25 IN DOGMA YEARS

Opening this weekend:

Dogma--God really enjoys the occasional game of Skee-ball. That's a sample of the startling theology we learn from Kevin Smith's Dogma. I'm not sure that's official Catholic dogma, but parts of the movie's twisty plot rely on genuine, if pedantically and literally interpreted, church law, like plenary indulgence. Two cast-out angels (Matt Damon and Ben Affleck) are hoping to exploit this doctrine to sneak back into Heaven after centuries of wandering the Earth (Wisconsin, specifically).

A Cardinal (George Carlin), hoping to get more "asses in the pews" is offering the ally-ally-in-free to anyone who comes to his church in New Jersey. The trouble is that if the fallen duo succeed in doing so, it will negate Divine infallibility, which will wipe out all existence.

This, at least, according to a rather irritable Seraphim (Alan Rickman). For some reason he presses Bethany (Linda Fiorentino), a woebegone Illinois woman who works in an abortion clinic, into service to stop this from happening. So Bethany hits the road for Jersey, picking up strange allies and enemies along the way.

I'm not sure I would have guessed that Dogma had a sufficient following to warrant a 25th Anniversary re-release, but it's back in theatres this weekend to celebrate its quarter-century mark, and I'm glad. I've always had a fondness for this messy, irreverent, sometimes offensive yet oddly devotional comedy.

It's a little overlong, and laden with some really dumb gags and gross-out effects. But there's something moving about Smith's grappling with the contradictions of a religion and tradition he clearly loves. And the ruminations and debates he puts in the mouths of his characters seem to me more thoughtful and reflective than those in, say, the Da Vinci Code flicks.

Besides, it's hard to beat Dogma's cast. Along with Affleck, Damon, Carlin and Rickman, the ensemble includes Chris Rock as the 13th Apostle, cut from the Gospels because of his race, Jason Lee as a snide demon commanding a trio of hockey-stick-wielding minions on rollerblades, glorious Salma Hayek as a muse-turned-stripper, and Jason Mewes and Smith himself as the inevitable Jay and Silent Bob, who join the quest to save the universe.

In smaller roles are the likes of Janeane Garofalo, Bud Cort, Alanis Morrisette and even Betty Aberlin (Lady Aberlin from Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood) as a nun. Best of all is Fiorentino, deeply likable in essentially the lead role, maybe the richest, most complex part she ever got to play in movies. Somebody ought to coax her out of retirement.

Ballerina--As it happens, I'm one of the handful who had never seen a John Wick movie. Until this week, that is, when I saw Ballerina. Wick, played as always by Keanu Reeves, appears briefly but bloodily in this action melodrama, which I found myself quite able to follow without a heavy remedial course.

The central character this time is Eve (Ana de Armas), orphaned daughter of an assassin. She winds up at a dance company run by the ever-imperious Anjelica Huston; the place is a front for an assassin school. Once grown up, Eve strikes out on her own in search of the people who killed her dad. These turn out to be members of a death cult of professional assassins who live together in a picturesque Alpine village, governed by the diabolical Gabriel Byrne.

The gore-splattered brawls and shoot-outs that ensue are all but non-stop, and the movie, directed by Len Wiseman, is very watchable and well-done for what it is, which is something fairly stupid. The bad guys here reminded me of the similar sect of murder fanatics in the Sylvester Stallone action flick Cobra (1986), and, as there, they feel trumped-up, spun out of whole cloth. They aren't full enough characters to be satisfyingly hateful.

Ana de Armas is a soulful and amusing presence, however, and vets like Huston, Byrne, Ian McShane, Norman Reedus and the late Lance Reddick provide some fun. But there's an artificial quality to this film's thrills that excludes it from the annals of the great revenge pictures.

Also, I had to wonder: What if you had great assassin skills, but two left feet? Would they reject your application to the ballerina school, or would they look the other way, like with college athletes?

AIR QUALITY

Opening today:

Air--Sneakers are no minor matter. The comfy footwear of choice for many of us--even those of us whose idea of exercise is a good brisk walk to the refrigerator--they seem like they should be apolitical. But almost nothing in the modern, mass-produced world is apolitical. The subject of sneakers is, alas, fraught with difficult social and economic and ethical issues, ranging from the circumstances of their production, to their pricing and the crimes to which it can give rise, to the environmental impact of their disposal.

So it was probably inevitable that sooner or later a movie would be devoted to the origin story of a famous brand of sneaker. It was less clear what director Ben Affleck and the other makers of Air, a chronicle of the beginnings of Nike's Air Jordan line, would want us to take away from their account.

The focus is on Sonny Vaccaro (Matt Damon), who scouts endorsement talent for Nike's basketball division. This being the early '80s, Adidas is king in the basketball shoe world, and Nike is a distant, unhip third to Converse, so Sonny struggles to attract big name players, especially with the anemic budget that Nike founder Phil Knight (Affleck) has allotted him.

Thus Air becomes a sort of corporate-level Horatio Alger story. Sonny's battle is on two fronts: first to convince Knight and his colleagues to let him put all of his money on the 17-year-old Michael Jordan, who hasn't even played his first NBA game, and second to convince Jordan's magisterial mother Deloris (Viola Davis) that Nike is the best place for her Adidas-loving son.

Affleck has demonstrated several times over now that he is a director of skill and panache, but also of emotional maturity. I've always suspected that if it wasn't for the elaborate fashionable contempt in which Affleck is held by many for his celebrity, his films would be hailed as the work of an important, probably Oscar-winning, American director. The fact that Nike allowed the use of their logos and products onscreen, and that Michael Jordan himself reportedly approved of the project, suggested that Air was unlikely to be deeply critical, but I went in hoping that Affleck and screenwriter Alex Convery would bring some complexity and uncertainty to the subject.

Well, at one point a character observes that most of Nike's shoes are made in Asian factories; he admits that he should feel ambivalent about this, but doesn't. It may be that Convery and Affleck are using the candor in this line to speak for the movie. Air prefers to allude to the long-term benefits to young athletes to which Jordan's deal led. Similarly, while Affleck largely plays Knight for laughs as a frustrated gnomic buffoon, a would-be sage hilariously beset with anxieties, the movie is nonetheless at pains to point out Knight's massive philanthropy. Any human toll that put him in a position to be so generous is carefully steered around.

And by that point, as an audience member I had pretty much set aside my ambivalence too, because Air is irresistible, the most entertaining movie I've seen this year. Like Moneyball, it's a sports story about the triumphs of middle-aged guys working in offices--the only kind of sports success to which most of us can remotely relate. And while it isn't as good as Moneyball, it's still gripping, funny and unaccountably compelling.

As with Elizabeth Banks in the recent Cocaine Bear, Affleck leans hard into the '80s period, both in the gleefully deployed fashions and music and cultural references and in the style of the filmmaking itself. The cinematography of the great Robert Richardson captures something of the dirty-newsprint look of an '80s flick. But the real key to the film is Convery's juicy dialogue, and the lustiness with which these actors attack it.

Having revived Ford's image in Ford v Ferrari and blown the whistle on ADM in The Informant!, Damon gets to redeem yet another corporation here as the pudgy, surly, keen-minded Sonny Vaccaro; it's his best role in a long time. Chris Tucker brings an extra sweetness to his usual fast-talking routine as Sonny's glad-handing ally Howard White, Chris Messina amusingly spews his Mamet-esque invective as Jordan's agent David Falk, and Matthew Maher has a quiet eccentric charm as shoe designer Peter Moore. As Nike Marketing Director Rob Strasser, Jason Bateman hits his laugh lines well but also brings the role an unexpected melancholy.

Except in some video footage, Michael Jordan himself is a barely-glimpsed extra here; his presence is treated rather like that of Jesus in Ben-Hur. But his camp is represented by Viola Davis, whose commanding presence settles a hush over the movie's antic tone every time she speaks. She's magnificent.

Marlon Wayans also turns up as Glenn Levering, long enough to tell Sonny the story of his attendance at a particular historical event. It seems to have been included here mainly because it's such a great story, but when it renews Sonny's resolve in his campaign, the movie is in danger of reminding us that all this is about the freaking marketing of an expensive sneaker. Several times the movie notes that a shoe is just a shoe until somebody steps into it. But in some contexts, a shoe is just a shoe no matter who is wearing it.

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.

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.

THE CAPES OF WRATH

Opening this week:

  
Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice—The title sounds like a Supreme Court Case, but it just refers to a spat between the two biggest names in the DC superhero stable. The Man of Steel thinks Gotham’s Dark Knight is a creepy vigilante, while the Caped Crusader thinks that the near-omnipotence of Krypton’s Favorite Son represents an existential threat to all humankind. Can either be called wrong with perfect confidence?

This had possibilities, certainly, and a deft director in Zack Snyder. And the film has its moments. The acting is quite strong—Ben Affleck makes a brooding, intriguing, suavely attractive Bruce Wayne, and his costume gives a perfectly competent performance as Batman. He’s far more credible as a superhero here than he was as Daredevil back in 2003.

Henry Cavill makes a serviceable Superman—like most actors who have played this role, his charm doubles whenever he’s in Clark Kent drag—and Jesse Eisenberg darkens his persona as a manic, nattering Lex Luthor. A young Israeli actress named Gal Gadot is introduced as Wonder Woman; she doesn’t get much to do, but she is unquestionably a wonder.

Parts of the clash between the title icons are amusing, but mostly Batman v Superman is an overwrought, laborious, punishingly heavy slog. The conflict is muddled and lacking in urgency, there isn’t nearly enough humor, and, above all, the movie is too freakin’ long. It’s TOO. FREAKIN’. LONG. By at least twenty minutes, probably more.

Various theories can be advanced as to why so many blockbuster action movies insist on being so outrageously overlong. But I would rather this review, unlike Batman v Superman itself, remain brief. 

City of Gold—This documentary challenges the commonplace that good stories require conflict. It’s a portrait of Pulitzer-Prize-winning L.A. Times restaurant critic Jonathan Gold, and it has almost none.

For an hour and a half, we watch the pleasant fellow galumph around the Greater L.A. area, going to Mom and Pop ethnic restaurants where adoring owners serve him plates of delicious-looking food. He takes a brief side trip to New York to dine with his idol Calvin Trillin, but otherwise that’s pretty much the whole movie, in terms of content. None of the talking heads have an unkind word to say about him; no appalling personal tragedies are revealed.

Of course, we do learn that Gold is a chronic procrastinator. A newspaper columnist who procrastinates? What a shocker! And his environmentalist brother gently reproves him for his fondness for overfished varieties of sushi. That’s about as much Shakespearean drama as we get.

But director Laura Gabbert, abetted by Bobby Johnston’s fine score, keeps City of Gold gliding along enjoyably. Gabbert’s bird’s-eye dissection of L.A.’s neighborhoods is fascinating and undeniably glamorous, and the movie works as genteel food porn as well. Mere humans may feel a pang of envy at seeing someone so seemingly contented with and well-rewarded by his talents, but Gold comes across so unassumingly that it doesn’t deepen into resentment.

JOE/GIRL

Gone Girl—“I feel like I’m in a Law and Order episode,” says Nick Dunne, as detectives begin to question him about his missing wife Amy, early in David Fincher’s new thriller. We in the audience think so too. In a scene from earlier, happier days in Nick and Amy’s marriage, they give each other the same gift on their anniversary, and Amy says “We’re so cute, I want to punch us in the face.” Here, again, screenwriter Gillian Flynn, adapting her own 2012 novel, seems to be pre-empting the audience.

No need, as it turns out. Nick and Amy’s marriage goes south, both figuratively and literally. They both lose their magazine writing jobs, Nick drags Amy from her beloved New York to Missouri to help care for his dying mother, and their relationship goes from punch-in-the-face cute to deeply dysfunctional.

Then she disappears, amidst signs of a struggle in the house. Nick calls the cops, remains flippantly calm during the search, and, perhaps trying not to behave self-consciously like a panicked husband, comes across for all the world like a guy who murdered his wife. People start to exchange significant glances behind his back. Interrupting this strand from time to time are episodes from Amy’s diary, depicting the crumbling marriage.

These are just the beginning of Gone Girl’s twists. After awhile I stopped thinking that we were in Law and Order territory—the plot may possibly be too gothic and convoluted even for that show.

None of which is to say it’s not entertaining. Flynn’s dialogue has punch, and Fincher crafts the scenes elegantly, at a confident, steady pace. His work is broodingly atmospheric without the dreamlike stylization of Seven.

Fincher also gets excellent, witty work from an excellent cast. The revelation here is Rosamund Pike, always lovely but often stuck in conventionally sweet parts; here she makes the most of the unexpectedly ripe, varied role of Amy. But Tyler Perry, Neil Patrick Harris, Kim Dickens, Patrick Fugit, Missi Pyle, Sela Ward and especially Carrie Coon as Nick’s twin sister also give enjoyable turns.

And then there’s Ben Affleck, handling this Hitchcockian leading man role with aplomb. The story hinges, in part, on Nick’s difficulties with public likability, something that Affleck, for reasons I’ve never entirely grasped, understands all too well. Gone Girl strikingly echoes Affleck’s life in the public eye, when you think about it—from the beginning of his ordeal, Nick’s every move makes him look like a smarmy creep. But the worse he looks, the more cameras get pointed at him.

The Joe Show—As the title implies, this documentary chronicles the rise and partial slump of Joe Arpaio, and especially his obsessive relationship with the media. The outrages summarized here—there are others—won’t be news to most informed viewers here in Maricopa County, but they can still boil your blood when seen in the aggregate.

What’s really remarkable about the film is the access that director Randy Murray got to Arpaio and his inner circle. Murray’s camera was present over what appears to have been years, including the 2012 election, and Arpaio and his gang eventually came to speak in front of it with startling cynical candor about their calculated showmanship in manipulating the media to their advantage. Simply on the basis of this footage, The Joe Show qualifies as an important document.

It’s also a slickly-made, wittily edited film about a satire-defying Arizona figure. I interviewed Murray for a Phoenix Magazine story last year, and he told me the same thing that my friend Barry Graham told me after he interviewed Arpaio for Harper’s years ago—that he liked Arpaio personally, a lot. The Sheriff’s almost childlike affability comes through in The Joe Show, and this quality sits uncomfortably with the facts the film presents—that he’s responsible for fatal brutality, banana-republic-style intimidation and the waste of hundreds of millions of dollars. Murray’s film also gets across something that’s less widely understood: Not only has Arpaio been abusive, he’s also been shockingly derelict of his legitimate duties.

What Arpaio’s behavior here shows is that, for all his ignorance and incoherence and delusional bluster, he has an instinctive grasp of how to exploit people’s piggy bigotries and appetite for bullying cruelty. Even when his media flack Lisa Allen and other cronies cringe with embarrassment at something he plans to do, like his “Birther investigation,” he knows perfectly well that it will work with the segment of the electorate at whom he’s aiming.

Allen comes across, by the way, far more repulsively than anyone else in the film, Arpaio included, though there’s also pathos to the exaggerated bonhomie of her manner—you can sense her desperation to make her job and her boss and her department seem mischievous and cute, a misunderstood, well-intentioned part of the normal world of decent people. But Murray’s film shows that it’s not. Arpaio was a grandstanding media whore from the start of his tenure, and with Allen as his pimp, he’s gradually grown into a monster.

SNUBSTANDARD

Somebody gets snubbed by the Academy Awards almost every year, but this year might just go down in Oscar history as The Year of the Snub. At this writing, Ben Affleck has won a BAFTA award, a Golden Globe and a Director’s Guild Award, among others, for directing his splendidly entertaining political thriller Argo.

The film itself has also been widely honored—indeed, it received seven Oscar nominations. But even if his movie won all seven on February 24, Affleck can’t be honored with an Oscar for Best Director, because he wasn’t nominated.

Argo indulges in a bit of hairbreadth-escape melodrama in its final stretch, and one could argue about whether the movie might have been equally tense and satisfying with a more realistic resolution, instead of this sort of corny Hollywood action. But this is a question of artistic taste, not of execution—corny or not, the picture, these scenes included, is rousingly suspenseful, and must be considered one of the best-directed movies of the year. It would be disappointing but perhaps legitimate if Affleck didn’t win, if the award went to Spielberg or Tarantino or Ang Lee or even to the visionary young Benh Zeitlin of Beasts of the Southern Wild. But for him simply to be ignored is arguably the most egregious Oscar snub in decades.

It seems to have happened for two reasons. First, Affleck has been a fashionable figure of ridicule for years, for reasons I don’t understand. I’ve never been a particular fan of him as an actor; though I think he’s given some fine performances—notably in Hollywoodland—he’s also been a bland lightweight at times. He’s impressively low-key and haunted in the lead in Argo, however, suggesting that he may, on top of everything else, be his own best director.

But no one really disputes the excellence of his work as a director. By any other name, the guy who directed Gone Baby Gone and The Town and then Argo would be hailed as, quite simply, a new Hitchcock. Because it’s Ben Affleck, however, much of the praise has seemed either grudging or insultingly astonished. Enough already—it’s time to declare him paid up for Gigli (sad to say, I’m part of that small cult of outcasts who thinks that Gigli, while certainly flawed, is overall a worthwhile movie).

In the long run, the snub will likely work to Affleck’s benefit—the standing ovations he’s been getting while he wins all those other directing awards suggest that it may have caused the filmmaking community to look at him with new eyes. And his oh-so-gracious-and-humble acceptance speeches, though probably sincere, are also flawlessly played.

The other reason for his omission seems to have been the need to find a place among the nominees for director David O. Russell, for Silver Linings Playbook. Russell is a superb director, rightly nominated for 2010’s The Fighter; snubbed himself for his terrific 1999 Three Kings. But while Silver Linings Playbook is a watchable, generally touching comedy-drama, I don’t think it represents anything near Russell’s best work, and it doesn’t come within a mile of Argo. I’m not sure why it’s been so rapturously received.

Silver Linings Playbook also seems to have figured into this year’s worst acting snub, that of John Hawkes for his star turn in The Sessions. I admit that I’ve had a hard time warming up to Bradley Cooper, but I thought his performance in Silver Linings was quite creditable and poignant. But it isn’t in the same galaxy as the luminous work of Hawkes—in any year in which Daniel Day-Lewis didn’t play Lincoln, Hawkes would deserve to win.

I was delighted, however, that Helen Hunt received a Supporting Actress nomination for her lovely turn in The Sessions. It’s a pleasant surprise, as Hunt—an authentically great actress—has long been fashionably sneered at in the same perplexing way as Affleck.

One other note: I was also delighted that the Best Animated Short nominees included The Longest Daycare, a riotous Simpsons cartoon that played before Ice Age: Continental Drift. Nice to know that Maggie Simpson wasn’t snubbed.

TO SURROGATE, WITH LOVE

Here's a pair of gems, both playing here in the Valley, that I only caught up with recently…

Stricken with polio as a child, the poet and essayist Mark O’Brien spent most of his 49 years in an iron lung. He was the subject of the Oscar-winning 1996 documentary short Breathing Lessons (viewable here). Now, with The Sessions, his efforts to claim a satisfying sexuality, with the help of a sex surrogate, have gotten the full feature treatment from writer-director Ben Lewin (a polio survivor himself).

It’s a film of charming sweetness and easygoing wit, built around superb performances. John Hawkes, in another demonstration of his phenomenal range, is luminous as O’Brien, utterly convincing in his depiction of the man’s disability and vulnerability, but also of his indomitable spirit. The performance is both a technical tour de force and a blast of star quality.

Helen Hunt is no less a knockout as the surrogate, Cheryl Cohen Greene, with her gentle, comically frayed aplomb and her undercurrent of admiration for her client. Then there’s Moon Bloodgood as O’Brien’s unflappable aide, and William H. Macy, terrific as his priest, who gives O’Brien’s project the green light on behalf of the Church. Alas, this means listening to O’Brien’s accounts of it, and glumly reflecting on the unspoken irony that the guy in the iron lung has a better sex life than his.

Ben Affleck is one of those high-profile celebrities about whom it was fashionably decided, at some point, that he was a douchebag and a joke, fit only for ridicule. If this had not been the case, if he were judged only on the merits of his three films as a director—Gone Baby Gone, The Town and Argo—what would his reputation be? I think that he would already have been hailed as the best, or at least most promising, director of suspense movies since at least Costa-Gavras, if not Hitchcock himself.

Argo, now in theatres, is a dramatization of the CIA operation to extract from Tehran the six Americans who escaped the US Embassy before it was overrun by Iranian revolutionaries in 1979, and thus were not among the 52 hostages that were held there for 444 days. It’s essentially a caper movie about stealing people instead of diamonds or whatever.

The agent who designed and conducted the caper, a man named Tony Mendez (Affleck), concocted a bizarrely over-elaborate-seeming cover story in which he and the hostages, who had taken refuge at the home of the Canadian Ambassador to Iran (Victor Garber), masqueraded as filmmakers scouting locations for a science-fiction film, called Argo.

From his crisply-edited, scary opening sequence—the Embassy takeover—on, Affleck’s step as director seems entirely sure-footed. Obvious liberties are taken in several sequences, especially toward the end, for the sake of eminent peril and hairbreadth escape, and one could argue the necessity of taking the movie so far into old-school melodrama. But the success with which Affleck executes these flourishes is spectacular: The suspense is excruciating, though it’s also nicely leavened by comedy, both from the sour, mordant CIA guys—Bryan Cranston is at his best as Affleck’s boss—and, more broadly, from Alan Arkin and John Goodman as a baggy-pants team of Hollywood cronies helping Affleck fake the production (Goodman plays real-life makeup man John Chambers, the Oscar-winner behind the Planet of the Apes effects).

As for Affleck’s own haunted, low-key presence in the star part here, Argo suggests that not only is he a superb director, but that he’s better in front of the camera when he’s also behind the camera.

RIP to Susan Luckey, a hoot as Mayor Shinn’s daughter in The Music Man, passed on at 74. Ye gods, she was cute…