Tag: Brie Larson

Room

Brie Larson stars in “Room” alongside 5-year-old Jacob Tremblay in Lenny Abrahamson’s second film.

Jack is a precocious 5-year-old boy. He has an imaginary dog named Lucky, he loves “Dora the Explorer”, and he says he gets his “strong” from his long, never-cut mane of hair. Jack is happy. But Jack cannot safely use the stairs. He’s terrified of playing with his mound of toys. He has no friends. His mom Joy, only in her 20s, has done all she can and pleads, “I just want him to connect with something.”

“Room” is Director Lenny Abrahamson and screenwriter and novelist Emma Donoghue’s moving story of motherhood and adapting to life in new circumstances. But it begins with Joy and Jack confined as prisoners in a small room housed in a garden shed. For Jack, Room (never “a room” or “the room” or “our room”) is the only world he knows. Escaping it means a radical change in Jack’s ability to grapple with what is real and what isn’t. “Room” is such an emotionally affecting story because, regardless of the circumstances, it concerns the walls and spaces we build inside our minds and how we seek solace within them.

Brie Larson is brilliant as Joy, or Ma, since “Room” is seen entirely through Jack’s (Jacob Tremblay) eyes. Despite their captivity, Joy carries on life as usual. She taunts Jack with games of racing from wall to wall, him hardly constrained for movement. Without candles to put on Jack’s birthday cake, she faces the same struggles of any mother trying to do their best for their child. She even protects Jack from her captor Old Nick (Sean Bridgers), keeping him in a closet away from sight while Old Nick has his way with her. 50 creaks on the bed, Jack counts, growing ever more aware of Old Nick despite his mother’s sheltering.

Eventually Joy realizes that after seven years they can’t live this way much longer, and she begins to tear down the lies and stories she has told that compose his understanding of the world. Slowly he starts to pick it up, that there are real people and things that exist outside of Room. Old Nick doesn’t bring things with magic. Dora the Explorer isn’t real, but other people on TV are, or at least playing “dress-up.” In the film’s second half, these new rules and discoveries about the world come in a whirl, five years of child development and exploration rolled into a few brief moments of being outside Room for the first time.

What’s remarkable about “Room” is how Abrahamson can take these dour stakes and make something poetic, even hopeful and amazing when looking at the world. We see Jack lying on his back in a truck bed, the blue sky racing by above him, and it’s a beautiful, mesmerizing moment as much as it is a shock. Inside that room, he’s got a sense of optimism, discovery and playfulness befitting any boy. “Room’s” score is equipped with either tender acoustic guitar strumming or delicate flights of whimsy and curiosity, and it expertly strikes that balance of fear and fantasy.

But “Room’s” themes emerge most prominently in its second half. Escaping Room has not solved their problems. They’re no happier or even less of prisoners, confined to Joy’s parents’ home due to the obsessive media attention. Happiness is not determined by your location but the state of mind you’ve built for yourself. Room contained stability and a healthy relationship for mother and son, and building that again in a new world, even one where Joy and Jack are now “free”, takes time.

Larson is by far the film’s heart and soul. She’s still young, but in front of Jack she’s a rock, stern and firm with the perfect blend of reassuring motherly affection. She can be irritable and sarcastic in the face of her own mother (Joan Allen) and bursting at the seams as she tries to juggle her own acclimation back to normalcy while helping her son. Larson joins the ranks of some of the finest movie moms and does so with maturity beyond her age.

At the same time, Larson has a bundle of joy to care for. Jacob Tremblay is just as special here. As an actor, he has perfect timing and chemistry with his movie mom. Some of his questions alone allow him to get a laugh even when Joy is at her most desperate.

When Joy asks how she’ll get Jack to connect with others, her question isn’t limited to kids or to survivors of abduction. “Room” gets inside the small room in our own head, and through its heart-rending story allows us to find solace through the connections in our own lives.

4 stars

2013 Movie Catch Up

Catching up with 2013 gems like “Ain’t Them Bodies Saints,” “The East,” “Short Term 12” and “To the Wonder”

I easily watch more new movies in December than any other month in the year. It’s a race to see what movies might end up on my year-end list and what movies I can start predicting for Oscar nominations.

Now both of those events have passed, and the urgency is gone. Still there are movies like “A Touch of Sin,” “The Past,” “Wadjda,” “At Berkeley,” “The Great Beauty,” “Bastards” and “The Wind Rises” that are beyond where I can easily access them (so maybe expect a part two to this post), but for those gaps that seemed most pressing, I finally amended them.

Rather than suffer through a full review for each long after the moment has passed, here are some capsule thoughts on recent 2013 movies I felt needed to be seen before they got lost in next year’s shuffle.

Ain’t Them Bodies Saints – 3 ½ stars

Though featuring shots that seem lifted from “Badlands” and a story that would appear to chronicle that film’s aftermath, “Ain’t Them Bodies Saints” isn’t quite Terence Malick-lite. David Lowery’s film details the end of jailbirds Bob and Ruth, but not their sordid beginning. Lowery instead explores the will of Bob to escape from prison and return to his wife and daughter he’s never met and Ruth’s determination to start anew. Bradford Young’s cinematography evokes the rustic earth tones present in Malick’s best and worst while Daniel Hart’s music channels Nick Cave with rhythmic pattering and trembling strings. But Lowery separates the spiritual poetry and narrated prose from the imagery, making this strictly a film about responsibility and parenting, establishing the close-knit tension from how seemingly close the characters are to accomplishing what they must. Rooney Mara and Casey Affleck only share a handful of scenes, but their chemistry is in the unspeakable ether. Affleck has a simple, matter of fact presentation of his jailbreak that categorizes the whole movie’s tender mystique and close to the bone authenticity. “Sir, I used to be the devil, and now, I’m just a man.” Continue reading “2013 Movie Catch Up”

The Spectacular Now

James Ponsoldt’s “The Spectacular Now” channels John Hughes-era dramas but is challenging, thought provoking, touching and has a rich subtext.

I’d like you to meet Aimee Finicky. She’s the girl you didn’t notice in high school. She doesn’t wear makeup, but she also doesn’t wear glasses like you maybe expected. She’s nice, smart, responsible, has never had a boyfriend and enjoys reading manga comics. Aimee is kind of adorable in her own way, but then she’s also fairly soft-spoken, timid, without any quirks or real passionate interests. She’s like the anti manic pixie dream girl, which is its own special blessing.

So who is Aimee? What’s her thing? “I’d like to think there’s more to a person than just one thing,” she says, which is a more mature, adult thought than any high school kid will give her credit for.

James Ponsdolt’s third film “The Spectacular Now” is filled with such universal wisdom. It channels John Hughes era dramas but embeds its coming of age tale with challenging, thoughtful and moving subtext that makes it anything but a “teen movie.”  It’s a light, good-hearted, beautiful and romantic film that feels spectacular both now and forever. Continue reading “The Spectacular Now”

Rampart

After the 1992 Rodney King beating was caught on tape, everyone had questions about the victim we were seeing. “Rampart” looks at the other side of the police brutality video, profiling a bad, racist cop who deserves all the pain that comes to him but recognizes he’s human all the same.

Oren Moverman’s (“The Messenger”) film takes place in 1999 Los Angeles, when the LAPD was notorious for corruption. For Dave Brown (Woody Harrelson), racism is a part of his daily routine. He’s got the mentality that we know to be stereotypical and wrong, and yet he’s been around so much that he displays a logic and understanding that can be hard to fully disagree with.

When a Mexican gangbanger collides with Dave’s cop car, the man shoves his car door into Dave and tries to make his escape, only for Dave to chase him down and beat him senseless. The violence is caught on video, and the DA’s office feels Dave is the perfect scapegoat to throw to the press as they juggle their own corruption allegations.

As he tries to escape his punishment and remain on the police force, “Rampart” follows Dave’s descent to rock bottom. Before long he’s pulled all of his strings with a former colleague (Ned Beatty), his on the street contact (Ben Foster) and the defense attorney who is his current lover (Robin Wright), and he’s got no one left to turn to in support of his reckless ways.

Less of a crime procedural and more of an emotionally poignant character drama, “Rampart’s” effort to make us feel empathy for this evil man is built on the fiery performance by Woody Harrelson. Blackmail, framing, adultery, brutality and racism; this guy does it all, but Harrelson is careful never to let Dave take sadistic pleasure out of all his hatred.

We see him as a nuanced man, powerless amidst his own family. He was married to two sisters (Cynthia Nixon and Anne Heche) and fathered a daughter with each. His oldest, Helen (Brie Larson), is now a man-hating lesbian and holds his dad responsible after Dave earned a reputation as “Date-Rape Dave” for allegedly murdering a man trying to rape a woman. He had his reasons for doing what he did to that guy, and they may have even been noble, but what matters is that his family doesn’t feel the same. You wonder then where Dave’s external hatred comes from.

Moverman shoots from canted angles and behind grated bars and windows to show just how skewed a perception Dave has on life. It gets over-stylized at times, and you beg for the simple gritty realism to be found in his previous film “The Messenger.” That movie contained more raw emotion in one, motionless shot that lasted for nearly nine minutes than “Rampart” does in its portrait of a much more emotionally intense character.

Still, “Rampart” is a powerful film. The movie’s cryptic screenplay and open-ended climax has left many audiences frustrated, but the ending doesn’t matter so much as the hard truth that for even the worst guy in the world, we wouldn’t wish upon him the pain of having nothing left.

3 ½ stars

21 Jump Street

Thus, “21 Jump Street” is a sharp, silly and self-aware movie that barrel rolls head-on into its ridiculous concept.

I’m used to seeing movies where the characters flash back to their embarrassing days in high school in the ‘80s and ’90s. Now in “21 Jump Street” even seven years earlier in 2005, when I was in high school, can seem like an eternity ago. Time moves fast, and jokes have to move even faster.

Thus, “21 Jump Street” is a sharp, silly and self-aware movie that barrel rolls head-on into its ridiculous concept as willfully as Channing Tatum dives head first into a gong while tripping out on drugs.

The film pairs Jonah Hill and Tatum as Schmidt and Jenko, two hapless cops who together are physically and mentally inept at their jobs. Their punishment is a reassignment to an undercover operation in high school to locate the supplier of a new synthetic drug.

The two were in different worlds in high school, but now they’re best buds, and the movie never messes too much with their bromance. They remain likeable even as they bro out and act too big for their egos, and “21 Jump Street” has a way of being raunchy and endearing simultaneously. It’s wild and absurd without being cynical in a way perhaps no blockbuster comedy has done since “Superbad.” Continue reading “21 Jump Street”