A Felliniesque fantasia on life, love and art, Paolo Sorrentino’s Youth (A-) is an answer to cinephile prayer. There will be many who dismiss this Swiss Alps resort set comedy-drama as pretentious drivel or avoid the film altogether for fear of glacial pace; but those seeking an appropriately contemplative requiem on the choices made in the sunset of life will treasure the movie’s nontraditional narrative structure, formalist art direction and unconventional approach to character development. Giving late career-best performances as an aging composer, filmmaker and actress, respectively, Michael Caine, Harvey Keitel and Jane Fonda (in a potent extended cameo) are a master class trio bearing wisdom and fortitude. They’re also really funny in their wry honesty. Rachel Weisz and Paul Dano are both strong as generational counterpoints. David Lang’s music, especially the work he created for Caine’s fictional composer, is sheer bliss. Sorrentino captures a grotesquerie of fascinating people against gorgeous backdrops in conversations that comprise a protracted art house aria. Like the film’s spas, green pastures and alpine wilderness, the film leaves room for characters to breathe and discover one another in harmony. Some may argue there’s very little plot, and they’d be pretty much right. But the film is impeccably perceptive in peeling back the layers of humanity and stripping its characters bare of the familiar. The wit and wordplay devised by an Italian writer/director is stunningly universal; and despite its older stars, this autumnal film beats with a youthful heart.
Related article: Fellow friend and critic Aaron West writes about Paolo Sorrentino’s Oscar-winning 2013 film The Great Beauty in this review on Criterion Blues.
Among many of the film’s great qualities is its exquisite music including this original work:
The 1950’s New York City of Todd Haynes’ Carol (B+) is gorgeous to behold. A stardust fantasy inked in pinks, draped in lavender and spiced with holiday peppermint sticks, it is also home to a burgeoning forbidden romance between an unhappy housewife played by Cate Blanchett and a timid shopkeeper played by Rooney Mara. Haynes films key sequences of this slow-burn drama via raindrop covered glass panes, through architectural lines that separate characters from one another and in front of mirrors that reflect tender love blossoming amidst the suffocating funhouse of a society in transition. The lead actresses are note-perfect in their commitment to characters and provide a fascinating portal into the sometimes too formalist unfolding of the proceedings. Haynes may be the ideal director for this austere work, skilled at keeping his heroines and the audience at safe distance from their surroundings and capturing the longing of outsider protagonists hoisted in space and time to alien earthly environments. If folks are left wanting a bit more, well, that’s sort of the point.
The central gimmick of Lenny Abrahamson’s Room (B) – of mother and son imprisoned in a secluded shed for many years – peaks early; and after the inevitable escape attempt, there’s nowhere else to go as the plot plumbs the psychological aftermath. Brie Larson and Jacob Tremblay give breakthrough performances as a family forged in trauma, and the close bond they form is a highlight of the film. The heavy-handed symbolism of the early sequences that feel virtually in utero (is the room actually the womb?) versus a wider expanse of the great big world as its own mental prison never gather the intended gravitas. Still, much of the film is gripping, and the performances are fresh and affecting. Once the central duo is expanded to a more established stunt-casting ensemble including Joan Allen and William H. Macy, it just doesn’t get more compelling. The film simply continues to long for the confined spaces and finer acting of the mysterious opening moments.
Like The Insider and Erin Brockovich, Peter Landesman’s Concussion (B+) depicts an individual’s courage in standing up against a real-life institutional cover-up. In this case, it’s an immigrant pathologist versus the National Football League in terms of who knew what and when on the issue of head trauma to players causing specific and unusual side effects at a relatively early age. It’s a film the NFL doesn’t want you to see. Despite its takedown of one of the nation’s pastimes, it is nonetheless a film about faith and the American dream. Smith’s sensitive doctor communes with the dead through his job at the Philadelphia coroner’s office, and his perpetual attention to detail prompts him to look deeper into the case of a famed football center who lost his mind before dying. From there, his findings escalate. Lifting this effort above its message movie trajectory is an absolutely exemplary performance by Will Smith that plumbs notions of science, spirituality and destiny. Like Liev Schreiber’s character in the recent Spotlight, he’s the outsider it takes to reveal an inconvenient truth. Albert Brooks and Alec Baldwin are strong as unlikely allies, but it is Gugu Mbatha-Raw as the female lead who helps anchor the film’s emotions brimming under the surface. Her character as well as Smith’s reflect an admirable stoicism against the odds they face, rendering the powder kegs that threaten to pierce their armor all the more dramatic. The film doesn’t break much new ground in its cinematic storytelling, but it will definitely color the way you watch tackles in football if the mounting facts over the past years haven’t altered your perceptions already.
Best known for directing Will Ferrell larks, director Adam McKay sets his eyes on a work of gravitas by tackling the American housing market collapse through the eyes of a few investing misfits who saw it all coming in the wry dramedy The Big Short (B). Treading familiar territory of big data chic honed to more entertaining effect by the same author’s Moneyball, this film suffers from a paucity of likable protagonists. That’s likely intentional but unfortunately undercuts the film’s sharpness. Steve Carell, Christian Bale and Ryan Gosling are standouts as guys who hope to strike it rich by betting against America and its institutions. The ultimate story is an important one to tell, and McKay sprinkles in some meta flourishes to ensure viewers can keep up. A civics lesson wrapped in the arch of a paranoid thriller, it’s close encounters of the earned kind. It’s a lot of exposition for the plaintive payoff.
Andrew Haigh’s bittersweet British drama/romance 45 Years (B) continues the talented director’s intimate character studies into complex people, examining their public and private lives with sophisticated perception. Charlotte Rampling and Tom Courtenay give outstanding late-career performances as a couple grappling with a relationship-altering revelation the week before they partake in a milestone party celebrating their marriage. Deliberately paced and quietly observed, the film ponders the “what if” of what could have happened if a loving couple had followed different parallel paths. Rampling is particularly marvelous as a woman coming to grips with demons of the past that could jeopardize legacy and the very nature of her near-half century love affair. Tiny details simmer to the surface in this slow-burn melodrama that mostly sidesteps conventions. The film is small in scale but big on ideas and will reward intellectual film-goers in search of meaningful stories.
The repeated refrain, “There’s a good story in there somewhere” is extraordinarily prescient in Jay Roach’s Trumbo (C), a rather tedious true story that finally gets compelling in its final act. Bryan Cranston plays the titular protagonist, an eccentric blacklisted Hollywood screenwriter and family man who improbably manipulated a Tinseltown underground to coax the powers that be out of their heavy-handed paranoia. Cranston shape-shifts into the role with wild abandon as a veritable Gandolfian gadfly and sly provocateur. Diane Lane gets the thankless spouse role and Dame Helen Mirren is wasted in her annual Golden Globe bait performance, in this case as a sassy socialite. Roach meanders and holds tight to too chronological a narrative, blunting the impact of the proceedings and clamping down on fruitless nuances. The tone never really gels. Some of the best bits involve actors playing real-life stars such as John Wayne and Kirk Douglas, who factor into the controversy. Ultimately far less than the sum of many interesting contributions, the film is an okay biopic that has a lot to say a little too late.
