Black Mass ****
Short Take: Biopic about the rise of Boston Irish mobster James ‘Whitey’ Bulger and his alliance with corrupt FBI agent John Connelly.
REEL TAKE: I like Johnny Depp, even when his career is in a slump, but I had some distinct reservations about Scott Cooper’s Black Mass, a biopic about the rise of James ‘Whitey’ Bulger. Having grown up primarily in the Boston area I, like everyone else, was aware of Boston mobster (‘The Satan of Southie’) James ‘Whitey’ Bulger and his ‘Winter Hill Gang’. He was renowned to most, feared by many and allegedly beloved by some. He was known to support the IRA, but back in the day IRA sympathizers marched in the St. Patrick’s Day Parade while rainbow flags were not allowed (time does take care of many things). By the time Whitey went off grid, living on the lam for 16 years, he was an urban legend.
Bulger’s capture in 2011 brought with it a renewed interest and a slew of books about him. I suppose it was only a matter of time until someone made a movie and not just loosely based on him a la Martin Scorsese’s The Departed (2006). The selection of Scott Cooper (Crazy Heart) to direct was an unexpected choice, but he does a solid job. Black Mass starts in the early 70s and focuses on Whitey’s rise in organized crime and his alliance with corrupt FBI agent John Connolly (Joel Edgerton), a fellow Irish-American kid who came up on the streets with him in Southie.
Interestingly Black Mass doesn’t focus solely on Whitey. In fact he’s almost a sub-character to the character of John Connolly. There’s good and bad to this. It keeps our knowledge of Whitey fairly superficial, but it makes the alliance between the Boston Irish mob and FBI, who take down the Italian mob, a very compelling story. For me it was this element, and the quality of the actors, that elevates Black Mass above standard biopic fare and mobster movies.
Australian actor Joel Edgerton, best known to American audiences for The Gift, Gatsby and Zero Dark Thirty, is terrific as Connelly, delivering just the right mix of bravado, cunning self righteousness and seedy underbelly. He deserves as much critical acclaim as Depp.
Whether Depp needed a comeback role, as the media has claimed, is questionable, but he has certainly earned their praise. He plays Whitey with a ferocious, brewing intensity and yet holds back with a steely reserve. Depp, who looks not a thing like Whitey Bulger, was heavily made up for the part to the point of distraction. The blue contact lenses designed to convey Whitey’s ice blue eyes are just bizarre. Nothing about them looks real, but as the story goes on they do work to affect Whitey’s persona.
The supporting cast, including Benedict Cumberbatch as unlikely pick to play Whitey’s politician brother Billy Bulger, Peter Sarsgaard as a sketchy small-time hoodlum, and Jesse Plemmons and Rory Cochrane as part of the Winter Hill Gang all deliver strong performances.
Black Mass is another performance driven film this month. If you like mobster movies and Dennis Lehane novels, it’s probably worth your while. Is it the definitive story of Whitey Bulger? No. But personally I don’t think the world needs to see that story. Black Mass is quite enough.
Rated R for brutal violence, language throughout, some sexual references and brief drug use.
Review by Michelle Keenan
Grandma ****
Short Take: A grumpy, gruff, widowed lesbian helps her granddaughter secure money for an abortion.
REEL TAKE: Lily Tomlin’s Grandma is getting rave reviews and currently has a 93% fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes. And while I too am giving a positive review, I do so with caveats. Audiences give it a 75% fresh rating and I would say that’s pretty fair. Writer-director Paul Weitz (About a Boy) turns in a work that seems tailor made for Tomlin. The story, in spite of its modern and topical context, is good but nothing new. It’s elevated by the performances of Tomlin and supporting cast members, including a superb Sam Elliott.
The film is being promoted as a comedy, but it carries too many moments of wrenching sadness and hurt to be marketed as such. Its comedic moments, of which there are many, make the proceedings more palatable, without belittling the issues at hand (of which there are also many). At its essence Grandma is ostensibly a bittersweet character study.
Lily Tomlin is Elle, a sharp-tongued, misanthropic poet and academic who is still grieving the loss of her longtime partner a year and half earlier. At the start of the film Elle is cruelly breaking up with her first girlfriend since the death of Violet. With her day off to a great start, it gets even better when her teenage granddaughter, Sage (Julia Garner), shows up on her doorstep needing $600, before the end of the day, for an abortion.
Elle, in debt for Violet’s medical bills and not one to be a slave to the system, cut up her credit cards and turned them into a wind chime. She doesn’t have the money, but she sets out with Sage to find the money and see her through her predicament. They climb into Vi’s old car (a 1955 Dodge Royal Lancer which Tomlin has owned in real life since 1975) and set off on a road trip of sorts, hitting up friends, acquaintances, old loves, and eventually family, for the cash they need. What ensues is a day of revelations and healing [of sorts].
Grandma clearly deals with some polarizing issues, but it is not a political movie. It, like most stories, deals with relationships and the human condition. In this case it’s also about the impact of the passage of time on life as is most profoundly played out in the scene between Tomlin and Elliott. This scene strikes a chord and lingers in the heart.
Cinematically there’s nothing much on display here, nor anything particularly new. But Tomlin’s performance is fantastic; its nuance is deceiving. She is powerful and unapologetic and yet full of pain and vulnerability. It’s great to see her in a lead role, and she deserves the accolades.
However, if you like your Grandmas to have a little more Hallmark and a little less bite, this may not be the movie for you.
Rated R for language and some drug use.
Review by Michelle Keenan
Meet the Patels ****
Short Take: Documentary meets romantic comedy in Ravi Patel’s journey to find his perfect match.
REEL TAKE: For most of us dating, in the hopes of meeting ‘the one,’ is never easy. It’s the source material for plenty a stand up comedian, romantic comedy, country western song and bad poetry. But throw in the elaborate processes of concerned and overly involved Indian-American parental units and now you also have the makings for – a documentary. Meet the Patels is one of the most charming documentaries you’re ever likely to see. Made by former Charlottean siblings Ravi and Geeta Patel, Meet the Patels is part documentary, part romantic comedy as it documents Ravi’s cross cultural journey to find love.
Ravi, an actor, and Geeta, a documentary filmmaker, are first generation Indian-Americans. Their parents, Champa and Vasant, are proud Indian-American immigrants, but traditional Indians no less. On the verge of turning 30, with no apparent matrimonial prospects in sight, Ravi’s parents decide it’s time for a family trip to the motherland to find Ravi a wife. This is when Ravi and Geeta decide to film the experience.
What Ravi’s parents don’t know is that he has just broken up with the only woman he’s ever dated seriously, a red-headed white girl from Connecticut. He dated Audrey for two years and never told his parents about her. Ravi always figured he’d settle down with a fellow Indian-American, someone who understood his family’s traditions, someone who understood what it was like to be him, or even more so, someone who knew what it means to be a Patel.
Ravi jokes that being a Patel in India is like being a Smith elsewhere, but really there’s so much more to it. This is where Ravi and Geeta excel. The siblings creatively, humorously, and lovingly illustrate cultural and generational differences in order to create cultural understanding.
Using the matchmaking process as its backdrop, Ravi and Geeta manage to create a film that meaningfully touches on the issues of culture clash, assimilation, modern values and traditional values, all while delivering a thoroughly enjoyable film. They make smart use of the dating game footage, cutting away from it to return to a cleverly animated narrative and interspersing the film with interviews with other Indian-American couples and even a few mixed race couples a la When Harry Met Sally.
As likable and enjoyable as this film is, there are [for me] two fairly petty grievances that work against it. The first is that they give up the punch line way too soon. This isn’t a huge flaw, but it would have made the reveal that much stronger if we hadn’t known exactly how it was going to end since almost the beginning of the film. The second thing is that I wondered how much of Ravi’s dedication to the matchmaking process was genuine and how much was done for the good of the film.
It’s easy to dismiss Meet the Patels as being slight. But after thinking on it for a few days, it’s breeziness and delightfulness doesn’t make it any less of a film. Generational, cultural, and economic differences, along with social pressures, parental pressures, and issues of skin tone were all addressed within the context of this warm and humorous familial tale. Love wins.
Rated PG for thematic elements, brief suggestive images and incidental smoking.
Review by Michelle Keenan
Pawn Sacrifice *****
Short Take: Edward Zwick’s biopic on Bobby Fischer and his 1972 World Championship chess matches with Boris Spassky is first rate in all departments and is a must see.
REEL TAKE: Pawn Sacrifice begins by focusing on Fischer’s childhood. It shows the early seeds of paranoia sown by his mother, a Jewish intellectual with Communist sympathies who was under surveillance by the FBI. The young Bobby was constantly asked to keep an eye out for FBI men. He started playing chess at an early age and by the age of 15 had participated in tournaments and was virtually unbeatable. He was briefly under the tutelage of William Lombardy, a former chess champion who had retired to become a Catholic priest.
Most of the rest of the film takes place in Reykjavik, Iceland focusing on the Championship matches with Boris Spassky. Fischer loses the first game and forfeits the second because he is bothered by cameras and crowd noise. He insists on moving to a back room to play and Spassky, who doesn’t want to win by default, agrees. Fischer won that game and then was willing to go back to the main stage. Game 6, which ended with Spassky applauding Fischer, is considered the greatest chess match ever played.
This basic description of what occurs gives no idea of how skillfully director Edward Zwick makes the game of chess exciting on film. It reminded me of how pool, through great cinematography and crisp editing, became more than just a game in the Paul Newman film The Hustler. But there is way more to Pawn Sacrifice than technical accomplishment. The performances by everyone involved, even the small parts, are exquisite.
Tobey Maguire worked for 9 years to bring this movie to the screen and his commitment shows. He captures all of Fischer’s qualities most of which are extremely unpleasant. He’s brilliant, arrogant, obsessive, and clearly paranoid. He also screams at and bullies his friends while treating his opponents with disdain. To say he is unlikeable is an understatement. But Maguire captures the essence of the man in a remarkable performance where the actor disappears and Fischer emerges.
However Maguire is not the whole show, far from it. Equally compelling, perhaps even more so, is Peter Sarsgaard as Father Bill Lombardy who is Fischer’s mentor, aide at tournaments, and the closest thing to a friend Bobby has. He has nothing but admiration for the chess player but is ultimately appalled at the man’s behavior. Liev Schreiber is given little to do as Spassky but he really makes the most of what he’s given.
Director Zwick, who is best remembered for Glory (1989), Blood Diamond (2006) and the TV series Thirtysomething (1987-1991), has turned in his finest work here as far as I’m concerned. He has crafted a remarkable movie that is technically accomplished while never losing sight of the human drama underneath. A highlight is his incorporation of period clips of the 1960s and 70s placing the Championship within the context of its time. The icing on the cake is a remarkably taut screenplay from Stephen Knight (Locke).
Pawn Sacrifice is being marketed as an art house movie which it certainly qualifies as but it really deserves a mainstream release as it is tense and exciting and would play well to just about any type of audience. Come Oscar time I hope to see the film come out with numerous nominations. It’s already in my Top 10 list for the year and I don’t see it dropping out. It’s that good so go see it but do it quickly as I don’t expect it to be around very long which is a real shame.
Rated PG-13 for brief strong language and some sexual content.
Review by Chip Kaufmann
The Visit ****
Short Take: M. Night Shyamalan returns to form with this low budget children-in-peril thriller which has its share of scares but is not a horror film.
REEL TAKE: I’ve never been one to jump on the let’s-bash-M.-Night-Shyamalan bandwagon. Shyamalan was unfortunate enough to have a monster hit early in his career with The Sixth Sense and ever since then, studios, critics, and audiences have wanted him to produce another. Once it became clear that he wasn’t going to, they abandoned him right and left.
While his follow-up movies have been a mixed bag, I have always been able to find some merit in them whether it be in Mel Gibson’s performance in Signs or the central idea of Nature fighting back in The Happening. Until his last two big budget failures The Last Airbender and After Earth, the focus in Shyamalan’s films had been his writing, for he is the 21st century Rod Serling. Most of his films play like extended Twilight Zone episodes with twist endings and/or a moral to be drawn from the proceedings.
The Visit marks a return to form and is the latest variation on the children-in-peril theme that goes all the way back to Hansel & Gretel. There is a twist, of course, but unlike The Sixth Sense, this twist is expected and it is that very expectation that makes the film as effective as it is. We can pretty much guess what it is early on but we just don’t know how it’s going to play out.
In addition to Hansel & Gretel there are also elements of Little Red Riding Hood. The story is Fairy Tale 101. Two children go to visit their grandparents whom they have never seen. Once there, a series of events unfold that place them in greater and greater danger. Finally in a welcome reversal of roles, it is the girl rather than the boy who takes charge and tries to save them.
Gifted 15 year old Becca (Olivia DeJonge) has decided that she is going to make a video documentary of the trip for their single mother (Kathryn Hahn) who hasn’t seen her parents since she ran away from home when she was 19. Her 12 year old brother Tyler (Ed Oxenbould) is precocious, has a dream of becoming a rapper, and has serious germ issues.
They are met with open arms by their grandparents (Deanna Dunagan & Peter McRobbie) who live in a small Pennsylvania town. At first everything is fine but you just know that that’s not going to last. Slowly the grandparents begin exhibiting some rather bizarre behavior and things go from good to bad to worse.
We get to see Becca rise to the occasion as she tries to figure out ways to keep them safe and then find a way for she and her brother to escape. All the while she continues making her documentary, making The Visit a film within a film. This allows Shyamalan the opportunity to poke fun at the “found footage’ form of horror film which is currently so popular.
There is a great deal of humor in The Visit which only adds to the tension when the serious parts return. While there are a few genuine scares, mostly of the old school variety (sudden loud noises, quick edits, ominous music), the movie is not a horror film but an old dark house thriller in modern guise.
The performances by a cast of unknowns (especially DeJonge) are great and the screenplay is well written. The movie was made on a micro budget of $5 million and Shyamalan has talked about how liberating it was to focus only on story and character rather than technical things. Rod Serling would be pleased.
Rated PG-13 for disturbing content including violence and brief nudity.
Review by Chip Kaufmann