A Two-Ring Circus

Water for Elephants

** out of ****

Directed by: Francis Lawrence

Starring: Robert Pattinson, Reese Witherspoon, Christoph Waltz, Hal Holbrook and Tai the Elephant

Running time: 123 minutes

Back in the earliest days of the cinema, one wouldn’t have to try very hard to find a film featuring the boisterous theatrics of a circus, whether it be a thrilling daredevil stunt or the skills of a trained animal. These slices of life were shot on camera mainly to engulf the audience with a sense of dazzle and bewilderment.

The wondrous circus-set spectacle is now the background for Water for Elephants, based off of Sara Gruen’s impassioned page-turner. When the circus grandeur sets into the foreground, there is plenty of entertainment to go around. The feats of amazement, performed entirely by a troupe of real-life animals (no pesky CGI here, folks), are awe-inspiring. (Don’t worry: the credits claim that none of the animals were harmed during the production.)

Sadly, however, this means that the animals (especially Tai the Elephant in a tour de force as the brave, tortured Rosie) upstage the human performers. The high-flying circus grandeur is fiery, but the romance between Robert Pattinson and Reese Witherspoon lacks any spark.

Using a similar flashback structure to the novel, the film is told from the viewpoint of a 93-year-old Jacob Jankowski (Hal Holbrook, as crisply crinkled as Tai). Speaking to a young circus manager (Paul Schneider), he narrates about how he fled from a life of privilege after his parents’ sudden deaths and joined the (fictional) Benzini Brothers circus just months before their famed collapse in Depression-era America.

Pattinson is the young Jacob (a character name change which is bound to perplex adamant Twilight fans) and has exceptionally little screen charisma, mixed in with flat line readings and blank expressions. However, to be fair, his tan is nice – another touch that is bound to throw off the "Twi-hards."

Tan and tangent aside, Pattinson’s Jacob has run away from practicing veterinary sciences in college. When the circus ringmaster, August (Christoph Waltz), finds out the student's scholarly talents, though, Jacob is assigned the task of training the Benzini Bros.' latest “star attraction,” a twelve-foot elephant named Rosie.

Meanwhile, when he isn’t teaching Rosie instructions in Polish, Jacob is wooing the other star of the circus, the transcendent Marlena (Reese Witherspoon). Unfortunately, she is married to the determined August, and the quagmire escalates.

The film’s scope is grand, encapsulating the same “small fish in a big pond” feeling that gave the novel a universal appeal. The circus atmosphere that Gruen’s bestseller soaked itself in is recreated in top-tier form for the film adaptation, thanks to David Crank’s intricately detailed art direction and luminous costume design courtesy of Jacqueline West.

While the set design is serene, there is a muddy elephant stampeding around the film. I am not referring to Rosie here, but the slight characterization, although I blame this less on Richard LaGravenese’s faithfully adapted script but on the terribly miscast A-listers present.

Witherspoon and Pattinson do little to enliven their roles, and the drama often feels stagnant due to a lack of passion between the actors: she seems far too capable to portray a Depression-era dame, while he doesn’t have enough capability to carry a romance on his tanned shoulders.

The notable exception is Christoph Waltz, offering the same sly bravado that he personified as Col. Hans Landa in Inglourious Basterds. He is the real “star performer,” with added room to strut his stuff considering that the film’s version of August was blended with another character from the novel.

Under the firm grip of director Francis Lawrence (I Am Legend), Water for Elephants has the look, the feel and the elaborate production values needed to embellish a magical three-ring circus. But with an impotent romantic chemistry between the two leads, the show lags. And not even an elephant roaring and standing on its hind legs can save it.

Hanna, Barbaric

Hanna

*** out of ****

Directed by: Joe Wright

Starring: Saoirse Ronan, Eric Bana, Cate Blanchett, Olivia Williams and Tom Hollander

Running time: 111 minutes

Director Joe Wright’s new film, a slick genre exercise called Hanna, is first and foremost, maddeningly stylish. He proved with 2007’s Atonement that he can pursue his own style, which includes space-heavy long takes, quick edits and close-ups in a manner that effectively tells a story. However, the aesthetics in his next outing, The Soloist, were flashy and egregious when they didn’t need to be.

Wright’s newest film, however, stresses this indulgent output of technique more appropriately. This may be due to the fact that it is about a young girl – the title character portrayed by Saoirse (pronounced “Seer-sha”) Ronan – who must utilize her own brusque strength and physical style to survive.

Hanna’s father, an ex-CIA agent named Erik (Eric Bana), has been training her as a physical force to be reckoned with for many years. Housed entirely away from humanity in the Finnish wilderness, she has grown up on meals cooked by firewood and falls asleep to a selection of Grimm's fairy tales.

The teenager can also recite phrases in a variety of languages with crackerjack speed. She has learned a slew of knowledge for how to behave when interacting with the outside world, but has never strayed from the deep forest.

At the press of a button (literally), Hanna tells Erik that she is ready to begin her mission. It involves tracking down Marissa Wiegler (Cate Blanchett), a former partner of her dad’s, and executing her. Heading out into the free world, her father gives her one instruction: “adapt or die.”

Well, it turns out that Marissa wants Hanna to be gotten rid of too, and sends off her own team to scout out the savage teenage assassin. After the antsy Chemical Brothers score is cued and a couple of CIA agents are efficiently slain by the gnarly protagonist, not much else happens. The film is essentially a simple cat-and-mouse chase stretched to nearly two hours.

Even when the story feels slacken, the proceedings are mesmerizing, mostly credited to Ronan’s commanding performance as the gritty title character.

Ronan, just a pip when she received an Oscar nomination for Atonement, has morphed into an astonishingly fiery performer with a bewitching, angular face and the assuredness of a young Jodie Foster.

With a role of frightening complexion, Ronan must display a nimbleness to commit grievous crimes while gaining the audience’s sympathy. Whatever reservations one might have to her cold calculation in earlier scenes dissipates when Hanna encounters and runs away with a young British family, befriending their mousy teenage daughter (played by Jessica Barden) and making her first friend in the process.

It’s a remarkable about-face as Hanna discovers the outside world and develops glimmers of humanity. Ronan is up for the task, as she slowly detaches from her ultra-violent physicality.

Unfortunately, it’s the adults who get the pithy shove here. Cate Blanchett and Eric Bana get too little to do with elementary character types. Blanchett doesn’t embody her villain as much as scowl and grit her bloody teeth menacingly.

Meanwhile, Bana does get to kick a bit of butt, as he fends off a barrage of baddies in an elaborate, crisp tracking shot. Wright trusts his performers to the extent that editing slices are not as important as body chops.

While the story is by-the-book – and given the numerous blatant allusions to Grimm’s fairy tales, it’s by more than a few – Ronan throws the book out and inhabits a deliciously intricate character, full of rage, anguish and strength. It’s a fiery tour de force in a film whose story could have used more steam.

No Grace Under Pressure

Source Code

** out of ****

Directed by: Duncan Jones

Starring: Jake Gyllenhaal, Michelle Monaghan, Vera Farmiga, Jeffrey Wright and Russell Peters

Running time: 93 minutes

Director Duncan Jones broke into the sci-fi stratosphere two summers ago with his thought-provoking celestial drama Moon, which favoured small-scale setups and big emotions over the jumbled noisiness space-set thrillers usually provide. He waited for his sophomore effort, an intriguing if poorly executed genre-mishmash called Source Code, to situate himself with the frantically paced, plot-hole-ridden sloppiness that the genre so often falls upon.

This floundering is less Jones’s fault, but the result of scribe Ben Ripley, who takes an intriguing time-travel premise and an eclectic bunch of genres but is never able to mash them together. Source Code is a combination of science-fiction, paranoia thriller, romantic drama, and murder mystery. That’s a lot of genres to cover in 93 minutes, and instead of developing one or two, we’re left with a jumbling of more than what fits.

The film centers around Cpt. Colter Stevens (Jake Gyllenhaal), a pilot in Afghanistan who, at the start of the first reel, wakes up on a passenger train rattling toward Chicago and has no idea how he got there. The woman sitting across from him (Michelle Monaghan) seems to know him but he’s never met her before. Disoriented, he rushes himself to the bathroom and looks in the mirror – and sees a different man’s reflection staring back at him. Moments later, an express train rattles by and there is an explosion.

Colter suddenly wakes up in a grimy chamber with just a television screen. The woman on the screen, Goodwin (Vera Farmiga), informs Colter that he is the object of a simulation exercise sponsored by the U.S. military. He is informed that the train he was on blew up earlier than morning and there were no survivors. But it was a warning message for the authorities and the same bomber intends to strike the Chicago area later on in the day.

Colter is being used by Goodwin’s department on a experimental mission where he can be transported back onto the commuter train for the last eight minutes (the length of one’s short-term memory) up until the explosion and investigate the passengers to figure out the bomber’s identity - and (of course) save the dirty bomb set to go off.

Source Code kept me wrapped up in its breakneck pace up until the end credits started rolling. Then, the preposterous nature of the time-travel aspects started to unravel and I began to feel cheated. The film hurdles along so quickly, it thinks that you’ll forgive its lapses in logic, but much is left unexplained or isn't developed well enough.

By trying to deliver so much story in such a scant hour-and-a-half, Source Code feels rushed rather than refined. The love story between Monaghan and Gyllenhaal should be the soul of the film, but there aren’t enough moments between the two of them to get the sparks flying or deliver any romantic payoff.

Then there are the mysteries Colter has to solve, which includes the train drama, as well as how he suddenly shifted from a helicopter flying over Afghanistan to a plush Illinois passenger train. Why is he in charge with this certified mission and how did he become involved with the time-bending experiment? Gyllenhaal does an excellent job as the emotionally dislocated officer, as he tries to figure out his own reality amidst a bunch of virtual ones.

Less praise can be given to Monaghan and Farmiga, very good actresses in very banal, serviceable parts. Jeffrey Wright pops up (criminally underused, once again) as Farmiga’s boss, but the thin proceedings only call for him to be an intimidating stock character. Also, keep an eye out for Canadian funnyman Russell Peters, as (what else) a disgruntled comedian commuting to Chicago.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t take long for the bomber to reveal himself (or herself). Those who like their red herrings pickled and plentiful may be disappointed. This is a shame, considering how well the director is at establishing vivid, memorable spaces (another strong element from his debut shines here, albeit less so). With Colter’s déjà vu memories set amidst several train compartments, the mystery should have been more convoluted and multi-faceted.

The main key in telling a story set in a world we know but in a universe that is only loosely tied to ours is that the fantastical concepts have to be developed and explained rationally enough that we buy these unbelievable intrusions into our reality.

But, by the time the 93 minutes are up, many questions are still unanswered regarding the “Source Code” setup. In the film, Colter routinely complains about needing more time to get the answers he wants. The audience can sympathize.

Canadian Carnage

Hobo with a Shotgun

** out of ****

Directed by: Jason Eisener

Starring: Rutger Hauer, Molly Dunsworth, Brian Downey, Gregory Smith and Nick Bateman

Running time: 87 minutes

Hobo with a Shotgun originated as a faux-trailer with the Canadian release of the masturbatory B-flick celebration known as Grindhouse. Legend has it that the fake advert was shot for $150 in pizza money – which makes sense since the new film version is pure cheese.

However, the cheese is an odorous and unpleasant one that sours the taste of the initially promising take on exploitation pictures. It’s a slimy genre flick that’s ultimately not very satisfying.

Portrayed by Dutch actor Rutger Hauer, most notable for sinister roles in Blade Runner and The Hitcher, our title character doesn’t even get a name. He does get a motive, though. Our homeless tramp walks around Hope Town (cute name), Nova Scotia, with a grocery cart full of supplies and signs asking for change. Once he gets $50, he can purchase a lawn mower and start a gardening business.

Until then, he has to avoid the eyes of a sneering kingpin named Drake (Brian Downey) and his two sadistic cronies (Gregory Smith and Nick Bateman) as they terrorize the local community.

Our hero seeks refuge in the decrepit apartment of a prostitute named Abby (Molly Dunsworth), a target on the lowlife alleyways where she repeatedly sells her body. He vows to protect her and challenge the repugnant ways of Drake and company by, well, firing back with a vengeance.

Hobo with a Shotgun is a trashy flick under the misguided assumption that all it could do is lap up onerous buckets of gore, gratuitous pounds of unadulterated flesh and embarrassingly over-the-top one-liners to its audience.

The film wants to be tasteless fun, but director Jason Eisener, a native of Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, works hard to pile the screen with mindless filth and depravity, but doesn't concentrate on very much on the rest of the material.

There seems to have been more thought put into the film’s cruel shenanigans and killings by its screenwriter John Davies than onto the plight of the protagonist. The off-kilter tonal balance between self-conscious comic amusement and bloody, putrid glory rarely works when there is so much vile nature on display.

That’s not to fault the actors, many of whom seem to be enjoying chewing up all of the trashy scenery. Hauer is also a hoot, even offering shades of a pummeled struggle between his routs of carnage and ultra-stylized monologues. One wishes the crew behind Hobo with a Shotgun would’ve learned how to balance the two extremes just as well as Hauer.

Maybe I’m being too harsh about a film called Hobo with a Shotgun, which nary a soul will go to see to analyze its merits as a work of art (or even as its status as a Canadian film, even though it takes place in a reality that’s not often seen in the Great White North).

I think it was at the point of the film about halfway-through when an entire bus of young children are massacred by two cronies wielding a flamethrower that my expectations started to dim. Grindhouse flicks have every right to be shameless, over-the-top and exploitative, but they shouldn’t make us feel queasy.

Not to be Confused with Charlie Sheen’s Upcoming Biopic

Win Win

*** out of ****

Directed by: Tom McCarthy

Starring: Paul Giamatti, Amy Ryan, Alex Shaffer, Bobby Cannavale and Jeffrey Tambor

Running time: 106 minutes

American writer/director Tom McCarthy continually makes the same kind of low-key dramedies, about the feelings of comfort and connection that arise when unlikely strangers become friends. His first two films were the humanely funny The Station Agent and the bitterly moving The Visitor, the latter of which landed Richard Jenkins an Oscar nomination.

These original, if modest creative ventures find a good companion in his newest film, Win Win, about the unlikely camaraderie between a miserable attorney and a compassionate, high-school wrestler.

The attorney is named Mike Flaherty and portrayed by Paul Giamatti in one of those wry, grouchy, sad-sack roles that seem to have been written for him and no one else. Mike’s firm is heading downhill, his health is waning, the boiler below his office is prone to blow to smithereens any day now and the high-school wrestling team he coaches is the lowest-ranked in New Jersey.

Even with these setbacks, he still has to provide for his family (he’s also married to Amy Ryan in a subtle, but warmly funny performance). So Mike decides to take one of his clients, an aging man with dementia named Leo (Burt Young), into his custody so he can pocket a $1,500 stipend every month.

Unbeknownst to Mike, but Leo’s grandson, a teenager with bleached-blonde hair named Kyle (Alex Shaffer, in his film debut), has come to stay with his grandpa in the Garden State as his drug-riddled mom finishes up in rehab.

When Mike decides to let Kyle stay with the rest of the family, he is delighted to find that the misdirected teenager is also a formidable wrestler. Guess who ends up joining the team.

Kyle is keeping a lot of emotions locked deep but trying to put his best foot forward given his morose family situation. The characters routinely question Kyle’s odd hair colour – a dyed blonde over a black base – and this is likely a metaphor for the dark currents of his home life that he is attempting to hide.

The victories rack up for Mike, but can his lucky winning streak continue to such an extent? We’re shaking our heads at Mike’s mistakes, knowing that his immoral behaviour will come back to get him, but we don’t feel an ounce of resentment for him. This intriguing viewer position can be credited to Giamatti’s pitch-perfect portrayal, where he exercises his regular, everyday qualities to align the audience with his hubris.

Shaffer, who is an actual wrestling champion, also gives a fantastic, naturalistic performance, which encompasses a range of mixed emotions in that restrained, tinny delivery that teens know how to deliver so well.

A highlight of the film is a small battle between Mike’s fellow coaches, played by Jeffrey Tambor and Bobby Cannavale, as the latter tries to usurp the right-hand man position out of the former’s grasp. They also fight to see who can garner the most belly laughs. In my mind, Cannavale wins but gets more screen time. So, let’s just call it a tie.

Sadly, the last third of the film is pat and predictable, resorting too much to formula when Kyle’s mom (Melanie Lynskey) comes back for him. It veers from the fresh bonds and relationships that have grown so naturally throughout the film into an act full of obvious situations and chummy conclusions.

Win Win’s story will undoubtedly racket up comparisons to The Blind Side, which rode a wave of flatfooted sentimentality and false patriotism to the tune of over $250 million in North America two years ago. Instead, it’s a wittier and more authentically heartfelt variation on the typical American sports flick.

Win Win is a nearly great film about the triumphs and the setbacks we face every day, and the wonderful cast keeps us in good company even when the story seems to fold into rhythms of tawdry predictability.