Drama

Me and Earl and the Dying Girl: The Schmaltz in Our Stars

Jeremy BeckReviews
This is a sappy movie about Greg and Earl and the Dying Girl

I often censure movies for being generic; no film is more hollow than one without a personality. The flip side, however, is the movie that pummels its audience into submission via a surfeit of quirk. This is why Me and Earl and the Dying Girl—Alfonso Gomez-Rejon’s skillfully made, unrelentingly precious, ultimately insufferable weepie—is a strangely worthwhile brand of disappointment. It is by no means lacking in individuality, and it sporadically sparkles with wit and ingenuity. But it channels its eccentricity in frustratingly clichéd ways, bludgeoning viewers with an onslaught of tackiness and schmaltz. It tries very hard to win your heart, and its calculated efforts to do so make it both laudable and oddly detestable.

Here is an example of this movie’s shtick: During one of his shaggy-dog voiceovers, Greg Gaines (Thomas Mann) analogizes hot girls—in particular the oblivious manner in which they exert their sexuality and power over horny boys—to moose inadvertently trampling over helpless chipmunks. It’s a cute enough metaphor, and the first time Greg describes it, Gomez-Rejon cuts to a crude piece of claymation that playfully illustrates two such animals acting out that very scenario. That’s a wry bit of visual inventiveness and formal looseness, but Me and Earl and the Dying Girl can’t let well enough alone. For the remainder of the movie, every time the token hot girl carelessly touches Greg’s shoulder, Gomez-Rejon returns to that image of the anthropomorphic moose and its pitiful chipmunk victim. The film desperately wants you to sympathize with the chipmunk (and, by proxy, Greg), and it actually half-succeeds; by the time it ends, you, too, will feel like you’ve been stomped on repeatedly. Read More

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Love & Mercy: Picking Up Vibrations, Good and Bad Alike

Jeremy BeckReviews
John Cusack stars as one half of Brian Wilson in "Love & Mercy"

Being a musical genius must be hard. You hear harmonies no one else can hear, you struggle to communicate your vision to your band mates and studio bosses, and if you’re fortunate enough to be able to actually produce revolutionary music, your innovative advances often go unnoticed until they’re discovered by later generations. But making a movie about such a genius—conveying those enigmatic bursts of internal, auditory inspiration through the visible, visual medium of cinema—is similarly perilous. Love & Mercy, Bill Pohlad’s strange and sensitive biopic of the Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson, does not entirely conquer this challenge. Despite its whirring sound design and persistent effort, it never quite communicates the creative synapses firing within its protagonist’s big, drug-addled brain. But Love & Mercy is nevertheless a compelling portrait of artistic triumph and toil. It is also, more surprisingly, a touching romantic drama. It’s odd that a film about such an idiosyncratic man is at its best when it is at its most conventional.

That doesn’t stop Pohlad, working from a screenplay by Oren Moverman (director of The Messenger) and Michael Alan Lerner, from laboring strenuously to circumvent the customs of the genre. His most obvious and daring maneuver is to structure Love & Mercy as two separate mini-movies. In one, set in the mid-’60s, Wilson (Paul Dano) drifts from his brothers and colleagues while obsessing over the production of the Beach Boys’ seminal album, Pet Sounds. In the other, set some 20 years later, a mentally ill, overmedicated Wilson (now played by John Cusack, delivering his best performance in more than a decade) romances a Cadillac saleswoman, Melinda Ledbetter (Elizabeth Banks, radiant), and wilts under the yoke of his domineering psychotherapist, Dr. Eugene Landy (Paul Giamatti, bewigged and ferocious). Love & Mercy toggles back and forth between the two eras without any particular rhythm or formula. (Think The Godfather Part II, only, er, not quite as good.) It’s an engrossing approach that nonetheless fails to reap any real dividends; it’s fair to wonder how the film would have played in linear fashion, given that neither subplot clearly informs the other. Of course, that lack of causality between the two stories is arguably the point, which is why, in the abstract, Love & Mercy‘s jagged chronology makes sense. This is a fractured movie about a broken man. Read More

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The Water Diviner: Searching for Sustenance, and the Dead

Jeremy BeckReviews
Russell Crowe cast himself as the hero in his directorial debut

The Water Diviner, the directorial debut of Russell Crowe, is a tumultuous mishmash of tones: part Indiana Jones adventure, part fish-out-of-water comedy, part Nicholas Sparks romance, all mystical goop. A throwback historical epic that’s as overwrought as it is uneven, it is almost redeemed by Crowe’s evident passion for his subject matter, which involves the Battle of Gallipoli and its woeful aftermath. Crowe clearly felt compelled to tell this story, and his ambition is admirable. His execution is another matter.

Crowe stars as Joshua Connor, a hardscrabble farmer whom we first see prowling the barren Australian landscape, searching for signs of water. It is 1919, four years after the wartime events at Gallipoli, which are presumed to have claimed the lives of Joshua’s three sons. After his wife, disconsolate from her children’s death, drowns herself in a makeshift pool of her husband’s own construction (oh, the irony!), Joshua resolves to travel to Gallipoli and locate his sons’ remains. When he arrives in Turkey, however, he learns that securing passage to the ruins is no easy task, and he takes up temporary residence in an Istanbul hotel operated by a fetching proprietor, Ayshe (Olga Kurylenko, stiff). Read More

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While We’re Young: Growing Older, But Not Growing Up

Jeremy BeckReviews
Ben Stiller and Naomi Watts start in Noah Baumbach's "While We're Young"

The obvious irony of the title While We’re Young is that it’s a movie singularly fixated on the fear of growing old. Its hero is Josh (Ben Stiller), a fortyish documentary filmmaker who lives a life of relative comfort in New York City but is nevertheless plagued with anxiety, about both the specific utility of his work and his general place in the world. In other words, Josh is a lot like Noah Baumbach, the forty-five-year-old director of this bewitching, frustrating film. Like Josh, While We’re Young is smart, and it posits a number of interesting and worthwhile ideas. And, like Josh, it cannot entirely escape the nagging feeling that it’s just running in place, waiting for something to shake it out of its complacency.

In Baumbach’s recent movies, that something has taken the form of Greta Gerwig, the fearless and funny actress whose luminous, achingly vulnerable performance elevated Frances Ha from a crisply amusing cringe comedy into a startlingly humane coming-of-age story. Before that, Gerwig poured her heart into Greenberg, playing opposite Stiller, who delivered a career-best turn as a prickly and altogether unpleasant neurotic. Sadly, Gerwig is absent this time around, while Stiller reverts to his bland, inoffensive screen presence. His lead performance here isn’t bad so much as polite; an established star, he can coast on familiarity and charm, graciously ceding the spotlight to other, hungrier actors. In While We’re Young, he makes room for the magnetic Adam Driver, who plays Jamie, a boisterous aspiring documentarian who seems to idolize Josh. Read More

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Human Capital: Three Lost Souls, Searching for Meaning (and Money)

Jeremy BeckReviews
Matilde Gioli brings the humanity to "Human Capital"

How much is a human life worth? Apparently, it depends on the life. That would certainly be the embittered response of Human Capital, Paolo Virzi’s dark, disquieting drama of entitlement and despair. A jaundiced look at the intractable divisions between the careless haves and the dejected have-nots, it aspires to fuse caustic social criticism with old-fashioned melodrama. On the one hand, it is a polemic, a poisoned arrow aimed at the heart of the new world order; on the other, it is a whodunit, a crime mystery of slippery suspense. These are lofty twin goals, and it’s no surprise that Human Capital never quite realizes its potential on either front. But even if its reach exceeds its grasp, the movie is consistently engaging, with enough intriguing ideas and interesting storytelling to draw you into its crisscrossing web of human ugliness.

The movie opens with a fateful incident: After some waitstaff clean up the crumbs following a posh event, one of them glumly clambers onto his bicycle, pedals off toward home, and suddenly gets run off the road by a burly black SUV. From there, Human Capital flashes back six months and replays the events leading up to this hit-and-run from the perspectives of three different characters. The first is Dino (an excellent Fabrizio Bentivoglio), a middle-class real estate broker with a newly pregnant wife, Roberta (Valeria Golino—yes, that Valeria Golino, from Rain Man and Hot Shots!), and a teenage daughter, Serena (Matilde Gioli, very good). One sunny day, Dino drops Serena off at her boyfriend’s house—a palatial estate with its own clay tennis courts and indoor pool owned by Giovanni (Fabrizio Gifuni)—and, seduced by the opulence towering before him, decides to invest his life savings (and then some) in Giovanni’s “can’t-lose” hedge fund. The second main character is Giovanni’s wife, Carla (Valeria Bruni Tedeschi), a dilettantish former actress who hopes to use her husband’s bottomless cash flow to renovate a defunct local theater. And the third is Serena herself, a restless young woman who has grown disenchanted with Giovanni’s buffoonish son, Massimiliano (Guglielmo Pinelli), and finds herself drawn instead to Luca (Giovanni Anzaldo), an outcast with a sensitive soul and unstable temperament. Read More

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