I have trust issues with Lady Gaga. When she burst onto the scene, social media was not yet as entrenched as it is today, but she understood that to be a pop star in the 21st century was to manage one’s own brand. She had her gays the way Trump has his base. But, in order to broaden her market share, she always had a fail-safe—machine-made mystification. A “Poker Face” fixates you on the mask to deflect attention from who is wearing it, just as anyone could be “Born This Way.” I would rather “Just Dance.”
To be fair, Gaga seems to have a genuine rapport with her fans—she has emerged from the “Poker Face” closet a full-on Judy Garland impersonator. Gaga officially earns her diva wings by reviving the kitschiest role possible: an Old Hollywood fainting spell that is all the more cheeky for its pretense of being virtuous and straight. The old saw about the altruistic wife whose career eclipses that of the saturnine star husband who exposes her to fame could not have been trotted out at a more receptive time; the story pairs a cultural longing for stable old feels with future-is-female sentimentality.
To be fair, again, I think Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper chose A Star Is Born as their acting and directing debuts, respectively, with (mostly) wistfulness in mind. (It is a strain to look for cultural relevance in a film that has been through development hell.) In these pre-Singularity times, they’ve realized that the human factor—giving it your all—comes at a premium. Their film flips the bird at upstart Instagram celebrities: performance is hard, it says, and these two want to show their work. Talent is two-thirds sweat.
The lukewarm reception of Joy will hopefully shake David O. Russell and Jennifer Lawrence out of the complacency that this bric-a-brac movie is surely the product of, but I want to take a moment to give them points for their sheer, batshit audacity. It’s a pleasure to think about and a pain to write about because it’s so chocked full of nuts that it’s hard to figure out which layers are intended as bullshit and which layers aren’t intended as bullshit but really, truly are. Wading in this septic think tank can put one in touch with the sublime; it’s like listening to an interview with William Shatner. But it can also be exhausting. Joy feels suspiciously like the last few Russell-Lawrence collaborations, but they power through this one as if under a 108-degree fever. They’ve sweat off the emotional weight.
First, the good stuff: This is a movie about a mop. That’s about the best thing I can say about it. I’ve never seen a film, or engaged with any work of art intended for adults, that has put a human face on household products. The mop is a symbol of our modern-day Cinderella’s domestic oppression as well as her ticket to freedom. More importantly, Joy in Joy makes the case that the mop mod she’s invented will shave minutes off your chores. Those minutes add up, and add value to your life. What Joy represents is utopianism on a granular scale: so granular that her ilk is often unfairly overlooked. Viewed through this prism, as-seen-on-TV junk is transfigured. Who knew that one might find an unsung hero behind ped eggs and lint removers and containers of OxiClean? Look deep into the food processor or up a set of knives and one might find the traces of a human being who was trying to make the world a better place. Joy sells her mop on QVC, back when shopping from home was a novel thing, and the film makes it clear that the network stands for something other than late-capitalist malaise. For a tweaker like Joy, it’s an honest-to-goodness platform for ideas.
Russell can make these points, and Lawrence can sell them through her dimples, all while going headlong into butterscotch-and-brown late-’80s kitsch. Their contrarian impulse has swagger, and it’s essentially humane. This is a female-empowerment movie without malice, but also, perhaps, without mental toughness. When one of QVC’s most experienced on-air personalities tries to shill for it, Joy’s mop is a flop, so the inventor decides to get in front of the camera herself. Bradley Cooper, as the slick head of programming, tries to weigh her down with bangle bracelets and gallons of hairspray, but she insists on going before the lights in plainclothes, so the viewers see the aw-shucks in her eyes. Guess what? It works!
If the fashions of the 1970s indicate a culture that had given in, the fashions of the 1980s indicate a culture that had given in but was pretending not to have. In the ’70s, couched in disillusionment, people weren’t hypocritical about being hypocritical; Americans indulged in new freedoms that they hadn’t yet learned to be afraid of. This wayward decade seems to be the spiritual home of the director David O. Russell, who turned 16 in 1974: the year that American Hustle takes off. Sydney Prosser (Amy Adams) and Irving Rosenfeld (Christian Bale), whose chest hair garnishes a leisure suit which is open all the way down to the gut, are two fish grooving in this brave new sea, though their sense of class is informed by an even earlier period; they fall in love over a Duke Ellington L.P.
Russell’s take on the ’70s in America differs greatly from Tomas Alfredson’s view of England during the same era in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. Britain’s finest hadn’t just given in—they’d given up. For small-time con artists like Irving, who bilks money out of other small fry by way of bogus loans, and Sydney, who assists him in the imperial guise of “Lady Edith,” this is a period of market expansion—until they get busted by Bradley Cooper in curls, an F.B.I. agent named Richie Di Maso. He takes a shine to Sydney—who still talks like Edith, even if her posh accent is less convincing than the Lady Eve’s—and decides to give the pair a break if they help him snare other criminals; they—Irving less willingly than Sydney—agree to help, and their con spirals out to the highest levels of the Mafia. To Irving’s way of thinking, however, it had gotten out of hand once the trap was set on Carmine Polito (Jeremy Renner), the mayor of Camden, N.J., whose graft for the cause of a rebuilt Atlantic City reads as corrupt to Richie but, to Irving, looks like the long game fairly played. All the while, Sydney plays them both—and herself, too.
Though very different in style and tone, American Hustle is a caper comedy with quirk baked in like The Brothers Bloom. Both take the idea of con men to Samuel Beckett extremes, and do so with self-awareness plateauing at healthy levels. But, with its roots in social realities, and in movies rooted in social realities—Bloom popped out of Wes Anderson and Fellini; Hustle Altman and Scorsese—Hustle attempts something more daring: Russell doesn’t only want to make a movie in the style of the ’70s masters, he wants to zero in on the sensibility that formed them. As someone whose taste in movies was born in that golden age before my birth, I can’t help but be thrilled by the spirit of his attempt. The big filmmakers of the ’70s were primarily Catholics and Jews—Russell is half-Italian and half-Jewish—and the adoration of Mayor Polito smacks of a certain form of tribalism native to the period. If The Godfather showed that the American Dream was paid for in blood, it also showed an ascendancy from Ellis Island that the sons and grandsons of immigrants could take pride in. Like the student protesters at U.C. Berkeley, their forebears were anti-establishment—but anti-establishment because they had to be. In the flattening of wealth that followed World War II, the ethnic diversity of the middle class boomed; but the aspirations were still hunky-dory Protestant in manner. In Bonnie and Clyde, the youth of a generation said “our turn”; that sentiment then rippled through the generation’s ethnic pockets. This self-identification, which can alas get mawkish, turgid, or worse, gave movies like Mean Streets some of their verve. The American Dream was rewritten in the vernacular.
Sometimes the power of positive thinking seems more acceptable when the people spouting it have been to hell and back. It’s a sympathetic reflex–if they think that will help them get their shit together, might as well let them try. Silver Linings Playbook softens us up with this technique, but the conditioning only goes so far. There’s a precise cutoff point when it goes from indie dramedy to straight-up rom-com; it’s as if Jennifer Lawrence were being replaced by Jennifer Aniston, and Bradley Cooper was being swapped out with, well, Bradley Cooper.
Not to rag on the guy. My main impression of him still comes from The Hangover, which he coasted through like an apotheosized frat boy. He had a leading-man stick up his ass, but none of the charisma that he shows here–a good-humored and sly satire of charisma that blurs it with crazy. The movie starts with his character, Pat, being let out of an institution that treated him for bipolar disorder; he’d caught his wife in the shower with another man, and socked the philanderer hard enough to squeeze a restraining order out of him. And Pat’s wife. So it’s Pat’s mission to convince her that he’s in shape and in control. We all know that isn’t going to happen; it’s just not the nature of the game. But the director, David O. Russell, postpones the inevitable with a vision of working-class Philadelphia that’s all loose screws. Diagnosed or not, everybody’s got something that someone could prescribe a pill for. But it’s not a broadside about our culture of medication–rather, it vindicates a society in which neurosis is the norm. The movie is consciously made in the spirit of the ’70s films of Robert Altman and Paul Mazursky, and even a Scorsese film like Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore; those directors embraced kooky Americana in all its jaggedness. Russell knows how to externalize mania in a way that layers anxiety upon anxiety–especially in the sound design–and, somehow, the immediacy of Masanobu Takayanagi’s handheld camera never gets stale.
But there’s a moment when Robert De Niro, as Pat’s book-making father, comes around to Tiffany, Lawrence’s nymphomanical widow, with his trademark puff of the lip and jerk of the wrist, and it’s as if he’s raising a white flag on behalf of his generation. That’s a dramatic way of putting it, I admit, but the movie takes to contrivance like a junkie and its focus-group concessions start to jump out of the woodwork: Oh, I get it, they’ve thrown in some football for the guys and a dance contest for the girls. Even Pat’s family being what’s-a-matta-you Italian seems suspect. To the film’s credit, however, enough good will spills over from the first half to make the betrayal of the second bearable–at least to me. (Bearable–even peppy–but not believable.) Maybe it’s because this is the rare movie where everybody has something to prove and yet nobody has a chip on his or her shoulder. Lawrence comes at us like a juggernaut of tightly wound emotions that clash with Pat’s aloof magical thinking; she may be compensating a bit for the tentativeness of her sylvan heroines, but her drive spills over into the role. Russell, for his part, makes it clear that Silver Linings Playbook belongs to the same chapter of his smorgasbord career as The Fighter; the charm of these bald attempts at inspiration makes one think that maybe he’s been to hell and back.
In On the Waterfront, a down-for-the-count Marlon Brando pined to his brother that he coulda been a contender, he coulda been somebody. And that’s basically what the half-brothers Dicky and Micky say to each other in David O. Russell’s The Fighter—substituting the past conditional for the past and future tenses, respectively. In the end, they both upgrade to the present tense. Although it’s based on the true story of Micky Ward—the Lowell, Mass., homeboy who became the World Boxing Union’s welterweight champion in 2000—the movie resembles Rocky: before Rocky lost his innocence. (To sequels—not to Adrian.) There’s a passing resemblance, too, to The Pope of Greenwich Village, with its good-brother / bad-brother dichotomy; Christian Bale seems to have based his Dicky on Eric Roberts’s wriggly, petulant hood Paulie. Dicky is himself a former champ; he became the pride of Lowell after defeating Sugar Ray Leonard back in 1978. But, by the time The Fighter is set, in the early 1990s, Dicky has devolved into a gaunt-faced crackhead; he still takes a swing every time he takes a step but his infectious swag is like a storm system brewing behind a pallid kabuki mask. The rings he now fights in are under his eyes.
Has ever an actor been more appropriately named than Christian Bale: two words that denote aery earnestness, a touch of the divine as well as a smack of malign, and even a hint of anguish? This Brit made a great American Psycho; but once he lost his mind, it looked as though he’d never recover it. Sanity appears to bore him. As The Dark Knight, he was torpid—perhaps because the director drooled over the banality of Heath Ledger’s evil and didn’t care a lick about good. But Bale looses focus, too; his wackadoodle dexterity was obvious in The Machinist, The Prestige, and Rescue Dawn—but he was spewing solar flares out of black holes. Despite being a cacophony of tweaky rhythms, his Dicky does have a core—a fallen brah’s braggadocio and a cracked sense of street humor. Mark Wahlberg’s exceptionally sweet and mannered performance as Micky seems to have grounded Bale; maybe Wahlberg’s selflessness tempered Bale’s masochism. Although Wahlberg doesn’t have any great scenes to himself, he conveys the saturnine softness of Brando; his up-turned mouth is always edging for a fight, but his eyes are far more conciliatory. It’s not a revelation by now, but he’s long since wiped Marky Mark off the marquee. He forces my mind to open wide enough to entertain the possibility that the next De Niro could be Justin Bieber.
The Fighter is a fine piece of work, though not a work of art. It doesn’t transcend its genre, like The Wrestler did (Aronofsky is listed as an executive producer); but it hits all the familiar notes in a way that wrings out more than the familiar sentiments. The first scene made me a little antsy: the -ickys careen through the hood—M- a little abashed; D-, ghetto blaster in hand, a fistic Pied Piper taking his town in tow—both on an apparent course for working-class Capra-corn. But the beauty of this picture is its immersion into local color; Russell is never above his subject—and neither is he looking at it from below, with reverence. I rolled my eyes when Dennis Lehane’s Mass-hole exceptionalism soiled Casey Affleck’s opening narration in the otherwise mild Gone Baby Gone; but these Lowellians are too tough, and, perhaps, too insular, to buy into that brand of bunk. The few daubs of style that the director allows himself—like the bouffant-topped Greek chorus that the boxers’ sisters comprise—may be a little too coarse, because he’s dealing with real people. (Otherwise, they’re not too different from the upper-crust caricatures in The King’s Speech or 8 1/2. They make for a witty “compile character,” cool-hearted though the effect may be.) The whole family reverts to obeisant putty whenever their materfamilias, Alice, is around. Melissa Leo—yet another appropriate surname!—gives Alice the squawk of an albatross and the pride of a lioness. Her children address her by name, but maybe they should call her “Sir”; her family is an enterprise, and she’s both queen and C.E.O. Russell even makes the music-to-loose-your-virginity-to-in-the-backseat-of-an-’86-Plymouth overcome any sports-montage stigmas: These sonic ’roids may be clichés, but they’re part of the guys’ pop culture.
There is a flipside. At one point, when Dicky’s in jail, he watches a nationally broadcast T.V. special about his decline: High on Crack Street. At first, he provides a sardonic commentary for his fellow inmates—who cheer his every jeer—but he comes to see that the joke is on him, and his family. This idea of seeing oneself reflected in a highly public mirror is as contemporary as it is fascinating; but it is probably the only interesting theme that the filmmakers develop. And they make a few goofs. We’re never sure when we are in the timeline, or how much time has passed since the last scene; and it seemed strange that Micky wasn’t awarded a moment with the ladies of his life—Alice and his girlfriend Charlene (Amy Adams)—after winning the championship. But Russell had been suffering from Mark Romanek Syndrome—this is his first feature since I Heart Huckabees, six years ago—so maybe he needed something a little stiff (that is to say, conventional) to aid in his convalescence. His commercial strategy seems akin to his heroes’ Zen pugilism: clobber your opponent once he thinks you’re a goner. David Edelstein calledThe King’s Speech a “middlebrow masterpiece”; The Fighter is a nothin’-special knockout.
The press has fallen in love with The Hurt Locker. For those of us who came of age during the combat-movie drought that wars like Iraq tend to engender—and who are typically disinclined to browse that genre at Blockbuster, besides—The Hurt Locker is like a first kiss. But I hesitate to stretch the metaphor, a.) As to not detract from the seriousness that is the movie’s desert, and b.) Because it is not quite so good as to extend to the proverbial loss of my virginity.
There’s a sense of inevitability that permeates The Hurt Locker, and though it affects us on a deeper level than most procedurals do by virtue of both skill and discretion, the film stays true to that limited form. I don’t wish to be unfair; the way the filmmakers follow the procedural lockstep is integral to their conception, and part of the movie’s power stems from the singular, sensuous way they underplay the suspense scenes—poeticizing the horrors that are, for these characters, routine. The flesh is thick, and there’s a heart beating beneath it, but we can still detect that skeleton with clichés in its marrow: the trailer-park individualist who gets the job done but puts others at risk in the process; the by-the-book black soldier whose respect the lone wolf earns; and the younger, more impressionable lad who comes to idolize the loner. There’s familiarity in all this, as well as in the lone wolf’s relationship with a young local boy (Christopher Sayegh)—an Iraqi Shia LaBoeuf who, in a nice touch, endears himself to Americans by way of curse words. (It sounds as if Lil Wayne was his English teacher.)
But the director, Kathryn Bigelow, is a pro in both the banal sense and the positive one; she knows the ropes, but knows how to tug them, too. Her focus is narrow and her methods are austere, but her targets are well embodied, and pregnant with echoes of their grander context. It’s as if she made a war film in the style of The Wrestler. She stages combat effectively, appositely—the complexity of her images is almost subliminal. Rich in its invocation of atmosphere, The Hurt Locker coats the sun-baked sands of arid Iraq with a cool iridescent gel. It’s not the kind of star-glamour antifreeze required for a bland, exploitive movie like The Kingdom (2007)—a lemon; it’s more like the psychological analgesics that professional soldiers mask their anxieties with. We aren’t given babes in the woods like Charlie Sheen in Platoon; unformed baby-men whose innocence is despoiled by war are a dramatic shortcut, as easy to sympathize with as puppies under Jack the Ripper’s knife. Bigelow lets us under her guarded soldiers’ skins with a vision that’s neither tawdry nor ironic.
These troopers constitute a bomb squad in its final weeks of deployment in Baghdad: cocksure SSgt. James (Jeremy Renner), prim Sgt. Sanborn (Anthony Mackie), and sensitive Sgt. Eldridge (Brian Geraghty). James is something of a legend for having disarmed 800-something I.E.D.s in his day, and approaches each new one with an aloofness that drives his teammates batty. This is pure procedural—vindicating the competent badass (and we’re cued in immediately that he’s a badass because he smokes cigarettes) who doesn’t follow the rules but gets the job done is old-bag Hollywood heroism. But the more we see James in action, the more his strut seems abreast of a fresher truth; back on the home front, he’s either a father or some woman’s baby-daddy—his ex-wife still lives with him, so he’s not sure. He’s graceful under pressure, and in the heat of combat, he’s coolly maternal to his men; yet, as Eldridge tells him, he’s one hell of a leader, but lackluster as a people person. He needs the specter of death barking up his leg like a rabid dog; without it, he can’t be all that he can be. His ravenous addiction to war is the tragedy of war.
Dressing up the march toward war in the heightened-mundanity style of The Office might seem like a ludicrously insensitive sneak attack, but the makers of In the Loop are savvy wolves in sheep’s clothing. They use faux reality-T.V. looseness as an antidote to high-flown demagoguery, yet they get their complex points across with the clarity of “Yes We Can.”
Not that their vision is so sanguine. The fresh-faced British Secretary of State for International Development, Simon Foster (Tom Hollander), opines on a talk-radio interview that an impending Middle Eastern war is “unforeseeable.” Of course, higher up within the government, war is quite foreseeable—in fact, it’s being actuated behind layers of sticky red tape—so the Prime Minister’s spin-doctor, Malcolm Tucker (Peter Capaldi), is assigned to Foster for damage control. Tucker is a Scots sociopath whose trenchant profanity is probably like Karl Rove’s id on rollerblades. He trains the naïve secretary to speak in ambivalent bromides, and against Foster’s better judgment, the secretary uses them at antiwar conferences held by the American Assistant Secretary for Diplomacy, Karen Clark (Mimi Kennedy). Foster, along with a document by Clark’s assistant Liza (Anna Chlumsky), are supposed to be Clark’s ace in the hole against the forces of her pro-war opponent, Linton Barwick (David Rasche). But, through swaths of convolutions, obfuscations, and manipulations, the strength of her hand goes up and down like the Scales of Justice turned into a playground seesaw.
The Middle Eastern war isn’t Iraq, though it’s clearly an echo of it. The head honchos on both sides of the Atlantic go unnamed and the references (Lily Allen, I Heart Huckabees, etc.) are clearly anachronistic for a 2002-3 timeframe. But the filmmakers are too clever as satirists to fall into the Iraq trap; In the Loop depicts the horrendous ways in which any modern war can be tricked into erupting. Similarities to Iraq give the writers (Jesse Armstrong, Simon Blackwell, Tony Roche, Ian Martin, and the director, Armondo Iannucci) moral ground to stand on—not a soapbox to scold from.
The cast, however, is given several opportunities to scold, shout, seethe and weave strands of B.S. with a scatological loom. Within the loop are hacks, stalwarts, armchair ideologues, sadists and suck-ups, and Iannucci gives each type a send-up, but not dismissively. Most of the actors deserve to get props, but Capaldi and James Gandolfini (as a pragmatic American general) are given the funniest and most difficult roles, respectively.
I usually wince at “pure” evil characters in “serious” movies, but Capaldi makes a robotic weasel like Tucker seem plausible; only once did I think he had his own opinion on something and wasn’t just brokering power for its own sake or for the sake of his ego. To paraphrase from The Lion in Winter, his human parts are missing; but it’s not within this movie’s docudrama purview to examine how that lack affects him internally. Gandolfini, on the other hand, has a role that seems alien to antiwar farce: the tough, sympathetic, mostly respectable Army careerist. His general has Tony Soprano’s physical menace, but that same imposing physique is only one tool that Gandolfini uses to give Lt. General Miller his gravitas. Miller is Soprano with brains as well as guts—pun intended, of course. One of the best—and tensest—scenes in the film pits these two characters against one another in a strength-of-will battle that rivals the Daniel Day-Lewis/Paul Dano confrontations in There Will Be Blood. Here, “good” has such supple reserves of violent strength that you almost fear for “evil.” It almost gives a glint of humanity to “evil.”
Movie Monster 