COOL, CLEAR WATER

A review requested by Tim Van Autreve, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser.

Director Claude Berri's Manon of the Spring from 1986 is maybe the best kind of sequel. It is greatly deepened in its emotional impact if you've seen Jean de Florette, its predecessor from earlier in 1986 (they were released in France about three months apart), and can fully appreciate the weight of history leaning down on the characters. But it works tremendously well as a standalone narrative (in fact, it does so better than Jean de Florette, which ends on something of a cliffhanger): the backstory is woven into character-building moments so fluidly that it doesn't register that we're having and entirely different film recapped, and having seen the original film, it doesn't register that we're having stuff we already know spit back at us.

This isn't actually all that much of an accident: Manon of the Spring began life as a 1952 film of the same name written and directed by the multi-talented Marcel Pagnol, novelist, playwright, screenwriter, director, and memoirist. As I understand it, the film was carved down so severely from Pagnol's original vision that he decided to turn it into a novel. And since he was already turning it into a novel, he went ahead and turned into a massive two-volume novel, so he could flesh out the film's backstory in its own full narrative. The hefty The Water of the Hills, or L'eau des collines, since everything is sexier in French (though I admit, I prefer the way Manon of the Spring feels in my mouth compared to Manon des sources) was published in 1963, and it was cyclically re-adapted by Berri and Gérard Brach, and so the overall point is, anyway, that if Manon of the Spring feels like it was worked out to stand on its own two feet, while Jean de Florette has an absence of resolution that gives it a kind of tacked-on feel, that's because that is precisely what happened.

I prefer Jean de Florette even so, but it's not worth being a dick about it: both movies are sort of terrific, much better than it seems like they should be on paper. They are relentlessly commercial 1980s French films - so 1980s French, right from the font used in the opening credits - designed for maximum international appeal in the period setting (the late '20s, approximately) and the casting, and shot by Bruno Nuytten (his last work as a cinematographer, before he shifted to directing) to shamelessly make Provence look as beautiful and tourist-friendly in its endlessly golden, sun-kissed fields and hills as any corner of God's earth ever has. The first time I watched the dyad, I approached with an undiluted suspicion verging on hostility, but it's simply too intelligently written and assembled not to overcome that. This is kind of the Gallic version of peak Merchant Ivory: it really seems like the thing that it is can't help but be awful, and instead it's really great.

Back to Manon itself, since that's the theoretical focus here. Some years ago, César Soubeyran (Yves Montand) contrived to block a spring that fed the neighboring property, to force Jean Cadoret, the owner, to sell; his conspiracy ended up getting out of hand and Jean died. Now César and his idiot manchild nephew Ugolin (Daniel Auteuil) own the property and use it to grow carnations, with the water from that very same spring. Jean's daughter, Manon (Emmanuelle Béart), who witnessed the Soubeyrans' treachery, now lives in the countryside as a goatherd, having come to accept her lot in life, though not forgetting the wrong done to her. This situation explodes because of three events: first, Ugolin watches Manon dancing nude in the hills to dry herself off after bathing, and grows obsessed with her. Later, on a trip to town, she overhears a pair of villagers talking about the wrong done to Jean all those years ago, and realises to her horror that the whole community knew about César's villainy, and did nothing to stop him, since he was such a prominent citizen. She'd be without any recourse, except that quite by accident one day, she discovered the small cave housing the spring that provides the village with all its water. Quicker than you can say "karma sucks, bitches", Manon blocks off the spring, forcing the villagers to come to reckoning with the past sins; they presume the dried-up water must be a sign of divine wrath. While this plays out, César grows increasingly obsessed with the idea that his inept, childless nephew is the last member of the line, and he feeds Ugolin's motivation for starting a family, which turns into an increasingly morbid obsession with Manon that, in turn, intensifies her desire to extract vengeance.

The title positions Manon as the protagonist, but in the actual film it's nothing of the sort: this is much more César's story and therefore a study in how past sins nag at the present, whether those are the sins of Jean de Florette's plot, or the history behind even that history. In the scene that most directly sets up the themes and stakes of his arc, he explains to Ugolin that the Soubeyran fortunes were done in by the family's greed and wretchedness in trying to wall out the rest of the world. "Interbreeding! It's bad for rabbits, and it's bad for people" he grouses to nephew, clearly a victim of that interbreeding.

In this context, Manon is an agent of fate more than a character in her own right, and Berri encourages us to think of that by keeping her dialogue and even her action to a minimum for the early parts of the movie. Casting Béart went a great deal of the way towards making that work: her incongruous beauty is absolutely never convincing as a rural shepherd girl, but it helps to make her seem like a nymph more than a person, something that the way she's filmed reinforces: our first glimpse of her is as a quick burst of motion that we can just make out as a human figure before it darts up a tree. When she's finally brought into the film as a proper character, we learn that she's articulate and inordinately intelligent for that place (a legacy from her intellectual father), and her behavior, coupled with Béart's deeply thoughtful expressions - it's not a very speech-dependent role - allows us to appreciate Manon as a fully-formed individual in her own right, and not just a prop for César's downfall and reckoning; but those early scenes cast a long shadow, and there's always a lingering feeling that she's an embodiment of nature's own revenge, and that the villagers' assumption that the blocked-up spring is a spiritual punishment is exactly right.

It is, in all ways, a film about the relationship of the land and the people who live on it, something accomplished especially well in wide shots that present human beings and their habitations as elements in the landscape, and not even the most important among those elements, sometimes. Even the postcard-appropriate photography contributes to this, focusing our attention on the scenery, which is given so much emphasis and liveliness that it becomes a character, if I may run headlong into a cliché. But clichés wouldn't be clichés if they didn't have some truth to them, and the sheer presence of the beautiful earth with its lush foliage and imposing rocky hills has much to do with how Manon of the Spring works at presenting its characters' place in the world.

In fairness, I don't know that anything that happens here could be honestly described as surprising; the film's themes are not new, and while its execution of them is especially handsome and well-tethered to its characters, it's not in any way challenging. If the film were American, I could describe it as "really good Oscarbait", I think you'd know exactly what I had in mind, and how hard that "really good" had to work. But the point is, that work happened: distinctly bourgeois art film sensibilities and all, Manon is smart and persuasive and very, very lovely to look at. It's not daring, but that's true of much of French cinema in the 1980s, and this film and its sibling are clearly among the strongest highlights in that country and decade.

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WILD WOMAN

To begin with, Wild is a great deal better than 2007’s Into the Wild, its most direct antecedent in the “people finding themselves by dropping out and trekking through nature, meeting several people along the way who give symbolic life lessons, and ‘Wild’ is in the title” genre. And really, that’s all I needed to declare it a success, so the rest is gravy. Which is just as well, since for every single thing Wild gets right - and that is not an unimpressive list - it gets something else wrong.

Based on the life and memoirs of Cheryl Strayed, played by Reese Witherspoon in the movie (it was the first project made by her new production company), Wild tells the story of the three months in that woman’s life during which she hiked the Pacific Crest Trail from the southern to the northern border of the United States. This trip, at least as it’s described in Nick Hornby’s screenplay, was a self-conscious attempt to reboot a life that had gone tremendously wrong since the death of her mother (Laura Dern, in flashbacks that amount to more of an extended cameo than a proper “supporting” role): heroin, sex with every random man who asked, a failed marriage, grinding poverty. And to the surprise of nobody watching - they made the movie, after all, and it’s not being marketed as a severe piece of icy art cinema that involves death and hopelessness - that’s exactly what proved to happen, though only through a great deal of trial and error and being generally miserable for long stretches of the hike.

That, more than anything, is what puts Wild head and shoulders above Into the Wild: it is much freer in admitting that Cheryl entered her grand quest blindly and a bit stupidly, and the task of discovering what her priorities and emotional needs were was an extension of the more immediate task of figuring out how to survive the experience she’s committed herself to. Which even manages to make the film more inspirational than it would have been without the cold splash of reality, since it does such a fine job in the first third of making it really clear just how fucking hard hiking the entire length of the PCT could be, and how much untapped self-reliance Cheryl need to find in order to cope with it.

The other great strength of the film is Witherspoon, giving a fearlessly physical performance, pretty easily the best work of her career. The process-oriented nature of Hornby’s script robs the character of some nuance and leaves the film a bit thinner of a psychological portrait than it apparently fancies itself, but within the limits thus established by the writing, Witherspoon is very nearly perfect: channeling Cheryl’s rage at setbacks and her small pride in triumphs with unforced clarity; she captures the wearying monotony of walking and walking and walking with a beleaguered heaviness that does all the work of suggesting the passage of time that the film, obliged with keeping itself under two hours, doesn’t have the luxury to depict. And when the script moves away from depicting the act of hiking, Witherspoon does lovely work coming to life in the more intimate, character-focused moments, giving exactly the right energy to Hornby’s sardonic humor and quiet desperation.

So okay, that’s the good part. The bad part is possibly also due to Hornby, for the film’s structure is a bit dire; it’s absolutely due to Jean-Marc Vallée, directing with as clumsy a hand as this scenario can manage to survive (which isn’t the worst he could do, you understand: the film still survives, after all). Three prestige dramas in - The Young Victoria and Dallas Buyers Club are his babies also - I’m not entirely sure what it is that Vallée gets wrong about filmmaking, since it doesn’t seem to be the same thing every time. But in the case of Wild, it’s an enervating mixture of lead-footed obviousness and arch, artsy, pretentious-ass bullshit. A good portion of the film is given over to flashbacks to Cheryl's tragic and then dissolute life, and they are ushered into the film with the sophisticated grace of a rhinoceros driving a go-kart. Ham-handed visual links, foggy narrative cues, and pensive close-ups to Witherspoon's sad, shocked face, and then we're off into jagged montages of split-second shots of images from Cheryl's memory. It's hard to say if it's more hokey or annoying. And if there's no worse editing in the film than the flashback intros, it's not for want of trying: editors Martin Pensa and Vallée himself (under the pseudonym John Mac McMurphy) take undue joy in chopping the film all to hell, cutting together innocuous scenes of Cheryl walking or setting up her tent or sorting her supplies into a ratty series of jump cuts that require only "Yakety Sax" instead of Simon & Garfunkel's "El Condor Pasa (If I Could)" as the underscore to complete the effect (and boy, points for originality on picking that song as the repeating motif). It's acutely distracting, and coupled with the strained artiness of the symbolic flashbacks, the film's entire aesthetic feels like a half-assed attempt at doing a '60s European art film, so half-assed that it's closer to being a parody.

And as for the repeated use of a fox with its head adorably cocked to the side as the most symbolic symbol of them all: I don't know if that's on Hornby, or Vallée, or producer/spirit-guide Witherspoon, or anyone else involved, but shame on everyone who had the chance to say, "you guys, this is the worst idea", and didn't.

But let's go ahead and retrench to positivity for the wrap-up, because all things considered, Wild is a pretty fine, moving example of Oscarbait going more or less right. The story is terrific, and Witherspoon embodies it with vigor and gritty commitment, and the fact that the visuals used to express the story are kind of a shambles is... well, it's a fact, but there are worse facts to contend with.

7/10

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HOLLYWOOD CENTURY, 2014: In which our study of one hundred years of Hollywood filmmaking ends as it began, with a well-heeled amateur directing a dubiously effective adaptation of a hot literary property

The life story of Louis Zamperini is fascinating and wide-ranging, and it shouldn't even be possible to condense it into a movie as all-around misguided as Unbroken. But that's what happens when you throw an enormous non-fiction bestseller at talentless check-cashing hacks like Joel & Ethan Coen. Or something. I suspect that the story of the screenwriting process and WGA arbitration that led to a title card proclaiming this adaptation of Laura Hillenbrand's book to be by "Joel Coen & Ethan Coen and Richard LaGravenese and William Nicholson" would be fascinating in its own right, though I would not want those four men to be responsible for writing it. Because if their combined skills couldn't do any better than this for poor Zamperini...

Zamperini, played here by Jack O'Connell in what is the highest-profile title of his big "look at me!" coming-out year as a new actor to watch, was an Olympic medalist in 1936 at Berlin, who set a handful of records during his career as a runner. He joined the Army Air Corps in World War II, survived one emergency landing and one crash into the ocean, floated for 47 days with two other men (one of whom died along the way), and spent two years in Japanese POW camps, including a lengthy stretch under the cruel ministrations of notorious war criminal Watanabe Mutsuhiro, "The Bird" (Japanese rock star Miyavi). After the war's end, Zamperini struggled with post-traumatic stress disorder which only started to recede when he converted to evangelical Christianity thanks to the preaching of Billy Graham, and his newly reinvigorated religion led him back to Japan, in order to offer his forgiveness to all the guards that had abused him during his time as a prisoner. After a lifetime as an inspirational figure, he was one of the runners carrying the Olympic torch near the end of its journey to Nagano, Japan for the 1998 Winter Olympics. And after all that, he passed away in 2014 at the age of 97.

That's a hell of a lot of living, and choices had to be made about what to focus on. But Unbroken finds the whole mess of writers making the very worst ones, alongside director Angelina Jolie, movie star, humanitarian, and most importantly for our present needs, helmer of the rather dreadful 2011 Bosnian War romance In the Land of Blood and Honey. Unbroken is certainly the better of her two films as director, though it's not much of an achievement, and more than it teaches us anything about the nobility of the human spirit or inner strength or anything else, the film teaches us that not every actor can automatically make the leap to directing, and that simply because one has the clout and access and moral fervor to make movies, that doesn't mean that one has the talent.

The film does not want to be a decade-spanning biopic, which is a thoroughly respectable impulse. In theory, then, it focuses all its energy on Zamperini’s time during the war, taking place across three narrative chunks: the failure of his first bomber under a barrage of enemy fire, done as a little mini-thriller to open the film, the crash of his second bomber and the 47 days floating on a pair of life-rafts, a much longer stretch of narrative, and at last his two years as a prisoner of war being singled out for his Olympic fame to receive the nastiest abuse at the hands of his captors. Good enough, but there are two gaping problems, entirely unrelated, and they collaborate to make what could have been a nerve-wracking study of desperate survival into the most tedious drudgery. For one thing, though it attempts to not be a stock biopic, this is exactly what Unbroken ends up transforming into, thanks to its self-destructive over-reliance on flashbacks. They start early, and they start heavy: during that same assault that opens the movie, while focusing on Zamperini’s stressed-out face, the film snaps its fingers and BOOM we’re in his childhood, watching a potted history of his early passion for racing as a way of funneling all his rage against the racist bullies maltreating him into something active and construction, on to his Olympic glory. I will say about this that C.J. Valleroy, playing Zamperini as a child, is inspired casting: he’s a dead ringer of O’Connell and has the acting chops to sell the character.

On the other hand, this is a terrible, terrible digression, right off the bat: teasing us with story momentum and stakes that are instantly shelved in favor of a capsule biography that speeds by too fast to do much more than communicate information artlessly. And this is information we’ll receive later through dialogue, anyway. Of all the ways in which it beggars believe that the Coens were supposedly the last screenwriters to take a whack at this script, the puffy flashback structure (they’re threaded all through the first two chunks, drying up for the most part after he’s captured by the Japanese) is the one that seems most obviously dysfunctional and beneath the talents and accumulated wisdom of any of the credited writers.

This bone-headed mismanagement of structure rears its head in a different and maybe even uglier form at the very end: the main action concludes with the V-J Day, and the rest of Zamperini’s life story is told in the form of title cards with photographs of the actual people involved, as well as some footage from 1998 of the man trotting along with the Olympic torch. Standard biopic procedure, but the enormous volume of the closing text, spinning out for minute after minute, is indescribably crude: besides being an admission that there was a whole lot more story to tell, it strongly implies that the untold story was the more important bit, and that the material the film was able to cover was maybe not done in an efficient way.

No, make that definitely not done in an efficient way. The other gaping problem is that Unbroken, for a whole hour of its running time, is nothing but a repetitive catalogue of suffering, all done with a bloodlessly refined classiness that keeps cozily within the limits of a PG-13 rating. So it’s not just torture porn, it’s torture porn with no cumshot. Never has the endless suffering of a man who refuses to give in to his tormenters felt so goddamn boring: Jolie and her team never switch things up in any way, or structure things to feel like the stakes and tension are rising: you could isolate all the scenes for that second hour and re-arrange them any way you wanted, and the film would basically flow the exact same way: the Bird wanted to hurt Zamperini in some creative way, did it, Zamperini stayed strong.

What the film lacks is any insight into the mind of the sufferer or the torturer: after its last good scene, in which Zamperini and fellow survivor Phil (Domhnall Gleeson) are stripped in the jungle and force to the ground, where they expect to be executed and Zamperini breaks down, there’s not a single beat of the movie that focuses on the psychological impact any of this has. We are done spending time inside Zamperini’s head, where the first hour and its litany of flashbacks was so eager to position us: from here on, it’s just watching brutality. The only connective tissue between Jolie’s two films as a director thus far is an overweening interest in violence, shot with a clinical detachment that removes the human-scale cost of that violence; it’s not a lovely trend, and though absolutely nothing about Jolie’s very public private life suggests that she’s full of bloodlust, her directorial style has a nasty way of lingering on suffering for no reason other than the joy of lingering. The idea is that this is an inspiration testament to human endurance - “If I can take it, I can make it” chants Zamperini with poster-reader sincerity - but despite the clear evidence that plenty of viewers have walked away from it duly inspired, I don’t see a molecule of that in the film’s eager, documentarian interest in capturing all the nuances of how prisoners get beaten.

Jolie’s not incapable of making good cinema: the entirety of the raft sequence is generally great, a more severe, realistic version of Life of Pi with noticeably crummier CGI, or a three-handed successor to All Is Lost. If we think of Unbroken as three films stitched together (something the writing and editing and visual styles all encourage us to do), this one is above reproach, one of the best sustained passages of filmmaking of the (anemic, to be sure) 2014 prestige movie season.. But the ghastly structure of the first filmlet and the just plain ghastliness of the third hold the whole thing back.

The film is, on top of everything else, slackly made: the editing by William Goldenberg and Tim Squyres, is satisfactorily functional without being clever, surprising, or insightful, and the cinematography is a bit over-attractive when it’s not blandly reducing everything to a generic mixture of nostalgically-tinged brownish-greens. For living legend Roger Deakins to have overseen this tremendously uninteresting-looking film is even more shocking than thinking that his regular directors the Coens could have helped effect the script: it’s basically just a third-tier knockoff of John Schwartzman’s style executed without Schwartzman’s conviction, and with no complexity to the lighting. I can think of a handful of individual frames that really worked tremendously well, some despite themselves (the idea to visually represent Zamperini as a Christ figure was a terrible one, but Deakins executes it beautifully), but this is as thoroughly routine as anything he’s shot in over a decade. It’s heartbreakingly adequate. So to is the score by Alexandre Desplat, which is far less surprising - it’s a rare year that goes by without him producing at least slightly treacly, schlocky score, and after surprisingly dodging that bullet in The Imitation Game, he was due.

It is unfair and inappropriate to ask Unbroken to stand in as the sacrificial lamb for an entire movie year, as I have sort of done by making it the finale to this series. If anything, it feels like the embodiment of the movie year 15 years ago or so (it has been eleven years since Seabiscuit, also adapted from a Hillenbrand book, and the aesthetic similarities between this film and that are hard to ignore: they have virtually identical color schemes, for one). This kind of pseudo-inspirational Oscarbait-by-numbers filmmaking is almost quaint in 2014. And yet its dogged commitment to making something that tells us exactly what to feel in its pushy score and its dabbled images, to shamelessly courting emotions even though it’s sort of really bad in a lot of ways - well that is Hollywood, is it not, and even if Unbroken seems fated to be a (possibly Oscar-nominated) footnote in cinema history, it is exactly the sort of thing that the American film industry has always made to prove how damn-ass dignified and serious and artistic it can be. The firmly mediocre polish and surface-level thematic messaging that go into this film are, for better or worse - worse, definitely worse - the life’s blood of Hollywood filmmaking, now and forever.

5/10

Elsewhere in American cinema in 2014
-Darren Aronofsky's distinctly non-traditional Noah is the biggest hit in an unexpected surge of religious and Bible-themed movies
-The government of North Korea and President of the United States Barack Obama both take a keen interest in the release pattern of innocuous dudebro comedy The Interview
-Guardians of the Galaxy is the only film to break $300 million during one of the financially weakest summers of the modern era

Elsewhere in world cinema in 2014
-Crabby old icon Jean-Luc Godard says Goodbye to Language with the help of avant-garde 3-D
-Australia's Jennifer Kent makes the scariest pop-up book in history the center of her directorial debut, The Babadook
-Lisandro Alonso's Jauja, an oblique philosophical drama, is among the better-received of the year's Argentine-Danish co-productions

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EVER READ CRYPTONOMICON? YOU SHOULD TOTALLY DO THAT INSTEAD.

There are two ways, I think, that one could go about making a story of Alan Turing and his key role in inventing the computer as a means of cracking a Nazi code during the Second World War. One way would be to go all-in on the psychological aspect, and take it for granted that Turing's closeted homosexuality was haunting him and driving him in his quest to uncover the secrets of his nation’s enemies, thus making his eventual punishment by the British government for his "gross indecency" even more ironically cruel. The other would be to discard personal matters altogether, and make a purely process-driven story, in which Turing and his colleagues are nothing but the human vessels for acts of research and insight, and the act of breaking the code is itself the protagonist, with all the people reduced to the status of window dressing.

The actual Turing biopic that exists in the world, The Imitation Game, tries to combine these methods in a hybrid that does not work much at all. It comes alive only when it most fully commits to being a war-era thriller about cryptography, dying another in a long line of tiny deaths when it alights on Turing's personality and especially his sexuality, which is handled in the most bone-headed, tasteless way. From the winking innuendos that keep elbowing those of us in the know (winking innuendos are a problem for the film: an even worse one is when Turing makes an offhand comment about the trickiness of using cyanide, and the part of me that knows how he died vomited a little bit in my mouth), to the outlandishly tin-eared way homosexuality finally pulled into the story proper, and finally to a cascade of "and then this happened" title cards near the end where, long after I assumed the movie couldn't do anything to make me more irritable, it commits its final act of trivialising the personal and political facts of its story that some registers as the worst moment of a film that only has two or three actively good ones.

So anyway, Alan Turing. Played here by Benedict Cumberbatch, straitjacketed into playing a much worse character than I think he should have been able to by a screenplay that pre-populates the character with a suffocating array of tics and ill-considered traits and bad focal choices - Graham Moore's script, adapted from Andrew Hodges's book Alan Turing: The Enimga, portrays him as possessed by a kind of sketch comedy reduction of Asperger syndrome down to the most barbaric "he's a dick! and he talks in clipped, dickish sentences about things nobody else cares about!" cluster of cheap clichés.The best thing I can say about the characterisation is that it neatly captures the peremptory, unlikable hardness of a brilliant mind more concerned with committing acts of genius than engaging with the world of humans. Which isn’t an uninteresting concept, though the film’s treatment of fumbles pretty badly.

Plainly, The Imitation Game fancies itself a descent into the closed-off interior world of a man who has gone to great lengths to disguise his actual personality. I expect it supposes that it has done a fine job of making Turing a sympathetic, tragic figure who just wanted to be known and understood. That’s certainly the implication of the demented line “Sometimes it’s the people no-one imagines anything of who do the things that no-one can imagine”, a tactical nuclear strike at the heart of English grammar that Moore loves so much, he includes it three motherfucking times. Well, sometimes it’s not that nobody imagines things of people, sometimes it’s just that people are tetchy and off-putting, and that’s far closer to the film’s depiction of Turing, with all his alienating tics that would feel better suited to a broad comedy than such a teary-eyed Serious Drama with all the hushed production design and costuming and stately lighting. Or the obnoxious way that Turing’s sexuality is pulled in as an “aha!” moment. I would like very much to be able to get over the film’s repellent use of Turing’s sexuality. But damn it, I guess I’m just not going to. Maybe it would be easier if the film’s very last beats didn’t leave such an ugly taste of “then he killed himself, but it’s okay, because the Queen pardoned him a half century later”.

So, while very little works in the film’s decision to make itself a biopic of Alan Turing rather than, say, a caper film about the team that broke the German Enigma machine, there are bits and pieces of The Imitation Game that are okay, or better. Alexandre Desplat has broken whatever curse he’s been laboring under, where for every good score he composes in a year, he has to pair it with a lousy one - this makes three times in 2014 (after The Grand Budapest Hotel and Godzilla) that Desplat’s music has augmented and deepened the film in crafty, enjoyable, even somewhat complex ways. It’s a mixture of mechanistic and romantic elements that do a much better job of exploring Turing’s headspace than the script or acting do.

In the face of a full roster of very talented people doing rather disposable things - Matthew Goode is all irritable reaction shots, Mark Strong is barely permitted more than a cameo (though it’s an amusing one), Charles Dance is stranded in a stock “priggish bureaucrat” role - Keira Knightley emerges as a deeply necessary and rewarding shot of human energy into the biopic-by-numbers feel of it all. Uniquely among the cast, she seems to have concluded that The Imitation Game would be better off as a comedy of manners than a bone-dry docudrama, and plays Joan Clarke, female genius in a world of condescending patriarchal men, with a distinctly spirited tang, almost more like an American’s parody of Brits and their stiff upper lips than an actual English actor playing an English character. There’s an ironic, play full twist to her line readings that gooses the film and makes it both meaningfully entertaining and aware of human emotions when she crops up onscreen.

And every so often, the techno-thriller this isn’t pokes its head up, and director Morten Tyldum suddenly shocks us by inserting a moment of well-paced, involving cinema into his creaky museum piece. The moment where Turing has an insight into the character string that will allow him to reliable break Enigma codes and rushes to implement it is absolutely tight and enthralling, not just an improvement over the dozing aesthetic of the rest of the film, but one of the best pieces of process-oriented filmmaking in 2014; it’s immediately followed by a discussion of war strategy and morality that’s equally strong and equally out-of-place in the film’s overall scheme.

Because, on the whole The Imitation Game isn’t just bland mediocrity, it’s actually lousy. Its agonisingly shallow, de-historical depiction of Turing as psychological agent never stops being annoying; its embalmed visuals make WWII England look like a diorama rather than a living place; its editing is actively shoddy, mashing frames together without caring in the slightest if they flow or if the performances within them feel continuous. It’s not just awards-bait filmmaking at its most trivially prestigious, but at its most stylistically flat as well. It’s not entirely without value, but not remotely enough to bother with it as a whole.

5/10

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HOW MANY FOXES WOULD A FOXCATCHER CATCH?

First point: Foxcatcher is, I am certainly, exactly the film director Bennett Miller wanted it to be. It is too precise, too focused, and too consistent for anything else to be the case. Second point: that's not really much of an excuse.

A true story of psychological gamesmanship between one of the more peculiar members of the du Pont family and a pair of Olympic wrestling medalist brothers, Foxcatcher is a film that ends in tragedy, and Jesus Christ, is it ever eager to foreshadow that fact. The film is drenched in funereal sobriety; not one single frame of one single scene accidentally perks up enough to admit anything but an oppressive sense of fatalism. This is true of the performances, which are hushed and mournful. It is true of the screenplay by E. Max Frye and Dan Futterman, which never passes up an opportunity to sadly point at some signifier of out-of-control class-based privilege and remind us that, you guys, the rich think of poor people as disposable objects. It is true in almost hilariously over-the-top ways of cinematography, by Grieg Fraser, who I have taken to thinking of one of the great new talents in his field across a handful of top-notch projects in the last few years, and at a technical level, what he's up to in Foxcatcher is hard to fault. Everything might be lit like the inside of a centuries-old mausoleum, but it would be impossible to do a better job of it. Still, the whole thing is so weepingly earnest that it could almost be silly, if it wasn't so inert and suffocating.

The more important of the brothers, for the purposes of drama, is Mark Schulz (Channing Tatum), who has labored his whole wrestling career under the shadow of older sibling Dave (Mark Ruffalo), even after their twin Olympic triumphs. When we meet them, in the mid-'80s, they've both sunk into obscurity, living and training in Wisconsin. And it is here that Mark is found by the agents of John Eleuthère du Pont (Steve Carell), who has decided that the best way to leave his mark on the world and throw off the spectre of his dismissive mother (Vanessa Redgrave, in what amounts to a cameo), is to personally oversee the training of a new U.S. wrestling team that can compete and win in the 1988 Olympics, proving American can-do dominance to the whole world (the film does not clarify - among the many, many things it does not clarify - that in 1984, the Communist world sat out the American-hosted Olympics, and thus everybody who won left Los Angeles with something of an asterisk following their name). Mark is to be the centerpiece of that team. Eventually, after completely seducing Mark, du Pont succeeds in dragging along Dave and his family as well, all in the name of his warped quest to say "fuck you" to Mommy, hiding his intentions behind a patriotic veneer. And eventually, his patrician, patronising treatment of the Schulzes, and everyone else poorer than he is (which describes virtually every human being alive), leads to... murder. Not a spoiler. The spirit of pointless, brutal death lies over the whole goddamn movie, as suffocatingly as it lay over Miller's fiction debut, Capote. Only in that case, the murder is how things started, and so the pall it cast at least made some kind of tonal sense. Nine-tenths of Foxcatcher is chilly and grim just for the sake of chilliness and grimness.

The point of all this, as presented by the film, is "something something American exceptionalism, blahblah class war". Oh, it's easy to figure out what the film meant to say: there are too many American flags clogging up all the sets for it to be secret for more than a few scenes that the film is setting its eyes on showy, insubstantial patriotism. And from the distant, alien performance Carell gives beneath a grotesque cake of latex that makes him look like a lizard, and which he permits to do almost all of the acting on his behalf, it's clear that the film wants us to be thinking about the distance between the super-wealthy and the rest of humanity, who a literally impossible for those super-wealthy to understand as members of the same species. But it being obvious what the themes are meant to be does not, in any way, mean that the film is actually doing the work of exploring those themes. As handsomely, and fussily, as the film's assembly no doubt is, it's all very shallow. One does not experience the film's message on either an intellectual or emotional level; one puzzles it out. The monotonously bleak tone certainly doesn't help the film connect, either: it's as dry as dry can be, as engaging as tax instructions and just about as intellectually stimulating.

The performances by Tatum and Ruffalo do, in fairness, threaten to bring a living humanity to the proceedings. Tatum's alternately needy and resentful approach to his father-exploiter figure is striking enough, making flexible use of the actor's chiseled features (made meatier through some modest prosthetics), and offering a hint of genuinely wounded self-awareness beneath his glossy magazine looks, that he even draws something vivid and intense out of Carell, who is otherwise playing up all the stiffest, weirdest parts of du Pont in his odd neck angles and sniffy accent, and feeling more like a collection of notes than a character. Ruffalo, in by far the smallest of the three lead roles, makes up an entire performance out of grace notes; his delicate approaches to his brother, his twitchy discomfort at having to read out a few lines of hagiography about du Pont and his wrestling program, the way he talks gently but commandingly to his benefactor, like a dumb child. Between them, these two actors manage to make entire scenes of Foxcatcher feel like a human story worth the telling, even as every element of the directing, writing, cinematography, set design, and audio mix are insistently trying to embalm the scenario and lock it in a vacuum-sealed glass case.

There's a good version of this story: one with this exact cast and script, frankly, kitted out with more freedom to play up the pathetic absurdities, to let the characters live and breath rather than grimly march through their pre-ordained tragedy. There's a version withonly a handful of tweaks that's genuinely about the predation of the thoughtless rich, rather than one that blankly states "the rich are inhuman" and then proves it by encouraging Carell to play John du Pont as a taxidermied heron. There's a version where the tragedy feels like it grows out of the character relationships, rather than plonked down arbitrarily on a movie that has laid the groundwork for it only by being so damned mirthless. Foxcatcher is, in fact, just about the most tedious version of its story that I can imagine. It is a finely detailed as a dusty-covered oil painting, and every bit as static and lifeless

5/10

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TRAVELS WITH MY DAD

Update: This review was based on what was in retrospect a screening plagued by a highly deficient projector resulting in unusually poor image quality. While I don't suspect that I'd ever come anywhere close to actually liking the movie, it's safe to say that my actual thoughts are more of a 6/10 than a 5/10, and this review should probably be disregarded.

Among those who just don't like the work of director Alexander Payne - and given how much more I dislike The Descendants, his worst film, than I love Election, his best film, I suppose I qualify in that company - the commonest criticism you'll find is the charge of misanthropic superiority. The idea that he thinks himself both smarter and morally superior to his characters, and enjoys mocking them. Which is not an easy charge to refute, though I think it misses the point (and not least among the reasons I prefer Election to all other Payne films is that it's far and away the most overtly cruel thing he's done). What I have found, and this was made clear as a breaking dawn by his newest film, Nebraska, is that Payne wants to tell very humane, kind stories of people trying their gosh-damnedest to get by, only he doesn't really know how to do that without setting his likeable, nuanced, realistic protagonists in contrast to cartoon gargoyles in the supporting cast. And the supporting cast in Nebraska is broad and wicked indeed, sitting very uncomfortably and unpleasantly next to the film that Omaha native Payne thinks he's making and even occasionally does make, which is a subdued and melancholy love letter to his home state. And it is very, very clear from the evidence of the film that Payne loves Nebraska. It's Nebraskans that he apparently has a problem with.

The film centers around a father-son relationship, because American screenwriters (first-timer Bob Nelson, in this case; the first Payne film without a writing credit for Payne) have more problems with their dads than anyone else in the world. Woody Grant (Bruce Dern) is getting old and starting to enter the earliest stages of dementia; his younger son David (Will Forte) is the only one who's trying to deal with the old man's confusion and stubbornness with patience and love, while Woody's wife Kate (June Squibb) and elder son Ross (Bob Odenkirk, whom I'd have much preferred seeing in Forte's role) tend to view him as a burden, with his muddy intellectual state merely the last inconvenience of an entire lifetime of shitty husbanding and fathering. Before the film begins, Woody has latched onto an idée fixe, believing with religious certitude that the "You might already be a millionaire" contest ad he received in the mail is a guarantee of riches, and David, acting out of much more kindness than common sense - and the script doesn't seem to think of it that way, an early sign of the crippling intellectual inauthenticity to follow - decides to drive Woody from Billings, Montana to Lincoln, Nebraska to humor the old man, who wants to claim his prize in person.

What follows isn't the road movie it promises to be. One night, Woody sneaks out to get drunk, and cracks his skull open. Rather than push the rest of the way, David decides to stop over in Hawthorne, Nebraska, the ancestral Grant hometown, where Woody and Kate first met; they stay there with Woody's brother Ray (Rance Howard) and sister-in-law Martha (Mary Louise Wilson), and their two awful sons Bart (Tim Driscoll) and Cole (Devin Ratray), and whatever mostly feigned sweetness the film has whipped up in the Woody/David car ride goes straight to hell as Nebraska parks in Hawthorne for almost the entire rest of the movie, as the deeply confused Woody manages to convince everybody that he's rich, and thus does everybody set themselves to the task of separating him from the largest share of his money that they can manage.

The consensus of opinion is against me on this, but Nebraska strikes me as a tiresomely mean-spirited film. And not because I read the film as Payne mocking his characters for being rural rubes - the people who see things like the taciturn gathering of Grant brothers to silently watch football and discuss, with great difficulty, the make of a 30-year-old car as being the filmmaker's attempt to make fun of the culture he's depicting are missing out on a very clear sort of affection that comes from familiarity. Yes, that is actually how people in the Plains States and Midwest live, and there's nothing about the film that implies this they're contemptibly unsophisticated as a result (it reminds me of the profound misreadings that still accrue to Fargo as showcasing the Coens' hatred for Minnesota). In terms of capturing the physicality, the pace of life, and the social interactions of life in the middle of the country - and while I have never lived in Nebraska, I've driven through it many times, and spent a great deal of time in similar communities - Nebraska gets everything right.

But the actions of the characters when they're called upon to be anything other than silent figures in Payne's Norman Rockwell painting of small town life reek of the filmmakers' misanthropy: the vast majority of people we meet are specifically painted as being craven idiots, or selfish bastards, or shrill harridan wives who do nothing but speak awful things about how much everyone is worse than they are (and how Squibb, lustily striking the one note of her character over and over again without modulation, can possibly be getting the amount of praise she's received thus far is going to be one of the great mysteries to me of this awards season). It paints a grossly one-sided depiction of humanity, reducing every character but David to basically one single character trait, and it's never a nice trait; if there's any insight into humanity, America, or anything else, I don't know what it might be, because neither the script nor the limited performances (the rapturous praise for Dern's deliberately glassy face and frustrated mumbling confuses me even more than the praise for Squibb does) do anything to suggest more than the most superficial themes and psychology. Some people are nice; most people are assholes, and they were even bigger assholes 50 years ago. Nebraska, ladies and gentlemen.

And all this I would feel less sour about, except the thing is motherfucking ugly as sin. Shot in black-and-white by Phedon Papamichael, putting in his best claim yet to being my least-favorite working cinematographer, the film is openly aping Peter Bogdanovich's exercises in monochrome from the early '70s without having any reason to do it; Payne has suggested in interviews that the motivation was primarily, "nobody said not to", and while you can squint and come up with something about the lens of nostalgia and revisiting the past and such, that's meeting the movie so much more than halfway that you're waiting in its kitchen for it to finish getting ready. Besides, even if it had a discernible purpose, it's still the crappiest-looking B/W I have seen in many years: smudgy images in which no effort has been made in the lighting or physical design of the movie to translate a full-color world into a greyscale one. A few landscape shots are dark enough that it has a certain dramatic look, but otherwise, this is a nonstop horror of smeary grey-whites bleeding into muddy grey-blacks, looking like Papamichael and Payne just hit the "destaturate" tool in Photoshop and called it a day.

I'd say, in fact, that the vile cinematography is enough to make this my least favorite Payne movie, but after a couple of days reflection, I think I should walk back from that. For one thing, its physical depiction of the bars and stores and fields of the Plains is close to flawless, and it succeeds on the "essence of being on a road trip, watching the scenery" front better than any movie since Cars. For another, whenever the film consists of absolutely nothing but Forte and Dern sitting along, Forte trying with (deliberately) painfully forced enthusiasm to find any means to bond with his distant dad, it actually feels like it has something to do with real human emotions, and the actors have a very nice rapport with each other that is natural and engaging. And to be fair, more of the movie is just Forte and Dern than it is the screeching parade of harpies around them, so strictly by the numbers, I probably like something around 65% of the movie. But that 35% leftover is a goddamn agony, and it makes the whole thing seem much worse than it probably is.

5/10

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LIFE DURING WARTIME

Very rarely, we're given the great and deep privilege of seeing a movie that reaffirms our collective humanity and opens us to worlds of joy and hope and pain and fear and love that we never knew existed. Movies that are emotional and spiritual journeys as much as they are a collection of images strung along a narrative. Such movies come along hardly ever, but it's the hope of seeing one just once that fuels the most fervid and passionate cinephilia, and stumbling across such a transcendent moment is the finest pleasure of the film-lover's life. The Book Thief is the polar opposite of that kind of movie.

It's about a dewy-eyed little girl in Germany in World War II, and if you're anything like me the klaxons are already wailing in your head, everything is turning bright red, and Engineering is pleading that the she canna take much more of this abuse, captain. Surely, there has been one great movie about beatific children in World War II, if only because there have so many of the motherfuckers that sheer numbers dictate that at least one of them has to have worked out. The Book Thief, at any rate, is not that one. It's as pandering as the form can possibly allow for, presenting not one single idea that hasn't been flogged down to the bone over the past 60 years, and spackling over its emaciated drama with suffocating production values that ooze respectability and class and refinement. By which I particularly mean a John Williams score that is shameless, shameless even if you're not ordinarily offended by Williams's more sentimental gestures. Shameless, and worse still, highly derivative: it feels like a remix of several of the composers earlier works. Or like James Horner doing an impression of the Hook soundtrack. It's treacly, sing-songy bullshit, is what I mean to say, and frequently too bubbly and tinkling for the moments its accompanying, even on the level of gloppy emotional manipulation.

But Williams is merely rubbing salt in the wound. The greater problems with The Book Thief have already torpedoed it long before one even notices the music. Even before we've met any of the characters, in fact, as the film opens with a honey-voiced narrator (Roger Allam), who drops enough hints for us to figure out by the end of his first speech that we are being told a story by Death. The ghastliest possibilities of this flourish (which I understand was present as well in the YA source novel by Markus Zusak) don't make themselves clear until almost all the way at the end, when Death tells us in pleasant tones what happened as he took the lives of all the people who've featured into the plot in a major way, but the whole movie is kind of insta-ruined from the moment this ironic but friendly Death crops up and promises a tone of magical realist lightness that is quite possibly the last thing I'd ever want out of a movie that even tertiarily touches on the Holocaust.

The plot, anyway, finds young Liesel Merminger (Sophie Nélisse) deposited in a small German town by her Communist mother when she is forced to flee the country. Here, Liesel - who is illiterate, much like in The Reader - "much like in The Reader" is an unfortunately handy phrase to have ready with this movie - lives with the Hubermanns, kindly and imaginative Hans (Geoffrey Rush) and stern, angry homemaker Rose (Emily Watson), a couple united only by the outrageous awfulness of their German accents. Liesel makes a little friend in the form of the lovelorn Rudy (Nico Liersch), learns of the nastiness of the Nazis during a book-burning that happens right around the time that Hans teaches her how to read, and catches the eye of fellow bibliophile Ilsa Hermann (Barbara Auer), wife of the local burgomeister. She also learns about the joy of words and writing from Max Vandenburg (Ben Schnetzer), the refugee Jew who comes to hide in the Hubermanns' basement, trading in a longstanding favor from the time his father saved Hans. This event is, presumably, the central hook of the entire movie, but director Brian Percival does not have any interest in modulating tones or perspective enough to privilege one bit of the movie over another, and the whole matter of the sick Jewish man whose presence could send the whole household to the camps isn't presented as mattering any more than Rudy's habit of asking for a kiss; not to Liesel (which is, potentially, a good aesthetic choice), and not to the audience (which is emphatically not).

Really, Percival's only functions here are to make Simon Elliott's storybook Wartime Germany production design look glowing and romantic, aided by cinematographer Florian Ballhaus, and to keep the actors from smacking into walls, or I don't know what. He's certainly not guiding them to any truths about their characters, or in Watson's case, preventing her from speaking with an accent on loan from Hogan's Heroes. Indeed, there's a real possibility that we're looking at career-worst work from both Watson and Rush: the former switches from icily Germanic wicked stepmother to nervous, caring woman full of all the love in the world without laying the groundwork for it at all (to be fair, the script does much the same thing), while the latter takes one single emotional register - fatherly warmth - makes it as big as he can, and never makes another acting decision again for the whole rest of the movie.

Setting aside its failures of execution, The Book Thief never manages to answer the big question: why the hell do we care about any of this? Maybe better writing and acting could make the characters interesting enough to follow on their own, but none of them - and protagonist Liesel least of all - is anything but a fuzzy mass of adjectives (noble! innocent! loving! illiterate!) that doesn't emerge from the well-appointed sets. All that leaves us with is some inscrutable observation that in World War II, there was a sad. This is insight-free, morally shallow tosh, the worst kind of Oscarbait presented without any distinction in a style for which the word "bland" is impossibly too generous. That kind of emptiness is a pity in any movie, but for a film on these topics, it's an artistic sin.

2/10

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CHICAGO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL '13: THE MIRACLE (SIMON STAHO, DENMARK)

Screens at CIFF: 10/12 & 10/14 & 10/20
World premiere: 26 August, 2013, Montréal World Film Festival

The question: how many shots of gorgeous cloudy skies with intensely augmented color correction that leaves them looking even more dramatic and powerful and just exactly perfect for an inspirational poster does it take before a movie starts to become extremely silly as a result? The answer: fewer than there are in The Miracle, in which a satisfying if arguably contrived infidelity drama is more or less ruined by cinematography that does everything in its power to romanticise every last minute of the film in gorgeously over-lit compositions that are literally handsome enough to pull focus from the plot, for which they are a bad fit anyway (no cinematographer was credited in the print screened in advance for critics, and so I cannot apportion blame for this where it belongs).

The linchpin of the romantic triangle about to erupt is Johanna (Sonja Richter), who many years ago had a promising career on the competitive ballroom dancing scene before a car accident left her without the use of her legs. A few years after that tragedy struck, she met and married a Protestant priest (Peter Plaugborg), who has since made proclamations that the miracle of her restored legs will be the proof of God's love for them and their congregation the cornerstone of his preaching; by the time we meet them, after ten years of marriage, it's hard to imagine that she ever felt particularly loved, or like anything other than a meat puppet, because that's certainly all she is now.

And things would go like this forever and ever until the sweet release of death, but somebody else dies first: Maria, the owner of a dance school where Johanna occasionally helps teach, in a limited capacity. This is a shocking, tragic event for the woman, all the more when it turns out that the new owner, Maria's long-absent son, has no interest in keeping the school open. And way more when it turns out that son is Jakob (Ulrich Thomsen), Johanna's first lover and dance partner, who she dropped when it became clear that his moderate talent was holding back her professional prospects. By this point, Jakob has become almost entirely devoid of happiness, but meeting Johanna again is all it takes to restart the spark of life in his heart and soul and primarily his crotch. The two put up a good fight, but in hardly any time at all they're sharing a bed and doing a pretty bad job of keeping it hidden from Johanna's husband, or their young son (William Lønstrup).

The only thing about this scenario that's meaningfully original is the addition of material surrounding a deeply pious man whose faith is only a mask for his authoritarian lust, his nominal affection for his wife merely a blind from which he can exert power. And that ought to be enough to tell you what "meaningfully original" even means in this context; it means that when you take two ancient clichés that aren't necessarily seen together every day of the week, and mash them up, the end result feels marginally fresher than it actually is. Still, the details of how the relationships play out are strong enough, with enough individualised insight into human behavior, that the thing feels accurate, if nothing else (the mind games involving their son that Johanna's husband plays in the last phase of the movie have an especially bracing sense of ugly authenticity, legitimate, relationship-sized cruelty that doesn't always get depicted in movies as unapologetically as it does here). Thomsen and Richter are both pretty fantastic, playing the slowly rekindled feelings between them as a slow dance (ha!) rather than just a plot-convenient burst of erotic desire.

So back to the beginning we go, to the one element which does the film in: its unmodulated visual scheme. Initially, it seems like director Simon Staho is playing a simple, obvious, but largely effective game: the times when Johanna is sad and suffocated are filmed in somewhat flat tones with plain lighting, and her moments of emotional intensity, especially when she recalls her passionate youth with Jakob (they are played here by Emma Segested Høeg and Allan Hyde, who exude charisma and chemistry, but are largely pantomiming), are represented by more flowery, lush cinematography. This doesn't end up holding true, though, and the film isn't very old before it becomes clear that nope, that's just how the filmmakers want to do things: the present and the past, moments of misery and moments of joy, shots favoring the lovers and shots favoring the cuckold, all of them are handled with painterly lighting techniques that are the very definition of "handsome", and the best we can say is that the color palette changes a little bit every now and then.

Maybe I'm picky but I just don't want my tales of emotional strangulation to be "handsome". Certainly not as unmitigated and surface-level as the handsomeness of The Miracle, an oppressively uniform movie in which all feelings are lacquered in an undifferentiated glossy coat. It's prestigious as all fuck, but only at what I'd call an unacceptable sacrifice of meaning.

6/10

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CHICAGO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL '13: A THOUSAND TIMES GOOD NIGHT (ERIK POPPE, NORWAY)

Screens at CIFF: 10/12 & 10/14 & 10/16
World premiere: 31 August, 2013, Montréal World Film Festival

There is, at this time, violence and rapine afflicting various countries in Africa and central Asia that goes almost totally unremarked in the news media of the developed world and unnoticed by the inhabitants thereof, and for the most part, the governments of the developed world make not the smallest hint of an effort to do anything positive to change this situation. As far as that goes, I'm only stating fact. I will assume, though, that you'll agree with my opinion that this is an incredibly sad situation, because I will assume as well that you're not a colossal asshole.

It is, in other words, a very noble and necessary argument to make, that Westerners should and can do a great deal more to alleviate suffering in the developing world, and no two ways about it. I wonder, though, if it's possible to make that argument in a less effective, more self-negating way than Erik Poppe does in A Thousand Times Good Night, which finds the photographer-turned-commericial-maker-turned-feature-director making a fiction film about a crusading photojournalist, Rebecca Thomas (Juliette Binoche), whose desire to explode the comfort of the ignorant West with her fearless, in-depth reporting on the grueling life in the darkest places for humanity puts her in conflict with the needs of her family, who are terrified every time she leaves their cozy home in Dublin, that this is the time she's going to end up blown apart, butchered, or otherwise dead. The idea, I think, is that the film is telling us that one must make hard choices and that doing good for the world is a worthwhile goal that requires personal sacrifice. In practice, though, I think that the film's real argument is a much simpler one: political activist journalists should probably not have children.

Regardless of whether or not it's even telling the story it intends to, the film's failure at consciousness-raising goes deeper than its success at making Rebecca's husband, Marcus (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau), and their two daughters, Steph (Lauryn Canny) and Lisa (Adrianna Cramer Curtis), seem considerably more level-headed and reasonable than she is (though Curtis is such a shrilly over-enunciating young actor that nothing she says or does can truly be called "reasonable" in any global sense). There's no squaring the circle here, of saying that Rebecca is a brave fighter for the good and true, and showing that she's selfish and harmful to her family. It is, bluntly, a bourgeois art piece both aesthetically and morally, about how bourgeois attitudes are bad for humanity, which is, if not exactly "hypocritical" in any useful sense of that word, awfully self-defeating, and it leaves the film feeling polished and handsomely dull where it needs to be challenging and severe.

At one point, Rebecca gets word from her publisher that a series of photographs she took of a female Mujahideen suicide bomber preparing herself on the last morning of her life have been rejected after pressure from the U.S. government, which considers the pictures to be "glamorising" suicide bombing. And we are, of course, meant to understand that this is nonsense, that the point is to reveal a woman's desperate act and not to praise her determination, and that moments like these are part of the culture that insulates Americans and Europeans from having to consider the humanity of people living in Afghanistan. Well and good. Later, Rebecca and Steph are visiting a camp in Kenya, documenting the rough lives of dislocated refugees, and do you know what cinematographer John Christian Rosenlund's lush colors and graceful shadows, and composer Armand Amar's pensive, emotion-tugging music do to the wretched Africans? I will give you a hint. It starts with "glam" and ends with "fuck you Erik Poppe".

It's too bad, because there are pieces of the movie that work really well: the opening sequence is a terrific fake-out that sets up the suicide bomber's preparations so cleverly and inductively that it's actually hard not to gasp at the reveal when it finally comes: a funeral in which the corpse wakes up and climbs out of the grave, and minutes go be before we understand why, exactly, this was being staged before her death, minutes of delicious ambiguity and the exact kind of objective, journalistic remove from the material that is meant to be Rebecca's stock in trade. Binoche herself is quite good, though it's not always easy to tell with a role as floppily-written as this, with its scattershot interchange of motivations. Generally speaking, she attempts to play Rebecca as an alienating obsessive, which is probably the only choice that could be psychologically justified at all; and this helps to level off the movie as it trucks along to its weird hybrid of domestic drama and social issues piece.

It would take a lot more than that still to fix the movie though, and its oversized self-regard relative to the milquetoast way it approaches its message transcends any vague niceties of performance, which are limited to Binoche and Canny in any case. This is a lukewarm film across the board: foggily-expressed human drama sitting uncomfortably next to ineptly-argued social issues, and not a bit of it is truly memorable more than a few minutes after it's over.

5/10

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