Flash of Genius

Posted on February 17, 2009 at 8:00 am

Americans do love our underdog stories and this one has the ingredients. There’s a David — an engineering professor named Robert Kearns (Greg Kinnear), who had a “flash of genius” and invented a gadget that all the geniuses in Detroit had been trying to figure out — an intermittent windshield-wiper to provide better clarity of vision when driving in the rain. Jackpot, right? No, there’s also a Goliath, and no giant is bigger and no overdog is overdoggier than the Detroit auto industry, circa 1960’s. And it really happened. Kearns sued Ford Motor Company for stealing his idea and pursued them for decades, representing himself in court. When they offered him millions of dollars but refused to give him credit for the invention, he turned them down. Integrity and pride, those are important elements of the underdog story, too.

Director Mark Abraham gives the film a gritty authenticity, evoking the era without overdoing it. And he gives the story its grittiness, too, showing us the price Kearns and his family pay for his dedication and stubbornness. Lauren Graham is a pleasure as Kearns’ wife. No one on screen today does a better job of portraying an intelligent, warm, sexiness. Kinnear shows us Kearns’ honesty, stubbornness, pride, and vulnerability. The courtroom scenes are exceptionally well done.

If there’s a fine line between genius and insanity, there’s an even finer one between genius and obsession. This film is a thoughtful, sympathetic, but clear-eyed portrayal of what Kearns gained but also what he lost.

Related Tags:

Body of Lies

Posted on February 17, 2009 at 7:00 am

Once movie spies were sleek and cool and impeccably dressed. They were devil-may-care, they had joie de vivre, they seemed to know everything, and they were unstoppable. The bad guys had endless money to spend on sociopathic sidekicks and elaborate contraptions. Most important, the bad guy/good guy lines were as clearly outlined as the crease in their perfectly pressed trousers.

But that was a long time ago. In Ridley Scott’s latest spy thriller everyone is tired, everyone is unsure, and everyone on both sides is morally compromised.

Back home in Washington, the CIA’s Ed Hoffman (Russell Crowe with 30 extra pounds and a cell phone earpiece permanently in place) sees and hears everything through surveillance screens and computers. While top agent Roger Ferris (Leonardo DiCaprio) is dodging bombs and bullets, Hoffman calmly purrs directions. Ferris promises a frantic Arab linguist escape to America. Hoffman says no. The linguist is killed. On to the next scrimmage.

There is a brief, clumsy attempt to make a larger point here about America, but it does not help. The movie has the fungible quality of the kind of book you buy for an airplane trip and toss as soon as you arrive. Crowe’s weight gain has no purpose. It seems like a distracting stunt. DiCaprio is, as always, focused and diligent, but his character is all surface. That is convenient in a spy, who must be able to blend in seamlessly, but dull for the audience. That leaves us with some competently-staged action sequences and one electric performance that just provides further contrast with the uninspired tone of the rest of the film. British actor Mark Strong plays Hani, the local head of intelligence, with silky assurance. His expression as he talks to Ferris conveys more about what America does not know about the intricacies and persistence of Middle Eastern conflicts than all of the bluster and blow-ups of this forgettable film.

Related Tags:

Action/Adventure Crime Drama

W.

Posted on February 10, 2009 at 8:00 am

Maybe it is just too soon, maybe we are just too used to the high-gloss satire of “Saturday Night Live” and “The Daily Show,” maybe it’s the kaleidoscopic structure, but this movie feels like a rough draft. Director Oliver Stone throws almost-randomly arranged scenes from the 43rd President’s life up on screen in an attempt at insight but too often it dissolves into caricature.

It begins promisingly with a defining moment for the George W. Bush presidency, or at least a moment intended to be defining. In an Oval Office meeting, W. (Josh Brolin) and his top advisors are debating the terminology they will use to explain the President’s view — literally — of the world in his first State of the Union address in January 2002, just months after the 9/11 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington. How to describe our enemies? They settle on “axis of evil.” And we get acquainted with the cast of characters who will be portraying the headline names — Jeffrey Wright as Secretary of State Colin Powell, Scott Glen as Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Thandie Newton as Condoleezza Rice, Toby Jones as Senior Advisor and political strategist Karl Rove, and Richard Dreyfuss as Vice President Dick Cheney. A strong beginning is diminished as the characters are introduced because the audience is distracted by the effort of determining which actors do the best job of look and sound like the real-life characters they portray (that would be Newton and Dreyfuss) and which look and sound nothing whatsoever like their characters (Glen).

Then we get some flashbacks to unroll the well-known story of President Bush’s misspent youth, the drinking, the partying, the series of failed careers. Brolin gives a thoughtful performance, but the superficiality of the assessment of Bush as a man (trying to both please and do better than his father) and as a leader (there is not enough here to understand his policies or priorities) give the film an uncertain tone, sometimes verging on satire, sometimes sinking to melodrama, sometimes showing flashes of farce, especially when almost every scene shows him chomping on a sandwich or when Rice murmurs support for everything the President says. Why give us Bush choking on a pretzel? Then why have it a second time?

Elizabeth Banks gives a warm and appealing performance as Laura Bush, Ellen Burstyn is fiery as Barbara Bush, and Dreyfuss has Cheney’s steely purr down perfectly. The movie ambitiously tries to make President Bush appear more overmatched than cynical or incompetent. There are hints of hubris but Stone does not doubt the sincerity of Bush’s intentions or the merits of his aspirations. But there are too many characters and the events are glossed over too quickly. It’s very tempting to make it a metaphor for the Bush Presidency — unclear in direction and suffering from attention deficit disorder. But ultimately, it is just a movie, and despite moments of value finally an unsuccessful one.

Related Tags:

Based on a true story Biography Drama

The Secret Life of Bees

Posted on February 2, 2009 at 8:00 am

The beloved best-seller by Sue Monk Kidd has been brought to screen with great care, deep sincerity, and a perfect cast. Unfortunately, it is so careful, so lovingly burnished, so deliberate that it becomes sluggish, never finding the distinctive voice of the book’s narrator. Dakota Fanning, coltishly adolescent, plays Lily, who runs away from her abusive father T-Ray (Paul Bettany), after their housekeeper Rosaleen (Oscar-winner Jennifer Hudson) is beaten and arrested for trying to register to vote following the 1964 passage of the Civil Rights Act.

They are taken in by three sisters named after months: August (Queen Latifah), May (Sophie Okonedo), and June (Alicia Keys). They live in a bright pink house and keep bees for their Black Madonna honey. August is strong, patient, and wise. June is impatient and angry. May is sweet and so easily brought to tears that she has a special wall for crying, like the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem. She writes down what worries her or makes her sad and folds the paper up to slip it between the rocks in the wall.

The three sisters have managed to create a quiet life of dignity, independence, and culture in part because they keep to themselves. They know that taking in a white child who has run away could give the bigots in their community an opportunity to make their lives difficult, but like Rosaleen, they believe that giving in to racism in order to get along is “just a different way of dying.” And Lily and a new friend explore some personal and societal boundaries that involve some serious risks.

Lovingly made, the film is beautifully performed, especially by Queen Latifah and singer Keys. It gently but honestly addresses the difficulty of relationships made more complex by mingling the ultimate equality achieved through selfless love and the ultimate inequality of pervasive bigotry. But it is too neatly constructed. The hair of the three sisters telegraphs their roles on the continuum of feeling and of where they are in time, May with her little-girl braids rooted to the past and June with her Afro and NAACP t-shirt reaching for the future. August is the bridge between them. T-Ray will come back for Lily, who will find that there is a reason she feels so much at home with the sisters. Everything falls into place, but it all takes just a little bit too long — do we really need three separate transitional montages? A little less respect would have opened it up for the livelier sensibility of the novel. It would have been less pretty, perhaps, but more fully engaging.

Related Tags:

Based on a book Drama

Pride and Glory

Posted on January 27, 2009 at 8:00 am

A big-name cast and some big-time issues are not enough to make up for a small-time script that adds absolutely nothing new to the too-often-told tale of police corruption and family betrayal. It is as generic as its title.

Four police officers are killed in an ambush, devastating a family of cops. Francis Tierney, Sr. (John Voight) is a department official. His oldest son, Francis Jr. (Noah Emmerich) is the police chief and his son-in-law Jimmy (Colin Farrell) is a colleague of the men who were slain. Francis presses his other son, Ray (Edward Norton) to leave his desk job, where he’s been hiding out since a conflict, and take over the investigation, not knowing that it will lead him to his own family.

Norton and Farrell are excellent, as always, as are supporting performances from Rick Gonzalez as a drug dealer and Jennifer Ehle as Francis, Jr.’s sick wife. But it makes an enormous and ultimately exhausting effort to hide the lightweight and predictable nature of the script with (1) non-stop bad language, (2) a lot of very graphic violence, including a horrifying torture scene, police harassment, murder, and suicide, (3) ramped-up emotions based on having every one of the main characters related to each other. It is weighed down further with over-used clichÃ©s like a slow-motion funeral procession in the snow and over-used dialogue like “Don’t talk to me about the truth. You got no idea what it takes to do what we do” and “I was a good man once.” Now that’s a crime.

Related Tags:

Crime Drama