Director: John Lee Hancock
Runtime: 125 minutes
Saving Mr. Banks begins and ends with shots of the clouds, which is just as well, seeing as the film seems to have been written and created with its head up among them. A sugar-coated, albeit never treacly, slice of Disney history, the film goes down easy, though it can't help but leave a sour taste in light of how events actually panned out. Emma Thompson is as effective and effortlessly watchable as ever as the film's lead, but even her work isn't enough to raise the material above (largely harmless) mediocrity.
Right off of the bat, it's clear that writer P.L. Travers (Thompson) isn't terribly enthusiastic about Walt Disney's (Tom Hanks) desire to turn her beloved Mary Poppins novels into a film. The stories, Travers insists, don't lend themselves to a feature film, especially if said film is to include musical numbers and, even worse, animated sequences. From the moment Travers sets foot on her flight from London to LA, she's standoffish with everyone from flight attendants to hotel bell boys. Her cheery hired Disney driver (Paul Giamatti) tells her that the sun has come out to greet her. Travers responds by remarking that the City of Angels smells like chlorine and sweat.
Travers' mood doesn't improve after meeting Disney, or the team of writers and songwriters who have been tasked with the adaptation (Bradley Whitford, B.J. Novak, and Jason Schwartzman). Hardly a line in the script goes by without a correction or objection from the protective author, who shoots down everything from set designs to the eventually famous lyric "supercalifragilisticexpialidocious." If there are parts of Saving Mr. Banks that are legitimately entertaining and informative, it's the early butting of heads between the Disney creatives and the author. Thompson's no nonsense, almost school marm-ish delivery is a highlight, and lends some contentious spark to an otherwise adequate film.
Less sure are the flashbacks detailing Travers' childhood in Australia, the experiences of which inspired the Poppins books. When Thompson is on screen, there's a level of restraint in both the writing and in Hancock's direction. With Thompson gone, however, the flashbacks often come off as a touch hoakey, despite events that lend a darker shading to the narrative. Instead of being anchored around Thompson, the trips into the past are shouldered on Colin Farrell as Travers' troubled, alcoholic father. Farrell has proven himself a talented actor, especially in dark comedies, but he seems miscast here. The overeager image he projects - in general or around his young children - tends to ring false. Moments between father and daughter that should charm are, instead, bland and hammy. More effective is Ruth Wilson as Travers' troubled mother, despite her performance largely consisting of reactions to her husband's actions.
Oddly, the most effective secondary thread has nothing to do with Mr. Disney or the Travers family's Outback melodrama. Though their scenes rarely build outside of a few quips, Thompson and Giamatti's slow-building friendship leads to a lovely conclusion that feels more in line with who Travers was, and what she stood for. The movie eventually has her won over by the 1964 Julie Andrews/Dick Van Dyke film, which undercuts the author's resilience and regret over the enterprise. On the other hand, Travers' relationship with her happy-go-lucky driver, however embellished or invented, have a mark of truth to them that transcends the otherwise pedestrian material, albeit only by a hair's breadth.
The rest of the film is a handsome, though uninspired, technical package, nicely capturing the period without doing anything to truly stand out. From the costumes to the generic Thomas Newman score, it all looks and sounds right, even though none of the techs leave an impression. In many ways, Saving Mr. Banks resembles last year's Hitchcock, another film about creative battles behind iconic Hollywood products. It gets the job done and provides a few moments of enjoyment, but it's ultimately little more than a sanitized take on a story that has thornier complexities that deserved to be unpacked and explored.
Grade: C+
Director: Paul Greengrass
Runtime: 134 minutes
Movies, like any art form, have a tricky relationship with reality. And that relationship only becomes more of a hurdle when the link to reality is concrete, and the story concerns matters of life and death, or success and failure. Even when a movie takes on a story that's decades old, reality tends to act as a roadblock to complete investment on the part of the viewer. That was the case with Brian Singer's Valkyrie, which told the story of a group of Nazi officials who attempted to assassinate Hitler. The subject matter of Singer's film is fascinating, but it fails to create an atmosphere that leads one to believe that (just maybe) the protagonists will succeed.
A similar issue looms over Paul Greengrass' newest film, Captain Phillips, even though it's a far more compelling bit of fact-based storytelling. As in the director's wrenching United 93, the basic outcome of the story is well-known, but the details aren't touched on much. Yet where Greengrass' 9/11 hijacking film was an ensemble piece, Captain Phillips ultimately zeroes in on a handful of people. Among the main subjects is the titular captain (Tom Hanks), whose cargo ship, the Maersk Alabama, was hijacked by Somali pirates in 2009.
Above all else, Greengrass has retained his ability to plunge audiences into the unnerving immediacy of tense situations. The story of Richard Phillips, his crew, and the Somali pirates has more to it than people yelling threats and pointing guns. Billy Ray's screenplay generally keeps things moving, while still allowing for the general emotional toll of the incident to build. Watching Phillips match wits with the pirates, who are often ready to counter their defensive tricks, provides the film with some of its best moments. The no-frills, crisp filmmaking enlivens scenarios where the outcome is obvious. We know that the pirates will board the ship, but seeing the back and forth between the two sides of the conflict leading up to that moment is every bit as compelling as what follows.
Where the film starts to sag is in its last section, which sees Phillips trapped on the Alabama's lifeboat along with his pirate captors. While the level of incidental detail shown on screen is technically impressive, the film's home stretch is where the story's endpoint starts disrupting one's cinematic investment. There's a point where Phillips tale, however extraordinary, has to segue into its harrowing final moments. Greengrass and Ray, however, are determined to keep stringing the viewer along, to the point where you wish the Monty Python lads would arrive and shout, "Get on with it!"
Despite the final act's excessive length, it does at least give Hanks and Barkhad Abdi (playing pirate leader Muse) room to chip away at their characters' exteriors. Even as the final stretch wears out its welcome, the two men's performances help dig beneath the otherwise clinical treatment of the story. Phillips and Muse are both pushed to very different breaking points, and Hanks and Abdi find the humanity beneath their characters' single-minded determination. Abdi, in particular, makes a strong impression, albeit less overtly than his famous co-star. Whatever his character's background and motivations (which are sketched out in a brief scene in Somalia), the actor never turns Muse into a garish cartoon villain. Muse and his crew are credible threats, but the pirates are far from the racist caricatures they could have been in less intelligent hands.
As good as the performances are, they still aren't enough to turn Captain Phillips in to more than ordinary. Greengrass' directing is as assured as ever, and suits the material perfectly, but the writing isn't as consistently engaging as it needs to be. This problem is only magnified by the story's ripped-from-the-headlines subject matter. It's a respectable account of the Alabama's hijacking, but there's nothing the be gained from this dramatization that you couldn't get from reading articles about the incident.
Grade: B-
Director(s): Andy & Lana Wachowski, Tom Tykwer
Runtime: 172 minutes
In an age when Hollywood has become increasingly prone to loud, mindless blockbusters and endless sequels, you have to admire the amount of faith that went into Cloud Atlas. Based on David Mitchell's acclaimed novel, this massive (in scope and in length) adaptation is the sort of ambition Hollywood ought to aspire to more often. Even if, as is the case here, the final product is neither a mind-blowing masterwork or a total train wreck but rather a well told story that works better narratively than emotionally.
As far as plot is concerned, Cloud Atlas has plenty, though it ultimately boils down to six main threads. Among them are a journalist's investigation of a shady nuclear power plant, a young musician's relationship with a famous composer, and a clone in the far future who gets dragged into a rebellion. How these, and other, stories link together is a matter of echoing dialogue, images, and sounds. Oh, and there are also very literal links as well. Whereas Mitchell's novel unfolded as a nesting egg of sorts, directors Tom Tyker and Andy and Lana Wachowski (the newly monikered Wachowski Starship) have strung the six major segments together as simultaneous narratives.
And, on the filmmaking level, it's impossible to deny the effort that the directing trio went through in order to bring Mitchell's novel to life. Each segment is well told, and though the genres range from sci-fi adventure to goofy comedy, they are strung together with such smart organization that changes from story to story are rarely, if ever, off-putting. Above all else, the true hero of Cloud Atlas isn't one of its dozens of characters, but rather editor Alexander Berner. The task before him had to be nothing short of monumental, yet he has turned the massive collaboration into a fluidly organized film, that not only runs upwards of three hours, but also tells some of its individual stories out of order.
Berner aside, technical prowess abounds in the film. Costumes and set design nicely recreate past worlds while also birthing new ones, while the cinematography captures each genre with lighting to match. There's also the quietly building score, courtesy of Tykwer, Johnny Klimek, and Reinhold Heil. Like some of the collaborations between Kieslowski and Preisner in the late 80s and early 90s, some of the music plays a major plot point across narratives, and this composing trio have crafted a nicely affecting set of recurring musical themes that carry the massive narrative with grace, rather than with overcompensation.
Of course, there's also the make-up. Many an actor has transformed him/herself with make-up and prosthetics, but never like Cloud Atlas. Every major player in the ensemble undergoes radical transformations across segments that include changes in race and gender. Part of the fun of the experience is figuring out who's who. Whether or not Cloud Atlas succeeds in being mindblowing as a whole is debatable but I'd be hard-pressed to find someone not won over by the extraordinary efforts of the hair and make-up teams.
Before I forget, however, there are actually people doing interesting things infront of the camera as well. Though some members of the ensemble are more prominent than others (Susan Sarandon feels largely underused), the cast is generally a marvel. No individual flies far ahead, but the performances all register nicely. Near the top of the crowd are Doona Bae, most prominently featured as a clone named Sonmi-451, and Ben Whishaw, best utilized as a struggling gay composer. Tom Hanks also surprises, in roles that range from cartoonishly evil to tenderly sincere. With so much ground to cover, the performers have few notes to play, though they hit them more often than they miss.
But looming larger than any character (or prosthetic nose) are Cloud Atlas's ideas. The idea that "everything is connected" has certainly be done before on film, but perhaps never on such a ludicrously large scale. To meld time periods and genres in pursuit of grandiose New Age wonderings is the sort of philosophical undertaking that could easily sink a film. How well it succeeds is somewhat difficult to describe. The connections between and among segments are often beautifully handled, never spelling things out so much as finding elegant and entertaining links to and from the various stories. Though separated by decades and centuries, part of what works in the film is that the connections evolve and deepen as time progresses. If Mitchell's novel was set up as a Russian nesting doll, then this adaptation is more akin to a very large jigsaw puzzle.
The inevitable drawback, however, is that with so much work put into simply telling the stories, there isn't quite enough room for the film to come together at the end. Each story has its own progression and arc. Each story has heroes and villains. But even as the pacing escalates up and down throughout the final hour, Cloud Atlas ends more with a whimper than with a bang. Moments that could elicit either immense awe or deeply felt sadness instead connect on a much more shallow level. Plot and construction are a critical part of the story's overarching themes, but in the transference to the big screen, the human element hasn't translated as fully.
The most immediate comparison I can make is Darren Aronofsky's The Fountain (2006). Despite being half the length (and also containing only three story strands), it's an equally ambitious film. And despite the differences in length and number of characters, both films work on certain levels, but are held back by certain deficiencies. For Aronofsky's film, it was the narrative and thematic elements that felt incomlpete, whereas in Cloud Atlas, it's the characters. Both weaknesses prevent the films, despite their strengths, from reaching their (insanely high) potential.
I have no doubt that many will disagree. Like The Fountain, Cloud Atlas is likely to be the love it/hate it film of its year. Yet once again I find myself in the curiously small middle ground. I merely liked and admired what the Wachowski's and Tykwer created. At the very least they succeeding in telling six engrossing stories - non-sequentially, mind you - over the course of three hours. In an age where big studio projects are built increasingly to move fast, be simple, and make money, Cloud Atlas is something of a relief. As A.O. Scott of The New York Times put it in his review, this is "the most movie" you can get for your eight (ten? twenty?) bucks. Yet considering how much "movie" I got from Cloud Atlas, it's hard not to be left a little wanting. That this film exists is something of a miracle in this day and age. A shame that it exists and only partially succeeds in reaching its lofty goals, which are left floating somewhere up in the stratosphere.
Grade: B
