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Movie review by Greg Carlson

The steadfast Jeff Bridges appears in nearly every frame of “Crazy Heart,” carrying the movie on his sturdy shoulders and infusing it with just enough depth, charm, and dignity to transcend the familiarity of its oft-told story. First time feature director Scott Cooper also wrote the screenplay adapted from Thomas Cobb’s 1987 novel, and Cooper gives Bridges all the space the actor needs to work his formidable magic. In the hands of a less gifted performer, a figure as messy and wrecked as alcoholic singer-songwriter Bad Blake could swiftly sour into a puddle of bathos, but Bridges knows exactly how much line to reel out, protecting Mr. Blake with an armor of tart intelligence and self-perception underneath the booze-soaked shame and regret.

Following a brutally funny piece of exposition that explains the distance of Blake’s fall from grace, Cooper reveals one of Blake’s sorest indignities: his once bright career has been eclipsed by the protégée he formerly mentored. Surviving on a diet of whiskey and cigarettes, the 57-year-old soldiers on, steering his battered two-tone Suburban to small time gigs with even smaller pay. The cheap motels and one night stands that await Bad after last call have evidently fueled the musician’s subject matter, even though the man has not written any new material in a few years. While Bad putters around from bowling alleys to dive bars throughout the American Southwest, his maintains just enough contact with his agent to convey his endless resignation and bitterness.

During a stop in Santa Fe, Bad agrees to be interviewed by writer Jean Craddock (Maggie Gyllenhaal), and despite the sizable gap in age, their initial flirtation turns into something more serious. “Crazy Heart” moves with an easygoing pace that masks some of the director’s desires to explore tougher, sterner complications brought on by Bad’s disease, and the tentative relationship that develops between Bad and Jean functions as the means by which Bad will eventually hit bottom. Against her better judgment, Jean lets Bad develop a bond with her four-year-old son, but an easily foreseeable near-disaster precipitated by Bad’s excessive drinking threatens to foil one of the last good things in the musician’s life.

Cooper is a more assured handler of character than plot, and the short scenes in which Colin Farrell appears as rising star Tommy Sweet, Blake’s former student and current rival, are among the film’s best. One expects Tommy to respond negatively to Bad’s barely concealed antagonism and hostility, but the younger man treats Bad with courtesy and respect. Bridges and Farrell also do their own singing, and are convincing interpreters of the perfectly crafted tunes by T Bone Burnett, Ryan Bingham, and the late Stephen Bruton.

Robert Duvall’s appearance in “Crazy Heart” immediately calls to mind “Tender Mercies,” and the veteran performer, who is also listed as one of the film’s producers, provides unaccompanied vocals on a section of Billy Joe Shaver’s “Live Forever.” In addition to “Tender Mercies,” “Crazy Heart” invites comparison to “The Wrestler,” particularly in the way that both films examine the strained dreams of once popular performing artists who have abused their bodies and neglected or abandoned their own children. Both Bad Blake and Randy Robinson seek comfort in the arms of younger single mothers, as well as second, third, or fourth chances in their personal and professional lives. In both films, we are reminded that the deepest beauty is often in the singer, not the song.

This review was also published in the High Plains Reader the week of 2/8/10.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

Spanish maestro Pedro Almodovar should easily win new converts to his cult of admirers with the ravishing “Broken Embraces,” a liquid bonbon of metafiction bearing many of the filmmaker’s hallmarks, including a superb performance by occasional muse Penelope Cruz. With few exceptions, most notably Woody Allen’s “Vicky Cristina Barcelona,” Cruz is at the peak of her game when working for Almodovar, and “Broken Embraces” is a dream vehicle for the performer, who plays a call girl/secretary/movie actress in a fantasy wonderland of humor and drama that belongs unmistakably to the imagination of its creator.

Heavy with the melodramatic flourishes that have transformed the filmmaker’s name into an adjective, “Broken Embraces” combines the guilty pleasures of soap opera romance with the director’s longstanding veneration of Alfred Hitchcock and classic film noir. Told mainly from the point of view of blind filmmaker Mateo Blanco/Harry Caine (Lluis Homar), “Broken Embraces” jumps between its contemporary setting and a series of events that transpired some fourteen years earlier. During the course of the story the audience will discover how the director lost his eyesight as well as the reason for his dual monikers.

Chief factor in the mystery is Lena (Cruz), the devastatingly beautiful wannabe actress who falls for Mateo during the production of his movie “Girls and Suitcases,” the film-within-the-film that allows Almodovar to quote purposefully from his own “Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown.” Lena’s much older lover Ernesto (Jose Luis Gomez) is bankrolling Mateo’s project and enlists his creepy son Ernesto Jr. (Ruben Ochandiano) to make a “behind the scenes” documentary as a means of spying on Lena. Ernesto also retains a lip reader to translate the inaudible exchanges captured by his son’s camera, and one haunting image in “Broken Embraces” focuses on Ernesto’s stricken face as he jealously watches footage of Lena and Mateo while seated next to the unblinking glow of the red, green, and blue eyes of his video projector.

Many of the best scenes in “Broken Embraces” reflect on the act of looking and the desire to comprehend the meanings conveyed by visual narrative. Hitchcock and voyeurism were a match made in movie heaven, but Almodovar is just as deliberate as the Master of Suspense in exploring the ways that watchers find and take pleasure – and along with it – some amount of pain. Almodovar’s exquisitely designed productions, which pop with solid blocks of saturated rainbow hues, especially red, explode with mouthwatering compositions that complement the considerable amount of dialogue spoken by the ensemble.

In addition to Hitchcock, Almodovar pays tribute to numerous cinematic inspirations, including Orson Welles, Douglas Sirk, Michael Powell, Louis Malle, and Roberto Rossellini, inviting fellow movie lovers to notice the references and quotations. One need not be familiar with specific motion pictures to enjoy the strange, emotionally complex journeys concocted by Almodovar, but earnest cinephiles will appreciate the shower of intertextuality. “Broken Embraces” is by no means Almodovar’s best film, even though it does happen to be his most expensive and longest. Instead, it is both thematically representative of the filmmaker’s impressive body of work and introspective in a manner that is most welcome.

This review was also published in the High Plains Reader the week of 2/1/10.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

“The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus” will draw some spectators solely on the morbid curiosity factor that director Terry Gilliam was in production when actor Heath Ledger died.  Gilliam, who continues to earn his reputation as one of the least fortunate filmmakers in the business, scrambled to salvage something worthwhile from the tragedy, but like so many of the fabulist’s features, the resulting movie is sloppy and poorly paced, lurching from one wild idea to another.  “The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus” is closer to “The Adventures of Baron Munchausen” than “The Brothers Grimm,” but like the latter, a dependence on computer-generated special effects will make many of Gilliam’s ardent supporters long for the handmade physicality of the pre-digital years.

Christopher Plummer plays the title character, a traveling carnival magician and Gilliam surrogate who makes ill-advised wagers with the Devil himself.  As the King of Hell, known principally as Mr. Nick, Tom Waits alternates between the “can’t be bothered” cool of his cultivated persona and the growls and barks of a well-lubricated guard dog in the style of Nick Nolte.  With Lucifer close at hand, Parnassus lumbers around modern day London in an anachronistic theatre wagon, facing the unfortunate prospect of having to turn over his nearly sixteen-year-old daughter Valentina (Lily Cole) to the evil one.  Parnassus, naturally, has not told his lovely offspring that her soul risks imminent forfeiture to Beelzebub.

Ledger enters the story as Tony, a possible amnesiac who joins the disheveled troupe and poses an immediate romantic threat to Parnassus’ underling Anton (Andrew Garfield) for the affections of Valentina.  Tony shakes up the daily routine, suggesting a new look for the nightly show that sends attendees through a Lewis Carroll-esque looking glass into a fantasy domain where Gilliam’s images blossom into arrays of surrealistic spectacle.  When Tony enters the hidden realm of the imaginarium to take part in scenes that had not been shot at the time of Ledger’s death, Johnny Depp, Jude Law, and Colin Farrell take over as the character.

The presence of the three stars has a curious impact on the movie, calling attention to Ledger’s absence while simultaneously providing the means for Gilliam to complete the film.  Ledger’s Tony is not the center of the movie, but the performer’s literal graven image overshadows the players with whom he shares scenes.  In particular, Verne Troyer is wretched and out of his depth as Parnassus company member Percy.  The diminutive actor fails to convincingly deliver a single line, infusing his readings with the flat, self-conscious cadences often heard in junior high school drama productions.  In hindsight, Mike Myers look brilliant for rendering Mini-Me mute.

Gilliam and screenwriting collaborator Charles McKeown tangentially address themes of death, but the most thought-provoking issues that surround fame and immortality, dying young, and the afterlife are drowned in the parade of Gilliam’s chaotic, frantic images.  In one eerie moment, miniature effigies picturing the likes of Princess Diana and James Dean float down a river that might be Styx, and the viewer half expects to see Ledger himself included in the group.  He isn’t, but his participation in “The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus” fixes the movie as a strange memorial that dominates any reading Terry Gilliam might otherwise have solicited or desired.

This review was also published in the High Plains Reader the week of 1/25/10.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

Judging from photographs as well as the popular imagination, Emily Blunt’s beautiful neck is at least twice as long as Queen Victoria’s, but historical fidelity is not the first thing on the mind of filmmaker Jean-Marc Vallee, whose “The Young Victoria” is an entertaining, sumptuous, and romantic confection.  Blunt has been marvelous in several films, especially “My Summer of Love” and “The Devil Wears Prada,” and the performer capitalizes here on a title role that allows her to inject modernity into what might otherwise have been a stuffy period costume ball.  Blunt’s sunny demeanor contrasts sharply with portraits of the morose majesty, and the movie is better for it.

“The Young Victoria” needs neither its obvious voiceover (it would surely be better to show, rather than tell, the audience that for Victoria, “Even a palace can be a prison”) nor its somber title cards announcing milestones in the monarch’s biography.  The film could also use a great deal more of Jim Broadbent as King William IV.  Broadbent relishes the puffery and pomposity of a hilarious banquet scene outburst that sends Miranda Richardson, the manipulative Duchess of Kent and Victoria’s mama, scurrying from the table.  Paul Bettany is underused as Lord Melbourne and Rupert Friend is handsome as Victoria’s husband-to-be, Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha.

Julian Fellowes’ screenplay switches between the blossoming romance of Victoria and Albert and the political jockeying that consumes the lives of those in the young royals’ orbit.  Fellowes opts to restrict the film’s point of view to the opulent quarters of the wealthy power brokers, a move that closes off any understanding of the common people who hate Victoria one day and love her the next.  This lack of perspective generates even more confusion when “The Young Victoria” alludes to widespread unrest.  An angry protestor chucks a brick through a window, and a slow-motion assassination attempt intrudes on Victoria’s cloistered world, but without further explanation, everyone pretty much goes about his or her business.

Despite some expository gaps, Vallee paces the 104-minute film with economy and fluidity, and as a result, “The Young Victoria” does not overstay its welcome.  History nuts, certain to gripe that Albert never actually took a bullet for his wife, might leave the theater feeling a little undernourished, but the movie has more than enough climbing through the House of Hanover’s family tree to send the faithful to their encyclopedias.  The depiction of the Kensington System, the elaborate set of rules forced upon Victoria by her mother, accounts for the Queen’s early unhappiness and offers the filmmakers a perfect conflict through which to dramatize Victoria’s eventual rejection of her mother’s control.

The strength of “The Young Victoria” rests with Blunt’s delightfully anachronistic performance and Vallee’s looseness with the title character’s courtship and eventual marriage to Prince Albert.  Victoria’s connubial bliss, complete with an impetuous frolic in the rain and a chaste bedchamber romp, imagines a side of the ruler seldom if ever seen, and Blunt and Friend make believable the joys and the frustrations of newlyweds bound by peculiar traditions, protocols, and expectations.  The script touches on gender, but never long enough to establish a substantive meditation on feminine power in interpersonal relationships.

This review was also published in the High Plains Reader the week of 1/18/10.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

Arriving after a sporadically produced stage play and an unaired television pilot, “Youth in Revolt,” the Miguel Arteta adaptation of C.D. Payne’s comic coming-of-age writings is a film so wispy it almost blows away when you sigh from your theatre seat.  It is also often funny and generally entertaining.  Michael Cera makes a fetching Nick Twisp, upped in age from just shy of fourteen to a more sexually mature sixteen.  Opening with a vigorous masturbation sequence that intrudes over the studio logos, “Youth in Revolt” announces ribald intentions that never convincingly materialize, despite plenty of hilarious conversation about all things carnal.

Twisp is another smart, self-deprecating, hyper self-aware teen, the type who listens to vintage Sinatra on vinyl and rents foreign language Criterion Collection DVDs.  Disgusted by the sex lives of his divorced parents and their partners, Nick fantasizes about losing his virginity, and his lustfulness turns to obsession when he falls under the spell of Sheeni Saunders (Portia Doubleday), a well-read Francophile whose quick wit and charisma instantly overpower Nick.  Sheeni calls out Nick when he mixes up Mizoguchi with Ozu, and despite living under the watchful eyes of her conservative, religious parents, she emerges as someone with her own designs on life beyond the Ukiah trailer park where she first meets Nick.

Despite Sheeni’s objectified position as Nick’s inamorata, Doubleday capitalizes on her opportunities, and will leave many viewers convinced that she would have made a principal character and protagonist every bit as interesting as the young Mr. Twisp.  Doubleday inscribes notes of condescension and aloofness in her interpretation of Sheeni, and the performer navigates the character’s detachment and frankness with dexterity.   “Youth in Revolt” is less interesting when Sheeni is not onscreen, and relative newcomer Doubleday will hopefully turn up in more features in the near future.

Among Payne fans, there will be much debate concerning the extent to which Nick’s alter ego Francois Dillinger, a wolfish, Belmondo-esque hustler who would like to tickle Sheeni’s belly button “from the inside,” succeeds, as Cera is called upon to play opposite himself in several special effects-driven scenes in the style of “The Parent Trap” and the more recent “Moon.”  Nick’s other persona and feminine side, Carlotta Ulansky, sees Cera cross-dressing to get close to Sheeni, but the ruse is played broadly and briefly, like many other outrageous gags that Arteta stages but neglects to develop.  Interstitial animations in different styles also contribute to the anarchic, grab-bag approach favored by the filmmaker.

For a film that purports to traffic in teenage rebellion, “Youth in Revolt” sticks with a familiar game plan.  Several set pieces, including dormitory shenanigans, a ballet of automotive destruction, and a Thanksgiving feast that sees a host of authority figures under the influence of hallucinogens, have already been done to death in sit-coms and teensploitation.  “Youth in Revolt” is always at its best when focused on Nick’s droll, biting observations about the injustices and frustrations of his daily life, and Cera’s skillful comic timing elicits many laughs.  The movie may not do much to change perceptions of its lead actor as an awkward man-child, but Michael Cera does it as well as anyone.

This review was published originally for Southpawfilmworks the week of 1/11/10.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

Something important went missing in the filmic translation of Cormac McCarthy’s novel “The Road” by director John Hillcoat.  Hillcoat’s “The Proposition,” a smart, grueling Western set in 1880s Australia caught the eye of “The Road” producer Nick Wechsler, who imagined that the filmmaker could recapture the terrible beauty of Hillcoat’s 2005 success.  This time around, Hillcoat capably visualizes the grim death of civilization, but “The Road” strings together a series of almost self-contained episodes that rob the story of momentum.

Like “Mad Max,” “28 Days Later,” “Children of Men,” “I Am Legend,” and 2009’s “Terminator Salvation,” “Zombieland,” and “2012,” “The Road” is another entry in the post-apocalypse filmmaking derby that has become a staple of several genres.  “The Road” leans heavily and needlessly on the weary voiceover of protagonist Viggo Mortensen, known metonymically as the Man, who leads his son, the Boy (Kodi Smit-McPhee), through a devastated landscape populated with cannibalistic scavengers.  Neither book nor film offers a specific explanation of the cataclysm that wiped out most plant and animal life, a choice that should focus one’s attention on the emotional relationship of father and son instead of the doomsday spectacle.

Joe Penhall’s screenplay hews closely to the events in McCarthy’s novel, but Charlize Theron, who appears in several flashbacks as Mortensen’s wife, plays a much larger role in the film version.  Along with sun-dappled visions of happier times, including a pastoral glimpse of the Man and his horse and a surreptitious grope during a public music performance, these interludes presumably break up the monotony of the Man’s quest to reach the rumored safety of the coast.  A perfunctory birthing scene – which should have intensified the inevitable and impending horror awaiting the newborn – is vexingly ordinary.  McCarthy has been parsed and criticized for ignoring women, but Theron’s duties in the movie add little to the present-tense immediacy of the father and son ordeal.

The most interesting carryover from the novel considers whether the Man is, as the Boy hopes, “one of the good guys,” and Hillcoat flirts with the question in a handful of scenes in which the Man makes starkly cruel choices, presumably to defend his son.  In one, Robert Duvall makes a cameo appearance as a decrepit traveler upon whom the Boy takes pity.  Duvall hangs around long enough to gush vomit and share some cryptic wisdom (not necessarily in that order, although it doesn’t really matter), but the Man refuses to offer him anything beyond canned fruit cocktail.  In another passage, the Man humiliates a would-be thief (Michael Kenneth Williams), divesting him of everything he needs in order to survive.

Unfortunately, Hillcoat doesn’t explore the Man’s impossible decisions, and since the audience is invited to identify with his role as a whatever-it-takes guardian and protector, the Man metaphorically assumes a Christ-like mien, especially as the magnitude of his sacrifice approaches its final moments.  Viewers unfamiliar with the novel might be more forgiving of the director’s handling of both the plot elements and the voice of the Man, but admirers of McCarthy’s unmistakable prose will flinch when exchanges that were stony on the page melt into goopy puddles.

This review was published originally for Southpawfilmworks the week of 1/4/10.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

If Jane Campion’s “Bright Star” is one of the year’s most Bressonian films, then Jason Reitman’s “Up in the Air” is certainly its antithesis.  Manipulative, smug, and supremely confident of its own worth, “Up in the Air” is a movie of and for its time, a skittering commentary on economic despair coupled with a conventional “to thine own self be true” mantra.  George Clooney’s tremendously appealing performance saves the film from total disaster, but the movie is ultimately too dependent on self-actualizing epiphany – in other words, it has more than one big moment in which a character realizes that a major mistake has been made, and then sprints off in the opposite direction to try and fix it.

Clooney’s Ryan Bingham is a seasoned terminator who fires people for a living, a veteran air traveler more comfortable on a hotel room mattress than in his own seldom used bed in a drab apartment in Omaha.  He crosses the country in pursuit of 10 million frequent flyer miles (a substantial upgrade from the novel’s 1 million), distancing himself from the anguish he leaves in his wake.  As Bingham shuttles from city to city, he divides his time between seducing fellow road warriors like Alex (Vera Farmiga) and condescendingly putting up with his earthbound sisters.

Reitman, with co-screenwriter Sheldon Turner, overhauls and transforms Walter Kirn’s grim, sooty novel so radically that only a smattering of themes, ideas, and lines make it from the page to the screen.  Kirn’s Bingham, a discombobulated, paranoid, pill-gobbling conspiracy theorist, is edgier and less likable than Clooney’s calm opportunist, and the book is more interesting for it.  Additionally, the filmmakers concoct the entire subplot of Bingham’s indoctrination of Anna Kendrick’s ambitious efficiency expert/career transition counselor.

Reitman sounds the movie’s sourest note during a grounded wedding interlude in “authentic” Wisconsin.  The director dredges up several old chestnuts, from a groom with cold feet to the encouraging pep talk that validates the protagonist’s persuasive rhetorical gifts.  The sequence, which includes a queasy visit to Bingham’s old high school with his new squeeze, is scored with fragile, melancholy acoustic tunes like Elliott Smith’s “Angel in the Snow,” a device that has felt stale and imitative ever since “Miss Misery” earned an Oscar nomination for “Good Will Hunting” in the original song category.

“Up in the Air” probably wouldn’t have received as much love and praise had Reitman skipped the equivocation and moralizing, but that combination is one of the filmmaker’s hallmarks.  Studio publicity has milked the anecdote that the people who appear in the “getting canned” montages are not actors but regular folks who have lost their own jobs.  Somehow, though, Reitman’s casting gesture seems less than magnanimous and more than a bit exploitative.  “Up in the Air,” like Reitman’s other features, vigorously mixes the solemnity with heaping helpings of comedy.  My favorite moment was Sam Elliott’s cameo resurrecting the Stranger.  He does not happen to mention that Bingham is the man for his time and place, but seeing him did remind me to watch “The Big Lebowski.”  Sometimes you eat the bar, and sometimes, well, he eats you.

This review was also published in the High Plains Reader the week of 12/28/09.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

In a recent interview with Maria Garcia in Film Journal International, director Jane Campion invoked the name of Robert Bresson, the colossus of unblinking austerity and scholarship of the soul, whose oeuvre has become a Rosetta Stone for generations of moviemakers.  Campion’s “Bright Star,” a love story based on the doomed courtship of Romantic poet John Keats and his neighbor Fanny Brawne, reverberates with many of Bresson’s techniques, and even if Campion lacks the most rarefied of the French master’s gifts, her talents are considerable.  “Bright Star” is among the director’s finest films.

Literary superstars, especially tubercular poets who die at 25, defy quiet cinematic portraiture, and Campion wisely filters the consciousness of the narrative through Abbie Cornish’s Fanny Brawne instead of through Ben Whishaw’s John Keats.  Cornish is superb, and her performance so sensual it is easy to see how Keats might have fallen easily, speedily in love.  The two actors share an inviting chemistry and a smoldering eroticism that allows Campion to perfect the art of suspended and sublimated desire.  Few movies manage to effectively translate the emotional resonance of poetry without a share of pretentiousness, but Cornish and Whishaw recite some of Keats’ best known work as though the lines were showers of sparks.

Campion’s sharp eye has often gazed upon strong women who negotiate and subvert expected gender roles with fierce intelligence and reserves of dignity.  In “Bright Star,” Campion seizes upon Brawne’s keenness for fashion, imagining the teenager as an artist with a needle and thread whose facility for innovative clothing construction matches Keats’ way with words.  Far from reinforcing the old-fashioned concept that relegates supportive young women to homemaker-appropriate pursuits, Campion sees Brawne as Keats’ aesthetic peer.  One of the movie’s most potent images reveals an intricately embroidered pillowcase sewn by Fanny for Keats’ consumptive brother.

Campion’s vision of 19^th century Hampstead Heath is simultaneously elegant and understated.  She directs from her own script (inspired by Andrew Motion’s Keats biography), and makes certain that the measure of daily life in Regency England is just as restrained and chaste as the restricted affair between Brawne and Keats.  With the exception of a few sultry kisses, Fanny and John must forego physical contact, but Campion turns the ache to her advantage.  In one stirring scene, Fanny transforms her quarters into a lepidopterist’s hothouse, filling the space with delicate butterflies while she swoons on the bed and attempts to articulate to her concerned mother the intensity of her feelings for Mr. Keats.

The brilliance of “Bright Star,” and one of its Bressonian traits, lies in how much Campion leaves unspoken and left to the viewer.  Paul Schneider, the American actor who played opposite Zooey Deschanel in “All the Real Girls,” steals several scenes as Charles Armitage Brown, Keats’ best friend and protector.  Brown dreads the spell Fanny casts over Keats, convinced that the flirtatious girl will obliterate the poet’s concentration and dilute the quality of his verse.  Brilliantly, Campion manages to legitimize Brown’s complaints without turning him into a grotesque or a villain (even though he does impregnate the Irish maid).  In an irony surely not lost on Brown, Fanny instead fuels some of Keats’ most brilliant achievements.

This review was also published in the High Plains Reader the week of 12/21/09.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

Like many of Clint Eastwood’s recent films, “Invictus” takes its sweet time to arrive at a conclusion determined from the opening moments.  A glossy and superficial account of the 1995 Rugby World Cup in South Africa, the movie blends biopic with traditional sports genre elements, including lengthy sequences in which rugby games are photographed from every possible angle.  Morgan Freeman plays Nelson Mandela with authority and gravitas, but too much of the dialogue is reduced to aphorism and platitude, conveying the feeling that as a political leader, Mandela was more angel than human.

Alongside Freeman, Matt Damon takes on the role of Springbok captain Francois Pienaar, the Afrikaner flanker who came to understand the transcendent potential of a World Cup victory once Mandela reached out to him.  Somewhat strangely, Damon is given very little to do outside of his athletic duties, a frustrating aspect of a movie that might have had much more to say about the key personalities in one of South Africa’s most suggestive and meaningful sports accomplishments.  Pienaar leads the team that black South Africans cheered against, but his presence in the film is unusually apolitical.

“Invictus” follows a linear chronology that builds some momentum as the story unfolds, but the one-thing-at-a-time structure tries the patience when so many scenes alternate between snippets illuminating Mandela’s ulterior motives for taking such a keen interest in rugby and the progress of the Springboks as they struggle to develop a winning team.  Eastwood carefully modulates the way we come to know Mandela, opting to focus on the man’s incredible sense of forgiveness in the service of healing national wounds rather than on any particular demands of his role as the newly elected President of South Africa.

For all the time Eastwood lavishes on rugby, the audience learns very little about the rules of the game or the individuals who made up the championship Springbok team.  Ironically, Mandela is shown in one sequence studying a roster in order to be able to greet each player by name, but with the exception of Pienaar and Chester Williams, the only non-white member of the 1995 Springboks, the viewer is not expected to differentiate among the footballers.  Despite Williams’ claims that some of his own teammates spurned him with racist name-calling, the movie version focuses on Mandela’s anxiety that the winger’s injury will prevent him from being a visible black representative when the Boks take the field.

Eastwood’s decision to refrain from procedural explanations of rugby will divide viewers, but “Invictus” strains to make clear the tensions and stakes of post-apartheid South Africa.  Mandela shrewdly understands the symbolic power of showing up in Pienaar’s green and gold number 6 jersey, and Eastwood guarantees the audience won’t miss the point either.  An economical subplot concerning the racial integration of Mandela’s security detail covers the same territory, as does a series of shots in which a small boy, unable to gain entry to the Ellis Park final, loiters near a car to monitor the game on the radio.  The toughest cynics will have a hard time swallowing the climactic displays of black/white esprit de corps, but more shocking is the truth of the historical record.  Yes, Eastwood suggests that Mandela almost singlehandedly orchestrated the World Cup championship, but the against-the-odds win of the Springboks is a perfect illustration of real life drama tailor-made for big screen adaptation.

This review was also published in the High Plains Reader the week of 12/14/09.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

A remake of the 2004 Danish film directed by Susanne Bier, “Brothers” adds nothing new to the tradition of the returning-from-war subgenre, even as veteran filmmaker Jim Sheridan’s steady hand guides an attractive and talented cast.  Three of Hollywood’s most promising young leads, Natalie Portman, Tobey Maguire, and Jake Gyllenhaal, are not entirely convincing as representatives of the working class, but the stars do their best with a script that depends too heavily on doses of mountainous inevitability and dubious implausibility.

Maguire plays Marine Captain Sam Cahill, a veteran soldier who has seen men through several tours of duty in Afghanistan.  Sam dotes on his two adorable daughters and lavishes affection on wife Grace (Portman), his sweetheart since high school.  As Sam prepares to deploy, his troubled brother Tommy gets out of prison, and the extended Cahill family copes uneasily with the changes.  Shortly after Tommy’s return, Sam is believed killed in action, and Grace turns to her brother-in-law for comfort and support.  In love triangle movies, sport can be made of imagining the actors trading roles, and it is hard not to think that “Brothers” might have been more interesting had Maguire and Gyllenhaal switched parts.

It has been suggested that mainstream studio-released films addressing Operation Enduring Freedom carefully avoid taking any political position, but haven’t war movies always balanced on the edge of cheering tremendous personal sacrifice while ruing the horrors that inevitably scar the brave protagonists?  Movies dealing with the cruelty of combat appeal to the voyeur who craves images of inherently dramatic mayhem and yet laments the tragedy of killing.  Sam pays a horrific price that erases his ability to readjust to domestic routine, but the template of “Brothers” is familiar enough that the viewer can anticipate nearly every scene.

Post Traumatic Stress Disorder propels the second half conflict of “Brothers,” in which Sam returns to pick up the pieces of his shattered life, but the film’s presentation of the debilitating impairment doesn’t hold a candle to “Taxi Driver” or “Coming Home.”  The story demands that Sam be presumed dead long enough for Tommy and Grace to develop a relationship, but that very requirement challenges the audience to sympathize with the absent Marine, whose own children verbalize their desire for Mommy to partner with Uncle Tommy.  As Sheridan cuts between Sam’s ordeal in Afghanistan and Grace and Tommy growing closer, a tone of anxiety and unease clouds the narrative.

The deficiencies of “Brothers” include oversimplified and underwritten roles for the leads (Portman’s part in particular is egregiously neglected by screenwriter David Benioff), and a few farfetched plot complications.  Sam Shepard, who plays the alcoholic father of Sam and Tommy, praises his straight arrow offspring but makes no effort to hide his contempt for the one who spent time behind bars.  His hot and cold emotional shifts, represented as polar extremes, apply to many of the movie’s other relationships.  The Muslim bad guys are equally as flat, standing in as terror merchants whose lack of humanity feels contrived and convenient.  More disappointing, the principal characters in “Brothers” receive the same treatment, ending up as symbolic representations of dutiful wife, damaged soldier, and repentant lawbreaker instead of recognizable individuals.

This review was also published in the High Plains Reader the week of 12/7/09.