“IF YOU WANT a vision of the future,” George Orwell once remarked, “imagine a boot stamping on a human face – forever.” If that’s a grim forecast, it’s also a strikingly apropos one in relation to “Looper,” a dystopic sci-fi flick from writer-director Rian Johnson (“Brick,” “The “Brothers Bloom”). It’s the second best science fiction film of 2012, after the even loopier “Prometheus.”
The face-stamping boot in “Looper” belongs to Bruce Willis (old Joe), a contract killer working for a crime syndicate in the future, who returns to the year 2044 to confront a younger version of himself (played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt). Because time travel has been outlawed, young Joe is a bad guy (and a junkie), a “looper” hired to, as he puts it, “take out the future’s garbage.” He works a remote corner of a cane-field in Kansas where his victims suddenly appear, hands-tied, head-bagged, ready for a shotgun blast to the chest. The executions are carried out like clockwork until, of course, there’s a glitch in the “Terminator”-like system.
Unbeknownst to him, Joe’s bosses in the future have sent the old Joe back in time to be killed by the young Joe and effectively close the loop. We never see the evil genius known as the Rainmaker, busy sending old loopers thirty years back in time to be shot down by their former selves. Joe’s friend Seth (Paul Dano) suffers this gory fate early on in the film. Watch as a young Seth is cut down, limb by limb, in the present, his wounds materializing in the future. Don’t worry; the temporal antics of “Looper” won’t be on the test.
Johnson’s plot line is intricate whereas personal matters in “Looper” are fairly old-timey. There’s a prostitute (Piper Perabo) who keeps the young Joe drugged and confused, and, in the farm house nearby his killing floor, a single mom named Sara (a butch Emily Blunt) keeping a close watch over her precocious son Cid (Pierce Gangon). Could Cid be one of the three kids that the old Joe is dead-set on exterminating? The uncanny Gangon has special powers, which I won’t reveal here, but he could be the creepiest kid on film since the tricycle-riding Danny Lloyd in Kubrick’s “The Shining.” Blunt, meanwhile, who has the Midas touch in picking scripts, never gives a bad performance and she offers the film some much-need pathos. She shelters Joe, from old Joe and from the truth, and in the end, young Joe returns the favor in a sacrificial last act.
The only misstep in “Looper” was a needless effort to make Gordon-Levitt look like Bruce Willis. A plaster mold of Willis was cast to help the young actor resemble the iconic action film star. Fitted with a putty nose and prosthetic upper-lip, young Joe looks more like a glass-eyed Howdy Doody doll than the moonlighting star of yesteryear. And because science fiction is always already not the real world, this turns our anti-hero into something even further unreal and distracts the audience. The gun violence is gratuitous as well, and though it happens off-screen, watching children getting shot at close range threw me for a loop. It goes without saying that if the older version of myself in 2042 got in touch with me now, I’d be asking for stock tips, Super Bowl wins, Lotto numbers, and other money-making factoids, not whom to kill and when and where. But that’s the real world not the movies.
“Prometheus” aside, “Looper” could be the most inventive science-fiction film of 2012; what is your vote for best action/sci-fi film of the year thus far?
WHAT’S A BILLIONAIRE to do when he falls asleep at the wheel with his French mistress in the passenger seat? This, after losing 400 million dollars in a failed investment and having to dodge questions by his only daughter (also his chief accountant), who suspects the books have been cooked.
What, also, happens when a half-mad and alcoholic veteran of World War II named Freddie Quell becomes the disciple of a charismatic cult leader named Lancaster Dodd, a man who lures him into his inner circle only to treat him like something of a lab rat? Okay, make that his favorite lab rat.
These are the twin dilemmas at the core of two superb new dramas, “Arbitrage” and “The Master,” respectively. Crying out for Oscar gold, both are performance-driven films that revel in man’s fallibility and will to power. In the former, Richard Gere plays Robert Miller, a great white shark of Wall Street in tailored suits and an elegant penthouse shared by wife Ellen (Susan Sarandon). Her nightly mantra is “Working late again, honey?” when, in reality, she knows more than you (and husband Robert) think. Miller has gone on deceiving Ellen and his investors long enough when a freak car accident turns his life (and luxury sedan) upside down. Without a fixer like Michael Clayton of his own on speed-dial, he flees the scene and calls on Jimmy Grant (Nate Parker), the son of his chauffeur, to ferry him back to Manhattan and pretend as if nothing ever happened.
The live-in butler who sees Miller burning his clothes in a trash can later that night is nothing compared to NYPD detective Michael Bryer (played by Tim Roth), who doggedly pursues the billionaire with questions and accusations. Something of an Inspector Javier, he tells a fellow investigator: “He doesn’t get to walk just because he’s on CNBC.” First-time director Nicholas Jarecki is the son of husband-and-wife commodity traders – his half brothers are also the documentarians responsible for “Why We Fight” and “Capturing the Friedmans” – which means that film and finance are what the Jarecki family do best. Driven by Gere’s anti-hero, Jarecki’s plot is intriguingly layered but really no more complicated than your average episode of “The Good Wife” or “Law and Order.” Instead “Arbitrage” is a character study, powered, as it is, by excellent pacing and a memorable performance by Richard Gere, long overlooked because of, well, his looks and box-office appeal.
Yet Gere, now a silvery 62, has challenged himself as of late – recall his happy hands in Chicago and the wounded rage of his cuckold in Unfaithful – and is no doubt deserving of film-acting’s highest honor for his dead-on embodiment of a hedge-fund manager trying to keep his castle from crumbling. When he meets his daughter Brooke (Brit Marling) for a screaming match in Central Park, you will be convinced of this fact. Watch also as Gere and Sarandon go for each other’s throats later in the film: dressed for another glamorous gala, Ellen is wielding a cocktail and divorce papers while husband Robert is still hiding the ribs he fractured and the forehead he sliced open during his auto accident. Learning of Brooke’s disappointment in him, he informs Ellen: “The world is cold.” Sarandon, dead-set on revenge, shoots back: “Then you’re going to need a warm coat.”
“The Master” (A; SEE IT)
BABY, IT’S COLD OUTSIDE, especially so in the dark and unsettling orbit of Paul Thomas Anderson’s latest stroke of genius, “The Master,” which is a different animal altogether though its characters are driven by the same sins – greed, hubris, betrayal – that make “Arbitrage” crackle. Anderson doesn’t so much make films as he explodes the limits of first-grade filmmaking. His style zigzags from work to work – how can the neon lubes and lotions of “Boogie Nights” and the hot petrol that oozes through “There Will Be Blood” come from the same source? – but his six feature films are united by a detailed attention to American men living in extremis. Anderson sees the silver screen as a dissection pan. Think of Dirk Diggler, the porn god, Barry Egan, the neurotic collector of coupons, Edward L. Doheny, the ruthless oil tycoon, and now, Lancaster Dodd who – Tom Cruise, plug your ears – is some unauthorized version of Scientology founder, L. Ron Hubbard, with his pseudo-scientific, spiritual movement he calls the Cause. He promises his followers paradise and perfection, but he’s probably just preying on their insecurities, and in Freddie Quell, he’s found a veritable wellspring of weaknesses to exploit and control. He subjects Quell (who won’t, or can’t be, quelled) to “The Process,” a Q-and-A session in which subjects cannot blink or look away from their interrogator. Laura Dern plays a wealthy benefactor who keeps Dodd’s boat afloat and, for a little while, above the law.
“The Master” is really a study of the disciple, Freddie, however. After a brief hiatus from acting (and face-shaving), Joaquin Phoenix comes roaring back to the screen as the war-ravaged and shattered Freddie. He looks markedly older than he did in 2005’s “Walk the Line,” and his face is a twisted wreck of anger and anguish. Freddie is the id to Dodd’s super-ego: all animal, stinking of the alcoholic concoction he makes from paint thinner and cleaning supplies and looking for a fight as a department-store photographer. He’s also a bully and in one confounding scene, strangles a man sitting for a portrait with his own necktie. Anderson gives us the smiling faces of postwar American families, but this is not the America Freddie feels he can call home. A military doctor, administering a Rorschach inkblot test – Freddie sees only sex and genitals – tells him presciently: There will be people “on the outside” who fail to understand you.
On the outside, he stumbles onto a cruise-liner and falls for Dodd, a figure of some sagacity but also somewhat sinister; he’s expertly rendered by the indomitable Philip Seymour Hoffman. I use the romantic “falls for” because the men’s relationship is another Rorschach test: you might see them as repressed lovers, frenemies, or even God and Lucifer locked in mortal conflict. (The inclusion of the Irving Berlin song “Get Thee Behind Me Satan,” from 1936, alerts us to the metaphysical conflict at the heart of “The Master.”) As Dodd’s wife, Peggy, Amy Adams is on hand to temper the men’s feelings for each other. In another strange scene, we see a heavily pregnant Peggy seated naked in a living room chair while her husband’s other female followers flit around the room, also nude, while the men of the Cause look on with without any sign of desire or emotion. That’s because all of the emotion, all of the animal energy, is found in Freddie who becomes his master’s fiercest defender and bulldog. Question the science of Dodd’s practices at a polite social gathering and you’ll have Freddie waiting out back to slap you around for your irreverance. “You like be told what to do,” Dodd tells Freddie at one point, which, crucially, tells us that “The Master” is about what makes the cult of personality really click. It’s the dissection of Freddie Quell, but also a study in group psychology and the unspoken laws that make masters of very few and slaves of us all. In fact, watching “The Master” feels like psychotherapy: slow and uncomfortable at times.
But what really makes “The Master” a masterwork is that, like any lasting work of art, it’s not so much a film, but an outcry.
I’VE GOT BOB DYLAN on the brain this week, what with the release of his 35th studio album, “Tempest,” and upcoming visit to the Mile High City. The dark prophet, now 71 years old, has been singing of rising sea-levels for some time now. His 13-minute narration of the Titanic’s sinking (“Tempest”) is just an extension of 1964’s “The Times Are A’Changin’” – “Admit that the waters around you have grown” – and more recently, this forecast: “High water risin’/The shacks are slidin’ down/Folks lose their possessions/Folks are leaving town.” Dylan peers into the future and sees only diaspora and disaster.
That last lyric of his comes from “High Water,” released on September 11, 2001, and it was eerily appropriate that on the eleventh anniversary of 9-11, I caught Benh Zeitlin’s “Beasts of the Southern Wild,” a sensation at both Sundance and Cannes and deservedly so. This savage beauty of a film has all the bluesy magic of the late Dylan and shares his sense that humanity, on the brink of being swamped, should go on singin’ and dancin’. Set in the Gulf of Mexico, “Beasts” is something of an eco-fable; the ragtag residents of a territory known as the Bathtub are bracing themselves for another disastrous storm. Separated by a levee, they live close to the earth, so close, in fact, that they’re a bit beastly themselves: cinematographer Ben Richardson’s camera plunges us into the vats of writhing crawfish, chicken carcasses, and alligators stuffed with explosives. “Beasts” is an exercise in magic realism that gets down in the muck and mire. “Every animal is made of meat,” one of the Bathtub’s residents teaches the children, “It’s the buffet of the universe.”
At the eye of the storm is a motherless six-year-old named Hushpuppy (Quvenzhané Wallis) who occupies a filthy shack beside her father Wink (Dwight Henry). Before she burns it down, her shack is decorated with sports jerseys and jawbones; she keeps a football helmet in the freezer, which she dons when lighting her stove with a blowtorch. She has a preternatural connection with the animal world around her. Putting her ear to the heart of a chickadee, she tells us “Sometimes they be talkin’ in codes.” The little actress beat out 4,000 other girls to win the role and the fourth-grader will likely become the youngest actor ever nominated for an Academy Award.
“Beasts of the Southern Wild” is a survivalist tale: Wink is dying of drink and disease and Hushpuppy must soldier on in the face of poverty and climate change. She is the embodiment of the human will, but in yellow underpants and rubber boots. Her father calls her “little man” and the two square off with a brutal sort of love for each other. Is Hushpuppy the real beast of Zeitlin’s film, which he based on Lucy Alibar’s stage play, “Juicy and Delicious”? Or is it the herd of prehistoric boars she imagines roaming the bayou and shaking the very earth beneath her feet? Equally beastly are the governmental workers who try to quarantine the Bathtub residents though they can’t, or won’t, be contained. At a climactic moment, when Hushpuppy stands fearlessly before these beasts of her imagination, I was brought suddenly to tears. The film’s raw emotionality is earned; its earthiness induces nausea. I laughed, cried, and for 90 minutes, wanted to throw up; what more could you want from a film?
“Beasts” wants us to see the abjection of American life up-close and you’ll need an iron gut to stomach Zeitlin’s stroke of genius. As Dylan once warned, “You better start swimmin’ or you’ll sink like a stone.”
“DON’T YOU KNOW words ruin everything!” That’s Dennis Quaid, as novelist Clay Hammond, in “The Words,” a morality play on the perils of plagiarism. Written and directed by Brian Klugman and Lee Sternthal, “The Words” is also the title of Hammond’s newest novel, which tells the tale of a young writer named Rory Jansen (Bradley Cooper) struggling to find literary stardom.
If that sounds like a story-within-a-story, that’s because “The Words” is a three-tiered narrative in which Hammond pulls the Thackeray-like strings, giving a public reading of his new work and attracting the attention of his number one fan (Olivia Wilde). Quaid duplicates the arrogant professor role he played in 2008’s “Smart People” – could this tepid performance be a form of self-plagiarism? – and his lifeless narration drains “The Words” of much of its energy. Still, the tale he tells is an absorbing one: rejection letter after rejection letter, Rory is turned away for writing books described by literary agents as too “interior.” Honeymooning in Paris, he finds, while antiquing, a yellowed and unpublished manuscript sealed inside a suitcase. That manuscript, which Rory promptly publishes as his own, is entitled “The Window Tears,” and it brings Rory immediate commercial and critical success. Rory’s own number one fan is his randy wife Dora (Zoë Saldana) who believes wholeheartedly in her husband’s potential, that is, until his literary lie is revealed. After reading Rory’s new novel, she tells him: “there are parts of you in this novel never seen before.”
The problem is that Rory’s best work yet has been seen before: by its actual author (a commanding Jeremy Irons) who comes out of the woodwork to confront Rory with his plagiarism. Known as the Old Man, the Irons character has yet another tale to impart and he does so on a bench in Central Park. This third narrative, told in flashbacks, is more urgent than the others because it’s undoubtedly his own: as a young man (played by Ben Barnes) in 1940s France, he wrote “The Window Tears” in the wake of his baby girl’s death only for the manuscript to be lost by his waitress wife (Nora Amezeder). This inner-most story in “The Words” mirrors the real-life legend of Hemingway’s first wife who lost Papa’s unpublished writings in 1922 and because of it, lost Hemingway’s love and trust forever.
Since his breakout performance in “The Hangover,” Bradley Cooper has sobered up and partaken in more intelligent fare. The problem is that for a film about the pitfalls of plagiarism and the pressures of originality, clichés abound. Writers on screen are usually portrayed as selfish sadsacks, and Rory is no exception; he’s a well-groomed thirysomething still hitting his father up for money. Given, however, his robust wardrobe, Cooper looks more like an assistant editor at Men’s Journal than he does a Franzenish raconteur. Lukewarm, “The Words” is a noble effort with only modest results. It’s as if “The Words,” which is neither boring nor exciting, was written in invisible ink.
APPARENTLY IF YOU want to play a smart, complicated woman on screen – the kind Hollywood still has trouble conceiving – you have to write the role yourself.
That’s what Rashida Jones did, with a little help from her “Parks and Recreation” costar Will McCormack, to create the breakup comedy “Celeste and Jesse Forever.” Not exactly a romance, Jones’ screenwriting debut is a charming and contemporary take on what’s become as common as matrimony itself: divorce (the amicable kind). This film, which feels fresh and is stuffed with slang, centers on the neurotic Celeste: excessive exerciser, Facebook stalker, pot-smoking author of a book on declining American culture called “Shitegeist.” If Celeste is an irritating character – deceiving herself that she’s actually over her ex – it’s because she feels relatably lifelike.
Directed by Lee Toland Krieger, “Celeste” was filmed in just 23 days for under $1 million. Consequently, the performances have an honest, improvisational inflection as if the actors are actually friends. That’s because they are: Jones and McCormack, who briefly dated in real life, would simulate sex acts using baby-corn and Chapstick when suffering from writer’s block. Here, they have their fictional counterparts (Celeste and Jesse) do the same while in the car and at the wedding of friends Tucker (Eric Christian Olsen) and Beth (Ari Graynor), the latter of whom abruptly leaves a dinner because she objects to the divorced couple’s closeness. There’s nothing but truth-telling in “Celeste and Jesse Forever”; “I go to yoga to meet girls” confesses Celeste’s love-interest Paul (the always dependable Chris Messina). Namaste!
Andy Samburg (“I Love You, Man”) plays Jesse, an oversensitive visual artist living in Celeste’s spare room and suspended in a kind of romantic abeyance while the ink on the divorce papers dries. Ex-wifey is none too happy when Jesse rebounds in a matter of months and, we’re told, “puts a baby in a lady.” When Celeste phones Jesse to help her assemble an IKEA purchase, the two turn to red wine and reminiscing. We all know where that leads. Rewind to when we first met the hipster couple at the film’s opening and we’re not exactly sure what Celeste and Jesse mean to each other as they drive around Los Angeles, cracking inside jokes with their scorched-earth sense of humor. Jesse reminds his soon-to-be-ex-wife that she dislikes the sight of architect Frank Gehry’s Disney Hall, that blasted tuna can of a landmark and an important metaphor for the couple’s romantic life: open and messy and, well, kinda’ lovely.
Unbeknownst to him, Joe’s bosses in the future have sent the old Joe back in time to be killed by the young Joe and effectively close the loop. We never see the evil genius known as the Rainmaker, busy sending old loopers thirty years back in time to be shot down by their former selves. Joe’s friend Seth (Paul Dano) suffers this gory fate early on in the film. Watch as a young Seth is cut down, limb by limb, in the present, his wounds materializing in the future. Don’t worry; the temporal antics of “Looper” won’t be on the test.
timey. There’s a prostitute (Piper Perabo) who keeps the young Joe drugged and confused, and, in the farm house nearby his killing floor, a single mom named Sara (a butch Emily Blunt) keeping a close watch over her precocious son Cid (Pierce Gangon). Could Cid be one of the three kids that the old Joe is dead-set on exterminating? The uncanny Gangon has special powers, which I won’t reveal here, but he could be the creepiest kid on film since the tricycle-riding Danny Lloyd in Kubrick’s “The Shining.” Blunt, meanwhile, who has the Midas touch in picking scripts, never gives a bad performance and she offers the film some much-need pathos. She shelters Joe, from old Joe and from the truth, and in the end, young Joe returns the favor in a sacrificial last act.
Colin Carman 