CHESAPEAKE PERFORMANCE

Caught up with a couple over the weekend:

The Baltimorons--Appropriate for September or not, this one is a Christmas movie. It stars Michael Strassner as Cliff, an unemployed improv comic and recovering alcoholic with a single, inept suicide attempt to his credit. He's quite the sad sack, but he's sort of funny, and he's honestly been trying to get his act together for the sake of his worried girlfriend Brittany (Olivia Luccardi). 

Disaster strikes when he has a dental emergency on Christmas Eve. He manages to find a newly divorced dentist, Didi (Liz Larsen) willing if not happy to come into her office late in the day. By the time she's finished working on him, however, his car has been towed, so she wearily offers him a ride, and the two can't seem to shake each other's company after that. Wacky misadventures ensue.

Directed by Jay Duplass, who co-wrote the script with Strassner, this low-budget indie really might put you in the Christmas spirit, since it's about looking out for strangers when you probably would rather not. It's somewhat in the vein of odd couple road comedies like Planes, Trains and Automobiles or Due Date, but The Baltimorons rings true in a way those laboriously-carpentered films don't. Strassner's face, fleshy and boyish behind whiskers, wins our sympathy quickly, and Larsen shades her performance as Didi with great skill, taking her believably from harried irritability to seductive warmth.

It's also a love letter to the great city of Baltimore, through the holiday-empty streets of which the characters chase after cheer, to the accompaniment of Christmas jazz by Jordan Seigel in style of Vince Guaraldi's Peanuts music. We see the rowhouses and the Key Bridge, pre-collapse. At one point Cliff and Didi even do a little Christmas Eve crabbing.

If you hurry, you can catch this gem, still playing on a few screens here in the Valley through at least Thursday.

Also still playing in the multiplexes:

Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale--At this writing I have still never seen an episode of Downton Abbey (ITV; 2010-2015), but I saw the two previous feature films (2019 and 2022). I'm also a big fan of HBO's The Gilded Age, the other period series by Julian Fellowes about the lifestyles of the rich and famous, and their servants. Gilded Age is set in America, and thus is all vigorous drive and enterprise and new horizons.

Downton Abbey, by contrast, set mostly in rural England, is sedate and idyllic. Allowing for the limitations of their circumstances, the members of Crawley family, led by patriarch Hugh Bonneville, are decent enough sorts, befuddled at how difficult and expensive it is to keep the title pile of bricks in decent repair. By the time we've reached this last chapter, directed by Simon Curtis and set in 1930, the mood is all sunset melancholy and the wistful acceptance that the social system within which these people have always lived is swiftly receding.

The opulence of the setting notwithstanding, this Grand Finale doesn't feel particularly grand; as with the two earlier films, it's a relaxing, undemanding holiday, not only from our time and circumstances, but from any judgements we might have about what we're seeing. Grumbling about class implications in a story like this would be like complaining about the social order in Shakespeare or Sophocles, not because Fellowes is on the level of those writers (he's not) but because it's what must be accepted to access a story from that world.

Despite the much-acknowledged absence of the late Maggie Smith, the cast is full of veterans like Bonneville, Elizabeth McGovern, Jim Carter, Penelope Wilton, Dominic West, Paul Giamatti, Alessandro Nivola, Arty Froushan--as Noel Coward, who comes to dinner--Simon Russell Beale, Kevin Doyle, Joely Richardson and many others, all confident as ever. But as in the earlier films, Michelle Dockery, as Lady Mary, divorced and wryly put-out to find herself a figure of scandal, is the closest the ensemble has to a leading lady, and the source of much of the movie's fun.

Here's what a byword the very name "Robert Redford" once was for male beauty...

A group shot from the 1980 senior yearbook at Your Humble Narrator's dear old Harbor Creek High for the National Honor Society (I'm not in it, you'll observe): My friend Mike's thought balloon says "Eat your heart out Robert Redfert [sic]"; my friend Karen, in the row in front of him, is thinking "I'll take Bobby R."

Peace and joy eternal great man, and thank you for the memories.

ABBEY NORMAL

Opening today:

Downton Abbey: A New Era--The saga of the lives of Brit nobility and their servants at the titular fictitious pile of bricks was an ITV series from 2010 to 2015, then a feature in 2019, and now this sequel. I never watched the show, and while I had seen the earlier film I could barely remember a thing about it, just the impression that it was pleasantly sedate. So it was with no special excitement that I settled in for the sequel.

Thus this New Era, directed by Simon Curtis, was a nice surprise. Screenwriter Julian Fellowes has concocted twin storylines, both of which have a fairy-tale charm and both of which pay off with a gratifying sense of wish-fulfillment. Most of us could do with a happy ending right now, and this movie serves up a couple of elegant ones.

In the first strand, Crawley family matriarch Violet (Maggie Smith) informs her astounded relations that she's been given a villa in the south of France by a passionate admirer from her youth who has passed on, and that she wishes to give the place to her great-granddaughter Sybil. Violet is past traveling, but the Frenchman's highly civil son (Jonathan Zaccai) invites the family to visit the place and get acquainted, much to the disgust of his mother (Nathalie Baye).

The other, livelier plotline has a film crew arriving to shoot a movie at Downton Abbey; the family reluctantly agrees to this indignity to finance a new roof for the house. It starts as a silent picture, but The Jazz Singer has just come out, so it becomes a talkie mid-shoot. What ensues is surprisingly similar to the plot of Singin' in the Rain, right down to a beautiful blonde silent star with an incongruously grating voice.

The regulars from the series, like Smith, Hugh Bonneville, Elizabeth McGovern, Robert James-Collier, Samantha Bond, Phyllis Logan, Jim Carter, Penelope Wilton and the beguiling Michelle Dockery as Lady Mary, who keeps an eye on the film folks while her family is in France, are in solid form. One of the veterans from the series, Kevin Doyle as butler turned schoolteacher Mr. Molesley, gets a particularly marvelous payoff here; a cinephile, Molesley's rapture at being in proximity to moviemaking is funny, but it borders on moving as well.

The fun this time, however, is mostly from the new characters. As the film producer who understandably falls for Lady Mary, Hugh Dancy hits just the right quietly lovestruck note. Just as good are Dominic West as the jovial leading man of the movie and Laura Haddock as his breathtaking, covertly cockney leading lady.

Fellowes, who also triumphed this year with The Gilded Age on HBO, has so long been a skillful--and seemingly admiring--chronicler of the obscenely rich and those who derive their living from pampering them that it may be hard, watching Downton Abbey, to stifle your class outrage at times. At one point Violet, watching the film people at work, remarks "I'd rather earn my living down the mine!"

Drawing on a lifetime's experience as a hard-working actress, Maggie Smith delivers the line peerlessly. But even as she makes you laugh, you may not be able to suppress the thought, of the Dowager: yeah, spoken like some mega-rich jerk who never had to earn a living at all. Try ten minutes "down the mine" sometime and see if you still feel that way.

But the idyllic tone of A New Era wore me down; I couldn't maintain any indignation. Of course, the social system depicted here is grotesque and, not to put too fine a point on it, wrong. But so are the social systems approvingly depicted in, say, Twelfth Night or Much Ado About Nothing, and that doesn't stop us from entering into and enjoying them. I'm not (remotely) putting Fellowes, brilliant though he is, in the same class as Shakespeare. But this movie does have the structure, and some of the pastoral flavor, of a Shakespearean comedy, with all the storylines resolving in joy.

BEAR, TRACKS

Opening this weekend:

Paddington 2—As far as I know, this is the first crime thriller about the theft of a pop-up book. The title bear wants to buy the one-of-a-kind tome, you see, as a gift for his adored Aunt back in "darkest Peru." Alas, before he's saved up enough of his pay as a window-washer to make the purchase, the book is filched from the antiques store by a mysterious burglar, and Paddington is suspected of the heist and thrown in jail.

The real culprit—it’s revealed early on, but stop reading now if you don’t want the “spoiler”—is a crackbrained, down-on-his-luck actor played by Hugh Grant, who knows, as Paddington does not, that the pop-up book contains clues to the location of a hidden treasure. So as Paddington struggles to negotiate the perils of prison life and his upper-middle-class adoptive London family searches for evidence of his innocence, the thespian gets closer and closer to claiming the loot.

Michael Bond's beloved bear, with his blue coat, floppy red hat and love of marmalade, has been a mainstay of Brit kiddie-lit since the late ‘50s. Bond, who died this past year (Paddington 2 is dedicated to him) claimed that the character’s inspiration came, in part, from the sight of tagged children on railway platforms being evacuated from London during WWII.

There have been several animated TV series based on Bond’s tales, but the first feature film was a 2014 live-action effort, with a CGI Paddington excellently voiced by Ben Whishaw. That movie had plenty of charm, but it was marred, for me severely, by the introduction of a Cruella de Vil-like villainess played by Nicole Kidman, an obsessed taxidermist who, lacking a specimen of Ursa Marmalada in her collection, wanted to stuff Paddington. This nastiness felt really out of place in the gentle context of the movie.

Paddington 2 is a major improvement. Directed, like the first film, by Paul King of the marvelous Brit TV comedy The Mighty Boosh, the sequel features lengthy, complex slapstick sequences in the sprit of Buster Keaton or Jacques Tati, executed by Paddington (Whishaw again) with similarly earnest absorption. And its softer and sillier villain hits just the right note, without taking too much of an edge off the picture. It does, after all, contain the line, spoken by a security guard at St. Paul’s, “A nun went beserk.”

And that cast! Returning from the first film are Sally Hawkins, Hugh Bonneville, Julie Walters, Peter Capaldi and Jim Broadbent, joined here by the likes of Brendan Gleeson, as Paddington’s tough-guy prison mentor, Tom Conti, Joanna Lumley and Eileen Atkins, billed here as Dame Eileen Atkins, if you please. It’s a testament to the bear’s iconic status over there that that sort of a-list talent could be assembled for a kiddie-movie sequel.

Stealing the picture from all of them is Grant, who turns his no-good greedy ham into a star part. He gets to use a variety of accents and wear cunning disguises—including as that aforementioned “very attractive nun.” He even gets to perform a full Sondheim number.

The Commuter—Liam Neeson plays a 60-year-old ex-cop turned insurance salesman who rides a commuter train from Tarrytown to Manhattan and back everyday. Heading home on the day he gets laid off, baffled by how he’ll send his son to college, he’s approached by a mystery woman (Vera Farmiga) with a proposition—somebody on the train doesn’t belong, she says.

He’s given a false name that the person is traveling under (he isn’t told the gender), and promised that he’ll be given $100,000 if, using his cop skills, he makes the identification for them. In a moment of weakness he takes the down payment, but quickly realizes that the people who have hired him are ruthless killers, and that he’d be dooming their target by making the ID. He also realizes that his own family is in danger.

Directed by Jaume Collet-Serra, the Spaniard behind 2015’s Run All Night and several other Liam Neeson righteous/reluctant killing sprees, this thriller pays obvious tribute to Hitchcock—overtly to Shadow of a Doubt—but is just as reminiscent of the Bruckheimer-style action excess playbook. The plot gets more convoluted, and the action more ludicrously overscaled, as the movie progresses.

But as usual, there’s Neeson at the center of it, with his quiet masculinity and his decency and his pained, sad-faced acceptance of the distasteful duty of pulverizing his enemies—it’s distasteful to him, that is; we in the audience drool for their retribution. He’s an action hero for middle-aged guys who feel ineffectual, and he delivers again here.

On the whole, The Commuter is more fun than many of Neeson’s other massacres. It doesn’t take itself too seriously, and it’s generous-hearted: especially in a Spartacus-like climatic flourish, it’s about strangers sticking up for each other.

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.