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Review: “Wanderlust”

01 Thursday Mar 2012

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“Tahini Green”

Review: B (RENT IT)

BELIEVE IT OR not, it’s been fourteen years since Jennifer Aniston and Paul Rudd first co-starred in “The Object of My Affection,” a bold rom-com (for its day) about a New Yorker named Nina who falls for her gay best friend George.  By now, Aniston and Rudd, two of the most prolific comic actors on screen, are masters of the straight face, that concealment of laughter and/or derision.  “Wanderlust” (directed by David Wain of “Role Models” and “Wet Hot American Summer”) is a reunion of sorts, both for Aniston and Rudd, as well as for members of the ‘90s-era MTV sketch troupe, The State, such as Kerri Kenney-Silver (“Reno 911”), Michael Ian Black and Joe Lo Truglio.  (Stay for the outtakes and see the actors lose it.)  This time around, Rudd plays it straight as the grounding force in a comedy about a hippie commune in north Georgia populated by kooks, yogis, and nudists.  Because Aniston delivers a comedy seemingly every full moon, her flicks are a bit like pistachios: only one in a batch is truly savory and “Wanderlust” is that flick, affectionately light-hearted and genuinely funny.

As George (again) and Linda, Rudd and Aniston are New Yorkers (again) struggling to make it in a city later defined by three things: “Stress. Blackberries.  Sleeping Pills.”  Wain’s comedy opens with the couple, perfectly matched as a pair of motor-mouth Manhattanites, buying what their realtor (Linda Lavin) calls a “microloft” in the West Village.  There’s barely room for them to lower their Murphy bed.  But George abruptly loses his job just as Linda’s pitch to HBO to buy her dead-serious documentary falls through.  A pregnant exec at HBO shoots down Linda’s project about penguins with testicular cancer, telling her: “We do violence and heartache.  But it’s sexy.”  Off the couple goes to visit George’s brother Rick (played by Ken Marino, also the film’s co-writer) and zombie-like wife (a scene-stealing Michaela Watkins) who tells Aniston at her fancy margarita mixer:  “I have a little Sky Mall problem.”  Their pathetic existence within a McMansion sends the couple back to the hippie commune, Elysium, which they stumbled upon only nights before.  They’re taken to the leader, Seth (an unshaven Paul Theroux), who waxes philosophic on veganism, anti-materialism, but when he sings the praises of free love and wife-swapping, it’s really Aniston he wants.

Apart from the commune’s patriarch (an unshaven and always likable Alan Alda), there are some great supporting cast members, namely Lauren Ambrose (“Six Feet Under”) and Malin Akerman (“Couple’s Retreat”), the latter of whom has her eyes on Rudd.  Elysium’s motto?  “We share everything here.”  Laughs aside – and there are plenty – “Wanderlust” is diagetically deranged: this urban couple is hardly the type to last long in a commune, even if it is an “intentional community” as Seth terms it, and the film goes on long after the thrill of “Wanderlust” is gone.  If drama’s pitfall is sentimentality, the death of any comedy is sheer stupidity and there are a few truly dumb moments in “Wanderlust,” especially the pep-talk Rudd gives himself before trying to even the score with Aniston-Theroux and bedding (but blowing it) with Akerman.  Much of the comedy also is a transparent opportunity to see Aniston in jean cut-offs, cowboy boots, and camisoles.  Call it (Bob) Marley and Me.  Neverthless, the couple’s choice between deadening conformity and free-spirited escapism rings true.

Review: “Take Shelter”

03 Thursday Nov 2011

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“Fall Out Boy”

Review: “Take Shelter”

Grade: A- (SEE IT)

OSCAR SEASON IS upon us and the great Michael Shannon as Curtis in John Nichols’ nerve-wracking new film “Take Shelter” shouldn’t lose his seat amongst the usual suspects – DiCaprio, Clooney, and Pitt – when the 2011 Academy Awards convene next year.  Whether he’s playing Nelson Van Elden, the repressed Protestant and Federal Prohibition agent on HBO’s “Boardwalk Empire” or the wild-eyed prophet in “Revolutionary Road” (2008), Shannon is hands-down the most electrifying actor on screen today and “Take Shelter” is his tour-de-force.

But Shannon will also break your heart in part because this brilliant examination of mental illness in an age of American anxiety refuses to pin him down as either a schizo or a Tiresias.  Either way, his family and neighbors begin to worry when Curtis LaForche, a faithful husband, father and hard-worker in his heartland community, begins to build a panic room out back.  “Missed you at church this morning, Curtis,” says a neighbor to which he replies flatly (his mind, in this film, always someplace else): “I’m thinking of cleaning up that storm shelter out back.”

What prompts his growing panic are hair-raising nightmares in which his dog Red bites him, his deaf daughter Hannah is snatched by shadowy figures, and his wife Samantha (this year’s ingénue Jessica Chastain) menaces him with a kitchen knife.  The unifying theme in all of Curtis’s dreams is persecution: ominous storm clouds rolling in and swaths of dive-bombing birds like Hitchcock’s birds except on Prednisone.  After checking out Understanding Mental Illness from the local library, he visits his mother (Kathy Baker) whose own paranoid schizophrenia led her to a lifetime inside a health-care facility.  “There was always some panic that took hold of me,” she tells Curtis, “people listening to me.”  Like mother, like son?  You be the judge.

Yet “Take Shelter” isn’t exactly a thriller as it aims ultimately for the kind of ambiguity normally forbidden on the big screen.  As director Nichols (who also cast Shannon in 2007’s “Shotgun Stories”) recently explained: “We carry a lot of anxiety and fear and stress about our lives and the world around us staying on track and I thought that was something a lot of people could identify with and I thought it was worth making a film about.”  Worth it, indeed.  Are Curtis’s portentous dreams the work of a madman or an everyman prophet?  Only the film’s dazzling last scene points toward a possible answer and like Shannon’s wrenching performance, it’s impossible to shake.

Review: “The Ides of March”

11 Tuesday Oct 2011

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“Et Tu, Brute?”

Review: “The Ides of March”

Grade: B+ (RENT IT)

Back in 2006, when President Obama was still on the top of the world, he wrote in his bestseller The Audacity of Hope that an American politician may not “lie” per se, but “understands that there is no great reward in store for those who speak the truth, particularly when the truth may be complicated.”  The fact that the system facilitates political prevarication, Obama asserted, remains a sufficient obstacle to making American politics cleaner and more transparent.  George Clooney’s fourth directorial effort, “The Ides of March,” could serve as another reality-check to Obama’s loftier aspirations.  In many ways, it’s not far off from Sarah Palin’s snide rejoinder: “How’s that hopey-changey thing working out for ya?”

Still, the truth is actually quite uncomplicated in “The Ides of March,” but it’s the cover-ups and team-switching to protect the lying politician at the center of it all that powers Clooney’s indictment of a corrupt and corrosive political arena.  The truth is simple because it’s sexual in nature: no spoilers here, but suffice it to say that when a fresh-faced intern named Molly Stearns (played by Evan Rachel Wood), strolls onto the scene, men in power quickly come unglued, or rather, unbuttoned.  As erotic napalm, Wood reprises the vixen role she played so expertly in HBO’s reboot of “Mildred Pierce,” but she’s more vulnerable here and ultimately, tragic.  The script smartly piles it on, too, inasmuch as Stearns is the DNC chair’s daughter and soon an important player in the Ohio state primary.  Thankfully, Clooney’s film also treats its viewer like a grown-up; when Morris’s top aid gets the axe, for example, all we see is actor Philip Seymour Hoffman step inside the governor’s Suburban, then, without dialogue, exit to a rainy alleyway.

Adapted from a Broadway play, entitled Farragut North (2008), by Clooney’s longtime collaborator Beau Willimon (and Grant Heslov), who worked on campaigns for Schumer, Dean, and Hilary Clinton, “The Ideas of March” has the realist pulse of an exposé based on firsthand experience.  Our man-on-the-ground is Stephen Myers (played Ryan Gosling, who has more or less commanded the screen since the summer), a thirty-year-old campaign advisor to Clooney’s Mike Morris (a governor and presidential contender with a few skeletons in his closet).

“The Ides of March” is ultimately a cynical and disillusioning film in which Marisa Tomei, as a jaded Beltway reporter, speaks to its central beliefs.  “He’s a nice guy,” she says of Morris, “They’re all nice guys.  He’ll let you down sooner or later.”  Tomei is just one of the film’s great supporting actors: in addition to a Karl Roveian Hoffman – can’t someone in the costume department help Hoffman tie a necktie so it reaches his belt-buckle? – there’s Paul Giamatti as the top aide to Morris’s opponent and Jeffrey Wright (briefly) as another influential senator.  Each has a secret agenda and if Stephen survives their machinations it’s because he’s cut from the same duplicitous cloth.  It’s a relief to find an unabashed anti-hero at the core of “The Ides of March”; love or hate him, at least Gosling’s Stephen will inspire some spirited discussion after the film.

Historically, the Ides of March refers not just to the Roman calendar but to the day Julius Caesar was stabbed twenty-three times on the Senate floor.  We may no longer carry out our assassinations in the open-air, but as Clooney’s fine political drama suggests, we’re every bit as dead-set on power and revenge.