dhlough Reviews

Starter for 10 (2006)

John Hughes Goes to University

[8/10 · 12 February 2007]

Though he's been acting since 1995, young James McAvoy is poised to become the next great European import based on his kindly faun Mr. Tumnus in The Chronicles of Narnia and his wide-eyed work in The Last King of Scotland alongside Forest Whittaker's fierce Idi Amin. Yet sometimes a performer's measure isn't in their solid ensemble acting, but how they carry a minor work with the sheer force of talent or personality.

McAvoy's turn in Starter for Ten as frosh geek Brian Jackson, at University in 1985, is wondrously physical and inspired. He's graced with an infinitely pliable, benevolent face that's both plain and handsome. As a smart, shy working class boy, still reeling from the loss of his father years ago, McAvoy wields Jackson's intelligence as both sword and shield – he draws you to him with his wit, and keeps you at arm's length with the same.

For all his smarts, he's at a loss when drawn to both the enigmatic Julie (the piercingly funny Catherine Tate) – a partner on the school's quiz team – and the politically active Rebecca (the tall beauty Rebecca Hall who hits low vocal notes reminiscent of Emma Thompson).

Directed by Tom Vaughan from an agile screenplay by David Nicholls, Starter for Ten is the best movie John Hughes would have made if he was English and set his comedies in college instead of high school. Though predictable and erratically paced, there's a real suggestion of university life in it. And McAvoy's creation wrings true emotion. He has a showcase scene in a restaurant where he goes from laughter to tears within the same sentence – you're with him all the way. The movie is an entertaining piffle, but it serves notice that you just might be watching the birth of a star.

Hostel (2005)

Effective Little Gross-Out

[6/10 · 23 June 2006]

Eli Roth's Hostel isn't a very good film, nor is it – in its genre – all that imaginative. But it's effective, intermittently engaging and, above all, very satisfying.

Two Americans – the cocky Paxton (Jay Hernandez) and the broken-hearted Josh (Derek Richardson) – are backpacking across Europe with an Icelandic pick-up, the party-hard Oli (Eythor Gudjonsson). Stuck in Amsterdam, and bored with the influx of Americans, they meet the bug-eyed (or is that cross-eyed?) Slav Alex (Lubomir Bukovy, with the freaky presence of a young Marty Feldman). He entices them to head to Slovakia, where the women are all supermodels and will screw you just because of your foxy American accent. So off they go, soon in the clutches of babes who bed them, drug them, and sell them to an organization that allows you – with the right amount of cash – to kill another human being.

A film like Hostel lives and dies by its concept. This movie's queasy set up is a doozy. Roth takes his time getting his entertaining trio to Slovakia, and the camaraderie of men in pursuit of cheap thrills and cheaper women feels right. The scenes in the murder factory aren't as gross as the ads would have you believe – you grow immune to the shock fast, and reminisce about the more ingenious gross-outs of Saw. Yet the last thirty minutes are everything a horror movie should be: tense, funny, and insanely reliant on crazy twists of fate that are never less than satisfying to an audience.

And Hostel is a film that requires an audience: one that shouts, groans, and laughs at the sheer giddy high of more bloodshed and its attendant acts of revenge. The best revenge may come from the spike (pun intended) in travel to the countries of Eastern Europe; regardless of the carnage (and the pus and the gristle), there isn't one ounce of cellulite on its women.

Fateless (2005)

Listless

[3/10 · 23 June 2006]

Holocaust narratives, like coming out stories, are legion – there're millions of them, each differentiated by details of personality, place, storyteller temperament. But those specifics are vastly important. If they aren't unique, the narrative risks falling into recognizable clichés. Fateless, directed by cinematographer Lajos Koltai (Malena, Mephisto), is The Compleat Holocaust – familiar to us from films as different as Schindler's List and Au Revoir les Enfants, to name only two.

Gyuri Koves (Marcell Nagy), an average teen, is taken from Budapest to Auschwitz, then Buchenwald. These Hungarian sections – prior to Gyuri's deportation – are understated and wrought. The first thirty minutes of Fateless concern Gyuri's family's last day together, before his father's shipped to a work camp. These domestic scenes are underplayed and harrowing. Yet once Gyuri is taken from a public bus and loaded onto a train with other Hungarian Jews, Fateless plays – too slowly – like a compendium of other, better films.

Fateless is shot on desaturated stock. Though elegantly framed, this absence of color – of vitality – might work if the earlier scenes in Budapest were not also drained, and if the same technique hadn't also been used in Spielberg's Schindler's List. (I kept waiting for the girl in the red coat to wander by.) Koltai ends sections with fade outs – at first, they seem organic, until they're used to finish every scene. This affectation robs the film of its accretion of horrific details. Each fade out compartmentalizes what has come before; the narrative disconnects, becomes anecdotal.

And Marcell Nagy's Gyuri is disaffected from the start. He seems much the same at the beginning as at the end; thinner, certainly, but still the same sullen teenager. What he's gone through is awful. But the film isn't fateless, it's listless, and it robs Gyuri's story of its power.

Hard Candy (2005)

Ambiguous, Elaborate Cat-and-Mouse Thriller

[6/10 · 23 June 2006]

Hard Candy – billed as a "psychotic thriller" – has a great central conceit: when the 14-year-old Hayley Stark (Ellen Page) meets the 32-year-old photographer Jeff Kohlver (Patrick Wilson) after a brief liaison online, the film sets in motion an ambiguous, elaborate cat-and mouse game between unlikely allies and victims.

For roughly the first third of Hard Candy, director David Slade develops a queasy frisson between the precocious teenager and her smooth predator. These expository scenes are expertly played with uncomfortable nuance. The young actress Ellen Page is prodigious here, with the precise modulation of innocence and budding sexuality. But when she turns the tables on her would-be suitor – when she becomes the Hard Candy of the title – her performance loses its focus. While innocence and flirtatiousness are in the best end of her range, toughness and vengeance create a reliance on acting ticks. You see her trying too hard, and it guts the very threat necessary for the role – and the movie – to work.

Patrick Wilson – with his strapping handsomeness and physicality – couldn't be better. He never begs for sympathy for his unsavory character, yet his choices are sneakily smart. He keeps us guessing – even in the midst of some lunatic situations – whether he really is the monster of the young girl's accusations. He's so convincing that a strange development occurs; while we flirt with the idea that this man may be the most heinous kind of sexual predator, our sympathies move from the doe-eyed innocent teen to her captive and very likely guilty victim.

Even though Hard Candy doesn't work, we root for the film because it's trying to get at something – that delicate line between victim and prey, and the ages old dilemma of the lure, for certain men, of the teenage girl. It isn't every day we get a "psychotic thriller" about an avenging angel of pedophilia.

Lucky Number Slevin (2006)

MacGuffins

[7/10 · 23 June 2006]

Lucky Number Slevin – no, that's not a typo – will easily be dismissed as Tarantino-esquire. Starring Josh Hartnett as the unlucky title character, the film has more twists and turns than a high-tech roller-coaster, but it's just as much fun (and almost as immediately forgettable).

Directed with breakneck technique by Paul McGuigan from a clever though highly implausible script by Jason Slimovic, the film is cast, with one minor exception, impeccably. It marks the first role that justifies Josh Hartnett's hype, and bestows Lucy Liu the most normal – and incandescent – part of her career. It's a bonus that they have palpable on-screen chemistry, as well as great foils in the guise of Bruce Willis and Morgan Freeman (though Ben Kingsley's high-strung performance as The Rabbi is a miscalculation). The film itself is stylized – written in high gumshoe/screwball mode, with a guided tour of ugly wallpapers throughout history as part of its hard-boiled milieu – though the actors' convictions root the topsy-turvy narrative in recognizable human terrain.

At its best, Lucky Number Slevin has the feel of a minor John Huston caper directed, with prankish glee, by Brian DePalma. It's a blood-revenge thriller with no depth, though there are reservoirs of feeling in Hartnett's and Liu's performances, as well as wit. Liu seems to the screwball manor born. And Hartnett prances around for nearly 30 minutes of screen time in nothing more than a long purple towel and a quizzical expression. He's such a game actor that his performance is both a put-on and homage to the long line of Macguffins in film noir. With, of course, a twist.

Transamerica (2005)

The Real Thing

[9/10 · 23 June 2006]

Felicity Huffman has been memorable on television in "Sports Night" and the zeitgeist-busting "Desperate Housewives" (she's the comic drudge Lynette). Her film work, though, has been spotty. Small roles in good movies like Magnolia and The Spanish Prisoner and larger ones in forgettable fare like Christmas with the Kranks won't prepare you for her performance in Transamerica as Bree, the pre-operative, male-to-female transsexual.

On the eve of gender reassignment, Bree gets called from a New York prison by Toby (Kevin Zegers) who claims to be the son of Stanley (Bree's male name) from a college encounter. Posing as a Christian missionary, Bree bails Toby out of jail. Together they embark on a cross-country odyssey of discovery.

But Transamerica is no after-school special. Duncan Tucker's sharp script and direction don't plead on behalf of the transgender population. His characters are flawed, alive, and too damn funny to be held down by polemics. Toby favors drugs and gay hustling. Bree acts like a Teutonic librarian – persnickety about language and how she feels a woman should behave. (She travels with a bright pink cosmetic case from the early-60's that's like an emblem of arrested femininity.)

Huffman moves with the subtly exaggerated gestures of a man trying to pass; attempts at gentility are trumped by equilibrium-thwarting hormones. She swoons when she walks. She's a mess, yet Huffman controls her comic creation with delicate poignancy. She's both mannered and unfussy; a gargantuan caricature and a beautifully modulated human being. When we see her fully naked, it's no surprise that she has a fully-operational penis. Huffman's triumph is that the offending organ doesn't look like a special effect, but the real thing.

Tristram Shandy (2005)

An Honest Crack

[8/10 · 23 June 2006]

Laurence Stern's "The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman" is considered the first meta-fiction novel. Written in the 1700's, before the phrase or even concept of 'meta-fiction' was born, it's the story – or, rather, Shandy's attempt to tell the story – of his life. But as all readers know, it's a work of epic digression, the tale of nearly everything else but the life of its title character.

It's also considered the most unfilmable work in the English canon. So give the restless director Michael Winterbottom respect for his ingenious attempt in Tristram Shandy: A Cock & Bull Story that, while not perfect, is true to its source material in the most important ways.

With invaluable assistance from his leads Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon, Winterbottom has created a meta-film: a meditation on the novel that plays as a movie-within-a-movie. After setting up the conceit with a scene of the actors in make-up discussing the subtleties of billing, and the color of Brydon's teeth, we're cast into Sterne's knotty and bawdy world, brought to vivid life with all the technical sleight-of-hand film can offer. Coogan, as both Shandy and his father, narrates the story of his birth, popping in and out of scenes as character and actor, commenting on the proceedings, interrupting them, revising them. The backstory of the drama between the actors parallels that of the movie, especially the growing competition between Coogan and Brydon, and the numerous deviations of the director, the other actors, and the crew.

Winterbottom's film is a stunt that doesn't fully succeed – the last third, especially, fails to contextualize the detours of the filmic narrative and the filmmaker's dilemmas. It simply dead ends. But it's a wildly inventive, honest crack at an impossible novel.

The Proposition (2005)

Smartly Directed Disappointment

[5/10 · 23 June 2006]

John Hillcoat's The Proposition, written by singer Nick Cave, has a eulogistic beginning. A dirge plays beneath 1880's photos of Outback life, a solemn opening shattered as we're plunged – in medias res – into the capture of the Burns brothers, Charlie (Guy Pearce) and Mikey (Richard Wilson), wanted murderers. The sequence's punch – the reflective tone against animalistic conflict – sustains stretches of narrative that forsake character detail for archetypal flavor.

Hillcoat's spatial compositions are superb. His Outback is as raw and unprotected as the characters. We learn that Mikey Burns is a hothead, Charlie his elusive protector, and there is a brother, Arthur (Danny Huston), the gang-leader they've forsaken for reasons unexplained. Their captor, Captain Stanley (Ray Winstone), proposes to spare Mikey's life if Charlie brings Arthur in by Christmas Day. The townspeople want vengeance. Stanley wants civilized justice, and to protect his sensitive wife (Emily Watson) from the grizzly details of the murders.

Pearce, Winstone and Watson are effective; remarkable even considering the self-conscious sparseness of the script. Cave gets mileage from his archetypes – these situations are fresh to him – but the movie aims high with shades of better films; the Leone westerns, and – in Charlie's search for his brother – Apocalypse Now. But Arthur is no Kurtz. Danny Huston, creepy as Arthur, is given poetic fits of Irish blather to spew (the family's from the old country). Pearce, in high grunge mode, skillfully becomes the isolationist myth that Cave throws at him. He's like a Clint Eastwood drifter, but with an actor at the core.

Yet the longer the film goes on, the less we care, because we're witness to the pulping of an historical moment. For all its supreme, harsh vistas and observed details, The Proposition is ultimately a smartly directed, frustrating disappointment.

Time to Leave (2005)

Ozon's Masterwork

[10/10 · 23 June 2006]

François Ozon's films produce a cool admiration. From naturalism (Under the Sea) to visual sophistication (8 Women) – his work creates distance. This may be a "French thing"; their films move more naturally towards philosophy than drama. His stunning Time to Leave (Le Temps Qui Reste) has delicately meditative moments, yet it's hard to remain aloof.

This second of a proposed trilogy about grief is a masterwork. Ozon may be a cool observer, but there's no detachment in the story of Romain (the extraordinary Melvin Poupaud), a gay photographer with terminal cancer. We get little of his pre-diagnosis life – he seems to have always been a bastard – but we ride his volatile emotions to the end. He tells almost no one of his illness; pushes away his family, his lover; acts cruelly. Ozon neither glorifies nor excuses these actions. Yet the accretion of details as Romain hurtles towards our common end creates a tense empathy in the audience. We may disagree with Romain's behavior, but we understand his every exploit.

Ozon's screenplay flows with incisive scenes; one of the best involves Romain's grandmother (Jeanne Moreau), herself close to death. Better still is the director's handling of sex scenes: a brief, violent one with his lover after he has been diagnosed, another with a woman and her husband who've asked him to help them have a child. Movie sex scenes are perfunctory; when one has heat and acuity, real eroticism, they're exhilarating. Ozon's are more – they're resonant; the threesome in particular, because we're profoundly aware of what's at stake for all the players.

Slated for release in the middle of summer movie madness, Time to Leave is an anti-blockbuster. Who wants to see a film about the death of a gay hedonist when there are superheroes out to save the world? I suppose only those who'd like to understand what it is about that world that's worth saving.