Elysium

Zero Tolerance for Citizens
or
Spinning That Ol' Wheel of Fortune

I expect nearly everybody was looking forward to Neill Blomkomp's next film, after the gooey splash District 9 made.  His new one, Elysium, has the same kind of life-lesson—"what have you done for someone else lately?" and how one's perspective changes when you walk around in someone else's downtrodden shoes.  

The approach is slightly different, though, even if the futuristic milieu is still glum.  In this future, the current economic climate hasn't changed, only the locations have.  Earth, after years of neglect, is one big slum, there is no distinction between urban and rural anymore, the green spaces are dead, and there is a space-age version of urban flight—the "one percenters" have moved on up to an orbiting oasis called Elysium, and it is, as in Greek Myth, the isle of the Fortunate, a paradise, with estates and luxury homes perched inside it's rotating ring. It's the ultimate gated community.  A large star in the sky, it is out of reach but never out of the sight or the minds of the stragglers of Earth who hope to get there by fortune or by smuggling themselves by shuttles, which Elysium's defensive perimeter either discourages or destroys.

The parallels to today's refugee and immigrant desperation is baldly presented, and obvious to anyone whose world-view isn't in spec-fic but down here on Earth, much as apartheid was morphed into xenophobia in D-9. Add to that that the penthouse in space also seems to have access to the ultimate in universal health-care, a medi-bed that scans you and...simply cures you (it seems).  Other than those fanciful details, everything's played a little straighter, no doubt because you have big stars like Matt Damon and Jodie Foster, rather than just Sharlto Copley (although he's here too, bless him), so the financial risks are slightly more, so they make the stakes in the film a little higher, too.  Higher in that the government (naturally) is up there in Elysium, in the form of President Patel, who has a rather prickly defense secretary (Foster, channelling Angela Lansbury from The Manchurian Candidate), who has a unique sense of how to protect The Ring, supplementing the force of robot-police with soldiers of fortune, like a particularly nasty one named Kruger (Copley), who would probably kill for a hobby if he wasn't being paid for it.

Down on Earth, it's dog-eat-dog, and former car-thief Max Da Costa (Damon) is trying to go straight, working towards the dream of going to Elysium by working in one of the factories mass-producing the robo-cops that keep the populace under their teflon thumbs.  But an industrial accident leaves Da Costa dying, with only five days to live.  His only chance is to somehow get up to Elysium and one of those miracle-med-things, so, with a few super-drugs pumping through his system, he signs up to do some dirty work for a former employer, which involves stealing industrial secrets—which just happen to be Elysium's security codes—that will unlock the station's defenses and allow a mass exodus from Earth to Elysium.

Da Costa allows himself to be merged with a powerful exo-skeleton and neural-net to download the codes, then, once there—well, let's just say things get personal, as these things are wont to do, but not selfish, as that flies against the "hero" sense that movies must have, so there has to be some deflection of need for Da Costa to some other....blah-blah-blah.  Face it, the exo-skeleton could be a crucifix motif, so Da Costa has to do some sacrificing because...well, that's the way they do it in movies these days.  There can't be any motivation of "self" because apparently that would make you as "bad" as the Elysium-buyers.  So, ultimately, Da Costa has to do all the fighting and scraping for somebody else, and, as per usual, it's an acquaintance's sick child.  Again.

And that's the main thing that makes Elysium less than thrilling: for all the "neat" visuals, for the interesting "take" on today's events, for all the good intentions and the perversions of such, it feels like every other sci-fi Christ allegory and leaves you feeling a little hollow while its trying to make you feel noble and unselfish while watching it.  Well, I've seen that before, and I thought the intention of sci-fi was to show you something different.  It is a noble effort, but ultimately, it suffers from story-sameness, and recycled ideas from the cookie-cutter school of script-writing.  It's too bad because Elysium has a lot going for it.

Elysium is a Rental. 

Gotta say that Elysium has some pretty cool concepts for its pleasure-wheel

Contagion

"Night of the Coughing Superstars"
or
"Please Wash Your Hands Before Exiting the Theater"

It's not nice to fool Mother Nature.  Or even to crowd The Bitch.  Because, sooner or later, she's going to look at all that nice smooth asphalt we've laid across her, and send up some crab-grass to seek out the weak spots and crack it.

"How do you like them pot-holes, Ozymandias?"*

Steven Soderbergh's "pandepic" Contagion fits quite well in the movie medical chest that includes such plague-filled films as Panic in the Streets, The Satan Bug, and The Andromeda Strain (one could also mention "The Stand," I Am Legend and the recent Rise of the Planet of the Apes—even, if we're talking Gaia's uprising, such natural disasters as The Happening (2008) and The Birds)—an organized, technologically advanced, scientifically-disciplined infrastructure is helpless against a simple organism that spreads through the sheer inevitability of exponentiality.**  It also cross-germinates into the "Butterfly Effect" genre (see Babel, 21 Grams, Crash)—you know, where we're all so interconnected that if a butterfly sneezes in China, we'd better cover our mouths in the United States or else we'll keel over into the Stone Age.***  And with so many stars (all very good, actually), it also reminds of one of those Irwin Allen SAG-slaughter disaster movies of the 1970's, that featured tag-lines like: "Who Will Survive?"

Contagion comes a few years after the majority of us could dismiss SARS and H1N1 in the real world with a blithe "where's the pandemic?" (completely dismissing such very real threats as AIDS and the hair-trigger Ebola and Marburg viruses).****  But, it is chilling that with all our research capabilities, we'd still be running behind any new threat, simply because the little suckers can evolve faster in the gut than we can be creationists in the lab.  And Scott Z. Burns (who wrote Soderbergh's The Informant! and is updating "The Man from U.N.C.L.E." for him) has taken an...er...clinical approach with his screenplay, starting moments after "first contact," following the progress of the disease from China, to the United states, its spread and detection by the Center for Disease Control and their efforts to isolate the cause, and, possibly, find a cure.  However fast they go (and it's a process hampered by testing schedules and production runs...and which pharmaceutical companies will profit from it), it's not enough to prevent wide-spread death and a near-collapse of societal structures throughout the world.  "It's figuring us out faster than we're figuring it out," says one of the techs (Jennifer Ehle) to her boss at CDC (Laurence Fishburne)...and it doesn't have a bureacracy to work through.  The drama is situational, so don't go in expecting ambulance chases and LED countdowns to disaster, but situations where families are ripped apart, investigators become victims, and desperation becomes just another symptom.  It's a procedural with a widely-flung spray pattern.

The cast is amazing...Matt Damon, Gwyneth Paltrow, Jude Law, Fishburne, Marion Cotillard, Kate Winslet...and just when you think they've run out of actors, up turns John Hawkes, Elliott Gould, Demetri Martin, and Bryan Cranston...you half-expect the full cast of Ocean's 13 to show up and cough out cameos.  No one dominates, everybody underplays, and the heroics are human and low-key. 

Nicely done, and food for thought, just wash your hands before eating.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I have a 2:00pm appointment for a flu shot.

Contagion is a...*cough*...Matinee. 

* "Ozymandias" by Percy Bysshe Shelley

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: `Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert... Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear --
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.'

** We could also mention "The War of the Worlds," but there, the bugs are the good guys.

*** A better example would be: "If Greece doesn't raise its debt-ceiling, should I rollover my 401k into doubloons?"

**** And yesterday, I heard people are dying from Listeria-infected cantaloupes! 

Green Zone

This week, we're re-publishing some reviews of the films from the post 9-11 environment.

"Weapons of Myth Destruction"

The team that brought you the more popular of the "Bourne" movies (Paul Greengrass, stunt coordinator Dan Bradley and star Matt Damon) basically take the same "run-and-shoot" scenario into the Iraq War in Green Zone—a government operative goes rogue and takes on the higher-ups with something to hide, who are willing to kill him in order to silence him. And just as The Bourne Ultimatum felt like a re-tread of The Bourne Supremacy,  Green Zone has the same worn been-there, fragged-that quality, owing more to tracts like  Body of Lies (which this one closely resembles, despite having an "original" screenplay by Brian Helgeland) and the earlier collaborations of this particular action troika. It's the Iraq War, but without the "shock-and-awe," unless the awe comes from a stifled yawn.
The same issues—the manufacture of intelligence to promote a "sellable" war scenario—are at play in both the Greengrass and Ridley Scott films. The main difference being that this one lands square in the middle of the early "dazed and confused" days of the Iraq War (having just passed its seventh Anniversary) with the first crews of Army inspectors coming up trumps in their search for the legendary Weapons of Mass-Destruction, the Holy Grail of this Crusade. Adapted freely—very freely—from the book "Imperial Life in the Emerald City" (which reads like a book version of the documentary No End in Sight), the screenplay posits American efforts to steam-roll a provisional government into Iraq by propping up their own Iraq partisan (based on Ahmed Chalabi) who hadn't set foot in Iraq for thirty years and was of dubious integrity, and the double-blind of an Iraqi general (played by Yigal Naor), whose reports of destroyed WMD's are falsified by the White House, and the promised assurances of participation in any new government for cooperating are ignored in the process of "De-Ba'athification."* Helgeland took the strategic failings of the Coalition Provisional Authority and used them as background for the cut-and-paste screenplay, constructing an "Army rebel" scenario in which Damon's "Roy Miller" is disgruntled with how his squad is continually sent on bogus WMD searches, chasing wild geese rather than chemical weapons. It becomes clear to the acronym-spewing MOP'd op that something is SNAFU, as the sites they fight to raid appear free of ordinance of any kind...and haven't for a very long time. Miller's investigation with the help of a frustrated CIA agent (Brendan Gleeson) becomes an effort to keep the SNAFU's from becoming FUBAR before he goes Tango Unicorn. Besides the angry and destabilized citizenry, they also have to fight a CPA op hard-wired to the White House (represented reprehensibly by Greg Kinnear) and the Special Forces commander who doesn't ask and doesn't tell, but merely re-loads (the terrific Jason Isaacs, nearly unrecognizable, looking like Bono in fatigues). You can't swing an HD camera (in simulated field-documentary fashion) without coming into conflict with somebody. **

It's one of those trope-heavy screenplays heavy on the "table-turning" dialogue ironically bantered back-and-forth during different stages of the screenplay—the big ones (delivered with the required dripping sarcasm) are "don't be naive," and "you didn't ask to confirm?" Ho-ho! Gotcha. You are so "occupied." These are the small PR victories lost in the cluster of the Iraq War.

It's not that Green Zone is bad. It is quite competent. But it is tired, and tired at its reckless pace feels silly and unnecessary...and a waste of time. Still, far more people will see Green Zone than No End in Sight, so if the message has to be "Damonized" at least it's doing some good, though in 20/20 hindsight.

Now...about the next one...

Green Zone is a Rental.



* Although the process is a matter of public record as is the Coalition Provisional Authority's dissolving of the Iraqi Army, the "playing" of the general is more akin to President Bush's tactics in dealing with Democratic senators while he was governor of Texas—he'd make promises to get a crucial vote and renege on those promises.

** Like the "Bourne" films and Greengrass' United 93, the film doesn't have a still shot in it, or a held shot of more than four seconds, making Kathryn Bigelow's The Hurt Locker look serene by comparison, but it's not as bad as second-unit director Dan Bradley's work on. Quantum of Solace, which looked like it was filmed from the POV of a Mixmaster set to "discombobulate." The guy's who's turned this sort of stuff into a science is J.J. Abrams, who's designed a personal system for hitting the camera—actually whacking it—in a certain rhythm to give it a "shaky-cam" stutter while letting you follow the action and still identify the participants.

The Adjustment Bureau

"I Guess The Lord Must Be in New York City"
or
"Dicking Around with People's Lives..."

The stories of Philip K. Dick have provided all sorts of story-fodder for the movies for both good or ill:  Blade Runner, Total Recall, Minority Report, Paycheck, A Scanner Darkly, Next, and Impostor.
They feature the sort of high-concept story-spine that easily translates into genre-bending sci-fi/fantasy films that are the easiest thing to translate to the screen short of a superhero property.  Just put a slight spin on a story concept—a police force that stops crimes before they happen, spies and detectives who are mentally undercover, a guy who can see into the future, but just eight minutes out—all odd concepts that illuminate the character dilemma in a way that a straight story might not highlight.  You don't have to be a genius to "get" what the movie says.  And the inevitable SFX look great on trailers.

So, here's The Adjustment Bureau, a paranoid conspiracist's validation of all things manipulated.  Young senatorial candidate David Norris (Matt Damon) is about to lose an election big, due to some ill-considered party-decisions earlier in his life.  In the men's room of the Waldorf, he practices his contrite, yet defiant acceptance speech, only to find that he is being overheard by Elise Sellas (Emily Blunt), who is evading hotel security after crashing a wedding upstairs.  It's a "meet-cute" as the two banter about Norris' loser-status and Elise becomes intrigued enough to plant a lip-lock on him.  His campaign manager (the always welcome Michael Kelly) walks in just in time to catch this and bust it up to get Norris to the ballroom to admit defeat.  I'd've fired him on the spot.

It's some time later and Norris is working for an investment capital firm with his manager.  He's running a little late, so he doesn't notice a team of angular men in business suits and fedoras are shadowing him.  One in particular—Harry (Anthony Mackie)—has an assignment: Norris must spill coffee on his shirt by 9:05 am, not any later. It's his job, says Agent Richardson (John Slattery), so don't screw it up. 

But, if he didn't, there wouldn't be a movie.

There's no use crying over unspilled coffee, but as a result, the rest of the movie is the Team attempting to solve the mess the non-mess creates: Norris is able to catch his bus on-time, where he once again encounters Elise, and gets to work just in time to see the Pre-Destinators (my term) sweeping the office, the personnel frozen, and key players receiving a "mind-wipe."  Norris catches on quickly, and tries to evade the invaders, only to find them around every office corner, calmly telling him to that, really, he should take it easy and cooperate and "this" will all go a lot easier.

He wakes up in an empty warehouse, with his pursuers deigning to tell him the truth about things: "You've just seen behind the curtain you never knew existed."  They're a team of agents who manipulate events among humankind—a kind of Uber-illuminati ('"sometimes it's chance, sometimes it's us")—at the behest of "The Chairman."  They lay down the law: He can't have a relationship with Elise, which David objects to ("Your entire world just changed and you're thinking about a woman?") as it's not in "the plan," and if he tells anybody about what he's seen, they'll make everyone think he's crazy, and "reset" him, leaving him basically lobotomized.* 

Norris is too much a free-thinker to obey the "button-down men of Fate" and the rest of the movie entails him "changing the curtains," as it were.  It's very clever and director George Nolfi, (who wrote the screenplay for the similarly time-trippy Timeline, had fun adapting his screenplay "Honor Among Thieves" into what would become Ocean's Twelve, and was one of the team who wrote—and re-wrote—The Bourne Ultimatum) ingeniously keeps things moving at a good clip, while also staying one jump ahead of the story-complications inherent in the plot...while also doing enough cinematic sleight-of-hand to keep the Doubting Thomases in the audience from falling into plot-holes.  He gets good performances out of everyone—allowing enough ad-libbing in the scenario to make it seem real and fresh, sort of a real-life version of the film's conceit of re-writing History in pencil before the Cosmic Ink dries.  It's fast, fun, and fresh and avoids pretentiousness or taking itself too damn seriously.  It is only after a little Time has passed that it feels a bit slight, but who could have anticipated that?

One thing is for sure: I gotta get me one of them hats!

The Adjustment Bureau is a Matinee.







* At that point I flashed on former CBS news-anchor Dan Rather walking down a New York Street and being attacked by men and all they said was "What's the frequency, Kenneth?"  Everybody acted like Rather had had "a spell," but I wonder if his attackers were wearing hats.

True Grit (2010)

"Revenge in a Minor Key"

or

"Hoo-raw'd by a Little Girl"

Someone had to save "True Grit" and that the Coen Brothers are in charge of posse is reason to be appreciative.  After their rather opaque film A Serious Man tanked seriously at the box-office (I thought it was last year's best movie), they needed a more accessible property to bring in audiences, and the well-known property (whether by book or previous film) is a good match.

Sure, I love the original 1969 version.  But, over time legend has overcome its considerable gifts, overshadowing the story, as John Wayne's performance overshadowed the movie.  True Grit (1969) is an adventure story, where the book is a post-modern comic drubbing of Old West myths.  The first film has a lot of those myths intact, those being the myths from Hollywood's westerns, including such at-the-end-of-an-era things as Strother Martin, Jeff Corey, Hank Worden, the opening song, Elmer Bernstein's  Copland-with-brass score, clean streets and available light.  The first True Grit is a sun-dappled western romp more pretty than gritty, with Kim Darby (good as she is) having to play young rather than the character, and Glen Campbell (out of his depth) as the Texas Ranger LaBoeuf.  It's just so clean, and the enterprise at its core so self-congratulatory that the point of the book gets a bit swamped in the process. 

The Coens take True Grit back to its roots.  Keeping in Mattie Ross' arch narration, and casting 14 year old Hailee Steinfeld as the young protagonist is a shift that greatly improves this adaptation.  Steinfeld is just severe enough, and, as opposed to the earlier film's Darby, spends her time acting more adult, as opposed to being an older actress acting young.  She's a bit arresting, bossing around Cogburn (Jeff Bridges) and horse-trader Hollister (Dakin Matthews), not having to sell the "young" aspect, but merely rise above it.

Like Steinfeld, the rest of the casting is superb.  Matt Damon's LaBoeuf is still a glory-hound, but of such fool-hardy self-assurance and puffery that you actually feel a bit sorry when it doesn't pan out to his vision.  Josh Brolin does a fine job as Tom Chaney, the initial object of the man-hunt, bigger in myth than he is in real life, and something of a whiner.  And Barry Pepper is nearly unrecognizable as Lucky Ned Pepper (I'm sure, no relation), who reveals a gift for rolling around the stilted dialogue he's been saddled with, and who (bless him) acknowledges in his performance the work of the fine actor who preceded him in the role.*

And everyone will be watching Jeff Bridges, because he has small boots to fill—Wayne had little feet—His "Rooster" Cogburn has his eye-patch on the other side (Wayne kept his left eye covered, Bridges his right—that a political statement?), and his deputy Marshall is more dissolute, less jolly, growlier and more willing to admit his infirmities.  His drunk is a bit more dangerous and cantankerous (the Coens keep the corn-dodger shooting match between Cogburn and LaBoeuf), although Bridges always tries to invest some dignity in the stumbling, playing it less for laughs than for character.  The role has little of Wayne's "star" presence, but a nice sunken lived-in quality.  His "Fill your hands, you son-of-a-bitch" is not said as a challenge, but in genuine anger, without Hollywood quotation marks.  He's superb, and by the time he confronts a Choctaw body-snatcher on the hunt, Wayne's version is cheerfully merely remembered.

But, it goes beyond that for the Coens' version.  Their True Grit is steeped in atmosphere, acknowledging racial differences and feeling less like a scout outing on a beautiful spring day.  Confrontations are held in pitch-black night, during snow-flurries, and inclement weather.  Nature in its beauty played a big part in the appeal of the 60's Grit, here it is nature in its ambivalence—one gut-wrenching scene taking place in the pitch of night under a dwarfing sky of shining stars.  The struggles of the individuals, man and beast, under that canopy are thrown into stark relief with those indifferent points of light.  It haunts, and throw one more sharpening aspect of this version that the previous lacked.

For, after the deeds have been done, this Mattie Ross, confidently bossy 14 year old, is given a sight of the carnage her single-minded quest has left in its wake.  There are moments, under that clear sky, of regret that the first film didn't dare preach, and of the destruction such obstinance can wreak.  A further coda follows the book's conclusion, that such lessons may not keep, under so strict a host.

It's lovely.  It's the book, done in a minor key in an overcast light, not dressed-up and gussied-up, but bittersweet, full of sand, and a lot of grit.

True Grit (2010) is a Full-Price Ticket

* Okay, I can't keep it a secret, it is so delicious: Robert Duvall played Pepper in the first film, and in a key-scene (with Pepper in close-up) giving instructions to stay with Mattie Ross, Pepper gives a two-fingered hand-signal that was a running gesture of Duvall's iconic (and beloved) Augustus McRae in the "Lonesome Dove" mini-series.  That move calls to mind another gesture echo in classic westerns: John Wayne's grabbing his arm in the last shot of The Searchers in a quiet tribute to the habit of another star of John Ford westerns, Harry Carey.  Lovely, and nearly invisible.

Hereafter

"The Sweet Hereafter"

I had a friend who disappeared for awhile, and when we made contact again after too long, he had an odd explanation: he'd become psychic, able to read people's thoughts, completely unbidden and unasked for, crowding in with his own, and had undergone a battery of tests to see if he was losing his mind.  He hadn't, as much as gaining insight into other people's. For awhile he found ways to exploit his ability, writing a column, diagnosing illnesses (he claimed to be very accurate) and making a living as a working seer.  But, he gave it up.  It was too painful for him, and his clients were too needy...pathetic, even.  Life is complicated enough in one's own mind to be peeping through the windows of others'.  I don't know whether I absolutely believe him (I'm as psychic as a block of wood, and he was a writer), but his observations were so ironically down to Earth—"Oh, man!" he told me one time, "Ghosts are ASSHOLES!  Why don't they just move ON?"—that I just accepted his stories, while keeping any true belief in check.  He was my friend.  I supported him.

George Lonegan (Matt Damon) wears gloves. Childhood circumstances and medical complications damn near killed him and left him handicapped—all he need do is touch someone, "make a connection," and he is jerked back to an old haunt, the "white corridor" of light that is the foyer of Death.  He's been there before, many times, but the touch of an individual's hand takes him to the spirits of the recently deceased of that particular person's past, so that he may pass on their thoughts to those left behind.  He wears gloves, so he can avoid these encounters.  But he can't avoid the grieving.  He used to be a working psychic, ("Look, I don't even DO that anymore." he consistently tells the persistently bereaved*), but he gave it up, despite the imploring of his exploitative brother, Billy (Jay Mohr, toned down and playing a recognizable human being).  "You've got a gift!" he is told.  "It's not a gift!  It's a curse!"  Now he works, driving forklift at a sugar warehouse in San Francisco, a "normal" occupation that might lead to a "normal" life.  That is his wish.  Life, not Death.

My psychic friend's story is highly reminiscent of Lonegan's (nice name, that) in Hereafter, Clint Eastwood's film of an original screenplay by The Queen scribe Peter Morgan.  Morgan's subjects are fairly factual, so it's surprising to see him venture into the nether-territory of Bruce Joel Rubin (Jacob's Ladder, Ghost).  But, he places it in the here and now, our world where Death can come specifically from all realms, natural and unnatural.  The film begins with a spectacular effects sequence recalling the horrific tsunami in Thailand,** that viscerally places the audience into such a disaster.  But that is only the beginning.  It is what comes after—the surviving of such an extreme occurrence, the coming back from it—that is the subject of the film.  How, after Death has touched us, can we go back to a normal life...when what awaits us, normally, is our own ending?  How can we live while still grieving?

I called them "The Death Tapes."  I have no idea who has them now, I passed all the copies I had to friends who were interested (and who isn't?).  I did a recording session that was being used for publicity purposes for a fairly terrible Joel Schumacher pot-boiler called Flatliners, about morbid medical students experimenting with near-death experiences—it is typical hyperventilating Hollywood exploitation—all chases and races-against-time, whereas this Morgan-Eastwood film is intriguingly commonplace.  The interviewees were all people who had had NDE's;  they'd died, and were pulled back to the land of the living.  They were from all walks of life—one woman had been electrocuted in a television studio, another was a Vietnam vet who'd been mortally wounded in a mortar attack.  The particulars of how they'd gotten there were all different, but their itineraries were all the same.  They'd gone to a corridor of pure white light, where they were met with spirits of their past, and informed, questioned about their circumstances and released back to life.  They'd all been significantly changed by their experiences, but in different ways, as Death was no longer the  terrifying unknowable it had once been.  Been there.  Done that.  The woman had been yanked back through no choice of her own, through the efforts of EMT's in the studio.  The soldier had volunteered to come back, in a way. Asked in that blinding corridor if there was any reason for him to go back, he implored the Voice,  "I want to see my son!" which is significant for the detail—he knew his wife was pregnant, but there was no way to know the sex of the child in those years before ultra-sound (Sure, it was a 50/50 chance, but...still...).  An expert (as much as one still breathing can be of such things) talked about children who'd gone through "the process" and other adults, speculating that, perhaps, it could be some spasming electrical processes of self-preservation.  But the stories were so similar—the same corridor, the after-life "concierge," the specifically relevant memories of the deceased (and not the living—would a brain going through synaptic anarchy be so choosy?)—combine that with the myths of "pearly gates" and exit-interviews with St. Peter, and it becomes disquietingly consistent.  Yes, we have the same meat in our brains, but chemically, we all have our own brand of soup.  So, then, would everybody see it the same way?  Don't know.  And we won't know.  Not until we "see the light."   

The people left behind—in both senses of the experience—(Richard Kind, Bryce Dallas Howard—a brunette, this time—Frankie McLaren, Cécile De France) are changed by the brush with death, but they all have the same goal—a "normal" life, or what passes for normal given the knowledge of extinction.  But as that is something that unites us all, players and audience alike, isn't that "normal?"

It all sounds terribly depressing, doesn't it?  But it isn't.  There are moments of high drama to be sure, but moments of levity, as well.  Rather than a dark and morose drama befitting the Hallowe'en season, it ultimately has the feeling more of a star-crossed romance.  And Eastwood, who has been known to denature the color palette of his pictures, particularly in Letters from Iwo Jima and Changeling, returns to a more vivid color scheme here, as if to present life in all the glories of luminous sunrises and sunsets.  Those looking for a spook-show, like the poor, unsure desperates who crowd the emporiums of the medium-charlatans in the film, should look elsewhere for signs of the occult, or speculation about what it all means. 

Eastwood's movie gives us no definitive answers—Hereafter never crosses the threshold into Shakespeare's "undiscovered country," that final frontier we must all travel, the journey of the spirit taking flight unbound by the physical restraints of life, our mortal coil.  It remains solidly in the realm of the comfortingly tactile, and concludes with a smile, a touch—simple, normal acts of being, that stave off the nullifying black and the welcoming light.

Hereafter is a Full-Price Ticket

* The script by Morgan (The Queen, Frost/Nixon, The Damned United, The Last King of Scotland) is extraordinarily precise in its use of words...in English and French (there are subtitles...Eastwood, who directed the all-Japanese Letters from Iwo Jima isn't afraid of them), and quickly you pick up that, more than usual, he uses specific ones, over and over, that tie his characters together...almost like they were a mantra.

** This sequence is exploited in the trailers and advertising for the movie, making it seem like it's a 2012 disaster-like "entertainment."  But, if I can be allowed a SPOILER-like caution, don't be fooled.  This sequence...and another jolting one that recalls an arbitrary terrorist attack...are merely means to an end.  The story is about recovery of such incidents, and in living a life of hope, despite the common glimpses through the opening of Death's Door.

Green Zone

"Weapons of Myth Destruction"

The team that brought you the more popular of the "Bourne" movies (Paul Greengrass, stunt coordinator Dan Bradley and star Matt Damon) basically take the same "run-and-shoot" scenario into the Iraq War in "Green Zone"—a government operative goes rogue and takes on the higher-ups with something to hide, who are willing to kill him in order to silence him. And just as "The Bourne Ultimatum" felt like a re-tread of "The Bourne Supremacy, "Green Zone" has the same worn been-there, fragged-that quality, owing more to tracts like "Body of Lies" (which this one closely resembles, despite having an "original" screenplay by Brian Helgeland) and the earlier collaborations of this particular action troika. It's the Iraq War, but without the "shock-and-awe," unless the awe comes from a stifled yawn.

The same issues—the manufacture of intelligence to promote a "sellable" war scenario—are at play in both the Greengrass and Ridley Scott films. The main difference being that this one lands square in the middle of the early "dazed and confused" days of the Iraq War (having just passed its seventh Anniversary) with the first crews of Army inspectors coming up trumps in their search for the legendary Weapons of Mass-Destruction, the Holy Grail of this Crusade. Adapted freely—very freely—from the book "Imperial Life in the Emerald City" (which reads like a book version of the documentary "No End in Sight"), the screenplay posits American efforts to steam-roll a provisional government into Iraq by propping up their own Iraq partisan (based on Ahmed Chalabi) who hadn't set foot in Iraq for thirty years and was of dubious integrity, and the double-blind of an Iraqi general (played by Yigal Naor), whose reports of destroyed WMD's are falsified by the White House, and the promised assurances of participation in any new government for cooperating are ignored in the process of "De-Ba'athification."* Helgeland took the strategic failings of the Coalition Provisional Authority and used them as background for the cut-and-paste screenplay, constructing an "Army rebel" scenario in which Damon's "Roy Miller" is disgruntled with how his squad is continually sent on bogus WMD searches, chasing wild geese rather than chemical weapons. It becomes clear to the acronym-spewing MOP'd op that something is SNAFU, as the sites they fight to raid appear free of ordinance of any kind...and haven't for a very long time. Miller's investigation with the help of a frustrated CIA agent (Brendan Gleeson) becomes an effort to keep the SNAFU's from becoming FUBAR before he goes Tango Unicorn. Besides the angry and destabilized citizenry, they also have to fight a CPA op hard-wired to the White House (represented reprehensibly by Greg Kinnear) and the Special Forces commander who doesn't ask and doesn't tell, but merely re-loads (the terrific Jason Isaacs, nearly unrecognizable, looking like Bono in fatigues). You can't swing an HD camera (in simulated field-documentary fashion) without coming into conflict with somebody. **

It's one of those trope-heavy screenplays heavy on the "table-turning" dialogue ironically bantered back-and-forth during different stages of the screenplay—the big ones (delivered with the required dripping sarcasm) are "don't be naive," and "you didn't ask to confirm?" Ho-ho! Gotcha. You are so "occupied." These are the small PR victories lost in the cluster of the Iraq War.

It's not that "Green Zone" is bad. It is quite competent. But it is tired, and tired at its reckless pace feels silly and unnecessary...and a waste of time. Still, far more people will see "Green Zone" than "No End in Sight," so if the message has to be "Damonized" at least it's doing some good, though in 20/20 hindsight.

Now...about the next one...

"Green Zone" is a Rental.

* Although the process is a matter of public record as is the Coalition Provisional Authority's dissolving of the Iraqi Army, the "playing" of the general is more akin to President Bush's tactics in dealing with Democratic senators while he was governor of Texas—he'd make promises to get a crucial vote and renege on those promises.

** Like the "Bourne" films and Greengrass' "United 93," the film doesn't have a still shot in it, or a held shot of more than four seconds, making Kathryn Bigelow's "The Hurt Locker" look serene by comparison, but it's not as bad as second-unit director Dan Bradley's work on "Quantum of Solace," which looked like it was filmed from the POV of a Mixmaster set to "discombobulate." The guy's who's turned this sort of stuff into a science is J.J. Abrams, who's designed a personal system for hitting the camera—actually whacking it—in a certain rhythm to give it a "shaky-cam" stutter while letting you follow the action and still identify the participants.

Invictus

"No One Plays 100%"

Rugby for the sake of rugby would not a movie make. John Huston's "Victory," a soccer film about soccer, is a listless affair even with a cast that features Michael Caine, Sylvester Stallone and Pelé. But Clint Eastwood's "Invictus,"* about Nelson Mandela's uniting of an apartheid-torn South Africa though a burst of sports-fever, manages to tell a deeper story through the guise of a sports-film. It's a ruse that's perpetuated throughout the film as incident after incident of potential assassination or terrorism is exposed as something else; the fragile coalitions uniting the divided country are constantly in danger of exploding into violence, and the reminders are all around.

Reminders is exactly what Mandela is fighting against. His personal mandate is to keep the past in the past and move towards a united future. A former terrorist and prisoner, as president of a deposed Dutch government, he re-casts himself fresh to serve his country's interests, and finds the most difficult part of the job convincing others to do the same. By uniting former enemies under a common interest, the hope is the citizenry can at least start to look at each other without suspicion.

Eastwood lays out the territory in his first elegant shot, panning from a neatly manicured grass-field filled with well-appointed white rugby players, up over a rigid fence to a city street and beyond it, to a ram-shackle wire fence holding back a vacant lot of towns-folk playing rugby as best they can. They have the one thing in common, but that's it. And that's the start.

A major criticism of the Eastwood style is a tendency to over-state the case, and that is in abundance in this film: through ham-fisted characters like a full-of-himself sports-announcer who provides story exposition in the most patronizing way; in the performance of Morgan Freeman, who, though stooped and halting, does not in any way project Mandela's fragility, making him more of a wax-work representation than a characterization; the occasional too-blunt dialogue.

The dialogue is where the movie fails; the direction is where the movie succeeds and surprises. One becomes more interested in the film's back-story of how Mandela's security detail—once on opposite sides of a political conflict—now must forge a bond to protect the president and each other (there is a situation in which they are clearly over their heads, and the empathy for them knows no boundary). The coming-together of the group stutters and evolves organically, far smoother than the soccer story.

But once, the soccer story kicks in—that's when things get very interesting. Field sports are tough to simulate and make authentic-looking (even "The Damned United" avoided it, for the most part, with archival footage), but Eastwood doesn't shy away from it, going in close, slowing the action down, amping up the stakes. The final game of the 1995 World Cup between South Africa's Springboks and the Māori-themed New Zealand All Blacks (there's some historical irony for you), where one should expect the film to start to drag, instead becomes a brutally intense struggle that more than serves as a metaphor for government struggling against itself and its own inertia to gain some ground in accomplishing some good. You can gripe all you want about stodginess and speechifying, but in subtle and surprising ways, Eastwood and crew bring you back to a thoughtful, invigorating re-appraisal of the themes through the action of the film, delivering a moving sub-text that elevates the film far beyond words. One goes into the film expecting one kind of film, and walks out amazed at how fulfilling, and skilfully presented, the film is.

"Invictus" is a Matinee.


* Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll.
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.

William Ernest Henley (1849 - 1902)