Posted on August 24, 2015 at 8:00 am
Tobey Maguire, Liev Schreiber, and Peter Sarsgaard find the genius behind the madness of Bobby Fischer in the upcoming film, “Pawn Sacrifice,” from one of my favorite directors, Edward Zwick.
Posted on May 9, 2013 at 6:00 pm
Kids, here’s a hint: Don’t think you can pass a sophomore English exam on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s jazz age classic and high school reading list perennial by watching this movie. While this version of the story of a man who changes everything about his life so that he can win back the woman he loves hits the Cliff’s notes highlights, spending more time on the green light on the dock than Gatsby and on the eyeglass billboard than Nick Carraway, co-writer and director Baz Luhrmann misses the forest for the trees. His trees are fun to look at, though. 
It goes off the rails from the very first moment, when it turns out that narrator Nick Carraway (Tobey Maguire) is telling the story in a snow-covered sanitarium, presumably because the events he is about to disclose are so traumatic they have caused him to have a breakdown. Or, perhaps this is Luhrmann’s way of eliding Carraway with Fitzgerald himself, though there is no indication that Fitzgerald wrote this book as therapy.
The more significant violation, though, comes from the mangling of the book’s famous opening lines. Like the book, the movie begins with Carraway telling us that his father warned him not to judge people. But it leaves out the most important part — the reason why. “In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since. ‘Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone,’ he told me,‘just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.’” This is crucial for understanding the way Nick looks at Gatsby and his rival, Tom Buchanan. But Luhrmann inexplicably does not think it is worth including.
Perhaps it is because he is so eager to get to what matters to him, the pageantry. He is the genre/mash-up “Moulin Rouge” guy whose motto seems to be “more is still not enough, even with glitter on it. And firecrackers. And 3D. And Jay-Z.”
The story takes place in 1922. Nick is a WWI veteran who has literary tendencies but is working at a low-level job “in bonds” on Wall Street. He is living in a small cottage in the Hamptons, next door to a vast mansion owned by a mysterious man named Jay Gatsby (Leonardo DiCaprio), who gives fabulously decadent parties but is seldom seen. They are across the bay from the old-money side, where Nick’s cousin Daisy (Carey Mulligan) lives with her wealthy, upper class, polo-playing brute of a husband, Tom Buchanan (Joel Edgerton). He is having an affair with Myrtle (Isla Fisher), the restless wife of the struggling owner of a garage.
It turns out that Daisy and Gatsby knew each other five years earlier, when he was in the military and before she was married to Tom. But “rich girls don’t marry poor boys.” Gatsby has changed everything to change himself into the man Daisy could have married. He lives across from her home so he can look toward her (and the green light on her dock). He hopes that his parties will lure her to his home. When he discovers that his neighbor is her relation, he goes to great lengths to assure Nick that he is trustworthy and to persuade Nick to invite him to tea with Daisy, so he can see her again. He is convinced that they can erase the past and go on together as though five years that included her marriage and child never happened. Nick admires Gatsby for his ability to hope. And in Lurhmann’s version, that is a quality that more than makes up for the compromises and selfishness of Gatsby’s single-minded quest.
Of course, thoughtful consideration of issues like those is not the purpose of this film. It is a confetti gun of a movie, all sensation and senseless mash-up. The party scenes and period details are gorgeous for the sake of gorgeousness, with no sense of perspective or irony. Fitzgerald, who had a love-hate relationship with wealth and status, had some ambivalence in his descriptions of the characters luxuries, but in general Lurhmann’s portrayal of the negligent opulence of the old money Buchanans and gauche display of the new money Gatsby is somewhere between awe and envy. The Jay-Z-produced soundtrack is not as anacronistically intrusive as one might fear, only because the sensory overload barely allows it to register. But it is thin compared to the book. Fitzgerald’s carefully chosen songs and the lyrics of the era that he included are far more evocative and illuminating as words on a page than all of the thump thump thumping of the music we hear.
Luhrmann may be trying to make some point with the marginalization of African-American characters, relegated to playing music, dancing, and looking on at what the white folks are doing from tenements. But it is distracting and unsettling to see them treated as just another set of props. But then, the white characters are not much more than props, either, with a director more interested in posing them and moving the camera than in any kind of performance. Daisy’s friend Jordan (Elizabeth Debicki), impossibly long and thin, is like a Giacometti sculpture towering above mere mortals. DiCaprio has some affecting moments, but seems too old and too sleekly comfortable for the role.
After at least five unsuccessful attempts to make this novel into a movie, it may be time to declare it unfilmable. There is no cinematic equivalent to Fitzgerald’s voice. This is not “The Great Gatsby.” It’s an often-visually pleasing kaleidoscopic music video with a 3D shower of shirts.
Parents should know that the movie features violence including murder, suicide, a fatal traffic accident, and domestic abuse, also drinking and drunkenness, pills, smoking, sexual situations that are explicit for a PG-13, and brief strong language including racist and anti-Semitic epithets.
Family discussion: What do the green light and the billboard symbolize? Why does Nick say that Gatsby is hopeful?
If you like this, try: the book by F. Scott Fitzgerald and compare this to the other versions, including the 1974 Robert Redford film, the Mira Sorvino miniseries, and the updated “G”
Posted on December 13, 2002 at 5:17 am
Remember when “Superman” was released with the tagline, “You will believe a man can fly?” Well, “Spider-Man” will not only make you believe that a teenager can swing from the skyscrapers; it will almost make you believe that you are up there swinging with him.
Comics were hugely popular back in the days when they could show us stories that no one else could. But now, movies can show us anything that can be imagined, and a movie like this does it so well it makes you think that this is what imagination is for.
Toby Maguire plays Peter Parker, a brilliant and sensitive high school senior, so deeply in love with his red-headed next door neighbor Mary Jane (Kirsten Dunst) that he can barely bring himself to say hello to her. On a school field trip, he is bitten by a genetically engineered spider and the next morning he wakes up with some distinctly arachnid-like qualities. He can see without his glasses and he has become muscular. He can climb walls, eject webbing with the swinging power of rope and the strength of steel, and anticipate danger.
So, like any teenager, the first thing he does is impress a girl and humiliate a bully. He enters a wrestling match to get money so he can buy a car to impress the girl even more. His decision not to interfere with an armed robber has tragic consequences, and so he learns that his uncle was right in telling him that with great power comes great responsibility. Great risk comes as well — everyone he cares about is put at risk because of who he is.
Meanwhile, Peter’s best friend’s father, industrialist Norman Osborn (Willem Dafoe) has decided to try out his company’s new product on himself. He, too, develops extraordinary power and a mad fury. He is dubbed the Green Goblin for his bizarre armor-like covering.
Maguire is just right as Peter, thoughtful, sensitive, thrilled with his new powers. You can believe that he is the kind of kid who would spend his time a little bit apart from the others, taking photographs that are clear and perceptive. The supporting cast is great, especially stage star Rosemary Harris as Aunt May and J.K. Simmons as Peter’s bombastic editor. The script is excellent, and strikes just the right note of respect and affection for the source material. It has a contemporary feel without being showily post-modern or ironic.
The special effects are thrilling. New York City is brilliantly stylized. Peter’s relationship with MJ is sweetly romantic. And when a bunch of New Yorkers throw things at the Green Goblin, yelling, “This is New York and we fight back!” it is genuinely touching.
The movie’s weakest point is that it fails in the single most important requirement for a comic book-based movie — the villain is not unforgettably crazy or evil or larger-than-life. The best Batman movies featured Jack Nicholson as The Joker and Jim Carrey as The Riddler. Willem Dafoe is a brilliant actor (just take a look at his Oscar-nominated performance in “Shadow of the Vampire”), but the part of Osborn/Green Goblin is just not interesting enough to be truly scary. The flying surfboard he rides around on is very cool, but his exoskeleton costume and mask are just dumb-looking.
Parents should know that the PG-13 rating comes from a couple of mild words, a clingy wet t-shirt, and a great deal of violence. The violence gets very intense, and includes not just fires and explosions but people getting vaporized, shot (off-camera), and impaled. Characters lose people close to them to violent deaths. A group of schoolchildren are in peril. Parents emotionally abuse their children.
For parents who are struggling with whether this movie is appropriate for kids under 13, the best guide I can provide is to say that it is about at the level of X-Men. I recommend caution, especially for children under 10. Keep in mind that just because a child can repeat after you “it’s only pretend” does not mean that he fully understands what that means until he is 10 or even older, and that the terrorist attacks may make some of the material scarier than it would have been before (scenes featuring the World Trade Center have been removed from the movie). Some kids may see the movie and appear to have no problems with it, but may act out in other ways. Be watchful for kids who respond by desensitizing themselves to violence or re-enacting it. And if you are going to let childrn see the movie, make sure that they know that this is an exception and that you will not be permitting them to see any PG-13 just because you allowed this one.
Families who see this movie should talk about the idea that the people we love make us feel good about who we are at the same time they make us see a way to be better. Do you agree that “people love to see a hero fail?” Characters in the movie keep a lot of secrets. What makes them decide not to tell, and who is and is not right in making that choice?
Families who enjoy this movie will also enjoy Superman and Batman. Mature audiences will enjoy Toby Maguire’s outstanding performances in “Wonder Boys,” “The Cider House Rules,” and “The Ice Storm.”
Posted on December 13, 2002 at 5:16 am
In “Dave” and “Big” screenwriter Gary Ross gave us characters whose innocent honesty and goodness revealed and transformed the adult world. Now, as both screenwriter and director of “Pleasantville,” he has created teen-aged twins who are transported into an idyllic black and white 1950’s television sitcom where everything is perpetually sunny and cheerful, married couples sleep in twin beds, the basketball team never loses, and messy complications simply don’t exist. Tobey Maguire (David) and Reese Witherspoon (Jennifer) are well aware of the messy complications of the modern world. David has retreated into reruns of “Pleasantville,” a television show that makes “Andy of Mayberry” and “Father Knows Best” look like hard-hitting docudramas. And Jennifer is something of a self-described “slut.” When a mysterious TV repairman played by “Andy of Mayberry’s” Don Knotts gives them a magic remote control, David and Jennifer find themselves transformed into Pleasantville’s Bud and Mary Sue. As the twins interact with Pleasantville’s black and white world, they cannot help revealing its limits and ultimately transforming it. “Mary Sue” mischeviously introduces the concept of sex to her high school classmates, and then, more sensitively, to her Pleasantville mother (Joan Allen). “Bud” tells them about a world where the roads go on to other places, where the weather is not always sunny and mild, where people can decide to do things differently than they have before. As the characters open themselves up to change, they and their surroundings begin to bloom into color, in one of the most magical visual effects ever put onto film.
But some residents of Pleasantville are threatened and terrified by the changes. “No colored” signs appear in store windows. New rules are imposed. When the twins’ Pleasantville father (William H. Macy) finds no one there to hear his “Honey, I’m home!” he does not know what to do. He wants his wife to go back to black and white.
At first, Jennifer thinks that it is sex that turns the black and white characters into color. But when she stays “pasty,” she realizes that the colors reveal something more subtle and meaningful — the willingness to challenge the accepted and opening oneself up to honest reflection about one’s own feelings and longings.
High schoolers may appreciate the way that the twins, at first retreating in different ways from the problems of the modern world, find that the rewards of the examined life make it ultimately worthwhile. Topics for discussion include the movie’s parallels to Nazi Germany (book burning) and American Jim Crow laws (“No colored” signs), and the challenges of independent thinking. NOTE: parents should know that the movie contains fairly explicit references to masturbation (and a non-explicit depiction) and to teen and adulterous sex.
Posted on December 13, 2002 at 5:16 am
Homer Wells (Tobey Maguire) reads David Copperfield aloud to his fellow orphans, letting us know that like Copperfield, he will let us decide for ourselves whether he is the hero of his own life. Homer, twice returned by adoptive parents, has become the surrogate son of the head of the orphanage, the benevolent Dr. Larch (Michael Caine).
The orphanage is a place where people come “to find a child or to leave one behind.” And women also come there for abortions — “Sometimes it was the woman who needed to be delivered.”
The movie is set during World War II, and abortion is illegal. Homer, who has never been to school, has been trained by Dr. Larch to practice medicine and perform medical procedures. But he will not do abortions, even when Dr. Larch shows him that the alternative is to leave women to take desperate, even fatal, measures to end pregnancy. They are unable to save one woman who comes to them after a botched abortion. As they bury her, Dr. Larch tells Homer that “she died of secrecy — she died of ignorance.” Still, Homer refuses, because it is illegal and also perhaps partly because he is aware that he and the other orphans were the results of unwanted pregnancies.
Dr. Larch is clearly raising Homer to take his place. But Homer hitches a ride with a couple who has come to the orphanage for an abortion and goes out to see the world outside the orphanage for the first time.
Homer gets a job picking apples, living in barracks with migrant workers led by Mr. Rose (Delroy Lindo). On the wall is a list of rules, but the migrant workers cannot read, and they believe that since they did not write the rules, the rules cannot apply to them. They feel the same way about other kinds of rules. Mr. Rose says, “Don’t be holy to me about the law — what has the law done for any of us here?”
This is the theme of the movie. Many of the characters break rules, from the rules on the wall (against smoking in bed and climbing on the roof) to the laws of the state (abortion, licensing requirements, prohibitions on drug abuse), to rules that most people would consider fundamental principles of morality (prohibitions against dishonesty, betrayal of a friend’s trust, incest, and, for many people, abortion).
In some cases, viewers will think that breaking the rules was the right thing; in others they will not.
Notice that there are rules that characters take seriously, like the rules that Mr. Rose explains to Homer about how to pick apples. One of those rules, is to be careful not to pick an apple bud, because then “you’re picking two apples, this year’s and next year’s,” a rule which may have a deeper meaning to Homer given his views on abortion.
Families should talk about rules, how they are developed, when, if ever, breaking rules is justified, and, when it is justified, how important it is to be willing to take the consequences. Some characters in the movie seem to let life decide things for them, but others take the situation into their own hands, and it is worth discussing how to know when to act.
Questions to talk about with teens who see the movie include: What does it tell us that Homer was rejected by one set of adoptive parents for not crying and by another for crying too much? Why did Buster say that he’d like to kill his parents if he found them? Why did Dr. Larch tell the board that he did not want Homer to work at the orphanage? What is the importance of Mr. Rose’s question, “What business are you in?” What business was he in, and what business was Homer in? Which lies in the movie do you think were right and which were wrong? Do you agree with the doctor’s statement that adolescence is “when we think we have something terrible to hide from those who love us?” And compare the way that Candy lets life make decisions for her with a “wait and see” approach to Homer, who makes decisions based on his values, including the importance of having a purpose. They have very different reasons for getting together — he loves her, but she “just can’t be alone.”
Parents should know that the movie includes incest, non-explicit scenes of abortions, nudity, drug abuse, and a non-explicit scene of an unmarried couple having sex. There are also some very sad character deaths, including a child.
