Drama

Morris from America: In a Strange Land, Father Still Knows Best

Jeremy BeckReviews
Markees Christmas and Craig Robinson in "Morris from America"

Early in the modest and winsome crowd-pleaser Morris from America, a father scolds his son for writing vulgar, misogynistic rap lyrics. When the son counters that his father curses constantly, the father explains, “I’m not mad because it’s explicit, I’m mad because it’s bullshit.” That judgment applies to parts of Morris from America itself. A slender study of disenchanted youths, the film is sometimes false and artificial, even when it postures as authentic. Yet the incisive honesty with which the father delivers his verdict exemplifies what makes this small, heartfelt movie worth watching. As a portrait of a teenager straining to find himself in a cruel and uncaring world, it’s fairly rote. But as a story of the fragile-yet-powerful bond between parent and child, it is wonderfully specific and true.

The son in question is Morris (Markees Christmas), and you can guess where he’s from. The more interesting detail is where he lives; Morris resides in Heidelberg, the touristy German town where his widowed father coaches soccer. His status as an immigrant lends some spice to the film’s otherwise mild recipe. By which I mean, despite its European location, Morris from America—which was written and directed by Chad Hartigan—fits snugly within one of the most durable genres of American independent cinema: the coming-of-age story. It tells the tale of a diffident outsider who struggles to connect with his peers and understand his elders, but who also, thanks to the careful nourishment of his confidence and the attentions of a pretty girl, gradually discovers how to accept and assert himself. As the movie progresses, you can be sure that Morris will fall in love, make some questionable decisions, get his heart broken, lie to his father, and ultimately learn some valuable life lessons. Read More

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The Light Between Oceans: On a Spit of Land, Still Lost at Sea

Jeremy BeckReviews
Michael Fassbender and Alicia Vikander in "The Light Between Oceans"

Derek Cianfrance isn’t subtle. His movies traffic in heavy sentiment and obvious themes, and they are systematically designed to induce trauma and heartache. If he were less talented, this would feel like manipulative hackwork, but thankfully, he’s as skilled as he is blunt. In Blue Valentine, he performed a brutal autopsy of a marriage while it was still alive, in the process coaxing superlative performances from Michelle Williams and Ryan Gosling. He followed that with The Place Beyond the Pines, a striking, generational crime saga of failed fathers and sons. His new film, The Light Between Oceans, maintains his twin fixations on matrimony and family, striving to wring sweat from your brow and tears from your eyes.

It does not quite succeed. The movie is too deliberate, too mannered, to incite the response it so plainly seeks to provoke. But there is still much to admire in The Light Between Oceans, beginning with its superlative craftsmanship. This is a gorgeous film, with magnificent cinematography from Adam Arkapaw, the talented lenser who gave us the unforgettable tracking shot in True Detective, as well as the ethereal beauty of Jane Campion’s Top of the Lake. Here, capitalizing on Cianfrance’s preference for shooting on location, he delivers frame after frame of stunning naturalism: gentle sunrises peeking over a hillside, waves crashing onto rocky shoals, ships slicing through the mist like wooden blades. These images are accompanied by the tinkling piano and whispering woodwinds that could only be orchestrated by the great Alexandre Desplat. It’s all rather lovely. Read More

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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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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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