Mud

Possession is 9/10 of the Law
or
Lookin' for Love in All the Wrong Places

The last film that Jeff Nichols wrote and directed was the very interesting, very odd, and quite layered Take Shelter.  His latest Mud is part coming-of-age movie, part Southern Gothic, part classic romance and part tragedy and complete curiosity.  It features a couple of great kid performances and a top-tier cast supporting them.

Tye Sheridan and Jacob Lofland play two tweeners living on the Mississippi River.  They're a couple of restless kids who hired help in their families, but with minimal supervision, have the freedom to sneak out at night exploring.  On one of those pre-dawn excursions they motor over to an island and find a wonder—a boat nestled in a tree.  Checking it out, they're in for a shock.  Someone's living there.  

That someone is Mud (Matthew McConaughey) who is eking out an existence there.  How he got there is a mystery.  Why he's there is not.  He's killed a man, who was messing with the girl he loves, and that man has a powerful family (led by Joe Don Baker).  He's hiding out, waiting for word from Juniper (Reese Witherspoon), and when he hears, they'll run off together, where...well, that's a little unspecific.  In the meantime, he uses the little go-betweeners to get food, supplies, and word out, that includes to one of Ellis' (Sheridan) neighbors, a solitary man named Tom Blankenship (Sam Shepard), who Mud labels "an assassin." Blankenship calls Mud a liar, making Ellis slightly conflicted; he's willing to do anything for Mud in his quixotic quest, out of a young man's puppy-love instincts, in part a response to the fracturing marriage of his parents (Ray McKinnon, Sarah Paulson) and his own interactions with "townie" girls, particularly May Pearl (Bonnie Sturdivant).

It's to Ellis' advantage that he and "Neckbone" (Lofland) are under the radar of everybody's notice, his parents have other concerns and Neckbone's uncle (Michael Shannon) is in his own little world, so the two boys go back and forth between mainland and island with messages and supplies, which becomes increasingly complex when Mud decides he's going to get that boat out of the tree.  And Ellis in his come-to-the-rescue way to interfere when one of the goons keeping an eye on Juniper gets aggressive with her trying to get information about Mud's whereabouts.

Things begin to spiral out of control to a conclusion that can't come to any good, despite everyone's best and worst intentions, due to the breaking of borders between the insular natures of the players.

But, there's something else going on here that creeps like an adder through the Louisiana swamp, something to do with misogyny.  Maybe it's just the timing of events—no accidental as it's all in the control of the writer-director—but all the problems seem to generate from the war between men and women.  The women here—Juniper, Ellis' mom, May Pearl—have an edge of capriciousness and undependability (in the males' eyes, anyway) that derails their plans and dreams.  The men are hardly blameless, going through their lives with their eyes wide shut, totally aware that the women in their lives may prove disastrous in the short term, quixotically playing the hero or the rescuer, anyway.  Everybody has some romantic view of life that is not theirs, and their pursuit of it proves their undoing.  One leaves the theater with the sense of a good story well told, but with a stake through the heart in the futility of good intentions.  One wants the waters of life to be smooth and transparent, but the reality of it is that it's the consistency of the movie's title.

Mud is a Matinee.

Man of Steel

Zod It
or
The Never-Ending Battle (No, Really.  The Never-Ending Battle)

Marvel Comics' film division has so saturated the movie market that its Direct Competition, DC Comics looks like a 98-pound weakling by comparison.  Oh, they did well with Christopher Nolan's "Dark Knight" Batman series (very well), but the Warners film version of Green Lantern was a little dim.  So, if they put out any more product, they'd better do it right, or be seen as also-ran's.  And the one they HAVE to nail is the DC super-star and cornerstone, Superman. The Last Son of Krypton debuted in comics in 1938, has been on-screen since the Fleischer cartoon days of 1942, a radio series since 1940, on television since 1952, and the big screen since 1980 (ushering the current glut of superhero movies).  Superman has had several iterations since, especially on television, starting with George Reeves, then "Lois and Clark," then "Smallville."  Much tribute has been paid the last few years to the movie version starring Chris Reeve—he even appeared on "Smallville" a few times before his death—and Bryan Singer's attempted re-boot, Superman Returns, was a slavish recreation with better technology, that, in retrospect, was so slavish, it was a little creepy.

The rumor is Warner Brothers HAD to make a Superman movie or pay out a healthy sum to the family of Jerry Siegel, the characters' co-creator, and coincidentally, David Goyer gave Christopher Nolan a great idea for how to handle Superman while they were making The Dark Knight Rises.  Nolan wants to direct other things besides super-heroes, so he brought in Zack Snyder (300, Watchmen) to do the film, and in some ways its a good choice.  Snyder knows how to bring comic books to the big screen, transposing the static images to a hyper-dramatic movement, even if he sometimes misses the point of what those stories are saying. The trick was making a GOOD Superman movie—even the Reeve ones corroded after a few years—out of an essentially "old-fashioned" character that challenges for worthy opponents.  What can you do with Superman that hasn't already been done?  How do you present it-him?  Is he Moses or Hercules?  Christ or Pro-Wrestler?  There have been lots of interpretations over the last 75 years, and Nolan-Goyer-Snyder have snatched quite a few of them to their purposes.

Lets talk about what's good about Man of Steel: they're no slavish interpretations: on Krypton, there are no gleaming towers, head-bands, or crystal palaces, but instead an interesting steel-chrome re-imagining, with no plastic in sight (even their view-screens are pointilated metal images), with no clean architectural lines but re-engineered as if by Frank Geary.  Superman's suit is more rococo than Ringling Brothers.  Casting is uniformly excellent: yes, Laurence Fishburne makes a great Perry White; Amy Adams a spunky, no-nonsense (for once) Lois Lane; and Henry Cavill is empathetic as the many identities of alien Kal-El, preternaturally handsome, almost beautiful, and alarmingly ripped, he never winks, acts cute, and plays it straight and unironically, with maybe a little too much furrow in his brow.  Russell Crowe's Jor-El is a bit more of an action-figure this time, which seems unnecessary, and Ayelet Zurer has much more to do as Lara than just cry and fret.  Kal-el's Earth foster parents, the Kents, are marvelous, both Diane Lane and Kevin Costner, but especially Costner, whose Jonathan Kent is a moral force to be reckoned with, fully aware that his son is not only a special-needs child, but a sociological game-changer, the answer to "we're not alone in the Universe" and all the potential for panic and fear that his very existence might produce. Costner's been waiting in the wings doing good, unsentimental character work in smaller movies, shucking his ego, for many years for the opportunity to do something this good and remind people that, yeah, he's a good, clever, disciplined actor capable of great things.

The other thing that gave me great hope for Man of Steel was its re-interpretation of the whole "growing up super" problem.  Kal-El/Clark Kent grows up with a gradually increasing set of powers—in class one day, he freaks out because he can see the skeletons of all his classmates, a cacophony of sounds from miles around threaten to split his skull, he runs to isolate himself in (as tradition) a broom-closet, and when teacher threatens to open the door, he zaps it with heat-vision.  He can't tell people what's going on—Dad's orders—but he has to learn to deal with being different, and suppress it, even to the disservice of others.  It's the "gift or curse" dlllemma, which has been touched on before in the mythos, but never to this extent.  And the other nifty thing is that more than any other "Super"-movie, this one is more science-fiction oriented, it's an alien invasion movie that "Superman" just happens to star in, and be the chief target for.  And there is a concerted effort to make this "THE moment" when Clark becomes Superman.  Here, Kent's been going from one job to another for years, hiding from society, and when super-opportunity rears its ugly head, he moves on, lest he be found out (it's also the impetus to introduce Lois Lane, who happens to stumble on this "mysterious stranger" and, reporter that she is, tracks him down).  But, that "alien threat" text is a great way to keep Superman under wraps,* dealing with the anonymity, and bringing Lane into it.  There's great potential there, as the one person who exposes to the people of Earth that there are "aliens among us," is the picture's chief villain, Krypton's General Zod.

One of the best things about Man of Steel is its cast, including Kevin Costner as Superman's Earth Dad.

And this is where the movie gets into trouble.  Not that Zod isn't a great character.  Genetically-engineered—the Kryptonian way—to be a soldier, he stages a coup in the last days of Krypton in a misguided attempt to keep Krypton "pure."  He finds the naturally-birthed Kal-El repellent, Jor-el a traitor, and is single-mindedly determined to return Krypton to its proper way.  And as spewed by Michael Shannon (who's terrific here, but then he's always terrific), he is a seriously deranged megalomaniac. And although his plans are simple, his means of doing it are so complex,** they tend to bog the movie down, leading to the worst problem with the film—it's ultimately dull and tedious.

We all remember Superman II—with Terence Stamp as General Zod—and the extended fight between Christopher Reeves' Superman and the three Kryptonian criminals which, while good for its time, seemed to be merely a bunch of fighting Cirque De Soleil wire-work.  This time, it's the way it's imagined in the comics, super-fast, punching, punching, punching, the combatants sending each other crashing through buildings and skidding across  pavement to screw themselves up and go at each other again...over and over and over again.  Comics-geeks (including me) have always wanted to see this, it's a dream come true, but like Hitchcock's retort to why his characters never go to the police ("because it's bo-oring" and then proved it in Psycho), it's too much of the same thing, no matter how much collateral damage is being inflicted, it becomes as dull as a "Transformers" movie. One shouldn't be looking "up in the sky" by rolling their eyes. Someone once expressed a dissatisfaction with "super-hero" movies because Hollywood has turned them from adventure stories to war stories, and the ante is being upped to the point of unsustainability and sameness. It's the familiar, in recent story-challenged movies, city-calving carnage, but just in different costumes, and if film-makers are going to keep trying to tap this dry well, they need to come up with unique stories besides battles royale, ones suited to the particular characters (and not particularly the villains').

And that's where Man of Steel ultimately fails—the screenwriters let the character down.  What sets Superman apart is he IS so pure, his intentions are the best, he's "the big blue boy scout," with a moral compass that's been set on both Krypton and Earth, the best of both worlds.  Here Superman makes choices for his adopted home-world that should scare the bejesus out of its citizens, and they're made about twenty minutes of destruction (and how many unseen lives) too late. Forget the considerable property damage sustained—whole city blocks are turned to scrap, buildings collapse, with I'm sure lots of people crushed in the rubble—his ultimate action and the timing of it, is just not what The Man of Tomorrow represents in any of its incarnations. The filmmakers negate what makes the character of Superman so special in that one act, making the character just another guy with too much power in a suit, and not a very good guy at that.*** 

Lots of good things here, but lots of bad things as well, and I argued back and forth with myself over what to rate this, but just because of the tedium factor I chose what I chose, so one could fast-forward—like a speeding bullet—through the never-ending battles.

Man of Steel is a Rental.

Direct dialogue grab from Grant Morrison's (and Frank Quitely's) "All-Star Superman"

* The TV-series "Smallville" did a similar thing, hiding "Supes'" as "The Blur," but Clark Kent stayed illogically stationary as a target.

** In fact, it's the same story-line of the recent story-arc "H'el on Earth" that spanned through the comics last year.

*** It's not like the filmmakers don't know it, they're preaching it throughout the entire movie.  In fact, at one point, Kal-el surrenders to the military as part of Zod's ultimatum to Earth.  He sits in an interview room, placidly, in hand-cuffs, the allowance of which is brought up by reporter Lane.  His explanation and one of the best lines in the movie:  "Well, it wouldn't be much of a surrender if I didn't..."

Take Shelter

Riders on the Storm
or
"Take Care of Your Family.  Handle Your Business."

The Laforches, Curtis (Michael Shannon) and Sam (Jessica Chastain) are re-united in the evening—he from his construction job, she from her consignment cottage-business and taking care of their daughter Hanna.  They hold each other in the doorway of their daughter's room, as the child sleeps soundly.  And even though their daughter is deaf, they still speak in hushed tones.  "I still take my boots off before I come in the house," he says, wondering at the extra precaution.

"I still whisper," she murmurs, smilingly, in reply.

It's a lovely little scene in a resolutely controlled horror film.*  But, it's emblematic of the themes of Take Shelter as a whole.  Curtis and Sam are made for each other, protecting their family, even unnecessarily.  They just approach it from different ways.  "You've got a good life, Curtis," says his friend and co-worker, Dewart (Shea Whigham).  "That's the best compliment. Look at a man's life and say that he's doing everything right."

Yep.  But that good life is about to be tested.  And woe to the prophet who sees things no one else can, be they Moses, Jor-El, Melanie Daniels, Roy Neary, or Dr. Miles J. Bennell.  Despite their special knowledge, they are, at best, ignored, and, at worst, (well, aside from their planet blowing up), shunned and reviled...from those who do not see and are deaf to his warnings.  Nobody likes a party-pooper, however good their intentions.  And that "special knowledge" will test the best of marriages and relationships.** Especially when it comes to family.  He's doing crazy stuff to protect them, and she's wondering if he's crazy and should get out of the situation...to also protect them.  The goals are the same, but coming from opposite points of view.  The potential for a train-wreck is dire.

But "dire" is exactly what Curtis is worried about.  His region of Ohio is being pelted by severe thunderstorms and even when the rains cease, the cloud don't part but roil in the background heaving shafts of lightning to the fields below.

Then, there are the dreams that involve those closest to him attacking him, leaving him gasping in panic attacks, costing him sleep...and perspective.  The dream-scapes become more and more...uh, nightmarish as torrential rains obscure vision, townies become zombie-like predators and the laws of Nature are supplanted by cheap courtroom theatrics, birds, reflecting the odd flying patterns seen in his real life, rush in a fevered frenzy and begin dropping out of the sky, dead.  The rain becomes oily, then God knows what will happen.

But only God.  Curtis' visions doesn't extend that far.

Of course, he could merely be going crazy, like his wife and neighbors think, especially when he spends a lot of money and risks his job to expand the storm shelter out back.  And, then, there's his family history—his mother (Kathy Baker) was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia when she was Curtis' age.  Maybe pills will stop the oncoming onslaught if it is only in his mind. 


But what if it doesn't? 


Take Shelter is discomfiting, just as Hitchcock's The Birds is.  No explanation is made and one is kept guessing throughout.  And writer-director Jeff Nichols (Shotgun Stories) manages to, again, take a simple idea, and expand it to feature length, keeping the film centered on human drama rather than ignoring the potential of the story with empty spectacle.  Shannon delivers a dangerously controlled performance that only snaps into a rant at one particularly inappropriate moment.  And Jessica Chastain continues her roll of extraordinary movie-choices and making her parts uniquely her own, not unlike her co-star from The Help, Sissy Spacek.  All in all, an interesting exercise in dread.

Take Shelter is a Matinee.

* I use the term advisedly, as Take Shelter is an "Environmental Horror" film, in the same genus as Hitchcock's The Birds, or M. Night Shyamalan's The Happening.  There are no slashings, and hardly any blood is spilled, but it does mess with your head and keep you guessing.  Oh, yes it does.

** Think of the Nativity, and the conversation that ensued when Mary told Joseph "I'm pregnant and God did it.  Oh...and Merry Christmas."