A Not So Welcome Stranger

The Woodsman is a sharp, touching portrait of an ex-con who encounters both internal and external obstacles to putting his past behind him. That the character’s crime was pedophilia makes his struggle all the more dramatic and sometimes even uncomfortable to watch, and yet the film manages to make him sympathetic while not shying away from the unsavory compulsions that continue to haunt him.

Played with a haunted and faraway look by Kevin Bacon, Walter returns to live in Philadelphia after serving 12 years in prison for molesting young girls. He gets work in a lumberyard where he meets Vickie (Kyra Sedgwick), a tough, rebellious woman who becomes his lover and eventually stands by him even after she’s learned the truth about his past. At his weekly therapy sessions, Walter discusses his difficulties re-integrating himself into society and dealing with his still-present impulses, while he also faces the resentments and prejudices of both family members and co-workers. Paying periodic visits on Walter is a local detective played with understated menace by Mos Def. The film’s title refers both to Walter’s profession and to the hero in Little Red Hiding Hood, the woodsman who cuts open the wolf to save the little girl inside. In one of his monologues meant to disquiet Walter, the detective tells the story of an abducted girl who had been murdered and laments that there aren’t any woodsmen left in the world.

First-time director Nicole Kassell has a good feel for how to direct a movie like this, giving delicate scenes ample time to unfold between her actors, and using grainy film that amplifies the film’s feeling of oppression. Bacon gives a remarkable performance as a man who’s almost completely shut himself off from the world, while Sedgwick expertly combines toughness and vulnerability in her portrayal of Vickie. The movie also contains a remarkable acting performance by Hannah Pickles as a young schoolgirl that Walter attempts to seduce; at first, Pickles comes across as confident and self-possessed but later reveals a vulnerability that makes it all too easy to see how child molesters succeed in seducing their prey. The Woodsman is undoubtedly a challenging film to watch, but one that succeeds in showing us the humanity within people we usually think of as having none.

Lost in Translation

Say this for Spanglish—it’s not a film that’s afraid to take risks. In telling the story of a single Mexican mother who goes to work for an upwardly mobile family in Los Angeles, it shines a light on a group of people—Mexican domestics—that Hollywood seldom acknowledges even exist. Furthermore, no English subtitles are provided for the numerous scenes in Spanish, presumably to reinforce the idea of the language gap that exists among the film’s main characters but at the risk of losing its non Spanish-speaking audience members. Most conspicuously, the film allows and even encourages one of its main characters, the beautiful Téa Leoni, to appear out-and-out unattractive for most of the movie, not only physically but also in terms of her personality—to say she’s neurotic and narcissistic would be putting it mildly. That the film is able to take such risks is probably a testament to the stature of its director, James L. Brooks, who helmed the Oscar-winning Terms of Endearment and more recently, As Good as it Gets, in addition to being one of the primary creative forces behind The Simpsons.

Unfortunately, Spanglish doesn’t quite reap the rewards for the risk its takes, primarily because the story it tells lacks dramatic heft, except towards the end of the film. The situations depicted throughout most of the film—mostly having to do with assimilation and figuring out the best way to raise one's kids—ultimately seem fairly mundane, despite the pregnant pauses and swelling music that desperately try to convince you that there’s more at stake than there really is. This lack of significance makes it difficult to become as involved in the story as one might like.

Another problem with the film is that Flor, the Mexican maid played by Spanish star Paz Vega, is too one-dimensional a character to ultimately be that interesting. While Vega does her best with the role, which requires her to communicate much non-verbally, she’s basically given two sets of emotions to portray-- kind and understanding, or proud and angry. Her role as the uncomplicatedly good minority stands in stark contrast to Leoni’s complex and layered performance, playing a woman who, while often crazy and selfish, is not entirely unlikable and never less than compelling to watch.

The film also suffers from a lack of clarity as to whose story is ultimately being told. Is it the story of Flor’s daughter Christina (Shelbie Bruce), whose application essay to Princeton serves as the narration for the movie? Is it Flor’s, navigating the difficult role of being a single mother in a foreign country? Or is it John Clasky’s (Adam Sandler), whose family life is falling apart and who sees a possible solution in the arms of another? A movie can, of course, tell multiple stories at one time—just see any of Robert Altman’s films or many of John Sayles’ movies—but Spanglish switches perspectives back and forth too often and too abruptly.

While Spanglish does contain a number of excellent acting performances, including that by Adam Sandler, who’s rapidly becoming a solid dramatic actor, Spanglish unfortunately doesn’t utilize those performances in service of as strong a story as it could have. It should be commended for the risks it takes, but not for the final results.

To Catch A Thief

Ocean’s Twelve, starring George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Matt Damon, Julia Roberts, et al

Directed by Steven Soderbergh

Perhaps no other director working in Hollywood today with artistic ambitions is more adept at also producing quality mainstream movies than Steven Soderbergh. In films like Erin Brockovich and Out of Sight, Soderbergh brings his trademark visual and narrative style to films aimed at a wider audience, making for satisfying yet not too challenging entertainment. It’s a feat that eludes Wes Anderson in his latest film, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, who appears unable to rein in his artistic impulses in the service of a more conventional narrative film. Presumably working on these major studio films affords Soderbergh the opportunity to also work on riskier and more artistically ambitious films like Traffic and The Limey.

While I don’t count Ocean’s Eleven among those mainstream successes—the movie seemed more like an excuse to get a lot of big stars together in a movie than a sincere attempt to make a quality film—its sequel, Ocean’s Twelve, does manage to present a more conventional entertainment with a welcome degree of originality and verve, due not only to Soderbergh’s directorial talents but also to a well-written script with several nice plot twists. Ocean’s Twelve reunites the cast of the earlier film, a group of thieves assembled by Danny Ocean (George Clooney) and co-led by Rusty Ryan (Brad Pitt). In this go-round, the mark they ripped off earlier, Terry Ryan (Andy Garcia), has tracked them all down and demands they pay him back what they stole from him with interest, and so the group must now embark on a new series of heists to raise this money.

While the plot may seem a bit thin, it’s actually not, given the details of how Terry is able to track down each member of the group and what ensues. These details involve the appearance of a rival to Ocean’s larcenous activities, the mysterious Night Fox, played here with the perfect combination of arrogance and charm by French actor Vincent Cassel. As the story of each caper and double-cross unfolds, Soderbergh employs some of his usual techniques of allowing dialog to run on into the next scene, often with serendipitous results, as well as shooting group scenes with a single handheld camera to heighten the feeling of intimacy.

Unlike in the previous film, the secondary characters in Ocean’s Twelve are sharply-delineated, and the film’s good lines, of which there are many, are divided more evenly among the large cast. Particular standouts are Matt Damon as the insecure logistics expert who desperately wants to play a more active role in the group's operations, and Elliot Gould as the veteran numbers guy who comes up with some priceless moments of comic exasperation.

The first two-thirds of Ocean’s Twelve is about as good as mainstream film gets, with some inspired comedy, intricate caper scenes, and a confident, well-paced script that doles out regular helpings of unexpected surprises. It all seems like it’s going to inevitably lead to an extremely satisfying conclusion, but unfortunately, Soderbergh and writer George Nolti prove unable to resist throwing in one or two unnecessary twists at the end, including one involving a well-known actor playing himself. These superfluous flourishes slow down the momentum of the movie and are sometimes downright confusing. They’re akin to a basketball team making one pass too many when one player already has a great shot at the basket. Still, the film is extremely enjoyable and a welcome improvement on Ocean’s Eleven, with Soderbergh cementing his reputation as one of the most versatile and original filmmakers working today.

Stars: ***

The Fabulous Destiny of...Mathilde?

A Very Long Engagement, starring Audrey Tautou, Gaspard Ulliel, Ticky Holgado, Marion Cotillard, Dominique Pinon, and Chantal Neuwirth
Directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet
(In French with English subtitles)

The first half or so of A Very Long Engagement might as well be titled the Further Adventures of Amélie, so closely does it hew to the style and plot of that earlier international hit, which also teamed director Jean-Pierre Jeunet with Audrey Tautou. Like Amélie, Engagement has at its center a quirky, slightly frail heroine who’s incurably romantic and prone to superstitious beliefs. Engagement also shares with its predecessor the device of introducing each character with a rapid summation of their personal history and quirks in voice-over. And among the actors, I counted at least four from the earlier film in Engagement.

Even fans of the earlier film, however, among whom I count myself, will likely not be pleased at how similar Engagement is to Amélie. After all, the movie isn’t titled the Further Adventures of Amélie, and that’s probably not what most of us were expecting to see. Instead, the likely hope was that Jeunet would apply his unique visual style to tell an entirely new story, and that Tautou might reveal her ability to play something other than a gamine romantic with her head in the clouds.

In the case of this film, both Jeunet and Tautou are given ample material with which to fashion something original. Engagement is based on a recent French bestseller of the same name about Mathilde, a young soldier’s fiancée during World War I who believes against all odds that her beloved Manech is still alive. In the story, Manech, who’s played in the film by the very young-looking Gaspard Ulliel, is sentenced along with four other soldiers to be court-martialed for injuring himself in an attempt to get discharged. The rest of his story is told via flashback in bits and pieces as Mathilde tracks down every possible clue in hopes of finding him.

Although the story’s initial battle scenes are rendered with an impressive realism reminiscent of Saving Private Ryan, the film doesn’t really start to come into its own until it allows characters other than Tautou to take over the screen and tell their stories. Most notable among these other characters is Jodie Foster in an unbilled cameo as the wife of one of the officers who witnessed Manech’s final days. Speaking in perfect French, Foster gives an incredibly heartfelt and realistic performance that contrasts sharply with the often whimsical or exaggerated dispositions of the film’s primary characters. Marion Cotillard does the same in a subsequent scene as the vengeful lover of one of Manech’s fellow soldiers, helping the film to build to its inevitable conclusion.

It's only when Jeunet abandons the fanciful tone of Amélie, however, that his film is able to achieve a deeper level of resonance. For it’s then that his bravura storytelling skills are used most effectively to illustrate the film’s themes of the power of love and the idiocy of war.

Stars: **1/2

The Genius of Jamie Foxx

Ray, starring Jamie Foxx, Kerry Washington, Regina King, Clifton Powell, Harry J. Lennix, Curtis Armstrong, and Larenz Tate

One of the primary dangers in making a bio-pic is the tendency to reduce the main character’s motivations to a single incident or experience for the sake of narrative coherence. Billy Bob witnesses his mother being abused so he becomes a champion of women’s rights. Little Amy sees her father’s shame at begging for work to get by and vows to never be poor, amassing a huge fortune in her adult life.

Of course, filmmakers need to draw some conclusions about a person’s motivations—that’s sort of the point, after all—but a good biography film doesn’t simplistically trace every single action in a character’s life back to a single motivation or desire. After all, how many of us can point to one reason why we do the things we do, let alone a half-dozen?

Ray, directed by Taylor Hackford (Proof of Life, An Officer and a Gentleman) and starring Jamie Foxx as the jazz and R&B great Ray Charles, certainly has moments where it falls into this reductionist trap, trying to relate too much of Ray's behavior to a traumatic incident suffered when he was a child. But any hint of over-simplification gets left behind every time Jamie Foxx is on-screen depicting the title character. That’s because beyond being an incredible impersonation of Charles, Foxx’s performance is so complex and layered that he makes you feel as though you’re watching an actual human being up on the screen and not just an actor portraying one. Even as the film's script attempts to pin Charles down, Foxx's portrayal of the man defiantly resists any single label or category.

Building on his fine performance as the reluctant taxi driver starring opposite Tom Cruise in Collateral, Foxx has woven an incredibly rich portrait of an iconic performer that represents some of the best movie acting I've seen in years.

Like many great artists, Charles was an incredibly complicated person—charming, funny, and full of dignity despite his handicap, but also selfish, self-deluding, and at times cruel to those who loved him—and Foxx captures every one of these facets of Charles’s character without a single false note. Although Foxx does not sing in the movie, he does play the piano and his lip-synching to Charles’s recordings is flawless.

The film tells primarily of the middle part of Charles’s life, from the time he first arrived in Seattle as a teenager to play gigs to the time at age 36 when he finally kicked heroin in a rehab center. Along the way, there are flashbacks to his upbringing in rural Florida under a tough-as-nails single mother (Sharon Warren) who taught him to take care of himself after losing his sight to childhood glaucoma when he was seven. The bulk of the story traces Charles’s rise as a performer and the origins of many of his most famous songs, as well as his marriage to Della Bea Robinson (Kerry Washington) and his many extramarital dalliances. Most of these scenes are well-crafted, if occasionally oversimplified as noted above; one quibble I had, however, was that the titles showing where and when different scenes took place were maddeningly inconsistent—sometimes the place and year were noted, sometimes just the place, and sometimes neither.

The movie also loses some momentum towards the end as the filmmakers try to cram in too many details about Charles’s later life, and there’s a bit of unnecessary hagiography at the end depicting Charles as a civil rights pioneer when that was only a small part of what he was about.

While Ray is clearly not a perfect film, it does have as close to a perfect acting performance as you’re going to see this year in Jamie Foxx’s depiction of the musical genius.

Stars: ***1/2

Sexual Healing

Kinsey, starring Liam Neeson, Laura Linney, Peter Saarsgard, John Lithgow, Oliver Platt, Tim Curry, Chris O’Donnell, Timothy Hutton

As the subject for a bio-pic, Dr. Albert Kinsey represents a challenging choice. While he produced the, ahem, seminal Sexual Behavior in the Human Male that blew the doors open on American’s cloistered sexual habits, he could also be emotionally distant and almost doctrinaire in his approach to overturning orthodoxy. Later in his career, he encouraged destructive promiscuity with and among his coterie of assistants, and he also implemented unethical research methods such as having his assistants sleep with subjects.

Despite this challenge, Liam Neeson and director Bill Condon, who directed the excellent Gods and Monsters and who more recently wrote the screenplay for Chicago, succeed in constructing a complex portrait of a man shaped by two main forces—his strict minister of a father, played here by John Lithgow, and Kinsey’s unwavering belief in science. While Neeson never achieves the sublime heights of characterization that Jamie Foxx does in Ray—perhaps because of the inherent qualities of the respective men they are portraying—he nevertheless is able to revealingly portray a complicated and sometimes troubled man who, despite his flaws, was ultimately motivated by a desire to help his fellow man.

The movie looks at Kinsey’s early childhood, but spends most of its time on his life after he became a respected biology professor at Indiana University. Having studied gall wasps and become fascinated by their incredible diversity—he eventually collected over one million specimens—he later applied the same approach to his study of human sexuality, which to that point had never been looked at in any kind of systematic fashion. While his first book on male sexuality was lauded as a breakthrough, his second book on female sexuality predictably raised hackles among conservative and religious groups, threatening his funding. In the end, Kinsey died before he was able to complete the various studies he envisioned doing.

As Kinsey’s supportive wife, Laura Linney gives her usual strong performance, but her role is largely secondary in this film. Peter Saarsgard as Clyde Martin, Kinsey’s chief assistant and at one time, his lover, is perfectly cast, with the actor’s lidded eyes and thin voice striking just the right note of ambiguity and even a hint of danger.

Kinsey utilizes an elegant device of having the movie framed by his assistants interviewing Kinsey himself, leading naturally to flashbacks of his own sexual history, and also revealing his methodology. Of the thousands of sexual histories he recorded, some even now have the power to shock, including that of a man who had sex with 9,600 people including boys and girls (note: this film is not for the squeamish).

Kinsey’s documentation of all the ways that human beings are polymorphously perverse, to use Freud’s phrase, was undoubtedly an important achievement, but it also had mixed consequences--some viewed Kinsey's cataloging of all types of sexual behavior as tacit approval of all such acts, including those considered criminal, , while others felt liberated to explore alternative forms of consensual sex by realizing that they were far from alone in favoring them.

In the end, the film nicely balances the negative and positive consequences of Kinsey’s work—and of his life—by honestly depicting instances of each.

Stars: ***

Driving Sideways

Sideways, starring Paul Giamatti, Thomas Haden Church, Virginia Madsen, and Sandra Oh

In movies like American Splendor and the just-released Sideways, Paul Giamatti has perfected his portrayal of a particular kind of modern American anti-hero, neurotic and self-loathing, yet somehow still sympathetic and capable of redemption. With his receding hairline, flabby facial features, and permanently bad posture, Giamatti cuts a less-than-dashing figure, suggesting an updated Woody Allen. But whereas Allen’s exasperation at life’s indignities, whether real or imagined, tends to the comic, Giamatti’s often veers toward the violent, precipitating cringe-inducing bad behavior. The results, though much darker, are no less funny.

In Sideways, a brilliantly-crafted buddy picture and road movie directed by Alexander Payne (Election, About Schmidt), Giamatti’s talents are expertly utilized. Giamatti plays Miles, a frustrated novelist and full-time killjoy still pining for his ex-wife, whom he divorced a year ago. His former college roommate, Jack (Thomas Haden Church), is about to get married and so Miles takes him on a trip to California’s wine country to share his passion—and often, pretension—for wine. Jack, a semi-successful actor, has other ideas for the trip, however, seeing it as a chance to have a few last flings before entering the halls of matrimony.

With his rugged looks and goofy charm, Jack is irresistible to women and it’s not long before he’s set up a date for the two friends with Stephanie (Sandra Oh), a pourer at a local winery, and Maya (Virginia Madsen), a waitress at a restaurant that Miles has known for a while but who he’s convinced is not interested in him. While Jack and Stephanie almost immediately jump into bed, Miles lets his feelings for his ex-wife and general pessimism get in the way of connecting with Maya, who nevertheless shares Miles’s love of wine and responds to his obvious intelligence.

The scenes between Miles and Maya are among the film’s best, with Maya’s discriminating palate and compassionate nature earning Miles’ respect and awakening in him visible joy at finding someone he can connect with again. The subtext in Miles’ answer to Maya’s question about why he loves pinot noir so much—it’s a thin-skinned grape that rewards those with the patience to grow it—is so apparent that it almost ceases to be subtext.

The movie is also full of laugh-out-loud moments, mostly coming out of the conflict created by Miles and Jack’s competing agendas, which provides many opportunities for Giamatti’s simmering peevishness to erupt into full-blown comic fury. As is the case with Giamatti, the talents of Thomas Haden Church, perhaps best remembered as the clueless mechanic Otis on TV’s Wings, are used expertly here in his portrayal of an incorrigible womanizer who stubbornly refuses to think of anyone besides himself.

Aside from the movie’s final third, which contains a few unnecessary scenes, Sideways is extremely well-paced and the writing is always sharp and funny. A jazzy score by Rolfe Kent serves as a perfect accompaniment to the movie, and the movie’s gorgeous shots of northern California’s wine country really help place the viewer in the mood and setting of the film’s characters. One particularly creative sequence makes use of multiple split screens to depict Miles and Jack’s visits to several different vineyards.

All of these elements combine to make this story of middle-aged malaise and redemption one of the best films of the year.

Stars: ****

Politics Unusual

Team America: World Police, starring the voices of Trey Parker, Matt Stone, and others

To an unprecedented degree, 2004 has been the year of the political movie. From Fahrenheit 9/11 to The Fog of War to several documentaries about both Kerry and Bush, filmmakers have decided to put their stakes in the ground this year and use their movies to express their political views.

The latest entrant in this year’s movie-as-political-soapbox derby comes from the twisted geniuses behind South Park, Trey Parker and Matt Stone. Knowing the pair’s reputation for irreverence and the film's title, you might think that Team America would be a parody America’s recent interventionist tendencies and feature a liberal (pun intended) sprinkling of potshots against President Bush and members of his Administration. But you would, in fact, be wrong.

While the movie does make fun of America’s clumsy efforts to maintain world peace—and I do mean clumsy, since the characters are all played by puppets with barely-articulated limbs—the real targets of this movie are actually Hollywood liberals who promote political issues like Alec Baldwin, Tim Robbins, Susan Sarandon, and Sean Penn. Far from criticizing America’s recent foreign policy, Team America actually winds up supporting it, as our heroes stop a mad Kim Il Jung bent on destroying the world by persuading the world's leaders that what America offers is considerably better than the anarchic alternative (not surprisingly, the argument for an interventionist America is made in much—and I do mean much--coarser language).

Team America unfolds with an elite fighting team being assembled to stop the world’s worst terrorists. To help their cause, they recruit Broadway actor Gary Johnston (voiced by Trey Parker), who’s reluctant to use his acting “powers” because he always ends up hurting people. After one mission ends badly, Gary quits the team, leaving them to face Kim Il Jung (voiced by Trey Parker) and his team of liberal Hollywood actor/flunkies (most of whom are voiced by—you guessed it—Trey Parker) all by themselves. Gary ultimately rejoins the team at their darkest moment, of course, but not before he hits bottom and lies sprawled face-down in a Bel Air mansion-sized pool of his own vomit.

Along the way, the movie manages to hilariously send up action movie clichés like the obligatory training montage sequence and Matrix-style fight scenes. There’s also an incredibly funny scene of puppet sex much raunchier than anything you’d see in Avenue Q (how raunchy? let’s just say it looks as if the Kama Sutra was used as reference material). And the puppet Kim Il Jung is actually oddly endearing, crooning about how lonely he is, except in his mangled pronunciation it comes out as “I’m so rone-ry” (as a somewhat unrelated aside, it's a little-known fact that Kim Il Jung was a big film buff in his youth and even wrote a well-regarded book on movies; one can only imagine what Kim Jong-Il’s reaction to Team America will be--if and when he sees it).

While Team America has some great moments in it, it isn’t as consistently funny in the way that a good episode of South Park can be. I can’t say whether the movie would have been any funnier if W. and his cronies were being lampooned with equal venom, but I do know there was a funnier movie in here somewhere; Parker and Stone just didn’t manage to find it.

Stars: **1/2