Hell or High Water

(David Mackenzie, USA, 2016)

At its best, Mackenzie's potboiler is a competent crime movie, awkwardly accessorized with some social commentary.  Sure, Jeff Bridges is a gas, as he always is.  But the script, by Taylor Sheridan, remains mostly paint-by-numbers.  It has just the right amount of local flavor, but plot-and-character-wise, it hardly rises above the schematic.  And there's simply too much would-be open range poetry, all of it taken straight from the book of hardscrabble Western cliché.  Hard lives, desolate wide-open spaces, tough men with big hearts, family loyalty - the whole thing is strictly ersatz.  The action scenes have a certain pop to them, and it is undeniably handsome (although rarely beautiful) but it only begins to develop real narrative interest towards the very end.   Even by its conventional standards, the first two thirds of the film - maybe even the first three quarters, lack decisive momentum.  By the time of the finale, we have a better sense of the depth of the characters, what they might desire and pursue.  But then the film abruptly stops.  Thus, the political aspect of the film takes a backseat to the procedural elements of plot.  This wouldn't be such a big deal, except that a large portion of the praise this film has garnered has to do with its sociological relevance, its story of noble-but-flawed men trying to resist the predations of the banksters.  Unfortunately, the makers of this film don't provide a compelling portrait of the psychological costs of such predation.  The faux-seriousness of Hell or High Water is its undoing, marring a passable heist film with unearned gravitas.  

Instellar

(Christopher Nolan, USA, 2014)

Nolan can't resist his penchant for bombast and dramatic overkill, but there's an undeniably vital sensibility at work here.  It manifests itself mostly in the space stuff, which combines genuine wonder with a science-nerd scrupulousness (I got a geeky thrill from the fact that, as pedants have always insisted at the movies, there's no sound in space), although it departs from credibility on a more than a few occasions.  Thematically, it's a lot of unfortunate treacle, combined with a distasteful technocratic slant.  An odd combo, to be sure, but just odd enough to keep one interested.  Nolan is an strange bird, never more so than here - he combines his extravagant melodramatic reflex with a steely, tasteful eye (the deep, dense 35mm and 70mm cinematography is luscious). Interstellar's debt to Kubrick is enormous, but it does better than mere imitation or pastiche, and it deserves credit for that.  The story, however, is B-grade sci-fi pablum, and no better for being intricately plotted.   Had Nolan allowed himself to go fully abstract, and fashioned something closer to a 2001 update, it would be a better film.  

The Death of Empedocles

(Danièle Huillet & Jean-Marie Straub, France/Germany, 1987)

I'm tempted to describe this film, my first Straub-Huillet, as hyper-austere.  But that doesn't quite do it justice.  Poised, incisive, and unexpectedly sensual, with a special eye (and ear) for the ever-shifting features of the natural world.  I'm still unfamiliar with their overall project, their aesthetic ideas, and their politics, but a brief gloss led to the impression that their approach was somewhat Brechtian - the renunciation of any dramatic affect, with the end goal being the awakening of revolutionary consciousness among their imagined audience. I'm not sure they got very far with this, but the work, which tried my patience and my ability to focus (parts of the text were un-subtitled) has an undeniable power.  At times, it was almost trancelike, the way I was attempting to catch and follow the line of thought, usually expressed with as little inflection as possible by the actor, and which was, after all, rendered in 18th-century German dramatic verse.  Where it worked best for me, it seemed it could've used a good deal more actual drama, but there was something oddly captivating about the blankness.  A prelude to more investigation.  Preceded by Black Sin, an even more stripped-down version of a different version of the source play. 

Thou Wast Mild and Lovely

(Josephine Decker, USA, 2015)

A brilliant, audacious, truly wild piece of work.  Decker is the real deal: fervidly imaginative, keenly perceptive, creatively restless and courageous.  Lovely is a work which frustrates the usual tendency to speak of coherence.  A lot is going on, as they say, but it's perhaps the highest compliment I can pay to say that the voltage of her energy, the originality of vision, outshines any temptation to question her choices.  This kind of thing can be mistaken for being easy, or worse, haphazard.  But it's so much more than a kitchen-sink capriciousness.  Instead, it's a carefully considered, deeply felt plumbing of primal energies and desires.  The evocation of a torrid, rural summer, her probing, revelatory, haptic camera, her quicksilver pursuit of light, skin, and color: it's all of a piece.

Star Wars: Rogue One

(Gareth Edwards, USA, 2016)

After finally seeing it, I was surprised at how harshly some critics have responded; it's a bit wan and mechanical, sure, but otherwise unobjectionable.  It appeared to me to be pretty much exactly as advertised: a brisk, sensational adventure story, told in the vernacular of the OG Star Wars world (effectively, an exact simulacrum of Lucas's original combination of throwback kitsch and '70s grit), but with a suitably "darker" tone.   At this point, there should be no kvetching about the rampant nostalgia-mongering that is the franchise's stock-in-trade.  That's at least half of what viewers are showing up for, myself included, although I will say that my own case is one of mild curiosity rather than devotional zeal; different strokes, etc.  The other half is a passably diverting, engrossing - pick your adjective of lukewarm enthusiasm - tale of derring-do.

And on both counts, Rogue One delivers.  It's all a bit processed, yes, and the near-constant winking at the fans, from the casual to the ultra-hardcore (I can only imagine the volume of tics and references that I didn't pick up on, and I'm someone who put some serious wear on my A New Hope VHS as a youngster) can get a bit wearying, but it moves - it has the giddy momentum that its rather thin story requires, with just enough human drama to save it from inconsequence.  There's nothing particularly notable about the film's visuals, but they are effective enough - moody when they need to be, and even exhilarating at other moments (particularly in space, during the final battle, which conjures fantastic scale and motion with aplomb, and the arrival of Darth Vader on the Rebel ship, a brief but thrilling sequence of furious destruction.  It's better than anything Lucas choreographed in his goofy prequels, and even better than the light-saber battles in The Force Awakens.)

As for the stories of extensive re-writes and re-shoots, calling at least some of Edwards' authorship into question - we're talking, again, about a highly processed, rigorously committee'd, enormously expensive work of corporate entertainment.  I'm willing, in cases such as these, to enjoy the sausage, which would seem to require a certain indifference to how it's made, and of what.  What's strange is the cavils that this film has prompted, when so many other Kraft-cheese extravaganzas of recent vintage are done with far less wit and verve.  For all of its shortcomings, Rogue One manages to be effective without the mind-numbing overkill that tends to mar so many contemporary megabucks spectacles.  And the cast is uniformly great - confined, but excellent, with special mention going to Forest Whittaker and Ben Mendelsson, two giants who radiate intensity that can match, and even surpass, the CGI explosions.

PS - there are, I think, ethical questions that ought to be addressed about the digital reanimation of Peter Cushing and Carrie Fisher.  I found it creepy and distracting, a point at which the pull of nostalgia and the embrace of kitsch went alarmingly full-blown.  But that's a matter for another day.

Creed

(Ryan Coogler, USA, 2015)

A gloriously inventive re-interpretation of the Rocky story, both a loving tribute and a daring break in new directions.  Coogler makes no attempt to hide his exaltation of the original film, but does justice to his own imaginative impulses.  It's a tender work and an exhilarating one, with an astonishing breadth of experience and maturity.  We feel Rocky's broken down and faded glory, his exhaustion and regret, and his increasing proximity to mortality.  Stallone, an excellent actor who has often been underserved by the industry and his own choices, has rarely been better.  We also feel the exuberance and the anger of young Adonis Creed, played with incandescent energy and wit by Michael B. Jordan, as he struggles against the burden of legacy and the precariousness of ambition.

The film gets off to a tentative start, with some slightly clunky gestures, but it quickly finds its footing and momentum.  By the time we've reached the end, we've seen the delights of Coogler's mercurial imagination, both as a storyteller and as a creator of images.  Rarely have the pitfalls of franchise-making and the familiar territory of personal triumph been so brilliantly and refreshingly navigated. 

Sully

(Clint Eastwood, USA, 2016)

While I remain unconvinced that Eastwood's body of work as a filmmaker constitutes a truly exceptional artistic vision, I find myself increasingly inclined to give him more credit, particularly after seeing Sully.  It's a nearly perfect film, transcending Eastwood's expected proficiency and presenting a striking moral vision, a depiction of heroism as humanism, and vice-versa.  The film is compact, streamlined, and yet it never feels rushed or reduced.  The details feel uniformly correct; the performances are nuanced and un-showy.  Sully succeeds as a work of organic unity, a finely tuned orchestration of emotions, moving the insistent beat of an idea.  From Eastwood on down - including Hanks, at the absolute top of his game, exuding decency and harrowing strain - everyone is doing their part to honor the miraculous events, without undue fuss or embellishment.  The wholeness of the work, its focus and its awed calm, creates an almost ecstatic effect; for me the experience was unaccountably moving.

But not entirely unaccountably so.  To account, then: Eastwood deliberately depicts Sully as the real man apparently wishes to be perceived; as a consummate professional, heroic only by circumstances, and if so, only one hero of many.  His flight crew becomes, in a moment of potentially terrible fate, a crack team of life-savers.  Ditto the passengers, who help each other through the ordeal in relative calm and orderliness.  Ditto also all of those who rushed to assist, from the ferry captains to the first responders.  The film at its finest is a tale of people at their finest; not as paragons but as human beings, moral agents in a chaotic and unfathomable universe, where the mundane can very quickly transform into the horrific, or the miraculous.  It also pays tribute to the universal need for narratives, to the very human requirement for a valuation of the human, particularly in an age of fantastically complex and powerful machines.  Sully is a hero because he needed to be one - first to land the plane, and then to serve as the receptacle of people's highest aspirations.  And to weather both the real events and the subsequent lionization with something like grace.

The one flaw, and a sign of Eastwood's own political baggage, has to do with the depiction of the federal committee that is convened to determine whether the "miraculous" landing was in fact caused by a pilot error, and that he would've been better off taking the plane back to La Guardia or Teterboro airport in New Jersey.  The committee is shown from the outset as being hostile, arrogant bureaucrats, only slightly restrained in their condescension to Sully and in their preference for computer simulation over actual events.  In the climatic final scene, it's even suggested that they were guilty of a kind of deck-stacking, concealing vital details from Sully and the proceedings, in order to bolster their version of events.  In a film that goes out of its way to respect everyone involved, this is an unfortunate lapse into caricature. What would it have cost the narrative to show the committee members as similarly professional, rather than craven and scheming?  In fact, it would have strengthened an already formidable film, further harmonizing with the overall theme.

But the film is predominantly magnanimous, and it's to Eastwood's credit that he consistently favors subtlety over simplification.  On a metafilmic note, it was also immensely satisfying to experience the delicious thrill of suspense without a resort to the kind of ludicrous bombast that has come to pass for "action."  Even knowing, as we all do, of the safe delivery of every soul on board, it was a heartening reaffirmation of the power of visual storytelling in building dramatic tension - and with such deceptively simple means.  Here again, my hat is off to Eastwood.  That the film was so popular only belies the usual nonsense about the death of cinema, or the general dullness of the audience.  People do want to see, and to experience, and they'll consume quality if it's delivered.

How can we compare this, then, to 2014's American Sniper?  What can account for Sully's steely excellence and Sniper's gauzy imprecision?  A director's main job is the creation of a world, and Eastwood's career has been marked, especially lately, with a preference for real-world stories.  He's a filmmaker of immense moral seriousness, and for someone so inclined, moralism becomes an occupational hazard.  Sniper's flaw was in its inability to grapple with the actual cirtumstances of Chris Kyle's life and death, which included the criminality of the Iraq War.  His depiction of Kyle was nuanced, but it was hemmed in by the tale of heroism that Eastwood's own sensibility seemed to require.  There's a limit to the heroic ideal that Eastwood so admires; a certain flattening of vision, a willingness to see the world in binaries of strength and weakness, virtue and vice.  At his best, as in Sully, the ideal is given contour and depth through the diffusion of heroism into a collective enterprise, and a moment of serendipity that becomes re-interpreted as brilliance.  At his worst, it becomes a prerogative for narrowness.  In American Sniper, the victims are absent, and the cost of war is internalized as a test of manhood.  In Sully, we are moved by the fact that we are all potential victims, by the human frailty is that is ever-present, even in Sully at his finest.