Jane Eyre

Posted on March 24, 2011 at 10:03 pm

Why do film-makers keep coming back to Jane Eyre? Charlotte Bronte’s story has elements of horror, mystery, revenge, romance, and morality, but it is an internal narrative, Jane’s own clear-eyed but personal view of her story (“Reader, I married him.”) And yet, it is such a perennial favorite that this is at least the ninth (at least and so far) English-language cinematic visit to the wild moors and the wilder hearts of Jane Eyre. And that is not counting the many, many variations and spin-offs, including a book and movie that tell the same story from the perspective of another character.

Jane Eyre is an orphan, raised under the cruelest circumstances by her aunt (Sally Hawkins). Her spirit and integrity are such an affront to the aunt that she is sent away to a charity school called Lowood, where the girls are treated with contempt. She makes one true, loving friend, a girl named Helen, who ties of consumption in Jane’s arms. When she finishes at Lowood, Jane (Mia Wasikowska of “The Kids are All Right” and “In Treatment” in a performance that beautifully conveys both Jane’s emotional vulnerability and her strength of character) takes a job as a governess at a home called Thornfield. She is warmly welcomed by the housekeeper, Mrs. Fairfax (Dame Judi Dench) and her charge, a little French girl, but it is some time before she meets her new employer, Mr. Rochester (Michael Fassbender, in a less broody, more desperately unhappy performance). When she first sees him, she is walking in the woods and his horse rears up and throws him. She must help him to the house and they walk slowly, him leaning on her heavily. The emotional upheaval and unexpected intimacy of this encounter are followed by mysterious disturbances in the house, by an anguished longing, an almost unimaginable romantic ecstasy, and then by betrayal, loss, a new start, unexpected independence, and then acknowledgment of a connection too strong to resist.

And it is that relationship, all smolder and repressed passion, that answers the question. The Eyre/Rochester romance has inspired happy sighs for 160 years and in these days, when so little is repressed that no one makes time for smolder, it still delivers.

Director Cary Fukunaga (“Sin Nombre”) wisely used natural light and no make-up to give this version a rough, natural, intimate feel. Jane’s hair is a smooth loop over each ear with an intricate knot in the back, showing capability and determination. And perhaps some imagination as well. The way that the setting and events seem to embody the emotion the main characters cannot express, which is what makes an internally narrated story so compellingly cinematic.

(more…)

How Do You Know

Posted on March 24, 2011 at 10:00 am

Lisa (Reese Witherspoon) and George Madison (Paul Rudd) are both nice people and team players. And that is why they end up on a horrible date on what is for each of them the worst night of their lives.

It’s the worst night because both of them have been cut from their teams. That’s literally the case for Lisa, a 31-year-old professional women’s softball team. Being the hardest working and most supportive player is not enough when she’s a second slower getting to first base than she used to be. She makes everyone around her better. “The intangibles are everything,” urges the assistant coach. But they don’t score runs. The upbeat little post-it note aphorisms Lisa has covering her bathroom mirror do not provide any guidance. They can remind her to be determined, but she is no longer clear on what she should be determined about. And although she tells her sort of boyfriend, a player for the Washington National baseball team (Owen Wilson) that she doesn’t want to talk about her feelings, she is a little disconcerted when he tells her that is his preference.

George, a top executive at a corporation founded by his father (Jack Nicholson), has been informed by the company lawyer that he is under investigation and on his own in finding and paying a lawyer to defend him from possible fraud charges. And his girlfriend, a physics professor, dumps him with cheery efficiency. It is a lot to process. And he doesn’t want to process it. So, why not call that blind date prospect he had put aside when he thought he had a girlfriend?

As terrible as the date is — they ultimately decide that it is better they don’t speak at all — they sort of enjoy it. And we do, too, because writer/director James L. Brooks (“Broadcast News,” “Terms of Endearment,” “As Good as It Gets”) is very good at exactly that: showing us a world of flawed people dealing with messy, complicated, and painful challenges in a manner that draws us in and keeps us on their side.

There is a lot that does not work. It completely fails in portraying with two subjects I know very well: securities law (note, Mr. Brooks, that’s “securities” plural — “security law” is more like TSA pat-down challenges) and Washington D.C. (no place in Washington is an hour and ten minutes from any other place, even on the bus). George’s father is a character even Jack Nicholson can’t make anything more than a highly artificial narrative inconvenience. The magnificently talented Kathryn Hahn (please, someone give her a worthy role) does her best in a part that is both over- and under-written as George’s very pregnant and very loyal secretary. One of the big turning-point speeches doesn’t deliver the punch it sets us up to expect.

A lot of people are not going to like this movie. But I did because for me he got a lot right. Audiences expecting a conventional structure and tone will be disappointed. I like a movie that is, like its leads, endearingly messy and subverts our genre expectations. Brooks colors outside the lines. There is more happening around the edges of this movie than happens in the middle of the screen of most — George’s problem is more than just a topical reference. And the difference between a male and female professional athlete is not addressed; it’s just there.

Brooks’ dialogue is always a great pleasure. Rudd, one of the most engaging of actors, has never been better. Watch his face carefully in the elevator scene, when he thinks his world has collapsed and then looks up to see that the girl from the awful silent date is there. The mixture of emotions is superbly handled. Witherspoon is revelatory as a woman who relied on an all-encompassing structure with answers for everything and now realizes there were questions she did not even know she had. And if that makes us question our own conventional notion of what we know, well, it just shows you that the intangibles really are everything.

Related Tags:

Drama Romance

Limitless

Posted on March 17, 2011 at 6:16 pm

B+

Lowest Recommended Age:	High School
MPAA Rating:	Rated PG-13 for thematic material involving a drug, violence including disturbing images, sexuality and language
Profanity:	Strong language
Alcohol/ Drugs:	Plot concerns a performance-enhancing superdrug,
Violence/ Scariness:	Some intense and graphic violence
Diversity Issues:	None
Date Released to Theaters:	March 18, 2011
Date Released to DVD:	July 18, 2011
Amazon.com ASIN:	B0051MKNV8

Most of us feel that there must be some way for us to unleash the best version of ourselves. Whole sections of bookstores, whole shelves of vitamins, dozens of infomercials, motivational speakers, and guides to personal growth, self-actualization, and personal and professional success are evidence of the powerful human sense that there must be some trick to getting us out of our own way. So, if someone offered you a pill that would do all that for you, you’d probably be tempted to give it a try.

That’s what happens to Eddie (Bradley Cooper) in this stylish thriller. He’s a guy who feels like a loser. He has yet to write a single word of the book he is supposed to be working on. His girlfriend (Abbie Cornish as Lindy) has dumped him. He lives in a dive and he is out of money and out of ideas. He has just about lost touch entirely with any notion of himself as a person in control, a person on track, a person with a sense of possibility. He runs into his former brother-in-law, who says he has moved on from selling street drugs to selling legal pharmaceuticals and offers him something new and special, a small, circular, clear little performance-enhancing pill. Eddie swallows it.

classid=”clsid:D27CDB6E-AE6D-11cf-96B8-444553540000″
codebase=”http://download.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflas
h.cab#version=9,0,47,0″>value=”http://c.brightcove.com/services/viewer/federated_f9?isVid=1″
/>value=”@videoPlayer=829895656001&playerID=96582452001&playerKey=AQ~~,AAA
AAFCMKy8~,3VViztqA_TcSrhvwTBcnNIRndWXpS3R1&domain=embed&dynamicStreaming
=true” />name=”seamlesstabbing” value=”false” />value=”true” />name=”allowScriptAccess” value=”always” /> src=”http://c.brightcove.com/services/viewer/federated_f9?isVid=1″
bgcolor=”#FFFFFF”
flashVars=”@videoPlayer=829895656001&playerID=96582452001&playerKey=AQ~~
,AAAAAFCMKy8~,3VViztqA_TcSrhvwTBcnNIRndWXpS3R1&domain=embed&dynamicStrea
ming=true” base=”http://admin.brightcove.com” name=”flashObj”
width=”480″ height=”410″ seamlesstabbing=”false”
type=”application/x-shockwave-flash” allowFullScreen=”true”
swLiveConnect=”true” allowScriptAccess=”always”
pluginspage=”http://www.macromedia.com/shockwave/download/index.cgi?P1_P
rod_Version=ShockwaveFlash”>

It hits him like a combination of Ritalin, steroids, speed, and super-powerful ginkgo biloba. It hits him like spinach hits Popeye, if it grew his brain instead of his muscles. Suddenly, everything makes sense. Eddie has focus, confidence, motivation, clarity. The scales drop from his eyes. Everything makes sense to him, information, numbers, people. He can effortlessly access any information he has ever skimmed over, even if he was unaware of it at the time. He finishes writing his book in four days and it is a masterpiece. He can learn new languages almost instantly. He gets a haircut, cleans up his apartment, starts to work out. He gets Lindy back. He starts investing and the money pours in. A billionaire (Robert De Niro) makes him an offer.

But there’s a problem. Eddie becomes dependent on the drug. He keeps upping his dose and he starts to have black-outs. His ex-wife gives him a shattering glimpse of what it means to go cold turkey. The dealer has been murdered. Eddie has a stash, but no way to get more. Other people know about the drug and they desperately want him to get it for them. Can he out-think other out-thinkers?

Cooper has become one of Hollywood’s most appealing leading men and this movie, which he co-produced, plays to his strengths. If he is not exactly convincing as the pony-tailed mess at the beginning, he has all of the genuine movie star gloss to make the newer, better Eddie look, as Dolly used to sing, better than a body has a right to. Director Neil Burger keeps the movie amped up, making us feel a little wired as we watch. It’s fun to get inside the head of someone working at 500 percent capacity, seeing how he thinks through his options, trying to maintain control internally and externally, balancing the swings between extraordinary powers and terrifying dependence and vulnerability.

Even those of average intelligence to spot the problems Eddie overlooks — or the obvious solution it takes him the entire running time to figure out. But it is still a lot of stylish fun to see Bradley Cooper inhabit the fantasy — and deal with the fallout.

The Lincoln Lawyer

Posted on March 17, 2011 at 6:12 pm

That’s not Lincoln as in the rail-splitting President. It’s Lincoln as in car. Mick Haller (Matthew McConaughey) is a lawyer whose office is in his car, the better to maneuver between his court appearances and his clients. He’s a criminal defense attorney, and this is a nicely gritty portrayal of the criminal justice system. That means he has no illusions, either about his clients or about what we like to call the justice system. He has no illusions about happily ever after, either. He is mostly-amicably divorced from a prosecutor (the always-welcome Marisa Tomei), and shares custody of their daughter.

Mick rides around from court to court and client to client, driven by a former client working off his legal fees. He gets paid up front. He’s not above giving a kickback to a bail bondsman for a referral or giving a little sweetener to a clerk to get his case pushed to the head of the list. He’s used to dealing with, well, dealers and other low-lifes. So when he gets a chance to represent a murder suspect who is not only wealthy but claims to be innocent, this is a chance for Mick to do well by justice and himself.

But things are never so simple, and Mickey must find a way to both use and bend the rules after it appears that this case has complications that extend all the way back to a plea bargain he made on behalf of another murder suspect in a case with some disturbingly similar evidence.

McConaughey is well cast as Mick. He has the surface, slightly seedy charm of a trial lawyer. He easily conveys the struggle of someone with essential decency but a gift for shortcuts that makes him money but also makes him feel like he has to try harder. His scenes with Tomei bring out a warmth and essential decency that keeps us on Mick’s side as he tries to do the right thing.

Related Tags:

Based on a book Courtroom Crime Drama

Hereafter

Posted on March 15, 2011 at 8:00 am

According to this movie the two universal human imperatives are the need to find out whether we can contact the dead and the need to use Google to do so. Can we please de-Google-ize movies? I love Google, too, but it is impossible to make a compelling movie scene out of someone typing into a search engine and scrolling through the links that pop up.

Clint Eastwood’s latest film is a meditation on death, with three entwined stories. A French journalist survives the tsunami but is haunted by visions from an NDE (near-death experience). An English boy sees his twin brother die and desperately tries to find a way to communicate with him. And an American factory worker resists his gift for acting as a conduit between the living and the dead. There are some powerful and moving moments, but the film overstays its welcome and fails to deliver on its promise.

There are people who are consumed with the need to talk with those they have lost, to ask forgiveness, to forgive, to know there is something, someone there. And then there are those who do communicate with the dead, and can be just as consumed with the need to get away from them, whose most important lesson from those who have passed over is that they need to make a life among the living. George (Matt Damon) is one of those. He once had a website and a business doing “readings” for those who want to reach out to their loved ones who had departed. A book was written about him. He appeared on television. But the comfort he brought to those who found some sense of completion in his ability to connect to the dead was outweighed by his own inability to disconnect from the messages he was carrying.

Then there is Marie (Cécile De France), a successful French television journalist on vacation with her producer/boyfriend on an Indonesian resort when the tsunami hits. This is Eastwood as his best, a stunningly powerful sequence that will leave the audience feeling swept into the pounding power of the ocean. Marie glimpses a vision of what might be the afterlife when she is briefly near death. After she returns to France the concerns that occupied her before — her ambitions, the stories she covers, even her relationship — are not as important to her as understanding what she saw and what it means. When once she was excited to appear in posters for Blackberry, now she is interested in a more profound form of communication.

Jason and Marcus (played interchangeably by real-life twins George and Frankie McLaren, a nice touch to show their close connection) are British twins who are exceptionally devoted to one another. They have to be. Their mother is a heroin addict, so they have to work together to take care of her and of each other and keep the social workers from finding out what is really going on in their home. Jason, 12 minutes older, is the more verbal and the decision-maker. He is killed and Marcus sees him die. He is put in foster care while his mother goes to rehab. He is alone. And he needs, desperately, to find a way to talk to the brother who is in every way the other half of himself. He tries a number of psychics but they all seem to be well-meaning fools or downright fakes.

Nothing that happens later in the movie lives up to the inexorable, thundering, power of the tsunami, which makes the under-imagined images of the afterlife seem thin and tepid. Eastwood’s own score (he is an accomplished jazz musician) is nicely understated and evocative. And it was a relief that the heroin-addict mother and the foster parents were not Dickensian ogres. But the stories meander. The movie could lose half an hour easily — until they all come together for a conclusion that feels inadequate. When a magician shows you a hat, you are entitled to see a rabbit. No rabbit here.

Related Tags:

Drama Fantasy Spiritual films