Drama

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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Queen of Earth: Woman on the Verge of a Total Collapse

Jeremy BeckReviews
Katherine Waterston and Elisabeth Moss are so-called friends in "Queen of Earth"

Queen of Earth, the fourth feature from writer-director Alex Ross Perry, is a razor blade wrapped in translucent silk. It takes place almost entirely in a single, idyllic location—a sun-dappled New York lake house—where two seemingly close friends are ostensibly lounging on vacation. But despite the beauty of its setting and the privilege of its characters (one is the daughter of a famous artist, the other an apparent heiress), this grim, unsettling picture is by no means soothing. It is, rather, a barbed psychological study of one woman’s gradual descent into madness, and of another’s pain and helplessness. It is the kind of film that asks far more questions than it answers, chief among them: Why do people remain friends? Do we ever really know one another? Do we even know ourselves? Most importantly: What the hell is going on in this movie?

The latter inquiry is probably best directed at Virginia (Katherine Waterston, the femme fatale from Inherent Vice), the relatively stable half of Queen of Earth‘s lakeside duo. She is the aforementioned heiress; her parents own the resplendent villa, a cozy slice of serenity tucked next to a placid lagoon and surrounded by multihued leaves. Virginia is a layabout—she’s supposedly on holiday, but it’s unclear exactly what she’s taking holiday from—but she can at least credibly distinguish between fantasy and reality. The same cannot be said of Catherine (Elisabeth Moss, going for broke), Virginia’s spasmodic companion who opens the film in a state of extreme agitation and only grows more disheveled from there. Catherine’s face is the first thing we see in Queen of Earth, her blue eyes flashing anger as tears streak through her smudged black eyeliner. She’s getting dumped by her boyfriend, James (Kentucker Audley), and she isn’t taking it well. In the first of many extended close-ups that define the film’s intimate aesthetic (Perry cuts away only once), the camera watches nosily as Catherine sobs, seethes, and howls, eventually screaming “Go!” in a guttural rage. This woman, Moss makes inescapably clear, is badly damaged. She could really use a vacation. Read More

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Z for Zachariah: A Garden of Eden in a Land of the Dead

Jeremy BeckReviews
Margot Robbie is the last woman on Earth in "Z for Zachariah"

The apocalypse has long fascinated filmmakers, and no wonder. From the black comedy of Dr. Strangelove to the commercial satire of Dawn of the Dead to the blunt-force survivalism of I Am Legend, the concept of the end of the world yields fertile cinematic soil for eager directors to till. But the marvel of Z for Zachariah, Craig Zobel’s solemn and soulful third feature, is that it isn’t really about the end of the world at all. Certainly, it recognizes the starkness of its reality, but it shows only the barest of interest in exploring the origins of its inciting event. (The sum total of its exposition occurs when a character muses, “Maybe something with the weather patterns.”) Instead, Z for Zachariah uses the apocalypse as scaffolding to explore a genre that is far more cataclysmic: the domestic melodrama. Zobel doesn’t care how civilization collapsed. He wants to know how hearts break.

Not that this lush and expressive film is remotely lacking in ghoulish imagery or toxic atmosphere. From its opening moments, which follow a hooded figure clad in Hazmat gear prowling through a barren landscape, Z for Zachariah silently communicates the calamity that has befallen the planet. That figure is Ann (Margot Robbie, an Australian giving her best shot at a Southern accent), the lone remaining denizen of this unhappy valley that’s located somewhere in Southern Appalachia. Ann’s hair initially appears lank and her face is caked with grime, but this isn’t one of those cheesy uglification jobs, and her natural luminescence quickly shines through because, you know, Margot Robbie. One day, this solitary looker spies John Loomis (a terrific Chiwetel Ejiofor), a civil engineer wandering a dusty road in a comically oversized “safe suit”. He futzes around with a Geiger counter and then, upon confirming that the air is uncontaminated, strips off his suit and lets out a bellow of euphoria, tears streaming down his face; with that, in less than 30 seconds and without uttering a single syllable, Ejiofor makes his character’s agony and ecstasy known. Indeed, John is so excited by having finally found a safe environment that he stupidly wades into a nearby pond without first testing the water, which is, Ann frantically informs him, radioactive. Read More

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The Diary of a Teenage Girl: Hungering for Sex, Love, and Womanhood

Jeremy BeckReviews
Bel Powley gives a breakthrough performance in "The Diary of a Teenage Girl"

The very first line of The Diary of a Teenage Girl, Marielle Heller’s uneven, appealing coming-of-age story, is “I had sex today”; it is immediately followed by a very Fifty Shades of Grey-like exclamation, “Holy shit!” But despite her youth and initial lack of worldliness, Minnie Goetze (Bel Powley) is no Anastasia Steele. She is not timid, nor is she entranced by notions of masculine dominance. She is instead a confident, eager, and often foolish femme who does not apologize for her desires, even if she does not entirely understand them. “I like sex,” Minnie tells us early on, and in case you didn’t believe her, she clarifies, “I really like getting fucked!” That may strike some as vulgar, but the most satisfying thing about The Diary of a Teenage Girl—beyond the powerful performance at its center—is its frankness in discussing sexual desire and its attendant emotions. Minnie is the hero of her story, she wants sex, and she refuses to cast herself as the victim.

Though she is very much that, at least in one sense. Minnie, as you may have gleaned from the film’s title, is a teenager—fifteen, to be precise. That’s young enough as it is, but it becomes alarmingly so once you learn that the person she is so happily, repeatedly tumbling into bed with is her mother’s thirtysomething boyfriend, Monroe (Alexander Skarsgård). Yet Heller, who also wrote the screenplay (adapting Phoebe Gloeckner’s novel), is not interested in the legal or moral ramifications of Minnie and Monroe’s illicit union. She is more concerned with exploring how it makes Minnie feel: how it affects her sense of self, her demeanor, and, most distressingly, her relationship with her mother (a very good Kristen Wiig). In so doing, Heller puts a tremendous amount of weight on Powley, a 23-year-old British actress appearing in her first American feature (the movie takes place in 1970s San Francisco). She shoulders the load with aplomb, capturing Minnie’s vitality and hunger while also revealing glimmers of her fragility. Read More

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