Valkyrie

2008 // USA - Germany // Bryan Singer // January 2, 2009 // Theatrical Print

C - With Valkyrie, Bryan Singer delivers his most artistically unambitious film to date, which isn't to say that this tale of a German plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler is a failure. It vaults neatly over the primary obstacle that confronts all historical dramas about well-known figures and events, in that it summons tension despite the fact that we know how the story ends. Sticking close to the field manual employed by countless WWII dramas—crisp production values, a stable of familiar faces, and a cavalier disregard for linguistic incongruities—Valkyrie tricks the viewer into sweating the outcome with a polished but unremarkable technique. Singer neglects to plumb the thornier moral aspects of his mutinous protagonist, Claus von Stauffenberg, and with Tom Cruise filling his boots, who can blame the director? That said, Cruise's affinity for both rattled desperation and starched poker-faces suits the film's perilous intrigues. The remainder of Valkyrie's cast of heavyweights and recognizable character actors serve primarily as set dressing, putting the viewer at ease amid the swastikas. If the film dodges a bit on the German Resistance's character, it also avoids burnishing its conspirators too much, focusing instead on conjuring a pure mood of subsumed panic.

Frost/Nixon

2008 // USA // Ron Howard // December 28, 2008 // Theatrical Print

C - It's never been clear to me why the 1977 interviews between talk-show host David Frost and disgraced ex-President Richard Nixon necessitate a dramatic narrative. I haven't seen Peter Morgan's play Frost/Nixon, but Ron Howard's thoroughly unspectacular adaptation does little with the premise. Howard's Frost/Nixon is a determinedly momentous dollop of prestige film confection, surprisingly witty and wistful in the moments when it stops earnestly clenching to its historical crib sheet. Unfortunately, it rarely coalesces into anything more profound than the immediate drama of the dueling journalist and politician. Frank Langella is grandly watchable, as always, as Dick Nixon, although it takes a minute to settle into his deliberately off-center stripe of mimicry. The film is most compelling when it plumbs the shared class resentments in Frost and Nixon, and its finest scene involves a drunken late-night phonecall where all the bad dreams of a decade boil out in one monologue. More often, however, it just plods along, a curious mix of reliable plotting and obscure context. Blessedly, I recently read Rick Perlstein's epic political history, Nixonland. How might another thirtystomething fare with Frost/Nixon's breezy treatment of Watergate's minutia?

Doubt

2008 // USA // John Patrick Shanley // December 27, 2008 // Theatrical Print

C - The appeal of Doubt is that of a slick, addictive puzzle. Shrugging off the more undemanding prospects within a tale of (maybe) Catholic pedophilia, John Patrick Shanley's adaptation of his play creates something perplexing and remarkably vast within the fine grains of gestures and dialog, self-consciously provoking water-cooler mulling of the film's legion of possibilities. Shanley's disciplined and occasionally too-clever-by-half commitment to narrative ambiguity is Doubt's selling point and its most irksome flaw. Ultimately, the film is a knickknack engineered to spark conversation, or at best a Rorschach test that will coax the viewer's prejudices to the surface like so much greasy film. It's ingenious in its way, but not really a film achievement, especially given Shanley's preference for a decidedly flat theatrical presentation with the odd bit of visual punctuation. (Count the Dutch angle shots!) However, even a miscast Philip Seymour Hoffman rarely distracts from Doubt's main attraction: a fierce, invigorating Meryl Streep as Sister Aloysius, whose withering glares and surprising vulnerability lend the film both a vividness and a dose of needed thematic depth. The veteran's actress's casual ease with such a contradictory protagonist bestows on Doubt its most fascinating tensions, particularly between vigilance and bigotry.

I've Loved You So Long

2008 // France // Philippe Claudel // November 11, 2008 // Theatrical Print

B - Kristin Scott Thomas is the skin, flesh, and bone of I've Loved You So Long. Director Philippe Claudel, in his first feature film, is keenly aware of how central his lead actress is to the potency of this studious, intimate drama of forgiveness, forgetting, and starting over. Thomas' presence hovers over every moment of the film. Claudel spends long minutes waiting with a cinematic exhale caught in his throat, savoring the way Thomas glances, sighs, smokes, and stands. The entire story—of a woman's entry into her younger sister's family life following a prison sentence—seems to lie in the veteran actress' eyes, so sharp, luminous, and haloed with middle-aged wear and beauty. Never mind the hackneyed bits and dramatic missteps. (Wine-lubricated confession at a French dinner party? Check! Tear-smudged, slightly underwhelming revelation? Check!) Also marvelous are Laurent Grévill and Frédéric Pierrot, who charm Thomas' Juliette in scenes scripted with distinctly Gallic confidence and deep currents of hope. I've Loved You So Long just might be the film of Thomas' career. It succeeds despite an unsatisfying final act and too much narrative thumb-twiddling. It succeeds because Thomas is just that damn good, and Claudel bottles every spark she generates.

Elegy

2008 // USA // Isabel Coixet // August 19, 2008 // Theatrical Print

C - For approximately its first half, Elegy at least succeeds in being an engaging portrait of a relationship, banal in its details but oddly seductive in its execution. Forget that Ben Kingsley often seems to be acting in his own movie, or that his chemistry with Penélope Cruz is middling at best. It's hard not to thrill as the veteran works his witchcraft when he actually seems to be enjoying himself. With a creased Dennis Hopper lurking around to provide masculine wisdom, Elegy seems to arrive at a comfortable place, where skillful performers luxuriate in giving us a simple human story done well. The problem arrives when the admittedly juicy melodrama of an asshole libertine sabotaging his own happiness becomes insufficient grist for novelist Philip Roth and screenwriter Nicholas Meyer. At the point when the film started layering on the (sigh) terminal illnesses, I started to check my watch. Coixet's unconventional editing and genuinely inspired bits of sound design don't elevate Elegy above such movie-of-the-week turns, or alleviate the tedium of its lingering conclusion. The literate May-December romance was more heartfelt last year, when it was called Starting Out in the Evening.

Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson

2008 // USA // Alex Gibney // July 24, 2008 // Theatrical Print

B - My only previous experience with director Alex Gibney was Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, a slick, illuminating feature with an unfortunately tittering tone. Enron slimmed down Bethany McLean and Peter Elkin's dense chronicle of capitalism amok until it was undetectable. With Gonzo, Gibney seems to find material that works much better with his momentous and yet slightly mocking angle of attack. In this biographic sketch of "freak of letters" Hunter S. Thomspon, Gibney seems uncannily attuned to the grunting poetics of Thompson's typewriter, if a bit superficially dazzled by the man's insights. Johnny Depp assists with ripe narration of the journalist's words, which spatter into the film accompanied by crude, quirky visuals (occasionally far too literalist). Gibney mostly shies from anything mournful; even Thompson's suicide is addressed with a minimum of schmaltz. The portrait that emerges depicts a cowboy of social consciousness, the second coming of Mark Twain soured by aimlessness and self-doubt. Gonzo offers no trenchant revelations, and the relentless "It's Happening Again" political flourishes undercut its subtler intentions. Still, the films serves as a sort of flamboyant, seductive crash course that will inspire newcomers to seek out Thompson's work.