starring Sean Penn, Josh Brolin, and Emile Hirsch
written by Dustin Lance Black & directed by Gus Van Sant
Rated R for language, some sexual content and brief violence.
79%

In the 1970s, Harvey Milk (Penn), is inspired to move to San Francisco with his new boyfriend and eventually to campaign for political office in an attempt to combat the anti-gay bigotry he sees all around him. Eventually, after a series of hard-fought elections, he becomes the first openly-gay man elected to major political office (city supervisor) in the United States. Overnight, Milk becomes an inspirational figure to a community of individuals that have felt threatened and marginalized throughout their entire lives, but the real battles have just begun. However, Milk’s crusade is cut tragically short when, for reasons that remain cloudy, he, along with San Francisco mayor George Moscone, is assassinated by fellow supervisor Dan White (Brolin), a conservative Catholic, in 1978.

I know that this is an Important Movie that communicates Important Ideas, because it told me so (several times, in fact). To paraphrase Harvey Milk’s catchphrase: This film’s name is Milk, and it is here to recruit you. Perhaps its cause is a just one, but when the message cannot be communicated without waving it in the audience’s face like a banner, and draining heroes and villains alike of moral complexity, then the storyteller has utterly failed. And Milk‘s screenwriter, Dustin Lance Black, has utterly failed.

I really have no other significant complaints about the film. Penn has a very magnetic screen presence, well-suited to the portrayal of a man whose charisma must have been formidable. His co-stars also do notable work. Brolin’s Dan White is, unfortunately, inscrutable, but this is doubtless a failure of the writing, or (thinking more charitably) simply because no one really knows what drove to White to act as he did. Van Sant is a good director, and Milk is solidly-constructed (if largely conventional). None of this matters, however; the transparency and lack of depth in this screenplay are an insurmountable problem.

White alone, in fact, develops a certain complexity, but ultimately he is an enigma. One might even be tempted to say (unfairly, no doubt) that he is not explained because he could not be easily reduced to the film’s simplistic conceptions of “good” and “evil” like every other character. Harvey, on the other hand, is a saint. This not only makes him rather uninteresting, but is doubtless a disservice to the reality of the living, breathing, imperfect man Milk actually was. He encounters hardship in the film, certainly, but somehow they hardly register. He seems so extraordinary that his accomplishments aren’t terribly surprising.

The tale’s framing device is a particularly poor one. Harvey tells his own story, via tape recorder. This allows for voice-overs to explain what is going on and create bridges between scenes when a lot of time has passed. What I never quite understood was why Harvey was sitting alone in his kitchen, shortly before his death, dictating his life story into a microphone. It’s almost as though he expects to be killed (which doesn’t make any sense). Because this is a biopic, are we expected to believe that he actually did this? Surely not. The device is lazy and confusing. I say that Harvey tells his life story, but this isn’t entirely true. One might expect to hear more about where he came from and what made him the man he became. His life seems to begin on his 40th birthday, and he emerges out of nowhere to become the political savior of San Francisco’s gay community. This only adds to the dull hagiographic feel of the movie.

Milk draws a very hard, extreme line down one side of a volatile and complex issue, and then demands that its characters and its audience choose a side. If they, and we, choose the right side, we become brave and heroic individuals, standing on principle for what is right. If we choose incorrectly, we are everything that is bad and wrong in America today. Whether or not I agree with the ideology in play here (and I am far from unsympathetic to it), this sort of high-handed invective is a major turn-off, and certainly no way to win hearts and minds. No amount of high-brow production standards or armload of Oscar nominations is going to change that.

Posted in Reviews

starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Kate Winslet, and Michael Shannon
written by Richard Yates and Justin Haythe & directed by Sam Mendes
Rated R for language and some sexual content/nudity.
79%

Once upon a time, Frank (DiCaprio) and April (Winslet) met at a party, fell in love, and got married. Now, seven years and two kids later, the Wheelers are living in a suburb in 1950s America, and (as everyone knows) that means they are leading lives of quiet desperation. However, April has an escape plan. The couple has some money set aside, and it seems that the French government pays its secretaries excellent salaries. In order to escape the banality of their present existence, Frank will quit the job that he hates and the family will move to Paris, where April will work to support them and Frank will finally have a chance to discover what he truly wants to do with his life. No sooner has the plan been set into motion, however, than unexpected problems begin to rise and block their way.

In 1999, Sam Mendes directed American Beauty, a story of a joyless drone living in suburbia who wakes up one day and starts to live for himself, at his family’s expense, only to discover (almost too late) that the secret to genuine joie de vivre has a lot more to do with loving others than loving yourself. Then, in 2006, Kate Winslet starred in Little Children, a story of a young mother and a young father, also leading unhappy lives in suburbia, who meet while pushing their children on the swings at the playground. They, too, eventually begin to live for themselves, to the detriment of their families, before being unexpectedly jolted back into fulfilling their marital and parental responsibilities as adults. I love both movies (though I have oversimplified them a bit here) for their great artistic beauty, powerful storytelling, and redemptive themes. Now, Mendes directs Winslet (the two are married) in a story about marital infidelity, living for self, and suburban malaise. Strangely enough, the result left me completely cold.

There is no technical reason why this should be so. Winslet is one of my favorite actresses (although here she seems to have trouble humanizing a somewhat inaccessible character), and DiCaprio is very good when, as here, he has been cast appropriately. Roger Deakins’ cinematography is as haunting and beautiful as always, and the film is underlined with a lovely score by Thomas Newman (my favorite composer of the moment), who also scored American Beauty and Little Children. I have no specific criticisms to offer, beyond a vague sense of discomfort and unease that lasted from the moment the film began until after the credits had ended. What is Revolutionary Road trying to say, and why?

I would like to draw attention to two performances that may be able to help me express my problem. First, of course, there is Michael Shannon, whose brief but attention-grabbing part as John Givings has earned him an Oscar nomination. Shannon is good, and I don’t want to run down his performance in any way, but the part is a showy one which doesn’t require a great deal of subtlety. Givings is a mathematician who has suffered some sort of mental collapse and has been institutionalized. We are not told precisely what his trouble is, but it is hinted that there may be nothing the matter with him; that the problem may belong to everyone around him.

Givings is the only character who is free to speak the truth and shatter the layers of self-deception, thick and thin, which coat the perceptions of the other characters. In fact, he is not so much a character as a plot device; a loud and bitter force of nature who verbalizes what everyone else is afraid to say, or even think. He is helpful (to the audience), and his violent outbursts are satisfying amidst the sterile civility around him, but he is not terribly interesting.

David Harbour’s portrayal of Shep Campbell stands as a stark contrast to Givings. Campbell is the Wheeler’s next-door neighbor, and their are deep, deep layers to him that we never catch more than a glimpse of on his face. I felt that he was the most real, and most interesting, character in the film. If we could have spent more time with him, he might have had the most to say. But he is a footnote in the Wheeler’s story; a story which, unfortunately, is not all that compelling.

The Wheelers seemingly exist to illustrate the consequences of settling for bland mediocrity instead of pursuing one’s dreams, but neither of them seems to have any real dreams of their own beyond the vague ambition to move to Paris, as though that alone will bring their lives meaning. Frank has not given up on what he wanted to do with his life, because he never knew what that was. April, who has never even been to Paris, seems to have given up the desire to act, not because circumstances have prevented her, but because she just isn’t very good.

Most of the movie is like watching a car wreck in slow motion. One braces for the impact long before the vehicles collide, and then cringes at the screeching of metal, breaking of glass, and shattering of emotional bone. The exercise feels all the more empty in light of all of the opportunities to avoid disaster that the characters are afforded. Instead, they steer steadily and deliberately and almost knowingly towards disaster, as though they wanted to end badly in order to prove some still-obscure point. Or maybe the point isn’t obscure at all. Maybe it is so crushingly obvious that I am ignoring it in the vain hope that Revolutionary Road has something meaningful and profound to say.

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starring Daniel Craig, Liev Schreiber, and Jamie Bell
written by Clayton Frohman and Edward Zwick & directed by Edward Zwick
Rated R for violence and language.
92%

When the Nazis invade their neck of the Belorussian woods, the three Jewish Bielski brothers, Tuvia (Craig), Zus (Schreiber), and Asael (Bell), retreat deep into the forest, set up camp, and prepare for long-term survival. Before long, however, the camp is overflowing with refugees, ranging from the young, strong, and skilled to the old, weak, and sick. Tuvia and Zus, as the natural leaders of this place of refuge, are soon engaged in an ethical and philosophical clash over the best course of action. Tuvia thinks that they must hold on to their humanity at all costs and do their best to take responsibility for the weak, even if it endangers everyone’s chances of survival, while Zus believes they should assure the survival of the strong and join the local partisan forces in waging war on the Nazis.

I wouldn’t say that American movie audiences have not become desensitized to the Holocaust, but a certain jadedness does exist towards films about the Holocaust. Defiance suffers from its relation to a genre that can feel exploited (and exploitative) at times. Consider, for instance, the very fact that one can categorize “movies about the Holocaust” as a genre. This year alone has produced several such films, and the subject feels a bit belabored. However, as long as there are more stories to be told about that ultimately indescribable event (and there always will be), movies will continue to tell them. Defiance, at least, brings to life a genuinely incredible story that deserves to be told, and does it well.

Perceptive viewers will immediately notice that Defiance has an obvious historiographical axe to grind. Zwick obviously believes that the film’s first duty is to tell the story he wants to tell, and its second (when it can be made to coincide with the first) is to remain true to history. However, as long as we are aware of the film’s creative license, this is a strength rather than a weakness. Zwick uses the idea of a group of Jewish partisans facing eradication in 1940s Eastern Europe to explore what are really universal human questions.

In setting up a moral conflict between Zus and Tuvia, the film forces us to confront our own assumptions about how to prioritize our own self-preservation when it might threaten the sanctity of other innocent human lives. The film also refuses to allow its characters to exist in a simplistic world of obvious choices between right and wrong, nor do the “heroes” always act “heroically.” The power of these moments exists in the uncomfortable disconnect between the exhilaration we can’t help but feel and the queasy knowledge that it wasn’t right.

These were the elements that lent depth to my viewing of Defiance and prompted me to sit up and take notice. I should say, though, that first and foremost I definitely connected to this film on a visceral level. It is thrilling in an armrest-gripping way that is very easy to get caught up in. I presume it could be argued that there is a great deal of calculated effort to play on audience emotions, but if that is so it is not done with the sort of ham-fisted blundering that drags the viewer out of the movie. By the end I was just sort of in awe at the thought that even a fraction of this story might actually be true. In the face of an account that compelling, it seems almost superfluous to compliment the production on its various components: performances, cinematography, score, and so forth. All are good enough, but the important thing is the way they come together to bring the incredible world of the Bielski otriad to life.

Posted in Reviews