Be sure to check out this year’s Hollywood issue of the New York Times Magazine this weekend. Some of the year’s biggest stars try out some iconic roles in a series of photographs and short films. Brad Pitt is Eraserhead. Rooney Mara of “Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” is Alex in “Clockwork Orange.” “The Help’s” Viola Davis is a ladybug-infested Nurse Ratched from “One Flew Over a Cuckoo’s Nest.” And George Clooney is almost unrecognizable as Captain Bligh from “Mutiny on the Bounty.” Some of the other performers appear as archetypes rather than specific characters — the siren, the homewrecker, the hothead. Clearly, they were all having a blast.
Beau Willimon took his experience on the Howard Dean campaign and turned it into a play called “Farragut North,” for the Metro stop near the fancy Washington D.C. offices occupied by political consultants. Working with George Clooney and Grant Heslov, it has become “The Ides of March,” named for the ominous date when Julius Caesar was stabbed to death by his political rivals in 44 B.C. The reference is that while the blood may be more metaphorical than literal, it still gets spilled.
Ryan Gosling plays Stephen, an ambitious but idealistic young campaign worker who is responsible for media in the midst of the Democratic primaries. His candidate, Mike Morris (Clooney) is a progressive governor. In Ohio, a key state, they are ahead but their toughest competitor is close enough to make them nervous, especially since a New York Times reporter named Ida Horowicz (Marisa Tomei) is trying to get a story out of it. Even if they win, she will spin them as losing if they win by less than they are predicting. So Stephen and his boss, Paul (Philip Seymour Hoffman) have to come across as confident and — most of all — sincere. They have to be friendly and open with Ida but they have to be careful with her, too, and careful about letting her know just how careful they are being. Not that she is fooled by it. A lot of faux charm is deployed in both directions.
And there is a young, beautiful campaign worker named Molly (Evan Rachel Wood) who is, as they used to say in the theater, the second-act complication.
Co-writer/director Clooney as assembled a powerhouse cast and it is worth seeing the movie just to watch the way Hoffman and Paul Giamatti eye each other as opposing campaign managers. But in adapting the play he made some poor choices. In the original version, the candidate himself did not appear. Making the Governor an important part of the story and having the character played by Clooney throws the film off-balance, especially when he finds it necessary to give himself a chance to spout some political promises that are just a distraction. It was much more powerful when everyone in the audience could project onto the candidate whatever positions they wished (or feared) he would take.
And Clooney ramps up the scandal from the original so that it becomes melodramatic and less realistic. By the time he brings out the big, big flag (ironically), with the idealistic speech in front of the audience and the angry exchange backstage, and the people having sex while watching the news on television, it has gone past heavy-handed to preachy. Did I really hear someone say, “This is the big leagues?”
Poor Wood has to struggle with a character whose behavior is so bizarrely unrealistic that she seems to be playing two different people. But Clooney evocatively captures the combination of cynicism about the system, optimism that something can be done to improve it, and grim ends/means practicality about arbitraging the gap. You can almost smell the stale coffee and put on five pounds from campaign trail stress eating. He knows the snap and rhythm of political talk, the constant temperature-taking and ceaseless spinning, so much spinning that the words go 360 degrees and then go around again.
Danish director Nicholas Winding Refn said that “Drive” is his vision of a contemporary fairy tale about a princess who has to be rescued from a dragon. It is a highly stylized, brilliantly acted, and brutally violent story about a man we know only as “the Driver” (Ryan Gosling), a mechanic, sometime movie stunt driver, and occasional getaway driver. He befriends a young mother named Irene (Carey Mulligan) and her son while her husband is in prison.
“You put this kid behind a wheel and there’s nothing he can’t do,” says a gimpy guy named Shannon (“Breaking Bad’s” Bryan Cranston), who runs the garage where the Driver works. “How’s the leg?” asks Nino (Ron Perlman). “I paid my debt,” says Shannon, acknowledging the real question. This is a world where debts must be paid and reminders of that fact can be painful.
And this is a world where the Driver is not the only one who has a range of roles that include both sides of the law. And there are bad guys and really bad guys and really, really bad guys. Irene’s husband Standard (a superb Oscar Isaac) gets out of prison. When he is sucked into one more robbery, the Driver goes along to make sure nothing bad happens. And then a lot of very bad stuff happens, and that makes him a target. Irene and her son are at risk and so is a woman named Blanche (“Mad Men’s” Christina Hendricks, looking great in tight jeans, even when she’s terrified). Behind much of what goes on are the deceptively genial Bernie Rose (look for a Supporting Actor nomination for Albert Brooks) and the hot-tempered and impetuous Nino.
It is a volatile situation, and Refn plays that off the minimalist storyline, stripped-down dialog, retro electronic soundtrack, and cool compositions, with each frame as perfectly laid out as a still life waiting to be painted, each movement as swoon-worthily choreographed as a ballet.
Fall Movies 2011 — Miss Piggy, Double Clooneys, Spaceys, and Lautners, the First Silent Film in 80 Years, and Brad Pitt Plays Ball
Posted on September 3, 2011 at 8:00 am
Summer is time for superheroes, remakes, raunchy comedies, and sequels. As the leaves begin to fall, movies get a little more ambitious, a little edgier, a little weightier, with less CGI and a bit more depth. But that doesn’t mean they forget how to be fun. Here are some of the movies I am most excited about between now and Thanksgiving:
1. “Moneyball” — based on the book of that title by Michael Lewis, the guy who wrote “The Blind Side” and “Liar’s Poker.” Brad Pitt stars as the real-life Oakland A’s manager Billy Beane, who revolutionized the way players are selected by applying an intense statistical analysis to determine which players were undervalued by traditional scouts. Two of my favorite screenwriters, Aaron Sorkin (“The Social Network,” “The West Wing”) and Steve Zallian (“Schindler’s List,” “Searching for Bobby Fischer”) and the director of “Capote” are behind this film and I think Pitt is going to remind us that he can act.
2. “The Ides of March” — from “Farragut North” (the name of a DC Metro stop), a play by a guy who knows electoral politics from the inside — he worked on the Howard Dean campaign. George Clooney directed and stars in this story of an ambitious campaign worker (Ryan Gosling).
3. “The Skin I Live In” — Antonio Banderas is back with the man who gave him his start, Spanish director Pedro Almodovar, in this story about a plastic surgeon who holds a woman captive for an artificial skin experiment. Almodovar movies are always filled with electrifying melodrama and this one reportedly has a plot twist no one will see coming.
4. “The Artist” — one of the most talked-about films at Cannes this year is a black and white silent film about an actor in the silent era whose career collapses when talkies come in. John Goodman co-starred with French actors who spoke no English, but I guess it doesn’t matter because it has old-fashioned title cards.
5. “Hugo” — Martin Scorsese directs a film based on the Caldecott-award winning The Invention of Hugo Cabret, which was inspired by the man who invented special effects, George Méliès. Sir Ben Kingsley and Chloë Moretz star.
6. “The Muppet Movie” — Jason Segal, Amy Adams, Miss Piggy, Kermit, the Swedish Chef, Fozzie Bear, and my favorites, Statler and Waldorf. Guaranteed to be the family movie of the season.
7. “Immortals” — Tarsem Singh’s “The Fall” was one of the most visually sumptuous movies ever made. I can’t wait to see what he does with this story about a battle of the Greek gods. Bonus: the new Superman, Henry Cavill, stars as Theseus.
8. “Puss In Boots” — Banderas again, with his “Shrek” character on an adventure of his own, co-starring with “Hangover’s” Zach Galifinakis as Humpty Dumpty.
9. “The Descendants” — Clooney does not usually play a dad, but in this film from Alexander Payne (“Sideways,” “Election”), he is a father who discovers that his wife was cheating on him.
10. “Margin Call” — Who better to play a Wall Street guy trying to prevent a meltdown at an investment bank than Kevin Spacey? (He also stars in “Father of Invention” as a man hoping for a comeback.)
Could be guilty pleasures: “Real Steel,” “A Very Harold and Kumar Christmas 3D,” and “The Big Year”
Prestige movie that could be boring: Leonardo diCaprio in “J. Edgar”
Remakes I hope aren’t terrible: “Footloose” and “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy”
Taylor Lautner has two big releases: “Twilight: Breaking Dawn Part 1” and “Abduction”
I’m least looking forward to: Adam Sandler as boy and girl twins in “Jack and Jill”
Looks intriguingly twisted: “Take Shelter”
Seen them already and liked them: “Drive,” “Warrior,” “50/50”
This painful comedy about the agonies of love has some deftly observed moments and strong performances but its essential tawdriness overwhelms its efforts to be cuddly and life-affirming.
Everyone is miserably in love with the wrong person. Steve Carell plays Cal, married for almost 25 years to his teenage sweetheart, Emily (Julianne Moore), who tells him in the opening scene that she wants a divorce. Their 13-year-old son, Robbie (Jonah Bobo) is in love with their 17-year-old babysitter, Jessica (the heart-twistingly vulnerable Analeigh Tipton). Jessica has a crush on Cal. Emily slept with her co-worker, David (Kevin Bacon). Cal goes to a bar to drown his sorrows and meets someone who is not miserable and not in love: Jacob (Ryan Gosling), who takes a different beautiful woman home from the bar every night. Jacob tells Cal that he lost Emily because he lost his sense of what it means to be a man. For Jacob, being a man means pitching the New Balance shoes and ill-fitting suits and manipulating women to have sex by pretending to listen to them. Cal is soon channeling his inner playa, first seducing a teacher named Kate (Marisa Tomei in a thankless role) and then a series of montaged lovelies. Meanwhile, Robbie is texting romantic pleas to Jessica and Jessica is following the advice of a classmate and taking nude photos of herself to give to Cal and Emily is dating David, whose role seems to be nice guy whose unfitness for love is demonstrated by everyone’s intended-to-be-funny-but-not-funny-at-all inability to pronounce his last name correctly.
Got that? Then, just as Jacob’s method begins to work for Cal, it stops working for Jacob. The one woman who turned him down is Hannah (Emma Stone), a recent law graduate studying for the bar exam. Circumstances lead her to return to the bar to proposition Jacob and back at his sleek bachelor pad something unprecedented happens — a night of real intimacy, talking and laughing. Now Jacob needs advice on his uncharted territory: how to be a part of a relationship that lasts more than 24 hours.
There’s an inexpressibly lovely moment as Emily calls Cal, not realizing he is right outside their house because he sneaks over at night to maintain the garden (metaphor alert). She tells him she is in the basement trying to restart the pilot light but he can see she is upstairs and just needed an excuse to call. And Stone continues to be one of the most endearingly honest, intelligent, and expressive performers on screen. She shows us how the flurry of mixed emotions she feels that first night with Jacob flicker across her face as she tries to manage her feelings of confidence and fear, longing and logic.
But that is not enough to make up for the smarminess of the story’s assumptions and the characters’ behavior. There’s an excruciating climactic scene in which two of the characters made humiliating public declarations that are intended to be gallant but come off as self-indulgent and completely inappropriate. And other than Hannah, the characters are just not very nice. Jessica keeps telling us she loves Cal because he is such a kind man and great father. Not from what we see. He shows little concern for what his children are going through with their parents’ separation or anything else they are going through. He does not know who his son’s teacher is. And he is awful to the women he sleeps with, which the movie seems to think is fine. When one of them becomes angry at him because he never called her, she is portrayed as shrewish and unreasonable. Jacob, whose only evidence of responsibility or being aware of anyone else’s needs or feelings is his decision to help Cal become a lady-killer, provides very little reason other than hotness for deserving Hannah’s love or making any effort to earn it. The film is as callous toward the one-night-stands who get tossed aside as Jacob and Cal are. There is no suggestion that someone should give them pointers on how to respect themselves enough not to fall for manipulative cads. Even worse is the treatment of the Jessica/Robbie relationship. She is, we are repeatedly told, 17. Taking nude pictures of herself to give to a man is not just seriously bad judgment and a terrible signal to a prospective romantic partner but probably a crime. Giving those pictures to a 13-year-old is portrayed in the film as an act of compassionate generosity when it is not just seriously bad judgment and a terrible mixed message but definitely a crime. The movie is going for a wistful romanticism. For me it was more like a pervy sociopathy.
Be sure to check out this year’s Hollywood issue of the New York Times Magazine this weekend. Some of the year’s biggest stars try out some iconic roles in a series of photographs and short films. Brad Pitt is Eraserhead. Rooney Mara of “Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” is Alex in “Clockwork Orange.” “The Help’s” Viola Davis is a ladybug-infested Nurse Ratched from “One Flew Over a Cuckoo’s Nest.” And George Clooney is almost unrecognizable as Captain Bligh from “Mutiny on the Bounty.” Some of the other performers appear as archetypes rather than specific characters — the siren, the homewrecker, the hothead. Clearly, they were all having a blast.
, which was inspired by the man who invented special effects, George Méliès. Sir Ben Kingsley and Chloë Moretz star.