MAGGIE HE COULDN'T HAVE TRIED ANY MORE

Opening at Arizona Mills this weekend: 

Maggie—Abigail Breslin plays the title role, a Midwest farmer’s daughter who’s been bitten and infected during a cannibal zombie plague. Arnold Schwarzenegger is Wade, the farmer, who has brought her home from the hospital to wait out the four-to-six week period before she undergoes “The Turn” and becomes “necroambular.”

Directed by Henry Hobson from a script by John Scott 3, this is an austere, low-key horror drama that attempts to depict what a zombie apocalypse would really look like. It’s broodingly atmospheric and well-acted. I don’t know if Schwarzenegger is a better actor than he used to be or if age has just given him more weather-beaten gravitas, but either way he’s a strong presence here. His understated star turn is genuinely poignant, and Breslin does fine work as well, as does Joely Richardson as Maggie’s stepmom.

The movie is very well done on its own terms, but I can’t say I enjoyed it. There’s almost no action to speak of, and, because the situation seems pretty hopeless from the start, not much suspense. There’s a scene in which Maggie has a date with a similarly infected boy that’s rather good, and the last five minutes or so are redemptively touching, but other than that, the movie offers Schwarzenegger’s haggard, haunted visage as he helplessly watches his beautiful, fresh-faced daughter turn into a corpse. It wasn’t my idea of fun.

But perhaps Maggie’s lack of fun is a sign of integrity. The zombie genre has burgeoned so much in the last twenty years partly because it’s an economical way to make a horror picture, and partly because it’s proven more resonant than would have been guessed. But it’s also expanded, I think, because of a queasy enthusiasm that some fans show for the anything-goes world it depicts—especially, I fear, an enthusiasm for the opportunity to shoot people in the head with impunity.

Maggie can be seen as a reproach to the idea that a zombie plague would be cool—a reminder that it would be, rather, mostly about people witnessing the loss of their loved ones. What The Road was to the post-apocalyptic sci-fi action movie, Maggie is to the zombie movie.

Hot Pursuit—Sofia Vergara’s shtick works for me; I find her elongated, nasal, whining vowel sounds and her sense of tempestuous grievance sexy and funny. And while Reese Witherspoon has never been a special favorite of mine, her work in Wild and Election and other films shows that she’s a formidable actress.

So it would take a lot for a movie to rob these two of their appeal. Yet this wretched chase comedy manages the impressive feat.

Witherspoon is a high-strung, hyper-by-the-book San Antonio cop, and Vergara is the protected witness against a drug lord she must transport to Dallas to testify. Various goons shoot at them and chase them in cars.

Conventional though this is, there’s nothing very wrong with it as the premise for a buddy comedy. There’s nothing terribly wrong, even, with the way the director, Anne Fletcher, shapes some of the action scenes. But the dialogue is vacuous, and the two leads, perhaps sensing no help from the writing, push their personas to cartoonish extremes.

The resulting antics are excruciatingly unfunny. In fairness, I suppose I should report that the screening audience with whom I saw the film seemed to be having a fairly good time. But I’m very indulgent when it comes to lowbrow comedy, and I’m not sure that Hot Pursuit made me laugh out loud a single time.

The great Jim Gaffigan has a minor role, and even he didn’t make me laugh. When Jim Gaffigan doesn’t make you laugh, it means the movie isn’t working.

OZ AND EFFECT

Opening this weekend:

The Wizard of Oz—For many Americans of my generation, The Wizard of Oz was an annual event, usually shown on TV on Easter Sunday. Many of us watch it now unconsciously mouthing the dialogue and lyrics along with the actors. But seeing it blown up for the IMAX screen—as it will be, for a one-week release opening September 20—brings new meaning to the familiar “See it again for the first time.”

I’ve seen the film dozens of times over the years, but I was struck by how many details from MGM’s extravagant 1939 fantasy based on L. Frank Baum’s novel I had never caught before: The crowned crane and the toucan in the background of the scene with the talking trees, the bric-a-brac in Professor Marvel’s carriage, the costumes on the Munchkins. The performances of Judy Garland, Ray Bolger, Frank Morgan, Burt Lahr, Jack Haley, Billie Burke and Margaret Hamilton—it was the finest hour for almost all of them—remain joyous, as do the sometimes darkly comic songs of Harold Arlen, but the real winner in this new version is Toto. On the IMAX screen, he’s the size of a Shetland pony, and his expressive performance gets across. He’s no longer just a fuzzy little smudge, like he was on our black-and-white TV screens half a century ago.

Thanks For Sharing—This comedy-drama follows three Manhattan guys at different stages of recovery from sex addiction: a veteran contractor, Mike (Tim Robbins) whose lifestyle revolves around 12-Step meetings, his younger “sponsee” Adam (Mark Ruffalo), a hotshot businessman who’s been faithfully “working the program,” and Adam’s sponsee Neil (Josh Gad) a young wreck of an ER doctor who hasn’t even really admitted he has a problem. Other characters are woven into the story, like Adam’s new girlfriend (Gwyneth Paltrow) from whom he’s hidden his addiction, Mike’s son (Patrick Fugit), a former drug abuser, and a young woman (Alecia Moore, aka Pink), new to the program, with whom Neil bonds.

Carol Kane contributes a funny but disturbing turn as Neil’s Mom, and Joely Richardson is quietly powerful as Mike’s battle-hardened wife. It’s a smallish role, but in her unshowy way Richardson gives maybe the best performance in the film.

While there’s little consensus in the real-life psychological and medical fields as to what constitutes sex addiction, or if it even exists, the movie, the directorial debut of the gifted screenwriter Stuart Blumberg (The Kids Are All Right, Keeping the Faith), seems to take at face value the 12-Step Model as the answer to it. Whether you agree with this or not, Blumberg does get across the desperation with which these men are containing themselves, and the added difficulty they face in getting others to accept their destructive behavior as pathological rather than just a character flaw—horniness crossed with reckless self-indulgence.

Blumberg makes good, rueful comedy out of the unavoidable ubiquity of sexual stimulation in modern culture, and he gets fine performances from his cast. As the droll, self-loathing Neil, young Gad, in particular, steals much of the flick from his accomplished co-stars.

SOMETIMES BARD IS BAD

Your Humble Narrator missed the screening of Anonymous last October, & didn’t catch up with the film during its brief theatrical run. I wrote a column summarizing my thoughts about the premise it dramatizes—that the works attributed to Shakespeare were secretly written by Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, with Shakespeare as a front, & that this was covered up for various political & personal reasons.

Ludicrous as I think this idea to be, I was nonetheless very curious to see if Anonymous might be a fun movie on its own terms. Last week it came out on DVD & PPV, & I got my chance to find out.

The film, directed by Roland Emmerich from a script by John Orloff, is a really crazy Renaissance fever-dream. Though the class & academic snobberies from which I believe the Oxfordian “theory” arises are the tale’s unmistakable subtext, it’s hard for me to imagine even a staunch Oxfordian thinking much of the case it makes, since Emmerich & Orloff ignore history at every turn.

Rather than offering even a partial list of its nonsense, suffice to say that, even aside from any speculation about Shakespeare’s authorship, the film shows no more interest in historical accuracy about the Tudor period than, say, Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds showed toward the history of WWII. Taking such liberties is, of course, a perfectly acceptable convention in period drama—for the most obvious example, it was Shakespeare’s own method in his history plays. But it seems an odd approach for a movie that claims setting the historical record straight as its mission.

Aside from any issue of accuracy, the plot, built on the idea that Oxford & Elizabeth I were longtime lovers, is overlong & overcomplicated. But for all that, I quite enjoyed Anonymous. This shouldn’t be mistaken for a recommendation, except to other fanatical (& thick-skinned) Shakespeare geeks for whom even a curio like this has its appeal. It’s a pretty bad movie, I suppose, but it’s a well-made movie, with an absurdly distinguished cast.

Rhys Ifans, with his handsome high forehead & his troubled eyes, is effective as Oxford, wisely not trying to make him likable—the Earl is an imperious & bitter sort, but with a quick, observant mind. Vanessa Redgrave & Joely Richardson are both beguiling as different vintages of Elizabeth, Sebastian Armesto makes an improbably self-effacing Ben Jonson, & Mark Rylance actually gets to do a bit of classical stage acting as Henry Condell.

But these are only a few examples of the fine work done by the huge cast. The actors skulk around the loving recreation of late-Elizabethan London in doublets & tights, murmuring exposition at each other, & if you’re a sucker for this sort of thing, as I am, there’s a decent chance you’ll be amused. Also, laborious as the plot may be, its final twist, though silly & unsavory, is at least a juicy humdinger.

What I most enjoyed about Anonymous, however, was, oddly, its depiction of the “real” Shakespeare. Played rather likably by Rafe Spall, this version of ol’ Will is a Dickensian knave, not just a fraud but a drunken, whoring lout, a vain buffoon, a blackmailer, & even a thuggish cutthroat—it’s implied he murders Christopher Marlowe for threatening to reveal his secret (some six years after poor Marlowe had already died in a barfight).

I couldn’t help but find something perversely endearing in this very posthumous & ineffectual attempt at character assassination. I think it reveals the psychological heart of the Authorship Controversy: The envious resentment that we mediocrities may feel when confronted by an unassailably superior talent—especially a talent who had the nerve not to go to college.

The urge to paint Shakespeare as this movie does isn’t very different, perhaps, than the urge of an underachieving student to doodle obscenely on the face of the valedictorian in the yearbook. It’s outrageous, of course, but—especially at this historical distance—it’s too human to be truly offensive. Shakespeare can take it.