Drama

Hell or High Water: Paying Off That Mortgage, No Matter the Cost

Jeremy BeckReviews
Ben Foster and Chris Pine in "Hell or High Water"

The dusty Texas landscape of Hell or High Water is dotted with brightly colored billboards, each promising salvation to those in need. The path of this purported deliverance is not spiritual but financial; neatly lettered signs like “Fast Cash” and “Debt Relief” court blue-collar laborers who are behind on their mortgages or their bills. The striking visual contrast—between the glossy print of the highway advertisements and the dilapidated cars and trucks that drive past them—hints that these assurances are illusory, a cruel commercial ploy to exploit the perpetual suffering of the working class. It’s an accurate impression, as the movie is, in part, a damning indictment of corporate avarice, one that recalls the impotent rage of The Big Short, only with the gleaming skyscrapers of the Big Apple replaced with the vast and desolate ranches of the heartland. Hell or High Water is in many ways a classic heist picture, but the true thieves depicted here are the banks.

That may sound a tad polemical, and it’s fair to criticize Hell or High Water for tarring and feathering an avatar of exaggerated evil that has already been burned in cinematic effigy. (Recent examples include 99 Homes and Money Monster, though the closest comparator here is Killing Them Softly, Andrew Dominik’s seamy underworld yarn that embellished its pulpy narrative with persistent commentary on the government’s post-Katrina nonfeasance.) But this smart, soulful movie is too nuanced—and too compassionate—to be reduced to its talking points. Its message may be broad, but its details are thrillingly specific. Read More

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Eye in the Sky: Where Collateral Damage Is a Cherub, and Our Collective Soul

Jeremy BeckReviews
Aaron Paul in "Eye in the Sky"

Eye in the Sky is the kind of movie that seeks acclaim simply for existing. It is designed to ask thorny questions about geopolitical warfare in the terrorist age, to make you plumb your conscience and grapple with the inherent tensions between morality and security. It’s a noble objective—these are questions that we all should be asking ourselves, and our elected officials—but Eye in the Sky fails to execute its mission with the necessary nuance. It feints at complexity, but it is actually shrill, a didactic sermon that is less interested in probing than proselytizing. Ultimately, the only question it asks is this: “Are you willing to murder an angelic young girl just to stop a few terrorists?” Answer wrong, and ye be judged.

To be fair, Eye in the Sky takes its time before it sheds its camouflage of earnest inquiry. In its opening scenes, it hopscotches around the globe, introducing us to the various players who will take part in its game of philosophical purgatory. These include: Colonel Katherine Powell (Helen Mirren), a British military commander stationed in Sussex who is remotely overseeing an operation in Kenya; Lieutenant General Frank Benson (Alan Rickman, in his final onscreen performance), Powell’s superior who monitors the operation from London, in a roomful of anxious bureaucrats; Jama Farah (Barkhad Abdi, in his first role since Captain Phillips), a Kenyan field agent providing ground support; and Steve Watts (Aaron Paul), an Air Force pilot in Nevada charged with manning the surveillance drone that gives the film its title. Read More

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The Revenant: In This Wilderness, It’s Men vs. Nature, and Man vs. Man

Jeremy BeckReviews
Leonardo DiCaprio braves the wilderness in Alejandro González Iñárritu's "The Revenant"

The Revenant defies categorization, not because it refuses to serve as a particular type of movie, but because it is so many movies at once. Both art film and action flick, both meditative drama and survivalist thriller, both historical fiction and contemporary allegory—the latest and craziest picture from provocateur Alejandro González Iñárritu wants it all. This level of naked ambition is rare in modern cinema, and it is tempting to praise The Revenant—a two-and-a-half hour adventure film with minimal dialogue and maximal craft—for simply existing. But look past its staggering audacity, and The Revenant reveals itself as a work of true duality, even beyond its mirrored ambitions. It is, in empirical terms, both a good movie and a bad one.

Let’s begin with the bad. Based on a novel by Michael Punke (Iñárritu wrote the screenplay along with Mark L. Smith), The Revenant‘s storyline is exceedingly slight. Set in the early nineteenth century, it follows a band of fur trappers in the American wilderness. Initially, there are roughly 30 of them, but after the native Arikara (dubbed “Ree”) spring an ambush—a characteristically bloody sequence filled with loud musket-fire and zooming arrows—their numbers are reduced to about 10, though only two are of any consequence. They are Glass (Leonardo DiCaprio), an inveterate tracker with a half-Pawnee teenage son, and Fitzgerald (Tom Hardy), a brusque trapper who is as unapologetically selfish as he is culturally insensitive. After Glass is severely wounded by a bear—more on that in a bit—he and Fitzgerald are separated from their unit; not one to loiter with an invalid, Fitzgerald murders Glass’s son and leaves the immobilized Glass for dead. The remainder of The Revenant focuses on Glass’sagonizing efforts to survive in the forbidding wild, driven by his need to enact revenge on his son’s killer. Read More

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The Hateful Eight: Fun and Fury in the Old West

Jeremy BeckReviews
Kurt Russell and Samuel L. Jackson in Quentin Tarantino's "The Hateful Eight"

The Hateful Eight is silly, self-indulgent, overlong, and obscenely ostentatious. It is also funny, bracing, suspenseful, and supremely entertaining. It is, in other words, a film by Quentin Tarantino, cinema’s poet laureate of grisly violence and savory dialogue. This is the kind of happily ridiculous movie where the no-good woman spends the entire second half with her face covered in blood, and where the manly men seem to have engaged in a mustache-growing contest. As a writerly work of fiction, The Hateful Eight is difficult to take seriously. As a thrilling piece of pulp art, it is impossible to dismiss.

That is especially true for cinephiles. The world’s most celebrated former video-store clerk, Tarantino can be exasperating in his nerdy superiority, his compulsion to constantly remind you of the scope of his encyclopedic knowledge of film’s annals. But he possesses real love for the movies, and The Hateful Eight—which, as the opening title card gratuitously announces, is the eighth picture of his career—is his most pronounced valentine to the form yet. Shot in the fossilized format of 65-millimeter film, its languorous opening scenes—featuring painterly images of a stagecoach striving against the snow of a Wyoming blizzard (shooting took place in Colorado), and of a cloaked man with his head bowed against the cold—beautifully capture the visual majesty of the medium. (Most theaters with digital projectors are showing The Hateful Eight in a slightly truncated version, but a “traveling roadshow” is exhibiting the film in select areas in 70mm, complete with an overture, intermission, and a few extended scenes.) Tarantino’s screenplays may go overboard with their insouciant humor, but in these striking early scenes (shot by Oscar-winning cinematographer Robert Richardson), he makes clear that his craft is not a joke. To him, movies still matter. Read More

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Carol: As Society Frowns, True Love Blooms

Jeremy BeckReviews
Rooney Mara and Cate Blanchett star in Todd Haynes's "Carol"

Carol is the new film from Todd Haynes, though perhaps I should have preceded that factual nugget with a spoiler alert. Over the past two decades, in features such as Safe and Far from Heaven (both starring Julianne Moore) and in the HBO miniseries Mildred Pierce (with Kate Winslet), Haynes has established himself as America’s preeminent chronicler of the tragedy of feminine domesticity. He makes movies about putatively happy women who are nevertheless battered by normative prejudice and suffocated by societal constriction; his heroines, visibly content to onlookers, are secretly trapped by a lack of mobility and an absence of true freedom. Given this, you may anticipate—perhaps “dread” is the better word—that bad things will happen to the women in Carol. But while the characters here do endure their share of misfortune, what is stunning about this remarkable, enormously empathetic film is how life-affirming it is. A work of raw, pure emotion, Carol testifies to the power of human compassion, even as it also unflinchingly depicts human ugliness. It breaks your heart, and then, in startling fashion, it puts it back together again.

Based on a Patricia Highsmith novel called The Price of Salt, the movie’s title is somewhat deceptive. Yes, one of the principals is named Carol, and it seems only logical to christen the film after her, given that she is played with luminescent magnetism by Cate Blanchett. Yet the movie belongs equally to Therese Belivet (an extraordinary Rooney Mara), a twentysomething woman with a pageboy haircut and wide, hazel-green eyes. When we first take stock of Therese (the year is 1952), her life seems perfectly satisfactory. She has a steady if thankless job at a Manhattan department store, she has secured the romantic attentions of a good-looking man (Jake Lacy, from The Office and Obvious Child), and she has a fairly healthy social calendar, sneaking viewings of movies with friends in a projectionist booth and occasionally grabbing beers with them at a local bar. She appears to be on the fast track to a life of security, comfort, and contentment. Read More

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