Only Yesterday

From Studio Ghibli, Isao Takahata’s 1991 film “Only Yesterday” finally gets an American release.

 

OnlyYesterdayPosterOut in the Japanese countryside, budding yellow flowers dot the fields, trees line the horizon and a stream cuts through the valley. From the top of a hill, you learn that over hundreds of years, everything you can see has been man-made. In “Only Yesterday,” Isao Takahata’s Studio Ghibli animated film from 1991, the farmer Toshio (Toshiro Yanagiba) explains to the visiting Taeko (Miki Amai) that on this farm, “Every bit has its history.” Each moment of Takahata’s film shows that a person’s experiences shape their life and identity. There’s history and beauty in even the most mundane and ordinary moments of life.

For her vacation from work in the city, 27-year-old Taeko decides to visit her family in the countryside to work on their farm. As she travels, she reflects back on her life as a child. The 10-year-old Taeko (Youko Honna) is spunky, sunny and just a little bashful and spoiled. She’s a typical little girl, so overwhelmed with joy as she visits a bath house that she faints, mystified by how to cut open a pineapple, and so smitten and petrified in her crush on the cute, 5th Grade pitcher of the baseball team.

“Only Yesterday” shares the look of all Studio Ghibli animated films, with soft pastel colors and rich, painterly, hand drawn detail within every frame. But unlike the fantastical tropes of Hayao Miyazaki’s many films within the studio, Takahata grounds “Only Yesterday” in reality. The film’s modest scale only make the many slices of life more beautiful.

Takahata made the film back in 1991 (since then he’s been nominated for an Oscar with “The Tale of the Princess Kaguya” in 2013), but Disney originally blocked its American release due to a scene in which the naïve kids start piecing together what it means to have a period. Sure enough, “Only Yesterday” approaches many mature, adult themes through young eyes. Similarly, Takahata’s masterpiece “Grave of the Fireflies,” his previous film in 1988, deals with war, violence and death in a way that perhaps a child can understand.

“Only Yesterday” however finds tragedy in smaller moments. In one scene, Taeko gets a single line in a play, and though she’s discouraged from improvising new lines, she makes the most of it in her performance and gets offered a part in a college production. Her fantasy about fame blooms to life in preciously hilarious pinks, yellows and greens around her. It’s adorable, and it’s so intimate that it hurts all the more when her father quietly puts his foot down and dashes her dreams. In another, Taeko gets a D on a math test because she doesn’t understand dividing fractions. She draws a picture of an apple and cuts it into pieces, so she’s clearly practical, but her older sister thinks there must be something wrong with her, and it’s devastating to see Taeko within earshot of her sister’s ridiculing.

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Of course the spirit of any Studio Ghibli movie lies in its animation. Every film that has ever come from this studio has a meticulous, loving care in each still frame. Takahata literally blurs the frame itself to give “Only Yesterday” a hint of magic. After a baseball game, Taeko quickly runs home to avoid the boy she has a crush on. Though he’s just as bashful, the boy chases after her, and there he is, standing in the distance, a small figure at the end of an alley. The bright orange sunset is just behind him, and everything else in the frame is white and washed of its color, with the edges of the foreground specifically erased to create a sense of depth within the 2D, animated frame. He mumbles out a question: “Do you like sunny, rainy, or cloudy days?” She stutters out her answer, “c-c-cloudy,” they both smile, and he runs off. Taeko then turns down the block and starts to seemingly climb up the frame and fly away. You’ll melt watching it.

“Only Yesterday” drips with warm, fuzzy sensations of nostalgia. The childhood story and characters are whimsical and light-hearted but are concerned with intimate, personal truths about life in a way that would be meaningful at any age.

4 stars

Rapid Response: Planet of the Apes (1968)

PlanetoftheApesPosterWatching “Planet of the Apes” today is like trying to sway a climate change denier or a Creationist: it’s not going anywhere and after a while it gets pretty tiring.

Franklin J. Schaffner’s film came out in a period of civil and racial unrest in 1968. Martin Luther King Jr. was even shot and killed the next day after receiving its wide release. It speaks directly to racial fears and the hatefulness that leads to ignorance and abuse. By flipping the script of racial politics into one of man vs. ape, it packs big ideas into a flashy, fun genre film of the Old Hollywood tradition. Except just before its famous ending it almost asserts the superiority of man, with Charlton Heston standing as its virile leader. The cynical ending in front of the Statue of Liberty proves that man is ultimately no better than beasts, responsible for their own demise through their vices of lust and greed that the ape culture has rejected. But there’s a degree to which the damage has already been done, suggesting that the future of a different breed being superior to the white males is a scary one.

“Planet of the Apes” perhaps isn’t as explicit about race or animal rights as it could be, opting more broadly to be about human nature. But whereas the newer sequels “Rise of the Planet of the Apes” and “Dawn of the Planet of the Apes” have tied the series more to environmental concerns than racial ones, sitting through the original can be awfully frustrating when dealing with characters so obviously stubborn and hateful.

The scene that comes to mind places Heston’s astronaut George Taylor at the center of a trail. He and his friendly ape protectors Cornelius and Zira are accused of heresy against ape law and religion. The judges, including the protector of the faith Dr. Zaius (Maurice Evans), immediately write off and overlook anything Taylor does as a hoax. He can talk, he can understand ape language (conveniently, English, even over 2000 years in the future), he can write, but you know no matter what he does they’re not going to budge, so why bother? The film’s more interesting moments happen before the men come across any apes, with Heston smugly challenging his travel companion’s existential views on trying to achieve fame and immortality. Now over 2000 years old, Heston says, “You got what you wanted. How does it taste,” before cackling maniacally as he plants an American flag, a symbol that has long lost its meaning.

Surely such discussion was highly thought provoking back in 1968. Or maybe not. Cliche idioms like “Man see, man do,” or “to apes, all men look alike,” were as cheesy then as now, if not more so. But today the subject has grown tired and has evolved beyond such obvious racial distinctions. I can still turn on cable news today and find people just as resistant to change, but “Planet of the Apes’s” antiquated views beg for something more sophisticated in today’s political climate.

Of course, “Planet of the Apes” has aged really poorly when you consider it came out the same year as “2001: A Space Odyssey.” It would be really hard to argue that the makeup effects still look “good,” but they’re certainly not distracting. More distracting is Heston; he has remarkable charisma and screen presence but was one of the hammiest actors of his generation. Here he’s embracing his more primal nature in his performance, practically beating his chest and howling as he’s being sprayed by a hose or chasing through the streets. But even when his character is supposed to be sincere, holding up a man’s old glasses, false teeth and heart valve, Heston still feels cocky and diminutive to the weakness of humans other than him.

Embrace of the Serpent

Colombian filmmaker Ciro Guerra documents the Amazon during the rubber boom of the 1900s.

embrace-of-the-serpent-poster“Embrace of the Serpent” mysteriously and surreally takes us on a journey through nature and history to examine the value of preserving culture in the face of radical, profound change. Told in two time periods surrounding the Amazonian shaman Karamakate’s encounters both as a young and old man with visiting white men, Ciro Guerra’s Oscar nominated foreign language film finds unexplored twists in the culture clash narrative and delivers an entrancing look at the jungle through a native’s eye.

“How could I forget the gifts that God has given us? What have I become?” Karamakate speaks these words in fear of becoming a “chullachaqui,” or as the film defines it, an empty ghost and shell of one’s past self. He sees a photo of himself for the first time and comes to understand it not as himself but a memory of a past moment. In that moment lays the lost legacy of his people.

“Embrace of the Serpent” is loosely based on two diaries documenting the events of the rubber boom in Colombia, during which time an estimated 90 percent of the native population was wiped out by wealthy, white rubber barons (think Herzog’s “Fitzcarraldo”). The first by Theodor Koch-Grunberg, a German ethnologist, serves as the basis for Theo (Jan Bijovet), a white scientist at the turn of the century slowly dying and in need of a sacred and medicinal flower called yakruna (also fictional). Several decades later, Evan (Brionne Davis) is an American botanist (this part based on biologist Richard Evans Schultes) who reads Theo’s account and wants to see if yakruna really exists. In each alternating story, Karamakate (Nilbio Torres as a young man, Antonio Bolivar as an old man) finds himself at odds with his companions, mistrusting of their intentions but reluctantly willing to lead them through the forest to find the sacred plant.

Yet Guerra challenges some of the typical assumptions of the invading white man learning to discover nature, and he avoids the insanity tales that have been a trope of the Amazon movie since “Aguirre, Wrath of God.” Karamakate initially seems right to be wary of Theo, warning him that the only way to survive the jungle is to respect it and follow the rules of the wildlife that lives there. But his hatred may be unfounded when we see how Theo has earned the trust of his travel companion Manduca (Yauenku Migue) as well as another tribe. This dynamic complicates the culture clash narrative that all native cultures are pure and innocent. In one scene, Theo shares stories and sings and dances for a tribe’s amusement, and they repay him by stealing his compass. Theo argues that with technology, they’ll lose their built-up knowledge of navigating by the stars, to which Karamakate replies, “You can’t forbid them to learn, but you can’t know that because you’re white.” Guerra’s story has layers and is hardly so black and white.

“Embrace of the Serpent” however is a spiritual story above a cultural one, and the many and frequent metaphors, symbolism and surreal diversions (including one yakruna-fused head trip that seems to channel “2001: A Space Odyssey”) range from devastating to enlightening to strained. One run-in with a deluded, cannibalistic Messiah figure is wholly shocking but feels separated from their more tangible journey. When “Embrace of the Serpent” reveals the plight and suffering as a result of the rubber boom, it’s more effective than when reaching for religious themes. One encounter with a muddy, disfigured native who grovels for his life after Karamakate ruins the man’s rubber harvest particularly resonates, far more so than vague symbolism of jaguars, serpents and meteors.

But Guerra’s film mystifies and enchants with a liberated camera and stark black and white cinematography that give an entirely magical look at nature. The camera has a habit of stalking through the forest, swiveling around trees and gliding over the river. It’s the Amazon in the way a native might see it, and as Karamakate wished, it serves as a reminder of the gifts God has given us.

3 ½ stars

Slow West

A Scottish boy teams with a bounty hunter to track down his love in the Old West.

SlowWestPosterLying on the ground in the Old West, a naïve boy and a grizzled bounty hunter look up to the moon and constellations in the night sky. The boy cocks his fingers into a gun and shoots holes in the heavens, and the bounty hunter says that when we finally get to the moon, the first thing we’re likely to do is kill all the natives that live there. Even space is a reflection of their bleak reality.

John Maclean’s “Slow West” is a Western as a fairy tale, an often unusual and quirky independent film with more than a few stylized, surprising moments like those above that buck the conventions of the genre. “Slow West” starts as a coming of age story of overcoming naïveté and insecurities, and it at least seems less interested in the violent, bloody resolution where it inevitably ends up. Maclean’s film tries to be economical and subtle in its storytelling but often feels light on strong narrative if not outright contrived.

Jay Cavendish (Kodi Smit-McPhee) is a young Scottish man come to America to reunite with the love of his life, Rose Ross (Caren Pistorius). Lost in the wilderness and in danger, he teams up with a bounty hunter named Silas Selleck (Michael Fassbender) to get him to his destination in one piece. Except Silas is using Jay to reach Rose first, who has a hefty Dead or Alive bounty on her head, a fact unbeknownst to Jay. Jay is also oblivious to how little Rose actually cares for him. We see in a flashback in Scotland that she thinks of him as “like the little brother I never had” rather than Jay’s true love. When Silas comes to the realization, “You haven’t bedded her yet,” it’s clear just how fruitless Jay’s journey is.

Maclean (who also wrote the screenplay) fills in the gaps of Jay and Silas’s motivation through some clunky voice-over narration. It’d rather tell us that Silas is the ruthless, loner type than actually show us, and surprisingly rarely does Fassbender get to actually perform the stunts and acts of gunslinger heroics that would prove to us just how dangerous he’s supposed to be. Silas even gets sidelined during the film’s unnecessarily bloody ending and even cheesier coda, and his change of heart to protect Jay and his interests comes from nowhere.

It’s the more modest, artistic moments that help “Slow West” stand out as a potential indie darling. In one scene, Jay separates from Silas and happens across an amicable German writer making camp in the middle of an open, desolate swath of desert. The still image cinematography has some otherworldly beauty, and Maclean reaches for more profound ideas of “dreams and toil” that defined the Old West philosophy. In another, Silas and Jay admire a skeleton of a man crushed by a tree he was chopping down. “Natural selection,” Silas crows.

“Slow West” is weirdly stylish and thoughtful in these isolated moments, but they hardly feel baked into a complete whole. It’s a fairy tale without much of an ending.

2 ½ stars

45 Years

Charlotte Rampling and Tom Courtenay star as a married couple in Andrew Haigh’s drama.

45YearsPoster“They found her body…I know I told you about my Katia.” That little word “my” effectively seals the fate of the marriage of Kate and Geoff Mercer in Andrew Haigh’s film “45 Years.”

One week before their 45th wedding anniversary, Geoff (Tom Courtenay) receives a letter informing him that the body of his girlfriend from 50 years earlier has been found, frozen in a glacier in Switzerland after being lost in a hiking accident. Kate (Charlotte Rampling) knows her husband all too well and can sense how this news has instantly made him peculiar and nostalgic.

“45 Years” dredges up the past to show how even a loving, married couple that isn’t complacent, even after so long, can still be unsettled. It’s an endearing, highly realistic story complete with top-notch veteran performances and the same intimate pillow talk and sophisticated human dynamics found in Haigh’s last film “Weekend” (he’s also the director of the short-lived HBO drama “Looking”).

“She’d look like she did in 1962, and I look like this,” Geoff says. The thought alone is enough to signal all the angles “45 Years” can take and how conflicted he must feel. Kate is supportive but grows increasingly irritable at his subtle hints that he’s still longing for her, be it checking out a book on climate change or a late night trip to the attic to find an old picture. When Geoff shares with Kate his memory of the day of her disappearance, Haigh’s screenplay (adapted from a short story called “In Another Country” by David Constantine) becomes elegant and achingly heart wrenching. Geoff describes hearing her scream as an “outpouring of air from her lungs, a low guttural sound not like her voice.”

It’s beautiful, and Courtenay plays Geoff as lightly absent minded at times. He seems to piece his sentences together carefully as he goes along, not quite muttering but not quite in the moment. He’s lost in his memory for Katia, and Kate, who Rampling plays with far more calm authority and dignity, is desperate to bring him back to their present.

Easily Rampling’s finest moment comes when, tucked away in their attic, she looks at old slides of her husband’s former love. As she clicks through, the light flickering on her face, Rampling keeps her composure and hunched posture but reveals her eyes just barely drooping in crestfallen defeat. Her performance hits tragically emotional and personal notes, but is never broad and never pitiful. “45 Years” does away with melodrama fore a more modest, even light story that doesn’t let the burden of their marital conflict weigh their chemistry or the film itself down.

Haigh keeps his distance, setting “45 Years” in Britain’s quiet, pastoral countryside and, particularly in the film’s contemplative final shot, at length to show that what lies ahead for this couple is still uncertain. “Funny how you forget the things in life that make you happy,” Kate says in passing. That’s “45 Years” in a nutshell, in which we know what makes this couple happy, loving and enduring, but we’re unsure if at this age they’ll still remember.

3 ½ stars

The Witch

A 17th Century colonial family fights off curses from the devil.

TheWitchPosterIn “The Witch,” the latest in a hot streak of indie horror films, the devil is only half of this family’s problems.

William (Ralph Ineson), his wife Katherine (Kate Dickie) and his five children are banished from their home on a 1630s New England colony and settle a farm outside an ominous forest. Their oldest daughter, the teenage Thomasin (Anya Taylor-Joy) has just prayed for mercy from God, saying she has broken all Ten Commandments “in thought” and that she knows she deserves “more hellfire” in her life but begs forgiveness. After her prayer, she plays peekaboo with her baby brother Samuel, only for him to vanish when she closes her eyes.

The baby is lost to “the wood,” and Eggers hints at its horrific fate without explicitly showing the act: mutilated, churned to a bloody pulp and covered over a writhing, decrepit woman’s naked body. Eggers illustrates each monstrous deed throughout the film often through a quick percussive beat and cut to black. It’s light on genuine scares and completely without traditional horror jump thrills, but “The Witch” has a sickly, unsettling aura to everything this family must endure. It’s the story of how a pious family is torn apart through tragedy and mistrust.

The film invokes thundering religious overtones time and again as this Puritanical family speaks only of their lord and little else. Ineson himself has the gravely, rumbling voice of God and dresses to resemble Jesus Christ. And yet there is no God in this world, only evil. Everything is washed of color and light, and much of the film illuminates its brown interiors only through candlelight. “The Witch” is a bleak, never showy nightmare made only more disturbing in how it’s a story of witches and demons but relies only on dark realism to create its scares.

Not unlike “The Babadook,” “The Witch” heightens the family melodrama above the fantastical horror. The family’s middle son Caleb (Harvey Scrimshaw) starts to notice his older sister’s burgeoning womanhood, the two toddler twins are adorable little terrors who perpetuate rumors that Thomasin is a witch, William tells a small white lie to his wife after the disappearance of a family heirloom, and Katherine slowly grows to loathe her daughter and seems to blame her for baby Samuel’s loss.

All of this mistrust mounts as the curse upon the family takes hold in small and large ways, and Eggers’s strength lies in walking the line between who are the real devils and sinners of the film, and how even the most righteous can turn to evil. At the same time, the abstract, slow burn horror could be in need of some more startling moments, and with the glut of Old English period dialogue, “The Witch” gets awfully talky.

But with gross out horror and cheap found footage pics the norm in the mainstream, “The Witch” is proof that we deserve more hellfire.

3 stars

Hail, Caesar!

hail-caesar-posterThe Coen brothers’ “Hail, Caesar!” acts as a sizzle reel for all the classic Hollywood film genres the pair could’ve honored and lampooned throughout their career but never got the chance. It shows how the Coens might do a sword and sandal epic, a lush costume melodrama or even a Gene Kelly musical. But “Hail, Caesar!” is a movie about the future, a post-modern mish-mash of genres and styles that hints at where history will take cinema as much as it is a throwback. The Coens are having a lot of goofy fun but still manage a surreal, captivating art picture on par with many of their classics.

Eddie Mannix (Josh Brolin) was a real VP and “fixer” in Hollywood up through the ‘50s, but here he’s an executive with the fictional Capitol Pictures, the same studio that employed Barton Fink. His job requires wrangling stars and getting films completed, and he’s the through line connecting all of “Hail, Caesar!’s” disjointed cinematic set pieces that traverse genres. Set during the 1950s, Capitol’s major prestige picture, also called “Hail, Caesar!,” is a story of Christ featuring the massive Hollywood star Baird Whitlock (George Clooney, playing a doofus as he so often does in Coen films). A pair of extras drug Whitlock on set, abduct him to a meeting of Hollywood Communists, and demand $100,000 in ransom.

Meanwhile, Hobie Doyle (Alden Ehrenreich, delivering a breakout performance) is a burgeoning Western star reassigned to a fancy production called “Merrily, We Dance.” He can’t really act to save his life, and he doesn’t gel with the loquacious, British thespian of a director Laurence Laurentz (Ralph Fiennes channeling Vincente Minnelli). It’s Doyle who becomes “Hail, Caesar!’s” unlikely hero instrumental in locating Baird.

“Odd” does not quite capture how perfectly weird “Hail, Caesar!” actually plays. No scene or gag feels cut from the same cloth. The Coens will stage an opulent aquatic ballet in the spirit of an Esther Williams/Busby Berkeley routine starring Scarlett Johansson as a mermaid starlet, with the kaleidoscopic colors and aerial shots at times recalling “The Big Lebowski’s” dream sequence, only to abruptly cut away and become a shadowy noir.

Even the Coens humor ranges from absurd to deadpan to modest to rapid-fire wordplay. There’s Tilda Swinton channeling Old Hollywood gossip columnist Hedda Hopper as not one, but two twin sisters, never on screen at the same time and each one-upping the other in terms of their readership. There’s the cleverly circular dialogue between a group of religious experts debating whether “Hail, Caesar!” will pass censors. And of course there’s Channing Tatum, who explicitly reminds everyone why he’s the contemporary Gene Kelly, donning a navy sailor suit and charming the hell out of the audience with a showy tap dance number.

Ehrenreich as Hobie Doyle is the real surprise, a baby faced dolt with a stoic, stilted demeanor. In one shot he performs a lasso routine just to pass the time, and his eyes barely emote a thing in a way that makes his act hilariously Buster Keaton-esque. And in a verbal showdown with his director Laurence Laurentz, a simple line reading, “Would that it were so simple,” becomes the film’s unusually outrageous centerpiece.

What do the Coens have to say with all this madness? If the set pieces seem cold, or if the individual sequences feel disconnected from the rest of the film, it’s the act of showing the movie’s seams that stand out. Between flashy wipe cuts and gorgeously artificial backlot sets, the color and visual design of “Hail, Caesar!” leap out at you. We recognize Hollywood as the beautiful forgery that it was, and we can appreciate the Coens’ tribute to the era in how they call attention to everything it stood for.

Hollywood was all of these things in its Golden Age, and in the subtext are Mannix’s internal malaise, the arrival of the H-bomb at Bikini Atoll, and the coming drama of the Blacklist. “Hail, Caesar!” does this period better than “Trumbo.” But it invokes the arrival of the near future, how genres would be blended and how the world would become less clear. “Hail, Caesar!” is a lot of movies rolled into one, but it captures the spirit of an era in a way very few films have.

3 ½ stars

A War

AWarPoster“A War,” the Danish film nominated for this year’s Best Foreign Language Oscar, is the rare war film to consider a soldier’s practical war as well as a moral one. It’s not just about coping with life after war, but about how a soldier faces hard decisions and consequences upon returning home.

Claus (Pilou Asbæk) is a commanding officer leading patrols of local villages in Afghanistan. A 21-year-old under his command dies from an IED and his platoon begins to question why they’re risking their lives. Claus’s message is a humanitarian one of needing to protect the local communities, and already this war film has a different feel from the flag-waving American actioners.

It’s all slow burn suspense until on one campaign Claus and his squad is pinned down by enemy fire in a chaotic battle in which we never actually see the attackers. Claus orders an air strike and saves the life of one of his men. The heroics are handled modestly, with the wounded warrior via a remote satellite feed communicating his gratitude through an amusing series of paper signs. But awaiting Claus is an accusation that he bombed a region without having visual confirmation of the enemy’s presence, ultimately killing civilians as a result.

The chaos of that scene actually serves a narrative purpose. The back half of “A War” becomes a courtroom drama in which Claus faces charges that all hinge on what exactly happened. Director and screenwriter Tobias Lindholm poses a practical dilemma in which a good man who made a tough decision in the heat of the moment, choosing one life over the lives of innocents, now has to face the consequences at the hand of the country he serves.

Lindholm previously wrote and directed the equally modest drama “A Hijacking”(also starring Asbæk), a film that, like “A War,” concerns a man trapped in a practical dilemma imposed by a broader institution, not just an internal moral conflict. But “A Hijacking” made villains out of the larger institutions and had plenty to say about human nature on a broader scope. “A War” is heavy courtroom drama but doesn’t raise as many questions about the purpose of such a military campaign or the nature of the law. We only fear Claus’ unfortunate fate, in which if he served jail time, he would have to leave his wife Maria (Tuva Novotny) and three children.

“A War” also struggles to find its footing and energy until it returns to the home front in its second hour. Part of that hinges on how Lindholm constructs melodrama. Time and again Claus’s moral decisions boil down to the lives of children. One terrorist uses a local boy as a human shield against sniper fire. Another Afghani father pleads with Claus to allow his children to stay protected on the military base. And Maria, who receives surprisingly ample screen time, is on the brink of being overwhelmed with their kids. If Claus gets convicted, the kids are at risk yet again. It’s carefully calculated to make Claus appear to be a good man, but it’s drama centered more around easy plot devices rather than complex character growth.

But American and foreign war films never even begin to tackle the institutional issues Lindholm’s “A War” does even superficially. It’s at war with the idea of what a war film can be.

3 stars

The Finest Hours

The_Finest_Hours_posterThe members of the Coast Guard don’t get the credit that cops, firefighters or soldiers do for saving lives. “The Finest Hours,” Disney’s telling of an historic rescue mission, is full of heroics but also people just doing their job. It’s a sentimental, old-fashioned thriller but is also endearingly modest.

Chris Pine is known for playing the hot-shot, loose cannon Captain Kirk in the “Star Trek” movies, but here he’s Bernie Webber, stationed on the coast of Cape Cod in the winter of 1952. Webber is timid, sheepish, apologetic and looking to please. In front of his bride-to-be Miriam (Holliday Grainger) he practically melts. Miriam is everything he’s not: confident, forward and even willing to ask him to get married.

Webber isn’t the only timid one. A few miles out to sea Ray Sybert (Casey Affleck) is aboard a sinking tanker caught in a violent storm. In a remarkable shot, a seaman stops short on a broken bridge to discover that the entire ship has split apart with the front half suddenly barreling toward him before plunging into the ocean. Sybert knows the boat up and down, but no one quite likes his introverted demeanor or appreciates him tucked away in the engine room. When we see him nervously explaining their situation to a reluctant crew looking to abandon ship, Affleck plays Sybert hunched between bodies, quietly and calmly stating his plan as he peels open a hard boiled egg. Both Pine and Affleck are uncharacteristically understated and are the heart of the movie’s sentimental charms.

The twist involves a second tanker that has also split in two and has dividing the Cape Cod crew, leaving Webber, his inexperienced team and a tiny, 36-foot motorboat the only chance for Sybert and the remaining sailors biding their time.

Will the Coast Guard save the day? Take a wild guess. “The Finest Hours” remains bloodless and predictable, even contrived as Miriam forces her way into the office of Webber’s commanding officer (Eric Bana) or when one of the trapped sailors (John Magaro) pettily challenges Sybert’s manhood. But the film is not without danger or suspense. The waves keep getting bigger, the sea grows darker, and the stakes more impossible as time runs out.

Director Craig Gillespie (“Million Dollar Arm,” “Lars and the Real Girl”) has the finest special effects available to him, whether in its impressive set design, some stunts that take the Coast Guard’s small boat inside the curl of a wave, or in its flashy digital, 3D cinematography that swoops from the ship’s deck to its hull in a single unbroken take. And everything has a wintery color palette that makes the film look decidedly classical.

It’s no surprise Disney made a movie in which the heroes are transformed into underdogs who have to overcome their insecurities and fears. More surprisingly, “The Finest Hours” feels muted in its storytelling and its heroics. These characters are the humble second-string guys just doing their job rather than the first responders. And the film remains epic despite being a rescue mission for just 30 people instead of 30 million.

For telling a good story well, give the Coast Guard and “The Finest Hours” some much deserved and long overdue credit.

3 stars

The Crowd (1928)

Crowd-1928-PosterHas any single image in film history better captured the idea of conformity and order than the endless rows of identical desks in a vast office building in King Vidor’s “The Crowd”? Shot on a slant and tracked overhead to infinity, it’s one moment of many that display 1920s New York City as a futuristic, even surreal cityscape representative of all the world’s uniformity and ceaseless rat race. Vidor films at towering low angles that give New York such gravitas and immense presence, from skyscrapers that look like temples and the glistening lights of Coney Island that look heavenly.

Vidor’s film has inspired countless artists, with the desks alone cropping up in Billy Wilder’s “The Apartment,” the Coen bros. “The Hudsucker Proxy” and Terry Gilliam’s “Brazil.” But rather than a satire like those films, “The Crowd” is a steep melodrama that manages to run the gamut of the human condition. It feels universal and innocent even as the film’s bleak melancholy sinks in.

Released in 1928, “The Crowd” is one of the last silent films of the early era of cinema (with the exception of some Chaplin stragglers). Like “Sunrise” the year before, Vidor had reached the peak of what was capable with silent filmmaking, the camera sweeping, the set design stylized and the lighting dreamy, all before talkies took over Hollywood and tied the camera down again for several years. Look at an early shot in the film, the camera angled down a flight of stairs that both illuminate and cave in on a boy slowly creeping up to learn his father has died.

Vidor uses these cinematic techniques to lend a macro sensibility of patriotism and worldliness to the micro story of a man hoping to amount to something. The generically named John Sims (James Murray) arrives in New York and hears from a passerby, “You’ve gotta be good in that town if you want to beat the crowd.” All John needs is an “opportunity,” and “The Crowd” is a film about how he’ll eventually conform to that crowd in order to make his own opportunity.

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John’s attitude is one of entitlement, elitism and condescension, laughing at a man juggling to promote a billboard and believing with little evidence or work ethic that he’s better than the rest. Murray bites and licks his lip in a way that gives him a snobby quality and increasingly makes John unlikable. Within that characterization there’s a class dynamic at play. John’s in-laws are disapproving members of the bourgeois; they loath how he and his wife Mary (Eleanor Broadman) live in poverty beneath an El train.

John is detestable to the point that Vidor, in a pre-Code era, gets away with making the Sims’ Hollywood ending still fairly tragic, with society unwilling to mourn his family’s loss in one horrifying scene, and with John and Mary sinking into a sea of faces all laughing like buffoons at a vaudeville stage in “The Crowd’s” closing shot. “The crowd laughs with you always but will cry for only a day,” reads one ironic title card. John succeeds in the end, but not as a man who was so good he could beat the crowd, just join them.

“The Crowd” perhaps has not aged as well as some of the German Expressionistic silent films it was inspired by. But the film is a remarkable relic of 1920s New York prior to the Great Depression, and its influence is undeniable. In an age when Hollywood would seek to make escapist fantasies and popcorn entertainment, Vidor’s film had the audacity to stand out.