Tag: Robert Redford

Captain America: The Winter Soldier

“Captain America: The Winter Soldier” is the most bullet-ridden superhero movie ever made, and it has a strange assortment of politics embedded within.

Captain America is a hero of morals and integrity. He represents the American ideal not because of his politics but because of his values. And yet his presence in comics dating back to World War II has always had to contend with the American political sphere. What would be the implications if the values of America’s greatest hero no longer matched America’s behavior?

Marvel took an ambitious step by removing Captain America from his ’40s origin story and dropping him into the modern day. “Captain America: The Winter Soldier” is a film in which Steve Rogers (Chris Evans) must now grapple with thorny, ripped from the headlines debates surrounding America’s defense spending, use of military drones and their technological dominion over our privacy.

It’s the first time a Marvel film has presented grave, real-world stakes. In one way, the modern setting makes “The Winter Soldier” feel hardly like a superhero movie at all, closer to a conspiracy thriller complete with modern weaponry and combat. But in another way, Directors Anthony and Joe Russo’s placement of the film well within the Marvel template and “Cinematic Universe” make the presentation of “The Winter Soldier’s” vague political ideas that much queasier.

Continue reading “Captain America: The Winter Soldier”

All is Lost

“All is Lost” is a purely cinematic story of a man versus nature in a journey for survival. Robert Redford is masterful.

There’s an especially tumultuous scene in “All is Lost” where Robert Redford is braving a storm on his yacht. The waves toss the boat upside down and Redford is carried along with it, shoved down beneath the ocean surface and drifting aimlessly, free of coherent direction or space. He lunges for the banister as it’s about to rock right-side up, and when he comes out the other side, he shows a momentary sense of uncertainty as he orients himself. “Did that really happen,” Redford seems to say. “Is all of this really happening?”

It’s one surreal moment in this otherwise quietly powerful and grounded film by J.C. Chandor (“Margin Call”). With “All is Lost,” Chandor and Redford together have made an intelligently provocative and tense movie about survival, free of the pretension, the spirituality, the philosophy and most notably the dialogue that detracts from such a story’s purity.

Redford plays a nameless sailor on a one-man yacht 1500 miles off the Sumatran coast. We meet him as he’s jolted awake by water pouring into his cabin. A shipping container has punctured the hull, and now fixing it is the only thing on his mind.

Redford silently responds to this crisis with practical, measured alertness. He dons an athletic, movie star presence but is worn beyond his years. Redford the character seems to inhabit all of Redford the actor and director’s iconography and battle scars through the decades, his face lined with wrinkles and his eyes showing concern but not panic.

At first the accident is little more than a hiccup. Radio, gear and backup equipment is all damaged, and although he can get the hole mended, his faith in his patch is shaken. The man of the elements that he is, everything changes in Redford’s eyes as a storm approaches. Chandor follows Redford up the sail in a massive crane shot and swivels back to reveal the looming terror of the storm. Continue reading “All is Lost”

Rapid Response: All the President's Men

“All the President’s Men” is the finest movie ever made about journalism. It’s probably the only journalism movie that’s really about the thing that its about, and yet the movie stops just short of the moment when the hunch reporting that Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein were doing became an actual story, and then a scandal. The last shots of the movie are steely cold moments that echo the equally frigid, typewriter opening. The words quickly thunder onto the page at this point as Woodstein is left nearly eclipsed in the background.

Rather, this story of journalism isn’t about a valorous effort to snuff out corruption, a personal vendetta, about two people working together, an effort to prove oneself against all odds or to show that journalism can still matter. It’s about finding the needle in the haystack, about the speculation and possibility that arises from complete uncertainty. Almost like this year’s “Zero Dark Thirty,” it’s a movie about seeing in the dark. Continue reading “Rapid Response: All the President's Men”

The Conspirator

Robert Redford’s “The Conspirator” poses questions of American values in a time of uncertainty for our country. It conveniently even applies to the recent death of Osama bin Laden, pondering if an unprecedented villain is entitled to his human rights. But could the reiteration of those values appear any more trite than they are here?

Through some extensive and deep research by his screenwriter James Solomon, Redford re-enacts the time following President Lincoln’s assassination through the eyes of Frederick Aiken (James McAvoy), a captain for the Union Army in the Civil War and now a lawyer working for the Southern senator Reverdy Johnson (Tom Wilkinson). His job is to defend Mary Surratt (Robin Wright), a keeper of a boarding house charged with sheltering, aiding and conspiring in the murder of President Lincoln with John Wilkes Booth.

Aiken is nearly certain of her guilt, as is the rest of the country looking for answers and revenge, but Johnson convinces him that the Constitution entitles her to the same fair trial as anyone else, and the trial made up of a jury of Northern war officers and a biased Attorney General is not it.

This becomes more than clear as it does in almost all courtroom dramas. A judge is always bitter and unfair, the prosecutor is always ruthless and smarmy, the surprise witnesses are always unpredictable bombshells and the pitiful client will always sit silently and stoically until the climactic moment when an outburst in the courtroom threatens to place them in contempt.

I grew tired of “The Conspirator’s” drawn out portrayal of yet another courtroom drama with hints of conflicting American values not so subtly poking their heads into the proceedings. Continue reading “The Conspirator”