TOMFOOLERY

In theaters this weekend:

80 for Brady--It's a testament to the star power of the four leading ladies in this movie that I didn't resent that their characters were Tom Brady fans. Not that much, anyway. I didn't even resent that the film amounts to a feature-length commercial for the NFL; it's being released the weekend before Super Bowl Sunday, almost as if the league is trying to offer its own counterprogramming.

Who cares? At this point in their careers, Lily Tomlin, Jane Fonda, Sally Field and Rita Moreno could pretty much read grocery lists and it would carry a certain pop-culture gravitas. The script, by Sarah Haskins and Emily Halpern and inspired by a real-life circle of elderly Boston-based fans of Tommy Boy and the Patriots, doesn't really offer them much more to work with than a grocery list would, and they still come off all right.

Tomlin, a cancer survivor, is the outspoken instigator who insists that she and her friends must go watch Brady play in the 2017 Big Game. Fonda is a flirt given to romantically leaping before she looks; she's also successful writer of erotic fiction about Rob Gronkowski. Field is an academic weary of her dependent, literally absent-minded professor husband (Bob Balaban) and Moreno yearns to break free of assisted living despite a fellow resident (Glynn Turman) who likes her.

The quartet ends up in Houston having wacky adventures at the Super Bowl Experience and at parties and poker games and chicken wing eating contests and such. All does not, it need hardly be said, go smoothly. They're befriended by the choreographer of the half-time show (Billy Porter) and if you think they don't end up dancing to get past security, think again.

With her blunt, urgent delivery, Tomlin somehow emerges as the team captain of the ensemble. But all four are infectiously energetic and seem to enjoy goofing around with the supporting players shoved in their paths, like Porter, or Harry Hamlin as a love interest for Fonda, or Sara Gilbert as Tomlin's daughter, or Andy Richter as a high roller in a skybox, or Alex Moffat and Rob Corrddry as a dyspeptic sports-talk team, and of course Brady and Gronk and Guy Fieri and others as themselves. Even the bit players include the likes of Patton Oswalt and Sally Kirkland.

80 for Brady starts slow, but it should be said that as it progresses, and gets broader and sillier, it also gets better; both livelier and more heartfelt. By the end these women had me absurdly emotionally invested. This is, possibly, the lamest and most ridiculous film that has ever brought tears to my eyes.

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.

THE MOON ALSO RISES

As much as any Tolkien geek or Star Trek nut, Wes Anderson delights in invented worlds of immersive detail. At times he’s like a little kid, showing you the pictures he’s drawn in a spiral-bound notebook. The difference is that his invented worlds aren’t fairy-tale domains or distant planets, they’re embellishments on twee upper-middle-class Boomer-era culture, especially as experienced by adolescents, and by the eternal adolescents that this culture produced.

The conceit of Anderson’s Royal Tenenbaums (2001) was that we were seeing enacted a Salinger-esque midcentury Manhattan novel. In The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou (2004) he went so far as to invent marine species, like the “Sugar Crab” or the “Jaguar Shark” (charmingly stop-motion animated by Henry Selick), for his titular TV star/explorer hero to chronicle.

His latest, co-written with Roman Coppola, is Moonrise Kingdom, a pubescent star-crossed love story set on fictitious New England coastal islands in 1965, and it’s as obsessively imagined as the rest. Anderson gives us maps, fake meteorological history delivered by an authoritative-sounding Chorus (Bob Balaban), a warren-like house with an intricate floor-plan, a made-up scouting organization for boys called the “Khaki Scouts”—with its own magazine, Indian Corn—and a series of “young reader” novels pored over by the heroine that truly look like the sort of thing you’d have found on a Bookmobile in that era. The movie is a ‘60s childhood as it should have been, but also, specifics aside, as it sort of was.

Said heroine is twelve-year-old Suzy (Kara Hayward), whose cold-fish Dad (Bill Murray) and repressed Mom (Frances McDormand) are both lawyers. At first the stonefaced Suzy is a little creepy, peering through binoculars out the windows of her handsome home, but even though she’s capable of violent outbursts she’s no bad seed. She’s a romantic, keeping vigil for her beloved.

He arrives in the form of Sam (Jared Gilman) a runaway from a Khaki Scout camp on the island. A year earlier, he saw her as The Raven in a local production of Benjamin Britten’s Noye’s Fludde, and knew immediately he’d found the meaning of life. They talked only once, but she invited him to correspond, and he did not shirk.

The two of them run away together. Sam, an orphaned foster child, tries to impress her with his woodcraft, unaware that his ardor has already won her heart. They camp out, and she reads to him from her favorite books as he smokes a corn-cob pipe. Needless to say, their idyll drives the rest of the island into a tizzy.

Besides Suzy’s parents, the worriers include the earnest Khaki Scoutmaster (Edward Norton) and the slow-spoken, sad-sack Police Captain (Bruce Willis). The other Khaki Scouts treat the operation not as a search for two missing children but as a manhunt for potentially dangerous fugitives; they fan out, armed to the teeth.

More complications arise, including a Deus ex machina storm, and eventually a Social Services representative (Tilda Swinton in striking blue) and a Khaki Scout bigwig (Harvey Keitel) enter the action as well. Willis gives one of those performances that he’ll be remembered for after most of his action roles are likely forgotten, Norton is touching, the kids are excellent, and Murray and McDormand are effective even if they get less than usual to do here. Robert Yeoman’s water-color-ish cinematography is ravishing—there’s a shot of Willis crossing a church roof that has the austere devotional beauty of an image from Dreyer—and so is the music, by composers ranging from Alexander Desplat to Mark Mothersbaugh to Britten.

For me, Anderson has never topped his first two features, Bottle Rocket and especially Rushmore—one of my favorite movies—but Moonrise Kingdom, despite some clunky missteps toward the end, falls only a little short of these. Some parents may be uncomfortable with the (non-graphic) scenes of Suzy and Sam’s physical intimacy, and with the period-realistic tobacco habits of both Sam and the Scoutmaster, and in the course of the story an animal meets a jarringly awful (and gratuitous) fate that might be a deal-breaker for some kids (and some adults). But with these caveats duly noted, Moonrise Kingdom borders on the sublime.