The Finest Hours

Posted on January 28, 2016 at 5:53 pm

Lowest Recommended Age:	Middle School
MPAA Rating:	Rated PG-13 for intense sequences of peril
Profanity:	Some mild language
Alcohol/ Drugs:	Social drinking
Violence/ Scariness:	Intense scenes of peril, characters injured and killed
Diversity Issues:	None
Date Released to Theaters:	January 29, 2016
Date Released to DVD:	May 23, 2016
Amazon.com ASIN:	B019PQ0NZG

“In the Coast Guard they say you gotta go out. They don’t say you gotta come back in.” It was a big nor’easter storm off the coast of Massachusetts. It was February 1952, so communications technology was limited. And not one but two tankers split in half. The most experienced Coast Guard crew went off to rescue the first one. When word came in that a second one was sinking, four young men, all under 25 and two who had never been on a rescue operation, took a small boat out into the storm.

That second ship was the Pendleton. Knowing that they had no more than two to three hours before their half of the tanker would sink into the icy storm-tossed waves, they had to decide who would be in charge. “No officers, no rules, every man for himself,” a crew member says. But they realize they must choose between the man who wanted to take the lifeboats or the engineer they did not know as well who said he had a plan (Casey Affleck, understated and compelling). “They may not like you, but they know to listen to you,” one member of the crew admits.

Based on the true story as told in the book by Michael J. Tougias and Casey Sherman, screenwriters Scott Silver, Paul Tamasy and Eric Johnson efficiently introduce us to the characters and the challenges they are facing. Chris Pine plays Bernie Webber, a departure from his usual cocky, confident roles. Bernie is a little shy, but very sincere, and he believes in the rules, not in a rigid way but in a careful way. When we first see him, he is about to see the girl he has been talking to on the phone for the first time and he does not want to get out of the car because he is afraid she will not like him.

And of course she does like him. Her name is Miriam (British actress Holliday Grainger, last seen as an evil stepsister in “Cinderella”). Director Craig Gillespie (of the wonderful “Lars and the Real Girl”) gives them just enough time to get invested in their relationship — and to get us invested in it — before the storm comes in.

Gillespie really gets going when the storm does, though, and those scenes are powerful and exciting. We are in the small boat with Webber as the window shatters and the compass is wiped out. The boat is tossed around like a cork, at one point completely on its side, with monster waves crashing down. And we are in the Pendleton’s engine room as seams burst and beams come down. And then we are back on land, as Miriam tries to find out what is going on, tries to get the commanding officer to bring the rescue team back, and then learns what it is to love a man who risks his life as a part of his job.

In a film like this, the most important job of the director is to make sure we understand how daunting, even impossible, the task is, and then to make sure we get to see what goes into surmounting the obstacles. Some of that is missing here, as when we are told that there are too many men on the Pendleton for the small boat to carry, and then somehow it carries them. The compass is out, there’s no communication, and yet somehow Webber’s crew finds the Pendleton. It may be that no one knows how it worked, but it undercuts the drama to skip over some of those details.

The quiet heroism of these characters is movingly portrayed, and these days, when heroes are hard to come by, this is a touching story of selflessness, courage, and dedication, and exactly the kind of story that Disney tells best.

Parents should know that this story concerns a real-life catastrophic storm with many lives lost. There are scenes of very intense peril, some mild language, and social drinking.

Family discussion: How did the men on the tanker decide who should be in charge? How did Bernie decide when to follow the rules and when not to? What did Miriam learn from her visit to the widow’s house?

If you like this, try: “The Perfect Storm” and “The Hunt for Red October”

The Lady in the Van

Posted on January 21, 2016 at 5:55 pm

What connects us to each other? What creates a sense of obligation? Why is it that we somehow find ourselves alone when we don’t want to be and with others when we don’t want to be? Are there secrets that completely change the way we think about people we thought we knew?

And is it possible to be fair to the other people in our lives when we tell stories about them?

Writer Alan Bennett (“The History Boys,” “The Madness of King George”) got an urgent appeal from a disheveled woman in a kerchief. You know the kind of person I am talking about, the ones we ignore or pretend to ignore. She is not exactly homeless. She has a dilapidated, broken-down van parked on the street near his new home. His neighbors are not unkind. One even tries to bring her food. But for some reason, Miss Shepherd (Maggie Smith) likes Bennett. And for some equally inexplicable reason, he kind of doesn’t dislike her. And for another equally inexplicable reason, as frustrating and annoying and inconvenient and often infuriating as Miss Shepherd (as he always calls her) is, he finds it easier to deal with her than with his own mother, who is beset with her own cognitive challenges.

“A writer is doubled,” Bennett tells us, “the one who writes, the one who lives.” He is clearly most comfortable as the one who writes. And we get to see them both. Alex Jennings plays two slightly different variations on Bennett, the subtle variations of clothing and attitude showing us the tension as he wavers between being involved and observing. Part of him recoils from Miss Shepherd’s “multi-flavored aroma” with a thin layer of talcum powder. Part of him knows that she could lead to exactly what we are watching — a book, a radio play, a theatrical production, a movie with an Oscar-winning Dame in the title role. Yes, she asks if she can park temporarily in his driveway and stays for 15 years. But given the money he made from the story, who was sponging on who?

A writer will inevitably be drawn to the peculiar mix of sense and nonsense, sometimes called a word salad, coming from someone like Miss Shepherd. There’s something about the way she ends her mildly preposterous statements with equivocation. “I’m in an incognito position, possibly,” she tells Bennett. He will learn more about her past, but Bennett has enough respect for us and for Miss Shepherd that there is no attempt to try to explain her. It is just to help us do what he did instinctively, though perhaps reluctantly — to see the person inside the weirdness.

“A proper writer might welcome such an encounter.” Yes, he might. Yet, he thinks, “You won’t catch Harold Pinter pushing a van down the street.” Shouldn’t a writer get to pick his subject? “I don’t want to write about her,” he says. “I want to write about spies.” He knows that “you don’t put yourself into what you write; you find yourself.” And his two selves seem to come closer together as Miss Shepherd disintegrates further. If, as Arthur Miller wrote in “Death of a Salesman,” attention must be paid to people we would prefer to overlook, Bennett has done that for Miss Shepherd, with grace and humanity.

Parents should know that this film includes themes of mental and physical illness, fatal car accident, blackmail, and non-explicit sexual situations and bodily functions.

Family discussion: Why did Alan treat his mother and Miss Shepherd differently? Why does he let her stay? Why are there two Alans and what can we tell from the way they dress and speak?

If you like this, try: “The Madness of King George” by the same author and his early work in “Beyond the Fringe”

Son of Saul

Posted on January 14, 2016 at 5:56 pm

A-

Lowest Recommended Age:	Mature High Schooler
MPAA Rating:	Rated R for disturbing violent content, and some graphic nudity
Profanity:	Racist language
Alcohol/ Drugs:	None
Violence/ Scariness:	Intense and deeply disturbing Holocaust atrocities including shooting, gas chambers, graphic images
Diversity Issues:	A theme of the movie
Date Released to Theaters:	January 15, 2016
Date Released to DVD:	April 25, 2016
Amazon.com ASIN:	B01BZBOA30

As we move past the time when there are living witnesses to the Holocaust who can tell us their stories, we need more than ever voices like first-time writer/director László Nemes to tell the stories. I know there are those who will shrug sheepishly and say that they just can’t handle another one. But each story is about a singular individual who had a singular experience. And this Oscar-winning drama is distinctively different in subject matter and in the form of storytelling. It deserves careful attention.

The Nazis took more than lives in the concentration camps. They took identities and they took souls. Saul (Géza Röhrig), the title character, is a Hungarian Jew in an unnamed extermination camp near the end of the war. Because Hungarian dictator Miklos Horthy cooperated with the Nazis but did not allow them to take the 800,000 Hungarian Jews until he could no longer prevent it in 1944 (see Walking with the Enemy), Saul has only been there a short time. Throughout the movie, the camera is close to his face or at his shoulder as he numbly tries to hold on to his life and to some sense of himself amidst the horrific slaughter and nightmarish chaos all around him. We get only glimpses.

In the very first moments, we see him standing silently as a reassuring German voice tells the new arrivals that there will be jobs and food for them, as soon as they clean off in a shower. They leave everything they brought with them, clothes, jewels, money, photos, in the outer room and then, naked, walk into the gas chamber, where they are killed.

What happens to Saul is worse than death. He is a Sonder-kommando, a prisoner forced to assist in this process, from making the new arrivals feel a little less hopeless to ransacking their belongings and removing the remains, which the Nazis will not dignify with the term “bodies.” They are called “pieces.” And he is forced to be a part of it.

Somehow, a boy, perhaps 10 or 11 years old, survives the gas chamber. He is still breathing. So he is sent to the doctor (another prisoner) to be killed and autopsied, to help make the killing process more efficient.

And that is Saul’s breaking point. He becomes convinced that the boy is his son, though it appears likely he never had a child. This may be manifestation of trauma-induced delusion, or it may be an adaptive mechanism to restore his shattered sense of the world. He knows he cannot save this both in life. But perhaps in death he can do one kindness and provide the boy with a religious burial, away from the discarded “pieces.” Increasingly desperate, contrary to his previous flat affect, Saul seeks a rabbi who can say the mourner’s prayer over the boy. Throughout the film, we see quick glimpses of the ways other prisoners hold on to some tiny element of control. For some, it may be keeping a record. For Saul, who seems to see very little of what is going on around him, it is giving a boy a better death.

This insistence on a sacred burial at any cost is a direct link to Sophocles’ 442 BC play Antigone, the final chapter in the Oedipus trilogy. Three thousand years of human history later, and someone is still finding meaning by refusing to make one final compromise.

Parents should know that this is a Holocaust movie with scenes of Nazi brutality and disturbing themes and images including gas chambers, shooting, suffocation, and dead bodies, some nude.

Family discussion: How does the style of this film help to convey the experience of the concentration camp? Why was this boy so important to Saul? What were the special issues faced by the Sonder-kommandos and the doctor?

If you like this, try: “Conspiracy,” “Schindler’s List,” and “Labyrinth of Lies”

Anomalisa

Posted on January 7, 2016 at 5:39 pm

B+

Lowest Recommended Age:	Adult
MPAA Rating:	Rated R for strong sexual content, graphic nudity and language
Profanity:	Very strong and explicit language
Alcohol/ Drugs:	Drinking
Violence/ Scariness:	Peril and unhappiness
Diversity Issues:	None
Date Released to Theaters:	January 8, 2016

The “Fregoli delusion” sometimes called the delusion of doubles, is a rare disorder that makes people believe that everyone else in the world is in fact a single person who changes appearance or is in disguise. When Michael Stone (David Thewlis) checks into the Fregoli hotel in this stop-motion animated film from Charlie Kaufman (“Being John Malkovich,” “Adaptation,””Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind”), we begin to understand why it is that everyone else we have seen in the film’s first few moments including the passenger sitting next to Stone on the airplane and his cab driver, have the same face and voice (Tom Noonan).

Even his wife and child speak with Noonan’s voice.

Michael checks into the hotel on a business trip. He will be the speaker at a conference on customer service. He has written an acclaimed book on the subject. He teaches customer service representatives, the subject of near-universal frustration and derision. He tells them “Each person you speak to has had a day.” He tries tell them to be aware of what is special about each individual, but around him everyone seems the same. And Michael himself, as he speaks of humanity, is, well, a puppet. Literally. This stop-motion animated film is remarkably realistic with one of the most authentically awkward sex scenes in cinema history. But the figures themselves, expressive as they are and fluid in their movements, are frankly artificial, with clear breaks on their faces at eye level so we can see how the various face parts get swapped in and out to create emotions.

Michael calls a former girlfriend and they meet for a painfully clumsy conversation. And then he happens upon two other hotel guests, women who are in town for the conference and looking forward to hearing him speak. One is Lisa (Jennifer Jason Leigh), a shy woman, self-conscious about a scar on her face, and often second-guessing herself or making self-deprecating comments that anticipate being judged a failure or a bother by those around her.

She thinks that if he is going to make a pass at anyone, it will be her friend, and clearly the friend (who, like everyone else, has the voice of Tom Noonan), does, too. But it is Lisa Michael invites back to his room. She is an anomaly, he tells her. Something about her voice. Anomaly. Lisa. Anomalisa.

The film is beautifully designed. Michael’s hotel room and the hotel bar are masterpieces of bland and yet somehow sinister anonymity. An encounter with a hotel employee who has an office so enormous it must be traversed by golf cart is reminiscent of the daffy between-floors half-level ceilinged office in “Being John Malkovich.” Any writer is in a sense a puppetmaster, and we have seen Kaufman’s fascination with puppets before; in “Being John Malkovich,” John Cusack’s character was a puppeteer and the various characters in essence used actor John Malkovich (playing a version of himself) as a puppet when they took over his consciousness. In “Synecdoche, New York,” Philip Seymour Hoffman’s character was a playwright trying to maintain control over an increasingly uncontrollable narrative. Here the puppets give Kaufman the greatest possible control over the way the story appears and the way it is told. Stop-motion is so exacting that only seconds of footage are completed each day and the sex scene alone took six months to complete. It also allows him to explore issues of memory, identity, imagination, and loneliness. Dream-like images demonstrate through both illustration and contrast the reality behind the platitudes in Michael’s speech. Just as a raw and needy reality keeps bursting through his remarks, the anguish and hopelessness he feels — and the fear and hopefulness that Lisa feels — transcend the plastic pieces of the dolls who are, it must be said, acting.

For a brief moment, it seems Michael has found something extraordinary. But when he tries to find a way to stay with her, the Fregoli syndrome — or maybe just his terror of genuine intimacy — kicks in. By that time, our own connection to these characters, as artificial as they appear, or, perhaps because of the oddness of their artificiality, is surprisingly warm and intimate.

Parents should know that this film includes very explicit sexual situations and frontal male (puppet) nudity, very strong and explicit language, drinking, and adultery.

Family discussion: What does the name of the hotel tell us about the story? Why did Lisa’s voice change?

If you like this, try: “Being John Malkovich” and “Adaptation” by the same screenwriter

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The Revenant

Posted on January 7, 2016 at 5:35 pm

B+

Lowest Recommended Age:	Mature High Schooler
MPAA Rating:	Rated R for strong frontier combat and violence including gory images, a sexual assault, language and brief nudity
Profanity:	Some strong and racist language
Alcohol/ Drugs:	Drinking
Violence/ Scariness:	Intense, graphic, and disturbing violence including arrows, knives, guns, sexual assault and prolonged animal attack
Diversity Issues:	A theme of the movie
Date Released to Theaters:	January 8, 2016
Date Released to DVD:	April 18, 2016
Amazon.com ASIN:	B01AB0DX2K

In the 1820’s, ladies of fashion liked fur trim. And, true then as now, men like money. So frontiersmen went on trapping expeditions into the wilderness of the young country of the United States of America (played here by British Columbia and Alberta, Canada). The rewards for bringing back fur pelts are significant. The risks, including attack by the Arikara Indians, are dire.

A frontiersman named Hugh Glass was the guide for one of these expeditions. According to lore, he was savagely attacked by a bear and left to die by his companions, but survived and made it back over 250 miles to the nearest fort, intent on revenge. The story has been told — and embroidered and adapted — over the years, reflecting each era’s perspective and concerns. This version is based on the novel by US Trade Michael Punke (who, as Deputy US Trade representative and Ambassador to the World Trade Organization is restricted from promoting the film). As co-written and directed by “Birdman’s” Alejandro González Iñárritu it is a story of resolve. As often with Westerns, it is a way to explore the fundamental contradictions of the American spirit: determination, vision, courage, but sometimes without any regard for the damage they can cause.

Both Iñárritu and his Director of Photography Emmanuel Lubezki won Oscars for this film. They filmed only in available light, meaning they had to limit themselves to just moments of filming each day. As the director told Deadline, they created “little-by-little jewel moments; that’s the way I designed the production…But those locations are so gorgeous and so powerful, they look like they have never been touched by a human being, and that’s what I needed.” They filmed under conditions so arduous that Will Poulter, who plays real-life frontiersman/trapper Jim Bridger, told me that no acting was necessary to show that they were freezing and exhausted. The bear is CGI (and the bear attack is truly horrifying), but almost everything else was really there and really happening, including diCaprio’s hacking coughs (he had the flu).

The cinematography is the most stunning I have ever seen, perfectly focussed throughout the depth of field, even across endless vistas. Second only to the visuals is the movie’s real theme, not revenge or even will, but law.

When there is no structure, no church, no police, courts, or jail, no lawmakers, no appeals, how do you decide who is in charge and what to do? The film’s most fascinating moments are the ones where we see characters across the continuum on those questions, with one in particular who is still deciding where he fits in, decide what they should do, what they must do. In an early scene, the Indians attack and the frontiersmen’s response is: pelts payload first, and every man for himself second. Wounded men are left behind without a second’s hesitation.

But when Glass (Oscar-winner Leonardo DiCaprio) is critically wounded in the middle of nowhere, Captain Henry, the leader of the expedition (Domhnall Gleeson) is certain what he is owed. Because he has been an essential and honorable part of their expedition (and, unstated but evident, because no one is shooting arrows at them at the moment), he decides two men will be left behind to care for him until he dies and then give him some semblance of a Christian burial. They are John Fitzgerald (Tom Hardy) and Bridger (17 years old at the time). Glass has a teenage son (Forrest Goodluck), from his marriage to a Native American woman who was killed, and he stays with his father as well.

But Fitzgerald becomes impatient and commits a terrible act of cruelty while Bridger is away from the campsite, then lies to him about what happened. Glass is left for dead. As Glass, Fitzgerald, Henry, and Bridger deal with the consequences of these actions, we see the beginnings of a society and culture. Some day, the pristine landscapes explored by Glass and Bridger would be covered with roads and cities and we will try to re-create them by filming in other countries to show us what we were. But the story of the struggle for justice, always the great work of this country, is a story we will keep telling forever.

Parents should know that this film includes extremely graphic and disturbing human and animal violence with many explicit and disturbing images of dead bodies and wounds, murder of family members, sexual assault, brief nudity, some strong language, and racism.

Family discussion: How many different views about law and morality do you see among the characters? What should the group have done with a severely injured member?

If you like this, try: “Touching the Void,” a documentary about an extraordinary story of survival in the wilderness