Lincoln

There are two pretty grotesquely awful moments in Lincoln, Steven Spielberg's semi-biopic of America's 16th President, and they, coincidentally or not, come at the very beginning and very end of the film.  In the opening scene Lincoln is surveying a battlefield and two soldiers, mostly unbidden, recite the Gettysburg Address at him (one of the soldiers is played by Lukas Haas, which is either a very sly cameo or an indication that Lukas Haas is further down the Hollywood food chain than I would have thought.)  Perhaps there's an interpretation for this scene that I'm missing, but all I read is a filmmaker who feels that the 16th President needs an introductory moment to lay out who he is and Why This All Matters.  On the other end of the film there are essentially two endings, both equally execrable, first with Lincoln's assassination and then with a flashback to the 2nd inaugural address.

These scenes, all three of them, show a distinct lack of trust in the audience to place the events of the film in context on their own, something which comes up over and over (and over) with Spielberg, which is perhaps why he's always been more of a populist filmmaker than a critical darling.  And it's a shame, because Lincoln is mostly a well-crafted biopic that manages to draw a vivid portrait of its subject matter without ever (except for the aforementioned scenes) feeling like a trip through the Big Events, the jukebox musical version of a biopic (think Ray, for instance).  Tony Kushner's screenplay takes one specific event (the push for the passage of the 13th Amendment, outlawing slavery once and for all in the United States) and uses it as a prism to explore Lincoln as a whole man rather than an amber-preserved historical figure, and it is a very effective script, with a major assist going to Daniel Day-Lewis' almost preternaturally gifted performance.

I'm on record that I generally prefer a star turn performance (say, Brad Pitt in Moneyball) than a method-y, over-accented performance, but it's kind of impossible to look at what Day-Lewis is doing in Lincoln and not be awestruck.  This would be a career capper if he hadn't just put one in a few years ago in There Will Be Blood, but his Lincoln is as small and sweet and lived-in as Daniel Plainview was large and apocalyptic and just downright weird.  (Throughout much of Lincoln's very long pre-production period, Liam Neeson was supposed to play the role, and whatever anyone thinks of latter-day Neeson he would have been several steps down from Day-Lewis.)  Tommy Lee Jones has the film's second showiest role as Thaddeus Stevens, and it's nice to see him put in the effort for a change (no one checks out of a film that he doesn't care about faster than Jones), and Sally Field is on hand to lend her own gravitas to Mary Todd, but other than Day-Lewis the best parts of the casting come from character actors given meaty parts - TV favorites David Costabile and Walton Goggins both get nice showcases as members of Congress, S. Epatha Merkerson shows up in a small but pivotal role as someone close to Stevens, and the trio of James Spader, John Hawkes and Tim Blake Nelson get all of the film's funniest non-Lincoln moments as a trio of operatives working behind the scenes to press members of Congress on the passage of the Amendment.

And that's probably the most surprising part of the film; not how serious Lincoln is (and he is) but how funny and charming the film allows him to be.  He has a tendency to speak in folksy stories and homespun wisdom, while the characters around him look on half in admiration and half in exasperation; it's obvious that this is how his friends and family are used to being delivered wisdom by him.  It's a clever conceit, one that (I think) is mostly historically accurate, and it takes some of the stuffiness out of what is, at base, another one of those stories about the men of Congress passive-aggressively sniping at one another and then eventually taking a monumental, historical vote.  I wish Spielberg had had the faith in the audience to bookend his film with scenes that fit the tone of the rest of the movie, but we still got a pretty damn good Lincoln movie anyway.  A-

Argo

The CIA-led Iranian coup of 1953, which deposed Mohammed Mossadegh in favor of Shah Reza Pahlavi, was something of a Patient Zero in the warped relationship the United States has with the Middle East.  The Shah became one of the world's most despised leaders and the Iranian people, quite rightly it turned out, blamed the United States (and the UK) for meddling in its internal affairs in favor of a man who ran the country as a ruthless autocrat.  The Muslim world in general came to distrust the intentions of the United States, and the end of the Cold War focused that mistrust into a mutually-held fear of the Other.

I don't mean to damn Argo with faint praise when I say that its opening section, when it summarizes this history in the form of a Persepolis-esque series of cartoon images, is perhaps its most impressive.  Director Ben Affleck manages to hit the major points in this history in an interesting visual way, setting the scene for the film's tableau during the 1979 revolution that ended the Shah's reign and put Ayatollah Khomeini in charge of the country.  It is, to be fair, at least a slightly simplified history, mostly leaving out the justified fear that the Western powers had that Mossadegh would draw Iran closer to the Soviet sphere of influence in favor of a purely oil-based justification, but it is still very effective.

As everyone surely knows by know, Argo is the story of six American diplomats who managed to escape the US Embassy in Tehran for the Canadian ambassador's residence just prior to the 1979 hostage crisis, and their extrication from the country before they were discovered by the Ayatollah's agents.  Affleck stars as Tony Mendez, an exfiltration specialist, who concocts a cover story in which the six diplomats pretend to be the Canadian film crew for a Hollywood-produced, low-budget science fiction movie named Argo (in reality, an adaptation of a fairly well known science fiction novel, Roger Zelazny's Lord of Light.)  John Goodman and Alan Arkin portray the production team that helped Mendez build the cover story, and Bryan Cranston plays Mendez's boss at the CIA.

Argo neatly cleaves into two stories - there is the plight of the six diplomats, both before Mendez shows up to help them and after, and there is the story of Mendez putting together a fake movie in sun-drenched 70's Hollywood.  The mid-film tonal shift into the Hollywood portion is somewhat jarring, but Affleck has enough confidence as a filmmaker (and as an old Hollywood veteran himself, who certainly knows his subjects as well as anyone) to make it work.  It helps that Goodman and Arkin give the film its two most interesting characters, Hollywood hustlers par excellence who see the Argo plan as their one big shot to do something of true substance.  The six diplomats are much less well-defined - the film only gives them a few scenes to develop as characters, and other than the way they wear their hair (and facial hair) it is sometimes difficult to tell them apart, except for the fact that a few of them are played by semi-recognizable actors (Tate Donovan, Clea DuVall and Rory Cochrane are the three whose names I knew).  Mendez is also something of a problem - Affleck gives himself by far the biggest role in the film, and while his performance is perfectly serviceable, it lacks anything remotely resembling a spark.  I tried to think about how I would recast the role, and my initial instinct was Mark Ruffalo, but there are just a lot of working actors who would have brought more to the role than Affleck is capable of.

But we're not here to discuss Affleck the actor, who is what he is, we're here to talk about Affleck the filmmaker.  And while I thought the storytelling was solidly delivered in Argo (despite the relative flatness of the characters) my biggest complaint of the film was just how flop-sweaty some of the thriller elements were. There are just too many scenes where everything is on the knife's edge of completely falling apart, and while I am willing to allow some dramatic license to enhance the story, at some point I just stopped believing what was happening on screen in any meaningful way.  The story that Argo is based on is a fascinating one, and I wish Affleck had trusted in its details more, and embellished them less (some of this also has to rest on the shoulders of screenwriter Chris Terrio).  It is still a good film, and the storytelling is extremely efficient.  I have yet to see The Town, but between this film and Gone Baby Gone, Affleck certainly has an eye for the lived-in details of the worlds he is creating (the Argo table read in the Hollywood section is worth the price of admission all by itself, like Ed Wood's version of the Star Wars cantina).  I wish this film had more trust that the audience would follow the real details of the story, as opposed to the Hollywood-ized version, but I suppose that's what happens when you make a fake film within a real film about real events.  On some level, everything that comes out of Hollywood is bullshit, and eventually it all comes down to arguing about degrees.  B

Compliance

I can pinpoint the exact moment at which I stopped believing the story being told in Compliance.  Fast food restaurant manager Sandra (Ann Dowd) has been on the phone with a man purporting to be a police officer named Daniels (Pat Healy), told that her employee Becky (Dreama Walker) had stolen something from a customer earlier in the day, and essentially deputized over the phone and ordered to conduct an interrogation and strip search in order to get at the truth.  Naturally, "Officer" Daniels is no such thing, and is conducting an unspeakably cruel prank for reasons which remain mysterious.  Sandra is told that she needs to bring a man into the room where she's holding Becky to watch after her and after another employee, Kevin (Phillip Ettinger) balks at the assignment of keeping tabs on a half-naked Becky, Sandra calls her fiance, Van (Bill Camp), who leaves his construction worker friends to come to the restaurant.  Once Van is in the room alone with Becky, the caller orders him to take an escalating series of liberties with the cowed Becky, and Van complies.  How could he believe that this was a police officer who was telling him to do such unspeakable things?  No one could be that naive, or that cruel.

The twist here, if you'll indulge me in calling it that, is that Compliance isn't simply "based on a true story" as it purports (I mean, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre claimed to be based on a true story, and that's only true in the absolute loosest sense of the phrase) but takes something pretty close to a documentary level of realism with the facts of the case (this case, and reading the details will both horrify you to the soul, and spoil you on the film, so be warned on both accounts.)  All of the real people involved did act in the exact ways that the film suggests they did, and this isn't some threadbare urban legend, this is a criminal case with filmed corroboration that happened in a real place to real people.  The young woman who was victimized, Louise Ogborn, has been remarkably forthcoming about the case, and all parties involved have been filtered through the justice system in one way or another.  It turns out that people aren't simply capable of acting in the bafflingly cruel ways that they act in this film, but they did, in fact, act in those ways.

The film is mostly successful in its storytelling - the story is harrowing and deeply, deeply uncomfortable, and director Craig Zobel tells it with a straightforward efficiency.  Dowd's performance holds the film together, her reticence about the tasks she's asked to do but extreme deference to authority giving the outlandish nature of what's happening somewhere to rest in real space.  Walker has to be alternately defiant, cowed and broken, and she acquits herself well.  Zobel's insistence on the procedural details of getting us from point A to B (a strange man calls a restaurant out of the blue, and the people involved wind up committing sexual assault because of his suggestions) means that we get somewhat short-shrift with the characters - it would have been nice to have known a little bit more about Becky, and about Van and Sandra's relationship prior to this, although I will say that I appreciate that he did not attempt to psychoanalyze "Officer Daniels", a character (and real person, who is named David R. Stewart and who managed to wrangle an acquittal from the justice system) who doesn't deserve anything more than a cursory analysis.

People have commented on the meta-analysis of the film - in a story that strips away the humanity of its main victim by forcing her to strip for strangers, there is a level of audience compliance in the story, in that we are voyeurs watching Walker strip down.  I think Zobel does a pretty good job of walking the line between uncomfortable nudity and titillating nudity, and the film never feels exploitative of Walker the way it very easily could.  But the very nature of how film works means that we are, at least in part, enacting the same drama, in a small way, that the people who went along with stripping Ogborn of her clothes and her humanity enacted, and that is an uncomfortable proposition that has to be wrestled with.  The second meta-layer is that everyone in this film has a real-life counterpart, and especially for the victim (who was not consulted on the film, and that is an issue that I don't feel confident opining about), the entire world now has the option of re-enacting the most traumatic night of her life in real time for entertainment purposes.  I'm not really sure what to make of that - it is a troubling story that can and should be told, and it has some obvious (and some less obvious) lessons for all of us in its dissemination.  But boy, the troubling nature of this film only barely touches the surface, and there are layers upon layers if you keep digging.  B

Beasts of the Southern Wild

5-year-old Hushpuppy (Quvenzhané Wallis) and her father Wink (Dwight Henry) eke out a meager but seemingly happy existence in the Bathtub, a sort of "based on a real location" version of the wilds of the Louisiana bayou which exists on the other side of one of the levees that protects the population centers further north.  When the big storm hits and others flee the danger of the Bathtub for more solid ground, Hushpuppy and Wink (along with some of their neighbors) choose to ride out the storm at their homes, come what may.  The storm brings complications which threaten their community, and Hushpuppy has to find a way to survive both the encroaching influence of the authorities, as well as Wink's failing health.

Katrina was a seminal event for New Orleans, and for America at large, but the low-lying parts of Louisiana are constantly under threat, both from storms (smaller storms than Katrina can do quite a bit of damage) and from the slow rising of the level of the sea.  Beasts of the Southern Wild plays directly into our post-Katrina understanding of this part of the world, but the status quo of the Louisiana bayou is much more tenuous than perhaps most people realize.  There is something to be said for the maintenance of that status quo, and there is something to be said about the way Katrina affected the lives of the people even further down the totem pole of American society than the forgotten residents of the Ninth Ward, people like Hushpuppy and Wink who exist on the very fringes of society itself.  The problem with Beasts is just how little it establishes why that status quo is worth saving, and why anyone should look on the life that Hushpuppy is being raised in as anything other than borderline child abuse.  And I use that "borderline" very hesitantly, not only because Wink is not above physical abuse, but because the life Wink has chosen to give Hushpuppy on the bayou is one that is constantly on the edge of even mere subsistence - there is a scene in the film where she nonchalantly cooks up a pot of pet food to eat.  Hushpuppy goes to a version of school along with a handful of other children living in the same area, but her teacher seems more interested in apocalyptic tales of Biblical-level destruction than in teaching them the basics of learned society.  These kids are basically a lost cause for true societal integration before they've even had the chance to make that choice for themselves, and while I find that idea deeply troubling, the film very clearly takes for granted the notion that the threatened existence of these people is something to be treasured.

Wallis gives a surprisingly subtle performance as Hushpuppy, although the movie mostly asks her to be spunky and fiesty - she was nominated for an Oscar, which seems a little gimmicky, but her performance certainly works within the context of the film.  Henry's performance as Wink is a significantly bigger problem - he was famously cast as a non-actor, and while he's not a complete embarrassment by any stretch, he is constantly putting the needle in the red where a defter, subtler touch is called for.

Director Benh Zeitlin unquestionably has an eye for bringing out some of the beauty of this part of the world, although he has a predilection for shaky-cam shots that gets a little tedious after a while.  I don't doubt his sincerity about wanting to tell a story about the forgotten denizens of a forgotten place, but that sincerity excuses too many terrible choices being made by the film's characters, particularly Wink.  I can understand why some people have fallen in love with this film, as its moments of triumph and catharsis are beautifully staged and shot.  But they betray a hollowness at its core that I could never get past.  Wink and his neighbors may choose to live in a meager libertarian paradise, but that doesn't mean I have to condone the choice.  D+

Zero Dark Thirty

There's a moment towards the end of the second act of Zero Dark Thirty when the CIA director (played by an actor in a mostly unbilled cameo that I won't spoil) polls his operatives, including dogged pursuer Maya (Jessica Chastain), about the odds that the compound in Abbotabad, Pakistan actually houses Osama bin Laden.  Sixty percent they mostly agree on, although one says 80 and Maya is absolutely, 100% certain that UBL, as they call him, resides there.  60 is a big number but it's not that big in context, given what Maya's ultimate goal is, which is to kill bin Laden.  Maya would prefer to simply drop a bomb on the compound but that number, 60, means that the higher-ups are skittish about the operation, and they choose to send a strike force in instead, a decision which puts American lives at risk but which allows for a bit more nuance in terms of who lives and who dies inside the walls of the compound.  If a Saudi drug dealer lives in the compound with his family, and a bomb is dropped on top of it, very uncomfortable questions will be asked of the US government by the Pakistanis.

Zero Dark Thirty is a film that, more than anything else, pulses with the energy of a supremely confident filmmaker who knows exactly how to ratchet up and release tension, even when not much more is happening on screen but two people talking to each other about what some tiny shred of intelligence actually means.  Kathryn Bigelow has always been a talented visual stylist, but she's found a collaborator in screenwriter Mark Boal who has allowed her, first in the masterful Oscar winner The Hurt Locker and now in this film, to deploy her talents on a film that has real substance.  The story of the hunt for Osama bin Laden is one of countless numbers of people, working across all manner of intelligence and bureaucratic agencies, painstakingly putting together the pieces of where bin Laden was hiding.  Boal takes that story and filters it through Maya, a character who, thanks to Jessica Chastain's typically excellent work, we come to empathize with and genuinely care about, even though we know next to nothing about who she is.  A rotating cast fills out the edges of her story; Kyle Chandler, Jason Clarke, Mark Strong, Joel Edgerton, Jennifer Ehle and a number of other actors flit in and out of the story but Maya always remains, with her eyes fixed on the one target that she desperately wants to find.

That 60 percent number is where the film resides.  If the Maya (and the other CIA agents) had been wrong, no one ever makes Zero Dark Thirty, because it's just another failed, and subsequently covered-up, operation.  Sixty percent is, realistically, the best anyone can do under the circumstances, because that is how intelligence works, with percentages and probabilities, not certainties.  Maya believes in her own certainty, but the people in charge of making the decision can't afford to be anything less than completely honest about the mission.  In the end, the film is, at its heart, a revenge flick, and revenge flicks don't exist without closing the book on the target of their vengeance.  The toll the hunt takes on Maya is obvious in the closing scene but the truth is that the killing of Osama bin Laden from the audience's perspective is a cathartic moment.  Just like there is no such thing as an anti-war movie, there is no such thing as an anti-revenge movie.  This film earns its vengeance, even if it might not be completely satisfied with it.

It is, of course, not possible to talk about this film without at least mentioning its politics - I believe that it is a film whose politics are, by and large, those that a person brings to bear on it.  If you believe that America's torture program was (and is) absolutely crucial in the fight against international terrorism, there is plenty here that would suggests that you are right.  If you believe (as I do) that America's torture program was a practical failure and a morally repugnant turn for this country, there is evidence for that too.  However you feel about legally sanctioned torture, the film does not allow anyone off the hook for what it actually looks like on the ground, the brutality and degradation of it, and I appreciated that fact, even if I maintain some degree of trepidation about just how much of the film's point of view is with the CIA.

This is a film about the slow but steady accumulation of intelligence, and also about how quests for revenge change the perspective of those who engage in them.  Just as surely as Osama bin Laden ultimately got precisely what he deserved, it is reasonable to inquire what, exactly, the continuing quest for justice, one that did not truly end with his death, has cost America.  Zero Dark Thirty, by focusing on Maya, asks that question obliquely, but it is always there, traveling along with the film, even as it thrills on the surface.  A

Magic Mike

It's not hard to believe that Magic Mike is a semi-autobiographical film based on Channing Tatum's brief career as a Tampa-area stripper in the late-90's, and not just because Tatum has the physique and dance moves of, well, a male stripper.  It's also because Mike Lane, the character he plays in the film, has the same go-go hustle that an actor of as limited abilities as Tatum possesses must also have in order to have turned himself into one of the most interesting film stars of the last 5 years.

Magic Mike, as he is known, is the star attraction of the all-male strip club run by Dallas (Matthew McConaughey).  Mike, naturally, considers stripping a temporary gig, something to provide him with the sort of money he needs to start his own business. What little thread of a plot there is running through the film involves Lane taking a directionless young man named Adam (Alex Pettyfer) under his wing as the latest member of the revue, while simultaneously falling for Adam's sister Brooke (Cody Horn).

Steven Soderbergh films Florida with a sort of washed-out, sun-dappled color scheme - it doesn't look ugly, per se, but Tampa's limited charms are certainly presented with very little glamour.  The first half of the film is mostly just a character study, as we explore Mike's life through the eyes of Adam, and simultaneously watch Adam discover just how much talent he has, not only for stripping, but for the lifestyle that comes along with selling sex to eager women until the wee hours of the morning.  I couldn't begin to tell you how a wooden actor like Tatum has managed to craft himself into a film star but between this film and 21 Jump Street (which he stole from Jonah Hill) there is simply no getting around the fact that he arrived as a genuine talent in 2012.  McConaughey has gotten most of the awards-season attention (and he is indeed bursting with charm here as the older, retired version of Mike) but Tatum carries the film from start to finish, and his performance is the real revelation.  I was less enamored of both Pettyfer and Horn; Pettyfer does a passable job selling the fairly unlikable Adam, but never really sells the idea that his character has the charisma to replace Mike as the star of the show.  Horn's performance travels from awful to simply mediocre, and the film frankly becomes less interesting once the plot, mostly involving Adam's various fuck-ups and Mike attempting to deal with them while Brooke looks on disapprovingly, begins to intrude on the purer pleasures of the front half.  But with Tatum and Soderbergh's guidance, what could have been "that male stripper movie" proves significantly more captivating than it has any right to be.  B+