Ad Astra (James Gray, 2019)

Brad Pitt in Ad Astra

Cast: Brad Pitt, Tommy Lee Jones, Donald Sutherland, Ruth Negga, Kimberly Elise, Loren Dean, Liv Tyler, Donnie Keshawarz, Sean Blakemore, Bobby Nish, LisaGay Hamilton, John Finn, John Ortiz. Screenplay: James Gray, Ethan Gross. Cinematography: Hoyte Van Hoytema. Production design: Kevin Thompson. Film editing: John Axelrad, Lee Haugen. Music: Max Richter.

It's said that there are really only two types of sci-fi movies: space Westerns and mind-bogglers. The Star Wars canon would be the archetype of the former, Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) of the latter. But James Gray seems to want to bridge the types in Ad Astra, with some exciting action sequences in the first half of the film, including a spectacular fall by the protagonist, Roy McBride (Brad Pitt), from a space station near enough to the Earth for him to be affected by gravity, and an exciting chase sequence involving moon pirates. But then the film shifts into something more mythic, a father-son fable with overtones of Oedipus and Laius, Daedalus and Icarus, Orestes and Agamemnon, Abraham and Isaac, and so on. It goes from action to introspection so suddenly that it lost a lot of its audience, who may have gone in expecting something like Armageddon (Michael Bay, 1998) and found themselves watching something more like Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life (2011), and not just because Pitt sometimes seems to be reprising his character from the Malick film. Gray also makes nods to the Kubrick classic, with some wry twists: In 2001, for example, space flight has been commercialized, so that people travel to the moon on Pan Am (an airline that went out of business before the real 2001 rolled around). In Ad Astra, the moon flight is on Virgin, and Gray slips in a dig at today's commercial aviation when Roy requests a blanket and pillow and is told that the charge for them is $125. Earthlike crime and corruption have also infected travel in space: Not only are there pirates on the moon, the international competition for mineral rights has bred distrust. The American program has been militarized, with the usual consequences of rank-pulling and official secrecy screwing things up. Pitt carries the film as he has never carried one before, having developed a gift for revealing the internal torment carefully masked by external stoicism. I have a feeling that Ad Astra, though reckoned a bit of a box office disappointment at the time, is going to grow in stature over the years, along with Gray's reputation as a director.

Lincoln (Steven Spielberg, 2012)

Sally Field and Daniel Day-Lewis in Lincoln

Abraham Lincoln: Daniel Day-Lewis
Mary Todd Lincoln: Sally Field
William Seward: David Strathairn
Robert Lincoln: Joseph Gordon-Levitt
W.N. Bilbo: James Spader
Preston Blair: Hal Holbrook
Thaddeus Stevens: Tommy Lee Jones
Robert Latham: John Hawkes
Alexander Stephens: Jackie Earle Haley
Edwin Stanton: Bruce McGill
Richard Schell: Tim Blake Nelson
John Hay: Joseph Cross
Ulysses S. Grant: Jared Harris
Fernando Wood: Lee Pace
George Pendleton: Peter McRobbie
Elizabeth Keckley: Gloria Reuben
George Yeaman: Michael Stuhlbarg
Clay Hoggins: Walton Goggins
Corporal Ira Clark: David Oyelowo
First White Soldier: Lukas Haas
Second White Soldier: Dane DeHaan
Samuel Beckwith: Adam Driver
Lydia Smith: S. Epatha Merkerson

Director: Steven Spielberg
Screenplay: Tony Kushner
Based on a book by Doris Kearns Goodwin
Cinematography: Janusz Kaminski
Production design: Rick Carter
Film editing: Michael Kahn
Music: John Williams

The all-star patriotic historical pageant celebrating American democracy had long been a featured genre of Hollywood films until the disillusionments of Vietnam and Watergate put it pretty much out of favor. But during the brief resurgence of liberal optimism after the election of Barack Obama, Steven Spielberg decided to bring it out of mothballs with a film about Abraham Lincoln's struggles to pass the 13th amendment, banning slavery in the United States. He initially planned to star Liam Neeson in the title role, but when Neeson decided he was too old for the part, the choice fell on Daniel Day-Lewis, the most chameleonic of actors. Lincoln has been played on screen by actors as varied as Walter Huston, Henry Fonda, and Raymond Massey, but Day-Lewis covered himself with glory and encumbered himself with a third Oscar in the role. It is in fact a superb performance, emphasizing the humanity of the man with depictions of his marital problems, his earthy sense of humor (no previous movie Lincoln was ever heard to utter the word "shit"), and above all his willingness to play down-and-dirty politics. The bulk of the drama is in the maneuverings to get a two-thirds majority in the House of Representatives to ratify the amendment, which has substantial opposition even within the president's own party, the Republicans. This means maneuvering some of the holdouts with promises of government jobs and patronage, a task that falls to a team of lobbyists led by W.N. Bilbo, played beautifully by James Spader. It also involves persuading the most volatile of abolitionists, Thaddeus Stevens, to utter compromising language on the floor of the House, in which he asserts that all men are equal before the law, but not necessarily equal "in all things," creating a fiery, funny scene for Tommy Lee Jones as Stevens. Lincoln is also forced to conceal that he is engaged in peace negotiations with the Confederates, fearing that this would lead to postponement of the vote on the amendment. Tony Kushner's screenplay is more cerebral than most, focusing on points of law and political maneuverings, which is why some reviewers and audiences were not fully enthusiastic about it. Though it was nominated for 12 Oscars, it won only two, for Day-Lewis and for production design, losing best picture to Argo (Ben Affleck) and best director to Ang Lee for Life of Pi. Both losses, I think, are inexcusable, as was Sally Field's loss as the fragile Mary Todd Lincoln to Anne Hathaway's lachrymose Fantine in Les Misérables (Tom Hooper). I suspect Lincoln will grow in esteem over the years, thanks to its many finely detailed performances, the superb re-creation of a period in its sets and costumes, and a general lack of cinematic clichés: John Williams even manages to compose a score without quoting from "The Battle Hymn of the Republic," "The Star-Spangled Banner," or any number of other sure-fire, heart-tugging patriotic melodies.

No Country for Old Men (Joel Coen and Ethan Coen, 2007)

No Country is not my favorite Coen brothers film; Fargo (1996), Inside Llewyn Davis (2013), Miller's Crossing (1990), and maybe O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000) and The Big Lebowski (1998) would have to rank higher. But that only shows what an extraordinary contribution the brothers have made to motion picture history. There are those who task the Coens with too much cleverness, too much awareness of breaking or bending conventions, such as, in this film, dispatching both the protagonist and the antagonist off-screen, depriving us of the catharsis usual in such a thriller. There is, some critics argue, something chilly about the Coens, never letting us get too involved in their characters as potentially real human beings. I'd argue that engaging sympathetic identification with characters is not a sine qua non in art, and that the tendency of writers and directors to do that has led to a lot of sentimental and falsified endings. And anyway, who doesn't feel a sympathetic identification with Marge Gunderson in Fargo, or the Dude in The Big Lebowski, to name two of their greatest characters? (They also happen to be original creations of the Coens, not borrowed from a novel, as the characters in No Country are.) I haven't read the Cormac McCarthy novel, but the film strikes me as a moral fable akin to Chaucer's Pardoner's Tale, with the implacable Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem) as the Death figure stalking Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin), whose avarice -- though modified by a few virtues, such as bringing a jug of water, albeit too late, to the man he finds dying in the desert -- finally proves his undoing, despite his clever attempts to avoid his fate. We root for Moss because of our common humanity, a trait lacking in the psychotic Chigurh, but it's telling that the story is framed by the point of view of Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones), who can only see the story as a manifestation of what is lacking in human beings. Ed Tom thinks it has something to do with the changing times, which is why there seem to be no countries for old men anymore, but I would suggest that the medieval fable analogy overrides Ed Tom's theory: Human beings have always been like this. That said, the Coens seem to be assembling a kind of American collage. One thing that No Country shares with all of the Coens' best movies is a strong sense of time and place, whether it's the frigid Minnesota of Fargo, the Greenwich Village in the '60s of Inside Llewyn Davis, the unspecified Prohibition-era city of Miller's Crossing, the Depression-era Mississippi of O Brother, or the '90s L.A. of The Big Lebowski. In this case, it's West Texas in 1980, and every note struck about place and period has a resemblance to truth, without being literal about it. As usual, the Coens' collaborators -- especially cinematographer Roger Deakins and composer Carter Burwell -- play a major role, especially Burwell's almost subliminal score.