A HOLOGRAM FOR THE KING
(US/Germany/France/Switzerland/Mexico - 2016)
There isn't much of a sense of urgency in this occasionally obvious and heavy-handed midlife crisis/culture clash drama based on the 2012 novel by Dave Eggers. It's a rare instance of a Tom Hanks movie not getting much of a push, with Lionsgate getting it on just 520 screens at its widest release. Hanks' durable, everyman persona makes him perfectly cast in this fish-out-of-water story centering on a skidding sales rep who's seen better days, being offered One Last Chance to Close the Sale of His Life. Alan Clay (Hanks) hasn't really liked himself much since selling out an American Schwin plant to China, a deal that put several hundred people--including his dad (Tom Skerritt)--out of work. His marriage fell apart and though he feels like a failure, his relationship with 21-year-old daughter Kit (Tracey Fairaway) remains strong thanks to her dislike of her mother. Now working for a tech company, Alan's been handed the plum contract of setting up IT service for Saudi Arabia's royal family. Once on site, he's constantly given the runaround, the wi-fi doesn't work, and he's so bogged down by jet lag that he repeatedly oversleeps and misses his shuttle to the work site. He forms a tentative friendship with Yousef (Alexander Black), a buddy of the hotel concierge, who drives him to the palace grounds every day in his beat-up clunker. A rapidly growing cyst sends Alan to a local doctor, Zahra (Sarita Choudhury), for whom an attraction is mutual, but societal customs initially prevent any moves from being made.
And that's about it. There's a health scare and Alan starts drinking to excess in an attempt to counter his malaise, and in his interactions with both Yousef and Zahra, he learns to appreciate life and pull himself together, while doing what he can to help his new friends in their assorted plights (Yousef's involvement with a married woman and Zahra's pending divorce and a life lived as a second class citizen, even though she's a brilliant doctor). A HOLOGRAM FOR THE KING is an unusual project for director Tom Tykwer, normally a more rambunctious filmmaker best known for the innovative 1999 cult classic RUN LOLA RUN. Tykwer directed Hanks in 2012's underappreciated CLOUD ATLAS, and Hanks, a huge fan of the Eggers novel, was likely instrumental in ensuring Tykwer could make this film at all. But even Hanks' involvement didn't generate any Hollywood interest, as the film was an independently-financed, five-country co-production, with extensive location work done in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Morocco. It's easily Tykwer's most low-key film to date, and somewhat European in its pacing and style, probably why Lionsgate didn't see much potential for it at US multiplexes, instead relegating it to its Roadside Attractions arthouse division. It really only starts gaining momentum very late, when Alan and Zahra start to admit their feelings for one another, after the symbolic removal of the cyst on Alan's back is the literal weight lifted off of his back. Tykwer more or less abandons Yousef, who's such a prominent character that you expect him to be there by the end, and a potential love interest for Alan in Danish contractor Hanne (THE DUKE OF BURGUNDY's Sidse Babett Knudsen) is a subplot that goes absolutely nowhere. Skerritt's brief performance looks phoned-in from his living room, and Ben Whishaw, a Tykwer semi-regular since 2006's underrated and insane PERFUME: THE STORY OF A MURDERER, has even less screen time as the titular hologram, designed as a long-distance meeting facilitator for the Saudi king. It's got some expectedly rock-solid work by Hanks, who gets strong support from Choudhury and a very likable performance by Black, but A HOLOGRAM FOR THE KING is a harmless trifle that just never really catches fire. (R, 98 mins) FATHERS & DAUGHTERS (US/Italy - 2016)
The warning signs are all there if you look closely: a movie you've heard nothing about, featuring a star-studded cast with several Oscar wins and nominations between them, debuting on VOD in 2016 courtesy of the Redbox-ready B-movie genre outfit Vertical Entertainment with no fanfare, still sporting its 2014 copyright. Yes, FATHERS & DAUGHTERS has spent some time gathering dust on a shelf, a bad movie that's so earnest and self-serious that is occasionally feels like an act of cruelty to be bagging on it. A maudlin, overwrought tearjerker that will have even the most easy weepers rolling their eyes, shaking their heads, and calling bullshit, FATHERS & DAUGHTERS is directed by Italian filmmaker Gabriele Muccino, who had some success in Hollywood several years back with a pair of Will Smith dramas, THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS (2006) and SEVEN POUNDS (2008), before tanking with the instantly forgotten Gerard Butler flop PLAYING FOR KEEPS (2012). Muccino fashions FATHERS & DAUGHTERS as a shameless weepie, telling two intercutting, parallel stories taking place in 1989 and 2014. In 1989, blocked Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jake Davis (Russell Crowe, also one of the producers) is behind the wheel when a tragic car accident takes the life of his wife, leaving him to raise their seven-year-old daughter Katie (Kylie Rogers) alone. Jake's grief is overwhelming and, coupled with a head injury he sustained in the accident that causes random seizures that threaten a psychotic break, he's institutionalized for several months while Katie stays with his late wife's wealthy sister Elizabeth (Diane Kruger) and her high-powered lawyer husband William (Bruce Greenwood). Once Jake is out, Elizabeth, still bitter over her sister's death, wants custody of Katie. Jake's latest book becomes a critical laughingstock and commercial bomb, and he's running out of money to fight the impending court battle. In 2014, adult Katie (Amanda Seyfried) is a grad student and social worker attempting to break through to a troubled girl (BEASTS OF THE SOUTHERN WILD Oscar-nominee Quvenzhane Wallis) when she isn't trying to LOOKING FOR MR. GOODBAR her way through her daddy and abandonment issues, frequently picking up random men at bars for public quickies (Jake isn't around in 2014, so it's obvious he's died at some point in the 25-year interim). She meets an aspiring writer, Jake Davis superfan, and all-around good guy in Cameron (Aaron Paul), and their tender lovemaking is a stark contrast to numerous scenes of Katie getting drilled from behind in the backseat of a car or in a men's room shitter at a bar. Of course, nice-guy Cameron is exactly like her father and therefore, the film posits, exactly what she needs, so she repeatedly tries to sabotage a potentially good thing with her inability to commit and face all the trauma in her past with her mother's death and her father's breakdown.
Never mind the cliche of a woman resorting to promiscuity over unresolved parental issues--Muccino and debuting screenwriter Brad Desch have no notion of the concept of storytelling subtlety. They floridly hammer everything home in an overbaked fashion both in dialogue and filmmaking techniques, with one Katie/Cameron argument pointlessly played out in a long, dizzying single take down a NYC street, into a cab, and back out on the street again for no reason other than Muccino trying to make something out of nothing. Or there's clumsy exposition drops like our first look at adult Katie, when one of her fellow grad students runs up to her and exclaims "I can't believe you're about to get a graduate degree in Psychology!" It just grows more laughable as it goes on, in the 1989 scenes with an increasingly distracted Jake repeatedly trying to make amends with young Katie by referring to her nickname "Potato Chip," the two of them singing along to a Michael Bolton cover of Burt Bacharach's "(They Long to Be) Close to You," and Jake being hit by seizures at all the predictable times, like a major book signing (he has pills for this condition--why doesn't he take them?). In the 2014 scenes, FATHERS & DAUGHTERS turns into an all-out howler by the end, with Katie about to leave a bar to partake in an orgy with some strangers when the Bolton cover of the Bacharach song comes on the jukebox, prompting a total meltdown. This is a non-descript little dive bar in NYC that's playing alternative music at the beginning of the scene. Not even the most insufferable Williamsburg hipster douchebag would play a Michael Bolton song. And why is that song even a choice on a jukebox in this bar? And when a night out is ruined by the drunken appearance of one of Katie's one-nighters from a year ago ("I fucked you on your kitchen floor!" he yells), she tries to explain her past to Cameron, a guy so nice and sensitive that a never-played acoustic guitar is visible on a rocking chair in his apartment, with "You thought you were getting Potato Chip, and you ended up with some cheap piece of ass." What else? Oh, during an argument between Jake and William over the looming custody fight, a sneering Greenwood is actually required to bark the line "I've got more money than God!" The film completely strands its capable actors with unplayable roles, whether it's Crowe slipping in and out of a broad Noo Yawk accent or Kruger delivering a shrill, wine-swilling performance as the boozy, bitchy control freak Elizabeth. Younger actors Wallis and Rogers manage to escape unharmed, but there's also nothing supporting roles for Octavia Spencer (an Oscar winner for THE HELP) as Katie's boss, two-time Oscar-nominee Janet McTeer, wasted in one brief scene as Katie's therapist, and Jane Fonda in a small role as Jake's caring agent who can't bring herself to tell him he's washed up. Ludicrous, manipulative, and completely over-the-top, FATHERS & DAUGHTERS definitely has some potential to be an audience participation camp classic down the road. (R, 116 mins)
EXPOSED is one of those films with two parallel storylines that finally converge in the closing minutes. In a predominantly Latino neighborhood in NYC, Dominican-born Isabel (Ana de Armas) has a strange hallucination of a levitating albino while waiting for the subway at the very stop where a cop (Danny Hoch) is killed the same night. That dead cop's hard-nosed detective partner is widower and anger-management case Galban (Keanu Reeves), who focuses his investigation on local drug lord Black Jones (Big Daddy Kane). Galban digs deeper, ultimately getting romantically involved with his partner's widow (Mira Sorvino) and uncovering evidence of police corruption and his partner's extracurricular, outside-the-law activities that must involve Isabel or there'd be no movie, and perhaps there shouldn't have been. The chaotic backstory of EXPOSED is far more interesting than anything that ended up onscreen. Originally shot as DAUGHTER OF GOD, the film was an indie drama about, among other things, the plight of poor immigrants, violence against women, the lasting trauma of child abuse, and the effects of the war in Afghanistan on the families of those who serve. Making his feature writing/directing debut, Gee Malik Linton lucked into the involvement of Reeves following the death of Philip Seymour Hoffman, who was originally cast as Galban and knew that it was intended to be a small role. Reeves, who became one of 30 credited producers and whose presence helped secure funding and a Lionsgate distribution deal, brought his KNOCK KNOCK co-star de Armas onboard, and all was well until Lionsgate saw Linton's cut.
DAUGHTER OF GOD got positive reaction from test audiences, but Lionsgate insisted they were promised a commercial Keanu Reeves thriller, and no one was going to confuse DAUGHTER OF GOD with POINT BREAK, SPEED, or JOHN WICK. They proceeded to take the film away from Linton, gutting it from 126 minutes to 102, losing much of the cultural elements--most of DAUGHTER OF GOD was in Spanish with English subtitles--and eliminating entire subplots and characters. The biggest change they made was cutting down the screen time of those who remained in the film while keeping everything with Reeves, who signed on for what was to be Hoffman's small supporting role--a big-name actor doing a solid to help out a new indie filmmaker--but was now the co-lead with as much screen time as de Armas. A "source" claimed Reeves supervised the overhaul, first called WISDOM and then changed to the more lurid EXPOSED, though Reeves' rep insisted he had nothing to do with it. Realizing he was fighting a battle he had no chance of winning, Linton successfully petitioned to have his name removed as director, with credit going to Alan Smithee protege "Declan Dale," while remaining credited for his screenplay under his own name. It should go without saying that EXPOSED, in its released form, is almost cataclysmically awful and borderline unwatchable, the logical end result of trying to turn a low-key and largely foreign-language art-house drama into a mainstream cop movie. Disjointed and dull, with fantastic elements that make appearances as random as those of the recognizable character actors in the supporting cast (Christopher McDonald plays Galban's captain, and Michael Rispoli appears a couple of times for some reason), and with the war in Afghanistan and child abuse subplots now looking exploitatively wedged in and quickly abandoned, the film makes no sense at all and more or less just ends in the least satisfying way possible, topped off with the bonus of glacially slow closing credits to inflate the truncated running time by another ten minutes. It's certainly a possibility that Linton's director's cut of DAUGHTER OF GOD is a worthwhile film, though considering he named an inner city, African-American crime lord "Black Jones," one shouldn't be too quick to assume it's a lost masterpiece. Lionsgate dumped EXPOSED on VOD and in as few theaters as contractually required with no publicity at all. Welcome to Hollywood, Gee Malik Linton! (R, 102 mins)
YOUTH
(Italy/France/UK/Switzerland - 2015)
Italian filmmaker Paolo Sorrentino returns with a spiritual cousin to his Oscar-winning THE GREAT BEAUTY, set at an almost tomb-like resort in Switzerland. Like the guests, the film never seems to leave that location, at least until the final scene, with the primary focus on two elderly friends, both artists, both feeling the effects of a lifetime of love, loss, regret, and age, with the looming feeling that death is waiting just around the corner. It's a film of much sadness and melancholy, but it's not a depressing downer, and is in fact quite funny at times, even if it's not what US distributor Fox Searchlight seemed to pass off as a GRUMPY OLD MEN for the art-house crowd. Fred Ballinger (Michael Caine) is a legendary composer and conductor, now retired and refusing an offer by an emissary of the Queen to be knighted and to perform his most famous piece, "Simple Songs," at a gala event for the Royal Family. Fred's best friend of 60 years is renowned filmmaker Mick Boyle (Harvey Keitel, in his best role in years), who's working with four young screenwriters on what he intends to be his final masterpiece, his "testament" to a life in cinema. You can already sense the Fellini homages in the form of nude bodies--young, old, toned, and flabby--posed in pools and saunas in an almost still photography fashion, coupled with Visconti shout-outs in the ornate but dreary resort that's still a draw for the jet-set but, like its central characters, has seen better days.
Characters drift in and out of the story--Rachel Weisz is Lena, Fred's daughter and assistant, who's just been dumped by her husband (Ed Stoppard), who happens to be Mick's son; Paul Dano is a Shia LaBeouf-like American actor, deeply focused on his art and working with the most important European filmmakers but unable to escape the fact that everyone knows him from a big, dumb Hollywood blockbuster where he played a robot; and Jane Fonda as an aging, embittered Hollywood legend, star of 11 of Mick's 20 films, who flies all the way from L.A. to Switzerland to tell Mick a lot of things he doesn't want to hear--but Caine's Fred and Keitel's Mick are the foundation. The two icons are magnificent together, whether they're lamenting the inevitability of the end, or reminiscing about a girl they both loved 60 years ago and clearly still think of often (leading to one of Keitel's most unexpectedly poignant scenes). YOUTH can be downbeat (Weisz spits out a devastating monologue where Lena unloads on her father for leaving her mother decades earlier) and cynical (a cinema purist who dedicates the film to Francesco Rosi, Sorrentino doesn't have much use for television), but it's also very funny. Fonda's only in the movie for five minutes, but she makes every second count, whether she's emphatically stating that she had no problem blowing producers to get a foot in the door 50 years ago or telling Mick "Stop licking my ass" when he's overselling how great she looks. Her character is crass and vulgar ("She's only read two books her entire life, and one of them was her autobiography written by a ghost writer," Mick tells Fred), and Fonda plays it to the hilt with very little screen time. Fred and Mick start their days bitching about how they can't piss and are later shocked when they're out on a walk and happen upon to elderly resort visitors screwing up against a tree. Like the classic Italian cinema that Sorrentino adores, YOUTH is artsy and surreal, whether Fred sits in a field of cows conducting a symphony played by their cowbells, or Mick is confronted by all of the heroines from his movies. The most outrageous bit comes from Dano's brooding method actor, prepping a Hitler biopic and deciding to get in character by spending his remaining days at the resort walking around in full Hitler makeup and costume to get the feeling of alienation and being hated, which seems like exactly the kind of idiotic, attention-seeking stunt LaBeouf would pull. YOUTH is a lovely, hypnotic film that deserved more exposure than it got, even though "Simple Songs" got an Oscar nomination, which is odd considering it's an almost sublimely awful composition, perhaps intentionally so. (R, 123 mins)
LEGEND
(US/UK/France - 2015)
Peter Medak's 1990 film THE KRAYS was a mean, tough chronicle of twin British gangster siblings Ronnie and Reggie Kray played by two-years-apart brothers Martin and Gary Kemp, best known as, respectively, the bassist and lead guitarist of the '80s radio staple Spandau Ballet. LEGEND--what a terrible title--is based on John Pearson's book The Profession of Violence, and tells essentially the same story, with Tom Hardy playing both roles. Written and directed by Brian Helgeland (PAYBACK), who won an Oscar for his L.A. CONFIDENTIAL screenplay, LEGEND has Hardy turning in two distinctive and vividly exceptional performances as the gay, hot-tempered, paranoid schizophrenic Ronnie and the ostensibly more focused and level-headed Reggie, but one of the key facets of the film is how their personalities eventually cross over to the point where Reggie gets so out of control that an on-his-meds Ronnie is the one who has to calm him down. LEGEND doesn't have much to go on other than Hardy's performances. Helgeland is content to let his star carry the weight of an otherwise rote and routine gangster movie that borrows liberally from Scorsese, right down to a long GOODFELLAS tracking shot when Reggie takes his girlfriend and eventual wife Frances (Emily Browning) to a nightclub, and pissed off British mobsters constantly calling each other "cunts" instead of "jerkoffs." The time element in LEGEND isn't handled very well--we know the Krays ruled London from the late '50s to the late '60s, but the film seems to start in the late '60s and we see their ascent in the nightclub scene after a partnership with Philadelphia-based gangster Angelo Bruno (Chazz Palminteri shows up for a couple of scenes), a top underling of Meyer Lansky. There's conflict with the Krays' cash handler Leslie Payne (David Thewlis) and hapless flunky Jack McVittie (Sam Spruell), whose brutal murder at the hands of an enraged Reggie is what would eventually be the beginning of the end for the Krays, with Reggie sentenced to life in prison in 1967, though he'd get a "compassionate release" in 2000, when he was dying of cancer and had only a few weeks to live (Ronnie would succumb to a fatal heart attack in prison in 1995).
Helgeland sticks to the standard-issue tropes and basics here, with a lot of time spent on Reggie and Frances' crumbling marriage while curiously glossing over Ronnie's relationship with "Mad Teddy" Smith (KINGSMAN's Taron Egerton). He also utilizes the hackneyed device of having the film narrated by a dead character, and even resorts to a sneering Reggie confronting dogged Scotland Yard inspector Nipper Read (Christopher Eccleston) with the obligatory "Ya know, we're not all that different, you and I" speech. Hardy is exponentially more effective as the Krays than the Spandau Ballet siblings were, but THE KRAYS is the overall better film even though it took some liberties with history. THE KRAYS had a vicious and ominously sinister LONG GOOD FRIDAY feel, along with a WHAT EVER HAPPENED TO BABY JANE?-esque freakshow of a performance by the great Billie Whitelaw as the Krays' harridan mother, a character who barely figures into LEGEND and mainly just makes a couple of dismissive remarks about how Frances can't make a decent cup of tea. By comparison, LEGEND just feels like an overlong Scorsese retread in a London setting. A much bigger success in the UK than in the US, where its planned nationwide release was busted down to a limited run at the last minute, LEGEND inspired two cheap, Asylum-worthy British knockoffs with this year's THE RISE OF THE KRAYS and THE FALL OF THE KRAYS, as movies about the Krays are apparently to the UK what Coco Chanel biopics are to France. (R, 132 mins)
