The Dark Side of the Plate

Moneyball

***1/2 out of ****

Directed by: Bennett Miller

Starring: Brad Pitt, Jonah Hill, Phillip Seymour Hoffman, Chris Pratt and Robin Wright

Running time: 133 minutes

From Gary Cooper’s teary proclamation that he was the luckiest man on the face of the earth to Kevin Costner hearing the ghosts of baseball’s past and building his own field of dreams, American baseball movies usually hit past our emotional fences. They are, essentially, idealized and romanticized love letters to an adored cultural pastime.

But if The Pride of the Yankees and Field of Dreams represent the pinnacle of sweet, good-natured, fundamentally all-American entertainment, then Moneyball may be the most terrible addition to baseball cinema one could conceive. It is a cold, cynical and deeply conflicted film about the value of the human spirit. In other words, it’s a business picture rather than a sports film.

See how in the film’s compound title that ‘money’ precedes the word ‘ball’? There’s a reason for that. Moneyball examines baseball not by the play-by-play on the field, but by the backroom deals that can ultimately guarantee that one team goes further in the playoffs than another.

Based off a compelling read by business and sports writer Michael Lewis, Moneyball begins with a playoff game between the New York Yankees (at that time, the richest team in baseball) and the Oakland Athletics (the poorest, with nearly a third of the earnings of their rival). New York eliminates Oakland, and then to sour the wound even further, begins pilferating the Athletics' top players for the next season. The Yankees can do that because their payroll allows them to.

Enter Billy Beane, the Athletics’ general manager, played by Brad Pitt. Devastated by the loss and having to deal with managing an unfair financial situation, Beane realizes that the only way to fight back against the baseball behemoths is through changing the approach to the game. "Adapt or die," he says to the team's coach in one scene. (The coach is played by Phillip Seymour Hoffman, who could have used far more screen time.)

While trying to raise some extra funding, Beane meets a patient but keenly intelligent sports analyst named Peter Brand (Jonah Hill). Brand explains to him how there are many undervalued players who have worth as competent athletes because they get on base, yet are marginalized by major league teams for small quirks and differences. These players are cheap to pick up but can deliver runs. Beane instantly hires Brand, and the two start to build a new approach to the Oakland franchise.

Brad Pitt is currently batting 1.000 in 2011 with an exceptional turn in this, as well as The Tree of Life. But for an actor whose youthful vitality shines through in many of his roles, he looks seasoned and contemplative here. Pitt takes the opportunity to explore Beane as a has-been trying to pursue a second chance in the major leagues. (Beane was a young MLB player in the 1980s but never reached the heights of his potential.)

Now, his redemption comes from organizing a team with players who are undervalued and under-appreciated. But, this is an underdog story that doesn’t come from the players’ perspectives.

Pitt is very natural in scenes with his preteen daughter (Kerris Dorsey), as well as when he develops a professor-protégé relationship with Brand. Meanwhile, Hill makes a nice transition to dramatic fare. It is fun to see how the stocky, awkward statistics expert develops into a major player on the Athletics staff.

Director Bennett Miller (Capote) intends to steer through the shreds of warmth and modest hope of the cold baseball empire. As a result, the film is not flashy—it rarely steps onto the field or shows any footage that would make it into a highlight reel.

Interestingly, Miller and writers Stephen Zaillian and Aaron Sorkin capture the human element of baseball in an ironic way: by focusing on Beane and Brand, who are essentially numbing the human spirit of baseball by bringing statistics and computer-generated analysis into play. The film analyzes baseball as a financial entity rather than a game.

Moneyball is a film that does not invigorate the love of the game but deconstructs it. It is a sad reflection of America’s pasttime at the current moment, and it explores this with nuanced performances and spare but powerful direction. It’s a very different kind of baseball movie, but also one of the finest sports films in recent memory.

Smack, Crack, Bushwhacked

Drive

*** out of ****

Directed by: Nicolas Winding Refn

Starring: Ryan Gosling, Carey Mulligan, Bryan Cranston, Oscar Isaac and Albert Brooks

Running time: 100 minutes

In the new pulpy noir Drive, our enigmatic driver protagonist played by Ryan Gosling throttles a Chevy Impala through the dimly lit Los Angeles streets. Like the car, the film looks as conventional as everything else on the road, but has a real roar underneath.

It is a standard action film with stock characters, but the artistic pretensions and slow-burn techniques from Danish filmmaker Nicolas Winding Refn, who won Best Director honours at Cannes this spring, ensures that the film is a step above the typical genre entry.

The driver that Gosling portrays is not given a name or much of a history. He has three jobs: a professional stunt driver for the movies by day, a getaway driver for inept criminals at night, and an auto repair shop worker on the side (his boss is played by the always-welcome Bryan Cranston).

He has also become attracted to a neighbour, Irene (Carey Mulligan), and enjoys taking her and her son, Benicio (Kaden Leos), on drives along the concrete L.A. River basins. When Irene’s husband (Oscar Isaac) returns from prison and gets mixed up with some shady mobsters—including a wryly funny and shockingly sadistic duo of Ron Perlman and Albert Brooks—the Driver must protect Irene and her son as the mobsters' schemes become increasingly convoluted.

Refn’s film oozes with a self-conscious sense of style, as if it knows it’s the coolest thing in the room. The synth-heavy soundtrack, neon text and the white leather jacket donned by our protagonist—featuring a gold scorpion on its back—scream for the galore of hard-boiled action pictures from the 1980s (Michael Mann's Thief is a good reference point).

The perplexing ambiguity and aimlessness of the protagonist speaks better to action-packed excursions from the late sixties and early seventies, though—think of the films that Steve McQueen and Alain Delon would be suited up for. But since the Driver resembles an action hero character more than a complete and absorbing human being, Drive would rather serve as a fascinating genre exercise than a character study.

Not that that’s a bad thing, especially considering how Refn experiments with the execution of action sequences. He (thankfully) excludes the chaotic frenetic energy that so frequently drowns out coherence in contemporary action cinema, and instead uses a variety of point-of-view shots, rhtyhmic music and tight framings to keep the action throttling forward without having to disorient the viewer.

Mostly, though, the film takes its precious time setting up each brutal murder. This teases the audience as to when the violent impact will finally be heard or seen, adding suspense and ensuring that the audience absorbs the details on the screen as they await the bloodshed.

When the action starts off, the results are nasty and overwhelmingly bloody. In one sequence, the driver shares a passionate kiss with Irene just seconds before stomping on a man’s face to the extent that nothing remains above his neck a minute later.

For a film that basks in a retro coolness and that is classily patient in how it executes pivotal moments of graphic violence, it is a bit shallow. The cast is uniformly excellent, but they can only do so much to make up for paper-thin characterizations, courtesy of screenwriter Hossein Amini (who based his material off of a slim James Sallis yarn). Even Gosling’s calm, knowing stare feels like a bit much to base an action hero off of at certain points.

Don’t go into Drive expecting a fourth Transporter film. Even though its roots in the action genre are apparent, the surprises lie in Refn’s storytelling techniques rather than the story itself. With such capable hands steering the action, the film is a smooth, if remarkably gory, joy ride.

Valuable Lessons of the 2011 Summer Movie Season: A Recap

Okay, so I have some good news and some bad news for Hollywood's behemoth studios. The good news is that admissions at the summer box office this summer were up from last year. More disheartening, however, is that this season marks the third least-attended summer session at movie theatres across North America since the multiplex boom started to take hold in 1997.

Between the highs and the lows, though, there were a lot of lessons that hopefully some studio bigwigs should take into account as they assemble future summer schedules. Note that my opinions on some of this summer’s films are interspersed within this recap.

Never Underestimate the Power of Women (also a good life lesson, in general):

Every year, the big studios carefully schedule around their prime programming, films with humongous budgets and the most lavish visual effects artistry that hundreds of millions of dollars can buy—and most importantly, appeal to young males. Then there are the executives who position ‘counterprogramming,’ also known as films that appeal mainly to women or older adults. This summer, the two most unprecedented surprises were both films under this ‘counterprogramming’ category, and both mainly appealed to older females. They were the hilarious Bridesmaids and the heartfelt adaptation of The Help. Both films utilized rich (and mainly female) ensembles to create fully-dimensional characters that both males and females could feel for and laugh at. Both Bridesmaids (***) and The Help (***1/2) relied on the concept of female camaraderie in their synopses, as well as their marketing campaigns. For the studios and the audience, it paid off in dividends.

Never Underestimate the Power of Nostalgia (but that doesn’t give you an excuse to make The Smurfs and other facsimiles):

In Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris, the protagonist played by Owen Wilson is working on a novel about a man who works in a nostalgia shop. Of course, this man is some variation of the Wilson character, and since the actor is playing the Woody Allen surrogate, it shouldn’t surprise you to note that the film is a highly romanticized look back at a time that has come and gone. By reminding us of 1920s Paris in the spring, Woody gave us his most adored film in more than a decade. On a similar note, J.J. Abrams’ blockbuster Super 8 was an endearingly composed Spielberg symphony, recalling the childlike whimsy and dazzling escapism that has captured audiences for generations (and will continue to). Despite my reservations on its hokey ending, I saw Super 8 twice—few films can encapsulate the thrills and raw affection that Spielberg’s can, and Abrams’ tribute came stunningly close.

Stop Overestimating the Power of Superheroes:

We got no fewer than four high-profile superhero films this summer (Thor, Green Lantern, Captain America: The First Avenger, X-Men: First Class) and none of them were exactly, well, memorable. Their box office takes were moderate at best for the subgenre, their stories were relatively standard, and despite impressive ensembles and effects work, they didn’t have a lot of heart. Then again, it’s hard to feel any majestic powers of superiority when you’re being pushed out of theatres by another superhero movie every other week.

What’s Going On in Sundance?:

The Utah festival has helped build buzz for some of our generation’s most defining films. Films like Garden State, Napoleon Dynamite, The Blair Witch Project and Little Miss Sunshine have ridden their January buzz into big summer takes. This summer, not one Sundance premiere made much of a dent in the schedule. Of the three films that I saw—the sci-fi drama Another Earth, coming-of-age drama Terri and quirky comedy Submarine—none of them were good enough to recommend and are practically unheard of by mainstream moviegoers. Are studios beginning to lose faith in their independent divisions? Or are they saving the grand daddies for the fall season, with potential award gold on the table? Let’s hope that the latter is true.

Nothing Ruins a Grand Finale Like Too Much Exposition:

Yes, Steve Kloves, I’m talking to you. You wrote seven of the eight Harry Potter films, and saved the most disappointing adaptation for last. I know I’m in a minority who thought that Deathly Hallows: Part 2 was underwhelming, but considering how much of that book's final third was a tremendously thrilling action sequence featuring a echelon of beloved characters, why was there such little action and such constricted room to fit everyone in? The grandeur was there, but the excitement felt contained. Next time, Mr. Kloves, you may want to snip some of the leaden dialogue-heavy sections that turned one of the most anticipated finales in cinematic history into a mouthful rather than an eyeful.

Someone Needs to Take a Pulse on What People Find Funny:

Yes, Bridesmaids featured some of the funniest scenes of any film in recent memory. But if that laughter was medicine, it didn't make up for the excruciating pain caused by The Hangover: Part 2 and Horrible Bosses, my two least favourite films of the summer. One was essentially a carbon copy of the original, although with the inspired comedic bits strangely missing, and the second was a total waste of a terrific concept and a diverse, talented ensemble. What made these two films most alike, beyond the notion of having a trio of male leads to get themselves in particularly sticky situations, was that the shots of humour were foul and bleak. Both of these films lacked wit, heart and characters who resembled actual people, and were essentially works of mass vulgarity. When there’s such little truth to the humour, it’s hard to care about what’s onscreen and even harder to let out a laugh.

Let Terrence Malick Do His Thing:

The reclusive American artist and director of 2011’s best film, The Tree of Life, is one of the only filmmakers on the planet who is able to have their personal vision remain intact in the final cut. This may explain why his film was such a glorious, fascinating and transcendent piece of beauty and thematic complexity. Many found Malick’s cerebral, ‘sense memory’ approach to his tale of a small-town Texas family in the 1950s perplexing, while others (like myself) found it to be key to the telling of a triumphant coming-of-age tale that didn’t attempt to skirt with audacious themes and concepts. If only more filmmakers had the clout to take on such liberties with their work…

Top Tens #5: My Top 10 Favourite Films of All Time

I’m off to camp tomorrow and I hope to see you all back at The Screening Room when I return in late August. Oh, and here is my new, improved, updated, refurbished, hot-off-the-press list of my favourite films!

10. Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981, dir. Steven Spielberg)

I first watched this film when I was five years old and I often return to that age (in spirit, at least) every time John Williams’ score kicks in. Steven Spielberg’s brawniest and most thrilling entertainment is, first and foremost, escapism as its purest. Mixing in the best parts of old adventure serials with a globe-trotting scope as ambitious as anything the James Bond franchised has ever tried, Raiders of the Lost Ark is the beacon of action filmmaking and also an illustrious peak for one of Hollywood’s greatest screen heroes—Harrison Ford. Oh, and that scene between Indiana and the swordsman is still one of the funniest sequences ever captured on film.

9. Chungking Express (1994, dir. Wong Kar-wai)

No director working anywhere in the world today has their films swim with romance quite like Hong Kong stylist Wong Kar-wai. Honest, passionate and dreamlike, his 1994 masterpiece follows two separate stories told one after the other: both are about cops dealing with recent break-ups while new women dance in and out of their lives. The photography of urban Hong Kong is intoxicating and the performances, especially from Tony Leung and Faye Wong, are terrific. The film breathes with life and a commanding energy, but it’s the raw, subtle nuances between the romantic leads in both stories that feel utterly true. It’s a buoyant journey, and one I’ll be delightful to take again and again.

8. Apocalypse Now (1979, dir. Francis Ford Coppola)

Apocalypse Now could have been one of Hollywood’s biggest flops. During production, several sets were destroyed, director Coppola nearly went bankrupt, actor Martin Sheen nearly died, and plenty of hours of footage made it to the cutting room floor. So, it’s quite a miracle that the film turned out as stellar as it is. Undoubtedly one of the most complex studies of human madness and also a remarkably involving and harrowing war film, it’s a film that pulsates with so much vivid imagery and fiercely haunting performances, it practically recreates the fear, soullessness and destructive nature of the Vietnam War. In terms of recreations of war on film, this one smells like napalm in the morning.

7. Barton Fink (1991, dir. Joel Coen)

One of the signs of a great film is when one finds new things on every repeat viewing. Two directors, Joel and Ethan Coen, loves to immerse audiences with this treat and pack their films with symbols, metaphors and themes. As terrific as their filmography is, no film is as multi-faceted or as brilliant as their massively under-appreciated 1991 classic. In it, John Turturro plays an uptight New York playwright who moves to Hollywood to work on a boxing film, and ends up, well, wresting with himself. It’s a mix between a hilarious satire and a horror film, and it is an endlessly fascinating trip. Whether you leave the film scratching your head or entirely intrigued, it’s a hard movie to get out of your mind. Maybe another watch will do?

6. 12 Angry Men (1957, dir. Sidney Lumet)

When Sidney Lumet died last April, the motion picture community lost of their finest craftsmen. He was a brilliant actor’s director and made films that felt socially conscious but never self-important. The finest proof of his mastery is his 1957 debut 12 Angry Men, based on a Reginald Rose play. The set-up is simple: 12 jurors discuss, argue and deliberate the facts of a murder trial. It’s more riveting and suspenseful than any courtroom drama has any right to be, and the fact that it develops a dozen fascinating characters in the process (tremendous work from Henry Fonda, Lee J. Cobb and company certainly helps) is testament to Lumet’s genius as a director. Note that the film rarely moves beyond the jury room, yet the visual style never feels rote. It’s a compelling thriller that is composed entirely of dialogue and character development. Those kinds of films are becoming mysteriously hard to find.

5. Memento (2000, dir. Christopher Nolan)

Where was I? Long before he was earning big budgets to make Batman films, Christopher Nolan was primarily known for this brainy neo-noir puzzle about a man (an excellent Guy Pearce) with anterograde amnesia trying to figure out who raped and murdered his wife. The gimmick is that since he can’t remember what’s happened right before, we’re given the details backwards (so we have no prior knowledge of the previous events either). Clever, complex and undeniably compelling, Memento is probably the best example of how to construct a movie in a non-linear fashion. It’s also a fine mystery that may take a few viewings to entirely decipher—but that’s just part of the fun. Ok, so where was I?

4. Almost Famous (2000, dir. Cameron Crowe)

There’s a scene at the beginning of Cameron Crowe’s 2000 rock-and-roll epic where William, the aspiring music journalist, is dismissed as merely a critic by the rock band he is assigned to cover. William then spends the next minute unleashing his intense adoration and enthusiasm for each member of the band. He is a fan first, critic second. I like to approach films in a similar way. That said, this semi-autobiographical film from writer/director Crowe is such an intelligent, exuberant, compassionate, dynamically acted film that every scene feels like its part of a terrific album from decades ago. It’s also one of the best films ever made about music, and one that I will always be happy to give another spin.

3. Se7en (1995, dir. David Fincher)

This film is bloody brilliant, and both of those adjectives can be used equally to describe this grisly detective thriller, arguably David Fincher’s finest achievement. A headstrong rookie (Brad Pitt) and a warm-hearted veteran (Morgan Freeman) are working to track down a serial killer who is murdering victims who have committed one of the seven deadly sins. It’s a frightening journey, filled with twists (courtesy of Andrew Kevin Walker’s cunning plotting) and stomach churns (striking, if lurid visuals come from Fincher’s cold vision). It also features the most spine-tingling finale that I can recall, an ending so devastatingly brilliant that Pitt almost quit the film when studio heads were thinking of replacing it.

2. The Apartment (1960, dir. Billy Wilder)

I already spoke about this one of my Top 10 Comedies list, but it bears repeating: The Apartment is tightly plotted, bruisingly funny and blissfully romantic. Few onscreen couples have had as much zing as the irreplaceable Jack Lemmon and Shirley MacLaine, the former which gives a performance of precise comedic timing and dramatic weight. He plays the owner of a New York apartment, who lends it out to his co-workers and their dates in exchange for a good word and a promotion at his workplace. Lemmon’s balance of humour and pathos is almost as remarkable as the deft way in which director Billy Wilder massages dark themes with light comedy—tone-wise, of course.

1. Magnolia (1999, dir. Paul Thomas Anderson)

The world of film buffs is filled with two types of people: those who thought that Magnolia was an overlong, pretentious bore, and those who thought that Magnolia was a magnificent opus of Biblical proportions. I am of the latter variety. It is P.T. Anderson’s masterpiece, an audacious and remarkably acted three-hour journey through one rainy afternoon in the San Fernando Valley. We follow several lonely, troubled souls struggling to find each other—and then the unimaginable happens. Magnolia blooms with big themes, brave ideas and bold methods of storytelling and performance. It’s a film that has grown on me ever since I saw it years ago, and it leaves me spellbound every time I watch it again.

Daze of Heaven

The Tree of Life

**** out of ****

Directed by: Terrence Malick

Starring: Brad Pitt, Jessica Chastain, Hunter McCracken, Laramie Eppler and Sean Penn

Running time: 138 minutes

For those of you who aren't keeping a tally, this is my 100th post on The Screening Room. And, boy, do I have an incredible film to mark the occasion.

There are only a small handful of directors who can create a film with the title The Tree of Life without extending their reach or pretension, and Terrence Malick is one of them. The reclusive American artist, best known for his World War II epic The Thin Red Line, is a name that means zip to mainstream audiences. But, his small yet revered filmography and his stature as an evocative, expressionistic filmmaker that is more concerned with how story is defined by patterns of image and sound rather than through a cohesive narrative, means that every project of his becomes a cultural event for film buffs.

His latest film, the recent winner of the Palme D’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, encapsulates the best attributes of Malick’s work, meaning it’s a film that’s easier to describe with adjectives than with nouns.

The film opens with a whispered voice-over from Mrs. O’Brien, the saintly small-town mother played by Jessica Chastain. “There are two ways through life. The way of nature and the way of grace. You have to choose which one you follow.”

This quote becomes the defining conflict for her son, a doe-eyed preteen named Jack (newcomer Hunter McCracken), who is caught between these two halves. Jack and his two younger brothers (Laramie Eppler and Tye Sheridan) are growing up during the 1950s in the midlands of Texas. Their father (Brad Pitt) goes by the way of nature: he is a failed musician, whose stinging regret for the things he hasn’t accomplished makes him determined to live vicariously through his boys. He is a strict disciplinarian who nurtures his children with pride and punishment, demanding the best from them.

Mr. O’Brien is the face of nature and the struggles and demons that come attached to it, while Mrs. O’Brien embodies grace. She is a sunny mother, although naïve—her husband pointedly remarks about her slightness on occasion—who raises her children in a different way, through prayer and plenitude.

The Tree of Life is about the battle between religion and reason just as much as it is about the binary that separates this family. It is a film both intimate in its approach to character, while transcendent and exhilaratingly grand in its depiction of everything else, from the creation of the world to the beauty of the neighbourhood where the O’Briens reside.

The scenes are small in action but have an overpowering aura surrounding them—can this be reminiscent of Biblical territory, as the tiny property of man tries to explore his relationship with a higher power?

Filmgoers uninitiated by Malick’s cerebral approach may find a lot of the film and the connections between certain moments perplexing. For instance, why does the family storyline suddenly move into a colourful interpretation of the Big Bang and the creation of the cosmos, full of rushing waters and fiery blasts of light?

It is a challenging parallel to explain concretely, but the theme of creation and destruction is a central aspect in The Tree of Life. By delicately chronicling the early days of how the O’Brien sons grew from babies into boys, and by later depicting how their stable family fabric crumbles, Malick frames a battle between the possibilities of creation and the vast soullessness of nature that threatens to tear it all apart.

Adding to this thematic element, one could frame the film as a series of mementos from Jack as an older man (played by Sean Penn). He works in a colossally tall glass skyscraper in a giant metropolis—the unlimited potential of the building’s architecture sums up creation—but his family, who are no longer with him, are fading, fragmented memories that still wrestle inside of him.

With such a careful, cautious perfectionist behind the camera, the technical aspects are all masterful. No cinematographer working in film today is as innovative as Emmanuel Lubezki. (His Oscar loss for Children of Men still hurts and his camerawork here will hopefully make the Academy atone.) Filming most of the action outside, Lubezki ensures that the camera doesn’t move as much as float, capturing the fluidity of youth, and the dreamy movements and colours that can pervade one’s memory when they harken back to an earlier time. Immaculate set design from Jack Fisk and a hymnal score by Alexandre Desplat appropriately adds further grandeur.

The cast is remarkable, as well. With a riveting intensity and a slight vulnerability, Brad Pitt has never expressed a wider range as a leading man. Chastain is also a revelation with a terrifically, expressive face—vital considering how her character says very little. Hunter McCracken debuts as the young son who is enveloped by his loss of innocence, and he is sublime, with a haunting, ashen face that darkens his tender spirit (the young actor also lets his body language do much of the talking).

Due to the writer/director’s private nature, we will likely never know how personal this tale is for him. Malick was a young boy growing up in Waco, Texas, at the same time as the young characters in the film. Even though its personal sympathies will remain a mystery, The Tree of Life is an audacious, glorious symphony of sound and image, and an endlessly fascinating coming-of-age tale. It is a daunting but glorious work of art that beckons to be seen and seen again.