The Croods; Rush; A Most Wanted Man

The Croods

The Croods is fine.  It’s pretty, it tells a nice story, and its voice cast includes personal favorites Nicholas Cage, Emma Stone, and Cloris Leachman.

That’s about all I can say for it, however.  I didn’t laugh.  I didn’t cry.  I just sorta rocked along pleasantly for an hour and half.  That ain’t bad.  It ain’t great, either.  It’s fine.  No, really.  It’s fine.

Rush

I spent the first hour or so of Rush not enjoying the movie.  Like Amadeus, the film sets up a conflict between a natural talent (Chris Hemsworth, a British Formula One driver) and a grinder (Daniel Brühl, his Austrian nemesis (the actor also appears in A Most Wanted Man, discussed below)).   Thing is, I identified with the grinder. Hemsworth’s character put my teeth on edge.

Then the movie took an unexpected turn, went in an entirely different direction than I’d expected, and made me hold my breath, tense in sympathy to the action onscreen, and hang on every twist and turn of the competitors’ races.

I feel like I started out with Days of Thunder and finished with something wonderful.  Rush is the most surprising movie I’ve seen this year. 

A Most Wanted Man

Some deaths get to you, even if you never really knew the person in question.  I still miss Phil Hartman.  I miss Philip Seymour Hoffman.

In A Most Wanted Man, Hoffman plays the Hamburg chief of a small German intelligence organization occupied with hunting terrorists.  The film, based on a John le Carré novel, occupies itself not with fast cars and gadgets, but with the nondescript, dedicated, and frequently exhausted people who actually make the intelligence community go.  Hoffman, overweight, disheveled, and brilliant, is a perfect match for this world.  His character belongs in dimly lit bars, crafting plans and making deals, and I believed in him every step of the way.

The plot?  Well, it’s a le Carré story, so it features twists and surprises and a kind of mundane weariness that feels all the more immediate because we can imagine it happening right in the next booth over.

The effect?  Well, mostly sadness.  Sadness for the characters in the story, but particular sadness for the loss of Philip Seymour Hoffman, one of our generation’s great actors and a talent that I’m sure to miss for a long time to come.

Moneyball

When I heard that Moneyball was in production, I thought it would fail.  How do you take a book about statistical analysis and turn it into a narrative film?

Moneyball succeeds by changing focus from the book.  The book, as I said, is about statistical analysis and uses one team’s experiment with it to educate the reader.  The movie is about Billy Beane, the manager of said team, his journey, and how his grasp of the potential of statistical analysis changed his sport, his team, and his life.

Brad Pitt plays Beane as smart and savvy, yet insecure.  He’s a baseball guy, but he’s so totally a product of his lifelong immersion in the sport that he’s a baseball guy only.  When he spots an influential whiz kid (Jonah Hill) in an opposing manager’s office, he understands the value of a completely different perspective.  It’s a perspective so different that betting on it could cost him his career.  There’s your drama.  There’s your movie. 

Now, I like baseball.  I go to several games per year, I follow the Nationals in the Post, and believe that Marconi invented radio specifically to give the world the magic that is Vin Scully.  But you don’t have to like baseball to like this movie.  You have to like scrappy underdogs, you have to like things that don’t go boom, and you have to like Brad Pitt.  I like all three, and I like this picture.  I want to see it again as soon as I can.  

The Conspirator

The Conspirator tells the story of Mary Surratt (Robin Wright).  She owned the boarding house where the Lincoln Assassination conspirators met.  She didn’t do anything wrong.  She hanged for it.

That’s the hook, at least.  It really tells the story of Frederick Aiken (James McAvoy), an idealistic young attorney and Union war hero who takes her case.  Aiken’s a believer, you see, in the Constitution and due process.  He believes in the jury of one’s peers and the rule of law.  He can’t imagine America as a wounded, bloodthirsty nation, one out for revenge even at the cost of its soul.

That’s the text, at least.  The subtext is an exploration of hubris and vengeance and the injustices they wreak.

That’s the subtext, at least.  The context is an America ten years on from 9/11, an America that has recoiled from its own lashings out and now seems more interested in taking its own measure than sharpening new swords.

And of course it’s very well done.  Robert Redford knows how to direct a film and he can attract the best talent around.  But that subtext, at least in today’s context, feels a bit too on the nose.  We can tut at cynical old men, now long dead, and compare them to cynical old men who still haunt the studios of Fox News.  But this film can’t teach us anything about them because it focuses too closely on its text.  It assumes the rest and assumes that we’ll assume it, and it leaves those of us who refuse the easy answer on the outside.

So there I sat, admiring the film’s recreation of post Civil War Washington, admiring its performances, and enjoying the courtroom drama of a case whose outcome I already knew.  But I couldn’t shake the film’s simplicity of viewpoint and its almost too casual judgementalism.  The Conspirator will engage your imagination and it may break your heart, but it should light off at least one alarm bell in your brain.  It certainly did in mine.