Wednesday, May 29, 2013

Silver Linings Playbook (Movie Review by Bob Racine)



                             2 hr & 2 min, color, 2012

Crazy meets crazy!  A young man named Pat (Bradley Cooper) just released from a mental institution where he has resided for eight months, self-deluded into supposing that the wife who long ago left him is just waiting with bated breath for his release and for their reconciliation, gets tangled up with a young woman named Tiffany (Jennifer Lawrence, this year’s Oscar winner for Best Actress) recently widowed and fired from her job, who is herself threatening to self-destruct.  Pat has been released into the care of his dysfunctional parents (Robert Deniro and Jacki Weaver, and what a terrific pair they are!) and placed under a restraining order by the court.  (Yes, he has been a bit felonious too!)  It sounds like anything but a match made in heaven, unless heaven has become an oddball dealer in high stakes long shots.  All who look for pearls of wisdom in the unlikeliest and most outlandish of places will want to saddle up for this bumpy ride.  The movie deserves its plaudits.  It is easily the funniest picture out of 2012 that I have seen.   It could have been played for high tension drama, but you are not that far into the action when you know already that you are meant to unwind and laugh with it.

Rapid fire and overlapping dialogue is sometimes difficult to follow in current motion pictures; details and clues can get lost in the crossfire.  But here is an example of how to use it without alienating the slowest of us in the audience.  The story is easy to follow and no time is wasted on needless digressions.  The zigzagging plot never loses coherence.  While the lives of the characters are not very stable, the path charted for them to follow remains firmly grounded in the issues they face, and each moment of encounter carries echoes of subject matter which all sensitive people, whatever their state of mind or circumstance, confront on a daily basis.  Communication!  Listening!   Mutuality!  The risk of honest self-disclosure!  The ownership and the dumping of baggage!  Forbearance!  Forgiveness!  Loving compromise!  Completion!  Not that Pat and Tiffany and their immediate families are enlightened experts on any of these factors.  They are volatile and unpredictable, but they have a way of stumbling into the right garden patch and challenging the best and worst in each heart.  They even manage to surprise themselves at certain points.

This is the third movie of Jennifer Lawrence’s that I have seen, and each time I have been overpowered by her work.  As I pointed out in my review of “The Hunger Games” many months ago, “she knows exactly how to light each scene and each close-up from within herself.”  Especially is this true of close-ups.  When she looks straight to camera or even in the camera’s direction, it is no exaggeration to say that she “nails” me.  How many actresses could make magic out of an utterance like this one from Tiffany, coming on the heels of an altercation with Pat over propriety:  “There’s always going to be a part of me that’s sloppy and dirty, but I like that, with all the other parts of myself.  Can you say the same about yourself?  Can you forgive?  Are you good at that?”  

I get the feeling that Lawrence is not only submerged into the character she is playing but that she could not possibly be anyone else, though I know this is not true.  She takes over both the stage and the soul of the person, enters our minds and imaginations and grips the heart as well.  But at the same time she creates perfect chemistry with anyone sharing the scene.  In this case that individual is most often Bradley Cooper, who gives us an unforgettable portrait of a neurotic hanging onto his sanity by the tips of his fingers.  These two are simply marvelous.  They create so much between them that I almost did not want the film to end, as noisy and impulsive and volatile as they are.  In real life I would find them very uncomfortable to associate with, but on the screen I can appreciate and enjoy the fight that comes out of them and the strange sense they make.    

And the two of them are not bad dancers either.  She entices him into dance therapy and dance competition, and watching him learning to coordinate his stiff body parts is a super pleasure.  What threatens to shipwreck their plans, however, is Pat’s father’s mania for sports betting and his superstitious jabberwocky about “reading the signs.”   How that works out I will leave for you to learn and enjoy.  I should add here that Deniro as Pat’s father gives the best performance I have observed from him in years.

The genius behind the film is its Director /Writer David O. Russell, having already made a name for himself in recent years with such movies as “Three Kings” and “The Fighter.”  He has adapted a novel of the same name by Matthew Quick.   In some directors’ hands the material may have left us feeling punched out, but Russell makes it work.  A word of caution, however!  The F word is liberally used, so parental discretion is surely required.   


To read other entries in my blog, please consult its website:  enspiritus.blogspot.com

I welcome feedback.  Direct it to bobracine@verizon.net

Wednesday, May 22, 2013

The Truman Show (Movie Review by Bob Racine)



                             1 hr and 43 min, color, 1998

Those of you who have recently joined the mailing list for my blog entries might want to check into the website – enspiritus.blogspot.com – and read my first posting in March of 2012, wherein I explained what my blogging content would pertain to.  In that introduction I expressed the wish from time to time to take fresh looks at old movies, even those in black and white, that have retained their resonance and viewing value.  “The Truman Show” is in color, but it surely has established itself as a lasting and ever contemporary treasure which fifteen years has not tarnished.  A very special treat!  I recommend it highly for all teens and adults.

Did any of you as a child ever imagine that maybe all of life is rigged, that you are in the center of a big hoax staged at your personal expense?  Did you ever imagine that maybe your alleged family, your playmates, your teachers, the hordes along the street, humanity everywhere as you observe them, are complicit in that hoax, that you are either the object in an experiment or the specimen displayed for everyone else’s sickly amusement?  Could it be that the whole universe was once waiting for you to be born so that you could serve some predetermined agenda, and once out of the womb you were placed immediately under the supervision of powerful people who have always been watching every move you make in connection with that agenda?  Please, somebody tell me that I am not the only one who has ever had that flight of imagination.  Please reassure me that I was not the supreme paranoid fantasist during those scattered moments in my early youth. 

Thank you!     

Now meet Truman Burbank (Jim Carrey), a thirty-year-old man, who has spent the entire three decades of his life on an idyllic island called Sea Haven, a life without noticeable wrinkles.  Everything seems to him to be wonderfully real – his wife (Laura Linney), his desk job as an insurance salesman, the affluent house that he calls home, his smiley and ingratiating friends and neighbors.  But unbeknownst to him his entire existence from birth has been seen by a world-wide public in a 24-hour-a-day telecast, finessed by a genius TV producer named Cristof (Ed Harris).  Privacy for him has been nonexistent.  Also unbeknownst to him is the fact that the sea and shore and sky that surround his apparent haven are the creation of human hands.  The sand and the sea water are not natural phenomena; even the supposed daylight is artificial.  Everything surrounding him is counterfeit.  Cristof, its inventor, calls it an omni-cam ecosphere.    The people who Truman knows as parents and neighbors and associates at work are actors in the continuing TV drama, as is the wife.  All seems to be placid and perfect, until he begins to feel the stirrings of wanderlust and his attempted travels to places on the globe he has been told about are thwarted by curious complications.  He starts to sense that somehow life in Sea Haven revolves around him.  By degrees he comes to see that he is in fact a prisoner on his “island” and has to try to fight his way out. 

Carrey gives a wonderful, well-modulated performance that balances humor and pathos almost to perfection.  And the film is as well crafted as Truman’s world.  What could very easily have been an over-the-top, heavy-handed, campy gimmick becomes a quality work of absurdist art in the hands of Director Peter Weir.  (In some future entry I might discuss the amazing sum total of this man’s work, going back to the 1970s.) 

Almost as fascinating to me as Truman himself is the character of Cristof.  He is a reclusive billionaire who has constructed this seemingly airtight ecosphere, and the sole reason for his existence is to keep Truman’s contrived life ongoing inside it.  He is a workaholic forever on the job, monitoring the screens that trace the movements of Truman’s life and even varying the narrative from moment to moment by his own wireless verbal transmissions to performers in the sphere, transmissions of which Truman is completely unaware.  It reminds me of the ancient picture of God, as one who puts his words into the mouth of his servants as they speak. 

Ed Harris gives one of his very best portrayals in this role.  He plays it rather tight to the vest.  He does not make Cristof the demonic scientist frothing at the mouth, but he lets us see and hear the obsessive fanaticism that lurks below the surface of his composure.  And most fascinating of all is his rationalization for what he is doing with Truman.  Having adopted him as an orphan before he was born, he sees himself as the young man’s protector from the sick world outside the ecosphere.  Ironically, however, Truman has never seen or communicated with his adoptive parent, not until the movie’s fabulous climax.                  

Truman  has been protected from anything ugly or life threatening.  His world is rot free, crime free, and disaster free.  It is the sleek, micromanaged, contrived world of interminable soap opera.  The millions around the world who watch are captivated by his life.  That life follows no script, but it is controlled; parameters for it have been set in place.  For him, unlike the viewing public, the soap opera is not an escape from world weariness; he inhabits it.  Reality for him is our unreality – until his great awakening.  Andrew Nicol’s original screenplay then takes us for a most exciting ride, with a strong payoff and a brilliant case in point for originality.  The camera, sequence by sequence, has never been used with more skill or imagination, and the production designs are incredibly shrewd. 

As I see it, “The Truman Show” speaks metaphorically to the struggle many of us undertake – to learn to think and act outside the box.  There are risks involved in doing so, and perhaps greater risks in not doing so.  God give us grace to help in that struggle.  


To read other entries in my blog, please consult its website:  enspiritus.blogspot.com

I welcome feedback.  Direct it to bobracine@verizon.net

Friday, May 10, 2013

Life of Pi (Movie Review by Bob Racine)



                              2 hrs & 7 min, color, 2012

Familiar maxims that might seem tiresome, if repeated often enough by people on the street or in living rooms or byways of human commerce, can become sparkling and new again when spoken in the context of a choice narrative.   In dramatic terms they can ring many more bells than they can in the private precincts of moral instruction or conversation.  “Faith is a house with many rooms.”  And, as so many of us have discovered and re-discovered, “All of life is letting go.”  Though few in western society have had the chance to meet up with starvation, most of us most likely have heard some version of “Hunger can change everything you thought you knew about yourself.”  And we surely have been warned not “to tempt fate,” an admonition that makes most sense when you are defiantly facing a dangerous storm and dare yourself not to take cover. 

Such are the familiar sayings that pop up in “Life of Pi,” and we have a refreshing narrative to give them new power, thanks to a novelist (Yann Martel) and an imaginative movie director (Ang Lee) assisted by a sentient and perceptive screen writer (David Magee) and a brilliant master of visual effects (Bill Westenhofer).  I have not read the best-selling book, but I can attest that what appears on the screen in this adaptation is a top flight work of artistry in every department.  It unlocks the mind and heart and soul of a young gifted Indian boy in his teens who sets out to find God and finds more than he could ever have imagined.  The tragic misfortune of a shipwreck from which he is the only survivor out of his four member family propels him on his journey, with the most unlikely companion in travel.

Pi, short for a longer name given him at birth, is played by a most gifted young actor named Suraj Sharma, someone I found great pleasure in watching and hearing.  He carries the film quite soulfully.  Pi was born in a zoo (yes, a zoo!) that his well-heeled father has owned, grows up among animals of many stripes and demonstrates more than a little acumen at science and math, until economic stress forces the family to sell the property and move from southern India to Canada by way of a Japanese freighter, taking many of the animals with them across the water.  The storm that brings on the deadly calamity drastically alters the fate of everyone involved, and Pi ends up the only human in a lifeboat alongside a beautiful but extremely dangerous Bengali tiger.  Up until this point he has believed that animals have souls.  “I’ve seen it in their eyes.”  But such a belief is about to be put to the most excruciating test.  The tiger is one of Pi’s father’s caged possessions whom the son has admired from a distance but who he quickly comes to fear and match wits with to stay alive. 

By the point of the shipwreck Pi has already declared his belief in deity and is in the process of familiarizing himself with the teachings of all the major faiths without settling on any one.  His father has taught him that religion in any form involves darkness, the boy little knowing how soon a hallowed darkness would be cast upon him.  When he finds himself afloat with his animal companion, his innocence succumbs to the bane of loneliness, desperation and dire necessity.  For a long spell the universe ceases to be a colorful fascination, as it previously has been, and he faces into a purgatory far more brutal than anything his Catholic education has taught him.     

One thing I greatly admire about the movie is the way scenery and substance work so very well together.  There are so many notable shifts and turns in the use of the camera and so much that must have had to be computer generated with unfailing precision and so much activity on the part of the ocean and the sky and the broiling water and the many species of animal. There was a danger that the viewer could get caught up largely in the techno-craft of the production and become distracted from Pi’s spiritual quest and the part that the tiger plays in it.  But thanks to Suraj’s terrific acting and the ingenuity of the director and writer this did not happen.  The picture is not a nature study or some yarn about the taming of a beast.  The tiger by slow degrees becomes a life force from which the boy learns intangible things as well as tactics for cohabitation. 

We know from the film’s beginning that Pi does survive, because we meet him as an adult (Irrfan Khan) many years later telling his tale to a young writer who is searching for story material.  The narrative is framed in such a way that we anticipate learning how Pi the boy finalizes his relationship with God and the universe and himself.  Viewers who consider themselves on a spiritual quest will probably be right at home with it.  Finally in the closing minutes the film makes an unexpected demand upon our imaginations.  It wraps itself in the gauze of a riddle that puts all that has been depicted into a new perspective, one that honors the eternal duality between darkness and light and myth and reality. 

Not the least of the film’s features is Michael Danna’s tender and serenely enchanting score.  It retains its tenderness and its serenity even through storms and tiger snarls and crashing waves and batteries of flying fish and the fury of the deep.  The most musically enchanting sequence of all comes at the film’s very beginning during the opening credits, as we are taken into Pi’s family’s menagerie.  The creatures, some crawling, some flying, some striding, some waddling, perform as if in a ballet, and yet all the movement is perfectly natural, no animation.  Breathtaking in every respect!   One of the most animal friendly few minutes of film footage ever created! 

The movie won Oscars for Lee’s direction and for Westenhofer’s special effects and was nominated for Best Picture and for Magee’s screenplay. 
 
A word of caution is in order for parents.  Stories on film about children and animals have traditionally been regarded as whole family entertainment, but in this case smaller kids might find it a bit scary and upsetting.   Not all the living creatures portrayed win their fight for survival; nature can be cruel by human standards and some of that cruelty is seen up close, though it is not depicted in a gross or vulgar fashion.  I do recommend it for most children above the age of eleven, but it may be wise for parents to screen it first and then decide on its suitability for their particular offspring. 

I lay this gem at your feet and wish you all an exciting adventure with it, though I doubt that my wishing it is really necessary.


To read other entries in my blog, please consult its website:  enspiritus.blogspot.com

I welcome feedback.  Direct it to bobracine@verizon.net