The Spectacular Now

The Sins of the Sons of the Father
or
What if the Hokey-Pokey IS What It's All About?

(500) Days of Summer was one of my favorite movies a couple years back, a smart combination of naiveté, winsomeness, and cynicism about the whole "love" thing...especially from the needy/selfish male point of view, and was very charitable to the elastic female point of view...something you wouldn't find in your basic Woody Allen (or any male-written) love story.

The director, Marc Webb is off (er...) web-slinging on the re-booted "Spider-man" series, but writers Scott Neustadter and Michael Weber have done a new screenplay of Tim Tharp's National Book Award finalist The Spectacular Now, directed by James Ponsoldt, who's less flashy than Webb, a little less assured technically (especially in the sound department), but has a great casting eye as he's gotten a spectacular ensemble cast for this film.

When we first meet Sutter Keely (Miles Teller, who is brilliant in this, his face morphing between man and boy with split-second speed), he's filling out a college entrance question: "Describe a misfortune, hardship or challenge in your life: How did it affect you, and what did you learn from it for the future?"  Sutter doesn't even hesitate: "Dear Dean of Admissions: Up until yesterday, I had the best fucking girlfriend in the world.  Sorry, I probably shouldn't say 'fuck' in this..."

It's true.  Sutter's just gone through a bad break-up with Cassidy (Brie Larson), who, in his eyes, was the perfect girlfriend and they were the perfect couple, the hit at every party (and there are a lot of them), but it's all come crashing down when she says "I'm done!" over Sutter helping his buddy get a girl, by giving a couple of fellow high-schoolers some of the ice-cooler'd beers he regularly stashes in his trunk.  Sutter's good for that, but for Cassidy that's not good enough.  They're through, so over and done.

Miles Teller, the breakout performance of The Spectacular Now

Cut to the title.  Next thing we know, we're looking up at a sun-blocking silhouette saying: "Hey!  Hello?  He-lllooo!  Oh my God, you're alive!"

It's 6 am.  He's passed out on a lawn of a house he's not familiar with, his car is nowhere to be found, and standing over him is Aimee Finecky (Shailene Woodley, proving that her instinctually felt performance in The Descendants was no fluke), who is out doing her Mom's paper route, only to find a body on the way.  They know each other from school.  Aimee helps Sutter up, and the two continue the route with two missions: delivering the papers and looking for his car.  The goals are short-term, which suits Sutter just fine.

It's clear early on that Sutter is a boat without a rudder (or even a paddle), and the women in his life, be they his Mom (Jennifer Jason Leigh, welcome back), Cassidy or the new Aimee, keep him focused and on the true.  Or as true as Sutter will let himself be (and Teller has a wonderful ambling gait, which I started calling "The Sutter Strut" that is both assured yet not going altogether fast, keeping anything approaching at a mesure pace).  Fairly early on, we learn that Sutter may indeed be "the life of the party," but he's also considered a flake and unreliable.  A heated discussion in the family kitchen produces a "Sometimes, you remind me so much of your father..." comment (and not in a complimentary way) from his mother and he's annoyed because a) his father having left the family early with no subsequent contact leaves a void about how that should be taken; and b) he harbors the notion that the reason Dad's gone is that it's Mom's fault, all evidence to the contrary being missing.  In the meantime, and for the moment, he is spending his critical senior year in High School marking time, regretting Cassidy and "hanging out" with Aimee.

"Dude, she's not a rebound!" he assures a buddy, but it's pretty clear she is, at least at the start, using her as an excuse to go see Cassidy at a kegger. It's a quid pro quo kind of arrangement: she can help him with algebra, he up's her social quotient—she's never had a boyfriend and he's an established arm to hang on. But before long, the conversations start to get deep, the facile conversations ("what's your 'thing?'") turn personal, the "maybe-I'll-see-ya's" become orchestrated "bump-into's" and the period apart starts to become a noticeable measure of time.  They're starting to fall into something: for her it means someone to share her plans for the future and college; for him, a long-term commitment is asking her to the prom.

She already knows what he's just beginning to suspect.

Now, before we go too far into this, let me say what a joy it is to watch Teller and Woodley riff off each other.  The lines are established, sure, but the way they stumble, falter, eke out, and fly from each other's mouths colliding in awkward crashing cadences and emotional ranges between feigned self-assurance to tip-toeing fear is truly something to see and enjoy.  Both actors are top of the line working with the other actors, but, with each other, there's a yearning sparring that feels like the magnetism of puppy-attraction.  If it ain't convincing as love, it sure is convincing as fresh conversation that feels real (and spoken for the first time), and is as fine as any movie bantering I've seen in years between young actors.*

So, with all that raw talent going for it,** where does the movie go?  There's been so much writing here, one worries that too much is going to be given away, and any particulars in subject matter and how it is revealed will result in the spoilage of any sort of subtle enjoyment of the film and how it subtly ingratiates and glad-hands you into darker territory..  It skirts Afterschool Special territory, but does it in so circumspect a way that you may not even be aware of The Problem, until you are confronted with it in the same way Sutter confronts it, in reflection, but he sees it, not when he looks in the mirror, but when he is especially focused on something other than a short-term goal, but rather on the realization of a dream.  Sutter has no depth, except in what he avoids, and he only realizes it to his horror and imagined shame.  The Spectacular Now includes author Tim Tharp's original ending for the book, but the screen-writers give Sutter an "out" to end on an up-beat note in the grand Hollywood "bauble" tradition, but at least they take a page from Mike Nichols' play-book, and don't make it a comfortable one, but leaves him...and the audience hanging on a precipice, leaving the Spectacular Now and entering an Uncertain Future.

The Spectacular Now is a Matinee (but I could change my mind in the Future) 

"Stumble, falter, eke out and fly..."- Teller and Woodley

* Come to think of it, they remind me of the Andrew Garfield-Emma Stone hemming-hawing in The Amazing Spider-man.

** And I haven't even told you about Kyle Chandler, who plays against "type" and does it so unnervingly well, you want to start a barroom brawl with the guy.

The Descendants

"Finding Grace in Paradise"
or
"Keeping the Kidneys and Other Vital Organs Working and Hoping for the Best"

There's a lot of water in Hawaii.  It's an island, after all, a string of volcanic mountains surrounded by water on all sides.  Plus, there are the myriad rivers that course through, invading the land, falling off the mountains combined with the torrential rains that sometimes beat down with such ferocity that they turn highways into flood corridors, making negotiating trails on the islands difficult.  All that water does have an advantage—it turns the volcanic soil green with lush verdant beauty.

And it also hides the tears.

Alexander Payne's adaptation of Kaui Hart Hemmings' novel The Descendants is something of a miracle, a nearly perfect adaptation, much like James L. Brooks' transformation of Larry McMurtry's Terms of Endearment (and if there's any justice...or taste...in Hollywood this awards season, Payne's film will be awarded as much gold as Brooks').  It retains Payne's way of nailing a particular culture, as he has with right-wing religion, high school politics, retirement wanderlust, and the pretentious pseudo-culture of Napa Valley.  In The Descendants, it's the extreme casualness of the privileged Howlies, who have invaded the island culture, overcoming it like a tsunami.

But, there's a difference here.  All of Payne's films have been a trifle dodgy, askew or off-kilter.  Not The Descendants. It is a fine distillation of the book, taking the best of the dialogue, a perfect cast of vets and unknowns and bringing it together with polish, exquisite comic timing and poignancy.

Attorney Matt King (George Clooney) is the last in a long line of Kings of Hawaii, who trace their roots back to King Kamehameha, a family history that has held in trust 25,000 acres of undeveloped, still natural Kauai'i coastline which will be out of trust in seven years.  Matt is the sole trustee, but is in negotiations with his family on how to deal with the land.  A decision is to be made soon.

But, that's the least of Matt's concerns.  His wife, Elizabeth, has been put in a coma from a boating accident.  He is left with her medical decisions and the caretaking of their two daughters—Scottie, 10 (Amara Miller), and Alexandra "Alex," 17 (Shailene Woodley, I hesitate to mention he performance as a standout, because everyone is great)—a difficult task as the aloof and professional Matt is, for all intents and purposes, "the back-up parent."  Scottie is starting to react to her mother's hospitalization in odd, destructive ways...and Alex?  She's already been shipped to another island to a strict boarding school for dabbling in drugs and older boyfriends.  "What is it with the women in my life that they want to destroy themselves?" Matt asks in one of the many narrations that dominate the film.

Good question.  And the answers to that one aren't even explored in depth here.  Let's just say that Matt is responsible, and must be more responsible if he is to save his family, nuclear or extended.  However diligent he might be as a man or a person, he cannot prep for the emergencies that life hands to him.  He cannot research what to say or argue before the court of his kids, and absolutely must find a way through the briarpatch of mercurial emotions that has nothing to do with reason or law.  There is no precedent to draw upon for what he is going through. This is life, not jurisprudence. There is no preparing for that. Life is off-the-cuff, on the wire, winging it because life is what happens (as John Lennon said) "while you're busy making other plans."  In the film, Clooney's character must deal with both death and life and find the personal grace to do both, simultaneously, letting go of the past and dealing with the essential unforeseeable future. 

There are two axioms that I hold dear in life as true, and recently they came up again, in my life, to steer me to a clearer, calmer path. The first is "actions speak louder than words." Words are fine, nice, even comforting. But they are useless, and can be even considered lies if not backed up by a concurring action.* The other is one of the few things I take as absolute truth from the Bible and that is that "love never dies." I realized that with the death of my parents, but it is only reinforced to me, day after day. Like energy in science, once it's generated, love never leaves the Universe. It can change, sometimes savagely, turning into hate (at least, temporarily, because the opposite of love is indifference), but it never goes away...never "vanishes." And The Descendants, in its funny, quirky way, eloquently speaks to those truths.

I love this movie.  There are choices that Payne and his co-writers have made in the presentation of Hemmings' novella that are oddly poetic, even beautiful, and with the clear-eyed collaboration of his actors, have made up some of the most memorable scenes in a film that have moved me this year.  It is certain that many of them will show up as "Moments" in the year-end wrap-up of the best of 2011.  This one might be the best film of the year.

But, the movie-year, despite being deep in its 11th month and on the cusp of the 12th, is still young.  Who knows what lies ahead? 

The Descendants is a Full-Price Ticket.

Matt looks over a hedge—one of the many quirky directorial choices
Payne makes that makes this film so enjoyable.

* It's especially true of politicians.  Think of that during the next political campaign.