Biopic

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

Jeremy BeckReviews
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

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Steve Jobs: Thinking Different, and Big, and Mean

Jeremy BeckReviews
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

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The Walk: Race to the Top, But Don’t Look Down

Jeremy BeckReviews
Joseph Gordon-Levitt defies death as Philippe Petit in "The Walk"

Robert Zemeckis’s The Walk tells the story of Philippe Petit, the French daredevil who one day in August 1974, to the surprise and delight of thousands of unsuspecting New Yorkers, tiptoed back and forth across a wire stretching between the roofs of the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center. Midway through the film, Philippe and two confederates slink into a Manhattan electronics store and ask to purchase an interphone. The proprietor, a sharp fellow named J.P., suggests they buy a walkie-talkie instead, but Philippe refuses, explaining to his comrade in rapid French that cops can listen in on walkie-talkies. This statement raises the eyebrows of J.P., who it turns out speaks French (his initials stand for Jean-Pierre, and he is played very well by the American actor James Badge Dale); he assumes that this motley crew is intent on robbing a bank, and that they’re in dire need of some help.

Strictly speaking, J.P. is wrong—Philippe has no plans to steal anything, except perhaps a few moments of immortality. But in cinematic terms, J.P. is on the mark. The Walk, in its elemental form, is a crime caper. Its story, which it tells with considerable glee and marginal distinction, is that of a gang of lawbreakers who conspire to evade police detection and carry out a seemingly impossible objective. In this way, it is a successor to classic heist pictures like Rififi and Ocean’s Eleven. What distinguishes this one is that, where most capers thrive on the planning of the crime rather than the actual execution, The Walk achieves its power in depicting Philippe’s improbable, death-defying triumph. For the majority of its runtime, it’s a fun, frothy film: nicely acted, convincingly staged, and thoroughly familiar. Then Philippe steps out on that wire, and this modest, unmemorable movie becomes unforgettable. Read More

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Pawn Sacrifice: For Queen, Rook, Self, and Country

Jeremy BeckReviews
Tobey Maguire stars as Bobby Fischer in "Pawn Sacrifice"

In 1972 in Iceland, Bobby Fischer attempted to become the first American-born man to win the World Chess Championship, seeking to wrest the crown from imposing Soviet grandmaster Boris Spassky. Now, if you think that sounds challenging, try making a movie about it. Sure, sports films are only tangentially about the sports themselves, but they almost always revolve around some degree of dynamism or athleticism, some sort of physical heroism for the camera to capture. But Pawn Sacrifice, Edward Zwick’s dramatization of Fischer’s famous battle against Spassky and the Iron Curtain, is about chess, which is basically the least cinematic sport imaginable. Zwick’s seemingly impossible task is to transform a thoroughly sedate affair—one in which two men stare at carefully sculpted figurines, furrow their brows, and think—into an actual thriller of tangible urgency and excitement. He mostly succeeds. Functional, beautifully acted, and curiously engrossing, Pawn Sacrifice resembles the best traditional sports movie Zwick possibly could have made on this subject. In other words, it isn’t half-bad.

The film opens in medias res, after Fischer has forfeited the second game of the Championship (the rules provided for up to 24 total games) and has barricaded himself in his rented cottage, flinching at the slightest sound. It then flashes back to his childhood in New York, a predictable device that immediately illustrates both the benefits and the drawbacks of Zwick’s orthodox approach. The flashback, which is mercifully brief, does its job: It bluntly illustrates that Fischer (played as a young boy by Aiden Lovekamp and then as a teen by Seamus Davey-Fitzpatrick) is both a genius and a prick. Expressing the former element proves problematic for Zwick; unable to telegraph Fischer’s virtuosity visually, he settles for dialogue, with adults repeatedly gushing about the boy’s brilliance, followed by a montage of handshakes soundtracked to laudatory notices from newscasters. (To be fair, Zwick initially toys with using graphics to convey Fischer mentally maneuvering pieces on the chessboard, but it’s a gimmicky tactic that he wisely abandons.) But he efficiently articulates Fischer’s petulance, as when the youth loudly berates his mother without a hint of remorse. This kid has no time for sensitivity—he has chess to play. Read More

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Black Mass: Cops and Gangsters, Caught in a City’s Undertow

Jeremy BeckReviews
Johnny Depp stars as Whitey Bulger in "Black Mass"

James Whitey Bulger was one of the most notorious mobsters in United States history. What, don’t believe me? Just watch Black Mass, a movie that repeatedly and insistently trumpets Bulger’s legendary place in American gangster lore at every shrill turn. It features no shortage of people, whether harried law enforcement agents or cowed criminal cohorts, braying about Bulger’s illegal exploits and moral contemptibility. Yet the oddest thing about this adequately entertaining movie, which was directed in workmanlike fashion by Scott Cooper and features a dream-team cast, is that for all its vociferous proclamations, it reveals very little about who Bulger was, what he did, or how he eventually became one of the country’s most wanted fugitives. Yes, he kills a few people over the course of the film, and he threatens a few others, and he certainly seems very mean. But to the extent that he ruled Boston’s underworld for two decades as the leader of the Winter Hill Gang, well, you’ll just have to take Black Mass at its word. It presents a litany of testimony swearing to Bulger’s evil, but therein lies its flaw: It tells, but it does not show.

This does not mean that there is nothing to see. To begin with, there is the unforgettable sight of a blue-eyed Johnny Depp. Those eerie cerulean irises (the product of contact lenses), along with slicked-back pale-blond hair and prosthetically rotted teeth, combine to give 2009’s sexiest man alive a truly frightening countenance. And while one might quibble with the subtlety of Depp’s performance as Bulger—which is to say, there is none—it is impossible to deny the ferocious commitment he brings to the role. Often the target of critical ridicule for his unfettered flamboyance (which can, of course, yield spectacular results), he is all business here, those unblinking, alien blues teaming with a snarling Beantown monotone that befits Bulger’s blunt, monolithic persona. He rarely raises his voice, but he is always threatening, whether he’s coolly berating an underling or, in the film’s most quietly terrifying scene, exerting his will over a colleague’s wife. He is not someone you wish to cross. Read More

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