NATURAL HORN KILLERS

In the multiplexes this weekend:

Death of a Unicorn--Paul Rudd plays Elliot, a lawyer, who is enroute to the home of his megarich employers, where he's on the verge of a massive promotion. With him is his sullen daughter Ridley (Jenna Ortega), perfectly well aware that she's being used as a prop to show what a good family man Elliot is, to help him clinch the deal. They're both still bereaved over the recent death of his wife.

Driving up a mountain road to the remote home, Elliot hits and injures what appears for all the world to be a baby unicorn. Just as the creature is establishing a psychic bond with Ridley when she touches its horn, Elliot bashes it in the skull, meaning to put it out of its misery, and also to get the hell to the meeting for which he's already late.

They carry the body to the palatial home in the back of their rental SUV, but if you guess that their encounter with single-horned magical equines isn't over, you'd be right. The movie takes off from its literal-minded opening into a satire of the wealthy, their bottomless capacity to self-justify, and the similar capacity for toadies like Elliot or the rich family's manservant Griff (the excellent Anthony Carrigan)--to justify enabling them. The employers, you see, are in the pharmaceutical biz, and they--Dad Richard E. Grant, Mom Tea Leoni and cloddish son Will Poulter--soon realize that the creature's horn is a virtual panacea offering a cure for cancer, among other miraculous properties.

Written and directed by Alex Scharfman, Death of a Unicorn is strikingly funny and exciting. It also carries a tinge of sourness, but this is true of most satires. Rudd's obsequious, cowardly character is deeply unlikable for much of the film's length, but this is offset because, of course, Rudd himself is one of the most naturally likable actors on the planet.

In the same way, Scharfman offsets the (justified) bitterness of the satire with monster-movie elements--even some gore--and a dash of New Age mysticism. And he plays fair by the rules of these genres. It's also nice to see unicorns rescued from My Little Pony-style cutesy insipidity, and depicted as badass.

The Penguin Lessons--From horned horses to flightless birds: here's the second movie in less than a year set in South America and based, however loosely, on the real-life friendship between a foundling penguin and a bereaved aging man. Last summer we got My Penguin Friend, with Jean Reno. Despite Reno's undeniable star presence, some gorgeous scenery and the endearing title character, this new effort is a big improvement.

Steve Coogan plays Tom Michell, a cynical, lazy, emotionally shut-down English professor at a private school for upscale Argentine boys in Buenos Aires in 1976. On a weekend in Uruguay, he's walking on the beach with a beautiful woman he's met dancing, and they come upon an oil-slicked Magellanic penguin. 

Mostly to impress the woman, Michell takes the poor creature back to his hotel and they clean him up. Things don't work out with the woman, but Michell finds himself stuck with the penguin, smuggling him back into the school and trying to keep him a secret from the strict Headmaster (Jonathan Pryce). Eventually the bird, dubbed "Juan Salvador Gaviota"--the Spanish name of Jonathan Livingston Seagull--becomes a classroom teaching aid and a beloved mascot.

Juan Salvador also triggers a spiritual reawakening in Michell, who connects through him with the family of a cleaning lady at the school. The Junta has just taken over, and people are being "disappeared" off the street in broad daylight; Michell finds himself unable to remain apolitical.

Despite a couple of Monty Python references early on--the Pythons had a long and noble history with penguins--this Brit film isn't a broad comedy. At the beginning we're told that "This story is inspired by real events," whatever that may mean; the script by Jeff Pope is based on a memoir by the real-life Michell. Directed by Peter Cattaneo of The Full Monty--one of the very best poignant Brit comedies--The Penguin Lessons has laughs, but it's also character-driven and melancholy; in the long run it could fairly be called a tearjerker.

It's hard to imagine the movie working as well as it does with anyone but Coogan in the lead. As in the terrific Philomena (2013), he plays an elaborately ironic, acerbic poseur whose reserve is gradually and reluctantly broken down by a guileless fellow being; the penguin serves almost as well as Judi Dench in this role. But Coogan never gets sappy. He lets the marvelous bird melt us, then he dries the movie out again.

TAKING (OR LEAVING) THE CURE

Opening this weekend: 

The Death Cure--Well, that would be an impressive medical breakthrough, wouldn't it?

This is the third film in the Maze Runner trilogy, based on the young-adult sci-fi novels by James Dashner. This time the pretty-boy hero (Dylan O'Brien) and a few of his more characterful comrades are on a quest to rescue an old pal (Ki Hong Lee) from his days imprisoned in "The Glade" back in Part One. They infiltrate the city stronghold of the sinister agency known by the anagram WCKD--their marketing department should perhaps have put in a little more time on that branding--where his friend is being held as a possible key to a cure for the disease that is turning the human race into zombielike creatures known as "Cranks."

The first film in the series, 2014's The Maze Runner, had the title labyrinth to help generate intrigue and mystery. In The Scorch Trials, from the following year, the boys had escaped their inscrutable prison, and the results were far more routine adventures, with the same overlay of teenage masochism. This third film is a further step down, alas. The dialogue is banal and the plot, as with The Scorch Trials, is full of elements that recall older, better sci-fi flicks, most notably The Omega Man.

The Death Cure is not without strengths, however. Director Wes Ball, who helmed the previous entries, handles the initial big action scenes excitingly. There are a number of capable vets in the cast, including Giancarlo Esposito, Barry Pepper, Will Poulter, Rosa Salazar, Aiden Guillen, Patricia Clarkson as the WCKD honcho and Walton Goggins in a small but memorable role as the noseless revolutionary leader of the Cranks. Thomas Brodie-Sangster, the kid from Love, Actually, is once again touching as our hero's loyal friend. With the help of these actors and others, the film remains watchable enough until the torturously drawn-out, Wagnerian, sturm-und-drang finale wears out our patience.

This movie is another example of a striking recurrent motif in post-apocalyptic yarns of recent years, however: Walls. Walls erected by the frightened powerful to hold the feared and dispossessed at bay have shown up in the Divergent flicks, last year's Resident Evil finale, War for the Planet of the Apes and now this film. It seems like our collective mind has begun to, well, Hit the Wall.

MEN IN THE WILDERNESS

Opening in the Valley today:

Anomalisa—A middle-aged man from L.A. flies into Cincinnati for a speaking gig. He’s the author of a popular tome on customer service, and people murmur his name when he walks into his hotel lobby. He checks into his room, tips the bellhop, orders some room service, calls an ex-girlfriend who lives in town. The setting is mundane and his behavior is entirely unremarkable, though a deep sadness and loneliness suffuses the atmosphere.

All of this, by the way, is depicted in painstakingly detailed stop-motion animation. For a while, I thought that this was the object of the cinematic experiment—could stop-motion lend its sense of stylized wonder even to this sort of naturalistic, slice-of-life drama?

But eventually [spoilers coming, by the way], the tension at the heart of this strange story becomes clear, as we realize that everybody in the movie except our hero, Michael, speaks in the same voice. Michael speaks in the gentle British-accented tones of David Thewlis, but his wife and young son on the phone, the ex-girlfriend, the cabbie, the desk clerk, people on TV, and everybody else speaks in the unnerving adult male voice of Tom Noonan.

It’s clear that this is how Michael’s been hearing the world for a long time, because he springs into action when he suddenly hears an unfamiliar voice passing in the hall. He tracks it down to a young woman named Lisa (Jennifer Jason Leigh) who’s staying in the hotel. Lisa’s a sweet, slightly dowdy woman with poor self-esteem. Lisa—who is an anomaly, get it?—and a girlfriend (with the usual voice) have come from Akron to hear Michael speak, so she’s starstruck when he begs her to spend time with him.

Written by Charlie Kaufman (based on his own radio play), who co-directed with animator Duke Johnson, this solipsistic fantasy grows even more bizarre from there on, in the manner of Kaufman’s earlier pop-absurdist weirdness like Being John Malkovich or Synecdoche, New York. It’s also sexually graphic, with results that are both touching and surprisingly erotic.

This won’t be everybody’s cup of tea, obviously, but on its own terms it’s among the strongest and most emotionally charged pictures of the year. Kaufman takes his time, letting the freaky conceits establish themselves gradually, and also allowing Michael’s terrible sense of isolation to become overpowering.

Lisa is the movie’s greatest success. She’s tremendously likable, and in the face of Michael’s rather predatory neediness, Kaufman, Johnson and Leigh make us feel urgently protective of her.

The Revenant—Probably because there’s a part of me that still thinks of him as that little kid from the sitcom, the adult Leonardo DiCaprio is an ongoing amazement to me. In this adaptation of Michael Punke’s 2002 novel DiCaprio is entirely credible as Hugh Glass, the frontiersman who, on an ill-fated pelt-hunting expedition in South Dakota in 1823, was savaged to the point of death by a bear, then abandoned by the men charged with staying with him. Horrifically wounded, he nonetheless dragged himself across hundreds of miles of wilderness, for the sake of survival and revenge.

This historical incident (it was also the basis for 1971’s memorable Man in the Wilderness, with Richard Harris) has been embellished, giving Glass an even more spaghetti-western-ish motive for his vengeance. Director Alejandro G. Innaritu stages scene after scene of gruesome and grueling violence—Indian attacks, the bear mauling, murders, scalpings, disemboweling animals to sleep in their carcasses—with undeniable primal force.

The final clash between Glass and his chief enemy (Tom Hardy, who’s superb) is a standard action-movie grapple, and somehow banal. But on balance, The Revenant is potent stuff, and vividly acted by DiCaprio, Hardy and Will Poulter as the young Jim Bridger.

I couldn’t help but notice, however, that Inarittu’s previous film, the rhapsodically received Birdman, was about a movie star prepared to end his own life because his acting career wasn’t going quite as well as he’d hoped. This time Inarittu gives us a hero who literally crawls out of his own grave, eats raw meat and cauterizes his own wounds with gunpowder just to keep breathing. It’s kind of hard to pin down Inarittu’s philosophy.

RUNNING/WALKING

New this week:

The Maze Runner—In the vein of The Hunger Games and Divergent, The Maze Runner is young-adult sci-fi with a body count. Based on James Dashner’s 2009 novel, it’s set in “The Glade,” a grassy, open area inhabited by adolescent boys. Their earlier lives, and how they came to The Glade are unknown to them—they’re all amnesiacs, remembering only their names.

Every now and then a freight elevator vomits up a new resident from far underground. The boys have done better at organizing themselves into a functional community than the lads in Lord of the Flies—they’ve set up an agricultural village with carefully assigned roles. The fastest, fittest and bravest of the boys serve as Maze Runners.

The Glade, you see, is enclosed by monolithic stone walls which open, during the day, to allow access to an enormous Maze. The Runners explore this by day, in hopes of mapping it and finding a way out, but are careful to get back to The Glade before the huge doors close. If they don’t, they’ll be trapped in the Maze with the Grievers, howling presences which stay out of sight during the day, but have the run of the place by night. No one, we are told, has survived a night in the Maze with the Grievers.

All this and shovel-loads more exposition is flung at the newest arrival, Thomas (Dylan O’Brien). He’s an intrepid, somewhat rebellious fellow, and he of course becomes the hot new Maze Runner, and comes face to face with the Grievers, and lives to tell the tale, and generally shakes things up in The Glade—with the result that its population is thinned. It does, however, gain a female resident, Teresa (Kaya Scodelario), who turns up in the elevator with a note declaring that she’s the last one ever.

The premise of The Maze Runner is undeniably intriguing; it stirs the imagination. And director Wes Ball stages many exciting scenes and gets vivid work out of his young cast, especially Blake Cooper, Ki Hong Lee, Aml Ameen, Thomas Brodie-Sangster and Will Poulter. What marred the film, for me, was overexplanation—in the homestretch, we get a deluge of unconvincing backstory on how this situation came to be, and the mystery and inscrutability of the boys’ plight, and its allegorical associations with life in general, are sapped of their power. The hook of the movie was negotiating the Maze itself, not learning what the Maze was for.

A Walk Among the Tombstones—When Liam Neeson tells somebody, in that soft, deep, almost apologetic tone of his, that they’re in trouble if they harm some innocent victim, it’s hard not to take his threats seriously. Thus he’s making quite a career out of playing haunted father-figure rescuers and avengers, in melodramas like Taken and Taken 2, The Grey, Non-Stop and now A Walk Among the Tombstones.

Well, it’s certainly not a Tiptoe Through the Tulips. Based on one of the Lawrence Block novels about Matthew Scudder, an ex-NYPD recovering alcoholic and unlicensed private detective, the movie is a parade of horrors, starting us off with a gruesome shoot-out before the opening credits and getting much more unsavory from there. It’s set in 1999, against the backdrop of Y2K anxiety—how quaint does that seem now?—and involves a revolting kidnapping operation run by two of the most loathsome villains (David Harbour and Adam David Thompson) to turn up in a thriller in years.

Scudder (Neeson) is hired to find these two by a swanky drug trafficker (Dan Stevens) whose wife ended up dead even though he paid the ransom. All manner of twists are unraveled, Scudder’s horrifying guilty past is revealed, and our hero also befriends a homeless teenager (Bryan “Astro” Bradley) who wants to be a detective, before the big showdown in the graveyard between good and evil—or, rather, between evil and comparatively good—arrives.

Nasty though it is, I found this Jacobean Big Apple bloodbath intense and satisfying. The script, adapted by director Scott Frank, has some creaky passages, and the strand with the teenage kid bumps up against sentimentality, though it’s well played and it allows Neeson some lighter moments. But Frank’s direction, with his measured pacing and his melancholic atmosphere reminiscent of a certain style of ‘70s urban crime thriller, is really expert.

As the movie progressed, however, I became increasingly aware that these villains were so odious that no comeuppance would be sufficient to calm my vengeful bloodlust toward them. And indeed, it wasn’t sufficient. But that’s my spiteful heart’s problem, not the movie’s.

FOUR, SQUARED

There seem to be certain actresses who, having attained some popularity and acclaim, are suddenly subject to a peculiar fashionable backlash. Jennifer Aniston has been a major star for almost twenty years now, but I can only think of one person I know who would admit to liking her.

Except me, that is. I like her. She isn’t, perhaps, an actress of any great range, but within the scope of what she does she has an easygoing, companionable manner, an unpretentious, goodhearted air of common sense that I find fairly irresistible. She has what used to be called a girl-next-door quality.

She’s also managed her career with remarkable shrewdness. The adult comedy We’re the Millers would probably be a very small blip on the summer movie radar if the movie’s trailer didn’t make it clear that Aniston performs a striptease. The scene in question is nothing especially eye-popping in itself—though Aniston, at 44 years, has every reason to feel confident with her clothes off—but there’s somehow an unearned pop-culture piquancy because it’s sweet little Rachel from Friends gyrating up there.

Aniston is the story about the film, but she isn’t the central character. That distinction belongs to the likable SNL veteran Jason Sudeikis as Dave, a scruffy, single, small-time weed dealer in Denver. Dave’s not a bad sort, but when he gets robbed of his stash and cash, and is forced to make a huge smuggling run to Mexico and back to make up the loss to his noxious boss (Ed Helms), he realizes that “disreputable loser” is written all over him, and that he’ll never get past the border guards alone.

His wacky solution is to enlist three neighbors from his building to masquerade as his square middle-class family, taking a trip south of the border in an RV the size of a small continent; he figures this hide-in-plain-sight cover will make him invisible to the authorities. So a neglected adolescent boy (the terrific Will Poulter) plays his good-hearted son, a guttersnipe runaway (Emma Roberts) plays his teenage daughter, and a broke, fed-up stripper (Aniston) poses as the little woman (a thieving boyfriend is used to explain how a stripper with no drug problem comes to be broke).

The plan works perfectly, and the trip goes smoothly. Just kidding. All manner of humiliating—and rather xenophobic—complications arise for the foulmouthed, sarcastic quartet, all in roughly the manner of The Hangover and its imitators. “The Millers” end up entangled with drug lords and DEA agents and crooked motorcycle cops; they’re pulled into other people’s marital frustrations. A tarantula crawls up a pantleg, resulting in a sight gag similar to a notorious one in 1998’s There’s Something About Mary.

It’s a sentimental comedy, of course—the four start to truly bond as a family through all of this and to look out for each other. Director Rawson Marshall Thurber gets the picture off to an excellent start, setting up the premise with admirable speed and efficiency. But the contrived, heavy-handed shtick slows it down as it progresses.

Still, the actors keep it from grinding to a halt. I thought there were plenty of laughs—mostly rising from the characterizations, not the coarse gags—even if the movie loses some energy in its second half. The four Millers really do seem to connect and learn to enjoy each other’s company. It’s soon easy to perceive affection just under the surface of their casual, almost reflexive exchange of obscenities and aspersions.

In this way, their behavior probably isn’t too different from most square middle-class families. They just think it is, because they’ve gotten their image of such families from movies and TV. But then, the makers of We’re the Millers have probably gotten their image of outcasts and misfits from the movies.