Director: Martin Scorsese
Runtime: 161 minutes
Martin Scorsese has been grappling with his Catholic faith for his entire career, even when it seemed the least obvious. The intensity of his religious convictions, as well as the intensity of his questions and severe doubts, have manifested in ways both literal (The Last Temptation of the Christ) and abstract (Taxi Driver). Catholicism (or, in a sense, any faith) is the third pillar at the foundation of his filmmaking, seated right alongside masculinity and violence (and all of the intersections among the lot).
Though Scorsese remains an impeccable craftsman, often invigorating his material with dynamism of someone decades younger, he has recently started to run on fumes when dealing with story's beyond their basic text. The Wolf of Wall Street tackles excess, but to the point of becoming excessive itself. Even Best Picture winner The Departed, though powerfully acted and edited, comes up short when one looks for something to chew on beyond the bloody bodycount.
The apparent exhaustion of two of Scorsese's thematic pillars (well, for now) has left a clearing for capital F Faith to grab the spotlight all for itself. After an on-and-off journey of roughly 30 years, Scorsese has taken Shusaku Endo's novel "Silence" and brought it to life on the big screen. Here, the man who almost became a priest turns his camera to meet not just his maker, but the ideals and practices of those serving in his name. And, while not without its faults (largely at the outset), Silence ultimately proves itself to be a worthy landmark moment of the latter stages of Scorsese's career. Regardless of your religious persuasion (or lack thereof), there is a tremendous amount of value in the issues raised in this exhaustive and exhausting work of Catholic cinema. Though not the director's most polished or lush work, it more than compensates with its staggering devotion to crafting a drama filled with ideas about the earthly and the transcendent.
Yet much like the film's journey to the big screen, Silence is not without its hiccups. The earliest passages, concerning Jesuit priests Rodrigues (Andrew Garfield) and Garrpe (Adam Driver) seeking out a former mentor in 17th century Japan, come off as stilted. Despite some striking, simple visuals, Silence begins by playing things in a strangely safe manner. At times, it even seems shockingly amateurish. Even longtime Scorsese editor (and basically co-director) Thelma Schoonmaker isn't immune, and turns in some of her weakest work to date. Simple conversations change angles with a frequency at odds with such contemplative subject matter. And Mr. Driver, though an intriguing casting choice, can't quite master what is supposed to be a Portuguese accent (the Portuguese characters speak in English). Early on, a few lines escape his throat like a squawk from a goose raised in the Bronx. Garfield generally fares better, though even he is not without his stilted moments. It's not an auspicious beginning, especially for a film that is so clearly a labor of passion.
But the further the two Jesuits step into the so-called "swamp of Japan," the more Silence finds its footing. The beauty of Endo's novel, which Scorsese has wisely left intact, is its refusal to sugarcoat or simplify the conflicts at hand. And what conflicts they are. On the surface, Silence's tale involves priests administering aid to Japanese Christians living under persecution. In less enlightened times, such a socio-political conflict would have likely been sanded down to lift the Jesuits up as Christ-like figures. Scorsese includes such a moment, though it's hardly presented as sincere. Alone and starving, Fr. Rodrigues finds himself confronted with his reflection. After a moment, the face transforms into a familiar sight: a Goya painting of Christ's face which we've been shown as how Rodrigues imagines the Lamb of God in his prayers and meditations. Garfield, with his thin features and his hair grown out into a magnificent mane, makes a fitting vessel for this sort of transfiguration.
The moment, alas, does not come greeted with a moment of intervention or inspiration. Rodrigues bursts into unsettling, hollow laughter. In his manic, dehydrated state, he seems ecstatic with such a vision, but the tone and timing suggests the sort of madness one would find in a 70s-era Herzog drama. Yet Scorsese curtails the sequence before such madness turns hallucinatory. Rodrigo Prieto's images, even at their most painterly, have an air of reality to them. The staging thrives on ordinariness, rather than elaborately constructed tableaus.
All the better, then, to enable the film to cut to the heart of its conflicts. Somewhere towards the middle (I think) of the film, Silence shifts from acting as a drama about the faithful, and morphs into a searing interrogation of men of the cloth and their motivations. Rodrigues meets a number of foils among the Japanese, chief among them a translator (Tadanobu Asano) and the inquisitor Inoue (Issei Ogata). Though radically different in their approaches, the two men proceed to challenge not just Rodrigues' convictions and his mission, but the core of Catholicism itself, as well as its place in a country like Japan.
And it's here, when it's most bound to simple scenes of people talking, that Silence finally grasps the intangible profundity it's been reaching for the whole time. Asano and Ogata make excellent philosophical adversaries for Garfield's Rodrigues, with Ogata in particular relishing every word (among his most notable jabs: "the price for your glory is their suffering.") So many faith-based films use Christian conviction as a crutch, including this year's Hacksaw Ridge, which also planted Mr. Garfield at the center. With that baseline established, a film like Silence becomes all the more remarkable. Here is a drama with source material from a Catholic writer (albeit a Japanese convert, and not a European), directed by a passionately Catholic director, that avoids turning its protagonists into the one-note martyrs they secretly wish to be.
The most magnificent wrench of all, however, comes in the form of Fr. Ferreira (Liam Neeson, thankfully not even attempting the accent). In addition to administering to the persecuted faithful, Rodrigues and Garrpe have snuck into Japan to seek out their former mentor, who has been rumored to have renounced the faith and taken up life as an ordinary member of Japanese society. Ferreira's eventual return to the narrative (best left unsaid) gives Silence a final headbutt of ambiguity, heightening the specificity of the film's conflicts, while simultaneously making them all the more universal. Neeson, in his all-too-brief screen time, is nothing short of mesmerizing. In such quick moments, he conveys Ferreira's decades of work in Japan, and the toll it took on him. Ferreira's exploits could have easily been their own film, and the way Neeson takes the bones of Scorsese and Jay Cocks' script and turns it into its own meal is nothing short of astonishing. It's a masterful moment of teaching both for Rodrigues and the viewer, the complexity of which has stayed with me long after the lights went up in the theater.
In my four years at a Jesuit-led high school, one of the theological ideas that I remember most is that faith without room for doubt is not really faith, but merely blind obedience. That remarkably nuanced notion, standing in such stark contrast to the right wing extremists now posturing as 21st century moralists, has stayed with me even as whatever religion I had slipped away. And, whatever my personal beliefs now, that Catholic and Jesuit identity (hello, Catholic guilt, you old bastard) is still etched, however faintly, in my being. To see that same sort of depth is a monumental intellectual achievement, one that overrides the vagueries that somewhat plague the central role of Rodrigues (he is both an individual and a representative of the faith as a whole, though not quite to the degree where it feels possible to empathize with him enough). With such a long wait, it would be tempting to hold Silence to the standard that anything less than a masterpiece would be a letdown. To do so, I think, would be to dismiss the tremendous accomplishments on display. Rodrigues and Garrpe may find themselves starving, but their story is veritable feast of ideas, the strengths of which are made all the more powerful by their existence alongside the flaws.
Grade: B+
Director: Jeff Nichols
Runtime: 120 minutes
Fire may rain from the sky in a critical scene of Midnight Special, but make no mistake: this is no showboating blockbuster. Arkansas-born director Jeff Nichols' (Take Shelter) fourth feature certainly has brushes with the epic and the supernatural. Yet the heart of Midnight Special is a delicate, somber study of parents protecting children against the unknown.
In the case of Midnight Special, however, it might be the adults who need protection. 8 year-old Alton Meyer (Jaeden Lieberher) may be frail looking, but his otherworldly abilities suggest that he has capabilities far beyond any weapon. And yet, as we learn from various characters, Alton's abilities may not do much good against the ominous date of March 6th (deciphered from the boy's fits of speaking in tongues and code).
When it comes to obvious answers, however, Nichols mostly withholds. Despite its lack of overt thrills, Midnight Special's plot is more or less a chase film, with Alton being taken somewhere by his father Roy (Michael Shannon) and family friend Lucas (Joel Edgerton). On their tale are two wildly different groups: the US government, who believe Alton may have somehow tapped into classified intelligence, and the cult where the boy was raised.
As in Take Shelter and Mud, the plot hardly rushes by, with momentary bursts of violence cropping a handful of times over 110 minutes. Still quite early in his career, Nichols' weakness as a director comes down to occasionally letting his slow-burn pace become plodding. Thankfully, Midnight Special represents a step in the right direction after the bloated meandering of Mud, even though it does drag out some scenes in the final act (a few too many reaction shots of people staring just a little too long).
But even when Nichols stumbles, he at least has the benefit of working with a much stronger foundation than his previous film. There's a lack of theatricality to the performances from the ensemble (which includes Adam Driver and Kirsten Dunst), but the main roles all blossom as the story progresses. Shannon previously played a distressed parent for Nichols in Take Shelter, but the roles are quite different. Shannon's Roy is tough, grounded, and compassionate, even when his devotion to Alton leads to questionable decisions (exhibit A: telling Lucas to shoot a state trooper because they can't afford to be slowed down). Edgerton's character begins as something of a convenience, but gradually reveals his own layers.
Dunst, who doesn't arrive until much later, is similarly excellent as Alton's mother. Though she left the cult early, Dunst's Sarah dresses and styles herself like one of its members, suggesting the group's lasting impact. You get the feeling that Sarah could slip back into her old ways (whatever those may have been; the cult's practices and rituals are left vague). It's an odd balancing act, especially given the lack of exposition to answer big questions, but Dunst (coming off a revelatory performance on TV's Fargo) plays it perfectly. Lieberher, despite mostly existing in the frame as a prop, does quite well when his character is called upon.
Yet so much of Midnight Special is quiet, brooding set up (aided by David Wingo's excellent music) that the climactic revelation can't help but come off as a bit of a let down. After teasing the audience (and the characters) with what might happen on March 6, Nichols overcorrects when it's time to finally pull back the curtain. It's hardly a disastrous narrative choice, but suffice it to say the journey, and not the destination, is what makes Special, well...special.
Grade: B+
Director: J.J. Abrams
Runtime: 135 minutes
Everyone who cares even a little about Star Wars has their own set of expectations for the next wave of films. Films 1 - 6 (technically 4-6/1-3) spawned such a vast empire of media that story options for a new trilogy seem endless. And yet, by reaching back to what made audiences flip out for A New Hope in 1977, director J.J. Abrams has taken on a herculean task and somehow delivered. The Force Awakens, despite years of expectations and millions and millions of dollars powering it, carries the same scrappy spirit of George Lucas' first journey to a galaxy far, far away. The final product, regardless of whether or not you were caught up in the hyper machine, has its flaws, mostly when it comes to balancing the old and the new. And unlike the much-maligned prequels (galactic senate meetings, midichlorians, the shadow of Jar Jar Binks), The Force Awakens is a legitimate fresh start for the series, with a speedy plot that takes audiences from planet to planet and starship to starship. Even with nods and winks to the audience, this is, finally, the 21st century Star Wars movie we both wanted and needed.
Abrams, Disney, and Lucasfilm have tried to keep as much of The Force Awakens under wraps, and even though the movie is out now, I'll do my best to refrain from spoilers. Even so, in terms of structure, there isn't much to spoil. For better and for worse, Abrams and co-writer Michael Arndt have stuck with Lucas' concept of having the trilogies "mirror" each other in terms of plot developments and character arcs.
This concept has ups and downs, but it mostly works as a pleasing middle ground compromise. Despite the PG-13 rating, The Force Awakens doesn't try to get away with as much as it can (versus, say, The Dark Knight), as it's trying to bring in old fans and stir the imaginations of new ones who might not even be 10 yet. Diehards looking for the franchise to leap forwards and mature (in the way the Harry Potter books and then films did) might be left wanting. When making a movie that's designed to please as many people as possible while also playing to a core fanbase, it's hard to come up with something that checks off every box.
The sense of compromise (pandering seems a bit too harsh/negative) that permeates The Force Awakens might seem like a red flag, but it's far from a dealbreaker. When it comes to the "mirroring" aspect, the film's hit-to-miss ratio winds up being rather good. This is especially true of the first hour or so, which is almost entirely filled with the next generation of heroes and villains. Among the good eggs are desert scavenger Rey (the instantly-winning Daisy Ridley), AWOL stormtrooper Finn (John Boyega, a charming and bumbling accidental do-gooder), and ace pilot Poe Dameron (Oscar Isaac, cutting loose and having fun with limited material). If ever there was a sign that this Star Wars was a creation of modern times, it's the much needed diversity found among this key trio.
Yet where there is light, there is also darkness. The Sith and the Empire may be extinct, but that hasn't stopped a new wave of devotees from arising. Most compelling is the masked and hooded Kylo Ren (Adam Driver...yes the guy from Girls), a temperamental student of the Dark Side with a Darth Vader complex. He is the film's own mirror for Rey, a mysterious loner drawn to the supernatural gifts of the Force, and his desire to hide his past is one of The Force Awakens' most compelling angles.
And with so much going on in The Force Awakens (starting anew while also tying into the original films), the actors deserve immense praise for being so charismatic in their roles. The film hops and skips around so much, and the characters could have gotten lost in the shuffle. Yet even when Abrams pushes his young leads to go a little too broad (we get it, they're in over their heads/wide eyed with amazement), the actors still deliver. Ridley and Boyega are a great deal of fun as a pair of loners forced together by chance (or maybe fate...), and Isaac's swagger further grounds the film in a tone more in line with the adventure serials that originally inspired Star Wars. Driver is a hoot as well, especially as his mood and presence adjusts when he removes his helmet.
So much of what's new is so invigorating that the arrival of characters from the first films throws off The Force Awakens' balance. As pure nostalgia it's bliss to see Harrison Ford back as Han Solo. But as Solo becomes integral to the plot, The Force Awakens starts sliding a little too far backwards. The new torchbearers of the franchise slip into the backseat for a while, leaving the midsection a bit rudderless. Seeing Han and Leia together is great on its own, but it's hard not to think that such scenes might have been better spent developing Rey, Finn, etc...
Despite this issue, Abrams brings it all home in the final stretch, even though the conclusion boasts the most overtly derivative moments from a structural standpoint. It takes a while to get there, but Abrams and Arndt do thankfully get around to resetting the chess board for future installments. Like any good adventure saga, The Force Awakens wraps up enough to function as a self-contained story, yet also ends in a way that begs for another chapter. In these final stages, Abrams restores the earnestness and charm of the series while also boldly positioning it for bigger and better things. And, at the very least, Abrams managed to combine a 'hello' to the next generation with a proper 'goodbye' to the old. It's hard to ask for more than that.
Grade: B
Director: Saverio Costanzo
Runtime: 113 minutes
Parenthood can be a scary thing, but hopefully not as scary as the woes that befall the central young couple in Saverio Costanzo's Hungry Hearts. It also likely won't descend to such stupid depths. Substitute the supernatural elements of Rosemary's Baby for paranoid veganism, and you get the drama at the center of Costanzo's latest film. It's certainly not a bad set up, and the Italian director (adapting Marco Franzoso's novel) gets some solid mileage purely based on the atmosphere. But after a compelling first half, Hungry Hearts degenerates into a series of increasingly idiotic actions and reactions by characters who barely have a single note to play over and over for two hours.
Young couple Jude and Mina (Adam Driver and Alba Rohrwacher) first meet after getting locked together in a foul-smelling bathroom in Chinatown. They struggle, in vain, to call for help, amused and disgusted by the absurdity of their predicament. Jump forward to the next scene, and they're living together. And then another scene comes by and they're married. And then Mina's pregnant. Costanzo keeps the pace going nicely as he covers these relationship milestones, using them as building blocks before the heft of the narrative arrives.
Where things change is after Mina gives birth, and insists on keeping the new (and never named) baby boy "pure." That means not going outside, or eating processed foods, or anything derived from animals. While Jude is a vegetarian, Mina is a hardcore vegan, and her intense devotion to her son's diet starts having adverse effects.
Unfortunately, from this point on, Costanzo's camera work evolves far more than his characters. Jude and Mina's anti-meet-cute unfolds over a single cramped shot. Other early scenes involve long, eye-level close ups. Most of these are reserved for Mina/Rohrwacher, whose face has a constant look of deeply-buried fear. And then, when things really start going down hill, the shots become wider, and Costanzo and cinematographer Fabio Cianchetti break out the fish-eye lens. Some of the later shots feel like rejected material from a David Lynch movie, and not necessarily in a good way.
Where Hungry Hearts really goes awry is in the behavior of its characters as Mina's paranoia increases. Jude is happy to standby and trust his wife, but even when he starts undermining her orders, he remains a weak-willed pushover. This isn't automatically a bad thing from a writing angle, but given that Jude has absolutely no other characteristics, it leaves his actions looking like those of an idiot. Though he eventually does take some sensible actions, he gives Mina far too many breaks regarding her behavior. Eventually, he sneaks the child out of the house in order to feed him meat, rather than put his foot down and insist to Mina that her parenting method is stunting their son's growth. When Jude's mother Anne (Roberta Maxwell) confronts her son during one of these feeding trips, she practically speaks for the audience, asking what the hell Jude is doing.
While Jude is nothing but a concerned pushover, Mina is only allowed to be unhinged and resolute in her paranoia. She insists that she knows what's best, even when her husband gives her evidence to the contrary. Yet even a pushover like Jude shouldn't have trouble standing up to the waif-like Mina. Her determination is disturbing, but not exactly intimidating. If she ever tried to do anything truly crazy, all Jude would have to do is cough on her and she'd probably be knocked off of her feet. Rohrwacher, for what it's worth, does what she can with the more expressive of the lead roles, but she fares better when she only has to act with her face, and not Costanzo's dialogue. I mean this as no slight against the actors themselves, but how Driver and Rohrwacher won the acting prizes at the 2014 Venice FIlm Festival is baffling.
To his credit, Costanzo manages to sustain the atmosphere from the first half all the way through to the end, but there simply isn't enough beyond that to make Hungry Hearts work. Jude's one dimensional personality only becomes a bigger problem when he tries to separate Mina and the baby, yet still gives her an unreasonable amount of access to visit the child. And Mina's freakish determination to keep her son pure is so clearly nuts in ambition that there's never room to question who's right and who's wrong. Jude and Anne are right, and Mina clearly just needs help. Lots of it. There's no room for nuance or doubt to lend this tale of marital strife a sense of balance or mystery. It's a one note enterprise under the impression that if it keeps playing louder and louder, it'll eventually turn into a melody.
Grade: C
Director: John Curran
Runtime: 112 minutes
To watch Mia Wasikowska in Tracks is to witness a rare feat of acting, one that combines physical exertion and quietly suggestive character detailing. In tackling the real-life expedition of Robyn Davidson across nearly 2000 miles of the Outback, director John Curran (The Painted Veil) couldn't have picked a better actress for the part. Wasikowska wears the role with integrity, allowing the marks of Davidson's journey to slowly, but surely, leave their marks on her mind, body, and memory. Even with a somewhat spotty script, Curran's fifth film is a rewarding return to form, bolstered by Wasikowska's beautiful performance and some outstanding cinematography courtesy of Mandy Walker (Australia).
Earlier this summer, The Rover portrayed the Outback as a dry, empty, unforgiving landscape. Tracks' vision, though formidable in its own right, is a much more inhabitable place, albeit for a chosen few. Among those few is Robyn Davidson, who - for reasons not immediately given - always preferred living in the company of mother nature than in the company of other people. She's not on a journey to "find herself." Instead, she already knows who she is and what she wants, and her response to the obvious question of "why?" is simply "why not?"
Despite no clear angle for the journey other than "because I like being alone and am capable," Curran and writer Marion Nelson have fashioned a steadily paced, gradually involving exploration of Davidson's journey and its connections to her childhood. Despite a handful of friends and seemingly decent relationships with her father and sister, Robyn is determined to make as much of the trek on her own, with her only companions being her dog and four uppity camels.
With so many shots of Davidson and her four-legged friends trudging through the sun-blasted Australian desert, it's a bit of a miracle that Tracks and Wasikowska never settle into empty, repetitive rhythms. Wasikowska - along with some truly stellar make up - is calm and determined, yet she finds ways of pushing beyond one or two default expressions along the way. Not once does it feel like the actress is coasting simply because a shot doesn't require obvious emoting. She sells the big, teary-eyed moments effortlessly, in part because she earns them through the dignity she brings to so many dialogue-free scenes covering Davidson's epic journey. The young actress has been on a roll this year in a handful of (sometimes underwritten) supporting roles, and she doesn't disappoint when her time in the spotlight finally arrives. Tracks is rarely, if ever, and exciting film, but it holds one's attention thanks to Wasikowska's sensitive portrayal of Davidson's physical and emotional struggle to endure nature at its harshest.
The only thing more important to the success of Tracks are Robyn's surroundings, and the film certainly disappoint here either. Cinematographer Mandy Walker (who, as a woman, is an unfortunate rarity in the field) turns in some truly gorgeous work capturing the Outback's harsh beauty. Her imagery - like Wasikowska's performance - never grows repetitive, even though it may seem like there's only so many ways to capture reddish sand and dried out plant life. Tracks is aces all around on the technical front, but it's hard to over state just how crucial Walker's work is making Davidson's journey look convincing.
Additional departments like the aforementioned make up also contribute greatly to making Tracks work as well as it does. Garth Stevenson's lush, yet unobtrusive, score works wonders without threatening to overtake the images and emotions. With so much wordless traveling to be done, montages inevitably pop up (smoothly handled by editor Alexandre de Franceschi), and Stevenson's music keeps everything flowing along with understated elegance. That understated elegance is shared by Curran's directing which takes on the considerable task of balancing Davidson's literal and metaphorical journeys with smooth results.
The lone disappointment of Tracks comes from Nelson's screenplay, which doesn't always hit its mark when it comes to pacing or timing. National Geographic photog Rick Smolan (Adam Driver) shows up multiple times early on, and as a result it feels like it takes far too long for Davidson's real journey to get going (kudos, though, for not simply starting the film off with her already in the desert). Certain elements, like a compass with deep ties to Robyn's past, are introduced only moments before they become important viewer, which drains the film of some tension. Thankfully, Wasikowska and company are usually enough to counterbalance Nelson's structural missteps, even as they still keep Tracks from being an across-the-board triumph.
Tracks will, with good reason, not be everyone's cup of tea. Its treatment of Robyn's past and her mental state will strike some as lazy or shallow, and will leave them with almost nothing to connect to, even as Wasikowska tries her hardest. For all of the epic visual moments, it's the tiniest of details that will separate Tracks' admirers and detractors. Like Davidson's preference for limited human interaction, Curran's film is understandably not for everyone. Yet if there is a connection, what transpires over roughly two hours will prove to be a gradually-involving work of tremendous scope and delicately beautiful human strength.
Grade: B+/A-
