Review: "The East"

Director: Zal Batmanglij
Runtime: 116 minutes

Cults are all the rage these days in the entertainment world. On the small screen, Fox's The Following proved to be a major hit. On the big screen, Sean Durkin's Martha Marcy May Marlene lit up indie theaters as well as the festival circuit. And, last year, burgeoning indie It Girl Brit Marling, along with director/co-writer Zal Batmanglij, tackled cults in the micro budget thriller Sound of My Voice. That film, Marling's sophomore effort as both an actress and writer, was not exactly a break out hit, but it did push the writer/actress ever closer to the first stages of stardom. Now, roughly a year later (and with some major backers), Marling and Batmanglij have returned to the territory of their first collaboration. A sequel to Sound in spirit, The East marks another interesting evolution in Marling's career, even as it suffers from a handful of significant setbacks.

Marling's position on camera is flipped around with this latest effort. Sound cast her as a supporting role as a mysterious cult leader. Now, she plays Jane, an intelligence operative for a private firm. Jane's boss, Sharon (an underused Patricia Clarkson), gives her a major, and highly coveted, assignment: to infiltrate and dismantle a growing eco-terrorist collective known as The East. The group, headed by the mysterious Benji (Alexander Skarsgaard), targets CEO's of companies that sell harmful pharmaceuticals or damage the environment via their factories. Yet rather than stage protests or carry out bombings, The East's MO involves giving the responsible individuals an ugly taste of their own medicine (sometimes rather literally).

And, before too long, The East's similarities with the cult from Sound of My Voice arise. Bizarre (but harmless) rituals and anti-consumerist lifestyles permeate the group's compound, even as they plan their violent acts of retaliation. Even as Jane struggles to fit in and earn her place, she gradually earns their trust, up to the point where they take her along for a mission. As Jane spends more time with The East, her periodic visits back home  start leaving her less satisfied. The group's methods make her uneasy, yet she can't exactly deny the grains of truth in their ideology.

Yet, once again, Marling's (and Batmanglij's) ambition has outstripped her execution, and not just behind the camera. Sound of My Voice found a perfect vehicle for Marling's gifts as an actress. There's a certain sleepy reserve to her screen presence that was well matched to her role as cult leader. She started off sounding merely dippy, yet gradually revealed herself as a skilled manipulator of the weak-minded and gullible. As the investigative force in The East, however, there appears to be some disconnect. From what we're told, and what the actions suggest, Jane is a quiet, steely, resourceful, and driven individual. Though she loves her boyfriend (Jason Ritter), when she needs to go to work, she can flip the switch in a heartbeat. But for all that we're told, and even shown, Marling can't quite seem to shake the sleepiness from her performance. The role, for the first half, requires the same sort of stern grit that Jodie Foster brought to Clarice Starling, and Marling can't seem to muster up the necessary alertness.

The supporting cast, thankfully, all seem quite game in their roles, as thin as they are. Ellen Page stands out nicely as an increasingly radical member of the collective with a surprising past. It's the sort of role that allows the actress to firmly dispel the idea that she's only cut out for characters in quirky indie comedies. Alexander Skarsgaard and Toby Kebbell have nice moments as well, even though the former is never quite as magnetic a leader as the one from Marling and Batmanglij's first outing. Yet neither actor is served well by the writing. Skarsgaard is given a tragic past that feels empty, at best, while Kebbell's background is used more for exposition and forwarding the plot. Meanwhile, Patricia Clarkson isn't given nearly enough to do, rendering Jane's growing conflict hugely unbalanced.

Even though The East comes with bigger production values and some talented actors, it doesn't quite stick the landing in one key area that Sound of My Voice nailed, and that's the cult itself. The sense of intrigue and danger never fully connects, even with all of the rituals depicted. Sound built more suspense out of the repeated scenes of a ritual handshake than The East accomplishes with its more hazily sketched routines. When the film builds to its bigger moments, Batmanglij manages to pull it off, but the writing is constantly letting down the atmosphere (which receives a nice boost from the dynamic score). 

The film's handling of issues also can't help but feel rather thin as well. Even without succumbing to lengthy monologues, the film could have engaged with its ethical issues with greater insight. That missing insight only makes the titular collective more generic. These issues are not helped by the film's final 20 minutes, which rushes through a number of developments in order to set up its open-ended (and rather pat) conclusion. Somewhere in The East are the seeds of a great, morally complex thriller, one that Marling and Batmanglij will hopefully make in the near future. As the next step in the pair's evolution as storytellers, however, it can't help but come up short, even with its more polished aesthetic. The East has competence to spare, yet not nearly enough that is truly exceptional.

Grade: C+

Review: "The Company You Keep"

Director: Robert Redford
Runtime: 121 minutes

When a film comes front-loaded with stars, red flags start to go up. While it's impressive to see films that can string together stacked ensembles, there are always some immediate questions that arise. The big one is whether the film will give each member of the cast moments to shine, or if some of the stars have been cast in thankless roles strictly for their name value. While Robert Redford's The Company You Keep may not exactly be a great film, it can pride itself on being the rare example that manages to juggle a large, first-rate ensemble without dropping too many balls along the way.

Adapted from Neil Gordon's novel, Redford's latest directorial effort opens with the arrest of Sharon Solarz (Susan Sarandon) in upstate New York. A former member of the Weathermen (specifically, its radical militant arm), she's arrested for a crime that took place 30 years prior. Solarz doesn't resist, and goes along with as if it's exactly what she wanted. Yet Solarz's willingness to be caught creates a domino effect that starts to affect the lives of her former comrades. Local journalist Ben Shepard (Shia LaBeouf), who catches on to the story, eventually outs former Weathermen member Nick Sloan (Redford), who has been living under the alias of Jim Grant for decades. Sloan realizes that, with the FBI now putting extra effort into finding other members of the Weathermen, he'll need to abandon his life to set an old mistake right, and clear his name. 

And once the chase begins (both Shepard and the FBI), The Company You Keep starts to trot out its cavalcade of stars with smart efficiency. Sloan's contacts across the film are all more than plot devices. Each one manages to bring up a different facet of the Weathermen's lost ideologies, as well as Sloan's relationship to those ideologies, without becoming episodic. These scenes are nicely broken up with jumps to Shepard's parallel investigation, as well as a handful of looks at the FBI team trying to catch Sloan and his contacts. 

Though earlier detours are simpler (those involving Nick Nolte and Chris Cooper are closest to being strictly plot-oriented), the later encounters deepen the humanity of the chase. Richard Jenkins and Julie Christie (especially the latter) deliver poignant work as two very different kinds of former radicals. Jenkins' Jed is now a college professor, while Christie's Mimi is still boiling with radical fervor under the surface. Sarandon is also compelling in her fleeting screen time. As the woman who helps set off the plot, she's tasked with communicating years of confusion, regret, and broken idealism, and she does so marvelously.

For much of the story, Redford is more of sounding board onto which the ensemble reminisces. Thankfully, his work behind the camera more than compensates for his largely bland role in front.  We may be watching a man run from a 30 year old crime, but Redford's direction captures the cat-and-mouse game as if his crime had taken place in the first scene. The suspense is never overbearing, and is allowed to play out with a mature naturalism that helps define the film. 

Yet if the film is a strong showcase for its older cast members, the younger cast members get less satisfying material. Like Redford, LaBeouf doesn't have too much to work with, although his character traits are established much sooner and with greater clarity. Anna Kendrick, perhaps the ensemble's only truly wasted member, has even less as Shepard's FBI contact. The script tries to throw in a half-baked aside about the pair's former relationship, but it feels more like filler. Rising star Brit Marling fares better, and injects some spark into a similarly bland role, yet she's ultimately saddled with a subplot that is more intriguing on paper than in execution.

Though The Company You Keep handles its plot threads and the majority of its characters with skill, it comes across as a rather shallow piece. The engagement with the characters' ideas feels simplistic, even though the actors handle their dialogue well. While it marks a big step in the right direction for Redford from 2007's atrocious Lions for Lambs, the film is more concerned with being a thriller than a study of ideas, actions, and their implications. This makes it entertaining, but it also saps it of some dramatic power along the way. After moving along so smoothly for most of its runtime, the script shoe-horns in a little speech from Sloan meant to condense a bunch of ideas about journalistic integrity and personal growth into less than a minute. It has all of the subtlety of a hammer to the face. 

Though The Company You Keep never fully sinks, it is weighed down by its surface-oriented screenplay and a shrug-inducing ending. Overall, it's an engaging, well-made piece of entertainment, yet it also thinks that by merely touching on important ideas and history, it suddenly becomes weighty and meaningful. The real result is that the film just feels overly confident, without the goods to back up that confidence.

Grade: C+

Review: "Sound of My Voice"

Director: Zal Batmanglij
Runtime: 84 minutes

In 2011, the independent scene saw the rise of a potential breakout talent named Brit Marling. Marling's sci-fi drama Another Earth (which she co-wrote) became a major talking point at Sundance, and the film was released theatrically later in the same year, to mixed reception. She hasn't gone unnoticed. In addition to appearing in 2012's Arbitrage, she is set to appear in Robert Redford's next film, and has begun lining up plenty of other projects. Yet despite her discovery, Marling hasn't completely left behind the low-budget indie aesthetic that brought her into the festival circuit spotlight. Like Another Earth, 2012's Sound of My Voice is written by (and stars) Marling, and plays as a drama tinged with loose sci-fi elements. And, like Another Earth, Sound has its problems, even as it marks a progression in overall consistency and narrative intrigue.

If anything, Sound of My Voice is the "broader" of Marling's two indie projects. Where Another Earth used science fiction to explore issues of chance and confronting one's past, Sound is grounded in a more thriller-oriented narrative. Young couple Peter (Argo's Christopher Denham) and Lorna (Nicole Vicius) decide to to infiltrate a burgeoning cult hidden somewhere in Los Angeles, and then expose it with secret footage. After receiving instructions to prepare themselves, they are led to the cult's heaquarters, where the meet the elusive leader, Maggie (Marling). Maggie claims to be from the year 2054, and though she doesn't know how she's traveled back in time (the film is set in 2010), she's made it her mission to help a select group of disciples spiritually prepare themselves for an upcoming "journey."

What Sound of My Voice gets right is its depiction of the small cult at the center of the story. From the daffy rituals (that handshake if kind of cool, though), to Maggie's vague philosophical posturing, one can see how susceptible minds would be in awe of her. Even as we identify with Peter and Lorna's skepticism (which is present before they even set foot in the cult's HQ), Maggie as a character still casts her own spell as she gently manipulates her blind disciples. This is in large part thanks to Marling's portrayal of Maggie. Accuse the writer/actress of vanity all you want (granted, some of it is probably valid), but in this film she's firmly out to prove herself as more than a pretty face. Her roles in Another Earth and Sound aren't terribly reliant on expressiveness, yet the actress is able to work quiet wonders with her vocal inflections. Maggie's first appearance feels a little too monotone, but the more time we spend with her, the more magnetic the character becomes, even as we continue to hold her story in immense skepticism. 

Yet if Marling's performance gives the film (which only runs 84 minutes) an intriguing center, her work with Zal Batmanglij on the screenplay is less consistent. Unlike Another Earth, which established that its sci-fi conceit was very real in the opening minutes, Sound wades into purposefully uncertain territory. But instead of an intriguing back-and-forth, it's difficult to overcome one's initial doubt in nearly everything Maggie says. Where the film could easily lose its way is when Peter begins to find himself actually entertaining the possibility that Maggie isn't lying. The scene where Maggie gets under Peter's skin is well-played by both actors, but there isn't quite enough grounding the moment to make us question our own doubts. We remain die-hard skeptics even as the movie wants to tease us with 84 minutes of "is she or isn't she?" 

That's why Sound's journey is more compelling than its individual parts, or its destination for that matter. Cult mindsets fascinate us for good reason, and watching Maggie hold such sway over her wide-eyed followers is what makes the film worth sticking with. Maggie displays no overt malice, yet there is still a palpable disease we feel at seeing someone control people so easily. That she mostly does it with such a reserved, soothing demeanor is even more unsettling. 

In the end, however, the flaws of the screenplay do eventually start to build up and, coupled with the ending, prove frustrating rather than satisfyingly mysterious. There's a subplot involving Peter's relationship with his deceased mother that has potential, yet it's handled so quickly that there's no time for it to accumulate weight. We spend so much time with our eyes on Maggie that the deeper concerns regarding Peter and Lorna's identities start to fall by the wayside. Denham and Vicius handle the material capably, but it ultimately feels rather thin. Maggie may ultimately be a supporting role, but it's all too clear that the screenplay cares perhaps too much about her character. 

Even as Sound of My Voice starts to firmly throw some validation to the skeptics, it feels as though it's rushing towards a conclusion, further at the expense of plausibility. Batmanglij and Marling seem convinced that they've earned enough suspension of disbelief that they can throw caution to the wind in the last 15 minutes, and at times it's more irritating that intriguing. Finally, there's the matter of the open conclusion. I won't spoil a thing, but I will say that it comes off as a slightly overblown way of allowing the story to have its cake and eat it too. 

In the immediate moment the ending is compelling, but as time passes and the credits scroll in front of you, the more you feel as though you've just been led on an elaborate tease, rather than an appropriately complex and subtle mystery. Whatever debates Sound of My Voice provokes about Maggie's story will likely give way to quibbles about the film's narrative decisions rather quickly. That doesn't stop large portions of the film from being enjoyable, but it does limit the film. Though more immediately gripping than Another Earth, Sound of My Voice is hindered by issues in its screenplay that make its vague sci-fi pieces feel more like narrative cheats.

Grade: B-

Review: "Arbitrage"

Director: Nicholas Jarecki

Runtime: 107 minutes

I have no doubt in my mind that Nicholas Jarecki's Arbitrage is a solid movie. It is solidly acted, solidly made, and gets better as it goes along and the stakes increase. All that it's really missing is something special, whether in the form of a stirring performance or a unique score. Arbitrage is the epitome of the type of film that satisfies the desire for engaging, adult-minded entertainment, yet leaves your mind barely after you exit the theater. 

Playing off of the 1% vs. 99% concept that has thoroughly engulfed the nation in recent years, Jarecki's film centers on Robert Miller (Richard Gere), a hedge fund king trying to sell his company. When Miller's longstanding affair with a French art dealer ends in tragedy, he struggles to cover up his involvement, and keep his empire afloat long enough to close the sale. 

Jarecki weaves an interesting tale of financial and moral deception and has a knack for communicating information without deluging the audience. He also has material solid enough for Gere, Susan Sarandon (as Robert's wife), and Brit Marling (Robert's daughter Brooke, a rising business star) to turn in effective performances. The women are perhaps more impressive because their roles initially seem thankless, yet both have moments to deliver on the emotional front. Ultimately this is Robert's story through and through, and Gere makes for a dynamic, albeit never truly compelling, lead, to the point where you almost want him to get away with everything. 

But step back from Arbitrage, and the utter vanilla-ness of the whole enterprise only becomes more clear. Jarecki has fashioned an interesting tale, but without diverse enough characters and personalities to push the material to the next level. For that reason alone, the film's MVP is actually Nate Parker as a Harlem-based twenty something caught up in Miller's escapades and thrown under the bus. He's the one element in the whole film whose involvement feels unexpected, and his character's relationship with Miller informs the film's best scenes. But one interesting piece isn't enough. That's not to rain on the film's parade as an assured debut. Jarecki deserves that much credit. It's just not a debut that excites with its promise. It merely assures us that Jarecki can deliver thoughtful competence. 

Grade: B-/C+

Review: "Another Earth"

One of the less-talked about, yet most surprising trends of 2011 has come from an unexpected merger: independent films and cosmic/sci-fi elements. First was Terrence Malick's long-gestating The Tree of Life, with its grandiose depictions of the big bang and the early stages of life on earth. Next came Lars von Trier's Melancholia, which featured a plot involving a hidden planet that would have felt right at home in some overblown Hollywood production. Now comes Mike Cahill's Another Earth, which made its debut at Sundance earlier this year to mixed reviews.

Yet despite some simple-yet-convincing VFX work and cool black and white footage of Jupiter, Cahill's film is easily the least cosmically minded of the trio. When we first meet Rhoda Williams (Brit Marling), she's just been accepted to MIT, and is celebrating by partying with some friends. As she drives home, she hears on the radio that a duplicate earth has been discovered far off in the distance. As Rhoda, already somewhat drunk, becomes mesmerized by the new blue light in the sky, she tragically crosses paths with Yale professor John Burroughs (William Mapother) and his family. The film then jumps ahead four years, to the day of Rhoda's release from prison, with the duplicate earth now looming overhead 24/7.

But even with the inclusion of a subplot involving a contest to win a trip to the so-called Earth 2, the duplicate planet takes a backseat to Rhoda's attempts at redemption. Cahill and Marling's script would rather use Earth 2 in order to raise questions about identity and second chances. Unfortunately, that's where the problems start to surface. Strip Another Earth of its thin layer of sci-fi, and its story of redemption becomes rather trite. There's nothing new brought to the narrative, which involves Rhoda making peace with John - he doesn't know she's the student from the accident - by pretending to be part of a cleaning service. John's life (and, consequently, his house) has fallen into disarray, but as Rhoda starts to make her weekly cleaning visits, the pair begin to bond (see what they did there?).

Well sure, but the sci-fi elements are there, so that must add something, right? Not exactly. There's an interesting subplot about an essay contest to decide who will be the lone 'average joe' to go on the mission to Earth 2, but by the time it truly comes to the foreground, there's not much it can do to lift the otherwise familiar proceedings. Cahill and Marling are clearly trying to use the duplicate earth story in order to give this intimate story bigger, deeper implications, but their effort stops at the most basic level. At best, there's one conversation between Rhoda and John about Earth 2, and a theory about how it may differ from our own planet, but it's used strictly as a plot device, and never attempts anything bigger. Save for a scene where John plays a strange little tune for Rhoda using a violin bow and a saw, there's nothing about this type of relationship that we haven't seen before, and it isn't terribly interesting in its own right. It's merely held together by those scenes involving mentions of Earth 2, or the slow-mo shots of Rhoda walking along the street while the planet looms in the background.

And speaking of walking, there's quite a bit of that. Rhoda doesn't even speak (disregarding her opening voice-over) for the first 10 minutes of the film. Instead, Cahill gives us shot after shot of Rhoda walking or staring. These scenes do convey the sense of alienation that Rhoda feels, but since the writing for her character isn't terribly deep and her guilt isn't explored with great success, they can be repetitive. This is a shame, because there was potential to create something truly compelling out of Marling and Mapother's work. The pair have a decent chemistry with each other, but even though they share quite a bit of screen time together, little comes of it. The result is that, despite some nice moments, the performances come off as merely adequate, no matter how many times Mapother looks downtrodden or Marling stares off into the distance. The tragic circumstances of the plot aren't enough to give these characters the emotional depth and resonance that Cahill is clearly striving for.

The performances, at least, fare better than the screenplay, which throws out an intriguing scene, only to then cut to the credits. If there was any doubt as to whether or not I might have had some fond feelings for Another Earth, Cahill and Marling erased it with the ending. It's a cheap shot, one that's meant to provoke a sudden "whoa!" moment and then leave you stunned as the credits roll. Unfortunately, given the gradual build up, the ending feels like a cheat. This was where the film could have fully explored its sci-fi premise, and the nature of chance and identity. The ambiguity didn't necessarily have to be a bad thing, but here it rings false, as if Cahill and Marling got too scared of actually exploring their sci-fi conceit to the fullest extent, and decided to tack on a vague 'shock' in the hope that it would leave audiences thinking. I'll admit, I was left thinking, but not about the film's meaning. Rather, I was thinking about what a wasted opportunity Another Earth turned out to be.

Grade: C