Asteroid City (Wes Anderson, 2023)

Cast: Jason Schwartzman, Scarlett Johansson, Tom Hanks, Jeffrey Wright, Tilda Swinton, Bryan Cranston, Edward Norton, Adrien Brody, Liev Schreiber, Hope Davis, Stephen Park, Rupert Friend, Maya Hawke, Steve Carell, Matt Dillon, Hong Chau, Margot Robbie, Tony Revolori, Jake Ryan. Grace Edwards. Screenplay: Wes Anderson, Roman Coppola. Cinematography: Robert D. Yeoman. Production design: Adam Stockhausen. Film editing: Barney Pilling. Music: Alexandre Desplat.

On the Netflix series Heartstopper, a teenage boy works up the courage to ask a girl he likes (and who secretly likes him) to go on their first date. He takes her to a movie that he likes and she doesn't, and the date is a disaster. The key fact here is that the movie is Wes Anderson's Moonrise Kingdom (2012). In my day, a comparable move would have been to take a date to see Jacques Demy's The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964). Like Demy, Anderson makes movies that display an uncompromising sense of style. The only question is whether that style works for you or not, whether you think it betrays a lack of substance or opens vistas of meaning. In Anderson's case it's certainly a consistent style: an absence of closeups, long takes with characters artfully placed, actors who deliver their lines deadpan facing front, tricks like switching the screen from standard Academy ratio to widescreen and from monochrome to color. Sometimes Anderson's style works for me and sometimes it doesn't -- I love The Royal Tenenbaums (2001) and The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014), but I could barely sit through The French Dispatch (2021). In the case of Asteroid City, I still haven't made up my mind completely, but I'm leaning toward the favorable view. I think it captures something essential about the brutal innocence of 1950's America -- the film is set in 1955 -- and does it without clichés. There's an acidity of tone to the film that keeps it from becoming twee -- an adjective frequently applied to Anderson's movies. The performances of its all-star cast are often delightful: I particularly liked Bryan Cranston's performance as the TV host who serves as the narrator in the frame story. Cranston somehow manages to walk a line between Rod Serling and Walter Cronkite in his delivery. Scarlett Johansson and a bearded, pipe-smoking Jason Schwartzman manage to transcend the limitations of deadpan delivery as the film's romantic leads. Jeffrey Wright doesn't overplay the role of the pompous General Gibson, and there's a brief starry cameo by Margot Robbie. Asteroid City may be one of those films it's more rewarding to think about after you watch it, but watching it is fairly painless.

Elvis (Baz Luhrmann, 2022)

 

Cast: Austin Butler, Tom Hanks, Olivia DeJonge, Helen Thompson, Richard Roxburgh, Kelvin Harrison Jr., David Wenham, Kodi Smit-McPhee. Screenplay: Baz Luhrmann, Sam Bromell, Craig Pearce, Jeremy Doner. Cinematography: Mandy Walker. Production design: Catherine Martin, Karen Murphy. Film editing: Jonathan Redmond, Matt Villa. Music: Elliott Wheeler. 

In 2001, the two movie critics at the San Jose Mercury News both put Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge! on their end-of-the-year lists: One put it on his list of the year’s best movies, the other on his list of the worst. Something like that may happen to Luhrmann’s Elvis, which similarly divided critics into love it or hate it cohorts. But how can anyone object to the movie as “loud” or “garish,” as some do? This is Elvis Presley, for god’s sake, not the most subtle or cerebral of celebrities. And no one expected subtlety from Luhrmann, one of our most operatic directors. Elvis has its stylistic roots in Luhrmann’s love of opera, and it has to be described as Wagnerian, with Elvis as a kind of Siegfried, a naïf and demigod, and ultimately a tragic figure, undone by his trust in others. The villain of the piece, though he’s determined in his voiceover narration not to bear that label, is Col. Tom Parker, played by Tom Hanks in a performance almost smothered in prosthetics. It’s this old carny who turns Elvis’s life into a perpetual carnival. The real triumph in the film is Austin Butler’s: He manages to keep Elvis real despite all the gaudy trappings with which the self-commissioned colonel (not to mention Luhrmann) is determined to adorn him. This is not my idea of a great film, being one in which substance is fitfully allowed to co-exist with the style that threatens to overwhelm it, but it’s pretty damn good entertainment.  

Toy Story 4 (Josh Cooley, 2019)

Cast: voices of Tom Hanks, Tim Allen, Annie Potts, Tony Hale, Keegan-Michael Key, Madeleine McGraw, Christina Hendricks, Jordan Peele, Keanu Reeves, Ally Maki, Jay Hernandez, Lori Alan, Joan Cusack, Bonnie Hunt, Kristen Schaal, Emily Davis. Screenplay: Andrew Stanton, Stephany Folsom, Josh Cooley. Cinematography: Jean-Claude Kalache, Patrick Lin. Production design: Bob Pauley. Film editing: Axel Geddes. Music: Randy Newman.

Wouldn't you know it: On the night that the Oscars get interesting, I decide not to watch them. Instead, I watched Toy Story 4, which at least won for best animated feature while I was watching it. That was, of course, one of the more predictable wins of the night, along with the four acting awards. The fourth Toy Story movie is on a par with the other three: a solid representative of the Pixar formula mix of laughs, thrills, and tears. I did have the feeling that by now its world of toys has become overpopulated, and that the movie might have been better if the old familiars from Andy's (now Bonnie's) toy box -- Rex, Hamm, Slinky, the Potato Heads, etc. -- had been jettisoned so that the adventures of the newcomers could have been given a sharper focus. But I did like the attempt at closure in the film's ending, when Woody goes off to start a new life with Bo Peep and the other lost toys. I just hope Pixar can resist the temptation to make Toy Story 5 or to start a new series of Lost Toys that will go to infinity and beyond.

Saving Private Ryan (Steven Spielberg, 1998)

Tom Hanks, Edward Burns, Tom Sizemore, and Jeremy Davies in Saving Private Ryan

Capt. Miller: Tom Hanks
Sgt. Horvath: Tom Sizemore
Pvt. Reiben: Edward Burns
Pvt. Jackson: Barry Pepper
Pvt. Mellish: Adam Goldberg
Pvt. Caparzo: Vin Diesel
T-4 Medic Wade: Giovanni Ribisi
Cpl. Upham: Jeremy Davies
Pvt. Ryan: Matt Damon
Capt. Hamill: Ted Danson
Sgt. Hill: Paul Giamatti
Lt. Col. Anderson: Dennis Farina
"Steamboat Willie": Joerg Stadler
Minnesota Ryan: Nathan Fillion
Gen. Marshall: Harve Presnell
War Dept. Col.: Dale Dye
War Dept. Col.: Bryan Cranston
Elderly Ryan: Harrison Young
Elderly Ryan's Wife: Kathleen Byron

Director: Steven Spielberg
Screenplay: Robert Rodat
Cinematography: Janusz Kaminski
Production design: Thomas E. Sanders
Film editing: Michael Kahn
Music: John Williams

The criticisms usually leveled at Saving Private Ryan are that its framing scenes of the elderly Ryan visiting the cemetery in Normandy are superfluous and sentimental, that it trades on war-movie clichés such as the ethnically mixed company of soldiers (an Italian, a Jew, a Brooklynite, a Bible-quoting Southerner, and so on), that it eschews any portrayal of the enemy as other than cannon-fodder, and that there's no overall originality of vision on its director's part. And they're all valid criticisms. Are they outweighed by the sheer brilliance of Steven Spielberg's movie-making -- and that of his usual team of cinematographer Janusz Kaminski, editor Michael Kahn, and composer John Williams? As a lover of movies I have to say they are. I would like Robert Rodat's screenplay to be edgier and more intelligent. I would like for the film to provoke thought and to give us a new vision on World War II. But each time I watch the film I come away admiring the way Spielberg and company push my reservations about it into the background as I'm caught once again by the masterly way they manipulate both the medium and its audience. I have learned to ask more of movies than Spielberg gives us -- the unique personal visions of Ozu and Hitchcock and Tarkovsky, for example -- but I'm also content to suspend my expectation that all movies should aspire to that standard and to let myself be manipulated into temporary submission to simple wonder at mastery of the medium.

Bridge of Spies (Steven Spielberg, 2015)

It goes without saying that Steven Spielberg is one of the great directors, with a seldom-equaled skill at visual storytelling and at building tension and suspense. But Spielberg tries too hard to make a statement in Bridge of Spies -- something about defending the Constitution -- when it could have been simply an engaging film about Cold War tensions. It also suffers from the wrong kind of star power: Tom Hanks has devolved from a terrific actor, skilled at both comedy and drama, into the movies' iconic Good Guy. Casting him as the lawyer James Donovan, forced to defend a Soviet spy, deprives the film of any ambiguity about Donovan's defense of Rudolf Abel (Mark Rylance). Hanks's Donovan can simply wrap himself in the Constitution and we're with him all the way, even as public opinion of the time turns against him. As a film actor Hanks has lost his dark side, so we know that whoever he plays will triumph. Imagine Bridge of Spies with Donovan played by George Clooney or Bradley Cooper, stars with just a touch of shadow in their personae, and you can see what I mean. Fortunately, the film is otherwise well-cast, including Rylance's Oscar-winning turn as Abel, as well as Scott Shepherd's impatient CIA man and Sebastian Koch's duplicitous East German lawyer, and the screenplay by Matt Charman and Joel and Ethan Coen manages a good deal of suspense. (Sometimes at the expense of historical accuracy: Donovan was never shot at in his home, as the film has it.) The Coen brothers were brought in to work on the first draft of Charman's screenplay, specifically on the section in which Donovan finds himself negotiating separately with the Soviets and the East Germans to engineer an exchange of Abel for imprisoned U2 pilot Francis Gary Powers (Austin Stowell) and an American student, Frederic Pryor (Will Rogers), who has been accidentally arrested in East Berlin. It's the best part of the movie, as Donovan wrangles not only with the conflicting egos and bureaucracies of the Soviet and East German officials but also with the CIA's insistence that only Powers need be included in the deal. Unfortunately, Spielberg doesn't know when his movie is over. Bridge of Spies should end with the exchange of spies at the bridge, but Spielberg keeps it running as Donovan boards the plane for home, returns to the arms of his family just as the news of his successful negotiation is breaking, gives his wife (Amy Ryan) the jar of marmalade he promised to bring her from London, witnesses her realization that he wasn't in London after all, and soon afterward rides to work on the bus where a woman who had previously frowned at him as a traitor now smiles at him as a hero after seeing his picture in the newspaper. All the while, Thomas Newman's score is telling us what we're supposed to feel. It's sheer sentimental anticlimax, of the sort that many critics decry in what are usually regarded as Spielberg's greatest films, Saving Private Ryan (1998) and Schindler's List (1993). (I happen to agree that the frame story of the aging Ryan's visit to the cemetery in Normandy is unnecessary, though I think the Yad Vashem sequence at the end of the latter film can be justified by the enormity of its subject matter.)  Bridge of Spies is by no means a bad movie, but it would have been a lot better if Spielberg hadn't given in to his instinct for overemphasis.