GROWTH SPURT

Opening this weekend:

Annihilation--An extraterrestrial object crashes next to a lighthouse on a remote coastline. This gives rise to a slowly spreading zone with a border of eerie prismatic light referred to, by the government researchers who work on the edge of the evacuated area, as "The Shimmer." Military expeditions are sent into The Shimmer, but nobody comes back out.

We learn all this along with Lena (Natalie Portman), an ex-military biologist. Six months earlier her soldier husband (Oscar Isaac) left on a covert mission. She hasn't seen or heard from him since, and assumes he's dead. Then one evening, just as she's in the therapeutic act of re-painting the bedroom, in walks Isaac, handsome as ever but somehow different--quiet, blank, uncommunicative. Shortly thereafter he falls deathly ill, and he and Lena are both whisked off to the secret facility just outside The Shimmer. When Lena learns that a new expedition into the zone is soon to leave, she volunteers to go along.

That's the set-up for this sci-f thriller directed by Alex Garland, based on a novel by James VanderMeer, and it's intriguing enough that you stay with the movie for a long time. Lena's comrades (Jennifer Jason Leigh, Gina Rodriguez, Tuva Novotny and Tessa Thompson) are all women, all intellectual and/or physical badasses, and each with some tragedy in their pasts. Beyond the border of The Shimmer, they find a realm of mutant plants and animals, souped-up versions of familiar species. Some are beautiful and some hideous and lethal, but these external menaces turn out be the least of their worries.

The story echoes ideas and motifs from Lem's Solaris to Carpenter's The Thing to Attack of the Crab Monsters, among others. It's gripping for most of its length, but I wanted to like it better. The tone is somber to the point of pretentiousness, with muted light and murmured dialogue, like a sci-fi flick by Harold Pinter. The monster-picture scare scenes are crudely effective, but there's also a lot of gore that's fairly unpleasant, and the Ligeti-like electronic music is headache-inducing.

Then, after three acts of rising tension and curiosity, the climatic scenes give us a blow-out of (very good) special effects. But the revelations, to the extent that they're made clear at all, are nothing we couldn't have guessed. It's sort of underwhelming.

If I were a more rigorous Freudian I might point out the juxtaposition of the phallic earthly lighthouse with the alien orifice from which the invading presence issues. I might make note of the horror of the male characters at the prospect of life and movement inside their bodies, or of the general atmosphere of gloom and dread that hangs over this story of distaff orientation, written and directed by men.

But I'm not that rigorous a Freudian. So I'll just say that Annihilation is three-quarters of an excellent sci-fi picture, but in the end it loses its shimmer.

WITCH SESSION

Opening today:

The Love Witch—After a brief run at the Valley Art, this labor of obsessive love from writer-director Anna Biller has resurfaced downtown at FilmBar. It’s an attempt to re-create the look and sound of a drive-in or grindhouse erotic supernatural melodrama of the early ‘70s, something along the lines of Daughters of Satan or Voices of Desire or Simon, King of the Witches. It also has a strong dash of Russ Meyer to the hair and clothes and the saturated colors of M. David Mullen’s lush cinematography—the film was shot and cut, incredibly, on actual 35mm.

Simply as a stylistic forgery, it’s a remarkable achievement. In the opening scene, as our heroine Elaine (Samantha Robinson) drives up the California coast, in blue-green eye shadow with raven hair rising over her head, smoking cigarette after cigarette, with the road receding behind her clearly a back-projection, it’s a marvelous evocation of an earlier era of moviegoing.

And strictly on a visual and aural level, Biller sustains this impressively. If it weren’t for the contemporary cars on the streets of Eureka, California, where Elaine settles, or for the occasional cell phone or computer, you might just believe it if somebody told you that this was a genuine relic.

As the title implies, Elaine is a witch, of the Wiccan, non-Satanic variety—which is not to say she couldn’t be called a wicked witch. Her interest in magic, as she tells us in solemn voice-over narration, is simply as a means to obtain the love of a man. But several times in the course of the film, her potions and rituals reduce the objects of her seduction to sniveling, emotionally helpless wrecks, and she promptly loses interest in them.

It’s a pretty good feminist joke, if a self-conscious one. But the plot wanders around from one strand to another with little rising tension and many interminable digressions—like a Ren-Faire-style wedding ceremony—that leave the movie at least twenty minutes too long. To be fair, of course, the movies that Biller is imitating weren’t always models of disciplined storytelling, but it’s still a shame—had Biller been able to shape the story a bit more tightly and less episodically, to build some suspense and some investment in the outcome, The Love Witch could have been a crazy instant classic instead of an interesting curio.

Having said that, it’s a really interesting curio. A fascinating curio. The women are gloriously beautiful, the men are almost all appropriately repellent, and the defiant emotion behind Biller’s satirical pose…well, no way around it, it casts an undeniable spell. 

 

Jackie—Natalie Portman stars, as the most iconic of American First Ladies, in this richly colored but otherwise austere historical drama. Directed by the Chilean Pablo Larrain from a script by Noah Oppenheim, the film focuses on the days just after that fateful motorcade in Dallas—arguably the least mysterious chapter in the title character’s life. The story is told through flashbacks, as Jackie narrates, rather testily, to an equally edgy journalist (Billy Crudup).

As with Peter Landesman’s Parkland a couple of years ago, Jackie doesn’t really tell us anything controversial about the assassination or its aftermath. The ostensible point of the film, insofar as it has one, seems to be that behind the indelible public persona of Jackie Kennedy in the wake of the killing—harrowed yet dignified and stoic in blood-spattered pink Chanel—was an intense anger with no healthy outlet. Her circumstances—the mores of her social class, her celebrity position, her beauty, her pride—closed off every avenue by which this fury could be acceptably expressed.

The movie suggests that even Jackie’s personal mannerisms may have militated against any response except shocked, meek bereavement. As depicted here, she’s an intelligent, well-read, reflective woman trapped behind a breathy, ethereal voice that could come across, quite frankly, as vapid, even simple.

Throughout, the people around her, men and women alike, treat her like a child, with gentle condescension and looks of embarrassed discomfort whenever she asserts herself. The exceptions are the equally infuriated Bobby Kennedy (Peter Sarsgaard)—though even he insists on keeping the news that Lee Harvey Oswald has been murdered from her—and a befuddled old priest (John Hurt), who speaks comfortingly to her without talking down.

The real point of the film, of course, is to provide an actress with an award-bait showcase role, and Natalie Portman rises to the opportunity, capturing that airy voice as well as the raging human being behind it. There are other strong performances—Sarsgaard and Hurt, Greta Gerwig as Social Secretary Nancy Tuckerman, John Carroll Lynch as LBJ, Beth Grant as Lady Bird, Max Casella as Jack Valenti, Richard E. Grant as William Walton—but most of them are little more than bit players. Jackie feels curiously like a funereal pageant, with the Pageant Queen at its center simultaneously rebelling against, resenting and relishing the spectacle.

JUST BEAT IT

Opening here this weekend:

Kill Your Darlings—The title is a maxim from literature and journalism. The “darlings” here are the beautiful words, phrases and passages you’ve written; the advice is to cut them cold-heartedly if they aren’t absolutely necessary to the piece overall.

Most writers have a hard time with this rule, and in particular it’s not a literary philosophy with which the likes of Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs are especially associated (although Burroughs’ lean, excellent early works reflect the style, his more famous later stuff doesn’t). Nonetheless, that’s who this movie is about: The initial meeting, at Columbia University in the mid-‘40s, between these three men who eventually became celebrated as “The Beats,” as well as Lucien Carr, the rebellious, literary-minded rich kid who introduced them.

Carr never became a famous novelist or poet (though his son, Caleb Carr, wrote The Alienist). But his dramatic life makes for a much juicier movie than that of his iconic friends, who were on the fringe of a lurid murder case in which he was implicated. The movie’s focus is on Ginsberg (Daniel Radcliffe), his fascination with Carr (Dane DeHaan), and their attempt to create a “New Vision” for stodgy American lit.

It could be argued that they achieved this, in the long run. I don’t know how closely Kill Your Darlings follows the record, but the movie seems to suggest that they revolutionized midcentury literature not by writing striking works that deflated aesthetic orthodoxies but rather by needling professors, playing pranks in the library, hanging out in jazz clubs, vandalizing old books and getting drunk. And we’re expected to cheer as they crap on the Western canonical tradition without which their counterculture would have been not only meaningless but impossible.

Kill Your Darlings is nicely directed, by John Krokidas, and very well acted, but it really brought out the (small “c”) conservative in me. I say this as somebody who treasures at least some work by Ginsberg, Kerouac and Burroughs: I spent this movie thinking “Get the hell back to class, you little pricks, learn to write a proper sonnet and quit wasting your parents’ tuition money.”

Like I said, though, the ensemble cast is strong. Radcliffe seemed like odd casting to me as Ginsberg, but he’s creditably serious. In the flashier role of Carr, DeHaan is quite the glamorous object—he looks like a hybrid of Brad Pitt and Leonardo DiCaprio. I mean, that's really exactly what he looks like. The movie presents Carr as a narcissistic, manipulative tease and possibly a sociopath, which may be unfair, but DeHaan’s performance is gripping.

Jack Huston (great-nephew of John Huston) is solid as Kerouac, and the always-interesting Ben Foster is interesting as Burroughs, though both of these roles are recessive compared to Ginsberg and Carr. Michael C. Hall is both scary and pitiable as Carr’s obsessed would-be mentor David Kammerer, and Elizabeth Olsen makes an impression in the small role of Edie Parker. There is also a fine gallery of character actors as the older generation—David Cross as Allen’s father, the poet Louis Ginsberg, and Jennifer Jason Leigh as his mentally shattered mother, Kyra Sedgwick as Carr’s mother and John Cullum and David Rasche as buffoonish Columbia faculty.

Most of these grown-up roles are presented with a hint of caricature, especially the academic stuffed shirts. But I must admit that, as they dealt with these punks, I empathized with them. Boy, did this movie make me feel old.

Thor: The Dark World—Chris Hemsworth is once again agreeable as the Marvel Comics version of the hammer-bearing Norse deity. This time the McGuffin is an amorphous something or other called “The Aether” that has invaded the body of Thor’s mortal love interest Jane (Natalie Portman), and is coveted by a race of trolls or goblins or something because it would allow them to take the Universe from Light to Darkness. Or something like that.

The makers of Thor: The Dark World—director Alan Taylor, the cast, which includes Anthony Hopkins as cranky Old Man Odin and Rene Russo as Frigga, and the special effects and design folks—work hard to put on a show for us, deploying otherwordly armies and strange cosmic forces with gusto, like kids playing with action figures. In the course of the movie, Thor must place trust in his shifty brother Loki, who’s locked up in Asgard’s rather elegant dungeon. Sly, droll Tom Hiddleston steals the movie effortlessly in this role, and when his strand of the story is satisfyingly resolved the movie was, for me, effectively over.

But the demands of the blockbuster are such that we’re dragged through another interminable round of fistfights and explosions and rubble and sifting ash, just like the finales of The Avengers and Iron Man 3 and Man of Steel. Do they all have to end like that? I can’t claim that I didn’t sit there enjoying large chunks of this movie’s spectacle, but as usual with these big superhero or action movies, I was ready for it to be over at least a half-hour before the filmmakers were done pummeling me.