EVERYTHING EVERY TIME ALL IN ONE PLACE

Opening wide in the multiplexes this weekend:

Here--A spot in a living room in an upscale eastern Pennsylvania suburb--that's the title locale of this latest from Robert Zemeckis. It's our static vantage point for, essentially, the whole movie, looking across the room through a picture window that offers a view of the big brick colonial-era house across the street. 

We see the view there before it was a living room--long, long before. As in, we see it during the extinction event that ended the Cretaceous Period, sixty million years ago. We see it as a woodland make-out spot for indigenous lovers (Dannie McCallum and Joel Oulette), and as a burial site. We see it as part of a dirt road leading up to the aforementioned historic manse, which once was occupied by William Franklin (Daniel Betts), estranged Loyalist son of Benjamin (Keith Bartlett).

After the house is built, we get glimpses of the lives of its early 20th-Century inhabitants, like an enthusiastic aviator (Gwilym Lee) whose wife (Michelle Dockery) frets about his flying. They're followed by a whimsical inventor (David Fynn) and his sexy flapper wife (Ophelia Lovibond). This guy is trying to perfect a reclining chair; his working title for it is "Relax-y-Boy." And we see the house's early 21st-Century occupants, an African-American family; Nicholas Pinnock and Nikki Amuka-Bird are the parents, and Anya Marco-Harris is the beloved housekeeper.

But the movie's main focus is the midcentury family that takes the place over after WWII: Dad (Paul Bettany), a combat veteran and a seething, disappointed functional alcoholic, his sweet, quietly unfulfilled wife (Kelly Reilly), and his oldest son (Tom Hanks), an aspiring artist. The son gets his beautiful girlfriend (Robin Wright) pregnant, so there goes both art school and her college dreams. They move in with the parents, and stay for decades.

So the movie packs in a lot of history (and prehistory), a lot of longings fulfilled and unfulfilled, and cultural references ranging from the Spanish flu to the Spanish Inquistion sketch from Monty Python. But I'll admit that when I realized we were going to be parked in one place for the whole thing--I went in not knowing this--I panicked for a moment.

I needn't have worried. Zemeckis has always been a skillful showman, and while the audacious experiment of Here is by no means an unqualified success, it certainly never bored me. The script, by Eric Roth and Zemeckis, is based on a 2014 graphic novel by Richard McGuire, and Zemeckis employs comic-book techniques like overlapping inset panels to interweave the various timelines and bounce them off each other thematically. It's an impressive and confident exercise in narrative, and it does carry a cumulative emotional punch.

There are downsides, however. The fixed point of view means that the actors tend to seem a bit far away from us a lot of the time, and when they are brought up into the foreground it somehow feels forced. Zemeckis may have been worried about this distancing too; Alan Silvestri's music, though pretty, is ladled on a bit thicker than it should be, as if to telegraph what we're supposed to be feeling.  

Much more jarringly, though, the people in Here often have an ersatz, CGI "Uncanny Valley" look to them. The leads were taken all the way back to teenaged through some sort of real-time computer tech, and while the results are tolerable, they aren't perfected in realistic terms.

It must be admitted, however, that Hanks and Wright transcend this limitation, especially Hanks. The other actors sometimes feel like cyber-phantoms, but Hanks is so vibrant that he can project his humanity right through the program. And after Apollo 13, Castaway, Captain Phillips and Sully, it's also a relief to see the poor guy stay put.

FLOWER MOON SHADOW

Opening this weekend:

Killers of the Flower Moon--In the 1870s the Osage Nation settled on a large reservation in northeastern Oklahoma consisting of land thought to be of little value. But in the late 1890s, it was discovered to be sitting on an ocean of oil. Because the Osage had retained mineral rights to the land, by the early '20s they found themselves to be the wealthiest people, per capita, on the planet.

It need hardly be said that opportunistic white folks moved in fast to snatch this bounty through a variety of schemes, perhaps the vilest being the practice of marrying into an Osage family and then murdering the spouses and other heirs. Because the case was eventually broken by the nascent FBI, the story was briefly dramatized as one episode in The FBI Story, Mervyn LeRoy's 1959 chronicle (and whitewash) of the Bureau, starring James Stewart.

Martin Scorsese's account is not so brief. Scripted by Eric Roth and Scorsese from David Grann's 2017 book, the director's three-hour-plus Killers of the Flower Moon is an epic nightmare, solemn and heartbroken yet charged up with a fierce and sweeping vitality. The style feels different from his previous work, yet somehow it's still unmistakably a Scorsese picture.

The focus here is on Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio), a WWI vet who arrives in Osage country to work for his uncle, the cattle rancher William King Hale (Robert DeNiro). Ernest soon marries an Osage woman named Mollie Kyle (Lily Gladstone) and starts a family with her. A dull, malleable sort, Ernest seems to genuinely love Mollie, yet all the while they're married he's secretly serving as a thuggish henchman for the sanctimonious Bill Hale, who condescendingly professes love for the Osage while conspiring in the deaths of Mollie's mother and sisters and others in the community. Eventually and inevitably, Mollie also becomes a target of Bill's plans.

Killers is shot in chilly shades of gray and sepia by Rodrigo Prieto, edited by Scorsese's longtime collaborator Thelma Schoonmaker and moved along by a brilliant, pulsing score by Robbie Robertson, to whose memory the film is dedicated. Yet despite the presence of these cronies, this isn't business as usual. Scorsese doesn't give us the kinetic flashiness of his gangster sagas here. There's no darting, antic camerawork, no wall-to-wall narration.

But this isn't a staid historical drama either; the tone is feverishly immediate and chaotic, almost hallucinatory at times, and there's a tinge, especially in the scenes between DiCaprio and DeNiro, of deeply grim comedy. Scorsese's comic edge doesn't distance us from the horror, either, as perhaps it could be accused of doing in Goodfellas or Casino. The murders and other violence are presented with an angry bluntness, as nothing but sordid, wasteful and evil.

Essentially, what Scorsese gives us here is a vision of life in hell, not just a hell of butchery and menace, though this is amply depicted, but of the fractured spirit and toxic guilt generated by racial terrorism and piracy. The agony of this life is reflected in the superb performances of DiCaprio and the serene, gravely beautiful Lily Gladstone. DeNiro is at the top of his form as the genially satanic Bill Hale, and the enormous cast includes fine turns by Tantoo Cardinal, William Belleau, Cara Jade Myers, Brendan Fraser, Scott Shepherd, Sturgill Simpson, Katherine Willis and Barry Corbin, among many others. John Lithgow appears as a prosecutor; he's always welcome but gets less of a chance than usual to flex here.

There's also a strong supporting performance by Jesse Plemons as Tom White, the Texas Ranger turned G-Man who led the BOI (later FBI) investigation. The case was an early success for the Bureau, depicted here as a largely unknown agency at the time (Grann's book is subtitled The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI), and Plemons, speaking softly and politely but firmly from under his Stetson, lightens this bleak and grueling movie's mood just enough to get us through; we at last feel a dawning of hope for justice and salvation. He shows up just in time.

One more note: I was expecting, and hoping for, the usual afterword before the end credits, explaining what ultimately became of these people. Kudos to Scorsese for coming up with a more creative and witty way to present this information. It's an ingenious coda to this great and terrible American tale.

NEW YORK STATE OF MIND

Despite the title, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is a mostly quiet movie, & for quite a while it keeps its emotional distance, too. The central character, Oskar Schell (Thomas Horn), the son of a Manhattan jeweler (Tom Hanks), speaks in a direct, declarative manner, even when, a couple of times, he raises his tone in anger.

He has plenty to be angry about. Oskar’s very smart & imaginative but obsessive, phobic, possibly Aspergers-afflicted. None of this gets any better after 9/11, on the morning of which his father is at a business meeting more than a hundred flights up in the World Trade Center. This, presumably, is the reference of the title—how New Yorkers perceived the attacks. The loss leaves Oskar even more confused & secretive, & opens a gulf between him & his gentle, shattered mother (Sandra Bullock).

Oskar’s Dad would send him on fanciful “reconnaissance missions” in Central Park, designed in part to force him to interact with other people, in search of artifacts of a mythical “Sixth Borough” of New York City. About a year after what Oskar refers to as “The Worst Day,” the boy is snooping in his Dad’s closet, & he finds a key in a small envelope with the word “Black” written on it.

Taking this as a posthumous reconnaissance mission, this strange, wounded kid ventures out into his strange, wounded city. He starts spending his Saturdays pestering people named Black throughout the Five Boroughs, sure that if he can find the lock that this key fits, it will reveal a message from his father. Really, of course, he just wants to keep his connection to his beloved departed parent alive.

I must admit that it took a while for me to respond to Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. The film is directed with precision by Steven Daldry & beautifully shot by Chris Menges, & it features another lovely, urgent score by Alexander Desplat. There’s no shortage of fine acting, either. But for almost the first half, the script, by Eric Roth from the novel by Jonathan Safran Foer, seems precious & self-consciously whimsical.

It’s also a particularly single-minded exercise in that relentlessly pursued theme in the American narrative tradition, the Search for the Father. For all the excellence of young Horn’s performance, when the supposedly sweet-natured & sensitive Oskar ignores, even exacerbates his mother’s sufferings, it becomes hard to like him, fairly or not.

But about midpoint, a character enters the story known only as The Renter, who lives with Oskar’s grandmother (Zoe Caldwell) & can’t or won’t speak. He & Oskar take to each other, & he starts to accompany him on his Saturday quests, conversing only through cryptic scribbles in his notebook, or through the words “Yes” & “No” written in the palms of his hands.

The Renter is played by the great Max Von Sydow, & the odd, somber rapport that he & Horn find in their scenes together makes the movie start to click. It might be too much to say that Von Sydow, with his alert, wary face, saves the movie single-handedly. But he’s a big part of its salvation, & he does it without ever speaking a word.

By its final stretch, when the mystery of the key was finally solved, & Oskar’s own terrible secret was cathartically revealed, I was fully drawn into the movie. Oskar’s flailing reaction to the tragedy becomes a proxy for his city’s, & his country’s, & if what he learns about himself & his neighbors is extremely heartbreaking, it’s also incredibly uplifting.