• Review: “The Great Gatsby”
  • Review: “Mud”
  • Review: “The Place Beyond the Pines”
  • Review: “Ginger & Rosa”
  • Review: “Stoker”
  • Review: “Side Effects”
  • Review: “Mama”
  • Review: “Zero Dark Thirty”
  • Review: “Gangster Squad”
  • Review: “Les Misérables”
  • Review: “This Is 40”
  • Review: “Any Day Now”
  • Review: “Anna Karenina”
  • Review: “Silver Linings Playbook”
  • Review: “Hitchcock”
  • Review: “Lincoln”
  • Review: “Life of Pi”
  • Review: “Flight”
  • Review: “Skyfall”
  • Review: “Argo”
  • Review: “The Perks of Being a Wallflower”
  • Review: “Looper”
  • Reviews: “Arbitrage” and “The Master”
  • Review: “The Words”
  • Review: “Celeste and Jesse Forever”
  • Review: “Lawless”
  • Review: “The Campaign”
  • Review: “Total Recall”
  • Review: “To Rome with Love”
  • Review: “The Dark Knight Rises”
  • Review: “Moonrise Kingdom”
  • Review: “Magic Mike”
  • Review: “The Amazing Spider-Man”
  • Review: “Brave”
  • Review: “Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter”
  • Review: “Prometheus”
  • Review: “Snow White and the Huntsman”
  • Review: “Bernie”
  • Review: “The Dictator”
  • Review: “The Raven”
  • Reviews: “Salmon Fishing in the Yemen” and “Jiro Dreams of Sushi”
  • Review: “Chimpanzee”
  • Review: “The Cabin in the Woods”
  • Review: “American Reunion”
  • Review: “Detachment”
  • Review: “The Hunger Games”
  • Review: “Casablanca” (In Re-Release; 1 Night Only)
  • Review: “Silent House”
  • Review: “Wanderlust”
  • Review: “This Means War”
  • Review: “Safe House”
  • Review: “The Woman In Black”
  • Review: “The Grey”
  • Review: “Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close”
  • Review: “Contraband”
  • Review: “Shame” and “Young Adult”
  • Review: “War Horse”
  • Review: “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo”
  • Review: “Like Crazy”
  • Review: “Hugo”
  • Review: “The Descendants”
  • Review: “My Week with Marilyn”
  • Review: “J. Edgar”
  • Review: “In Time”
  • Review: “Take Shelter”
  • Review: “The Thing”
  • Review: “The Ides of March”
  • Review: “Dream House”
  • Review: “50/50”
  • Review: “Moneyball”
  • Review: “Abduction”
  • Review: “Drive”
  • Review: “Contagion”
  • Review: “The Debt”
  • Review: “Our Idiot Brother”
  • Review: “The Help”
  • Review: “Fright Night”
  • Review: “Beginners”
  • Review: “Crazy Stupid Love”
  • Review: “Rise of the Planet of the Apes”

Colin Carman

~ Jane Austen Scholar & Culture Vulture

Colin Carman

Tag Archives: tony kushner

Review: “Lincoln”

30 Friday Nov 2012

Posted by colincarman in Film Reviews

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

bruce catton, civil war, confederacy, daniel day-lewis, doris kearns goodwin, drama, james spader, joseph gordon levitt, lincoln, politics, sally field, thirteenth amendment, tommy lee jones, tony kushner

Lincoln

“This American Life”

Grade: B+ (RENT IT)

ABRAHAM LINCOLN ISN’T just a man but a monument.  Meanwhile, the movie inspired by his commitment to ending slavery and the Civil War is a mixed bag, a union, as it were, of playwright Tony Kushner’s talky script and Steven Spielberg’s love of spectacle.  What happens when you pair the intensely verbal with the intensely visual?  Sadly less than the sum of its parts, “Lincoln” is a mathematical equation as tricky to decode as “four score and seven years ago.”

Sally-Field-LincolnOn the plus side, there are the performances.  Daniel Day-Lewis is a titan of serious cinema, from “My Left Foot” to the best American film tragedy of the 2000s, “There Will Be Blood.”  This is a Method actor so focused and unfunny that he makes Anthony Hopkins look like Robin Williams.  He nails Lincoln’s reportedly reedy voice and effortless erudition. Reviewing “A Room with a View” back in 1985, Pauline Kael wrote of the actor: “In some scenes I wished the camera were at a more discreet distance from Day-Lewis, because you can see him acting and you’re too conscious of his black hair and mustache – you suspect he’s made up to be ascetic and all profile.” All these years later, Day-Lewis’ profile finally gets the close-up of its career.

On the surface, the casting of Sally Field as Mary Todd seems questionable given that the actress is eleven years D-Day’s senior, but dress any actor in Lincoln’s chin curtain beard and top-hat – and any actress in a hoop skirt and greasy hair curls – and their ages somehow find equilibrium.  The Lincolns’ youngest son Tad (Gulliver McGrath) is seen before the fireplace, studying pictures of slaves disfigured by their masters’ whips. Mary is agonized over the enlistment of her older son Robert (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) into the Union Army while, beyond the domestic, Republican abolitionist Thaddeus Stevens (Tommy Lee Jones) and Secretary of State William Seward (David Strathairn) are busy strategizing how to squash the Southern delegation.  “Lincoln,” at its heart, is not a biographical portrait but a study in political procedure. Seward has hired a group of Falstaffian fellows to cajole members of the House of Representations into passing anti-slavery legislation. The stand-out is W.N. Bilbo (a greasy James Spader) who brings some much-needed levity to “Lincoln” as he struts right through the front doors of the White House and delivers some deliciously salty language.

On the other hand, there are elements that subtract from “Lincoln,” or, at least, oppositional elements at work that make the film wobble like a house divided. Thanks to Kushner, “Lincoln,” inspired by Doris Kearns Goodwin’s “Team of Rivals,” limits its scope to the political wrangling involved in the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment, which outlawed slavery and put one more nail in the Confederate coffin.  As the famed1ea284fabeb8cb8df6779196e5615d49b08dcbaafd7f816ff5ce83b6 Civil War historian Bruce Catton wrote, “To save the Union the North had to destroy the Confederacy, and to destroy the Confederacy it had to destroy slavery.”  Given the misnomer of its title, one expects from “Lincoln” a sweeping biopic that begins with the sixteenth President as a young prodigy growing up in a cramped log-cabin on the Sinking Spring Farm in Kentucky and ending with a very bad night at the theatre. The maximalist Steven Spielberg is no doubt up to the task.  So, too, is Kushner, the Pulitzer prize-winner who co-wrote the screenplay for Spielberg’s 2005 “Munich” and, oh, just a little play called “Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes.”  Whether Kushner and Spielberg are a match made in heaven should remain in question.  There’s a palpable tension between Spielberg’s love of the panoramic (i.e. the coast of Normandy, the Atlantic Ocean, space) and Kushner’s theatrical impulse to withdraw to the musty interiors of the White House and other Washingtonian halls of power. Regardless, “Lincoln” is destined to dominate next year’s Academy Awards; they might as well host the ceremony at the foot of Mount Rushmore.

Have no fear: there will be Oscars.

Review: “J. Edgar”

14 Monday Nov 2011

Posted by colincarman in Film Reviews

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

a. mitchell palmer, angels in america, armie hammer, bryan burrough, charles lidnbergh, clint eastwood, clyde tolson, dustin lance black, eleanor roosevelt, F.B.I., geoff pierson, j. edgar, james cagney, joe mccarthy, judi dench, leonardo dicaprio, machine gun kelly, martin luther king, naomi watts, orson wells, shakespeare, tony kushner

d

“Secret Agent Man”

Review: “J. Edgar”

Grade: B+ (RENT IT)

“WHAT DETERMINES a man’s legacy is what isn’t seen.”  This from J. Edgar Hoover, studiously embodied by Leonardo DiCaprio, in Clint Eastwood’s new bio-pic, “J. Edgar,” a tragedy in which quite a lot of Hoover’s secrets are begrudgingly brought to light.  The secret files shredded by his lifelong secretary Helen Gandy (played by Naomi Watts) at the film’s conclusion serve as a potent symbol for Eastwood’s study more generally: the files may be history, but our fearful fascination with Hoover remains just as potent as it was back in 1963 when the head of the F.B.I. was busy wire-tapping Martin Luther King, Jr. and deriding Eleanor Roosevelt as “old horse face” and lesbian.

With “Milk,” screenwriter Dustin Lance Black turned to gay-lib crusader Harvey Milk for an open book of love, laughter and liberation.  Turning to a droll anti-radical like John Edgar Hoover, the very antithesis of Milk, was a bold way to balance two extremes in twentieth-century American culture.  Hoover’s public achievements, of course, are extremely well-known.  Appointed director of the Bureau of Investigation (later the F.B.I.) in 1924, Hoover served eight presidents before his death in 1972.  Eastwood’s “J. Edgar” gives us the sense that, at the zenith of his Orwellian power, it was really Hoover’s Washington while everyone else, including the Kennedy brothers, were merely his special guests.  Jeffrey Donovan, as Robert F. Kennedy, has to remind Hoover that communism is no longer an internal but external threat to effectively beat back the bulldog.

Spanning that long career, from a librarian to a crime-fighter, “J. Edgar” begins with a bang, literally, as the Washington home of A. Mitchell Palmer (Geoff Pierson) is bombed by anarchists in 1919.  Determined to destroy the source of the attack, Palmer soon recruited a 24-year-old law school graduate named John Edgar Hoover to arrest and deport those suspected of anti-American activities.  But Hoover was no Joe McCarthy, a scourge dismissed by Hoover as an “opportunist.”

As the new acting director, Hoover fought the cancer of communism on American soil with the same ferocity he fought facial hair and bowties amongst his employees.  Hoover’s involvement in the so-called “Crime of the Century” – the fatal abduction of Charles Lindbergh’s infant son, Charles Jr., from the second story nursery of the aviator’s New Jersey home in 1932 – brought instant notoriety.  So, too, did Hoover’s pursuit of gangsters Machine Gun Kelly and Vi Mathias.  It was the age of the Tommy Gun and James Cagney and Hoover saw himself as the tireless watchman at the center of it all. And centralize he did: Hoover’s innovations included a fingerprint database and state-of-the-art forensics.  Bryan Burrough, author of Public Enemies: America’s Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI, observes that “in late 1933, the FBI was still only a shadow of the professional crime-fighting organization it was to become” since “Hoover’s College Boys were long on energy but short on experience.”

Eastwood’s “J. Edgar” also turns to Hoover’s lack of experience when it came to the opposite sex and draws a rather reductive line between Hoover’s alleged homosexuality and his closeness to his mother Anna Marie (a puppet-master in petticoats played by Dame Judi Dench).  She lurks about the house they share, asking “Are you abandoning me again tonight?” on hearing her little Edgar has plans.  One harrowing scene features a forlorn DiCaprio standing before the mirror, mother over his shoulder, telling her through euphemism: “I don’t like to dance with women.”  It’s staggering to think that DiCaprio, who could have easily passed as one of the Fanning sisters in his “Romeo and Juliet” days now looks like a young Orson Wells.  What follows DiCaprio’s pained admission is Dench’s narrative about the suicide of a gay man she called “daffy” (for daffodil), adding: “I’d rather have a dead son than a daffy son.”  DiCaprio and Dench’s scenes together elevate the psychology of “J. Edgar” to something like Shakespeare’s Coriolanus and Volumnia, another oedipal duo in which a boy’s best friend, as Norman Bates put it, is his mother.  Cinematographer Tom Stern keeps the film half-lit to match an ambience of secrets and lies.

But the ambitious young man nicknamed “Speed” gets all tongue-tied upon meeting the handsome Clyde Tolson (played by Armie Hammer, the “Winklevi” twins in “The Social Network”).  Hoover and Tolson become fast friends and they remained so until the Director’s death, after which Tolson accepted the U.S. flag draped on his friend’s coffin and inherited Hoover’s half-a-million dollar estate.  Still, Black’s script is a work of historical revisionism, just as dependent on rumors and suspicions as Hoover’s own secret files.  No one knows for sure what Hoover and Tolson shared, but Black’s script, taking a cue from Tony Kushner’s treatment of Roy Cohn in “Angels in America,” casts the repression of Hoover’s own sexuality as the engine that drives his ruthless oppression of others.  It’s a bit simple but it forms the humanizing core of “J. Edgar,” a gay film from an unlikely source: cowboy auteur Clint Eastwood.

Eleven years before his death in 1975, Tolson suffered a stroke. Like an old married couple at the breakfast table, Hoover, every bit the control-freak, orders that Clyde better enunciate his words.  Tolson was later buried in the Congressional Cemetery only yards away from J. Edgar where perhaps the all-seeing Director could eternally keep an eye on him.  As Hoover’s secretary put it before every appointment, “The director will see you now.”

Recent Posts

  • It’s Alive…with Mary Shelley!
  • A Rare & Exclusive Interview with Plague-Writer Daniel Defoe!
  • Sign Posts!
  • What Killed Jane Austen?
  • Was Austen a Holy Roller?

Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Join 262 other followers

Top Posts & Pages

  • A Rare & Exclusive Interview with Plague-Writer Daniel Defoe!

Jane Austen

action alien alpha dog amanda seyfried animals anton yelchin blue valentine bradley cooper brad pitt British literature bromance carey mulligan charlize theron chawton christina hendricks christopher plummer colin farrell comedy crazy stupid love daniel craig dickens dracula drama emma stone england ewan mcgregor family frankenstein freud gay george clooney hampshire hbo horror jack russell terrier Jane Austen jessica chastain john lithgow joseph gordon levitt jude law kurt cobain mad men madonna mansfield park mary shelley matthew mcconaughey michael fassbender naomi watts oscars paris paul rudd philip seymour hoffman poetry politics portsmouth pride and prejudice romantic romantic comedy romanticism ryan gosling science fiction september 11 sex shakespeare shelley steven soderbergh summer blockbuster the hangover the help the social network thriller tim burton true blood twilight viola davis

Blog Stats

  • 51,298 hits
  • RSS - Posts
  • RSS - Comments

Colin Carman Twitter

  • All of the #tigerwood coverage boils down to three words: (1) Was (2) Tiger (3) Drinking? Wishing him well 1 day ago
  • Twenty years today w/ my Wookiee! Happy Anniversary @marcburdck 🏳️‍🌈😍 https://t.co/z77IqfteHK 3 days ago
  • "Happy Ending" (1929) by WH Auden https://t.co/tyAG4QVR33 3 days ago
  • @alexander_olly #ItsASin is a superbly stylish look at another plague, HIV-AIDS. Great ensemble cast & soundtrack!🌈🏳️‍🌈 4 days ago
  • RT @eltonofficial: It's A Sin is one of the best things I’ve seen on television – ever! So it was great to have @alexander_olly as my co-ho… 4 days ago
Follow @ColinCarman

Colin Carman

Colin Carman

Archives

  • April 2020
  • March 2020
  • July 2019
  • May 2013
  • April 2013
  • March 2013
  • February 2013
  • January 2013
  • December 2012
  • November 2012
  • October 2012
  • September 2012
  • August 2012
  • July 2012
  • June 2012
  • May 2012
  • April 2012
  • March 2012
  • February 2012
  • January 2012
  • December 2011
  • November 2011
  • October 2011
  • September 2011
  • August 2011
  • July 2011

Blogroll

  • Cinema Train
  • Dan the Man's Movie Reviews
  • Fogs' Movie Reviews

Category Cloud

Film Reviews Jane Austen Pandemic Posts Poems and Plogs (Poem-Blogs) Uncategorized

Blog at WordPress.com.

Cancel

 
Loading Comments...
Comment
    ×