Wilmington On Movies - February 4, 2010

Dear John (Two and a Half Stars)
U.S.; Lasse Hallstrom, 2010

Nicholas Sparks novels have been made into some of the sappiest, most ostentatiously glamorous star-crossed-lovers-obsessed movie romances ever -- including Nights of Rodanthe and the absurd Message in a Bottle -- and this Jamie Linden script of another Sparkschmaltzfest is really no better, even though director Lasse Hallstrom makes it look good, and Channing Tatum and Amanda Seyfried are a powerfully attractive young star couple.

But the story -- Tatum’s somber hunk John Tyree and Seyfried’s winsome blond cutie Savannah Curtis meet on the beach and fall in love on the Carolina coast in two breathless weeks, then are separated for years while John fulfills his armed forces commitments in the world crisis after 9/11 -- is as phony as they come.

A “Dear John” letter is what World War II soldiers used to receive from their sweethearts, dumping them for somebody stateside. That’s what John gets here, after he decides, following the half-month of heaven, that he really has to serve one last year, which becomes two, which keeps mushrooming -- until I could feel the audience silently screaming “Enough! Make some phone calls!“ (Talk about snail mail. Throwing another message in another bottle would have been quicker.)

None of this made sense to me, even though I’ve gotten a Dear Mike episode or two myself. And I wasn’t even moved, except for one moment, by the strenuous efforts of the stalwart Richard Jenkins as John’s emotionally wounded, coin-collecting dad, not even when Jenkins worked so hard to convey all the pain of watching a loved parent die in a hospital -- something I’ve also experienced. Swede Hallstrom is a gifted, compassionate filmmaker, My Life as a Dog is one of the great modern post-1980 family films and he shouldn’t get stuck with stuff like this. Couldn’t the producers have given him a break and sent him a “Dear Lasse” letter instead? I’d like to see Michael Bay and Hasbro take a shot at Sparks. (That one might make you weep more than Wall-E.)

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Crazy Heart (Four Stars)
U.S. Scott Cooper, 2009

Why is Crazy Heart such a heart-crusher?

Well, for me, the trio of Helen Mirren in The Last Station, Yolande Moreau in Seraphine and Meryl Streep in Julie and Julia topped the actress honor lists for 2009’s movies.

But no U. S. male movie actor at all was better this year than the always excellent but usually under-awarded Jeff Bridges, in a role -- a fading, self-destructive alcoholic country and western star named Bad Blake -- once intended for Waylon Jennings.   Bridges' fellow cast members -- Maggie Gyllenhaal as a single mother and reporter who becomes maybe his last ladylove, Robert Duvall as an aging ally and Colin Farrell as a young country phenom once in Blake’s band -- are all fine too.

But Bridges, who never quite seems to get what he’s earned, was just tremendous. His role, in which he does his own singing, his own playing -- and even fools you into thinking he’s doing his own drinking -- is full of rich opportunities for double-edged feeling, busted love and the sense of human wreckage on the hoof that often splits your heart in a country song, in a stretch of country where Hank Williams‘ “I‘m So Lonesome I Could Cry“ is the national anthem.

If Bridges doesn’t win the Oscar for this, Price Waterhouse should resign. It’d be highway robbery or East Coast snobbery and lots of other things too. Still, maybe the highest award here is just the fact that he got to play Bad -- and played him so well. T-Bone Burnett, none better, wrote the songs and handled the music. “Crazy Heart” is also a fine debut by writer-director Scott Cooper, who made everyone else look so good, he upstaged himself.

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From Paris With Love (Two Stars)

From Paris? With Love?

When we think of Paris and the movies, we think perhaps of the City of Light, the Eiffel Tower, and the Arc de Triomphe. We think of great art in the Louvre, great food and wine in the restaurants, great French cinema in the Cinematheque (Grand Illusion! Children of Paradise! La Ronde! Pierrot le Fou!), of dreamy walks in the Bois du Boulogne, of songs sung by Edith Piaf or played by Django Reinhardt, of Leslie Caron and Gene Kelly dancing blissfully to Gershwin by the Seine. (Oui, oui!) And most of all perhaps, we think of the City of Love.

Not in the new movie, From Paris With Love, though -- however the title may fool us.

Director Pierre Morel’s and producer-writer Luc Besson’s hyper-active new thriller, with John Travolta and Jonathan Rhys Meyers as two American C. I. A. guys on a bloody rampage, gives us something entirely different: the City of Carnage and nonstop ultra-violence, of Chinese coke dealers and Pakistani terrorists, of gunfights in the bistros and rocket launcher battles on the freeways.

Morel’s and Besson’s last movie, the world-wide surprise smash hit “Taken” -- which I thought was exciting but ridiculous -- also presented Paris as if it were some mix of Dodge City, Beirut, and Chicago in the Capone era, with hero Liam Neeson killing bad guys by the dozens. From Paris With Love piles up almost as big a body count. And it’s a comedy! (At least partly.)

L’amour? Toujours? No way, Renee. Morel’s Paris becomes instead a testing ground and training day for would-be C. I. A. agent James Reece, an ambitious, chess-playing aide to the U. S. Ambassador Bennington (Richard Durden, who looks like the dried husk of Lee Marvin), and Travolta’s emergency driver/partner/butt-of-all-jokes. It’s also a murderous arena for Travolta‘s character, Charlie Wax -- and it's Charlie that gives this movie most of its entertainment value, and that once more displays, to the max, Travolta‘s gift for playing psychopaths.

Charlie is a muscular, if somewhat overweight C.I.A. troubleshooter in commando garb, with a black goatee, a chrome-dome bald pate, the acid gab of a very mean radio talk show host, a flair for firing off uzis with both hands, and a seemingly insatiable appetite for drugs, hookers and bloodshed.

He’s no Charles Boyer. But then, Morel’s Paris is no romantic comedy -- though, considering the bad odor left by the recent When in Rome, that may be a blessing.

The main romance we see on screen isn’t between model-slim wannabe hero James (played by Meyers, the Irish-born TV Elvis and Henry VIII in Thac Tudors) and James’s lithe, giggly French girlfriend, Caroline (played by Kasia Smutniak, a fetching ex-model who at first suggests ‘60s French sexpot Francoise Hardy on a joint or two).

Nah. The movie’s prime flirtation is between James and Charlie, who gives his younger buddy a baptism in massacre and a bloody coming of age. Soon, poor James is fully engaged as Charlie’s go-fer chauffeur, forced to carry around a huge vase full of cocaine for what seems half the movie (after Charlie John-Woos it up at a local Chinese restaurant/drug den), and to watch bodies drop down a spiral staircase and bounce on the steps as the Wax-Man above whacks baddies and tosses them away.

And, helas, to keep breaking dates with Caroline. (Non, non!)

Charlie Wax is a compelling, amusingly loony character. He even shares the famous preference of Travolta’s Pulp Fiction guy Vincent Vega for that French Macdonald’s specialite du maison, a “royale with cheese.” But considering the fact that, according to James, Charlie is averaging about a kill an hour on his brief stay, this seems a really dangerous liaison. Besides, Caroline is cuter. Though not by much.

SPOILER

The title From Paris With Love seems intended to suggest James Bond and the C. I. A.-British spy heyday of From Russia With Love -- though Charlie Wax and James Reece are to Bond what The Three Stooges are to Cary Grant. The politics of the movie are a little rough: The moral seems to be "Kill everyone in sight, get that promotion and live happily after with a psychopath." But I suppose even to call this show’s viewpoint political is somewhat flattering it. If some movies are plot-driven and some are character-driven, this one is cojones-driven.

Morel knows how to make a movie move; Paris, With Love flies by in a windstorm of quick-slick street shots and rat-a-tat cutting. But, like Taken, it’ll make you feel took, if you mull over the plot. And the movie‘s ending, with its perverse reverse echoes of Casablanca, is a little queasy-making. It doesn’t look like the beginning of a beautiful friendship to me. Unless James really, really likes royales with cheese.

SPOILER END

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Fish Tank (Three and a Half Stars)
U.K.; Andrea Arnold, 2009

Sometime an amateur actor can embody a role so thoroughly that we seem to watching drama-turned-documentary-and-back-again. Katie Jarvis, the young non-professional; whom Andrea Arnold picked to play the lead in her own second feature film, after Red Road, is a case in point. We seem to be not do much watching her perform, as eavesdropping on her character.

Jarvis plays, or embodies Mia Williams, a young British girl -- 15, foul-mouthed and rebellious -- who lives in the projects with her blonde curvy hell-raiser of a mother, Joanne (Kierston Wareing), her equally foul-mouthed little sister, Sophie (Charlotte Collins) and whatever new boyfriend Joanne is bedding at the moment. In this case, the bloke of choice is Conor (Michael Fassbender of Hunger), a security guard who seems smart and responsible and very nice to Joanne’s daughters, especially Mia.

Too nice? Arnold and Fassbinder keep us guessing. But the possibility always looms -- as Mia rocks around the house in the aggressive hip-hop routines she wants to try out at a local strip parlor dance contest, and as Conor applauds and helps out and encourages her -- encourages a little too much for the quality of the dancing.

Soon, something happens, and then something further happens, more drastic, more dangerous, when Mia, who’s a bit of a psychopath, breaks through the barriers for a chilling try for revenge. This sequence, which we won’t describe (You‘ll know it when you see it) has been damned by some of the film’s more fastidious admirers as melodramatic, though, given Mia‘s personality and background, it’s not all that implausible.

Perhaps only the extreme naturalism of most of the rest of Fish Tank, and its superficial similarity to the work of British naturalists like Ken Loach and Mike Leigh -- often it seems closer to the Lynne Ramsay of Ratcatcher and the Alan Clarke of Scum -- lulls some viewers into too casual a sense of what some fifteen year old girls can be capable of. Certainly actress Jarvis and filmmaker Arnold give us plenty of preparation.

Fish Tank won the Jury Prize at last year’s Cannes Film Festival. It looks as if it deserved it.