REVIEW: Lincoln

Lincoln (2012): Dir. Steven Spielberg. Written by: Tony Kushner. Based on the book Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln by Doris Kearns Goodwin. Starring: Daniel Day-Lewis, Sally Field, David Strathairn, Tommy Lee Jones, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, James Spader, John Hawkes, Tim Blake Nelson and Lee Pace. Rated PG-13 (Bribery, slander, demagoguery. Politics as usual). Running time: 150 minutes.

4 stars (out of four)

The first great sigh of relief in Lincoln comes early in the film. The former president reclines in an armchair, his feet propped up, while he idly describes a dream to his wife. The sight is likely not the image of the famous leader most have in their minds. I suppose my mental image of Abraham Lincoln, culled from a sketch in some grade school textbook or another, is of him standing behind a podium, gesticulating forcefully as he gives a speech. (Fear not, there is plenty of that in this movie too.) Yet there is a hint of familiarity in seeing Lincoln in this relaxed state, speaking freely. He feels like a real person.

Coming into this movie, you may have your reservations. You may presume it has a certain amount of stuffiness that is reasonable to expect from a historical biography of Abraham Lincoln directed by Steven Spielberg (one of the few living directors who may end up getting his own biopic one day). But the air is soon cleared of most of that.

You may be relieved to find that Lincoln is not the story of a heroic figure, a demigod who ended the Civil War, freed the slaves and renewed the American Dream for millions. Lincoln instead tells the story of a man – the most unsavory kind of man too! a politician! – who worked hard to do all of the above long before the gloss of history transformed him into something greater than a man.

Abraham Lincoln, compassionately played here by Daniel Day-Lewis, is a sensitive man. He is intelligent, well read and well spoken. He has a gift for orating and bringing crowds of onlookers cheering to their feet. But his skills as a speaker are not limited to grand arenas where his voice rises in thrilling crescendos. He is just as capable performing for a smaller audience – and seems even to prefer it – quietly sharing amusing anecdotes with his cabinet, with soldiers, with whoever is there to listen.

He is humble but, being a man of great conviction, does not wear the power afforded him by his prestigious position lightly. He sees it as his responsibility and his sworn duty to fight for what he believes no matter how seemingly insurmountable the obstacles are that stand in his way.

And here I go hyperbolizing, no better than my old textbooks. Lincoln, however, offers something more interesting than blind hero worship.

This is a remarkably well-researched film, elegantly adapted by playwright Tony Kushner from the nonfiction book, Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln by Doris Kearns Goodwin. Mr. Kushner’s script, marked by a persistent love of facts over melodramatic interpretations, will no doubt be adored by history buffs. But the film’s emphasis on the nuanced mechanisms of American politics serves a greater purpose. Lincoln depicts the president as a hard working politician who knew how to use the system to achieve his goals.

It is January 1865 and, two months after his reelection, Lincoln is in a position of considerable political power. The Civil War is winding down and his popularity in the Union ensures public support of just about any legislation he seeks to push through Congress. Against the better judgment of his cabinet, however, Lincoln sees a window of opportunity to fight for something riskier. Now is the time, he believes, to pass a thirteenth amendment to the Constitution, one that will abolish slavery.

The ambitiousness of this amendment is soon apparent when we meet the divided and bitterly partisan House of Representatives. The House chamber roils like the Colosseum as members of the Democratic opposition take to the floor for a series of vitriolic speeches condemning the amendment. Among the most vocal of them is Representative Fernando Wood (a fine Lee Pace), the de facto leader of the Democrats whose entertaining sermons paint Lincoln as a power-hungry tyrant who must be stopped at all costs.

Even Republicans in Lincoln’s own party are wary of fighting for the amendment now, when the end of the Civil War is so near. But if the Lincoln administration waits until after the War, the legality of the president’s Emancipation Proclamation, a temporary measure made possible by Lincoln’s war powers, may be called into question, and the fate of so many freed slaves would be uncertain.

So Lincoln must rely on unanimous support from Republicans in addition to flipping a few crucial votes of Democrats if he hopes pass the amendment. The fervent abolitionist and curmudgeonly old-timer (Tommy Lee Jones, who else?) Representative Thaddeus Stevens proves to be a useful ally. His sometimes crude and insult-laden tirades on the House floor help corral Republicans behind the cause.

Meanwhile, Secretary of State William Seward (David Strathairn) recruits a band of lobbyists (John Hawkes, Tim Blake Nelson and James Spader) to convert vulnerable Democrats by offering them cushy jobs in exchange for votes. Their attempts to do so, chronicled throughout the film in a series of farcical scenes, expose a much less romantic but no less important side to American politics. A vote procured through bribery is still a vote.

Though the nitty-gritty of the political process takes up the bulk of the film, Lincoln also reveals the president’s human side. Lincoln’s wife, Mary Todd (Sally Field), tormented by life in the White House, struggles to support her husband publicly though their marriage is in decline. Lincoln also tries to protect his son, Robert (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), from the horrors of the War but the boy insists on enlisting, refusing to remain on the sidelines of history.

Captured in the sepia-tinged soft glow of Janusz Kamiński’s photography and accompanied by the strains of a typically powerful John Williams score, Lincoln has the look and feel of a film aiming for a level of prestige worthy of its subject. But the film’s excellence is not superficial. This beautifully crafted movie does not just recount history but pulls an absorbing story out of it and illuminates the past in vibrant, living detail. The final scenes drag on too long and give us more than we need but I'll forgive Mr. Spielberg a few grace notes following such a masterful symphony.

Anchored by a fully realized and wholly compelling performance, Lincoln presents not only a man who led according to the morals and convictions he held so deeply but a man who appreciated the imperfect system that allows an individual to fight for those morals. Watching the relentless feuding and mudslinging of the congressmen in this film, you may dismally conclude that though the contents of the debates have changed between 1865 and today, the tenor of Washington has not. But Lincoln is an ode to that messy and often frustrating democratic process and a tribute to one man who understood better than perhaps anyone how to achieve greatness with it.

- Steven Avigliano, 11/23/12

REVIEW: Looper

Looper (2012): Written and directed by Rian Johnson. Starring: Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Bruce Willis, Emily Blunt, Jeff Daniels and Paul Dano. Rated R (The future is not a happy place.) Running time: 118 minutes.

3 stars (out of four)

The premise of Looper is the kind of big sci-fi concept that’s so good it carries the whole film. The dense, knotty plot will appeal to puzzle-solvers who loved Inception and may well frustrate many others but the movie’s success rests heavily on the degree to which you accept the following:

The year is 2044. Thirty years in the future (that is, in 2074) time travel is possible but has been outlawed. Ingeniously, the mob uses it to carry out hits, sending victims back in time with a bag over their head. They arrive in the past on their knees in a field, a warehouse, or somewhere similarly out of the way, and are killed on the spot by “loopers,” for-hire assassins wielding high-powered shotguns.

Loopers are paid well enough – for reasons never totally clear to me, they are paid in slabs of solid silver – but have pretty bleak contracts with their mob boss, Abe (Jeff Daniels). Termination of a looper’s contract means termination of his life. He receives a handsome payout and enjoys the next thirty years until a bag is thrown over his head and is transported back in time to be killed by his younger self. Most loopers accept this as a grim fact of their trade.

Word through the temporal grapevine, however, is that a new mob kingpin in the future is ending the looper program. He’s closing all the loops, so to speak, sending every looper into the past to their death whether they’ve asked for an end to their contract or not.

Joe (Joseph Gordon-Levitt underneath some very convincing makeup and prosthetics that provide continuity between the present and future) is a looper. He enjoys the cavalier lifestyle associated with his work; he takes narcotics through eye drops, goes to the club with his best pal (Paul Dano) and has the standard Oedipal relationship with a prostitute (Piper Perabo) that all brooding men in movies have. Imagine his surprise when one day, on the job, his future self appears in the form of Bruce Willis – on his knees to be killed but without a bag to hide his identity – and books it.

What does Present Joe do? If he doesn’t hunt down and kill Future Joe, he’ll have to answer to Abe in the present day. If he can kill Future Joe, he’ll at least be able to enjoy the next few decades, moral and metaphysical trauma notwithstanding.

If all this sounds complicated, you’re right – it is. But Looper has a reassuringly flippant attitude toward its mythology. During one confrontation between the two Joes at a diner, a highlight of the film, the Bruce Willis iteration dismisses a logistical question about the rules of time travel. They could sit there all day drawing charts and diagrams, he says, but he doesn’t care about that. What matters is the here and now, subjective though those concepts may be.

There is more to the film than I’ve mentioned but describing it all would be difficult, not to mention spoil some surprises. For a while the movie seems as though it will play out like a sci-fi variation on The Fugitive, with Present and Future Joe playing hunter and hunted, respectively. But a mid-film development invites meditation on the age-old time travel question: Is it ethical to punish someone for a crime they’ve yet to commit if it means preventing future tragedy? The film’s center of gravity during this latter half shifts from Joe to a remarkably precocious kid (Pierce Gagnon) and his tenacious mother (Emily Blunt).

Personally, I prefer the movie’s setup to its payoff but don’t let that discourage you from seeing it. Writer/director Rian Johnson’s noir-tinged style (carried over partially from his debut, the highly stylized and incredibly fun nostalgia binge Brick) makes Looper addicting entertainment. The script has wit and rhythm; the dialogue during the diner scene crackles like water in a pan of hot oil. Joe has the charismatic appeal of the classic Bogart antiheroes. (In a dry voiceover, he reveals that ten percent of the population in 2044 has a telekinetic mutation. “Assholes levitating quarters in bars to pick up girls,” he explains.)

Looper makes a genuine effort to be Great Science Fiction, which is kind of thrilling to watch even if it falls a bit short. The last act feels less sure of itself than what precedes it (a barrage of bullets fired by Bruce Willis late in the film seems to be from another movie entirely) but a great idea is still a great idea. With any luck, Rian Johnson has a few more in store for us.

- Steve Avigliano, 10/9/12

REVIEW: Premium Rush

Premium Rush (2012): Dir. David Koepp. Written by: David Koepp and John Kamps. Starring: Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Michael Shannon, Aaron Tveit, Dania Ramirez, Jamie Chung and Wolé Parks. Rated PG-13 (Scrapes and bruises). Running time: 95 minutes.

3 stars (out of four)

Premium Rush is a fun new action movie with a pretty forgettable title. (I foresee many people searching in vain at their local Redbox for Premium Ride, Rush Delivery or, most likely, That Bike Movie.) But don’t let the seeming staleness of the movie’s title discourage you from seeking it out. Premium Rush is a lively series of crosstown chase scenes, nearly all of which are on bicycles, buoyed by a sense of humor and the dependably likable Joseph Gordon-Levitt.

Mr. Gordon-Levitt plays Wilee (pronounced like the Coyote), a bike messenger in Manhattan. Bike messengers, he explains in voice-over narration, are still very much needed in New York. When e-mail is inadequate and regular mail is too slow but you just have to get something from Point A to Point B, the city turns to them.

In that same voice-over, he describes his relationship to his fellow messengers as a sort of brotherhood, a comradery due at least in part to a mutual hatred of cab drivers. Because they draw the ire of most every other New Yorker, they have to look out for each other. I don’t know if any of this is true but it seems believable enough and the animosity of every non-biking citizen in the film adds some nice touches. Cops are constantly yelling at them, cars beeping at them and pedestrians leaping out of their way.

Wilee rides around the city on a custom-built bike with no brakes. (“Brakes are death,” he says, though I’m not quite sure why.) He runs red lights, weaves through traffic at reckless speeds and maneuvers around any number of obstacles with a host of fancy tricks and jumps. His former girlfriend, Vanessa (Dania Ramirez), thinks he has a death wish, an opinion echoed by Wilee’s professional and romantic rival, Manny (Wolé Parks).

All three are tremendously skilled riders. Personally, when I ride a bike, I all but pray I don’t break my neck. Needless to say, I was in awe of these characters. I hold an even deeper admiration for the stuntmen and stuntwomen who worked on this movie. A whopping forty of the film’s ninety-one minutes features action on bikes.¹ Think about that for a moment. Roughly half of Premium Rush takes place in motion. The technical logistics of shooting a movie like this staggers me.

The plot of Premium Rush focuses on the delivery of one envelope, the contents of which are irrelevant but the value of which is apparently huge. Wilee picks up the envelope from Nima (Jamie Chung), an acquaintance of his and a current student at Columbia Law where Wilee recently dropped out. So far, this appears to be a routine job.

Wilee is just leaving the campus, however, when Bobby (Michael Shannon) flags him down. Bobby claims to be an officer investigating Nima. There has been a misunderstanding, Bobby says. He needs to see that envelope. No can do, says Wilee. That would break the ethical code of bike messaging. The envelope must be delivered as originally requested.

What follows is the first of many good chase scenes, this one featuring a snarling Michael Shannon behind the wheel of a car in hot pursuit of Joseph Gordon-Levitt. Mr. Shannon, who specializes in playing loose cannons (see also: his Oscar-nominated work in Revolutionary Road and his star-making turn in last year’s excellent Take Shelter) and he plays a good one here as a desperate man with a gambling debt. He is, by turns, funny and frightening, the latter usually immediately following the former.

He even hijacks the movie for a solid fifteen minutes in a mid-film sequence that fleshes out his character’s backstory. Actually, the whole midsection of Premium Rush becomes something of an ensemble with a series of interlocking flashbacks that reveal the envelope’s significance.

Director David Koepp (who co-wrote the script with John Kamps) manages to not only organize the story’s various pieces in an easy-to-follow flow but also maintains visual coherence during the chase scenes. Characters are rarely in the same place for very long but I never had any difficulty understanding where they were in relation to everyone else and where they were heading next. Credit should also be given to editors Derek Ambrosi and Jill Savitt for making a slick and efficient product out of a kinetic and sometimes complicated movie.

Premium Rush gets a little dopey in a few scenes but all in all this is good, clean, unpretentious fun; a cheerful burst of late summer energy and a nice palate cleanser following the annual string of over-hyped mega-blockbusters. It is one of the year’s more pleasant surprises.

¹ Time on bikes provided by Alex Krajunus.

- Steve Avigliano, 8/27/12

REVIEW: The Dark Knight Rises

The Dark Knight Rises (2012): Dir. Christopher Nolan. Written by: Christopher and Jonathan Nolan. Story by: David S. Goyer and Christopher Nolan. Based on characters created by: Bob Kane. Starring: Christian Bale, Michael Caine, Gary Oldman, Anne Hathaway, Tom Hardy, Marion Cotillard, Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Morgan Freeman. Rated PG-13 (Gloomy brooding and brawling). Running time: 165 minutes.

2 stars (out of four)

Eight years have passed in Gotham City since the events of The Dark Knight, when the Joker plagued the city, turned Harvey Dent into Two-Face and raked in hundreds of millions of dollars at the box office. Gotham is a safer place now: the streets have been rid of organized crime and there is no need for the Batman, that masked vigilante the police mistakenly accused of murdering Harvey Dent.

On the streets, however, there is still belief in the Bat. The streets of Gotham also, for the first time in the series, actually feel part of a real city, one with food vendors and school playgrounds, suited investment bankers and cabbies. And director Christopher Nolan populates his city with some intriguing, well-developed characters.

Commissioner Gordon (Gary Oldman) is back, a tired man who’s probably getting too old for this sort of thing but just believes in it too much to quit. Gotham is in “peace time,” as one officer puts it, but Gordon has seen it at war and remains wary. It is his diehard commitment to justice that caused his wife to take off with the kids, leaving him alone to defend a city that does not currently need him but could at any moment.

Perhaps he is not alone though. John Blake (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), a young and ambitious officer, appears to be on hand to pick up the Commissioner’s torch of idealism. As an orphan, Blake looked up to Bruce Wayne, the parentless billionaire, but even more so, he idolized Batman. He has since lost faith in Wayne but still believes in Batman.

Speaking of Batman, where is he? He mysteriously vanished from Gotham following Dent’s death, we are told. (He also mysteriously vanishes for sizable chunks of this movie.) The man behind the suit, Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale), is still alive, living in self-imposed exile in Wayne Manor. Tending to him as always is the Wayne family butler, Michael Caine. Er, I mean, Alfred.

There is also Selina Kyle (Anne Hathaway), a leather-clad femme fatale with hair so silky smooth you’d think she was strutting through a Pantene commercial. Selina is a cat burglar. She robs jewelry off the wealthy and while the movie is sneaky in the way it avoids flat-out calling her Catwoman, we know better by that sly, twinkling Hans Zimmer theme that accompanies her on the score in several scenes.

Coy though the movie is about her, she is one of the best parts of it. Ms. Hathaway is a nimble actress, both physically in combat scenes but even more so when playing the role of seductress, and she is a lot of fun to watch. She is the only glimmer of the wisecracking playfulness that was once (long ago) a hallmark of the superhero genre.

The rest of that freewheeling fun is buried deep under a heap of rubble by Bane (Tom Hardy), the joyless antagonist of The Dark Knight Rises. Bane is a terrorist who was excommunicated from the League of Shadows, that nefarious organization Batman worked so hard to defeat in Batman Begins. Bane, like Batman, wears a mask, except his only covers his mouth and distorts his British accent into a hissing Darth Vader-esque growl. This makes for an intimidating presence but also obscures roughly half the actor’s lines so that he sounds as though he is talking through a washing machine.

Bane seeks to burn Gotham to the ground and punish its citizens for their decadence. In turn, Christopher Nolan punishes us with an overlong and supremely decadent second half, which disappointingly goes on autopilot. The Dark Knight Rises is undoubtedly Mr. Nolan’s sloppiest script (he co-wrote it with his brother, Jonathan Nolan, from a story by David S. Goyer). It labors early on with expository backstory and neglects to surprise in its final act. The absence of surprise is the most lamentable aspect of this cheerless movie. Mr. Nolan is usually so good at keeping us on our toes; here he bores us by plodding through every plot point his characters have promised us will happen.

Much has been made of the dark tone Christopher Nolan adopts in his Batman films. That somber mood does play a crucial role in the success of the first two movies but even more important is the grandeur Mr. Nolan lends them. He treats these comic book stories as though they are classical myths.

But there is a fine line between grandeur and pretentiousness and The Dark Knight Rises hurtles right over it. Aside from Gordon and Blake (Gary Oldman and Joseph Gordon-Levitt are Mr. Nolan’s two most valuable and underused assets), the movie is dominated not by people but by symbolic avatars used to bludgeon us over the head with the film’s thematic intent. Bane stands for anarchy. Batman stands for some vague notion of justice.

What made 2008’s The Dark Knight so much fun was its identity as a thrilling comic book movie elevated to the level of a crime epic. The Dark Knight Rises is all elevation and no entertainment. During that dreary slog of a second half, Christopher Nolan wants us to sit and be impressed by his movie, to be overcome with awe. I sat. I was impressed. Awe? Eh.

- Steve Avigliano, 7/20/12

REVIEW: 50/50

50/50 (2011): Dir. Jonathan Levine. Written by: Will Reiser. Starring: Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Seth Rogen, Anna Kendrick, Bryce Dallas Howard, Anjelica Huston, Phillip Baker Hall and Matt Frewer. Rated R (Medicinal drug use, language and sexuality). Running time: 100 minutes.

3 ½ stars (out of four)

50/50 takes typically melodramatic material and, with keen emotional insight and a collection of strong performances, avoids the cheap sentimentality that often comes with a film about cancer. Largely a comedy, the film takes time for some well-earned tear-jerking scenes in its last third. A product of Judd Apatow’s extended family (frequent Apatow collaborator Evan Goldberg produced the film along with Seth Rogen, who also co-stars), 50/50 explores the bonds of friendship (call it a bromance if you must), romantic love and family when put under the strain of a debilitating disease.

Adam (played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt) is a young Seattleite who works in public radio with his best bud Kyle (Rogen). Adam and his girlfriend Rachel (Bryce Dallas Howard) are entering the domestic stage of their relationship – she is flattered to learn he has made space for her clothes in one of his dresser drawers – though Kyle has some choice words regarding Rachel’s prudishness and Adam’s flagging sex life.

Still, life appears to be as good as it gets for a hip, well-dressed twentysomething such as Adam. That is, until he receives the unfortunate diagnosis from his doctor. He has a malignant tumor on his spine. The news creates serious ripples in his personal life and each of those closest to him react differently.

Kyle is perhaps even more distraught than Adam but, like a true friend, he is quick to provide distractions. Does Adam realize, for example, how easy picking up chicks will be when they hear he has cancer? Not to mention the medicinal marijuana. Rogen is in goofy best friend mode here (something he does exceedingly well) and his bumbling stoner cadence is just right to diffuse potential melodrama and lighten the mood for his pal.

The other members of Adam’s support circle are less reliable. Rachel may not be as prepared for the difficulties of chemotherapy as she claims and Adam’s overbearing mother (Anjelica Huston) only makes him more anxious with her persistent maternal worries.

Two older gentlemen Adam meets in chemotherapy, Alan (Phillip Baker Hall) and Mitch (Matt Frewer), offer a more understanding perspective. They know how painful the treatment can be and assuage Adam’s fears with jokes and homemade weed macaroons.

Adam also starts seeing a hospital therapist, Katherine (Anna Kendrick), a doctorate student still new to treating actual patients. She accurately identifies Adam’s reactions to the disease by pointing out the stages of shock and anger to him but her textbook approach is hardly comforting. Indeed, the two learn from one another and tiptoe around the patient/therapist relationship while laying the groundwork for a possible romance.

Kendrick, who received an Oscar nomination for her performance as a calculating but ultimately naive businesswoman in Up in the Air, plays a softer shade of that character here. She has a wonderful way of using the tics and fidgets of uncomfortable social interactions to flesh out a character. Underneath the cutesy-perky energy of her characters, she finds the tension between their emotional vulnerability and the sterile professionalism they have been told to exhibit.

As a lead, Joseph Gordon-Levitt skillfully navigates the film’s tonal shifts between comedy and drama. His shell-shocked response to the diagnosis works well as a comedic foil for Seth Rogen but Gordon-Levitt also has the chops to handle the heavier material. Adam’s silence is punctuated by outbursts of rage and fear late in the film as the gravity of his situation becomes clearer.

50/50 deftly examines the emotional turmoil of cancer treatment though it mostly does so through the familiar mechanisms of a romantic comedy structure. All of the pieces are in place – the best friend, the waning relationship and the new romantic prospect on the rise – but they are more effective here than in similar films because the emotions are authentic. Either 50/50 is a heartfelt drama that conforms to Hollywood conventions or a rom-com imbued with surprising genuineness. Whichever way you prefer to look at it, this is an entertaining and thoughtful film about the unexpected complications life throws our way and the strength of human connection in difficult times.

- Steve Avigliano, 10/2/11

REVIEW: Inception

Inception (2010): Written and directed by Christopher Nolan. Starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Ken Watanabe, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Marion Cotillard, Ellen Page, Tom Hardy, Cillian Murphy and Michael Caine. Rated PG-13 (sequences of violence and action throughout). Running time: 148 minutes.

3 ½ stars (out of four)

If you had something to hide – a secret, personal demons – to what length would you go to protect it? In Inception, the new mind-bending thriller from The Dark Knight director Christopher Nolan, there’s a guy who keeps a vault inside an arctic fortress protected by soldiers armed with sniper rifles and grenade launchers. And those are just for his daddy issues.

Dom Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) is an “extractor.” He has the ability to enter people’s minds through their dreams and once inside, steal whatever secrets they may be hiding. For each theft, an “architect” develops a blueprint dream world, one that the dreamer fills in with personal details and populates with projections of people from his own memory. Much like a dream, not until waking up does the person realize it’s all an illusion, if he realizes at all. Whether Cobb is the developer of the technique or simply an independent contractor isn’t entirely clear in the film, but we know he’s the best at what he does.

A businessman named Saito (Ken Watanabe) approaches him with a special job. He wants to convince a competitor’s son (Cillian Murphy) to make some ill-advised business decisions in the wake of his father’s death. In order to do this, Saito enlists Cobb and his men on an “inception” job, which you may have guessed from the change in prefix is the opposite of extraction. Rather than stealing something, he wants Cobb to plant an idea inside the young entrepreneur’s head and convince him that that idea is his own. To perform inception without the person realizing is a task many say is impossible, but Cobb takes on the job regardless because, well, he’s the best.

Filling out the rest of the team are Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Cobb’s right hand man, Ellen Page as a promising young student who becomes the team’s new architect, and Tom Hardy as the brawns with brains of the operation. Michael Caine shows up too for a cameo as Cobb’s father, but this isn’t an actor’s movie. Everyone is fine for his or her part though, particularly DiCaprio who has a way of bringing emotional credibility to roles you wouldn’t think needed it.

The inception job proves to be rather complicated; there’s a dream within a dream within a dream and there’s more after that but what would be the point of explaining it all here? The team also runs into trouble when they find that their victim’s mind has been trained for this very moment. Apparently it’s possible to turn your subconscious into a sort of cerebral militia.

This is a film that demands a fair amount of mental energy if you want to keep everything straight but Nolan, who also wrote the screenplay, structures the film in a digestible way, keeping its mysteries intriguing rather than frustrating. Late in the movie, when he cuts between three layers of consciousness within more than one person’s mind, we wonder how anyone could have thought The Matrix was difficult to follow. And yet we’re always entertained. There are the occasional lines of bland expository dialogue, but they’re necessary to clarify the complex plot.

Though the premise is high science fiction, the film is essentially a heist movie where the endgame is leaving something behind rather than burglary. Nolan understands this and even if you don’t follow every bit of scientific jargon, he gives us plenty of exciting sequences and moments of CGI wonder.

The film is also more thoughtful than most summer sci-fi or action flicks, meditating on the human consequences of experimenting with the dream world. These people spend as much time in dreams as they do the real world and they’re constantly suspicious that their mind is deceiving them, spinning tops and rolling loaded die to ensure that gravity is functioning as it should. The emotional side of the equation is also treated when haunting memories of Cobb’s wife jeopardize the mission. The film explores in some surprising ways how the mind handles feelings of guilt and denial.

Thoughtful and smart as it may be, Inception, like Nolan’s Batman films, is still a summer blockbuster. Just when we start wondering how the subconscious projections of a man who has probably never held a gun are able to fire submachine guns with impressive accuracy, something cool happens to distract us.

The ending is deliberately ambiguous, leaving you wanting to see the film again, but even without that there is enough here to warrant a second viewing. Christopher Nolan is the rare big-budget auteur that consistently delivers, reminding us that Hollywood hasn’t run out of original ideas. It just needs a few more people like Nolan to sneak in and plant those ideas.

- Steve Avigliano, 7/16/10

REVIEW: (500) Days of Summer

(500) Days of Summer (2009): Dir. Marc Webb. Written by: Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber. Starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Zooey Deschanel. Rated PG-13 (sexual material and language). Running time: 95 minutes.

3 stars (out of four)

There’s a line in High Fidelity that goes something like, “Do I listen to pop music because I’m depressed, or am I depressed because I listen to pop music?” Not only does Tom, the Hopeless Romantic of (500) Days of Summer agree with the latter, he gives a rousing speech late in the film, throwing Hollywood movies and greeting cards into the mix, and accuses them all of poisoning the minds of our youth with lies of romance and love. But give the guy a break, his girlfriend just broke up with him 100 days ago.

The movie recounts a romance that begins in the office when Tom (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) spots the new assistant, Summer (Zooey Deschanel) and falls for her despite her lack of interest in a serious relationship and her insistence that love does not exist. Some 200+ days later the relationship crumbles, leaving Tom devastated and at the mercy of his friends’ and younger sister’s attempts to comfort him. For the most part, the film intercuts the beginnings of their relationship with the final days, a structure that provides some fun contrasts between the initial bliss of new love and the eventual misery that follows. Once the earlier scenes catch up to the day of the breakup, the film focuses on Tom’s post-Summer days, which consist mostly of wallowing in a self-induced misery.

These scenes successfully capture the mindset of a young man blindsided by the seeming cruelties of the opposite sex, delving deep into the self-pitying world of one-word questions (“How?” “Why?”). With visual inventiveness, (500) Days of Summer turns familiar territory into something fresh and full of energy. After a very good first date, Tom joins an over-the-top musical number, complete with a choreographed dance and tweeting animated birds. Later, the film’s best and most heartbreaking moment comes in a split-screen with Tom’s expectations for a party playing alongside the unpleasant reality. From the mock-text that opens the film, assuring the audience that the story is not based on a real girl, (500) Days of Summer is a playful recreation of post-breakup suffering, accompanied by a killer soundtrack.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Zooey Deschanel are entirely at ease with one another, creating chemistry in their many moments onscreen together. Gordon-Levitt is especially charming, pulling the extra weight in his scenes without Summer. Along with recent films like Brick and The Lookout, Gordon-Levitt has recently been turning in strong performances in interesting movies, G.I. Joe notwithstanding, and is becoming one of the best young actors working today. Deschanel too, may be counted on for a likable performance; she’s given the difficult task here of continuing to be irresistible even in Summer’s coldest moments. She allows her to be a complex and inscrutable character, and if we never learn the exact reason for Summer’s change of heart, that’s only because Summer herself probably couldn’t tell us.

(500) Days of Summer succeeds where other romances falter by remaining honest in its depiction of relationship complexities, the constant balancing act of emotions, needs and the reality-check of life’s unpredictability. There’s an attention to detail here that makes the young couple so worth rooting for. But for all its authentic moments, (500) Days of Summer has its fair share of movie contrivances, both large (a convenient train ride to a mutual friend’s wedding provides an opportunity for a reunion) and small (I’ve never heard of a jukebox that has Pixies’s “Here Comes Your Man” but not “Born to Run”), but these moments are not entirely out of place in a film whose lead character is conflicted between a romantic belief in Fate and a nihilistic acceptance of life’s randomness.

After a breezy 95 minutes, the characters eventually decide on the view that everything in life happens for a reason, but the movie never explicitly endorses that belief. Life and love are what you make of them. Sure, they’re unfair, but maybe they have a way of coming around and rewarding the patient. Is such an ambiguous conclusion a satisfying one? The final shot of The Graduate, which this film shows in full, watches the two lovers’ smiles fade as they look around, unsure of their next move. Tom’s final look in (500) Days of Summer is, by contrast, much more assured and confident. Me, I remain unconvinced on the issue of destiny and randomness, but I’m happy that he’s happy.

- Steve Avigliano, 8/13/09