Review: "Starred Up"

Director: David Mackenzie
Runtime: 106 minutes

The last time David Mackenzie made a movie, he attracted two sizable names - Ewan McGregor and Eva Green - yet virtually no audience outside of festivals. That film was called Perfect Sense, and like all of Mackenzie's other films, it was divisive. Yet when Perfect Sense's odd blend of pandemic thriller and romance clicked, it truly soared. After two all-over-the-place acts, Mackenzie stuck the landing in the home stretch, particularly in the devastatingly beautiful final sequence. Perfect Sense could be a tin-eared, tone deaf mess, but there was something intriguing about the dedication on all fronts. 

Jump forward two years (or only one if you're in the UK), and Mackenzie has done a total 180. His new film, Starred Up, finds the fascinating director tackling the well-worn territory of the grimy prison drama. Working off of a script from Jonathan Asser, Mackenzie has made a film that ticks all of the gritty kitchen sink cinema boxes, down to the accents that will leave large portions of non-British English speakers leaning in to better decipher the dialogue. Starred Up is a turning point for Mackenzie as a director - as evidenced by the thus far unanimous acclaim for the film, but I find myself apprehensive about where his career will go from this point. Mackenzie has delivered what is both his most consistent film, and his least interesting. 

At the center of Starred Up is Eric (rising Irish star Jack O'Connell), a volatile young man who has just been transferred from a young offender institution to an adult prison. Though Eric doesn't immediately attract attention from other inmates, an unfortunate incident puts him on thin ice with the draconian prison staff, who give him an ultimatum: he must take a group therapy course led by Mr. Baumer (Homeland's Rupert Friend) without any more violations, or risk being sent to solitary confinement. Complicating matters is the guiding hand of fellow inmate Neville (Ben Mendelsohn), who just happens to be Eric's estranged father.

To Mackenzie's credit, he has adapted to this more traditional narrative format quite well. He navigates the confined spaces of the prison well, never allowing the limited spaces to force him into visual repetition. Mackenzie's work with his cast is also quite effective, with O'Connell giving solid evidence that those "next big thing" labels may actually be justified. It's an enormously physical performance, relying on the actor's ability to snap into violent rage at any given moment, and O'Connell carries himself quite well through all of it. Mendelsohn, meanwhile, continues his streak of compelling portraits of morally dubious men, while Friend - despite not enough to do - brings a nice level of calm to his scenes. 

Yet even though Asser's script steers Mackenzie into relatively straightforward territory, it's also responsible for the rather shrug-worthy pieces that fit into Starred Up's whole. The story spends far too long getting Eric into Baumer's group, leaving barely any time for the group therapy scenes to amount to much of anything. While Asser's dialogue avoids overbearing profundities, it also never taps into the inner workings of its characters and their histories of violence. The development of Eric and Neville's father/son relationship is paced rather glacially, which keeps the harrowing final scenes from landing with their full impact. 

The script's stabs at tackling broader issues often suffer as well. In tiny doses, Starred Up tries to tackle the ideas of a broken prison system that spends no time trying to rehabilitate its inmates. It may have been an attempt at subtlety, but it feels like a giant missed opportunity. Friend does his best to sell Baumer's impassioned plea for actual support of the inmates' mental health, but the scene ultimately rings false. Rather than subtlety, it's an example of there being too little far too late. 

Mackenzie and his cast, at least, navigate through the slipshod story quite well, even when so many potentially compelling moments wind up dramatically inert. Starred Up tries to play the prison drama angle two different ways - gritty character piece and social commentary -  yet can't quite make either one connect. The film goes through the paces, often admirably, yet there's a noticeable lack of true tension or danger, even when the fists start flying. The most interesting part of it all may simply be wondering what attracted a man like David Mackenzie to something so unwaveringly mundane. 

Grade: B-/C+

Review: "The Place Beyond the Pines"

Director: Derek Cianfrance
Runtime: 140 minutes

Bold, intimate, and raw. These three adjectives, among many others, were thrown at Derek Cianfrance's Blue Valentine when it opened to rave reviews in 2010. That film was a split look at the rise and fall of a romance and marriage, confined entirely to characters navigating the ups and downs of every day life. As such, when Blue Valentine worked, it delivered tremendously powerful, and often unsettling, moments that burst from the screen. The same three above-mentioned adjectives can also be used to describe Cianfrance's follow-up, The Place Beyond the Pines, with one new addition: ambitious. Unfortunately, it's that new adjective that leaves Pines falling short of its lofty goals. For all of its merits, Pines is ultimately more admirable for its ambition, rather than its execution. 

Split into three stories (each of which could, in a sense, be their own full-fledged films) linked by time, the film ultimately comes down to the relationships between fathers and sons. There's Luke (Ryan Gosling), a heavily tattooed, volatile motorcycle stuntman who learns that a former fling (Eva Mendes), has had his child. Meanwhile, fresh-faced cop Avery (Bradley Cooper) is doing his best to fight against corruption in the local police force, while also dealing with his own newborn son. Detailing how the story threads cross paths, and ultimately play out, would require quite of bit of plot spoiling. Suffice it to say that as time passes, and the film's scope widens, the plot becomes more and more dire for all involved. 

In fact, the evolution between and among stories (one of which involves a 15 year jump forward) is the most compelling aspect of the script, written by Cianfrance, along with Ben Coccio and Darius Marder. The ways in which actions, and the way we see them, echo across stories and time periods is often subtle, but lends the film a nice connective thread. Gosling is first introduced to us in a long tracking shot that follows him with his back turned to the camera. In the third part of the film, one of the first times we meet his high school-aged son Jason (Dane Dehaan), we also follow him as he keeps his back turned to us. It's a simple, but telling, bit of camera work that reinforces the idea that Luke (and therefore, any of his offspring) are outsiders, always moving forward and unable to sit still and settle down. Less clear is the titular place beyond the pines, which seems to be a vague manifestation of the place where bad decisions begin and/or play out. 

Cianfrance's ability to link the stories is critical, as the film runs for nearly two and a half hours. Though the first hour or so is more energetic (Luke gets into the bank-robbing business) than the remaining screen time, the energy never really flags. If anything, Cooper carries more of the film than Gosling does, despite both presences looming over the entire film. His story at first seems more mundane, but it actually has equally (perhaps more?) interesting emotional territory to mine. 

But as the film progresses, Cianfrance lets the widening scope of the material overwhelm him. Despite the nicely handled plot mechanics, Pines never achieves the emotional resonance that it clearly strives for. The most immediate comparison is last year's Cloud Atlas, a film which had to put so much effort into churning out its six stories coherently than it wasn't able to stick the landing on the emotional front. Even though all three sections of Pines are clearly linked on multiple levels, there's still the feeling that certain relationships aren't fully explored. A potentially gripping subplot involving Avery ratting out some dirty cops is glossed over (albeit elegantly) in order to get things moving forward.  

Emotional developments suffer from this approach as well. Part three introduces us to Avery's troubled son AJ (Emory Cohen), yet the film never attempts to even hint at how the son of an upstanding cop became such a boor. Cohen's performance in the role doesn't help matters, and often feels overwrought. He's not merely troubled or volatile. He's a straight-up bully who we have no reason to empathize with. Faring much better is Dehaan, who actually has an interesting emotional conflict (struggling to connect to a very distant father).

Even this arc, however, is undermined by the overblown conclusion that the film leads towards. When the film reaches what should be its emotional high point, it ends with more of a whimper than a bang. The energy of the storytelling can only paper the lack of true character development for so long, and by the time the ending rolls around, the film's facade comes crumbling down. The ingredients, however, are all in place for a unique, mesmerizing character drama. Performances are solid across the board, with Gosling, Cooper, Dehaan, and Mendes all getting at least one brief moment to shine with some excellent silent emoting. And cinematographer Sean Bobbitt lends the film a richly colored, gritty look, while composer Mike Patton's unconventional score creates a unique atmosphere out of ghostly choirs and piano chords. 

But the film has more energy than honest emotion. It's telling that the film's most compelling moment is a chase sequence (brilliantly shot in long takes from within a police car), and not the moments of emotional desperation in the final act. A side character played by Ben Mendelsohn (criminally underused) tells Luke that, "if you keep on riding like lightning, you're going to crash like thunder." Like Luke, The Place Beyond the Pines rides like lightning. When it crashes, however, it often sounds more like a hollow thud. 

Grade: C

Cannes '12 Review: "Killing Them Softly" [Competition]

Killing Them Softly, the next film from Andrew Dominik (2007's masterful The Assassination of Jesse James...) may lack the poetic beauty of its director's previous film, but that doesn't stop it from being a rollicking good film in its own right. An adaptation of the novel "Cogan's Trade" by George Higgins (the film initially shared the same title), Dominik's film may not be a subtle piece like his last film, yet what emerges is undoubtedly the work of a compelling filmmaker. Though perhaps just shy of the greatness required to, say, win the Palme D'Or, Killing Them Softly boasts strong performances and excellent technical aspects that make it one of the stand outs of the festival, as well as the year (the Weinstein Company will release it theatrically in the fall).


Moving the story to New Orleans, Dominik's film first introduces us to a couple of low-level thugs (Scoot McNairy and Animal Kingdom's Ben Mendelsohn) who rob a card game held by Markie Trattman (Ray Liotta). As it turns out, Markie once robbed his own card game, and then admitted it (albeit late enough so no one got too upset). Still, if he were to pull the same stunt again, things wouldn't go over so well. So when McNairy and Mendelsohn's thugs go in to rob the game, naturally, things start going south for poor Markie. Enter Jackie Cogan (Brad Pitt), backed up by Johnny Cash's "The Man Comes Around" to spectacularly satiric effect. Hired by the unseen upper echelon mob members, it's Cogan's job to sort things out, and punish those who deserve punishment. In hindsight, the plot isn't anything special on paper. That's where the execution comes into play.


Set against the false hope(s) of the 2008 presidential election, Killing Them Softly is one cynical bastard of a film, and it's all the more enjoyable because of this. Dominik never attempts the subtle route in his message - that America is a business - yet the film doesn't feel weakened because of this (though I'm sure many will disagree). Filled with technical flourishes (lateral camera moves, tracking shots, depth of field manipulation, etc...), Dominik takes an ugly looking world of decay and grime and turns it into something oddly beautiful. Sometimes it becomes too much, such as a scene where the camera tries to evoke the feeling of Mendelsohn's high-as-a-kite character, but ultimately his stylized tendencies are a resounding success. The tracking shots in particular pay off nicely, building a nice sense of momentum and tension. Watching the camera follow McNairy and Mendelsohn into the critical heist is made more cinematic and suspenseful by virtue of the unbroken shot(s) following them towards their target. Another crucial moment, a mob hit, comes stunningly to life thanks to the use of gorgeously gritty slow motion. 


The performances aren't half bad either, by which I mean there's some damn good acting in the film, even if some is a little one note. Pitt, who shows up surprisingly late in the game, starts off merely decently, but evolves into one hell of a presence. His Cogan is a man who does his job well, but takes no relish in it, preferring to kill his targets "softly," (take them out from a distance) so there's no room for emotion to get in the way. It's not on the same level as Pitt's collaboration with Dominik in Jesse James, which saw the actor reach new heights of dark magnetism, but the film does show the two to be a strong actor-director match. It's somewhere between the richness of their previous collaboration and one of Pitt's better "star" turns, like last year's Moneyball, a mix of persona and actual character detailing that is never truly remarkable yet impressive nonetheless. 


The supporting players are dynamite as well. James Gandolfini is truly remarkable as a major hitman Cogan calls in, only to discover that he's past his prime and wasting his life on hookers and booze. Though the interactions between the two go on just a hair too long, there's no denying that Gandolfini owns the scenes, creating a cynically tragic figure, a man left wallowing in decline in a position of greed and violence. McNairy and Mendelsohn are also quite fun to watch as the idiot thugs who try and get away with the heist that sets everything off. Richard Jenkins, in the most normal role of the bunch, remains compelling in his interactions with Cogan as the mob's coordinator. 


Yet despite its upfront nature, Killing Them Softly has a little more on its mind, and I suspect this is where it will prove divisive. Dominik is clearly trying to say something about a part of America left behind before the promises of the 2008 election, as well as how America is becoming more and more of a business. While I wouldn't question the opinions of those who found Dominik's approach to be too much, I have to concede that I enjoyed the hell out it. It's not subtle, nor does it pretend to be. It's in your face, and extremely satisfying because of it, culminating a pitch-perfect bit of black comedy that is also Pitt's best scene. Technically stunning, well acted, and packing a (completely in-your-face) message, Killing Them Softly may lack the poetry of Dominik's last film, but that doesn't stop it from being a damn good one. 


Grade: B+/A-

Review: "Trespass"

I really have to wonder why Nicole Kidman chose to take part in Joel Schumacher's Trespass. Did she want an easy paycheck? Did she owe someone a favor? Did she want to get kissed by Cam Gigandet? Did her double duties as star and producer of Rabbit Hole wear her out and cloud her judgement? I would hope that it's one of the above, because there's really no reason why an actress of her caliber is slumming it in this second (third? fourth?) rate home-invasion thriller. The man in the director's chair certainly doesn't help matters.

Ever a hit-and-miss director, Joel Schumacher has been on something of a downward spiral recently, and Trespass does absolutely nothing to reverse the trend. Kyle and Sarah Miller (Nicholas Cage and Kidman, respectively) are a wealthy couple with a teenaged daughter. Kyle does...well, honestly, it doesn't matter. You just need to know that diamonds are involved. One night, while trying to keep their daughter Avery (Liana Liberato) from going to a friend's party (she sneaks out anyway), the couple are overtaken by burglars. What starts as a seemingly regular robbery spirals out of control as the burglars' identities and backstories come to light.

All in all, it's not a terrible premise for a thriller, but in the end it's execution that counts, and good lord, are there problems with the execution. Though it establishes the Miller family and gets to the robbery efficiently, the more Trespass goes on, the further down the rabbit hole of stupidity it goes. The script, by Karl Gajdusek, certainly deserves a lot of the blame. Characters, both burglars and victims, make increasingly dumb decisions just so the plot can agonizingly protract itself. It says a lot about a movie when the smartest (I'm using that term lightly) character is the angsty teenaged daughter. Aspects like this ruin whatever B-movie funTrespass might have held for its audience, barring a few unintentionally funny lines. But the bigger, and more distracting, offender is Schumacher's direction, which appears to have been limited to telling his performers to say each line louder than the last. So for all of the screaming, pointed guns, death threats, broken glass, and attempts at improvised kidney-removal surgery (yes, you read that correctly), there's rarely a moment when any tension materializes.

It's really a shame, because there's enough talent among the cast to make this feel like a wasted opportunity, rather than shameless junk. Ben Mendelsohn, last seen giving a chilling performance in Animal Kingdom, makes a perfectly compelling ring-leader, while Kidman and Liberato give passable performances (though they're often reduced to yelling at the top of their lungs). Cage, often the subject of ridicule these days, does OK for himself too, dialing it down and never going any more over the top than the rest of the ensemble. There are, however, two dead weights in the cast who drag it all down. First is Jordana Spiro as the lone female burglar. The script tries to liven up the character by giving her a drug addiction, though all it really adds it the opportunity to see Ms. Spiro strut about in her underwear for no justifiable reason. Her acting certainly doesn't help matters; at least when most everyone else is yelling, it's believable, regardless of how shrill and exhausting it all is. That is, except for Cam Gigandet. To say that this is an actor who has gotten by on his looks would be an understatement. Where I previously remembered him as the worst part of Easy A, now I get to remember him as the worst part of Trespass. You can almost feel what little stardom he has evaporating as the movie goes on. To be fair the performance is actually acceptable for the first act or so of the film. Unfortunately, in an attempt to keep us on our toes, Gajdusek inserts one of his dumb little twists. Turns out Gigandet's character is a bit of a closet psychotic who wants to 'rescue' Sarah. I rest my case.

On the technical front there's really nothing worth mentioning. Lighting is acceptable and appropriately moody without being ridiculous, and the score, while predictable, never becomes intrusive. I might have to reconsider that last sentence though, because I spent a good deal more time watching Ms. Kidman's weave unravel (it truly is a wonder) than I did really soaking in the film's production values. However, to sum things up, as far as production values go, it's perfectly adequate, with virtually nothing that would make you think that Trespass was originally headed straight to DVD. Worse films have made their ways into theaters, not that this gets Trespass off of the hook. Schumacher's latest is little more than a lukewarm thriller that features characters who aren't worth caring about, and a plot that switches directions and character motivations so often that you only have a mild interest (at best) in who lives or dies. There's neither enough legitimate moments of suspense, nor a camp factor to make the ride enjoyable, even with a clean 90 minute run time. Rather than wind up being casual, dumb fun,Trespass is merely dumb and forgettable, to the point where, as I write this, it's already fading quickly from memory.

Review: C-/D+