Hitchcock ****1/2
Short Take: An utterly entertaining look at Alma and Alfred Hitchcock’s marriage during the production of Psycho.
Reel Take: I admit that prior to seeing Hitchcock, I had reservations. From the trailers, I thought Anthony Hopkins looked possibly even creepier as Alfred Hitchcock than he did as Hannibal Lechter. After seeing it, I can tell you the trailers don’t do the film justice and Hopkins is delicious as ‘The Master of Suspense.’
Unfortunately Hitchcock is being critically maligned for being too light and not a serious biopic. They are right, it is light and it’s certainly not a biopic. It’s an utterly good-hearted romp and entertaining look at the marriage of Alfred Hitchcock and Alma Reville (Helen Mirren) during the making of Psycho. Hitchcock himself would (I think) be quite pleased with the result. If it’s good enough for the great Alfred Hitchcock, it’s good enough for the rest of us.
The film is fun and wonderfully odd in an Alfred Hitchcock Presents kind of way. Director Sacha Gervasi, whose only previous directing credit is for a documentary about the Canadian rock band Anvil, has a knack for comedy and obviously a healthy respect for the titular character. The film picks up as Hitchcock is looking for his next project, following the success of North by Northwest. He is at the top of his game, but wants to raise the stakes of the game. When he sets his sights on Psycho, he owes one more picture to Paramount, they don’t want it. Even when Hitchcock finances the film himself, the studio still pushes back against it, dubbing it a picture “about a queer killing people in his mother’s dress.”
The risk Hitchcock takes to make Psycho puts a strain on his 30 year marriage to Alma Reville who, fed up with being taken for granted and annoyed by his fantasy affairs with his leading ladies, decides to make Hitch sweat a little by collaborating with a man who does pay her attention, screenwriter Whitfield Cook (Danny Huston). With the mere power of suggestion (a distinctly Hitchcock trait), we see what happens in the mind of the man, whose imagination is in the process of creating the scariest horror movie to date, as he frets about his wife’s fidelity.
As his mind runs wild, he is occasionally given advice by the serial killer who was the inspiration for Norman Bates. These are odd deviations and don’t necessarily fit with the rest of the movie, but I found them inventive and befitting the Hitchcock imagination. Alma, of course, does not leave Hitch or nor does she leave him hanging. He needs her expert eye to help edit Psycho into the cinematic phenomenon that was to take the world by storm. You know the old saying, “Behind every great man …”
Hopkins seems to relish the role with every Hitchcockian syllable. Helen Mirren doesn’t look like Alma, but she’s fantastic, so a lack of resemblance mattered not to me. James D’Arcy as Anthony Perkins is eerily, wonderfully good. The rest of the supporting cast including Scarlett Johansson, Jessica Biel and Danny Huston all turn in fine performances. Hitchcock may not be a great film, but it great fun.
Rated PG-13 for some violent images, sexual content and thematic material
Review by Michelle Keenan
Hyde Park on Hudson ***1/2
Short Take: Pleasant but not particularly engaging movie about FDR’s ongoing affair with his cousin Daisy during a visit by the King and Queen of England right before the outbreak of World War II.
Reel Take: Moviegoers of an earlier time will recall a different film of FDR, that of Sunrise at Campobello (1960) based on a Broadway play and starring Ralph Bellamy in his signature role. That took place in 1921 and dealt with the 40 year old, pre-Presidential FDR coming down with polio and his attempts to master the disease that left him crippled for the rest of his life. Buoyed by adoring family and friends, he is able to overcome numerous setbacks and make a successful return to the public eye at the 1924 Democratic Convention.
Hyde Park on Hudson takes place in 1939 just before the outbreak of World War II and gives us a very different picture of FDR (Bill Murray). Here, uninhibited by the production code, we see FDR, warts and all, as a heavy drinker and a philanderer who is having an affair with his distant cousin Daisy (Laura Linney) but who is still the Commander-in-Chief and very much in control of his surroundings despite the interference of his mother (Elizabeth Wilson) and his wife Eleanor (Olivia Williams).
In addition to a family that is anything but harmonious (Eleanor’s bisexuality and dominating personality are fully on display here), FDR must entertain the King and Queen of England marking the first time the British Royal family has ever appeared in America. They are King George VI (of King’s Speech fame and the current monarch’s father) and his wife Elizabeth who are wonderfully portrayed by Samuel West, complete with stutter, and Olivia Colman.
The movie is essentially a character study, but done in the style of a Lifetime Movie of the Week. Bill Murray makes an excellent FDR showing his complete control of whatever situation he happens to be in. He conveys considerable charm when it comes to dealing with the ladies (except Eleanor) and makes an approving father figure for the young King George who so desperately needs one.
Laura Linney is normally a very fine actress but in Hyde Park she is just sort of there. It’s not entirely her fault as the screenplay by Richard Wilson, based on the letters and diaries of the real Daisy, doesn’t really give her very much to do. Elizabeth Marvel, fresh from The Bourne Legacy, makes a strong impression as Missy, FDR’s aide and occasional tryst partner.
Director Roger Michell, best known for Notting Hill (1999), has captured the look and the period feel of the late 1930s but his easy going approach to the essentially bland material insures that the film itself will be rather on the bland side. Hyde Park on the Hudson is not a bad movie and it will certainly appeal to an older audience but despite some fine performances it could have been so much better.
Rated R for brief sexuality.
Review by Chip Kaufmann
Les Miserables *****
Short Take: Outstanding film adaptation of the long running musical has a strong cast (Hugh Jackman, Russell Crowe, Anne Hathaway), spectacular cinematography, and remarkable direction from Tom Hooper (The King’s Speech).
Reel Take: During my junior and senior years in high school, I worked my way through several of Victor Hugo’s novels in English translations. I began with The Hunchback of Notre Dame because I had seen several different movie versions of the story. I then moved on to Les Miserables, The Man Who Laughs, and The Toilers of the Sea with the latter being my favorite at the time. After college, when life took over, I forgot about Victor Hugo and Les Miserables for many years even after seeing three different film versions.
Almost 40 years later, the last 30 of them here in Asheville, I became acquainted with Les Miserables once again through the musical version affectionately known as Les Miz. Originally a concept album (like Jesus Christ Superstar only in French), the stage version opened in London in 1985 to initially lukewarm reviews until word of mouth made it the sensation it is today. My daughter became interested in it a few years ago and because of her I listened to the score and fell in love with it.
Movie adaptations of stage musicals can be problematic to say the least ranging from excellent (Phantom of the Opera) to indifferent (Sweeney Todd) to terrible (Man of La Mancha). I am happy to report that this film adaptation is an unqualified success in virtually all departments.
First and foremost are the characterizations which are very good indeed from Hugh Jackman’s touching, defiant, and humble Jean Valjean to Russell Crowe’s magisterial Inspector Javert to Anne Hathaway’s endearing and pathetic Fantine. The really pleasant surprise is Samantha Barks’ heartbreaking interpretation of Eponine who dominates every scene she’s in. All are in great voice with the exception of Crowe who makes up for it with his powerful and dominating presence.
The only discordant note for me and it’s a very minor one are the performances of Sacha Baron Cohen and Helena Bonham Carter as Eponine’s parents, the nefarious Thenardiers. Instead of characterizations both actors indulge in shticks that they have done before in other movies but this is a minor quibble as their roles are reduced from the original musical.
After the characters comes the look of the movie itself and it is lavishly staged and superbly photographed and was everything that I was hoping Les Miz would be. Tom Hooper directs all this with a sure hand showing that he can handle the large scale complexities of a project this size with the same assurance that he brought to the intimate personal drama of The King’s Speech.
So ignore the hype and forget the trailers. Les Miserables is finally here and it makes for the perfect holiday offering especially on the big screen and with glorious sound. I haven’t gotten this involved in a movie musical since The Phantom of the Opera back in 2004. When everything comes together as it did then and it does here then it makes for a truly remarkable movie going experience.
Rated PG-13 for suggestive and sexual material and for violence and thematic elements.
Review by Chip Kaufmann
Promised Land ***1/2
Short Take: This well meaning message picture from Matt Damon about the consequences of natural gas fracking is just too lightweight to be truly effective.
If this movie had been made a generation ago, then the director-star would have been Robert Redford. Star Matt Damon was originally scheduled to direct but due to prior commitments he wound up relinquishing the director’s chair to his old friend Gus Van Sant renewing a partnership that began with Good Will Hunting in 1997.
Reel Take: So far, so good or so it would seem yet somewhere between concept and execution, something got lost in the process. What should have been a really good film is only an OK film that could have been a lot better. It plays well but when it’s over you realize that you’ve already forgotten most of it.
Damon plays Steve Butler a conglomerate representative who, along with his partner (Frances McDormand), are sent to a small rural town in Pennsylvania to obtain land contracts so that the company can begin extracting natural gas from people’s properties through the process of fracking. A local schoolteacher (Hal Holbrook) raises objections and asks the town to put it to a vote.
While trying to fit in with the locals so that he can get their votes on the local referendum, Butler becomes attracted to a local woman (Rosemary DeWitt) but then has to deal with the sudden appearance out of an outside environmentalist (John Krasinski) who threatens to win the people over and have them vote his way.
Fracking has become a hot button topic of late and Promised Land does have that in its favor. However it can’t make up its mind as to whether it wants to be a hard hitting expose or an examination of the values of small town America that had been hit hard by the recession. In trying to do both it winds up doing justice to neither.
Damon is likeable enough and is more than ably supported by McDormand who gets all the good lines but DeWitt’s part is so insignificant as to be negligible. Hal Holbrook is as wise and as patriarchal as you would expect him to be but the real surprise here is John Krasinski. His environmentalist who turns out to have a secret is effortlessly engaging. I found myself caring more about him than I did Damon.
In the long run Promised Land is well intentioned and well made but it has no staying power and that’s not good for a movie that wants to make a statement. If Damon and Van Sant didn’t want to make a statement than the movie needed to be more entertaining than it was. Considering the talent that was involved, I was expecting more and I just didn’t get it. Maybe you will. Danny Elfman’s score didn’t help either.
Rated R for language.
Review by Chip Kaufmann
Silver Linings Playbook ****1/2
Short Take: A delightfully edgy romantic comedy about two people that proves the old adage, “there is someone for everyone.”
Reel Take: The idea of a mainstream Hollywood romantic comedy about two mentally unbalanced and socially inappropriate people was cringe inducing. However, when I heard David O. Russell would be directing the adaptation of Michael Quick’s novel, I had hope for the project. With Russell at the helm, so-called ‘quirky’ characters would likely be allowed to be themselves without being made over to a more pasteurized, conventional version of quirky. Nor would it be insulting to people with mental illness. My hunch was right.
Silver Linings Playbook is one of the best films of 2012. It is simultaneously edgy and dark, funny and touching. Pat (Bradley Cooper) is a former teacher with bi-polar disorder and anger management issues. At the beginning of the film his mother (Jackie Weaver) is springing him from the mental institution, where he’s spent the last eight months after violently attacking his wife’s lover. Pat is newly invigorated; inspired by his belief is a silver lining. He intends to win back his wife and rebuild his life. The problem is he’s still bat shit crazy.
At a dinner party, he meets Tiffany (Jennifer Lawrence). Tiffany is a young widow and the town tramp. Her issues are born more from insecurity, depression and pervasive loneliness than anything else. One of the film’s funniest scenes comes at the dinner party when Pat and Tiffany swap stories about psychiatric medications and their side effects, much to the dismay of their hosts.
Tiffany is interested in Pat straight away, but Pat still has his sights on his wife Nikki (Brea Bee). Tiffany’s sister Veronica (Julia Stiles) is friends with Nikki, so Tiffany agrees to get a note from Pat to Nikki, but he has to do her a favor as well. She wants to enter a dance competition but needs a partner. What ensues is crazy, discombobulated, perfect match in the making.
Cooper, who executive produced the film, in order to help get it made, clearly relished the opportunity to play a character like Pat. Pat speaks in a slightly odd cadence and a little louder than usual, he’s intense about everything, and he doesn’t blink much. Pat has done a horrible thing, but somehow Cooper brings a level of hope and humanity to Pat that makes us root for him. Meanwhile Jennifer Lawrence, who impressed me enormously in Winter’s Bone, thoroughly shines as Tiffany. Tiffany is ball of insecurities; defensiveness is wrapped around self-loathing, she’s lonely but socially a bit of misfit, but somehow at the center of it all is hope.
The ups and downs and twists and turns of our character’s personalities are a terrific ride. The supporting cast, including Robert DeNiro as Pat’s father and Chris Tucker as a fellow psych case, is great. The climax of the movie was more conventional than I would have expected, but I didn’t mind. Ironically by the end of the movie our bi-polar hero with violent tendencies is Mr. Sensitive, but then again they don’t call it a silver lining for nothing.
Russell is purported to have a bit of a temper himself. Perhaps it’s his own issues that help him interpret this story with chaos, pathos and above all, heart.
Rated R for language and some sexual content/nudity.
Review by Michelle Keenan
Zero Dark Thirty ****1/2
Short Take: The hunt and eventual capture of 9/11 mastermind and Al Quaida leader, Osama Bin Laden.
Reel Take: Considering we know how it ends, Zero Dark Thirty is a remarkably suspenseful telling of the 10 year hunt for Osama Bin Laden. Director Kathryn Bigelow and writer-producer Mark Boal smartly set the tone from the get go with blackened screen and audio from September 11, 2001, starting with the initial news reports and then a reassuring conversation between a 911 operator and a worker in one of the towers – a conversation cut short, raising every hair on the back of our necks and sending every memory from that horrible day to the forefront of our minds. This was a powerful and effective creative choice. I was extremely grateful that they did not subject us to images of the towers yet again, that so many filmmakers would have done.
When the screen brightens the setting is a secret interrogation site in Pakistan. The interrogation of an Al Qaida suspect with ties to Osama Bin Laden has been going on for quite a while. He is beaten and bloodied and strung up. When he is cut down he is water boarded and stuffed in a small crate. Watching the process for the first time (just like the audience) is a young CIA operative named Maya.
Maya becomes the central figure in the story of the search for Bin Laden. To say the opening scenes are uncomfortable to watch is an understatement, but in time we harden to it right along with our heroine. Maya is younger than the rest of the team. When the aforementioned interrogator, Dan, (Jason Clarke) asks if she’s got the chops for this work, he’s told, “Washington says she’s a killer.” Much later in the movie we learn that the CIA recruited her right out of high school. Beyond that Maya has no back story. She is singularly focused on their work. She becomes friends with Dan and another operative (Jennifer Ehle), but these are the only bonds we see her form and they do not detract from her focus.
After years of interrogations and research, she stumbles on to a common thread involving a man who she believes is Bin Laden’s personal courier. Testing her theory, she realizes that if they can get to the courier, they can get Bin Laden. After navigating the bureaucratic waters of Washington for what seems an eternity, her relentless steely resolve is rewarded with the covert operation that finally brings Bin Laden down.
As we watch the SEAL Team 6 operation unfold, I found myself sitting forward in my seat and holding my breath. The flight in over the mountains and the raid of Bin Laden’s compound, all seen through night vision goggles, is riveting. Many will wonder how in heck we ever pulled it off, but we did.
There couldn’t have been a more perfect teaming than reteaming Kathryn Bigelow and Mark Boal (The Hurt Locker) to make Zero Dark Thirty. In researching the story, Boal said one woman in particular caught his interest and that’s how they came to form the story around the character of Maya.
Bieglow and Boal elegantly show the complexity and layers of the story without sacrificing suspense and action. They raise moral and ethical questions in the hunt for Bin Laden, but leave the audience to make up their own minds. As Jennifer Ehle’s character says in the film, “Here’s to big breaks and the little people who make them happen.” If there is a must see film for 2012, Zero Dark Thirty is it.
Rated R for strong violence, including brutal disturbing images, and for language.
Review by Michelle Keenan
