REVIEW: To the Wonder

To the Wonder (2013): Written and directed by: Terrence Malick. Starring: Ben Affleck, Olga Kurylenko, Rachel McAdams, Javier Bardem and Romina Mondello. Rated R (Fleeting glimpses of breasts). Running time: 113 minutes.

2 stars (out of four)

Offhand, I can only recall one instance – no, wait, I’ve just thought of another – when a character walks at a pace faster than an idle stroll in To the Wonder, Terrence Malick’s dispiritingly limp new film. As Mr. Malick’s ever-moving camera swirls about his subjects, you may find yourself wishing someone would take a sure step forward and walk with something resembling purpose and conviction.

But this is not a film that places much value on certainty. To the Wonder, though it is not to be confused with the imperative Lil’ Jon refrain, does actually feature its share of characters moving to the windows. Standing beside the windows of homes, churches and motel rooms, they sometimes caress and kiss one another but more often they simply gaze outside looking for… for what?

For happiness, I suppose. Also empathy and love. The film’s characters are trapped inside themselves, longing for a lasting and meaningful connection to another person. This is, at least, how I saw the movie but it is abstract enough to invite multiple interpretations.

To the Wonder follows, in mostly linear fashion, a relationship in decline. A French woman (Olga Kurylenko), abandoned by another man some years earlier, decides to move to a rural Midwestern town where she and her daughter (Tatiana Chiline) will live with an American man (Ben Affleck). Terrence Malick also interweaves memories from the past, chases tangents by following the lives of other townspeople and ends on what I understood to be a fantasy.

We never learn how the two met but it is soon clear that the romance is now gone and the love was perhaps never there to begin with. Ben Affleck’s character as we see him is cold and detached. He is usually down for some fondling (beside one of those windows) or sex but we can see from the anguished expressions of Olga Kurylenko that something vital is missing from their relationship.

This man remains at a distance, not only from Ms. Kurylenko, but from us as well. His presence looms large over the film but we never get a sense of his internal emotions, not even when he is alone. He wanders through the muck and dirt of construction sites, apparently surveying the damage being done to the town’s water, which has been tainted by chemicals, but no expression ever crosses his face. Is he weary? Defeated? Indifferent? Mr. Malick does not offer any clues. Ben Affleck has hardly any lines in the entire film; he just walks around stone-faced and vacant-looking.

Call it an artistic gamble, an experiment, a bold choice, but it drains the emotional power from the movie. And with the heart of the film missing, its curious diversions are all the more frustrating. The midsection of the film, which depicts a romance between Ben Affleck and an old flame played by Rachel McAdams, adds nothing new. He is the same with her as with Ms. Kurylenko. An opportunity to flesh out a new side to this opaque character is lost.

Javier Bardem, as a priest, walks around town, speaking with and blessing the impoverished. Some are physically deformed from the contaminated water. His scenes in this ostensible leper colony offer some fascinating images worth chewing on and mulling over but they feel too disconnected from the rest of the film. It is difficult to know what to make of them.

And this is what makes To the Wonder such a tantalizing but ultimately underwhelming film. Mr. Malick is known for shooting lots of material and whittling it down to its final form in the editing room, and the results are usually mesmerizing. His films are lyrical suites of images and naturalistic moments caught on film; structurally, they resemble musical compositions more than narrative storytelling. But something is missing this time.

You get the sense that the raw material of To the Wonder has potential to make a very strong movie but that Terrence Malick has cut the film in a way that dampens this material’s impact and mutes the emotions. There are at least a dozen breathtaking shots in To the Wonder and I find myself thinking about the film days later, recalling images from it the way one does a dream. All the more disappointing then that the actual experience of watching To the Wonder was such a chore.

The exception is Olga Kurylenko who, particularly in the film’s second half, gives a forceful performance. She is lonely and desperate for love, and cannot understand why the man who invited her to live with him continues to deny her any kind of real intimacy. In one scene, a friend (Romina Mondello) visits her and the two stroll through the wide streets of this flat Midwestern town (leisurely of course). The friend yells out. Where is everyone? Is this whole town dead? Where is the life? The passion? All valid questions.

- Steve Avigliano, 5/2/13

REVIEW: Skyfall

Skyfall (2012): Dir. Sam Mendes. Written by: Neal Purvis, Robert Wade and John Logan. Based on the character created by Ian Fleming. Starring: Daniel Craig, Judi Dench, Javier Bardem, Ralph Fiennes, Naomie Harris, Bérénice Lim Marlohe, Albert Finney and Ben Whishaw. Rated PG-13 (Guns and girls). Running time: 143 minutes.

3 stars (out of four)

James Bond was having a bit of an identity crisis. Where does the suave secret agent fit into the movie landscape of 2012? And do we even need him anymore? If Tom Cruise’s Mission Impossible movies have a firm grip on over-the-top, cartoonish action, and the Bourne franchise continues to hold the mantle of gritty realism, what can 007 offer that his American competitors cannot?

2006’s Casino Royale, the first film to feature Daniel Craig in the role, reinvented Bond as a stoic hero. Mr. Craig’s rugged face and understated performance gave the character a noir edge that nicely offset Bond’s more charming side. For my taste, 2008’s Quantum of Solace took the character too far in that direction – too brooding, too moody – and risked encroaching on the well-worn territory of other franchise reboots that adopted a darker tone, namely Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight movies.

Skyfall, Mr. Craig’s third Bond movie and the twenty-third overall in the series, strives for balance. There are moments of sheer ridiculousness (as when a construction excavator is driven while atop a speeding train), plenty of breakneck chases and a few brutal fistfights. Daniel Craig is as intensely focused as ever but there are hints of a smile hiding behind the rim of his martini glass. And as for my question posed above, Skyfall answers that too.

Elegance is the special ingredient that makes Bond distinct from his peers and keeps the series a worthwhile entertainment. Skyfall is a classy action picture, evenly paced and in no great rush (though at 143 minutes, it is too long). Director Sam Mendes soaks in the film’s international locales and shoots them in rich, frequently gorgeous wide shots. The movie hops from the rainy streets of London to the neon-streaked skyscrapers of Shanghai and ends at a stately abandoned manor in the Scottish countryside.

Mr. Mendes also indulges himself at the right times. The big explosion that punctuates the film’s climax has to be one of the biggest, and certainly one of the most thorough and satisfying, movie explosions in recent years. And in the opening scene he spends what would surely be the whole budget of other movies on a chase that begins on foot, blasts through a Turkish marketplace with cars and motorcycles, and ends on the aforementioned train.

So, yes, this is a good Bond film. I would probably rank Casino Royale a little higher, but I’m hardly a Bond scholar, so take that for what it’s worth. I’ll admit there were a few moments when the movie lost me and I had no clue what was happening or why but I was never bored.

How could I be with Javier Bardem strutting around as Raoul Silva, the blond-haired, flamboyant villain of the film? Mr. Bardem, clearly enjoying himself, delivers his monologues with no shortage of flair. His laugh is a sinister little laugh but he means to do great harm to Bond’s employer, MI6. A disgruntled former agent, Silva has major beef with M (Judi Dench), the agency’s head, and will not be satisfied until she is dead.

Meanwhile, MI6 faces scrutiny from government bureaucrats who question the spy agency’s ability to function effectively after a list of undercover agents is stolen and leaked to the public. Leading the investigation is a government higher-up played with subtle menace by Ralph Fiennes.

It is up to James Bond to protect M and preserve the agency’s future. Naturally, while saving the day, he also finds time to tangle with a lovely named Sévérine (Bérénice Lim Marlohe) as well as fellow field agent Eve (Naomie Harris). The always great Albert Finney makes an appearance late in the film too as a wily, old groundskeeper.

Skyfall is marked by a back-to-basics approach that works well. When a brainy kid shows up as Q (Ben Whishaw), MI6’s technology developer, he gives Bond a sleek and simple gun and nothing else. “Exploding pens and the like,” he says. “We don’t do that anymore.” There are probably a few too many winks and nudges like this in the film, as though the filmmakers were trying to defend the franchise’s relevance with coy in-jokes, but I appreciate the movie’s straightforwardness.

Even the theme song by Adele, the first actually decent Bond theme in years if not decades, has the feel of a series reinvigorated. Skyfall is not another revamp of the franchise but rather an affirmation of its continued quality. There is still a place for Bond at the movies and he didn’t even need to change up his style to prove it.

- Steve Avigliano, 11/12/12

BEST OF THE DECADE - #3: No Country For Old Men

No Country For Old Men (2007): Written and directed by Joel and Ethan Coen, based on the novel by Cormac McCarthy. Starring: Tommy Lee Jones, Javier Bardem, Josh Brolin. Rated R (strong graphic violence and some language). Running time: 122 minutes.

**NOTE: This review freely discusses the final scenes of the film, so be forewarned of spoilers.

Strange, that after three viewings, I’m still at a loss to identify what exactly No Country For Old Men is. The main storyline featuring Llewelyn Moss’s (Josh Brolin) discovery of $2 million in drug money and killer Anton Chirgurh’s (Javier Bardem) subsequent pursuit of him are the makings of a fine crime thriller. Sheriff Ed Tom Bell’s (Tommy Lee Jones) investigation adds an element of a police procedural to film, but after much of the main action concludes, the film curiously stays with him for an additional 20 minutes. If you ask the Coen Brothers, they’d call the film a comedy, but perhaps it’s more of an absurdist drama, a comment on the randomness of crime and violence. Its lack of a clear identity is one of its mysteries, and in attempting to identity the parts of No Country, one begins to get at its intent.

The film is set near the Texas/Mexico border in 1980, when drug-related violence was at a peak from illegal trades across the border. However, if not for specific time markers, we might think the film is set in a post-apocalyptic world. In one scene, as Moss runs on foot from a group of Mexican drug dealers, a bolt of lightning splits the sky. Another scene sets a gritty standoff in an eerily quiet street that only offers parked cars as cover. Jones’s aged Sheriff Bell explains in his opening monologue, he doesn’t know what time make of this new world’s crime. The darkness and brutality of the violence he’s faced with has no logic or reasoning, and it appears to him that the world around him is becoming just as bleak.

Anton Chigurh presents himself as a product of this environment, and his identity is a mystery in itself. Bell thinks he’s a ghost. Or is he an incarnation of Death? Both theories are refuted in one scene that shows him bandaging a gunshot wound, revealing him to be very much human. Still, Chigurh views himself as more of a force than a man. For him, the murders he commits are not his choice, and he decides people’s fates by a coin toss. “I got here the same way the coin did,” he says. He is simply facilitating our eventual deaths. There is no systematic technique to his killings – he is not a serial killer in this sense – but he does retain a consistent tone and attitude. In several scenes, he speaks calmly to his potential victims, telling one man to “Hold still” and inquiring into another man’s family life. In others, he acts quickly and efficiently, and the Coen Brothers do not cut away from these killings. In this sense, the camera is as unflinching as Chigurh is. If the violence feels gratuitous, Sheriff Bell shares your view.

As the characters move through this bleak world, the pace remains methodical, and there is barely any musical score, with several sequences presnted in near silence. As a result, these scenes take on a chilling, sober air, and we find ourselves drawn to them with an almost animalistic fascination as Llewelyn fights for survival. The dialogue is minimalistic, and though the Coen Brothers claim to have simply opened up Cormac McCarthy’s novel and transcribed the dialogue, the pacing and delivery of it are decidedly Coen-esque. Watch how Javier Bardem takes the time to chew cashews in between lines of the first coin toss scene and raises his eyebrows to emphasize a point just before leaving. Later, a frank exchange between Llewellyn, dressed only a hospital gown, and a salesman elicits a laugh when the man states that, “It’s unusual” for a customer to come in without clothes on. These touches of humor and strangeness seep into the film without ever disturbing the film’s solemnity.

One of the main sources of mystery surrounding the film comes from what at first appears to be an extended epilogue after the main action has ended. The focus is redirected to Bell as he struggles to understand the world he is now a part of, ultimately conceding that he has neither the strength nor the will to actively fight back. A conversation with his uncle, a retired sheriff, convinces him this resignation is for the best; the evil forces in the world are too much for him. The scene that follows presents the film’s only glimmer of hope, a meeting between Llewelyn’s wife, Carla Jean (Kelly Macdonald) and Chigurh, who she finds in her home. When asked to call Chigurh’s coin toss, she refuses, stating that the coin has no say. Her resistance to Chigurh’s game expresses a belief that the world, Chigurh included, does not need to be the way it is. The scene cuts before we see his actions, but he checks the soles of his shoes in the next shot, and we know from a previous scene where he lifts his feet from a spreading pool of blood that he has killed her. The film returns to Bell for the final scene, ending with his recounts of two dreams featuring his father. He explains how his father never saw these times, and perhaps he wishes he hadn’t either. Reinforcing the theme of changing times is the sound of a clock in the background that is heard after the cut to black and into the credits. In the dream, Bell’s father is “going on ahead” to build a fire in the dark, perhaps a sanctuary in the afterlife of some sort, and in time, Bell will be joining him.

No Country For Old Men is a virtually perfectly edited film; nothing unnecessary is said or shown. It showcases the peak of the Coens’ craftsmanship, every shot a beautiful visualization of McCarthy’s bleak world, every character, no matter how minor, a fleshed out individual. It is a film that exists outside strict genre identity, delivering a potent and uncompromising take on a brutal and violent country.

- Steve Avigliano, 2/10/10