Into the Wild
dir. Sean Penn
To recapitulate: In 1990, a young man named Christopher McCandless
graduated from Emory University, gave his life savings to Oxfam, burned
his cash, cut ties with everyone he knew, changed his name to Alexander
Supertramp, and wandered the country, living a fantasy of Emersonian
heroism.
Two years later, he walked into Alaska’s Denali National Park with a
gun, a 10-pound sack of rice, and not much else; 112 days later, he
died of starvation. Four years later, an adventure writer named Jon
Krakauer wrote a book about McCandless and got famous. Eleven years
later, Sean Penn adapted and directed this movie about McCandless. It’s
a simplistic, dewy-eyed paean to a conflicted young man whom Penn would
rather canonize than investigate.
Krakauer also has a crush on McCandless—how could an adventure
writer not?—but he at least wonders whether “Alexander
Supertramp” was a little melodramatic, maybe even a little ridiculous.
He raises the question early, in the fifth paragraph of his book, when
an Alaskan named Jim Gallien picks up the hitchhiking Supertramp:
“Gallien wondered whether he’d picked up one of those crackpots from
the lower forty-eight who come north to live out ill-considered Jack
London fantasies.”
He had.
McCandless is in good crackpotted company: There’s Timothy
Treadwell, in Werner Herzog’s documentary Grizzly Man, who got
eaten by a bear. There’s Donald Crowhurst, in the recent documentary
Deep Water, who went mad while trying to sail around the
world. There’s the writer Isabelle Eberhardt, a Victorian Englishwoman
who wandered around North Africa and died in a flash flood in the
desert.
They’re all rich, knotty characters—megalomaniacs who loathe
themselves and their origins, who have an almost erotic desire to make
their bodies do things that bodies aren’t supposed to be doing. They
change their names, accents, and biographies. They keep diaries where
they bloviate about nature and the universe and transcendence. Then
they die, leaving filmmakers and biographers to wonder whether they
were heroic adventurers or grandiose jackasses.
Unless you’re Sean Penn. If you’re Sean Penn, it’s all heroics, all
the time: epic hikes and boat trips, hunting, foraging, riding the
rails, disdain for cities and convenience and convention. Penn omits
the details that might complicate his portrait of Saint Christopher,
like the forest service cabin in Denali National Park, just six miles
from the camp where McCandless starved, that was stocked with emergency
food (and, mysteriously, vandalized during the 112-day sojourn). Penn
also indulges in embellishments: McCandless can’t just burn his money,
he must also toss in his driver’s license and Social Security card;
McCandless can’t just get hauled off a train by a railroad bull (as his
letters report), he must also be beaten.
It makes sense that Penn would be more interested in a movie about a
martyr than a person. Penn plays the part of conspicuous freethinker
and adventurer, with well-publicized visits to Iran, bro-downs with
Hugo Chávez, and open letters to George W. Bush. You get the
sense that the director considers his subject a brother in spirit. (One
wonders what McCandless would’ve thought about that.)
Thus, the movie suffers. By overplaying the Emersonian heroism, Penn
flattens the most interesting part of the story, leaving nothing but a
pretty picture (shot on location) with an Eddie Vedder soundtrack and
an insufferably pious protagonist. By the time he gets to Alaska, we’re
hoping he’ll hurry up and die his famous death so the rest of us can
get on with living. BRENDAN KILEY
The Kingdom
dir. Peter Berg
Movies designed to be “of the moment” face a significant hurdle: Go
breezy on the intricacies of the material and risk eggheaded wrath; get
cerebral and watch the general audiences scatter. Much like the
similarly themed In the Valley of Elah, The Kingdom is a Big, Important movie that feels much more successful when it
downshifts into a simple genre picture—in this case, a rock ’em,
sock ’em action flick. Given the relevance of its subject matter, this
is a bit of a problem.
Matthew Michael Carnahan’s script follows a vengeance-minded FBI
forensics team (consisting of Jamie Foxx, Jennifer Garner, Chris
Cooper, and the dependably awesome Jason Bateman) investigating a
suicide bombing at an American compound in Saudi Arabia with the aid of
a sympathetic local cop (Paradise Now‘s marvelous Ashraf
Barhom, doing what he can with his character’s flash-card
characterization). Director Peter Berg apes the playbook of his
producer Michael Mann to a T (characters existentially defined by their
jobs, check; over-the-shoulder subjective shots, check), but with
precious little of the single-minded fluidity that makes Mann, well,
Mann. As a result, the narrative’s combination of deep character
moments and well-researched info dumps clunks along more awkwardly than
it should. (On a side note, anyone who was nauseated by The Bourne
Ultimatum‘s constant shaky-cam would be well advised to hit the
Dramamine beforehand.)
Cinematically speaking, Berg seems on much surer ground with the
final act, a bravura extended action sequence that plays out like a
genuinely angry revenge fantasy. As cathartic as it is in the moment,
though, the sudden depiction of the enemy as faceless killing machines
raises some weird questions about the ultimate intent of the movie. Is
it a provocative, ripped-from-the-headlines think piece, or a
jingoistic, squib-happy ass kicker? Pick a card, folks. ANDREW
WRIGHT
Trade
dir. Marco Kreuzpaintner
It’s tough to make a movie about sex trafficking without looking
like either a sleaze or a sap. The plot supplies itself: A young woman
is abducted from or sold by her guardians, she is raped and beaten and
endures inhuman living conditions, she escapes or is rescued, and she
emerges heroic, subtly but permanently scathed. But how to portray this
girl, who, by definition, must be desirable? The righteous message
would be ruined if viewers began to overidentify with her captors.
The lazy way to avoid exploitation is to make the girl
attractive—in a virginal or maternal sort of way—but
swaddle her in so much thick sentimental insulation that her body
becomes irrelevant. In Trade, the first dump of sentiment
comes in the form of a red rose (A RED FUCKING ROSE!) given to the
victim upon her arrival in Mexico City and then crushed underfoot
(CRUSHED UNDERFOOT!) as she’s shoved into a waiting van (A WAITING
VAN!). The main characters in Trade are an angelic blond
mother from Poland (Alicja Bachleda-Curus) and an 11-year-old slum
dweller (Paulina Gaitan) whose most secret desires are directed toward
a pink bike festooned with streamers.
The talented young German director Marco Kreuzpaintner is gay (his
last film, the 2006 SIFF entry Summer Storm, is one of those
obligatory nostalgic autobiographies about sexual awakening and a
rowing team), and I have this horrible feeling that sexuality played a
critical role in his being asked to direct this movie, his Hollywood
debut. Who better to ignore female sexuality than a gay man? But
Kreuzpaintner does more than ignore female sexuality. He strangles it
with imagery better suited to one of those icky, squicky
father-daughter “purity balls” that evangelical Christians like to
throw. Trade tries to avoid the stench of sexual exploitation,
but lands in a mess of sentimentality—red roses, pink
bikes—which is far more revolting. ANNIE WAGNER
King of California
dir. Mike Cahill
Miranda (Evan Rachel Wood) is an independent 16-year-old in Southern
California with a neat old house, a job at McDonald’s, an absent
mother, a dad in the loony bin, and a beat-up Volvo. She takes care of
herself in her neat old house—yellow paint, a wraparound porch,
dark wood floors—while tract housing metastasizes around her.
Life’s quiet. Things aren’t bad.
Then her dad, Charlie (played by Michael Douglas and his bristling
beard), gets out of the loony bin and drags her into a search, through
the California suburbs, for a chest of gold buried by a Spanish monk in
the 17th century. She’s skeptical but plays along, partly to appease
Charlie and partly to keep an eye on him. A doubloon and a few pottery
shards later, they’re both convinced, rampaging around the contemporary
landscape—golf courses, parking lots, construction
sites—with their minds lodged in antiquity.
Troublingly, the movie romanticizes Charlie’s manic depression as
something cute, fun, and mildly inconvenient. Kind of like a
kitten—it wakes you up in the middle of the night and
occasionally destroys your favorite things, but adds invaluable
richness to your boring, sane life. It’s a stupid proposition, but a
perennial one. (Remember Benny & Joon?)
It endures because it works: Charlie and Miranda are a charming pair
and there is real pleasure in watching them—with their maps,
surveying equipment, and centuries-old diary—scheme past the
dullards of the modern world to find their treasure. By the time
they’re working out how to tear up a Costco floor with a jackhammer and
dive into an underground river without anybody noticing, the seduction
is complete. BRENDAN KILEY
The Jane Austen Book Club
dir. Robin Swicord
The other day I listened to director Robin Swicord (whose
screenwriting credits include such abominations as Memoirs of a
Geisha) complain on NPR that her film would be dismissed as a
“chick flick.” Okay. This movie is about a varied group of women plus
one emotionally oblivious rich guy… or more accurately, a varied
group of women plus one emotionally oblivious rich guy who form a book
club… even more specifically, a varied group of women plus one
emotionally oblivious rich guy who form a book club exclusively devoted
to the works of Jane Austen. Chick flick? I have to vote yea.
The readers are, to a woman, incapable of thinking about anything
that is not plot, so their conversations will grate on anyone who knows
the novels. I had to pretend the club was meeting about ponies
(fitzwilliams are so handsome and headstrong!) or landscape gardening
(mariannes are such delicate flowers!) to make it through their feeble
analysis. But the characters are slightly more than the sum of their
ideas about Austen, and I was dragged, only half-unwillingly, into
their psychological minidramas about sudden divorce and impetuous
lesbianism and criminally negligent mothers. (None of these themes, you
will note, are much addressed in the works of Austen.)
I blame the actors, who are way too talented to be wasting their
time on this sort of pseudointellectual nonsense. Emily Blunt (My
Summer of Love), in particular, should never have consented to
play a frail shell of a teacher named Prudie—who, I swear to god,
was modeled after Miranda July, by the costume designer if not the
dialogue coach. Somehow, overcoming a terrible wig and countless
flouncy blouses, Blunt figures out a way to make self-defensive
pretension seem almost appealing. It’s a perverse brand of talent, but
she’s got it. ANNIE WAGNER
Feast of Love
dir. Robert Benton
Someone somewhere once said something like this: The grandest
subject of all, love, can only be tackled by directors who are beyond
the age of 55. At that point in life, the director has the experience
and distance to make sense of an emotion that is powerful and
unpredictable. If there is any truth to this way of thinking, the movie
Feast of Love contradicts it. The director of the film, Robert
Benton, is well past 70, and yet what he has to say about the grandest
subject of all could easily be said by a man whose life has been around
the sun 20 times.
Feast of Love, which is set in Portland, Oregon, but based
on a novel that is set in Ann Arbor, connects love with the cosmic,
love with the magical, love with madness, love with birth, and love
with death. But like the phone lines in Zimbabwe, none of these
connections work. Why? Because after the director makes a
connection—love and death, for example—he does not check to
see if it is meaningful, if it functions, if it is incomplete. And he
doesn’t check because his direction is not guided by a philosophy (or
art) that can make more of a connection than what it already is—a
connection.
The worst thing about Feast of Love, however, is that the
sex scenes are not sexy. The lovers in the film lack fire, heat,
passion. The lovers fuck (make a connection), moan a little bit, and
then the scene is over. But we (the audience) want the camera to
explore the bodies, film his flesh, adore her lips, follow those hips.
This is sex, this is love in action, this is the source for oceans of
happiness or mountains of misery. The director should have gone all the
way. CHARLES MUDEDE
December Boys
dir. Rod Hardy
December Boys begins with an artfully upsetting bang: a
slow pan along a row of young men, ranging from roughly 6 to 16 years
old, lined up according to height. Each boy sports a drab, tidy haircut
and flashes a full smile. These smiles make some boys look like
politicians, others like pageant contestants, and the best—the
warmest and most natural—like sons. From this row of sample
orphans, a single winner is selected and whisked off to a presumed
family paradise. The rest return to the orphanage in the Australian
outback, to lives of waiting and making do and praying for a better
outcome at the next audition.
The ferocious desire for family burning in the heart of every orphan
is the preeminent theme of December Boys, which was adapted
from Michael Noonan’s book of the same name, and whose title refers to
the orphanage’s once-monthly birthday celebrations. In the early 1960s,
the orphanage’s quartet of “December boys” is sent on a seaside holiday
(this is Australia, so December means summer), courtesy of a kindly old
couple who welcome the orphans into their home. When talk of a possible
adoption is overheard by one of the boys—our narrator, Misty, a
four-eyed “gifted child” played with quiet charm by Lee
Cormie—the seaside holiday becomes a fight for family, as the
boys jostle for prominence in the eyes of their prospective adoptive
parents.
From this perch of interest, December Boys settles clunkily
into an episodic coming-of-age drama, shoved roughly along by director
Rod Hardy, who showcases his gorgeous locale with admirable
thoroughness before marching his film to a brusque and mawkish close.
Along the way we get a standard-issue “fast girl” who teaches Daniel
“Harry Potter” Radcliffe a sexy lesson in heartbreak and at least three
instances of characters hollering the film’s title triumphantly. DAVID
SCHMADER
Hannah Takes the Stairs
dir. Joe Swanberg
Hannah Takes the Stairs is being billed as the poster child
for the so-called “mumblecore” movement. A series of minimalist, lo-fi
gems about awkward twentysomethings by awkward twentysomething
moviemakers starring their awkward twentysomething
friends—including the excellent Quiet City, Mutual
Appreciation, and Funny Ha Ha—the mumblecore label
brought some justified attention to a batch of intertwined films and
filmmakers in the last couple of years. But like a goofy, 1950s
rock-and-roll record must have sounded to a Muddy Waters fan,
Hannah Takes the Stairs seems like an empty parody of the
form.
It has the ingredients right: Aimless but earnest characters hang
out in their apartments and at their jobs waiting for something to
happen, as painfully halted conversations and flirtations fill the
time. And at times, Hannah does what this genre does best:
catching those loaded moments that punctuate seemingly casual chatter.
The choreography that moves Hannah from a seat on the couch next to her
roommate over to a seat next to her latest crush, for example, is one
of those poignant moments that these minimalist films nail.
But director Joe Swanberg spoils things by trying too hard. And it
doesn’t help that the main actor, the sexy and often naked Hannah
(Greta Gerwig), plays at being awkward rather than actually being
awkward. The best of these films don’t try; this one makes a point of
it. JOSH FEIT
