JOKER (US/Canada - 2019) Directed by Todd Phillips. Written by Todd Phillips and Scott Silver. Cast: Joaquin Phoenix, Robert De Niro, Zazie Beetz, Frances Conroy, Brett Cullen, Shea Whigham, Bill Camp, Marc Maron, Brian Tyree Henry, Glenn Fleshler, Leigh Gill, Josh Pais, Rocco Luna, April Grace, Sondra James, Murphy Guyer, Douglas Hodge, Dante Pereira-Olson, Sharon Washington, Chris Redd, Hannah Gross. (R, 121 mins) After a month of thinkpieces and endless debate, praise, hand-wringing, and outrage following its premiere at the Venice International Film Festival, the revisionist origin story JOKER is, at this point, pretty much a scorching hot take that happens to be accompanied by the incidental release of a movie. Certain to provoke divisive reactions and possibly more, the film has admirable aspirations of being a loving homage to the gritty NYC of old, particularly two Martin Scorsese classics in 1976's TAXI DRIVER and 1983's THE KING OF COMEDY. It gets it right for a while, starting with the old-school 1970s Warner Bros. logo and various pop culture indicators (BLOW OUT and ZORRO, THE GAY BLADE on a theater marquee, and posters for WOLFEN, EXCALIBUR, ARTHUR, and DRAGONSLAYER) placing the setting in 1981 and, for the most part, successfully nailing the period detail. While partially indebted to the classic 1988 Alan Moore/Brian Bolland graphic novel Batman: The Killing Joke, JOKER's title character as a cackling, chain-smoking amalgam of TAXI DRIVER's Travis Bickle and THE KING OF COMEDY's Rupert Pupkin, with a bit of DEATH WISH's Paul Kersey and the infamous 1984 Bernhard Goetz NYC subway shooting, an incident reminiscent of a sequence in DEATH WISH a decade earlier.
All that aside, the whole show here is Joaquin Phoenix as the eventual title character, a mentally-disturbed clown-for-hire named Arthur Fleck, who lives in a rundown Gotham tenement with his gravely ill mother Penny (Frances Conroy) and is generally treated like a punching bag by the entire world. On seven different medications that aren't helping, and often making others uncomfortable with a neurological, Tourette's-like condition that causes screeching laughter at inappropriate moments, Arthur is doomed to be a loner ("God's lonely man," as Travis Bickle might say), but he has visions of getting organizized and being a stand-up comedian ("Don't you have to be funny for that?" his mother asks). But bad luck follows Arthur like a fly on shit: he's rolled by a group of teens who viciously beat him and steal a sign he was waving on a job, and his boss threatens to take the cost of the sign out of his paycheck; he's given a gun by co-worker Randall (Glenn Fleshler), only to have it fall out of his pants while entertaining some kids in a children's hospital, after which Randall throws him under the bus and gets him fired; and that same day, he's taunted again on the way home by three Wall Street douchebags who start beating him, causing Arthur to snap, shooting and killing all three of them in an act of self-defense that turns into cold-blooded murder. All the while, a class war is brewing in the garbage-strewn streets of Gotham, with the city's downtrodden growing tired of the gutting of social services ("How do I get my medication?" Arthur asks his social worker when she says her department's funding has been cut and she's being let go) and of being overlooked by the city's wealthy movers and shakers, represented by billionaire Wayne Enterprises CEO Thomas Wayne (Brett Cullen), who's just announced a mayoral run because he's "the only one" who can fix Gotham.
Like everything in JOKER, the "I alone can fix it" Donald Trump comparisons aren't subtle, but what happens in Gotham is tantamount to a revolution when word gets out that a guy in a clown costume killed three rich assholes on the subway. Soon, protesters flood the streets dressed as clowns, intent on taking the city back by any means necessary. Though his identity remains a mystery, Arthur has started a movement, and finally, people are starting to notice him. That includes attractive, single mom neighbor Sophie (Zazie Beetz), who lives down the hall, as well as a leaked videotape of a nervous, cackling Arthur bombing at Gotham comedy club open-mic night, with the humiliating footage making its way to TV courtesy of LIVE WITH MURRAY FRANKLIN, a late-night talk show hosted by Arthur's Johnny Carson-like idol and fantasy father figure Murray Franklin (Robert De Niro, looking embalmed). De Niro's presence is the most overt example of the Scorsese worship on the part of director/co-writer Todd Phillips (the HANGOVER trilogy), and while it's obvious Phillips loves vintage Scorsese movies and is trying to stretch beyond his bro comedy filmography that also includes ROAD TRIP and OLD SCHOOL, he doesn't quite have the knack of pulling one off himself. JOKER works very well for a while, but after about Phoenix's 26th or 27th laughing fit with accompanying dancing and pirouetting, it starts to become clear that the story is secondary to indulging the star's extreme Method tendencies. Make no mistake, an emaciated Phoenix gives this everything, but it grows tiresome no matter how remarkable it is at times, and starts to resemble a hammy version of his ultimately stronger performances in films like THE MASTER and YOU WERE NEVER REALLY HERE.
While it gets off to a good start as the most transgressive, depressing, and unrelentingly bleak comic book movie ever made, it's a safe bet that, despite the incessant media coverage, a lot of mainstream multiplexers are still bound to go into this expecting a Batman movie and are seriously going to hate it (you could also envision it as a comic book movie made by Abel Ferrara at his KING OF NEW YORK/BAD LIEUTENANT pinnacle). Augmented by a suffocatingly downbeat Hildur Guonadottir score that's beyond oppressive, JOKER begins to work at cross purposes in the markedly inferior final act. Part of this stems from the disastrous way that Phillips and co-writer Scott Silver (8 MILE, THE FIGHTER) handle Beetz's character, but also in the way the messaging becomes so heavy-handed once Arthur--by now a deranged murderer going around in full Joker makeup--finally appears as a guest on Murray Franklin's show, where he gives a rambling speech that sounds like a love letter to be quoted as a enraged rallying cry by self-pitying incels everywhere.
THE KING OF COMEDY did a brilliant job of conveying reality's blurred lines with the delusions of the hapless Rupert Pupkin, but Phillips--again, no Marty Scorsese and probably not the right director for this--either lacks the finesse to communicate that or doesn't trust the audience to figure it out, perhaps a combination of the two, though there's certainly an argument to be made that the entire film is just a figment of Arthur Fleck's imagination. The casting of De Niro is a missed opportunity, and not just because of his limited screen time. While Scorsese superfans and hardcore movie nerds will get some amusement out of seeing the one-time unstoppable dreamer Pupkin aged into Jerry Lewis' cynical Jerry Langford, De Niro seems indifferent to the material, much the way he did in his stumbling, cue-card-flubbing appearances as Robert Mueller on the last couple seasons of SNL. While functioning as a standalone film, JOKER does tie into the Batman mythos by the end and is an interesting major-studio experiment that's worth seeing once. But barring any real-life tragedy that keeps it in the news, the buzz on this is likely to quiet down quickly once initial curiosity about Phoenix's performance is satiated (Heath Ledger's DARK KNIGHT Joker still retains the crown) and word of mouth gets around.
THE SISTERS BROTHERS (US/France/Germany/Spain/Romania/Belgium - 2018)
The $40 million revisionist western THE SISTERS BROTHERS was an expensive flop when it opened in theaters in the fall of 2018 and grossed just $3 million. An unmarketable art-house offering that had no business being sold as commercial multplex fare, it's the English-language debut of acclaimed French filmmaker Jacques Audiard (THE BEAT THAT MY HEART SKIPPED, A PROPHET, RUST AND BONE) and is based on a 2011 novel by Patrick deWitt. It was a long-gestating pet project for star John C. Reilly, who acquired the movie rights immediately after the book was published. It took Reilly six years and funding from six countries to finally get the film made, and with picturesque exteriors shot in Romania and the old spaghetti western stomping grounds of Almeria, Spain, cinematography by the great Benoit Debie, a score by Alexandre Desplat, and costume design by the legendary Milena Canonero, the money and the prestige are certainly up there on the screen. But the story is so sluggish and its intent so indecisive that the film never quite catches fire despite some excellent work by Reilly and his co-stars. Opening in 1851 Oregon during the Gold Rush, the story has sibling gunslingers Eli (Reilly) and Charlie Sisters (Joaquin Phoenix) assigned by their powerful robber baron boss The Commodore (Rutger Hauer, wasted in a silent cameo and seen only briefly through a window) to track down Kermit Herman Warm (Riz Ahmed), a chemist he claims has stolen something valuable from him. The Commodore already has another regulator, John Morris (Jake Gyllenhaal), on Warm's trail, but the Sisters brothers are perpetually several days behind, due in large part to Charlie's heavy drinking. Eli is skeptical of the work they do for The Commodore, not really buying that so many people steal from someone so feared. Indeed, Warm has stolen nothing from The Commodore: he's invented a formula for a chemical that illuminates gold deposits when poured into a body of water, and he's got an investor in California ready to buy it from him, while The Commodore simply wants to steal it--and eliminate Warm altogether--for his own plentiful financial gain. The Sisters brothers eventually catch up with Morris and Warm, forming an uneasy alliance brought about largely by their collective loathing of The Commodore, but in particular, it's Eli who wants something different, even suggesting to Charlie that they ditch their outlaw life and "maybe open a store" (Charlie: "A store? What fucking store?!"). The good-hearted Eli longs to better himself, and Reilly really captures that sentiment in a wonderful little moment when he sees that the more sophisticated and erudite Morris also uses a toothbrush, a new and rare commodity in these environs that Eli just acquired but hasn't quite mastered.
THE SISTERS BROTHERS looks great and it's obvious that Reilly put his heart and soul into it, but maybe Audiard just wasn't the right guy for the job. He's made some terrific films, but this one can't really commit to being anything. It's too slow and dour to be a comedy, but it's also too offbeat and quirky with their bickering and brawling to be a serious western, trying to have it both ways and succeeding at neither. Both stars have worked multiple times with Paul Thomas Anderson (Reilly in HARD EIGHT, BOOGIE NIGHTS, and MAGNOLIA, and Phoenix in THE MASTER and INHERENT VICE), and I kept thinking that Anderson might've been more suited to what this seems to be going after as an introspective character piece about brotherly bonds and family trauma that stems from their abusive father. In the end, it's a noble, well-intentioned misfire that never really pulls itself together, and they seriously could've used a cardboard cutout of Rutger Hauer for as little as he's required to do in his scant seconds of screen time. (R, 121 mins)
THE GUILTY (Denmark - 2018)
Thrillers set in one location are always tricky to pull off, largely because the filmmakers often can't wait to get away from that specific location. It's hard to not recall the acclaimed Tom Hardy-in-a-car film LOCKE while watching the Danish thriller THE GUILTY. It's also reminiscent of the Halle Berry 911 thriller THE CALL, but with the patience and the discipline to stay in one place and, more importantly, with one person. Jakob Cedergren is on camera from the beginning to the end as Asger Holm, who's working as an emergency services dispatcher. Debuting director and co-writer Gustav Moller very deliberately fills in the pieces of Asger's back story as the film proceeds, but what we know up front is that he's a Copenhagen cop and he's been temporarily busted down to emergency dispatch for undisclosed disciplinary reasons. He's nearing the end of his shift, and he displays a visible impatience bordering on contempt--for the callers, his colleagues, and generally everything. He scoffs at a guy needing an ambulance because he's tripping on speed, and almost openly mocks a caller who was mugged by a hooker in the red light district. But then a call comes from a woman that caller ID lists as Iben Ostergard (voice of Jessica Dinnage). She's talking to Asger but pretending to talk to her daughter. Asger quickly deduces that she's been abducted and she's in a moving vehicle. He notifies the nearest precinct of her approximate location, then calls her home number to talk to her young daughter Mathilde (voice of Katinka Evers-Jahnsen). She's home alone with her infant brother and tells Asger that her parents had a fight and that Mommy (Iben) left with Daddy. Checking the records of Iben's estranged husband Michael, Asger discovers he's a convicted felon with a history of assault. Despite everyone--from his supervisor to the dispatchers at various precincts--telling him that he's done his job and they'll take it from here, the detective in Asger can't let it go. He calls his partner Rashid (voice of Omar Shargawi) and has him go to Michael's address to look for clues. Cops think they found the vehicle Iben is in, but it's a false alarm. The another team of cops arrive at Iben's house and are met with a shocking discovery. And all of this plays out with Asger listening in on a headset and staying on the line.
About 30 minutes in, Asger moves from his work station into a private office, which allows other developments to come to light. Why is he taking such an intense interest in this? Is he just that dedicated to his job? Will it get him out of the doghouse with his bosses? Is it a distraction from an oft-mentioned court appearance scheduled for the next morning? Why is a reporter calling him on his phone? Moller does an exemplary job with what essentially unfolds in real time, though specific time is never referenced nor a clock ever shown. It just feels like real time without the gimmick of drawing attention to itself. THE GUILTY is the kind of film that you find yourself watching with palpable tension and baited breath to the point where even the sound of vibrating phone is enough to put you on edge. It's like an 85-minute anxiety attack, especially when everything Asger does to help the situation in his take-charge fashion inevitably ends up making it worse. This wouldn't be nearly as effective as it is if not for the sure-handed vision of Moller and the riveting performance of Cedergren, who's logged a lot of time on Scandinavian TV (he co-starred in the original Danish version of the series THE KILLING) and is probably best known to foreign film enthusiasts for the 2008 black comedy TERRIBLY HAPPY. THE GUILTY got a good amount of acclaim during its limited US theatrical run, but nobody saw it. It's waiting to be discovered on Blu-ray and eventually streaming, and it wouldn't be at all surprising if it got a neutered Hollywood remake--which would likely have Asger ditching the dispatch center 15 minutes in and going on a city-wide rampage himself to find Iben--but this under-the-radar gem is a tightly-wound, expertly-constructed, and extremely well-played exercise in stomach-knotting tension. (R, 88 mins)
Offscreen since Woody Allen's lackluster 2015 dud IRRATIONAL MAN, Joaquin Phoenix won the Best Actor award at the 2017 Cannes Film Festival for his mesmerizing performance in the hellishly brutal YOU WERE NEVER REALLY HERE. Adapted from Jonathan Ames' 2013 novel by writer/director Lynne Ramsay (WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT KEVIN), YOU WERE NEVER REALLY HERE is, for all its arthouse bells and whistles, a genre revenge thriller at its core, so much so that I'm shocked it was given a limited release by Amazon instead of a nationwide rollout from A24. It's a generally "commercial" story, but told in an elliptical, minimalist way, with particular attention to sound and background detail, and with some precise and tension-cranking editing techniques that make it more substantive than the kind of mainstream studio fare that it could very easily be with a little tweaking. Phoenix is Joe, an enigmatic mystery man whose backstory is slowly revealed over the course of the film in subtle cutaways and recurring images in his dreams. Haunted by his past--abused by his father as a child, suffers from PTSD from his time in the military, and may be a former FBI agent--Joe lives in Yonkers with his elderly, ailing mother (Judith Roberts, best known as The Beautiful Girl Across the Hall in David Lynch's ERASERHEAD) and earns a living by tracking down abducted or trafficked children. After rescuing a young girl in Cincinnati, Joe is informed by his handler McCleary (John Doman) that his services are requested by State Senator Albert Vatto (Alex Manette), a widower whose young daughter Nina (Ekaterina Samsonov) has been taken and forced into sexual slavery at a brothel catering to pedophiles being run out of a nondescript NYC residence. Armed with his weapon of choice--a hammer--Joe manages to infiltrate the house, kill several people, and whisk Nina to safety at a motel while he awaits word from McCleary. But that's where everything goes off the rails: a breaking news report reveals that Vatto took a plunge off the roof of his apartment building in what's being called a "suicide." Three cops followed Joe and Nina to the motel, where they enter the room and take the girl, with one staying behind to kill Joe, who turns the tables on him but takes a bullet through the cheek in the process. It soon becomes clear to Joe that there are powerful forces pulling the strings and that he's been drawn into a situation even more dangerous than he presumed.
A lot of the buzz around YOU WERE NEVER REALLY HERE likened it to a modern-day TAXI DRIVER, and it's not an inaccurate take. Like Robert De Niro's Travis Bickle, Joe is a troubled combat vet who finds a purpose in rescuing a young girl from a life of a forced underage prostitution. Joe is just as shell-shocked as Travis Bickle, though he acts out even more dangerously. He routinely engages in suicidal games like sticking a knife in his mouth or wrapping a plastic bag around his head. But where Travis tries to fit into society, Joe has long since abandoned any pretense of wanting to be a part of anything. With his slumped shoulders, ratty beard, and his long hair tucked into a ponytail and hiding under a hoodie, Phoenix lumbers through this film like a wounded animal paralyzed by internalized rage. Though the circumstances and motivations are different, Phoenix's work here is reminiscent of both the raw fearlessness demonstrated by Harvey Keitel in BAD LIEUTENANT and the driving obsession of Terence Stamp in THE LIMEY, combined with the similar sense of a ticking time bomb that Phoenix displayed in Paul Thomas Anderson's impenetrable THE MASTER and James Gray's little-seen TWO LOVERS. It's an absolutely riveting, hypnotic performance--you can't take your eyes off of him--and it's a key component that helps elevate YOU WERE NEVER REALLY HERE beyond its rather standard, DEATH WISH-esque foundation (plus bonus points for the unexpectedly haunting use of one-hit wonder Charlene's "I've Never Been To Me."). Notoriously difficult, prickly, and unpredictable, Phoenix has been very quietly compiling an impressive body of work as he's gotten older, and with the retirement of Daniel Day-Lewis apparently still a thing, YOU WERE NEVER REALLY HERE is the latest film to make a credible argument that he's a legitimate contender to inherit the title of our current Greatest Living Actor. (R, 90 mins)
SWEET COUNTRY (Australia/France - 2018)
It falls a little short of being the next PROPOSITION, but the Australian western SWEET COUNTRY is a powerful saga of frayed race relations in the 1920s Outback whose story and blistering social commentary still remain relevant today. In a desolate stretch of land in the Northern Territory, devoutly religious preacher Fred Smith (Sam Neill) allows his middle-aged Aboriginal farmhand Sam Kelly (non-professional Hamilton Morris, in a quietly powerful big-screen debut) and his wife Lizzie (Natassia Gorey Furber) to share his land and home. Preacher Fred is approached by abrasive, shell-shocked Boer War vet Harry March (Ewen Leslie) to borrow his "black stock" to help him build a fence on a nearby swath of property he's purchased. He hesitates, not really liking March's demeanor and informing him "We're all equal in the eyes of the Lord," to which March bullies him into loaning out Sam and Lizzie because "It's the Christian thing to do." Accompanied by their visiting teenage niece Lucy (Shanika Cole), Sam and Lizzie travel to March's, where the women help get his home in order while Sam endures all manner of verbal abuse while doing most of the work putting up the fence. With Lucy outside and Sam tending to some horses, a drunken March corners Lizzie and rapes her, telling her "I wanted the other one, but you'll do." Lizzie keeps the incident to herself, but March was belligerently asking enough questions about Lucy that upon returning home, Sam asks Preacher Fred to take her back to her parents on his journey into town for supplies, which leaves Sam and Lizzie to watch the ranch for several days. March ends up using another Aboriginal boy named Philomac (twins Tremayne and Trevon Doolan), who may or may not be the son of white landowner Kennedy (Thomas M. Wright), and the boy manages to escape March's property after being beaten and shackled as elderly, Uncle Tom-ish Archie (Gibson John) looks on. March heads to Preacher Fred's ranch, incorrectly assuming he's harboring the boy, and when he fires multiple shots through the doors and windows, Sam shoots him dead in self-defense.
Knowing he'll be hunted down and killed for murdering a white man, Sam takes Lizzie and heads to the even more desolate regions of the Outback, with ex-military sergeant and ruthless regional lawman Fletcher (Bryan Brown) forming a posse consisting of a deputy, plus Kennedy, the duplicitous Archie, and Preacher Fred, who insists on tagging along to negotiate Sam's surrender if necessary and to ensure he isn't shot dead on sight. Sam and Lizzie venture deep into still-unexplored areas inhabited by indigenous natives who have never seen white men, in territory so treacherous that Archie won't even lead Fletcher through it ("This ain't my country," Archie shrugs, adding "Never been here before"). Director Warwick Thornton, who won some acclaim for his 2009 aboriginal coming-of-age drama SAMSON AND DELILAH, fashions SWEET COUNTRY as a revisionist slow-burner, often effectively using almost subliminal-quick flashbacks and flash-forwards to create a sense of unease and ominous foreshadowing of tragedies to come (though his opening shot of a close-up of a pot of water heating to a boil as we hear two men arguing offscreen screams "SYMBOLISM!" a little too loudly). Rarely saying much and letting his sad eyes speak volumes, Morris is tasked with carrying much of the film and does a fine job, and Leslie is a memorably despicable villain. It's also great seeing old pros Neill and Brown in the kind of meaty roles that most veteran actors don't often get as they approach the emeritus years of their careers (71-year-old Brown is in terrific shape, looking at least a decade younger than his age, and even indulging in some unexpected Harvey Keitel exhibitionism at one point). The story does drag a bit once it hits its "courtroom drama" turn (the courtroom being outside, in the center of town), but it regains its momentum for a heartbreaking revelation and a downbeat finale that shows its characters and the audience no mercy. Barely released in US theaters, SWEET COUNTRY is a sleeper gem that deserves to find an audience on Blu-ray and streaming. (R, 113 mins)
On the heels of 2014's pleasant but decidedly minor MAGIC IN THE MOONLIGHT, Woody Allen turns in another inconsequential trifle with IRRATIONAL MAN, where he essentially recycles the Martin Landau half of 1989's infinitely superior CRIMES AND MISDEMEANORS and parts of 2005's MATCH POINT. The 80-year-old Allen cranks out so many movies that it's getting harder to keep track of the less significant ones, and while no one's expecting him to blaze new trails at this point in his career, it's not unreasonable to expect something a little more than the lukewarm leftovers served up with IRRATIONAL MAN. You know when a legendary rock band starts getting a little long in the tooth and instead of new albums, they just start releasing collections of unreleased tracks and outtakes that weren't good enough to make it on previous records? That's where Allen's at now. It looks and sounds like a Woody Allen movie, but he doesn't even seem engaged with the material. It's a serious Allen film, one that involves murder and deception, but he makes no effort to generate any suspense or tension, and for perhaps the first time in his career, the only humor is unintentional in the absurd way he keeps repeatedly playing The Ramsey Lewis Trio's "The 'In' Crowd." It's almost like he used it as a temp track and forgot to put the intended music in the finished film. Regardless of the situation, the only music you'll hear is "The 'In' Crowd," and its inappropriateness becomes amusing until it grows so utterly grating that you'll never want to hear it again.
Woody's protagonist is Abe Lucas (Joaquin Phoenix), a depressed, alcoholic philosophy prof doing a guest lecturer stint over the summer semester at the fictional Braylin College in Rhode Island. Burned out and creatively blocked, Abe ambles through his job in a drunken blur and shows little interest in the advances of married colleague Rita (Parker Posey). He strikes up a friendship with Jill (Emma Stone in her second straight Allen film), an intelligent student whose paper he legitimately admired, and her constant talk of Abe eventually drives a wedge between her and boyfriend Roy (Jamie Blackley), especially when it's obvious she has feelings for the troubled Abe. While at a diner, Abe and Jill eavesdrop on a conversation in the next booth, where a woman is in tears over an unsympathetic judge who she says is deliberately hassling her in court, siding with her husband and likely awarding him custody of their children after their divorce. It's at that moment that Abe feels the spark he needs to get his life back on track: with no motive and no connection to the woman or the judge or any of his cases, he's going to kill the judge, committing the perfect crime and completely getting away with it. There's lots of talk of moral quandaries and references to Kierkegaard and Dostoevsky and Crime and Punishment, but IRRATIONAL MAN never gets going and never seems like it's heading anywhere. Allen's dialogue is trite and repetitive. He used to really have a knack for human interaction and astute observation but he's reached that Stanley Kubrick/Terrence Malick/George Romero point where it's obvious he doesn't get out much anymore, demonstrating no feel or understanding for how universities in 2015 operate or how college students even talk (not even a charming actress like Stone can sell a line like "I enjoyed making love with you"--what young person says "making love"?), and one scene where Abe attends a college party is just embarrassing in its utter disconnect from reality. Phoenix is uncharacteristically dull here and Allen is just going through the motions in a way that recalls 2012's TO ROME WITH LOVE, one of his worst films. Though it's definitely bottom-five Allen, IRRATIONAL MAN isn't quite as bad as that or 2003's ANYTHING ELSE?, but even in those duds, his personality periodically made its presence known. IRRATIONAL MAN has none of that: it's a Woody Allen film that feels like someone else trying to make a Woody Allen film and not getting the job done. It's bland and listless and Allen doesn't imbue it with any of his signature wit or insight. He doesn't let his funny side show and he keeps his misanthropic side under wraps. There's just nothing here and no reason for him to make this film other than he thinks he has to make a new one annually. The last year without a new Woody Allen offering was 1981. Maybe taking a year or two off to regroup and recharge would do him some good. (R, 95 mins)
PARANORMAL ACTIVITY: THE GHOST DIMENSION
(US - 2015)
The latest, least, and hopefully last of the trendsetting found-footage franchise is the worst yet, the sixth film (seven if you count 2010's Japan spinoff PARANORMAL ACTIVITY: TOKYO NIGHT) in a series that ran out of gas halfway through the first sequel. In the hands of writer and eventual director Christopher Landon, the son of iconic TV star Michael Landon and a once-promising screenwriter (Larry Clark's ANOTHER DAY IN PARADISE), the PARANORMAL ACTIVITY movies proceeded to create an increasingly convoluted mythology surrounding Katie, the heroine in the first film played by Katie Featherston. With the exception of the TOKYO NIGHT offshoot, which still hasn't been released in the US, Featherston has turned up in all of the sequels at some point, including the allegedly unrelated Latino-aimed spinoff PARANORMAL ACTIVITY: THE MARKED ONES, which may as well have been titled PARANORMAL ACTIVITY 5. While Oren Peli started things off, he left after the first movie and the franchise pretty much became Landon's baby once he was hired to write PARANORMAL ACTIVITY 2, then wrote and produced 3 and 4 (both directed by the CATFISH guys) before directing THE MARKED ONES himself. Landon did nothing but drag this series out past the point of anything resembling relevance (even though everyone's quick to point out that oscillating fan bit from 3 is pretty cool), and even he had the sense to jump ship for the latest, PARANORMAL ACTIVITY: THE GHOST DIMENSION, which is directed by series editor and short-straw-drawing Gregory Plotkin. The series has seen diminishing box office with each successive entry, so as a last-ditch attempt to lure people back and make the franchise a thing again, they did the obvious: made it in 3-D. After a slow start, the almost-nonstop plethora of 3-D effects might've made this work a little bit better in theaters, but Paramount shot themselves in the foot by announcing a drastically-shortened 53-day VOD window (compared to the typical 90), infuriating the major cinema chains, who responded by refusing to show the movie. As a result, GHOST DIMENSION only made it to about 1600 screens compared to 3000-3500 it would've been on under normal circumstances. It still managed to gross $18 million, but the word of mouth was toxic, and this vacated indie-owned theaters pretty quickly.
Unless you have the capability of viewing this in 3-D at home, the standard DVD version is a complete fiasco, a blurry, globby mess as the spirit that's haunted everyone for the last five movies now manifests itself and hovers around the frame as "Tobi," an ectoplasm that looks like a shapeless version of the jungle camouflaging by the title creature in PREDATOR. Video-game designer Ryan (Chris J. Murray), his wife Emily (Brit Shaw), and young daugher Leila (Ivy George) move into the house once owned by Katie and sister Kristi's spirit-conjuring grandma (respected stage actress Hallie Foote). Ryan's comedy-relief hipster brother Mike (Dan Gill) and Emily's friend Skyler (Olivia Taylor Dudley, in her second terrible horror movie of 2015 after THE VATICAN TAPES) come to visit, and they find a box in the basement with an oversized 1980s camcorder and some VHS tapes. The camcorder still works, and when looking through its viewfinder, Ryan sees the gloopy, formless ghost surrounded by cosmic dust and debris, and after watching Katie and Kristi's childhood paranormal encounters on the VHS tapes, he concludes that this camcorder is rigged to record spectral matter (and even more incredibly, was somehow able to record in 16x9 HD in 1988). Of course, "Tobi" makes contact with Leila, and eventually she becomes possessed, which brings in a priest (Michael Krawic), who proclaims "This isn't an exorcism...it's an extermination!" Resorting to 3-D is bad enough, but trying to scrounge a few nibbles at the empty EXORCIST ripoff trough is just pathetic. And all the while, Ryan and Mike never stop filming. Even the easy jump scares come up weak this time around, and since Plotkin and the visual effects team "show" a lot of Tobi so they can maximize the 3-D, what's really here is a dull, found-footage version of POLTERGEIST, which we need about as much as that POLTERGEIST remake that came out earlier in 2015. Abysmal in every way save for one inspired moment when it becomes clear to Ryan that Katie and Kristi on the 1988 VHS tape are watching Mike and him watch them, PARANORMAL ACTIVITY: THE GHOST DIMENSION should be the wheezing death rattle of this moribund franchise. The fact that it took four screenwriters (including two writers of the found-footage EXORCIST knockoff THE TAKING OF DEBORAH LOGAN) to come up with this should be an embarrassment to the entire Writer's Guild. (R, 88 mins)
SCOUTS GUIDE TO THE ZOMBIE APOCALYPSE
(US - 2015)
Another Paramount release that fell victim to their ill-advised shortened VOD-window botch and was banished from major cinema chains, SCOUTS GUIDE TO THE ZOMBIE APOCALYPSE was directed and co-written by Christopher Landon, and while it isn't anything spectacular, it's at least an improvement on anything Landon accomplished while running the PARANORMAL ACTIVITY franchise into the ground. There isn't a whole lot left to be done with anything related to zombies at this point, and SCOUTS isn't giving SHAUN OF THE DEAD any competition as the world's best comedic zombie homage. It's about on the level of the intermittently amusing but forgettable ZOMBIELAND, only with grosser and raunchier hard-R gags that usually involve genitalia. Three high-school sophomores--sensitive nice guy Ben (Tye Sheridan), horndog Carter (Logan Miller), and overweight dweeb Augie (Joey Morgan)--are the only three childhood holdovers still actively involved in their Boy Scouts program. Carter insists it's time to grow up since, as he puts it, "all girls turn into sluts junior year." Carter talks Ben into ditching Augie and going to a senior rave instead of their final Scout campout, and when their badly-toupeed, Dolly Parton-obsessed scoutmaster Rogers (an underused David Koechner) is turned into a zombie, they find the entire city infected as they make their way to the rave so Ben can rescue his lifelong crush, Carter's older sister Kendall (Halston Sage), who's dating total douchebag Jeff (Patrick Schwarzenegger--yes, his son). Along the way, they meet tough strip-club waitress Denise (Sarah Dumont), who teaches them how to man up. SCOUTS is harmless enough and it moves fast and has a few funny moments amidst the expectedly juvenile toilet humor. But it almost always goes for easy gags like having the three scouts, armed to the teeth with makeshift weapons they assembled after raiding a hardware store, taking out a rave full of zombies to the tune of Scorpions' "Rock You Like a Hurricane." Where's the joke there, other than teen audiences recognizing a familiar '80s hair metal staple? At least BORDELLO OF BLOOD's use of Sweet's "Ballroom Blitz" as former comedian Dennis Miller took out a bunch of vampires with a holy water-filled Super Soaker was set in something that looked like a ballroom. Instead, SCOUTS is a film that gives you the spectacle of 89-year-old Academy Award-winner Cloris Leachman as a zombified crazy cat lady neighbor, pulling Miller's pants down and trying to take a bite out of his bare ass. Is this really the best Hollywood has to offer Ms. Leachman in her eighth decade in show business? (R, 93 mins)
INHERENT VICE (US - 2014) Written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson. Cast: Joaquin Phoenix, Josh Brolin, Owen Wilson, Katherine Waterston, Reese Witherspoon, Benicio Del Toro, Jena Malone, Maya Rudolph, Martin Short, Joanna Newsom, Eric Roberts, Serena Scott Thomas, Michael Kenneth Williams, Martin Donovan, Sacha Pieterse, Sam Jaeger, Timothy Simons, Jordan Christian Hearn, Hong Chau, Jeannie Berlin, Michelle Sinclair, Peter McRobbie, Keith Jardine, Andrew Simpson, Jefferson Mays, Christopher Allen Nelson. (R, 149 mins)
INHERENT VICE, Paul Thomas Anderson's long-planned adaptation of Thomas Pynchon's most accessible, commercial novel, is a wildly careening, frequently meandering shaggy-dog/stoner noir set in the fictional SoCal haven Gordita Beach in 1970. As it plays out, it certainly brings to mind what might happen if someone remade CHINATOWN with Jack Nicholson's Jake Gittes replaced by Jeff Bridges' The Dude, or perhaps The Big Sleep if authored by Kurt Vonnegut. While INHERENT VICE has its share of laugh-out-loud scenes and quotable dialogue ("Molto panacaku!") and comparisons are perhaps inevitable, it's a much darker film than THE BIG LEBOWSKI, almost filled with as much somber sadness as absurdist humor. With its twisting, turning, labyrinthine plot at times akin to trying to watch THE TWO JAKES without ever seeing CHINATOWN, INHERENT VICE is likely to frustrate many moviegoers who think it's the wacky comedy the trailers and TV spots are selling. It is, for the most part, but it's also distinctly the work of Anderson, the guy who gave audiences a cast sing-along and a storm of frogs at the end of the three-hour MAGNOLIA, a film they expected to be a Tom Cruise vehicle, and whose PUNCH-DRUNK LOVE had Adam Sandler fans demanding refunds when they realized it wasn't an Adam Sandler movie. You can draw a straight line from the "Regret" deathbed speech by Jason Robards' Big Earl Partridge in MAGNOLIA to hippie private eye Doc Sportello (Joaquin Phoenix), whose days spent in a weed-induced haze are primarily his way of getting over the one that got away.
That would be Shasta Fay Hepworth (Katherine Waterston, Sam's daughter), who suddenly reappears, walking through Doc's front door a year after they split. She's gone semi-establishment, with a sugar daddy in wealthy real estate developer Mickey Wolfmann (Eric Roberts). Wolfmann is missing, and Shasta tells Doc that she was offered a chance to take part in a haphazard plot by Wolfmann's wife Sloane (Serena Scott Thomas) and her boy-toy Riggs Warbling (Andrew Simpson) to orchestrate Wolfmann's disappearance and ship him off to a mental institution. Fearing for her own safety, Shasta leaves Doc's and promptly disappears herself as Doc soon becomes embroiled in a complex plot that inevitably leads back to Shasta. Drifting in and out of the story are Doc's chief nemesis, raging, flat-topped detective and part-time actor Bigfoot Bjornsen (Josh Brolin); Sortilege (Joanna Newsom), Doc's imaginary Girl Friday who functions as his conscience and the voice that brings Pynchon's prose to life; ex-con Tariq Kallil (Michael Kenneth Williams), who points Doc in the direction of Wolfmann's neo-Nazi bodyguard Glen Charlock (Christopher Allen Nelson), who turns up dead; Charlock's sultry sister Clancy (Michelle Sinclair, aka porn star Belladonna), who's only into doing two men at once; Doc's current girlfriend and assistant D.A. Penny Kimball (Reese Witherspoon); session saxophonist and recovering drug addict Coy Harlingen (Owen Wilson), who's forced into being an informant by both the cops and the FBI; Doc's attorney Sauncho Smilax (Benicio Del Toro), whose specialty is maritime law; coke-snorting, sex-addicted dentist Rudy Blatnoyd (Martin Short); runaway rich girl Japonica Fenway (Sacha Pieterse); incompetent, nose-picking FBI agents Flatweed (Sam Jaeger) and Borderline (Timothy Simons); and various shady figures like Japonica's wealthy father Crocker Fenway (Martin Donovan), drug lord Adrian Prussia (Peter McRobbie), and Aryan Brotherhood strongarm Puck Beaverton (Keith Jardine); and a huge shipment of heroin swiped from Golden Fang, a corporation used as a front for the nefarious Indo-Chinese drug trade.
At the heart of INHERENT VICE is the relationship between Doc and Shasta, and one of the highlights of the film is a long and extraordinarily erotic sequence that should likely make a star out of Waterston (you'll know it when you see it). Phoenix is in every scene, and displays some comic chops and timing that really allow him to stretch and cut loose in ways you've never seen before. His banter with cartoonish supercop Bjornsen is often screamingly funny, and whether he's bellowing at diner cooks, kicking down doors, or delicately eating a frozen chocolate dipped banana in a way that bears an alarming resemblance to fellatio (with Phoenix's dismayed expressions looking like those of a disgusted Benny Hill) or tacitly dissing Smilax (working as Doc's criminal defense lawyer) with "Don't you practice marine law? Well, we've got kidnapping and murder, but we can throw some pirates in if it makes you more comfortable," Brolin has never been better than he is here. Amidst the drug humor and the increasingly ridiculous situations in which Doc finds himself, there's a downbeat streak of melancholy running throughout the film, from exterior elements like political upheaval and societal horrors (the Manson family is invoked on a couple of occasions) with characters lamenting the passage of time, opportunities squandered, and love lost.
That's not to suggest it goes as deep as a MAGNOLIA or a THERE WILL BE BLOOD, but INHERENT VICE, like THE MASTER, is an Anderson film that probably can't all be taken in on one viewing. Where THE MASTER was often impenetrable and cold, it markedly improved on a second and third viewing, once the plot was known and the more intricate details could be studied. With INHERENT VICE, it's due not to thematic complexity and deeper meaning, but simply because there's so many characters weaving their way through the impossibly complicated storyline, which mostly hangs together but occasionally feels like one of those BIG SLEEP situations where the plot is so tangled that the screenwriters adapting Raymond Chandler's novel weren't even sure who killed one of the victims, forcing them to seek the guidance of Chandler himself only to find out that he didn't know either. At two and a half hours, INHERENT VICE marks the first time that an Anderson film actually feels long. Perhaps because it's mostly an engagingly silly stoner comedy (this may have more blazing than the entire Cheech & Chong filmography), the epic length does make things drag at times...not enough to deem it a buzzkill, but for a guy whose past films never feel as long as they are (how many 189-minute films move as briskly as MAGNOLIA?), the bloat doesn't always feel justified here. Still, minor missteps aside, INHERENT VICE is a very good film by a director usually counted on to deliver great ones, one of the few filmmakers whose every new work is a legitimate event, and in the current American movie scene, Anderson's "very good" is still better than most filmmakers' "best."
THE IMMIGRANT (US/France - 2014) Directed by James Gray. Written by James Gray and Richard Menello. Cast: Marion Cotillard, Joaquin Phoenix, Jeremy Renner, Dagmara Dominczyk, Yelena Solovey, Angela Sarafyan, Jicky Schnee, Antoni Corone, Maja Wampuszyk, Ilia Volok, Joseph Calleja. (R, 117 mins) "You are not nothing."
Writer/director James Gray isn't the most prolific of American filmmakers with just five films over his 20-year career (plus co-writing this year's BLOOD TIES), but there's been a growing consensus that he's among the most under-appreciated. His latest film, THE IMMIGRANT, was poised to be his breakthrough that would get him the accolades and respect that's been a long time coming. Early buzz on THE IMMIGRANT prior to its May 2014 release was overwhelmingly positive, and then...nothing. US distributor The Weinstein Company began slowly rolling it out and abruptly pulled the plug. It trickled into some major cities and the people who saw it raved about it. As recently as last week, it was still playing in a few art houses in the US, but at its widest release, it was only on 150 screens. Whatever momentum that was building for the film has long since stalled and while there's no DVD/Blu-ray street date as of yet, it unexpectedly turned up as a Netflix Instant streaming title this week. While such a move makes THE IMMIGRANT available to more audiences than ever, the treatment given to the film by its distributor borders on criminal, and once again, Gray is relegated to being the next big thing in American cinema, which he apparently always will be.
Gray's 1994 debut LITTLE ODESSA got some good reviews but landed him with the "Tarantino wannabe" tag and the film lumped in with the post-RESERVOIR DOGS crime genre. His follow-up, THE YARDS, the first of four collaborations with star Joaquin Phoenix and the first of two pairing Phoenix and Mark Wahlberg, sat on a Miramax shelf for two years before Harvey Weinstein barely released a recut version on just 146 screens in 2000 (Gray's improved director's cut was eventually issued on a special edition DVD). It was another seven years before Gray resurfaced with the major-studio crime saga WE OWN THE NIGHT (2007), which reteamed Phoenix and Wahlberg and harkened back to the gritty cop dramas of Sidney Lumet, a major Gray influence. Despite generally positive reviews, audiences didn't respond. Gray's next film was 2009's TWO LOVERS, a departure with Phoenix as a sad sack recovering from a suicide attempt and torn between manipulative Gwyneth Paltrow and sweet Vinessa Shaw. It was a step away from cops & criminals films and demonstrated Gray's versatility, but any chance TWO LOVERS might've had was torpedoed when Phoenix used its publicity tour to go on talk shows in his madman-bearded, Andy Kaufman-esque meltdown stunt which was later revealed to be a hoax for his faux documentary I'M STILL HERE. With a history of credible critical acclaim but minimal audience interest, Gray's day in the sun was finally supposed to happen with THE IMMIGRANT. At this point, one can hardly blame the man if he may start to feel that the entire film industry is conspiring against him.
THE IMMIGRANT finds Gray in familiar--and problematic--company: it reunites him with Phoenix, even after the TWO LOVERS debacle, and the film's distribution rights were picked up by The Weinstein Company. Considering how unpleasant Gray's last experience with Miramax-era Harvey Weinstein proved to be, it's not out of the realm of possibility that Weinstein's abandonment of THE IMMIGRANT and its unceremonious dumping on Netflix Instant less than two months after its miniscule theatrical release and before a DVD/Blu-ray street date has even been announced has the distinct stench of score-settling. Even if it isn't, the treatment that's been bestowed upon THE IMMIGRANT is a tragedy. It's a great film--emotional, heartfelt, beautifully acted, masterfully filmed. It's the kind of richly-detailed, exquisitely-crafted, prestigious period piece that was commonplace in the 1970s and 1980s--the time that a director like Gray really would've flourished--and the kind of majestic Oscar-sweeper that the Weinstein of 10-15 years ago would've been aggressively pushing come awards season. Times have changed, and if something like THE IMMIGRANT gets swept under the rug and banished to the world of Netflix streaming without ever being given much of a shot, then the movie industry is indeed broken beyond repair.
In a career-best performance, Marion Cotillard is Ewa Cybulska, a Polish woman arriving at Ellis Island in 1921 with her sickly sister Magda (Angela Sarafyan). Magda is quarantined for six months due to tuberculosis, while Ewa, thanks to dubious claims of "immoral" behavior on the trip to America, is immediately processed for deportation back to Europe. Ewa, a nurse in her homeland for a British diplomat's family, speaks perfect English and after a chance process-room encounter with one Bruno Weiss (Phoenix), ends up leaving with him and staying at his Lower East Side apartment. Weiss seems to manage a crew of "doves"--beautiful young immigrant women who perform at a burlesque venue and whom he pimps out to customers backstage after the shows. He has a connection at Ellis Island with processing officer McNally (Antoni Corone), who helps him procure new women. Bruno senses something special with Ewa, who only wants to free her sister from quarantine and get their piece of the American dream.
Nothing happens the way you expect it to with THE IMMIGRANT. You expect Bruno to be a heartless bastard. You expect Ewa to be a naive innocent. Bruno talks a good game but isn't the smoothest operator, and Ewa has street smarts and a keen sense of self-preservation that you rarely see in immigration dramas of this sort. Ewa begins working as one of Bruno's prostitutes, and rather than gleefully count the money she makes for him, Bruno feels genuine remorse because he loves her. The story gets complicated with the introduction of Bruno's cousin Emil (Jeremy Renner), aka "Orlando the Magician," who arrives back home and is immediately drawn to Ewa. THE IMMIGRANT isn't so much a "dark side of the American dream" misery-fest as much as it's a somewhat cynical triumph of the human spirit saga, one that remains plausible in Ewa's many disappointments but also earns its few feel-good moments legitimately. Lives can change in an instant, and nothing in THE IMMIGRANT is black or white. Even when Bruno is at his worst, Phoenix manages to make you care about him, as when he eavesdrops on Ewa as she's in a confessional and only then understands the horrific life she and her sister have had and how much the promise of America means to them. Also, Gray doesn't paint Ewa as a crucified martyr. She can be just as cold and cruel as the world around her, and even a shift in Emil/Orlando's behavior plays as completely natural and believable, where many less nuanced directors would've crammed it into place.
James Gray and cinematographer Darius Khondji
Gray, cinematographer Darius Khondji (THE CITY OF LOST CHILDREN, SE7EN, MIDNIGHT IN PARIS) and the production design team have fashioned a visual triumph with THE IMMIGRANT. Shot in muted and sepia-tinged tones, the look of the film recalls the Young Vito Corleone sequences in THE GODFATHER PART II (1974) and the flashback scenes in Sergio Leone's ONCE UPON A TIME IN AMERICA (1984), as well as Milos Forman's RAGTIME (1981) and Paul Thomas Anderson's THERE WILL BE BLOOD (2007), and though it's not a western, you'll sense the visual influence of Michael Cimino's HEAVEN'S GATE (1980) as well. Movies just don't look like THE IMMIGRANT anymore: the attention to detail is such that you feel transported to 1921 Manhattan. Gray's use of CGI is seamless, utterly non-intrusive, and highly effective. He tells the story efficiently and succinctly, always focused and making every moment and every shot count as the film just under two hours and feels complete, where nine out of ten filmmakers would've had this clocking in at a minimum of three hours. His framing of the actors and the action throughout frequently resemble old photographs, and the composition of the final shot is stunning in its presentation. THE IMMIGRANT would obviously play best on a big screen, but most of us won't have that option. In the end, sure, it's just a movie, but when something this vital, ambitious, powerful, and just flat-out beautiful can't seem to find its place in the world, much like its beleaguered heroine, then there's something very wrong with the state of cinema and film distribution. This is a film that should be celebrated. Instead, it's being streamed. In short, THE IMMIGRANT is a masterpiece in search of an audience and it's time for James Gray to get his props as one of today's great filmmakers. The "James Gray is the best filmmaker you've never heard of" pieces every time he makes a movie are getting tiresome. Give him a seat at the table. He's earned it.
Written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson. Cast: Joaquin Phoenix, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Amy Adams, Laura Dern, Ambyr Childers, Jesse Plemons, Rami Malek, Kevin J. O'Connor, Madisen Beaty, Christopher Evan Welch. (R, 138 mins)
Don't look for any straightforward storytelling in THE MASTER, easily the most impenetrable and difficult work yet from Paul Thomas Anderson. Drifting away from the kinetic, propulsive, last-third-of-Scorsese's GOODFELLAS-style structure of BOOGIE NIGHTS (1997) and MAGNOLIA (1999) and feeling colder and even more stand-offish than his most recent film, THERE WILL BE BLOOD (2007), THE MASTER is not something easily digested in one viewing or even five. I'm not even sure if I like it, and that's never been a reaction I've had after seeing a Paul Thomas Anderson film (BOOGIE NIGHTS is probably my favorite film of the 1990s). There's a lot to admire in THE MASTER, but it's a film that never lets you in, and not in the way of needing everything explained to you. It keeps you at a distance and really doesn't let you know entirely what's going on or what the stakes are or why some people behave the way they do.
Joaquin Phoenix, in his first film since his I'M STILL HERE/"retiring from acting to become a rap star" prank/debacle that claimed James Gray's excellent TWO LOVERS as a casualty, stars as Freddie Quell, a disturbed WWII vet trying to adjust to postwar life. He's belligerent, antisocial, drinks too much (making his own concoctions with distilled paint thinner), and seems to have an immature fixation on the female anatomy. His unpredictable, often violent behavior gets him tossed from job after job, and by chance, he stows away on a boat that's hosting an extended wedding party for the daughter of Lancaster Dodd (Philip Seymour Hoffman). Dodd is a doctor, a philosopher, and the guru of a new religious belief known as The Cause (intended by Anderson to represent L. Ron Hubbard and Scientology, though the film isn't specifically about the religion itself). With nowhere else to go, and with Dodd enjoying his unusual beverage concoctions, Freddie becomes Dodd's de facto right-hand man in his quest to legitimize The Cause, even physically assaulting those who dare to question Dodd's teachings. From then on, the film focuses on the relationship between Dodd--"The Master"--and Freddie, and there's any number of interpretations to draw from it. Are they two sides of the same coin? Have they met, either in this life or in another? Is Freddie a spy who might turn on Dodd? Is Freddie welcomed into the Dodd family much like Mark Wahlberg's Dirk Diggler became part of the family of Burt Reynolds' Jack Horner in BOOGIE NIGHTS? Is this all a complicated man-crush or is unrequited, or even forbidden love?
THE MASTER looks stunning, from the beautiful cinematography to the painstaking production design and period detail. Hoffman is a commanding presence, and he's matched by Amy Adams as Dodd's devoted, controlling wife Peggy, who may be more in charge of The Cause than Dodd's devoted followers think. You've never seen Adams like this before, putting a disturbing spin on her inherent red-headed feistiness to where Peggy is either very brainwashed or she the one really calling the shots. Is she jealous of Dodd's bond with Freddie? Why does she tell him he can do whatever he wants as long as she or people they know don't find out about it? And why does she do this while jerking Dodd off and calmly demanding "Come for me"?
It's Phoenix who gets the film's most difficult and problematic role, and he too often succumbs to hamming it up and going overboard with the tics and mannerisms, but he has to keep up such a tortured intensity between Freddie's contorted stature and his weird body language that the actor looks like he's in constant physical pain. It's a brave performance and an almost impossible role to play, and I'm still not sure whether my issues are with the character or with the way Phoenix is playing him. But there's no denying how brilliant he is in his "sessions" with Hoffman's Dodd, or when Dodd makes Freddie go through an entire day of repetitively walking across a room and describing the wall and the window, or in one amazing scene of sustained, top-of-their-voice shouting from Phoenix and Hoffman as their characters argue in adjacent jail cells.
I'm still not sure what to make of THE MASTER. On one hand, it's too original, bold, and inventive to dismiss, but on the other, it's the first time I've felt Anderson was being pompous and pretentious, and a "Slow Boat to China" serenade isn't quite "I drink your milkshake!" In equal measures brilliant and overwrought, ambitious and aloof, hypnotic and baffling, THE MASTER is like no other film you've ever seen (except maybe John Huston's long-buried 1946 documentary LET THERE BE LIGHT, from which Anderson quoted several lines of dialogue), which is what we've come to expect from Paul Thomas Anderson. And like it or not, he's made the film he wanted to make. I'm just not quite sure what he wanted.
