable performance, Vice is overlong and confused, wavering from straight behind-the-headlines dramatization to satiric bits like a waiter (a cameo by Alfred Molina) serving up Republican agenda items to a tableful of fat cats. The narrative is chopped up with flashbacks and time jumps, and even includes an occasional narrator named Kurt (Jesse Plemons), whose identity is withheld for most of the film to provide a small but essentially pointless surprise. There’s even a bit in the middle of the final credits, in which a contemporary focus group comes to blows over the film's “political bias.” I share McKay’s obvious bias, but I wish he didn’t wear it so proudly.
Critics were kind of meh about Thor: Love and Thunder, but I found it one of the less wearying of the entries in the superhero comic book sweepstakes. Aside from the unnecessary episode with the Guardians of the Galaxy, it zips along through the narrative challenges and nicely balances the love with the thunder. Chris Hemsworth is one of the most engaging actors stuck in the action genre, especially when Taika Waititi is giving him opportunities to play the goof. Christian Bale turns Gorr into one of the more complex Marvel villains, and it’s good to see Russell Crowe loosen up and have a ball playing Zeus. I have mixed feelings about Natalie Portman’s performance as Jane: She does a good job playing the diminutive foil to Thor, but I never felt the necessary chemistry in their love affair. Thor seems more enamored of Mjolnir than he does of Jane. I don’t know why Waititi needed to reprise the gag of the actors – Luke Hemsworth, Matt Damon, and Sam Neill – playing Thor, Loki, and Odin, this time adding Melissa McCarthy as Hela; it only overloads an already bloated excursion into Thor World.
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| Christian Bale, Melissa Leo, and Mark Wahlberg in The Fighter |
You don't have to be familiar with the real-life Micky Ward to know that the movie about him is going to end with the scrappy underdog coming from behind to win the championship. All you need is to be familiar with the genre of sports movies, especially boxing movies, to which The Fighter belongs. And you don't have to know much about the acting careers of Christian Bale and Melissa Leo to know that they were shoo-ins for the Oscars for best performances in supporting roles. All you need to know is that the Academy loves flamboyant acting in roles as working-class characters. If that sounds a little cynical, I don't really mean it that way: Bale and Leo deserved their awards, partly because they help bring a perhaps overfamiliar (not to say clichéd) story to life. The Fighter works because it's nuanced and textured in ways that films heavily shadowed by genre history have to be in order to hold our interest. And a lot of the nuance and texture was contributed by the less showy performances of Mark Wahlberg and Amy Adams -- and she at least got a nomination. It helps, too, that Wahlberg, who grew up in a Boston-area working class neighborhood much like the Lowell of the film, loved the story and its characters, and as producer made it work. You might gather from my opening that boxing movies are a genre I don't have a great fondness for, and you'd be right. But there's a lot to enjoy about The Fighter, including the ambience Wahlberg probably had a lot of say in creating, like the chorus of Micky Ward's big-haired sisters, waiting to pounce on an intruder like Charlene Fleming (Adams) who had the effrontery to go to college but return to the neighborhood and claim equality. The fight scenes are well-done, I guess, and I couldn't help getting caught up in their momentum. Still, it'll be a while before I choose to watch another boxing movie.
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| Michael Caine, Scarlett Johansson, and Hugh Jackman in The Prestige |
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| Heath Ledger in The Dark Knight |
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| Christian Bale in The Big Short |