Tag Archives: Character

The Place Beyond the Pines is a movie in three parts,
tracking the lives of a doomed loser and a conflicted cop and
contemplating the interlocked fates they pass on to their children.
Fortunately — this being a film that runs two hours and 20 minutes
– there are also propulsive jolts of police corruption, botched
robberies and hair-raising chases. Director Derek Cianfrance’s last
movie, Blue Valentine, was a powerful downbeat chamber
piece; here he’s going for grand sweep, and I think his gift for
mood and structure (he cowrote the script), and his trust in the
talents of some fine actors, lifts the picture above whatever
objections there might be to its deterministic
worldview. ; ; ; ;
The story takes a number of surprising narrative turns and is
packed with intricate character detail, which mustn’t be spoiled.
The movie opens with a five-minute tracking shot in which we meet a
motorcycle daredevil named Luke (Ryan Gosling). The camera surveys
his bare torso, thick with tattoos, and then follows along behind
his blond dye-job as he traverses the midway of the traveling
carnival in which he works. Luke makes a bare-bones living roaring
around inside a big round metal cage with two other bikers, for the
entertainment of onlookers who presumably would be even more
entertained if something went seriously wrong. He’s a guy whose
life isn’t adding up to much, and Gosling, as effortlessly
charismatic as he was in Drive, but to greater purpose,
uses his eloquent stillness to project this man’s unformed yearning
for something more.
Fateful shadows gather. Luke is startled to learn that a woman
named Romina (Eva Mendes), with whom he hooked up on his last pass
through town (we’re in Schenectady, New York), has since given
birth to a baby boy – his son. Uncharacteristically, Luke feels the
pull of paternal connection. But Romina and the baby are
contentedly settled down with a good man named Kofi (Mahershala
Ali, of House of Cards), who owns his own home and has
happily taken on the role of father to Romina’s child. Luke is an
unlikely candidate for solid-citizenship (his tattoo collection has
crept up onto his neck and even his face), but he decides to give
it a shot, delusionally hoping to win back Romina and become a real
dad to their son. Quitting the carnival, he goes to work as a car
mechanic for a creep named Robin (pungently unsavory Ben
Mendelsohn, of Animal Kingdom). Luke needs money to
finance his dream of domesticity. Robin has a plan. Luke is
listening.
About a third of the way through the movie, after a rousingly
cranked-up chase sequence, a new character is introduced — a
rookie policeman named Avery (Bradley Cooper) — and the story
smoothly changes lanes to follow him. Like Gosling, Cooper has a
distinctive charisma; here, though, he carefully mutes it to play
an increasingly wary man who seems beset by shadows. Avery has a
wife and child – the happy family that Luke was fated never to
have. He’s a straight-arrow cop, but when a nasty senior detective
(scuzzball virtuoso Ray Liotta) starts leaning on him, we wonder
how long he can resist being sucked into darkness.
The movie becomes a precinct procedural for a while. Then, as
years pass, Avery becomes a politician, preoccupied with large
ambitions. His now-teenage son, AJ (a fiery Emory Cohen), has grown
into an abrasive young thug. One day, in the cafeteria of his new
school, AJ encounters a troubled kid named Jason (an intense Dane
DeHaan). The final third of the movie focuses on their interaction,
and the story of Luke and Avery continues.
Is all of this too pat and predictable? Maybe. But Gosling and
Cooper bring a weighty emotional conviction to their roles, and the
picture plays out almost as ritual. Philosophical objections aside,
the movie is a dark, hypnotic experience. ; ;
The Host
It’s not often — not ever, in fact — that even the clunkiest
sci-fi movie will put you in mind of Battlefield Earth.
The Host, however, manages it. Like that earlier John
Travolta catastrophe, the new film presents a world that has been
conquered by space aliens. Here, though, the intergalactic
oppressors aren’t dreadlocked clods in Kiss boots; they’re glowy
insects that resemble off-world silverfish, who apparently hand out
lasery contact lenses to the humans whose bodies they take over.
The upside of this body-snatching invasion is that the planet is
now free of hunger and violence, “the environment is healed,” and
everybody is very, very nice. The downside is that this global
upgrade seems in several ways like a socially-engineered one-world
Hell. ; ; ; ;
The movie is based on a doorstopping 2010 novel by Stephanie
Meyer. Having once made a forced march through Meyer’s first
Twilight book, I took her participation here as an
unpromising portent. But the story — a sort of existential romance
– isn’t the problem; it’s the picture’s execution by
writer-director Andrew Niccol (Gattaca, In Time).
The Host isn’t as overwhelmingly awful as Battlefield
Earth, but it’s woeful in some similar ways. The action, if
that’s the word, is unthrillingly limp; the picture feels
under-inhabited; the characters are in some cases interchangeable;
and the pictorial values – lots of dusty tan desert, soundstage
caverns, and a sterile alien office (!) – are unremittingly
dull. ;
Saoirse Ronan, so good in Hanna and The Lovely
Bones, is trapped in a dual role here. As Melanie Stryder,
she’s one of a group of rebel humans who falls into the clutches of
the shiny-eyed Souls (as the aliens are oddly called). After having
an extraterrestrial bug inserted through a slit in her neck (is
this really how these creatures conquered the planet?), she becomes
Wanderer – same girl, but with shiny eyes of her own and a mission
to ransack Melanie’s memories for the location of her fellow
partisans. Immediately there’s a problem: Although Wanderer has
moved into Melanie’s body, Melanie refuses to evacuate the
premises. This leads to endless silly scenes of Ronan arguing with
herself – as Wanderer in the flesh and as Melanie in voice-over.
Ronan does what she can with this nonsense, but – in the screening
I attended, at least — not enough to smother audience
snickers.
After some light complications — including pursuit by an alien
Seeker (grim-lipped Diane Kruger) intent on dragging the runaway
bug-girl back to the head office — Melanie and Wanderer set out
for the rebel stronghold in the bowels of a faraway mountain. The
rebels are led by Melanie’s Uncle Jeb (William Hurt with a
half-hearted ponytail), and include among their number Melanie’s
generically hunky boyfriend Jared (Max Irons) and her little
brother Jamie (Chandler Canterbury). Jared and the rest of the
unassimilated humans are all for terminating the shiny-eyed
interloper, but Uncle Jeb, emotionally torn, commands forbearance.
(“I’m in here!” Melanie cries in voiceover, and in vain.)
This story is not without interest. Will true love enable
Melanie to somehow break out of her shell, so to speak, and reunite
with Jared? Will Wanderer’s encounter with unfamiliar human
passions push her over to the rebel side, or at least into a maiden
bonk with one of the other generically hunky young men on hand?
The Host isn’t as dire an undertaking as the
Twilight films, but it exhausts what small portion of
narrative vigor it has pretty early on. There’s no reason this
movie should run a little more than two hours in length. A little
more than two hours shorter might’ve been a better way to go. … Read More