Earn This

“The reasons we go to war always fucking matter!”

Rating: 3 stars (out of 4)

That line serves as both the kiss-off and take-away message of Green Zone, the adroitly executed new thriller from the Matt Damon/Paul Greengrass team.  Green Zone functions perfectly as a balance between real-world issues and fantastical action thrills, a sort of 2010 version of Blood Diamond.  This is the rare action movie with a brain, a perfect sense of pacing, no cringe-inducing dialogue, and real actors.  It knows exactly what buttons to push: just when you’re ready for exposition to cease and the action to accelerate, it does that; and right when it needs to slow down, it does that. 

Such feelings are given a purpose beyond mere entertainment thanks to a story that, although it doesn’t quite make this movie into a classic in the genre, may make the hairs on your neck stand up.  Damon plays Roy Miller, a chief warrant officer in the U.S. army deployed shortly after the start of the Iraq War in 2003 to find WMDs.  When Miller’s crew keeps coming up empty at sites fingered by credible sources, he refuses to accept the red tape that he gets as answers.  He thus becomes that classic American hero, the lone soldier off in search of the truth.  This time, however, we know what the truth is, and we know that he’s not going to like what he finds. 

That’s why it doesn’t matter that Green Zone isn’t purely factual—indeed, it would have failed as such.  It’s enough to have a basis in fact from which we can be entertained.  Adapted loosely from Rajiv Chandrasekaran’s book The Imperial Life in the Emerald City (by Brian Helgeland, writer of L.A. Confidential and Mystic River), its central question—plus the energy level—place it on much more inherently interesting footing than the typically turgid ‘war is hell’ movies.  It’s not necessarily an anti-war film, but it’s an anti- ‘war film.’   

Helgeland’s film introduces several characters accepted to be unnamed stand-ins for certain Iraq War players.  Amy Ryan’s reporter peddling pro-Bush administration stories can be assumed to represent The New York Times’s Judith Miller, and Greg Kinnear’s Pentagon-connected bureaucrat could be lots of people.  Miller finds help primarily from CIA lifer Marty Brown (an effective Brendan Gleeson) and an Iraqi native called Freddy who’d just like some measure of normalcy in his country (Khalid Abdalla with the most stirring performance).

All of this is put together with an excellent tone that’s neither ponderous nor flippant.  Helgeland’s script briefly touches on deeper questions people might be inclined to discuss afterwards, like whether we should have involved the Iraqi army more after Saddam fled.  The ending narrows the perspective a little bit, as tends to happen in thrillers, and so it will take repeated viewings to really determine what place Green Zone has in the pantheon of action thrillers.  But the gaps are filled in by Damon, who continues his remarkable run of the last seven months (after 2009’s The Informant! and Invictus) and does such a good job that I can’t really imagine any other actor in the role.   

I anticipated Green Zone for almost a year, but I also worried that it would become the next Kingdom.  Damon and Greengrass and Helgeland wouldn’t let it.  As it went along, I noticed no awkward scenes, no unnecessary characters, and no choppy dialogue, all of which were eschewed for crisp plotting and Greengrass’s own considerable skills.  That’s a wonderful sense to have as you sit and watch a movie, and such warm and fuzzy feelings are embellished by the expert direction.  No specific set pieces here compare to the best of the Bournes (what do?), but Greengrass continues his ascension to the top of the ranks of action directors, his visual style again imparting incredible energy and intensity without ever sacrificing clarity.  Working off a slightly-tamed version of the Bourne shaky cam, Greengrass uses long takes and then fast cuts, off-center visuals and ever-so-briefly seen critical pieces of information that he congeals together in a perfectly coherent hole.  He’s the only director I know who could have me sit for hours in a cool theater and walk out sweating.

He commented that Green Zone wouldn’t appeal to everyone, and there’s no doubt it doesn’t suffer from the puppy-dog desire for universal appeal that dooms many mainstream features.  It doesn’t indict George W. Bush, but assumes that America was duped by a few powerful men who wanted an excuse to remove Saddam Hussein.  That’s hardly the kind of material upon which most war films are based, but the applause that greeted the credits at my showing reveals not just the film’s execution but also how much we’ve changed since 9/11 generated overwhelming pro-military, pro-Bush support.

Green Zone achieves entertainment first and foremost, but there’s a point, there’s always a point for Damon and Greengrass, as there should be in nearly every movie.  As Damon talks to Ryan’s befuddled report or Kinnear’s look-the-other-way bureaucrat about why we went to war, you can feel the discomfort in the audience and the way it relishes that aforementioned line.  Damon and Greengrass are bumming me out by hesitating to sign up for another Bourne flick; but if they keep churning out films like this one, I might not mind.

Rating: 2 and a half stars (out of 4)

For those who have seen the trailers and are reasonably familiar with the puppets behind the stage, Invictus will probably be much like what you expect.  Clint Eastwood’s directorial style—at best, smooth and undistracted, at worst flat—Morgan Freeman and Matt Damon’s dignified acting, and a stirring finish are all delivered as expected.  But although Invictus is certainly safe in its own way, it’s not at all the kind of movie one might have expected about Nelson Mandela…nor is it nearly as good as it could have been.  This film centering around the famous president of South Africa, elected after spending 27 years in prison, doesn’t delve into his incarceration, The Hurricane-style, or tell a birth-to-present biographical story complete with cries from his estranged family members.  Instead, it possesses many hallmarks of a classic sports movie, replete with an underdog we can cheer for and a ceremonial ending.

At the movie’s outset, Mandela (Freeman) has been recently elected president of South Africa, a country in tatters and still filled with racial strife.  Blacks are pleased with his election but skeptical of Whites and of the possibility of actual change; meanwhile, Whites wonder whether their dominance will be stripped away.  Mandela starts by surprising the Whites on his staff by telling them they won’t be fired, then begins contemplating how to start unifying his country.  He cares not about revenge but rather wants whatever will help his country heal fastest.  And to that end, he turns to rugby.

Captained by Francois Pienaar (Damon), the national rugby team, the Springboks, have long been ignored or condemned by the country’s Black population.  Playing a largely White sport (as opposed to soccer), the Springboks have represented apartheid for years.  Blacks want the team and its colors disbanded, but Mandela sees a different angle: he wants the country to rally around its team in the upcoming Rugby World Cup.  Mandela, shrewdly, seems to sense the transcendent power that sports victories have for people, and he envisions a winning Springboks team as a potential beacon of inspiration for his countrymen, regardless of their skin color.

Eastwood and writer Anthony Peckham carry much of the film with grace and effective understatement.  But given their decision to focus so much on sports—and rugby, no less—and not the historical figure, their inability to generate the proper gravity of the climactic game has to be considered a damaging flaw.  That this rugby team, considered a laughingstock before the Cup, actually managed to come together and win after Mandela encouraged them to do so is mind-boggling—the kind of thing that would be laughed out of the cutting room floor of a proposed fictional tale.  Invictus, sadly, imparts absolutely no sense of the moment, of the magnitude of the success.  Not only is there no explanation of how the team improved or of how improbable that was, the film, and its climax, doesn’t feel nearly as ‘big’ as it should.   

What’s more, we don’t know anything about any players (including Damon’s) or, let’s face it, the sport itself; so, with all that combined, we watch the final game in a sort of blank numbness.  Since that game lasts about twenty minutes—and since the escalation of the team’s skill accounts for most of the film’s latter half—that severely hampers our ease at fully enjoying the proceedings. 

Invictus deserves credit for adding in a few mischievous lines for Mandela to keep him from merely being a boring saint, but other small details are botched.  We don’t need the awkward quasi-hug between the antagonists-turned-somehow-friends after the winning game (an irritating sports movie cliché), or the astoundingly predictable sequence involving a young Black kid and police officers during the game, to which Eastwood cuts back too many times. 

Surprisingly for a movie that takes its obscure Latin title from the William Ernest Henley poem from which Mandela drew strength while in jail, Invictus is nothing more than a conventional sports movie.  There’s more about Mandela that’s interesting, obviously, but they chose to go in a different direction.  Greatest credit should go to the actors, especially Damon, who nails his limited role and accent (there’s a locker room scene where he delivers an anti-inspirational speech with such restraint and focus it’s a shame it only lasts for a couple minutes).  But otherwise, it’s a safe movie, a relatively competent one, and a relatively frustrating one.

Rating: two stars (out of four)

It’s not hard to see why The Departed drew such strong acclaim.  It features a well-known cast of actors, even down to the nominal supporting roles, and is directed by a Hollywood favorite, Martin Scorsese.  Its plot concerns the well-mined territory of mobsters and cops facing off against each other, and the screenplay sparkles with some witty dialogue and clever insults.  Yet something feels terribly off here: though it’s intriguing and endlessly entertaining, it doesn’t feel like much of a movie in retrospect.  Repeated viewings reveal not just plot holes but plot impossibilities; and the movie, laced with flippancy and levity, doesn’t seem to take itself seriously enough for its subject matter.

A remake of the 2002 Hong Kong movie Infernal Affairs, the movie centers on the Massachusetts State Police Department’s Special Investigations Unit, headed by Captain Queenan (Martin Sheen), and its attempt to thwart a gang headed by Frank Costello (Jack Nicholson).  The set-up is loaded with promise: each group has infiltrated a mole into the other’s inner circle.  Billy Costigan (Leonardo DiCaprio) grew up around nothing but criminals.  Perhaps because of this, he wants to be a cop, but Queenan and his second-in-command Dignam (Mark Wahlberg) decide that his background makes him a perfect fit to be a mole inside Costello’s circle.

On the other hand, Colin Sullivan (Matt Damon) was raised a proper church-goer on the good side of town; perhaps because of this, he’s susceptible to Costello’s fatherly guidance during his youth.  Costello grooms Sullivan from youth to be his mole within the police unit (one of them, anyway).  The bulk of the movie follows DiCaprio and Damon trying to oust each other before they’re found.  In the meantime, Damon’s Sullivan is appointed as the internal affairs cop within the SUI, being asked to look for Costello’s mole—to find himself.  A psychiatrist named Madolyn (Vera Farmiga) gets involved with both men and further entangles the plot.

The potential for a great movie is here, but The Departed doesn’t deliver on its promises.  Its weak script is manifest in an overly flippant tone and terrible plot holes.  The film is far too slick for it’s own good, failing to achieve any level of gravitas.  It’s more concerned with telling us how funny Mark Wahlberg is, or how outrageous Nicholson’s props are, and it’s impossible to take The Departed seriously when it is so amused with itself.  It’s no coincidence that it couldn’t have taken place without present day technology (such as text messaging), because it reflects present culture’s fascination with overly-stylized, soulless, superficial products, ranging from TV shows to music to movies.  Yet everyone, from critics to the general public, mixed up the slickness and the comedy and the violence into a blender and assumed something pure came out.  Oh, look, Captain Queenan just fell hundreds of feet to his death, aren’t Martin Scorsese films just so gritty!

We live in an age when a movie can succeed with a few demonstrative moments even when it does very little thinking, because apparently audiences don’t care if a stiff breeze would collapse the plot.  Why, for example, does Sullivan make secret calls to Costello while walking through the halls of the police headquarters; and why does Costigan make secret calls to Queenan just a few feet out of range of his comrades?  How does nobody hear the numerous gunshots occurring in the showdown between Sullivan and  Costello until the former announces their whereabouts, and why was he even allowed to go after Costello alone?  I couldn’t really buy Costigan’s first defiance of Costello (leading up to his tryst with Madolyn), or the fact that the Chinese would have let Costello get away with his swindling.  But I was probably the most annoyed by the potentially fascinating street chase between Costigan and Sullivan fizzling into nothingness because the former’s phone rang to announce an incoming text—when he had just minutes before been receiving texts that caused the phone to vibrate.

Scorsese pumps the movie full of energy and color, which at times works to its advantage, as it’s endlessly watchable and full of some riveting scenes, such as the sequence leading up to Queenan’s death and the ultimate rooftop confrontation between Costigan and Sullivan.  Other times he tries too hard, as evidenced in the overly frequent use of music that likes to cut off sharply to make a point.  But it’s William Monahan’s script that truly sinks the film and makes it leave a bad taste in your mouth afterwards.

The script lays things out nicely enough at the outset, but it does take a while for the energy level to really rise, and the character development throughout leaves a lot to be desired.  Madolyn’s relationships with the two men don’t ever boil over into anything substantive, which is a shame, because, if nothing else, she represented a solid opportunity to flesh out their characters.  The film has to ascribe impotence to Sullivan to enable her to become interested in Costigan—an unlikely story, to be sure—and when she walks away from Sullivan in anger at a funeral, the film misses the obvious chance for her to deliver a devastating line.  And when Sullivan tells Costello that he’ll succeed at a task because “it involves lying, and I’m pretty good at that,” the line sounds so off that one suspects that its inclusion must only predict Madolyn later hearing it.

Elsewhere, as the film accelerates towards its climax, it is indeed intriguing to watch Sullivan try to make legitimate attempts to find the mole hidden within SUI.  But, too often, the film has to resort to its characters acting stupidly for things to fall into place.  Costello, for example, is way too naïve in his attempts to figure out Costigan’s loyalties: he foolishly assumes that if Sullivan hasn’t heard something in the office, Costigan couldn’t have given away his secrets, a particularly narrow-minded attitude especially considering that Sullivan knows that Queenan refuses to divulge any information about his undercovers.

On and on the contradictions go, particularly in one titillating but frustrating sequence wherein Costigan has his therapy session and flashes back to a meeting with Queenan and Dignam under a bridge.  You want to revel in DiCaprio’s acting and the sharpness of his words (“Two pills?  Great…why don’t you just give me a bottle of Scotch and a handgun to blow my fucking brains out!  Are we done with this psychiatry bullshit?”) but Farmiga’s struggles to find realism throw some cold water over the dream state.  And you can’t enjoy the encounter with Queenan and Dignam because of Dignam’s idiotic threat to erase the only proof remaining that Costigan’s a cop—as though you would say something like that to someone whose dangerous undercover service you wanted to continue.

DiCaprio and Damon clash in the film's best scene.

The film’s acting garnered the same effusive praise that the whole film did, but it’s uneven.  Farmiga looks awkward and out of her league as Madolyn, but a lot of the supporting characters do fine work, namely Alec Baldwin, Sheen, and Ray Winstone (as Costello’s number one).  However, two pivotal characters grate.  Wahlberg’s Dignam delivers a few amusing insults (“I’m the guy who does his job—you must be the other guy.”) but by the end, both the character and the performance remain so one-dimensional it almost becomes caricature.  There’s an irritating scene where Costigan is trying to talk to him from an airport about something constructive, and he can’t do anything but blow him off.

And Jack  Nicholson, though he looks the part, is so over-the-top that he’s wholly unbelievable.  Nearly every line and ridiculous facial expression (note the mimicking of a rat) Nicholson delivers with Oscar-seeking relish—he’s far more Nicholson, with all of his patented showiness and egotism, than Frank Costello.

Amidst all this, there is one redeeming aspect: Leonardo DiCaprio, who bumps it up a half-star or so.  Costello may be the brain of the movie, but DiCaprio is the heart.  DiCaprio’s Costigan slowly unravels over the anxiety his double life causes him, and he is so fantastic that you don’t stop to wonder how good he could have been if Nicholson (or Farmiga) had shown up.  Costigan’s tough on the outside, and he’s tougher on the inside than you might expect shortly into the movie.

DiCaprio unearths all the subtlety in a startlingly loaded, blistering performance.  In my review of The Basketball Diaries, I wrote that DiCaprio was “so good, it’s frankly a little scary,” and it’s the mark of a great actor that with each role he expands his repertoire and just gets better and better.  DiCaprio is so riveting here that he tops everything he’s done before, even his outstanding turn in Blood Diamond.  He officially grew up in 2006; no longer the impossibly young-looking teenage boy who melted girls’ hearts in Titanic or felt Robert De Niro’s wrath in This Boy’s Life, he’s now a man.

Sadly, Colin doesn’t measure up to Costigan, for various reasons.  He’s not nearly as interesting or well fleshed-out as Billy is.  Often, indeed, the motivations for his actions are unclear.  Is he, for example, truly evil, or has he just been brainwashed since a young age to protect Costello from getting caught?  The film doesn’t bother to investigate.

Damon, for his part, is effortlessly natural in his scenes with Madolyn, but too often something felt a little off with him—his mannerisms a little too histrionic, even a little feminine.  When pressed into fierceness–as in the rooftop scene–he knows what to do; but on the whole this has to rank as a disappointing turn from one of my favorite actors.

The Departed, as a whole, has lots of style and little substance—and the truly disappointing fact is that the movie doesn’t aim for any more than that.  DiCaprio brings the necessary gravitas, but most of the film doesn’t.  It’s just the kind of movie Hollywood loves these days, but in the end it’s just full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

Legendary musician and producer Brian Eno once said, “Every review should have, below the name of the critic, their 10 current favorite works in the medium.  That way you have some chance of seeing their prejudices.”  Well said, sir.  To that end, I proffer my ten favorite movies, not currently but all-time.  I present this list with the conditions that I know there are countless intriguing movies I have not seen—particularly any made before the last decade—and that my tastes continue to shift.

1) Mystic River

Joy Division set to cinema—the most ferociously intense, haunting movie I’ve ever seen.  Mystic River speaks, above all, to the different ways people cope with grief (just as JD did).  The characters in this movie try everything possible to lead productive lives that have been wrecked by tragedy, and though some succeed more than others, they all tell us something about what it means to be human.  As a murder mystery is investigated, questions, desires, and regrets that have lain dormant between three old friends are unearthed.

Clint Eastwood imparts a brooding, plaintive feel upon the action, understanding how atmosphere can enhance, but not overpower a story, and he culls exceptional work from his actors.  Tim Robbins’s command of a wide and rapidly shifting range of emotions is nothing short of stunning, and the incomparable Sean Penn triumphs even all of his other performances.  Yet it’s Kevin Bacon who speaks the film’s truest and most heartbreaking lines, in a late scene with Penn that might be the most emotive scene I’ve ever seen in a movie.  The best art speaks universally and personally at the same time, and in Mystic River, everything feels connected to my life, no matter what’s going on in it at the time.

2) Closer

Closer uses four spectacularly dysfunctional relationships to make profound statements about more reasonable and, hopefully, more common ones.  Asking questions most movies don’t want to touch, it makes articulate observations of the relationships among its four characters applicable to our everyday lives.  The actors and script each evince their extraordinary skill by quietly showing us that, behind the characters’ betrayals and brutal words lie a vast expanse of pain and hurt—even if they don’t want to admit they’re feeling those things.

Closer has a reputation for being depressing, but since everyone gets what he or she deserves, I see it more as a warning than a suicide pill.  It’s not really about the loneliness that touches everyone in it.  It’s about how much people who have been hurt in the past are willing to risk again, how much a failure to resist sexual attraction taints one’s character, and whether any relationship can succeed without significant flaws.

3) Good Will Hunting

An unfailingly sincere movie, and thus one that is quite easy for the sarcastic and ironic to mock.  Yet the sincerity in this movie carries along with it some implosive drama.  Matt Damon and Robin Williams give career-best performances as, respectively, a math genius whose life is going nowhere yet is frequently on edge, and the worn-down therapist who helps him connect with what’s important.  The riveting final third of the film, featuring sparkling scenes between these two as well as the other side characters, is everything it should be: provocative, intelligent, assertive, well-acted, and always very real.

4) Saving Private Ryan

The reputation of Steven Spielberg’s epic, set during World War II, precedes it, but the hype is all worth it.  The famous opening 20 minutes of war footage will leave you wishing your heart rate would subside even while your eyes are spellbound to the screen—it’s unimaginable, chaotic, and easy to follow all at once—but the movie truly becomes great with the way it handles the rest of its story with such humanity.  As eight men, led by Tom Hanks’s John Miller, search for one missing soldier, writer Robert Rodat imbues a philosophical tone upon the material, raising questions about fighting that are not easily answered.  Finding Ryan isn’t the point; the point is what Miller’s men think about it, what Miller does while executing the mission, and what Ryan says when told he can return home.

5) Children of Men

Lead actor Clive Owen has an affinity for playing characters who derive strength from destruction occurring around them (Closer, Croupier), but here it is the rest of the world that has fallen apart while he ultimately finds a measure of decency and redemption.  Showing us what would happen in a world with no children, the explosive Children of Men uses mature filmmaking to study the human condition.  In the jaw-dropping final ten minutes, as hope intermingles with despair and Owen looks towards the future, the film achieves an emotional resonance few can in their entire running time.

All the touches from the hand of director Alfonso Cuaron, who also co-wrote the screenplay, have a revelatory effect.  Even when you don’t think he’s doing something, he is.  Sean Penn himself said the movie “is arguably as well-directed a picture as there’s ever been.”  I can’t give it any higher praise than that.

6) Garden State

A quirky, unconventionally smart film written and directed by star Zach Braff, Garden State captures 21st century ennui perfectly.  Braff plays Andrew, an emotionally blank, marginally successful actor who’s drawn home for the first time in 9 years with the news of his mother’s death.  There, he meets old friends who aren’t much more productive with their lives yet still enjoy it—something he’s forgotten about—and one special new one, played by Natalie Portman.

Culling strong performances from Portman and Peter Sarsgaard, Braff constructs an often hilarious and always touching portrait of 20something loneliness.  The film has tiny flaws, but Braff deserves praise for his underlying message that being able to feel something is better than avoiding pain.  As he tells his father, “We may not be as happy as you always dreamed we would be, but for the first time let’s just allow ourselves to be whatever it is that we are…and that’ll be better.”

7) A Beautiful Mind

What’s more important in life, truth or beauty?  That question forms the heart of A Beautiful Mind, the story of the life of brilliant and troubled mathematician John Nash.  The film explores the head, heart, and psyche of its character with an excellent script given even more depth by Russell Crowe’s superb lead performance.  The film is both taut and comprehensive, avoiding becoming another rote biopic that merely sketches biographic details by letting us into Nash’s world and that of his closest friends.

Cast Away

Like Children of Men, Cast Away takes a simple but devastating hook and uses that, and its symbolic main character, to make profound and poignant statements about human nature and the world at large.  After being marooned by a plane crash, Chuck Noland (Tom Hanks) faces a deserted island and little chance of ever seeing the real world and his fiancée Kelly again.  The film speaks to the ability of the human spirit to motivation itself to action even when all seems hopeless, but it is defined by its final act, after Chuck returns home to see how life has changed for everyone else while he was away.

His scene with Helen Hunt at her house is about as sad as movies can be, and he’s left to wonder whether it was even worth it to get off the island.  There is no Hollywood ending here, no reassuring words from anyone that life will all go back to normal now, no triumphant return to Kelly; but the final frames perfectly articulate, without words, the present status of the life of someone who wants desperately to find a reason to keep living.

9) American Beauty

With a pitch-perfect tone of quiet desperation, American Beauty lulls you into respect and then shocks you into moments of startling recognition.  An unbelievably consistent film, it accelerates to climactic scenes you simply can’t take your eyes off, no matter how many times you’ve seen them.

Everyone in the film, inhabiting the worst aspects of the “American dream” gone very wrong, is fighting for a way out of the straitjacket flung onto them, by their family, friends, or society.  Some succeed, some don’t, and their efforts are all put together with a masterful economy of dialogue, timing, and scene construction.  Kevin Spacey’s performance lives inside of it, but everyone, from the other actors (notably Chris Cooper) to first-time director Sam Mendes and first-time writer Alan Ball to cinematographer Conrad Hall, makes a contribution that you won’t soon forget.

10) Million Dollar Baby

This 2004 Best Picture winner demonstrates precisely the power that a great movie can have—emotionally, psychologically, visually, and viscerally.  It introduces three richly developed characters—a boxing trainer, an aspiring fighter, and a former star—given rich and human performances by the actors, and it ties it all together with a stellar script.  This is the rare film that doesn’t want to be sarcastic or glib and is unashamedly emotional—and that’s before it reaches its apex.  Loses points only because it’s not quite so re-watchable and some of these others.

What’s so remarkable is how strong it is for its first two-thirds, before taking a right-turn and morphing, seamlessly, into something entirely different for the final act.  Million Dollar Baby lingers on the minds of viewers long after it’s over because of the way these three people’s lives interact that deeply affect all of them, for better or worse, and make it impossible for them to declare their previously dead-end lives meaningless.