Director: Denis Villeneuve
Runtime: 116 minutes
There is a moment in Arrival in which an observation about language caused me to freeze in my seat. If I was shocked, it was due not to some sensational revelation. For a "big moment," it is played with an almost disorienting amount of elegance and reserve. And yet this delicate, seemingly banal line about the nature of languages (or rather, one language in particular) left me in the same state of awe as the climactic passages of 2001, Solaris, or Stalker. It serves not as a copout, but as a mind-warping enrichment of everything that comes before and after.
Adapted from Ted Chiang's acclaimed short story "The Story of Your Life," Arrival's set up is hardly novel. Aliens land, and it's up to us to figure out what they want (and, in the worst case scenario, to fight back). So it's all the more astonishing that, Arrival has been allowed to exist in its present form. As written by Eric Heisserer and directed by Denis Villeneuve (Prisoners, Sicario), Arrival represents the most extreme opposite of bellicose blockbusters like War of the Worlds or Independence Day. Though the special effects are impressive, they pale in comparison to what is achieved through the enigmatic storytelling, and the haunting lead performance from Amy Adams.
Adams plays Louise Banks, an expert linguist called upon to help the US government following a global incident. 12 UFO's, which look like elongated obsidian eggs, have touched down across the globe, including one in America's backyard, Montana. At the forceful request of Col. Weber (Forest Whitaker), she is rushed out to US-bound spacecraft, and paired with theoretical physicist Ian (Jeremy Renner) to decipher the aliens' intentions.
Global tensions, understandably, run high, and yet the plot's trajectory never fails to subvert expectations. The linguistics conversations are not an entryway to a standard thriller plot, but rather the launchpad for a richer tale of time, memory, and communication. Deciphering a language, much like editing a book, is not a process that lends itself to screen-drama. And yet, somehow, Heisserer's screenplay often does what so many others struggle to accomplish. The writing is devoted to explaining various connections and theories, but never allows them to grind the narrative to a halt.
And even when the dialogue becomes purely expository, it is gracefully complimented by Villeneuve's overall grasp on the material. Since making the leap from Quebec, the Canadian helmer has become a first rate director of the sort of mid-budget, adult-targeted dramas that are so hard to come by in Hollywood. With each new project, Villeneuve moves to different genres and settings, yet maintains a devotion to keeping his stories grounded in the authentic. Arrival has far loftier intentions than Villeneuve's previous work, and it works because of, not in spite of, its fantastical elements.
With so much emphasis on ideas and plot trickery, one might understandably fear that the human element of something like Arrival would be an inconvenience. But what ultimately gives Arrival its tremendous impact comes down to its refusal to separate the emotional and cerebral components. The eventual intersection of the large and small scale conflicts, which could have so easily derailed the film, builds to an ingenious series of developments that drastically alter the stakes, but in the most unexpected ways.
Louise is at the center of all of Arrival's plot threads and themes, and Adams is nothing short of stunning in the role. Much like Emily Blunt's protagonist in Sicario, Louise is often quite withdrawn. She is a reactor, not an actor, but that doesn't make her a blank slate. For all of her guardedness, Adams is still tremendously expressive throughout. The movements of her face and eyes appear to hold several lifetimes worth of emotion. Louise is out of her depth, yet somehow has all of the answers. She has moments of understanding, yet can't figure out how she got from point A to point B to begin with. Despite playing the put-upon hero of sorts, Adams delivers the antithesis of a star performance; her work is defined by introspection and nuance.
Renner and Whitaker are reliable, though of the humans it all comes down to Adams. The Heptapods (our name for the aliens) are appropriately enigmatic, as if the monolith from 2001 sprouted legs and communicated through inky hieroglyphs. Tech credits are excellent across the board, with the score and editing standing out in particular.
Yet even with the Heptapods and their spaceship, the images (photographed by the outstanding Bradford Young) that seem to linger most in Arrival are among the simplest. A shot of an empty house, two people embracing, Louise's eyes lighting up as she connects the latest series of dots. Or, in one case, the way the camera holds on Adam's exhausted, solemn expression as the spaceship sits in the background, obscured and out of focus. The utter stillness of the moment crystallizes everything that's beautiful about Arrival. Here is a science-fiction story defined not by promises of effects-driven chaos, but by a paradoxical mix of melancholy and hope in the face of the great infinite beyond.
Grade: A
Director: Denis Villeneuve
Runtime: 121 minutes
The prevailing notion is that once foreign-born filmmakers make the leap to English-language filmmaking, they get lost in the great big American studio machine. As prevalent as this issue remains, look to French-Canadian helmer Denis Villeneuve as an all-too rare exception to the rule. In 2013, he made his English debut with back to back successes in Prisoners and Enemy (the latter of which was released last year). Enemy was the artier and more thematically ambitious of the pair, but it's in Prisoners that one sees Villeneuve's potential. The man is poised to evolve into a reliable commander of mid-budget studio fare aimed at a more sophisticated base. In an age where mid-budget (let's call that between $20 and 60 million) films are increasingly difficult to finance, Villeneuve's recent hot streak is nothing to sniff at.
Issues of financing special significance for Mr. Villeneuve's latest, the drug war drama Sicario. Despite the attachment of Emily Blunt in the lead role, the filmmakers were repeatedly told that they would get more money if Ms. Blunt's protagonist was switched to a male. So even though Sicario does little to break ground with its character archetypes or its plotting, it remains something of a marvel amid the slowly-evolving mindsets of the major studios.
All of this would mean precious little if the film in question was a failure. Thankfully, Sicario - though not the action-thriller its marketing promises - is another victory for Villeneuve and company. Though the film, written by first-timer Taylor Sheridan, favors mood over pointed commentary, it still works rather effortlessly on its own harshly beautiful terms.
That harsh beauty is apparent from the opening sequence, in which FBI Agent Kate Macer (Blunt) leads a raid on a drug compound that quickly spirals into tragedy. As lensed by the legendary Roger Deakins (re-teaming with Villeneuve after Prisoners), the opening is harrowing because of the way Deakins blends naturalistic images with those meant to come laced with menace. Sicario takes place in the sun-baked terrain of Arizona, Texas, and Mexico, yet its cumulative effect is to leave one shuddering. Villeneuve, Deakins, and the rest of the behind-the-camera workers get the job done with haunting results.
So much work goes into the look and feel of Sicario, that it's understandable that the characters may prove too simple and too distant to connect with at all. Blunt and her co-stars (Josh Brolin's smarmy black-ops leader and Benicio Del Toro's gun for hire) have been given relatively simple roles that don't really demand emotional fireworks. But as Sicario winds towards its conclusion, and the focus shifts in surprising directions, the coldness of the protagonists emerges as a deliberate and intelligent choice.
Despite taking place in a completely different world, what Sicario most strongly resembles is Kathryn Bigelow's Zero Dark Thirty. Sicario leans heavier on terse dialogue and ominous music cues, but there's an unsettling distance from the weightier emotional components that ultimately works in the film's favor. The War on Drugs, like the War on Terror, is filled with queasy ambiguities and moral grey zones that push people like Kate (and the audience) to question the methods and end goals of such broadly-defined, jingoistic labels.
The journey from blunt determination to moral quagmire is superbly embodied in Blunt's performance, and comes closest to giving Sicario a heart (albeit a dark one). The British actress - seamlessly blending in with her American and Mexican co-stars, maintains a poker face early on, but doesn't fall into the trap of appearing blank. Her expression may be flat, but Kate's face is one that remains alert to the vagueness of her mission. When time comes for the steely facade to crack, Blunt keeps emotions in check, never mugging even when her character is at her most vulnerable.
Mr. Brolin and Mr. Del Toro, meanwhile, have considerably fewer quiet notes to play, though both are convincing and have strong chemistry with Blunt. A third act shift in focus does open up more room for Del Toro, to the film's benefit. The actor's performance does not change, but the added context given to his demeanor acquires new heft, and further plunges Sicario's morality into the mud. Though I longed for more scenes between Blunt and Del Toro like the one found in the final frames, the questions left at the end prove more satisfying than additional answers.
Because even Sicario is not a film with a big Message, what little it does whisper to the audience proves valuable, if not terribly surprising. Drug violence is bad, and people in power do shady things. Not exactly shocking in this, the year 2015. But Villeneuve and Sheridan have nonetheless created a brooding pseudo-thriller that captures the human cost of the drug war, as well as the futility of fighting it with such simplistic and aggressive means. Some films tackling contemporary issues overstate their cases and wind up saying less. Sicario, meanwhile, says very little, yet its impact lingers because of its brevity. It's a work of level-headed and purposefully de-sensationalized violence, and that's exactly why the images of dry, sun-scorched earth do nothing to counteract Sicario's blood-chilling jolts.
Grade: B+
Director: Denis Villeneuve
Runtime: 90 minutes
"Chaos is order undeciphered," reads the apt opening title card of Denis Villeneuve's Enemy, a film which either has quite a bit of order to decipher, or simply a small amount of order that's been reconfigured beyond recognition. The second, and artier, of the director's collaborations with actor Jake Gyllenhaal, Enemy escalates slowly, before finishing with a nightmarish bang. With strains of Kubrick, Lynch, and Hitchcock in its DNA, Villeneuve's latest finds the director focusing on atmosphere over narrative details, to positive and negative effect.
After an unsettling prologue, Enemy turns its focus to the humdrum life of college professor Adam Bell (Jake Gyllenhaal). A neurotic shut in, Adam's life changes when he notices an extra in a movie he's watching who looks just like him. Rather than shrug off the incident, Adam lets his neuroses get the best of him, and he sets off to investigate. The other man is Anthony Saint Claire (Gyllenhaal as well), a haughty actor and motorcycle enthusiast. Adam lives in bland, cluttered apartment and has a girlfriend (Melanie Laurent), while Anthony is married to Helen (Sarah Gadon), who is six months pregnant.
As the title suggests, the eventual meeting of the Gyllenhaals doesn't exactly bond the pair. Adam freaks out, and wishes he'd never pursued Anthony to begin with. Anthony, meanwhile, is tempted to toy with Adam's life. Their similar, yet oh so different, paths in life start to cross, and then they fold onto each other, before merging in thoroughly unsettling ways.
Rather than constantly play Gyllenhaal off of himself, Javier Gullon's adaptation of Jose Saramago's "The Double" is more interested in how the two men act as individuals. The cocky Anthony is keen to use Adam's life as another role to play, while Adam struggles to cope with the idea once he's actually confronted with it. Adam's mother (Isabella Rosselini) tells him that he's her only son, which takes out the only logical reason for Anthony's existence. There's also the matter of Adam's dreams, which may or may not be a sign of a deeper connection between man and doppelgänger (and vice versa).
Yet compared to other media involving similar concepts, Enemy focuses less on the mystery of how than the ramifications of the collision of two lives that are only separated by a few threads. Twists aren't the driving force of Enemy's limited narrative. Instead, it's the gradual (at times too gradual) release of details that glues the story together. Rather than build to a big revelation, Enemy ends in a way that dares the viewer to go and figure it all out on their own (though I suspect certain details have meanings that will remain elusive).
It's all a marvelous showcase for Gyllenhaal and Villeneuve, even as Gullon's adaptation leaves them to compensate for the script's emptiness. Gyllenhaal creates clear distinctions between Adam and Anthony, most noticeably in posture. Though the film's decision to keep the two men apart pays off, a few more interactions between the pair would have likely only deepened the sense of danger that the aesthetics work so hard to create. Of the rest of the cast, only Sarah Gadon makes an impression as Anthony's vaguely paranoid wife. Meanwhile, Villeneuve and cinematographer Nicolas Bolduc shoot the Toronto settings with a sickly, yellowish haze that lends even the most mundane skyscrapers a foreboding presence. Meanwhile, composing duo Danny Bensi and Saunder Jurriaans turn up the atmosphere with their eerie, off-kilter score.
The big factor holding Enemy back from fully hitting its mark as a nightmarish psycho-drama is that it doesn't go far enough with its central mystery. There's quite a bit hinted at that could have been explored without 'solving' the case. Despite the 90 minute run time, the first act's glacial pacing is also partly to blame. It's long on atmosphere and short on character ground work. Despite some nice visual characterization and elegant editing, Enemy's initial foundation isn't as solid as the film thinks.
Shortcomings noted, though, it's refreshing to see a psychological drama/thriller that isn't afraid to leave most of the hard work to the audience. Villeneuve and his cast's commitment to the brazenly head-scratching material is admirable, and ensures that Enemy never sinks under the weight of its own weirdness. Spiders play a significant (albeit puzzling) role in Enemy's puzzle, which couldn't be more appropriate. Enemy lures you in with hints of danger, but only shows you enough to draw you deeper and deeper into its web. By the time you think you have an idea of where it's going, you're hit with the blood-chilling realization that it's already too late.
Grade: B/B+
Director: Denis Villeneuve
Runtime: 153 minutes
You'll have to look awfully hard to find anything new in a film like Prisoners, the English language debut of Quebec-born filmmaker Denis Villeneuve. As written by Aaron Guzikowski, the film's tale of two missing girls and the search to find them covers its share of well-worn tropes, many of which can be found on one of the many police procedurals currently on TV. Yet thanks to superlative craftsmanship, effective plotting, and top flight performances, Prisoners rises above the average procedural, even though it never quite transcends the genre to achieve true greatness.
As the film opens, we see hear Keller Dover (Hugh Jackman) reciting the Lord's Prayer as he and his son lie in wait for a deer to shoot. This immediate juxtaposition of faith and violence (on an innocent subject, no less) will echo throughout the film's tale of desperation, loss, and vigilante justice. On an overcast Thanksgiving Day, the youngest children of the Dovers (Jackman and Maria Bello) and the Birches (Terrence Howard and Viola Davis) go missing. Though twitchy Detective Loki (Jake Gyllenhaal) quickly finds potential suspect Alex Jones (Paul Dano), the hunt for the girls has just begun. Frustrated with the police department's inability to find strong evidence, Keller takes matters into his own hands.
All of this takes up no more than the film's first 40 minutes, leaving roughly 110 more. Yet rather than cram the remaining runtime with twists and red herrings, Prisoners finds a smart, and even surprising, balance between the mystery driving the narrative forward, and the character drama that holds it all together. While this makes the narrative less immediately compelling, it allows Prisoners to explore its characters and the repercussions of their actions without having to rush. Rather than try to pull off something we've never seen before, the film simply takes familiar ingredients and executes them with a very sure hand.
There's also the matter of the effort that's been put into the film's look, which does its best to distance itself from the small screen as possible. With its gloomy visual aesthetic and haunting flares of music, Prisoners owes as much to the crime thrillers of David Fincher as it does to TV dramas like Broadchurch and The Killing. Where the film receives a considerable boost is in the lensing from master cinematographer Roger Deakins. With its rainy, wintery suburban settings, there appears to be little room for a movie like Prisoners to have any visual flair. Yet Deakins, with all cylinders firing from start to finish, finds ways of capturing the dreary and plain settings with a level of artistry that feels wholly cinematic, yet never pretentious or distracting.
The cast certainly aren't shirking their duties either. Stacked with talent in every major role, the entire ensemble gives it their all. Even Bello and Davis, whose characters are somewhat underutilized, have moments that they knock out of the park. Dano is effective as well as the mumbly Alex, while Melissa Leo underplays her ambiguous role as the boy's doddering aunt. Of the supporting roster, however, it's Howard who makes the strongest impression. Some of that is due to how the script uses the character, but the actor finds ways of communicating grief and confusion without ever being redundant. As one of the cast members who spends the most time playing off of Jackman, Howard makes his straightforward character a nicely conflicted foil.
Where the acting really shines, however, is in the leading duo of Jackman and Gyllenhaal. The roles are radically different, yet the way they reflect the dual strands of Prisoners' narrative creates a compelling blend of material driven by pure emotion and by pure clinical determination. Jackman, coming off of a career high with Les Miserables, has the emotional side of the story to carry, and the ferocity he brings to the role is never less than gripping. For all of the hysterical yelling involved, the actor never sounds shrill or false. It may not be subtle work, but Jackman invests each growl and yell with a fury that would make even Wolverine cower. On the opposite end of the spectrum is Gyllenhaal, who makes the less emotive role work in his favor. He puts a nervous bit of blinking, though initially distracting, to smart use as a means of communicating the character's internal processing of events.
Behind the scenes, Villeneuve deserves immense credit for his intelligent balance between the emotional and the procedural elements of the story. His previous film, 2010's Oscar-nominated Incendies, marked him as a talent to watch. Though more harrowing than Prisoners, that film also suffered from a messiness that built to a pair of twists that bordered on laughable. Prisoners runs nearly 15 minutes longer than Incendies, but it feels remarkably more focused, despite the room it allows for slow-building drama. Procedural mysteries live or die by how well they pull you in. Even the best of the genre, such as The Silence of the Lambs and Seven, have their implausibilities upon reflection. Yet what makes a great procedural work is its ability to cast a strong enough spell to allow you to suspend your sense of disbelief. Following in the footsteps of those aforementioned films, Prisoners certainly succeeds on that level, albeit with less flash (you'll find no lip-smacking cannibals).
The lone disappointment of Prisoners, however, stems from the very aspect of its script that also makes it a success. By aiming for character-based drama over thrills, the film starts to feel more generic as a whole, despite the first rate filmmaking. There's a tantalizing taste of the more ambitious, possibly pulpier, movie that could have been made in the form of a mysterious maze symbol. You can practically feel Guzikowski contemplating whether or not to take said symbol and use it to turn Prisoners into a denser and more twisted story. Instead, the resolution of the maze, and the main plot, comes across as rather expected, even though it's as well-crafted as everything that precedes it.
In straddling the line between thoughtful character drama and attention-grabbing thriller, Prisoners somewhat robs itself of a sharper identity. In trying to focus more on emotional developments, the film forgets to give itself a memorable stamp. Not content to end with a whimper, however, Prisoners ends (and the sound team deserves kudos here) its somewhat mundane narrative with a brilliant piece of ambiguity. Just when it seems in danger of fading out forgettably, it throws in one last nasty little kick that ensures that it'll stay with you just a little bit longer (Law and Order looks cheerful in comparison). It may not be the next Zodiac, but Prisoners is still an compelling and satisfying mystery with a refreshingly adult look at unsettling subject matter.
Grade: B+
