EIGHT MEN IN

Merry Christmas everyone! Now in theaters:

The Boys in the Boat--The 1936 Berlin Olympics was a highly satisfying episode for the good guys. Most famously, when Der Fuehrer said his was the Master Race, Jesse Owens heiled (phfft!) heiled (phfft!) right in Der Fuehrer's face. It wasn't enough to prevent the war that was coming, but it was a great foreshadowing of who would prevail.

Yet alongside that glorious debunking of supposed Aryan racial superiority, right under the noses of its promulgators, was another splendid underdog story. Briefly played by Jyuddah Jaymes, Owens is a minor figure in this period spectacle about the improbable rise of the University of Washington's eight-man crew to compete for the U.S. in those same games. It's directed by George Clooney from a script by Mark L. Smith, based on Daniel James Brown's 2013 book.

The story was remarkable before the crew got to Berlin. The UW boys were already upstarts in the sport, long associated with elite, affluent Eastern schools. This crew included working class, Depression-era grunts; the focus here is on Joe Rantz (Callum Turner), who when we first meet him is literally homeless. He lives in a junked car in a Seattle hobo jungle, patching the holes in the soles of his shoes while trying to eke out an engineering degree. He joins the crew for the stipend and the roof over his head.   

"Eight-man crew is the most difficult of all team sports," the coach here pronounces to the aspirants. "The average human body is just not meant for such things." I once had occasion to learn first-hand that my below-average human body wasn't meant for such things. Two of my nieces rowed crew, and back in the '80s I myself had the opportunity to take a one-man shell out onto the Potomac River; my near-helplessness in managing to get the thing to go anywhere gave me a small taste of how much delicate skill the sport requires, even setting aside its physical demands.

The Boys in the Boat gets across hints of this subtle precision; Clooney shows us, for instance, the hiccup-y little wrist-flip that precedes the return stroke. There's a great deal to like about the film, really, starting with what a wonderful, heartening story it tells. It's handsomely produced, with lustrous cinematography by Martin Ruhe, crisp editing by Tanya M. Swerling, another lovely score by Alexander Desplat. And it has rich, sometimes fascinating period detail, like the swanky spectator trains that run along the river banks at the fancier courses.

But as with several of Clooney's earlier directorial efforts, this movie is well-made, well-intentioned, good-hearted and generally enjoyable without being entirely satisfying. And unlike, say, The Monuments Men or The Tender Bar, it doesn't even have vivid star character actors to liven things up.

Joel Edgerton as Coach Al Ulbrickson and Peter Guinness as master boat-maker George Pocock are authoritative presences, but not complex characters. The guys playing the crew aren't, as in the standard sports movie template, a ragtag band of misfits with distinctive oddball personalities; they're just pleasant, good-looking young men. Rantz's coed love interest (Hadley Robinson) tries to generate some playful, mischievous heat, but she's rowing upstream opposite her bland leading man.

Overall, this film has the flavor of a feature length Super Bowl commercial. Like the best of those commercials, it can raise an inspirational tingle. But I don't know that it does much more in two hours than a good Super Bowl commercial can do in sixty seconds.

UNCLE BOOK

Opening today:

The Tender Bar--J. R. Moehringer's 2005 memoir is the basis for this  coming of age story directed by George Clooney, from a script by William Monahan. J. R. (the excellent Daniel Ranieri as a kid; the perfectly acceptable Tye Sheridan as a youth) grows up in the run-down Long Island home of his run-down Grandfather (Christopher Lloyd at his most run-down). His single Mom (Lily Rabe) has retreated there, in common with other failed or struggling or stuck descendants of the house.

J. R.'s father (Max Martini) is barely in the picture; a radio disc jockey known as "The Voice," he's a mean and unreliable drunk, so this is likely for the best. In his absence, the narrator turns to his Uncle Charlie (Ben Affleck) as a surrogate father, and lucks out. Charlie, another inmate of the shabby Manhasset manse, maintains a mildly gruff pose, but is a pussycat who adores his nephew, slipping him a bill now and then and dispensing life wisdom about how to be an upstanding guy. He's also a bibliophile who runs a bar called "The Dickens" which is full of great literature that he encourages--dares, really--J. R. to read.

Apparently this educational strategy works out, because in the second half, the grown-up J. R. goes to Yale. We follow him there as he chases a gorgeous rich kid (Brianna Middleton) who likes him but doesn't take him seriously, though he can't get this through his head; we also see him break into the pages of the New York Times and begin his meteoric career. Through it all, he never loses his affection for The Dickens, its regulars, and the quietly tender Uncle Charlie.

There's nothing very wrong with any of this, but there's nothing very urgently dramatic about it, either. The scenes between J. R. and his sneering, contemptuous father are the only time the movie shows any real volatility. There's a pleasant, nostalgic rhythm to the first half, buoyed along easily by Affleck's keenly likable performance; the second half, with J. R.'s paysan parvenu adventures in college and beyond, feels more formulaic and tired.

The movie does feel like a throwback, however. Stories of kids striving to make good in the academic big leagues are now customarily not about straight white guys. J. R.'s success feels akin to stuff like The Paper Chase or A Small Circle of Friends. Clooney may not have been altogether at ease with how white The Tender Bar is, as he cast the longed-for rich beauty as biracial, though in the book Moehringer describes her as classically whitebread. There's nothing remotely implausible about J. R.'s (or anyone's) attraction to the movie version of the character, but this pointedly nontraditional casting feels more preemptive than period precise.

SHOW ME THE MONEY (MONSTER)

Opening this weekend:

Money Monster—George Clooney plays a buffoonish TV financial pundit in the Jim Cramer mold. Julia Roberts plays the long-suffering director of the silly show he hosts, and Jack O’Connell plays the scruffy disgruntled loser with a gun who takes him hostage on the air, demanding to know what happened to the $60,000 he lost to an investment that the TV guy claimed was safer than his savings account.

The screenwriters, Alan Di Fiore, Jim Kouf and Jamie Linden, aren’t exactly Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur, but they do manage to give the dialogue a certain amount of snarky, unpredictable wit, and the director, Jodie Foster, stirs up a lot of whirling frenzy around what is essentially a static situation. So the movie generates a Front Page-like energy that carries us along quite enjoyably, even as the story’s complications grow harder and harder to swallow.

It helps that Clooney, who also co-produced, doesn’t seem to mind looking like a stooge onscreen. We’re asked to believe that, in this crisis situation, the host, director and crew of this show would swing into action as highly competent investigative journalists, swiftly tracking down the secret that led to the loss of the guy’s money. But helping us accept this laughable conceit is the look on Clooney’s face—scared, but also glum and guilty; the look of a man who has known all along, at some level, that he’s just a shill, but is only now confronted with the reality of his irresponsibility.

Roberts gives a maternal authority to her role—she’s as much a nanny as a director—and some of the other actors, notably Christopher Denham, Giancarlo Esposito, Caitrona Balfe, Lenny Venito, Emily Meade, Dennis Boutsikaris and Condola Rashad, bring speed, charm and a surprising amount of comedy to what they’re given. Money Monster is too conventional, too close to superficial, to be a really scary monster—I doubt it could be considered much more subtle in its dissection of matters financial than the shows it's spoofing. But it’s fast and well-made and entertaining, and the cast gives it heart.

A personal note: I was sworn to secrecy until it opened, but my pal Gayle Bass, lovely co-host of Right This Minute, appears briefly in Money Monster, playing the complex role of Gayle Bass, lovely co-host of Right This Minute. So even if there was no other reason to see it…

AUSTEN POWER

Opening today:

Back in 2009 Jane Austen collaborated with another young writer. A fellow named Seth Grahame-Smith added cannibal ghouls and martial arts action scenes to Austen’s 1813 masterpiece Pride and Prejudice, and called the results Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. The stunt was a hit, giving Grahame-Smith a career, and starting a less-than-welcome vogue for such literary or historical “mashups”—Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters followed, for instance, as did Grahame-Smith’s own Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter.

Even though her participation was posthumous and without consent, from a literary point of view Austen was the winner in this odd collaboration. I listened to the audiobook of P&P&Z (excellently read by the droll, deadpan Katherine Kellgren) some years ago on a road trip, and as it went into its homestretch, I noticed myself sighing with impatience every time the text shifted to a horror scene. Such are Austen’s chops that I would have preferred to drop the ludicrous zombie gimmick and just hear how her story turned out—even though I’d already read it.

Still, on its own terms this one-joke book was a reasonably funny joke, and now it’s been made into a fairly lavish movie. Adapted and directed by the American Burr Steers (of 17 Again), it departs freely from Grahame-Smith’s storyline, but considering what he did to Austen, Grahame-Smith hardly has grounds to complain.

Wary-eyed Lily James of last year’s Cinderella plays heroine Elizabeth Bennett. As in the book, Lizzy and her sisters are in the market for well-to-do husbands, but they have also been trained in the fighting arts of the East, allowing them to wield swords and dismember any hungry undead that should wander into a country dance or accost them as they’re on their way to make a social call. Sam Riley, excellent as the title character’s sidekick in Maleficent, here plays Darcy, who can’t help but fall for Lizzy despite his pride.

Most of the other major characters are retained, though often in wildly different form. The scoundrel Wickham (Jack Huston), for instance, is a proponent of a zombie appeasement scheme, while haughty Lady Catherine (Lena Headey) is a formidable zombie-hunter with a chic eye-patch. Charles Dance gets to play Mr. Bennett relatively straight, but Matt Smith camps up Mr. Collins to a sketch-comedy degree.

In short, P&P&Z the movie is outrageously silly. It isn’t very scary, but the squeamish should be forewarned that unlike 2013’s World War Z it is quite gory at times, with some inventively gruesome sight gags.

Overall, I thought it sustained itself for its entire length a little better, maybe, than the book, because it brings the material more of a sense of…well, female empowerment. Masterly as Jane Austen’s works are, there’s something troubling about the way these tales of near-powerless women anxiously waiting for husbands are often used by modern readers as fantasy fodder—a romanticizing of social and economic strictures to which Austen, for all her talent, had no choice but to conform.

It would be a little much to call P&P&Z, by contrast, a feminist film. Admittedly, the warrior-woman archetype comes with its own set of male fantasies and presumptions. But something about the movie’s Regency-era ladies arming themselves under their Empire waist gowns feels bracing and liberating. It seems possible, somehow, that Jane would approve.

Hail, Caesar!—George Clooney never seems happier onscreen than when he gets to act like a buffoonish clod of the first order. And the Coen Brothers have repeatedly been happy to indulge him—in Intolerable Cruelty, in Burn After Reading, in O Brother, Where Art Thou?

They do so again in this spoof of midcentury Hollywood. Clooney plays Baird Whitlock, a leading man in the Victor Mature/Charlton Heston/Kirk Douglas high-testosterone mold, who gets kidnapped right off the set of the titular Biblical epic.

The kidnappers are a cadre of rather well-heeled communist screenwriters who’ve decided to take a break from their usual business of inserting Red content into movies and to step up their game by demanding ransom from “Capital Pictures.” Baird’s a boob, but he’s an agreeable sort, and when he listens to his captors hold forth on politics he has to admit that maybe they have a point.

This notion—what if Malibu commies really acted the way the McCarthy-ites thought they did?—has possibilities. Much as I enjoyed Trumbo, there’s probably something healthy in blowing a raspberry at its easy pieties (Louis CK provides that service within that film). The trouble in Hail, Caesar! is that these scenes, and many others during the film’s first half, dawdle on forever and land with a thud.

Whole strands, like the one involving Scarlett Johansson as an Esther-Williams-ish “aqua-musical” star, add little to the movie beyond length. And there are extended set pieces, like the one in which a cowboy star (Alden Ehrenreich) struggles to deliver a line in a “sophisticated” comedy, that simply aren’t the riot the Coens seem to think they are. The movie looks great, and it has a funny line here or a lyrical image there, but for a long time it refuses to take off.

But then it does. Typically when a Coen picture goes wrong, it does so in the second half—after a brilliant beginning, the story collapses over the Brothers’ stubborn distaste for providing dramatic payoffs. But Hail, Caesar! rewards patience with a painfully slow opening act. About the time that a film editor (Frances McDormand) learns an important safety tip for her profession, the movie starts to find genuine laughs, and some heart, too.

The real star isn’t Clooney but a growly Josh Brolin as studio boss “Eddie Mannix,” who, like his real-life namesake at MGM, serves as a “fixer,” managing the crises and scandals of Capital’s stable. A straight shooter, Eddie’s been offered a job in aviation that would have regular hours and dignity, but he enjoys cleaning up after his rambunctious wards.

Brolin keeps it low-key and holds the picture together, while several other cast members—Ehrenreich, Veronica Osorio as a Carmen Miranda-type musical star, Tilda Swinton as identical-twin Hedda Hopper types—nail their goofy scenes. By the time we get to Channing Tatum in sailor drag, in a double-entendre-packed On the Town-style dance number called “No Dames,” the movie is on a pretty full-fledged roll.

What makes act two of Hail, Caesar! unexpectedly a little touching is its peculiarly un-ironic concern with spirituality. It’s a while before we realize, for instance,  that when Eddie, a devout Catholic who wearies his priest with too-frequent visits to the confessional, consults Catholic, Protestant, Jewish and Orthodox authorities about the Hail, Caesar! script, he isn’t just covering his ass, he honestly wants to know if they’re getting the theology right.

Eventually it becomes clear that Eddie is troubled by the disconnect between the triviality of what his industry produces and the satisfaction he takes in his work—he wants a justification by faith. I wonder if the Coens want this too. For them, faith and the movies seem to be the same thing.

OLD MASTERS AND CUBISM

Opening this weekend:

The Monuments Men—It’s worth remembering that the Nazis weren’t just murderers, they were also thieves, looting and hoarding the art treasures of the countries they occupied. Formed in 1943 to work against this shameless robbery was the Monuments, Fine Art and Archives program, known for short as the Monuments Men, a division of Allied forces made up of artists, restorers, collectors, architects and the like in charge of recovering and returning this incomparable booty.

Out of Robert M. Edsel’s acclaimed nonfiction book on this outfit’s intriguing exploits, George Clooney and cronies have crafted a throwback. The Monuments Men is sort of a benign, high-minded version of the facetious buddy-ensemble military actioners that were popular in the ‘60s and ‘70s, like The Dirty Dozen and Kelly’s Heroes and What Did You Do in the War, Daddy? Like those films, it’s not likely to be regarded as a piece of high cinematic art, and like those films, it’s relaxed and engaging—a guy movie for middle-aged gallery rats. The composer, Alexandre Desplat, even provides a jaunty march theme, a la The Great Escape.

Clooney co-produced and co-wrote the script with his frequent partner Grant Heslov (who has a small role as an army surgeon), and provided the easygoing direction. As an earnest MFAA Lieutenant, Clooney also leads his cast into battle, searching for such prizes as Michelangelo’s Bruges Madonna and the Van Eyck Ghent Altarpiece. His followers include Matt Damon, John Goodman, Bill Murray, Jean Dujardin, Bob Balaban and Hugh Bonneville. It may be noted that most of these guys are a trifle long in the tooth for basic training, and Clooney doesn’t hesitate to use gray hair and paunches for their comic value.

But these actors are proven good company, and that’s what they add up to here. Murray and Balaban pair off into a mild comedy team, and Goodman and Dujardin show a pleasing rapport together as well. Damon is particularly good, managing a few sweet, wistful scenes with Cate Blanchett, as his Parisian contact who has secretly tracked the art’s destinations (her character is based on the marvelous real-life Resistance figure Rose Valland), without trying to turn them into feverish drama.

While recognizing its limitations, I enjoyed The Monuments Men a lot. It’s fascinating material, and the cast is tough to beat, and its old-fashioned feel carries, for guys of my age, a nice dose of nostalgia. But I think the real source of its charm may be that it begins as the war is ending—with the Nazis in ignominious retreat, and the shattered ruins of western Europe starting to take a breath. The very fact that the Allies could start worrying about getting art back to its owners was a sign that the good guys were winning.

Because of this, the lackadaisical pace that Clooney sets is almost a benefit. The Monuments Men is no monumental movie, but it’s suffused with a refreshing sense of day breaking after a long and horrible night.

The Lego Movie—Not only did I never have Lego building blocks as a kid, I don’t remember ever playing with them at school or at another kid’s house. Nor did I regard myself as especially deprived by this absence in my toy box. Thus I was an unlikely audience member for The Lego Movie, and thus I was surprised to find myself laughing out loud at a lot of this computer-animated kids' comedy-fantasy, and to walk out of it thinking that I seen something sort of brilliant, even slightly thought-provoking.

In the generic Lego city of Bricksburg, rank-and-file construction worker Emmet, voiced by Chris Pratt, finds himself the object of a prophecy—he’s told he’s “The Special,” the “Master Builder” who can save the (Lego) universe from schemes of the tyrannical President Business (Will Ferrell). The trouble is that Emmet is an enthusiastic conformist who only wants to follow the instructions and fit in.

This leads to a fast-moving and highly complex, but as far as I could tell seamlessly-thought-out, adventure involving everybody from a wizard (Morgan Freeman) to a woman of action (Elizabeth Banks) to a “Unikitty” (unicorn/kitty hybrid) to licensed characters like Batman (Will Arnett, growling amusingly) Superman (Channing Tatum) and the Green Lantern (Jonah Hill) to a villainous Bad Cop with a kindly Good Cop on the other side of his swiveling head (both are voiced by Liam Neeson).

Much good comedy is derived from the limited range of motion possible for rigid Lego figures, and the dialogue is witty too. Yet the movie manages, without so much as a wisp of pretentiousness, to hint at some troubling allegorical resonances about conformity and creativity in human society. The whole thing, if you’ll excuse my saying so, snaps together nicely.

GRAVE MATTERS

Opening this weekend:

Gravity—Sandra Bullock is a scientist from the Space Shuttle. She’s spacewalking, installing some sort of new gizmo, when a collision with some debris sends both her and hotshot astronaut George Clooney spinning untethered through the cosmos. It’s basically the same setup as Ray Bradbury’s 1949 short story “Kaleidoscope,” except the men flying away from each other in that tale knew they were lost, and their conversation was a poignant poetic elegy to life.

Gravity, however, is a no-let-up survival thriller. Clooney and Bullock struggle to get back to the wrecked Shuttle, and from there to the International Space Station. At some point they get separated, and Bullock must make a third extravehicular sojourn, this time to a Chinese space station with working escape pods.

Clooney has fun fitting his own persona into the archetypical squared-jawed, calm in the face of disaster astronaut, cracking dumb jokes and flirting with the terrified Bullock, partly to keep her spirits up, partly just because he’s a flirt. But it’s really Bullock’s movie, and she’s uncommonly touching as this melancholic woman with a dreadful tragedy in her past who still keeps fighting to survive.

The director is the excellent Alfonso Cuaron, of Y Tu Mama Tambien and Harry Potter and the…well, I can’t keep those titles straight, but the best and spookiest of the Harry Potter movies. He keeps the tension pulse-poundingly high in Gravity, and the otherworldly atmosphere beautiful yet hostile—the dramatic irony of sailing through the boundlessness of space and at the same time being oppressively trapped is not lost on him.

Gravity is so exciting, so close to a home run, that it seems ungrateful to nitpick, but there’s no way around it—the picture gets away from Cuaron in the end. The movie begins with a frightening sense of plausibility and realism, but as the story progresses its action also grows steadily more comic-book corny and improbable. It’s still entertaining, but it moves more into the realm of Hollywood hokum. Then, in the final minutes, as Cuaron piles more and more peril and obstacles onto poor Bullock’s plate, her plight begins to seem a little funny.

Another small grumble: The concussions which tear the spacecrafts apart happen, appropriately, with no sound at all, and the effect is weird and chaotic and chilling. But the filmmakers can’t resist piling on Steven Price’s brooding, ominous music, to cue us that something terribly dangerous is happening—and also, maybe, to reassure us that the sound system in the theater hasn’t malfunctioned. I can’t help but wonder if complete cosmic silence might have made these scenes even more disorienting and scary.

Parkland—The title refers to Parkland Memorial Hospital in Dallas, to which John F. Kennedy was taken after his motorcade passed Dealey Plaza in November 1963. He was already a goner by the time he got to the emergency room, and that’s the oddity of this film, directed by Peter Landesman—it’s all aftermath.

The main characters in Parkland are the likes of ER resident Jim Carrico (Zac Efron), or Abraham Zapruder (Paul Giamatti), who was shooting home movies when the motorcade passed, or FBI man James Hosty (Ron Livingston), who had gotten a threatening note from Lee Harvey Oswald weeks before the shooting, or Forrest Sorrels (Billy Bob Thornton) of the Dallas branch of the Secret Service—ordinary people remembered for their proximity to an iconic historical shocker. We also get a look at the Oswald family—maybe the two best of the film’s many strong performances are those of James Badge Dale as Lee Harvey’s brother Robert, and Jacki Weaver as their nutty mother.

While Landesman’s script is adapted from a book by Vincent Bugliosi that reportedly espouses the Oswald-acted-alone viewpoint, the movie takes no obvious position pro or con on the matter of a conspiracy. It sticks to what is more or less undisputed in the record.

This could legitimately lead to the question of what, exactly, is the value of one more retelling of this extremely familiar story. I‘d guess that the answer, aside from capturing uniformly fine ensemble acting, is to suggest that national hysteria, perhaps mixed with the celebrity worship of Jackie Kennedy, may have been more than sufficient to account for the irregularities in the case that, in retrospect, seem so suspicious.

The characters scramble around recklessly, and while the movie seems to suggest that they’re honestly doing their best, they’re too stunned to get it right. A coroner seems ghoulish when he demands that the President’s body be left behind for an autopsy, and the Secret Service agents seem goodhearted when, "for Jackie," they ignore his demand, but the result is that no autopsy was performed in the highest-profile murder case in U.S. history.

Whatever your view of that strange and indelible historical episode, nothing in Parkland is likely to change it. But I found the film absorbing from start to finish.