Review: "American Honey"

Director: Andrea Arnold
Runtime: 162 minutes


More than any other country, America loves to put itself in the titles of movies. American Sniper, American Hustle, American Beauty, American Graffiti, American Gigolo, etc etc etc... At this point, movies with "American" in the title are as American as baseball, apple pie, and really uncomfortable discourse about race. That there are two new movies due out this year bearing the "American" flag in their title isn't surprising. The fact that both are directed by Brits, however, is. Adding to the intrigue is that both films, Andrea Arnold's American Honey and Ewan McGregor's American Pastoral, depict such radically different slices of American life. Hollywood spends so much time inflicting its ideas of other cultures on the cinematic landscape that it's only fair for the tables to get turned now and then.

Which brings us to Arnold's Honey, the first of the two to land in US theaters. Following generally positive response out of Cannes (and the Grand Jury Prize, the fest's equivalent of 3rd place), Arnold's vision of American decay and poverty is quite a wallop. But even though the director and her collaborators offer up a handful of bravura, inspired passages, they are drowned in a nearly three hour journey that covers lots of physical terrain yet rarely goes anywhere. Adjectives like "sprawling" and "freewheeling" seem like inevitable parts of the conversation about American Honey, yet the film earns neither. It's simply too much fat wrapped around a less-than-filling piece of meat.

From her Oscar-winning short Wasp, Arnold has been preoccupied with the lives of the impoverished and the lost, and American Honey is no different. Despite hailing from across the Atlantic, Arnold's vision of lower class America feels spot on. It's not sugar-coated or fetishized, despite the abundance of it that fills the cramped framing. Working with regular DP Robbie Ryan, Arnold turns scenes of spontaneous action into memorable, pseudo-mythic images without sacrificing the grime and grit beneath the surface. Despite the absence of meticulous framing or composition, there are any number of shots and sequences of American Honey that have been seared into my memory. Even something as simple as a close up of the main character's thumb, stuck up to hitch a ride, coated in cracked pink nail polish, lingers thanks to the texture that Ryan's lighting brings to each moment. 

Arnold also continues her hotstreak of mostly untrained actors, and getting performances out of them that ring true. Front and center is Dallas native Sasha Lane, making quite a debut, even when she's stuck in a role that eventually runs out of steam on page. Whether concealing a smirk or calmly taking in some strange new sight, Lane is a find on par with Katie Jarvis, the lead of Arnold's Fish Tank. Lane's character Star begins promisingly. A well-intentioned misfit from the rough side of the tracks, Star bolts at the chance to get the hell out of dodge and hitch a ride with a traveling group of wayward youths crisscrossing the country and selling magazine subscriptions.

Despite the wide array of characters, Lane makes a more than able lead, even when going toe to toe with the experienced actors of the bunch. Her on/off chemistry with Jake (Shia LaBeouf) is palpable and messy, and she holds her own against icy group leader Krystal (Mad Max: Fury Road's Riley Keough). The other kids piled into the white van with Lane are all effective in small doses, and Arnold creates an aura of unforced camaraderie among the bunch in the many scenes in which dialogue floats from one end of the vehicle to the other. 

But there's only so much Arnold, her cast of misfits, and a killer soundtrack (including the eponymous Lady Antebellum track) can wring out of American Honey's set up. Lane's performance never wavers, somewhere in the second hour her development stops being an arc and turns into a circle. By the time American Honey lurches to a close, it's Keough's Krystal who emerges as the most compelling character, if only because we get the sense there's something more behind her facade. Arnold gives us so much of Star (and even Jake) that she outgrows her status as protagonist. Characters like Krystal leave us with questions and possibilities, while Star and Jake eventually exhaust and exasperate. 

And so, for 162 minutes, American Honey casually careens from one episode to another, never quite finding a steady-enough rhythm to become a melody. It's not too much of a good thing, but rather just too much. The exhilarating final minutes, pitched perfectly between bittersweetness and ecstasy, prop up American Honey enough to keep it from collapsing under its own weight. But what those final minutes are tasked with supporting, despite its highest of highs, is too unwieldy to justify the sum of its parts. 


Grade: B-

  

Review: "Fury"

Director: David Ayer
Runtime: 134 minutes

"War is hell." It's not a new idea. It hasn't been for a very, very long time. Even so, it's not impossible to find something new (or at least fresh) to add to one of the most obvious statements in the English language. David Ayer's WW2 tank actioner, however, isn't up to the task of doing or saying anything remotely new or creative. Though there's plenty of impressive technical work on display, Fury's characters are such cardboard cutouts that there's next to nothing to connect to beyond surface investment in the protagonist's survival.

Our set up is as follows: Army desk clerk Norman (Logan Lerman) is assigned to fill the place of the titular tank, headed by Wardaddy (Brad Pitt, rocking the same unfortunate hairdo that Jake Gyllenhaal suffered through in Prisoners). Norman's first task is to clean the brains of his predecessor out of his seat, while the rest of the hardened crew look on, mostly with derision. The other tank-mates include Bible-quoting cannon expert Boyd (Shia LaBeouf), driver Gordo (Michael Pena), and shell-loader Grady (Jon Bernthal). They're all assholes in their own special ways.

Now, here's a fun game: who lives and who dies? If you're expecting surprises, don't. As American soldiers march through war torn German terrain, Fury marches through every plot development we've come to expect in war stories about the Greatest Generation. Playing spot-the-cliche is often as interesting as the scenes where guns and bombs aren't going off. 

Most of Fury is simply a prolonged set-up for its final firefight, wherein the tank's crew, stranded on a rural road, must face off against 300 Nazi foot soldiers. When it comes to carnage, Ayer and his behind the scenes team really do know what they're doing. The claustrophobia of the tank's interior adds an extra layer of tension as the situation grows more dire. Editing and sound work give all of the heavily armed chaos proper emphasis without bludgeoning the viewer, and the make up team ensures that war looks as grimy as possible. Steven Price's booming score is sporadically effective, though it's often too big for its own good. At least it gives the viewer something else to listen to other than the dialogue. Turns out, the only time when Fury comes alive is when scores of people are dying.

Yet it's difficult to find anything worthy of praise when it comes down to the men who we spend more than two bloody hours with. Norman's arc has been done to death, and neither Ayer nor Lerman have come up with anything intriguing about the film's supposed window into the physical and mental toll of war. Pitt, at least, gives the film a consistent performance to hold the stale drama together, but Wardaddy's standard tough yet honorable leader schtick is too restrictive to achieve great depth. 

The supporting players don't fare much better, though often for different reasons. Pena simply doesn't have enough to do, while LaBeouf is stuck fighting a battle against the editors and the script. Boyd's religious alignment overwhelms the rest of his character, and LaBeouf's dialogue wears thin early on. And even though the actor is impressively restrained a times, certain cutaways to his ruddy, tear-stroked face look like they belong in a silent movie. On a completely separate level is former The Walking Dead actor Bernthal, and not in a good way. There's nothing wrong with Grady being a repugnant jerk, but Bernthal throws himself a little too fully into the role. He's not a compelling thorn in anyone's side. Instead, he's just unbearable. Sure, Nazis are terrible, but for much of the ride it's Grady who I wished would get his head blown off. 

If Fury had merely been a pure adrenaline rush, it might have been more convincing. Unfortunately, Ayer is determined to say something meaningful, and it doesn't go all that well. There's a glimmer of hope when Wardaddy and Norman visit a bombed-out town and rest in a local woman's apartment. In addition to allowing the wonderful Romanian actress Anamaria Marinca to appear, the apartment scene is one of the few nonviolent segments of the film that comes close to tackling some complex notions about the relationship between invading armies and native citizens. But then Grady and the rest of the Fury crew show up, and it's all downhill from there. Grady's increasingly boorish behavior adds nothing to the scene's dynamic, and it only serves to make him even more repellent. 

Once Fury bulldozes through its entirely expected climax, connection with the story finally breaks. The admittedly impressive final shot shows how much horrific effort went into such a brief moment of a war that last nearly a decade, but it has a second, unintentional effect. As the film shows us the minute significance of the final battle in the grand scheme of the war, it also serves as a reminder of Fury's own insignificance as a war story. Hollywood has a whole ocean of WW2 dramas, and nothing about Fury is good enough to make it more than just another drop.

Grade: C+/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+

The straggler - Cannes '12 Review: "Lawless" [Competition]

A solid piece of film making that marks its director's most commercial outing to date, Lawless may not wind up a major awards contender come year's end, but it does provide an engaging ride through bootlegging in the Prohibition Era. Directed by John Hillcoat (The Proposition, The Road) with a nice sense of narrative momentum, this is a sturdy, entertaining, nicely acted film, even though it represents a less original, independent point of view than his previous films. Gone is the harsh poetic tone, replaced by lots of talk and lots of shooting.

Based on the, allegedly, true story of the Bondurant brothers, the film charts their run-ins with a dandified new officer (an eerily commanding Guy Pearce) as they attempt to maintain their bootlegging enterprise in Virginia. The plot is straightforward, yet right from the outset, Hillcoat and his collaborators create a palpable atmosphere and a sense of pacing that keeps things moving, without ever rushing. It may not really dwell on character the way Hillcoat's previous films did, but the characters come across nicely. Shia LaBeouf and Tom Hardy deliver nice work as the film's leads, with LaBeouf proving surprisingly charismatic. The characters may not be strongly fleshed out, but the actors at least inhabit them comfortably. The scene-stealer is easily Pearce, in a broadly played yet still scary-as-hell role. Less successful, through no fault of their own, are the film's two female roles, played by Jessica Chastain and Mia Wasikowska. They're mostly used as objects of potential romantic affection for the men, and little else, although Chastain does get one nice, complicated scene toward the end. From a technical standpoint, everything looks and sounds nice, save for a moment or two where Nick Cave's score comes in far too loud. Not the sort of film that will truly amaze you, but it will hold your attention and remain engaging, even when the epilogue hangs on just a hair too long.

Grade: B

Trailer: John Hillcoat's "Lawless"

Now that the Cannes Film Festival lineup for 2012 has been unveiled, the countdown begins to see which competition entries will release trailers and clips first. Near the front of the pack is John Hillcoat's Lawless (formerly known as The Wettest County until Terrence Malick gave up the title from his forthcoming film), which looks like a shot of gangster-ized adrenaline.


With a stellar cast (...and Shia LaBeouf) and a fun setting/subject matter (Depression Era bootleggers), Lawless always held a lot of appeal for me. What really caught my eye, however, was director John Hillcoat, whose two previous films (The Road and The Proposition) were simultaneously elegant and brutal. So, knowing Hillcoat's previous work, I thought I had an idea of how Lawless would look and feel. If the trailer is indication, I'm completely wrong. Lawless looks both talky and fast paced, and marks a major departure from the director's previous work. Granted, part of being an artist is the chance to explore new styles, but I can't help feel that some of Lawless looks a little ordinary, and that we're losing a chance to see what his previous style could have had on this sort of story. Granted, the cast looks to be in fine form, and Gary Oldman and Guy Pearce look like excellent villains, but as much as there is to like here, I can't help but feel that we might be headed for something of a missed opportunity.


Trailer Grade: B-