Posts Tagged ‘Sam Rockwell’

Cowboys & Aliens

July 28, 2011

Once in a while, even the most tried and true narrative formula needs repackaging for retail-friendliness. Or so it must seem at least to those bottom-line minders who cut checks to Daniel Craig and Harrison Ford.

So let’s do this: a thing and another thing…but not the other thing you expect! And the thing is cool, and the other thing is differently cool, so as to convey a vibe of maybe just being plum crazy enough to work. This being a delicate art, it’ll involve some trial and error. Like so.

Spaghetti and meatballs: Classic.

Spaghetti and glass shards: No thank you!

Spaghetti and Gummi Bears: Keep talking….

And before we know it we’re in the Old West, but with invading extraterrestrials. “Cowboys & Aliens” may sound conceptually obvious, but in fact it is obvious in every other way, too. For instance, Craig and Ford don’t play the aliens. And if this is not exactly what you expect from director Jon Favreau and an original movie-ready property by comic book industrialist Scott Mitchell Rosenberg, it must be because you’re not sure who those guys are anyway. No matter.

The stars look great, but unfortunately that’s no matter either. If anything could redeem this, it would be the sense of a kid gathering all his random toys together, non sequiturs be damned, into one sincerely urgent, internally logical superstory. What “Cowboys & Aliens” lacks, aside from the better execution we’ve already seen more than once in Pixar’s “Toy Story” franchise (not to mention Ford’s own frolic with Gene Wilder in “The Frisco Kid” some 30-odd years ago), is an attitude of abandon.

All the cheerfully winking genre enthusiasm Favreau brought to such fun romps as “Elf” and the first “Iron Man” is not readily apparent here. “Cowboys & Aliens” feels like a perfunctory, mercantile exercise — sagging misshapenly under the weight of its way too many producer and writer credits, which include some big shots whose demands may well have simply worn Favreau down.

Neither homage nor satire, quite, it’s more like a brainstormed shorthand checklist of plot points and payoffs. The characters got sketched in at some juncture, and since then everyone seems to have just decided to leave them sketchy, letting stereotype pose as archetype. There’s the loner hero (Craig) with no past, and no fear. The crusty rival-cum-ally (Ford) with a heart of gold. The irksome whelp (Paul Dano) on whom the hero puts a beating, to comic effect. There’s the hero surrounded: by thugs, by Apache, by aliens, and the surprise cavalry-arrival rescue(s) just when all seems lost. There’s the creature all up in your business, with body parts within its body parts. The uncertain but timely weapons proficiency. The boy and his dog. The manly speech. The humbling. The vision quest. The warrior honor bullshit. The woman (Abigail Spencer) who gets to make out with Daniel Craig. The other woman (Olivia Wilde) who gets to make out with Daniel Craig. There’s the blah blah and uh huh and whatever.

Some scenes begin promisingly but most just tend to stall out. We’re invited to do the dramatic (or occasionally comedic) legwork ourselves, but not at all required to, so it’s doubly insulting. If you’re sick of cowboy cliches, Favreau seems to be saying, just wait for the space-invader cliches. If you’re sick of those, it’ll be over soon.

Sam Rockwell brings some less contrived humanity to his tagalong supporting part as a docile shopkeeper, and the movie seems happy to have him, so that’s nice. But of course it’s a movie whose principal achievement probably is the stoic array of straight faces it has managed to gather under its own silly circumstances. Just about everyone who appears here does seem wholly convinced that he or she populates and Old West being invaded by extraterrestrials. There is some squinting, what with the scorching southwestern sun and the interstellar trespassers’ probing beams, but winking at the audience? Next to none.

That leaves us and the bottom-line minders standing glumly in a pile of packaging. “Cowboys & Aliens” really is just a hooky premise in search of a paycheck. Don’t let it abduct yours.

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Conviction

October 29, 2010

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Yes, the title has two meanings, but that just makes it doubly obvious. Don’t expect much in the way of poetic nuance here, for there is only belaboring: This conviction refers both to the guilty verdict that put a man in prison for many years, and to the certitude with which his sister then devoted her life to proving his innocence.

It actually happened, which means that any movie about it might too easily seem like a TV movie. This one does. It has the advantage of Hilary Swank playing to her Academy-approved strengths, as a regular gal of modest means (unless you count her great fortitude) who rises to a real challenge. And it has the second advantage of Sam Rockwell, an actor with an excellent sense of proportion and a gift for natural displays of conflicted conscience. But one disadvantage is that it almost doesn’t matter who plays “Conviction”‘s blandly characterized, likable-underdog leads. Another, greater problem is an old familiar one, which is that a well-organized fidelity to facts, no matter how remarkable those facts are, is not the same thing as a dramatic shape.

The facts are these. Betty Anne Waters (Swank), an uneducated bartender and mother of two from the small town of Ayer, Massachusetts, saw her only brother Kenny (Rockwell) put away for the brutal murder of a neighbor in 1983. She knew he didn’t do it. So she got a GED, put herself through college and law school, became a lawyer, got in touch with more famous fellow lawyer Barry Scheck (Peter Gallagher) in the early days of his nonprofit Innocence Project, retrieved forgotten evidence from her brother’s case and had it reevaluated in order to exonerate him. DNA testing didn’t exist when her quest began, but became essential when it ended. That’s how long it took.

And yes, that’s enough for screenwriter Pamela Gray and director Tony Goldwyn to craft a functional if unfortunately forgettable drama. Goldwyn has plenty of experience as an actor, and the emotional rhythms of his film suggest an earned easy rapport with actors. But rapport alone is not enough. Most of his directing experience has been in television, and “Conviction” suffers from the debilitating effects of small-screen thinking. Obviously it doesn’t help that small-screen thinking is just what Gray’s script demands.

On the plus side, Gray and Goldwyn’s virtue-minded project does offer several strong supporting female performances: from Ari Graynor as Kenny’s waylaid daughter, Minnie Driver as Betty Anne’s law-school friend, Juliette Lewis as Kenny’s ex-lover and a dubious witness, and particularly Melissa Leo as the cranky cop who had it in for Kenny since day one.

There are hints that being the only female cop on the Ayer police force in the early ’80s might make anybody cranky. And that Kenny, a hothead and a troublemaker at least since he and his sister were unwillingly separated as foster children, never seemed inclined to respect authority. But the movie doesn’t make a priority of exploring these intriguing ambiguities, nor the related notion that this ostensibly inspiring story might also be read as a deeply disillusioning one. Not all sacrifices are inherently uplifting; not all persistence is noble. Finally, and vexingly, the film doesn’t bother to trouble itself much about the real perpetrator, and the victim, of the murder Kenny Waters apparently didn’t commit.

Instead it seems to worry that courtroom scenes and other legal procedures are inherently boring, whereas cloying childhood flashbacks are not. Lest it seem too arty for the less educated stock of working-class heartlanders whose lives it surveys, “Conviction” treats the Waters’ sibling bond, and the ordeals it endured, with a too heavy hand. It all adds up to a discomfiting leadenness — not the kind that feels like a lump in the throat or a weight in the stomach, alas, but rather the kind that results from too-familiar narrative tedium. Of course it’s the filmmakers’ prerogative to have a point of view on their material, but theirs is too protective, too packaged. At worst, that seems patronizing; at best, it lacks a certain courage of conviction.

 

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Moon

June 29, 2009

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“My upbringing was pretty weird,” says David Bowie’s son. I know: You’re thinking, No WAY. But sure enough–or so Duncan Jones, the artist formerly known as Zowie Bowie, told the New York Times a few weeks ago.

Jones was recalling the formative years during which his father introduced him to the likes of George Orwell, J.G. Ballard and Philip K. Dick, and let him hang around the set on movies such as Labyrinth. Now Jones has made his own film, the dauntingly pedigreed but quite self-sufficiently entertaining Moon.

Sam Rockwell stars as a near-future moon base laborer who for three years has, by himself, mined the lunar soil’s rich supply of Helium 3, with which his far-flung administrative overseer claims to be solving Earth’s energy crisis. But those claims are dubious. The plan involves converting the element into its gaseous form and compelling most of the human race to inhale it regularly so they all talk funny, forget their troubles, relax the pace of industrial development and therefore use less energy.

No, not really. But I almost had you for a minute there, didn’t I? The truth is that I’m stalling, because it’s hard to discuss Moon in detail without giving the real plot away, and the real plot is best discovered by the audience as it’s discovered by the protagonist: gradually, and with a piquant combination of good humor and dread. Of course this plot–developed by Jones with screenwriter Nathan Parker–is also pretty ridiculous. But it’s still less ridiculous than you might expect from a movie by a guy who grew up reading Orwell and Ballard and Dick and watching David Bowie work on the set of Labyrinth.

Let’s just say that Moon takes place on the mysterious frontier between space madness and corporate malfeasance. And it most certainly could have happened someplace else. Hell, our hero might just as soon be mining borax in the high desert of northern Nevada. The important thing is the quiet, airless brutality of the landscape in which he toils, the sense of distance from civilization and from loved ones. The especially important thing is that he’s alone. That way, when a very unlikely visitor arrives and turns out to be very unpleasant company, you’ll be as freaked out as he is.

In recent years, Rockwell has been building a fine body of work by wondering how men live with themselves, and Moon is all about that. There’s potential for much actorly gimmickry in this role, but his performance never descends; it’s a tour de force. It’s the entirety of the movie, yet also somehow simply one of several essential parts.

Such is Moon’s wily charm. It amounts to an assembly of nice touches–like Clint Mansell’s driving score, or the deliberate tactility of the production design, or the obligatory omnipresent talking computer being voiced by Kevin Spacey, whose performances always seem like facsimiles of humanness anyway. (That the computer looks like some contraption from your dentist’s office, and also expresses itself through crude variations on the smiley-face emoticon, only heightens the amusing/unsettling effect.)

As a throwback to the unabashedly philosophical, pre-CGI science fiction of decades past, the assembly works: Moon is a small movie of big ideas. Jones may have inherited some of his father’s spaced-out sophistication, but his film’s real achievement is remaining so down to earth.

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Frost/Nixon

December 9, 2008

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Without Frost/Nixon, if he’d given us only the goofy Obama endorsement that surfaced on Funny or Die just before the election, Ron Howard would be well advised to stay away from political filmmaking.

In that brief, affectedly self-effacing video, Howard addresses his audience directly, declaring his support for the candidate and, in what he calls a demonstration of sincerity, outfitting himself (complete with wig) as the characters he grew up playing on television. He enlists Andy Griffith and Henry Winkler, reprising their respective roles as sheriff Andy Taylor and the Fonz, for a pair of clunky little skits in which the characters discuss America’s future. Then Howard tells us: “We haven’t done those characters in decades. But the three of us agree that with Barack Obama, we Americans have a rare opportunity to elect an extraordinary president.”

And the connection is…what, exactly?

Still, look who walked away with the presidency. Howard must have been on to something, right? Of this, happily, his new movie offers a more coherent example. It’s important to point out that, although well timed to coincide with the departure from office of the often-Nixon-equated George W. Bush, Frost/Nixon’s prognosis for America ultimately has more to do with growing up on television than with politics. But that’s why Howard seems right for the job of directing it.  

Adapted by Peter Morgan from his own 2006 play, Frost/Nixon dramatizes the origin and accomplishment of the now-forgotten but then-momentous 1977 TV interviews–spanning six broadcast hours in total–between British talk-show host David Frost and a post-Watergate but still very tricky Dick. Michael Sheen and Frank Langella reprise their roles from the award-laden stage version (a hit first in London and then on Broadway), and so it should be; the casting is definitive.

Sheen, so memorably exact as Tony Blair in The Queen (another Morgan script), brings Frost alive more loosely, with a palpable combination of playboy cockiness and vulnerable status anxiety–as befits a ratings-sensitive, reasonably famous media personality who’s not taken seriously as a journalist and not entirely sure he wants to be. He bares his toothy grin as both weapon and shield at once; it’s no wonder at all that Tim Burton has cast Sheen as the Cheshire Cat in the forthcoming film of Alice in Wonderland.

Langella is of course not the first and probably won’t be the last actor to portray the disgraced 37th president on the big screen, but his owership of the role–crass and charming, sonorous and lumbering, venomous and self-loathing–is total. This is so much more than merely an impersonation, and so completely consistent, that every once in a while it becomes hard to remember what the real Nixon looked like.

Through separate actual on-air occasions, Howard introduces the adversaries obliquely, watching from behind as handlers prep them for broadcast. It’s as if both Nixon and Frost are not real to us until they’re camera-ready. Otherwise, the director generally has the good sense to get out of his actors’ way.

Frost/Nixon is inherently reductive–the actual interviews recorded nearly 29 hours worth of material–and its dramatic stakes are accordingly simple. As Nixon puts it, both he and Frost want a way back to the “winner’s podium,” and they both know that when their contest has ended, “the limelight can only shine on one of us.” Each man, in other words, seeks the ultimate comeback–redemption as defined by the public perception of legitimacy.

The duelists have their seconds–and thirds and fourths and so on. Kevin Bacon gamely plays Nixon’s loyal, tough-but-wounded military aide, Marine Colonel Jack Brennan, and Toby Jones is the president’s peculiar, homuncular agent, Swifty Lazar, who compels Frost to cough up $600,000 for the privilege of the interview (even in spite of TV networks unwilling to countenance “checkbook journalism”). Oliver Platt, Matthew Macfadyen and Sam Rockwell round out team Frost, whose shared goal is the telegenic satisfaction of scoring the apology America never got.

Not unlike Howard’s foray into online political PSA, Frost/Nixon has something of a so-what factor. It seems like an exercise mostly for its own sake. But there is also a sense of security with its own limitations. To Howard, understandably, it’s an enduring fascination: Nixon on TV = unhappy days. 

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Choke

September 17, 2008

One thing that may not have occurred to you about the Heimlich Maneuver is that, during a crisis of survival, it is at the very least a reliable way of being held. That’s how Victor Mancini (Sam Rockwell) sees it, anyway. And just because Victor is a fatherless, sex-addicted med-school dropout who solicits bankable pity from diners at upscale restaurants by pretending to let them rescue him from choking doesn’t mean he’s wrong.

He uses that pity money to keep his demented mother (Anjelica Huston) cared for in a Catholic nursing home, whose staff Victor beds, or wants to (yes, he even imagines nuns nude), and whose patients’ own confused traumatic memories he indulges. It’s sweet, the way he gives them closure, says the young lady (Kelly Macdonald) who appears to be his mother’s most attentive attending physician. You can bet Victor wants to get with her too.

Anyway, Victor’s best pal by default is his fellow addict and roommate Denny (Brad William Henke), the kind of guy who woos a stripper by sketching her portrait and who can’t resist pleasuring himself to an old photo of Victor’s mom. When Victor does manage to get himself to support-group meetings, it’s mostly just to screw his sponsee on the bathroom floor. You think that’s bad? It gets worse: He has a day job as a professional reenactor of Colonial American history. What kind of sick bastard is this guy?

The kind who springs forth from the affectedly depraved comedic stylings of novelist Chuck Palahniuk, who sees right through the polite veneer of our fucked up world and believes in the redemptive power of adolescent spitefulness posing as sociopathy. Naturally. When director David Fincher made a film and a sensation of his novel Fight Club in 1999, Palahniuk just about became a household name, albeit not an easy one to pronounce, and the movie version of Choke, adapted by actor Clark Gregg for his directorial debut, has been highly anticipated ever since.

The self-described cultists can talk amongst themselves about this movie’s omissions and distortions of its source, but there’s no question of its basic fidelity to Palahniuk’s pet themes–particularly that memory and imagination, especially where trauma is concerned, are subjective and selective.

Thus, as in Fight Club, just when a significant plot turn starts to seem bogus, along comes an unexpected twist to explain and justify it–unexpected, that is, because the twist itself is so bogus, so obvious, that you never thought the story actually would go through with it. Well, sure enough. Obviously all of this is hard to discuss without giving anything away; suffice to say the plot turn in question actually is not the one involving Jesus’ foreskin.

Otherwise, with Huston doing the familiarly dodgy yet deep-feeling matriarch routine and Rockwell reading Victor’s mix of self-loathing and self-congratulation with a leisurely bemusement that makes him sound like a lost Wilson brother, some viewers may be left wondering what kind of unequivocal breakthrough or failure Choke would’ve been had Wes Anderson directed it.

Gregg, for his part (and he plays a part, too, as Victor’s priggish, Colonialese-spouting boss and unlikely romantic rival), does OK. Maybe he’ll lose points for lacking Fincher’s slickly overwrought style, but that works to the movie’s advantage. It’s a credit to Gregg’s discretion that Victor’s (mercifully few) choking scenes play out with more discomfiting intimacy than his drolly cynical sex scenes. 

But to call yourself a true fan of rebelliously anti-mainstream transgressive solipsism, track down Caveh Zahedi’s I Am a Sex Addict for a proper Choke chaser. 

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