Director: Bong Joon-ho
Runtime: 126 minutes
It's somehow fitting that a film like Snowpiercer opens on the same weekend as the latest Transformers product. Together, the pair represent opposite ends of a spectrum of would-be summer blockbusters, even if Snowpiercer's background and limited release dooms it to be confined mostly to art houses. Yet even though Transformers will rake in obscene amounts of money, it's Snowpiercer that really deserves to pack in the crowds at the theater. Chameleonic South Korean director Bong Joon-ho's English language debut is a resounding success, one that blends pulpy genre tropes with first class filmmaking. Transformers is what Hollywood thinks its blockbusters should be. Snowpiercer is what they should actually strive towards.
Though post-apocalyptic settings are hardly new by this point, Snowpiercer's main set-up certainly moves it far ahead of the pack. The year is 2031, and after a disastrous attempt to counter climate change, Earth has been completely frozen over. Humanity's last few remainders are stranded not in the icy wasteland, but on an advanced train designed to circle the globe in perpetual motion.
Life on the train is good. That is, if you entered it as a member of the wealthy elite. While the 1% still live lives of comfort and luxury in their numerous train cars, everyone else is crammed into the slum-like tail end. For the downtrodden masses, including Curtis (Chris Evans), the gross inequality needs to be overturned. Unfortunately, that involves finding a way to break through the security forces and steel gates that prevent them from accessing the train's middle and front sections.
English-language debuts can prove troublesome for foreign-born directors. For Snowpiercer, the results were almost disastrous. Harvey Weinstein fought with Joon-ho over a specific American cut that would be 20 minutes shorter, and include heavy voice-over work to fill in the plot gaps. Thankfully after plenty of sensationalized exchanges between director and distributor/producer, Joon-ho emerged victorious. Whether you take to it or not, it feels instantly like it belongs along side the director's Korean-set films, which run the gamut from police procedural to monster movie.
Of course, when foreign sensibilities collide with the English language, there can be some bumpiness along the way. The current South Korean New Wave cinema is known not only for mashing genres together, but also tones. Gruesome violence and chaos is often puntuated by humor that ranges from darkly satirical to broad and slapstick. It's an easy thing to lose in translation (despite being a South Korean-American co-production, 95% of the film is in English).
Yet Joon-ho and Kelly Masterson, in adapting the acclaimed French graphic novel "Le Transperceneige," have retained the former's sense of humor, while still making the whole enterprise quite accessible to average audience members. Joon-ho's style and vision may have been translated, but the finished product shows that such translation can occur without any watering down.
This becomes apparent the moment Minister Mason (a thoroughly hagged-up Tilda Swinton) first enters the scene. While punishing a disruptive passenger, Mason delivers a monologue about the train's pre-ordained order that is both terrifying in its implications and rich with black humor. Swinton, decked out in fake teeth and ugly prosthetics, has an absolute bawl with the role. The actress turns her native Scottish accent up to 11, not so much chewing the scenery as swallowing it in a single lascivious gulp. It's smartly over-the-top work that inspires just the right amount of laughter and nervous familiarity. Whatever fantastical pseudo-science has been worked into Snowpiercer's world, the echoes of truth presented remain unnerving.
The rest of the cast are, in their own ways, perfectly in tune with Joon-ho's vision. Yet rather than keep everyone entirely on the same wavelength, the director makes some go broader, while others stay more grounded. Evans trades in his optimisitic, clean-cut Captain America look for a grizzled, haunted stoicism, and proves he's up to the task of carrying more than just super-hero fare. While cast members like Swinton, Bremmer, and Octavia Spencer go bigger, Evans holds the film together without being left as a boring audience cipher. As the casualties mount and the scenario grows grimmer, the actor's more genuine acting style helps Snowpiercer stay firmly on the rails. His interactions with John Hurt and Joon-ho regular Song Kang-ho are a nice counterweight for the film's bigger, flashier moments.
Yet when Snowpiercer gets to its claustrophobically entertaining stretches, Joon-ho and his technical collaborators keep everything flowing along beautifully. Hong Kyung-po's cinematography and camera-work creates plenty of space within the various train cars, all of which are brilliantly conceived by Ondrej Nekvasil and Stefan Kovacik. The variation of the train cars, especially as the rebel masses push forward, is not only beautifully varied, but it plays nicely into the film's visual representation of how much the 1% have, while the rest are confined to cramped squalor.
And when the action sequences arrive, Joon-ho ensures that they pop. His use of slow-motion, particularly in one tableau-like shot of Evans wielding an axe, is put to smart effect. Some action beats are more frenetically shot, and the director knows when to slow things down to really let the viewer drink in everything that's happening in the frame. Marco Beltrami's score, though it lacks any distinctive themes, is a perfect compliment to everything going around, enhancing the atmosphere without drawing too much attention to itself.
In Snowpiercer, Joon-ho and company have walked on quite the filmmaking tightrope, making the film's success that much more impressive. Snowpiercer provides the sci-fi thrills and bloody violence, yet it also has quite a bit on its mind regarding distribution of wealth, resources, and our treatment of the environment. Films like Memories of Murder and The Host (the monster movie, not the dreadful teen sci-fi romance) have some pointed commentary about South Korean officials. Snowpiercer's target is bigger, and smartly amplified by the occasional glimpses of the outside world; the failure at the top of the food chain to respond to climate change won't be selective in its victims. It may not be subtle, but that doesn't mean the handling of the execution here lacks elegance.
And with a runtime just over two hours, it's hard to find a moment worth jettisoning. Snowpiercer is a film that knows how to use its time well to truly build up characters and tension, as brief as certain performances are. Editing ensures that the film's set pieces and contemplative moments are carefully paced, allowing neither to drag or throw things out of balance. One could have easily trimmed down a scene involving an elementary school for the wealthy, and their eerily enthusiastic teacher (Alison Pill), but the scene's inclusion only enriches the rest of the story.
Despite the bleakness of Snowpiercer's message, however, the film never sinks into full blown misery. Joon-ho and Masterson have beautifully merged entertainment and message so that each compliments the other. In a way, Swinton's Mason character is onto something. Balance is key to success. Yet where Mason's idea of balance stems from nonsensical notions of a pre-ordained hierarchy, Bong Joon-ho's idea of balance involves actively working to achieve a much more equitable sense of harmony. Blockbusters don't need to be all razzle dazzle or all overly serious brooding. They can, in fact, take the best of both sides of the coin and merge them into something singular and spectacular.
Grade: B+/A-
Director: Jon S. Baird
Runtime: 97 minutes
Above all else, Filth is a testament to the range of Scottish actor James McAvoy. He first came to prominence as a sweet little faun in the first Narnia film, and has since played doomed lovers (Atonement) and superheroes (X-Men) with equal skill. Yet none of the actor's previous work will prepare you for what he pulls off in Jon S. Baird's adaptation of Trainspotting author Irvine Welsh's novel about police corruption. While it's (hopefully) far too early to call McAvoy's work the performance of his lifetime, it sure as hell sets the bar quite high. There is, sadly, a tradeoff. In order to see James McAvoy be so brilliant in Filth, you have to actually watch Filth the movie.
Great performances surrounded by lackluster films are nothing new, to be sure. Just a few years ago, Javier Bardem delivered stunning work in Biutiful, which was otherwise a sluggish, empty drama. Yet maybe the boredom that came with Biutiful wasn't so bad after all. Filth likely won't leave you bored, but that's because it's trying so hard to be edgy and outrageous, when it's mostly just cruel and vile, even though it's not noticeably more graphic than similar films.
Though not nearly as big in scope, Filth is something like a Scottish answer to last year's The Wolf of Wall Street. This time, however, the corrupt figure at the center is a policeman, rather than an investment banker. That policeman is Bruce Robertson (McAvoy, complete with oily hair and scuzzy ginger beard), who is desperate for a promotion. Said promotion, according to an oddly theatrical intro scene featuring his wife Carole (Shauna Macdonald), will help put the spark back in their marriage. The couple aren't exactly struggling, but they're in the midst of a ritualistic sex game of sorts, with Bruce's work life currently functioning as the playground. All Bruce has to do undermine his co-workers, at any cost, in order to make himself the clear choice for the job.
Yet just as Bruce's boss spends more time thinking about movies than policework, you'll soon find part of your mind wandering elsewhere. Filth has a little bit of naughty fun with Bruce's inner monologue at the outset (particularly his views on the Scottish people), but it runs out of fun or interesting things to say not much later. This is the sort of cinematic provocation that walks a fine line between vivaciously portraying wicked behavior and actively condoning said behavior. Sophomore director Jon S. Baird generally avoids falling into the trap of supporting Robertson's commentary, which includes homophobia, misogyny, and buckets of crassness.
Unfortunately, that doesn't mean that Filth gets away with having its dirty little cake and eating too. The plotting weaves murkily between exploring Bruce's vices and his undermining of his coworkers, without much of an arc really emerging. The career stuff really gets the short end of the stick, and what could play out as a set of wicked games is left to laziness (ex: Bruce writes homophobic graffiti in the office, assigns blame to someone else, looks noble...the end).
The work subplot is ultimately just more fodder for the film to show Bruce's depravity. In fairness, Baird gets that across well enough, especially when he visualizes the inside of the character's head. But, despite a running time only half of The Wolf of Wall Street, Filth starts to flounder as it heads down the tar-black rabbit hole. The brunt of the film's psychology is withheld for the sporadically nightmarish final act, which feels lazy, rather than shocking. The ugly, blue-hued visuals certainly don't add anything to whatever atmosphere Baird and Co. were aiming for.
Literally the only worthwhile part of the enterprise is McAvoy, who is placed front and center throughout all of the muck and grime. Though the material is often frustrating, McAvoy takes the scant initial details and absolutely goes to town with it. Others would have drowned in the ugly quagmire at the film's core, but McAvoy smashes through it, making every naughty grin and sadistic freak out feel effortless. He'd send the rosy-cheeked heroes of Narnia (and maybe even a few of the monsters) fleeing for their bedrooms. Meanwhile, the rest of the talented supporting cast are left with little more to do than act oblivious, or fall prey to Bruce's spell.
Though the final act does introduce some compelling psychology to the bad-boy mayhem, it feels desperate, rather than earned. In the hands of someone like Martin McDonagh (In Bruges), a story like Filth could have been a brilliant, warped, and ultimatelty devastating look at mental illness and unchecked immorality. Instead, the mental illness piece of the puzzle is wielded as a blunt instrument in a last ditch effort to make Filth "about" something, even as it provides the viewer one last faux-edgy kick in the final frames. Inside Bruce Robertson's head is a fascinating, albeit disturbing, character and story waiting to be unlocked. Filth, unfortunately, is little more than Mr. Baird and Co. going through the motions as they intermittently fumble with the keys. A performance as good as the one McAvoy turns in here deserves a far better vehicle.
Grade: C-/D+
Director: Lars von Trier
Runtime: 118 minutes
By the time Part 2 of The Nymphomaniac comes to its bleakly humorous conclusion, one thing has become clear: despite the split release of Parts 1 and 2, this is truly one film. Von Trier doesn't bother with set up or introduction at the start of Part 2, which only further cements the idea that it should have, somehow, been released as a single 4 hour film. Taken as separate entities, however, it's clear that Part 2 is where The Nymphomaniac really comes together. With Charlotte Gainsbourg finally doing more than narrating, The Nymphomaniac gets a whole new life, and comes closest to achieving the sort of epic sexual saga that von Trier was striving towards.
This is, in large part, due to Part 2's descent into much darker territory. This was first hinted at in the final shot of Part 1, when young Joe (Stacy Martin) loses all sexual sensation. From this point on, we see Joe transform not only into her older self, but also into a woman caught up in the destructive side of her sexuality. In the confines of young adulthood, Joe was able to experiment without significant consequence. Now a grown woman, she's finally starting to feel the weight of expectations and social mores closing in on her.
Joe initially wilts, but soon pulls herself together and starts using her sexuality to lash out against what she views as prudish bourgeois morality trying to shame her. Even so, her newfound sexual outlets aren't without their costs. At the start, Joe had a whole world open to exploration. Now she's finally run out of territory, and there's really something at stake for her. It's this significant shift that von Trier handles best in Part 2, and it's the reason why, even in isolation, Part 2 has the heft that Part 1 lacked.
In fairness, part of the credit is simply due to Gainsbourg appearing on screen in the flashbacks. Ms. Martin was quite effective in Part 1, but the disparity between narrator and protagonist proved something of an odd barrier to surmount. With past and present now inhabited by the same woman, The Nymphomaniac becomes a much richer work. Gainsbourg, relegated to passive narration in Part 1, finally has room to actually give life to Joe's journey beyond reciting it. Once again, Gainsbourg's gifts are an ideal match for von Trier's material, even if she never reaches the heights of her performance in Melancholia.
The supporting cast, meanwhile, remains rather one dimensional, despite the increased number of recognizable faces. Joe leads a lonely life, and the film reflects this by not really delving into the backgrounds of other characters. The lone exception is P (Mia Goth), who Joe unwillingly takes on as a protege after getting involved with a seedy businessman (Willem Dafoe). Though P comes into play in, as Joe describes it, a remarkable coincidence, it nonetheless helps The Nymphomaniac come full circle in a deeply unsettling way. Even when doing her best to care for another life, Joe is still pitted against P in surprising ways. Their relationship is a microcosm of how parts of society treat women, never allowing them to be more than just friends. There must always be competition either in service of men or for the pleasure of men.
With its noticeable stakes and sense of danger, Part 2 serves as a fitting conclusion to von Trier's would-be opus. Though at times unwieldy in its dialogue, (though less so than in Part 1), Part 2 is where Joe becomes more than someone to follow; she becomes someone to be invested in. After so much build up, Part 2 is where The Nymphomaniac feels more in tune with its characters than with its concepts and ideas. Taken as a whole, The Nymphomaniac is certainly a compelling portrait of a woman's sexual journey, but only it Part 2 does that journey fully come to life.
Grade: B+
