Kingsman: Secret Service; Creed; The Judge

Kingsman: The Secret Service

Andrew Ting said it best: Kingsman: The Secret Service is an amusing spy romp with an undertone of unsettling nastiness.  I’m still not sure whether that works for me or not.

Creed

Creed made me lose track of time.  Creed made me cry.  Creed didn’t move me in quite the same way as did the superlative Rocky Balboa, but you can’t blame a good movie for not being a great movie.  I’m ready for Creed II.

The Judge

There’s a scene in The Judge in which protagonist Robert Downey, Jr. tries to make an uncomfortable confession.  “This is going to be rough,” he says to himself.

This one line encapsulates my problem with the film.  At this point, I’ve already been watching for over an hour.  I know what he needs to confess, I know to whom he needs to confess it, and I can guess at the very serious consequences this confession will entail.  And yet, The Judge thinks I’m an idiot so it tells me that yes, this confession will be rough. 

This is just one of many ways The Judge thinks I’m an idiot.  It thinks I’m an idiot because it underlines the film with a score designed to inform me, in very clear terms, when to laugh and when to weep.  It thinks I’m an idiot because it’s compelled to show me, again and again, how unimaginably idyllic Indiana really is.  It thinks I’m an idiot because it expects me to believe that absolutely everyone in its protagonist’s life has been stuck in time, like mosquitos in amber, since the day Downey moved away some thirty years before.  [Interlude]Look.  I come from an idyllic small town.  My wife comes from an idyllic small town.  We each moved away from our respective idyllic small towns roughly thirty years ago.  When we return for the occasional visit, we may run into one or two people who remember us and are happy to see us.  But nobody’s accusing us of having run out, of having turned our backs on our roots.  We’re just nice people who moved away to another idyllic town.  Those old friends are happy to see us and chew the fat for a bit, but they’ve moved on.  That’s how life goes. [/Interlude]  It thinks I’m an idiot because it photographs its heroes in the golden light of hagiography, its villains in the harsh blues of villainy.  Basically, it thinks I’m an idiot.

All of which leads me to inquire: what kind of an idiot reads a script that’s basically My CousinVinny with all the jokes torn out and replaced with heavy handed family dynamics, “coming home”
mythology, and uncomfortable incest subplots, and thinks, “Bingo?”

I’m not sure, but I am sure that I’ll be very careful about investing the time to see said idiots’ next film.  I know they didn’t mean to crash the car, but that doesn’t mean I need to be in a hurry to climb back in.

Calvary

Calvary is rough going.

The film begins with an Irish priest (Brendan Gleeson) sitting in confessional.  He’s listening to a man recount his tale of having been raped by a priest at the age of seven.  Then he hears the man say that since the rapist is long dead, the man will take the life of one good priest in a week’s time.  Brendan Gleeson is the good priest.

One could go a lot of places with a story like this.  It could be a pre-murder mystery.  It could be a meditation on faith.  It could be a thriller.  This film’s approach, however, is right there in the title: Calvary.  This is The Passion of the Christ, with the scorn of an Irish village and the sting of cruel words taking the place of the scorn of Jerusalem and the sting of the lash.

You see, this is an Ireland reeling from financial meltdown and revelations of years of sexual abuse at the hands of the clergy.  The people of our priest’s little town have not only lost faith, they’ve turned actively hostile to faith, actively hostile to the church, actively hostile to our priest.

And in the middle of it all, walking his own road to Calvary, our priest struggles to maintain his own dignity, his own faith, his own love.  He’s miserable.

On one level then, we can view Calvary as an exercise in making Brendan Gleeson unhappy.  On another, however, we can see it as a story of the very toughest part of Christianity: the imperative to actively love people who may actively hate you.  As such, Calvary has much to offer the devout viewer.

But that viewer is going to have to work for it.  This is not a film for the faint of heart or faith.

The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 1

Without an extended sequence in the Hunger Games Arena, The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 1 is merely half of a dystopian revolutionary thriller. 

That said, it’s a *good* half of a dystopian revolutionary thriller, thanks to its cast.

I’ve been on the Jennifer Lawrence train since Winter’s Bone.  While I still haven’t quite forgiven her for Silver Linings Playbook, there’s no denying that she’s a movie star through and through: whenever she’s onscreen, she’s the most interesting thing onscreen.  Surround her with supporting players like Rachel McAdams (having a wonderful time), Stanley Tucci, Woody Harrelson, Jeffrey Wright, Julianne Moore, and the late (and legitimately great) Philip Seymour Hoffman, and you have a cast that could elevate a soap commercial to the realm of high art.


And elevate they do, for while this is only half of a story, they fill it full of interesting moments.  I look forward to viewing the other half and seeing how the whole thing hangs together.

Army of Darkness

Attention S-Mart Shoppers:

I doubt it’s possible to love movies without loving Army of Darkness.  This movie has everything: knights, wizards, skeletons, a princess in distress, and a hero with a chainsaw who isn’t afraid to belt out a lusty “Gimme some sugar, baby!” when he has a damsel in his arms.

The film represents the culmination of Sam Raimi’s “Evil Dead” series.  The first, a reasonably straightforward horror movie about college kids in a remote cabin, is respectably scary.  Evil Dead 2: Dead by Dawn, mixes horror with comedy, as when its protagonist amputates his own (possessed) hand atop a stack of books that features A Farewell to Arms.  Army of Darkness goes for full slapstick, with scenes paying comic homage to films as diverse as Return of the Jedi, The Seven Samurai, The Three Stooges, The 7^th Voyage of Sinbad, Gulliver's Travels, and The Day The Earth Stood Still.  It’s goofy, it’s silly, and it’s an all-around good time at the movies.

That’s if you’re an adult.

Last Halloween, I saw Army of Darkness with my pre-teen boy and his friends.  They found it much better than a “good time at the movies.”  In fact, the movie had them howling with laughter, frequently rewinding to re-view parts they’d missed because they’d been laughing so hard.  Somehow, this film’s combination of slapstick and horror resonated in a way I hadn’t expected, turning Army of Darkness from a beloved amusement (for me) to an instant Halloween classic (for them).

And y’know what?  Laughter is catching.  The more they laughed, the more I laughed with them.  And when I laughed at the gags specifically directed to the older members of the audience (there’s a whole Chuck Conners in ‘The Rifleman’ thing going on), they cracked up just because they were in the zone.

So this was the Halloween in which I learned to love Army of Darkness even more.  I didn't think that was possible.  Hail to the king, baby!

3 Recent Screenings

Alive Inside

Alive Inside is a documentary about Dan Cohen, a nursing home volunteer who discovered exposing seniors with dementia to the music of their youth can relight their memories and personalities.

Here’s the deal:  when we’re growing and our brains are still in supersponge mode (a period that lasts roughly from birth through our mid-20s), the music of our youth gets encoded deep in our brains – way back near the stem.  If dementia sets in, that’s the last part to go.  Thus, it’s possible to light up the brain once more by triggering those musical memories.

This isn’t to imply that iPods cure dementia.  It appeared that patients slipped back into their hazes some time after the music stopped.  Nevertheless, while the music played, these people were themselves again in a fundamental way.

That’s a thing of beauty.

Fury

Fury is a by-the-numbers WWII picture, just like they used to make.  Brad Pitt is the grizzled, fatherly first sergeant.  Jon Bernthal is the hick; Shia LeBeouf the preacher; Michael Peña the alcoholic, and Logan Lerman the New Guy.

They hit many of the same beats as the dogfaces from the great Lee Marvin film The Big Red One, and the film doesn’t have much to offer in the way of surprises.  But if you like war movies, you’re sure to like this one.  It touches all the bases.

Hot Tub Time Machine 2

Rude, crude, and mildly amusing, Hot Tub Time Machine 2 is the perfect movie to fold laundry by.

The Story of Adele H

Francoise Truffaut’s The Story of Adele H chronicles the descent into madness of Adele Hugo, daughter Les Miserables author Victor Hugo.  While exiled to the (British) island of Guernsey, Adele fell in love with a seducer named Albert Pinson, a lieutenant in the British Army.  When Pinson’s regiment transferred to Nova Scotia, Adele followed.  When it transferred to Barbados, Adele followed.  She simply refused to believe that the man she’d fallen for had not, in fact, fallen for her.  She broke with reality and wound up in a madhouse.  So, kids, there’s your night out at the movies.

Isabelle Adjani, as Adele, is a fine actress who performs creditably in the title role.  Her very casting, however, struck me as a misstep that created a barrier to my suspension of disbelief.  You see, Adjani ranks among the most beautiful women of her generation – not “interesting beautiful,” but “Greco-Roman statue beautiful.”  I simply could not imagine any young man, particularly one so saddled with debt as Pinson was at the time, passing on the opportunity to marry a woman both so beautiful and so wealthy as Adele Hugo.  I particularly couldn’t imagine an ambitious young British Army officer of the 19^th Century refusing such an opportunity.  Ms. Hugo’s beauty, wealth, and connections would have made a star of her husband at a time when a man could climb the promotion ladder simply by purchasing higher-ranking commissions and being generally regarded as a “good fellow.”  Even knowing that The Story of Adele H was based on the historical record, I think I may have had an easier time of becoming lost in the narrative had its protagonist been somehow more average.

Still, this is an engrossing film.  Though its pacing feels anything but brisk, Adjani is so watchable (and so well-photographed) that we can’t turn away from her descent from romantic to obsessive to lunatic.  The Story of Adele H is one worth seeing.

SMOSH: The Movie

SMOSH, for those of you without children, is the YouTube channel of Ian Hecox and Anthony Padilla.  The duo specializes in adolescent humor, cheap gags, and song parodies.  They’re hammy, they’re crude, and my older boys love them.  My boys aren’t alone: Ian and Anthony have parleyed SMOSH from a couple of YouTube videos into a multimillion dollar empire with a Spanish language affiliate, record deal, and their own movie.  Regardless, this was a movie I decidedly did not want to see.  However, my older kids begged me and I do like to style myself a marginally good father, so I sat down with one either side and locked myself in for a tedious 84 minutes.

I am surprised and delighted to report that, while juvenile, crude, and hammy, SMOSH: The Movie is actually funny.  The film establishes parental goodwill in the very first frame, when it announces itself as an Alex Winter (Bill of Bill &Ted’s Excellent Adventure) film.  [I like Alex Winter.  I want good things for him.  I’m happy he landed the gig.]  It then proceeds into the laziest story imaginable, when our YouTube stars find themselves actually stuck inside YouTube, flitting from video to video on their quest to find and erase the one clip that so humiliated (Ian?  Anthony?  I get them mixed up.) that he can never find true love.

Just when I started thinking about all the chores I could have been doing, however, the gags started rolling in.  And they kept rolling in, one after another.  This is the kind of movie that, while aggressively stupid, is so intent on making you laugh that it just keeps throwing stuff at you until something sticks and you catch yourself chuckling.  Then, once it has broken down your resistance, it throws more silly gags at you until, despite yourself, you find yourself laughing out loud, then laughing again.

Look, don’t get me wrong: this movie still feels like something recorded for nothing in somebody’s living room.  Ian and Anthony are bad actors, they’re surrounded by bad actors (with the notable exception of a beloved supported player from Bill and Ted, whom it’s a pleasure to see onscreen), and the entire affair comes across as B-level stuff.  However, Ian and Anthony are bad actors who are willing to do just about anything for a laugh. 

And y’know what?  That’s good enough for me.  I can’t believe I’m writing this, but I’ll actually queue up Smosh 2.  And I’ll do it with a smile.

Under the Skin

Under the Skin is a great example of why we need more 60-minute featurettes.  This is a mesmerizing film, featuring a brilliant performance from Scarlett Johansson, that’s about 48 minutes too long.

Johansson plays The Monster, albeit a monster who happens to look like Scarlett Johansson in a hooker costume.  She spends the first act of the film (mostly) driving around Glasgow in a windowless van, hunting for single young men.  When she spots a mark, she pulls over and asks for directions.  Once she has the young man talking, she tries to talk him into the van.  Pro tip:  don’t ever let a stranger lure you into a windowless van, even if that stranger looks like Scarlett Johansson in a hooker costume.

Fun fact: many of the film’s early encounters actually happened.  Johansson spent several days and nights driving around Glasgow in a van wired with microphones and hidden cameras, and she really did stop strangers and try to talk them into the vehicle.  Those who declined were chased after by people with waivers.  Those who accepted met the crew hiding in the back of the van and – you guessed it – signed waivers.

Not so fun fact: Under the Skin’s first act is an hour long, though it only takes the audience about twenty minutes to discern The Monster’s pattern and understand that she is growing and changing.  After that, it’s 40 tedious minutes of more of the same, punctuated by the occasional scene of heartbreak and horror.

Those second two acts move along nicely and keep us engaged, and in so doing they give us an inkling of how wonderful this film may have been as a 60-minute featurette.  Under the Skin creates a wonderful, suspenseful, and uneasy (yet meditative) mood.  It does great things with special effects on a very low budget.  It draws a career-highlight performance from its star, who is such a good actress that she can stand, nude, in front of a mirror and keep this male viewer's eyes locked on her face.

This film has so much going for it, I can only imagine how much better it may have been with a more ruthless edit.  As it stands, Under the Skin is good.  At 60 minutes, it could have been great.

Spy

I’ve been slow to climb aboard the Melissa McCarthy bandwagon.  Her performance in Bridesmaids reminded me of Chris Farley, who made a string a successful movies built around fat jokes.  Sadly, Farley was consumed with self-loathing, and the drugs to which he turned eventually killed him.  Thus, it felt cruel to go to the movies just to laugh at the fat lady.  Cruelty is not my idea of a good time.

And yet, there I was: stuck in Coach on a long flight, having already seen most of the pictures the in-flight entertainment system had to offer.  I remembered that Spy garnered good reviews, so I decided to give it a (skeptical) shot.

I laughed all the way through Spy, from the first silly gag involving bats in the CIA Comm Center through the silly gags involving various sequel ideas that played through the closing credits.  Spy is not 90 minutes of laughing at the fat lady.  It’s 90 minutes of laughing with the clever, capable woman who just happens to be a little larger than normal.  Oh, and lots of laughing at Jason Statham.  Jason Statham.  Who knew?

Here’s the setup: McCarthy is a “back room” CIA agent along the lines of Mission: Impossible’s Simon Pegg.  Like Pegg, she winds up doing field work even though nobody (including her) thinks she’s up to the task.  Like Pegg, she turns out to be awesome.

Spy, of course, plays this setup entirely for laughs.  To do so, it recruits a murderer’s row of some of the finest supporting talent working in movies today, from Jude Law to Rose Byrne to Bobby Cannavale to Morena Baccarin to Peter Sarafinowicz to Allison Janney.  And this isn’t the kind of movie in which various big name supporting actors just turn up to cash a paycheck: each of them endows his or her character with enough personality, enough life, to make every moment pop.  Even the Big Bad, while dangerous enough to present a credible threat within the context of the film, exhibits just enough silliness to put a smile on our face.

I loved this movie.  Spy is raunchy and goofy and laugh-out-loud funny from beginning to end, and it’s all that not only without demeaning its star, but with making her absolutely awesome.  Writer/Director Paul Feig nails it, and I’m now firmly aboard the Melissa McCarthy bandwagon.  I can’t wait to see what the two of them do with Ghostbusters.

Music Double Feature

CBGB

CBGB tells the true(ish) story of Hilly Kristal, the owner of New York nightclub CBGB.  

CBGB, of course, was the epicenter of the Punk Rock movement and a launching pad for acts such as The Ramones, Blondie, The Talking Heads, and The Police.

Alan Rickman (CDNW) plays Krystal, a man with no business sense but a great ear for music.  Rickman’s just wonderful: slovenly, disorganized, kind of a jerk, but totally good-hearted; it’s difficult to see that man in this role and imagine him as anything else.

As for the story, well, I imagine that your response to this movie will depend on your affinity for the subject matter.  If you care about the history of alternative music in general (and punk rock in particular), this movie is for you.  If not, well, it’s a peek into a subculture that wasn’t your thing to begin with.  As for me, the soundtrack alone made it a great film to have on in the background while sorting through paperwork, even though it doubled the time required for my project because I kept putting it down to focus on whatever Rickman was up to next.  As such, I enjoyed CBGB.  I think I’ll buy the soundtrack.

Get on Up

Get on Up is a reasonably straightforward biopic, enlivened by an exceptional performance from 42’s Chadwick Bozeman.

This film, a James Brown biography, skips around the artist’s life to show us, warts and all, what this man was about.  A canny businessman, a relentless self-promoter, an artistic genius, a wife beater, a tax cheat, and an all-around SOB, Brown alienated pretty much everyone on his way to the top, and he kept on alienating them once he got there.

But man, that artistic genius part.  That’s really something. 

Chadwick Bozeman captures all of it, with a lightning-in-a-bottle performance that spans a hardscrabble youth, electrifying performing career, and drug-addled old age.  From the speaking voice to the dance moves to the odd, almost palsied shuffle, the actor has James Brown right on down.  The film is worth seeing for him alone.

As an aside, the film captured the imagination of my 15-yr-old, who’s on something of a ‘60s music and history kick.  I see some James Brown CDs infiltrating his regular Doors/Stones/Hendrix rotation in the very near future.

Crimson Peak

Crimson Peak is marvelous, if you like that sort of thing.

That is, if you like haunted mansions.

If you like downright evil, hiss-able villains.

If you like tortured villains.

If you like virtuous, brave heroines.

If you like virtuous, brave heroes.

If you like sumptuous costuming and set design.

If you like Wuthering Heights in particular, and Brontë novels in general.

If you like House of Usher in particular, and Vincent Price movies in general.

If you like Mia Wasikowska, and Jim Beaver, and Jessica Chastain, and Tom Hiddleston, and Charlie Dunham.

If you like slow-burn horror.

If you like jump scares.

If you like movies.

If you like that sort of thing, Crimson Peak is marvelous.

The Martian

I liked The Martian so much, I hope it sparks a genre.

No, not near-future science fiction.  Not Mars.  Not even Survival.  I hope it sparks a genre called “Smart, capable people solving problems.”  Like Apollo 13, and even like All is Lost, it’d be a genre without villains and without gunfire (But ‘splosions are always ok.  What’s the point of a movie camera if you can’t point it at a ‘splosion?).  It’d just be people figuring out how to do stuff. In The Martian, near-future astronaut (and botanist) Matt Damon needs to figure out how to survive being marooned on Mars while NASA scientists need to figure out how to rescue him.  That’s more than enough drama for 144 minutes of film.

Why?  Because figuring out how to do stuff is absolutely fundamental to the human condition.  As such, drama about this process is both universal and captivating (if done right).

Hang on a minute: I’ve just described the “heist” movie.  Smart, capable, professional criminals solving problems are the bread and butter of heist movies.  Apollo 13, All is Lost, and The Martian are basically heist movies in which the characters are trying to figure out how to save a life instead of crack a safe.

Man, I love heist movies.

Ok, back to it.  Drew Goddard adapted The Martian’s screenplay from Andy Weir’s novel of the same name.  Goddard wrote and directed the superlative The Cabin in the Woods, another tightly plotted and thoroughly entertaining film.  In one his promotional interviews, director Ridley Scott said that Goddard’s Martian script was the best he’d seen since Alien, and I believe it.  I can’t wait to see what Goddard writes next.

As for the rest of the pieces of the puzzle, Christopher Orr says it best in this ‘Atlantic’ article.  The Martian is a tale of people who are good at their jobs doing their jobs well, and The Martian is a product of people who are good at their jobs doing their jobs well.  It’s a pleasure to behold.

Oh, on another note: Devin Faraci at birthmoviesdeath.com makes a great point about the inspirational power of this film.  No, not like those silly posters of people rowing crew that one finds on the walls of dispiriting cubicle farms.  The Martian is the kind of movie that inspires kids to grow up to work at JPL, or NASA, or the USDA.  Sure, it’s easy to make astronauts look cool, but your average kid has a better chance of growing up to play in the NBA than make it into the Space Program.  Show me a movie that makes science qua science, math qua math look cool, and you have a movie to which I am absolutely going to drag my kids.

Focus

WARNING: MAJOR SPOILERS FOR FOCUS AHEAD.  This is a “con” movie, so these spoilers could ruin things.  Nevertheless, I don’t think I can write about the film without spoiling it.  Sorry.

Ok.  You’ve been warned.

I have three problems with Focus.  First, it’s a con movie without a long con, only shorter cons that keep the action moving.  Second, it has a romantic element that’s kind of creepy.  Third, costar Margot Robbie, while particularly attractive, is not a particularly good actress.

First, the con.  Early in the film, Smith specifically tells Robbie to misdirect, to deceive, to make the con so invisible to the mark that the mark doesn’t trip until the con man is far away.  It worked on me, because I was misdirected.  I spent the whole movie focused on Robbie, trying to sniff out her misdirections and the long con she had to be pulling on Smith.  But, alas, there was no long con.  What kind of a con movie leaves out the long con, the one in which the student outwits the master?  Or, at least, the one in which the student thinks she’s outwitted the master, only to find out she’s been the mark all along.  Alas, no.  Focus starts out a promising film about the art of the con, but ultimately it just fizzles out into another BS love story.  And there I was, staying focused for 90 minutes for no reason whatsoever.  I mean, c'mon.  It's right there in the title: the imperative Focus.  If you aren't going to follow through on your title, why bother?

Second, the romantic element.  Will Smith is too old to be playing Margot Robbie’s love interest.  His character is supposed to be completely together, but how emotionally and intellectually stunted does a guy have to be to go for someone who never saw Ghostbusters on the big screen?  This whole element of the film creeped me out, as if it were the collective wish fulfillment of a bunch of old men in the entertainment industry.

Third, Robbie has this scene in which she’s supposed to break down and cry.  She can’t quite pull this off, so she does that thing where she covers her face with her hands and just sorta heaves her shoulders up and down a few times.  I don’t care how attractive an actress is: if she isn’t willing to learn her craft, I’m not willing to spend 90 minutes watching her.

So, there you have it: no long con, no compelling love story, one poor performance in a major role.  Focus on another film.

12 Years a Slave

12 Years a Slave is a great movie.  I never want to see it again.

This harrowing film, based on the memoirs of escaped slave Solomon Northup, brings to life the cruelty and inhumanity of the antebellum South through a faithful recreation of Northup’s luring away from his New York home, subsequent enslavement, and eventual repatriation to the land of the free.

The recreation is served by the production designer’s careful attention to detail, scarring performances on the part of the cast, and careful direction and photography that highlight the jarring cruelty of slavery by showing just how routine that cruelty had become.

The production design is immaculate.  From period construction equipment to architecture to clothing, 12 Years a Slave is better than a museum: it doesn’t just show us where people lived and what they used and wore; it shows us how they lived there, how they used the materials to hand, how the clothes they wore actually looked in motion.

The cast, well, it’s remarkable. Lupita Nyong'o as a fellow slave trying to maintain some humanity provides an unforgettable performance.  Benedict Cumberbatch and Michael Fassbender, as slaveholders of variable degrees of humanity, provide contrasting images of the corruption of absolute power.  Paul Dano, as a foreman who, though below Cumberbatch and Fassbender on the social ladder, absolutely assumes his God-given superiority over the slaves under his dominion, creates a character of both weakness and power – a difficult, but important, station to portray. The anchor, as he is for so many films, is the great Chiwetel Ejiofor, who Can Do No Wrong.  His intelligence, his humanity, his fear, and his desperation provide both a hero for the film and an audience identification character.  From Dirty Pretty Things to Kinky Boots and now to 12 Years a Slave, Ejiofor is putting together a filmography that’s marking him as one of the most compelling actors working today.

Of course, without the right director and photographer, all this hard work would come to naught.  Director Steve McQueen and DP Sean Bobbitt, however, are up to the task.  Watching their film, one can almost feel the heat and humidity of the Louisiana Bayou.  One can almost smell the stench of a slave quarters.  Most importantly, one can understand how life goes on even as men and women are captured, tortured, raped, murdered, and buried in shallow graves time and again, year after year.

And of course, this is all part of our American heritage, as much a part of the fabric of our country as the rockets’ red glare or the New Deal.  It’s a part of our heritage we know about, but kind of gloss over because it’s so painful to contemplate.  That pain is why I don’t want to see 12 Years a Slave again, though I’m glad I saw it once.  Do not miss 12 Years a Slave.

Life Itself; All is Lost

Purely by coincidence, this turned out to be a death-themed post.  Sorry about that.  Here's a picture of a puppy and a kitten.

Life Itself

Roger Ebert is to the amateur movie blogger as Big Papi is to the beer league softball player.  Life Itself, a biographical documentary about the man and his declining months, doesn’t tell us much we don’t already know from watching his shows, reading his reviews and his blog, and following his career.  Nevertheless, it makes us part of the celebration, makes us witnesses to the man.  It’s an insightful, touching film, and I think Roger would have given it a thumbs up.

All is Lost

I watch a lot of movies on the installment plan: 20 minutes on the elliptical here, half an hour in an airport lounge there.  Do not watch All is Lost on the installment plan.

The movie’s about a solo mariner (Robert Redford) sailing his yacht across the Pacific Ocean.  When the yacht collides with a floating shipping container which smashes a hole below the waterline, the mariner handles the situation calmly and competently.  When faced with more, compounding problems, the mariner handles them in the same fashion.  Sometimes, however, life throws more at you than you can handle, calm competence or no.

In a way, All is Lost works as a metaphor for life.  We sail along in our prime, with the wind at our backs and the sun overhead.  Then something goes wrong, then something else, then another thing.  We handle it all as best we can.  We fight against the dying of the light.  But the light is temporary; it’s meant to die.  And calm as we remain, competently as we handle one health scare after another, we degrade, and fail, and sink beneath the waves.

Heavy stuff, I know.  So heavy, in fact, that I found All is Lost rather hard going.  I’m currently in the apogee of my own life, and contemplating my inevitable decline isn’t really my favorite way to spend a couple of hours.  Still, I’m glad I saw this film.  It’s ambitious, and it executes on that ambition.  If Robert Redford was once the perfect embodiment of death, he’s now the perfect embodiment of the process of dying.  You could do with a worse guide to inform you that all is lost.