Director: Robert Zemeckis
Runtime: 124 minutes
All's murky in love and war, especially when you and your spouse have both spent time working the international espionage racket. So goes the world of Robert Zemeckis' Allied, which oscillates between Casablanca homage and grim antidote to Mr. and Mrs. Smith. Despite a twisty set up, generally strong production values, and solid performances, Allied comes up short when it's time to wrap up its mission.
While much of what we see on screen has a welcome Old Hollywood gloss, Zemeckis' recent love of visual effects starts Allied off on a distractingly modern note. A rather embarrassing opening shot follows a hilariously fake parachute landing into a desert landscape that's only marginally more convincing. Emerging from the fakery is Max Vattan (Brad Pitt), who has arrived in French Morocco to meet up with a French resistance operative to take out a Nazi ambassador in Casablanca. The operative turns out to be Marianne Beausejour (Marion Cotillard, in full Golden Age glamor mode), who helps Max pose as her (fake) husband prior to the assassination. For Marianne, the trick lies in keeping the fakery of their work grounded in some kernel of authenticity.
It's notion that Cotillard pulls off beautifully, making it all the more frustrating that the film around her often fails do follow suit. Allied's sets and costumes are richly designed, but there is often a certain sheen to the imagery which goes beyond romanticism and into fakery. An early scene set in a Casablanca plaza looks the part at first glance, but the longer you soak it in, the more it appears to take place in a vacuum. Tilt the camera the wrong direction by just an inch or two, and the framework of the soundstage would make an unwelcome appearance.
Thankfully, things improve once the action moves back to England. Max and Marianne's fake relationship blossoms into a genuine one, and they settle down and have a baby. Then, right on schedule, the other shoe drops: British intelligence informs Max that Marianne may be a deep cover Nazi spy, and that he'll need to set up a trap to prove her innocence or guilt.
The answers that eventually come our way, courtesy of screenwriter Steven Knight, largely prove satisfying. Whatever quibbles one might have with the plot's internal logic, Allied boasts enough first rate design and star power to allow for comfortable suspension of disbelief in the moment. But while Knight's story is a fun guessing game, Zemeckis' direction often gets in the way. Allied's opening passages are punishingly slow, with the build up to the assassination taking up far too much time. The Casablanca scenes lay the necessary groundwork with clues and red herrings, but Zemeckis directs on autopilot through much of it. Spycraft lives or dies by the details, but in Allied, those details exist as exposition that need to be trudged through before getting on to the good stuff.
By the time Allied finally introduces the question of Marianne's innocence, you might be ready for the story to just end already. But wait, there's more! The superior second half, when finally given room to take off, is no faster than the opening, but it moves with more confidence and better sustains the intrigue. Act 1 is an overlong obligation, while Act 2 gets to the heart of the matter. Livening things up are short performances from a strong group of supporting performances filled out by the likes of Jared Harris, Lizzy Caplan (kudos for including an LGBT character), Matthew Goode, and Simon McBurney.
Without enough genuine character development to support the film's star power, however, the bulk of Allied never consistently catches fire. The twists, thankfully, give the story more heft by providing questions worth considering (as opposed to derailing the plot, which they easily could have). Allied's eventual conclusion is convincingly solemn, in large part thanks to Cotillard's multifaceted performance. The story's lack of focus, coupled with Zemeckis' lack of verve, leaves you with the feeling that you've just witnessed a halfhearted take on what could have been a tense mix of romance and thrills. At least Cotillard provides the fizz in an otherwise flat concoction.
Grade: C
Director: Morten Tyldum
Runtime: 114 minutes
British mathematician Alan Turing completed a Herculean task at the height of World War II as multiple opposing forces closed in on him. Time was of the essence when it came to breaking the Nazi Enigma encoding device. At one point, MI6 operative Stewart Menzies (Mark Strong) tells Turing (Benedict Cumberbatch) that in the time they've had to introduce themselves, three British soldiers have been killed thanks to messages sent using Enigma's seemingly impossible encryption codes.
And yet despite the massive looming threat of the Third Reich in the background, the story of Turing's crowning achievement has surprisingly little urgency. Director Morten Tyldum and writer Graham Moore rely on too many weary storytelling tropes and framing devices. The Imitation Game is solid, quietly rousing entertainment, but it lacks the sort of polarizing intellectual dynamism that made its subject such a visionary in his field.
Hopping from 1951 (the year of Turing's arrest for homosexual acts) to the early 40s, and even back to Turing's school days, The Imitation Game has quite a bit to juggle in under two hours. To their credit, Tyldum and Moore tell their story smoothly, ensuring that one never gets lost amid the jumps in time. Tyldum's direction is polished, and opens up the scenes so as to keep the film from looking either stagey or like a generic TV movie. Moore's screenplay, adapted from Andrew Hodges' book, has its share of witty exchanges and carefully timed emotional outbursts. To an extent, the Norwegian Mr. Tyldum deserves credit for directing the most downright British movie of the year, with its restrained emotions and real-life-period-piece narrative.
Everything in The Imitation Game, for better or for worse, has been calibrated to make the film both important and widely accessible. While there's nothing inherently wrong with this approach, the execution here - however pleasurable - is what gets in the way of the film leaving a lasting mark. The scenes set at boarding school and in 1951 each have their own internal arcs, yet by stringing them along with the WW2 story, their impact is muted. They feel like optional subplots even though both (especially the latter) have direct connections to the middle timeline. Rather than work in harmony, the subplots leech off of the WW2 story to the detriment of the entire film. The danger of the war and the possibility that Turing's sexuality may be exposed never feel like terribly pressing matters. There is only one sequence, in which Turing and his team must decide whether to warn a British ship about a U-boat attack, where the required urgency actually materializes. Breaking the Enigma code was not a tidy solution, but the film barely gives one a taste of this crucial and fascinating angle.
The cast is the real draw here, and even the actors with underwritten roles are at least fully engaged with the material. Cumberbatch is an ideal fit for Turing's isolated, anti-social genius mindset. Though there are similarities with his character on Sherlock, the actor's work here is characterized by an understated wit and a less abrasive frankness in his dealings with co-workers. When Turing tells his commanding office that his teammates will only slow him down, it comes from a place of cold objectivity, rather than malice or derision. Cumberbatch's cast members, though often relegated to playing simple types, turn in solid work, with Matthew Goode doing some fine work as Turing's confrontational adversary. Breaking up the boys' club is Keira Knightley as fellow decoder Joan Clarke, who forms the most in depth bond with Turing. Clarke is the one person who sees and understands who Turing is beyond his brilliant mind, and Knightley's scenes with Cumberbatch are easily among the film's best, even if her character doesn't really have her own arc.
Behind the scenes contributions are all quite strong without overwhelming the story or the actors. Production designer Maria Djurkovic (Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy) varies the decor of the film's many interiors to lend the imagery subtle, unobtrusive distinctions. The film looks simple, yet elegant, and Alexandre Desplat's understated score gives the story an extra boost of energy. Costumes, meanwhile, communicate the time period without being distracting.
There's no doubt that everything in The Imitation Game looks and sounds right. The underlying problems with structure certainly don't hold the film back as an accessible crowd-pleaser. Instead, the frustration with The Imitation Game isn't that it does something horribly wrong, but that it - like a few other recent films - takes its real life story and turns it into something so by-the-numbers. Tyldum and Moore may have told Turing's story, but in their approach they have failed to capture his spirit.
Grade: B-
Director: Chan-wook Park
Runtime: 98 minutes
If Jee-woon Kim's The Last Stand was an example of a foreign director succumbing to the Hollywood machine, then consider Chan-wook Park's Stoker a delightfully mad case wherein a director smoothly transplants his style to an English-language feature. The South Korean auteur, best known for his wince-inducing Vengeance Trilogy (specifically Oldboy) reportedly didn't speak much English on the film's set. In some cases, it shows, as the dialogue from Wentworth Miller's script can sometimes feel like a first draft. Yet where Mr. Park can't quite overcome the wobbly dialogue, he compensates by creating some exquisite visual story-telling. Stoker's script may be problematic in certain areas, and it doesn't quite get to the same level of humanity of some of Park's earlier films. At the same time, this is perhaps the director's best executed film in terms of story pacing and (brilliantly over-the-top) atmosphere.
As much as Stoker has been marketed as a near-horror film, it actually stakes out much more interesting territory in which to play its wicked games. Said territory is that of a psycho-sexual thriller. Stoker's set-up is efficient and introduces the major players, before segueing into a beautifully amorphous narrative of sexual awakening, manifested in flashes of dark violence. On her 18th birthday, India Stoker (Mia Wasikowska) learns that her father Richard (Dermot Mulroney) has died in a car crash. On the day of Richard's funeral, India's mysterious uncle Charlie (Matthew Goode) slips into the Stoker family, and quickly charms India's desperate housewife of a mother Evie (Nicole Kidman). From there on, the film is less interested in simple answers or entirely believable actions as it is in the way Charlie upsets the recently traumatized Stoker household.
For Kidman's Evie, Charlie represents a romantic interest in light of her husband's passing. For India, Charlie is a mysterious stranger determined to draw her out of her sullen state of unsexed adolescence. In the film's most arresting sequence, Charlie joins India at the piano for a duet, and the escalating music, coupled with the silent body movements (a carefully placed hand, an ankle twisted in anxiety) make it clear that Park's gifts as a director have lost nothing in the big leap from Asia to North America. The film is heavily stylized, perhaps more than any of the director's previous work. The camera movements, which often swoop over to indicate a character's point of view, certainly aren't aiming for subtlety, nor is the sound design or Clint Mansell's score. For as deeply as emotions (and secrets) remain opaque, the film charges ahead full throttle on the aesthetic front. One could argue that this choice nearly smothers whatever substance there is, but the aesthetics are consistent from the start. You'll likely either find them enthralling or hugely off-putting.
Yet even as Stoker throws its surface in the audience's face, there remains a heart - albeit a very chilly one - underneath that surface. The in-your-face sights and sounds - coupled with some really beautiful editing - are beautifully in-sync with Wasikowska's slowly awakening India. The character remains rather stoic for the most part, yet the flashy style creates a wonderful fever-dream atmosphere that perfectly taps into the film's sinister vision of burgeoning female sexuality. Yet as stone-faced as India remains, Wasikowska never lets the role trap her. In fact, Stoker is perhaps the best use of the actress' wan features and reserved persona to date. There are little touches of perverse enjoyment and sardonic wit that permeate the performance, and Park gives them room to breathe, even amidst the heavy style.
The adults in India's world aren't slouches either. Kidman, though not given too much to do throughout, handles her flighty, flustered trophy wife role with aplomb. Many of her scenes simply require her for sheer star power and presence, but when the actress finally gets the chance to deliver, she knocks it out of the park in a spectacularly concise monologue. And Goode, who really ought to be a bigger star (at least on the indie level) by now, is a perfectly unsettling stranger. The actor's angular features (his face and eyes often carry a vaguely reptilian look), and silky, steady voice create an interesting puzzle of a man who, to be frank, really doesn't have much in the way of development across the film. But the film's ultimately Wasikowska's (and also Park's), and she carries it on her slender frame with an effortlessness that has eluded many of her previous performances.
Where Stoker runs into some level of trouble is in its third act. Now, from a purely narrative standpoint, I'll admit that I enjoyed it, even if it was somewhat on the banal side. It's a classic case of a tired trope that works due to the specifics and the execution. Yet one key revelation between acts two and three has the unfortunate potential of making earlier scenes not add up, or at least become less convincing. Mr. Park seems more concerned with the three-way relationship in the Stoker house more than anything, which requires the audience to suspend our disbelief more than we might expect. In this sense, Stoker can easily be compared to the work of Hitchcock, whose films often contained plot elements that seemed flimsy only after one left the darkness of the theater. The same is certainly the case here. How much you enjoy Stoker, during or after the film, may very well depend on how much you think the execution smooths out the screenplay. There's a reason the film has proven divisive on multiple levels.
Yet even as I found quibbles with the narrative's twist and the way I was forced to reconsider early scenes, I still found myself firmly under Park's spell. More than any of the director's other films, which have a tendency to sag in the middle, Stoker moves with a sinister elegance all the way through its somewhat predictable conclusion. The effective performances and truly exquisite level of craftsmanship created a deliciously dark experience that often left me mesmerized and/or violently clutching my arm rests. No matter what I can think of about Stoker's plot or its occasionally stiff dialogue, I can't deny that the film displays Park's directorial powers at their absolute height in more than one instance. Flaws and all, Stoker sent a surge through my body that has left me unable to get the film out of my head. Call the film style-over-substance if you want, but it's one hell of a style.
Grade: B/B+
