Loving: Found Guilty for Finding Love

Joel Edgerton and Ruth Negga as a real-life couple in "Loving"

Loving is a very pleasant American movie about a very unpleasant time in American history. It tells a story of adversity, perseverance, and ultimate triumph, and it proceeds in a rigorous straight line, with minimal eccentricity or embellishment. This is perhaps to be expected, given that Loving belongs to a specific subgenre: the earnest and well-meaning docudrama. But it is also something of a surprise, given that its writer and director is Jeff Nichols, whose previous films (Take Shelter, Mud, Midnight Special) were largely off-kilter and opaque. Nichols tends to focus on odd protagonists—a delusional laborer, a wandering gangster, an alien boy—but even more central to his filmmaking are his disdain for convention and his gift for unpredictability. Yet anyone with access to Wikipedia could comfortably predict how Loving will play out.

This does not make it bad. On the contrary, it can be satisfying to watch a familiar story unfold on screen, particularly when it is well-told and well-acted. And of course, the movie’s theme—that stoic decency can defeat senseless bigotry—is a worthy one, equally relevant now as when the events of the film took place. Still, the challenge for Nichols is to make Loving stimulating as a piece of cinema as well as a lesson in history. Given his meat-and-potatoes approach to this material, it’s a marvel that he even half-succeeds. Read More

Hacksaw Ridge: In the Shadow of Death, Bearing Witness, But Not Arms

Andrew Garfield is a pacifist at war in Mel Gibson’s "Hacksaw Ridge"

Early in Hacksaw Ridge, a jittery blood donor attempts to impress a pretty nurse with a spectacularly cheesy pickup line. Yesterday, when she jabbed a needle into his arm, was the first time they’d met; today, he insists that he needs a transfusion because ever since he saw her, his heart’s been beating so fast that he’s nearly out of blood. “That’s pretty corny,” she responds, but when he asks if that makes it bad, she blushes and continues, “I didn’t say that.” Hacksaw Ridge, the fifth movie directed by Mel Gibson, is also pretty corny—OK, it’s very corny. It is also sappy, grandiose, and preachy. Does that make it bad? Not by a long shot.

That aforementioned blood donor is Desmond Doss, played as an adult with sly, aw-shucks charm by Andrew Garfield. We first meet him as a boy (portrayed by Darcy Bryce) in Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains, where he roughhouses with his brother before inadvertently knocking him unconscious. Fearing for his sibling’s life, the young sinner slumps into an adjoining room, where he gazes at a crude illustration of a murder, ornamented with the text of one of the Commandments: “Thou shalt not kill.” This blunt, didactic sequence quickly establishes two things: one, Doss will grow up to be a deeply religious pacifist, and two, Gibson has no use for subtlety. Read More

The Birth of a Nation: Black Men Fighting Back, Then and Now

Nate Parker in the complex, controversial "Birth of a Nation"

No movie exists entirely within its own bubble, but the clamor surrounding The Birth of a Nation is so loud, it’s threatened to silence the actual film. When it premiered in January at the Sundance Film Festival, The Birth of a Nation was hailed not only as a good movie—it won both the Grand Jury Prize and the Audience Award—but as a timely and potent corrective to the monochrome of the Academy Awards, which were squirming through the second consecutive year of #OscarsSoWhite. But in August, reports surfaced that Nate Parker, the film’s writer-director as well as its star, had been charged with rape in 1999 along with Jean McGianni Celestin, who shares a story credit with Parker. In 2001, Parker was acquitted (Celestin was convicted, but the verdict was overturned on appeal); then, in 2012, his accuser killed herself. This tragedy—combined with the fact that the film features a rape whose accuracy has been questioned—ignited a firestorm that has engulfed the picture, resulting in boycotts, short-circuited interviews, and a marketing campaign that could charitably be described as tentative. Both the breadth and the volume of the rhetoric surrounding The Birth of a Nation‘s release make it challenging to look past the movie’s context to see its content.

Yet here we are. By which I mean, my job as a film critic is not to analyze The Birth of a Nation’s Best Picture prospects, nor is it to reconcile Nate Parker the person with Nate Parker the artist. (It is certainly not to determine the validity of the sexual assault allegations against Parker or to assess the prospect of causation with the alleged victim’s suicide, tasks for which I am wholly unqualified.) It is instead to evaluate this movie as, well, a movie. And on that score, perhaps the most interesting thing about The Birth of a Nation is how ordinary it is. What we have here is a prototypical biopic, alternately stimulating and stultifying. You’ve seen movies like this before, which means you are much more likely to remember this one for what it represents than for what it contains. Read More

Sully: He’s Not a Hero. Just Ask the Government.

Tom Hanks is a haunted hero in Clint Eastwood's "Sully"

In the dreadful 2012 flop Trouble with the Curve, Clint Eastwood plays a grizzled baseball scout who has grown disgusted with the sport’s increasing reliance on analytics and technology. “Anybody who uses computers doesn’t know a damn thing about this game,” he growls at one point. His irascible critique encapsulates the film’s worldview, namely, that the classicist’s wisdom of observational experience will always vanquish the modernist’s reliance on statistical data. That broad thesis is now the animating force behind Sully, Eastwood’s brisk, hackneyed, intermittently diverting reenactment of an American tragedy that wasn’t. It’s the kind of movie where the officious villains blindly trust computer simulations, only to be taken aback when they’re informed that they’ve failed to account for that most vexing of variables: humanity.

The majority of the humanity in Sully derives from Tom Hanks, an actor who, luckily for Eastwood, could imbue a paperclip with an aura of moral and professional authority. Here he provides the necessary blunt-force gravitas as Capt. Chesley Sullenberger, the pilot better known as, well, you know. The film opens with anonymous voices screaming Sully’s name as an airplane glides above the streets of Queens before crashing into a skyscraper. It’s a nightmarish image, which makes sense, given that it is born from Sully’s nightmares. In actuality, as you will no doubt remember, things went quite differently: On January 15, 2009, after U.S. Airways Flight 1549 suffered power failure in both engines due to bird strikes, Sully successfully landed the plane on the Hudson River, saving the lives of all 155 souls on board. The incident was swiftly dubbed “the Miracle on the Hudson”, with Sully as its chief architect. Roll credits. Read More

Steve Jobs: Thinking Different, and Big, and Mean

Michael Stuhlbarg, Michael Fassbender, and Kate Winslet star in Danny Boyle's "Steve Jobs"

Steve Jobs was undeniably a great man, but was he a good one? That question, along with many others—What is the true purpose of technological innovation? Why did the Macintosh look like it was grinning? Is that really Kate Winslet?—is tackled forcefully and adroitly in Steve Jobs, Danny Boyle’s exhausting, exhilarating biopic of Apple Computer’s founding father. A portrait of an artist as an obsessive young man, this manic, mostly marvelous movie wisely sidesteps the unconquerable challenge of condensing Jobs’s entire adult life into a two-hour film. But while its scope is sensibly narrow, Steve Jobs nevertheless allows you to glimpse the magnitude of its subject’s vision, and to feel the intensity of his longing. It is not another generic movie about a tortured genius; it is wholly its own movie about this tortured genius.

Speaking of troubled smart people, the screenplay for Steve Jobs is by Aaron Sorkin, which practically makes it a clandestine autobiography. (In fact, it is a loose adaptation of a book by Walter Isaacson.) Perhaps America’s preeminent wordsmith, Sorkin is renowned for creating characters who are brilliant, driven, and insufferable—you know, kind of like Aaron Sorkin. It’s small wonder he wanted to write about Steve Jobs, who is portrayed here, in a fantastic performance by Michael Fassbender, as equal parts visionary, egomaniac, genius, and jerk. The German-born Irish actor, who appears in every scene in the film, is blessed with a colossal screen presence (recall his magnificently loathsome turn in 12 Years a Slave), and he is effortlessly hypnotic in front of the camera. But there is more to Fassbender’s performance than sheer charisma—every narrowing of his eyes, every curl of his mouth, conveys a precise combination of intelligence and condescension. The Jobs we meet here isn’t just a man with a prophetic plan; he’s a higher power who’s so convinced of his superiority, he can’t help but look down on humanity with despair and disgust. Read More