Claire Danes plays Dr. Temple Grandin in an outstanding new HBO film about the pioneering animal scientist whose autism is a central element of her ability to understand animals and to think visually. Her astonishing and inspiring story first came to public attention in an article by neurologist Oliver Sacks called An Anthropologist On Mars. The title comes from Dr. Grandin’s own description of her sense of bafflement in trying to understand human behavior and communication.
But her understanding of animal behavior transformed the operations of cattle facilities. The movie makes clear that Dr. Grandin faced prejudice not just as an autistic person but as a woman. But her ideas were so compelling that she has become a world-respected authority. And she has been a guide to autism as well, writing and speaking about her experiences as a way of helping neuro-typicals understand those who literally see the world differently.
Amelia Earhart, the pioneering aviator who was lost over the Pacific, is given the big Hollywood biopic treatment in a curiously retro film that feels like it was intended for Katherine Hepburn or Susan Hayward. It is not the 1930’s setting that makes it feel so old-fashioned; it is the traditional take on a very un-traditional life. Earhart’s passion and achievement are what make her most interesting to contemporary audiences. But this film never shows us why flying was important to Earhart or what made her so determined. It does not show us what she was good at. The first name-only title provides the first indication that like the recent “Coco Before Chanel” it will minimize and marginalize the achievements of a woman of enormous historic import by focusing on her love life.
And it’s dull.
Hillary Swank, who produced and stars, plays Earhart as a woman who keeps a lot inside. Much of the acting is done in the varying breadth of her toothy smile, with an occasional blinking back of tears. Earhart is unfailingly brave and game, whether taking first lady Eleanor Roosevelt (an engagingly game Cherry Jones) on a moonlight flight over the Capitol, posing for a luggage ad as a way to finance her flights, or feeling drawn to a man other than her husband (who happens to be, we are repeatedly reminded, the father of future author Gore Vidal).
The film spends too much time on Earhart’s romance with publisher/promoter George Putnam (Richard Gere) and dalliance with Vidal’s father. It feels like a string of incidents without any connecting theme. Even the usually able director, Mira Nair, seems to have her pilot light turned to simmer. As Earhart tries to land on a tiny island to refuel in her attempt to circle the globe for the first time by air, screenwriter Ron Bass (“Stepmom,” “Snow Falling on Cedars”) makes the mistake of trying for for suspense even though the one thing everyone knows about Earhart is that she does not land successfully. The best part of the film comes from the exquisite images from cinematographer Stuart Dryburgh and production design by Stephanie Carroll; they make the backgrounds seem more alive and involving than the characters or the story. It just never takes off.
Back before the days when trashy faux celebrities from tawdry reality shows merited magazine covers and “gangsta” rappers postured and pretended to be killers, there was once a romanticized fascination with actual killers with names like “Baby Face” and “Pretty Boy.”
John Dillinger needed no infantalized nickname. He robbed at least 24 banks and killed several people, including police officers. But he had a rakish audacity and an innate populism that endeared him to people during the depths of the Depression. “I’m not here for your money,” he says to one bank customer who had the bad luck to be there during a robbery. “I’m here for the bank’s money.”
Dillinger became the most wanted man in America by law enforcement authorities and helped inspire the enactment of new federal laws and increases in budget and authority for the FBI. His story, ended when he was gunned down by the FBI coming out of the Biograph Theater in Chicago, has been the subject of many books and movies, and now this latest starring Johnny Depp as Dillinger, Christian Bale as FBI agent Melvin Purvis, and directed by Michael Mann (“Miami Vice,” “Collateral”).
In this diligent but somehow chilly and uninvolving retelling of the story the details seems right and Depp delivers a performance of enormous depth, maturity, and appeal. Bale, however, is a cipher as Pervis, leaving the story unbalanced.
It’s a forest and trees problem. The details are all careful and often arresting, but there’s no real sense of what the movie’s overall story is or why it is being told. We know how it will end, indeed we are there to see the big shootout, but that removes much of the suspense. Depp is fascinating as always but Dillinger himself is not all that interesting. Is he a sociopath? Is it desperation or rebellion? The focus on just the last portion of his short life does not give us enough of a clue. When he has the inevitable crime movie scene with Dillinger and his devoted girlfriend (Oscar-winner Marion Cotillard as a Depression-era Bess the landlord’s daughter), dreaming of escaping to a peaceful life, it is unconnected to anything about him we have seen before. What do we learn from this violent man’s devotion to one woman? He is impulsive but cagey, shrewd about today but not about next week, cocky but fatalistic.
And the movie fails to connect in any meaningful way to the parallels in today’s world. It’s a hat movie, pretty good but nothing more.
Once again, we now have a population that might secretly side with someone who robs banks, feeling that it is a just reversal of what the banks have done to us. But these days, we don’t glamorize criminals any more. We’re too busy keeping up with Jon and Kate.
“Julie & Julia” is — I can’t help it — a scrumptiously satisfying film about writer/director Nora Ephron’s two favorite subjects: food and marriage.It is based on two true stories. Julia Child revolutionized American notions about food with her cookbook and PBS series that brought haute cuisine to the “servantless” American housewife in the early 1960’s. Cookbooks and magazines in those days had recipes that included canned peas and crushed potato chips. But Child (Meryl Streep), newly settled in Paris with her diplomat husband, Paul (Stanley Tucci) fell in love with the fresh, subtle, deeply sensual quality of French cooking and decided to study at the Cordon Bleu. She was an unlikely epicure and an even more unlikely spokeswoman, over six feet tall and with a rather horsey quality, a voice with a trill that made her sound like a cross between Eleanor Roosevelt and Miss Francis of the Ding-Dong School. But she was passionate, knowledgeable, accessible, and completely fearless. She boned a duck with knives that could slice through granite and scooped up food from the floor and put it back on the plate, crisply assuring her audience that it was all right because no one could see them in the kitchen. Americans fell in love with boeuf bourguignon, chocolate mousse, and with Julia, too. Half a century later, Julie Powell (Amy Adams) was in need of some of Julia’s resolute forthrightness. While her “cobb salad lunch” friends made million-dollar deals on their cell phones, Julie had a half-finished novel and a job answering the phone in a cubicle, listening to the problems of people seeking help with their 9/11-related injuries and losses. She and her husband Eric (Chris Messina) lived in a tiny, dingy apartment over a pizza place, with a handkerchief-sized kitchen. But Julie wanted to do something big and important. She wanted to finish something. And so she decided to work her way through Julia’s famous cookbook, to take on every recipe including deboning a duck, to do it all in one year, and to do it in public, on the then-novel outlet of a blog. Both Julie and Julia were drawn to the literally hands-on nature of cooking, the sense of purpose and mastery, and the generosity of it. Ephron’s screenplay, based on memoirs by each of its main characters, touches on the parallels without overdoing it. And one of the sweetest is the rare portrayal of tender, devoted, and, yes, very passionate married love, even more palpably luscious than the abbondanza array of diet-busting delicacies.It is the Julia story that is the heart of this film and it is Meryl Streep who is at the heart of this story. A little bit of movie magic makes the 5’6″ actress tower over her co-stars and even the furniture. But it is sheer, once-to-a-planet acting that makes Child so touching and inspiring. No one is more adorable than Amy Adams, and she wrinkles her little nose and throws her little tantrums as a twinkly romantic movie heroine must. But Streep as Child is revelatory, real, and irresistible. In one scene, when she responds to some good news from her sister (wonderfully played by Jane Lynch), the mixture of emotions that cross Streep’s face in a moment tell us of decades of pain. In another, as the Childs and their friends celebrate Valentine’s Day, we see an expression of love and trust so deep and enduring and joyous and sexy that it makes most expressions of movie romance feel like whipped cream made with skim milk and fake sugar.This is a movie about food and love and courage and dreams and lots and lots of butter, and doing something — cooking or acting — brilliantly and with gusto. And it is delicious, nourishing, and good to the last drop. (more…)
Former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamera, the architect of the Viet Nam war, died today, still a figure of controversy after nearly half a century. Every family should watch the Oscar-winning documentary The Fog of War for a thought-provoking (and often just provoking) look at the way people of the greatest possible intelligence, experience, and good intentions, can make decisions with terrible consequences. The parallels to contemporary challenges are undeniable.
