LONE STAR

Opening this weekend:

Rogue One—In the advertising, it’s referred to as Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, but on the screen it’s simply titled Rogue One. That’s the first of many things I liked about this movie—it’s not Episode Anything or Chapter Anything.

This truly seems to have been conceived as a stand-alone tale, and not as a new branch of the franchise. It doesn’t open with the familiar John Williams fanfare—the fine score is by Michael Giacchino, with borrowings from Williams where necessary—or with a crawl of exposition. We get an occasional subtitle explaining what planet we’re on, but that’s it. The atmosphere is tense and hectic and dark and, despite quite a lot of effective comedy, rather fatalistic.

Having said that, this movie nonetheless felt far more authentically like a “real” Star Wars movie to me than Phantom Menace, Attack of the Clones or Revenge of the Sith, the “official” opening trilogy of the series. Like The Force Awakens last year, Rogue One is a strikingly retro work—by necessity, as it's set just before the events of the original George Lucas Star Wars movie, made in 1977.

So the lovingly re-created sets and costumes have a flaky, dated look to them. They feel as self-consciously “‘70s” as bell bottoms or lava lamps. And while there are, among the leads, plenty of women and non-European-looking men—not to mention robots and aliens—the space fighter pilots and the Imperial officials are mostly played by the same kind of saggy white dudes that generally played such roles back in the ‘70s.

If I had to speculate, I’d guess that the script—by Chris Weitz and Tony Gilroy (based, in turn, on a story devised by effects master John Knoll and Gary Whitta)—grew out of dissatisfaction with a perceived implausibility in the first Star Wars flick: the idea that the whole Death Star could be blown to smithereens by just two wimpy torpedoes from Luke Skywalker. The heroine here, a surly, hard-fighting young delinquent named Jyn (Felicity Jones), is pressed into service by the Rebellion to contact her surrogate father (Forest Whitaker) in hopes of gaining intelligence on that colossal, planet-shattering weapon of mass destruction.

She’s thrown together on this mission with Cassian (Diego Luna), a Rebel agent of uncertain motivation, and K-2SO, a snide, kvetching robot voiced by Alan Tudyk. Along the way, this trio picks up a variety of scruffy misfit allies, and after many twists and turns the story comes to a head in a massive Rebel raid on a force-field-fortified Imperial base.

Director Gareth Edwards, of 2010’s imaginative low-budgeter Monsters, handles the epic action sequences rousingly, and there’s no shortage of visual wonder to the movie. The Death Star and the huge Imperial ships hanging in the skies have a chilling, oppressive awe to them; conversely, there’s a sprightly wit to the sight of swarms of Rebel ships springing out of hyperspace like popcorn kernels popping. The focused storyline allows for less in the way of digressive episodes and strange creatures, although there’s a mind-reading tentacled horror that’s pretty memorable.

But the general visual vocabulary of Rogue One owes as much to classic WWII movies as to sci-fi. “There’s fighting on the beaches,” somebody says at one point. Inevitably, some of the dialogue echoes with contemporary political resonance, and no matter what your ideology, you’re likely to cast “your” side as the Rebels and the other side as the Empire. In any case, the line “Rebellions are built on hope” figures prominently in this film, and hope is something that many of us are sorely in need of right now. 

 

La La Land—Mia (Emma Stone) is a struggling actress, working as a barista on the Warner Brothers lot in the title town. Sebastian (Ryan Gosling) is a struggling jazz pianist who wants to open his own club. The story of how they meet, fall in love, drift apart and so forth unfolds via original songs staged as elaborate production numbers.

There’s a lot that’s really good about this picture, and it’s hard not to admire its ambitiousness. Written and directed by Damien Chazelle, with music by Justin Hurwitz, and lyrics by Benj Pasek and Justin Paul, it’s a serious, un-ironic attempt to do something that seems to me very much worth doing—reinvent the old-school movie musical as a fully contemporary form. So I feel like a bit of a bum not being able to join in the general critical rapture. But I don’t think La La Land entirely comes off.

It’s possible that Chazelle has succeeded in creating a sort of neoclassical style for musicals that can be built on. But La La Land’s jazz tunes, though pretty, are a little tame and unvaried, and the large-scale dances have the feel of flash-mob cavorting—they don’t bristle with the intensity and insolent precision of the numbers in, say, a ‘50s-era MGM musical, or, for that matter, of the average "Bollywood" musical.

More problematically, the leads aren’t natural musical performers. Gosling and Stone have a touching rapport as actors—you believe they’re in love—and they dance well. But their voices seem featureless and slight. They’re vivid screen presences until they start singing. As soon as they do, their personalities recede.

For many of us, there are few forms of entertainment that have the potential to generate the sheer excitement of the musical, both on stage and screen. If La La Land brings the genre back to vitality, I’ll rejoice. But while much of this movie is clever and enjoyable, I can’t say I found it exciting.

TRIAL & TERROR

Opening this weekend:

The Scorch Trials—The screen version of James Dashner’s novel The Maze Runner, released a year ago this month, was about a bunch of teenage boys with no memory, living in an encampment surrounded on all sides by an enormous maze that only opened during daylight hours. At the end they got out, to find they were test subjects of an evil scientist (Patricia Clarkson) in a post-apocalyptic society.

This sequel follows the surviving boys, and one girl, as they escape from yet another sinister complex, only to find themselves in the Scorch, the godforsaken, sandblasted ruin of an American city. As they try to reach a (possibly mythical) resistance, they’re beset by zombies (here called “cranks”) and other menaces, and are pursued all the while by the scientist’s minions.

The first film was fairly routine masochistic young-adult-fiction melodrama, but that mysterious maze gave it a certain fascination, at least until everything was overexplained toward the end. Scorch Trials doesn’t have anything that tantalizing. It’s just a jumble of sci-fi chase movie tropes. Everything seems to have been borrowed from other movies—The Omega Man, Logan’s Run, The Road Warrior, Coma.

Director Wes Ball, who also helmed The Maze Runner, manages the big action scenes well, and several fine character actors—Giancarlo Esposito, Aidan Gillen, Barry Pepper, Lili Taylor and Alan Tudyk, among others—provide some energy. Most of the kids are attractive but on the uninteresting side, with one big exception: a young actress named Rosa Salazar joins the gang about midpoint, and gives Scorch Trials a much-needed dose of soulfulness.

Black Mass—Jonny Depp plays James “Whitey” Bulger, a notoriously brutal South Boston gang boss of the ‘70s and ‘80s, in Scott Cooper’s somber, violent true-crime drama. Cooper’s focus is on Bulger’s unholy alliance with the FBI, apparently the result of the boyhood hero-worship that one of the agents (Joel Edgerton) had for him.

Depp is convincing and scary but repellent, and you may find yourself wondering why you should care about this charmless monster. Not, of course, that he would be less of a monster if he was more charming, but part of the dynamic of the gangster picture is the transgressive thrill it offers in making gangsters so charming we forget they’re monsters while we’re watching.

We certainly don’t forget it here. But the cast is strong—Benedict Cumberbatch stands out as Whitey’s respectable brother—and the movie packs plenty of punch.

By the way, for the tens of readers out there who are no doubt wondering why there was no Monster-of-the-Week yesterday, the feature is on hiatus. Probably at least until October gets here.

PASSION PLAY BALL

The story of Jackie Robinson has been told in the movies before, notably in a low-budget 1950 effort called, reasonably enough, The Jackie Robinson Story. The title role in that film (which may be viewed, in its entirety, here) was played by Jackie Robinson himself—rather woodenly, it must be said, but with a dignified presence.

In Brian Helgeland’s oddly enjoyable new film 42—the title refers to Robinson’s number with the Brooklyn Dodgers, the only number retired by all of Major League Baseball—the role is played by Chadwick Boseman, a young TV actor previously unknown to me. Boseman bears some resemblance to Robinson, and he plays him as a stolid, assured man of unembarrassed self-regard, not looking for a fight but not afraid of one, either.

He doesn’t work overly hard to be likable, and as a result, he is. It’s a creditable turn—Boseman manages to hint at some texture and complexity to Robinson, which is an achievement since the role, as written and shot, is almost a pageant figure. The same can be said of Nicole Beharie, who gives an observant intelligence and a touch of sultriness to the all-but-unwritten role of Robinson’s wife Rachel.

Robinson’s struggle, in this telling, isn’t principally against the racist insults he receives as he breaks the color barrier in the Bigs in 1947. It’s against himself—against the agonizing temptation to respond in kind to the appalling snubs and taunts. Boseman lets us see the price of this; he doesn’t sugarcoat it.

When he offers him the job, Dodgers GM Branch Rickey tells Robinson that to accept him, whites have to know two things: “That you are a fine gentleman, and a great baseball player.” Rickey seems to have had an uncannily prescient grasp of white racial psychology, of how ordinary justified anger would seem like overscaled rage coming from a “negro.” Virtually every African-American who’s been a pioneer in a previously all-white field has had to try to avoid this without lapsing into servility on the other side.

Because of Robinson’s near-perfect navigating of these straights, his story is probably almost as well known to a couple of generations of elementary-school civics-class students as it is to baseball fans. I’m not sure that 42 adds anything much to it, aside from a devotional tone—again and again, the movie reminded me of an old-school Biblical epic.

Partly this is because of its ornately declarative dialogue, and the glossy, burnished look that Helgeland gives the images. But the movie is also overtly pious. Rickey was a devout Methodist, as was Robinson—it’s suggested that this may be why Rickey favored him—and he counsels his new player that he’ll have to turn the other cheek, “Like Our Savior.” He also says, more than once, “God built him to last” (only until the age of 53, as it turned out, but probably Rickey would regard this as sufficient).

Rickey’s perfectly comprehensible financial incentive for bringing black players to his team is noted in 42, early and often, by Rickey himself, and this seems intended to debunk a cynical interpretation. We’re meant to see that, for him, this action was really religious and moral. The movie even ends with Sister Wynona Carr’s wonderful gospel song “The Ball Game” (also used, to more ironic effect, in Ron Shelton’s interesting 1994 misfire Cobb).

It’s understandable if contemporary viewers find the idea that the integration of a professional sport, however overdue, can really carry this sort of cosmic import. But for many of us, baseball, with its weird orthodoxies and its ceremonial, Stations-of-the-Cross flow of action, always feels, in a way that no other sport can claim, like an allegory for Something Bigger.

I don’t mean to give the impression that 42 is like sitting through a requiem mass. It’s generously leavened with humor, and—as is often the case with religious epics—much of the fun comes from the character actors in the supporting parts. In good form here are Christopher Meloni as Leo Durocher, Max Gail as Burt Shotton, Alan Tudyk as the intolerable Ben Chapman and Lucas Black as Pee Wee Reese. John C. McGinley gives his lines an amusingly fussy, euphemistic ring in the small role of Red Barber.

Maybe the true heart of the film, however, is the performance of Harrison Ford as Branch Rickey. Ford has always been a reliable star, but for most of his career, with a few striking exceptions, he’s been a leading man, not a character actor. Here, portly and fleshy-faced, with a self-delighted grin and a deep, comically ponderous delivery, Ford creates a peculiarly convincing portrait of a man of the world still ruled by his heart—a rich man who, if he were a camel, might just make it through the eye of that needle.