DAY, DREAM BELIEVER

Check out my review of Spielberg's newest, Disclosure Day...

...online at Phoenix Magazine.

DIAL, THOUGH YOUR HEART IS ACHING

Opening this weekend:

Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny--The first sound we hear is the ticking of a clock. Thus the fifth and valedictory entry in the series about Harrison Ford's globetrotting, whip-cracking archaeologist establishes Time, and its persistent shadow, Mortality, as the theme.

The movie starts with a lengthy and rather splendid act set in France in 1944, with Ford made young via some impressive CGI alchemy. Indy and a brilliant sidekick (Toby Jones) are snooping around a mountain stronghold, trying to filch back some artifacts from the plunder of retreating Nazis, among them a coldly businesslike SS Colonel (Thomas Kretschman) and a reptilian physicist (Mads Mikkelsen) who identifies the title gadget, a clockwork contraption built by Archimedes himself that supposedly can be used for time travel.

From here we fast forward to New York in the late '60s, where Indy is a grumpy and bereaved old man on the verge of retirement from teaching, separated from his beloved Marion, annoyed by the Beatles blasting from the hippie pad neighboring his cluttered apartment. His goddaughter Helena (Phoebe Waller-Bridge), who he affectionately refers to as "Wombat," pulls him into one more adventure, chasing the Dial from Tangiers to the floor of the Mediterranean to Sicily. The unrepentant Nazi prof, who went on to help NASA get to the moon, is looking for the Dial too, with his murderous goons.

The first Indy flick, 1981's Raiders of the Lost Ark, is a favorite of mine; tight and witty and curiously modest, it genuinely felt like a Republic serial of the '40s, maybe directed by William Witney. It was also built around a terrific Jewish joke, with its Nazis arrogantly supposing they could co-opt cosmic Jewish power unscathed. The lavish, overstuffed sequels were enjoyable enough, but all of them fell far short, for me, of that snappy, surefooted original.

Dial of Destiny falls short of the original too, but even so it may be the best of the sequels. It's the first that Steven Spielberg didn't direct; the duties here went to the always proficient James Mangold, who was also among the many screenwriters. And for the first half--the 1944 scenes, and the stuff in '60s-era New York, with Indy on the run against the backdrop of war protestors and astronaut ticker-tape parades--it's sensational.

The trouble is that, like so many contemporary blockbusters, it's outrageously overlong, at least thirty or forty minutes longer than it really needs to be. As MacGuffins go, the Dial doesn't have the same stirring imaginative power and poetry as the Ark, and its implications get the narrative in a little over its head in the later acts. For a story that starts with urgent ticking, the movie manages time very poorly.

Still, there's a lot to like here. Ford is wonderfully on point. He seems to have grown into the curmudgeonly manner that's always been part of his persona, but he's also emotionally present to a surprising degree, truly connecting with the other characters. Mikkelsen is a top-notch, quietly megalomaniacal villain, and Toby Jones, Antonio Banderas and John Rhys-Davies could all have warranted more screen time as Indy's allies, as could Shaunette Renée Wilson as an exasperated U.S. intelligence agent. Ethann Isidore is likable as Helena's street urchin pal.

Maybe best of all is Waller-Bridge's Helena--headlong, fearless, smiling, eyes full of self-delighted mischief. She even shows a hint or two of lewdness, welcome in this largely asexual series. It would be okay with me if they gave her more movies.

Ruby Gillman, Teenage Kraken--At the very least, one must admit that this is a take on teen angst we haven't seen before. Ruby and her family are Krakens, the fearsome tentacled sea creatures of Nordic lore, but they're passing themselves off as humans; Ruby's Mom has a good career as a realtor in a seaside town. Ruby is under orders never to get wet in the ocean, lest her giant Kraken-ness be revealed to her classmates. This means she's forbidden to go to prom, as it's being held on a boat.

Soon enough Ruby (voiced by Lana Condor) learns that her Mom (Toni Collette) and her Grandma (Jane Fonda) are giant Kraken as well, and their backstory includes a feud with the mermaids. Indeed, the story is sort of The Little Mermaid in reverse, with many of the same psychological and sexual subtexts at work. And like an earlier DreamWorks Animation effort, Shrek, the snarky shots at Disney are amusing, in an inside-baseball way.

This movie has a glitzy, primary-color sensibility, like a fever dream after bingeing on My Little Pony and Powerpuff Girls and eating too much cioppino. And it feels about that ephemeral. But it's a sweet-natured fish tale, and undeniably original.

CAUGHT '22

2022 is unlikely, it seems to me, to go down in history as a banner year for popular movies. But even in less auspicious years, there are always some good flicks, and some good or even great scenes or performances in movies that aren't so great overall.

Out of what I saw, here are ten movies that stood out as best for me this past year:

Nope--Jordan Peele's latest is probably the best UFO movie since Close Encounters, though it has a more sinister edge. It's wildly original, funny and creepy sci-fi/horror, yet it also carries the heroic charge of a good western.

Good Night Oppy--This documentary about the Mars rovers Opportunity and Spirit has interesting information about the Red Planet, but it's really about the way the NASA nerds anthropomorphized the robots and fretted over them and cheered them on and ultimately grieved over them. In an entirely unpretentious way, the movie hints at the question of where sentience comes from. 

The Duke--This pandemic-delayed release was, I thought, perhaps the most overlooked and delightful movie of the year. Jim Broadbent is splendid as Kempton Bunton, a cab driver, factory worker and anti-television fee protestor who in 1965 confessed to stealing Goya's Portrait of the Duke of Wellington from the National Gallery in London; Helen Mirren is his fed-up wife. The direction, by the late Roger Michell, is warm, graphically lively and period-rich.

Everything Everywhere All At Once--Family drama, immigrant saga, sly comedy, martial arts actioner, Matrix-style sci-fi adventure and more are mashed-up in this freaky yarn from writer-directors Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert that tries to live up to its title. It's epic, intimate, silly and profound. All at once.

Thirteen Lives--Dramatizing a technically complicated rescue mission in detail, Ron Howard is in his element in this moving account of the rescue of twelve Thai kids and their soccer coach from a flooded cave in 2018. A little tough if you're claustrophobic, but a true feel-good movie.

The Whale--Brendan Fraser gives a luminous, possibly generational performance as Charlie, a morbidly obese English teacher trying to reconnect with his furious estranged daughter. Directed by Darren Aronofsky, the movie is a little heavy and one-note aside from the star, but Fraser's radiance shines through the prosthetics.

Gabby Giffords Won't Back Down--Infuriating because of what Giffords lost when she was shot in 2011; inspirational because of how much she got back, and how courageously she refused to give in to despair. Directors Julie Cohen and Betsy West build the movie around how central music was to Giffords' recovery.

The Fabelmans--In Steven Spielberg's loosely autobiographical coming-of-age yarn, scripted by Tony Kushner, the focus is largely on the parents, beautifully played by Paul Dano and Michelle Williams. The movie isn't a grand slam, but it's fascinating, and it has the best final shot of the year.

Marcel the Shell With Shoes On--This feature expansion of the 2010 viral short by Dean Fleischer-Camp, with Jenny Slate voicing the tiny title character, is sunny and hilarious, but with improbably dramatic and poignant undertones. Isabella Rossellini is exquisite as the voice of Marcel's "Nan."

The Banshees of Inisherin--Martin McDonagh's black comedy about the agonies of friendship goes so sour in its later acts that I almost didn't put it on the list. But the brilliance of the initial conception and, especially, the magnificent acting of Brendan Gleeson, Colin Farrell, Barry Keoghan and Kerry Condon demand its inclusion.

One more list, while I'm at it; for anyone who might unfathomably be interested, here is the embarrassingly short list of books I read this year (as always, it doesn't include short stories, poems, comic books, essays, articles, reviews, automotive manuals, skywriting, menus, fortune cookie fortunes, etc etc)...

The Silent Gondoliers by William Nolan

Sucker's Portfolio by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

Orphans of the Sky by Robert A. Heinlein

Saturday Night and Sunday Morning by Alan Sillitoe

The Moon is a Harsh Mistress by Robert A. Heinlein

The Spread by Barry Malzberg

Ben by Gilbert A. Ralston

Player Piano by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

The Investigation by Stanislaw Lem

The Werewolf Principle by Clifford D. Simak

Destry Rides Again by Max Brand

A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG BOYCHIK

In theaters for Thanksgiving (a safe and Happy Thanksgiving, by the way!):

The Fabelmans--It begins with little Sammy Fabelman being taken to his first movie, in New Jersey in 1952. A cautious, slightly fretful 7-year-old, Sammy (Mateo Zoryon Francis-DeFord) is not sure if he's up for the experience; he's heard the people onscreen are gigantic, and the idea worries him. So his adoring parents attempt to reassure him, from opposite sides: his practical-minded, scientific dad Burt (Paul Dano) explains how film works technically, while his whimsical pixie of a mom Mitzi (Michelle Williams) says that movies are beautiful dreams.

The dream in question turns out to be DeMille's The Greatest Show on Earth, and the big train wreck scene hits Sammy's psyche like...well, like a speeding train. He tries to re-create it with the Lionel train set he gets for Hannukah, and later he films his re-creations with a home movie camera.

As you probably know, this is Steven Spielberg's autobiographical coming-of-age movie, scripted by Tony Kushner from a synopsis they worked up together, and made by the usual gang: filmed by Janusz Kaminski with a score by John Williams. The episodes that follow depict the family's life as Burt, a computer genius, chases work in the budding industry from New Jersey to Arizona, where Sammy makes war epics, to northern California, where he encounters anti-Semitic bullies.

Mitzi, who gave up a career as a concert pianist to be a wife and mom, shows signs of restlessness and depression, except when she's interacting with Burt's best friend Bennie (Seth Rogen), or when she impulsively buys a monkey, who she names Bennie. All of these strands are filtered through the growth of the relationship between Sam (Gabriel LaBelle as an older kid) and the art and craft of moviemaking.

Even though he's one of the most commercially successful popular artists in the world, I think that Spielberg has, in a sense, been critically underappreciated for decades. After the initial, unprecedented splash he made with Jaws,  Close Encounters of the Third Kind, E.T. and Raiders of the Lost Ark, he went through a slump in the late '80s and early '90s and cranked out some real bummers; cloying, heavy-handed, trying-too-hard stuff like Hook and Always that made him seem like a phony.

I'm not sure that many critics noticed the way he rediscovered and deepened and sharpened his style with the films he's made in recent years, even when their scripts have sometimes been uneven. Works that range with seemingly equal ease from crisp yet almost invisible technique like The Post to Hitchcockian panache like Bridge of Spies to flashy showmanship like West Side Story suggest an artist who has matured, and who might have something interesting to say about his own life.

And so he does, by turning his gaze outward. Sammy is likable enough, but he's not a rich or idiosyncratic protagonist. What's important is his point of view on Burt and Mitzi. Spielberg here dramatizes the anger and terror, the sense of betrayal, that can result when you begin to see your parents--as Sammy does through his footage of them, while editing home movies--not as stock figures in your story but as complex characters in their own.

And Dano and Williams create vivid, warm portraits of imperfect but unconditionally loving people. So does Rogen, and so does Judd Hirsch in a showcase role as a crazy visionary uncle who tells Sammy hard prophetic truths. So do Jeannie Berlin and Robin Bartlett as the Grandmas, and so do the excellent kids who play the younger sisters. So for that matter, does the monkey.

Not everything in The Fabelmans comes off. There's maybe a scene or two more than is needed of Williams sadly playing sad piano, and the stuff with the bullies, who look like they stepped out of Nazi poster art, feels psychologically confused and uneasy. A scene in which Sammy has a fraught confrontation with a bully he's tried to flatter through moviemaking is potentially interesting for what it hints at about the director's willingness to use his art calculatingly, but it thrashes around and fails, somehow, to come into dramatic focus.

On the other hand, the scenes involving Sammy's early romantic encounters are livened up by the hilarious Chloe East as Monica, his both religiously ecstatic and sexually avid girlfriend, who sees Jesus as one more teen heartthrob. While chaste in the typical Spielbergian manner, they offer a peek at the character's, and the director's, bemused reaction to Christianity.

The movie closes with a depiction of Spielberg's familiar anecdote about his first brush with Hollywood greatness. It allows him to end the film with a self-deprecating "meta" joke that also slyly reminds us that what we've just seen, however honestly intended, is nonetheless a carefully curated official story.

RE-MAKE OF OUR HEARTS

Opening this weekend:

West Side Story--The original 1961 film version of the 1957 Broadway musical has aged well, on the whole, but it has aged. The retelling of Romeo and Juliet in New York street gang dress still holds an audience beautifully, and the performances and numbers remain exciting, at their best electrifying. But the depiction of gangs can feel a bit quaint; the Jets, in particular, come across more like the Bowery Boys than like convincingly dangerous hoodlums, and the take on Puerto Rican culture is narrow. The dubbing sounds a little canned at times, and the orchestrations are over-symphonically lush.

That said, it remains a terrific picture, and it was hard to see a pressing need for a remake. But director Steven Spielberg and screenwriter Tony Kushner have given us one, and it's improbably superb, better than the original in some ways (not all), reimagined without laborious "reinterpretation"; new, yet somehow entirely faithful to the material.

It begins with urban renewal--Spielberg's camera gliding down and skulking around the wreckage of the slummy Upper West Side neighborhoods being cleared to make way for the Lincoln Center complex in the late '50s/early '60s. To those unmistakable, teasing opening bites of Leonard Bernstein's score, we see the Jets (Anglo gang) stealing cans of paint and making a sortie into the turf of the Sharks (Puerto Rican gang) for a reason that carries a shocking punch.

From there on, Spielberg and Kushner ingeniously, even playfully dramatize the economic and ethnic shifts that created the gang animosities, and give their movie a specific context that the original, with its almost fairy-tale Montague-and-Capulet conflict, only hints at. Other marginalized figures, like "Anybodys" (non-binary actor Iris Menas), get a deeper treatment here as well.

Stimulating as all this is, it would mean nothing if the music and acting were soulless. But somehow these numbers, some of them repurposed and reset, spring to life. Along with choreographer Justin Peck, Spielberg, again, deserves no small portion of the credit for this; he even gets the cars on the streets into the kinetic rhythms of the tunes.

But the actors are even more potent, most surprisingly in the treacherous lead roles. Who knew Ansel Elgort could sing like that? He plays Tony straightforwardly and guilelessly, and he and tiny newcomer Rachel Zegler, as Maria, throw themselves into their joy at each other with no mannerism or embarrassment, so that their pure and perfect love at first sight, always the difficult part of this story, almost becomes plausible.

Mike Faist brings a haunted undertone to his cocksure manner as Riff, and Ariana DeBose and David Alvarez are knockouts as Anita and Bernardo. If neither of them quite have the febrile glamour and sexiness of Rita Moreno and George Chakiris in the original, well, who could?

Moreno, by the way, appears here, not in a honorary cameo but in a real role--the equivalent of Doc the drugstore proprietor--and she nails it with guts and grace. She gave the best performance in the original, and one of the best here.

TRENCH MOB

In theaters this weekend:

Journey's End--Samuel Johnson famously said that every man thinks meanly of himself for not having been a soldier. That guilty sentiment (which now probably extends to a lot of women as well) negates the intentions of a lot of supposedly "anti-war" movies.

The makers of such movies may even genuinely intend them to be anti-war, but the nature of the western narrative tradition being what it is, what often ends up onscreen is an action-adventure story with some inserted piety about the horrors of war. They may leave young viewers in the audience even more eager to rush off to battle, and older viewers reproaching themselves, Johnson-style, for never having done so.

There are exceptions, though. Probably because World War One is now historically regarded as such a colossally wasteful, sordid mess, that conflict has produced several pretty effective cautionary war dramas. All Quiet on the Western Front, both the novel and Lewis Milestone's 1930 movie, truly seem to get across something of both the terror and the futility of trench warfare in WWI. So, from the other side, does R. C. Sherriff's 1928 English play Journey's End, about desperate, shell-shocked, boozing British officers at the end of their rope in the trenches in France in spring of 1918.

Not long ago I saw the 1930 film version of Journey's End, the feature debut of director James Whale, and was impressed with how potently and poignantly it holds up. Going into this new, but surprisingly faithful, British version, directed by Saul Dibb, I feared that the claustrophobic quality of the original might be sacrificed for a more epic scale, and I'm happy say that this isn't the case. This new Journey's End is "opened out" just enough to keep it from feeling stagey, but not enough to lose its atmosphere of crushing dread.

The focus is on the veteran Captain Stanhope (Sam Claflin), a shattered alcoholic barely held together by his older Lieutenant, the avuncular schoolmaster Osborne (Paul Bettany). There's a reason that Stanhope isn't happy to see the eager new Lieutenant, Raleigh (Asa Butterfield), an old school friend who hero-worships him. Also under Stanhope's command are the chuckling, equable Trotter (Stephen Graham), the terrified Hibbert (Tom Sturridge) and the deadpan cook Mason (Toby Jones). This ensemble is terrific top to bottom, with Claflin subtly getting across the same bitter, jittery fury that Colin Clive did as Stanhope back in 1930. Butterfield is touchingly callow, and Bettany is heartbreakingly dignified as the "Uncle" Osborne.

The drama arises from the tensions and clashes, and the kindnesses, between these men. There's little in the way of battlefield action, and what there is lacks romance; it's hectic and frightening, with no sense of accomplishment. The heroism in the film, such as it is, comes from the stoicism with which these men try to face their useless deaths. By the end, you may admire them for their courage, but you're unlikely to reproach yourself for declining to share their fate.

Ready Player One--Human society is run down and slummy, but most people don't care that much because they spend most of their time in virtual reality anyway.

But enough about present-day America. Steven Spielberg's latest, based on a 2011 novel by Ernest Cline, takes this state of affairs further, into a bleak and distressingly plausible version of 2045. The teenage hero Wade (Tye Sheridan) resides in a stack of mobile homes in Columbus, Ohio. But he, like most of his neighbors, spends as much time as possible in an immersive online universe called The Oasis, in which people assume the roles of "avatars," many of them based on favorite pop-culture characters ranging from the Mutant Ninja Turtles to Harryhausen's Cyclops, as well as many original creations: Wade's avatar Parzival resembles an anime hero.

The departed creator of the The Oasis, a socially awkward genius named Halliday (Mark Rylance), has left behind a series of "Easter Eggs," three keys that, if found, will make the player the heir to The Oasis. Tye, of course, is determined to find them. It's a bit like The Matrix meets Willy Wonka, with Ben Mendelssohn as an evil corporate Slugworth. There's a dash of The Searchers, too.

Wade/Parzival falls in with various allies, and wild fights and chases ensue, both in The Oasis and the real world. The movie starts slow, and is a bit of a mess; long stretches of it, like a nutty passage set in the Overlook Hotel from Kubrick's The Shining, are absorbing and funny, while other stretches, especially the real-world stuff, recall the heavy-handed, obsequiously crowd-pleasing Spielberg of the later '80s. It's a bit perplexing to see, after the effortless command Spielberg demonstrated a couple of months ago in The Post.

The real fun is in the juxtaposition of pop icons: Where else can we get King Kong and Chucky and The Iron Giant all in the same movie, along with countless characters from video games and cartoons and toy series? Even Mechagodzilla turns up, accompanied by a whisper of Akira Ifukube's unforgettable Godzilla theme.

Ready Player One seems to be an allegorical plea for, on the commercial and political end, net neutrality, and on the personal end, a bit of moderation where online life is concerned. Neither of these positions is particularly radical, but the movie seems to have its middle-of-the-road heart in more or less the right place.

THE POST POST

Opening here this weekend:

The Post--Steven Spielberg's latest is, in a sense, a prequel to All the President's Men. Scripted by Liz Hannah and Josh Singer, it dramatizes the Washington Post's handling of the Pentagon Papers story in 1971, in the face of the threat of legal action by the White House. Not that it's topically relevant or anything.

The revelations in the DOD documents sneaked out by Daniel Ellsberg had already broken in the New York Times but were stopped by a federal injunction after only the first few articles had run there. Ellsberg then gave the documents to the Post, among other media outlets, and editor Ben Bradlee and publisher Katherine Graham were put in the position of deciding whether to defy the injunction.

The result, at least according to this movie, had a lot to do with putting the Post on the map as a national rather than a local paper. In other words, the story did more for the Post than the Post did for the story, and the movie could be criticized for being off-center: A journalist I know said he liked the film but thought it could more justly have been called The Times.

Maybe so, but the specific content of the Pentagon Papers case isn't really the dramatic meat and potatoes here. It's true that, as he did in Lincoln, Spielberg opens The Post with a brief but scary battle scene, to remind us that this isn't a civics class; these decisions have real-world consequences. Still, at some level this could be about any hot-potato exposé. Spielberg and the screenwriters boil the drama down to the choice of whether to run the story, not over doubt in its accuracy but under pressure from government bullying.

This is, admittedly, more superficial than All the President's Men, with its detailed unraveling of the implications of the Watergate case, and of the tiny clues and pitfalls that can make or break an investigative piece. But on its simpler level, The Post is exhilarating journo-porn, shot in newsprint tones by Janusz Kaminski and peopled with a fine pack of veteran character players, from David Cross to Tracy Letts to Carrie Coon to Michael Stuhlbarg to Bradley Whitford to Michael Rhys as the haunted Ellsberg to Bruce Greenwood as the even more haunted Robert McNamara. I think my favorite of the supporting ensemble, however, was Bob Odenkirk as a perpetually downcast Ben Bagdikian.

As Bradlee, Tom Hanks is unlikely to displace the classic turn by Jason Robards in ATPM, but he's steady and amusing as ever. All are overshadowed, however, by the star turn of Meryl Streep as Katherine Graham. Her attempt to rise to the ethical dilemma and potential legal jeopardy in which she has improbably found herself is touching, and its resolution is thrilling.

THAT'S ONE BIG EFFIN' GIANT...

Opening this weekend: 

The BFG—The title stands for “Big Friendly Giant,” and the title character is just that—a pleasant colossus (Mark Rylance) whose job is delivering pleasant dreams. A young English orphan girl, Sophie (Ruby Barnhill) ends up as his houseguest and friend.

“Big” is a relative term, as it turns out. The BFG’s neighbors in giant land are much bigger than he is, and the monstrous, thuggish brutes (led by Jemaine Clement) routinely bully him. They’re also much less friendly, especially to humans—in the grand tradition of giants, they’re eager to eat Englishmen/women (and presumably any other nationality). The BFG won’t do this—he maintains a vegetarian diet mostly consisting of a revolting-looking produce item called a snozzcumber. He’s also fond of a carbonated beverage with downward-traveling bubbles that induce epic intestinal activity.

Steven Spielberg directed this adaptation of one of Roald Dahl’s strange tales for children. The script is by the great Melissa Mathison, who passed on last year, and to whom the film is dedicated. Mathison wrote the scripts for such kid-movie classics as The Black Stallion (1979) and E.T.—The Extra-Terrestrial (1982), as well as the underrated 1995 The Indian in the Cupboard. At her best, she was able tap into the subconscious power of such tales. I never thought she got as much credit for, in particular, the success of E.T. as she should have; the best lines in that movie carry an almost Jungian tingle, without the slightest pretension.

Her swansong was another script for Spielberg with, curiously, another initialed title character who befriends a little kid. I wish I could say that the result was another classic, but I think this one falls a little short of their earlier achievement. Visually it has the feel of a throwback, to the sort of fantasy movies made in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s.

Some of these were by Spielberg himself, in the worst phase of his career—like 1991’s Hook, probably my least favorite Spielberg film—and some of them were by other filmmakers trying to imitate Spielberg and his command of the box office. Like Hook, The BFG is all painterly colors and delicate compositions of the sort that wins Caldecott Medals for book illustrators, and the music, by John Williams of course, has the same soaring, leaping manner that Williams seems able to muster in his sleep.

As for the story, it has the free-wheeling, sometimes slightly sinister absurdity that is the trademark of Dahl’s stories for kids, like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. The BFG goes in for a degree of kid-pleasing scatology, as well. The Queen of England (Penelope Wilton) samples the BFG’s favorite beverage, for instance, with predictably Chaucerian results.

But somehow the energy just isn’t there with this one. There’s something muted and melancholy to the atmosphere of The BFG that makes it feel heavy and slow and draggy in its first half. Things certainly pick up in the second half, when the more broadly comic stuff kicks in, but even this shift feels vaguely forced—the dream-logic of the goofy narrative doesn’t seem organic.

All that said, there’s a redemptive virtue to The BFG, and that’s Mark Rylance. Endowed via CGI with a long nose and enormous ears below his sloping forehead and swept-back white hair, this great actor, who justly won an Oscar this year for his turn in Bridge of Spies, dries any schmaltz out of the film with his quiet, matter-of-fact line readings. And his young costar Barnhill is impressive, too—she’s a cute kid, but you never see her being cute on purpose. 

The Purge: Election Year—Writer-director James DeMonaco’s Purge movies, of which this is the third, are dystopian chillers set in a not-too-distant future America wherein, once a year for twelve hours, law and order is suspended and all crimes are fair game. The supposed premise is that a wild night of unchecked murder and vandalism will exorcise everybody’s demons and society will be more stable the rest of the year.

This loathsome holiday is explicitly reactionary in origin. DeMonaco seems to think that it’s the natural extension of the hardcore Right’s gun fever and evangelical fervor and class and racial animus, if they ever decided to drop the self-righteous posing. I wish, in light of the current primary season, that I was more confident that he’s wrong about this.

But that doesn’t mean that the movie, set in Our Nation’s Capitol, isn’t exultantly stupid and disgusting. It’s also one of the more disingenuous films I’ve ever seen, inviting our contempt at a social outrage of its own invention, while eliciting bloodthirsty whoops of delight every time one of the “Purgers” gets flattened by the good guys.

Said good guys include a Senator (Elizabeth Mitchell, in the specs of a sexy librarian from an ‘80s video) who’s running for President on a vow to abolish the Purge, and her security man (Frank Grillo). These two, stuck on the street after an assassination attempt, are befriended by the owner of a D.C. deli (Mykelti Williamson) and his friends (Joseph Julian Soria and Betty Gabriel) who are trying to defend their store from vengeful Purgers. The whole gang gets swept up into a revolutionary movement against the creepy “New Founding Fathers.”

Ugly and satirically ham-fisted as the movie is, it would be useless for me to deny that I found it a perfectly well-made and exciting Jacobean bloodbath. The dialogue is a little stilted at times, but the actors are easy to sympathize with, the story is tightly constructed, and DeMonaco knows how to use horror shtick—scary masks, cheap shocks—to build an unsavory atmosphere of dread. Election Year—like this election year— may be improbable and revolting, but it isn’t boring.

BRIDGE OVER TROUBLED GEOPOLITICAL WATERS

Opening this weekend:

Bridge of Spies—This Cold War drama opens with one of those mesmerizing sequences that the mature Steven Spielberg does so effortlessly, as Soviet spy “Rudolf Abel” (Mark Rylance) is stalked by the Feds through the streets and subways of Brooklyn. After Abel, a British-born Russian who seems to have squeezed his espionage work in around his passion for painting, is captured in 1957, his defense is turned over to a staid Brooklyn insurance lawyer, James B. Donovan (Tom Hanks) who had worked on the prosecution at the Nuremberg Trials.

From there on, Bridge of Spies, scripted by Matt Charman and Joel and Ethan Coen, becomes a reflection on the meaning of patriotic duty. Donovan regards it as a point of national pride to provide Abel with a genuine best defense, while everyone from the judge (Dakin Matthews) to his wife (Amy Ryan) to the CIA creep shadowing him (Scott Shepherd) regards his role as a formality in a kangaroo court, and roll their eyes with disgust at his idealism. The public is even less sympathetic, glowering at him over their newspapers on the subway.

But a few years later, when U2 pilot Francis Gary Powers (Austin Sowell) is shot down and captured by the Soviets, Donovan’s spirited advocacy in keeping his client out of the electric chair seems prescient. He’s asked by Allen Dulles (Peter McRobbie) to travel to Berlin, where the wall is just then going up, to unofficially negotiate the swap of Abel for Powers at Glienicke Bridge between Berlin and Potsdam in February of 1962.

Hanks is terrific in the sort of Capra-esque hero part for which he’s the modern go-to American star—Spencer Tracy or James Stewart or Henry Fonda would have excelled in it too. But Hanks makes it his own, giving Donovan a certain wry perplexity at how those around him don’t seem to get it; don’t grasp that excluding foreigners or alleged enemies from full due process and civil protection is a betrayal of American values. These issues never seem to go away, alas—Donovan’s frustration will be familiar to anyone who ever felt like their head was going to explode in arguments over, say, waterboarding or Abu Ghraib.

Reliably fine as Hanks and several other members of the veteran cast are, the best performance in Bridge of Spies is by Rylance, as the mysterious, ethnically pied, imperturbable Rudolf Abel. Initially dismayed at his assignment, Donovan is almost immediately disarmed by his client’s dignity, resolve and ironic humor, while Abel seems moved by Donovan’s honor and good faith. Rylance and Hanks get all of this across without heavy-handed telegraphing; in each of their scenes together the two men are closer and closer friends.

I’m not historian enough to say to what degree this story has been streamlined and made symmetrical for dramatic purposes. Plenty, I’d guess. Nor can I say how much the movie’s version of Donovan, or any other character, reflects the reality. But as drama, it’s insistently absorbing. The final minutes—Donovan’s return to Brooklyn, just as his family is seeing a TV news report about him—are perhaps a bit too pat and burnished and reverent. It’s the only moment when Spielberg drops his impressive reserve here, and it’s brief. Otherwise, this low-key, sedately-paced movie builds quietly, earning its emotional payoffs with both a verbal and cinematic eloquence.

  

Goosebumps—Just in time for Halloween comes this comedy fantasy riff on the popular series of young-adult horror novels of the '90s. The work of the insanely prolific R. L. Stine, the formulaic Goosebumps yarns featured young protagonists going up against zombies, ghosts, werewolves, blobs, abominable snowmen, giant insects, murderous garden gnomes and just about every other imaginable horror motif (almost all of them, of course, pillaged from the movies).

Stine is an onscreen character in the film, played by Jack Black as a curmudgeon living in small-town Delaware. It turns out that Stine’s imagination is so potent that his monsters will “literally leap off the page” of the original manuscripts if their locked covers are opened. Our young hero (Dylan Minnette), a new kid in town who is drawn to Stine’s daughter (Odeya Rush), inadvertently liberates all of the Goosebumps monsters. Under the leadership of the evil ventriloquist dummy Slappy, they go on the hunt for their author, who they resent for their imprisonment in the books.

The storyline is silly, to be sure, but the script, by Darren Lemke (from a story concocted by Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski), is a little wittier than you might expect, and Rob Letterman’s direction is exuberant. Black’s short-fused, fussy, vain, self-dramatizing Stine is a study in broad and happy hamming; he seems to be channeling Gale Gordon.

It's also great to hear the scherzos of Danny Elfman, in his classic style, on the soundtrack. Goosebumps is a trifle, certainly, but it’s a well-crafted, funny and colorful trifle. It would perhaps be a good family option for the season—grown-ups can get a kick out of it, and on any but the littlest viewers, it’s unlikely to raise any serious goosebumps.

PARK & REX

The realization that Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park turns twenty years old this year left me feeling pretty prehistoric myself. I was in my early thirties when the film of Michael Crichton’s bestseller came stomping into theaters, but I had been a dinosaur geek since childhood, to which the movie sent me back.

Now Jurassic Park has returned to the multiplexes, in a re-mastered 3-D version. I still love dinosaurs, but two decades have made it easier, now that astonishment at the truly convincing special effects has faded, to pick the movie apart logically, and to acknowledge the middle-class banality of its dramatics. Granting all this, however, I still say that Jurassic Park is one of the most thrilling special effects spectacles of all time, and that it remains the best showcase of computer-generated effects to date.

I say this in full awareness of James Cameron’s Avatar, which astounded so many people a couple of years ago. Avatar was an absorbing sci-fi romance, preoccupied with the human ability to disrupt nature—a theme it shared with Jurassic Park. But Cameron used the story to wow us with CGI effects which, though impressive and sometimes even lovely, were always obviously virtual phantoms. Spielberg used his rock-solid virtual effects—seamlessly blended with animatronic puppetry—to draw us into the story.

In case you’ve forgotten or somehow missed it the first time, the film concerns a theme park on an island off Costa Rica featuring real live dinosaurs, cloned from blood extracted from ancient mosquitoes trapped in amber. Prior to opening this ill-advised attraction, the founder (Richard Attenborough at his jolliest), invites several scientists (Sam Neill, Laura Dern and Jeff Goldblum) as well as his own grandkids (Ariana Richards and Joseph Mazzello) to endorse it. A bit of industrial espionage and a power outage lead to dinosaurs on the loose.

Because of Spielberg’s brilliant timing and theatrical flair, I didn’t notice until I’d seen the film several times how vague and malleable the geography of the park is: steep retaining walls suddenly appear when they are needed dramatically, characters strike out across open country when it would make more sense to wait where they are for help to arrive. But when you’re watching the movie, Spielberg’s confident touch, and the effects, hustle you past these inconsistencies.

There are eccentric moments that still play beautifully, as when one velociraptor quixotically lunges to the defense of another against a much larger tyrannosaurus. The gag involving the rear-view mirror, which even people who disliked Jurassic Park had to admit was pretty good, is now being used in the poster, presumably to tout the movie’s new 3-D status.

But here, alas, I have to note that the re-release gains nothing in particular from the addition of 3-D. I can’t think of one scene that was enhanced by the effect in any way I noticed. Again, not that it matters—my ten-year-old, no particular dinosaur fan, joined me for the screening and was properly spellbound. With or without 3-D, Jurassic Park still has teeth.

ABE PLUS

It’s understandable if, after endless months of venomous, bitterly divisive politics, you aren’t particularly in the mood for a movie about a venomous, bitterly divisive period in American politics. But it would be a shame if political burnout kept audiences away from Lincoln, Steven Spielberg’s amazing movie built around the performance of Daniel Day-Lewis as the 16th President.

Honest Abe has been irresistible to moviemakers for more than a century, depicted sometimes reverently, as in D.W. Griffith’s Abraham Lincoln (1930), Young Mr. Lincoln (1939) or Abe Lincoln in Illinois (1940), and sometimes irreverently, as in Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure (1989) or this year’s Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter. His achievements in office, his unassuming manner and his tragic end have, in the movies, generally resulted in one extreme or the other—either he’s a secular folk saint, or else he brings out the urge to spoof. There was TV miniseries called Lincoln back in the ‘80s, based on Gore Vidal’s book and with Sam Waterston as Abe, that made some effort to delve into the man’s psychology, but as I recall it was pretty slow going.

Spielberg’s film takes its time, too, and it’s pictorially beautiful. The cinematographer, Janusz Kaminski, infuses his compositions with a muted radiance that still seems realistic and immediate—the whole movie feels like a spring thaw. Yet it’s no iconic hagiography, and the unhurried pace that Spielberg sets gives the story a rising hum of dramatic energy. It’s not a tour of wax-museum tableaux from the man’s life. Surprisingly, and to the movie’s great benefit, it’s a story of nuts-and-bolts politics: the seemingly insoluble legislative wrangle to pass the 13th Amendment to the Constitution, ending slavery in the United States.

The script, by Tony Kushner, is partly adapted from Doris Kearns Goodwin’s 2005 book Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln. The title suggests the difference in the new film’s approach. Political genius isn’t the first thing we associate with Lincoln. Yet the movie suggests that it was skill—at strategy, at marshalling favors and muzzling enemies, and at navigating the moral ambivalence of deep compromise—that, paradoxically, led him to accomplishments of moral grandeur.

Spielberg is at the top of his form here. I think film critics and buffs have, in a sense, underrated him for years. After his initial great success with Jaws and Close Encounters and E.T., he made some really terrible movies in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s—pushy, cloying, evasive stuff like Hook and Always—and many viewers naturally assumed that he was just going to be a sentiment-peddler forever. Some of them, I think, didn’t notice that Spielberg’s films in the ‘90s and early 2000s, though often highly uneven in terms of script or casting, were stunningly directed. Amistad and Munich and Saving Private Ryan and War of the Worlds were all flawed, but they were the often mesmerizing work of a master filmmaker—indeed, of a master filmmaker who had rediscovered and deepened his art.

We see this again in Lincoln, from the first images—of a horrifyingly bloody and brutal Civil War battle—to the first few lines of dialogue, as Lincoln converses with two black Union soldiers of very different temperament, and then with two awestruck white soldiers. There’s a weird and complex play of symmetry and conflicted agenda and formality and off-handedness, all presented with an effortlessness of revelation, that few other directors could have managed, or would even have thought to attempt.

What allows Spielberg to maintain this level of mastery through all that follows is the script. Kushner, who wrote the magnificent Angels in America plays, is one of the few contemporary dramatists who is both capable and unafraid of high-flown language, and the 19th Century idiom allows him to cut loose in this regard without sounding overly stylized.

Yet for all of Spielberg’s and Kushner’s brilliance, and for all the splendors of Kaminski’s camera, what makes Lincoln unique is Daniel Day-Lewis. Like the movie, his Lincoln will not suit all tastes, but for me, it’s one of the great performances in, maybe, the history of movies. It’s up there with Falconetti as Joan of Arc and Brando in The Godfather, and nobody but Day-Lewis could have given it.

A number of people I’ve talked to have been put off by the voice he uses—a thin, soft, upper-register drawl instead of a stentorian baritone. This is thought to be historically accurate, I believe, but it also works in the context of the character as Spielberg, Kushner and Day-Lewis conceive him. The movie operates on the premise that Lincoln was a compulsive raconteur. Again and again throughout the film, he stops, chuckles to himself, and launches a maddeningly digressive anecdote, and everyone in the room, even his friends and allies, look miserable as they sit there and wait for the punchline. This recurring gag, and the voice, connect to the idea that as a speaker Lincoln preferred quiet eloquence to thundering oratory, and as a leader preferred self-deprecating persuasion to conquest.

Day-Lewis doesn’t give the only fine performance in the film. Sally Field strikes the right strained yet sympathetic note as Mary Todd Lincoln; Joseph Gordon-Levitt is moving as Robert Lincoln, and Tommy Lee Jones lets it rip as Radical Republican abolitionist Thaddeus Stevens. Less flashy than Jones but just as essential to the movie is David Strathairn as Seward, and then there’s Bruce McGill as Stanton, and Jared Harris as Grant, and Jackie Earle Haley as Alexander Stephens and Gloria Reuben as Elizabeth Keckley and Hal Holbrook as Preston Blair and James Spader, John Hawkes and Tim Blake Nelson as three comically shady political operatives, among many other creditable turns.

Lincoln is, ultimately—and perhaps to its commercial peril—a movie of remarkable restraint. Spielberg, Kushner and Day-Lewis eschew almost every opportunity for melodrama. Even the score, by John Williams, keeps its voice down. Yet the cumulative effect of this low-key movie is, at least for one viewer, overwhelming.