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He wants revenge: Depp in Sweeney Todd. |
Bloody
Salvation
By
Ann Morrow
Sweeney
Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street
Directed
by Tim Burton
It takes blood-and-guts bravura to bring a musical as successful,
and pathological, as Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of
Fleet Street to the big screen, and not just because of
the story’s blood and guts—easy to sleight on stage, not so
easy in Panavision. Stephen Sondheim’s 1979 Tony-winning musical
featured an iconic performance by Angela Lansbury, and famously
difficult phrasing for the catchy lyrics and dissonant melodies.
So, if audiences are privy to close-ups of Sweeney Todd’s
butchery, will they still have sympathy for him? And if the
actors are less than Metropolitan Opera-quality in their vocalizing,
will the songs still sting? In director Tim Burton’s high-dudgeon
adaptation, the answers are, remarkably, yes and yes.
Johnny Depp plays Sweeney Todd, a Victorian-era barber with
a vengeful agenda that compels him to slash the throats of
unsuspecting customers. Sent to a penal colony 15 years previous
on a trumped-up charge by Judge Turpin (Alan Rickman), who
coveted his beautiful wife, Lucy (Laura Michelle Kelly), Sweeney
returns to London to find that Lucy committed suicide. Helena
Bonham Carter is in the Lansbury role of Mrs. Lovett, the
widowed owner of a meat-pie shop who becomes his partner in
crime. The febrile chemistry between Depp and Bonham Carter
is noticeable from the moment Sweeney steps foot in her roach-infested
shop, and not just because of their matching ghouls’ promenade
visages. Both of them act through the songs, turning their
lack of range into an advantage; this is Burton’s Todd, not
Broadway’s (though reportedly Sondheim’s stage vision would’ve
been more horrific if not for the modulating influence of
director Hal Prince), and the effect of the songs is more
about words than “lyrics.” Depp’s pleasing singing gently
conveys Todd’s passion for revenge—“My Friends,” sung to his
precious silver straight razors, is as moving as any lover’s
lament—while the lack of vocal pyrotechnics allows the character’s
world-weariness to dominate. Bonham Carter’s voice has a piquantly
morbid quality, especially for Mrs. Lovett’s dreamscape love
song, “By the Sea,” which Burton visualizes as a postcard
of steam-punk Victoriana, while her natural melancholy makes
songs such as the blackly comic “A Little Priest” (describing
Lovett’s inspiration to turn Sweeney’s victims into ingredients
for her pies) more poignantly desperate than buffoonish.
The acting-singing, along with the desaturated cinematography
and the Gorey-esque art direction, amplify the show’s themes
of anti-industrialism. The strife between the upper- and under-classes
(Todd and Lovett justify cannibalizing their fellow Londoners
as a reversal of how the rich consume the poor); the oppression
of women (there’s a skin-crawling incident in an insane asylum);
and the sick privileges of people like Judge Turpin all receive
their entertaining due. Besides giving the film a distinctively
Burton-like dark cloud of pathos, the film’s blue-gray palette
seems to be the result of the city’s omnipresent smokestacks.
Along with the fetchingly gothic costuming, the art direction
bristles with grisly little details, such as the reappearance
of an old doll’s eyes in a woman street beggar.
The outstanding grotesquerie is Timothy Spall as the judge’s
henchman, a repellent reversal of a fop in a too-short waistcoat
that accentuates his ungainly gut. Even more memorable is
Sacha Baron Cohen as Pirilli, a barber and hair-tonic mountebank
who is Todd’s rival. Cohen, who has a flowery baritone, performs
a high-wire vocal act, singing in an a showy Italian accent
that he occasionally lets slip to Cockney and then back to
a deliberately false accent. The soundtrack has its haunting
side, as well, with the recurring motif of “Johanna,” inspired
by Todd’s long-lost daughter.
As the melodramatic cogs of the plot grind up most of Fleet
Street, Burton succeeds, amid geysers of jugular blood, to
delineate Todd’s descent from vengeance to homicidal mania,
and still deliver, almost movingly, too, on his manifesto
song: “I will have salvation.”
Family
Affair
The
Savages
Directed
by Tamara Jenkins
Writer-director Tamara Jenkins likes to dig deep into family
dynamics, and sometimes she draws blood—most memorably in
Slums of Beverly Hills, in which a daughter (Natasha
Lyonne) defends her dad (Alan Arkin) from the verbal attack
of his viciously condescending brother (Carl Reiner) by stabbing
her uncle in the leg. With a fork. In an airport snack bar.
And hard enough to start the blood flowing.
The
Savages is an equally blunt black comedy about a middle-age
brother and sister (Philip Seymour Hoffman and Laura Linney)
forced to deal with the sudden, debilitating dementia of their
elderly dad Lenny (Philip Bosco). Jenkins introduces us to
the elder Savage with appropriate emotional—and visual—savagery,
making it painfully clear that Lenny is losing it.
At first, the joke is that his kids aren’t doing very well
either. Son Jon teaches theater in Buffalo and can’t commit
to his soon-to-be-deported Polish girlfriend. Daughter Wendy
is an aging Manhattan bohemian—an unproduced playwright—reduced
to stealing office supplies at her temp jobs to submit her
perpetually rejected fellowship applications. Jenkins plays
this cannily, however, by introducing these two at their worst.
As the film develops, we come to understand, and sympathize
with, both of them.
A movie about such serious themes—one that pulls few punches—would
be an unbearable experience if it weren’t so funny. Which
it is. And it’s hard-earned humor, based on the blinkered
self-involvement of each character. Lenny is a mean son of
a bitch; Jon is incapable of intimacy; and Wendy gets through
life by lying. The comedy comes when these personality traits
clash; the pathos comes in the ocassional moments when the
three decide, simply, to treat each other decently.
Bosco is the film’s angry heart, playing Lenny without a hint
of self-pity. The film would not work if he did it any other
way. Linney has the flashiest role, and pulls off the impressive
feat of keeping Wendy’s deviousness from becoming pathetic.
Hoffman’s character teaches the “theater of protest,” and
is working on a book about Brecht; Jenkins knows this is self-evidently
ridiculous to a good portion of the audience. She undermines
possible smug reactions by taking it seriously; in Hoffman’s
most revealing scene, he’s driving around Buffalo singing
a Brecht-Weill song. It’s almost sweet.
Speaking of Buffalo, The Savages incorporates a lot
of location footage of the metropolis on Lake Erie. It’s one
of the details that adds both verisimilitude and credibility
to a film that’s shockingly honest about aging and death.
—Shawn
Stone
Baby
Mama Drama
Juno
Directed
by Jason Reitman
Like this summer’s Knocked Up, Ja son Reitman’s
Juno has us contemplating, along with its sanguine
heroine, the complexities of an unplanned pregnancy. In the
latter case, the title mother in question (Ellen Page) isn’t
an up and coming exec in the glamorous world of TV, but a
high school junior, and her condition is not the result of
a serious drunk, but of sheer after-school boredom. Another
area where the two films diverge is that while the parents-to-be
in Knocked Up have to get to know, even like (forget
about love) each other en route to delivery, Juno MacGuff
is good friends, with perhaps a dim yearning for more, with
her baby’s father, the geeky Paulie Bleeker (Michael Cera).
Written by newcomer Diablo Cody, Juno is a witty yet
moving exploration of one young woman’s voyage, not so much
to motherhood, but to adulthood. Precocious and sardonic,
Juno greets the unwelcome news of her pregnancy with probity
and an eye toward organization. Checking abortion off her
list of options, after she finds out that the bun in her oven
has fingernails, she decides to look for adoptive parents,
something that turns out to be as easy as perusing The
Pennysaver. Soon, she’s meeting with Mark and Vanessa
Loring (Jason Bateman and Jennifer Garner)—a couple whose
stereotypical perfection is eventually revealed to have a
far more interesting, poignant reality. Having been burned
before when a potential donor mother changed her mind, Vanessa
is leery of getting too attached to the idea of impending
motherhood, to the point that Juno wonders if she’s really
more interested in maintaining her career-woman status. She
has an easier time warming up to Mark, a composer of corporate
jingles who works from home, and who enjoys sharing with Juno
their mutual love of horror flicks and alt-rock. Just when
you get the icky sense that something is going to happen between
these two, the script, and the characters, surprise us in
substantial ways, namely by showing us Juno’s growing maturity
as it begins to dawn on her that maybe this guy isn’t the
mature sophisticate she assumed.
Juno
is packed with great performances, with Allison Janney, as
stepmother Brenda, and J.K. Simmons, as dad Mac, obviously
thrilled to have such meaty roles. While the MacGuffs’ relatively
placid acceptance of Juno’s condition might seem unbelievable,
their overall love and support of their daughter, not to mention
their obvious respect for her intelligence, is decidedly refreshing.
What elevates Juno from something like a better-than-average
after-school special is Page, who lets us see the little moments
of panic and doubt that befall our otherwise plucky heroine.
These moments remind us, as do details like Juno’s hamburger
phone and the way she takes the news that Paulie has asked
another girl to the prom, of how young and inexperienced she
really is, and give the movie its heart. And Garner’s nuanced
turn in a significant role could, in lesser hands, have turned
one-note. What at first seems like a glib, laugh-a-minute
story gestates into one of the most unexpectedly poignant
films you’ll ever see.
—Laura
Leon
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From small things: Etel and egg in The
Water Horse. |
It’s
Magic
The
Water Horse: Legend of the Deep
Directed
by Jay Russell
Seeing as it’s based on a book by Dick King-Smith, the genius
behind Babe, it should be no surprise that The Water
Horse: Legend of the Deep carries with it the same delightful
sense of awe and wonder. In this case, the magic is transposed
to World War II-era Scotland, and instead of a cute pink piglet
who has a way with sheepherding, the title creature goes on
to become the misunderstood Loch Ness Monster. But first,
he enters the life of Angus MacMorrow (Alex Etel), a lad both
drawn to and terrified of water. Desperately missing his sailor
dad, Angus spends long days collecting shells and such from
the shores of the majestic loch that borders the estate on
which he, his sister, and housekeeper mother (Emily Watson)
reside. One treasure so culled is a curiously luminous egg,
which cracks open one night to reveal a rubbery little dinosaur-type
critter, promptly dubbed Crusoe, who quickly develops a taste
for potato slices and general mischief.
The other seminal event of Angus’ summer is the arrival of
a troop of British soldiers, stationed at the end of the world
as a deterrent to German subs attempting a back entrance to
British waters, such as had been accomplished by the disastrous
sinking in 1939 by a U-boat of the HMS Royal Oak. The head
of this detachment, who has an eye for Mrs. MacMorrow and
a thin skin when teased about how far he is from the front
lines in Europe, tries to “man up” Angus, with disastrous
results. A happier relationship is that which Angus shares
with new handyman Lewis (Ben Chaplin), who keeps mum about
Crusoe, but nevertheless advises Angus to release the creature
to the sea, especially when the army sets its firepower upon
the “monster.”
Cynical tweeners who prefer action-packed computer-generated
flicks may find the movie slow; it’s their loss. The Water
Horse features amazing special effects, courtesy of Weta
Workshop, which made the Lord of the Rings trilogy
so visually memorable. More important, at least as far as
this reviewer is concerned, is that the movie maintains an
exquisite sense of place and time, which add immeasurably
to its coming-of-age story. A sense of loss, as well as childhood
wonder, permeates this gentle movie, and has more than enough
to recommend it to any moviegoer still enthralled with magic
and imagination.
—Laura
Leon
A
Labyrinth of Stupid
National
Treasure: Book of Secrets
Directed
by Jon Turteltaub
“My
family killed President Lincoln.” That’s the hyperactivated
hypothesis behind National Treasure: Book of Secrets,
the follow-up to 2004’s National Treasure, which combined
zany, modern-day fortune hunter Ben Gates (Nicolas Cage) with
ramped-up borrowings from the Indiana Jones movies;
the biggest surprise, though, was its smash success at the
box office. In Book of Secrets, Ben and his band of
treasure hunters, including his high-tech sidekick, Riley
(Justin Bartha), his erudite, exasperated dad (Jon Voight),
and the girlfriend he acquired in the original, historical
archivist Abigail (Diane Kruger), are again on the trail of
the greatest treasure in the world; again, the trove is hidden
by the most extensive network of treasure-clue hiders ever
known. Only Abigail is now Ben’s ex-girlfriend, and since
she’s kicked him out, he’s been living with his dad.
Father and son have recently discovered that a family ancestor
had a connection to John Wilkes Booth, in a far-reaching conspiracy
in which the assassination of President Lincoln was only a
part. Another part is the existence of a city of gold known
only to Native Americans.
A descendent (Ed Harris) of a Confederate general besmirches
the Gates family lineage when he produces a missing page to
Booth’s diary. The page is really a cipher—and the motivating
piece of ephemera for a mind-bogglingly convoluted quest that
takes Ben and company from the banks of the Seine to the bedchambers
of the Queen of England to the ivory tower of Ben’s mother
(a game Helen Mirren) who just happens to be an expert in
precolonial Native American dialects, and eventually, to Mount
Rushmore, which, as they learn, was part of the cover-up to
keep the gold of the city of gold out of the hands of the
Confederate Army. This summation gives the plot more linear
rationale than it actually has, but Book of Secrets’
jumble of arcane facts, political science, genealogy, American
history, dusty conspiracy theories, and antiques-sleuthing
does give it an intermittent buzz of energy.
Intermittent, that is, because the slapdash filmmaking—most
of the action is shot in crazily framed close-ups—and the
implausibility of the treasure hunt, which exceeds the ludicrousness
of the original over the boundary of utter nonsense—gets tiresome,
even for the cast; both Cage and Kruger seem merely to be
going through the motions, and most of their comic throwaway
lines are literally thrown away by lousy editing. Not that
there’s much comedy: The dialogue relies on interfamily squabbling
instead of intrigue. Late in the game, the proceedings get
a dollop of interest when Ben lures the American president
(Bruce Greenwood) into the catacombs below Mount Vernon, gaining
him access to the ultra-secret Secret Book of American Presidents,
but Ben’s rather charming interaction with the commander-in-chief
is just a stopover to the big finale, a massive archeological
set-piece that is numbingly familiar in its water-filling
antechambers, swaying stone bridges, and sentimentally resolved
family dynamics.
—Ann
Morrow
Almost
Inspired
The
Great Debaters
Directed
by Denzel Washington
There’s so much right about The Great Debaters, the
story of an undefeated debate team from an African-American
college in Depression-era Texas, that it seems mean to dwell
on what’s wrong. So we’ll get the gripes out of the way immediately.
One, there should be a Director’s Guild of America-mandated
class in avoiding visual clichés for actors-turned-directors.
If there was, then, perhaps, Denzel Washington might have
not highlighted every emotional peak with a sledgehammer-subtle
tracking shot close into the actors’ faces. Two, this is a
movie about debating. The verbal content of the debates should
be sharper than the film’s dialogue, and it isn’t. This isn’t
screenwriter Robert Eisele’s worst sin, though; the script,
(very) loosely based on a true story, piles simplifying plot
twists one on top of another.
What should be crippling flaws, however, aren’t. It turns
out that the screenwriter does one thing very well: The details
of life and work on a traditionally black college campus are
precise and compelling, and the complex Southern racial boundaries
of the period are carefully drawn. And Denzel Washington,
as director, also does one thing wonderfully well: He elicits
rich, detailed performances from both the accomplished veteran
actors and the youngsters. The families in this film act like
real families.
Washington is Prof. Melvin Tolson, the stern taskmaster of
the debate team at Wiley College. He’s a genius with words,
using them to shock, inspire and, when necessary, destroy.
He’s also a family man, and a labor-organizing Communist.
(That they didn’t gloss over the latter deserves mention,
and credit.) His debaters are live-wire Henry Lowe (Nate Parker),
brainy-and-beautiful Samantha Booke (Jurnee Smollett) and
14-year-old prodigy James Farmer Jr. (Denzel Whitaker). The
shifting relationships among these three are nicely portrayed.
If Tolson has an opposite, it’s James Farmer Sr. (Forest Whitaker),
a conservative professor not pleased with the former’s activism
and politics. What keeps the two men in harmony—they agree
to disagree—is a mutual devotion to racial politics and rigorous
scholarship.
One can’t help but feel elated by the debaters’ triumphs;
if only the filmmakers had more faith that the audiences didn’t
need a pile of clichés to do so.
—Shawn
Stone
Lovely
and Doomed
Atonement
Directed
by Joe Wright
1934. A beautiful young woman takes off her dress in front
of an equally attractive young man, dives into a fountain,
and emerges, her slip transparently plastered to her body,
with a look of defiance that stuns the young man. Later in
Atonement, this unexplained incident—as observed by
the woman’s younger sister, who is watching from a window—will
be revealed as a puzzle piece in a longer sequence of actions
that begins with the woman’s selection of a flower vase for
an expected visitor. The water motif expands to a bathtub,
a lake, and eventually, to a bombed-out seaside amusement
park. It’s a subtly bravura recurrence worthy of Ian McEwan’s
acclaimed novel of the same name.
Christopher Hampton is an often-superlative literary screenwriter
(Dangerous Liaisons, The Quiet American), and
his atmospheric adaptation of Atonement is an admirable,
occasionally remarkable attempt. The minimal use of dialogue
recalls the poetic potency of Terrence Malick, and two very
different settings—a baronial country estate in England and
the evacuation of Dunkirk, France—are vividly evoked. And
yet Atonement on film isn’t the emotive tour-de-force
it might have been, despite its similarities to The English
Patient. Told mostly from the perspective of the younger
sister, 13-year-old Briony Tallis (Saoirse Ronan), an amateur
playwright, the narrative lurches from a seductively languid
build-up to a hallucinatory denouement and then on to a disconcertingly
pragmatic coda.
Briony’s older sister is Cecilia (Keira Knightley), an arrogant,
bored aristocrat with a requited passion for Robbie Turner
(James McAvoy), the handsome son of the family cook (Brenda
Blethyn). The guest Cecilia is expecting is the jaunty, soon-to-be-powerful
owner of a chocolate factory. Barely audible in the background
of the Tallis’ privileged existence is the rumbling of war.
Yet the tensions that erupt, that night, into criminality,
are sexual, not social or political: Briony’s romantic notions
of Robbie are shattered when she walks in on his steamy tryst
with Cecilia in the library (one of the film’s more memorable
visual compositions). Several reprehensible acts occur the
same night, and tragically escalate four years later when
Robbie is engulfed by the battles of Dunkirk (filmed with
art-house fervor), and Cecilia and Briony (played as an 18-year-old
by Romola Garai) contend separately with the carnage of war
as volunteer nurses.
Even so, the forebodings of doomed love—the metallic plink
of Briony’s typewriter is augmented by a stark piano score—is
underwhelming, simply because we see so little of the lovers
together onscreen. The rapturous cinematography emphasizes
the physical allure of Knightley and McAvoy to the detriment
of their characters’ emotional bond (Knightley’s emerald evening
gown is more striking than anything she does in it), while
contrapuntal views of the mutilated flesh of wounded soldiers,
though harrowingly powerful, seem stagy because of it. And
because director Joe Wright (Pride & Prejudice)
does a merely adequate job with the actors and the flow of
events, the impact of McEwan’s story is left, too largely,
in the exceptionally capable hands of Hampton, composer Dario
Marianelli, and especially, cinematographer Seamus McGarvey.
—Ann
Morrow
 Channeling
History
Charlie
Wilson’s War
Directed
by Mike Nichols
There’s a chilling yet hysterical moment in Charlie Wilson’s
War, in which post-coital Texas socialite Joanne Herring
(Julia Roberts) declumps her recently reapplied mascara with
what my mother would describe as a diaper pin—the big-ass
implement once used to gather up waddles of cotton triangles—punctuating
each threading with another fact about the crisis in 1980s
Afghanistan, then under siege by a dominant Russian army.
The ease and precision with which Joanne accomplishes both
tasks seems in striking contrast to the current administration,
which appears most times to have blueprinted its Iraq strategy
more along the trajectory of a pinball than anything approaching
reason and experience. That Joanne’s lesson in civics is being
directed to her most recent prey, Congressman Charlie Wilson
(Tom Hanks), who holds an influential position on a pair of
defense appropriations committees, and that this conversation
will be the impetus for American intervention, and subsequent
Soviet defeat, is a decided grace note to the observation.
Based on the George Criles book detailing a chapter in history
that too many of us have forgotten (or never knew about),
Charlie Wilson’s War us is as much a piece of political
theater as it is a hilariously funny movie. Director Mike
Nichols teams up with TV’s Aaron Sorkin, with sharply satirical
results, to furnish a trim (97-minute) film that pops, incongruously,
with good humor and cynicism. The congressman from Texas,
first glimpsed sharing a hot tub with a Playboy centerfold
and two strippers, is a good-ole-boy who loves his country,
his Scotch and his ladies, not always in that order. When
educated about the Afghan situation, his inherent good will
and desire to accomplish something take center stage, even
while an ethics investigation threatens to derail his career.
In what is probably the film’s funniest sequence, Wilson instructs
his lovely assistants, including Amy Adams, on how to counter
the investigations of one Rudolph Giuliani (“Never heard of
him!” snorts Wilson) while trying to converse with covert
operative Gust Avrakotos (Philip Seymour Hoffman) about what
kinds of weapons might be useful to fight the Russians. To
go into more detail would take away a priceless moment; suffice
it to say that Hoffman and Hanks sharing the screen makes
for a highly entertaining, very rewarding experience.
The constant jigging up of the amounts of potential military
appropriations for the effort, as well as a series of meetings
with disparate allies from Israel, Egypt and Saudi Arabia,
bring Charlie Wilson’s War into Preston Sturges territory—a
very welcome, if altogether too rare, development in modern
cinema. Happily, both Nichols and Sorkin are up to that challenge.
In fact, the surreal nature of the political maneuverings
and the philosophical posturings surrounding the issue would
be hysterical, if the end game, which Wilson, in a coda, acknowledges
as having been “fucked up,” weren’t so terribly sad. What
it lacks in insight it more than makes up for in intelligence,
humor and the good grace not to preach to the audience—as
was done to disastrous effect in, say, Blood Diamond.
The filmmakers are smart enough to know that their audience
doesn’t need much more than Joanna’s lash-plucking monologue
to put the pieces together. It’s what we do with them after
the fact that will ultimately matter.
—Laura
Leon
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