Lance Mannion

"Big Miracle": We're to help each other get through this thing, whatever it is

Originally set free from the ice Saturday, February 11, 2012. Re-released Friday night, January 1, 2021, and posted Monday morning, January 11.

Drew Barrymore as a Greenpeace activist better at making friends with whales than getting along with human beings in the movie based on the real story of a trio of whales trapped in the ice off the coast of Alaska in 1988, "Big Miracle".

There be whales here!

Here being there, over on Twitter tonight. (Friday night, January 1, 2021.) Shannon Watts, the founder of Moms Demand, asked her followers to “Name a whale-related book, documentary, podcast, etc., that’s worth buying.” Melville’s was a given. She didn’t say why she was initiating this virtual whale watch, but since I’m one of her followers and thinking about whales strikes me as a good way to start off the new year, I made a few suggestions, starting with David Niewert’s “Of Orcas and Men”. I followed right up with “A Whale for the Killing” by Farley Mowat. Mowat, who is sadly gone now, was one of my favorite nature journalists, and “A Whale for the Killing” is my second favorite of his books. (The first is “Never Cry Wolf”.) Niewert is following closely in Mowat’s wake with “Of Orcas and Men”. “A Whale for a Killing” was made into an excellent TV movie starring Peter Krause back when it seemed all the best TV movies starred Peter Krause. It’s almost totally fictionalized but worth buying although you don’t have to buy it: it’s free to watch on YouTube, if you can put up with the ads.

“Never Cry Wolf” is a great movie.

But I had another recommendation. Another movie. Another one based on true events. 2012’s “Big Miracle”. Not a great movie, it doesn't make my list of Best Pictures of the 2010s, but it's a likeable one. Stars Drew Barrymore, John Krisinski, Ted Danson, and Kristin Bell, and features a cameo appearance, via a vintage news clip, by Sarah Palin. It’s based on a book by Tom Rose, which I haven’t read---I’m on a course to fix that---so I can’t say how fictionalized the movie is. At any rate, here’s my review from when we Mannions saw it in the theater in February of 2012.

Oh, before launching into the review I have to mention that Oliver Mannion’s recommendation was “Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home”.

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February 11, 2012.

One of the very good things about “Big Miracle”---and there are many---is that Drew Barrymore’s character, Rachel Kramer, a passionate Greenpeace activist determined to save a family of whales trapped in the ice off the coast of Alaska, is irritating and obnoxious. Adorably irritating and obnoxious but still irritating and obnoxious.

Rachel, whom we first meet wielding a bullhorn and disrupting an auction of oil drilling rights by the, as you may remember, not environmentally conscientious Reagan Administration’s Department of Interior, is committed, energetic, and persistent. She’s also a self-righteous scold convinced that everyone she argues with needs her to explain to them not just how they’re on the wrong side of the issue politically but how they’re on the wrong side morally as well.

When after she outmaneuvers him on the PR front the governor shakes his head and sighs, “I hate her so much,” we feel for him.

And she doesn’t change. At best she learns she needs to change.

It’s 1988, and three gray whales have somehow wandered off course in their annual migration from their far northern summer feeding grounds above the Arctic Circle to the warm waters off California and Mexico where their species winters. The ice has closed in around them and they have only a small opening through which they take turns popping up to breathe. The hole is inexorably freezing over and when it does the whales will drown. When she hears about the whales, Rachel packs her bags and rushes up to Barrow, the town closest to where the whales are trapped, intent on saving the whales and certain that she is the only one who cares enough to do it.

She may have another motive. She gets the news off the television in a story reported by the first journalist on the scene, her ex-boyfriend, Adam Carlson (played with his dependable affability by John Krasinski), and from the look that passes across her face it might be that her plan is that after getting the whales out of the ice she’s going to push Adam in.

I’d better stop this review right here to tell you “Big Miracle” is not a romantic comedy. It’s not a chick flick. It’s a family movie in the best sense of the term. But it’s something else as well. Rachel’s and Adam’s places in the story aren’t defined by their romance but by the individual jobs each one has to do to help rescue the whales. Big Miracle is about a community effort to do a small but transcendent act of decency and the group of oddballs who come together to form that little community. Barrymore and Krasinski are the stars and Rachel and Adam are the main characters, but they’re the main characters the way Maggie and Joel were the main characters on “Northern Exposure”.

“Big Miracle” is like “Northern Exposure” in more ways than its being set in a small town in Alaska populated by eccentrics. In any given episode of Northern Exposure the story’s focus would shift away from Joel and Maggie to any and all of the other regular and semi-regular characters who’d be working their way through subplots of their own only thematically related to what was going on with Joel and Maggie. And in any given scene of Big Miracle the focus shifts away from Rachel and Adam to the other main and important supporting characters working their way through their own part of the story arc.

In fact, just as often happened with Maggie and Joel on “Northern Exposure”, Rachel and Adam are dropped from the story for scenes at a time only to reappear, again like Joel and Maggie, apart from each other, working their way through problems that have nothing to do with each other or the question of whether or not they’ll get back together.

On television and in the movies, a whole school of quirky ensemble dramas and comedies about little communities of eccentrics developed after “Northern Exposure”. (Someday I may write a post about the influence of Cicely on “Deadwood”.) The creators of Northern Exposure didn’t invent it. Preston Sturges got there way ahead of them. But they repopularized it and did it as well or better than it had been done before or has been done since, and I write that not just as a “Deadwood” fan but as someone whose favorite movie from the 1980s might just be Local Hero.

In these movies and TV shows, characters are defined by their roles within their community of eccentrics but they also define themselves against the community, and that’s how it is here.

In "Big Miracle", every character is a “character” but not just in the sense of being a weirdo, oddball, eccentric, or otherwise afflicted with a screenwriter’s idea of colorfulness. They are characters in having characters of their own, in being themselves, in not being the person you expect them or need them to be. And they have stories of their own apart from their role in the story we happen to be watching and they tell us a little bit of that other story whenever they open their mouths, like the waitress at the northernmost Mexican restaurant in North America who tells her story in her one single line of dialog. She’s Eskimo---Inupiat---like most of the residents of Barrow, but her brown skin, black hair, and sharp Indian cheekbones set off against the place where she works cause an out-of-towner who knows better but can’t help himself to ask, “Are you Mexican?”

“Only at work,” she says.

Everyone has their story. Everyone has their rhymes and their reasons. Nobody’s a villain, at least not in their own eyes, and we get to see them through their own eyes. Most people try to do the right thing, it’s just a rare occasion when we’re put into a circumstance where the right thing is clear and everybody sees what it is and agrees what to do about it.

So here are some of the other characters whose stories we’re told along with Rachel and Adam’s:

There’s an oil company executive named McGraw and played by Ted Danson with persuasive mixtures of charm and false charm, smarminess and sincerity, true jollity and malicious glee, and greed, ambition, opportunism, and a sense of limits to all three that allows him to be more of a decent guy than an all around bastard. He is a bastard, but only some of the time and incidentally. McGraw doesn’t really care about the whales one way or another but he puts his company’s resources behind the rescue, and joins in himself, because he hopes the good PR will help him win drilling rights within the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve. (It’s dismaying to be reminded how long and how relentlessly the oil industry has been pushing to drill, baby, drill up there.) The surprise to him is that once he starts to help his talents and his brains and his energies are engaged and whenever that happens to him he goes all in. He starts to see saving the whales as a personal responsibility because that’s how he feels about any work he undertakes. He’s responsible for seeing it’s done right and done well because he has the skill and the knowledge to get it done right and well.

There’s an official from the Reagan White House who sees the whales’ plight as an opportunity to make up for something that has been a personal disappointment to her, Reagan’s terrible record on the environment and there’s a National Guard helicopter pilot who’s given the dangerous job, thanks to that official’s efforts, of towing an ice breaking barge to the where the whales are trapped. Their two stories combine in the other romantic subplot of Big Miracle.

There’s an ambitious young TV journalist from Los Angeles (a coolly blonde Kristen Bell deftly locating her character at the midway point in her transition from idealistic journalism school grad to seasoned and cynical pro) who’s sent to cover the story to get her out of the way of her station’s star reporter and then blossoms as a reporter on camera and finds herself competing with that star reporter who arrives hoping to take over what she’s helped turn into a major news story.

There’s Nathan, a savvy twelve year old Inupiat, who is feeling the pull of the greater and wider---and whiter---world outside Barrow. He already knows his future isn’t in Barrow but he can’t articulate to himself his dilemma: how to be true to himself and pursue his own dreams while honoring his family and his people. And there’s his grandfather Malik, one of the leaders in the attempt to rescue the whales, who is trying to figure out how to let Nathan go and what to give him to take with him, emotionally and spiritually, and how to make him see it’s worth taking with him, how to teach him he’ll be leaving something precious behind without burdening him with guilt about leaving it.

There are the captain and first mate of the Soviet Navy ice breaker that sets off to come help with the rescue and there are a pair of small businessmen from Minnesota who rush up to Alaska with a de-icing device they’ve invented to keep holes open for ice fishing.

And there are scientists, oil men, politicians, half the population of Barrow, and, briefly, Ronald Reagan.

Oh, and the three whales.

Another very good thing about “Big Miracle” is that director Ken Kwapis doesn’t overdo it with the whales or make any attempt to anthropomorphize them. Things get a bit sloppy and sentimental in a few scenes, but come on. They’re whales. They might die. But mainly Kwapis allows them the same dignity to be themselves he allows his human characters and the whales are what whales are, something wonderfully other, aliens from another world we have only begun dimly to understand. Our rooting interest in their being saved is in their being alive.

But at the heart of everything is Rachel.

Rachel has spunk and when you see her spunkiness in action you understand why Lou Grant hated spunk.

She is brave and she is honest and she is remarkably pure of heart. But she is proud and tactless and pathetically unself-aware and socially inept. She says exactly what she thinks and expects that people appreciate her forthrightness even when she is in fact insulting them.

This is not a helpful way for a political activist to be.

It’s not helpful even when she’s right and in the right, like when she confronts the official from the Reagan administration with her boss’s horrendous record on the environment. All Rachel succeeds in doing is offend a potential ally and cause her to go all Morning in America in defense of what the official knows is indefensible. And it’s not helpful when Rachel lays into the tribal leaders who are already leaning towards helping to rescue the whales. Rachel is a liberal, of course, but she’s not much of a poster girl for liberalism. She gives no thought to the Inupiat’s traditions, customs and economic needs. All she knows is that the Inupiat hunt whales (bowheads not grays, but as far as she’s concerned there’s no difference) and that makes them bad guys in her book and she can’t stop herself from letting them know that.

Rachel expects people to just accept that she is there to serve the cause of goodness and light and they should get out of her way and let her do what needs to be done. It doesn’t dawn on her that she might need their help to do it.

This is where her romantic past with Adam becomes thematically key.

As soon as she sees his story on TV, Rachel calls Adam and in her best accusatory tone, and without saying hello first, demands to know why he didn’t call her right away to tell her about the whales. He doesn’t bother to point out that she is no longer the first person he is expected to think of under any circumstances or that even if she was he had his job to do first. But he does remind her that when they broke up she told him never to talk to her again.

Of course she thinks he ought to have known that something like this would be an exception but also that he should have known that she hadn’t meant it anyway. She wanted him to try to talk to her again. She expected him to. She waited and waited for him to. She’s still waiting for him to and she’s mad at him, and herself, that she’s the one who had to break the silence.

But we can tell from this quick call that one of the things that broke them up was that he got tired of having to sort out what she really meant from what she said because she was carried away by her temper.

I love it when a movie doesn’t waste time on a lot of back story and trusts its audience to figure out what’s going on between and within characters. Just about everything we need to know about what went wrong between Adam and Rachel is told to us by the two colors of Drew Barrymore’s hair. We can see that for a time Rachel was as blonde as Kristin Bell’s coolly disciplined and professional TV news reporter. She has let her hair grow out and we can measure the time since they broke up by the several inches of brown roots now showing, but there’s more to it. We can be pretty sure why she’s let it grow out and make a good guess why she dyed her hair in the first place. Him.

We see how his head’s turned by the likes of Bell’s character. Rachel must have seen something like that happen before too and it caused her not very deeply submerged insecurities to breach and leap like whales. At some point she tried to turn herself into the kind of cool, professional blonde she thinks is Adam’s type, completely missing the fact that there’s no way she could ever be cool or even professional in that way. She takes everything too personally. But she’s also missed the fact that his type is her, only with the intensity dialed down a notch or two, because who would want to be with her?

Another revealing touch is the bathrobe Rachel gives Adam when they meet face to face in Barrow. She tells him it’s a belated present she didn’t give him at the time because they broke up before his birthday, but we can see three things right away. Adam suspects she’s lying because he knows she would have forgotten his birthday until the last minute, he hates the robe, and he understands why she’s giving it to him and how she came to pick it out. He knows she’d have made a dash to the store to buy something that would impress him and make him regret their breakup, picked out fifteen perfect gifts, and then, unable to make up her mind which was the most perfect, made a desperate last second decision, reaching almost instinctively for the worst possible choice, regretting it almost immediately, and then stubbornly and perversely sticking to it. And that sums up how things often went between them, Rachel doing and saying what she realized a second too late was exactly the wrong thing to do or say.

Rachel is an emotional and social klutz who’s pretty clearly assigned herself the mission of saving the whales because she’s entirely clueless about how to manage living with other people. It’s not that the case with Rachel is that she loves mankind but can’t stand people. It’s that she doesn’t understand people and the people she least understands is herself. And the thing she least understands about herself is that she needs help from others as much as she believes they need help from her. She thinks of it as her job to look out for others, for the whole world, in fact, but she is hopeless at looking after herself, and she’s too proud and stubborn to admit it.

We quickly come to suspect that the defining dynamic in Rachel and Adam’s relationship was Rachel batting away every effort Adam made to help her take care of herself.

Now, Adam is talented and ambitious, but he’s talented and ambitious in two conflicting directions.

He’s a talented and ambitious journalist. He’s looking for the break that will get him out of Alaska and into a job at a major network affiliate in the lower forty-eight and with the whales’ story he’s found that break. And when Kristen Bell’s character, Jill, shows up to cover the story herself he’s in a position to capitalize on that break. Jill recognizes a fellow pro and she also recognizes that she needs Adam’s help. But unlike Rachel, she’s secure enough not just to accept it but to ask for it, and Adam is happy to oblige. Rachel can’t help seeing Jill as a romantic rival, the blonde princess Rachel thought she had to be to attract Adam, but a big part of Jill’s appeal for Adam is that she represents an independent life for him. She needs his help, but she doesn’t need him. And she makes it clear that although she’s willing to give him a leg up professionally she doesn’t think he needs her to succeed, he’s good enough to make it on his own. Her showing up is fortunate. They make a good team. But that doesn’t make them an inevitable couple, which is fine with both of them. They both have exciting careers ahead of them that they’re going to have to pursue on their own.

But one of the qualities that makes Adam a good journalist is that he’s interested in people and not just for their stories. He understands them, too, and he has a talent for helping them in exactly the way they need to be helped and to give them that help in exactly the right dose. And as is usually the case with anyone with a talent, he’s ambitious to put that talent to work. We see this broadly in his friendship with Nathan and we see it specifically and most practically when in a scene aboard a helicopter flying at night with its doors open to let out the carbon monoxide fumes a portable generator that has to be kept running because there’s a chance it won’t re-start out on the ice and the pilot’s eye freezes shut.

The pilot reluctantly, very reluctantly, accepts Adam’s help, because of the form it has to take, but he accepts it, and the willingness to accept help is a general point of the movie.

Kurt Vonnegut liked to quote his son Mark the pediatrician’s answer to the existential question Why are we here?

“We’re here,” Doctor Vonnegut says, “to help each other get through this thing, whatever it is.”

All the characters rallying to save the whales want to help. But after a while it’s almost as if the whales themselves are beside the point. The point is to help. Helping is not saving. You can’t help alone. You help along with at least one other person, the one you’re helping if no one else. Helping is admitting you can’t do it alone as much as is asking for help. You need that person’s help to help them. Implicit in being helpful is accepting help yourself. Giving and receiving help is being part of a community. It might be the definition of a community.

One by one the characters in “Big Miracle” join the community until only one person is left struggling alone outside it.

When Adam asks her to appear on camera and tell the folks at home why people should care about whales, Rachel says, “Even though they’re big and powerful, they’re so much like us…We’re vulnerable, we get scared, we need help sometimes too.”

The question is when is Rachel going to realize she’s not talking about just the whales and what is she going to do about it if and when she does?

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The blonde’s blurb: Sob. Oliver Mannion determined to take his mother to see “Big Miracle” when he caught her tearing up at the trailer. He wanted to see if she’d start bawling in the theater. She did. Me too.

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The ads say “Big Miracle” was “inspired by” a true story. I took that to mean what it usually means, that the filmmakers had given themselves a license to invent. And there’s a lot of invention in Big Miracle, but it’s the characters who are invented. It’s interesting to read how closely the plot follows the real-life events.

Kwapis also does a good job of weaving actual TV news clips from the time in with his faked footage, better even than Bennett Miller did in “Moneyball”, in fact and I was happy to see that one of the things I thought had to be made up was real---they really did cut a path of rectangular air holes five miles long for the whales to follow to safety.

Most of the characters are inventions or composites but two have almost exact real-life counterparts, the Reagan aide and the National Guard officer who fall in love. Their real-life story is sweet but also sad.

“Big Miracle”, directed by Ken Kwapis, screenplay by Jack Amiel and Michael Begler. Based on the book by Tom Rose. Starring Drew Barrymore, John Krasinski, Kristen Bell, Ted Danson, Tim Blake Nelson, Stephen Root, Dermot Mulroney, Vinessa Shaw, John Pingayak, and Ahmaogak Sweeney.  Available to stream on YouTube.

Argo: "The best bad idea we have"

Original mission undertaken Thursday night, November 4, 2012. Declassified Saturday night, November 7, 2020.

Lost in the bazaar:  Ben Affleck as CIA operative Tony Mendez leads the six American diplomats he’s come to rescue down a street in Tehran during the Iranian Hostage Crisis in Argo, an Affleck-directed political thriller based on an actual covert mission that involved putting a fake movie into pretended production and having the diplomats pose as members of a Canadian film crew scouting locations for their non-existent Star Wars rip-off.

[From the Department of One Thing Leading to Another: I need to add a note or even write a whole post about how we ended up re-watching “Argo” for Family Movie Night. But that’s what we did. I’ll update when I post one or the other.  Meantime, here’s my review from back when we saw it in the theater when it came out in November of 2012, almost eight years ago to the day.]

If you sit still when the lights come on and the credits start to roll at the end of Argo---which you should do because 1. It’s a good movie and you should be sitting all the way through it anyway and 2. These days filmmakers are in the habit of opening up audience-rewarding Easter eggs during and after the credits of their movies and you should still be kicking yourself if you didn’t wait until the very, very last credit of The Avengers---you’ll see how proud Argo’s director and star Ben Affleck is of his movie’s visual historical accuracy. And you can’t blame him.

Affleck juxtaposes scenes from Argo with pictures of the real people and events that show how closely he’s captured the look and feel and sense of those long, terrible 444 days from November 1979 until January 1981 when Iranian revolutionaries held fifty-two American diplomats hostage within the seized U.S. embassy in Tehran and with them our national pride and, I’d argue, our collective mental balance.

It’s not just that many of the key players are the spitting images of their real-life counterparts (with one notable exception). That’s the easy part.  It’s that the movie’s recreations of the scenes outside and inside the embassy and in the streets of Tehran more than look like the pictures on TV and in newspapers and magazines at the time---they have the same energy and evoke the same sense of something terrible, terrifying, and tragic happening right before our eyes and the same sense of frustration and helplessness that follows that godawful despairing realization that There’s nothing we can do!

If you’re old enough to remember the Hostage Crisis, though, you won’t need the pictures at the end to tell you how exactly Affleck and his cinematographer and designers got that right.  You’ll have felt it right from the start.

That’s one of the very good things about Argo but it’s not the best thing.  It makes the best things possible.  If Affleck had been content with historical evocations, Argo would be a simple costume drama with blocky polyesters and bad facial hair choices in place of bustles and stovepipe hats.

Of course, the history doesn’t just drive the plot. The history is the plot. But it also provides Argo with its look, its feel, its mood, and one of its important themes.

On November 4, 1979, as the crowds of Iranian protesters and militants stormed the embassy, six members of the station slipped out the back and found sanctuary at the home of the Canadian ambassador and his wife, who hid them out for three months until the situation became dire and untenable.  The Canadians were recalling the ambassador.  The Iranians were on the hunt.  There was nowhere else safe for them to hide.  The fear back in Washington was that if they were caught they’d be treated as spies but if the U.S. tried to rescue them, the Iranians would take revenge on the fifty-two hostages at the embassy.

CIA agent Tony Mendez (played by Affleck), who specialized in sneaking operatives, assets, and defectors out from under the noses of hostile governments, was tasked with developing a plan to get the six out.  Inspired by his son’s love of Star Wars and Planet of the Apes, he came up with the idea of passing the six off as members of a Canadian film crew scouting desert locations for a science-fiction movie.

In real life the movie was called Lord of Light for which an actual script existed, based on the novel by Roger Zelazny.  In Argo the movie is a Star Wars rip-off called…Argo.  In order to fool any Iranians who might go looking for physical evidence that a movie is in production, Mendez makes a side-trip to Hollywood where with the help of an Oscar-winning make-up artist named John Chambers (a real person played by a lookalike John Goodman) and Lester Siegel, an irascible producer with a World War II secret service background and a patriotic streak that he forgot he had (Alan Arkin playing a composite of four actual people), he sets up a phony production company, secures “financing”, and generates public relations campaign that results in puff pieces in the trades.

As evocative of the period as it is, it’s just as evocative of the movies of the period, particularly the political thrillers like Three Days of the Condor and All the President’s Men.

Affleck and his director of photography Rodrigo Prieto have given Argo the gloomy and gritty texture of those films, conjuring up the same look and feel of a society that had given up on itself, of a world literally crumbling from neglect---summed up by an anachronistic shot of the iconic Hollywood sign falling to pieces, which really had happened, although by the time of the Hostage Crisis it had been put back together.  and nobody seemed interested in putting it back together---the same mood of reasonable paranoia, the same sense of people taking shelter in lonely, little groups, hiding out from an almost sourceless menace. Mendez’s apartment in Virginia, his hotel room in Tehran, the kitchen of the Canadian Ambassador’s house reminded me of Faye Dunaway’s basement apartment in Three Days of the Condor and Jane Alexander’s character’s sister’s house in All the President’s Men.  And I couldn’t help thinking of President Carter looking lost and alone in his self-imposed imprisonment in the White House.  Throughout the movie, Carter is mostly seen on television sets in the background in real news footage, looking shrunken, isolated, trapped, and ignored.  In those ‘70s political thrillers, the threat comes from a secret source inside the government, if not from the government itself. In Argo, the government is as threatened and baffled as everyone else.

I feel like I’m making Argo sound unremittingly grim and didactic as well.  It’s neither.  It’s not exactly light-hearted but it is full of humor and not all of it of the gallows kind.  The movie has a satirical edge, although the edge is of a blade fingered behind the back rather than drawn and pointed.  Its targets are Hollywood, of course, but the government, politics, bureaucracy, and the spy game come in for it and, to a darker and more circumspect degree, so does the Iranian Revolution, which produced its own absurd bureaucracies and brand of politicians.

But in all cases the humor arises not from the institutions or systems being satirized but from the people who make them up. Argo’s Hollywood is a collection of lunatics among whom eccentrics like Chambers and Siegel connive to thrive and survive.  Mendez, Chambers, and Siegel have no trouble setting up their phony production company. The easy joke would be that that’s because one way or another everybody in the business is a phony and the whole industry depends on all these phonies pretending not to notice each other’s phoniness. But in Argo it’s more the case of everyone being too caught up in their own problems to pay close attention to what others are up to.  It turns out to be a similar case among the Iranians, with the difference being that people’s individual problems are often matters of life and death.  Revolutionary Iran is a scary place even for revolutionaries. But Mendez’s plan depends on individual Iranians having too much else to worry about besides whether or not he might be a spy.

Affleck takes the view that no matter how dire the circumstances get, people will be people and that means that they’re often ridiculous. We’re funny that way.  But it’s one of the things that makes us strong and resilient. We just can’t take it all in.  Our egos and vanities and misperceptions get in the way.  Our best defense is that we aren’t aware enough to realize how much trouble we’re in.  It’s a likable trait, even admirable in its way, and it’s the root of our commonality.  Before we’re anything else, an American spy or an Iranian revolutionary, we are ourselves. We just can’t help it.

To illustrate this point, Affleck fills Argo with characters being themselves despite themselves. All of them, from the leads and supports, and cameos to the nameless bureaucrats and spies in Washington and at Langley, to the bit players, stagehands, suits, and hangers-on in Hollywood, to the Iranian citizens, soldiers, shopkeepers, low-level government officials, and airport workers, are given dialog, even if only a line or two, or a shot in a scene that reveals them as distinct individuals with feelings and thoughts that transcend their function in the plot.

The odd exceptions are the six diplomats Mendez is trying to rescue who are differentiated mainly by their their hairstyles and shirt collar widths.  One of the six is given more lines and screen time than any of the others but for the most part he’s the spokesmen for their collective fears, doubts, and regrets. Except for one scene, and it’s a redeeming exception, he doesn’t speak for himself or, rather, he doesn’t speak as a particular self we get to know and understand on his own terms. I’m guessing Affleck and his screenwriter, Chris Terrio, were being tactful and taking into consideration the feelings of the of the real people all of whom are still alive and probably still haunted by their ordeal and Affleck may have been too careful about not seeming to exploit it or them they wouldn’t like to see it or them for dramatic effect.

But while this weakness may be deliberate and understandable, it’s all the more glaring because of how vividly almost all the other characters in the movie are portrayed.

Argo is an ensemble piece. Affleck is undoubtedly the star and his character is the hero, but although it’s a star’s part, it requires him not to do a star turn. The job he’s given himself is to be the calm center around which the craziness swirls. He builds a sheltered space where we can stand with him and watch and think along with him. In fact, much of his performance is watching and thinking. The showier work is left to others, with Goodman and Arkin getting the best of it and having the most obvious fun.

As Chambers and Siegel, they make a dueling but amusingly complementary pair of cynics.  Different types of cynics.  Chambers is the good-natured, forgiving type, amused by other people’s foolishness but grateful for it because it allows him to lead his two lives as artist and spy. Goodman plays him with an almost permanent grin as if he’s on the brink of bursting into a hearty laugh that will give away the whole game. Siegel is a cynic of the self-loathing kind whose disdain for humanity in general begins with disdain for himself in particular.  Siegel has himself convinced that he’s not doing anything worthwhile with his life. It’s a feeling leftover from his glory days an intelligence officer in World War II.  Making movies, even award-winning ones, just doesn’t compare to fighting Nazis. But like most movie cynics he’s a closet romantic and an idealist and, while profanely and grumpily expressing reluctance, he jumps at the chance to get back to meaningful work. Since he’s played by Alan Arkin, however, he’s even grumpier and more profane in his idealism than in his cynicism.

Bryan Cranston and Chris Messina, as Mendez’s immediate superior at the CIA and the agent in charge of operations in the control room at Langley, have almost as much to do as Affleck in roles that allow them to be more active and show more range than the star’s own.  Bob Gunton as Jimmy Carter’s Secretary of State Cyrus Vance and Philip Baker Hall in an uncredited appearance as Vance’s partner in official skepticism, who I initially thought was meant to be Deputy Secretary of State Warren Christopher but I’ve since learned was CIA Director Stansfield Turner, have one brief scene together that apart from its effectiveness in its own right serves up one of the best Muppet jokes ever not made by the Muppets themselves. Richard Kind turns up as a shark of a Hollywood agent who is almost a match in cynicism and irascibility for Arkin’s Siegel. Adrienne Barbeau turns up a fiery cameo as one of Siegel’s ex-wives. Zeljko Ivanek and Keith Szarabajka bluster and storm as State Department officials and capture the frustration and desperate need to do something, anything, but what? that gripped not just the administration but much of the entire country.

Compelling in quieter roles are Kyle Chandler as Carter’s Chief of Staff Hamilton Jordan, Victor Garber and Page Leong as Canadian Ambassador Ken Taylor and his wife Pat, Sheila Vand as their young Iranian housekeeper Sahar whose loyalties are a mystery even to herself, Ali Saam as a member of the Revolutionary guard who comes calling at the Canadian embassy and tests Sahar’s loyalties, and Hooshang Tooze as the Deputy Minister of Islamic Guidance who is probably something more than the simple bureaucrat he presents himself to Mendez as being.

The last three along with other actors playing Iranians of all sorts and conditions are important to Affleck’s determination to individualize the Iranians and make us see the Revolution through their eyes and not as the angry mobs we saw on TV at the time. This doesn’t mean that he wants us to sympathize with the revolution. The Iranians are shown as dangerous and implacable enemies of the United States, which, although Affleck doesn’t shy away from our transgressions and mistakes and crimes in the Middle East, is still us to the Iranians them.  But sorting out the good guys from the bad guys isn’t the issue. and the question of who’s right and who’s wrong---or who’s more right or less wrong---is irrelevant because it’s irrelevant to the characters in the movie.  They can’t do anything about it and figuring out an answer won’t help them solve their problem at the moment.

Which brings me back to the way Affleck uses history in Argo.

Affleck and Terrio grant themselves a good deal of dramatic license, naturally. It wouldn’t be a Hollywood movie without the filmmakers taking liberties with the facts.  And Argo is a movie, a thriller not a docudrama.  But Affleck never lets us forget the reality behind his story.  As I said, it does more than drive the plot.  It gives Argo its mood and its tension.  And it’s vital thematically. 

Affleck lets us know from the beginning and keeps reminding us that we’re not to expect a sense of triumph if Mendez pulls this off.  At best we’ll feel relieved.  Then he keeps the pressure on so that intensely that relief, if it comes, will be enough.  We’re not allowed to see the operation as a potential surrogate victory over the Iranians or even a moral one.  This is a job that has to be done for its own sake.  It will have no effect on the larger crisis except in that if the mission fails it might make things worse.

There are times when there really isn’t anything we can do.  There are problems that can’t be solved.  There are situations where even someone as powerful as the President of the United States has no control.  Under those circumstances, when success isn’t an option, despair and surrender are temptations that must still be resisted.  The best thing we can do is do our jobs, to exercise what little control we have in the little sphere in which we still have it, and instead of holing up by ourselves, reach out to those nearest whom we can help.  We have to take care of each other.

“I’ve never left anyone behind,” Mendez tells the six people he’s come to rescue.

He’s not boasting. He’s not merely trying to be encouraging.  He’s stating a simple fact. This is his job, to make sure no one gets left behind.

That’s all our jobs.

No matter what else, we’re here to make sure none of us gets left behind.

Argo, directed by Ben Affleck, screenplay by Chris Terrio, based on a Wired article by Joshuah Bearman.  Starring Ben Affleck, Bryan Cranston, John Goodman, Alan Arkin, Victor Garber, Kyle Chandler, and Chris Messina.  Rated R. Available to stream on YouTube.

"Star Trek: Beyond": Kirk's Odyssey begins

Beamed down, Saturday, July 23, 2016. Beamed back aboard, Saturday night, September 26, 2020.

“That endlessly cunning man”: Chris Pine as the Homeric captain of the starship Enterprise, James T. Kirk, contemplating the wreckage of his ship in “Star Trek: Beyond”.

Our Star Trek Movie Family Film Festival continued last night. Last week the feature was “First Contact” The week before: “The Voyage Home”. This week we watched “Star Trek: Beyond”, which, sadly, will probably be the last of the series of reboots. I hadn’t seen it in four years, and I was looking forward to its answering a question that’s been on my mind since I saw, what, fortunately, will be the last of the Star Wars sequels, “The Rise of Skywalker”: Abrams has claimed to have always been a Star Wars fan and to have never much liked Star Trek because it was too talky and not action-packed enough, so how did it happen that in the end he totally lost the plot and the theme and the feel of Star Wars, while “Star Trek: Beyond” turned out to be as true to the original Star Trek as if he was channeling the ghost of Gene Roddenberry? I thought it might have been due to his having the six main characters played by actors who themselves understood the series and their characters completely and their determined performances forced him to go along, while Disney forced him to make “Rise of Skywalker” an advertisement for Kylo Ren action figures. But I’d forgotten something.

J.J. Abrams didn’t direct it.

Something else I didn’t remember: A piece of personal history. “Star Trek: Beyond” warped into theaters in the summer of 2016. We went to see it on July 23rd. That would make it the last movie I saw before my back surgery five days later. I didn’t make it back into a movie theater until that September. You'd think that would've stuck in my memory.

At any rate, here’s my original review…

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Saw Star Trek: Beyond today. Better. Much Better.

I don’t know what producer and director J.J. Abrams thought he was doing with Star Trek: Into Darkness, the second of the now three installments of Abrams’ reboot of the original Star Trek series of TV shows and movies. I’m not sure Abrams knew either. Into Darkness opens with a rousing mini-movie that could have been an interesting full-length Star Trek movie and promises more fun to come; instead it’s followed by a series of mini-TV episodes each with the theme of Kirk learning a lesson in leadership and Spock learning a lesson in friendship and teamwork. That could have worked out fine. There are many good moments in the sequences. But they’re connected by a story arc about a sulking madman with minor superpowers that seem to come and go and an inexplicable grudge against the entire planet Earth who happens to have the same name as the original TV series and movies’ greatest villain.

It’s almost a category error to call Ricardo Montalban’s Khan Noonien Singh a villain. It’s like calling Hector the villain of The Iliad. From the Trojans’ and Hector’s own points of view he’s the hero. The tragic hero. And that’s what Kahn is, if you see things from his point of view, a tragic hero who unfortunately for him and his devoted followers goes up against a straight-forward romantic hero who---Watch out, there’s an abrupt switch of literary references coming---is as charmed and protected by his virtue as King Arthur.

But the Khan of Into Darkness is a run of the mill action-adventure movie bad guy bent on world domination. The only thing that saves him from being boring is that he’s played by Benedict Cumberbatch who, smartly having decided not to make even a gesture toward recreating Montalban’s lordly, high-minded, Milton and Melville-quoting anti-hero, Cumberbatches his way through the part with sinister charisma and a saturnine charm that I wish Peter Jackson had allowed him to show much more of as both Smaug and Sauron in The Hobbit movies. Actually, Cumberbatch is almost the only thing that saves Into Darkness from being only a mildly and intermittently enjoyable but forgettable time-waster. In the end, there just wasn’t much point to it, either in bringing in any version of Khan or to the movie itself, except to unmake the best of the original series’ original series of movies. Maybe Abrams thought he was doing an homage to Wrath of Khan, but all he accomplished was a travesty of Spock’s death and rebirth and to turn the love of Kirk’s life, Carol Marcus, one of the Federation’s most brilliant scientists, into a pin-up.

There wasn’t much humor in it either.

Star Trek: Beyond includes truly heartfelt and affecting homages to the original series and more than a fair share of humor. In fact, it begins with both, with Kirk alone on a diplomatic mission that doesn’t go quite as hoped and ends with him having to be beamed out of there in a hurry---a scene that’s an homage to an homage that many wiseacre fans regard as the best of all the Star Trek movies.

Galaxy Quest.

I’m not kidding.

Abrams is spending the greater portion of his creative life these days in that galaxy long ago and far away, overseeing Disney’s Star Wars franchise, where Abrams has admitted his fanboy’s heart truly lies. Star Trek: Beyond has a new director, Justin Lin, who manages to give the movie the feel and tone of an extended episode of the originals while still turning out his own lively and fun 21st Century action-adventure film.

The Enterprise is lured into a deep space version of the Sargasso Sea where among the wrecks and hulks of old spaceships it’s swarmed and boarded by insect-like space pirates. The Enterprise is destroyed, again, although for the first time in the reboots. The crew abandons ship, escaping to a nearby planet where most of them are taken prisoner by the pirates. Only Kirk, Spock, McCoy, Scotty, and Chekhov evade capture. The better part of the rest of the movie follows their attempts to rescue their crewmates, find a way to get themselves off the planet and back to Federation territory, and thwart the evil plans of the pirate captain Krall, who has gone Khan one better in holding a grudge. Khan just had it in for Earth. Krall’s grudge, which goes back a hundred years or more, is against the entire Federation of Planets. It’s not clear how much of the Federation he plans to destroy or conquer but he intends to start with the space station Yorktown, which is essentially a city in space, populated by thousands of innocent civilians including children, all of whom must die!

Krall, even though he’s played by Idris Elba, isn’t as compelling a villain as Cumberbatch’s Khan, but he makes more sense as a villain within the Star Trek universe than Into Darkness’s version of Khan, despite Khan’s canonical heritage. We’ve seen Krall before, other versions of him, at any rate, and once his motive is revealed, the reaction of most fans of the original series is likely to be a delighted “Well, of course!”

There are many “Well, of course!” moments in Star Trek: Beyond. The script was written by Doug Jung and Simon Pegg, who plays Scotty, and they know their Star Trek lore. Their affection for the original TV series and the movies and for the rebooted franchise is palpable. They are true to the spirit of the original while advancing the vision Abrams brought to the first of these new movies. The script contains many allusions,references, quotes and echoes---visual and verbal---and tropes and themes that call up vivid memories of the original---there’s even a great “Damn it, Jim! I’m a doctor, not a [fill in the blank]" joke---but it still tells a new and interesting story of its own.

The most important thing J.J. Abrams did when he rebooted the series was assemble a cast who could simultaneously remind fans of the original cast while making us forget them---that is, he gathered together an ensemble of talented actors who didn’t simply stand-in for William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, DeForest Kelley, and the rest but who, while capturing aspects of those stars’ performances, captured the essences of their characterizations while still making the characters their own. Zachary Quinto looks a lot like a young Leonard Nimoy (although he’s now four years older than Nimoy was when he first took on role of Spock), but he acts like Spock without acting like Nimoy acting like Spock. As McCoy, Karl Urban, who really doesn’t look that much like DeForest Kelley or sound like him, somehow looks and sounds exactly like Kelley’s McCoy. It’s downright spooky. And Chris Pine just is Kirk.

Much along the same lines can be said of Pegg, Zoe Saldana, John Cho, and Anton Yelchin. In their performances they pay homage to James Doohan, Nichelle Nichols, George Takei, and Walter Koenig, but they each add their own special touches and nuances that make Scotty, Uhura, Sulu, and Chekov their Scotty, Uhura, Sulu, and Chekov.

Down on the planet, our heroes are separated into teams of two. Kirk and Chekov, McCoy and Spock, and Uhura and Sulu.

Scotty, to his chagrin and exasperation, finds himself paired with a new character, Jayla, a teenage castaway who has been living a Swiss Family Robinson adventure but all on her own, a Swiss Family of one since she was a child, when the spaceship she was on was brought down by the pirates and her parents were killed.

Jayla, played by hip-hop and street dancer (which is to say extremely athletic dancer) Sofia Boutella, turns out to be an engineering prodigy who has taught herself all the tricks of the trade she’s needed to construct and maintain high-tech weaponry, build fiendishly cunning man-traps, and make a comfortable home and a fort out of a wrecked spaceship she calls her house. She’s also taught herself some formidable martial arts skills. She has not, however, taught herself manners or how to control her temper. That’s up to Scotty, who becomes a proud although wary surrogate father to this brilliant but ferocious wild child, who, I hope, is going to become a new series regular, playing something of the same role in the crew as Worf in The Next Generation and Seven of Nine in Voyager, the outsider of uncertain temper for whom acting “civilized” according to human standards is a continual challenge.

They’re a fun couple, but so are Kirk and Chekov, a pairing I wouldn’t have thought of as working as well as it does until I saw them in action together, and then it made perfect movie trope sense---the cocky, devil-may-care popular jock taking under his wing the nervous and insecure nerd who gains courage if not confidence in following the jock’s reckless lead. Chekov is a science nerd. He’s the Enterprise’s second science officer. So the nerdiness was there. Yelchin, who died in a freak car accident in his own driveway back in June, plays up the nervousness to delightful and funny effect and it’s sad to think what the future movies will be like without him.

As fans would expect, the pair who are the most fun to watch and whose actors seem to be having the most fun playing off each other are Spock and McCoy. Their scenes together could have been cribbed straight from the TV series, and Urban and Quinto capture the antagonisms and grudging affections that underlie McCoy and Spock’s prickly friendship. This is exactly what they---Spock and McCoy and Nimoy and Kelley---are like in the originals when Kirk isn’t around to referee or, as he often enjoyed doing, egg them on in their bickering.

The pair who are the least fun are Uhura and Sulu because they’re given the least to do. But it’s also the case that they’re ill-matched. They’re too much alike, strong-willed, highly competent, can-do lieutenants---that’s not just their ranks, it’s their fictional type.

A lieutenant is the character who steps into the role of hero when the story’s main hero isn’t available. This is how I’ve seen Sulu since I was a kid and, as I wrote in my warm-up post Captain Sulu, it was Gene Roddenberry’s plan for Sulu if the original series hadn’t been cancelled for him to become more of a leading man and do some Kirk-like swashbuckling and romancing on his own. But Oliver Mannion tells me it was also part of the plan for Uhura to become more active and adventurous. Never mind her red uniform, she was part of the command crew and although we never saw her do it in the original series Roddenberry intended that there would be times when Kirk would say to her on his way off the bridge, “Mister Uhura, you have the con.”

For some reason I have the idea that in the 23rd Century space navy, female as well as male junior officers are called by the traditional “Mister”.

Where’d I get that?

At any rate, Oliver adds that in an episode of the Saturday morning cartoon series, Uhura does get handed the con. So it’s good to see that side of her at work in Star Trek: Beyond.

The trouble is that Uhura and Sulu spend too much time together sharing the same role in the plot, taking turns doing and saying what only one of them needs to do and say. In other words, for a good stretch they’re pretty much the same character. The script eventually splits them up and gives each their own goal to accomplish, but I think it would have been better if they’d each been on their own from the start, with Uhura having to engage Krall in a war of wills and words right away as she pretends to be trying to talk him out of his evil plans---after all, she is the Communications Officer---while in the meantime Sulu engineers a Great Escape by the captured Enterprise crew, showing himself to be the future starship captain we know he is.

And for all its virtues, Pegg and Jung’s script continues one of Abrams’ egregious mistakes from the first two installments. Abrams made Uhura more assertive and physically active than she was in the original TV series, but at the same time demoted her to the stock character role of the Girlfriend.

Basically her job was to be supportive while at the same time try to rein in the boys’ egos and put a damper on their enthusiasms. Even though she has more to do this time out, she’s still mainly there to humanize Spock, and I swear she’s referred to more often as his "girlfriend” than she is by her own name.

This does lead to some great McCoy jokes at Spock’s expense, however.

Finally, though, it doesn’t matter, as the crew reunites and sets to work to defeat Krall in one of those classic “It’s going to take the whole team” plans the original set of movies made the basis of the plots of each of the films after Wrath of Khan. (Khan was essentially a one to one duel between Kirk and Khan.) This is true to the spirit of the original TV series and its follow-ups in which a connecting theme was that everybody matters, everybody contributes, everybody has individual worth.

It’s just that one character matters just a little bit more because it’s his story, after all.

Like I said, Krall isn’t as compelling a villain as Khan. In fact, he’s not very compelling at all except as a threat. And since his face is basically an animated mask and his voice is electronically altered, he could have been played by any halfway decent character actor. The reason he’s played by Idris Elba is to make the point that Krall, before he turned evil, was once somebody we’d have been happy to see played by Idris Elba. He was once a hero, a vain and temperamental hero, like Achilles or, to again to switch literary references in a hurry, this time from Homer to Shakespeare, Coriolanus, but still a hero. And this is important because of what it reminds us about Kirk.

The original series insisted on the possibility that as talented and smart and heroic as Kirk was he could still fail, either within an episode or in the end. It did this by having Kirk make mistakes---his rectifying a mistake was often more important to the adventure than defeating that week’s villain---and by routinely introducing talented, smart, and heroic Starfleet officers and starship captains, scientists, adventurers of different types, and one-time or would and could-be heroes of various other kinds, who not only made terrible mistakes but went wrong---who became villains.

The idea that Kirk was potentially a tragic hero was always in the subtext.

Pine’s Kirk has the essential intelligence, driving curiosity, and sense of mischief that Shatner gave to the character, but this time out Pine also includes the touch of melancholy that was an implicit in Shatner’s Kirk in the TV series and became more and more explicit in each of the movies, a melancholy that seemed to stem from Kirk’s awareness of the end towards which he was voyaging.

“I’ll die alone,” he tells Spock and McCoy in The Final Frontier.

That day is still a long way off when the story picks up in Star Trek: Beyond. Kirk is in a thoughtful and somewhat sorrowful mood when the movie opens, but it’s his birthday and in this timeline the day is more meaningful to him as the anniversary of his father’s heroic (and lonely) death than as a celebration of his own birth. In a scene that’s a real homage to The Wrath of Khan, McCoy and Kirk share a drink to toast the occasion and reflect on the meaning of it all. In Wrath of Khan, it’s established that the birthday toast is a long-standing tradition with them. In Star Trek: Beyond, the tradition isn’t as long-standing yet, but its purpose is the same. Bones sees it as his job to try to cheer Jim up.

By the way, this scene and the scene in Wrath of Khan it foreshadows reinforce a fact about the relationships of Star Trek’s three main characters. Bones is Jim’s best friend. Spock is his brother.

But back to the story. Kirk is brooding about his career as a starship captain. At the moment, he doesn’t see the point. He’s wondering why he even joined Starfleet to begin with. McCoy suggests it might have been to prove he’s a worthy son to his heroic father. But Kirk seems doubtful of that.

He joined up on a dare, he says, denying sentimentality played any part in his decision.

Of course we know why he joined or we ought to know. He tells us in the voice-over that began every episode of the TV series.

When the first of the movie reboots was on its way into theaters back in 2009, I wrote that the TV Kirk started out as a Boy Scout who needed to find his inner pirate while this new version of Kirk seemed to be a pirate who needed to find his inner Boy Scout. But it doesn’t matter which way he got there, Kirk is a blend of both pirate and Boy Scout and he needs to be both in order to be good at what he truly is, not simply a great starship captain, which is just something else he needs to be in order to be what he truly is. An adventurer and explorer.

And that’s what he’s on his way to becoming in Star Trek: Beyond or, rather, realizing that’s what and who he is, the Jim Kirk we know from the originals, the one whose last words, for all intents and purposes, are the ones he says at the end of The Undiscovered Country when Chekov asks what course to set for what will be the Enterprise’s final voyage: “Second star to the right and straight on till morning.”

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Probably shouldn’t push the allusions to Homer too hard, but then all epic adventure tales derive from Homer, so…

The Star Trek universe extending across all the series and movies features its Hectors and Achilleses, Ajaxes and Agamennons, Nestors, and various versions of Patroclus, Paris, Menelaus, Priam, Diomedes, Troilus, Philoctetes, and Aeneas. If I really wanted to stretch it, I’d make the case that Harry Mudd was a Pandarus and their Thersites would be a Ferengi. But there’s only one version of Ulysses otherwise known as Odysseus. The “resourceful” Odysseus. “The great tactician.” “That endlessly cunning man.”

Kirk.

It’s easy to imagine a Star Trek movie based on The Iliad with Kirk in the role of Odysseus, playing the diplomat between feuding Starfleet captains and coming up with a 23rd Century version of the Trojan Horse to save the day. In fact, he did just that in several episodes of the TV series. It’s also easy to imagine the last Star Trek movie…

Maybe Kirk dies alone in this timeline. Maybe he doesn’t. Maybe he doesn’t in the other one either. I think fans generally agree that Generations was a big mistake and that Shatner himself corrected it with his novel. Shatner, as you may know, is a pretty good sci-fi writer. I don’t like to let myself imagine past the end of The Undiscovered Country. But when I do I don’t imagine the story all the way to Kirk’s death. I end with Kirk, having finished a great adventure, making his last voyage...home.

Accompanied now only by Chekov and possibly Uhura but maybe only by Jayla, he makes his perilous way past Sirens, past Scylla and Charybdis, escaping the Cyclops and Circe and resisting the lotus-eaters---whom he’ll have dealt with before---and leaving behind Calypso, back to wherever his Ithaca lies where his Penelope, Carol Marcus, waits, not patiently but busy with her own work in the lab, and the tale ends where it ends for Odysseus and Penelope, with our hero finally home and the two of them alone in bed, telling each other the stories of their days.

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Previous mission: Editor’s log. Stardate 91048.4. My review of Star Trek: Into Darkess, Into Perpetual Adolescence.

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Star Trek: Beyond, directed by Justin Lin, written by Simon Pegg and Doug Jung. Starring Chris Pine, Zachary Quinto, Karl Urban, Zoe Saldana, Simon Pegg, John Cho, Anton Yeltchin, Sofia Boutella, and Idris Elba, is available for streaming on YouTube.

One lucky step short of self-parody: "Hellboy II: The Golden Army"

Originally posted August 3, 2008. Reposted Saturday night, September 12, 2020.

Liz (Selma Blair) and Red (Ron Perlman, front and center) with psychic Johann Krauss (voiced by Seth MacFarlane) and fishman pal Abe Sapien (Doug Jones) prepare to fight the evil elf prince’s mechanical army and avoid self-parody in the process in 2008’s “Hellboy II: The Golden Army”.

[Last night’s feature for Family Movie Night was “Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home”. Rooting through the archives to see if I’d written about it before, I came across this, a short review of “Hellboy II: The Golden Army” and reminded myself how much fun it and the original “Hellboy” were. Thought you might enjoy the reminder too.]

Presumably, this is the one and only sequel---or at least the one and only sequel that won't be a cartoon---and this is a good thing because while “Hellboy II: The Golden Army” is a lot of fun, there are indications that the next step would be into the swamp of self-parody. A poster for “Shrek the Third” should serve as the warning sign at the edge of the quicksand.

Already Red and Liz have a little too much of Shrek and Fiona about them, with Abe Sapiens serving as a more thoughtful, quieter, less annoying Donkey. One more movie and I won't be surprised to see Antonio Banderas show up as Puss, swashbuckling through layers of prosthetics and cgi.

Good villain, good fights, good jokes---maybe too many good jokes---one interesting addition to the cast of regular heroes, although I'm not sure having “Family Guy's” Seth MacFarlane provide the voice was the best choice---Yoda was such a surprisingly alive character that having the voice of Fozzie Bear and Miss Piggy coming out of his mouth was somehow transformative; hearing echoes of the voices of Stewie and Brian dubbed over a character without a mouth keeps the character from rising above the level of a cartoon. And the scenes in the troll market are clever enough, I guess. I just couldn't help thinking they were there because Guillermo del Toro wanted to show kids whose parents wouldn't take them to see “Pan's Labyrinth” some of what they missed out on.

Like I said, fun for all, but “Hellboy II: The Golden Army” is to the original as “The Search for Spock” was to “Wrath of Khan and “National Treasure 2: Book of Secrets” was to “National Treasure”: Too much of what's good is dependent on conjuring up memories of what was so enjoyable about the movie that came before and letting characters we love act silly.

For more cigars, kittens, and Baby Ruth bars, check out the official website of Mike Mignola's Hellboy comic book.

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“Hellboy II: The Golden Army” along with “Hellboy” is available to watch instantly at Amazon.

Ken Mannion reminded me that there were already two animated sequels to “Hellboy”, although one is technically a prequel: “Sword of Storms” and “Blood & Iron”. Both are also available to stream at Amazon. Ken gives both a thumbs up.

I’m an Amazon associate and earn a (very small) commission for movies, books etc. bought through the links on the blog.

"Snowden", a love story

Originally posted October 11, 2016. Resubmitted for reconsideration, Sunday morning, August 16, 2020.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt, as Ed Snowden, the computer analyst and programmer who exposed the U.S. government's mass surveillance of American citizens , wearing an expression as blank and unreadable as the movie he’s starring in often is itself, Oliver Stone’s untypically understated, uncharacteristically romantic "Snowden".

Trump’s talking about pardoning Edward Snowden. As usual, it’s hard to know if he means it, or if it’s just something to get attention, or he’s trying to distract his voters from all the bad news they might be hearing about their hero-king. And there’s the question of who put the idea in his head and why now? Something else we’re hearing he’s been saying to aides is that he wants to meet with Putin before the election. Maybe Putin said something. Like “Please take this bore off our hands. We’re tired of paying his rent.” Whatever’s going on, it started me thinking about Snowden’s case and about him and reconsidering both. I’m a grudging admirer of Snowden. I don’t see him as either a hero or a martyr, but I don’t see him as a traitor and a villain either. I see him as the victim of his own naivete and his peculiar ideology, someone who wanted to do the right thing but didn’t really have a clear idea what the right thing was or how to go about doing it, done in by hubris and folly, an anti-hero in an ironic tragedy of his own making. But the image I have of him is in a large part drawn from Oliver Stone’s movie “Snowden” and Stone, to put it mildly, is often done in by his own peculiar ideology and hubris. So I should do some homework, including re-reading Snowden’s memoir, “Permanent Record”, before I come to any new conclusions. In the meantime, I feel like it’s an opportune time to re-post my review of the movie, which I liked for the performances of its leads and supporting characters not so much for the movie itself---I thought Stone pulled his punches, something Stone isn’t known for doing. “Snowden” has more in common with more conventionally told, understated historical thrillers like “The Good Shepherd” or “American Sniper” than with “Nixon” or “JFK”, and what’s the point of going to an Oliver Stone movie if you’re not going to be punched in the face?

By the way, I left my favorite performance out of the review because I didn’t want to spoil the surprise of Nic Cage’s cameo. After four years, I think you’re allowed to include spoilers…

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Wasn’t looking forward to seeing "Snowden". With apologies to Matt Zoller Seitz, I’m not much of an Oliver Stone fan. I find his movies too...loud. And insistent. And he's too much of a believer in the idea of the Last Honest Man. I feel like all his movies tend to be about how one noble and innocent man, after temporarily losing his way, redeems himself by taking on and defeating the SYSTEM or in being defeated by it.

Of course that’s not entirely true. At any rate, it’s not true of "Nixon".

But "Salvador", "Platoon", "Wall Street", "Born on the Fourth of July", "The Doors", "JFK", "Any Given Sunday", even "Talk Radio" fit the pattern. I probably could make the case that "Natural Born Killers" is his own dark parody of the same theme.

And hand in glove with the Last Honest Man theme is Stone’s vision of America as a generally dark and sinister place ruled by a shadowy and corrupt elite made up of ruthless and power-hungry schemers, thieves, mass murderers, and madmen, and in that "Nixon" does fit the pattern. Richard Nixon and Nixon’s America are the implicit or explicit evils at work in all those other movies.

There are too many days when I agree with Stone on this and it’s one of the things I go to the movies to escape, that grim, cynical, despairing sense that Nixon won.

So I was expecting more of the same from "Snowden". But it wasn’t just the existential dread I was dreading.

I was dreading that Stone would try to make a hero of Edward Snowden, and I just can’t bring myself to think of Snowden as a hero.

This says more about my own orneriness than about anything else. I think a lot of liberals need to see Snowden as a hero the way a lot of conservatives needed to see Chris Kyle as a hero. And I want no part of that. They’re both too complicated, flawed, and all too human. I’ve always seen Snowden as an idealistic and well-meaning but naive young man who tried to do a good thing, by his lights, and did it badly in a way that ended up screwing himself and tainting his cause.

I’ve also never been sure exactly what good he hoped to do or how much good he actually accomplished.

I don’t know which side in the debate to trust. The government’s argument has been we need to do what we’re doing in order to stop the terrorists but don’t worry we’re not overstepping, which is not the kind of reassurance the government should expect people to just accept. What government has ever not overstepped? And no evidence that spying on everybody worked or that it was necessary. It didn’t help get bin Laden and the major terrorist threats that we know failed---the shoe bomb that didn’t go off, the underwear bomb that didn’t go off, the Times Square bomb that didn’t go off---were thwarted mainly by accident and the terrorists’ own incompetence.

On the other side, the argument seemed to be that nothing the government did to protect us was worth the assault on our civil rights and privacy---brave words, but seemed to me to come out of a sense that there was nothing to protect us from.

I figured I’d sit through the movie feeling as frustrated and manipulated and pulled in too many directions by the story Stone was telling as I’d felt by the real story as I heard it told in the news and online all along.

Didn’t seem like a fun way to spend a couple hours.

In the end I felt I had to go so I could write about it in order to maintain my standing as a dutiful liberal blogger. In other words, I went as homework. Not the best reason to go to a movie.

Turned out it wasn’t the kind of Oliver Stone movie I was dreading. It wasn’t loud. It was even nuanced. And parts of it were quite...sweet.

A nice surprise, at the beginning. By the midway point, though, I was wishing it was more of that kind of Oliver Stone movie simply because that would have been more exciting and fun. As it is, "Snowden" is as low-key, reticent, unforthcoming, emotionally reserved to the point of repressed, and monotonous as its portrayal of Edward Snowden himself.

But...while in many ways it still is a typical Oliver Stone movie, including its being about another Last Honest Man, whether or not it’s a typical Oliver Stone movie and whether or not I’m an Oliver Stone fan doesn’t matter. What matters is that I’m a Joseph Gordon-Levitt fan and "Snowden" features what’s becoming a typically excellent Joseph Gordon-Levitt performance.

An excellent Joseph Gordon-Levitt performance doesn’t mean an excellent movie. It just means a movie that’s at least worth watching for Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s performance.

Gordon-Levitt’s Snowden is watchful, self-contained, maybe not emotionally repressed but definitely willfully undemonstrative. He rarely seems to smile on his own volition. A smile is a reflexive reaction he should have controlled. When he’s made to smile---and it’s always as if been made to, against his will and better judgement---there’s a look in his eye that’s partly regret and partly amused admiration for whatever or whoever’s forced him to smile, as if he’s been fooled by a card trick he should have known better than to fall for but he still can’t help enjoying the trick and having been tricked in spite of himself. And talks openly only a little more often than he smiles. He says only what he has to say. He has a vibrant inner life but he’s determined to keep it to himself. He’s an intellectual and a voracious reader. He thinks deeply and philosophically about what he reads. But you have to work hard to get him to talk about it. You have to work hard to get him to talk, period. When he does speak it’s with a slight, barely perceptible hesitation, and with a studying look in his eyes, as if he’s scouting the path a sentence is going to take for holes to avoid stepping in and roots to avoid tripping over. It’s as if he’s hooked himself up to an inner lie detector test to ensure that everything he’s about to say---and feel---is truthful and accurate. A conversation style that cuts down on small talk. That’s the point. Talking just for the sake of talking is when you’re likely to give yourself away.

Not that Snowden has anything to hide---when we first meet him, at any rate. He’s not deceitful. He’s not particularly shy, either, and not naturally taciturn. His reticence is more like a point of principle. His business is his business, and yours is yours. He’s the living embodiment of the principle he’s ultimately going to ruin his life defending. No one gets to pry into anyone else’s life without explicit, specific, and limited permission.

Conversations should be about practical matters at hand, and he’s not just willing but eager to talk about those. He’ll gladly go into detail about what he’s working on---if you have the security clearance and he’s judged you smart enough and competent enough to follow him. He just won’t tell you why he’s working on it and for whom he’s doing the work.

Temperamentally, intellectually, emotionally, and, as it turns out, politically and ideologically he’s suited for working for the NSA and the CIA, which is to say essentially as a spy and an eager volunteer in the cyberwar on terror. Edward Snowden, I was surprised to learn, was a Republican and a libertarian when he started out in the intelligence business.

The problem, he learns to his own dismay, is that the nature of the work he has to do, and wants to do, and is proud to do and be able to do, is in conflict with his own nature.

As it happens, at this critical point in his life he falls in love with someone who in her own way is as all wrong for him as it’s becoming clear his job is all wrong for him.

His job requires him to treat everyone else’s business--and it’s literally everyone else’s business---as his business. Being in love with the politically liberal artist and professional free-spirit Lindsay Mills, played charmingly, exuberantly, and winsomely---but not too winsomely ---by Shailene Woodley, means allowing his business to become her business and through her the business of everyone else or, at any rate, anyone else she whimsically decides to share it with it and, given her nature, that could mean literally everyone else.

 

If Snowden’s motto is “Nothing about me is your business”, hers is “Everything about me is not only your business but something I expect you’ll find totally fascinating.”

Good liberal that she is, she isn’t the least bit worried about the government’s spying on her or on anybody because she not only doesn’t have anything incriminating to hide, she doesn’t hide anything. She puts her whole life online, practically uploading her soul and personality, a virtual her who’s even more open and free-spirited and uninhibited as the analog her.

She’s an exhibitionist. Her whole life is a work of performance art. Multi-talented, her art of the moment is photography and she’s using her camera to chronicle her life. Snowden, as an important part of her life, is an important part of the chronicle. He must be photographed. Continually. He’s her favorite model. She adores him as a person so she adores him as a subject. He has to perform for her. For her camera, at any rate. He has to smile. And despite himself, he does. He even begins to enjoy it, both smiling and performing for her.

So, even though at first glance in one way she’s all wrong for him, she’s in this way just right for him. She frees him up to be more himself. She brings him out of himself, gets him out and about in the world, shows him how to have fun and enjoy what life offers beyond work. It’s the old, old story going back to Pride and Prejudice. Creative and intelligent and passionate free-spirited young woman finds true love and happiness by saving a dour, emotionally repressed, all work and no play from himself and the stodgy, conventional boring life he’s headed for. It’s an old story but a good story.

Trouble is it’s usually a funny story.

"Pride and Prejudice" is a comedy. "Bringing Up Baby", another version, is a farce. Buried in "Snowden" is a comedy that could be called "Along Came Lindsay". Ed Snowden is a Mister Darcy who’s a genius computer programmer addicted to his work. Lindsay Mills is an Elizabeth Bennett who takes nude selfies and posts them on the internet. They get together, despite themselves, and live happily if somewhat complicatedly ever after.

This would be fine if only the story around them had also been a comedy. It could have been one too, if Stone had chosen to see it that way. There is something farcical about the government’s “Let’s spy on everybody!” plan to combat terror. And the character who serves as the movie’s central villain, a CIA operative named O’Brian and Snowden’s suave and sophisticated but sinister mentor, brilliantly played by Rhys Ifans, is in essence a comic villain.

With his long lupine face topped off by snow white hair combed boyishly forward, he looks like Draco Malfoy whom no one has told is now middle-aged and a lot less pretty than he was when he and Harry Potter last crossed wands---an effect probably emphasized in my mind by Gordon-Levitt’s looking as though the part of Snowden was between him and Daniel Radcliffe and Stone told him he’d only cast him if he played it as a grown-up and grown Severus Snape-grim Harry. O’Brian’s improbable hair cut hints at the man’s vanity as well as his phoniness.

Feeling professionally obligated to keep his true self hidden and to appear in the world in disguise, he’s chosen for his primary false identity to disguise himself as someone twenty years younger. In another of his guises, he’s a Hemingwayesque outdoorsman and hunter. (For this one he wears a Stetson that looks as improbable on him as the haircut.) He’s also, at various times, a bon vivant and man of the world and a country club-style hale fellow well met type of 19th hole regular as gregarious and sycophantic as if he’s congratulating business contacts he’s let beat him at golf. (This one seems to be real in that it’s something he really does as part of his spy craft.)

The role he plays most often with Snowden is that of wise to the ways of the world and magic wizard instructing an apprentice, Merlin to Snowden’s Arthur, Dumbledore to Harry, Obi-wan---the haircut is also reminiscent of Alec Guinness’s wig in the original Star Wars movies---to his Luke.

All of these disguises are self-flattering and self-aggrandizing and there’s comedy to be found in his inflated view of himself. But it’s also a wonder that he can keep them all straight and doesn’t occasionally play the wrong part at the wrong time for the wrong audience and that could have been funny, his getting mixed up from time to time. A few more good jokes and with Stone pushing him to ham it up a bit more---or giving him permission to. Ifans probably wouldn’t have needed much prodding or direction. He is British, after all, (Well, Welsh, technically, but so was Burton) and the Brits are taught how to be hams as part of their basic training as actors.---and O’Brian would have been a funny bad guy.

But even though there are funny moments in "Snowden", Stone doesn’t find any of the larger story amusing. That’s one of the reasons I’m not a fan. There’s never much he finds amusing. That’s ok, though. Not all love stories are comedies. Young lovers who would have had happy endings if only the grown-ups had stayed out of it are regularly in story and song brought to sorrow and grief. (See "Romeo and Juliet".) For stretches of the movie, it looks as though that’s what’s going to happen to Snowden and Mills. His work is going to break them up, break their spirits, and break their hearts. There’s even a tragic flaw within their love for each other that would have helped that to happen.

As good as she is for him in one way, she’s bad for him in another, because, despite her being a liberal hippie in comparison to him, she’s a spoiled rich girl used to living well and traveling in the “right” social circles. His job allows for both and she likes that.

As O’Brian’s protege he’s invited into the homes of the Beltway elite where he meets and is taken a shine to by important and Very Serious People who are happy to boost his career. When he gives up government work only to go back to work for the government as a consultant, his salary jumps and he and Mills are suddenly very flush with money. At first, Snowden’s not impressed by either the money or the social advancement. But he is impressed by how it makes her happy. And, under her influence, he begins to like it too, both the money and the social success.

On top of this, Mills is a bit of a vicarious thrill-seeker and she pushes him to go out into the field and do some actual spying.

This leads to what I think is the best section of "Snowden", almost a movie within the movie that could have been expanded into the plot of an entire Hitchcockinan thriller focused wholly Snowden and Mills as a pair of innocents caught up in intrigue and adventure.

Snowden is sent to Austria---setting of "The Third Man"---where he teams up with a charming but oily, hedonistic, and morally bankrupt operative, played by a leering and cheerfully dissolute Timothy Olyphant to manipulate an innocent banker into giving them information about a would-be terrorist. The banker isn’t connected to the terrorist himself. He has family connections who have connections to people who have connections to people who...you get the picture. He himself has no idea how he’s connected at such a remove, but Snowden and his partner get to those connections through his daughter. This leads to tragedy and Snowden’s first serious crisis of conscience.

There Stone had a story, if he’d wanted to tell it, about a pair of lovers who are tempted by money, status, and the pure thrill of behaving amorally and either fall into corruption or are saved from it by their own innate decency or the intervention of angels in human form, a tragedy or a comedy, whichever way he chose. He chose to go back to his main story about Snowden standing up to the System. That could have been a tragedy or a comedy too. Except for one hitch. Neither the tragedy nor the comedy happen because neither did happen.

You’d think that wouldn’t have been a problem for him since what really happened has never stopped him before from telling the story he wanted to tell and making the points he was determined to make.

But this time it did. Stone let himself be blocked by reality.

The real Snowden and Mills seem to be living out a romantic comedy. Who knows if they’ll live happily ever after, but from all appearances they’re living pretty happily in the here and now, despite the inconvenience of their Russian exile, a fate, by the way, the movie comes close to blaming on the Glenn Greenwald, the activist and blogger and columnist for the Guardian who advised Snowden at the time he decided to go public with what he knew about the mass surveillance and release the data he’d according to the law stolen from the U.S. Government. I’ll get to that in another post. The System gets taken down and Snowden and Mills survive as individuals and as a couple and Stone is left with a love story that’s neither comic nor tragic, just kind of sweet, interrupted too often by a not particularly dramatic historical drama.

Again, there’s a way he could have dealt with this. The one I suggested earlier. He could have the plot that surrounds the romance a comedy too or, at least, comedic.

For reasons I can only guess at, he didn’t do that. But then he didn’t do what I’d actually expected him to do. Treat the whole thing as a typical Oliver Stone overwrought melodrama.

There’s a surprising matter-of-factness to his storytelling in "Snowden". A this happened, then this happened, then that happened straight-forwardness that not only cuts down on the suspense but causes the movie to resist emotional involvement.

How are we supposed to feel about all of this?

The answer seems to be a bit of a shrug.

Feel?

Ok. Then how about think? What are we supposed to think?

Another shrug.

I was dreading going to "Snowden" because I expected Stone would try to be as emotionally manipulative and intellectually dishonest---in the cause of dragging the audience to the right side---as he’s often been. I didn’t want to be imaginatively wrestled into taking Snowden’s side and cheering him on as a hero. But I think I would have enjoyed that better.

Stone seems to be way too willing to let the facts speak for themselves for once. In truth, he seems barely interested in presenting the facts at all. At any rate, he doesn’t do much to dramatize them, let alone over-dramatize them in keeping with what I’ve always thought is his idiom. He appears to take it for granted we know all we need to know about the government’s massive data gathering enterprises and that we disapprove on intellectual, constitutional, and moral grounds, and he doesn’t have to work to make us disapprove.

The result is some rather desultory storytelling with many confusing and lazy plot twists and turns. Details and events have to be left out, compressed, or elided in all historical movies for the sake of time and in order not to overwhelm the audience with facts as if in a well-meaning but counterproductive effort to help us cram for a final exam. But in "Snowden" those left-out details and events aren’t compensated for either imagistically or through poetic license. This happened, then that happened, then...this happened. Wait? What? How did we get to that last this happened? What happened during the ellipses?

We’ll have to go back and read the books.

As for Snowden and what good he did...or harm…

On this point, as with the other, Stone seems to take it for granted that since we already agree that what the government was doing was wrong on principle, then we already agree that what Snowden did to put a stop to it was right on principle, and therefore Snowden is a champion of truth, justice, and the American way, on principle, and we will cheer for him in the end, on principle.

I don’t like to go to movies on principle. I went to this one on the principle I needed to do my homework for the blog and I wasn’t looking forward to being manipulated. But I would rather be manipulated into cheering for the hero than being expected to do it on principle. And that’s what I missed most watching ""Snowden, Stone’s old manipulative tricks.

I missed his special pleadings. I missed his tampering with history and the histrionics that usually go with it. I missed his very dark view of America. The government as presented in "Snowden" is generally incompetent while being too competent at the wrong things, corrupt but only routinely so and mainly because individual actors are corrupt, and generally wrongheaded to the point of stupidity. Which is why I think it could have been treated comically. But it isn’t actively evil. And it isn’t anybody, really. President Obama appears in clips that show him saying things we now know were official lies. But that’s all they are, official lies of the sort any and all political leaders engage in as a matter of course. There’s no George W. Bush here, no Dick Cheney. I didn’t miss them, particularly. But I missed there being real villains.

Especially the chief villain of Stone’s dark vision.

I missed Nixon.

"Snowden" is available for streaming on YouTube.

Him and Orson Welles and Optimus Prime

Original premiere Friday, October 1, 2010. Revival house version opening Saturday morning, March 28, 2020.

Prince of Thieves, King of the Gypsies, Hero and Villain: Christian McKay as Orson Welles in director Richard Linklater’s period fable, Me and Orson Welles.

How are you coming with your reading of “War and Peace”? Slow-going here, but I’m plugging away. Haven’t started watching “Mindhunter” yet.

What do you mean, what am I talking about? Didn’t you read the update to my re-post of my review of “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo” at the beginning of the month as part of my series Best Pictures of the 2010s? Here. Let me help you out:

Updated Saturday morning with regret and resignation: Fun. First thing I discover when I signed on this morning is that my blogging homework for the week is to re-read "War and Peace", watch the 2016 TV mini-series, and start binging "Mindhunter" And I did this to myself by re-posting this review.

See if you can tell how.

Actually, apparently you weren’t the only one. Nobody chimed in. I guess I’ll have to explain it myself.

“The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo” was directed by David Fincher. It was released at the end of 2011. It occured to me that I couldn’t name any movies Fincher had directed since. So I looked it up. You can do that on the internet. Who knew? Turns out he’d only directed one movie since. “Gone Girl”. And I wasn’t aware of it. Went right by me. The movie and the fact he directed it. “Gone Girl” came out in 2014. Six years ago. He’s been focused on TV and producing. But he finally has a new movie headed for the theaters, if and when the theaters re-open. It’s called “Mank”. Mank is the main character’s nickname. Herman Mankiewicz, the screenwriter whose heyday was the 1930s and 40s. He wrote a lot of movies in that period. One of them was “Citizen Kane”. “Mank” revolves around his tempestuous collaboration with a punk kid named Orson Welles. Gary Oldman plays Mankiewicz. An actor named Tom Burke plays Welles. I had to look Burke up. He’s not a punk kid. Thirty-nine. A lot older than Welles was when he wrote, directed, and starred in “Citizen Kane”. Burke was in the recent mini-series based on “War and Peace”. I didn’t recognize the name of the character he played. So I got out my copy and looked him up. Fedya Dolokhov. Pierre’s nemesis. But in looking Dolokhov up I got to reading, and that’s how I assigned myself “War and Peace” for homework. But I got to thinking. How good will Burke be as Welles? He’s going to have to be really good to be as good a Welles as Christian McKay was as good a Welles in a movie I’m still fond of, “Me and Orson Welles”, a romantic comedy from 2008, starring McKay, Zaf Efron, Zoe Kazan, and Claire Danes, and directed by Richard Linklater. It's centered around Welles’ fascist-themed stage production of “Julius Caesar”, which punched Welles’ ticket to Hollywood. I highly recommend it as a pleasant, nostalgic diversion. I’d watch it again myself tonight, if I didn’t already have enough homework…

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Seems like a cranky thing to say, coming from a director whose new movie is about Orson Welles’ 1937 staging of “Julius Caesar”:

There are enough of those movies made as it is: sequels, remakes, franchises. It depresses me. It's the way the industry is going. They figure they can make these huge-ass Harry Potters, Batmans and Transformers, spend $200m on a surefire hit, and who cares about the quality? They've basically stopped making my kind of movies altogether.

That’s Richard Linklater, whose “Me and Orson Welles” you’d think wouldn’t have gotten made if all the movie industry cared about were guaranteed blockbusters like “The Dark Knight” and “Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen”. “Me and Orson Welles” has two target audiences, die-hard Zac Efron fans and people who’ve seen and loved “Citizen Kane”, which is not a miniscule demographic, but nobody will get rich selling action figures to us. Well, maybe to the Zac Efron fans. At any rate, it’s not a small group but it tends to be concentrated in places where I’m not living, which explains why I had to wait for it to come out on DVD to see it.

But in that quote Linklater is actually explaining why he’s not in a rush to make a follow-up to his “Before Sunrise” and “Before Sunset” set of films.

He doesn’t want to make a movie just for the sake of cashing in.

Which is all he thinks the industry does anymore.

An old, old story, complicated in this re-telling by the collapse of the independent film distribution market.

"I caught a groove where the whole process of making movies didn't feel stressful," he says. "I had a good run of eight or 10 films. And then all it took was two films: Fast Food Nation [his fumbled 2005 adaptation of the Eric Schlosser book] and this one, where I thought: 'Wow, this is a really tough business.' This one especially almost pushed the bounds of possibility."

“Me and Orson Welles” was largely shot in the Isle of Man, way back in the early months of 2008. It was hoped that the movie would find a distributor at that year's Cannes film festival, and then again at the Toronto film festival. But by that point the recession was biting and cash offers proved thin on the ground. Ultimately the film's producers cut a deal in which they effectively released the film themselves, splitting marketing costs with the Vue cinema chain. All of which caught the director by surprise.

"I'd always seen the film industry as a constant," he says. "And then all of a sudden the bottom fell out." He now finds himself in an alien terrain; indie distributors have gone to the wall and the directors have become self-publishers, streaming their films for an online audience. He's not sure he likes it. "I still hold on to the romantic vision of people watching my movie in a cinema," he admits. "I don't want to watch Bright Star on a fucking iPhone."

This is only a part of the interview Linklater did with the Guardian’s Xan Brooks last December. The other part, the best part, is Linklater’s comparing himself to Orson Welles, not as a fellow genius but as a fellow director with the same sort of professional headaches and heartbreaks:

Linklater, by contrast, strikes me as an altogether more gentle and collegiate soul. I'm expecting him to shake his head at such antics. If anything he seems to applaud them. "Hey, if you want to work on stage or in a film, then that's how it is. There's only one director. Ships have only one captain. If you have a problem with the way he's doing things, I wouldn't suggest challenging him in front of the whole cast and crew. That's a lesson in integrity."

“Me and Orson Welles” tells the story of a precocious high school senior named Richard (played by Zac Efron doing a decent job of acting and making the case that he shouldn’t be blamed for having started out his career on the Disney Channel as a tweenage heartthrob) who dreams of being an artist someday. He’s not sure what sort of artist. He loves music, loves the theatre, loves writing and poetry. As he says of himself late in the film, “I just want to be part of it.” At the moment theatre is uppermost in his affections and he’s adopting the persona of an aspiring actor. One day he plays hooky to wander about New York City and two wonderful to the point of being magical things happen.

First, at the public library, he meets a nice girl named Gretta Adler (Zoe Kazan) who is struggling to become a writer.

Then he lucks into a small part in the Mercury Theatre’s now-legendary production of “Julius Caesar”. It’s legendary because its success begot the legend of the genius of Orson Welles.

Richard’s life is immediately swallowed up by the play, which is the same thing as being immediately swallowed up by Welles’ ego. Welles appears to take a real liking to Richard, but it’s like the liking a child takes to new favorite toy. Welles sees all his players as his to play with. They are instruments in his one-man orchestra. Richard is a new violin Welles looks forward to teaching himself how to play and he expects that he will play it beautifully.

Of course, any instrument that fails to respond to Welles’ liking takes the blame and gets quickly smashed.

Most of the movie is spent at the Mercury Theatre, but Richard does get back to the library to see the nice girl now and then. She’s easy to find since she spends most of her time sitting in front of a large Grecian urn that reminds her of Keats’ Ode and from which she takes both inspiration and heart.

Richard is presented with two contrasting---although as it turns out not necessarily conflicting---approaches to art. One is Gretta’s, in which ego is sublimated to serving art. The other is Welles’.

Sounds like a fable.

And there is a folkloric feel to the story. Young Simple leaves his home to go to the fair and learns that the great wide world is a more complicated, corrupt, and corrupting place than he imagined.

If Richard is Simple, then among the rogues he encounters at the fair, Welles is the chief rogue, the prince of thieves, the king of the gypsies.

But Linklater doesn’t play this as a fable. There’s no Wes Anderson-style whimsicality or borderline magic realism gently warning us not to take this at face value. “Me and Orson Welles” is shot as a realistic period piece, with those Isle of Man locations standing in convincingly for a few blocks of Manhattan circa 1937. The most fantastic thing in “Me and Orson Welles” is the Fantastic Mr Welles, a character who seems to have had to come out of a folk tale, because no real human being like this could possibly have existed.

Right?

Of course, Orson Welles was a literary creation. Created by…Orson Welles. In the movie we see the ingenious young Welles fashioning the legend of the Boy Genius Orson Welles on the fly, grabbing at everything he thinks he can use to help build that legend, and mostly what he grabs is other people.

As Linklater has it, Welles was a prince of thieves. What he stole, though, was ideas, credit, friends’ girlfriends and wives, time and attention, and other people’s energy, spirit, affection, and, in a very real way, their bodies and talents---when you went to work for Orson Welles he owned you. Like I said, people, actors, mainly, were his instruments, and you had no more right to object to how he decided to put you to use than that violin has to how it is played.

“I am Orson Welles! And each and every one of you stands here as an adjunct to my genius!”

There are only two people in his company who can resist him. One is Richard, whose heart and soul aren’t up for grabs because he’s already given them to Art. The other is Sonja, the company’s chief administrative assistant and Jill of All Trades, who is safe because she has boxed up her heart and soul and stored them away to be called for later. Sonja is played by a wry and no-nonsense Claire Danes with a constant somewhat sinister smile that, like the Cheshire Cat’s, implies she doesn’t have to take any of Welles’ or the other company members’ nonsense seriously because she knows she’s on her way out of here. She’s talented, hardworking, ambitious, and cannily opportunistic, and at any moment she’s going to disappear to move on to bigger and better things outside the theatre, leaving nothing behind but the memory of her smile.

She has to take a certain amount of abuse from Welles, now, because it serves her ambitions, at the moment. But except for Richard, all the other members of the company accept Welles’ abuse because he is their only hope of serving their ambitions.

Welles knows this and takes egregious and unconscionable advantage of it.

Welles is a monster of ego. There is nothing he can’t or won’t do that he decides needs doing to serve his ambitions and his vanity and the only reason that doesn’t include bank robbery and murder is that either would be beneath his genius. He is too smart, too charming, and too blessed by the gods to need to resort to vulgar criminality.

Charm, guile, and sheer force of will see him through.

Welles is the villain of Richard’s story. What’s intriguing about the movie is that it allows us to see that Welles is not just the hero of his own story but the hero of the stories of most of the Mercury Theatre’s players stories.

Welles is appalling. And there are points in the movie when you want to take satisfaction in what is going to happen to him, not in 1937, but by 1985 when he died at the surprisingly young age of 70. Surprising because by then it seemed that the once upon a time boy genius had been old for a very, very long time.

Welles spent the last third of his life not as a Prince of Thieves but as essentially a beggar, desperately trying to find financing to get his movies made, and his chief ploy---the “Crippled War Veteran” sign he wore around his neck while he begged---was to present himself as an outrageous self-parody. The Welles of the Dean Martin Roasts and the Tonight Show magic tricks and the “Paul Masson will sell no wine before its time" ads was, by his own design, a clown who fancies himself a fallen king but who believes in his own delusion so completely that his audience wants to believe along with him. It was a sad play to get people to reach for their wallets out of a mix of pity and wishful thinking and, while watching certain scenes in the movie you can’t help thinking “It must have been humiliating for him. Good!”

But remember. Linklater is on Welles’ side. At least in the struggle between director and actors.

While Welles treats them horribly, Linklater makes us see that his horribleness is necessary to their success. They are all too weak to survive in the theatre on their own. That doesn’t mean that they are all weak in the sense of having flawed characters, although most of them do, and several of them are as vain and egomaniacal as Welles’ himself, even more so, as they can’t see past their own vanities. Welles has a self-awareness that they all lack. But even the best of them are weak in the sense that ordinary mortals need Superman to break through brick walls and stop runaway locomotives for them.

You can’t be an actor unless somebody casts you in a play or a movie and then sees that the play gets produced or the movie gets made, and given all the obstacles---see Linklater on the movie industry above---that takes superhuman will, energy, drive, and confidence.

We can forgive Welles most of what he does to his players, even to Richard, if we keep in mind what is coming and realize that without Welles’ superhuman efforts of will, energy, drive, and confidence there would be no Citizen Kane.

We also need to keep in mind that even with that superhuman will, energy, drive, and confidence and the reputation he’d earned for Citizen Kane he couldn’t get The Magnificent Ambersons released as the movie he made or make another film to rival either of his first two.

Richard and Gretta believe in art for art’s sake. Welles knows that there is no art except for Welles’ sake. Linklater believes that Richard and Gretta’s point of view has an essential truth. His life and career have taught him that Welles’ point of view is what makes their point of view, even their lives as aspiring artists, possible.

In order for Me and Orson Welles to work---for it to make any sense---you not only have to know that there really was an egomaniacal bastard genius named Orson Welles, you have to believe he could have been a bastard in exactly the way the movie portrays him. You have to believe that the movie’s Welles is the Orson Welles.

Which is apparently why God created Christian McKay.

McKay’s performance is brilliant and magical. It’s not an impersonation so much as a recapitulation, the way a son can resemble his father to such an uncanny degree that it frightens people who knew the latter as a young man. McKay is so like Welles in expression, manner, and intonation that he has reason to ask his mother if she was by any chance near the set of Treasure Island or The Man Who Came Dinner nine or so months before he was born.

I think “Me and Orson Welles” is only comprehensible to people who have seen Citizen Kane. It’s more fun for people who not only have seen it but who are familiar enough with its history and the history of the Mercury Theatre to recognize some of the other names besides Welles’ and to see in Eddie Marsan’s and James Tuppen’s performances the resemblances to the real John Houseman and Joseph Cotton.

That may be a niche audience too small for the money people in the movie industry to see as worth chasing, but it’s not all that small a niche or demographically segregated.

A little while ago I was in our local video store and browsing the drama section nearby me was a group of kids, two guys and two girls, friends, it seemed, not a pair of couples. They were college-aged but things about the way they were dressed, the way they talked and treated each other made me think they weren’t college students. These were working class kids already out in the world on their own holding down the blue or pink collar jobs they would count themselves lucky to hold down for life. One of the guys was their leader in picking out the movie for the night and he was making suggestions based on his own quite clearly considerable movie-watching experience. He wasn’t reading the boxes. He was telling them off the top of his head the plots and who starred in the movies and what other movies they’d starred in and what other movies they’d all seen that were like the potential choices. They had narrowed it down to four or five DVDs until he spotted yet another title he recognized.

He snatched the box from the shelf. “Oh. Have you seen this one? You’ve got to see this one! It’s supposed to be one of the best movies ever made!”

On that recommendation the others agreed right away.

I don’t have to tell you what that movie was, right?

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“Me and Orson Welles”, directed by Richard Linklater, screenplay by Holly Gent Palmo & Vince Palmo, based on the novel by Robert Kaplow. Starring Zac Efron, Christian McKay, Claire Danes, Zoe Kazan, Eddie Marsan, Ben Chaplin, James Tupper, and Leo Bill. Rated PG-13. Available to watch instantly at Amazon.

"Fruitvale Station": Not just a simple question of character

Originally posted, Saturday morning, August 8, 2015. Re-posted Friday night, March 27, 2020.

Father and Daughter: He was no saint, but among the many virtues of Oscar Grant (Michael B. Jordan), whose real life tragedy is told in Ryan Coogler’s masterpiece of naturalistic storytelling Fruitvale Station, was that he was a loving and devoted and involved father to his daughter Tatiana (Ariana Neal). Unfortunately, his virtues didn’t save him and may even have contributed to his death.

Family Movie Night Tonight. Feature was “Just Mercy”, based on a true-story legal drama starring Jamie Foxx and Michael B. Jordan. The Mannion guys and I liked it. Mrs M didn’t. She loved it. I plan to stay up all night reading the book it was based on which was written by the lawyer Jordan plays, Bryan Stevenson. Jordan does an excellent job playing an actual human being. I mean that in two ways: Bryan Stevenson is an actual human being; the character he played in the last movie I saw him in wasn’t. He was a comic book super-villain. Erik Killmonger in “Black Panther”. But he did another excellent job in that one making Killmonger come across as an actual human being. Which reminds me. I need to finish my Best Pictures of the 2010s series of re-posts. I have only two left to go. I should have five but, oddly, I didn’t write reviews of three of them: “Dunkirk”, “Logan”, and “Creed”. “Black Panther” didn’t make the list but it’s at the top of my honorable mentions. I didn’t write a review of that one either. That’s two Michael B. Jordan films I didn’t write about. And two Ryan Coogler films. I can’t explain it. But I did write a review of another honorable mention that not only did Jordan star in but Coogler directed. “Fruitvale Station”. It’s the movie that brought both of them to fame, Jordan as one of the best young actors of his generation, Coogler as arguably (Well, I would argue it.) the best young director. So I’m posting that review by way of an apology for not having reviews of “Black Panther” and “Creed”. Jordan plays an actual human being in “Fruitvale Station” which is based on a true story. Jordan is very good at playing actual human beings as actual human beings.

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Tonight's feature for family movie night [Friday, August 7, 2015.] was Fruitvale Station, the winner of, among the many awards it and its director Ryan Coogler and leading man Michael B. Jordan garnered, the Sundance Festival's Grand Jury Prize for 2013. The film tells the story of the last day in the short, frustrated life of Oscar Grant, a twenty-two year old black man who was shot and fatally wounded in the back by a white transit police officer on a subway train platform in San Francisco on January 1, 2009 while not only unarmed but already under restraint by several cops and in the process of being arrested for his suspected part in a fight aboard one of the trains. I'm still mulling over what to say about it as a movie but for now: See it. See it right away. It's streaming on Netflix. But I've got a couple thoughts together on it is a documentation of a real life tragedy and a commentary on one of the most pressing issues of our time. Here's my first thought.

There's a scene, as the story closes on its climactic moments, when Oscar (Jordan) and his girlfriend Sophina (Melonie Diaz), in San Francisco from their home across the bay in Oakland to celebrate New Year's, make a pit stop at a restaurant so Sophina can use the bathroom. The restaurant's closing for the night, the owner's about to lock up, but Oscar persuades him to let Sophina in. Oscar, however, the owner insists, has to wait outside. Fine with him. But while he's waiting another young couple walks up with the same urgent need.

Oscar prevails again on the owner, who again agrees to let the woman in but makes the guy wait outside. As it happens, this couple, whose names are Peter and Steph (played by Darren Bridgitt and Caroline Lesley) is white. They're married and she's pregnant. Oscar now finds himself waiting awkwardly with the other guy. But they start to make friendly small talk about their respective marital states. Oscar asks Peter how long he's been married, and something in Oscar's tone alerts Peter to Oscar's doubts about getting married and after answering (eight years) he asks back You thinking about it? and follows up with What's stopping you?

No money, Oscar says. He's out of work, having recently been fired from his job at a butcher's. The only money he has coming in is from dealing pot and he's not particularly good at that because he doesn't like to do it. He's basically an honest person and he wants a more stable life for himself and Sophina and their daughter Tatiana.

Peter waves the lack of money away as a shitty reason to put off getting married. He didn't have any money when he got married.

Oscar perks up. If this guy managed things without money, maybe he can too. He asks Peter how he bought an engagement ring.

I stole it, Peter admits, sheepish but also a little proud, as if the fact marks him as a daring and clever outlaw and rebel in the cause of true love. Now Oscar is really intrigued. He's spent time in prison for dealing. Peter's a fellow outlaw who appears to have done what Oscar wants to do, leave that sort of life behind.

Peter's in a confessional mood now, and he tells Oscar how he stole the ring and at the same time how it happened he had no money so he needed to steal it.

"I used to be good with credit cards."

He means, of course, that he was bad with them. Lots of debt. Lots of bills he didn't pay off. He warns Oscar not to let that happen to him. Oscar assures him he knows better. But we can see from his expression that knowing better isn't the reason he won't get into trouble with credit cards. The reason is he knows, probably from bitter experience, no bank's going to give him one.

Peter goes on, not wanting Oscar to think he's still a loser but also wanting to encourage Oscar with his example. "But then I started my business," he says, implying he's done well for himself since. And this does give Oscar a moment of hope. Starting his own business? There's an idea. Wouldn't it be great to be his own boss. He asks Peter what he does.

Web design, Peter says matter-of-factly and he hands Oscar his card.

Oscar looks at it, crestfallen, his hopes already fading.

He'd thought he and Peter were kindred spirits, and in a way they are. But Peter has advantages Oscar can't see himself ever acquiring.

Credit. A college degree. And a marketable skill in a growing and lucrative field.

Sophina and Peter's wife come out of the restaurant and the couples part ways. Nothing comes of the scene. Oscar doesn't have a chance to think about it or tell Sophina because the very next scene is the one leading up to Oscar's death. But it doesn't matter, narratively, except in its being yet another seemingly minor incident that as part of a string of such incidents puts Oscar in the wrong place at the wrong time and leads to his death.

If Sophina hadn't had to use the bathroom, if the owner hadn't let her or if he'd taken less time to agree, if Peter and Oscar had talked longer, if, if, if...then maybe he wouldn't have been on that particular train in that particular car at that particular time.

But the scene matters more thematically. Oscar’s being on the train at that moment is simply a simple twist of fate. He’s there because one thing leads to another, yes, but those things happen because he is who is he is. And big part of who he is is a poor young black man living in an American city in the first decade of the 21st Century.

Things don’t just happen to Oscar. He does things. He makes choices. Some of those choices aren’t the wisest he could make. Most, though, make sense, given the circumstances and the options he has. And that’s the problem: his circumstances limit his options.

At no point does Coogler suggest that Oscar’s fate is determined by socio-economic forces over which he has no control. He isn’t a victim of those forces although he is a product of them. He doesn’t have control over that, but he has control of himself or, rather, he sometimes exercises self-control in a way that gives him some mastery over his own fate.

But then sometimes he doesn’t exercise that control and sometimes even when he does larger forces defeat him.

And that makes Oscar something of an everyman and not only an every poor young inner-city black man.

We are who we are and what happens to us happens to us, Coogler is saying, through a mix of character, circumstance, and accident.

Now that I think of it, I do have something to say about Fruitvale Station as a work of moviemaking art.

It’s a nearly perfect piece of naturalistic storytelling.

Every scene moves the plot along even the scenes that seem random and pointless. Every scene illustrates Coogler’s themes. No scene hits us over the head with the latter or seems forced in doing the former.

Coogler works his way subtly, patiently, and confidently to Fruitvale Station’s inevitable tragic conclusion using a cinematic verite style that doesn’t feel like an affectation or a gimmick or even visual commentary on the film’s being based on real events---it just seems like the right choice, as if this is the way this story had to be told.

Fruitvale Station is a tragedy before it is a social commentary.

Which isn’t to say it isn’t a social commentary. The social commentary is intrinsic to the tragedy.

It’s been the reflexive conservative position that poverty and the crime it engenders are not socio-economic problems. They are problems caused by individual failures of character.

If only those people would exercise self-control, behave, adopt better habits and values. If only they’d be more like us.

As if having been born white and middle class and into a stable, lucky family living in a good neighborhood was the result of choices they made and actions they took.

Conservatives seem to feel a desperate need to feel they have total control over their own fates---even the ones who claim that we are all pretty much God’s pawns and he moves us around the chessboard of life in accordance to his plans. Their hedge is that God’s moving them into advantageous positions is his way of rewarding them for being good people, so it’s not really the case that their fate is out of their control. There are a number of reasons behind their needing to feel this, but the point here is that one of the ways they make themselves feel it is to deny their own advantages. This is how we get the ludicrous phenomenon of someone like Paul Ryan talking as if he’d worked his way up from the gutter and lecturing people who weren’t born into a rich family and then married money on how to improve their lives. More generally, it’s how we get middle class and wealthy straight white American men talking about themselves as if they are an oppressed minority---the oppressed minority.

They refuse to acknowledge the advantages they were born with and refuse to acknowledge the disadvantages people who are not like them have to deal with from birth.

“It’s all your fault you are not safe, comfortable, prosperous, and successful like me. So stop asking me to care about you and your problems or do anything to help you solve them especially if what you’re asking me to do requires me to give up any of the advantages or privileges I refuse to admit I have.”

And this is one of the points Coogler’s making in the scene between Oscar and Peter outside the restaurant.

Oscar is far from a saint. But he is a bit of a hero. He has flaws and is given to vices. He’s impulsive, self-indulgent, arrogant (in the way most twenty-two year old men are, regardless of their virtues), entitled (again, in the way most twenty-two year old men are), thoughtless (again. But also a little more so), and he has a quick temper that he doesn’t feel a need to control. But he’s also tender and tender-hearted, generous, quick-witted, resourceful, charming, empathetic, and brave. His tragedy is that his virtues sometimes get him in more trouble than his vices---it’s even the case that if he wasn’t brave and generous and loyal and charming, he might not have wound up face down on that train platform with a cop’s gun to his back---and even when they don’t cause trouble they don’t earn him any rewards.

He can’t work his way out of his situation no matter how good his character if he doesn’t have the right skills or isn’t given the opportunities.

If society sees no use for people like Oscar---and it pretty much doesn’t---then his good character doesn’t matter. And if it does see a use for people like Peter, then his lack of good character doesn’t matter.

Peter likely has many virtues, but the only one we see is that he’s friendly. Otherwise all we know about him is that at one time he was a sneak, a cheat, a liar, and a thief. Just like Oscar. And, while one of the lessons we can draw from this, one Oscar tries at first to draw for himself, is that if Peter could save himself from his own screw-ups, then maybe Oscar can too, there’s the fact that Peter had and has advantages Oscar didn’t and doesn’t, possibly even more advantages than we can know from just this scene, like a family and friends who could help him pay off his debts and finance his start-up. Oscar’s family and friends are all as without money and connections as he is himself. In fact, he has to help them out of trouble as often as they help him, which sometimes means putting himself into more difficulties.

Like I said, sometimes his virtues cause more trouble than his vices.

Character matters.

But only to the degree it can overcome or at least survive the forces of bad luck and socio-economic conditions designed to keep people like Oscar from mattering, no matter what their character.

I feel like the obvious needs to be stressed: Whatever Oscar Grant did or didn’t do that landed him face down and under arrest on that train platform that night, he should not have wound up dead.  His death is entirely on the cop who shot him.

Boiled down, the conservative position on just about every socio-economic problem is “They aren’t like us and therefore we don’t owe them sympathy, pity, or aid.”  This, of course, is heartless, inhumane, and un-Christian (and most conservatives in the United States boast of being good Christian), not to mention selfish and self-serving. Which is why they try to cover it with hypocritical sermons on values and character. They don’t want to be seen for what they are. So when it comes to discussing problems of the inner cities, they are quick to jump on evidence that those problems are all their own fault.  For instance, they like to point to all the evidence of family dysfunction, particularly to the absence of fathers in the lives of their children. (This has the added benefit to the cause of male authoritarianism generally and denying women their rights to control their own bodies as well as their work and family lives.) They refuse to consider the possibility that they are reversing cause and effect. The toll the high rates of violence, crime, unemployment, and mass incarceration take on young men of prime parenting age includes removing those young men from their families and reducing their influence on the raising of their children.

Coogler doesn’t make much of this in Fruitvale Station, but it’s there to be seen if you're looking for it: in the various family arrangements among Oscar’s circle of friends and relatives shown in the course of the movie, there are no young adult men significantly involved in the family’s daily lives…except Oscar.  And it’s no small part of the tragedy that Oscar’s death robs Tatiana of a loving and involved father.

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Here’s a very good interview with Ryan Coogler by Benjamin Soloway at the Boston Globe that includes background on the making of the movie and the real life events surrounding Oscar Grant’s death: What happened at Fruitvale Station.

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"Fruitvale Station", written and directed by Ryan Coolger. Starring Michael B. Jordan, Melonie Diaz, Octavia Spencer. Rated R. Is available to watch instantly at Amazon.

And, in case you're interested in "Just Mercy" as well, it's also available at Amazon to watch instantly.

Filed under Best Pictures Of The 2010s According To Lance.

"California Split": Addicted to hope

First hand dealt, Thursday, February 14, 2010. Re-shuffled Thursday night, February 20, 2020.

Portrait of two gamblers. One does it for the company. The other does it to be left alone. Both are addicted to hope: Elliot Gould and George Segal (second and third from the left) in Robert Altman's "California Split". 1974.

[From the Department of In Search of Lost Time: Way back when, almost ten years ago to the day, in fact, in the days when blogs were the thing and this blog had a national rep (Thanks mainly to the generosity of Jim Wolcott), I began hosting a series of conversations on some of Robert Altman’s movies which I facetiously called The First Annual I Hate Robert Altman Film Festival. In those glory days, you could hold a real discussion in your comments section. I mean a real discussion, not like the back and forths of shallowly stated opinions that pass for discussions on Twitter. The movies I and fellow Altman fans among my readers conversed about deliberately didn’t include any of Altman’s masterpieces. I wanted to have something to talk about that wasn’t the usual “Oh that was great!” I included a couple of his failures and near misses---”Popeye” and “Buffalo Bill and the Indians”---and several I either hadn’t seen or hadn’t seen in a very long time. One of those was “California Split”.  I was reminded of this tonight when I saw our old comrade in blogging, film critic and writer Craig Lindsey answer a question posed by Jen Johans on Twitter, “What’s your favorite Robert Altman film?” Craig wrote:

I’m torn between LONG GOODBYE and CALIFORNIA SPLIT — two movies which feature Elliott Gould as a smart-ass who people dismiss as a loser, virtually overlooking his wily craftiness.

“The Long Goodbye” has always been one of my favorites. “California Split” hasn’t or wasn’t. I remember being disappointed by it, even bored, when I saw it in the theater in high school, but I’d never given it much thought since. That was the point of including it in the film festival: to make myself think about it anew. So for Craig’s amusement, I’m reposting what I thunk.]

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I’m assuming that everybody knows that calling this series of discussions the I Hate Robert Altman Film Festival is a joke.  I don’t hate Robert Altman. 

Altman’s one of my favorite directors.

He’s one of my favorite American artists.

I don’t know how I’d have felt about the man. Probably what George Segal, the star of tonight’s feature, “California Split”, felt when he was working with Altman.

Our relationship was warm, mutually respectful, and a little distant.  I wasn’t in his rhythms…I guess I was more middle-class than he would have liked.  Different sensibilities. He was living a seventies lifestyle and I was little bit behind in that area.  He’s Kansas City and living by the seat of your pants and making this totally innovative movie, M*A*S*H, changing the rules, and I’m a rule player.  Elliott [Gould, Segal’s co-star on California Split] was also an antirules guy and a freewheeling guy…I brought an innocence, and he didn’t have time for that.  Risk was not a part of my persona and it was part of his.

That distance Segal felt, Altman used it in the movie. He made the movie about it. I think Segal’s wrong about Altman not having time for that innocence. Maybe he didn’t off the set. It’s in the movie. It’s in every close-up of Segal and I’m not going to swear to this but I think there are more close-ups of George Segal in “California Split” than there are of any other actor in any of Altman’s other great movies from the 1970s, which is to say, the movies he made in his prime.

Altman’s movies were about people in groups, as members of societies.  He worked mainly in long shots and medium shots because he wanted to fit as many people into every shot as clowns want to fit in a circus car.  The difference is that the clowns want you to see them one at a time as the climb out of the car. If Altman had been a ringmaster he’d have had the car made entirely of glass and not let the clowns out so the audience could see them all crammed in there together and trying to get along or get away.  Every contorted face and body is interesting and important because of the pressures put on the person they belong to by the owners of the other faces and bodies rubbing up against them and for the pressures they put on them.

“M*A*S*H”, “Brewster McCloud”, “McCabe and Mrs Miller”, “Buffalo Bill and the Indians”, and “A Wedding” are all about people crammed into small spaces and forced to get along. The 4077th, the Astrodome, a haphazard collection of buildings hemmed in by wilderness that hardly deserves to be called a town, the tents and performance space of a travelling Wild West show, a single house. In “Nashville”, Nashville is a small, company town and in “The Long Goodbye”, Los Angeles might as well be a single street and a short strip of beachfront for all the room the characters have to escape each other’s company and problems.

In “California Split” the cramped and closed in space is the mental and spiritual one of shared addiction. The addiction isn’t to gambling. It’s to expectation.

All the characters, except Segal’s Bill Denny, but including the call girls, Barbara and Susan (Ann Prentice and Gwen Welles), who do not literally gamble, do what they do, take the risks they take with their money, their happiness, their jobs, their lives, for the joyful feeling of being on the edge of something wonderful.

That’s why Segal gets his close-ups. Close-ups are isolating and Bill is isolated within the community of hope addicts.

Bill’s the literal gambling addict. At least, he’s the one who knows what he’s doing when he gambling. He’s past hope. His addiction has lost whatever thrill it used to give him.  At the point we meet him gambling has cut him off from everything meaningful in his life, from the small, crowded communities he is supposed to be part of, his family, his office. He is alone, a cramped, closed society of one, and he hates the company.  Even sitting shoulder to shoulder with the people he’s playing poker with, he’s all by himself. He latches onto Charlie [Gould] because Charlie is involved.  Charlie lives on risk and hope, like all the other gamblers. But for him gambling is social. He can’t do it without conversation. Bill flinches from the people close to him.  Charlie reaches out to them. He has to bump, nudge, nuzzle, rub up against all around him. He loves the company. The attention of other people make him happy, even when the attention comes in the form of a beating or a stick-up.

Not that he’s a good guy, necessarily. In many ways, he’s a supreme asshole. He’s as addicted to expectation as the others, but he doesn’t expect happiness as much as he expects excitement, and so he gambles with other people’s emotions. He rubs shoulders in order to rub people the wrong way. He wants them to get angry with him because anger makes people unpredictable. It makes them reckless. It makes them interesting.

It makes them fun.

Bill wants to be like Charlie. He wants to be having fun. He wants to have friends. He wants to feel like part of the crowd.  He wants to think that what he’s doing at the poker table, at the track, at the casino is something nicer, happier, better than gambling.

The good feelings and good times only come in bursts, and in Charlie’s company, and even with Charlie there Bill can’t always sustain the mood, or the illusion of the mood. He falls back in on himself. He shuts himself off and up, and that’s how the camera often finds him.

Charlie is able to enjoy his life because he is corrupt and dishonest.  It isn’t right to call him a rule breaker or an antirules guy because he doesn’t seem to know that there are rules (not counting the rules of the games he plays and bets on) or why there are or need to be rules.

Bill, however, is a rules player. He even has rules by which he conducts his gambling. And he’s an innocent. At any rate, he remembers what it was like to be innocent. Bill is stuck in the middle of two opposing desires, although both would allow him to join in a society and shake his loneliness. Either way, he would belong again. He could give in, give up, and become like Charlie, and at least enjoy his self-destruction. Or he could give up gambling and go home. He can’t make up his mind, so he sits and broods and hates himself for both impulses.

Altman caught that.

Once an actress asked Altman how she would know when the camera was on her in a crowd scene so that she would know when to do her acting.  Altman told her to do her acting when she felt the moment was right, the camera would find her.

One of the many risks Altman ran when he made a movie was that the camera wouldn’t find an actress or an actor at a crucial moment, that it would get there too late or at the wrong angle.  And that probably happened many times. But those times didn’t matter because of all the other times when Altman had the camera right there.

He trusted that there would be lots of those times because he made sure that there was always something for the camera to catch.  If one character in a shot wasn’t doing something worth paying a lot of attention to, not just one other but several others were. He chose his actors to make sure of this.  And he kept track.

His eyes and ears were open in a way more disciplined, more exacting, more rules playing directors aren’t.  They pay attention to their plans. Altman paid attention to what was happening and paid so close attention that he could see what was about to happen because of it.  He could get the camera there a beat ahead.

He saw and he heard George Segal. And he made his movie about what he saw and and heard.

Ok, we’re ready.  Let’s get this discussion underway. Comment and refresh as needed.

Where should we start?

How about with this. The 70s sure were ugly, weren’t they?

11:30 PM. Time for me to call it a night.  Graveyard shift’s coming on to keep the comment thread open.  Please feel free to help yourself to the coffee and donuts which have been generously provided by the folks at Sue’s House of Pastry.  All we ask is that you bus your own tables on your way out.

Don’t forget. Next week: “Thieves Like Us”.

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"California Split", directed by Robert Altman and starring Elliot Gould and George Segal, is available to watch instantly at Amazon.

Filed under Second Run Movie Reviews and Robert Altman.

I’m an Amazon associate and earn a (very small) commission for books etc. bought through the links on the blog.

"The Three Stooges": Victims of Soicumstance

Original poke in the eye posted Sunday, April 21, 2014. Re-Curly Shuffled Saturday night, February 1, 2020.

“Nyah-nyah-nyahhh!”  Larry, Moe, and Curly (Sean Hayes, Chris Diamantopoulos, and Will Sasso) react to their latest disaster in the Farrelly Brothers’ 2012 movie The Three Stooges.

[No! “The Three Stooges” is not on my list of the best movies of the 2010s, even if by the best I mean movies I liked best. I did like it. A lot actually. Which is why I’m glad to hear that eight years later there’s finally a sequel in the works and when it hits the theaters I’m going to be one of the first in line. Please don’t tell Mom Mannion.]

Yeah, I went. What’s it to ya?

Have to admit I didn’t feel right about it. Sitting there in the theater, waiting for it to start, I was feeling uneasy and a little guilty. 

I was sure that as soon as the lights went out my mother would come charging into the multiplex, dash up to the projection booth, and turn off the projector.

Mom Mannion hates the Stooges. Always has.

When I was a kid one of the local TV stations used to broadcast an hour of Stooges shorts and Popeye cartoons every weekday morning starting at six.  And every morning at five thirty I’d be up, make myself a bowl of cereal, take it into the living room and settle down to watch the end of Sunrise Semester and then the Stooges.  I loved the Stooges. But I was careful not to laugh. And I kept the sound way down. Because I knew.

If so much as a nyuk or a woob or an Oh, a wiseguy made its way upstairs, Mom Mannion would snap awake and come flying downstairs to turn of the TV.

Like I said, Mom Mannion hated the Stooges. Everybody’s mother did.

So please don’t tell her I went to the movie.

Which I enjoyed, if you want to know. And I’m guessing you do, cause why else are you reading this? I had a blast.

Ok. I’m not about to recommend it, exactly. I’m just telling you I enjoyed it. I can’t tell you if you will. You have to use your judgment. If you’ve never liked the Three Stooges you probably won’t like The Three Stooges.  (You should ask yourself, though, if you really don’t like them or you just feel you shouldn’t like them.)  If you loved the Stooges, that’s another question. You might feel too loyal to the real Stooges to give these boys a chance. You might feel like film critic Tony Dayoub who told me in a Twitter exchange a while back that he was hoping to give the movie a skip because he never liked when the third Stooge was anybody but Curly, so why would he want to watch three replacements?

The answer to that is Shemp (and I have a soft spot for Shemp). Joe Besser, and Curly Joe DeRita were not acceptable replacements for Curly But Will Sasso isn't a replacement. He is Curly. Just like Chris Diamantopoulos is Moe and Sean Hayes is Larry. Boy, is he ever Larry.

If at this point you’re moved to point out that the Stooges were never the comic geniuses the Marx Brothers were, save it. Next time I’m in McDonalds enjoying a Big Mac, stop by and you can tell me how much better the burgers are at Carl’s Jr.

The main and maybe the only reason to see the movie is the performances of the three leads, who are brilliant. What they do goes beyond dead-on impersonations. They don’t do Moe Howard, Jerry Howard, and Larry Fine doing Moe, Curly, and Larry. They play the characters the Howards and Fine created.  I never felt reminded of the Stooges. I felt I was watching the Stooges.

The effect is helped by the Farrelly Brothers’ faithfulness to the spirit of the Stooges’ two-reelers.

To start with, there’s a plot.

The best of Stooges’ shorts told stories, slight ones but they told them solidly and as if the outcomes mattered.  Something was at stake and often not for the Stooges themselves but for someone else whose cause they'd adopted. The plots weren't excuses for the boys to hit, slap, poke, and wallop each other. They didn't need excuses for that.  They encountered problems they had to solve and the fun and the funny was in watching them try to solve them or fail to solve them.

In the movie, Mo, Larry, and Curly set out to raise money to save the orphanage where they grew up and somehow manage to enmesh themselves in the plot of Double Indemnity which leads them to invading a hospital, starting a salmon farm on a golf course, crashing a party at a mansion, and joining the cast of Jersey Shore.

Along the way there’s the expected amount of eye-poking, ear, nose, and hair-pulling, tongue-biting, head-knocking, belly-bumping, wall-thumping, heavy object dropping, pratfalling, and general mayhem creating.

No pie-throwing, amazingly. An oversight the Farrelly Brothers regret, I’m sure.

Much as I loved the Stooges when I was a kid, I don't have an encyclopedic knowledge of their oeuvre and it’s been years since I've watched any of their shorts all the way through.  But the Farrellys worked in at least nods to most of their best recurring gags, tropes, and routines, including a variation that nicely ups the ante on one of my favorites, Moe drawing a saw across Curly's skull, Curly's cry of pain “Oh oh oh oh” turning into a cheerfully surprised “Oh look!, and the camera closing in to show that all the saw's teeth are bent.

And while the movie is set in the thoroughly undisguised present, the plot takes the boys into settings and situations that haven't much changed since the 1930s.  A hospital nursery, a golf course, a zoo, a fancy party at a mansion. All places the original Stooges could bumble and stumble into to cause mischief without having to cope with any future shock.

I also liked how they found ways to get the boys into different costumes. Every short began with the Stooges in a new line of work. They were firemen, plumbers, auto mechanics, carpenters, farmers, big game hunters, ice men, cowboys, Union spies in the Civil War, private eyes, doctors.  (“Calling Dr Howard, Dr Fine, Dr Howard!”) There'd be no explanation for the career change or the time travel or their sudden acquisition of actual competency at whatever enterprise they were putting their hands to. But then every short was complete unto itself.  It didn't matter that they were soldiers in this episode after having been college professors in the last one. But the movie is a single long story and the Stooges are who and what they start off as throughout, so the trick the Farrellys have to pull off is how to get them dressed like carpenters and farmers and doctors and TV stars and society swells while keeping them inside the plot.  They pull it off.

One thing disappointed me. They don’t give Curly his due. Curly was often the hero of the Stooges shorts. The plots would center around him and it would be up to him to save the day.  And in many of the shorts we got to see Curly on his own, dealing with supporting characters, and even all alone, working out a problem, his solutions causing more trouble than they saved, of course. Jerry “Curly” Howard was the most gifted physical comedian of the trio and he had the best timing. His real-life big brother Moe knew this and made sure bits were built around his brother to showcase his talents as a mime and an ad-libber.  Sasso is given a couple of brief moments to shine on his own, but the Farrellys really should have let him have at least one extended solo routine like the original Curly’s classic ice shaving scene in An Ache in Every Stake.

Knuckleheads.

But that’s just a way of saying again how perfectly Sasso---and Hayes and Diamantopoulos---recreate the originals.  And, like I said, the three leads are really the reason to see the movie. Plus, it’s actually funny.

As for the supporting cast…it’s fun to see Jane Lynch playing it in a very non-Jane Lynch sort of way as a nun.  Jennifer Hudson’s best moment comes near the end of the credits, so stick around. A little bit of Larry David as Sister Mary Mengele goes a long way and fortunately the Farrellys don’t let him take it too far beyond that.  Craig Bierko takes his punishment well. Sofia Vergara wears her tight dresses in a way that makes you understand why men would want to kill for her. And Snooki and the rest of the cast of Jersey Shore do a good job parodying their self-parodies.

The real standouts are the three young actors who play the Stooges as ten year old kids, Lance Chantiles-Wertz as Larry, Robert Capron as Curly, and, especially Skyler Gisondo as Moe. And they get to deliver the Stooges’ signature musical Hello.

Now, one more thing that the Farrellys got right, and this brings me back to Mom Mannion.

They made the Stooges good guys.

Mom didn’t want us watching the Stooges because she was worried we would hurt ourselves imitating them. She didn’t think we were dumb enough to bop each other with hammers or rake saws across our skulls. But she did think we might try to pretend like they did and poke each other in the eye or bonk each other over the head or knock our knuckleheads together accidentally while “rehearsing.”

What I could never make her understand is that, well, yeah, I enjoyed the slapstick, but the reason I liked the Stooges was that I liked the Stooges.

They were good guys.

At least they were in my favorites. I didn’t like the ones in which they were just jerks or dopes.

In my favorites, they were well-meaning and good-hearted and they took the side of the weak and the downtrodden and the down on their luck and the nice and the decent and the honest against the rich and scheming and powerful and mean. 

And they looked out for each other.

You might remember that Moe rarely called either Larry or Curly (or Shemp) by their real names.  When he wasn’t calling them knuckleheads or other insults, he called them…

Kid.

Which is what a Depression era movie big brother would call the younger brothers he loves and worries about and who love him and worry about him back.

Like the originals, these Stooges love each other.

They just have a funny way of showing it.

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The Three Stooges, directed by Peter Farrelly and Bobby Farrelly, written by the Farrellys and Mike Cerrone, starring Chris Diamantopoulos, Sean Hayes, Will Sasso, Larry David, Jennifer Hudson, and Jane Lynch. Available to watch instantly at Amazon.

Filed under Second Run Movie Reviews. Follow the link to read my reviews of the Best Movies of the 2010s According to Lance.

I’m an Amazon associate and earn a (very small) commission for books etc. bought through the links on the blog.

"The Departed," revisited

Hoisted from the archives, Thursday, February 15, 2007. Posted Wednesday night, October 23, 2019.

Doubles. Matt Damon as a crooked cop pretending to be a good cop about to meet his moral reverse image, a good cop pretending to be a bad cop, played by Leonardo DiCaprio in Martin Scorsese’s “The Departed”.

One thing leading to another, as it does on the internet, I haven’t gotten to writing about Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola’s feud with superheroes. But in the course of doing my homework I turned up my review of “The Departed”, a movie I remember in much more detail than I do “The Good Shepherd”. What I don’t remember is why in writing the review I didn’t mention the film’s Boston setting, none of which matched my own memories of Boston, or how I missed the fact that Matt Damon’s bad cop pretending to be a good cop and Leonardo DiCaprio’s good cop pretending to be a bad cop aren’t simply conventional storytelling doubles---they are the same character. Scorsese was going the same route as Poe, Dostoevsky, and Stevenson in telling a story of a self divided against itself. I forgot that Scorsese, while being one of the most cinematic of directors is also one of the most literary ones. “Raging Bull”, “Goodfellas”, “The Last Temptation of Christ”, “Casino”, “The Age of Innocence”, “Hugo”, “The Wolf of Wall Street”, “Silence”, “The Irishman”, and coming up, a TV miniseries,”The Devil in the White City”---he’s a loving and incisive adapter of books.

Here's the review, very slightly revised and copyedited, with pictures added...

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Thursday, February 15, 2007.

Saw “The Departed” the other night.

It's good. I liked it. Scorsese should finally get his Oscar, though he's made better. The movie has no real ending. The catastrophe that brings about the violent climax depends on several characters suddenly getting far more stupid than we've seen them being to that point, and the level of violence and the body count are almost laughable. Makes me think Scorsese has seen too many of his own movies and traumatized himself---he can no longer judge how to effectively dole it out. Same with the profanity.

I don't know why people said Jack Nicholson's performance as Francis Costello was hammy and over the top, unless they missed the fact that Costello himself is a ham. A self-made made in the sense of being invented out of nothing, Costello is always playing the part of Costello.   He's not real to himself, other people aren't real to him either, and the only way he knows to make his life seem like anything to himself is to force himself and the people around him to act out a script he's writing for them on the spot.

He's not a movie gangster, but he plays one in real life.

His counterpart among the cops Mark Wahlberg's Massachusetts State Police Sergeant Sean Dignam.  Dignam is a more self-conscious, more self-aware self-creation. He hands people a script he's written and then judges them by how adept they are at resisting type-casting.

 Wahlberg is good, but his part is over written.

I'm talking about the part Scorsese gave Wahlberg to play, not the part Dignam's cast himself in.

The writing's sloppy.

Vera Farmiga as Madolyn Madden the police psychologist who falls for both Matt Damon's and Leonardo DiCaprio's characters is one of the oddest looking romantic leads I've seen in a movie in a long, long time. Skinny, ungraceful, with a long face and a habit of smiling like Stan Laurel.  Nice eyes though. She's one of the sexiest too. She quivers with desire in all of her scenes. It might all be acting. It explains the character.

Madolyn is always open to seduction. When Madolyn's asked why with her superior education, her impressive resume, and obvious talent and intelligence she's working at a thankless job that pays her less than a guidance counselor makes, she brushes off the question with a platitude about public service, as if this is her way of being a police officer and protecting and serving the public. It's the lamest of lies. She's taken the job so she can be around big, strong, dangerous men who might sweep her off her feet and carry her off to bed at any moment.

She allows every professional conversation she has to become very quickly about her. Private conversations have no other purpose at all. Her first date with Matt Damon's character isn't going well, she seems to have made up her mind that he's not her type at all, but when he jokes that she isn't his type and he doesn't think he'll call her again, she's absolutely crushed.

Needless to say, she comes across as entirely a creation of male fantasies.  A beautiful, sexy, intelligent woman who wants to sleep with you just because you're a man and she's a woman and so you don't have to bring anything to the table. But that's not why her character is a complete drag on the movie.

All her scenes stop the movie in its tracks because she is so obviously a device to help Scorsese avoid having to introduce another female character for DiCaprio's character to meet and fall for. Madolyn is, creatively speaking, an act of artistic economizing. I could spend a couple paragraphs justifying the character's double life thematically, but in the end, that turns out to be the only justification for the character's presence in the movie.

When you get right down to it, all characters are plot devices. But characters who have no purpose in a story except to help move the plot along should not be given much screen time, no matter how idiosyncratically beautiful and sexy the actresses playing them are.

It makes sense that DeCaprio's undercover cop Billy Costigan would need to see a psychologist, makes sense that he would fall for one with eyes like Farmiga's, and makes sense that she would be attracted to him strongly enough to forget her professional responsibilities. There is no reason that the same character should turn up as the girlfriend of Matt Damon's dirty cop, Colin Sullivan. The only dramatic reasons he needs a woman in his life is for her to be there to be lied to and as the main piece of furniture in yet another compartment of his insanely compartmentalized life.

Funnily enough, it's in the scenes with Damon, when she's most obviously just a plot device, that Farmiga does her best work and her character is at her most convincing. This is because in her scenes with DiCaprio she's tonally and emotionally and conceptually out of sync.

DiCaprio plays Costigan as being at the very end of his tether. He's operating at just this side of screaming hysteria. Farmiga can't match him twitch for twitch or strip herself down to his level of emotional rawness. It might have been interesting if Scorsese had let Madolyn become infected with Costigan's paranoia and hysteria, but he and Farmiga don't go there.

Their other option, for her to be his comforter, to bring him back to some, at least temporary, form of calm sanity, isn't available either, for the same reason, the limited conception of the character.

All Madolyn can do for Costigan is what she does for all the men who stray into her office, offer herself to him. She continues her trick of being desirable by desiring. The last thing Costigan needs right now is an emotional attachment to yet someone else he can't trust, but that's what she's there for, despite her better judgment. In other words, she fails him and herself professionally. This would make a whole movie in its own right, but it's too much for a subplot, particularly a subplot the director doesn't really care about. Scorsese leaves DiCaprio and Farmiga acting at cross-purposes.

You could say this is partly DiCaprio's fault for being too into character. He offers her nothing to connect to. He plays Costigan as repelling all intimacy. There's never any give to him, except, ironically, in his scenes with Nicholson.---

---But this walled-off quality about him is meant to be his tragic flaw. The psychological quirks that make him apparently the perfect choice for an undercover cop are also what make him finally incapable of surviving undercover. Costigan belongs nowhere and to no one except himself. When he reaches the edge, though, he has no one to reach out to and even if someone comes along offering to pull him back he can't bring himself to take their hand.

Given Costigan's situation, it would be dangerous for him to trust anyone too easily, and it's no wonder that the only other character he seems to like and trust to any degree is Nicholson's Francis Costello, the man Costigan's meant to destroy. Because Costello's playing out the script he's written for himself, he's predictable and he's in a perverse way honest. He is always true to his own conception of himself as the gangster's gangster. 

DiCaprio does a brilliant job of placing Billy Costigan in a line of movie detectives whose neuroses and self-deceptions almost overwhelm their heroism and practically make them the chief villain in their own story---Humphrey Bogart in “The Maltese Falcon”, Jimmy Stewart in “Vertigo”, Gene Hackman in “The French Connection” and “The Conversation”, and now DiCaprio played their parts entirely without a leading man's vanity, risking losing the audience's sympathy at the outset in order to win us over in the end with a more psychologically compelling and, ultimately, more sympathetic, if not particularly likable, characterization.

But as much as I admired what DiCaprio does in “The Departed”, I was more impressed by Matt Damon.

Damon's Colin Sullivan is a man divided against himself six ways from Sunday. He's not just living a double life.  He's living multiple lives. He's carefully walled each life off from all the others, but in doing so he's walled pieces of himself up inside each compartment.  His is a disintegrated personality. Each piece is a lot like the others, and all are like him, but no one piece is him or even a clue to him. The pieces don't fit together like pieces in a puzzle. They’re like circles of glass cut from the same pane.  Damon's job in “The Departed” is to play each separate Colin as distinct and yet the same. He has to come across as different, without acting different.

He does this mainly through his smile and his sense of humor. The different Colins smile with different degrees of broadness and sincerity and while they all talk about the same things using the same vocabularies they find different things about what they say funny. What's a joke to one Colin is the occasion of morbid self-pity for another. What one Colin thinks of as the most stern and earnest of businesses, another Colin treats with cynical contempt.

The trickiest part for Damon is that none of the Colins can contain an insight into any of the others, because if you could see any part of one while dealing with another you might accidentally see your way to the crooked cop Colin and that would be the end of all of them.

The telling scene is when Madolyn is moving some of her stuff into his apartment and he refuses to let her put any pictures of herself in the living room.  He points out to her that he has no signs of his own past anywhere about. The living room is the one room where the people who know the different Colins would be allowed into and therefore it has to be a room in which any of the different Colins might live. It's a room, then, that offers nothing to look at.  It's all surface, highly polished, gleaming, and resistant to the eye. You get tired of looking at it before you've begun to take it all in.

This is the quality that all the different Colins have in common. They are all surface, polished and gleaming, but not anything you want to look at for long. You can take them all in at a glance, convinced that you've seen all there is to see, and are eager and willing when Colin directs your attention to something else, to the view of the gleaming dome of the State House outside the window, for instance.

He can do this redirection so smoothly and charmingly that most people can be tricked into mistaking the beautiful view for the person pointing it out to them.

But he can't trick himself to see himself out there, stare as long and hard as he likes. And he can't see himself when he looks inward either, because it turns out to be a case of a reflection in a mirror looking at itself.

Damon has done a fine job of creating a perfectly hollow man.

It's a neat complement to DiCaprio's characterization of Costigan as a man trapped inside himself. Damon makes Colin Sullivan a man locked outside his own life, and one of the several Colins Damon manages to create is the one who can only stand apart and watch all the others. That's the real Colin, of course. But that's the Colin that's lost to himself. That's the Colin that's the departed of the title, the departed self.

Filed under Second Run Movie Reviews. Related re-reviewing: "The Good Shepherd:": Notes on notes for a review that still hasn't been written thirteen years later.

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“The Departed”. Directed by Martin Scosese. Screenplay by William Monahan. Starring Jack Nicholson, Leonardo DiCaprio, Matt Damon, Vera Farmiga, Mark Wahlberg, Martin Sheen, and Alec Baldwin. Warner Brothers. 2006. Available to watch instantly at Amazon.

The Good Shepherd: Notes on notes for a review that still hasn't been written thirteen years later

Hoisted from the archives, April 17, 2007. Posted Monday night, October 21, 2019.

Organization Man dwarfed by the Organization: Matt Damon as the good company man Edward Wilson whose company happens to be the CIA in Robert De Niro's  2006 movie about the early history of the agency, “The Good Shepherd.”

I wonder why I don’t I remember any of this...

I was doing some homework last night to see if I had anything worth saying about Martin Scorse and Francis Ford Coppola’s grouchings about superhero movies and I stumbled upon this old post of mine about the 2007 movie “The Good Shepherd”, which was directed by Robert De Niro and starred Matt Damon and Anjelina Jolie.  I was shocked. I’ve almost completely forgotten the movie.

I remember having seen it. I don’t remember much that I saw. A few fleeting image---among the most vivid: Angelina Jolie making her way disdainfully through a party of self-satisfied men too caught up in their attempts to impress each other to notice her---but I don’t remember a single whole scene. The only members of the impressive cast I remember being in it are Jolie, Matt Damon and De Niro. Even now, looking at the photos and being reminded they were in it, I can’t tell you who William Hurt, Michael Gambon, Keir Dullea, and Billy Crudup played and what their characters were like and how they figured in the plot. I have to take imdb’s word for it that Timothy Hutton was in it, since there are no stills featuring him. I have to take my own word for it that John Turturro’s character was what he was. I have no idea why I thought Alec Baldwin’s character could have been played in an earlier time by Charles Durning or Dabney Coleman---none of the photos suggest it’s a role that would have suited either---

---I do remember having a sense that the son of Matt Damon’s character would come more to the fore in the sequel I remember being sure the movie was setting up but thinking that the young actor playing the son was too young and would have to be replaced by a more grown-up and less gangly and gawky actor, a young leading man type and not someone like this actor who though I remember liking I was sure his future film career would be as a supporting player and character actor. That was Eddie Redmayne.

Shows you what I know.

And reading over the post, I find it interesting---in a What the devil was I thinking? way---that I didn’t feel the need to summarize the plot or even off-handedly mention that the movie was about the founding of the CIA. I don’t know if that was a lazy oversight or if I simply took it for granted that my readers would know it coming in, which would mean that it was much more talked about than I have any recollection of its having been.

At any rate, back to doing homework. I think I’ve talked myself into having to watch “The Good Shepherd” again.  Meanwhile, here’s the post again. Maybe you remember it better than I do. It’s pretty much as it was. I made a few minor revisions, some copyediting, and added the photos, none of which jogged any vivid memories.  The original title for the post was “Notes for a review that will never be written.” Maybe I should title this post “Notes for a review that might finally get written thirteen years later.”

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April 17, 2007.

Things Robert De Niro knows about directing he did not learn from all his work with Martin Scorsese:

How to be quiet.

How to keep his actors still.

How to fill up a scene with images rather than activity. In “The Good Shepherd”, De Niro lets us look at a shot, stare deep into it, and take our time and study it. Scorsese tends to force us to keep our eyes moving about constantly. Something is always in frenetic motion, usually his actors' mouths.

Much of this difference in directing style is due to tone and theme. Scorsese's movies are usually about people whose emotions get out of control, whose thoughts are all over the place. The characters in "The Good Shepherd" have stifled their emotions. They don't think anymore either. They calculate.

In “The Departed” Matt Damon played a man without a soul. In “The Good Shepherd” he plays a man whose soul has withdrawn to one side. It's there, watching him, horrified at what's happening.  If it had a voice, it would scream. We see it in Damon's eyes. Whatever or whomever he's looking at, his gaze is always a fraction off to one side. He seems to be watching himself watch himself, as if he can see himself reflected inside the lenses of his glasses.

I wonder if the glasses Damon wears are a tribute to Alec Guinness's George Smiley. They are a joke and a disguise, that's for sure. The joke is that they make Damon look like Clark Kent and at the back of our mind we can't help expecting him to whip them off at some point and reveal the real hero within, even though we know there is increasingly less and less inside him that resembles a hero. But “The Good Shepherd” does seem to owe a lot to John Le Carre's spy novels in which the spy game isn’t a romantic adventure starring James Bond types; it’s soul-deadening work for clerks who have little heart to put into it to begin with and who learn to ignore, even smother, what little they have.---

---And the 15 year battle of wills between Matt Damon's Edward Wilson and the Russian spymaster Ulysses definitely mirrors Smiley's decades' long contest with Karla. The difference between Wilson and George Smiley is that by the time Smiley comes to the fore in “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy” he has developed a kind of nostalgic loyalty to his former self, the one-time idealist and romantic who fought the good fight and wooed and won the Lady Ann. He does some things for that former self as if repaying a debt.  This doesn't bring his heart roaring back to life, but it makes him act as if he still had one from time to time. Wilson may have reached that point by the end of the movie but most of the film is devoted to observing the flame within him flicker and die.

If anyone wants to make a new biopic about President Kennedy they can do worse than cast Matt Damon as JFK. De Niro and Damon both seem to be aware of the resemblance and use it to suggest idealism and romanticism carrying the country away.  Payoff at the end---Damon in the Smithsonian with a Mercury capsule suspended behind him---may be too subtle. Like I said, De Niro likes to let images tell the story, make us look into the background of a shot. Something to be said though for dialog and action at least to bring things to a conclusion.  Images, being static, have no conclusions. This movie could use a few more of those conclusions.

“Blood Diamond”, “The Departed”, and “The Good Shepherd” make an interesting triptych for students of acting: “Leo to Leo and Matt to Matt:  A Study of Leading Men Playing Heroes as Character Types.”

Angelina Jolie is a good actress when she takes a part that requires her to act rather than pose and posture. She is not the prettiest or the sexiest actress in the movie. Tammy Blanchard is. That fact is due to Jolie's being such a good actress. Jolie's character, Clover, is a trophy and knows herself to be a trophy.  The reason she happens to look like a goddess is purely practical. Who'd want a trophy that wasn't beautiful?  Jolie plays Clover as a trophy come to life, aware of her beauty as a practical fact about herself, willing to use it when necessary, but otherwise indifferent to it except as it requires admiration to be worth anything.  Trophies only have meaning if the winner who takes possession of them cares about them. A living trophy that was not constantly admired wouldn't know itself to be a trophy. It wouldn't be able to tell itself from any other knick-knack around the house. Jolie plays Clover as if she can see herself visibly tarnishing and gathering dust, feel herself fading into the background as Damon grows increasingly indifferent to her.  Without losing her outward, trophy-like stillness she manages to show Clover on an emotional see-saw, always going up and down between panic and petulant depression.

When Damon reveals that he has never loved her, never valued her as a trophy, she ages twenty years overnight.

I wish De Niro had spent a little more time showing how Clover's disdain for the Skull and Bones' All boys together clubbishness and later for the CIA's clannishness are not signs of her rebel spirit, only of her jealousy. Clover represents and stands for a different kind of conformity.

Two spheres are competing for total possession of Damon/Wilson. Both represent the same system of values---conformity, unquestioning loyalty, total denial of self, service to a stated Ideal---Family, on the one hand; Patriotism, on the other---that is really a mask for Money as the source of all that's good.

The world of home, love, and family that Clover thinks she represents---

---is really just the material representation of wealth and privilege; the job her husband does, which she sees as taking him away from home, love, and family, defends that wealth and privilege. 

This is all there thematically and even symbolically in “The Good Shepherd”.  I just could have used a scene or two dramatizing it.

I also wish De Niro had spent a little more time showing how the Cold War had eroded John Turturro's character's soul.  We see him in World War II as a wiseguy GI type, our favorite kind of American soldier from the movies, us incarnate---cyncial, brash, anti-authoritarian, but tough, proud, taking no nonsense, knowing what's right and what's wrong instinctively and instinctively always coming down on the side of right---

Then all of a sudden he's a cold-hearted, merciless, too efficient functionary of the CIA, a servant of the establishment instead of a true patriot.  One scene would have done it. De Niro is satisfied with one look in Turturro's eyes

It's one hell of a look though.

A look full of the horrified shock of recognition.

Physically Turturro is a dream come true for an artistic designer whose job is to recreate the look of the 1950s for a movie.  He just looks like he's been cut and pasted from a photo in a contemporary issue of LIFE magazine. See him also in “Quiz Show”.  Same effect.

Good to see William Hurt at work again.  Ditto Keir Dullea. De Niro has cast Joe Pesci as a mobster and Pesci, for once in his career, plays somebody who resembles an actual human being, something Scorsese hasn’t managed to do. And twenty years ago, who'd have thought Alec Baldwin would one day be taking on the type of roles then going to Charles Durning?  Or---see “Running With Scissors”---Dabney Coleman?

Already suggested “The Good Shepherd” is an American “Smiley's People”.  It can also be seen as a WASP “Godfather”. (Maybe De Niro learned more about directing from Coppola than from Scorsese.)  Which would explain why it feels unfinished. Like “The Godfather” it wants and needs a sequel. Unlike “The Godfather”, though, it doesn't stand on its own. It's two hours and forty-eight minutes of prologue.  We start with the Bay of Pigs and end there. The Cuban Missile Crisis, Kennedy's Assassination, Vietnam, Watergate, and the break up of the Soviet Union are all ahead of us.

By the way, I haven’t  kept up on the conspiracy theories. Apparently on his deathbed Howard Hunt fingered LBJ as the mastermind behind the murder of JFK. I think his mind was wandering.  He was mixing up his spy novels with reality. But has anyone taken a serious look at the role the Cuban exile community might have played? If anyone had a motive it would have been the people who blamed Kennedy for leaving their relatives to be slaughtered on the beach.

Perhaps “The Good Shepherd Part II” will deal with that.

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“The Good Shepherd”.  Directed by Robert De Niro. Screenplay by Eric Roth. Starring Matt Damon, Angelina Jolie, John Turturro, William Hurt, Alec Baldwin, Michael Gambon, Keir Dullea, Tammy Blanchard, Billy Crudup, and Robert De Niro. Universal. 2006. Available on YouTube and to watch instantly at Amazon.

Humans to the rescue in "Thor: The Dark World"

Posted Sunday morning, May 12, 2019.

While Thor (Chris Hemsworth) and his brother Loki (Tom Hiddleston) recover from another family squabble, astrophysicist Jane Foster (Natalie Portman) does that thing she does that makes her the heroine of "Thor: The Dark World" and the only true leading lady in the Marvel’s Avengers series of movies---think for herself.

[Note from your mighty blogger and critic: Continuing posting my reviews of previous movies in the Avengers series while I dither about writing a formal review of "Endgame". Oliver Mannion tells me that in his own online explorations regarding the Avengers and Disney's future plans for the Marvel franchise he's come across a lot of fans looking back on the series and coming to a new appreciation for "Thor: The Dark World". Both of us were glad to see this. It's one of our favorites, despite its featuring, as Oliver says, the worst villain in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. When Malekith makes you miss Whiplash, Oliver contends, you know something's gone very wrong. Anyway, here's my review of "Dark World" from 2013. You'll notice I call Natalie Portman's Jane Foster the only true leading lady in the MCU. At that time, she was. Obviously Scarlett Johansson's Black Widow holds that role now, but that only began to develop a year later with the next installment in the saga, "Captain America: The Winter Soldier". It's funny, though, how, even though Portman decided not to continue in the series, Jane has remained important as the set up for the running gag of Thor vainly denying his heartbreak and his humiliation at being the one who got dumped. More evidence, as if its needed, that Chris Hemsworth is a great comedic leading man.]

The mortals save the day in Thor: The Dark World.

Thor helps out but he’s taking direction from the mortals, a team of scientists led by an astrophysicist named Jane Foster.

Thor’s girlfriend.

The love interest is the movie’s heroine.

This continues to give the Thor movies something the other entries in The Avengers series don’t have. A true leading lady.

In Captain America: The First Avenger, Peggy Carter’s role is to admire Cap and be admired back. She’s there to remind us that Captain America is everything he’s said to be and to represent the purity of Cap’s heart---when he gives his heart to something or someone, his country, an ideal, his best girl, his devotion is total, unswerving, innocent, and self-less. (But not blind or unquestioning.) Peggy is more of a symbol than anything else and the most important moment in her and Cap’s love story happens when she’s not on screen and the sexy blonde WAC plants a kiss on Cap that knocks him for more of a loop than anything Hydra has thrown at him. Peggy walks in on it, but we’ve already seen that Cap is more appalled than she’ll ever be. He can no more respond to another woman’s sexual advances than he could to a bribe from the Nazis.

In the Iron Man movies, Pepper Potts has a similar role. She has to admire Tony for us in order to remind us that although he can be a big jerk, there’s a man inside the armor (emotional armor, that is) worth caring about and she has to be admired back so that we can see that Tony isn’t entirely without a heart. Otherwise, she’s mainly there to be the damsel in distress.

I’m not sure if The Incredible Hulk is still considered part of the series. I think the only part of it definitely in the ongoing storyline is the part where he “broke Harlem.” But Betty Ross was an admirer and object of admiration and a damsel in distress and not either a heroine or a leading lady.

At any rate, Cap’s, Iron Man’s , and the Hulk’s love interests are defined by their relationships to their men.

Thor is defined by his relationship to Jane. Jane is defined by her relationship to her job and fits everything else in around that, including Thor.

And he likes it that way.

The Plot of Thor: The Dark World has Malekith, ruler of the Dark Elves of Schwartlfheim, leading his army of weirdly bug-eyed masked stormtroopers into a war to destroy Asgard and restore the universe to its original darkness. To succeed, Malekith needs to gain control of a simultaneously gaseous and liquid substance called the Aether, an energy source of, naturally, world-shattering power, and take advantage of a “Convergence,” when the nine realms of the Norse mythological cosmology will line up and all kinds of new laws of physics will come into play while old laws will no longer apply.

In short: SCIENCE!

Well, science-fiction.

Which is why we’re going to need a scientist to save the day.

Meanwhile, Thor and Jane have some issues to iron out and Thor’s mischievous and conniving brother Loki connives and makes mischief but to what purpose and who’s side is he on?

At the beginning of the first Thor movie---which now needs a subtitle---Thor and Loki have each fallen to the same temptation to think their special talents and abilities and their status as sons of the king exempt them from the rules all the other gods, mortals, and monsters have to live by. And die by.

Thor is punished for this sin and learns from it. But he learns his several lessons mainly through his dealings with Jane. And one of those lessons, the one that comes fully into play in The Dark World, is that god of Thunder or no god of Thunder, prince of Asgard or no prince of Asgard, superhero or no superhero, he doesn’t have to be the one in charge all the time. Not only that, but being in charge isn’t a matter of bossing others around and expecting them to follow your instructions. It’s a matter of listening to others’ ideas and letting them step up and take charge of seeing those ideas through.

This is the virtue that allows Jane to be a heroine. (It’s also a virtue Loki knows how to take advantage of.) Thor is willing to listen to anyone and will even let Jane’s goofball intern Darcy tell him what to do if the situation calls for it.

As The Dark World opens (I almost wrote As the Dark World Turns), Thor and Jane have been separated and kept apart and out of touch by various adventures and misadventures for two years. Both have been heartbroken, but Thor has had more to do to keep his mind occupied. Jane has been pining for Thor, though, and spending her time looking for a way to contact him up in Asgard. But as soon as she’s presented with a significant scientific mystery to solve, she puts the God of Thunder right out of her thoughts and focuses on solving it.

Of course this the moment Thor chooses to show up again. But Jane doesn’t go all swoony. Her attitude is, Oh good, you’re back. I’m glad. I’m mad at you for leaving me in the lurch like that but I still love you and we can work it all out later. Right now I need you to help me with this. Get to work.

Jane is one of the best written of all the characters, male and female, in the Avengers series and the best, after Loki, of the characters in the Thor movies. She’s allowed to think and speak for herself and as herself. She’s independent-minded as a matter of spunky heroine course and she’s intelligent by definition as a multiply-degreed astrophysicist, but it’s more than that.

She’s been given a mind that works independently of her role in the plot.

It doesn’t hurt that she’s played by Natalie Portman, one of the best and most intelligent actors in the whole Marvel franchise.

My favorite Jane moment is actually a moment when Jane’s intelligence fails her. When she learns that her goofy and less than competent intern Darcy has hired herself an intern of her own, we can see all the gears in Portman’s/Jane’s head spinning as she forgets everything going on around her and tries to comprehend the absurdity of that. Her brain just freezes up. It’s over in a moment but it’s a brilliantly delivered mental double-take.

Portman builds her performance on moments like this as Jane thinks her way through or around whatever problems and dangers the script throws her way. It’s not by any means a purely intellectual piece of work either. Portman’s Jane is full of warmth, spirit, humor, and just a hint of irritability. Having a superhero for a boyfriend and getting to be an action-adventure heroine yourself as a consequence has it charms, but it does get in the way of getting your real work done.

As good as Portman is as Jane, though, it’s still Tom Hiddleston’s Loki who gets off the best lines and steals the show, again, committing his thefts with a glance, a grin, a lifted eyebrow, a completely hypocritical but thoroughly convincing soulful look in the eye. This time out Hiddleston is allowed to play for some pathos. It turns out Loki has a heart capable of more than self-pity and mild, self-interested affection. He does love. And so he can have his heart broken too. In one scene, Loki lets one of his illusions drop and we get to see the effect of that heartbreak and it’s harrowing.

Of course, it’s still Loki and Hiddleston makes sure we’re left wondering what Loki’s scheming despite his bereavement.

Hiddleston’s performance, however, is dependent on his give and take with Chris Hemsworth’s Thor. So is Portman’s. And with both, it’s mostly Hemsworth doing the giving.

I don’t know if it’s all Hemsworth’s doing or if he’s just been very well-served by three directors now, but he’s made Thor’s willingness to step back and let others take over a defining quality of not just Thor’s character but his performance.

You’d think a guy that big and that handsome would have trouble blending in. But, while in my review of the first Thor I compared him to several actors of Hollywood’s Golden Age, particularly Errol Flynn, in his ability to become part of ensemble without toning down his leading man star power, he reminds me of…Gary Cooper.

If it was appropriate for a Norse god to say Aw shucks, Hemsworth would pull it off.

There are times when his Thor is beaming with affection and respect for his friends (and Loki) that you can see in Hemsworth’s eyes the urge to applaud his co-stars. Nobody gets pushed off screen by his size, looks, muscles, or charm. If anything, he draws them more towards centerscreen.

It’s getting past the point where it’s worth rating the Avengers movies against each other. The producers, directors, and writers are doing a good job of making them feel all of a piece. Still, I’d put Iron Man, Captain America: The First Avenger, and The Avengers at One, Two, and Three, with Iron Man 3 at number Four. But I have a growing soft-spot for Thor and Thor: The Dark World and it seems underappreciative to say they come in at Six and Five.

The Dark World explicitly rejects any idea leftover from the original comics that the Asgardians are actual god or even demi-gods. They’ve been reinvented as a long-lived and muscularly robust species of anthropoids with a technologically super-advanced civilization who have kept the trappings and mores of their ancient Viking-esque culture.

This creates a problem visually, particularly during the perfunctorily directed and digitized battle scenes on Asgard where the design and special effects clash and things on screen begin to look like mashups of outtakes from the Star Wars prequels and Lord of the Rings.

But Thor: The Dark World, like Thor before it, isn’t all that interested in itself as an action-adventure movie.

This is true of all the Avengers movies. Action-adventure is the given, not the be-all and end-all. But if the Iron Man trilogy (so far) is a potential tragedy unfolding and Captain America is a classically romantic hero’s journey and (if it still counts) The Incredible Hulk is a horror story, Thor: The Dark World is a comedy.

Or a tragicomedy, at any rate.

Bad things can still happen. But comedy doesn’t exist without tragedy and vice-versa.

None of the Avengers movies are short on humor. They wouldn’t be Marvel if they were. They’d be DC. (A fact Warner Brothers and DC seem perversely determined to emphasize.) But the Thor movies are different from Captain America and the three Iron Mans in that, battles and catastrophes aside, it is more continuously humorous and the comedy isn’t mainly a matter of wisecracks and mishaps. The comedy and humor arise out of the interplay of the characters just being their all too human and human-like selves.

Even Odin.

Which brings me to this…

I would have liked to have seen more of the Warriors Three. They’re back, now reconfigured to include the lovelorn warrior-princess Lady Sif along with the roistering, boisterous bruiser Volstagg and the roguish Errol Flynn avatar Fandral. (For some reason Hogun the Grim gets pushed out of the story very early on.) Each gets a few funny and swashbuckling moments, but really they’re relegated to background to make room for the adventures and misadventures of the Scientists Three.

Kat Dennings and Stellan Skarsgard return as Jane’s intern with an intern Darcy Lewis and her mentor and surrogate father Erik Selvig. Since we saw her last in the first Thor, Darcy has grown in confidence and developed a sense of authority without acquiring any of the competence that ought to be the basis for both. Selvig, meanwhile, is struggling to regain control over his own thoughts after having spent most of The Avengers brainwashed by Loki and the struggle’s not going well. He has enough self-command to head on up to Stonehenge to make some crucial calculations, but not enough to remind himself he doesn’t have to be as naked as an ancient Pict to do it. He can deliver a coherent lecture on the physics of the coming Convergence but seems unaware that delivering it to a hospital ward full of psychiatric patients, while he is one of those patients, probably won’t result in anyone taking necessary action based on his findings. Darcy and Selvig are potentially clownish characters then, but they’re saved from clownishness by Dennings and Skarsgard’s playing them as straight as can be---Darcy and Selvig make perfect sense to themselves---and by director Alan Taylor’s taking them on their own terms and making sure we do too, especially in the final battle against Malekith when almost all Thor can do is hold the line un.

til the scientists get their equipment set up.

The fate of nine worlds depends on a small band of nerds being able to calibrate under pressure.

Which leaves us with this as the moral of our story:

Being a big, strong, handsome blond superhero with near godlike powers is fun and all, but when the universe needs saving, call out the human beings.

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"Thor: The Dark World", directed by Alan Taylor, screenplay by Christopher Yost and Christopher Markus & Stephen McFeely. Starring Chris Hemsworth, Natalie Portman, Tom Hiddleston, Stellan Skarsgard, Idris Elba, Christopher Eccleston, Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje, Kat Dennings (Darcy Lewis), Ray Stevenson, Zachary Levi, Tadanobu Asano, Jaimie Alexander, Rene Russo, Chris O’Dowd, and Anthony Hopkins. 1 hour and 52 Minutes. Rated PG-13. Available on DVD and Blu-ray and to watch instantly at Amazon.

"Avengers: Age of Ultron": Of gods and monsters

Posted Thursday night, May 9, 2019.

Frankenstein and his monster: Robert Downey Jr as Tony Stark (Iron Man), begins to doubt he’s done the right thing in trying to bring about “Peace in our time” by creating the artificial intelligence software Ultron in Iron Man 4. Wait. I’m sorry. I meant Avengers: Age of Ultron.

[Apology from the critic: Still trying to decide how to go about writing a formal review of "Avengers: Endgame" and if i even want to. Meanwhile: G.K. Chesterton put together an essay collection popularly known as "Chesterton on Dickens". I think I've written enough posts on the Avengers series of movies to put together a collection called "Mannion on Marvel". (Agents and editors please take note.) I've been worried about over-thinking "Endgame". Based on a re-reading of my review of the second Avengers movie, "Age of Ultron", what I should be worrying more about is over-writing. But I over-thought it too. Tony Stark as Doctor Frankenstein? Anywho...the key item here is that I saw "Age of Ultron" not so much as an Avengers movie but as "Iron Man 4". Along with a lot of people, including the makers of "Infinity War" and "Endgame", I've come to see the whole series as Tony Stark's story, his Romance. He's a knight in shining, nano-tech armor.  From summer of 2015, here's my review, slightly revised, of "Age of Ultron". Oh, and the Frankenstein thing? Not really such a stretch.]

There’s a very simple story at the center of Avengers: Age of Ultron. A very simple, very old, and very true story. The story of an idealistic but vain scientist who, seeking to conquer death, creates a monster in his own likeness whose monstrosity lies in its---his---being at the same time more than human, less than human, and all too human. The monster escapes his creator’s control and runs wild, revealing himself to be not a conquering of death but a bringer of it. But the real horror is in his having a mind of his own and desires of his own that mirror his creator’s. The creator is forced to look in that mirror and see himself for what he is, a monster of vanity and ego, who has unleashed his own evil and set it loose upon the world. It’s a story, then, about how what we take pride in as being the best in ourselves can turn out to be the very worst.

This re-telling of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein with Tony Stark as Doctor Frankenstein and Ultron as his monster---Did you think I meant Bruce Banner and the Hulk?---might be easy to lose track of in the noise and confusion of the overlong and repetitive battle scenes amid crumbling cities; the irrelevant inclusion of an underwritten subplot that amounts to little more than a set of teaser-trailers for the Not-Coming-To-A-Theater-Near-You-Until-November 2017 Thor: Ragnarok; the clumsy attempt to work in the Hulk and Black Widow movies that will never be made; and the overly-insisted upon group angst about whether or not the Avengers will ever be a true team---a question I thought got asked and satisfactorily answered in the first Avengers. 

But I think the problem---which is probably only a problem for me---is caused by Age of Ultron’s having been mistitled as an Avengers movie and not as what it is.

Iron Man 4.

But then I don’t think Marvel Studios really has an Avengers series unfolding. They have two parallel stories of individual heroes that are on their way to merging in a dual tragedy. Steve Rogers’ and Tony Stark’s---Captain America’s and Iron Man’s.

Before I get into that…

Marvel has been either lucky or brilliant in the casting of its leads and supporting players in most of its productions, which now include Agent Carter, Daredevil, and Ant-Man, all three of which feature excellent leads and supporting players. (The less said about Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., the better.) I’m particularly (and sentimentally) impressed by Chris Evans as Captain America. I think he’s done a wonderful job of putting the lessons of Christopher Reeve’s Superman to work in playing a hero too good to true and making his goodness believable, likable, sympathetic, attractive, and---the truly super feat---fun. But Robert Downey Jr is still the best of the lot. Evans is good in Age of Ultron and James Spader is better, stealing most of the show with his amazing voice work as Ultron, but Downey is never blown off the screen---except when Iron Man is literally blown off the screen, which happens a lot, maybe too much. Like I said, the battle scenes get repetitive, but never mind. Spader has great fun with his monologues, making well-written lines sound like brilliant ones and brilliant ones sound like Shakespeare. (I think I’d better explain that below.) But Downey matches him easily, filling his every sentence with an essential Tony Stark-ness. Which is to say, that just about whatever he says, no matter how witty, charming, and smart is tinged with competitiveness, ego, jealousy, selfishness, and…insecurity.

A good example is in an apparent throw-away moment, Cobie Smulders as former S.H.I.E.L.D agent Maria Hill---who, unfortunately, is turning out to be the Avengers’ Girl Friday instead of Agent Coulson’s replacement as Nick Fury’s Right Hand and heir apparent---addresses Stark as “boss” and he immediately corrects her.

“He’s the boss,” he says, meaning Captain America, “I just pay for everything, design everything, make everyone look cooler.”

It’s beautifully delivered but a great deal of its beauty is that Downey imbues it with all those qualities I mentioned: wit, charm, smarts, competitiveness, ego, jealousy, selfishness, and self-doubt.

Downey makes it plain that Stark accepts Cap as the team’s leader and knows that that’s how it ought be but also that he also can't help feeling that he could bethe leader and can’t help letting Hill know that too and know why and know why she should be impressed with him, as if she wouldn’t be already and would be more if she didn’t also know what an overgrown brat he can be, a fact he knowsand has come to dislike about himself but which he can’t seem to correct.

These qualities, with the emphasis on the wit, charm, and ego, have defined Downey's characterization of Tony Stark since the first Iron Man.  And that characterization is thematic. Running through all three Iron Man movies and now both Avengersmovies is the question Who is Tony Stark and what does he want? and all those qualities mixing up together make that a hard question to answer.

The first Iron Man ends with Tony announcing “I am Iron Man.” But that turns out to be a problematic statement because while it's true in the most obvious way, it's also a declaration that he’s a superhero and Iron Man 2 calls that into question. In fact, in Iron Man 2, Nick Fury decides Tony's not a superhero, or at least not up to being one of Earth's mightiest heroes, and although he doesn't kick him off the Avengers project, he demotes him, from hero to technical support. Tony earns a second chance, but in the first Avengers he has to prove he deserved it, that he is a hero and not, as Cap accuses him of being, just a big ego operating a suit of armor that does all the real work. Tony proves it---to the team, but apparently not to himself. That's what Iron Man 3 is about. Tony becoming a hero in his own eyes.

Now we find out that there's a problem with that.

Tony developed a real hero's heart. He did not lose any of his vanity. He did not learn, like Cap did long ago, humility.

It's not enough for him to be a hero. He has to be the hero.

Which brings me to the other part of the answer to who is Tony Stark and what does he want?

He's Howard Stark's son and he wants what he cannot have. His dead father's approval.

Specifically, he's the son of a brilliant and successful father who was, Tony feels, aloof, overly demanding, overly critical, and whom he has in significant ways surpassed. All his life he has been in a competition he can't win for a reward he can't have.  Howard Stark wouldn't acknowledge his son's genius while he was alive and now he's not around to applaud his success and achievements---and admit he’s been bested.  Add to this that Tony has given himself the mission of making up for his own and Howard's mistakes and sins, something that comes back to haunt him and the other Avengers in Age of Ultron, in the persons of Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch.

If all that sounds neurotic and even juvenile, it's mitigated by Tony's having nobler ambitions. He sincerely wants to fix everything and save everybody.

Like I said, he wants to be a hero.

Unfortunately, like I also said, vanity is still a problem.

Tony wants to be the one who saves everybody and fixes everything.

He wants to be the hero.

He says he built Ultron so that the Avengers won't be needed anymore. But he does it in the belief that he doesn't need the other Avengers to help him. (He enlists Bruce Banner but pretty much relegates him to the role of Igor.) Basically, he believes that the world already doesn't need the Avengers. It just needs him.

In an argument with Cap, Tony defends what he was attempting to do in creating Ultron, prevent war forever or, as he says, thinking he’s being cute and ironic, bringing about “peace in our time.”  Cap won’t buy it. “Every time someone tries to stop a war before it starts,” he snaps. “Innocent people die. Every time.” A line that might inspire anti-war liberals with Iraq in mind to cheer, but which is really kind of a strange thing for a veteran of World War II to say. Wouldn't it have  been a good thing if Hitler could have been stopped before? (Leaving aside the question of whether he actually could have been stopped.)  But there's an answer, which Stark doesn't give, because this is an action-adventure movie not a novel by Tolstoy and there isn't time or space for philosophic and historical debates. Innocent people die in wars, many innocent people, so isn't trying worth it anyway, if only on the chance that maybe only fewer innocent people will die?

Again, no time or space in the movie or in a movie review even on this blog. But quickly. Stark's mistake is that he has already had this debate with himself and made decisions by himself, leaving everybody else out of it. He has assumed knowledge, wisdom, responsibilities, and power that Cap, a conventionally religious man of his bygone time, would probably say belong to God.

Like I said. Frankenstein.

This is where the stories of Iron Man and Captain America begin to converge in a way that, for me, turns the Avengers saga into a side story.  The real story, now, is leading into the next Captain America movie, Civil War.

Of course I don't know what's coming. But this is what I see being set up. Tony Stark is going to bring about what he says he created Ultron to do, put an end to the Avengers.

To put it in mythological terms, he's going to bring about the breaking of the Round Table.

In my review of  the first Avengers, The Romance of Tony Stark, I said that if you see the Avengers as having parallels to the stories of King Arthur and his knights, Tony is Lancelot. Not in personality but in the potential role of tragic traitor. He and Lancelot share the same tragic flaw, a willingness to put their own desires above what they know to be right. In Lancelot's case, it's his love for Guinevere that undoes him. In Tony's, it's his need to be the hero.

In my review, I said that I didn't see Captain America as King Arthur. But Winter Soldier changed my mind about that.

S.H.I.E.L.D. turned out to have been based on the premise that “Might Makes Right.” Cap doesn’t just believe like King Arthur in “Might for Right.” He believes that Right Makes Might. His ambition isn’t just to make the world safe. It’s to make it right.

He dreams of Camelot.

With this in mind, you can guess which scene in Age of Ultron I got the most kick out of: the scene at the party celebrating the Avengers' defeat of the last remnants of Hydra. The guys---Clint (Hawkeye) Tony, Rhodie ( who, thankfully, has given up calling himself the Iron Patriot and gone back to being War Machine), and Steve Rogers---take turns trying to lift Thor's hammer.  Of course, they can't try as they might. As we know, only he---or she. I've been following what's going on in the comic books.---who is worthy can wield the hammer. The guys know this and they don't really expect to succeed. But they've had a few and they are guys, after all. They're showing off. But once they get going, Tony's competitive juices start flowing. He becomes determined to lift the hammer.

It's not to prove he's worthy. He doesn't take that part seriously. (Downey tosses off a couple of great one-liners on the subject of how he will treat his subjects when he takes Thor's place as ruler of Asgard, and, again, the lines are witty and charming but tinged with vanity. He's in effect telling Thor he's not impressed with his being a god and hero-king.) What he wants to show is that lifting the hammer doesn't prove anything except that you've mastered the trick of lifting it. And he's convinced there's a trick and equally convinced that if there is he's the one who can figure it out. That's his main job as an Avenger.

But when it's Cap's turn, we see Steve approach the task with a bit of reluctance. He's doing it mainly to be a good sport. But he gives it his all and...

The hammer moves.

To Thor's shock and consternation---Chris Hemsworth does a terrific double-take here.---and to Steve's own, well, fright. He gives it one more mighty tug but his heart isn't in it and, as we know from The First Avenger, it's his heart that gives him his strength. The super soldier serum only worked on him because he had a good heart.  Then he gives up and the implication is that he does because he doesn't want to know.

Not that he isn't worthy. He already knows he's worthy. That's what makes him Captain America. He doesn't want to know he's worthier. He doesn't like being as worthy as he is. He’s weighed down by the responsibilities and filled with self-doubt. He doesn't like what being worthy has made him. Sad and alone, out of time and out of place. A misfit. A freak. A monster, in fact. In yet anther Frankenstein story, one he explicitly tells about himself in this movie, the kindly Dr Erskine who invented the super-soldier serum is Frankenstein and he, Captain America, is the Creature.

Chris Evans, working with some beautifully understated dialog, makes Cap almost as witty and charming as Downey's Tony Stark, but he gives Cap a kind of reverse vanity. While just about everything Downey as Stark says is a form of boasting, just about everything Evans' Cap says is self-deprecation.

I don’t recall any specific moments when we see him reacting to Cap’s modesty, but it probably drives Tony nuts.

Here's where it gets messy.

Like it hasn't already, Lance?

If a big part of who Tony Stark is is Howard Stark’s son, then in his eyes Steve Rogers would naturally be something of a stand-in for his father.

That’s how Tony first came to know of him, as his father’s good friend and war buddy. He grew up listening to his father talk admiringly about Cap and from that he learned to resent him. Doesn't matter what Howard said or how often he said it, what Tony heard was an incessant criticism: Why can't you be more like him?

In other words, Tony would have grown up thinking of Captain America as the son his father wished he had instead of him.

It's no wonder that when he meets him in the flesh, Tony's filled with jealousy and an intense spirit of rivalry that would be hard to overcome even as the two became good friends.

Which they have. With not a whole lot of interaction, Downey and Evans make it clear Tony and Steve like each other, have fun together, and rely on each other. The spirit of rivalry never goes away, though, and it's felt on both sides, because more than they are friends, they are, spiritually, brothers.

We all know how things tend to go between brothers in literature. (And in movies. If you want to push it---and I'm always ready to push these things---there are parallels between Steve and Tony and Thor and Loki.) Steve, even though he's younger---discounting the seventy odd years he was frozen in the ice---is in temperament and in effect the older brother, as well as the favorite son.

All right, maybe all that's too mythological. But superheroes are often said to be our new myths---mostly it's said by fans of the comic books and the artists who make their livings creating them. If it's true, however, it's only when they've escaped the comics and other mass media where they have their origins and enter the collective unconscious to the point that they resonate with the very many people who don't read comic books, play video games, or watch the TV shows and go to the movies. That's happened with Superman and Batman. You can geek out for days debating which others have achieved Superman and Batman's mythological status.

Obviously, for me, Captain America is part of my personal mythologies.

But if these stories were truly myths, they would have endings. And the endings would all be the same. The heroes die. That actually happens to the mythological Thor.

It can't happen to the comic book heroes.

Well, it does all the time. But I mean they die and stay dead. They don't, as Cap advises in Age of Ultron, walk it off.

Their stories have an end which no stories told about them can go past. As far as I know that's only happened to Barry Allen's Flash.

Oh no.

Don’t tell me…

At any rate, there’s too much money riding on the popular heroes’ immunity to mortality.

Now, the heroes of the movies can die and stay dead. And that could happen in the Avengers saga. If the twinned stories of Iron Man and Captain America are truly myths, Civil War will be a tragedy that ends with the breaking of the Round Table, Lancelot's self-imposed banishment, and the death of Arthur.

It could happen. It doesn't appear to be in the offing. Avengers 3 and 4: Infinity War I and II are in the works. The intriguing thing is that as things stand Downey won't be in them. I haven't heard for sure about Evans. He may not be. That doesn't mean Iron Man and Captain America won't be.

There's precedent for recasting.

Look out! Here comes the pesky Spider-Man!

Again.

But to get down to it at last, this is why I saw Avengers: Age of Ultron as Iron Man 4 and why, as far as I was concerned, after the scene with Thor’s hammers all the Avengers except Iron Man and Cap could have disappeared from the movie until the inevitable climactic battle. Thor, for all intents and purposes, does.

Like I said, mostly what he does between the hammer scene and the final battle is show up in interpolated teasers for Thor: Ragnarok.

As for that final battle, and all the big battles, I could have done without them too. For one thing, the cgi work is too detailed. Watching all those buildings crumble into dust, all I was thinking was “Who’s going to clean up that mess?” (Note to stickler fans: I know who’s going to clean up that mess. The point is I was focused on the mess.) But mainly, what I wanted and what I think the story needed was a final confrontation between Iron Man and Ultron, and, even better than a good fight, a good scene between them like the one between Tony and Loki in the first Avengers.

As for watching a good fight, it’s interesting that the one good one between Ultron and an Avenger is between him and Captain America. I took that as symbolic.

The battles themselves are well staged. I’m sure Whedon had other things on his mind but they play like he was saying to Man of Steel’s director Zack Snyder, “Thisis how you do it.” Whedon keeps the focus on his characters as characters---that is, they are always being themselves as they run, jump, dodge, duck, fly, and fight. He doesn’t just use them as avatars in a video game. And he makes sure that we see that most of their efforts go into saving people. We see and feel that there are actual human lives in jeopardy and that it matters if even one person in the crowd dies.

And as for the characters…

Aaron Taylor-Johnson as Quicksilver and Elizabeth Olsen as Scarlet Witch aren't given much to do. He's cocky and she's angsty. As the movie goes along, he gets cockier, she gets angstier. But pretty much they're here to save on time spent on exposition in the next Avengers movies.

I'm glad Whedon let Paul Bettany, who's been doing charming work as the voice of Jarvis, Stark's computer sidekick since the first Iron Man, appear as another new Avenger, the Vision. He's a little too much of a vision for my taste, but he's a needed calming, civilizing, and distancing presence. It's a relief to have a character who has some perspective and who can think clearly about what is happening and what the Avengers ought to be up to.  I don't expect that sanity to last. This is, after all, the Marvel cinematic universe.

Even though I didn't need to see them in this movie---as opposed to in those movies of their own that will never get made---it was good to see Jeremy Renner do more than take aim convincingly while cracking wise, Mark Ruffalo do something other than wrestle with his rage, although he still does a fair share of that, and Scarlett Johansson show yet another side of Black Widow, even if that side is that of the good-hearted bad girl who, to paraphrase Valerie Perrine as a variation of the type in Superman, doesn't get to get it on with the good guys.

Chris Hemsworth’s underused, again. Whedon gives a supporting female character a line that lets us know that he knows which of the Avengers most female fans---and gay male ones, I presume---want to see the most of and then doesn’t give it to them. Instead, proud and unabashed dork that he is, he lingers on Mark Ruffalo as Bruce Banner, and makes him the focus of the longing female gaze. Ruffalo’s good, of course, but he’s nowhere near as pretty as Hemsworth and Banner is, after all, a dork. Hemsworth, though, makes do with what’s given and it’s important to notice that most of his best work is silent. He’s a natural comic actor and all he needs is his eyes.

Spader, as everyone acknowledges, is the stand-out star. When I said he turns his dialog into Shakespeare, I didn’t mean flowery or poetic. I meant that he makes the words alive to the character saying them. Ultron’s listening to himself. Choosing the words carefully. Writing his own script. Writing himself into being. Hamlet does this. Falstaff does this. Iago and Rosalind do it.  Ultron knows himself to be performing. He’s literally making himself up as he goes. And not only is he creating himself in his own eyes, he’s forcing others to think of him as he thinks of himself.

I probably need to come back and rewrite that.

That’s it. Time to wrap this up. But one more scene before the credits roll.

Whedon has been given a lot of credit for shaping the Avengers saga and giving the movies their tone and spirit. But I think what he deserves the real credit for is recognizing what was already going on, accepting it, liking it, and running with it. The first and most credit, I think, should go to Jon Favreau, and I was happy to his name show up in the credits of Avengers: Age of Ultron as an executive producer.

It was Favreau, as the director of the first Iron Man, who set the tone and gave the series its spirit and sensibility. And the best thing he did to do that was fight to get Robert Downey Jr cast as Tony Stark.

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Because the running time of this review isn’t long enough: My reviews of the first Avengers, The Romance of Tony Stark; Iron Man 3, Big Man in a Suit of Armor; and Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Cap being Cap, the goodest of good guys.

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Avengers: Age of Ultron, written and directed by Joss Whedon. Starring Robert Downey Jr., Chris Evans, Chris Hemsworth, Mark Ruffalo, Scarlett Johansson, Jeremy Renner, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Elizabeth Olsen, Paul Bettany, Cobie Smulders, Don Cheadle, James Spader, and Samuel L. Jackson. Rated PG-13. Available on DVD and Blu-ray and to watch instantly at Amazon.

Filed under Avengers Assemble.

"Iron Man 3": Big man in a suit of armor

Posted Wednesday morning, May 8, 2019.

Iron Man beside himself:  Robert Downey Jr. as Tony Stark feels less than invincible as he contemplates what else he is without his suit of armor besides a genius, billionaire, playboy, and philanthropist, and wonders if he’s up to that job in Iron Man 3.

[Editor's note: Still working my way toward a formal review of "Avengers: Endgame". Part of the work is re-reading my reviews of the previous movies in the series. It's making for curious reading. For instance, here's my review of "Iron Man 3" from June 2013. I remember liking it better than it sounds like I did, but that's typical of me---I overthink when I write and that distances me from my feelings about a movie, so I tend to make movies I enjoyed sound less enjoyable and movies I disliked sound less dislikable. But the thing about this review that surprised me is my thinking that Tony Stark's story was over. That puts me in disagreement with my own review of the first "Avengers" movie, and I wonder why I thought so. My guess is that I was reacting to news floating around at the time that Robert Downey Jr was done with the series. And I need to rewatch it, but I suspect director Shane Black and his fellow screenwriter Drew Pearce were reacting to it too and might have shaped "Iron Man 3" so that it could be seen as an ending if it did turn out to be Downey's last hurrah as Iron Man. By the way, the painkillers remark? Spring of 2013 is when my back problems started to become severe. It might not have been the medicine that was dampening my appreciation of the movie. It might have been the pain. Anyway, take that for what it's worth.]

Maybe it’s the painkillers talking, but I’m about to write a review of Iron Man 3 arguing it’s a two hour commentary on Pixar’s "The Incredibles."

This isn’t a joke. After all, "The Incredibles" is one of the best superhero movies ever made, right up there with "Spider-Man 2", "Batman Begins", and the original "Iron Man". Every superhero movie ought to be able to stand up to comparisons of one type or another with it.

No matter where I go with this, I will not be arguing that Pepper Potts is sexier than Mrs Incredible.

But think about it. Syndrome is a version of Iron Man. Both owe their powers to available technology which means both are walking, flying, fighting advertisements for the notion that anybody can be a superhero. Syndrome not only embraces the idea, he intends to peddle it. Tony Stark rejects it, but what is it Cap says to him in "The Avengers?"

“Big man in a suit of armor. Take that off, what are you?”

And that’s the big question. What makes Iron Man a “super” and not merely a spoiled man-child playing with a lot of cool toys he’s invented?

What makes a “super” a superhero is one of the themes of "The Incredibles". It’s the theme of the Tony Stark/Iron Man arc in the Avengers series.

"Iron Man 3" is the story of Tony Stark trying to answer for himself the challenge Captain America put to him in The Avengers:

“Big man in a suit of armor. Take that off, what are you?”

Stark’s comeback, “Genius, billionaire, playboy, philanthropist,” is funny but empty, because it’s missing a word.

Superhero.

Or even just hero.

Stark tries to get back at Cap by calling him a lab rat and belittling his powers. “Everything special about you came out of a bottle.” Which shows that he must never have read his father’s notes on the Super-Soldier project.

We know, from "Captain America: The First Avenger," that everything special about Steve Rogers was already in him. That’s why Dr Erskine picked him. The serum just brought it to the surface. At heart and in his soul and to the physical degree he was capable of, Steve Rogers was already Captain America.

"Iron Man 3" is one of the better-made of all the movies in the Avengers series. But I left the theater feeling strangely let down and anxious and…lonely.

Alienated might be the better word.

This ennui surprised me because I thought I had been enjoying the movie while I was watching it. Mulling it over afterwards, I got half way to concluding I’d just been put off by the obligatory ad for the video game that’s become the standard climactic battle of every Marvel superhero movie. At least this one varies from the endings of "Spider-Man 3", both "Fantastic Four" movies, "Iron Man", "The Incredible Hulk", "Iron Man 2", "Thor," and "The Avengers". It doesn’t take place in the city streets full of crowds of screaming civilians running pointlessly to and fro while cars and trucks blow up around them and pieces of buildings rain down on their heads. But it’s confused, directionless, repetitive, purposeless in that it doesn’t build toward a satisfying confrontation between our hero and the villain, it just keeps throwing up more obstacles between them until the director and his stunt coordinator run out of gags and the whole thing just sort of times out, nihilistic, perfunctorily violent for violence’s sake, visually ugly, boring, and ultimately just another big noisy mess, and it’d have been no wonder if it was what had soured me on the film.

But then I realized that all the battle had done was dampen the sense of fun to the point that I was left feeling more strongly something I’d been feeling all along.

Sad.

And it dawned on me that "Iron Man 3" is in fact a sad story about the losses that come when you reach a certain age and you turn around and realize you are now the grown-up in the room and everybody around you is relying on you and you have no one to rely on yourself in the same way, because all the grown-ups you used to count on are gone from your life.

In "Iron Man" and I"ron Man 2", Tony Stark behaved as if he didn’t need anybody and nobody really needed him. Being a superhero was just something he did to amuse himself. In The Avengers he got a lesson in teamwork. He found out he couldn’t go it alone. The question was going to be whether the lesson would take.

Maybe we’ll get the answer to that in "The Avengers 2". In "Iron Man 3", Tony learns something else, that he was never as alone as he’d always thought and prided himself on being. But he learns it by finding himself suddenly very much alone. And he learns it while also learning that being a superhero isn’t something he can do for kicks. It’s something he’s obligated to do because other people need him to be one. And he learns that when as it happens he doesn’t have his superpowers.

Big man in a suit of armor. Take that away and what is he?

Jeez. No wonder Tony’s so sad. And since he’s still played by Robert Downey, his sadness is profound and convincing and, at least for me, infectious.

This is the first Iron Man---the first Avengers---movie without a certifiable grown-up, good or evil, to guide, advise, support, or challenge the hero, or, as Stark has always taken advantage of, mother, father, big brother or sister him. Agent Coulson is dead. Nick Fury is off doing whatever it is he’s doing with Cap in The Winter Soldier, along with Black Widow. Jim Rhodes is busy trying to chase down the super-terrorist known as the Mandarin. Happy Hogan’s in the hospital. Jarvis, Stark’s cyber-assistant and alter-ego, has been knocked out of commission. And, while Pepper Potts lives to take care of Tony, the trouble coming his way is way beyond her skill set and it isn’t long before she’s in no position to take care of him in any way.

Even Iron Man is out of the picture for much of the picture.

That is, if you accept that it’s the armor that makes Tony Stark Iron Man and not Stark who makes the armor something more than a machine.

Stark’s tried and true suits of armor have disappeared in the rubble of his house after the Mandarin’s minions leveled it in a helicopter attack and the one suit he has left is a prototype designed to assemble itself telekinetically but it has a few bugs in its program so that at the moment it’s much better at disassembling itself. It has a habit of short-circuiting and falling apart on him and eventually, instead of carrying Tony through the air, Stark is hauling it through the snow on a makeshift litter.

Tony is left to save himself, save his friends, save the President, save the country, and save the day all on his own, and it’s not a job he feels at all up to.

"Iron Man 3" isn’t about learning that with great power comes responsibility. It’s about learning that with responsibility you don’t have enough power to take care of everybody you’re responsible for and yet you still have to try to take care of them.

In "Iron Man 3", we get to see Tony doing things he hasn’t had to do before---think seriously about what he’s up to, doubt himself, ask for help---and not doing things and being things he’s used to doing and being. He has to not be so full of himself, not deflect criticisms, not shrug off or joke away feelings. In short, he has to act like an adult. Since he regards all this adult behavior as a drag (and an assault on who he thinks he is), he is add odds with himself in a way he hasn’t been before, consciously.

And he’s not sure whose side he’s on.

He jumps back and forth, but either way he jumps he treats himself as he’s been in the habit of treating everybody, dismissively, with impatience, with a general lack of sympathy, with offhand contempt, and as the deserving object of his meanest jokes.

And this means we get to see Robert Downey doing something he hasn’t had do to often in the series, play it straight. He gives us a Tony Stark who’s sober, somber, sorrowful, afraid, and…lonely.

It’s disconcerting. And of course Downey does it all very well. Maybe too well. Which it’s why it’s like I said earlier. Infectious.

Nothing that happens in "Iron Man 3" undid that for me.

Since Tony is on his own throughout much of the movie, Downey is on his own too. He has some fun moments in the early going with Jon Favreau as an unhappy Happy Hogan and a funny scene with a couple of the villains’ henchmen who let themselves get a little cocky after making the mistake of thinking that Tony Stark without his armor is just a billionaire, playboy, and philanthropist. But his scenes with Gwyneth Paltrow as Pepper Potts and Don Cheadle as Jim Rhodes are mostly a matter of their focusing together on the same spots on the green screens. All his best work with the Rebecca Hall as a sexy scientist with a secret and Guy Pearce as an unsexy scientist with a bigger secret is over and done with in the first fifteen minutes of the film.

And when Stark at last confronts the Mandarin, Downey’s main job is to hang back and feed Ben Kingsley pieces of scenery to devour.

The closest then Downey has to a co-star to really share a scene with is eleven year old Ty Simpkins, who plays Harley Keener, a fatherless middle-schooler with access to a workshop Tony commandeers to try to repair his recalcitrant suit of armor after it crashlands in the woods outside Harley’s small town in Tennessee.

Harley is a budding engineering genius in his own right and desperately in need of a father-figure, so naturally he takes to hero-worshipping Tony right away, something the old Tony would have enjoyed as his due but at the moment, beaten up from within by self-doubt and self-recrimination and not in the mood to hear what a swell guy he is, something he doesn’t feel he deserves. This has Tony brushing off Harley’s attempts at friendship which allows Downey to deliver some of the most acerbic anti-child acting since W.C. Fields last said, “Go away, son, you bother me.”

If you’re thinking that Tony and Harley sound a little like they're paralleling Mr Incredible and Buddy Pine at the beginning of The Incredibles, then you’re thinking along the same lines I’m thinking, but you’re ahead of me. I’ll catch up.

Downey and Keener make a good team, but given that Tony is divided against himself, Downey is really his own main co-star and mostly left alone to play against himself. Which means we finally get to see Tony Stark/Iron Man in the full Hamlet mode that’s the signature emotional state of Marvel’s superheroes.

This doesn’t mean he’s all gloom and doom. Like Hamlet, Downey’s Stark is still quick with a joke and, since the suit of armor’s been taken away, we get to see him (Downey and Stark) do something else we haven’t really seen him do yet, play the action hero. And Downey has a ball with it. As is the case with any great movie star, the man can move.

Stark is in good shape and he’s had training that’s made him a martial arts expert, but he’s no Captain America without his armor. What he is, though, is a genius. That’s his superpower: his ability to think and invent and build on the fly or, since the suit’s out of commission and he’s grounded, on the run.

He has to MacGyver his way through various challenges and around obstacles and past dangers and out of all kinds of trouble, and, as he showed in his last three outings as Tony, Downey is a genius at playing a genius. He doesn’t just look and sound smart, he moves smart. As a scientist, he’s poetry in motion. As an engineer, he’s a dancer and a painter, a musician and a performance artist. He makes the act of creating look creative.

Of course, what we’re really seeing is if without the suit of armor, Tony Stark is still Iron Man.

There’s always been a distant allusion to the Tin Man of Oz in the Iron Man myth, the working and survival and metaphorical existence of Tony’s heart being always and often literally an open question. Tony’s brain is what powers and empowers the armor, but what the suit needs is a heart. The Stark chapters of the Avengers series have been about the search for Iron Man’s heart.

But in "Iron Man 3", there’s one more missing element Tony has to find.

Courage.

Tony has never been a fraidy cat. But that’s not the same as saying he’s been courageous. What’s to be afraid of when you’re the Invincible Iron Man?

But it’s not physical courage he needs. He has plenty of that, although with him it’s a fine line between bravery and a recklessness born of pure vanity. Tony needs to find the moral courage to accept grown-up responsibility for other people even though he doubts he has the strength or the wisdom necessary for the job.

Ok. This has gone too far down the Yellow Brick Road. Let’s back up so I can get back to "The Incredibles".

In most superhero movies and most action-adventure movies in which the supposedly normal hero is in effect a superhero, the villain drives the plot in one of two ways.

Either he’s just going about his business as a supervillain and his scheme to control or destroy whatever he feels he needs to control or destroy is really just an excuse to show our hero acting heroically.

Or it’s personal. For one reason or another he has it in for our hero. His schemes to control or destroy are just ruses to draw our hero into a trap and, of course, force him to act heroically.

Sometimes the two get combined. Things get personal because our hero gets in the villain’s way and the villain’s feelings are hurt by that.

In The Incredibles it’s the second situation. It’s very personal for Syndrome. But with this variation. It’s the hero’s fault.

This is where things can start to border on the tragic or, at least, on the grown-up. Sometimes it’s personal because the hero has, to one degree or another, helped bring about the evil he has to confront and defeat.

And in effect, this puts our hero in conflict with himself.

Kind of goes without saying that The Incredibles isn’t a tragedy. Neither is Iron Man 3. And neither one is really intended for grown-ups. But it’s definitely an important theme of both movies. And The Incredibles does a better job of developing it and resolving it.

Both movies begin with our heroes making the same potentially tragic mistake. They reject offers of help from characters they make clear they regard as not worth their time or attention.

Stark does it with less reason and more cruelty and with a gratuitous demonstration of open contempt. But the effect is the same. The characters whose help they reject return to threaten everyone they love and they return having reinvented themselves as evil shadows of our heroes.

And their intention isn’t simply to destroy our heroes.

It’s to replace them.

Syndrome wants to be the superhero. "Iron Man 3’s" villain wants to be…Tony Stark.

They’re also in it for the money, of course. But that’s gravy. Mainly what they’re after is the sense of self-aggrandizement and self-satisfaction Mr Incredible expressed in rejecting Buddy’s application to be his sidekick. “I work alone” means I don’t need anybody else. But it also means “I get to take all the credit and reap all the rewards.”

Mr Incredible can only triumph by recognizing the mistake he made that brought Syndrome into existence and rectifying it. He has to face up to the fact that he can’t work alone and, not only is this well played-out in the dialog, it’s resolved in the climactic battle.

That’s what makes The Incredibles far more satisfying in the end.

That and that Syndrome is just a much better written villain with a far more interesting and sexy sexy henchwoman.

Also, "Iron Man 3" has no Edna Mode.

"The Incredibles" gives Mr Incredible time---and better dialog---in which to realize what’s he done and face up to the consequences.

Tony does realize his mistake but he and we have very little time to process it before the video game boots.

And the big noisy mess that’s the climactic battle sequence in Iron Man 3 doesn’t play out as a confrontation between Tony Stark and his own evil shadow.

That might have contributed to let down at the end. I think there was something else, though.

So, "Iron Man 3" isn’t as good as "The Incredibles". But how does it stack up against the other Avengers movies?

Pretty well. I’d rank them this way. "Iron Man", "The Avengers", "Captain America: The First Avenger", "Iron Man 3", "Thor," "The Incredible Hulk", and "Iron Man 2".

But it’s getting to where asking which movie you think is best is like asking which chapter of a novel you liked best. All the chapters share in a fan’s affection for being part of the same book, and that’s the point. Iron Man is now thoroughly part of the Avengers series and I missed the other Avengers, Cap most of all. Not just because I’ve always liked him the best, but because his story is still ongoing.

Tony’s almost certainly going to be back for "The Avengers 2" and possibly for an "Iron Man 4", and there’s already talk of recasting when Robert Downey decides to take off the armor for good. But really Stark’s and Iron Man’s story was completed in "The Avengers" and in a very real way "Iron Man 3" is about driving that home---the story is done and it’s time to say farewell.

So maybe that’s what I was feeling at the end. A sense of loss.

It’s over and I’m going to miss this Iron Man.

Filed under Avengers Assemble.

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Yes, Stan Lee’s back for another cameo, and, yes, you should sit all the way through the end credits.

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"The Incredibles", "The Wizard of Oz", Hamlet?  Really, Lance?  Of course. What else would you expect from the English professor who reviewed "The Avengers" as a commentary on the Knights of the Round Table?

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Like I said up top, as much as I like Gwyneth, Mrs Incredible is far sexier than Pepper Potts. But know what else? Much as I like Don Cheadle? No way the Iron Patriot is as cool as Frozone.

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Saturday Matinee update: I'm not the only one who saw references to The Incredibles.  Via Oliver Mannion: How Iron Man 3 Should Have Ended. Probably you shouldn't watch if you haven't seen the movie. Spoilers, of course, but also the jokes won't work if you don't know the film.

"Iron Man 3", directed by Shane Black, screenplay by Drew Pearce and Shane Black. Starring Robert Downey Jr., Gwyenth Paltrow, Don Cheadle, Rebecca Hall, Guy Pearce, Paul Bettany, Ty Simpkins, Jon Favreau, and Ben Kingsley. Available on DVD and Blu-ray and to watch instantly at Amazon.

"The Incredibles" is available at Amazon as well, on DVD and Blu-ray and to watch instantly.

"The Avengers": The Romance of Tony Stark

Thor, Iron Man, and Captain America square off in The Avengers in accordance with the rule that no superheroes can meet for the first time without getting into a fight so that fans have more fuel for their endless debates over who would win in a matchup.

This is what you get when you let a former English professor write movie reviews.

Within the cycle of movies of which The Avengers is the latest installment, Tony Stark---Iron Man---fills the role Lancelot fills in the King Arthur stories.

I warned you.

The Avengers isn’t a retelling of the Knights of the Round Table. For one thing, there’s no King Arthur. (If anyone wants to make the case that Nick Fury plays that role, feel free. I think it’s a reach. Try Merlin instead.)  And I'm not making a direct comparison of their personalities. In personality, Stark is no Lancelot. If he has a counterpart among any of the Knights of the Roundtable, it's Gawain. Gawain is vain, boastful, selfish, self-indulgent, a showoff and happy to think he can do it all on his own. He's also the second best of Arthur's knights. He was the best until Lancelot showed up. Fans can argue the actual ranking of the Avengers vis-a-vis each other. What matters is that Gawain wasn't inclined to admit to his demotion and Stark would disagree with you if you didn't rank Iron Man first among Earth's mightiest heroes. A lot of his best lines in the movie are cheap shots at the other heroes' expenses meant to let them know he's not impressed by them or their powers.

(The only other Avenger who even roughly has an Arthurian double is Captain America. He's like Galahad whose strength was as the strength of ten because his heart was pure. The super-soldier serum worked as it did on Steve Rogers because he had a good heart.)

Still, the comparison to Lancelot holds in that like Lancelot Iron Man is the hero around whose story the other heroes' stories are centered.

“I am Iron Man,” Stark declares at the end of his first movie. But as we learn in Iron Man 2, he’s not. Iron Man is just a robot Stark pilots from within. And for the robot to do its job it almost doesn’t matter who’s wearing the metal suit. What matters is if Stark can make the suit into a skin, that is, into an extension of himself.  And a lot has to change for that to happen. Every one of Lancelot’s adventures is crucial to the overall story of the Knights of the Round Table because the fate of Camelot depends on Lancelot remaining the exemplary knight he is while constantly confronted with the temptation to be just a man.  Every one of Iron Man’s adventures is crucial to the ongoing story of the Avengers because the fates of the Avengers and the world depend on Stark becoming a knight in shining armor, and he’s having a hard time with that.

Ok. Before taking this analogy any further…

I liked it. It’s fun. I had a good time. The Avengers is a good superhero movie.

It’s not a good movie the way Spider-Man 2 and Batman Begins are good movies.  Rio Bravo is a good movie. Rio Lobo is a good Western. The Dirty Dozen is a good war movie. The Guns of Navarone is a good movie. The Avengers is a good superhero movie. The best so far in this particular series of superhero movies after the first Iron Man.

Part of what makes it good is that it is very much a piece of that series. Director Joss Whedon, who also wrote the screenplay, has clearly studied, liked, and taken to heart the previous movies in the series and he deftly weaves together narrative and thematic threads from Iron Man, The Incredible Hulk, Iron Man 2, Thor, and Captain America: The First Avenger into one taut strand, pulls that strand smoothly through the movie, then quickly unravels it and spools the threads out towards the next movies in the series.  The Avengers sets up Captain America 2, Thor 2, and Iron Man 3.  (It doesn’t directly set up The Avengers 2.  That’s coming but it will have to pick up the threads from those sequels and do its part in continuing the series.) As Whedon has apparently learned from his long career in television and as a writer of comic books, everything doesn’t depend on single episode or issue.  The job of any particular episode or issue, in fact, is to get the audience excited about what’s coming next so they’ll tune in next week or buy next month’s issue.  For all the spectacle and mayhem that goes with bringing together Earth’s Mightiest Heroes and setting them up to fight off an invading alien army in the streets of New York City while landmarks like Grand Central Station are destroyed around them, The Avengers is a movie with an admirably modest ambition.

Moving the story along.

There’s a kick in watching the Avengers assemble for the first time and in listening to our favorites banter and argue. The dialog is sharp and snappy. The jokes are funny. The suspense level is high. Whedon makes us worry about every character. But the main reason for seeing The Avengers is the same reason why when you’re reading a book and you finish Chapter 10 you move on to Chapter 11 instead of skipping ahead to Chapter 12. It’s a fun and exciting chapter and, if you’re all caught up with your reading, a gratifying one that will have you nodding in appreciation and saying to yourself, “So that’s where they were going with that!” and “Of course! I should have seen that coming!” and even “Wow, I wasn’t expecting that at all!”  But that’s the thing.  All those reactions depend on your having done the homework.

You don’t need to be a fan of the comic books to enjoy The Avengers, but I don’t see how anyone who hasn’t seen the other movies in the series will be able to follow this one or find a reason to care about many of the characters or the story. Whedon is used to playing to an audience that includes lots of people who missed last week’s episode, so maybe I missed all the ways he slipped in to help viewers just tuning in catch up. But it seems to me that if you haven’t seen Iron Man 2, you won’t know why Tony Stark is a problem for the other heroes and himself. If you haven’t seen Iron Man, Iron Man 2, and Thor you won’t know why Agent Coulson matters or appreciate Clark Gregg’s performance in the part. If you haven’t seen Thor, you may think Tom Hiddleston is a ham of an actor instead of a great one. If you haven’t seen Captain America: The First Avenger you won’t know why Cap is so forlorn or appreciate the subtext in his and Stark’s instant dislike of each other.  And if you haven’t seen The Incredible Hulk, you might not get Bruce Banner’s best joke.

Note: I’m not warning anybody away from The Avengers. I’m just saying if you’re thinking of going and really want to get the most of it, watch at least a couple of the other movies.  They’re good and good for you.

I’m also saying that The Avengers isn’t a good movie in and of itself because it depends so much on those other movies.  Which is not a bad thing, just something to keep in mind when you’re telling friends how AWESOME it is.

And it is AWESOME. With the above caveats.

Of course the star attractions are the stars, both the real life ones and the ones from the comic books they play. Robert Downey Jr, Chris Evans, Chris Hemsworth, and Mark Ruffalo, Iron Man, Captain America, Thor, and the Hulk.

Evans does what he had to do going in, hold his own against Downey and Hemsworth while playing a much duller character and then make that dullness as compelling as Stark's naughty boy charm and Thor's swashbuckling sex appeal. Evans doesn't have Cap fight for his authority---if anything he has him doubting it. Cap's sense of himself is tied to what he sees as his place in the world, but his world is seventy years in the past. When the time is right, he assumes it, without fuss but with confidence. Events conspire to re-create a need and therefore a place for Captain America and Cap steps right in and suddenly Iron Man, Thor, Hulk, and the entire New York City police force are gladly taking orders from him. Evans is a modest enough and secure enough actor to let the movie come to him.

If you haven't seen Thor, you might not feel as I did that Chris Hemsworth is underused. Whatever those of you who did see it might have thought of Thor the movie, I think you have to admit Hemsworth was terrific as Thor the god of thunder.  He established himself as a star and swashbuckling leading man in the tradition of not just Douglas Fairbanks and Errol Flynn but Gene Kelly---how else would you describe Kelly's dancing style besides swashbuckling? What is his D'Artagnan doing while dueling if not dancing?---and Harrison Ford. In fact, if Steven Spielberg and George Lucas are truly intent on continuing with another Indiana Jones movie, they should consider doing a total reboot starring Hemsworth.

Thor's main job as part of the Avengers---and I mean the team as portrayed in the movie, not the whole movie itself---is to bring the mighty when the mighty's most needed. But the movie takes his mightiness as a given and his role in the story is to provide kindly approval of Cap, of Stark, and of human beings in general and show sympathetic disapproval of Loki.  Tom Hiddleston's Loki isn't dismissible as another cackling movie super villain because Hemsworth's Thor doesn't see him that way.

I would have liked to have seen a little more of this side of Thor in scenes with Evans and Downey. I'm also disappointed that Whedon didn't put him together with either Cobie Smulders or Scarlett Johansson. It would have been fun watching him charm them nearly out of their catsuits. And a scene between Hemsworth, Downey, and Paltrow in which Pepper Potts swoons for Thor while Stark drives himself nuts trying not to show how jealous he is would have been a real hoot.

Can't have everything, and one thing The Avengers has that I didn't expect was Mark Ruffalo's brilliantly understated take on Bruce Banner and the Hulk.

The Incredible Hulk is the weakest in the series, but it’s still a pretty good superhero movie. I thought its major flaw was the coldness and detachment of Edward Norton’s Bruce Banner.  Norton overemphasized Banner’s efforts to remain calm in order to keep himself from Hulking out. Ruffalo’s Banner isn’t calm. He’s ferociously, strenuously, and exhaustingly repressed.  He’s in the habit of referring to the Hulk as “the other guy,” but Ruffalo says the words with an ironic sneer in his voice and a look of fear in his eyes that let us know Banner is terrified and, even more wrenching, growing resigned to the fact that it’s Banner who’s the other guy and that the Hulk is the real him and the moment is closing in when the Hulk will assert himself for good.

When he reveals his “secret” to Cap in one of the movie’s most rousing lines, it’s one of those satisfying “I knew it!” moments.

The breakout character, however, is Black Widow. 

Can't say Scarlett Johansson brings anything special to the role besides an impressive deadpanning of her dominatrix persona and the ability to wear her catsuit with insouciance. But Natasha Romanoff---as far as I recall, she's only referred to as Black Widow once and then by an enemy spymaster who's using the code name that's the only name he has for her---turns out to have a superpower.

She thinks faster than a speeding bullet.

Literally.

I say Johansson doesn’t bring anything special to the part, but that’s not to say she brings nothing.  Intense and concentrated intelligence blazes out of her eyes as hot and almost as visibly as Superman’s heat vision.  She makes us realize that all Black Widow’s backflips, spin and scissor kicks, headbutts, karate chops, throat punches, and two-gun pistol shooting on the slide aren’t reflexive.  They’re plotted.  If The Avengers was a Guy Ritchie movie we’d see her in slow-motion set-ups, carefully assessing each opponent and planning her particular lines of attack.  The bad guys aren’t being out-fought as much as out-thought.  And this holds true when she’s not in a physical fight.

In mental duels, she out-thinks two of the smartest characters in the movie.

Still, I felt a little as though she was being forced into a leading role and forced at me.  Black Widow is a sidekick---my son thinks “sidekick” is a disparagement of her awesomeness. I should say she’s a first lieutenant to the hero-kings---and there is no other female character of note.  I'm not counting Gwyneth Paltrow's extended cameo.  As SHIELD agent Maria Hill, Smulders seems to be only on hand to wear the catsuit in case Johansson decides not to sign up for The Avengers 2.

At first glance it might seem that as Nick Fury Samuel L. Jackson hasn't been given much more to do but glower and growl and wear his black leather trench coat with a coolness that will make you desperate to own one yourself even though you know in your heart you will never be anywhere near that cool.  But as Stark warns, Fury is the spy's spy. He serves his country by lying and manipulation.  Jackson makes us see the sinister side of Fury's nature. He's not just Mace Windu with an eye patch. He has more than a touch of Darth Sidious and Darth Vader to make you want to rethink that black trench coat. You never worry about which side of the Force he's on. You just wonder if there's anyone he doesn't think of as a tool or a weapon to be used.

Like I said, you don't have to be a fan of the comic books to enjoy the movie, but if you're not I can't see how you won't be thoroughly baffled by the apparently wasted presence of Jeremy  Renner as Hawkeye (or even know he's called Hawkeye) for about two thirds the way through. Then he starts bringing the archery awesome and you'll be too busy thinking to yourself “I need to get a bow and arrow!” to care about his backstory.

But, getting down to it, I still see The Avengers as Robert Downey’s movie and the story being moved along as Iron Man’s story.

Of the big three, Iron Man, Captain America, and Thor, Iron Man is the unfinished character. Captain America just needed to get his chance and in his movie he got it. Thor has learned his most important lesson. But when last we left Tony Stark at the end of Iron Man 2, he was still not a hero. Iron Man and Tony Stark were separate entities and Nick Fury had decided he could do without the former if the former could only be had with the latter.

He’s still an open question and I’m not giving anything away by telling you that The Avengers leaves that question open.

Downey and Ruffalo have a couple of wonderful and funny scenes together in which Stark and Banner play dueling geniuses on their virtual drawing boards. Hemsworth’s not the only one of the stars who can dance, so to speak.  In the exuberant physicality of what is essentially a comic song and dance act, Downey and Ruffalo reminded me of Gene Kelly and Donald O’Connor or, maybe more aptly, Hugh Jackman and Neal Patrick Harris at last year’s Tony Awards.  What we’re watching is a partnership and a rivalry.

Stark has been drawn to Banner in an openly admiring and affectionate way we’ve never seen him drawn to any other character including Pepper Potts---mostly we’ve seen him deliberately annoying people in order to push them away.  In Banner he finds a potential soulmate capable of playing with him on his level, someone who shares his passion for science and can keep up.

But as they work together to solve a problem, Stark can’t resist turning it into a competition.

At first it seems as though he’s only trying to distract Banner by teasing him and peppering him with one-liners.  But then what he’s doing becomes more sinister and dangerous.  He’s trying to provoke him.  If Banner has to concentrate on keeping his cool, he won’t be able to focus on the problem.  But it gets worse.

He’s curious.

He wants to see Banner Hulk out.

It’s the pure scientist in him getting the better of him.  He can’t help seeing another human being as a potential science experiment.

Which is insane. Never mind for the moment that the fate of the earth is at stake. Trapping himself in a small room with the Hulk when he’s not wearing his armor is a really, really, really bad idea.

But that’s Stark. He’s rash. He’s impulsive. He’s reckless. He’s thoughtless. He’s immature. And he’s selfish.

And this is why I say that the whole series (so far) has been basically The Romance of Tony Stark and that’s likely going to be a main theme as the series moves forward.

Whatever the ostensible plots and whoever the villains, Thor 2 is going to be about Thor being awesome while searching for his lost love and Captain America 2 will be about Steve Rogers trying to find a place for himself in the 21st Century besides being Captain America.  But Iron Man 3 will be about whether or not Stark’s going to screw up again and how and how bad and how much of the result of that will carry over into The Avengers 2.

To get back to the Knights of the Round Table analogy, the one way Stark is most like Lancelot is that in both their romances everything depends on how the hero responds to his chief temptation which for Lancelot and Tony Stark is the temptation to put self before duty. For Lancelot that temptation comes in the form of his love for Guinevere. For Stark it's straightforwardly his ego.

Every tale of Lancelot foreshadows Lancelot’s ultimate failure and the breaking of the Round Table and the destruction of Camelot. Every one of Iron Man’s adventures (so far) foreshadows Stark’s potential failure to be the hero he and the world need him to be.

Again, I don’t think I’m giving anything away by telling you that in The Avengers we learn that if he has to Stark can overcome the temptation and be Iron Man and not just Iron Man's pilot, a billionaire, genius, playboy, philanthropist in a metal suit. It doesn't tell us that he is past temptation.

It’s a hilarious moment and a key one when Stark recognizes similarities between himself and Loki.  But we’re left to wonder what he’s going to do with this newfound self-awareness.

The romance is unfinished. The comedy or the tragedy is still to be played out.  The story continues.

Filed under Avengers Assemble.

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The Avengers, written and directed by Josh Whedon, starring Robert Downey Jr, Chris Evans, Chris Hemsworth, Mark Ruffalo, Scarlett Johansson, Jeremy Renner, Tom Hiddleston, Clark Gregg, Stellan Skarsgard, Cobie Smulders, and Samuel L. Jackson. On DVD and Blu-ray and available to watch instantly at Amazon.

Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them: Our story so far is that our story so far doesn't get very far

Posted Friday morning, November 23, 2018.

Fantastic beast wrangler and wizard Newt Scamander (Eddie Redmayne) knows where to find the fantastic beast that’s escaped from his magic suitcase, he just isn’t sure how to re-capture it, in this scene from Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them.

[Editor’s note: Happy Day After Thanksgiving! Hope you’re having pie for breakfast. It’s a sacred American tradition, as I’m sure you know. I finished my pie and am now working on my review of “Fantastic Beasts 2: The Crimes of Grindewald”, which we took Mrs Mr to for her birthday on Sunday. Meantime, if you need something wizardly to read with your pie, here’s my review of the first movie in the new series “Fantastic Beasts [I don’t know if they’re planning to officially add the 1 in the future. They haven’t yet.] and Where to Find Them”, from two years ago.]

Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them is the first in a series of movies intended to be to the Harry Potter series what Peter Jackson’s Hobbit trilogy is to his Lord of the Rings: prequels that deepen and expand our understanding of the originals, provide enlightening if not necessary background, but stand on their own and tell exciting and involving adventure tales of their own.

But, although played with his now trademark charming quirkiness and brilliant self-torturing physical dexterity by Eddie Redmayne, as likable underdog heroes go, fantastic beast wrangler Newt Scamender is no Bilbo Baggins and Fantastic Beasts doesn’t have much of a story of its own to tell.

And the most fantastic beast in Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them is of the human variety: A fervent Prohibitionist United States Senator from the state of New York.

Fantastic Beasts is set in New York City in 1926 and the idea that in 1926 New York would be sending a Dry to the Senate---back to the Senate. He’s the incumbent.--- is pretty much a matter of pure fantasy. Beside the fact that Prohibition was never popular (or diligently enforced) in New York, it was growing increasingly unpopular across the whole country. So much so that Al Smith, the Irish Catholic Democratic incumbent governor of New York, felt he could run for President in 1928 as Wet.

Smith lost, but his loss is generally attributed to anti-Catholicism (although Prohibition was implicitly anti-Catholic and anti-immigrant in effect and intent, so there’s a possible relation). Meanwhile, back home in New York, in the actual Senate election of 1926, liberal Democrat Robert Wagner, who would become one of the strongest champions of the New Deal in Congress, was on his way to defeating the Republican incumbent, James W. Wadsworth, conservative who opposed Prohibition (on good conservative grounds: it was federal government intrusion into decisions best left to the states and individuals.) There’s no evidence that dark forces affected the outcome of the election.

You’re probably asking what any of this has to do with the movie? I’ll tell you. Pretty much nothing. But then neither does the character of the Prohibitionist senator. Nor does his doting newspaper publisher father. Nor his jealous younger brother.

The senator’s murder by mysterious magical forces serves the plot in it might be the flashpoint setting of a war between the wizard and human worlds. But for that purpose the victim could have been any generic prominent public figure whose gruesome death before a large crowd wouldn’t be easy to cover up. His particular politics or his personality or his backstory don’t matter to that end.

But director David Yates and J.K. Rowling, who wrote the screenplay, give us all three before they kill him off. They spend what seems like an inordinate amount of screen time developing him and his father and brother as characters and laying out their dysfunctional family dynamic only to put their subplot aside just about as soon as he’s dead. They forget about the dead senator and push his father and brother so far into the background that they become just faces in the crowd at the end. Which raises a serious question.

What’s the point of their being in the movie at all?

And it looks like the answer to that will be given in the next movie.

And that’s one of the things wrong with this movie.

An awful lot of screen time is devoted to setting up Fantastic Beasts 2. Which makes most of Fantastic Beasts 1’s storyline exposition. That’s really a way of saying there is no storyline. Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them doesn’t tell a story. It sets us up to hear one.

What it has instead of a story is a string of comic mini-adventures in which Newt tracks down and tries to re-capture the fantastically mischief-making fantastic beasts that have escaped from his Tardis-like magic suitcase and a mystery involving the senator’s death for him and his new human friends to solve. Which is a fun but doesn’t get him or us anywhere in the end.

It’s as if Peter Jackson had decided to devote most of An Unexpected Journey to just getting Bilbo out of Bag’s End, interspersing the antics in the Shire with scenes of the elves at Rivendell talking ominously about what the Necromancer might be up to, with a pointless side-trip to Dale for a scene detailing the internal politics of Lake-town thrown in.

Now, however you feel about The Hobbit movies---I liked all three, but each one could have used some tightening and I really think Jackson made a hash of the scenes with Smaug---An Unexpected Journey did get right down to the business of establishing Bilbo as a hero and included the scene most important in leading us into The Lord of the Rings.

“Filthy hobbitses!”

Despite his awkwardness, Newt has heroic qualities and can even look the part, when he stands up straight and looks people as directly in the eye as he does his fantastic beasts. In the heat of a chase, he can even be a bit of a swashbuckler. And we suspect his special studies have given him the type of surprising powers that all misfits, weirdos, and easily underestimated characters in movies and fairy tales can call on in moments of dire distress. No doubt his knowledge of supernatural history and his skill as a fantastic beast whisperer will come into play down the line. But in Fantastic Beasts, Newt is a hero on a small scale. He’s the hero of his own little misadventure, and it’s hard to see how he can be the hero of the larger and grander adventure to come. In fact, we know he won’t be. We know who will be.

Dumbledore is only mentioned in Fantastic Beasts but his presence looms large because the presence of his antagonist and the adventure’s main villain also looms large.

Although Fantastic Beasts doesn’t get that story underway on screen, there are enough hints and allusions and foreshadowings to let us know that it is underway off screen and Gellert Grindelwald is hard at work---somewhere---on his plan to bring the whole non-magic world and that part of the wizarding world that isn’t made up of pure-bloods like himself under his tyrannical sway.

As fans know, Grindelwald is the terrifyingly powerful dark wizard who, when they were both young, enchanted, possibly seduced, and came close to corrupting Albus Dumbledore. So we know where this new series is headed. It’s going to be about the battle of wills and wits between Grindelwald and Dumbledore that climaxes in their epic three-hour duel.

This means that there’s a possibility that Tom Riddle’s transformation into Voldemort will be incorporated into the coming sequels, either as a part of the main story arc or as a major subplot. So there are going to be three characters more important than Newt to the overall saga.

Newt’s misadventure in New York is pretty much an aside to that larger story, but he’s not necessarily an ancillary character. I just can’t see him as a main character. What I see him as in the romantic hero of the tragic love story that’s a subplot to the larger story, and that romance at least gets a bit more of a start in Fantastic Beasts.

That explains Newt’s mopiness and diffidence when he’s around the character we’d expect to be his love interest in this one, a former auror demoted to a minor clerkship in the basement of the offices of the Magical Congress of the United States of America for her overzealousness in pursuit of practitioners of dark magic named Tina Goldstein and played by Katherine Waterston. Newt is still carrying a torch for his Hogwarts sweetheart, Leta Lestrange.

Yep. Of that Lestrange family.

Newt has landed in New York on his way to Arizona to release one of his fantastic beasts back into the wild. The escape of some of the other beasts and his attempts to round them back up have gotten him in deep trouble with the Magical Congress. He and Tina have to team up to solve the mystery of the senator’s murder and the expected romance...does not ensue.

Theirs is a love that cannot be. Not yet. It would get in the way of whatever is in store for Newt and Leta in the next movie. (Leta will be played by Zoe Kravitz. Is played. She appears in Fantastic Beasts but in almost literally a cameo, in the moving photograph Newt carries in his magic suitcase.) So Newt resists his growing feelings for Tina out of loyalty to Leta and Tina resists her growing feelings for Newt out of a sense of duty. They do too good a job of resisting. Which leaves us with a pair of romantic leads who don’t get to be particularly romantic.

No snogging.

Fortunately, for those of us who like a bit of romance with our action and adventure, we have Tina’s flapper with a heart of gold sister Queenie and a canning factory worker named Jacob Kowalski whose dreams of owning his own bakery have caused him to fall into cahoots with Newt. (A bank and one of Newt’s fantastic beasts, a little kleptomanic with a special fondness for shiny objects like coins and jewelry, are involved.) Jacob is a Muggle or, as muggles are known in the good old US of A a No-Maj, short for “No Magic”---we Yanks are brusque and to the point and have no poetry in our souls, donchewknow---but he and Queenie are drawn together by their mutual appreciation of pastry. Queenie is a witch like her sister but her favorite way to put her magic to use is to help her with her baking.

Jacob is played Dan Fogler. Queenie by Alison Sudol. Fogler is one of those chubby clowns in the tradition of Oliver Hardy, Lou Costello, Jackie Gleason, and Kevin James whose physical genius is their ability to move with a grace and agility their bodies don’t seem built to achieve. The comedy is not at the expense of their being fat but in their being able to move like Errol Flynn or Gene Kelly when they need to and like Charlie Chaplin at most other times. Fogler gives Jacob a self-deprecating soulfulness but also the confident toughness of a working man an former soldier who knows his limitations, mental and physical, but also knows that he’s overcome them in the past and so it’s worth a shot to try to overcome them again. Studol, channeling Marilyn Monroe as Sugar in Some Like It Hot, takes what’s in outline a stereotype---the airheaded sexpot who’s smarter than she looks---and turns her into a comic heroine, resourceful, courageous, quick witted, without letting go of the stereotype. Queenie’s intelligence isn’t meant to come as a surprise. It’s the natural extension of her good heart and sensitive nature. Queenie is funny because she’s not funny. Sudol and Folger are matched in that way. They’re both able to pull off what their outward appearances say they shouldn’t be able to pull off. He moves like a hero, she thinks like one. Individually, each is a delight to watch. Together they’re a joy.

The only real joy in the movie, as it turns out, except for the antics of Newt’s mischievous beasts.

Fantastic Beasts is actually pretty grim. Not surprising considering the story it’s setting up.

Apparently things are as dire in the wizarding world of 1926 as they will be in the 1970s in the years just before Harry’s to be born. (In the books Harry’s birthday is July 31, 1980), and David Yates has directed accordingly. In look, tone, and mood, Yates has tied Fantastic Beasts in with the four Potter films he directed, the last four of the series. That means, among other things, don’t expect a bright color palette.

But even within the limits of its own plot, Fantastic Beasts is a dark and somber film. Just about every moment, including the ones featuring Newt’s menagerie on the loose, is shadowed by gloom and dread. The American wizarding world is nowhere near as homey, warm, and cheering as what we've seen of its British counterpart in the Harry Potter films.  Even in the later movies there were still snug little islands of comfort and some semblance of security. At the end of Diagon Alley was a bright and welcoming pub. Fantastic Beasts takes us to a speakeasy, the lowest of low dives, presided over by a cigar chomping goblin gangster played by a CGI-ed over Ron Perlman with no mitigation of the goblin's malice, cynicism, or the sadistic amusement he gets from being a criminal with the power to hurt and disappoint people who come to him for help.

New York City in 1926 is dreary, gray, empty, and listless, as if the Depression has arrived three years early. The Congress of Magic seems to function more like the Kremlin than like the Ministry of Magic. The President is imperious and humorless and has no problems sentencing people to death without a trial and no matter the extenuating circumstances of their alleged crimes. And the mystery Newt and Tina set out to solve, besides centering around a hideous murder, involves a case of child abuse. But at least the villain is intriguing.

Grim and sinister, of course, but intriguing.

He's played by Colin Farrell with saturnine charm and a seductiveness that suggests Farrell had recently seen Frank Langella's Dracula and decided to turn the part into an audition for a remake.

I hope somebody does it, makes the remake.

It’s probably clear I was disappointed by Fantastic Beasts. But I still recommend it, to Potter fans, at any rate.

Like I said, it doesn’t do the job of getting the series main story arc underway. But it does lay important groundwork. And while I can’t say what role Newt is going to play, he’s a fun and interesting character, thanks to Redmayne, and Redmayne is always worth the price of admission. And some of Newt’s fantastic beasts are truly fantastic.

Then there’s Studol and Fogler.

It needs to be mentioned that in the United States, wizards and witches are not allowed to marry no-majes.  Newt considers this a barbaric policy and I expect it will figure in the future movies.

At least, it had better.

They’d better be planning to bring Queenie and Jacob back.

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Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, directed by David Yates, written by J.K. Rowling. Starring Eddie Redmayne, Katherine Waterston, Colin Farrell, Dan Fogler, Alison Studol, Samantha Morton, Ezra Miller, Ron Perlman, Jon Voight, and Carmen Ejogo. Rated PG-13. Available on DVD and Blu-ray and to watch instantly at Amazon.

A Most Wanted Man: Gunther's People are not Smiley's People

Posted Friday night, May 11, 2018.

No George Smiley: Philip Seymour Hoffman as Gunther Backmann, a German spymaster on the hunt for terrorists, contemplates his next move while wondering if he’s acting on principle or out of ruthless ambition in one of Hoffman’s last movies, Anton Corbijn’s adaptation of John le Carre’s novel, “A Most Wanted Man”.

I’ve been on a John le Carré kick today, going back and forth from “The Spy Who Came in from the Cold” and its companion novel---is there a name for a book or movie that takes place at the same time with some of the same characters and tells a parallel story as another book or movie in the same series? There are prequels and sequels. Are there side-quels?---le Carré’s latest, “A Legacy of Spies”. This has put me in the mood to watch a movie based on one of his novels. Nope. Not “The Spy Who Came in from the Cold”. Saving that one for a Family Movie Night. Same with "Our Kind of Traitor". We're saving that one too. And not “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy”. Still too vivid in my memory after six years. Not “The Constant Gardener” either. That one’s never grabbed me. “The Tailor of Panama” would be fun, but I’m not in the mood for “fun.”  And not “Little Drummer Girl”. I’m waiting for the miniseries. I could go with “Russia House” but, again, nope. I’m going with this one. “A Most Wanted Man”. Because…Philip Seymour Hoffman. Is there a better reason? Here’s my review from when it was in the theaters, back in the summer of 2014…

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In the novels of John le Carré, the spy game is a tawdry, debasing, corrupting, soul-curdling, heartbreaking, while you still have a heart---over time it shrivels the heart inside you when it’s not taking it right out of you---conscience-deadening business. No one who gets into it and no one whose life is touched by it survives without their principles and sense of self-worth shredded. Except for George Smiley, of course.

Smiley pays a price. There’s his purgatorial marriage to Lady Ann, for a start. It’s never clear if it’s a punishment or a penance he’s assigned himself. Whichever, he seems to accept that their mutual unhappiness is his fault and it’s somehow connected to his work as a spy. But he survives, that is, he continues to do his job while holding on to some of his principles and not totally compromising others. He’s able to do this because he’s the most competent agent in British Intelligence and he’s able to be that because he’s the most modest person in the service, at least the most lacking in vanity and careerist ambitions. What ambition he does have is inextricable from his commitment to doing his job well and if that means seeking and obtaining promotion, that’s fine. Moving up (or over or across or back, as necessary. A career as a spymaster is a chess game.) isn’t self-aggrandizement as it is for the likes of a Percy Alleline. It’s taking steps towards finishing the job, being finished with it, the ultimate goal being to make spying unnecessary by defeating his Soviet counterparts and helping to bring the Cold War to an end.

If there are others like George Smiley in le Carre’s universe, one of them is not Gunther Bachmann, the German spy heading a secret and only quasi-official anti-terrorism unit in Hamburg who is a main character in le Carre’s 2008 novel A Most Wanted Man and the main character in Anton Corbijn’s film adaptation now in theaters and starring Philip Seymour Hoffman in one of his final movies as Bachmann.

Bachmann might like to be, like Smiley, that is, if he knew who Smiley was and what he’d accomplished and how he’d accomplished it. But if he does, he’s temperamentally disqualified. For one thing, he has little of the necessary modesty. He’s vain of his skills, his intelligence, and his achievements. And he lacks the patience, for another. That’s partly due to the nature of his current assignment which is to identify and thwart imminent terrorist attacks, preferably by breaking up plots before the plotters even know what they’re plotting themselves. But it’s also due to his still being in mid-career. We know from hints dropped in the novels and TV and film adaptations of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and Smiley’s People that at a similar point in his life Smiley hadn’t yet learned to take a longer, more objective view.  The significant difference between Bachmann and Smiley, however, is that Bachmann is personally ambitious. Not to move up. To move out.

Bachmann is in Hamburg doing what he’s doing because something went terribly wrong at his last station in Beirut. We’re not told exactly what, except that it involved meddling by the CIA, against whom Bachmann now holds a grudge and whom he already despised as bloodthirsty and incompetent. But he also blames himself for having let himself be outfoxed by those bloodthirsty incompetents at the cost of the lives of several of his assets and operatives.

Bachmann is looking to restore his reputation in the hope of winning a new assignment out in the field where the real action is but also where he’ll be out of the reach of interfering superiors, politicians, and diplomats and freer to operate as he knows he knows best how to do. But he also wants to be where the people he’s spying on, deceiving, manipulating, betraying, and sacrificing to the cause aren’t his fellow Germans and innocents.

The bitter irony is that to get to that place he has to spy on, deceive, manipulate, betray, and sacrifice fellow Germans and innocents.

This doesn’t make him feel guilty, at least not that guilty. It makes him more determined to do it in order to get what he wants sooner.

This time out, there are three innocents he’s about to make use of, two German citizens and one who wishes to become a citizen.

That third innocent may not be that innocent: Issa Karpov (Grigory Dobrygin), the illegitimate son of a Soviet general and the fifteen year old Chechen girl he raped but then professed to have fallen in love with. She died shortly after Issa was born, but the general took care of their son, or at any rate paid for him to be taken care of, and then made him his heir. A pious Muslim, having been raised in his mother’s religion, who makes a show of his piety, Issa has sneaked into Germany after his release from the last of the several prisons where he spent a good part of the years since 9/11 when he was not spending them with various jihadist groups in the Middle East. He’s come to lay claim to his inheritance which his father secretly deposited in a Hamburg bank. He insists he doesn’t want the money, which for good reason he considers dirty, for his own use. The question is, then, what does he want it for? To give to charities that will help the Chechen people his father waged war upon or to funnel it to militant Islamists here in Germany or in the Middle East?

Bachmann doesn’t much care where the money might be going. If it’s going to be used to fund terrorists, he’ll put a stop to it, of course. But it’s better for his purposes if Issa plans to give it away, because Bachmann knows just where it should end up, in the accounts of his real target, a philanthropist who almost certainly skims from the many charitable organizations he advises and directs to send to terrorist groups around the world. Almost certainly.

Bachmann plans to use Issa and his money to learn for absolutely certain. That is, he plans to use Issa as bait for a trap.

The other two innocents Bachmann makes his pawns are not as innocent as they should be, either, or at any rate their consciences aren’t as clear as they’d like, which makes them both vulnerable to Bachmann’s manipulations: Issa’s idealistic lawyer, Annabelle Richter (Rachel McAdams), an attorney for an organization called Sanctuary North dedicated to helping immigrants obtain residency, citizenship, and, if they need it, political asylum, and a lovelorn banker named Tommy Brue (Willem Dafoe) who finds himself caught up in Issa’s story because his bank is the front for a illegal shadow bank set up near the end of the Cold War by Brue’s father to launder money stolen by corrupt Soviet politicians and high-ranking military officers and stash it away for them for the day when they need to get out of Russia while the getting is good. One of those secret depositors was Issa’s father, and Tommy Brue’s bank is the repository for a fortune that Brue feels duty-bound to hand over to Issa, provided Issa decides that he wants it and the police don’t nab Issa beforehand.

Going in to the theater, I was wondering how Corbijn and screenwriter Andrew Bovell had gone about trying to turn a rather talky novel into a satisfying work of visual storytelling. Le Carre’s A Most Wanted Man is built upon extensive conversations and internal monologs in which characters tell each other what has happened and what is going to happen and the reasons for both.  Most of the exciting and dramatic action takes place within quotation marks, that is, it takes place in a reported past, and that reporting is often second and third-hand.  That’s where the more interesting and dynamic characters, Issa’s and Brue’s fathers, live too, in the past. (In the novel’s present, both are several years dead.) This works fine on the page. A story told within a story being told works on readers’ imaginations just as if it comprised a novel all on its own. But on screen characters talking about the past are just characters talking about the past. Makes for dull viewing. So I expected Corbijn and Bovell would resort to extensive flashbacks.

That isn’t what they did.

The focus is all on the present with the working out of Bachmann’s personal dilemma becoming the driving force behind the narrative. Tension and suspense build out of the questions of how ruthless he’ll be in pursuing his goals and whether or not he’ll do the right thing in the end, because he really is one of the good guys and doing his job right and doing the right thing are the same for him as they are for George Smiley. His problem is, like I said, he’s not a George Smiley.

One of his problems.

Another problem is that he may not have time to do what he needs to do, right or not. He’s competing with the state police, other spy agencies, and, once again, the CIA for Issa and the right to claim his money. The cops just want to make headlines. The other spies don’t let Bachmann in on their agendas. All he knows is that politics and politicians are involved and that always means trouble for him. But the CIA, in the ingratiating and seemingly reasonable and cooperative person of a senior analyst played by Robin Wright in an unconvincing short black wig with a sweep of scythe-sharp bangs slashing across her forehead, wants to do what the CIA did a lot in the Bush years. So we’re put into the position of rooting for Bachmann even as we suspect we won’t like what he does.

This approach doesn’t require much of a change from the Bachmann of the novel to the Bachmann on the screen. It does require significant changes in the characters of Annabelle Richter and Tommy Brue, changes that diminish them as admirable human beings but make them more dramatically useful and, not so oddly, more sympathetic by making them more vulnerable to Bachmann’s scheming and manipulations.

As Annabelle, McAdams has the difficult task of acting out from behind the tangled tresses of her long golden blonde hair. The hair is perfectly in keeping with her character or, rather, it’s a perfect expression of her character, a spoiled rich girl rebelling against her establishmentarian family by playing at being a radical lawyer trying not to look like a spoiled rich girl rebelling against her family by playing at being a radical lawyer. It would probably have been a more effective disguise if she just dressed like a lawyer instead of a grad student who’s planning the next several days holed up in the library in a determined effort to complete a draft of her dissertation, a style choice that sends confusing messages to Issa and Tommy Brue.

In the novel, Annabelle isn’t rebelling against her family, she exemplifying a family trait of taking things a few steps farther than other people in the same situation are content to. It’s not enough for her brother the psychiatrist to be a Freudian, he has to be the Freudian’s Freudian. As a liberal lawyer, it’s not enough for Annabelle to champion underdogs, she has to take on the most wretched and hopeless clients. She’s a much tougher nut than her movie counterpart. Her exploitable vulnerability is in her shaken self-confidence. She recently failed to save a client from deportation. And now she’s constantly undermining herself with the fear she’ll fail Issa in the same way.

But that version of Annabelle only makes sense in the context of her family who are characters in the book but for whom there is no room in a two-hour movie.

McAdams’ Annabelle is immature, naive, more emotional than coolly intellectual in a lawyerly way. Her commitment to her work seems more an adopted attitude than to have a real passion as its source. And she’s way out of her depth. She knows it too and, while her self-doubting counterpart in the novel feels desperately in need of help, this Annabelle is desperate to be saved from a predicament of her own making. Which makes her an easy mark for Bachmann who recognizes that what she wants is to have the whole problem taken out of her hands.

The Tommy Brue of the novel is the jovial, bluff, outgoing son of an expatriate Scot whose heart is still in the highlands. He’s competent, canny, and knows his business, and, more important, knows his customers’ businesses. He’s somebody you’d gladly trust with your Euros. But there’s something a little off. His wife despises him. He’s hopeless with his difficult and neurotic daughter, and he’s so immediately and completely smitten with Annabelle, who is less than half his age, that despite his having been married twice and having a grown daughter, he appears to have not even a teenager’s clue as to how to relate to a woman. At first glance, he comes across as charmingly young for his age, in body and at heart, but it turns out not be as much the attractive youthfulness of a man enjoying an extended prime but the pathetic boyishness of someone who’s never really grown up. And no wonder. All his life, Tommy Brue (and note how he goes by a little boy’s nickname) has been defined in other people’s eyes and in his own as another, better man’s son.

Even now, with his father seven years dead and himself running the bank for as long, he still sees himself as answering to the man he refers to as Edward Amadeus and not father, papa, or dad. When thinking his way through a problem, he’s in the habit of addressing Edward Amadeus, practically holding dialogs between himself and the old man’s ghost, essentially asking for the ghost’s advice and permission to do whatever it is Tommy thinks needs to be done.

Again, as with the Annabelle of the novel, we have a character who only makes sense in the context of his family. But Tommy’s daughter is never seen or heard from and barely mentioned. His contemptuous way appears in one brief scene only to express her contempt. And Edward Amadeus is only a stick to beat the plot along, a piece of exposition produced when required to explain the action not an active participant in the unfolding of his son’s personal drama popping up through the stage floor to intone “Remember!”

And while you’d expect that Tommy, the novel’s Tommy, to be played by someone big, hearty, and full of good cheer, he appears on screen in the small, shrunken-looking, and sad-eyed form of Willem Dafoe who plays him as a weak, self-doubting, fraud or at least a fraud in his own eyes. We hardly need the scene with the contemptuous wife. This Tommy Brue is clearly a man used to living with the knowledge that he’s contemptuous and who believes he deserves it.

The novel’s Tommy at sixty is still as devoted to his father and in awe of him as he was at twelve and he’s determined to do right by the old man’s memory, which means seeing things through as he thinks Edward Amadeus would have wanted even though that means making himself complicit in his father’s crimes and by extension Issa’s father’s far worse crimes. It’s not so much a case of the sins of the father being visited upon the son as the son volunteering to complete the transgression.

If there’s a dead father haunting the movie Tommy, it’s not one who commands respect and obedience based on love and respect, but one who terrifies based on a lifetime of bullying and abuse. And that’s the ghost Bachmann channels as he sizes Brue up as a beaten man who expects, even needs to be bullied.

It’s a rare treat, but also a bit disconcerting, to see Dafoe playing a character so completely without menace and, apparently, meanness, also without any inner reserves of strength, a weak man whose facade of competence and superiority is easily cracked. revealing a moral coward who it’s no trouble to embarrass, rattle, and cow. It was probably even more fun for me because I’d just rewatched The Grand Budapest Hotel in which his character is the embodiment of menace and meanness. But, again, still disconcerting. A part of me kept asking What evil’s at work here that this can be to Willem Dafoe?

Issa is pretty much what he is in the book, as much a puzzle and a challenge for audiences as he is for readers and for Gunther.  It’s intrinsic to his character that he deflects sympathy. Simultaneously resistant to all efforts to help him and abjectly compliant and too stubbornly withdrawn to explain himself either way, he’s inscrutable, hard to figure, harder to like, self-righteous, full of his own sense of superior virtue, a sullen version of Dostoevsky’s Idiot Prince Myshkin, reflexively holding himself up as a moral example that he makes so unattractive no one wants to live it up to it even if they could.

Issa is taciturn, wary, unforthcoming. He’s not monosyllabic, but he uses as few sentences as possible and speaks haltingly as if not just thinking over each word but as translating them through his first two languages, Russian and Turkish, before delivering them in German. Dobrygin, who captures Issa’s tensed, spidery figure as described by le Carre in the novel, does most of his acting through his mournful, questioning, accusatory eyes. But when, to disguise himself, Issa’s forced to shave his beard, to his humiliation and shame, revealing Dobrygin’s own very boyish face, the mournfulness to outright sadness and pain, the questioning becomes a beseeching: “Please don’t hurt me anymore. I’m trying so hard to be good.” His whole aspect is that of a hurt little boy trying to be brave while abjectly expecting a whipping.

Which is natural considering the scars on his back from his stints in the prisons where he was torture. Issa is someone who had to withdraw so far into himself as his only defense against torture that he can’t climb out again. The little boy lostness of his expression and demeanor is what remains of the man who is lost to himself. The lost little boy would be easier to pity, however, if he wasn’t such a moral scold and quite possibly a once and future terrorist.

It may be that in using Issa Bachmann is also saving him from himself.

Which brings me to Hoffman as Bachmann.

I suppose it would have been fitting if this was one of Hoffman’s greatest performances and he’d gone out at the very top of his game. But that’s a sentimental notion and unnecessary to his legacy. In A Most Wanted Man he does what he did best throughout his career, create an entirely new person distinct from every other character he played and to do it without showiness or show-offiness and, seemingly, without effort. As he plays him, Bachmann is irritable, impatient, prone to bullying not just assets like Tommy Brue and Annabelle Richter but his superiors and his rivals in other agencies, people he should be placating if he wants to get his career back on track. He has his tender side and shows he had and probably still has a heroic one. But he’s relentless and ruthless and for the most part deliberately difficult to like and even more difficult to figure, probably because he doesn’t seem to much like himself or have himself at all figured out.  Hoffman’s Bachmann is a protagonist hard to root we root for anyway because he is so confoundedly human.

Corbijn makes Hamburg a dark and guilty place. It’s as gritty and full of shadows and fog as the London of Tomas Alfredson’s 2011 adaptation of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy but an even more oppressive, comfortless, and paranoia-inducing city and a more congenial home to spies and other villains because it’s lacking George Smiley.

What it has is a Gunther Bachmann and he and his people are lost in the gloom.

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Retrieved from the dark and guilty place known as the archives: From January 2012, my review of Aflredson’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy starring Gary Oldman as George Smiley.

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"A Most Wanted Man" directed by Anton Corbijn, screenplay by Andrew Bovell, based on the novel by John le Carre. Starring Philip Seymour Hoffman, Rachel McAdams, Willem Dafoe, Robin Wright, and Grigory Dobrygin. Rated R. Available on DVD and Blu-ray and to watch instantly at Amazon.

The novel "A Most Wanted Man" is available in paperback and for kindle at Amazon and as an audiobook from Audible.

Of Gods and Monsters: The Avengers: Age of Ultron

Posted Saturday morning, May 5, 2018.

I’d planned to re-post my reviews of the first two Avengers movies along with my review of “Infinity Wars” but as things are looking it’s going to be a while before we get to see “Infinity Wars” or any movie, so…

Just for the fun of it, below is my review of “Age of Ultron”. Below that, in a separate post, is my review of “The Avengers”…

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Frankenstein and his monster: Robert Downey Jr as Tony Stark (Iron Man), begins to doubt he’s done the right thing in trying to bring about “Peace in our time” by creating the artificial intelligence software Ultron in Iron Man 4. Wait. I’m sorry. I meant Avengers: Age of Ultron.

July 2015. There’s a very simple story at the center of Avengers: Age of Ultron. A very simple and very old and very true story. The story of an idealistic but vain scientist who, seeking to conquer death, creates a monster in his own likeness whose monstrosity lies in its---his---being at the same time more than human, less than human, and all too human. The monster escapes his creator’s control and runs wild, revealing himself to be not a conquering of death but a bringer of it. But the real horror is in his having a mind of his own and desires of his own that mirror his creator’s. The creator is forced to look in that mirror and see himself for what he is, a monster of vanity and ego, who has unleashed his own evil and set it loose upon the world. It’s a story, then, about how what we take pride in as being the best in ourselves can turn out to be the very worst.

This re-telling of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein with Tony Stark as Doctor Frankenstein and Ultron as his monster---Did you think I meant Bruce Banner and the Hulk?---might be easy to lose track of in the noise and confusion of the overlong and repetitive battle scenes amid crumbling cities; the irrelevant inclusion of an underwritten subplot that amounts to little more than a set of teaser-trailers for the Not-Coming-To-A-Theater-Near-You-Until-November 2017 Thor: Ragnarok; the clumsy attempt to work in the Hulk and Black Widow movies that will never be made; and the overly-insisted upon group angst about whether or not the Avengers will ever be a true team---a question I thought got asked and satisfactorily answered in the first Avengers. When Age of Utron hit the theaters back in May, the whole movie and not just the Frankenstein story got a little lost for many fans in online arguments over whether or not director Joss Whedon had betrayed Black Widow as a character by making her sad about not being able to have babies and whether or not that’s actually what was making Black Widow sad and then by fan outrage when Whedon closed down his Twitter account in what they took as his response to their complaints and criticisms, followed by a further debate over whether or not that was in fact the reason he’d done it and, if it was, did he have the right to shut fans out that way. [Editor’s note: I revised this paragraph a bit after input from longtime reader and blogging comrade Gary Farber. See his comment.]

But I think the problem---which is probably only a problem for me---is caused by Age of Ultron’s having been mistitled as an Avengers movie and not as what it is.

Iron Man 4.

But then I don’t think Marvel Studios really has an Avengers series unfolding. They have two parallel stories of individual heroes that are on their way to merging in a dual tragedy. Steve Rogers’ and Tony Stark’s---Captain America’s and Iron Man’s.

Before I get into that…

Marvel has been either lucky or brilliant in the casting of its leads and supporting players in most of its productions, which now include Agent Carter, Daredevil, and Ant-Man, all three of which feature excellent leads and supporting players. (The less said about Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., the better.) I’m particularly (and sentimentally) impressed by Chris Evans as Captain America. I think he’s done a wonderful job of putting the lessons of Christopher Reeve’s Superman to work in playing a hero too good to true and making his goodness believable, likable, sympathetic, attractive, and---the truly super feat---fun. But Robert Downey Jr is still the best of the lot. Evans is good in Age of Ultron and James Spader is better, stealing most of the show with his amazing voice work as Ultron, but Downey is never blown off the screen---except when Iron Man is literally blown off the screen, which happens a lot, maybe too much. Like I said, the battle scenes get repetitive, but never mind. Spader has great fun with his monologues, making well-written lines sound like brilliant ones and brilliant ones sound like Shakespeare. (I think I’d better explain that below.) But Downey matches him easily, filling his every sentence with an essential Tony Stark-ness. Which is to say, that just about whatever he says, no matter how witty, charming, and smart is tinged with competitiveness, ego, jealousy, selfishness, and…insecurity.

A good example is in an apparent throw-away moment, Cobie Smulders as former S.H.I.E.L.D agent Maria Hill---who, unfortunately, is turning out to be the Avengers’ Girl Friday instead of Agent Coulson’s replacement as Nick Fury’s Right Hand and heir apparent---addresses Stark as “boss” and he immediately corrects her.

“He’s the boss,” he says, meaning Captain America, “I just pay for everything, design everything, make everyone look cooler.”

It’s beautifully delivered but a great deal of its beauty is that Downey imbues it with all those qualities I mentioned: wit, charm, smarts, competitiveness, ego, jealousy, selfishness, and self-doubt.

Downey makes it plain that Stark accepts Cap as the team’s leader and knows that that’s how it ought be but also that he also can't help feeling that he could bethe leader and can’t help letting Hill know that too and know why and know why she should be impressed with him, as if she wouldn’t be already and would be more if she didn’t also know what an overgrown brat he can be, a fact he knowsand has come to dislike about himself but which he can’t seem to correct.

These qualities, with the emphasis on the wit, charm, and ego, have defined Downey's characterization of Tony Stark since the first Iron Man.  And that characterization is thematic. Running through all three Iron Man movies and now both Avengers movies is the question Who is Tony Stark and what does he want?and all those qualities mixing up together make that a hard question to answer.

The first Iron Man ends with Tony announcing “I am Iron Man.” But that turns out to be a problematic statement because while it's true in the most obvious way, it's also a declaration that he’s a superhero and Iron Man 2 calls that into question. In fact, in Iron Man 2, Nick Fury decides Tony's not a superhero, or at least not up to being one of Earth's mightiest heroes, and although he doesn't kick him off the Avengers project, he demotes him, from hero to technical support. Tony earns a second chance, but in the first Avengers he has to prove he deserved it, that he is a hero and not, as Cap accuses him of being, just a big ego operating a suit of armor that does all the real work. Tony proves it---to the team, but apparently not to himself. That's what Iron Man 3 is about. Tony becoming a hero in his own eyes.

Now we find out that there's a problem with that.

Tony developed a real hero's heart. He did not lose any of his vanity. He did not learn, like Cap did long ago, humility.

It's not enough for him to be a hero. He has to be the hero.

Which brings me to the other part of the answer to who is Tony Stark and what does he want?

He's Howard Stark's son and he wants what he cannot have. His dead father's approval.

Specifically, he's the son of a brilliant and successful father who was, Tony feels, aloof, overly demanding, overly critical, and whom he has in significant ways surpassed. All his life he has been in a competition he can't win for a reward he can't have.  Howard Stark wouldn't acknowledge his son's genius while he was alive and now he's not around to applaud his success and achievements---and admit he’s been bested.  Add to this that Tony has given himself the mission of making up for his own and Howard's mistakes and sins, something that comes back to haunt him and the other Avengers in Age of Ultron, in the persons of Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch.

If all that sounds neurotic and even juvenile, it's mitigated by Tony's having nobler ambitions. He sincerely wants to fix everything and save everybody.

Like I said, he wants to be a hero.

Unfortunately, like I also said, vanity is still a problem.

Tony wants to be the one who saves everybody and fixes everything.

He wants to be the hero.

He says he built Ultron so that the Avengers won't be needed anymore. But he does it in the belief that he doesn't need the other Avengers to help him. (He enlists Bruce Banner but pretty much relegates him to the role of Igor.) Basically, he believes that the world already doesn't need the Avengers. It just needs him.

In an argument with Cap, Tony defends what he was attempting to do in creating Ultron, prevent war forever or, as he says, thinking he’s being cute and ironic, bringing about “peace in our time.”  Cap won’t buy it. “Every time someone tries to stop a war before it starts,” he snaps. “Innocent people die. Every time.” A line that might inspire anti-war liberals with Iraq in mind to cheer, but which is really kind of a strange thing for a veteran of World War II to say. Wouldn't it have  been a good thing if Hitler could have been stopped before? (Leaving aside the question of whether he actually could have been stopped.)  But there's an answer, which Stark doesn't give, because this is an action-adventure movie not a novel by Tolstoy and there isn't time or space for philosophic and historical debates. Innocent people die in wars, many innocent people, so isn't trying worth it anyway, if only on the chance that maybe only fewer innocent people will die?

Again, no time or space in the movie or in a movie review even on this blog. But quickly. Stark's mistake is that he has already had this debate with himself and made decisions by himself, leaving everybody else out of it. He has assumed knowledge, wisdom, responsibilities, and power that Cap, a conventionally religious man of his bygone time, would probably say belong to God.

Like I said. Frankenstein.

This is where the stories of Iron Man and Captain America begin to converge in a way that, for me, turns the Avengers saga into a side story.  The real story, now, is leading into the next Captain America movie, Civil War.

Of course I don't know what's coming. But this is what I see being set up. Tony Stark is going to bring about what he says he created Ultron to do, put an end to the Avengers.

To put it in mythological terms, he's going to bring about the breaking of the Round Table.

In my review of  the first Avengers, The Romance of Tony Stark, I said that if you see the Avengers as having parallels to the stories of King Arthur and his knights, Tony is Lancelot. Not in personality but in the potential role of tragic traitor. He and Lancelot share the same tragic flaw, a willingness to put their own desires above what they know to be right. In Lancelot's case, it's his love for Guinevere that undoes him. In Tony's, it's his need to be the hero.

In my review, I said that I didn't see Captain America as King Arthur. But Winter Soldier changed my mind about that.

S.H.I.E.L.D. turned out to have been based on the premise that “Might Makes Right.” Cap doesn’t just believe like King Arthur in “Might for Right.” He believes that Right Makes Might. His ambition isn’t just to make the world safe. It’s to make it right.

He dreams of Camelot.

With this in mind, you can guess which scene in Age of Ultron I got the most kick out of: the scene at the party celebrating the Avengers' defeat of the last remnants of Hydra. The guys---Clint (Hawkeye) Tony, Rhodie ( who, thankfully, has given up calling himself the Iron Patriot and gone back to being War Machine), and Steve Rogers---take turns trying to lift Thor's hammer.  Of course, they can't try as they might. As we know, only he---or she. I've been following what's going on in the comic books.---who is worthy can wield the hammer. The guys know this and they don't really expect to succeed. But they've had a few and they are guys, after all. They're showing off. But once they get going, Tony's competitive juices start flowing. He becomes determined to lift the hammer.

It's not to prove he's worthy. He doesn't take that part seriously. (Downey tosses off a couple of great one-liners on the subject of how he will treat his subjects when he takes Thor's place as ruler of Asgard, and, again, the lines are witty and charming but tinged with vanity. He's in effect telling Thor he's not impressed with his being a god and hero-king.) What he wants to show is that lifting the hammer doesn't prove anything except that you've mastered the trick of lifting it. And he's convinced there's a trick and equally convinced that if there is he's the one who can figure it out. That's his main job as an Avenger.

But when it's Cap's turn, we see Steve approach the task with a bit of reluctance. He's doing it mainly to be a good sport. But he gives it his all and...

The hammer moves.

To Thor's shock and consternation---Chris Hemsworth does a terrific double-take here.---and to Steve's own, well, fright.
He gives it one more mighty tug but his heart isn't in it and, as we know from The First Avenger, it's his heart that gives him his strength. The super soldier serum only worked on him because he had a good heart.  Then he gives up and the implication is that he does because he doesn't want to know.

Not that he isn't worthy. He already knows he's worthy. That's what makes him Captain America. He doesn't want to know he's worthier. He doesn't like being as worthy as he is. He’s weighed down by the responsibilities and filled with self-doubt. He doesn't like what being worthy has made him. Sad and alone, out of time and out of place. A misfit. A freak. A monster, in fact. In yet anther Frankenstein story, one he explicitly tells about himself in this movie, the kindly Dr Erskine who invented the super-soldier serum is Frankenstein and he, Captain America, is the Creature.

Chris Evans, working with some beautifully understated dialog, makes Cap almost as witty and charming as Downey's Tony Stark, but he gives Cap a kind of reverse vanity. While just about everything Downey as Stark says is a form of boasting, just about everything Evans' Cap says is self-deprecation.

I don’t recall any specific moments when we see him reacting to Cap’s modesty, but it probably drives Tony nuts.

Here's where it gets messy.

Like it hasn't already, Lance?

If a big part of who Tony Stark is is Howard Stark’s son, then in his eyes Steve Rogers would naturally be something of a stand-in for his father.

That’s how Tony first came to know of him, as his father’s good friend and war buddy. He grew up listening to his father talk admiringly about Cap and from that he learned to resent him. Doesn't matter what Howard said or how often he said it, what Tony heard was an incessant criticism: Why can't you be more like him?

In other words, Tony would have grown up thinking of Captain America as the son his father wished he had instead of him.

It's no wonder that when he meets him in the flesh, Tony's filled with jealousy and an intense spirit of rivalry that would be hard to overcome even as the two became good friends.

Which they have. With not a whole lot of interaction, Downey and Evans make it clear Tony and Steve like each other, have fun together, and rely on each other. The spirit of rivalry never goes away, though, and it's felt on both sides, because more than they are friends, they are, spiritually, brothers.

We all know how things tend to go between brothers in literature. (And in movies. If you want to push it---and I'm always ready to push these things---there are parallels between Steve and Tony and Thor and Loki.) Steve, even though he's younger---discounting the seventy odd years he was frozen in the ice---is in temperament and in effect the older brother, as well as the favorite son.

All right, maybe all that's too mythological. But superheroes are often said to be our new myths---mostly it's said by fans of the comic books and the artists who make their livings creating them. If it's true, however, it's only when they've escaped the comics and other mass media where they have their origins and enter the collective unconscious to the point that they resonate with the very many people who don't read comic books, play video games, or watch the TV shows and go to the movies. That's happened with Superman and Batman. You can geek out for days debating which others have achieved Superman and Batman's mythological status.

Obviously, for me, Captain America is part of my personal mythologies.

But if these stories were truly myths, they would have endings. And the endings would all be the same. The heroes die.
That actually happens to the mythological Thor.

It can't happen to the comic book heroes.

Well, it does all the time. But I mean they die and stay dead. They don't, as Cap advises in Age of Ultron, walk it off.

Their stories have an end which no stories told about them can go past. As far as I know that's only happened to Barry Allen's Flash.

Oh no.

Don’t tell me…

At any rate, there’s too much money riding on the popular heroes’ immunity to mortality.

Now, the heroes of the movies can die and stay dead. And that could happen in the Avengers saga. If the twinned stories of Iron Man and Captain America are truly myths, Civil War will be a tragedy that ends with the breaking of the Round Table, Lancelot's self-imposed banishment, and the death of Arthur.

It could happen. It doesn't appear to be in the offing. Avengers 3 and 4: Infinity War I and II are in the works. The intriguing thing is that as things stand Downey won't be in them. I haven't heard for sure about Evans. He may not be.
That doesn't mean Iron Man and Captain America won't be.

There's precedent for recasting.

Look out! Here comes the pesky Spider-Man!

Again.

But to get down to it at last, this is why I saw Avengers: Age of Ultron as Iron Man 4 and why, as far as I was concerned, after the scene with Thor’s hammers all the Avengers except Iron Man and Cap could have disappeared from the movie until the inevitable climactic battle. Thor, for all intents and purposes, does.

Like I said, mostly what he does between the hammer scene and the final battle is show up in interpolated teasers for Thor: Ragnarok.

As for that final battle, and all the big battles, I could have done without them too. For one thing, the cgi work is too detailed. Watching all those buildings crumble into dust, all I was thinking was “Who’s going to clean up that mess?” (Note to stickler fans: I know who’s going to clean up that mess. The point is I was focused on the mess.) But mainly, what I wanted and what I think the story needed was a final confrontation between Iron Man and Ultron, and, even better than a good fight, a good scene between them like the one between Tony and Loki in the first Avengers.

As for watching a good fight, it’s interesting that the one good one between Ultron and an Avenger is between him and Captain America. I took that as symbolic.

The battles themselves are well staged. I’m sure Whedon had other things on his mind but they play like he was saying to Man of Steel’s director Zack Snyder, “Thisis how you do it.” Whedon keeps the focus on his characters as characters---that is, they are always being themselves as they run, jump, dodge, duck, fly, and fight. He doesn’t just use them as avatars in a video game. And he makes sure that we see that most of their efforts go into saving people. We see and feel that there are actual human lives in jeopardy and that it matters if even one person in the crowd dies.

And as for the characters…

Aaron Taylor-Johnson as Quicksilver and Elizabeth Olsen as Scarlet Witch aren't given much to do. He's cocky and she's angsty. As the movie goes along, he gets cockier, she gets angstier. But pretty much they're here to save on time spent on exposition in the next Avengers movies.

I'm glad Whedon let Paul Bettany, who's been doing charming work as the voice of Jarvis, Stark's computer sidekick since the first Iron Man, appear as another new Avenger, the Vision. He's a little too much of a vision for my taste, but he's a needed calming, civilizing, and distancing presence. It's a relief to have a character who has some perspective and who can think clearly about what is happening and what the Avengers ought to be up to.  I don't expect that sanity to last. This is, after all, the Marvel cinematic universe.

Even though I didn't need to see them in this movie---as opposed to in those movies of their own that will never get made---it was good to see Jeremy Renner do more than take aim convincingly while cracking wise, Mark Ruffalo do something other than wrestle with his rage, although he still does a fair share of that, and Scarlett Johansson show yet another side of Black Widow, even if that side is that of the good-hearted bad girl who, to paraphrase Valerie Perrine as a variation of the type in Superman, doesn't get to get it on with the good guys.

Chris Hemsworth’s underused, again. Whedon gives a supporting female character a line that lets us know that he knows which of the Avengers most female fans---and gay male ones, I presume---want to see the most of and then doesn’t give it to them. Instead, proud and unabashed dork that he is, he lingers on Mark Ruffalo as Bruce Banner, and makes him the focus of the longing female gaze.  Ruffalo’s good, of course, but he’s nowhere near as pretty as Hemsworth and Banner is, after all, a dork. Hemsworth, though, makes do with what’s given and it’s important to notice that most of his best work is silent. He’s a natural comic actor and all he needs is his eyes.

Spader, as everyone acknowledges, is the stand-out star. When I said he turns his dialog into Shakespeare, I didn’t mean flowery or poetic. I meant that he makes the words alive to the character saying them. Ultron’s listening to himself. Choosing the words carefully. Writing his own script. Writing himself into being. Hamlet does this. Falstaff does this. Iago and Rosalind do it.  Ultron knows himself to be performing. He’s literally making himself up as he goes. And not only is he creating himself in his own eyes, he’s forcing others to think of him as he thinks of himself.

I probably need to come back and rewrite that.

That’s it. Time to wrap this up. But one more scene before the credits roll.

Whedon has been given a lot of credit for shaping the Avengers saga and giving the movies their tone and spirit. But I think what he deserves the real credit for is recognizing what was already going on, accepting it, liking it, and running with it. The first and most credit, I think, should go to Jon Favreau, and I was happy to his name show up in the credits of Avengers: Age of Ultron as an executive producer.

It was Favreau, as the director of the first Iron Man, who set the tone and gave the series its spirit and sensibility. And the best thing he did to do that was fight to get Robert Downey Jr cast as Tony Stark.

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Because the running time of this review isn’t long enough: My reviews of the first Avengers, The Romance of Tony Stark; Iron Man 3, Big Man in a Suit of Armor; and Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Cap being Cap, the goodest of good guys.

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Avengers: Age of Ultron, written and directed by Joss Whedon. Starring Robert Downey Jr., Chris Evans, Chris Hemsworth, Mark Ruffalo, Scarlett Johansson, Jeremy Renner, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Elizabeth Olsen, Paul Bettany, Cobie Smulders, Don Cheadle, James Spader, and Samuel L. Jackson. Rated PG-13. Available on DVD and Blu-ray and to watch instantly at Amazon.

The Romance of Tony Stark: a review of the first Avengers movie

Posted Saturday morning, May 5, 2018.

Thor, Iron Man, and Captain America square off in The Avengers in accordance with the rule that no superheroes can meet for the first time without getting into a fight so that fans have more fuel for their endless debates over who would win in a matchup.

This is what you get when you let a former English professor write movie reviews.

Within the cycle of movies of which The Avengers is the latest installment, Tony Stark---Iron Man---fills the role Lancelot fills in the King Arthur stories.

I warned you.

The Avengers isn’t a retelling of the Knights of the Round Table.  For one thing, there’s no King Arthur. (If anyone wants to make the case that Nick Fury plays that role, feel free. I think it’s a reach. Try Merlin instead.)  And I'm not making a direct comparison of their personalities. In personality, Stark is no Lancelot. If he has a counterpart among any of the Knights of the Roundtable, it's Gawain. Gawain is vain, boastful, selfish, self-indulgent, a showoff and happy to think he can do it all on his own. He's also the second best of Arthur's knights. He was the best until Lancelot showed up. Fans can argue the actual ranking of the Avengers vis-a-vis each other. What matters is that Gawain wasn't inclined to admit to his demotion and Stark would disagree with you if you didn't rank Iron Man first. A lot of his best lines in the movie are cheap shots at the other heroes' expenses meant to let them know he's not impressed by them or their powers.

(The only other Avenger who even roughly has an Arthurian double is Captain America. He's like Galahad whose strength was as the strength of ten because his heart was pure. The super-soldier serum worked as it did on Steve Rogers because he had a good heart.)

Still, the comparison to Lancelot holds in that like Lancelot Iron Man is the hero around whose story the other heroes' stories are centered.

“I am Iron Man,” Stark declares at the end of his first movie.  But as we learn in Iron Man 2, he’s not. Iron Man is just a robot Stark pilots from within.  And for the robot to do its job it almost doesn’t matter who’s wearing the metal suit.  What matters is if Stark can make the suit into a skin, that is, into an extension of himself.  And a lot has to change for that to happen.  Every one of Lancelot’s adventures is crucial to the overall story of the Knights of the Round Table because the fate of Camelot depends on Lancelot remaining the exemplary knight he is while constantly confronted with the temptation to be just a man.  Every one of Iron Man’s adventures is crucial to the ongoing story of the Avengers because the fates of the Avengers and the world depend on Stark becoming a knight in shining armor, and he’s having a hard time with that.

Ok. Before taking this analogy any further…

I liked it. It’s fun. I had a good time. The Avengers is a good superhero movie.

It’s not a good movie the way Spider-Man 2 and Batman Begins are good movies.  Rio Bravo is a good movie. Rio Lobo is a good Western. The Dirty Dozen is a good war movie. The Guns of Navarone is a good movie. The Avengers is a good superhero movie. The best in this particular series of superhero movies after the first Iron Man.

Part of what makes it good is that it is very much a piece of that series. Director Joss Whedon, who also wrote the screenplay, has clearly studied and liked and taken to heart the previous movies in the series and he deftly weaves together narrative and thematic threads from Iron Man, The Incredible Hulk, Iron Man 2, Thor, and Captain America: The First Avenger into one taut strand, pulls that strand smoothly through the movie, then quickly unravels it and spools the threads out towards the next movies in the series.  The Avengers sets up Captain America 2, Thor 2, and Iron Man 3.  (It doesn’t directly set up The Avengers 2.  That’s coming but it will have to pick up the threads from those sequels and do its part in continuing the series.) As Whedon has apparently learned from his long career in television and as a writer of comic books, everything doesn’t depend on single episode or issue.  The job of any particular episode or issue, in fact, is to get the audience excited about what’s coming next so they’ll tune in next week or buy next month’s issue.  For all the spectacle and mayhem that goes with bringing together Earth’s Mightiest Heroes and setting them up to fight off an invading alien army in the streets of New York City while landmarks like Grand Central Station are destroyed around them, The Avengers is a movie with an admirably modest ambition.

Moving the story along.

There’s a kick in watching the Avengers assemble for the first time and in listening to our favorites banter and argue. The dialog is sharp and snappy. The jokes are funny. The suspense level is high. Whedon makes us worry about every character.  But the main reason for seeing The Avengers is the same reason why when you’re reading a book and you finish Chapter 10 you move on to Chapter 11 instead of skipping ahead to Chapter 12. It’s a fun and exciting chapter and, if you’re all caught up with your reading, a gratifying one that will have you nodding in appreciation and saying to yourself, “So that’s where they were going with that!” and “Of course! I should have seen that coming!” and even “Wow, I wasn’t expecting that at all!”  But that’s the thing.  All those reactions depend on your having done the homework.

You don’t need to be a fan of the comic books to enjoy The Avengers, but I don’t see how anyone who hasn’t seen the other movies in the series will be able to follow this one or find a reason to care about many of the characters or the story. Whedon is used to playing to an audience that includes lots of people who missed last week’s episode, so maybe I missed all the ways he slipped in to help viewers just tuning in catch up. But it seems to me that if you haven’t seen Iron Man 2, you won’t know why Tony Stark is a problem for the other heroes and himself. If you haven’t seen Iron Man, Iron Man 2, and Thor you won’t know why Agent Coulson matters or appreciate Clark Gregg’s performance in the part. If you haven’t seen Thor, you may think Tom Hiddleston is a ham of an actor instead of a great one. If you haven’t seen Captain America: The First Avenger you won’t know why Cap is so forlorn or appreciate the subtext in his and Stark’s instant dislike of each other.  And if you haven’t seen The Incredible Hulk, you might not get Bruce Banner’s best joke.

Note: I’m not warning anybody away from The Avengers. I’m just saying if you’re thinking of going and really want to get the most of it, watch at least a couple of the other movies.  They’re good and good for you.

I’m also saying that The Avengers isn’t a good movie in and of itself because it depends so much on those other movies.  Which is not a bad thing, just something to keep in mind when you’re telling friends how AWESOME it is.

And it is AWESOME.  With the above caveats.

Of course the star attractions are the stars, both the real life ones and the ones from the comic books they play. Robert Downey Jr, Chris Evans, Chris Hemsworth, and Mark Ruffalo, Iron Man, Captain America, Thor, and the Hulk.

Evans does what he had to do going in, hold his own against Downey and Hemsworth while playing a much duller character and then make that dullness as compelling as Stark's naughty boy charm and Thor's swashbuckling sex appeal. Evans doesn't have Cap fight for his authority - if anything he has him doubting it. Cap's sense of himself is tied to what he sees as his place in the world, but his world is seventy years in the past. When the time is right, he assumes it, without fuss but with confidence. Events conspire to re-create a need and therefore a place for Captain America and Cap steps right in and suddenly Iron Man, Thor, Hulk, and the entire New York City police force are gladly taking orders from him. Evans is a modest enough and secure enough actor to let the movie come to him.

If you haven't seen Thor, you might not feel as I did that Chris Hemsworth is underused.  Whatever those of you who did see it might have thought of Thor the movie, I think you have to admit Hemsworth was terrific as Thor the god of thunder.  He established himself as a star and swashbuckling leading man in the tradition of not just Douglas Fairbanks and Errol Flynn but Gene Kelly---how else would you describe Kelly's dancing style besides swashbuckling? What is his D'Artagnan doing while dueling if not dancing?---and Harrison Ford.  In fact, if Steven Spielberg and George Lucas are truly intent on continuing with another Indiana Jones movie, they should consider doing a total reboot starring Hemsworth.

Thor's main job as part of the Avengers---and I mean the team as portrayed in the movie, not the whole movie itself---is to bring the mighty when the mighty's most needed. But the movie takes his mightiness as a given and his role in the story is to provide kindly approval of Cap, of Stark, and of human beings in general and show sympathetic disapproval of Loki.  Tom Hiddleston's Loki isn't dismissible as another cackling movie super villain because Hemsworth's Thor doesn't see him that way.

I would have liked to have seen a little more of this side of Thor in scenes with Evans and Downey. I'm also disappointed that Whedon didn't put him together with either Cobie Smulders or Scarlett Johansson. It would have been fun watching him charm them nearly out of their catsuits. And a scene between Hemsworth, Downey, and Paltrow in which Pepper Potts swoons for Thor while Stark drives himself nuts trying not to show how jealous he is would have been a real hoot.

Can't have everything, and one thing The Avengers has that I didn't expect was Mark Ruffalo's brilliantly understated take on Bruce Banner and the Hulk.

The Incredible Hulk is the weakest in the series, but it’s still a pretty good superhero movie. I thought its major flaw was the coldness and detachment of Edward Norton’s Bruce Banner.  Norton overemphasized Banner’s efforts to remain calm in order to keep himself from Hulking out.  Ruffalo’s Banner isn’t calm.  He’s ferociously, strenuously, and exhaustingly repressed.  He’s in the habit of referring to the Hulk as “the other guy,” but Ruffalo says the words with an ironic sneer in his voice and a look of fear in his eyes that let us know Banner is terrified and, even more wrenching, growing resigned to the fact that it’s Banner who’s the other guy and that the Hulk is the real him and the moment is closing in when the Hulk will assert himself for good.

When he reveals his “secret” to Cap in one of the movie’s most rousing lines, it’s one of those satisfying “I knew it!” moments.

The breakout character, however, is Black Widow.  Can't say Scarlett Johansson brings anything special to the role besides an impressive deadpanning of her dominatrix persona and the ability to wear her catsuit with insouciance. But Natasha Romanoff---as far as I recall, she's only referred to as Black Widow once and then by an enemy spymaster who's using the code name that's the only name he has for her---turns out to have a superpower.

She thinks faster than a speeding bullet.

Literally.

I say Johansson doesn’t bring anything special to the part, but that’s not to say she brings nothing.  Intense and concentrated intelligence blazes out of her eyes as hot and almost as visibly as Superman’s heat vision.  She makes us realize that all Black Widow’s backflips, spin and scissor kicks, headbutts, karate chops, throat punches, and two-gun pistol shooting on the slide aren’t reflexive.  They’re plotted.  If The Avengers was a Guy Ritchie movie we’d see her in slow-motion set-ups, carefully assessing each opponent and planning her particular lines of attack.  The bad guys aren’t being out-fought as much as out-thought.  And this holds true when she’s not in a physical fight.

In mental duels, she out-thinks two of the smartest characters in the movie.

Still, I felt a little as though she was being forced into a leading role and forced at me.  Black Widow is a sidekick---my son thinks “sidekick” is a disparagement of her awesomeness. I should say she’s a first lieutenant to the hero-kings---and there is no other female character of note.  I'm not counting Gwyneth Paltrow's extended cameo.  As SHIELD agent Maria Hill, Smulders seems to be only on hand to wear the catsuit in case Johansson decides not to sign up for The Avengers 2.

At first glance it might seem that as Nick Fury Samuel L. Jackson hasn't been given much more to do but glower and growl and wear his black leather trench coat with a coolness that will make you desperate to own one yourself even though you know in your heart you will never be anywhere near that cool.  But as Stark warns, Fury is the spy's spy. He serves his country by lying and manipulation.  Jackson makes us see the sinister side of Fury's nature. He's not just Mace Windu with an eye patch. He has more than a touch of Darth Sidious and Darth Vader to make you want to rethink that black trench coat. You never worry about which side of the Force he's on. You just wonder if there's anyone he doesn't think of as a tool or a weapon to be used.

Like I said, you don't have to be a fan of the comic books to enjoy the movie, but if you're not I can't see how you won't be thoroughly baffled by the apparently wasted presence of Jeremy  Renner as Hawkeye (or even know he's called Hawkeye) for about two thirds the way through. Then he starts bringing the archery awesome and you'll be too busy thinking to yourself “I need to get a bow and arrow!” to care about his backstory.

But, getting down to it, I still see The Avengers as Robert Downey’s movie and the story being moved along as Iron Man’s story.

Of the big three, Iron Man, Captain America, and Thor, Iron Man is the unfinished character.  Captain America just needed to get his chance and in his movie he got it. Thor has learned his most important lesson. But when last we left Tony Stark at the end of Iron Man 2, he was still not a hero.  Iron Man and Tony Stark were separate entities and Nick Fury had decided he could do without the former if the former could only be had with the latter.

He’s still an open question and I’m not giving anything away by telling you that The Avengers leaves that question open.

Downey and Ruffalo have a couple of wonderful and funny scenes together in which Stark and Banner play dueling geniuses on their virtual drawing boards. Hemsworth’s not the only one of the stars who can dance, so to speak.  In the exuberant physicality of what is essentially a comic song and dance act, Downey and Ruffalo reminded me of Gene Kelly and Donald O’Connor or, maybe more aptly, Hugh Jackman and Neal Patrick Harris at last year’s Tony Awards.  What we’re watching is a partnership and a rivalry.

Stark has been drawn to Banner in an openly admiring and affectionate way we’ve never seen him drawn to any other character including Pepper Potts---mostly we’ve seen him deliberately annoying people in order to push them away.  In Banner he finds a potential soulmate capable of playing with him on his level, someone who shares his passion for science and can keep up.

But as they work together to solve a problem, Stark can’t resist turning it into a competition.

At first it seems as though he’s only trying to distract Banner by teasing him and peppering him with one-liners.  But then what he’s doing becomes more sinister and dangerous.  He’s trying to provoke him.  If Banner has to concentrate on keeping his cool, he won’t be able to focus on the problem.  But it gets worse.

He’s curious.

He wants to see Banner Hulk out.

It’s the pure scientist in him getting the better of him.  He can’t help seeing another human being as a potential science experiment.

Which is insane.  Never mind for the moment that the fate of the earth is at stake.  Trapping himself in a small room with the Hulk when he’s not wearing his armor is a really, really, really bad idea.

But that’s Stark.  He’s rash. He’s impulsive. He’s reckless. He’s thoughtless.  He’s immature.  And he’s selfish.

And this is why I say that the whole series (so far) has been basically The Romance of Tony Stark and that’s likely going to be a main theme as the series moves forward.

Whatever the ostensible plots and whoever the villains, Thor 2 is going to be about Thor being awesome while searching for his lost love and Captain America 2 will be about Steve Rogers trying to find a place for himself in the 21st century besides being Captain America.  But Iron Man 3 will be about whether or not Stark’s going to screw up again and how and how bad and how much of the result of that will carry over into The Avengers 2.

To get back to the Knights of the Round Table analogy, the one way Stark is most like Lancelot is that in both their romances everything depends on how the hero responds to his chief temptation which for Lancelot and Tony Stark is the temptation to put self before duty. For Lancelot that temptation comes in the form of his love for Guinevere. For Stark it's straightforwardly his ego.

Every tale of Lancelot foreshadows Lancelot’s ultimate failure and the breaking of the Round Table and the destruction of Camelot.  Every one of Iron Man’s adventures (so far) foreshadows Stark’s potential failure to be the hero he and the world need him to be.

Again, I don’t think I’m giving anything away by telling you that in The Avengers we learn that if he has to Stark can overcome the temptation and be Iron Man and not just Iron Man's pilot, a billionaire, genius, playboy, philanthropist in a metal suit. It doesn't tell us that he is past temptation.

It’s a hilarious moment and a key one when Stark recognizes similarities between himself and Loki.  But we’re left to wonder what he’s going to do with this newfound self-awareness.

The romance is unfinished.  The comedy or the tragedy is still to be played out.  The story continues.

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The Avengers, written and directed by Josh Whedon, starring Robert Downey Jr, Chris Evans, Chris Hemsworth, Mark Ruffalo, Scarlett Johansson, Jeremy Renner, Tom Hiddleston, Clark Gregg, Stellan Skarsgard, Cobie Smulders, and Samuel L. Jackson. On DVD and Blu-ray and available to watch instantly at Amazon.

Tinker...Tailor...Soldier...

Posted Tuesday night, February 13, 2018.

In “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy,” Tomas Alfredson’s film adaptation of John le Carre’s novel, spy-catcher George Smiley (played by a shadow-seeking Gary Oldman) operates in a London that, worn down by a generation of cold war, has become as gray, cold, and uncomfortable and univiting as any city locked up behind the Iron Curtain.

[Editor’s note: I’ve gotten lost in the attic. All I wanted to do was re-arrange a few shelves to make room for this year’s Oscar Week in Mannionville and I’ve wound up doing the equivalent of opening up all the old trunks and browsing through all the old family albums. But now I’m back downstairs and as soon as I brush off the dust and comb the cobwebs out of my hair, I’ll get back to work on the new posts I’ve had in progress, including the one on Gary Oldman and “Darkest Hour”  promised on Sunday. But speaking of Gary Oldman and the Oscars, here’s a relevant post from 2012 I thought you’d enjoy…]

Good God, the world was ugly in 1973.

Ugly cars. Ugly clothes. People uglying themselves up with ugly fashions, hair styles, attitude, vanities. The skies were still gray with the exhaust of cars burning leaded gas. Rooms were still foul, stale, and discolored from cigarette smoke. The sun never shone. The stars refused to come out. Nobody smiled with any real warmth.

It was a time when young men started thinking it was hip to look and act like little boys, It was a time when middle-aged men tried to look like young men by adopting the fashions of their sons but somehow still came across as older than their own fathers, stodgy, fusty, clueless, stubbornly set in their ways and Blimpishly satisfied with ideas worn out by their grandfathers’ day.

It was time when there was a lot of sex, but not much love, and what little real romance there was seemed always to come at the expense of someone outside the affair, when betrayal itself was romantic.

At any rate, that’s how 1973 appears to have appeared in Tomas Alfredson’s adaptation of John le Carre’s classic spy novel, “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.”

This is odd, considering that the London and the Europe in the background of the television miniseries based on the novel---which first aired in 1979, close enough to 1973 to be considered part of the same period, while the Cold War was still being “fought” and before the money that started flowing in the 1980s cleaned and livened things up---are warmer, cleaner, jollier, more cheerfully noisier places.

On the other hand, the movie’s London of 1973 looks very much like the London in the background of the earlier episodes of Rumpole of the Bailey, produced in the late 70s, dirty, decaying, charmless, soulless, grim and relatively silent. In the first couple of seasons, even Pomeroy’s Wine Bar, Rumpole’s retreat of choice, looked cold and unwelcoming. The spies in the movie don’t even have a Pomeroy’s to retreat to. They hold their office Christmas party in an institutionally characterless function room that looks like the cafeteria in a school for wayward boys and nobody looks like they’re having fun, especially the people who most act like they’re having fun.

I don’t know which is a more accurate rendering of the look of the period. But it doesn’t matter. The effect in both versions is thematic.

In the miniseries, the point is two-fold.  We’re meant to see that the world is going merrily on about its business, oblivious to the secret and dangerous work being done by George Smiley and his fellow spies and spy catchers and that that work is part of the world going on about its business. Smiley and his people are like everybody around them, ordinary Englishmen and women doing their jobs with a veddy British lack of fuss and bother. There’s a conscious de-romanticizing of the spies and their spy games.  The most Bond-like character, in his being the one with the license to kill and the one with the prolific sex life, is barely more than a street thug with an expense account.

In the movie, as longtime reader C dropped a note to observe, “the year 1973 turns out to be a compelling character in own right.”  Nearly thirty years spent waging the Cold War hasn’t only exhausted the spies, it’s worn out the civilian population as well.  A generation has grown up and another grown old in the shadow of the Bomb.  All the ugliness and decay---of infrastructure and spirit --- is due to neglect. No one wants to put money and effort into anything not directly related to defeating the Soviets, with the ironic consequence that the West has begun to look and feel like Eastern Europe in its gray decrepitude, lack of civil amenities, and general air of despondency and nihilism.  The fashions are distractions, as people try not to look like what they are or how they really feel, which is anxious, pointless, impotent, and futile.

The whole of society is not just morally but aesthetically compromised by the necessity of keeping secrets from enemies, from friends who might turn into enemies or might be co-opted by enemies, or who might think we’re enemies. Paranoia and its yang self-doubt poison every relationship, with colleagues and friends, with society…with self.

In another movie, a good guy character looking searchingly into a mirror is a not liking what he sees moment. Here it’s the case he doesn’t know what he’s looking at or for.

It’s inevitable that those who, like me admire the book and relished the miniseries and its sequel, “Smiley’s People,” will compare the movie to them, in general, and, in particular, Gary Oldman’s performance as George Smiley to Alec Guinness’ brilliant and I’d have thought definitive portrayal on TV.

But Alfredson quickly establishes that as a director he’s set standards and goals for his film that are different enough from the miniseries’ (and the book’s) that it can’t be judged easily through one to one comparisons.  The movie is more atmospheric, more indirect, and more allusive. He employs a far more visual form of storytelling.  The miniseries and the novel are dialog driven. You have to watch the movie more intensely than listen to it. Not only are there long stretches of silence, it’s hard to remember that any character, with one notable exception, who is not George Smiley, ever says more than two words at a clip or that other characters say anything in reply. Spies spy, that is, they watch, and the movie is about watching people watch each other, which sounds dull unless you keep in mind what they are watching for---weakness, dissimulation, the mistake that opens opportunities, threat, anything including virtues that can be turned against the person being watched.  Here, simply looking is an act of predation.

In this world, someone doesn’t have to fix you with a significant glare to put you on guard. He just needs to glance casually in your direction.

Which explains the symbolism of Smiley’s oversized glasses. Smiley’s main job is to look at people and his strength is that he sees everything when he does.

His best trick, however, is not being seen himself or for himself.

This is the opening Oldman exploits to differentiate his Smiley from Guinness’, with the smile-inducing effect of reminding us that Smiley didn’t have to be played by Gary Oldman or by Alec Guinness. Oldman and Guinness are playing a character, interpreted in different ways, who, never mind who’s playing him, is still himself.  Like Hamlet, like Fagin, like Jane Eyre, Smiley’s a character of many qualities and actors can pick and choose what to emphasize.  The performances vary but the characters remain recognizable.

Guinness emphasizes Smiley’s wounded pride.

The story---book, miniseries, movie---opens with Smiley forcibly retired from his high-ranking position at MI6, the center of the British Intelligence Service.  There’s been a shake-up at the top, and Smiley, as the right-hand to the ousted chief, is told he has to go too.  It’s expected that he will understand and not kick up rough.  It’s taken for granted that George Smiley, loyal, self-effacing, modest, devoted to Queen and Country, will do what’s best for the service.

It turns out, though, that Smiley is tired of being taken for granted, of being ignored, of having it expected that he will not mind or at least not show that he minds.  He minds.  He has always minded. Suddenly, surprisingly---and he’s surprising himself---he’s going to show how much he’s minded. Guinness makes Smiley irritable, querulous, impatient with anyone who expects him to act like his old self. 

But this is Smiley in retirement. No longer required by his job or his professionalism to repress his feelings, he feels free to resent both past slights and hurts and present calls that he go back to being a cipher. Even after he goes back to work to track down the Soviet mole who has burrowed his way to the heart of the secret service and has to re-adopt his old habits of reticence and diffidence, there’s the edge of complaint in his voice, as if he’s on the verge of exclaiming, “God damn it! I shouldn’t have to put up with this anymore!”  And Guinness lets us see Smiley’s vanity at stake. He’s determined to prove that firing him was a mistake. He’s no longer willing to be taken for granted.

But being taken for granted, getting overlooked, having people forget he is there even while they’re looking right at him are among his chief skills as a spy.  He is an expert at fading into the background. He’s there, but not there, seen but not really seen. You look at him and you can’t quite pick him out from the scenery. He’s deliberately blurry.

That’s what Oldman emphasizes, Smiley’s uncanny ability to take himself out of focus.

Oldman is constantly looking away, leaning back, turning his back on other characters and to the camera, and wandering off towards the edge of the frame.  Actors are taught from the beginning of their training to “find their light.”  Oldman finds his shadows.

In one of Oldman’s best scenes, Smiley recounts for his young assistant the time twenty years before when he met and interrogated Karla, Smiley’s Soviet counterpart and the spymaster assumed to be running the mole.  The recounting turns into a re-enactment, with Smiley taking on both parts, and as he gets into it, Oldman seems to wrap band after band of shadow around himself, blanking out more and more of himself until there are only jagged bits and pieces of himself left in any light at all.  This is where Smiley likes to work, in the near dark.  It’s also how he works.  So we’re not surprised to learn that while Smiley remembers Karla vividly, Karla remembers only one thing about Smiley. It happens to be a very important and damaging thing and a blow to Smiley’s pride. Guinness let us see that pride. Oldman lets us see it as he swallows it.

When he’s forced into the light and has to let others see him full on, Oldman’s face, his whole body, go perfectly still. There’s not a twitch of a lip, not the barest raising of an eyebrow, not the slightest shrug to give even the keenest observer a clue to his thoughts or his feelings. All there is to go on are his eyes, huge behind those glasses, wide-open, taking everything in.

Now, here’s the question, and I’m not in the position to answer it. How much does having seen the miniseries or read the book matter to your enjoyment of the movie?  My feeling is that although Alfredson has made the story his own, he went into the project assuming, possibly even counting on, his prime audience being fans of one or the other or both. I think he wants that audience to be able to appreciate the ways the movie is different.  I’m not saying that you won’t like the movie if you haven’t read the novel or watched the miniseries, but I wonder if you might have a little trouble following the plot. You won’t, I think, have trouble with the mystery, because…

Alfredson hasn’t made a mystery. In fact there is no mystery. If you don’t already know who’s the mole, if you keep in mind your movie mystery conventions you’ll figure it out pretty quickly. So if you haven’t read the book and decide to read it before you see the movie, you won’t be ruining it for yourself nor should you get mad if some blabbermouth gives it away before you get to the theater. The suspense is not in Whodunnit? but in wondering if and how the mole will be caught and at what cost and to whom.

And there’s horror and more suspense along the way as the collateral costs mount.

One of the ways the movie’s version of 1973 is ugly is that it is populated mainly by men. Women are literally pushed to the edge of the frame or forced into the background. (Fans of the book and the miniseries will be surprised that a major character in both appears only twice in the film and then in glimpses, through half-open doors.)  They are only allowed center screen when they become victims of the men’s spy games. The first casualty is a pretty young mother nursing her baby in the wrong place at the wrong time. Another is a pretty young wife who makes the mistake of falling for the spy spying on the spy she’s married to. The Cold War is destructive of new life and romance, not surprisingly, but it is destructive of all relationships based on affection and loyalty and we see that most in the victimization of Connie Sacks, the lone woman we meet with any real power, responsibility, and authority within MI6.

Played with an almost irritating open-heartedness by Kathy Burke, Connie is the only character who truly talks---to other characters and to us.  It’s not that she doesn’t know how to keep quiet like the rest of them. It’s that she is wounded, psychically and spiritually, by multiple betrayals and in gushing words she is showing us how much she is bleeding inside.

Besides Burke, the strong supporting cast includes Benedict Cumberbatch as Peter Guillam, Smiley’s suspiciously too boyish and dapper legman, Tom Hardy as Ricky Tarr, the handsome, charismatic, but not all that intelligent street thug with a license to kill, who is shocked to discover that instead of putting his life on the line, this time it’s his heart that’s in danger, and John Hurt, appearing mainly in flashbacks, as Smiley’s irascible and increasingly erratic friend and former boss, the head of MI6 who has discovered the existence of the mole just as illness has knocked the stuffing out of him and left him incapable of dealing with the threat physically, intellectually, and emotionally.

The stand-out, though, is Mark Strong, as the “scalphunter” Jim Prideaux, the one real secret agent in the group---that is, the one who, after Smiley, has come closest to leading an actually heroic life---who against his better judgment takes on one last assignment, ostensibly to get the name of the mole, but in his own mind hoping not to be told. Prideaux becomes one of the mole’s victims. He gets shot, he gets tortured, he gets shown the door when he’s finally returned home in an exchange with the Soviets that results in the deaths of several of Prideaux’s “assests.”  But none of that leaves as deep or as painful a mark on him as knowing he’s been betrayed and who by.  As Smiley, Oldman allows his eyes to reveal nothing. They take everything in and let nothing out. As Prideaux, Strong’s eyes reveal only one thing, heartbreak, and they let it all out.

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“Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy,” based on the novel by John le Carre, directed by Tomas Alfredson, screenplay by Bridget O’Conner and Peter Straughan, starring Gary Oldman, Colin Firth, John Hurt, Benedict Cumberbatch, Tom Hardy, Kathy Burke, and Mark Strong.  Available on DVD and Blu-ray and to watch instantly at Amazon.

Le Carre’s novel, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, is available from Amazon in paperback and a video and audio enhanced version for kindle.

The miniseries starring Alec Guinness and its sequel, Smiley's People, are available on DVD, also from Amazon.