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: Contagion

Contagion (2011): Dir. Steven Soderbergh. Written by: Scott Z. Burns. Starring: Marion Cotillard, Matt Damon, Laurence Fishburne, Jude Law, Gwyneth Paltrow, Kate Winslet. Rated PG-13 (Language and gruesome symptoms). Running time: 106 minutes.

3 stars (out of four)

During a quiet scene in Contagion, the new film from director Steven Soderbergh, I became acutely aware of every sound in the theater – every crinkle of a wrapper, every clearing of a throat – and realized the film was doing what it was intended to do.

Early on in Contagion there is a reference to Jaws that reveals the film’s aim. Similar to how that Spielberg classic played on our fear of the open ocean and made audiences think twice before the next time they went for a dip, Contagion takes a common fear – a worldwide virus outbreak – and crafts an effective thriller around it. We learn in the film that we touch our faces hundreds of times per day, (a point reinforced by frequent close-ups of hands), an unconscious habit that allows for the rapid spread of disease. With that information planted in our minds, each cough and sniffle in the film (deliberately foregrounded in the audio mix) become Contagion’s fin in the water – a sign of impending danger.

The film builds its queasy energy by assembling several storylines with characters that are connected by the mysterious disease. There is the American (Gwyneth Paltrow) whose business trip to Hong Kong may be responsible for the initial spread of the disease. Her husband (Matt Damon) and daughter (Anna Jacoby-Heron) provide the emotional arc of the film as they grapple with day-to-day life while the virus takes hold of the country.

On the bureaucratic end of things are Dr. Cheever (Laurence Fishburne) and his protégé Dr. Mears (Kate Winslet) of the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) who investigate the disease in pursuit of a cure. Assisting in that goal are researchers Ian Sussman (Elliott Gould) and Dr. Hextall (Jennifer Ehle) as well as French correspondent Dr. Orantes (Marion Cotillard) whose investigation of the outbreak’s source in Hong Kong takes an unexpected turn.

Meanwhile, a vicious blogger named Alan Krumwiede (Jude Law) scrutinizes the CDC’s every move and makes allegations of a partnership between the government and pharmaceutical companies. He is a political revolutionary of the modern age whose shocking online posts bring new meaning to the phrase ‘viral videos.’

Krumwiede is one of the film’s many insistent (bordering on incessant) reminders that the film takes place in the present day. Information is obtained and spread through video surveillance, texting, Twitter and other technological advancements familiar to most Millennials. These contemporary details are pervasive to the point of being overwhelming, though perhaps that’s the point. Much of the film’s dialogue blows by in a flurry of acronyms and multisyllabic mouthfuls, a fair dramatization of information overload in the Internet Age.

Soderbergh handles this material well, though. His frenetic style makes sense of the chaos unfurling onscreen and pulls the film’s many characters together into a cogent whole. He balances tense scenes of frayed nerves and frantic phone calls with more sober moments of investigative reporting that plunge into the murky realm of geopolitics without getting didactic.

Emphasis on international affairs does lead to an inherent lack in human empathy. The film is more interested in presenting the inner workings (and subsequent failings) of government agencies than telling a story about individuals. Soderbergh explores the ways in which these agencies communicate with one another to find a balance between law and moral order when catastrophe strikes. Contagion is critical of the layers of red tape that prevent decisive action but never villainizes any of its characters.

On further reflection, the earlier comparison to Jaws is not a perfect one. In 1975, that film created – or at least propagated – a fear of shark attacks. The terror lurking behind every scene of Contagion, however, does not originate with the film but rather is one that has already attained a level of omnipresence in our lives. Whether the threat of a pandemic is just media noise or indeed the fate of mankind remains to be seen. Either way, Contagion thoroughly documents that fear for future generations and offers a chilling apocalyptic tale in the meantime.

- Steve Avigliano, 9/13/11

REVIEW: Midnight in Paris

Midnight in Paris (2011): Written and directed by Woody Allen. Starring: Owen Wilson, Rachel McAdams, Michael Sheen, Carla Bruni, Corey Stoll, Tom Hiddleston, Kathy Bates and Marion Cotillard. Rated PG-13 (some sexual references). Running time: 100 minutes.

3 ½ stars (out of four)

Woody Allen loves Paris. And the Parisians love him right back. That he has taken this long to shoot a film there is something of a wonder. Recently, however, Woody Allen’s films have departed from his hometown of Manhattan and the auteur so beloved by Europeans has gone on something of a world tour of the major European cities.

There was London in the devastatingly understated noir Match Point and Barcelona in the sizzling romantic comedy Vicky Cristina Barcelona. There were other lesser films in between and since those but as any Woody Allen fan will tell you (myself included), when a filmmaker of this magnitude still produces a movie a year – this is his 41^st since his debut in 1966 – we are willing to overlook the mediocre efforts in favor of the really good ones.

Midnight in Paris falls perhaps just a shade below the two aforementioned films, standouts of latter-day Woody Allen. This is a comic fantasy akin to the director’s The Purple Rose of Cairo, where a movie star walks off screen and falls in love with a loyal moviegoer. The plot of Midnight in Paris was a surprise to me (I avoided the early reviews from Cannes) and some critics have made a point of not spoiling its story. I am not sure the secrecy is necessary; the film is a delight whether you know what it’s about or not. Still, those looking to see the film fresh can stop here and continue reading after seeing it.

The film opens with Gil (Owen Wilson), a somewhat neurotic Hollywood screenwriter looking to restart his career as a literary novelist, professing his love of Paris in the rain. He would give anything to live in Paris in the Twenties, when the city was a cultural hub of bohemian artists and writers. His fiancé Inez (Rachel McAdams) is not as enthused. There is nothing fun about getting wet, she says. The two are accompanying her parents on a business trip in the City of Light when they bump into an old friend of Inez’s, Paul (Michael Sheen), an insufferably stuffy scholar who is in town to give a lecture on Monet.

Gil needs to get away. Alone, he goes on a late night drunken stroll down the cobblestone streets and, of course, gets lost. At the stroke of midnight, a car stops for him and some lavishly dressed Parisians invite him to a party.

And what a party it is. Elegant partygoers smoke from cigarette holders. There is a pianist playing Cole Porter songs. Gil is in heaven. But when a fellow American, Zelda, introduces him to her husband, Scott Fitzgerald, Gil realizes where he is. Those cigarette holders are not nostalgic kitsch – they’re the real deal. That’s not a well-trained impersonator on the piano – it’s Cole Porter. Somehow Gil has been transported back to Paris in the Golden Age. But just when he’s been invited to Gertrude Stein’s place for a critique of his novel, he’s back in the twenty-first century.

From here, the movie whisks us back and forth between past and present-day Paris. In addition to the Fitzgeralds (played by Alison Pill and Tom Hiddleston), we meet comic caricatures of all the big names that drifted in and out of Parisian cafés and bars in the Twenties including Hemingway (the exceptionally funny Corey Stoll), Stein (Kathy Bates), Picasso (Marcial Di Fonzo Bo), Dali (Adrien Brody) and more.

Woody Allen has never been shy about expressing his opinions in his films and he is not subtle in showing his adoration for Paris in both eras. Allen, now 75, has recently taken to casting younger actors to play the parts he might have once written for himself. Owen Wilson is given the Woody Allen shtick here and the choice is a perfect fit. Wilson knows just how to deliver those stammering witticisms without ever coming across as imitating his director. McAdams fulfills the role of Gil’s disenchanted wife, a familiar character in Allen films, and Sheen is excellent as the biting academic. The rest of Allen’s typically strong supporting cast includes the French First Lady Carla Bruni as a museum tour guide and Marion Cotillard as a beauty from the past.

Midnight in Paris is a delightful movie that serves as a love letter to the city and its culture but also provides some wonderful insight late in the film into the ways in which we romanticize and idealize the past. This is probably not the film that will convert a non-fan of Allen (for that I would recommend Match Point and Barcelona or earlier classics such as Hannah and Her Sisters and Crimes and Misdemeanors) but it reaffirms my own love of Allen as all his best films do. It’s no wonder the Parisians love him.

- Steve Avigliano, 6/23/11

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