Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens

StarWarsEpisodeVIIPosterI was 9 years old when “Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace” was released, and despite all the bile hurled at the prequels, at that age I had no concept of good. All I knew was that there was more. More Star Wars was a good thing, and for the Millennials like me who give the prequels the most hatred, “Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens” is the first Star Wars movie we’ve been able to see for the first time as adults.

“The Force Awakens” doesn’t need to be as great as “A New Hope” or “The Empire Strikes Back” for it to live up to expectations. It needs to be able to fit snugly into the Star Wars canon in a way the prequels never seemed to belong. J.J. Abrams has delivered less than a masterpiece, but “The Force Awakens” is a Star Wars movie.

“The Force Awakens” has the spectacle, the whimsy, the humor, the campy, screwball charm, the romance and the invigorating excitement of the original three films. In channeling the same themes of good and evil and the mythos of the Force, this film has the spirit of a Star Wars classic.

In part, it’s because J.J. Abrams has nearly remade “Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope.” In between films, a new evil entity known as The First Order has risen to power. Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill) has vanished, and Kylo Ren (Adam Driver) is the dark lord out to find him and put an end to the rise of the Jedi. A Resistance pilot named Poe Dameron (Oscar Isaac) hides a map to Luke’s location in a droid called BB-8 and sends it off on a desert planet. The person who finds it is another scavenger, a person without a family and with dreams of becoming a pilot and getting out of this desolate place. Starting to sound familiar? The only difference is that this young person is a woman, Rey (newcomer Daisy Ridley). Along the way a Stormtrooper named Finn (John Boyega) will break off from The First Order and even stage a daring, hapless rescue of Poe before meeting Rey, working to protect her and banish his own past demons.

Though “A New Hope” is proud to boast themes of good and evil in the biggest and broadest of space opera, it is a film about growth, finding identity and believing in yourself. Luke makes that spiritual journey and sheds his youthful naiveté, and Rey will go on that same journey, answering the call to believe in the Force and embrace her destiny.

This is what Star Wars is about, and in that spirit Abrams more than delivers. As with the best of the franchise, the film dances between different moments of action on the ground and in the air. There are thrilling lightsaber duels, stunning dogfights, goofy chases and escapes from an amorphous tentacled creature, a scene inside a seedy cantina full of quirky galactic beings, and even something of a new Death Star. Despite the high CGI gloss, Abrams has captured the tempo of these pictures as much as the tone, with cathartic, cheerful action set pieces that avoid chaos and over-stylization in a way that’s classical and tangible.

John Boyega has a lot of uncontained enthusiasm as Finn, Adam Driver has a lot of angsty rage as Kylo Ren, and Daisy Ridley has a lot of scruffy, rugged charm and star power. Yet all three are led by the master, back in character as though he never left: Harrison Ford as Han Solo. Han is one of the great pop culture characters of all time, and he continues to get the best lines, and Chewbacca the best reaction shots. Ford is acting from the seat of his pants, sarcastic and cool yet always in a hurry and thinking on the fly. Finn has brought Han to the new Death Star and reveals he has no plan for taking down its shields, but maybe they can use the Force. “That’s not how the Force works,” Han bellows in his trademark exasperation. This could be Ford’s best performance in nearly two decades.

“The Force Awakens” does at times feel like a reboot, but hearing John Williams’s magical score swell in all the right places reminds us that there’s no harm in not reinventing the wheel. And the film does take one massive risk that will surely be polarizing. But regardless of if the plot has holes or if the twists hold up, this is still Star Wars. More is good.

4 stars

The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 2

“Mockingjay – Part 2” is a fitting end to the Hunger Games franchise.

HungerGamesPosterHow do you have a Hunger Games movie without the Hunger Games? That was essentially the problem of “Mockingjay – Part 1,” the padded first half to the third and final entry in Suzanne Collins’s Hunger Games book trilogy. “Part 2” finds a way to retain that Hunger Games feel without the repeat of the arena setting, and it finds Francis Lawrence’s film back on track for a satisfying conclusion to what has been an otherwise stellar franchise.

The rebel organization housed at District 13 has rescued Peeta (Josh Hutcherson) from the Capitol’s imprisonment and brainwashing, but at the end of “Part 1” he tried to murder Katniss (Jennifer Lawrence) and is still suffering from the after effects of the brainwashing. Katniss hopes to bring him back to the real world while organizing a plan of attack to bring down President Snow (an increasingly excellent, understated and chilly Donald Sutherland). The rebel leader President Coin (Julianne Moore) wants to use Katniss as a symbol for the rebellion, but Coin may be plotting a way to kill Katniss and get her out of the way in the event of Coin’s inevitable takeover and rise to power.

All this has traces of the politicking that bogged down “Part 1,” but “Part 2” is far better at reaching those intimate, character driven pow-wows and moments of conflict. Watching and waiting for the film to get to the action, Director Lawrence keeps the audience of two minds, torn between a craving for excitement and Katniss’s want for peace. For the first time in the franchise “Mockingjay” makes the dividing line between good and evil less clear. Katniss comes to realize the people trying to kill her are not her enemy, every drop of blood lost has less and less meaning, and the impact of each on the audience stings more.

“Part 2” gives back the “Hunger Games” feel by trotting Katniss, Peeta, Gale (Liam Hemsworth) and her outfit of teenage Marines into the barren warzone of the Capitol. The streets are littered with “pods” or cleverly designed booby traps. Their unmanned nature makes each feel gamelike, with someone from above pulling the strings and all the rules being decided on the fly. “Mockingjay” toys with everything from stormtroopers, flamethrowers, machine gun traps, spotlights capable of disintegrating and even slimy, faceless zombies that resemble the pale monster in “Pan’s Labyrinth.” One incredible set piece has the team running from a growing pool of oil; touch the surface and you’re immediately impaled by spears of the liquid suspended above the ground.

“The Hunger Games” have always stood out in the creative use of deadly traps and special effects, but it’s also one of the few that goes so far above and beyond the YA novel boilerplate romance and “be yourself” mantra. The symbolism here is all on point, with Katniss literally becoming the “girl on fire” after an explosion, with the floating packages previously used in the games as relief now used as harbingers of death, and with the televised murders of children not just used for action but to implicate us as an audience for enjoying it.

The very first “Hunger Games” showed this was not a trifling franchise just for kids. Katniss is a character in grief and anguish, the world is always in disarray, and love triumphs, but at a cost. “Mockingjay” ends this franchise fittingly; the odds were ever in its favor.

3 ½ stars

Chi-Raq

Spike Lee’s Chi-Raq is an urgent statement on gun violence drawn from the Greek play Lysistrata.

ChiraqPosterNo movie this year is as bold-faced opinionated and timely of a political statement as Spike Lee’s “Chi-Raq.” That’s because movies are rarely this topical, this aggressive or this urgent. The film is littered with names of African Americans the media has been shouting for months, it has numerous hashtag ready catch phrases, it stops the film for a sermon that is essentially a vicious op-ed, and it declares up front that “This is an EMERGENCY” in giant, flashing red letters.

And yet Lee’s film, easily his best in over a decade, is captivating and harrowing because it is so entertaining. “Chi-Raq’s” message of peace and love lingers in the memory because it’s told in rhyming verse, because it has glamorous musical numbers and because the dialogue has more words for sex than you can count. The film’s humor, color and energy don’t make light of a bad situation; it helps make the movie sing and sting.

Lee draws his source material from the Ancient Greek play by Aristophanes “Lysistrata,” in which women of the Spartan warriors refuse sex for their husbands until they put an end to the war and bloodshed. In modern day Chicago, homicides from gang related violence have killed more since 9/11 than the casualties of Americans in Afghanistan or Iraq. Lee uses the South Side and two rival gangs, the Spartans and Trojans, as a backdrop for how the women of Chi-Raq stage a sex strike (“No Peace, No Pussy”, they declare) to end the killings.

But drawing from “Lysistrata” isn’t just a happy accident or a cute framing mechanism to introduce sex into the story. Women in this film become the catalyst for change, and Lee’s use of this play reframes the conversation on gun violence to include gender and sexuality. The film barks that people are dying everyday, “and you want to talk about how women behave?”

Lysistrata (Teyonah Parris) is the girlfriend to the rising rapper and Spartan gang-leader Chi-raq (Nick Cannon), and after a local mother (Jennifer Hudson) begins searching for the killer of her young daughter, Lysistrata stumbles across a successful sex strike in Africa and rallies Spartan and Trojan women to organize and do the same. She leads everyone in a pledge, and they use their sexuality as a weapon, but without killing anyone. In a hilarious and outrageous move they capture a local armory and both force peace talks and rally women around the country and world.

Lee’s politics are relevant on a national stage, but “Chi-Raq” is effective in part because it is localized to these Chicago neighborhoods. The film is highly specific and captures a stark reality that people familiar with watching WGN 9 news will be all too familiar with. Lee even gets inside the culture and color of both this Greek chorus and community. Lysistrata’s outfits alone are worth putting down your guns for, starting in a tight purple cami and ragged cut-off jean shorts before transforming into sexy camo fatigues to show that this really is war.

Chiraq1

Samuel L. Jackson is the film’s eloquent and well-versed narrator Dolmedes. His ass was on the first Wheaties box, as he puts it, and Lee sets the tone beautifully by opening the film by freeze-framing it. Dolmedes stands on a stage and halts the chanting crowd behind him in order to explain the film’s Greek tragedy origins and their intention to rhyme everything. One more stat about homicides is like white noise at this point, but when Lysistrata says the men in this city just live by the “bang-bang”, you remember it.

“Chi-Raq” has some incredible set pieces. In one a man wearing Confederate Flag underpants rides a big black cannon and figuratively makes love to his gun. And to end the film Lysistrata and Chi-Raq partake in a sexual showdown broadcast live. But the one that sums up the film best is a sermon given by one of the film’s few white characters, Father Mike Corridan (Chicago local John Cusack). Less a sermon and more a fiery op-ed and call to action, Father Corridan screams repeatedly that “You will not murder our children” and that what’s happening in this city is “self-inflicted genocide.” His words stop the film’s plot in its tracks and boldly assert all of Lee’s politics. It’s bloody, it’s messy, but damn if it’s emotional and devastating.

“Chi-Raq” is as rebellious and invigorating as Lee’s “Do the Right Thing” was in 1989, and as scarily relevant and poignant as “25th Hour” was in 2002’s Post 9/11 New York. But this time he’s taken root in my city, and this truly is an emergency.

4 stars

Youth

YouthPosterNo filmmaker is more of a modern day Fellini than Italian auteur Paolo Sorrentino. His films are opulent wonders, but while his extravagant visual style has for some become a sensory overload, it was Sorrentino reckoning with that same opulence in his last film, the Oscar winning foreign language film “The Great Beauty”, that made that film’s fantasy a welcome escape.

With “Youth”, the colorful set dressing places us in a dream state. Like his previous English language film “This Must Be The Place”, “Youth” is a movie about aging artists in their twilight years, and it grapples with ideas of memory and love across lucid dreams and nightmares, as well as the more practical reality of old age. It’s enchantingly lush, abstract and fascinatingly stylized, but the self-indulgent cinematic flourishes aren’t as central to the narrative as Sorrentino made possible with “The Great Beauty.”

The film is set in a luxuriously fantastical hotel and spa in the Swiss Alps, where the legendary English composer Fred Ballinger (Michael Caine) and American film director Mick Boyle (Harvey Keitel) holiday over the summer. Fred is approached by an emissary to the Queen, who would like for him to come out of retirement and conduct a performance of his “Simple Songs,” arrangements that made him famous but that he considers trifling. But his reasons for his retirement and his apathy are personal, and Caine plays Fred as guarded, a little jaded, but still in good spirits as he waits out his life. Mick has recruited some young, hipster screenwriters to pen his last film and swan song, which he calls “Life’s Last Day.” But Fred and Mick together rarely talk work or feelings, instead one-upping the other on how few drops they got out going to the bathroom that morning, or reminiscing about an old flame they both had a crush on.

Fred and Mick’s conversations about pissing are amusing, but not without merit. These daily tasks, along with the entirety of their life’s work, take tremendous effort, yet produce an often modest result, Fred says. At his age, Fred can still conduct with grace, leading an orchestra of cows in nature in a beautiful aria, but what is the point of creating memories if we know we’ll lose them?

Fred is burdened by the loss of his wife Melanie, and his daughter and assistant Lena (Rachel Weisz) tries to encourage him to leave this hotel and at least leave flowers for the first time in 10 years. But no one is leaving this place. And how could you, when everything is so gorgeous?

Young and old, supporting characters color the decorum of this hotel, and “Youth” becomes less a movie driven by its plot and more by its contemplative assessments of character. There’s Jimmy Tree, a brooding artist of Christian Bale’s caliber with Johnny Depp’s oddities and facial hair, and yet played by Paul Dano. Like Fred, Jimmy played a robot in a mindless entertainment and has his other artistic achievements virtually erased among the people who recognize him. Another is a Spanish football star with a giant tattoo on his back that has made him into something of a messiah figure. He now has a giant gut, but can do wonders with a tennis ball. One sophisticated couple never speaks a word at dinner, each of them seething at what this marriage has become. And even Miss Universe makes an appearance, becoming a literal bathing beauty to further pull us into this dream world.

Sadly these characters are just coloring, with Sorrentino perhaps showing too unhealthy of a fixation on the female, and sometimes male, body, and it takes Jane Fonda channeling an ultimate diva to yank us back to reality. “Youth” is at its best when Caine, Keitel, Weisz and Dano are all being bluntly honest with one another. The four, along with Fonda in her scene stealing moment, are all as good as they’ve been in years. They act their age; they have chemistry and a personable quality that grounds them in this free-floating film.

It can’t be said enough how gorgeous and elegant “Youth” looks. “The Great Beauty” had a shot that literally tipped the camera on its head, and “Youth” begins in a similar fashion. Sorrentino’s opening shot places us on a revolving stage, always disorienting his audience and placing us in a reverie without knowing why. And another seems almost impossible, with the camera rising out of a pool and then seamlessly floating overhead to the soccer star sunbathing.

But unlike “The Great Beauty”, the majesty of “Youth” is in the simpler story at its center, and the dreamy mise-en-scene is at best lovely but at worst distracting. Jane Fonda’s diva actress sums it up best: “Life goes on, even without all that cinema bullshit.”

3 stars

Rapid Response: Suddenly

Frank Sinatra plays a man trying to assassinate the President in this 1954 thriller.

SuddenlyPosterI found myself this Friday caught in a wormhole of reading articles about gun control. The San Bernardino shooting happened an hour from downtown LA where I now live, and it has stirred up a lot of opinions and emotions.

So you can imagine my frustration when the movie I pick for the evening, “Suddenly”, turns out to be a pro-gun movie!

I’ve been pouring through Frank Sinatra’s films for a piece on his centennial, and this one was recommended as a surprising example of Sinatra’s hard-boiled side. Sinatra plays John Baron, a Silver Star winning ex-pat who killed 27 people in the war, but as something of an extension of his PTSD, has now taken a job to assassinate the President of the United States. In the small town of Suddenly, Baron takes a family hostage in order to gain a good vantage point when the President passes through town.

Rumor has it that Lee Harvey Oswald watched the film shortly before killing Kennedy, prompting Sinatra to bury the film for years.

But “Suddenly” has an unfortunate MO that has aged it horribly. The little boy among the family of hostages is Pidge, and he gets the local Sheriff Tod Shaw (Sterling Hayden) to buy him a toy cap gun. His mother Ellen (Nancy Gates) is strongly opposed, but even she’ll come around when the gun factors strongly into foiling Baron, not to mention that even she gets a shot or two off. Director Lewis Allen even gives Baron a cathartic feeling of self-esteem as he waxes on about the beauty and power of gun ownership saying, “When you have the gun, you are a kind of God.”

“Suddenly” often plays like a cheesy ’50s workplace PSA with a story shoehorned in around the war politics. Sinatra’s presence at the beginning of the movie is sorely missed, with the film’s flimsy supporting characters getting developed before we even know what the movie is about, not to mention that all the actors around him are atrocious.

But even Sinatra isn’t much better. Not once, but twice Sinatra plays directly to the camera, wide-eyed and scary in trying to amplify his past demons, but otherwise scowling and grimacing in his typical Sinatra persona and swagger.

“Suddenly” may try to avoid the politics of the time, or the political ramifications of killing the President (Baron at one point mentions the futility of his actions, knowing that as soon as the President is killed a new one will take his place), but with the gun argument front and center, this film is hardly a-political.

Carol

Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara star in Todd Haynes’s first film in 7 years.

CarolPosterRooney Mara as Therese Belivet in Todd Haynes’s “Carol” has perky, rosy makeup, frayed bangs beneath a plain black hair band, cute plaid outfits and a checkered fall hat. She looks like one of the toy dolls in the department store where she works. Enter Cate Blanchett as Carol Aird, who wears a movie star aura with a giant coat of golden fur, a stylish red French cap and later in the car an elegant green shawl to keep her looking perfect.

In fact, both characters are particularly magnetic, and the attraction they form in “Carol” is mutual. “Carol” is a coming-of-age story for the young Therese, but it’s a movie about two people entering into separate worlds and learning to feel at home. Haynes’s film is lush, poetic, and ravishing, a stellar romance in which the unsaid words and thoughts seep into the movie’s background and color everything.

After all, “Carol” is all about backgrounds. Haynes admires the patterned sewer grates in his opening crane shot and the beads of rain on a taxicab that give the whole film an elegiac tone. There are soothing green backdrops viewed through windows and individual stills that have painterly beauty.

Haynes adorns these details with care because the many words and themes of Carol and Therere’s courtship go unsaid. Set in 1952, when being gay was considered a psychological illness, Haynes avoids the thorny jargon and the explicitness of their affair. Carol and Therese are desperate to feel close to each other, and Carol begs Therese to “Ask me, please!” They want to speak their emotions and not have them be taboo.

Unlike the racial tension of Haynes’s other ‘50s period piece “Far From Heaven”, “Carol” is not a social issue film. It’s a deeply personal love story; Carol’s desires are tearing her apart from her husband (Kyle Chandler) and her young daughter, and Therese’s uncertainty about her sexuality complicates her relationship with a potential fiancée (Jake Lacy).

Mara and Blanchett have impeccable chemistry. When they first have lunch together, Therese again echoes her innocence, with Mara ever so slightly propping herself up in her seat as though she’s never had a cigarette before. It’s a wonderful little touch, and she as an actress maintains the film’s mystique by never appearing too indecisive or too waifish. Mara’s an accomplished actress, but here she channels a young Audrey Hepburn’s natural graces.

Blanchett meanwhile channels just about all the rest of Old Hollywood, and slowly she reveals herself to be a flustered, hurt woman without ever losing her poise or leaving her bubble. It’s not unlike the work she did that won her an Oscar in “Blue Jasmine”, but here she’s likeable and ultimately as vulnerable as her innocent young lover.

Phyllis Nagy’s debut script from a novel by Patricia Highsmith (“The Talented Mr. Ripley”) is poetic, profound and beautiful. The cinematography by longtime Haynes collaborator Edward Lachman is dreamy. And the aforementioned costumes by three-time Oscar winner Sandy Powell are impeccable.

But above all the technical brilliance, heed a piece of advice given to Therese: “I have a friend who told me I should be more interested in humans.” “Carol” delves deep into the world of these two human beings and finds a home.

4 stars

Spectre

Spectre, the fourth Bond film in the Daniel Craig era fails to live up to its predecessor.

SpectrePosterDo we need James Bond in 2015? After 2013’s incredible “Skyfall”, the answer was absolutely yes. It was first off unheard of that an action movie, as shot by Roger Deakins, could look that good. But Bond also felt like a human relief in a world of superheroes, wizards and teenagers fighting in dystopian universes. Give me a hard drinking and vengeful Bond with a tortured past, casual misogyny and all, and let him take on a contemporary computer hacker and show why there’s still a place for an analog assassin.

With Sam Mendes back at the helm and Daniel Craig giving 007 another go, “Spectre” seemed to be right in line with “Skyfall”. Bond’s here to stay… or that was until another movie this summer, “Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation”, had more memorable fun with the same concept of an outdated agent in a surveillance state of drones and technology. Continue reading “Spectre”

Spotlight

Thomas McCarthy’s film retells how the Boston Globe uncovered the Catholic Church sexual molestation scandal.

Spotlight Poster“Spotlight” may be the only journalism movie actually about journalism. “All the President’s Men”, this film’s closest companion, is about seeing in the dark and finding the needle in the haystack. “Ace in the Hole” is about escaping a trap through sketchy ethics and deceit. “Sweet Smell of Success” is about power achieved through words, wit and gossip. “Citizen Kane”? Well, that’s about a lot of things.

Thomas McCarthy’s film is not a thriller, a caper, a neo-noir or a melodrama. It does not have an ominous villain, a series of disturbing threats as the conspiracy unravels, or any suspense set pieces. Like “All the President’s Men”, “Spotlight” is a movie of hunches, discovery, research and hard work. The film embodies the philosophy of slow journalism, and it endlessly piles and escalates its stakes until finally both the journalists and us have a real story. A good journalist knows there’s always a follow-up to be had, there’s always more questions to be asked, more digging, and “Spotlight” just keeps going.

McCarthy’s film is the story of how the Boston Globe uncovered a series of child molestation cases among Boston priests, a revelation that eventually stretched far beyond Boston and all the way to the Vatican. The Spotlight team that uncovered the scandal started under the prodding of their new editor-in-chief, the stoic and emotionless Marty Baron (Liev Schreiber). A priest was accused of molestation, and there’s a suggestion that Boston’s Cardinal Law may have known about it, leading the paper to sue the church and try and find the deeper story.

Michael Keaton plays Spotlight’s editor Walter “Robby” Robinson, and when we first meet him he’s giving a goodbye speech to a retiring editor just before Baron has arrived. “What the hell do you know,” he asks jokingly. These guys can smell a story, and as his team (played by Mark Ruffalo, Rachel McAdams and Brian d’Arcy James) starts to ask questions, their obstacles are not only those who want to keep quiet, but their colleagues who are professionals, who have been around and know that many of these angles have already been done.

McCarthy’s screenplay along with Josh Singer (“The Fifth Estate”) is so perceptive to the journalism industry. These characters have persistence, they listen, and they constantly clarify. One of their sources even barks at them, “Why do you keep repeating everything I say?” And when they reveal their initial findings to senior editor Ben Bradlee Jr. (John Slattery), he reacts in the same straight-faced enthusiasm the audience is thinking: “90 fucking priests?”

And yet “Spotlight” is so sharp and tense because it avoids the bastions of many journalism films. “Truth”, starring Cate Blanchett and Robert Redford is currently in theaters, and “Spotlight” never even utters the word. It doesn’t try and position journalists as noble men and women exposing corruption and scandal; they’re just doing their job. Only occasionally do they allow moral high ground to take over and remind themselves that kids are being raped, but time and again they withhold reporting until the full story is told. When all is said and done, Baron congratulates them with the praise, “A story like this is why we do this, but we have to get back to work.”

McCarthy is more interested in the subtle ways this investigation gnaws away at these characters’ psychology. “Spotlight” is a film as much about losing faith in religion and belief as it is uncovering the truth. McAdams’s Sacha Pfieffer can’t look her church-going aunt in the eye the same way. James’s Matt Carroll has a priest living a block away. And Keaton’s Robinson ultimately takes the weight of the lives at stake onto his own shoulders.

Such complexity in characters is essential for an ensemble piece like this, and “Spotlight” has a stellar one. Mark Ruffalo is relentless and enthusiastic in the part, but he’s calm and likeable when doing his job, and we can feel the stress he’s exerting when he finally lets loose in a rage. Keaton is a mile away from the bigness of his “Birdman” work but feels right at home, modest and reserved but with a rumbling and subtle Boston accent that makes him feel like a local and a veteran. Schreiber is the biggest surprise, monotone to the point that he can’t be read. He withholds his words and hints that he’s harboring a vendetta against the church, but Schreiber’s work is too good for us to peer inside that vault.

“Spotlight” is all soft shades of blues and tight, carefully constructed static shots that give the film a docu-realistic, testimonial quality. Unlike the dark, even surreal flavor of “All the President’s Men”, “Spotlight” is neutral in both its themes and its aesthetics.

The sting of the Catholic sexual molestation scandal has dissipated since the story first broke. “Spotlight” and its shocking credits stinger will surely reignite that attention. But “Spotlight” is a journalistic film about objectivity. There are still questions to be asked and work to be done.

4 stars

Trumbo

Bryan Cranston plays Blacklisted Hollywood screenwriter Dalton Trumbo in Jay Roach’s biopic.

TrumboPosterDid the injustice of the Hollywood Blacklist have to do with Americans’ Cold War fears, how we suppressed the First Amendment rights of thousands, or how we wrongly persecuted and led a witch hunt against innocents and those just expressing political beliefs? Or was it all because Dalton Trumbo was just too good?

“Trumbo”, the biopic on the life of the Oscar winning, yet blacklisted screenwriter, is filled with some stirring sentiments and American values. As Trumbo, Bryan Cranston delivers winning speeches with impeccable diction, all while maintaining his position as a contentious, even disagreeable figure. Jay Roach’s film though may just be a little too fun for its lofty ambitions. The screenplay touts values of Free Speech, but the story itself suggests the motto, “Be so good they can’t ignore you.”

Trumbo was brought up in the Golden Age of Hollywood, so the film is fascinated with that Old Hollywood charm, playing off campy fun biopic beats as it checks off the list of stars who made their way through Trumbo’s life: Edward G. Robinson, John Wayne, Kirk Douglas, Otto Preminger. The cast all gets their moments to do their mini-impressions of some of Hollywood’s most iconic and eccentric figures. “Trumbo” even opens with a montage of some of Trumbo’s many credits and takes us through his work on “Roman Holiday,” “Spartacus”, “The Brave One”, and “Exodus”, and Roach peppers the score with slinky jazz and a light, breezy tone. Much early on is even told through news reels rather than personal moments.

And yet “Trumbo” can be questionably chipper when dealing with the severity of The Blacklist and The Hollywood 10. Trumbo was one of the first waves of Communists brought in front of HUAC, or the House Un-American Activities Committee, to testify and name names about his involvement with the Communist Party. Many Hollywood insiders, including his liberal friend Edward G. Robinson (Michael Stuhlbarg), sold him and his colleagues out. In turn, Trumbo and the other nine spent up to a year in prison despite not committing a crime, and they were barred from ever working in Hollywood again.

Trumbo instead took up aliases and fixed up bad B-movie scripts for producer Frank King (John Goodman), and Roach has a lot of fun with this concept. The behind-the-scenes dealings and a money-grubbing John Goodman brandishing a baseball bat at those threatening to boycott him are hugely entertaining, and often more of interest to Roach than the pain and suffering brought on by the Blacklist.

Roach illustrates the hatred of Communists through plainspoken bigots throwing drinks at Trumbo at a movie theater or the big talk threats of Hollywood gossip columnist Hedda Hopper (Helen Mirren). But it overlooks the Trumbo family retreat to Mexico, or the deaths that even took place during the period. Instead he zones in on the family drama and how Trumbo’s shadow screenplay work took a toll on his wife Cleo (Diane Lane) and his equally political and outspoken daughter Nikola (Elle Fanning in Nikola’s teenage years).

Cranston though is largely the catalyst behind “Trumbo’s” added weight, political significance and modern relevance. His Hollywood 10 colleague Arlen Hird (Louis C.K.) asks, “Do you have to say everything like it’s going to be chiseled onto a rock?” Cranston’s hitched up pants, his hunched posture as he marches about the room, and the way he chomps on a cigarette or cigar certainly smack of a “performance”, but he’s modest enough in his speech to make it convincing. Where everyone else is clear-cut about their politics, Cranston plays Trumbo as largely articulate and argumentative of principles over strict ideas. In one scene he stands up to John Wayne and challenges Duke’s non-existent war record, despite how he invokes the war to condemn people like Trumbo. The wit and words behind Cranston’s performance help elevate Trumbo as an artist and thinker but also show how he might be difficult at parties.

Roach’s film may be too entrenched in Hollywood history and royalty to not somewhat diminish the Cold War era hardships of the Blacklist, but Trumbo’s name was suppressed for years, and now this film proudly adorns it as a fitting title and story.

3 stars

Bridge of Spies

Steven Spielberg casts Tom Hanks as an insurance lawyer negotiating prisoner exchanges during the Cold War in “Bridge of Spies”

BridgeofSpiesPosterIn Steven Spielberg’s “Lincoln”, the President worked nobly to free the slaves through the passage of the 13th Amendment, but in the context of the film his work was a thankless task, controversial and even reviled. What’s more, the film’s signature set piece, the Congressional vote, was a simple re-enactment of political theater but played for the biggest suspense on the grandest stage.

Spielberg’s follow up “Bridge of Spies” is a Cold War drama that follows a character with a similar plight. James B. Donovan (Tom Hanks) is a pariah, a man without a country despite working on behalf of it, and his job is equally simple and thankless: defend the rights of a Soviet Spy and negotiate his exchange. As he did with “Lincoln”, Spielberg is taking the small-scale conflicts and telling them writ large, with all the style and Hollywood storytelling of any of his more ambitious action or sci-fi films. “Bridge of Spies” may be the story of a humble, average American insurance lawyer, but it isn’t modest, and the film’s simplicity is exactly the point.

Donovan is tasked with defending Rudolf Abel (Mark Rylance) in court after he’s captured and outed as a spy for the Soviet Union. Hanks plays Donovan with the same spark as James Stewart in “Anatomy of a Murder,” a man with principles and values but not without an attitude and the ability to tell off a CIA agent who demands to know what Abel has been telling him. Twice Donovan invokes people as cowardly for shirking their responsibility to the American justice system. He’s a boy scout, but he’s often on the offensive.

Abel on the other hand is without emotion, soft-spoken and displaying no fear or worry in his conversations with Donovan, and the two have an awkward chemistry that Spielberg feeds off of. Everything in “Bridge of Spies” is simple and straight-forward in its discussion of politics, and Spielberg hones in on the awkward silence that drives their understanding of one another.

Abel is inevitably convicted, but Donovan successfully helps him avoid the death penalty by hinting at the possibility of a trade of spies between the Russians and the Americans. After a spy pilot goes down in Russian territory, Donovan is whisked away to the far side of the Berlin Wall, which we see actually being constructed, in order to negotiate the exchange.

For all its Cold War theatrics, including one thrilling action sequence involving the crash landing of the American spy pilot, “Bridge of Spies” is for the most part a courtroom drama, the stuff of conversation, negotiation and debate. Spielberg, working from a screenplay by the Coen Brothers and Matt Charman, never incorporates elaborate chases or thriller set pieces to complicate the core tension of whether this one man will win his freedom. Spielberg finds the most drama in how Donovan can talk his way out of tight spots, like when his German counterpart parks him in front of border patrol agents as a negotiating tactic. And when “Bridge of Spies” reaches its climax of the actual exchange, the simple act of just walking across the bridge has all the suspense of the voting sequence in “Lincoln”.

Janusz Kaminski’s cinematography is calm and more classical in its lengthier shot lengths and composition. But it has a lush look full of deep blues and gets more ragged and handheld as Donovan navigates his way through East Berlin. Thankfully his work here is more understated than the “Gone with the Wind” artificiality of “War Horse” (still a gorgeous film in its own right), but “Bridge of Spies” still has that Old Hollywood quality that can make it timeless.

At the film’s close, Donovan looks out the train window into Brooklyn and sees a specter of the demons he witnessed in East Berlin of children clambering over a fence in desperation. At that moment we learn his hardships are just beginning. The real Donovan went on to negotiate the exchange of countless more spies that could arguably cement his contribution as an American hero, but with “Bridge of Spies” Spielberg has the audacity to tell the story of just one.

3 ½ stars