I, Tonya

Alternate Title:  Abuse: A Comedy

                                                                                                                                                            

One sentence synopsis:  Tonya Harding deals with her abusive mother and husband, all while trying to win acceptance through figure skating before and after the attack on Nancy Kerrigan.

Things Havoc liked: Like everyone else who was alive and above the age of eight at the time, I remember the infamous Tonya Harding/Nancy Kerrigan incident from the 1994 Lillehammer Olympics. It was, in many ways, the perfect scandal, filled with lurid details to titillate and thrill a news audience, women fighting one another for supremacy, America's sweetheart attacked by a violent thug, lurid plots among stupid people, overtones of classism, one of the first big media frenzies. I was there man, every one of us ate it up with a spoon. Following the Olympics, in which Kerrigan won a silver medal, and Harding won such infamy, Tonya Harding disappeared into the tabloids, popping up on news feeds periodically in celebrity boxing matches, in sex tapes, and in one trashy thing after another. I cannot say that I thought much about her in the intervening years, but all of a sudden, here we have a movie about the story of Tonya Harding from beginning to end, a film I ultimately decided to see purely because I felt I owed its main actress another shot.

You see, I didn't see I, Tonya, because I really desperately wanted to know more about Tonya Harding, I saw it because of Suicide Squad, a movie so bad I still suspect it to have been the result of some gruesome experiment in human psychology. Margot Robbie, who had the singular misfortune of starring in that film as Harley Quinn (a misfortune only slightly lesser than those of us who had to watch her) is an actress I have seen in nothing else to date (save a cameo in The Big Short), and while she was pretty goddamn awful in Suicide Squad, that much could easily be explained by the fact that everything touched by Suicide Squad turned to galvanized shit. After all, Viola Davis and Will Smith are both charismatic actors of considerable skill, and neither one of them could salvage any dignity. I therefore felt, given her increasing prominence, that I owed it to Margot Robbie to find out if she could act at all, an exercise I try to engage in when I encounter actors or actresses who have had the misfortune of making their major debut in a film so bad that nothing positive could be gleaned from it. The ur-example here is Twilight, a film that forced me to seek other examples of Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart's acting efforts, determining empirically that while Pattinson can act, Stewart cannot.

So with all that preamble aside, can Margot Robbie act? Ohhhhh yes. Yes she can, in fact Margot Robbie, playing a character that none of us ever got to know except in the pages of a tabloid, is phenomenal this time around, a treasure of a performance that fully justifies all of the faith that people placed in her following the atrocity that was Suicide Squad. Biopics are a dangerous game, as apt to win you condemnation as they are an Oscar, but Robbie, playing a character nobody really knows anything about, is exceptional, bringing all the classless rancor, the bitter devotion to her craft, the wounded patched-together pride of a victim of nigh-constant abuse, the serially-unreliable mentality of someone trying to make sense of her own life, bringing all of it together into a performance that merits the Oscar nomination that should be (and at time of writing, has been) forthcoming. It's a career-making performance, comic and tragic all at once, while still retaining the essence of what the public remembers of the character, and if that wasn't Robbie performing the fantastically-difficult skating maneuvers studded throughout, then the movie certainly fooled me.

I, Tonya, comes to us courtesy of Craig Gillespie, an Australian director who has yet to feature on this project, due to his propensity for mostly doing projects that don't look particularly interesting. The only movie of his prior to this one that I know anything about is 2007's exceedingly-odd Ryan Gosling vehicle Lars and the Real Girl, a movie that was effectively a weirder version of Her, and if you remember Her, that's quite a statement. This one is a bit more accessable than that one was, but is done in a fourth-wall-shattering style that emphasizes just how unreliable the various stories that the characters involved tell of the Kerrigan incident and everything that led up to it are. The result resembles The Big Short, or other movies that use unconventional directing techniques as a tool to emphasize the artificiality of the concepts they're attempting to get across, and in retrospect, it's probably the only way to do something like this without turning the entire thing into a Rashomon-style philosophical treatise, which would be highly unsuited for the material. It does, however, require a superb cast to be able to pull something like this off, and fortunately Gillespie has assembled one. Sebastian Stan, Bucky Barnes from the Marvel films, is utterly unrecognizable as Jeff Gillooly, an abusive loser who Tonya falls for due primarily to the fact that she has been conditioned by her upbringing to expect nothing but abusive losers to be interested in her. It's deceptively difficult to play a loser on screen, if only because most successful actors are charismatic, and the camera introduces such tremendous bias in their favor, but Stan pulls it off, giving us a character by turns entirely loathsome and yet completely believable, not a screaming monster but a person whose life is what it was always fated to be, and whose worst traits go utterly unexamined by himself or even his victims. But the best performance of all is Allison Janney's, because she gets to play a true monster. Tonya's mother LaVona, expertly portrayed by the one-time West Wing alum, is a vile, twisted, hyper-abusive harpy, an utterly loathsome creature whose every action and thought drips bitterness and resentment. And yet even here, Janney puts together a character that isn't just a caricature of an abusive single mother, but simply a person who is missing parts of their soul, who acts as she does because she thinks it the only way to properly act. We hate her all the more because we understand where she is coming from, and is that not the definition of an excellent villain?

If it sounds like the theme of abuse is coming up a lot in my description so far, that is because the movie is rife with it, not sensationalized, not dialed up to some unwatchable level, but inculcated into its very bones. The story of Tonya Harding, the movie claims, is a story of long-term abuse, not always cinematic and violent, and not always unreciprocated, but always there, poisoning everything it touches until actions that would seem unthinkable to any normal, rational person, are perfectly normal and indeed not deserving of comment to the characters that inhabit this world. Tonya is abused by her mother, by her husband, by the Media, by the US Figure Skating association which is made to look, probably with very good reason, like a bunch of classic snobs who never even considered giving Harding a real shot. Months and years of brutally-difficult work are rewarded time and again with "stylistic" point deductions and low-seeded rankings, despite Tonya being an exceptionally gifted technical skater, the only American woman to perform a Triple Axel jump. Without ever calling things out explicitly, the movie effortlessly places you in a mindset wherein anything, even attacking a rival with a retractable baton, seems reasonable, given that nobody else is playing fairly either. Moreover, despite everything I've just finished saying, the movie is also riotously funny at parts, mostly due to just how stupid so many of the participants in this little farce of a conspiracy were. Paul Walter Hauser, whom I've never seen or heard of before, plays Shaun Ekhart, Tonya's bodyguard, a loser among losers, who fancies himself some kind of CIA-trained espionage expert while living in his mother's house and plotting the dumbest caper in the history of dumb capers. Bobby Cannavale, whom I love dearly, gets the job of narrating most of this to us as a spray-tanned Hard Copy producer, describing in breathless glee how dumb the plan to assault Kerrigan actually was, with one conspirator staking out Kerrigan's training arena for three days, parking in an empty parking lot, and moving his car around it every fifteen minutes to avoid suspicion! Why only for three days? Because that's how long it took him to realize that Kerrigan was actually training in a different arena entirely in another state.

Things Havoc disliked: The film goes to some lengths to ensure that you know just how unreliable all participants in this absurd farce are. Everyone has their own version of what happened before and during the Kerrigan assault (the movie calls it "the incident"), and none of those versions stack up at all, particularly those of Harding and Gillooly themselves. This is fine, indeed it's only to be expected, nor is it surprising, given how much time it spends humanizing her, that the film ultimately winds up taking more of Harding's perspective than anyone else's. But the problem is that about two thirds of the way through the movie, without mentioning it or otherwise indicating, it basically hews entirely to the notion that Harding knew nothing about the impending attack, and if she did know something about it she didn't understand it, and if she did understand it she thought it was a joke, and if she didn't think it was a joke she thought the plan would involve threats, not violence, and if she did think the plan involved violence well it was only to be expected given her upbringing.

Um... right...

Look, nobody but Tonya Harding herself really knows how much she was or wasn't actually involved in the assault on Kerrigan, and given the nature of human memory and rationalization, probably not her either at this point. And it is certainly possible, though not much more, that Harding had nothing to do with the planning of the assault that put her back in the Olympics after her career was largely over. But for the movie to turn around so far into a story that is being told from multiple directions, and suddenly claim authoritatively that not only was the entire prosecution of Harding nothing but a political witch-hunt on the part of a classist Figure Skating world looking to finally be rid of her, but that it knows this for a fact is just ridiculous on its face. I don't demand that all movies represent nothing but the unvarnished truth, especially when that truth is open to interpretation, but when the movie's central thesis is that nobody knows the truth, it's a bit churlish to suddenly reframe everything that's happening as the truth because it casts your sympathetic protagonist in a more flattering light. And if you're going to do that, suddenly pivot from an unreliable to an authoritative viewpoint on the events in question, it's probably a good idea not to misrepresent the few actual facts that are known about the case. The movie's climax involves a tearful court hearing, where a barely-controlled Harding begs and pleads for her life after a stern, unsympathetic judge bans her from figure skating for life. Powerful stuff, if it had actually happened, but it did not. It doesn't take much research to know that criminal courts have no bearing on who can and can't participate in Figure Skating associations, and Harding was never so-sentenced. Instead, after she pled guilty to obstructing justice in the investigation of an assault on one of her competitors, the US Figure Skating association banned her for life, after their investigation concluded that she knew about the attack before it happened. Call the investigation a witch-hunt if you like, but please don't make up criminal penalties that never happened, framed to make your unreliable protagonist look sympathetic, and then wrap yourselves in the mantle of the one true arbiters of truth.

Final thoughts:   But I have to say, whatever the film's authorial bent or pretensions of truth and honesty, I, Tonya is an incredible film, a tightly-crafted, instantly-compelling, and brilliant-acted piece of 90s absurdity, taking a story we all knew and giving us even more salacious details about it, assuming we're willing to acknowledge that doing so makes us no better than the other people who tried to exploit Tonya Harding for our own purposes. It is a fantastic movie across the board, one that is entirely deserving of its buzz, and a fitting place to leave off the greatest single year I have ever experienced at the movies. With Awards season finally upon us, I, Tonya, along with many other fine films, is once more being re-released in theaters, and you all owe it to yourselves to give it a shot, whether you know the story or not.

Thank you to everyone who has followed these reviews over the course of the year now past. It has been quite a run, and I hope you are all ready to hear about it again, because it is finally time to evaluate the best this year offered us, and the worst...

Final Score:  8/10

Next Time:  Ladies and gentlemen, IT IS TIME!!!

Molly's Game

Alternate Title:  The Poker Room

                                                                                                                                                            

One sentence synopsis:  A former competitive skier builds an empire of underground poker games before being caught up in a massive federal case against the Russian Mafia.

Things Havoc liked:  Some stories are just too good not to film, really. Molly Bloom, a downhill skier whose career was derailed by injury, moved to Los Angeles in 2004 and was hired to staff a Poker game out of a backroom club called the Viper Room, catering to Hollywood celebrities. The game expanded, and Molly first took it over, then took it big, throwing lavish events and attracting moguls from industry, finance, entertainment, and every other corner of the high-roller world. By 2009, she had moved her operation to New York, running one of the most sought-after games in the country, before a 2013 raid and indictment caused her to lose everything in a massive RICO sting aimed at the many members of the Russian mob who were participants in her game. Along the way she dealt with addicts, egomaniacs, mobsters, drunks, Hollywood big shots, princes of various European and Middle Eastern royal families, and plenty of people who fit into more than one of the above categories. Her career came to an abrupt end in 2013 when she was caught up in a money laundering and racketeering sting by the FBI and Justice Departments, as part of their attempts to crush the Russian Mafia, most of whose most prominent members were players in her game. In the intervening years, she wrote a tell-all book (notable primarily for not even remotely telling all), and there were a number of attempts to turn her story into a movie, and after several abortive attempts, who has decided to take this on, but Television's master of self-important dialogue, Aaron Sorkin.

Molly's Game stars Jessica Chastain, an actress I have famously had little use for over the years (see my reviews for Zero Dark Thirty and Interstellar for more on that), as Molly Bloom, but for all my objections to Chastain's typical style of acting, if there's one thing 2016's The Huntsman: Winter's War taught me, it's that I had Chastain pegged incorrectly. The problem isn't that she can't act, the problem is that she can't act seriously. Her attempts to emote sincerity and seriousness have always fallen flat to me, making her sound alternately like a marionette struggling to understand these "hu-man" emotions, or like a petulant seven-year-old who has been denied a cookie. But give her a film or a situation in which she's supposed to be campy, or ridiculous, or over-the-top, and she suddenly becomes a completely different actor. And while Molly's Game is certainly intended to be a realistic portrayal of a young woman who simply got caught up in strange events, it's also written by Aaron Sorkin, of The Social Network and The West Wing (and several other things we will get to), who has one of the strongest and most distinctive authorial voices of any screenwriter in Hollywood (yes, moreso even than Joss Whedon). Sorkin's dialogue, no matter the setting or medium, has always felt like written dialogue, like something prepared in advance by a speechwriter, rather than something people might conceivably come up with and say in a real setting, and while that's not always a strength, it allows Chastain to do what she's good at, giving her the sort of snappy, witty, erudite one-liners that nobody would come up with in the spur of the moment. The long and the short of all this is that Chastain is excellent in this film, playing a driven young woman from a hyper-demanding background who is subjected to the sorts of raving, savagely egomaniacal, borderline sociopathic douchebags and pressures that are instantaneously believable as coming from the ranks of Hollywood or high finance.

And of course, Chastain is not alone. Idris Elba, my man-crush and yours, plays Bloom's lawyer, Charlie Jaffey, in the typical style of an Aaron Sorkin lawyer, meaning with wit, erudition, and snappy comebacks to every situation. As I know several people (Hi, Colleen!) who fantasize about Idris Elba yelling at them, this movie should provide plenty of fodder, and Elba is, as he always is, wonderful in the role, though his American accent this time is about as authentic as my British one. Kevin Costner, of all people, plays Molly's father, a professor of psychology and a helicopter parent, whose tough-love-style of borderline-verbally-abusive behavior is intentionally played in contrast with Costner's native salt-of-the-Earth persona. I've admitted before that for all the garbage that Costner has made over the years (and still continues to make, lest anyone forget Criminal), I've always liked him, at least in the rare occasions when the director and scriptwriters manage to get him something to say or do that is within his range. Sorkin does, and Costner, surprisingly, proves an excellent fit for Sorkin's stilted style, particularly in a late sequence where he sits down with his daughter and speaks what, to him at least, is brutal honesty. And then there's the various shitheads that Bloom encounters throughout her career, foremost among which is Michael Cera, of all people, as "Player X", a composite of various A-list Hollywood celebrities who frequented Molly's games, but apparently primarily based on Toby Maguire, or so the rumors have it. If those rumors are true, Maguire should take real care given the tenor of Hollywood today, as Cera plays this character as an actual raving sociopath, one who admits that despite all the poker he plays, he actually doesn't much like the game itself. What he likes, in his own words, is "ruining people's lives", something he does with Iago-like gusto to everyone he meets. My old pals Chris O'Dowd (of The Sapphires), and Jeremy Strong (of a whole bunch of crap), take smaller roles as, respectively, a drunken Irish associate of the Russian Mafia with a heart of gold, and a Hollywood wannabe/failed Los Angeles real estate agent with seemingly no heart whatsoever. This is the sort of thing one runs into when one turns in these circles, it seems. Both are superb, customarily so in O'Dowd's case, the opposite in Strong's, with O'Dowd managing to inject some real emotion into one of the oldest cinema character cliches in existence (the drunken Irishman), and Strong evidencing some of the douchiest behavior known to man outside of the White House.

Things Havoc disliked:You may have noticed by this point that I seem to be talking an awful lot about Aaron Sorkin, and that's kind of unavoidable, and not just because he both wrote, produced, and directed this film, his directorial debut, in fact. Honestly the direction is fine, Sorkin has a lengthy and well-established background in Television after all and has been working in film for over thirty years. But when it comes to the writing, we start to have an issue. You see, I mentioned before that Sorkin's authorial voice is one of the strongest in Hollywood, up there with the likes of David Mamet or Joss Whedon. This is not necessarily a good thing. You see for all of the success that Sorkin has had, with The West Wing, with Social Network, with Moneyball or Charlie Wilson's War, when Sorkin has nobody to restrain him the way David Fincher did, he generally produces works of such staggering, monumental authorial arrogance as to inspire mocking fake-twitter feeds that long-outlast the work in question. It was thus for Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, a failed behind-the-scenes-at-Saturday-Night-Live show that was so painfully preachy and unfunny as to make paint drying look like a Megadeth concert, and wherein Sorkin famously responded to the criticisms he was subjected to by calling all his critics basement-dwelling virginial bloggers with no taste. It was also thus for The Newsroom, one of the preachiest and most hamfisted television shows ever invented, wherein Sorkin re-wrote every story of the day as he would have reported on it with perfect hindsight, and then spent the rest of the runtime making his characters recite endless denunciations of strawman after strawman, particularly when it came to "the youths" and their "blogosphere". Now, let me be clear, Molly's Game doesn't have anything like those shows' levels of unfettered arrogance. What it does have, however, is the tendency for every character to sound the same.

You see, with a voice this strong, this recognizable, it's clear enough to me at this point that Sorkin doesn't know how to write anyone who isn't just like himself, an overeducated political and cultural snob (I say this with some endearment, as I am also an overeducated political and cultural snob). In shows like The West Wing, which was about a group of exceptionally intelligent and driven people at the heart of the political system, this mattered less, as Sorkin wrote his characters the way we'd like all of our elected officials to act and speak. With The Social Network, he was again dealing with masters of the universe, students at Harvard University with spectacular pedigrees and impeccable contempt for all the lesser creatures of the world. But in Molly's Game, despite all the high-rollers on offer, the movie is ultimately a character study of Molly, and to a lesser extent her lawyer, none of whom should sound the same as one another, and all of whom do, speaking in this inflappable, ultra-witty style of hyper-stylized dialogue that just does not exist when we are supposedly dealing with the real world. Everyone's speach consists of the same one-liners, peppered with references to high culture and in-jokes that it makes no sense for their characters to be making. And while I do like movies about smart people speaking in a smart fashion, Sorkin's voice is so overpowering that he risks losing the humanity of what's happening. It's hard for us as an audience to feel sorry or frightened alongside the main character when the film has spent the entire run-time establishing them as being beyond such mortal concerns as fright or sorrow. And none of this is helped by Sorkin, in the last third of the film, giving into his worst habits and spending a good portion of the movie waxing eloquently about the injustice of the FBI seizing Molly's assets and fining her hundreds of thousands of dollars, when in reality (as it turns out) neither actually occurred. I don't demand all biopics stick scrupulously to the truth of the matter, of course, but it's a bit rich to turn your film into an excoriation of the Federal Government for having done terrible things to poor Molly, when it did not actually do those things.

Final thoughts:  All that being said though, Molly's Game is certainly an enjoyable film, with a compelling story full of sleaze and greed and power games and, it must be admitted, luxuriously fun dialogue at times. Even if Sorkin makes everyone sound like himself, the fact is that his style of witty repartee is a lot of fun to listen to, especially when good (citation needed) actors are the ones reciting it. I don't know if it's worthy of the Oscars that it clearly is looking for, but as a film about the seedier side of high society and organized crime, I have seen far worse examples, and would recommend it unhesitatingly to anyone who likes the idea of the film, or just wants to watch Idris Elba yell for a while. And really, who doesn't?

Final Score:  7.5/10

Next Time:  Speaking of movies about women who formerly competed in Winter Olympic events...

Lion

Alternate Title:  Tremble, Little Lion Man

                                                                                                                                                            

One sentence synopsis:  An Indian boy adopted by Australians after being hopelessly lost from his family, searches for a way to find his original home as a young man.

Things Havoc liked: In 1986, a five-year-old boy named Saroo Khan left his home in the Khandwa region of central India to accompany his older brother to a work site nearby. Through a series of unfortunate circumstances, he wound up accidentally boarding a train which took him to the Bengali city of Calcutta, over a thousand miles away. Lost, and too young to remember the proper name of his village or mother, he wound up living on the street as a beggar before being picked up by an adoption agency and ultimately getting adopted by a couple from Tasmania. Decades later, the now-adult Saroo embarked on a quest to find his original family, conducting a grueling search using online resources and the scattered, fragmented memories of his home to eventually find the village he was from, re-united with his birth mother and family after twenty-five years' absence. This astounding story is the one that we are considering this week, thanks to Australian director Garth Davies, a veteran of commercials and television shows, who decided to produce a film adaptation of the above tale for his cinematic debut, one that would star Dev Patel, Rooney Mara, Nicole Kidman, and David Wenham.

But we're not going to talk about any of those people right now. We're going to talk instead about a little boy named Sunny Pawar, who plays Saroo as a young child, who was six years old at the time this film was made, and who is, unquestionably, the best thing in the entire movie. I've long held that kids are natural actors, which accounts for the high quality of the majority of child-actors one encounters at the movies, but Pawar is well and truly a prodigy, spending the majority of the first half of the film anchoring it by himself, as he turns up lost on the streets of Calcutta, scrounging food where he can, sleeping in train stations and underground tunnels, and dodging gangs of kidnappers, child traffickers, and sex slave operations (in case you had not guessed, this movie paints India as a wonderful and heartwarming place). It's a tall order for any actor, let alone one who is six, but Pawar does an immaculate job of portraying the innocence of his age combined with a child's intuitive ability to sense when there is something drastically wrong with a situation, even if he does not know what it is.

And it's not like the rest of the actors are letting the film down. Dev Patel, whom I have liked, albeit with reservations, ever since I saw Slumdog Millionaire nearly a decade ago, takes on the role of the adult Saroo, and plays a far more "adult" character than the wide-eyed idealists he's taken on in movies like the aforementioned Slumdog Millionaire, The Man Who Knew Infinity, or The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (the brevity of this film's title comes as a welcome sequence-break for him). The moments where we get to simply see him as a young man in Australia, though rather brief (more on that later), are convincing and compelling, showcasing more range than Patel has previously evidenced. Better still is Nicole Kidman, whom I've never had that much use for, as her career before this has involved films like The Invasion, Australia, Moulin Rouge, The Golden Compass, and Batman Forever, none of which were particularly good. She is, however, unreservedly excellent here as Saroo's adoptive mother, either when first meeting the young Saroo at the airport in Tasmania (where she sports one of the most magnificent examples of '80s hair' ever filmed), or decades later, trying to keep her family together in the face of mounting obstacles. Kidman has long been regarded as a fantastic actor, but this is the first time I've ever really seen it, as the cloying stupidities of previous years give way to a nuanced and heart-wrenching performance of a woman who desperately wants to keep her family together in the form she has managed to compile it, all without giving way to mawkish cliches that typically surround adoptive parents in films like this. Her reaction to Saroo's obsession with finding his original family, or to his adoptive brother's escalating drug use, centers the better parts of the film's second half.

Things Havoc disliked: Oh I'm sorry, did I forget to mention Saroo's adopted brother? Who is not only a drug addict but autistic to boot? Well don't worry, because the movie forgot to mention him too.

Well that's not really fair I suppose, for after all they did mention him enough for me to include him in this review. And it's not like the character, Mantosh (Divian Ladwa) is badly acted, as such archetypes (the autist, the drug addict) so often can be. Indeed, Mantosh and Saroo share an effective frustrated-but-fraternal chemistry when they're on-screen together. But given that this only happens for about twelve seconds across the entire film, it is rather hard to form a definitive opinion. Similarly Rooney Mara, so radiantly good in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, and so radiantly absent from my films ever since (save for a cameo role in Her). Her role in this one is Saroo's American love interest, but that implies that she has something to do in the film, which she does not, save for the occasional worried look as Saroo fails to speak with her about what the hell he is doing, something he does with great frequency with most of the cast, ignoring everything as he obsesses over Google Earth and searches ceaselessly for his real mother.

And why is he so obsessed? Well you'd think that question would be reasonably easy to answer given the circumstances, and yet the movie never really gives us any indication of what that answer is. Part of that is the fact that we never really get to know Saroo as an adult, he sort of springs fully-formed onto the screen as an obsessive young man neglecting girlfriends, jobs, and family in favor of this all-consuming quest. All well and good, but are we to assume that he has been this obsessed and closed off for his entire life? His well-adjusted circle of friends, his girlfriend, his loving family, all of whom react with worry and concern at his recent behavior, would all seem to indicate otherwise, and yet from what we have to go for on the screen, that's really the only explanation we've got, unless he spontaneously decided one day to become a haunted recluse crouched over a computer clicking on maps of northern India.

And that's really what kills the second half of this movie. Not the acting, nor the story, nor the characters, but the myopic focus on Saroo's search, a process that involves us watching him stare at Google Earth and click, and click, and click, and click. There's no sense of progression, of how he's trying to organize his search, of what methods he's using to try and find his original home. I'm not looking for a forensic geography lesson here (though that would have been pretty cool), but we need something to keep us occupied as the main character spends an hour staring at screens, in an admittedly perhaps inevitable violation of the common screenwriting rule that you never film other screens if you can possibly avoid it. Indeed, so badly-paced is this movie throughout its second half that when Saroo finally does find his home in blurry satellite pictures, a moment that should be infused with genuine emotion falls flat on its face due to the fact that, as far as we can tell, he stumbled into it completely by chance, having done nothing for the last few years but randomly drag his cursor over his computer.

Final thoughts:   It should be mentioned that the movie does end on a strong note, as Saroo returns to India (spoilers are irrelevant with a true story, I should think) to find his original family at long last, but the baffling choices made by Davis rob the movie of the potential to be something truly great. That said, for its strong first half, its superb performance by one of the youngest children I've ever seen act appreciably, and for the generally compelling nature of its remarkable story, Lion retains enough for a conditional recommendation on my part. Given that we're now in January, a time in which the film calendar has nothing but terrible horror movies, worse Christian movies, and the leftovers of last year's Oscar season, there are far greater sins than a bit of bad pacing.

Though I am still waiting for Dev Patel to make "that movie" that I know him to be capable of. If Ryan Reynolds can do it after all this time, surely he can too.

Final Score:  6/10

Next Time:  Denzel Washington yells at people.

Florence Foster Jenkins

Alternate Title:  First World Problems

                                                                                                                                                            

One sentence synopsis:   A wealthy philanthropist with no skill at singing attempts to fulfill a lifelong dream of singing at Carnegie Hall.


Things Havoc liked: I'm on record as being willing to see anything that Meryl Streep does. I've done so on more than one occasion for this project, including quite a few films (Into the Woods) that I would not otherwise have given the time of day to. Still, one must be consistent in one's cinematic dealings, even if those dealings lead us down paths terrifying to tread. Paths like ones that lead to Hugh Grant.

I don't know about the rest of you, but I haven't seen hair nor hide of Hugh Grant, once the crown prince of awkward befuddlement (Grant was once so ubiquitously milquetoast that there are still rumors he allowed himself to be arrested for soliciting prostitutes just so that he could credibly get an "edge" to his image), since his turn as about fifteen different things in the extremely strange (and extremely good) film Cloud Atlas. And before that? Nothing since Love Actually, all the way back in 2003. So given my blessed interval away from Hugh Grant, why am I talking about him and not about the Greatest Actor in the World? Because Hugh Grant is awesome in the movie and you all need to hear about it.

Grant plays St. Clair Bayfield, the most British man alive, a swinger of the 1940s with little money but a great deal of old English charm, married to the wealthy widower Florence Foster Jenkins and secret lover to what appears to be a number of swinging, hip women reveling in the freedom of the war years. There was a time when the prospect of Hugh Grant playing a character like this would have driven me screaming out of the theater, but there's no denying that an older, more mature, and more experienced Grant is goddamn perfect in this role, using his trademark understated humor to tremendous effect, and more than willing to inject ridiculous slapstick into the proceedings if he thinks it will get a laugh. Lest Grant's character sound like a playboy (which he is) and nothing else, the movie goes to enormous length to show just how devoted Bayfield is to Jenkins, whom he dotes upon to the point of lunacy, constantly keeping dozens of schemes spinning to avoid upsetting her in any way, and encouraging her whims and fancies of artistry, no matter how ridiculous they may seem. The film, and Grant himself, make it very clear that these are not just the actions of a kept man trying to keep his lifestyle going, but a besotted worshiper, who refuses to see anything but joyful foibles in his beloved's flaws, and indulges her delusions of adequacy when it comes to her singing career.

And they are indeed delusions, of the highest degree, for while Streep doesn't steal the show in this film the way she typically might, she does manage to play a dotty old woman whose belief in her own skill hovers between the narcissistic (though utterly without malice), and the simply demented. Meryl Streep can sing, very well in fact. She's proven that in everything from Mamma Mia to Death Becomes Her to Prairie Home Companion to a dozen other films. It consequently must be difficult for her to sing so badly, for so long, with such consistent lack of talent, grace, or self-awareness, as she contrives to as the titular Florence Foster Jenkins. It's not merely that she's terrible, but that she contrives to maintain no awareness whatsoever of her terribleness, not even as audiences laugh at her and critics boil over in rage, both because of her own delusions and the helping hand of her husband, who whisks away any bad news into a form more palatable to his beloved. One is reminded of Good Bye, Lenin!, the 2003 Wolfgang Becker film about a son desperate trying to conceal the fall of the Berlin wall from his Communist mother, particularly in sequences wherein Grant has to explain away the aftermath of a debauched party, or scramble to hide mocking reviews from his wife, who may not survive the shock.

Things Havoc disliked: Would that the rest of the cast were as good as Hugh Grant (there's a statement I thought I'd never make), or Meryl Streep, but they are not, and Florence Foster Jenkins loses a lot of its magic as a result. Simon Helberg, of The Big Bang Theory and little else, plays pianist Cosmé McMoon, hired to accompany Florence in her performances, and is simply not up to acting alongside either of his co-stars. Though his character is supposed to be something of a blank cypher, whose role is to bear witness to the madness that surrounds him, Helberg isn't even up to that much, and plays the character like a low-functioning idiot grinning his way through the movie in the hopes that it will end and he can go back to television. I got visions of Mark Wahlberg's performance in The Happening from him, and brother, that is not something you want to hear me say. The rest of the cast is forgettable, but particular honors must go to stage actress Nina Arianda, who brings a stage-size mentality to her role, which is to say that she overacts like a lunatic, with big, sweeping, melodramatic gestures that are totally at odds with the restrained farce that the rest of the film seems to inhabit. All of this means that the movie plays very broad with subject matter that isn't really up to the task of that, as though somebody dropped the Marx Brothers into the Bob Newhart show.

Now how about that for a reference that nobody will get?

Final thoughts:   Florence Foster Jenkins is an all right movie, not a great one, but a decent film worth considering if you're hard up for something to see, and given this year, who isn't? Meryl is incapable of delivering a bad performance, as usual, and Hugh Grant re-inventing himself as a character with refined comic timing is a very welcome addition to the small ranks of actors who can do that. The subsidiary performances are bad enough to drag the movie back down to earth, but then again, I hardly expected this movie, of all movies, to become some kind of classic masterpiece for the ages. Sometimes you just want something worth seeing, especially when there's so little out there that fits the term.

Final Score:  6/10

Next Time:  *Sigh*  Time to play catchup again...

Eddie the Eagle

Alternate Title:  I Believe I Can Fly...

One sentence synopsis:    A hapless, would-be British Olympian decides to become a ski-jumper, the first for Britain in 70 years.


Things Havoc liked:Those of you who remember my list of the best films of 2015 (which was not that long ago), will remember the movie Kingsman, the Secret Service, which was a demented, insane, bloodfest of a Matthew Vaughn movie which I adored to a degree that probably speaks poorly of my general character. Among the many, many virtues that Kingsman had was its lead actor, an unknown (to me) young man named Taron Egerton (who, I kid you not, grew up in a Welsh town called Llanfair­pwllgwyngyll­gogery­chwyrn­drobwll­llan­tysilio­gogo­goch). Egerton was absolutely fantastic in a role that should, by rights, have been insufferable, and has since garnered other awards for roles in movies I did not see such as Testament of Youth and Legend. I'm an actor's critic, as you all well know, so when a good young actor shows up, I like to track their career throughout the project, and lo and behold, his next film was, of all things, a feel-good sports movie about one of my favorite people of all time.

For those who do not know, Eddie "The Eagle" Edwards, was an Olympic Ski Jumper from Great Britain notable for being bereft of any shred of Olympic-grade talent for the sport, who nonetheless contrived (due to the fact that there were no other Ski Jumpers from his home country) to make it to the 1988 Calgary Olympics, which also played host to the Jamaican Bobsled team from Cool Runnings. Edwards had no particular aptitude for the sport of Ski Jumping (or for sport in general), but competed nonetheless, becoming a fan favorite on the back of his utter haplessness, self-effacing humor, and British Daring-Do. The role is a far cry from that of Egsy, from the aforementioned Kingsman, but Egerton is once again spot on with it, playing a particularly British type of myopic nerd, who dreams of becoming an Olympian and cares very little for what he has to do to get there, even if it means making a complete fool of himself, and sustaining the horrific bodily injuries that come with failing at a sport like Ski Jumping. These injuries are not minor, as we see in the best line in the film, where Eddie's coach watches with him as another ski jumper shatters every bone in his body while failing a moderate-sized jump, and then leans in to the horrified Eddie to comment "And he knew what he was doing..."

Ah, but the coach is very important in movies like this, isn't he, and Eddie the Eagle's coach is the, far as I can tell fictional, Bronson Peary, played by everyone's favorite wolverine, Hugh Jackman. Jackman is a sardonic, alcoholic bastard, in the wonderful style of these movies since time immemorial, who must gradually warm up to Eddie's innocent-if-ungainly earnestness. It's an old story for a sports movie, yeah, but Jackman has fun with it, gargling booze from everything in sight and seemingly growing to relish the opportunity to troll the entire establishment of Ski Jumping (which apparently exists) with an athlete who is not an athlete by any definition of the word. Long-time character actor and first-time director Dexter Fletcher (of Band of Brothers and Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels), takes on the director's chair with a style that seems to play around with the conventions of the sporting movie a bit, from comical overuse of slow-motion-uplifting-music shots to a truly trippy set of scenes involving the so-called "Flying Finn", Matti Nykänen, who rambles semi-coherently about the philosophical "meaning" of ski jumping like a cross between George Mallory and The Dude.

Things Havoc disliked: Unfortunately, the rest of the movie is all stock sports cliches, and not just that, but practically a re-tread of the aforementioned Cool Runnings. We have everything here, from the team of blond, blue-eyed, Nordic winter athletes (Norwegians, this time), who inexplicably hate our hero and resent his presence in the Olympics, to the fussy, over-proper British bureaucrats determined to prevent Eddie from doing anything so tremendously unorthodox (HARUMPH!) as competing in the Olympics. One of them even goes so far as to deliver a sneering, twirl-of-the-mustache remark about how the Olympics are not for amateurs, and how people with dreams should have them dashed so as to preserve propriety. Eddie, meanwhile, also has to deal with his father, a working-class plasterer who regards his sporting dreams as irrelevant, and who refuses to support him. Will Eddie's dad see the light in time for the big jump? Might he share a knowing nod with his son while acknowledging that he was right to follow his dreams all along? Perish the thought that I should spoil such mysteries of existence to you, but if you've seen a single film in the last thirty years, I have a feeling you'll work it out for yourself. Fletcher seems to have decided that the best way to make his movie would be to take all four of the plotlines that the four main characters in Cool Runnings had and merge them together into one, which is not precisely the decision I would have made. The result is a movie with a schmaltz and saccharine level that is high enough to carry a diabetes warning.

I also question what in the world several of the more prominent actors who lent their names to this film were thinking beyond the need for another paycheck. The wonderful Jim Broadbent is barely in the film at all, with maybe three minutes of screentime tops as the British broadcaster for the games, a role which requires him to do very little. He does, however, manage to do more than Christopher Walken, who somehow earned himself third billing in the movie for a total of roughly forty-five seconds of screentime, playing (in another nod to Cool Runnings) Jackman's former coach from his own days as a ski jumper, who is terminally disappointed in his once-promising pupil, and regards him as having embarrassed himself and his sport in fostering Eddie. As before, I shall refrain from revealing whether or not this ends with a tearful reunion at the end where bygones are allowed to be bygones and the former student is finally acknowledged by the master who once despaired of him, but I shall rely on the good judgment of all of my readers to determine what they think might come of all this.

Final thoughts:     Eddie the Eagle is a perfectly harmless movie in the style of a hundred other sports films, livened by a couple of good performances and the novelty of its source material, but required viewing by all fans of cinema it is definitely not. What you as a viewer are likely to get out of the film is going to be highly dependent on your tolerance for schmaltz, as well as your ability to excuse the fact that a film's plot is one you've seen many, many times before. I will confess to having enjoyed it, not as a masterpiece or a great work of art, but as a fun little story told reasonably well by a couple of actors I just like watching. There have been worse excuses for movies made.

 

Final Score:  6.5/10

Next Time:  The Fox and the... Meter-maid?

Joy

Alternate Title:  Joylessness

One sentence synopsis:     A young woman caring for her extended, dysfunctional family, invents a new type of mop and struggles to build a business around it.


Things Havoc liked: Some things are as regular as the seasons themselves. Take wintertime, when we encounter short days and cold weather, the NFL playoffs, Christmas holidays, and of course, the most regular of all predictable events, the yearly David O. Russel movie starring Jennifer Lawrence, Robert De Niro, and Bradley Cooper.

Yes, for the third year in a row (unless you count last year, but who does?), Three Kings and I Heart Huckabees director David O. Russell has returned to the well, bringing us another movie about weird, quirky people starring the same weird quirky actors as his last weird, quirky movie. In 2012, there was Silver Linings Playbook, a cute little romanitc comedy about two utterly broken, manipulative people, and their only-slightly-less-broken families trying to help them. In 2013, it was American Hustle, a madcap romp through the worst of 70s hairstyles featuring Christian Bale as a con-man with a combover of the gods. And now we have Joy, which is a movie about a whole panoply of insane, needy characters, and the one person who tries her best to take care of them all.

Joy stars Jennifer Lawrence, one of your and my favorite young actresses, and a veteran of both of the films I cited above, playing Joy Mangano, who is a woman in greater need of a week-long vacation to Hawaii than anyone else you or I will ever meet. A prodigy with mechanics and construction (or as the hipsters around here call it nowadays, a "maker"), Joy is inspired to invent a new type of self-wringing mop after one-too-many accidents while trying to clean up broken glass around her dysfunctional house (more on this later), and spends the rest of the movie trying to flog it to consumers any which way she can, eventually landing on QVC, the famous home shopping network, the meaning of whose initials I never knew before I watched this movie. Joy Mangano is a real woman, who really did these things in 1989, though how truthful the movie is to the reality of her story, I cannot tell. Lawrence is superb in this movie, as she is in everything I see her in, as a young woman stretched to the breaking point by the demanding needs of her extended family (more on this later), two kids, two parents, an ex-husband, a jealous half-sister, a job she hates, a desire to succeed, bills, arrests, and the thousand frustrations of life. The character never comes across as a martyr (very easy to do in cases like this), nor as some kind of needy twit (ditto), but an eminently watchable character just trying to keep all the plates spinning, in circumstances that occasionally had me wanting to run out of the room screaming (more on this later).

So what else does the movie boast? Well there's a reason Russell keeps coming back to this cast. Bradley Cooper this time plays a producer and acolyte for QVC, a salesman with a slightly messianic bent who proselytizes the gospel according to home shopping networks. His role isn't huge, but he's a strange, vaguely-orgasmic character, who seems to regard the production of a successful infomercial and the sales that it generates as a cross between conducting a symphony and performing stage magic. Robert De Niro and Virginia Madsen play Joy's father and mother respectively, the former a lonely, embittered car mechanic with good intentions and terrible habits, the latter a cloistered, dependent shut-in with no sense of perspective beyond the walls of her room. Both De Niro and Madsen are excellent in roles that have them screaming and breaking things and tearfully apologizing seconds later, be those things a water glass or their daughter's life and career. Edgar Ramirez, of Zero Dark Thirty (among other things) manages to be affable and appealing despite playing a deadbeat loser still living in his ex-wife's basement, while the eternally-glamorous Isabella Rossellini plays a wealthy widow whose business acumen is not quite the equal of the cold merciless demeanor she puts on when dealing with it. All of these are good actors, each of which have fun, meaty roles to play, which has always been the hallmark of Russell's success.

Things Havoc disliked: This time, however, the service all this talent is put to lets the whole movie down.

For a movie called Joy, this film is one of the hardest things I've had to watch since Leviathan mercifully ended, and the reason for that is because every one of these excellent actors, Lawrence excluded, has been instructed to put all their talent and skill towards portraying characters that I simply wanted to kill for almost all of the run-time of the film. The tone is set early on, when De Niro, fresh from another divorce, returns to Joy's house expecting to be given a place to stay, only to instantly confront and insult his first ex-wife and embark on a tirade against her that culminates in him violently smashing things while screaming invective. He apologizes, pro-forma of course, but treats the event as no big deal, expecting Joy to simply accept him acting in this way whenever he wants. So does Joy's mother, who watches soap operas all day and demands that Joy deal with every intrusion on her life from bills to repairs without even requiring her to lay eyes on other human beings. So does her sister, a thoroughly loathsome bitch seething with barely-suppressed jealousy, who sabotages her constantly in front of her children, business partners, and family. And Joy simply takes it, accepting the abuse and the negging and the jealousy and the dysfunction and the constant bickering fights that swirl around her. To Lawrence and Russell's credit, the film doesn't try to make her a stand-in for Jesus, but it does rob the audience of any sense of catharsis, as we are left sitting there waiting for Lawrence to do the sensible thing and throw everyone into an active volcano. Because she does not do this, we are left watching these awful, awful people for hours on end, and the skill with which the various actors blame Lawrence for every problem, denigrate and sabotage her constantly, and act like entitled dicks, only makes everything worse.

I grant, this isn't the first time that Russell has mined this particular vein of crazy, as Silver Linings Playbook had an extended family around the protagonist that was reasonably dysfunctional, while 2011's The Fighter had one that was utterly irredeemable and manipulative.  The devil here, though, is in the details. Silver Linings Playbook had protagonists who were considerably crazier than their extended families, and the madness that encircled them was there to showcase just how they might have come by their own issues.  The Fighter, meanwhile, a movie I had a lot more trouble with, gave the extended family (particularly Christian Bale), enough self-awareness to develop an arc over the course of our time spent with them.  It's a lot easier to spend an hour in the company of an awful person if there's a purpose to it beyond misery, and Joy has no such purpose.  Her family are terrible, manipulative, soul-excoriating people when they begin the film, and remain so even into the end-of-movie voiceover.

And on top of that, there's an issue with Russell's writing, normally as sharp as it comes, but this time so over-written, so impossibly on-the-nose, that it exacerbates all of the film's flaws. This isn't a movie where characters are allowed to simply emote or act, they must explain, in great and exacting detail, what they are feeling at this exact moment and how that relates to the arc of their lives. So it is that when Joy looks like she is faced with bankruptcy after her business is knocked onto the ropes by incompetence on the part of her family and outright theft on the part of her suppliers, her family gathers together to enact an elaborate after-action breakdown, in which they discuss, over and over again and in explicit detail, how this happened because Joy is a loser, who should not be in business, because she is weak, and will lose all her money, which she just did, because she is a loser, and has now lost her money, as losers do, and must now file for bankruptcy, the papers for which are right over here, which she should sign right now, signifying that she is a loser, who lost all her money, because she doesn't know anything about business, as the papers will attest to, which is why she should sign them, because then everyone will know she is a loser, who has lost all of her money in a risky business venture, which she should never have been in, because she should instead go home and be a loser, which is all she is, as attested to by the fact that she lost all her money, so she should sign the forms right now, and then everyone will forever know that she is a loser, whose life ended on this day after she lost all her money, and that will be the abrupt end of her story, with no possible chance of redemption, certainly.

Final thoughts:    Joy is not a badly-made movie, but it is a movie I flat out did not enjoy the act of watching, and had I been unable to make snarky comments about the awful people on screen, I would have enjoyed it even less. Plenty of movies are made about terrible people, including several films I have enjoyed tremendously, from Pain & Gain, to Russell's own American Hustle. This film, however, presents us terrible people not so that we may understand them or take pleasure in their sleaziness and greed, nor enjoy the act of watching them fail, but so that they can be inflicted on the main character, and thereby on us, for more than two hours without any compensating gain for our trouble. As such, despite the pedigree and the acting on offer, Joy is a film I simply wanted to end, and could not find much reason, in retrospect, to recommend to anyone. After all, even if you're a die-hard Jennifer Lawrence fan, and I have been accused of such in the past, surely you would prefer to see her in a role that serves some purpose beyond showering everyone with misery until the lights come up.

After all, if I wanted that, I'd go see an Alejandro Iñárritu movie.
 

Final Score:  5/10

Next Time:  I go see an Alejandro Iñárritu movie.

Black Mass

Alternate Title:  The Adventures of Jimmy B and his Bestest Palls

One sentence synopsis:     James "Whitey" Bulger and his gang form an alliance with the FBI to extend their power over Boston.


Things Havoc liked:  Ever since the details of his case came out back in 1997, the story of Irish mob boss Whitey Bulger and his illicit relationship with a network of corrupt FBI agents has tantalized a Hollywood still obsessed, in the main, with gangster flicks. Scorsese's "The Departed" was more or less openly based on Bulger's story, with Jack Nicholson taking on the starring role to effect that varied depending on who you asked. I quite liked The Departed, but it was pastiche, a thin retelling of a completely new story using characters inspired by real gangsters, something Scorsese has done many times before. The actual truth of the matter, of who Bulger was and what he did to earn himself a place on the notorious FBI Most Wanted list, remained untold, waiting for another director, in this case Scott Cooper, of Crazy Heart and Out of the Furnace (two excellent films), to come along and take a crack at it with the assistance of an actor who desperately, desperately needed to be in a good movie for a change.

What a decade it has been for Johnny Depp, a man I once respected immensely, who has systematically squandered all of the goodwill he earned from me with every appearance of intent. He was one of my favorite actors once, in movies like Finding Neverland, Ed Wood, What's Eating Gilbert Grape, Blow, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and of course Donnie Brasco, a gangster movie in which Depp played an undercover cop opposite Al Pacino during one of his brief periods of lucidity. All of this wonderful work, and yet what has Depp done for the last fifteen years but throw all of it away playing cartoon characters, literal or figurative, in appalling dreck such as the later Pirates movies, The Lone Ranger, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, Alice in Wonderland, Dark Shadows, and last year's execrable luddite homily, Transcendence. So bad has his career become that the best thing I can say for it is that his three minute cameo as a pedophilic Big Bad Wolf in last Christmas's Into the Woods didn't ruin the movie for me. Formerly regarded as one of the great actors of his generation, Depp has become a joke, through enough collective memory remains of his great early work that we keep hoping he will, against all expectations, pull a Matthew McConaughey, and suddenly transition back into good movies once again. Black Mass, in fact, was sold almost entirely on the notion that it was just that, Depp returning to serious roles as a serious actor. He's the reason I went to see the thing in the first place.

And you know what? He's awesome. Depp's films have been so bad, so cartoonish recently, that we forget just how great his acting range really is, and here, in this movie, we finally get to see something of the old magic again. Almost unrecognizeable behind makeup that ironically makes him look more like a Vampire than Tim Burton's films ever did, Depp is a sinister, menacing, violent figure looming over this film, with none of the self-referential winks or crotchety old-man vibes that Nicholson brought to the role. An evil, manipulative gang lord with no conscience or sense of redeeming qualities beyond the ferocious loyalty he half-inspires, half-enforces on the rest of his cronies, Depp blows everyone else off the screen, his voice a low, cavernous Boston drawl, dripping with semi-sarcastic hate. He seems to feed on his own persona as a local Irish townie who was tougher than everyone else, murdering men in broad daylight with a carbine or beating them into a bloody pulp with a sudden explosion of frothing rage. Even his own allies within the FBI are afraid of him, and so are we. It's Depp's best role in decades, one of his best ever, and an anchor point to the tie the movie to, the core element of what should have been a gob-smacking tale of corruption, violence, crime, and punishment.

Things Havoc disliked:  And yet...

To my surprise, given the pedigree of Scott Cooper, and the quality of the supporting cast, Depp isn't the problem with this movie. Indeed he's one of the only actors in the film that manages to pull anything out of it. The rest of the dozens of characters orbiting around Depp's performance are almost entirely useless for a variety of reasons, and it's this, not Depp, which ultimately sinks the film. Joel Edgerton, whom I'm beginning to realize is simply a bad actor, plays FBI Agent John Connoly, a childhood friend of the Bulger family, who proposes an alliance between Bulger's Winter Hill Gang and the FBI so as to bring down the Italian mob. Given that this alliance is the central drama of the film, and that the movie, truthfully or not, makes clear that the entire thing was Connoly's idea, foisted on a semi-reluctant Bulger after much persuading, it's really Connoly who should be the focal character of the film, at least structurally, but Edgerton is a boring actor, and his character, a slick, slimy, charlatan of an FBI agent who drags others down with him, is not as interesting to watch as Depp's Bulger is, nor does the film manage to convince us that he's the sort of person that could mastermind something like this. The movie makes Bulger look almost indifferent to the entire thing, blowing Connoly off when he brings up issues that might arise, and treating him with the grudging semi-contempt that a high school cool kid might treat a nerd who wormed his way into the cool kids' table at lunch. Indeed the film goes so far as to suggest that the entire reason Connoly maintained the alliance so long was because he was obsessed with being "in" with someone like Bulger, a obsession that was entirely unrequited. Maybe this is all true (though it smells a lot like someone trying to pin all the blame for a multi-decade conspiracy within the FBI on the one fall guy who got convicted for it all), but narratively, it's like watching the first half of an 80s High School movie over and over again, without any character movement or development, nor any rapport between our main characters, the sort of which is required for a good gangster movie like this to function. Michael Mann knew this much.

And the problem spreads from there. Because Edgerton looks hapless and frankly pathetic, it makes all of the other people engaged in trying to work around this unholy alliance look stupid or powerless. Kevin Bacon and David Harbour do their best with what they're given, but what they're given just isn't that much. They roil and scream or agonize over questions of what the right thing to do is, and then let themselves be walked all over by a man we have just watched being walked all over. When finally the noose starts to close around everyone, thanks to newly-arrived crusading DA Fred Wyshak (Corey Stoll, making up for a bad turn in Antman), the movie picks up somewhat, but only so that we can ask why nobody was able to put a stop to this earlier? Any hints of wider corruption are ruthlessly suppressed in the film, so we are left with the conclusion that the Boston office of the FBI was comprised entirely of shy, retiring gentlemen, who thought it would be too awkward to ask one of their agents to please stop assisting Whitey Bulger with his murder spree.

Meanwhile the rest of Bulger's friends and family are a just a mish-mash of poor execution and bad pacing. The movie opens with Friday Night Lights' Jesse Plemons playing a newcomer to the Bulger gang, his initiation, his meetings with Bulger, etc. The film clearly seems to be setting this character up as an audience viewpoint, along the lines of Goodfellas or Once Upon a Time in America, only to, ten minutes in, drop the character entirely and focus instead on someone else, then someone else again, seemingly at random. Benedict Cumberbatch, he of the most British name, is more or less wasted in the role of Bulger's brother Billy, popping up every twenty minutes or so to say hello before disappearing again without affecting the story. Other character actors, including ones I adore, such as Deadwood's W. Earl Brown, are so sparsely and ill-used in the movie that I actually mistook them for other characters when they finally made a reappearance. The plot, such as it is, just meanders along from point to point, with no cohesive narrative, no sense of the proper passage of time, or even of the rise of Bulger's criminal Empire. Contrast this to The Connection from earlier this year, which managed to show a convincing and utterly real crime syndicate building up and mutating as wars and pressure from the government continued to hammer on it. In Black Mass, nothing actually happens except for vignettes involving schemes to take over a Jai-Alai league (???), and the occasional comment about so-and-so's vending machines. I don't require that every gangster movie provide a primer on the commission of organized crimes, but some sense of what's actually going on here would be of help. As it stands, the movie simply expects us to take the existence of this massive crime syndicate on faith, while simultaneously floundering around in search of a subject.

Final thoughts:   Black Mass is not a bad movie, ultimately, but it is not by any means a great or even good one. That a director known for making legitimately great films like Scott Cooper could have floundered like this points to a serious breakdown in the production and writing process, and yet ultimately the result is that the movie isn't about anything at all, except some kid from South Boston who unrequitedly idolized a bad man so much that he did bad things himself. Ignoring the historical truth of that premise, if the film had just been honest about that being its subject matter, it still might have worked, but the strongest element of the movie, Depp's performance as Whitey Bulger, is never allowed to anchor the film, because of the need to wander this way and that through the screenplay in search of something that the movie can be about. On its own, Depp's return to form is good enough to warrant a look, but if this movie had ambitions of becoming another Scorsese-like exposition of the wacky, evil, violent, and sleazy worlds of organized crime, then all I can suggest is that it probably needs to familiarize itself with its subject matter some more, and come back when it has something to say.

And if not, then I'll be damned if I can figure out what the point of the whole exercise was. Because it sure as hell wasn't to tell the story of Whitey Bulger.

Final Score:  5.5/10

Next Time:  Into Thin Air.

The End of the Tour

Alternate Title:  My Weekend with David

One sentence synopsis:     A Rolling Stone reporter travels to North Dakota to interview David Foster Wallace during his book tour to promote Infinite Jest.


Things Havoc liked:  I did not know David Foster Wallace. I did meet him a couple of times. He was an associate professor of English and Creative Writing at Pomona College while I was studying there for my undergraduate degree. I was not able to take his course, though friends of mine were, and spoke well and highly of it and him. Wallace,of course, became famous for writing a novel called Infinite Jest, a thousand page tome brimming with supposed genius unread by me, as I have little interest in highbrow literary fiction. But I knew, then and now, of his importance to the world of literature, a man compared unironically to Proust and Hemmingway, and wish I had had a chance to take one of his courses. Failing that, however, I have this film, depicting a lengthy set of conversations between Wallace and Rolling Stone reporter (and novelist in his own right) Dave Lipsky during the final days of Wallace's publicity tour for Infinite Jest in the winter of 1996.

I'm well aware that everyone I know has already closed the review, surmising that this is another self-indulgent writers-on-writing sort of movie. And it is. But bear with me a moment, I beg you.

The End of the Tour is the sort of movie Richard Linklatter would make if he were trying to remake My Dinner with Andre, the infamously impenetrable Louis Malle film from 1981 which featured Wallace Shawn and Angre Gregory literally having dinner and talking about philosophy and experimental theater. It is an earthy, pretenseless film about two intelligent men trying to have an intelligent conversation about a number of matters that seem great to them, conscious as they do so that these matters may not be so great in the grand scheme of things. It is a movie whose subject matter should interest about a third of one percent of the population, but manages nonetheless to be spellbinding, not through artifice nor revelations of grand and universal truths, but via the more simple method of portraying interesting characters on the screen and following them around a while. The centerpiece of it is Wallace himself played to a pitch of perfection I have not seen in some time by Jason Segel, a man I had so little use for previous to this occasion that I don't believe I've ever seen him before. And perhaps I still have not, for Segel transforms himself into... if not David Foster Wallace himself, then a perfectly credible facsimile of the man that might have been. Bearing Wallace's trademark bandana, expounding at length his vague, unclear theories on writing, his insecurities about being seen as faking normalcy through his quotidian habits, and indulging in those habits themselves, from junk food to a profound appreciation for movies like Die Hard and Broken Arrow (ah, the 90s...), Segel is absolutely spot perfect in a role that could not possibly have been anything but torturous for an actor better known for sitcoms and romantic comedies. I don't know how faithful the representation is. My friend who took courses from Wallace was convinced and so was I, though Wallace's estate disowned the picture and his dearer friends have all claimed it is a travesty, mostly sight-unseen. But I do know that Segel is almost impossible to not watch, displaying Wallace's vulnerabilities, his meandering prolixity, his desperate desire to remain in some way genuine to himself in the face of nagging fear that he has never been so. His Wallace is a man who is not a regular guy, but desperately wants to believe that he is, who opines a preference for dogs over a girlfriend because he wouldn't know what to say on a date, and then goes home to write thousand page epochal novels, who analyzes his own television addiction even as he indulges in it, all without ever appearing, as biopics of this sort can often appear, to be nothing more than a screenwriter's conceited attempt at inventing some "brilliant, conflicted" parody, the sorts of which we find on dramatic network TV all the time nowadays. Segel makes Wallace look deeply human, and it is an achievement I have seen very few actors attain.

The End of the Tour was directed by Indie darling James Ponsoldt, whose last film, The Spectacular Now, made the usual circuit of film festival awards two years ago. My tolerance for such fare is limited, but Ponsoldt's directorial style and production is very deliberately low-key in this one, filming the subjects in an intimate, low-budget style to accent the focus on what they're actually talking about. To this end, he has employed Jessie Eisenberg, an actor I've never had much use for, to portray David Lipsky, whose task in the film is less to portray a character and more to assist Segel in portraying his. Younger than Wallace and infinitely less successful as an author, Eisenberg uses all of his awkward slightly-superficial charm to play a character who must ultimately force Wallace's character open for his interview, with the helpful side effect of letting us see what lies within the main subject. He gets a lot across with small gestures, fumbling with a tape recorder or using a moment's privacy to surreptitiously itemize Wallace's entire house, the better to recollect the details of the article he will one day write. Eisenberg allows just a hint of the wormy, anti-socialness he brought to The Social Network to infuse this character as he challenges Wallace not just on subjects such as drug use and institutionalization, but also the way in which Wallace affects at normalcy while consciously dumbing himself down to appeal to "normal" people around him. He does this because he must, as an interviewer and a journalist, and because Wallace is a man who wants to explain himself to himself if not to others. They clash, fight even, sit in awkward silence, mutually decide to proceed as though nothing happened, and press one another on the answers to mysteries as varied as existential meaning and Alanis Morisette. One does not, in the aftermath, get the sense that it's an experience Wallace would be interested in repeating, nor one that propelled Lipsky to new profound heights with his own writing. But the interplay between the characters offers so much richness of character and depth, that the plain intention is to offer us, the audience the catharsis that neither of them are capable of generating. And it is a strange movie indeed that causes me to write sentences like that.

Things Havoc disliked:  The End of the Tour is a film with very narrow horizons, by requirement, certainly, and that's no bad thing, but given how enrapturing the lead performance is, one wonders at the inclusion of everything else. An extended introduction to Lipsky, his work as a novelist and reporter, his budding interest in conducting the interview and the process whereby he convinces his boss to let him eats up a lot of runtime, and I'm not convinced it pays off in any way in revealing more about the subject of the film. As I mentioned above, the movie isn't really about Lipsky, but uses Lipsky to reveal more about Wallace, and while that's the right call manifestly, this much focus on the other character makes me wonder if that was not something of an accidental design choice.

There's also a good deal of stunt casting going on, from Ron Livingston as Lipsky's Rolling Stone boss to Joan Cusack as Wallace's hapless driver and escort around Minneapolis. Neither of them are bad at their roles, particularly not Livingston, whom I always love to watch. But Segel is so good at becoming Wallace, and Eisenberg so good at deflecting the spotlight back at him, that one forgets that one is looking at actors at all, until one is violently reminded of such by Cusack or Livingston. It's an unfair criticism, I acknowledge as much, but a filmmaker's job is to artfully craft a reaction from an audience, and my reaction was that I'd almost have preferred a more stripped-down version of this story to one that felt the need to dip back into more conventional cinema every half hour or so.

Final thoughts:   In 2008, David Foster Wallace hanged himself at his home outside Pomona College after a lifelong battle with depression and anxiety. He was 46. His longtime editor described him as "a comet flying by at ground level", while fellow author Bret Easton Ellis, writer of American Psycho, called him the biggest literary fraud of his lifetime (it should be mentioned that Ellis went on to claim that women were incapable of directing movies because they lacked the necessary 'male gaze', so take that for what you will). The End of the Tour does not seek to explain what David Foster Wallace's place was in American literature, nor to understand his depression and suicide holistically, though both subjects are touched upon, with some care, by the characters themselves. Instead, it seeks, as best it can with a subject who has been dead for seven years and who would likely not have wished to have biographical films made about him were he not, to portray a version of the man as he either was or might have been. In this, it is an unqualified success, a movie that rivets the attention as it digresses whimsically through perspectives on writing, Americana, angst, ego, and the need to be accepted or recognized. I will not pretend that these subjects aren't personally of interested to me, but my tolerance, as all of you have learned, for pretentious tripe done up in indie trappings, is very limited, and I have not hesitated to pillory critically-acclaimed films of this sort in the past, should they transgress my limits. Yet I keep returning, despite films like Under The Skin or Boyhood, precisely in the hopes that a thoughtful, hungry young indie director will make a movie like this one, a movie I simply wished to continue, that I might hear more of what this version, real or fictional, of David Foster Wallace had to say.

I did not know David Foster Wallace. I did meet him a couple of times. Perhaps the person I met in the theater last week was very much like him and perhaps he was not, and perhaps, as Wallace himself believed, all biographies are suspect, because the life of an author is incidental to his work. But whoever he was, making his acquaintance again was one of the best times I've had in a theater this year.

Final Score:  8/10

Next Time:  Johnny Depp wears ridiculous makeup.  Film at 11.