Prisoners (Denis Villeneuve, 2013)

Prisoners (Denis Villeneuve, 2013)

Cast: Jake Gyllenhaal, Hugh Jackman, Viola Davis, Maria Bello, Terrence Howard, Melissa Leo, Paul Dano, Dylan Minnette, Zoë Soul, Erin Gerasimovich, Kyla-Drew, Wayne Duvall, Len Cariou. Screenplay: Aaron Guzikowski. Cinematography: Roger Deakins. Production design: Patrice Vermette. Film editing: Joel Cox, Gary Roach. Music: Jóhann Jóhannson.

Overlong, overcomplicated, and sometimes just flat-out preposterous, Prisoners succeeds in casting a creepy spell even when you're questioning its improbabilities. It succeeds mainly because director Denis Villeneuve trusts that he can overcome the narrative flaws, and because he's working with a phenomenal cast headed by Hugh Jackman and Jake Gyllenhaal and generously provided with other first-rank actors like Viola Davis, Maria Bello, Melissa Leo, and Paul Dano. To my mind, Gyllenhaal stands out among even this company for his richly internalized performance as the detective in charge of the disappearance of two little girls. He buttons his shirts to the top, shielding himself against the world, determined to solve the case even when he's taking shit from his own captain and from the angry father of one of the missing girls, a volcano of a man beautifully embodied by Jackman. Roger Deakins's Oscar-nominated cinematography also casts a cold spell over the film, in which the external weather -- rain, snow, bleak days -- is a correlative for the emotions haunting the souls of the characters. There comes a point when you realize that the film isn't meant to be subjected to literal-minded analysis, that it's a parable about cruelty and loss, a validation of Jackman's character's mantra: "Pray for the best, but prepare for the worst." Villeneuve's adherence to this vision and his cast's abundant skills somehow overcome any desire we may have to impose a more realistic view on the material, to pick apart its contrivances and inconsistencies.

Unforgiven (Clint Eastwood, 1992)

Morgan Freeman and Clint Eastwood in Unforgiven

William Munny: Clint Eastwood
Little Bill Daggett: Gene Hackman
Ned Logan: Morgan Freeman
English Bob: Richard Harris
The Schofield Kid: Jaimz Woolvett
W.W. Beauchamp: Saul Rubinek
Strawberry Alice: Frances Fisher
Delilah Fitzgerald: Anna Levine

Director: Clint Eastwood
Screenplay: David Webb Peoples
Cinematography: Jack N. Green
Production design: Henry Bumstead
Film editing: Joel Cox
Music: Lennie Niehaus

Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven is the one "real" Western to win a best picture Oscar. Cimarron (Wesley Ruggles, 1931) is more about a fractured marriage, politics and land development in the Oklahoma Territory than about gunfire; Dances With Wolves (Kevin Costner, 1990) is preoccupied with revising our views of the American Indian; and No Country for Old Men (Joel Coen and Ethan Coen, 2007), though it doesn't lack for gunfire, is set in our times, not in the days of gunslingers and dance-hall girls. Unforgiven also a very good movie, though not a classic on the order of Westerns the Academy mostly cold-shouldered, like Red River (Howard Hawks, 1948) or The Wild Bunch (1969). It placed Eastwood among the pantheon of contemporary directors, though Eastwood had the grace to dedicate the film to John Ford and the less-celebrated directors Sergio Leone and Don Siegel; the latter two had made him a star and taught him the trade. Eastwood is a good director by virtue of not overreaching: He reportedly stuck closely to David Webb Peoples's screenplay, which provided him with characters of considerable depth. Gene Hackman's Little Bill Daggett is a nasty villain, but Peoples gives him a human side with his obsessive work on his house and a porch he can sit on and watch the sunset. What Peoples doesn't give Eastwood is a wholly satisfactory ending: The movie builds to the concluding shootout, even after we have been led to think that there's more to Eastwood's William Munny than just an old gunfighter in retirement. Earlier, we have seen evidence that Munny has lost his shooting skills, but suddenly at the end he's able to gun down a roomful of armed men with complete ease. Others object to the rather inessential stuff like the episode involving English Bob, and Saul Rubinek's writer in search of a subject for pulp-magazine hagiography is an overworked caricature. Still, for most of the picture Eastwood skates over the clichés and conceals vague motives -- like the swiftness with which Munny decides to leave his two children to fend for themselves while he follows the young would-be gunfighter on a foolish mission -- so that we don't have time to be bothered by them too much.

American Sniper (Clint Eastwood, 2014)

Bradley Cooper in American Sniper

Chris Kyle: Bradley Cooper
Taya Kyle: Sienna Miller
Marc Lee: Luke Grimes
Ryan "Biggles" Job: Jake McDorman
Dandridge: Cory Hardricht
Dauber: Kevin Lacz
Sheikh Al-Obodi: Navid Negahban
Jeff Kyle: Keir O'Donnell
Goat-Winston: Kyle Gallner

Director: Clint Eastwood
Screenplay: Jason Hall
Based on a book by Chris Kyle, Scott McEwen, and Jim DeFelice
Cinematography: Tom Stern
Film editing: Joel Cox, Gary Roach

I think American Sniper is not going to come into focus for us until 20 or 30 years have passed, and we have fully assessed the damage done by the American invasion of Iraq -- if, in fact, we ever do. Now, the only thing everyone seems to be able to agree on is that Bradley Cooper's powerful performance holds the film together. Otherwise, opinions about the movie range from those who see it as a reprehensible portrait of American arrogance to those who see it as a laudable portrait of American heroism. Most of us are somewhere in the middle, trying to decide whether it presents Chris Kyle as a victim of the Iraq incursion, as a misguided embodiment of false and outdated values, or as an archetype of the dutiful American military man. What it really seems to me is a muddle of all of these things because screenwriter Jason Hall and director Clint Eastwood can't bring the movie together into a satisfactory whole. It's wrong to review a movie that wasn't made, but I think American Sniper would have made a more coherent film if Chris Kyle's murder hadn't been relegated to a caption and shots of his funeral at the film's end. If the convergence of murderer and victim had been dealt with from the beginning, we might have had a more cohesive narrative about the effects of war on both those who can "handle it" and those who can't. As it is, we have only glances at large issues like simplistic world-view (Kyle's father's division of humankind into sheep, wolves, and shepherds), the American gun culture, the testosterone poisoning of machismo, the stereotyping of the enemy as "savages," and the inability of the United States to come to terms with the hidden problems of returning veterans. What we have instead are often exciting combat scenes mixed with rather clichéd domestic interludes. Sienna Miller does what she can with the underwritten and over-familiar role of the wife back home, but the script doesn't give her enough to work with. I admire Eastwood's restraint as a filmmaker, but I think it does him a disservice here. We are too close to the events of the first decade of the 21st century to have anything but our individual emotional reactions to them, and American Sniper is bound to ring false in some way to each of us. I kept thinking of Sergeant York (Howard Hawks, 1941) as I watched American Sniper. Made on the cusp of World War II, that unabashedly flag-waving movie about another American hero sharpshooter seems naive by contrast, even though the World War I in which Alvin York fought was at least as colossal an international fuck-up as the Iraq invasion, but it's also a better film. Maybe American Sniper will seem like a better film 74 years from now, but somehow I doubt it.