SMALL WORLD AFTER ALL

Opening this weekend:

Downsizing–Scientists have figured out how to shrink humans down to five inches tall. The discovery, which has obvious environmental advantages, is promptly commercialized, with people enticed to "downsize" into tiny planned communities where they can now afford a luxurious lifestyle.

Our Midwestern  everyman hero Matt Damon undergoes the irreversible process, regrets it at once, then gradually finds renewed purpose in his new home in New Mexico through his connection with a one-legged Vietnamese cleaning lady (Hong Chau) who was shrunk against her will for her dissident activities back home. He also forms a sort of bond with his neighbor (Christoph Waltz), a grinning Serb hustler who, if he wasn't shady enough already, hangs out with Udo Kier.

This neo-Swiftian satire is perhaps the most ambitious effort yet from the always-interesting Alexander Payne. He takes his time, working out the process and its implications in deadpan detail (although the obvious issues of civil-rights vulnerability for downsized people are not really addressed). This fully-imagined atmosphere extends to the characters. Damon, who wanted to be a doctor, ended up some sort of workplace physical therapist for Omaha Steakhouse–a perfect American intersection of frustrated aspiration, good intentions and barely-conscious consumption.

Downsizing is full of brilliant touches like that. But I'm not sure it amounts to much more than the sum of those brilliant touches, and of some fine performances, especially by Damon, Hong Chau and the ever-freaky Waltz.

The movie dawdles a bit, and Payne can't quite seem to bring it the emotional payoff he's trying for. Even so, this one of the more fascinating and substantial movies I've seen all year. I'll confess, however, that I'm too much of a philistine, and was too much a fan of Dr. Cyclops and Attack of the Puppet People and The Incredible Shrinking Man not to hope that a tarantula or a Gila monster might invade Damon's subdivision and liven things up.

The Greatest Showman –Understatement is strained by referring to this musical as “loosely based” on the life of P.T. Barnum. But then, Barnum wasn’t big on understatement, and it’s likely that nobody would appreciate this portrait of the founder of American pop culture more than Barnum himself.

Hugh Jackman plays the celebrated mid-19^th century purveyor of anomalies, human and otherwise, genuine and “humbug,” the promoter of the first American tour of “Swedish Nightingale” Jenny Lind, and the eventual co-founder of Barnum and Bailey’s Circus (and thus, as someone pointed out to me recently, of about a century and a half of unnecessary animal suffering). He’s characterized here not as an exploiter both of disadvantaged people and of unseemly public curiosity, but as a raffish yet open-hearted champion of misfits.

This may not be entirely unfair. Barnum was, for instance, a fairly ardent abolitionist, and a (carefully self-promoting) philanthropist, a capable and progressive mayor of Bridgeport, Connecticut, and an early benefactor of Tufts University. His highly entertaining 1869 memoir Struggles and Triumphs (which the filmmakers could have ransacked for far more colorful episodes than they have), for all its self-congratulation expertly passed off as modesty, nonetheless suggests a decent, well-meaning fellow.

Still, you have to check your sense of period context at the door to accept this movie’s vision of Barnum, or of his time. Screenwriters Jenny Bicks and Bill Condon try to give texture by showing him fold to social pressure here and there, but still, under his influence in this movie, even interracial romance can flourish—between Barnum’s junior partner Zac Efron and lovely aerialist Zendaya—and the human oddities find an empowering community under his roof and stand up to the bigots.

If you can tune yourself into this rosy view, it's very possible to enjoy the film. Jackman is a seamlessly proficient song-and-dance man here. The tunes, by Benj Pasek and Justin Paul of La La Land, could be a bit more varied, but director Michael Gracey and choreographer Ashley Wallen, both young Australians, bring ingenuity and verve to the staging, as in an imaginative duet between Jackman and Efron involving shot glasses.

Michelle Williams doesn't have to do much more than look serenely beautiful as Mrs. B, but the two Barnum daughters seem, creepily, not to age; when Barnum returns from a trip and says "You got so big" to one of them he seems to be trying to convince himself. Rebecca Ferguson has a regal presence as Jenny Lind, but the real standout in the cast is Broadway vet Keala Settle as Lettie Lutz the Bearded Lady, who lets it rip vocally in the movie's one really rousing and memorable song, "This Is Us," a proud anthem to letting your freak flag fly.

I, Tonya–Based on "irony free, wildly contradictory, totally true interviews with Tonya Harding and Jeff Gillooly," this docudrama retells the 1994 scandal from the world of big-time figure skating. In case you're lucky enough to have forgotten: The U.S. champ Harding's moronic main squeeze Gillooly and some even more imbecilic associates conspired to wack the skating champ's biggest American rival, Nancy Kerrigan, in the leg to ensure Harding victory at the Lillehammer Olympics. It didn't work out.

Harding may or may not have known, or known much, about the plot (she eventually pleaded guilty to a lesser charge to avoid jail time), but in any case her career was destroyed. The movie efficiently places this squalid, embarrassing story in the context of Harding's abusive white-trash background with her crazed, furious mother LaVona Golden, played by Allison Janney with her usual crisp acerbity. It also gets at some of the class-based ugliness in the skating world. Through it all, that opening disclaimer conveniently excuses the filmmakers from having to pass judgment on the characters.

Directed by Craig Gillespie from a script by Steven Rogers, it's a watchable, well-acted picture overall, but it contains a classic performance. Margot Robbie somehow makes Tonya Harding both a comic and a tragic figure, all the while never milking the audience for pity. Her face in the mirror in the film’s wordless emotional climax is devastating—it reminded me, no kidding, of Falconetti’s facial close-ups in Dreyer’s Passion of Joan of Arc.

Pitch Perfect 3 –The Barden Bellas, now out of college and down on their luck, reunite for a USO tour, and have wacky adventures across southern Europe. They’re competing with other acts on the tour, including an all-women rock band called “Evermoist,” to land a spot opening for DJ Khaled (who amusingly plays himself), and of course there’s some undemanding romance and even a bit of facetious action-movie peril.

This is the broadest, silliest and easily the weakest of the three flicks about the a cappella ensemble. But it’s nonetheless pleasant to sit through its brief running time. The young actresses, led by Anna Kendrick and Rebel Wilson, are still adorable and funny, and there’s some enjoyable music, although the film could have done with an extra number or two at the expense of some dumb slapstick.

The first Pitch Perfect was charming, and has proven surprisingly re-watchable in TV reruns. The sequels are increasingly laborious, but they both retained enough of the original’s merits to be fun. Judging from PP3, I don’t think this is further sustainable—it’s time to sing a fond aca-adieu to the series.

LONG STRANGE TRIPS

Opening this week:

Doctor Strange—Once he’s fully decked out in the cloak and amulet, with the neatly trimmed goatee, Benedict Cumberbatch really looks and sounds the part of the title character, one of Marvel’s more agreeably metaphysical superheroes. This is an origin story for the “Master of Mystic Arts,” conjured up in 1963 by Steve Ditko and Stan Lee for the pages of Strange Tales.

As in the comics, he’s a brilliant but selfish and arrogant surgeon who loses the use of his hands in a car accident. In desperation, he travels to Nepal to seek out “The Ancient One” (a droll and courteous Tilda Swinton) in hopes of being healed. Instead she recruits him as a new student of sorcery, teaching him to leave his physical body and use his astral form, travel through the “multiverse” and battle evil psychically. Reality-bending adventures across M.C. Escher-ish cityscapes ensue, as Strange and Mordo (Chiwetel Ejiofor)—a villain in the comics; here sympathetic—take on the sinister Kaecilius (Mads Mikkelsen), who has purloined a spell from one of the Ancient One’s books.

On the whole, I found this the most enjoyable comic book movie since Ant-Man in 2015, and Guardians of the Galaxy the year before that. Despite the cosmic scope of the material, director Scott Derrickson takes a straightforward and coherent approach to the narrative, which goes pleasingly easy on tired action-movie conventions.

Technically speaking, there’s little physical violence in the film at all. There’s plenty of martial-arts fighting, to be sure, but most of it takes place outside the physical realm, so for once the superhuman feats are justifiable. Better still, as we were leaving the screening, my friend pointed out “No guns,” and he was right—unless I missed it, there isn’t a single gunshot in Doctor Strange, and I didn’t feel cheated by this in the least.

Toward the end, the forces of darkness are unleashed, and buildings start to crumble in Hong Kong. I sighed. Again with the crumbling buildings, like in just about every other big action blockbuster of recent years—blocks literally being busted. But then Strange and his allies do battle with the bad guys while time runs backwards around them, and we get to see the buildings reassemble. This inversion of the sad, frightened post-9/11 subtext of the genre is very refreshing.

Trolls—Like the Smurfs flicks of recent years, this movie doesn’t shy away from its own potential to be annoying. The kitschy, cloying cutesiness of the “Good Luck Trolls” developed in the mid-20^th Century by the Danish toymaker Thomas Dam is built right into this CGI musical from Dreamworks Animation, in the hope that it can be turned to ironic, self-deprecating advantage. For the most part, this works, or at least it worked for me.

The Trolls, who have long shocks of prehensile hair sticking up above their elfin faces, live like perennial glam clubbers. Led by Princess Poppy (voiced by Anna Kendrick), they spend their days singing, dancing and partying, under a philosophy of life as “Cupcakes and Rainbows,” not to mention hourly scheduled hugs.

Twenty years earlier, they narrowly escaped from the “Bergens,” a race of miserable snaggle-toothed ogres who believe they can only attain happiness by eating Trolls. The lone Troll dissenter from constant cheerfulness, the glum Branch (Justin Timberlake), is sure that the Bergens are still a threat, and that Princess Poppy’s blithe insistence on noisy partying increases the danger. He’s proved right, of course, and he and Poppy must team up to rescue a group of captured Trolls in danger of becoming a Bergen banquet.

A variety of allegorical interpretations are possible here, from a straightforward vegetarian reading to an evaluation, at times surprisingly subtle and nuanced, of pessimism versus optimism. But in any event, the movie is a silly good time, with inventive, laugh-out-loud gags and a generous heart.

Also, the music’s pretty good. In part, this is a jukebox musical—Zooey Deschanel, as a lovesick Bergen, gets to sing Lionel Richie’s “Hello,” for instance. But there are some original numbers as well, and a couple of them are sung by Kendrick, in her singular steely yet sweetly plangent belt. Her presence on the soundtrack biases me in favor of Trolls, I admit—not to put too fine a point on it, I could listen to her sing all day. 

Coming Through the Rye—It’s 1969, and Jamie Schwartz (Alex Wolff) has written a stage version of Catcher in the Rye as his senior project at a private school in Pennsylvania. He hasn’t been able to secure permission from J.D. Salinger to produce it, however, so one weekend he and a free-spirited girl (Stefania Owen) head to New Hampshire to seek out the man in person.

This slight coming-of-age yarn is ostensibly based on the real-life experience of writer-director James Steven Sadwith. It’s pleasant, and sometimes poignant, and Wolff and Owen have a sweet chemistry. But there wouldn’t be much to the movie without the brush-with-reclusive-celebrity encounter.

Eventually Jamie manages to get a few minutes with Salinger, sharply played here, in two brief scenes, by the always-commanding Chris Cooper. Brusque and irritable but not unkind, the author endures another kid telling him about the connection he feels with Holden Caulfield. Momentous as this was to him, Sadwith is under no illusions that the episode was at all significant (or even unique) for Salinger, and this modesty gives Coming Through the Rye its rueful charm.

ACCRUAL WORLD

Opening this weekend:

The Accountant—There’s a degree of wit in naming an action thriller The Accountant. Even before the classic Monty Python sketches featuring Arthur Putey, accountants have traditionally been seen as comic dullards and drudges.

But as with Jean Reno’s “The Cleaner” in La Femme Nikita, the term “accountant” has an extra meaning here—it’s moral as well as financial books that get balanced. Ben Affleck plays Christian Wolff, one of many aliases of a bean-counter who secretly works for vast criminal enterprises, and gets paid in cash or gold bullion or first issues of Action Comics or Renoir and Pollack originals. Chris is a high-functioning autistic man of remote, robotic affect, given to self-stimulation and other obsessive behaviors in private.

For quite a stretch this thriller, directed by Gavin O’Connor from a script by Bill Dubuque, takes an intriguingly quiet, reserved approach, giving us peeks into the title character’s life and backstory as he studies the seemingly cooked books of a prosthetics manufacturer (John Lithgow) and tentatively bonds with an amiably nerdy fellow accountant (Anna Kendrick). All the while, two Treasury operatives (J. K. Simmons and Cynthia Addai-Robinson) are zeroing in on him.

Then, about midpoint, The Accountant suddenly spins into a tense and violent actioner, with shootouts and martial arts brawls. It’s quite effective on this level, too; the shift into Jason Bourne-style mayhem seems like an entirely natural turn for the movie to take.

Affleck keeps things admirably low-key as Chris, not letting more than a hint of loneliness or sly drollery slip out from behind the stony façade. All of the acting is strong, with Kendrick particularly endearing as the colleague, tirelessly friendly even as Chris keeps throwing her off-balance with his dogged literalism.

The movie is really quite good of its kind. If it misses greatness of its kind, it’s in the final third, when it takes yet another turn, this time for the windy. The Treasury man abruptly spews a big lump of exposition, and even with illustrative flashbacks it still calls up Simon Oakland’s explanatory lecture at the end of Hitchcock’s Psycho. It’s J. K. Simmons, so (as with Oakland) it’s delivered with enjoyable panache. But it still feels artificial, and O’Connor and Dubuque allow several other characters to launch into similarly wordy and heavy-handed rambles.

But this is less complaint than quibble. Considering the theme, and the impressive intricacy of the plot, it would be ungrateful to criticize O’Connor and Dubuque for making sure, perhaps overzealously, that all of the movie’s details are accounted for.

  
Max Rose—Jerry Lewis plays Max, a jazz pianist nearing 90. In the days after the death of Max’s beloved wife (Claire Bloom), he finds a clue—an inscription on her elegant compact—that indicates that she might have cheated on him, half a century earlier. Already devastated by grief, he’s further rattled by this possibility, and finds he can’t let it go.

Although Max’s probing of the past leads, toward the end, to a mildly Gothic confrontation with the author of the inscription, it’s nothing terribly shocking. This strand serves, mainly, to give a hint of mystery and tension to this small-scale drama, written and directed several years ago by Daniel Noah and only now finding its way into a few theaters. The movie’s real function is as a showcase for Lewis. He’s in every scene, almost every shot, often in full-on facial close-up, giving us his take on weary but unsettled old age.

And formidable his chops are. There’s never been any doubt of his talent or of his star power; with Lewis it’s always been a question of how much, at any given time, he was going to tyrannize us with his massive performer’s ego. As Max Rose, there’s no mugging, no pushing, no visible self-indulgence—his lined, drooping face is inscrutable, his speech maddeningly measured. If anything, he’s more restrained than he needs to be, but when he suddenly barks in anger, it’s like a slap.

The small supporting cast is led by Kerry Bishé as Max’s anxious, adoring granddaughter, who clowns for him and tells him silly jokes, and Kevin Pollak as the semi-estranged son to whom he can barely bring himself to speak. Also on hand are such vets as Lee Weaver, Dean Stockwell, Mort Sahl, Rance Howard and Illeana Douglas. But in most of their footage they serve, basically, as human follow spots for Lewis.

He lends a magnificent turn to a movie the point of which is that getting old is tough, and that you may not have known everything about the people closest to you. These revelations won’t exactly blow the minds of most viewers—even those of us who aren’t quite as old as Max yet—but it’s hard to argue with the power of the star’s presence.

HOLLAR TREE

Opening this week: 

The Hollars—Even though the small-town middle American family of the title isn’t especially prone to raising their voices, the name somehow fits just the same. They’re an explosive bunch; you get the sense that hollering is what they’re always on the verge of.

John Krasinski plays John Hollar, the son who ran away from home. An aspiring but blocked graphic novelist, he’s been living in New York, working a day job he hates, and reluctant to marry his girlfriend Rebecca (Anna Kendrick) even though she’s in the homestretch of carrying his child. When John learns that his beloved Mom (Margo Martindale) has collapsed and is in the hospital, he hurries home.

Immediately he’s dropped back into the squabbles between his blubberingly emotional, short-fused father (Richard Jenkins) and his divorced, underachieving, angry older brother Ron (Sharlto Copley), whose ex (Ashley Dyke) and two daughters are now living with a maddeningly nice, patient pastor (Josh Groban). Ron, by contrast, is living back at home with the ‘rents, even though Dad has fired him from the family plumbing business, which John also learns is about to go belly-up. Interrupting all of this drama is Mom’s massive brain tumor, for which she’ll quickly need surgery.

If you’re not hearing anything particularly groundbreaking in this synopsis, you’re not wrong. The Hollars, written by Jim Strouse and directed by Krasinki, is fairly standard dysfunctional family comedy-drama, the sort of modest, “character-driven” piece that actors have a hard time resisting.

Fortunately, the actors who couldn’t resist this script include several of the best now in American movies, and Krasinski managed them briskly. There are scenes that seem heavy-handed and obvious, as when the brothers confer with their mother’s Asian surgeon (Randall Park) and the anxious Ron can’t stop himself from bringing up the man’s race. But most of the interactions between these frightened, pissed-off, loving people ring more or less true, and the actors get all that there is to get out of them, and maybe a bit more.

Vibrant as the whole ensemble is, Krasinski deserves highest marks for giving Margo Martindale a juicy opportunity in a feature film. Long valued as a supporting player, Martindale is showcased here, and has a couple of Oscar-clip-worthy scenes with real punch. But her quiet scenes with the lantern-jawed, sadly smiling Krasinski are even better—John and Mom are the soft-spoken, mild-mannered Hollars, and their conspiratorial, amused alliance is the heart of the movie.

THRUSH HOURS, RUSH HOURS

Opening today:

Pitch Perfect 2—The 2012 comedy to which this is the sequel was set in the world of collegiate competitive a cappella groups. It had adorable young actresses, beautiful singing, and catty wit offset by a bit of heart, so on the whole, it was a fun couple of hours. It also had—and was, for me, marred by—some self-conscious, heavy-handed gross-out gags.

Pitch Perfect 2’s excuse for a plot has our heroines the Barden Bellas accidentally disgracing themselves at a Kennedy Center performance in front of the President. They’re pariahs in the a cappella community, but aim to redeem themselves at an international competition in Copenhagen. As they prepare for this, all sorts of wacky stuff happens, along with a bit of undemanding romance.

At the center of the ensemble, once again, is the charmingly commonsensical Anne Kendrick as Beca, supported by Brittany Snow, Rebel Wilson, Ester Dean, Hana Mae Lee and the rest of the gang from part one, along with additions Hailee Steinfeld and Chrissie Fit. Reprising their roles from part one are John Michael Higgins and Elizabeth Banks as two cheerfully inappropriate play-by-play commentators.

Banks also took over directing duties this time, replacing the original’s Jason Moore, and I think the results are looser, sillier and funnier. Banks sustains the comic energy through some nutty extended sequences, like a competition between four vocal groups, and the big numbers have some spectacle and punch. The script, again by Kay Cannon, is dense with quizzical, non-sequitur verbal jokes that play surprisingly well, and when Kendrick and her pals sing a wistful version of her improbable hit “Cup Song” around the campfire, it manages even to be a little touching.

About the music: A friend of mine expressed doubt that the songs here were truly a cappella—it sounded to him like bass and percussion enhancement had been added. He could be right, and if he is I suppose I would find that a disappointing cheat. But even so, it sounds good.

Mad Max: Fury Road—1982’s Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior is, I believe, arguably the best action movie ever made, at least of the chase variety. It would probably be somewhere in my top twenty or thirty favorite movies. So this follow up had a lot to live up to.

Set in the Down Under outback, The Road Warrior, a sequel to the 1979 low-budget actioner Mad Max, depicts a not-too-distant future in which the world economy has collapsed in the wake of a global fuel shortage. Society in the desert has returned to tribalism and savagery, and gasoline is the only currency left for the marauding brutes that rocket along the desolate highways in motorcycles and hopped-up cars. A small, fortified colony of reasonably civilized people have developed a refinery, and are trying to move the cache of gas they’ve generated to a safe location near the sea, but they can’t get past the besieging army of the masked, hot-rod-riding warlord Humungus.

To the reluctant rescue comes the title character, the mysterious “road warrior” known as Max, played by Mel Gibson. This soul-wounded loner agrees to drive the armored tanker-truck for the colonists and fend off the onslaught of the freaky gas-pirates. The resulting climactic sequence, full of thrilling and often horrifying stunt work and the sustained kinetic direction of George Miller, is, for my money, the most headlong, jaw-dropping, Wagnerian motor-vehicle chase ever put on film.

The 1985 sequel Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome wasn’t as good, and with the new film clearly employing heavy doses of CGI effects, I had my doubts that Miller could recapture the earlier classic’s remarkable quality. And he doesn’t, quite—The Road Warrior remains without peer. But happily, Mad Max: Fury Road is still a very potent action movie, and the second best of the series.

Miller has lost none of his directorial panache—Fury Road casually offers up everything from two-headed lizards to human dairy farming to combat inside a raging haboob. Along with this grotesque yet epic visual imagination, there’s a certain grandiosity, tinged with irony but still visceral, to Miller’s staging of violent action that is one-of-a-kind. His cutting has the speed and dazzle of modern action masters like, say, Paul Greengrass, but it also has a clarity and precision that give it a Rube Goldberg comic dimension, and a relentless momentum. There’s simply no filmmaker quite like him.

Fury Road benefits from having, like Road Warrior, a relatively straightforward storyline. Max finds himself helping similarly haunted, one-armed driver Charlize Theron transport a handful of the “breeders”—who look like refugees from a Victoria’s Secret ad—of a masked, rumbly-voiced warlord very similar to Humungus, to safety, wherever that might be. The path leads through a seemingly endless supply of bizarre vehicular killers.

As for Tom Hardy, he cuts a serviceably lively figure as Max, but—much as it galls me to admit it—he doesn’t have the electric presence of Mel Gibson. Unlike the somehow sullen Hardy, Gibson’s Max seemed…well, mad. Maybe he wasn’t acting.

JUST AN OLD-FASHIONED DUFF SONG

Opening this weekend:

The DUFF—Bianca, the heroine of the high school comedy The DUFF, is actually the title character. DUFF, you see, is an acronym for Designated Ugly Fat Friend. When Bianca has the term applied to her, she realizes that her best pals Casey and Jessica are two of the school hotties, while she’s a frump with a snarky sense of humor who loves horror movies (where were all the girls like this when I was in high school?). She finds herself wondering if her purpose in the trio is to make Casey and Jessica look even cuter by comparison.

She promptly freaks out, cuts off relations with her friends, and strikes a deal with the swaggering jock next door to help her gain confidence and style. The object of these tutorials is to get a date with her crush, a guitar-strumming pretty-boy to whom she is—literally—unable to say three words.

In other words, in terms of theme and plot, we’re on standard John Hughes teen comedy turf here. Indeed, The DUFF is so self-consciously of the Hughes School that it has a Breakfast Club reference in the first line of the narration, and it goes on to ring its own variations on the obligatory scenes of the genre: the Big Suburban Party, the Big Dance Climax, the Cafeteria Scene in which high school social stereotypes are broken down anthropologically.

The DUFF is more charming than all this makes it sound. The script, by Josh A. Cagan (from Kody Keplinger’s novel), isn’t without some heavy platitudes and some clumsily trendy references to social media, but the best of its dialogue is crudely, bluntly funny, and it has a generous streak—it’s immediately clear to the audience, for instance, that Bianca’s misjudged Casey and Jessica. Ari Sandel’s direction zips along swiftly, and while there are poorly-timed gags that don’t come off, most of them land skillfully.

The true strength of the movie, however, is the acting. As usual in such films, there are some slumming character players as the grown-ups, like Allison Janney as Bianca’s distracted motivational-speaker Mom, Romany Malco as the wound-up Principal and Ken Jeong and Chris Wylde as daffy teachers. Robbie Amell is brashly likable as the Jock Next Door, and Bella Thorne is effective as the mean-girl villainess.

But the film is really a showcase for Mae Whitman as Bianca. Having seen the TV ads for this movie, I’ll admit I walked in with a chip—Whitman, who has the droll adorableness of a slightly less elfin Ellen Page, seemed to conform to the usual convention in a film with an “ugly duckling” heroine. And as with other movies of this sort, the makers of The DUFF didn’t seem to get that preaching to us about how everyone is beautiful in their own way while refusing, for box-office reasons, to cast an actress who really might be seen as unattractive or overweight is an offensive attempt to have it both ways.

But Whitman’s performance broke me down on this preconceived point. A former child actress, she’s a veteran of more than twenty years in show business—among many, many other roles, she’s the current voice of Disney’s Tinkerbell. Yet as Bianca she transcends her own showbiz slickness—for all her sitcom timing, she has an emotional directness to which you can feel the audience respond.

The Last Five Years—Jamie is a young writer who sells a novel and hits it big. His girlfriend Cathy is a struggling New York stage actress who doesn’t, or at least hasn’t, yet. They’re played by Jeremy Jordan and Anna Kendrick, respectively, in this movie version of Jason Robert Brown’s musical, which premiered in Chicago in 2001 and Off-Broadway in 2002, and has since been produced all over the world.

In the play, a two-hander, Cathy sings her side of the story backwards from the break-up, while we get Jamie’s side forward, from the happy early days. The two strands pass each other in the middle. This ingenious structure is weakened in the movie, adapted and directed by Richard LaGravenese. Kendrick and Jordan sing to each other, and a few other actors—little more than bit players—are shooed past the camera as well, and I, at least, lost track at times of where we were in the five-year ordeal.

But I didn’t mind that much, because Brown’s songs are pretty and witty, and prettily and wittily sung, in the clarion belter style of contemporary musicals. A good thing the score is so strong, too, because the story, stripped of the sometimes thrilling music, is just the autopsy of a typical neurotic on-again-off-again relationship, perfectly believable but not much less tiresome than listening to some friend recount five years’ worth of marital troubles in bitter detail.

Such troubles are greatly improved by good singing, though. When the movie was over, I found myself thinking that I’d rather buy the soundtrack and listen to it while driving instead of having to watch the resentments and envies and deceptions of these two.

Both of the actors are impressive, but Anna Kendrick’s rise as musical performer, starting with the improbable chart success of her “cup song” from Pitch Perfect through her roles in Into the Woods and this movie, continues to tickle. Her voice has strength alongside a plangent, comically plaintive beauty. Once it looked like Kendrick might go down in movie history as the best friend in the Twilight flicks. But maybe the Twilight flicks will go down in movie history as Kendrick’s apprenticeship before she became a singing star.

TWO JENNIFERS, TWO CLAIRES

Opening this week:

Cake—Jennifer Aniston plays Claire, who lives in both L.A. and hell. She’s scarred from the accident that took her little son’s life and left her horrifically injured. She lives alone, apparently in financial comfort, separated from her husband (Chris Messina) but served by her tirelessly loyal housekeeper Silvana (Adriana Barraza, wonderful in a potentially clichéd, Sancho Panza role).

Claire’s near-constant chronic pain is nothing, of course, compared to her bereavement. She’s retained a sardonic wit, which only serves to keep her distant from her own healing and from those who want to help her. The only help she wants is in securing refills for the bottles of Percocet she has stashed around the house.

The movie, directed by Daniel Barnz from a script by Patrick Tobin, detail’s Claire’s very gradual, very tentative steps toward reconnecting with life. In off-kilter dialogue and quietly abrupt transitions, we’re shown how small encounters—with a teenage runaway, with a possum—prod her back toward reengaging with the world. Eventually she forms a bond with the widower (Sam Worthington) of a young woman who committed suicide, and whose smirky ghost (Anna Kendrick) drops in now and then to taunt her. It’s from this strand that the movie draws its enigmatic title.

Cake has been much discussed lately for the snub its leading lady, who was also its Executive Producer, seems to have received from the Academy. A cynic might point out that it hits many of the points of shameless Oscar-bait for actresses: No glamour makeup, physical disability and disfigurement, booze, pills, numb sex with the pool guy. Aniston doesn’t do full frontal or an accent, but that’s about all that’s left out.

And maybe lust for gold statuary really was the motivation behind Cake. But it’s ridiculous if that perception is really why Aniston was shut out. I’ve always thought she was a very good actress within her range, and this role fits her casual, sensible, unhistrionic style perfectly. A more demonstrative actress could easily have ruined it, but Aniston is touching, entirely convincing, admirable. I don’t know that it’s the best performance of last year by an actress, but I would have put it in the top five that I saw.

The Boy Next Door—Spectacular in—and sometimes out of—a variety of maxi tube dresses, pencil skirts, lingerie and music-video-librarian specs, Jennifer Lopez looks like a million freakin’ bucks in this quickie. I hope she got paid at least that much, because her appearance is the only remotely worthwhile time-killer in the length of this preposterous melodrama directed by Rob Cohen, who has made far more entertaining work.

J-Lo is another Claire, a high school teacher separated from her cheating putz of a husband (John Corbett). Her teenage son is befriended by Noah (Ryan Guzman), the obsequious, six-packed hunk next door, and one weekend when the son’s on a fishing trip with dad she impulsively sleeps with him. She apparently hasn’t committed a felony by doing this—he says he’s nearly twenty, anyway—but even so she almost immediately realizes what a mistake it was. Noah is a twisted stalker, dangerous to her and her loved ones.

For a while The Boy Next Door feels like a Lifetime movie with a bigger star and slightly more graphic sex. But after a while I decided that this was unjust to Lifetime movies. I hadn’t gone in expecting a lost work by Bergman, but I thought it might be hot, kitschy laughs. Alas, once it gets past a few weary double-entendres about Claire’s home-made “cookies” and that sort of thing, the movie is too banal, slow and unpleasant to be much fun even as camp.

Well, OK, I admit that the final life-and-death grapple made me cackle out loud. But that shouldn’t be taken as any kind of recommendation. It’s been a while since I’ve seen a big-studio offering that was quite this embarrassingly inept and lifeless. Lopez is game and committed, in addition to looking sensational, and Ian Nelson has a certain callow charm as her son, but everybody is defeated by the flat direction and Barbara Curry’s implausible, disjointed script.

With dialogue this inane it probably isn’t fair to judge him on the basis of this performance, but Guzman comes across so fawningly that it reflects poorly on our heroine. Cut though this dude is, Claire seems dopey for falling for his sugary come-ons. It’s as if Mrs. Cleaver had slept with Eddie Haskell.

MERRY CHRISTMAS...

...from Less Hat, Moorhead!

Into the Woods—A friend of mine likes to say that “Grimm’s Fairy Tales” and “Pittsburgh” are two of the more aptly named entities in creation. I can’t agree with him about the second; I’ve always been fond of Pittsburgh. But there’s no arguing the grimness of those tales.

So Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine’s 1986 fairy-tale musical Into the Woods can’t really be called “dark” by comparison to its source material. This retelling of several Grimm yarns is dark only by comparison to the toned-down and glitzed-up style of fairy tales popularized by Disney and its ilk over the past century. Perhaps ironically, it’s Disney that has produced the lavish, star-studded and entertaining movie version of Into the Woods opening today.

Set, like a Ren Faire, in a period-vague Once Upon a Time with elements of the Renaissance, the 19th Century and the 20th Century—the Big Bad Wolf dresses like a swing dancer—Into the Woods weaves the stories of Little Red Riding Hood, Rapunzel, Cinderella and Jack and the Beanstalk around the plight of a Baker and his Wife who are unable to conceive. These two learn from a neighborhood Witch that this is because of a curse upon their house. She gives them the recipe to lift the curse, which brings them into contact with the other characters.

Rob Marshall, who more or less revived the big-screen musical as a viable genre with his 2002 Chicago, directs nimbly, but with an agreeably more straightforward, less hyper-cut style. His work is accomplished, but as usual with musicals, the real key to its success lies in the cast, and the score.

The standouts in the cast, for me, were Meryl Streep, a hoot as the Witch, Emily Blunt as the Baker’s potentially naughty Wife, James Corden as the kindly young Baker, and a startling, apparently genetically-engineered little belter called Lilla Crawford as Red Riding Hood. Johnny Depp is droll in the brief role of the Wolf, Tracey Ullman is funny as Jack’s fed-up Mum, Anna Kendrick makes a sweet Cinderella, and as her self-impressed Prince Charming, Chris Pine, along with Billy Magnussen as Rapunzel’s Prince, scored spontaneous applause from the preview audience with whom I saw the film for their self-parodying duet “Agony.”

As for the score, it’s very, well, Sondheim-y, which for many is about the highest compliment a score can be paid. It’s pretty, if not, overall, as melodically soaring as some of Sondheim’s; it has a more frenetic, haywire sound, in support of the complex, almost patter-song lyrics. It’s compelling, though—when each number is done, you know you’ve really heard something, and you want to hear it again.

About halfway through the movie—at the end of Act One in the stage version—the plot strands are all ingeniously brought to a traditionally happily-ever-after resolution. But Sondheim and Lapine want to remind us that happily-ever-after is fantasy, and that a wish fulfilled always comes at a price—worth it, maybe, but never painless.

The long second act in which the characters wander the forest, struggling with the consequences of their wishes, is the unconcealed point of Into the Woods. But while there is much good music and comedy in this section, you can feel the impatience of the audience—plenty of them were quite satisfied with the corny fake ending, and palpably regard this elaboration as a tiresome imposition (I understand the school-play version of the show simply drops Act Two). It isn’t enough to ruin Into the Woods, but many viewers would have been perfectly happy with happily-ever-after.

So anyway...

Monster-of-the-Week: …let’s make this triceratops skeleton come to life in Night at the Museum: Secret of the Tomb our Christmas Day MOTW…