Posts Tagged ‘Hugo Weaving’

Captain America: The First Avenger

July 21, 2011

Actually, yes, the United States did flirt with eugenics for a while, and Nazi Germany did try to vaporize whole populations, but of course those scenes played out a lot less wholesomely than do the plot points in “Captain America: The First Avenger.” Even having the word “avenger” in its title at all seems bold for the movie in question, whose emotional baseline is so safe, so neutral, that for a while there he might as well be Captain Switzerland. (Consider also the perforated cheese of the plot.)

Just have a little faith, avers director Joe Johnston, with writers Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely, for maybe you can get a good summer blockbuster from a comic book based on a 70-year-old propaganda trope. Just like maybe you can get a metabolically enhanced “super-soldier” from a puny and sickly but brave and eager kid.

Chances are better than average if the kid’s played by Chris Evans, who got into superhero movies as the man on fire in “Fantastic Four” but now at last inhabits his more suitable element. Here he is as Steve Rogers, the willing World War II enlistee who actualizes a pronouncement made by Stanley Tucci’s sagely-schmaltzy German scientist: “A weak man knows the value of strength.” However weird it is to behold those early scenes with Evans’ head digitally grafted onto somebody else’s much less brawny body, his face and voice seem durable and reassuring. Swerving away from self-pity and into plausible humility, passing tests of character with declarative pluck, his Rogers is as ready for this particular promotion to captain as anybody can be — ready to stand up and sacrifice himself, if necessary, for the privilege of luxuriating in chastely spiffy, square-jawed Americana.

This is twice-filtered nostalgia, really, as Johnston draws much from the vintage Lucas-Spielberg playbook, itself a study of the pulp serials those directors grew up with. But moral reductiveness affords a certain popcorn-compatible clarity of presentation. In “Captain America”’s world, every Allied soldier is a decent guy, every woman a pin-up-worthy beauty, every authority figure an avuncular wit and every villain a faceless monster — be he a bondage-hooded foot soldier or, well, the aptly named Red Skull. Sebastian Stan, Hayley Atwell, Tommy Lee Jones and Hugo Weaving pose very naturally in these respective categories, each enjoying and enlivening the proceedings considerably. Meanwhile Toby Jones gives a glimmer of intelligence to a sub-par supporting role in just such a way as to suggest we’d all be better served had the role been reduced to a single scene.

Affability can’t last forever, and doesn’t, in a film so willing to neutralize its own personality for the sake of humdrum plot. But overall it does compare favorably with recently reviewed YouTube snippets of the draggy 1979 “Captain America” TV movie, which plays like educational-film-strip kitsch, and the 1990 attempt, which appears to have just plain sucked.

Determinedly, this one works as another component of a now familiar franchise kit. Iron Man’s father is here, and the inter-dimensional portal that brought us Thor, and so on. As to that bold extra bit of title, it too obviously sets up next summer’s “The Avengers” — cleverly encouraging us to wonder just how the good captain’s super-square valor and virtue will play in (the comic book movie version of) the America of now.

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The Wolfman

February 11, 2010

A man discovers that he is also a wolf. Hey, it happens. Just look at the last 75 years of movie history. Probably the first real problem with “The Wolfman” is how long it takes for the man to make the discovery. We’ve all been waiting.

Lawrence Talbot, a 19th-century American stage actor with a troubled family history, returns to his ancestral estate in England, on account of his brother there having gone missing. Then he finds relations with his father and his brother’s fiancee to be strained, on account of having contracted lycanthropy.

“Never look back, Lawrence,” father distantly advises. “The past is a wilderness of horrors.” So’s the present, it turns out. But on the plus side, Lawrence has certain resources. Among other things, he is played by Benicio Del Toro.

Good casting. That’s the first thing you think. Then maybe you think that’s the same thing you thought in 1994 when Mike Nichols, a director who should know about these things, put Jack Nicholson in “Wolf.” These things being, basically, men and their urges.

Or maybe you hadn’t thought about Nicholson in ‘94 at all, because that episode had gone quietly from memory, which should tell you how well it went over in the first place. Still, you’re optimistic about this one, because the same hopeful principle applies: Certain actors just ought to get the chance.

Henry Hull more or less blew his in 1935, but Lon Chaney Jr. nailed it so well in 1941 that an archetype, not to mention a perennially merchandisable Universal Studios property, was born.

It’s fair enough now to want to reclaim it. Kids these days, with their “Harry Potter” and their “Twilight” and their “Underworld,” don’t realize how far back the whole werewolf thing really goes. They neglect the ancestors. The Michael J. Foxes, and Jason Batemans too. Let alone the Michael Landons. Let alone the elders of the first generation. So now here’s “The Wolfman.” Now the archetype, not to mention the perennially merchandisable Universal Studios property, is in the grotesquely distending, fur-sprouting hands of Benicio Del Toro.

Good, right? Sure, in theory. As is Anthony Hopkins as the distant father, Emily Blunt as the brother’s fiancee, and Hugo Weaving as the determined Scotland Yard inspector on Talbot’s tail. Does he have a tail? Anyway, there’s a precedent for the image of a hirsute Del Toro on the run in the woods, of course, in Steven Soderbergh’s Che Guevara. But this is a different kind of legend.

He’s best in the wordless closeups, when peering out from under those eyebrows or otherwise going through the Wolfman motions: brooding, morphing, hurting, howling. Let’s say less convincing with the line readings, partly because the lines aren’t so convincing either. Screenwriters Andrew Kevin Walker and David Self have paid their respects to Curt Siodmak’s 1941 original, “The Wolf Man,” but apparently haven’t decided whether camp or reverence is the way to go — whether men and their urges even matter anymore.

“The Wolfman”’s director is Joe Johnston, who shouldn’t necessarily know about these things because he’s used to making films like “Jurassic Park III” and “Jumanji.” Also because he wasn’t even “The Wolfman”’s original director. Yes, it was a troubled production, with crew replacements, release postponements, redesigns, reshoots, and now a real air of resignation.

All that’s left are a sooty old England apparently on loan from Guy Ritchie’s “Sherlock Holmes,” a few cheap thrills lurking within Shelly Johnson’s underlit cinematography and Danny Elfman’s overbearing score, and the sad fact of the archetype reduced to the wrong kind of howler.

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V for Vendetta

March 23, 2006

The real reason to worry about the fate of Great Britain in the year 2020, if V for Vendetta is any indication, is that by then the Orwell knock-offs will be so uncontrolled and adulterated as to constitute their own permanent tyranny. The era’s soul-crushing conformist culture won’t be the politically despotic one portrayed in this movie; it’ll be a culture of numbly regurgitated, willfully cartoonish, pop political commentary.

Of which V for Vendetta is a prime (read: muddled, unimaginative) example. Scripted, perhaps inevitably, by The Matrix makers Larry and Andy Wachowski, it was directed by their first assistant from that trilogy, James McTeigue. The tale of a masked crusader battling an intolerant autocracy, it was adapted from the serious-minded serial comic written by Alan Moore and illustrated by David Lloyd from 1981 through 1988, during what most of the movie’s target audience isn’t expected to recall as Britain’s Margaret Thatcher years. The original has been updated with post-Iraq talking points and, also, it seems, dumbed down. Moore, who wants nothing to do with the movie, has called it “imbecilic,” and he isn’t exactly wrong. This V for Vendetta seems to have just one idea, which is that it’s still clever, subversive and useful for a popcorn-muncher to belabor the semantic confusion between freedom fighter and terrorist.

Hugo Weaving plays a Londoner partial to cloaking himself in dark capes and covering his face with the blanched, smirking likeness of the radical Catholic Guy Fawkes, who tried to blow up Parliament in 1605. He goes by the name of V, and he has some blowing up of his own to do. V is a sort of prog-goth swashbuckler vigilante, a weird amalgam of choice antiheroes from sagas past. He’s the Phantom Bat-Count of the Opera of Monte Cristo. He’s good with dagger-intensive martial arts and with florid, pseudo-intellectual fortune-cookie-style aphorisms.

What he’s up against is textbook dystopia—or, actually, CliffsNotes dystopia—conflating Big Brother, Hitler, Thatcher, Bush by association, the Taliban and, who knows, maybe somebody’s asshole science teacher? (The film features some seriously shady experiments.)

Point is: In this London town, if you’re, say, a young woman out past curfew, and the cops close in on you, you could do worse than a rescue via V. Such is what fate allows for Evey (Natalie Portman), a hapless employee of a propaganda-grinder TV station whose activist parents were imprisoned years ago and whom V quasi-adopts as a protégée.

Portman, still reigning as the movies’ loveliest nonentity, is perfect to play the lone bloom in a forcibly drab world—not to mention the object of many bookish-adolescent-male fantasies. What’s more, though I wouldn’t pretend to know my Derbyshire from my Nottingham, I’m sure her accent is a dead-on high-school-actress dialect—and therefore inadvertently sympathetic. The charm of their decidedly platonic courtship, for me at least, is the kinky hope that V will finally lose control and ravish her with a diction lesson.

Mostly they lurk in his “shadow gallery” among plunder from the Ministry of Objectionable Materials—butterfly collections, banned art, a jukebox, etc.—breakfasting over bossa nova and briefly philosophizing. This idyll can’t last, of course. For one thing, V’s idea of thwarting fascism—by killing innocent people and destroying the remaining symbols of functional liberal democracy—rightly strikes Evey as somewhat indelicate.

Can they reconcile? I’ll only say this: Fortunately, what the government somehow does not control is the mass production, sales and next-day shipping of Guy Fawkes masks, which V manages single-handedly, first as a tool of subterfuge and later, revolution. McTeigue stages it less as anarchy in the U.K. than a commercial for anti-allergy medication. People take off their masks, look up into the middle distance and breathe easy at last.

Other overstressed imagery includes V’s tag, logically enough a big red V, best displayed in tumbling dominoes or fireworks or spray paint on cinderblock walls. It’s a half-finished inversion of the anarchist’s A—or a rip-off from that early-’80s miniseries that went by the name of V. Remember? Reptiles from outer space who happened also to be imperialist totalitarians?

Anyway, you can see how these symbols are getting so oppressively cluttered. Heaven help us if V for Vendetta’s bleak future does arrive, and we don’t hear the marching jackboots because, as with so many annoying car alarms, we’ve finally learned to tune them out.

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