Posts Tagged ‘Toby Jones’

The Hunger Games

March 22, 2012

Odds are, by the time you read this, you’ll already have seen it. Possibly more than once. So let’s discuss. How about those Hunger Games, huh?! Speaking of odds, let’s speak of odds, as they often do in “The Hunger Games.” “May the odds be ever in your favor,” they say. Of course, if you’re playing, the odds are never in your favor. They’re at least 23 to 1 that you’ll die. Murder, starvation, exposure — options do abound; it’s just that none of them actually are favorable. The only way to win is to live. And to be sure nobody else does.

But you knew this. You knew this is what happens when pairs of adolescents from a dozen districts of some future former America annually are chosen by lottery for a woodsy death match on live TV, as has been going on for nearly three quarters of a century now. You knew because you’ve read the first book of Suzanne Collins’ bestselling young adult sci-fi trilogy, and you’ve readied yourself for the movie.

The best part of which is Jennifer Lawrence as its heroine, a coal miner’s daughter from District 12, where the fashion tends toward migrant-mother chic and folks glumly congregate like movie Jews en route to concentration camps — setting them starkly apart from those foppish capital-city richies who sanction the mandatory bloodsport (and, what’s more insidious, the mandatory viewing thereof) as some twisted pillar of a decadent glam couture. Boilerplate dystopia plot aside — and the script, by Collins, Billy Ray, and director Gary Ross, has its own battles to fight against pseudo-suspense and other bloating filler — the least guilty pleasure of “The Hunger Games” is seeing Lawrence go so agilely through a progress of contexts in which she stands out.

Here, given her character’s particulars — variously absent parents, little sister to look after, brutal quest to endure, woods — you may even have noticed with a peculiar frisson that what you’re watching is basically “Winter’s Bone” reconfigured as an overproduced blockbuster. Still it’s a great relief to find Lawrence not playing just another scantily clad ass-kicker, nor a wispy nonentity torn between mythical monster men. (Although yes, she is quite the archer, and yes, a love triangle does take shape, with Josh Hutcherson as her closest opponent and Liam Hemsworth as her brooding back-home pal). Contrasting peripheral not-quite-characters played with brightly costumed monotony by Elizabeth Banks, Woody Harrelson, Wes Bentley, Toby Jones, Stanley Tucci, Lenny Kravitz, and Donald Sutherland, Lawrence brings a steady presence and enough unabashed vulnerability to plausibly survive the flamboyant savagery at hand. This is partly a parable of show business, after all.

Reportedly inspired by Collins’ experience of flipping channels between war coverage and reality TV, it all seems appropriately more mind-numbing than groundbreaking or actively satirical. And there’s an unfortunate sense of money having been siphoned from the special-effects budget into the marketing budget. But fair enough: As you certainly know, it is important for young people to be made aware of the pop-cultural touchstones about which it is their birthright to feel possessive. Daunted neither by its provenance in Collins’ beloved books nor by the precedents of its many similar on-screen ancestors, the movie of “The Hunger Games” defies the odds by not bothering itself about them. And isn’t that just the sort of fighting spirit you like to see?

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Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy

January 4, 2012

His name is George Smiley, and he works for the Circus. It’s less fun than it sounds. The time is the early 1970s, the place is London, and the color is brown — or it was once, until being leeched into a sort of gloomy beige-gray. The Circus is what Smiley (Gary Oldman) and his colleagues (including David Dencik, Colin Firth, Ciarán Hinds, and Toby Jones) call the British Secret Intelligence Service, within whose upper ranks somewhere lurks a suspected Soviet double agent.

This won’t do for Smiley’s boss (John Hurt), who is called Control, and who dispatches one agent (Mark Strong) for a quick peek behind the Iron Curtain. When that doesn’t go well, Control and Smiley both find themselves nudged into retirement. Soon enough, however, Control has expired, and a strange little toast-munching government functionary (Simon McBurney) wants to put Smiley back to work. There is still the matter of the mole. A rogue agent (Tom Hardy) has resurfaced with a new lead on that front, and Smiley enlists a young assistant (Benedict Cumberbatch) to do some spying on his fellow spies. Others become involved, if only obliquely. It’s safe to say there isn’t a lot of trust going around. All the while our conspicuously bespectacled Smiley, peering through reflections, refractions and retrospections, doesn’t say much. He makes a weapon of watchful silence.

This should sound familiar. Before “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy” was a movie by the Swedish director Tomas Alfredson, who last made “Let the Right One In,” it was a 1979 BBC miniseries, and before that a 1974 John le Carré novel. Alfredson and screenwriters Bridget O’Connor and Peter Straughan had a lot to live up to. So did Oldman; Smiley in the miniseries was played, perfectly, by Alec Guinness. But Oldman the impassive beholder is quite something to behold. Facing down not just the ghost of Guinness but also his own huge presence, he now, somehow, makes nothing look like everything.

The miniseries stretched itself out for more than five hours. The movie, a bracing distillation, is rigorously concise. On purpose its pace feels thick and slow, but in fact what’s happening here is a succession of almost brutally economical scenes, some of them reduced to the presentation of a single detail. With all this setup and scenery sliding by — rather beautifully, thanks in particular to Hoyte Van Hoytema’s cinematography, Maria Djurkovic’s production design, and the modernist open voicings of Alberto Iglesias’ score — we’re left just about baffled. To mitigate any anxiety about not quite knowing what the hell is happening, we focus on the ostensibly pressing dramatic question. Could the mole be that one guy who’s played by an unfamiliar actor and really doesn’t seem to be doing much here at all? Or that other guy who’s played by that much better known actor who won an Oscar last year? Or maybe it’s the officious guy with the beady eyes? Wait, are we even sure it’s any of these guys?

There’s no time to fully delineate the men, but the film makes a good show of playing that potential deficit to its own advantage. At first we’re only able to gather that they’re all nonentities, as is part and parcel of the spy trade, and that they’re all suspects. Then, as Smiley’s investigation swells, every possible outcome seems too obvious, and we sink into a mild malaise of anticipating anticlimax. Accordingly, the reveal finally comes…and goes.

It’s not just mistrust that lingers in the air here, it’s resignation. Hence the visual equivalence of drab bureaucracy between Smiley’s London and the entirety of the Eastern Bloc. This is not by accident; it informs the whole moral framework. The great challenge for Alfredson is to make weary cynicism feel lively. But he is a practiced specialist of sly tension and playing against sensationalism. As his improbably revitalizing vampire movie of a few years ago already proved, he knows how to find the ghoulish in the everyday; here he has the actor who once went way over the top as Dracula now subdued nearly into oblivion. “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy” isn’t so much a throwback thriller as a cautionary tale about the soul-sucking espionage machine — immortal, apparently, yet dead inside.

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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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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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Infamous

August 12, 2006

People will be asking why the world needs another Truman Capote movie. OK, fair enough; timing has fated Infamous as a tough sell. But shouldn’t they be asking instead why the world needs, for just one example, another Jackass movie? Hey, maybe there’s a connection—something about ignorance of the cautionary Capote tale enabling a culture so sociopathically hungry for fame that all it creates are procedural chronicles of that rutting, self-degrading compulsion?

Blah, blah, right? Well, the good news is that Infamous wouldn’t dare affect a tone so archly allegorical. And that sets it apart from Capote right there. Not that it should be this movie’s duty to live down the piety and chilly rigor of its commendable predecessor, but Infamous’ looser, less reflexively sermonizing stance makes a real difference. It affords its protagonist safe passage from voracious self-centeredness into naked self-awareness and affords us an opportunity to adore the man and reproach him at the same time. Chalk that up to the world wisdom of writer-director Douglas McGrath (working from George Plimpton’s book). McGrath knew, regardless of any precedent, that for his movie to work as a human tragedy, foremost it would need humanity.

And because the tale’s essence is indeed a tragedy, it absolutely should be fair game for multiple stagings. So, yes, the two films cover the same ground, but that’s because it is the important stuff: how, in 1959, the author left his highly pampered haute-couture Manhattan nest for rural Kansas to write a “nonfiction novel” about two men who murdered an entire family there. How he won the community’s trust, and the killers’, and then arguably betrayed it. How he required many years to finish the book, partly because he had to wait for the men to hang in order to have an ending. How, in the meantime, he fell in love with one of them. And how the whole experience left him shattered.

Where Capote had unimpeachable credentials, Infamous has unexpected delights. Take the opening, which probably makes better, more efficient use of Gwyneth Paltrow than any other movie ever has. Her short, sharp turn as a nightclub singer who breaks down mid-song launches the movie and confers its priorities beautifully. After that act of good faith, why not accept Sandra Bullock as Harper Lee? As it turns out, she’s quietly terrific. Most of the supporting actors are.

Truman is taken up here by the excellent, appropriately pug-faced English actor Toby Jones. You won’t need to know who he is; just recognize that in Capote, you thought, “Wow, that’s Philip Seymour Hoffman.” In this one, it’s, “Wow, that’s Truman Capote.”

Really, though, the more important Infamous performance comes from Daniel Craig—that is, more important to the structure and meaning of this film and possibly more important to Craig’s career even than his inheritance of James Bond.

Here, as the murderer Perry Smith, he’s a man with a strong sense of himself, discovering that his sense isn’t complete. The revelation comes in fits of fury and need. Without telegraphing it, Craig makes clear the significance of Perry and Truman’s prison-visit transactions—which, though not ever innocent of mutual exploitation, nonetheless contain many mutual blessings. It’s a riveting, deeply unsettling courtship.

Of course, it should be Perry who delivers the truly perceptive literary criticism: “I thought the writing lacked kindness,” he tells Truman in a letter, cutting the maestro’s inflated ego to its quick. That matters, and McGrath is right to track it. When Truman gets fussy over his opus-in-progress—he wants it to be dazzling, he says, “like a Faberge egg”—the movie recognizes something essential and takes the trouble of dramatizing his efforts toward that end. McGrath moves the action around to Truman trying out lines of prose anecdotally on his society friends, revising for impact, relinquishing any fidelity to the facts.

It’s the only absolute betrayal in the movie, and the most costly, but McGrath isn’t wrong to treat it so breezily. That’s his way of respecting your intelligence, saying he knows you’ve already seen the other picture and thanks for seeing this one anyway. Mostly, though, it’s his way of saluting the homespun wisdom Truman gathers from a Kansas farmer—only, tragically, to ignore it: “We’re in control,” the man says, “until we’re not.”

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