Ashes and American Flags

How to Survive a Plague

*** out of ****

Directed by: David France

Running time: 120 minutes

A scandalously bloody blow-up dummy of President Bush (Sr.) flutters in the air like a balloon, as a rainbow flag – a symbol of the LGBT community – flows in the wind beneath it. The image exhibits both the inflamed stance and the spirit of AIDS activists during the late 1980s and early 1990s, which captivated the media's attention to an egregious lack of spending toward drug testing to quell the disease.

How to Survive a Plague is the second documentary in the last 18 months to focus on American communities affected by the AIDS epidemic, where the death toll lingers in the millions. The other film, We Were Here, was 2011’s best tearjerker, a deeply sympathetic glimpse at five gay men who lived through the epidemic as it spread through the streets of San Francisco.

Instead of San Francisco, the action kicks off in Greenwich Village; ACT UP protesters block traffic and stage kiss-ins at local hospitals to fight for their lives, as well as in memory of their friends who are dropping dead.

The ACT UP coalition wants a state of emergency declared due to the lack of government concern for testing promising new drugs, or even treating victims – many at St. Vincent’s in New York were denied access to hospital beds. Some hospitals would place the body of AIDS victims in black garbage bags once they died. Even worse, some funeral parlors would not accept the bodies.

Some AIDS sufferers went to an underground group to receive imported drugs that had not yet been approved by the FDA. These pills become even more lucrative for the sickly as some of the promising American-based drugs that became available ended up causing blindness. ACT UP urged for direct action for drug makers to get this treatment immediately delivered to the community, bypassing some later test dates.

The film’s most arresting moment comes from playwright and activist Larry Kramer, who yells, vitriolic, in the middle of a squabble between ACT UP participants, “Plague! We are in the middle of a plague!” The furor subsides, instantly. 

Other group members read up on biological research and made pamphlets for AIDS victims and their families to help them spot symptoms and learn about the nature of the disease. 

These protesters, many of whom were victims threatened with extinction, would not lie down, unless they were trying to make a point by ‘playing dead’ at demonstrations. While the audience recognizes the efforts of the groups, there is less effort to recognizing them as individuals.

The video footage compiled by director David France features more televised interviews than home movies of the subjects’ everyday existence. While these activists scatter their late loved ones’ ashes on the White House lawn, these powerful moments still lack the personal insight that made We Were Here so compelling.

Nevertheless, How to Survive a Plague is a potent and fiercely polemical documentary that highlights the incredible change to public policy and outlook that came directly from informed, enraged citizens.

Angel in America

Lincoln

**½ out of ****

Directed by: Steven Spielberg

Starring: Daniel Day-Lewis, Tommy Lee Jones, Sally Field, David Strathairn and James Spader

Running time: 149 minutes

Lincoln has the most misleading title of any motion picture released this year. Although it features legendary method actor (and double Oscar winner) Daniel Day-Lewis in an iconic role – one that stands in firm opposition to his usual teeth-gritting intensity and flair – Lincoln is flat and uninvolving as a study of the 16th president.

Like another bloodless Spielberg war film of last winter, War Horse, Lincoln’s technical precision and performances are solid enough to garner it many end-of-year nominations, but likely not the strength to compile it any statuettes.

It is a sentimental drama that delves deeper into the 19th century political process than with the characters, making it a terrific pedagogical tool for high school American history classes. Conveniently, Spielberg opens the film with Lincoln (Day-Lewis) hovering over a crowd of soldiers (including those played by Dane DeHaan and David Oyelowo) who recite, for him, memorized passages from the Gettysburg Address. They proclaim his greatness on the audience’s behalf.

Spielberg shies away from showing the bloodshed between Union and Confederate armies but instead focuses on the warring battles between Republicans and Democrats as they jeer and cheer in the House of Representatives. The matter of business is the 13th amendment, which would outlaw slavery but may deter the end of the war.

Lincoln requires unanimous Republican support (which, at that time, was a rarity) and needs to procure votes from Democrats for the amendment to pass. He hires three lobbyists (played by James Spader, John Hawkes and Tim Blake Nelson) to whip up bipartisan support.

The scenes of political impertinence as the three try to sway Democratic voters are sharp, like a 19th century episode of The West Wing. Tony Kushner’s script is as verbose and impassioned as the dialogue from that series.

Lincoln may be a civics lesson, but it is a finely acted one. Day-Lewis sinks so deeply into the character, nailing the president’s high lilt and hobbled walk, that he becomes invisible beneath the beard and makeup. The actor saves his regular flair for many charming tales he recites to his allies. These stories are captivating in their delivery, to the extent that Janusz Kaminski’s camera can move delicately from a wide shot to close-up, without one noticing the change in camera position until the end of the speech.

The supporting cast is equally strong: Sally Field as the fiercely loving and supportive First Lady Mary Todd Lincoln, David Strathairn as the intelligent if prickly Secretary of State William Seward, and best of all, Tommy Lee Jones as the quick-witted abolitionist Thaddeus Stevens, the Republican Congressional leader who viciously debates for slaves’ rights in the House.

True to the period, the film - which has most of its scenes indoors - gets its light source  from white glares in the windows. There is enough backlight to show off the austere, meticulously designed sets. Outdoors scenes are less frequent but have the same brown hues of the interior scenes, except for the omnipresent American flag that gleams brightly against the ash-filled backgrounds.

Lincoln feels like an award-winning five-hour television miniseries that is awkwardly compressed by half its running time, with the main history intact but the characters slighted on the story’s behalf. While the film ought to woo Academy voters with its formidable performances and decoration, it is often listless and plodding, exclaiming the president’s political genius without revealing much about him.

A Dame to Kill For

Skyfall

*** out of ****

Directed by: Sam Mendes

Starring: Daniel Craig, Judi Dench, Javier Bardem, Naomie Harris and Ben Whishaw

Running time: 143 minutes

Through 50 years and 23 films, James Bond has gone through enough actor alterations, story universes and franchise reboots that one is never quite sure how the next film will interpret the character. Sam Mendes’ take on the spy icon, the atmospheric and intelligent, albeit flawed Skyfall, revels in old-fashioned nostalgia while dealing with very modern subject matter.

As Daniel Craig’s installments go, Skyfall lacks the go-for-broke excitement that made 2006’s Casino Royale such a giddy thrill ride but is head and shoulders above the muddled mess that was 2008’s Quantum of Solace (a film whose dip in quality could be contributed to an unprepared script in lieu of a writers’ strike).

Skyfall is a slow-burn Bond, reclaiming in intelligent filmmaking what it lacks in visceral excitement. This is 007 with the moody introspections and ambiguous characterization of Christopher’s Nolan’s latest Batman films (which, interestingly, featured many nods to 007).

The opening sequence, set in Turkey, looks like something out of Homeland if that series had Mission: Impossible’s budget. Bond and his partner Eve (Naomie Harris) are on the move to grab a mercenary that has murdered an MI6 agent and stolen from him a hard drive with valuable intelligence. The scene moves from a car chase to a motorcycle race on the rooftops before ending with a mano a mano fight atop a moving train.

However, Eve fires a bullet from a distance that clips Bond in the shoulder and he plunges into the icy lake below. With Bond believed to be dead, an intelligence and security chair, Gareth Mallory (Ralph Fiennes), pressures MI6 head M (Dame Judi Dench) into giving up her post.

However, when a triggered explosion destroys MI6 headquarters and kills many, M is in a tough spot. “To hell with dignity,” she says. “I’ll leave when the job’s done.”

Not to fret, though, as Bond returns home, battered but ready to serve her majesty. To keep with the revised security precautions, MI6 shifts its base to the tunnels of London. Meanwhile, the new quartermaster (a precocious Ben Whishaw) looks like he belongs more in a One Direction cover group than in the Secret Service’s intelligence chambers.

Bond returns to field operations to recover the stolen intelligence, despite showing signs of strain and fatigue. His findings eventually lead him to Silva (Javier Bardem), a cyber-terrorist with a personal vendetta against M.

Bardem is just as slithery as the franchise's best baddies, but with a more intriguing back-story and a joyous, reptilian wit that works well in opposition to Craig’s cold demeanor, which is dry as the vermouth in Bond’s martini.

Although this is only Craig’s third turn in the iconic role, he is already starting to lack the charm and gravitas one usually associated with 007 – one that he claimed with might in Casino Royale. More brooding than exciting, this Bond lacks personality and wallows in an intense loneliness.

The film’s stark, sometimes colourless visual schematic fits well with the bitterness and ambiguity that comes with the character. In Skyfall, Bond often appears in a soft silhouette – not just in the iconic barrel roll – emphasizing a detachment from the character. The cold, washed hues that appear in scenes toward the end recalls the look of Mendes’ excellent 2002 drama Road to Perdition.

Meanwhile, Skyfall makes many nods to the iconography of earlier 007 films. The strings of John Berry’s classic theme start in the first frame, as the spy steps out of the shadows, before ending abruptly. A sleek ride moviegoers should recognize also appears in the film’s final third.

The film’s callback to old-fashioned elements is best epitomized by the Skyfall theme, sung by Adele, an artist whose pop hits are throwbacks to soulful 1960s love ballads. Her purry contralto voice is serious and seductive, and the opening song, a jazzy requiem, is very good.

Sadly, the film's action sequences are not up to standards. The opening chase is only intermittently thrilling, a lesser version of the virtuoso foot race that blasted off Casino Royale. Further, a cat-and-mouse showdown between Bond and Silva in a subway station doesn't stand out. The plan hatched by the villain in this ambitious sequence is intricate but feels too farfetched by how easily all the elements lock into place.

The best scene in Skyfall is a pursuit through a blue-lit Shanghai skyscraper, featuring a moody Thomas Newman score and which recalls the sleekness of Michael Mann at his best.

Skyfall is one of the better Bond entries, although it is probably the least exciting film in the franchise. Taking a page from the bleakness and political overtones of Nolan’s Dark Knight installments - it clearly takes place in a post-9/11 world full of security anxieties - Mendes’ film is classic in style yet contemporary in substance.

Sympathy for a Devil and a Drunken Angel

Flight

**½ out of **** 

Directed by: Robert Zemeckis

Starring: Denzel Washington, Kelly Reilly, Don Cheadle, Bruce Greenwood and John Goodman

Running time: 138 minutes

Smashed

*** out of **** 

Directed by: James Ponsoldt

Starring: Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Aaron Paul, Nick Offerman, Megan Mullally and Octavia Spencer

Running time: 83 minutes

Two new films focus on alcoholics and the turbulent highs and lows they encounter when dealing with their addiction. The first is Flight, which stars Denzel Washington as a coke-snorting, vodka-guzzling airline pilot whose substance abuse comes under the microscope after he makes a miraculous crash landing. The second is Smashed, a Sundance sensation featuring Mary Elizabeth Winstead as an oft-hungover schoolteacher who decides to sober up.

Both films are anchored by strong leading performances by the aforementioned players. However, while the former feature is nearly an hour longer, it is the latter film that examines how one dances with the demons of the drink with greater insight and poignancy.

In Smashed, Winstead plays Kate, a sunny face going through some cloudy moments. She is a schoolteacher but shows up to class hungover. As she instructs her second graders in an early scene, she vomits. When the students probe her sudden throwing up, Kate lies and tells them that she is pregnant.

Kate goes on many nights out of with her husband, Charlie (Breaking Bad’s Aaron Paul), but does not always arrive home when the night is done. After waking up in one unfamiliar place too many after drinking heavily, she takes up an offer from a co-worker, Dave (Nick Offerman), to attend an AA Meeting.

Smashed focuses on Kate as she faces her irresponsible behaviour and tries to remedy herself by going down a road to sobriety. Her decision to go “cold turkey” flummoxes Charlie, who no longer has a compadre for his good times.

Their relationship reaches a front when Charlie starts seeing her resolve as a deterrent to their marriage. She is as much a drinking partner to him as a life partner. Instead of helping her on the road to recovery, he actually promotes for a harmless (i.e. harmful) drink every so often. Paul and Winstead have a scolding chemistry that gets cooler as their relationship becomes more imbalanced.

James Ponsoldt’s slender film, shot for $500,000 and which won an award at Sundance earlier this year, uses Kate’s positive steps as a way to raise conflict between the determined protagonist and the flawed habits of her family, including her embittered mother (Mary Kay Place).

Winstead gives a brave performance that yields greater depth as she finds out that the demons she is embattling are more often the people in her life than the mixed drink in her flask. Unlike the immature, unperceptive drunkards that can populate other character studies, her arc from carefree to controlled to various stages in between is gripping, the transitions from state to state always believable. As a bruised soul straining to complete herself even as those around her reject her sensibilities, Winstead is riveting and affecting.

The indie film takes the lead over the Hollywood production when it comes to examining how people move toward sobriety. The title to Robert Zemeckis’ latest does not merely enforce how Washington’s character, Whip Whitaker, is a pilot, but how he decides to flee (not fight) his addiction to booze. Flight uses the turbulent flight near the start as a metaphor for the protagonist’s free-falling descent.

The film is a daring venture that earns its 18A rating by showing explicit drug and alcohol abuse and refusing to cover up female nudity. The opening scene alone is somewhat startling, as Whitaker curses, drinks and takes a snort of cocaine while a naked stewardess walks around his hotel room. However, while the content is harrowing, the film’s handling of addiction is slight.

Cpt. Whitaker drinks vodkas and takes a whiff of oxygen on a bumpy flight to Atlanta that also has poor visibility. As the plane descends, it loses control and spirals into a roller-coaster dive. As the lives of his 102 passengers are in peril, Whitaker is calm and collected.

This opening section culminates in that virtuoso crash sequence, when Whitaker flips the plane upside down to level it off before making a bumpy landing in a Georgian field. Although initial news reports crown him as a public hero, Whitaker does his best to avoid the limelight, knowing that attention drawn to him will eventually bring his addiction to light.

Flight has the outlines of a gripping character study in place, and the crash sequence is a virtuoso, perfectly paced, grip-the-armrests feat of direction. Nevertheless, despite its strong opening third, the film does not go far enough in exploring the nuances of how Whitaker’s alcoholism damages his psychology, or even how his drinking affects other people in his life.

Whitaker strikes up a small friendship with Nicole (Kelly Reilly), a heroin addict who is trying to sort own her own problems. The film treats the duo as more of a romantic couple than mutual support system. Thus, there is little traction in their relationship. Nicole is even abandoned in the film's final third.

Whitaker is a mostly irreconcilable character with a God complex and is a tough soul to root for given the lack of dimensions given to the character. Few actors in Hollywood are so consistently hypnotic playing characters with dark motives or temptations, but Washington gives a defiant performance in an underwritten film (the screenplay comes courtesy of Real Steel's John Gatins).

Flight is 138 minutes long, but despite its length, is strained by its lack of momentum in regard to character development. The end of the film, meanwhile, is too clean for such raw material, and makes too many easy, undeserved shortcuts to reach its sentimental and unsatisfying conclusion.  

A Refreshing Blast of Arcade Fire

Wreck-It Ralph

***½  out of ****

Directed by: Rich Moore

Featuring the Voice Talents of: John C. Reilly, Sarah Silverman, Jack McBrayer, Alan Tudyk and Jane Lynch

Running time: 101 minutes

Wreck-It Ralph is one of the most original animated features to come from the Disney vault. It is packed to the brim with visual humour and verbal wit, while overflowing with the same level of imaginative detail to character and atmosphere that the better pictures in the Pixar pantheon have in their audacious story worlds.

The wizard responsible for this fun, frenetic 101 minutes is television director Rich Moore, responsible for some of The Simpsons’ finest episodes (including "A Streetcar Named Marge" and "Marge vs. the Monorail"). The script from Phil Johnston and Jennifer Lee is equally high-concept and character-driven, an irresistible blend of old-school storytelling and new-age visual dynamics.

The title character, voiced endearingly by John C. Reilly, is a nine foot-tall villain with block-sized fists in a retro, coin-operated game called Fix-It Felix. Ralph rampages through an apartment building, smashing the place to bits. When the player presses start, their joystick moves Felix (Jack McBrayer) around as he mends the building with his trusty hammer.

When Felix celebrates the game’s 30th anniversary as part of Litwak’s Arcade, he doesn't invite Ralph to the festive celebrations. Tired of being used just for tantrums, Ralph voices his dismay to a support group of video game villains (a sequence that supplies a surprising number of cameos from licensed characters).

The collective says that he needs to take it easy – the slogan on a banner in the support group room says, “one game at a time.” However, Ralph wants to step away from his code and find his own autonomy. He abandons his game and travels into the realm of a frenetically violent battle world in the game Hero’s Duty, with high-definition graphics and a synth-heavy soundtrack. In that universe, Ralph is destined to win a medal and prove to Felix that he has heroic qualities within him.

However, after ascending to get the victory medal, he loses it to Vanellope (Sarah Silverman), a quizzical child who lives in the world of an obnoxiously cute candy-themed go-kart game, Sugar Rush. The king of the game's land (voiced by Alan Tudyk) has outcasted Vanellope from partaking in the races, condemning her as a “glitch” that could offset the game’s system.

As the nine-foot, eight-bit giant tries to reclaim his medal from Vanellope, the noble Felix joins forces with Hero’s Duty’s intrepid captain, Calhoun (Jane Lynch), to retrieve Ralph and the medal.

The film is more than just a Toy Story surrogate with many licensed video game and arcade characters – even though the barrage of cameos from nostalgic characters recalls Who Framed Roger Rabbit – but a charming, funny and dizzyingly creative adventure.

Like the Pixar film, Wreck-It-Ralph derives its poignancy from the human attributes adopted by wildly colourful “playthings.” It examines an unexplored realm of what recognizable (and some brand-new) arcade characters do when the patrons leave.

Ralph’s existential crisis, which he evokes at his game’s 30th anniversary party, recalls the complacency that Andy’s toys felt in Toy Story 3, while the father-daughter relationship between Ralph and Vanellope that drives the second half of the film is so snappily written it never droops with mawkish sentimentality.

Wreck-It-Ralph thrives on the creative capacity of its buoyant atmosphere and clever screenplay. This is also probably the first Disney film to have a character utter the word “guttersnipe,” a fanciful word made popular by George Bernard Shaw.

The subtle creative touches – the jerky motions of the characters in Felix’s game, the powerbar of Litwak's Arcade as the setting for "Game Central Station” – extend to the pun-filled dialogue. Even snippets involving armoured Oreo cookies and swooning Laffy Taffy are used to enforce the sugary setting, and do not feel like cheap product placement.

It is armed with the regular kid-aimed message to embrace yourself. Vanellope could have been a nuisance under Sarah Silverman’s squirrelly voice (which doesn’t quite match the character’s youthful vigor) but gets a wonderful back-story.

Full of thrilling set-pieces without sacrificing the touching story of heroic reconciliation in the middle, Wreck-It Ralph is the most boundlessly creative adventure that Walt Disney Studios has rendered in years.

Love is So Short, Forgetting is So Long

Stories We Tell

**** out of ****

Directed by: Sarah Polley

Running time: 108 minutes

When someone tells a story they insist is true, there is always the opportunity for slivers of fiction to creep into that retelling. Since it is so hard to determine the validity of one story over another, what counts as truth can be highly contested. Even in the framework of a documentary, the possibility of doubt remains.

One can try to label something as truth based on their closeness to the person, situation or concept at the centre, but how can one assess that accuracy over another’s to the same thing? Films like Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon and Errol Morris’s 1988 documentary The Thin Blue Line stirred the pot of linear narrative by having its characters or figures project different, irreconcilable versions of the same story.

Those tenuous strands that separate fact from fiction come to the forefront of Stories We Tell, a stunning cinematic achievement from filmmaker Sarah Polley. It is an experimental documentary of sorts, as well as a mystery, a family exposé and a deeply moving look at tangled human relationships, centering around Polley’s family.

Stories We Tell begins with the interview subjects – Sarah’s father Michael, an accomplished Anglo-Canadian actor, and her four siblings, among others – preparing to be filmed by the writer/director. Michael is placed in a recording booth with two cameras pointed at him. He stands in front a podium with a small stack of papers lying on it, a biography that Michael wrote and will recite to his daughter (and to the audience).

Polley asks her family and friends to retell the stories of their lives in their own words. The focus of these narratives is Polley’s mother, Diane, a vivacious beauty who died from cancer when Sarah was 11.

According to the actor-turned-director, these are not interviews but an interrogation. Sarah is keen to discover deeper truths about her family’s history.

As the story goes, Diane and Michael met in the theatre. She first saw him play an attractive, outgoing character on stage that was far from his usual, contained personality and quickly fell for him.

They were opposites who were attracted to each other: Diane often brimmed with excitement and had a memorably giddy laugh, while Michael was a private, stolid writer who was too afraid to pursue that craft to any success. Diane liked to dance to the music that Michael would rather have listened to in solitude.

As the interviewed family members reconstruct the past in their own words, her inquisitive subjects try to decipher Polley's motive with making the documentary. They wonder who would care about their family's stories. 

The plot thickens when the siblings recall their whisperings about how Sarah, the youngest member of the Polley clan, was not Michael’s biological daughter. Each has their opinion on the matter, although they suggest that she was the result of a fling Diane had had while starring in a theatrical production in Montreal. 

The passage of time and the variance to knowing much about their mother’s supposed infidelity ensures that much of what the subjects say is merely speculative.

As Polley moves forward to inquire about this possibility, Stories We Tell becomes an endlessly intriguing rumour mill. The writer/director sets to fill in the gaps of her life but is greeted with doubts and discrepancies from those closest to her.

Among Diane’s potential suitors that the film hints toward include a lively red-haired actor named Geoff Bowes and Canadian film producer Harry Culken, a romantic figure with bushy, Einstein hair. Sarah interviews them both and discusses with them about their ephemeral, fleeting relationship with Diane. She goes from probing the people in her own family to investigating and making sense of an unexamined truth.

Polley’s interrogation of her family also becomes an interrogation of the skewed subjectivity of storytelling – and in that regard, documentary filmmaking. The writer/director includes home movies shot on super-8, presumably by her father. This archival footage’s legitimacy is tested when some of the filmed material turns out to feature other actors appearing in the roles of her family members.

The truth is hard to pin down due to the discrepancies in the storytelling. Memories of Diane and her suggested affair gain greater complexion, and to an extent become more mysterious, as all of the stories cannot reconcile with each other.

Stories We Tell is a big leap forward for Polley even after her impressive debut, 2007’s Away From Her. That film also examined the relationship of intimate lives whose shared memories clash fiercely.

It is significant that many of the people shadowed in the film are actors, whose job is to reveal deep truths under a guise of artifice. When Michael makes a heartfelt statement about his late wife near the end of the film, he admits that he was not acting when he said the proclamation. This sentence beckons one to ask how much that he has included in his writing was embellished for artistic purposes.

One could ask the same of Polley, who explores these intricacies of truth and memory with skilled aplomb but also has the cunning power as the creative director of the film to alter the audience’s impression of the story.

Blending real footage with the imagined and the truth with speculative fictions, these paradoxes of storytelling – both on a personal level, as well as a creative outlet – make Stories We Tell a film that remains piercingly honest even as its enigmas threaten to manipulate us, the audience. It is a feat of tender, intelligent filmmaking that’s not to be missed.