Wilmington On Movies - October 3, 2008

Body of Lies
plus reviews of City of Ember, Flash of Genius, and The Express
Plus Quick Hits On This Week's DVDs

There’s a lot of potential in the one of the script’s ideas: the juxtaposition of Ferris and Hoffman‘s modern technological world and the low-tech, deliberately primitive methods of the terrorists, who don‘t even use cell phones. But Body of Lies gets outrageously corny -- thanks to a romance-kidnapping-lovey-dovey plot with Aisha, but also thanks to a premise I found insanely unconvincing: Ferris’ devious scheme to draw Al Saleem out by manufacturing a phony terrorist leader with the aid of a computer geek and phony terrorist attacks. (Tennent dug this? Is it really plausible CIA tactics? No wonder Iraq takes forever.) Yet Scott and Monahan make the film zip by so fast that you can almost accept the crazy scheme, even though ultimately it’s as nutty as the Bush Doctrine -- and the movie never really recovers from it.

Thanks to its high-talent pro lineup, Body of Lies passes the time well, even if it doesn’t necessarily enrich it. The actors keep pumping sarcasm and professionalism into the movie, DiCaprio makes us believe for a while in his Spy Who Came in From the Hot character, and Scott (with a new cinematographer, Alexander Witt) makes the spy games look incandescent -- even if he and Monahan can‘t fully sell this particular body of lies.

City of Ember (Three Stars)
U.S.; Gil Kenan

City of Ember is a children’s science fiction fantasy about social and technological collapse, and the possible end of the world -- and it turns out that modern movie children‘s fantasy is a good movie genre to address these grim, terrifying and increasingly plausible scenarios.

Director Gil Kenan (Monster House), writer Caroline Thompson (Edward Scissorhands), original author Jeanne Duprau and production designer Martin Laing (who deserves special praise), here concoct a futuristic, falling-apart world, where, as in Terry Gilliam’s Brazil, society seems to have gone into reverse. The outer surface of the planet has become inhabitable and humanity has fled into a deep underground city, called Ember, in which all light comes from an increasingly failing and sputtering electrical system, food is running out and the so-called government is run by a fat, duplicitous mayor named Cole (played by Bill Murray, looking like a bloated Bush) and his evil henchman Barton Snode (Toby Jones, looking like a tinier Karl Rove).

The key to the problem lies in a mysterious box that had been passed from Mayor to Mayor since the downward exodus, that was lost decades ago (when a Mayor unexpectedly died) and now falls into the hands of two recently graduated kids: Saoirse Ronan (the little liar of Atonement) as Lina, a messenger (there are no phones in Ember) and Harry Treadaway as Doon Harrow, a pipe worker, who toils down in the rotting sub-“Metropolis” network of pipes and generators beside the aged worker Sol (Martin Landau).

Doon and Lina are our hero and heroine, and when they open the box and start to decipher its messages, they become dangerous rebels in the eyes of the Cole establishment, and the film becomes a series of breathless chases through the gloriously decaying city -- called Ember, because it’s almost in ashes -- that Laing and company have designed.

City of Ember is probably the best new mass-audience movie out this week; indeed, it’s such a literate, artistic, well-mounted job, that it reminds you how good movie adaptations of fantasy adventure, children‘s bestsellers and classics have become. (Would that more adult classics and non-fantasies were treated as well.) I’d rate it higher, in fact, except for a puzzling letdown I felt at the end, which should have been a big, soaring scene. What’s wrong? I‘m not sure. (Maybe it‘s me.) ,

But anyway, Ronan and Treadaway are a beguiling pair. Landau, Jones, Tim Robbins, Marianne Jean-Baptiste, and Mary Kay Place are wonderfully dysfunctional adults. And Bill Murray is as fine a pig of a politician as ever oinked his way though a movie.

Flash of Genius (Three Stars)
U.S.; Marc Abraham

Flash of Genius offers us a great story, rather conventionally told -- but in this case, I think the importance and suggestiveness of the tale trumps the bland telling. Based on John Seabrook’s New Yorker article, the movie‘s script details the 13-year court battle of teacher/inventor Robert Kearns (played with humble skillfulness by Greg Kinnear) to gain recognition for his patented invention, intermittent windshield wipers, which he conceived in a “flash of genius” (wipers should work like blinking eyelids!) and brought to the Ford Motor Company -- and which Ford executives first accepted, then dropped, and later stole and claimed for their own.

Apparently it was all in the day’s work for these sleazy execs. They simply broke off negotiations with Kearns, put out the product without telling him, threw him out of a showroom when he discovered the truth, and threw their high-priced battery of lawyers and mean-as-hell legal hardcases at him when he took them to court. Fighting back was no easy task for Kearns; along the way, he lost his wife, Phyllis (Lauren Graham), his family, his job, his reputation, and the lawyers who, years before the finish, brokered him a small settlement. (That group includes Alan Alda as exasperated legal-eagle Greg Lawson, the movie‘s best and most indelible performance.)

Against these constant travails and the offhandedly brutal display of smug corporate power, Kearns acts as his own lawyer -- and one of the movie‘s decidedly unguilty pleasures is watching him face off Ford‘s shrewd, suave, tricky lawyers in court, in scenes that apparently come from the record.

Kinnear and the movie don’t play for easy sympathy. Their Kearns is an obsessed, driven, often maddening man -- but the movie shows that he almost has to be, in order to keep pursuing this seemingly endless case. To dismiss either the film or Kearns as boring or unsympathetic is, in a way, to play the corporate cutie-pie game that deprived the real-life Kearns of his rights. And it’s somewhat wrong to compare this movie to other David-and-Goliath movies, because the strength of Flash of Genius lies in the facts. Producer-turned-director Marc Abraham worked on the movie for years, and he should be praised and thanked for his first directorial feature, simply for forcing the project to completion.

To me, it’s an important story. Here's why. When I was a pre-schooler, I watched my mother, Edna Wilmington, spend happy days in our basement apartment in Chicago designing and executing some beautiful little finger puppets that she wanted to sell to a shredded wheat cereal company to pack with the partitions in their boxes. A wonderful painter, sculptor and cum laude master of arts graduate from the University of Wisconsin, she brought her idea and her lovely designs -- which included a fairytale Alice in Wonderland and a cute little African native boy -- to Nabisco, and talked to an enthusiastic representative about making them for the Shredded Wheat cereal biscuit boxes.

She never heard from him again. Months later, we were walking through the grocery store, when we noticed new packages of Nabisco Shredded Wheat that contained little finger puppets -- not her delightful designs, but a slick, vapid, very ordinary-looking little cowboy. Upset, she went to her original contact. He greeted her smiling, apparently under the delusion that the bosses had called her and that the puppets in the boxes were hers. When she told him what had happened, she says now, he turned “pale and ashen.” My mother was a working single parent, with no child support from my father, and she couldn‘t hire a lawyer, like Kearns, or spend years of her life sacrificing everything to battle the people who stole her idea and then lacked the guts, decency or manhood to recompense or even inform her. She was crushed.

So I don’t think the story of Kearns, with its greater financial implications, is boring or unimportant. Even if Abraham is, right now, a stronger producer than director, both he and his “unlikable” subject deserve all credit and praise for sticking to their guns.

The Express (Three Stars)
U.S.; Gary Fleder

If you’re looking for exactly the right subject for a genuinely inspirational and moving true-life sports movie, you can‘t do much better than the tale of storied Syracuse University running back Ernie Davis -- whose short, spectacular life and amazing football achievements provide the basis for the exciting, sometimes deeply touching new picture, The Express. When Davis was at Syracuse, my own interest in sports -- both playing and later writing about them -- was at its peak and this movie, which stars Rob Brown as Davis and Dennis Quaid as his famed coach, Ben Schwartzalder, would have knocked me out back then. It’s not perfect, either at recalling the facts or seamlessly heightening the drama. But, for all the feeling and action it generates, this movie gets to you. It lives up to its subject.

Following Davis from his hardscrabble working class Pennsylvania schoolboy days, and, very briefly through an incredible high school career -- during which Davis won four baseball letters and three all-conference citations for basketball in addition to his football exploits -- The Express mostly showcases the fleet, explosive runner’s barrier-smashing career at Syracuse. There, despite following another legendary Syracuse running back, the great Jim Brown, and despite a troubling backdrop of late-‘50's racism in the college football world and clashes with the hard-as-nails Southerner Schwartzalder, Davis eventually helped take a national championship as a sophomore; that year he was dubbed “The Elmira Express” by an Elmira sportswriter after the game against the University of Pittsburgh.

He also won two all-American berths, and in 1961, was named college football’s first black Heisman Trophy winner. The movie, mostly rivetingly, recaps that career. And it finishes, very emotionally, with the heartbreaking close to Davis’ story -- his unexpected fate after being drafted by Cleveland Browns owner Art Modell (Saul Rubinek) for a dream backfield with Brown (played by look-alike Darren DeWitt Henson) that had already inspired the flashy nickname “The Boys from Syracuse.”

The Express gets the human side of the drama: the ways Davis, a low-key type whose quiet generosity was a contrast to his more rebellious predecessor/mentor Brown -- coped with lingering ‘50s racism and the still-defiant old Deep South mores of some opponents, prejudices fully on display in the movie’s heart-pumping recreation of Davis’ great performance, before a vicious crowd, at the 1959 national championship game against Texas at the Cotton Bowl. This set-piece, set in Dallas, but shot mostly in Chicago, is the movie‘s knockout highlight -- both as social drama and as football action.

Though the story has been fictionalized a bit, the filmmaking team -- which includes producer John Davis (The Firm), director Gary Fleder (Runaway Jury), and writer Charles Leavitt (Blood Diamond) have done their homework and, in most cases, really delivered the goods. If you‘re any kind of sports fan, and you aren’t thrilled or moved on some level -- especially by Davis’ grace under pressure at Dallas and the contentious but deeply respectful relationship Rob Brown and Quaid show between the warm-hearted Davis and the spiky-tough Schwartzalder, you may have too punctilious expectations or a heart of stone.

The rest of the cast, notably Omar Benson Miller (the cheerful giant in Spike Lee’s Miracle at St. Anna) as Davis’ teammate/buddy Jack Buckley, Charles S. Dutton as his believably nurturing grandpa “Pops,” and Sarah Ward as his radiant fianceé Nicole, shine as well. All the football scenes, cast and staged by second unit director Allan Graf (who did similar duty on Any Given Sunday and Friday Night Lights) have a bone-crushing, pulse-racing veracity, which reaches its peak in the Cotton Bowl sequence.
Major sports fans should have a field day at The Express, but so should many non-football enthusiasts. It’s a great story, on or off the gridiron -- and I only wish I‘d seen it in my teens, when sports meant as much to me as movies.

The Duchess (Two Stars)
U.K.; Saul Dibb

In The Duchess, which I liked far less than I was supposed to, Keira Knightley plays Georgiana Spencer, the Duchess of Devonshire, Princess Di’s ancestor. According to the movie (and Amanda Foreman‘s recent biography, on which the screenplay was based), Georgiana was a London cultural and fashion icon, a political progressive and a tragic figure, victimized (like Di) by a loveless husband (Ralph Fiennes glowers expressively as the Duke), by his not-so-secret mistress (Hayley Atwell) and by the chains of aristocracy and propriety -- but without a mass modern tabloid press to trumpet her story.

This movie tries to fill that gap, but it's both too proper and too romance-novel-ish to succeed. Despite a good cast (Charlotte Rampling is Georgiana’s mother) and plush settings, it left me cold. And Dominic Cooper as Georgiana’s lover Charles Grey, didn’t move me much either; the real Charles Gray, in “Rocky Horror” drag, might have been more convincing. It must have seemed like a good idea, but this Georgiana struck me as a dubious heroine, victim and progressive -- deficient in almost everything but beauty and charisma.

Anita O'Day: The Life of a Jazz Singer (Four Stars)
U.S.; Robbie Cavolina, Ian McCrudden

Anita O’Day was a white jazz singer whom almost all the experts rank with Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday and Sarah Vaughn. She was also a plucky, often unlucky adventuress who led a real jazz life -- a biography, improvised and dangerous, that included hard times and years as a heroin addict, thanks to her junkie drummer-consort.

This superb documentary, successful on every level, brings us both the music and the woman, the song and the singer, from her early big band days with Gene Krupa (“Drum Boogie”) and Stan Kenton (“And Her Tears Flowed Like Wine”), to her still active octogenarian years -- with plenty of classic O’Day performances and testimony from a gallery of experts. There’s an unforgettable high point: Anita at the 1957 Newport Jazz Festival, in her summery straw hat and Vogue charmer outfit, delivering her knockout, completely untraditional rendition of “Sweet Georgia Brown.” You listen. You watch. All you can say is “Wow!” (By the way, I hope the eventual home video packagers of this instant classic don’t miss a trick and include a well-packed Anita CD with their eventual DVD.)

Max Ophuls’ Lola Montes is a movie romance par excellence, one of the most visually sumptuous of all the great European film classics. It’s almost swooningly beautiful, a nearly peerless example of its seductive genre: literate dramas about love affairs in elegant surroundings with sophisticated dialogue and first class, beautiful actors -- in this case Anton Walbrook, Peter Ustinov, Oskar Werner, Ivan Desny, and, as Lola, Martine Carol, the reigning French-movie sex-kitten goddess of the age (though she was just about to be replaced by Brigitte Bardot).

Adapted by Ophuls, Jacques Natanson and others, from the real-life history of the legendary dancer-courtesan and the book by Cecil St. Laurent, shot in color and Cinemascope by master cinematographer Christian Matras (Grand Illusion) in settings of incredible theatrical plushness, this film makes for nearly intoxicating entertainment. Released in 1955, two years before Ophuls’ death, it’s one of the most gorgeous and heartbreaking examples of its type -- even though the central title character, the irresistible dancer and scandalous inamorata Lola Montes (as played by Carol)-- is hard to love, or even at times to like; and though instead of just one great amour, we see her engaging in numerous affairs and liaisons all across Europe, an irresistible seductress of the elite of music, art and government.

Finally, in the film’s brilliant framing story, we see Lola peddling her lovers for the price of a ticket in an American circus, guided by an urbane and cynical ringmaster (played unforgettably by Ustinov) who endangers his star’s failing health by demanding that she perform perilous stunts -- and yet adores her as much as all her other stunned admirers (or so he says).

Lola Montes was once described by Andrew Sarris as the greatest film of all time. Well, not quite. (Andy later switched top honors to Ophuls‘ The Earrings of Madame de…) Personally, I wouldn’t rank Lola above Citizen Kane, The Rules of the Game, Vertigo, Singin‘ in the Rain, The Searchers, Seven Samurai, Fanny and Alexander and a number of others. But it belongs among them. And so does Ophuls‘Unknown Woman and his other French masterpieces La Ronde and The Earrings of Madame de…

No other film, though, is quite like Lola Montes. Few are so mesmerizing beautiful and well-made. It is a movie that is just not watched enough, even by the aficionados who should be its greatest champions. Yet, Like Kane and The Rules of the Game, it’s also a movie that can be seen over and over again without losing any of its poetry and its passion. As we enter the world of Ophuls’ movie, take our seats in the sawdust and tinsel, and watch the ringmaster tell us the life of Lola the danseuse, a whole world begins to dance before our eyes. Lola Montes is being re-released this week by Rialto.