Family Trees

The Place Beyond the Pines

*** out of ****

Directed by: Derek Cianfrance

Starring: Ryan Gosling, Bradley Cooper, Eva Mendes, Dane DeHaan and Emory Cohen

Running time: 140 minutes

The Place Beyond the Pines is an enthralling, although sometimes unconvincing family saga about the relationships between sons and their fathers from Blue Valentine director Derek Cianfrance. His latest is just as tense and tender as his earlier film, and also reunites him with Ryan Gosling; however, while that film was notable for its scaled-back intimacy, Pines is ambitious to a fault and nearly implodes in its final act.

The crime drama has a somewhat timeless quality: one can imagine this film opening in the early 1970s from a fresh Scorsese or Bogdanovich, with either Steve McQueen, Ryan O’Neal or even a young Jeff Bridges in the two lead parts. Still, Gosling and co-star Bradley Cooper are electrifying, although they both receive less than half of the film’s screentime.

Gosling, in a near note-for-note repeat of the brooding, enigmatic protagonist he played in Drive, is now Luke, an inked-up carnival performer. He arrives in Schenectady, New York with his traveling circus and meets up with an old flame, Romina (Eva Mendes).

Luke discovers that Romina had a son named Jason a year ago – whom is also his, and so he leaves his circus job to take care of Jason. One of the film’s most iconic scenes comes at Jason’s baptism, as the camera tracks Luke as he walks into the chapel and sits. As Jason is baptized 'in the name of the father,' the camera rests on Luke, granting him the chance for absolution in his son’s eyes.

To support his new family, the crusader with his leather jacket, repair shop job and fast ride – had Gosling not played him, I would call this character a rip-off of The Driver – starts knocking off banks in upstate New York. However, the trend of robberies gets attention from local police and Luke becomes the target of many thrilling pursuits, filmed from an in-cruiser perspective.

One of these cops on the hunt is Avery (Bradley Cooper), who left his calling as a lawyer to serve and protect. The second of the film’s short stories follows Avery, riddled with guilt for his actions that deemed him a local hero but left the victim fatherless.

The last third of the The Place Beyond the Pines moves forward 15 years and examines the friendship between Jason (Luke’s son, now played by Dane DeHaan) and AJ (Avery’s boy, Emory Cohen). It is here where Cianfrance begins pushing the elements beyond their breaking point, trying to wrap up the story strands within a neat package.

Cianfrance and co-writers Ben Coccio and Darius Marder push for clarity and coincidence within the deeds of sons in the names of their fathers. Instead of following their own paths in this chapter, however, the characters' motivations serve the need of the screenplay to wrap up all three stories in a neat package. Pines' last 25 minutes are contrived, betraying the foundations of the characters to close the film in a way that harkens back to the imagery and themes of the first two sections.

Nearly everything before this climax is fairly strong, though. The Place Beyond the Pines gets its name derived from the Mohawk meaning for Schenectady, and Sean Bobbitt’s cinematography is crisp and sparkling, giving the New York wilderness a cool glimmer of its own.

It is also hard to find fault within the terrific ensemble, which includes veteran character actors like Ray Liotta as (what else) a hard-nosed cop, Harris Yulin as Avery’s disapproving daddy and Bruce Greenwood as a begrudging district attorney.

Also of note is DeHaan, who is also starting to resemble Leonardo DiCaprio in more than looks, but for his darkly compelling supporting work that ensures he has a big future as a leading man. He played a perturbed teen dealing with the villainous side of superhuman impulses in 2012’s Chronicle and was the best part of last year’s DOA western-wannabe Lawless. He skillfully holds his own here, especially given the presence of a more uneven storyline.

Cianfrance is a smart director who does not let a kinetic visual style and an ambitious narrative form mire the heart of his latest film, treating characters both noble and resentful with pathos. Nevertheless, when one character tells Luke “If you ride like lightning, you’re gonna crash like thunder,” he could similarly be prophesying Cianfrance’s fate. There is skill behind the camera and stellar performances to spare, but the writer/director’s electrifying drama goes off the skids in the last 25 minutes, nearly crashing and burning his good intentions. 

Hard-Boyled

Trance

***½  out of ****

Directed by: Danny Boyle

Starring: James McAvoy, Rosario Dawson, Vincent Cassel, Danny Sapani and Tuppence Middleton

Running time: 101 minutes

The best films are the ones that have a hypnotic power over you. They grab you with force, fill you with wonder and leave you satiated, eager to revisit the trip again. The latest film from eclectic director Danny Boyle, best known for 28 Days Later and Slumdog Millionaire, is just that: an electric rush of intoxicating entertainment and one of the most ingenious noirs in recent memory.

Trance, despite middling box office results in North America and Boyle’s native Britain, is the director’s trippiest head rush since he broke through with Trainspotting in 1996. The script comes from that film’s scribe (and frequent Boyle collaborator) John Hodge and Joe Ahearne. It is something of a miracle, a twisty story that maneuvers between three characters and the unreliable headspace of one’s subconscious. Doubt lingers even as the excitement remains.

Trance begins in a London auction house, with our protagonist, Simon Newton (James McAvoy), addressing the camera with how the protocol works on securing the institution’s most valuable artworks. As he explains via voice-over, “no price of art is worth a human life.” Simon is working with a bunch of thugs, led by the slimy, threatening Franck (Vincent Cassel), to rob a $27 million Goya painting.

However, the heist goes awry, as Franck strikes Simon in the head and makes off with a package – but not one containing the Goya. When Simon returns to consciousness, he cannot remember what he did with the painting after swiping it. Franck and his cronies realize that the key to where the painting lies is hidden in Simon’s mind.

To uncover the painting’s location, Franck decides to put Simon in hypnotherapy sessions. Simon begins attending sessions with one of London’s best, Elizabeth Lamb (Rosario Dawson). When she begins suspecting an ulterior motive to unlocking the secrets in Simon’s mind, Elizabeth makes a deal with Franck for a piece of the $27 million artwork.

As Elizabeth puts Simon under her trance, his mind keeps giving him, the other characters and, accordingly, the film’s audience, mixed signals – and that’s just part of the film’s dizzying fun.

Like any sophisticated neo-noir, Trance is chock full with power shifts among our anti-heroes. Each character keeps taking advantage of the situation, and the balance often tilts in three different directions (and it changes depending on whoever subjective space the spectator occupies). Boyle’s mystery jets off at a throttling pace but only slowly unfolds character details that give the audience clarity on where things stand.

As the conflicted everyman with gambling debt who is also gambling with the lucidity of his own doubts, McAvoy is terrific, confident but slightly mad as he tries to figure out a tricky situation with an even trickier subconscious. There is also more to Cassel’s pouty, disgruntled thief and Dawson’s slyly intelligent hypnotherapist, but to spoil any more would be criminal.

Even when it is not dismantling the audience’s already fragile perception in the characters’ dream spaces, Trance looks ecstatically dreamy. Frequent Boyle collaborator Anthony Dod Mantle’s camerawork is lush, especially an exquisite pan-up that reveals a nude Rosario Dawson, and Jon Harris’s slick cutting never wastes a moment nor lingers too long on an image that will come up again toward the end. The throbbing synch soundtrack, from electronic musician Rick Smith, worms into your mind as if you were going under.

Trance is likely too bizarre and enigmatic (not to mention brutal and bloody) to catch the attention of those who are not hardcore Boyle fans. Nevertheless, it is a bloody smart one, and it expects the audience to keep up with the shady spins on the plot mechanics and the characters’ motivations.

Cunning and complex, Boyle’s latest goes a tad haywire in the last 15 minutes with an outrageous action sequence straight out of Jerry Bruckheimer’s playbook. However, this is a terrific addition to Boyle’s canon, as exciting, irreverent, unpredictable and bleakly funny as the early chapters of the filmmaker’s oeuvre. Trance put a spell on me.

Scenes From a Referendum

No

*** out of ****

Directed by: Pablo Larrain

Starring: Gael Garcia Bernal, Alfredo Castro, Luis Gnecco, Antonia Zegers and Pascal Montero

Running time: 118 minutes

As legendary media scholar Marshall McLuhan famously mused, “The medium is the message.” Few films examine the implications that other strains of media have on the social discourse (although you can find many that champion the cinema). No, which earned Chile an Oscar nomination for foreign film, is an entertaining political drama about how an appealing TV campaign shook Chile’s political foundation.

In 1988, Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet calls a referendum on his rule. If the people vote ‘Yes,’ he would remain in power for eight more years. If they vote ‘No,’ he would step down. Despite some hostility to his reign, there is a high number of voter ambivalence. Some shiver in anxiety with the thought that, if the naysayers triumph, Chile will turn into a socialist country.

In steps a youthful ad-man, René (Gael Garcia Bernal), who specializes in filming cheesy 80s commercials for cola products. He signs on to work on the ‘No’ campaign. René is dismayed that the only angle used in the anti-Pinochet movement is overwhelmingly negative images of social chaos and police brutality. He wants to change the discussion.

Each side gets 15 minutes of free television airtime to grab the public’s eyeballs on the referendum vote. René is uninspired by Pinochet’s reign. With his son, Simon (Pascal Montero), he watches the ‘Yes’ ads at the same moment that he heats up a grilled cheese sandwich in his microwave, a new technology in Chile at the time. The similarity is not lost on the audience: both the ads’ political rhetoric and the sandwich are warmed over.

At the helm of the ‘No’ campaign, René installs a crew more accustomed to buoyantly optimistic commercials. The footage that airs, consequently, in the 15-minute time-slot is pandering but sincere, complete with a catchy jingle, galloping horses, smiling children and a tacky rainbow insignia at the end. It is a shiny and alternative glimpse at life in a democracy (as René asks his compadres at the start, “What’s happier than happiness”), but it gets the public excited and the Pinochet side scurrying to attack the superficial product.

As René, Gael Garcia Bernal adds another quality turn to an already impressive filmography, including Bad Education, Y Tu Mama Tambien and The Motorcycle Diaries. Here, he maintains the boyish exuberance that he displayed in earlier roles, riding a skateboard and slyly cutting through the resistance of his conservative campaign team.

However, here he is elevated to playing a man in control, as well as one in familial conflict, separated from his wife and trying to find time for his son amidst a hectic campaign schedule. Bernal is terrific, mixing in a sharp focus for his day job with an uneasy exasperation for his home life.

No is also a stylistic triumph, and also Chilean director Pablo Larrain’s third film about the Pinochet government. To flash back to an era of sloppy haircuts and flashy commercials, cinematographer Sergio Armstrong films No with an early 1980s video camera. The scenes are low-fi, with a drained vibracy that recalls a home movie that has dried out into fuzziness after many replays.

Larrain also provides most of the social and political context through the advertisements compiled by both sides. This is both a help and hinder to the audience: we get a fascinating glimpse into the archive footage the creative folks on both sides made, but feel slighted by the lack of external evidence to support the claims.

Like sections of the ‘No’ campaign devised by René and his team, Larrain’s film is entertaining but simplistic. For a film whose agenda is to stick with the adage of ‘show, not tell,’ we hear more about the alleged political disarray more than we see it. Details of what happened in Chile after the referendum finished are also lacking. Regardless, No is a wry and sharp political drama with strong performances and a keen insight into one rambunctious referendum.

Hello, Goodbye, Peace

The Gatekeepers

*** out of ****

Directed by: Dror Moreh

Running time: 101 minutes

The Gatekeepers is a documentary about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that is simultaneously a miraculous record of Middle East turmoil and something of a missed opportunity.

The subjects the title alludes to are six former heads of Shin Bet, Israel’s counterterrorism agency. Since the Six Day War in 1967, Shin Bet has been at the forefront of intelligence operations in the West Bank and Gaza.

However, while it is astounding that filmmaker Dror Moreh managed to land interviews with six secretive men who have been decisive in protecting Israel, it is disheartening that they have little to say about the growing hostility between both sides. It is an astounding look at history, but a haphazard analysis of modern terrorism.

As the titular ‘gatekeepers’ to help ensure a tense region remains peaceful, they are also scrutinized as men of questionable morality. However, as Avraham Shalom, often criticized for ordering the murder of two terrorists that hijacked a bus on the way to Tel Aviv back in the 1980s, explains, “With terrorism, there are no morals.”

The central dilemma these men often faced was whether or not to commit acts of terror. Israelis encounter a double-edged sword when faced against terrorists liberated to destroy their foundation. If they bomb the terrorists, the Israelis will likely face repercussions and an increase of violence toward their own side. If they do not bomb, they may suffer the consequences if the people who remain alive commit further attacks. It is hard to envy these men for fighting through the fog of a shrouded grey zone of morality.

The six men are also responsible for ensuring Palestinians can maintain their essential rights. However, when there are constant suicide bombings and assassinations, the heads note how often they forget about the refugees who may eventually become collateral damage. “It’s easier to be on the secure side,” one of the figureheads admits.

Although all of the subjects are Israeli, they are not all in favour of the direction of their state’s government policies. Some speak of the fractured relationship they shared with Israel’s government leaders in the wake of the Oslo Accords, which attempted to resolve the conflict by creating Palestinian self-government and the Israeli army’s withdrawal from Palestinian territory.

Grief also sets in amongst many of these former leaders when they are unable to prevent suicide bombings. Although Shin Bet rounds up thousands of suspected terrorists or links to those who threaten Israel’s security, hallways full of intelligence can go work so far when ordinary citizens can wreak havoc with spontaneous protests and violence.

The Gatekeepers is a gripping, albeit grim, examination of the political atmosphere in the Middle East. The film becomes most enlightening when the six men, almost all of whom are white-haired and dressed in blue (the two colours of Israel’s flag) break their forceful demeanor and present their humanism.

Some of them admit shame at how they have “become cruel,” explaining that Shin Bet strived to be a representative of the people, but instead came to replicate a brutal occupying force. Others have bleak prospects at when (and if) a peace process will occur, explaining that there is no good faith and a lot of bad extremism on either side.

Those with a sketchy, limited knowledge of the schism between Israelis and Palestinians will likely learn a great deal from The Gatekeepers. The film works more as a conclusion of what has come before, though, than a hypothesis about where the two sides must go from here. Although, considering how polarizing the schism between Israelis and Palestinians is, perhaps a clear, balanced and nuanced understanding of where both sides stand is victory enough.

The Beautiful and Damned

Spring Breakers

*½ out of **** 

Directed by: Harmony Korine

Starring: Vanessa Hudgens, Ashley Benson, Rachel Korine, Selena Gomez and James Franco

Running time: 94 minutes

The opening scene of Spring Breakers is a parent’s worst nightmare and a young male teenager’s wet dream.

Topless women frolic on a Florida beach, soaking in their own drunken debauchery. The camera is usually positioned on two levels, focusing either on the females’ chest or crotch region. A familiar dubstep song blares on the soundtrack. The bare-breasted women lie back, their hips gyrating in the air, as boys (men would be too kind a term) pour booze from cans that stick out from their genital area. It falls into the girls’ mouths, as they taste it with promiscuous joy.

Kids these days.

Spring Breakers is a near-total failure from tasteless auteur Harmony Korine (the screenwriter of Kids), too hollow and stupid to be satire and too bleak to be labeled a parody.

There may be a lot of skin on screen, but the film is hardly revealing about the way teenagers think or act. It is an affront to good taste, but that would not be a problem if the ideas it presented were interesting or convincing. They are not. Spring Breakers is certainly the most boring film ever made to feature a sequence where a man gives fellatio to a loaded gun.

The film follows the exploits of four giggly, vague college girls, who vie to escape from their humdrum small-town life and go to sunnier skies to celebrate spring break. To pay for their travels, the three more rebellious members of the team rob a restaurant with squirt guns and sass (their characters’ names are inconsequential, but they are played by Vanessa Hudgens, Ashley Benson and Rachel Korine, the director’s wife).

The fourth wheel is a more naïve and innocent Christian girl, aptly named Faith (Selena Gomez, good but also portraying the only character offered any sense of place, direction or moral compass). As her religious guide informs her at the film’s start, “Every temptation is going to give you a way out.”

Florida, as it turns out, is full of temptations, from piffled pop music to parties with pills, puke and promiscuity. The girls scamper around the beach in bright bikinis, observe cocaine-fueled fiestas and partake in heavy drinking. When the police come to break up a house party, Faith and her posse land in jail – only to be rescued by a dreadlocked rapper with silver capped teeth, whose name (Alien) is just as precise to the character’s demeanor as Faith’s.

James Franco plays Alien, a self-parody of the ‘gangster’ persona championed on MTV. In one scene, he brags to the girls that he plays Brian de Palma’s Scarface on repeat and shows off his weapon collection, which recalls the flaunting materialism also employed by one Jay Gatsby.

Although it does not look the part, Spring Breakers is a loose updating of Fitzgerald’s masterwork. Faith is the Nick Carraway, observing social mores evaporate her into an excess of carefree attitudes and materialism. The oft-repeated line of dialogue, “This wasn’t the dream” also clues into the group’s ethos to achieve a better life, influenced by the garish, material society that was present in Gatsby.

The film’s ending shares its bleakness with Fitzgerald’s best stories, but is far too preposterous. The increasingly savage actions of the female characters are absurd and unconvincing.

The characters spout vapid dialogue and are barely defined as articulate people with motives and desires. The quadrant spends more time singing Britney Spears than charting any meaningful emotional terrain.

One stylistic caveat: Korine transitions from scene to scene with a disorienting sound cue, a mix of a safety load and a camera click. It is a cool effect the first time, but obnoxious on the twentieth.

Although Spring Breakers looks great, a myriad of picture-perfect beach shots and hyper-saturated close-ups from frequent Gaspar Noé collaborator Benoît Debie, the film is just as shallow and directionless as its subjects. It is not even fun enough to recommend as a guilty pleasure. Spring Breakers unfolds with the tackiness and vacancy of a trashy pop song played on repeat for 94 minutes, instead by the end, the song we hear is a warped imitation of itself. 

The Balcony is Closed: A Roger Ebert Retrospective

In the February of 1999, just weeks before my eighth birthday, my father and I took the subway downtown to Toronto’s Carlton Cinemas to see a film called Children of Heaven. It was a terrific little gem from Iran, the country’s first film to be nominated for an Academy Award. It tells the story of a brother and sister from a poor family who have to share a pair of shoes. It was a sweet and affecting crowd-pleaser, and the first subtitled film I ever saw.

I went to see Children of Heaven based on Roger Ebert’s recommendation.

Just a weekend earlier, I had my first glimpse (at least from what I can recall from 14 years ago) of At The Movies with Siskel and Ebert, although the former host was just two weeks from passing away. Ebert helmed the episode solo and had great disdain for all of the films he reviewed, except for Heaven. Although I cannot find a clip of that show online, it is known that much of his review writing is faithfully translated to his television series. In his four-star review, he wrote:

“The movie is from Iran. Immediately you think kids would not be interested in such a movie. It has subtitles. Good lord! Kids will have to read them! But its subtitles are easy for 8- or 9-year-olds, who can whisper them to their siblings, and maybe this is their perfect introduction to subtitles. As for Iran: The theme of this movie is so universal there is not a child who will not be wide-eyed with interest and suspense.”

That paragraph is essential Ebert: clear and conversational, full of buoyant optimism and making the case to introduce audiences (in this situation, children) to new films and kinds of filmmaking (here, subtitles). Through his 46-year post as a writer for the Chicago Sun-Times, few wrote about cinema with such heart, such simplicity and such respect for the art form as Roger.

I would bet if you asked any North American to name one film critic, almost all of them would name Roger Ebert. He became synonymous with the job due to the several television series he originally co-hosted with the Chicago Tribune’s Gene Siskel (and later with Richard Roeper) and the ‘thumbs up’ motto he promoted that gave the gesture a universal appeal.

He became one of the most respected figures in film culture for championing many up-and-coming talents (such as Jim Jarmusch, Spike Lee and Quentin Tarantino) and using his public profile to vouch for little-seen gems in a time when independent studios needed support. He remained prolific as an exceptional writer of thousands of reviews, in print and later online.

I have read plenty of Ebert’s reviews and they are unique for many reasons. Foremost, the simplicity of the language he uses is digestible for those who know little about the movies. Those unversed in the lingo of cinema, who would find it hard to decode the work of haughtier alternative daily critics, were at home with Ebert’s weekly commentary. He brought conversation about movies down to the public level, a feat that likely inspired many cinephiles to start loving the movies.

Also, Ebert was not often a man who spent much of his reviews nitpicking the content or creative decisions. Instead, he wrote about how the movies affected him. If a film excited him tremendously, touched his heart or was full of transcendent visual beauty, he would write, elegantly and succinctly, about the experience of how these elements moved him. On the flipside, if a film enraged him, he would spare no time seething his teeth and ripping the director and/or actors to shreds. Not only were his reviews insightful, but they were incredibly fun to read – especially his disgruntled columns on terrible films.

(For those unfamiliar to his reviews, many collections of his raves and pans are available at bookstores and online. His 2011 memoir, Life Itself, is also a delight.)

  

He also became the people’s critic for choosing to review films as they were relative to the values of their genre and audience, instead of how they ranked against the whole scheme of cinematic offerings. All culture writers can learn from this. I will let him explain this concept in an excerpt taken from his Shaolin Soccer review:

“…The star rating system is relative, not absolute. When you ask a friend if Hellboy is any good, you're not asking if it's any good compared to Mystic River, you're asking if it's any good compared to The Punisher. And my answer would be, on a scale of one to four, if Superman (1978) is four, then Hellboy is three and The Punisher is two… And that is why Shaolin Soccer, a goofy Hong Kong action comedy, gets three stars. It is piffle, yes, but superior piffle. If you are even considering going to see a movie where the players zoom 50 feet into the air and rotate freely in violation of everything Newton held sacred, then you do not want to know if I thought it was as good as Lost in Translation."

He outranked many others critics of the day by embracing film beyond the written word. Of the various columns I have read from mainstream reviewers after his death on Thursday, many of them were either friends or had nurtured an e-mail correspondence with Ebert. He was classy, giving advice to other writers who may have otherwise felt intimidated in his shadow.

Starting in 2002, Ebert went through various surgeries to deal with cancer in his thyroid and salivary glands. Although he lost the ability to speak, eat or drink in 2006 due to complications with these operations, Ebert never lost his voice. He continued, periodically, to write reviews of films he missed during his rehabilitation.

Later, he embraced the Internet and became a major force on Twitter. He also continued with EbertFest, the festival held in Champaign, Illinois, where he selects all of the films (many of which were overlooked in theatres). His wife, Chaz, is set to continue with this year’s EbertFest, scheduled for later this month.

Even while going through a tumultuous period of poor health and rocky recovery, Ebert continued to do what he loved. On April 2, just two days before his death, he wrote a blog post titled “A Leave of Presence,” signaling that even though the cancer had returned, he would still write selected reviews, relaunch his web site and kick off an online campaign to bring back “At the Movies,” which he introduced with Siskel many years earlier.

Along the way (appropriately during his time in and out of the hospital), there have been too many dour columns about the end of arts criticism, as many daily newspapers have ditched their critics and writers for syndicated reviewers. There is a general apprehension that critics do not seem to matter anymore. Roger Ebert would not ever believe this finality: he was always faithful that as long as there was an audience hungry for arts and entertainment, it was the job of journalists like him to make sure these folks were well-fed.

Anyone worried about the state of arts criticism would wash those woes away when reading Roger’s reviews. Those arts columnists who still review films every week have a lot to learn from the man who, even after his death, will still be considered the world’s most prominent film critic.

Not that depth, description and detail is unwarranted from film criticism, as great critics I adore like J. Hoberman, A.O. Scott and the late Pauline Kael testify. But few outside of elite New York circles know any of these names. Ebert was, and will continue to be, America’s most prominent reviewer.

Ebert often proclaimed that his favourite film was Citizen Kane, and his life is as multifaceted as that story’s hero. In a way, the beloved film critic was likely used to the publicity and star persona enjoyed by newspaper mogul Charles Foster Kane. However, Kane’s death in the film is shrouded in mystery. For those who have not seen Kane, the structure comes from reporters heading out to uncover the meaning behind his final word, “Rosebud.”

However, as the reporters interview each source and peel back the layers behind Kane, they find a man of complexity and contradiction. In the wake of Ebert’s death last week, if the same reporters in the film were to venture out to examine the life of the great writer, journalist and film enthusiast, the story would remain the same among each source. Roger Ebert was a happy man, a loving husband, a charitable advocate for cinema, a passionate writer, and a courageous fighter. He was a smiling, buoyant child at heart – the movies were his “Rosebud.”

All arts writers, now writing or coming soon, are indebted to the clarity and elegance of his writing, and the joy and love that Roger showed as he treasured films, classic and current. His loss is one of Xanadu’s proportions, especially given how personal he was to many people. Nobody loved movies, or made millions of viewers and readers love the movies, as much as Roger Ebert.