ONCE UPON A TIME...IN HOLLYWOOD (US/UK/China - 2019) Written and directed by Quentin Tarantino. Cast: Leonardo DiCaprio, Brad Pitt, Margot Robbie, Al Pacino, Emile Hirsch, Margaret Qualley, Timothy Olyphant, Austin Butler, Dakota Fanning, Bruce Dern, Kurt Russell, Luke Perry, Julia Butters, Damian Lewis, Mike Moh, Lorenza Izzo, Damon Herriman, Zoe Bell, Lena Dunham, Rumer Willis, Samantha Robinson, Costa Ronin, Rafel Zawierucha, Nicholas Hammond, Mikey Madison, Madisen Beaty, Maya Hawke, Michael Madsen, Clifton Collins Jr, Scoot McNairy, Rebecca Gayheart, Marco Rodriguez, Clu Gulager, James Remar, Martin Kove, Brenda Vaccaro, Daniella Pick, Harley Quinn Smith, Omar Doom, James Landry Hebert, Lew Temple. (R, 161 mins) An epic, freewheeling, kaleidoscopic wet dream for hardcore movie nerds, ONCE UPON A TIME...IN HOLLYWOOD allows Quentin Tarantino to fly his geek flag like never before. What other director could get away with stopping a big-budget, wide-release summer movie cold for an impromptu lesson on the making of 1960s Italian spaghetti westerns and the Americanized pseudonyms that were often employed by their directors? A love letter to the Hollywood 50 years ago on the cusp of tumult and tragedy, HOLLYWOOD takes place in February and August of 1969 and centers on Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio), an actor desperately clinging to the fading fame brought by his starring turn a decade earlier on a TV western called BOUNTY LAW. The show was cancelled when he quit to do a pair of movies that ended up bombing (and he lost out to Steve McQueen for the lead in THE GREAT ESCAPE, a role he was up for along with "the Three Georges--Peppard, Maharis, and Chakiris") and has spent the latter half of the '60s doing failed pilots and bad guy guest spots on nearly every network TV show. He's desperate enough that he's seriously considering an offer by his new agent Marvin Schwarzs (Al Pacino) to head to Rome to make easy money doing spaghetti westerns and 007 knockoffs. He's also gotten a bad rep around town for his drinking, and multiple drunk driving accidents have caused him to lose his license, forcing him to be driven everywhere by his longtime stunt double Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt), who's also his errand boy, confidante, drinking buddy, and seemingly his only friend. When he isn't driving Rick around, house-sitting for him, or being a handyman around his house, Cliff lives in a broken down trailer behind the Van Nuys Drive-In with his loyal pit bull Brandy. Cliff's fortunes mirror those of Rick's: where Rick can only land quick-paycheck guest spots because of two costly big-screen flops and a troubled personal life, Cliff has become persona non grata among the Hollywood stuntman community after the mysterious death of his wife Billie (Rebecca Gayheart). It was ruled an accident but rumors still persist that he killed her and got away with it.
There's a kinship among the pair, but the laid-back Cliff tends to spend much of his time consoling the insecure and depressed Rick, who has a slight stutter offscreen and laments that he's "washed-up" and doesn't want to do "Eye-talian westerns." The third figure in the story is Rick's next-door neighbor, promising VALLEY OF THE DOLLS co-star Sharon Tate (Margot Robbie), whose new husband, Polish filmmaker Roman Polanski (Rafel Zaweirucha), is the toast of the town with the huge success of ROSEMARY'S BABY. The lives of Rick, Cliff, and Tate will intersect in a variety of ways over the course of HOLLYWOOD's 161-minute running time, and while the specter of Charles Manson (played here by Australian actor Damon Herriman, also cast as Manson in the upcoming season of Netflix's MINDHUNTER) looms large over the proceedings, this is not another HELTER SKELTER chronicle of the Tate-LaBianca murders of August 9-10, 1969. Tarantino, with the help of veteran visual effects maestro John Dykstra (STAR WARS), vividly, almost obsessively, recreates 1969 Hollywood to the point where you feel immersed in the past. The period detail is often astonishing, from the cars to the movie marquees to the production design to its depiction of the counterculture and the perfect selection of needle-drops (bonus points for possibly being the first late '60s-set film involving hippies to not feature Buffalo Springfield's "For What It's Worth"). Rick's derisive scorn toward "the goddamn hippies" signifies his being stuck in the past of his heyday, while Cliff has a more accepting, come-what-may attitude, particularly in his recurring flirtaceous encounters from afar with hitchhiking flower child Pussycat (Margaret Qualley) until one fateful day when he finally decides to give her lift. As played by Robbie, Sharon Tate is the ingenue with a heart of gold, and the scene where she goes solo to a matinee at the Bruin in downtown L.A. to see herself in the Dean Martin "Matt Helm" adventure THE WRECKING CREW ("I'm in the movie!" she cheerfully tells the girl at the ticket booth) and gets quietly overcome with joy at the audience laughing at her comedic performance and cheering her kung-fu ass-kicking of co-star Nancy Kwan is truly touching.
Countless familiar faces play figures--both real and fictional--who wander in and out of the story, sometimes in the blink of an eye. On the entertainment front, there's Timothy Olyphant as LANCER star James Stacy, who would lose his left arm and leg in a motorcycle accident in 1973; the late Luke Perry, in his last film, as LANCER co-star Wayne Maunder; Nicholas Hammond as TV director and character actor Sam Wanamaker; and Rumer Willis as Tate friend Joanna Pettet. Emile Hirsch is Tate's ex-boyfriend Jay Sebring, who still remains close to her, patiently waiting for her to leave Polanski; Damian Lewis is an uncanny Steve McQueen getting stoned at the Playboy Mansion; Mike Moh is Bruce Lee in possibly the film's funniest scene; Kurt Russell and Zoe Bell are husband-and-wife stunt coordinators on LANCER (Russell is also the film's occasional narrator and is not playing his DEATH PROOF character Stuntman Mike as some speculated); Dakota Fanning is Manson follower Squeaky Fromme; Lena Dunham, Harley Quinn Smith (Kevin's daughter), and Maya Hawke (daughter of Ethan Hawke and Uma Thurman) are other Manson disciples; and in a role intended for Burt Reynolds, who attended a table read with Pitt and Fanning but died just before he was scheduled to shoot his scenes, Bruce Dern is elderly and blind George Spahn, the owner of Spahn Ranch, a long out-of-commission 55-acre movie and TV western location set that was taken over by Manson and his "family."
Tarantino treats ONCE UPON A TIME...IN HOLLYWOOD as his cinematic playground, and the more well-versed you are in obscure TV and Eurocult titles of the day, the more fun you'll have with it (I would love to see Rick Dalton and Gordon Mitchell in an Antonio Margheriti Eurospy thriller called OPERAZIONE DYN-O-MITE!). As has been the case with latter-day Tarantino (never more than in the bloated THE HATEFUL EIGHT, a story that didn't need to take 168 minutes to be told), his tendency to meander does rear its head every now and again. While it's important to the story in terms of Rick's bottoming out and eventual path to redemption, the painstakingly laborious recreation of long takes and sequences from LANCER, where Rick has a guest spot as a bad guy, is the filmmaker at his most self-indulgent. At the same time, Rick's interaction on the set of LANCER with a committed, eight-year-old method actress (Julia Butters) provides HOLLYWOOD with one of its most genuinely moving moments, along with the final scene, which actually had people in the audience applauding. As good as DiCaprio and Robbie are, the secret weapon here is Pitt, who delivers a possible career-best performance. He's at the center of one of the film's strongest sequences--a visit to the Spahn Ranch that's every bit as intense and stomach-knotting as Jake Gyllenhaal's journey into the film programmer's basement in ZODIAC--and he's the key element of a shocking climactic showdown for the ages in a startling bit of revisionist history that makes this a great companion piece to Tarantino's INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS.
Luke Perry (1966-2019)
Though mournful and elegiac at times, ultimately, ONCE UPON A TIME...IN HOLLYWOOD is surprisingly wistful and uplifting in its own strange way, and even though it exists in an insulated, alternate universe of make-believe (Vietnam is barely mentioned), it's indicative of an older and more reflective Tarantino. Granted, it's jaw-droppingly outrageous at times, but in the redemptive arcs of Rick Dalton and Cliff Booth in an industry that's leaving them behind, there's a certain parallel with Pam Grier's and Robert Forster's characters in JACKIE BROWN, and for all the game-changing influence that PULP FICTION had 25 years ago, it's JACKIE BROWN that's looking more and more like Tarantino's best work with each passing year. Like most Tarantino films, ONCE UPON A TIME...IN HOLLYWOOD is compulsively rewatchable--maybe fast-forward through a couple of those LANCER scenes on subsequent revisits--and filled with several moments that are instantly etched in your moviegoing memory. In spite of his self-indulgent tendencies--which some believe came about after the unexpected death of his regular editor Sally Menke in 2010, but he was getting pretty tough to rein in way back around the time of KILL BILL--and his omnipresent foot fetish (he seems really taken with Robbie's and Qualley's), he's one of the few American auteurs for which each new film remains a legitimate and wildly unpredictable event, and to that end, ONCE UPON A TIME...IN HOLLYWOOD delivers the goods.
Though it's anchored by two of the year's top performances, the noir-inspired THOROUGHBREDS never quite gels together like you hope, or at the very least, it's never quite as clever as it thinks it is. It's the directing and screenwriting debut of playwright Cory Finley, and though its talky script contains some insight and some often lacerating dialogue, the film never seems to shake the notion that it might've been a better fit for the stage. Lily (THE WITCH's Anya Taylor-Joy) and Amanda (READY PLAYER ONE's Olivia Cooke) were once best friends in high school but have grown distant in the years since. Now in college, they awkwardly reconnect when Lily agrees to tutor Amanda, who's awaiting trial for animal cruelty in the killing of her horse. As they spend more time together, the dynamic of their relationship undergoes subtle shifts and Amanda, who's been "diagnosed with everything" in the DSM-V ("I don't have any feelings. Ever.") brings out the sociopath within Lily, who's grown intolerant of her boorish, asshole stepfather Mark (Paul Sparks) and doesn't need much prodding when Amanda suggests killing him. The murder plot involves securing the services of a fall guy in the form of Tim (the late Anton Yelchin in his last film; production wrapped just two weeks before his tragic death in June 2016), a none-too-bright local drug dealer and registered sex offender following a fling with a high school student ("I wasn't 25, I was 23!" he tries to explain). Amanda records Tim agreeing to the plan to kill Mark and the girls prepare their alibi, but since this is that kind of film, things don't quite go according to plan.
THOROUGHBREDS only made it to 500 or so screens during its spring 2018 release, but it was one of those films that managed to develop a cult following while it was still in theaters. Many people went for the easy description of "HEATHERS meets AMERICAN PSYCHO," which is pretty much meaningless as far as what the film is all about. It's more of a cerebral mood piece in the guise of a Hitchcockian thriller, but its strengths come not from suspense but from the outstanding performances by Cooke (also great in the recent THE LIMEHOUSE GOLEM) and Taylor-Joy. They manage to create multi-dimensional characterizations even though Finley's insistence on withholding details often works against building any kind of flow or momentum. That works when the film plays more cinematically, but for a film that most often has the feel of a play, it too frequently comes off as forced and trying too hard, with characters referencing things they already know but having to stop and backtrack to shoehorn vital info in to get the audience caught up, leaving them to realize "Oh, Lily's father died?" or "Oh, she was expelled." Cooke and Taylor-Joy are terrific, and with limited screen time, Yelchin creates a memorably hapless sketchball with entrepreneurial pipe dreams that are clearly going nowhere fast, but THOROUGHBREDS is a film where the end result is a bit less than the sum of its parts. (R, 92 mins)
DELIRIUM (US - 2018)
Hot on the heels of STEPHANIE comes another long-shelved Blumhouse production, this one from director Dennis Iliadis and screenwriter Adam Alleca, the team behind the surprisingly not-terrible 2009 LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT remake. Shot in 2015 under the title HOME and quietly dumped on DVD two weeks after its gala VOD premiere, DELIRIUM is marginally better than the obviously unfinished and abandoned STEPHANIE, but that's not exactly a glowing recommendation. Released from a mental institution where he's been held since he was 12 years old, Tom Walker (Topher Grace) is placed under house arrest and left alone for 30 days at the family mansion where his disgraced politician father (Robin Thomas) has recently committed suicide. Tom is regularly badgered by his chain-smoking, flask-swilling, bitch-on-wheels parole officer Brody (Patricia Clarkson), but things get worse when he starts hearing noises and catching glimpses of his father's decaying corpse. He finds a tentative friend in grocery delivery driver Lynn (Genesis Rodriguez), but then his psychotic older brother Alex (Callan Mulvey) shows up and periodically vanishes as Tom is no longer sure what is real and what's in his imagination. 20 years earlier, 12-year-old Tom was rejected and humiliated by a girl and Alex talked him into getting back at her with a prank. Instead, Alex forced his little brother to watch as he beat the girl to a pulp and drowned her. Alex was sent to prison and Tom to a mental institution, and their shell-shocked mother vanished, leaving their domineering and impossible-to-please father behind. As the possibly paranormal hacktivity continues, Brody isn't buying Tom's stories of the house being haunted and doesn't believe that Alex has been visiting him because he was recently killed in prison fire.
Even on a rudimentary jump-scare level, DELIRIUM is a dull, unfocused mess. Iliadis drops the ball early on by never really getting the audience acclimated with the house, so when we hear noises and see Tom exploring, we really have no clue where he is in relation to the other areas or how he gets from one place to another. There's missed opportunities with the handling of Clarkson's character, who vacillates between sympathizing with Tom and openly expressing her desire to send him back to the institution for good. She even tries to seduce him at one point in what could've been an intriguingly perverse plot development, but then it's just dropped, which is a shame because Clarkson gives this thing its biggest jolts of life. The film spends a lot of time trying to convince you that Lily and Alex are figments of Tom's imagination, which is the only way those characters can possibly make any sense. Grace is cast radically against type as Topher Grace, and the film attempts to mine some easy humor from Tom being 20 years behind on pop culture and rocking out to The Presidents of the United States of America's "Lump" while wearing a Gin Blossoms concert tee and not knowing what Wikipedia is. DELIRIUM is bad, and while it's not quite engulfed in the dumpster fire flames of STEPHANIE, it's still easy to see why Universal sat on it for three years before a borderline covert release. Co-producer Leonardo DiCaprio took his name off of the movie, probably around the time that REVENANT Oscar buzz was picking up some heat. (R, 96 mins)
I KILL GIANTS (US/Belgium/China/UK - 2018)
Adapted from Joe Kelly and Ken Niimura's 2008 graphic novel and counting Chris Columbus among its boatload of producers, I KILL GIANTS is an earnest and sincere examination of a child coping with the grieving process that's frequently too heavy-handed for its own good. It's also a victim of bad timing. J.A. Bayona's A MONSTER CALLS explored very similar territory two years ago, and while the I Kill Giants graphic novel preceded both the book A Monster Calls and its eventual film version, the impact of I KILL GIANTS can't help but be diminished. In a small town on the coast of Long Island (but shot in Ireland and Belgium), young Barbara (Madison Wolfe of THE CONJURING 2) is living with her adult sister Karen (Imogen Poots) and teenage brother Dave (Art Parkinson). Karen is struggling to keep up with her own job and taking care of her siblings, and while Dave is engrossed in his video games, Barbara is acting out, seemingly spending her time with 20-sided die role-playing games but quietly prepping the town for an inevitable giant attack that she's certain she can ward off with traps and an all-powerful weapon she dubs "Covaleski," named after early 20th century Phillies pitcher Harry Covaleski. Derided as "the nerd queen" by Dave and relentlessly bullied at school by imposing mean girl Taylor (Rory Jackson), Barbara is frequently visited by "harbingers" warning of the pending attack. At the same time, she reluctantly befriends shy, lonely British transfer student Sophia (Sydney Wade) and gradually opens up to her and school psychologist Mrs. Molle (Zoe Saldana) about her plot to take on the giants.
Of course, the absence of a visible paternal figure in the house and Barbara's head-first dive into a complicated fantasy world is too big of a tip-off as to where I KILL GIANTS is ultimately headed, especially if you've seen A MONSTER CALLS. Making his feature debut, Danish director Anders Walter (an Oscar-winner for 2013's Best Live Action Short HELIUM), gets a marvelous performance out of Wolfe, who's so good that you'll wish her dedication was in service of a more consistently strong film. The ultimate reveal may result in more questions than answers--such as "How did this family situation never come up in conversation?" and "Is Dave even a member of this family?"--but it has some convincing visual effects and some genuinely heartfelt moments that may make it therapeutic for younger children coping with similar circumstances. Some strong parts but it never quite comes together as a whole. (Unrated, 106 mins)
LIVE BY NIGHT (US - 2016) Written and directed by Ben Affleck. Cast: Ben Affleck, Zoe Saldana, Chris Cooper, Chris Messina, Sienna Miller, Brendan Gleeson, Elle Fanning, Remo Girone, Robert Glenister, Miguel J. Pimentel, Matthew Maher, Anthony Michael Hall, Clark Gregg, Max Casella, J.D. Evermore, Christian Clemenson, Benjamin Ciaramello, Derek Mears. (R, 130 mins) Ben Affleck made his directing debut with 2007's excellent Dennis Lehane adaptation GONE BABY GONE, and after establishing himself as a solid filmmaker with 2010's THE TOWN and 2012's Best Picture Oscar-winner ARGO, he returns with LIVE BY NIGHT, based on another Lehane novel. Where GONE BABY GONE and THE TOWN (based on a Chuck Hogan novel) were set in contemporary Boston, LIVE BY NIGHT looks at the city in a Prohibition-era setting. While Affleck the director captures the look of late 1920s Boston, his script is all over the place and he's completely miscast in the lead role. Affleck isn't an actor who thrives in period pieces and the film would've been better served had he stayed behind the camera as he did with GONE BABY GONE and cast someone else (co-producer Leonardo DiCaprio, perhaps?). With his Panama hat and oversized suit, he never looks comfortable in the role of Joe Coughlin, a WWI vet and Boston stick-up man-turned-Tampa rum runner. There's simply too much story for a feature film, and here is yet another example of an overstuffed film that would've been better served as a cable miniseries where characters could be fleshed out and events wouldn't be so glossed over. The pacing is choppy and there's reams of sleepy,, mumbly Affleck narration to cover exposition and whole sections of plot that are missing, not to mention Scott Eastwood and Titus Welliver having their entire roles cut out (Welliver is still in the credits, but if he's there, I didn't see him). Robert Richardson's cinematography and Jess Gonchor's production design are top-notch and every now and again, there's a striking image (like a car engulfed in flames sticking out of a shallow lake) or a memorable line of dialogue (the "So what am I talkin' to you for?" bit is great), but the cluttered and muddled LIVE BY NIGHT is otherwise is just too familiar to make its own mark in the gangster genre, borrowing too many ideas from too many movies that came before it to tell a story we've seen countless times before.
Affleck's Coughlin is a small-time Boston hood who happens to be the son of a high-ranking police superintendent (Brendan Gleeson). He's also in love with Emma Gould (Sienna Miller), the moll of powerful Irish mob kingpin Albert White (Robert Glenister). Their plan to run away together is thwarted when she's intimidated into ratting him out to White, who beats him senseless and leaves him in a coma. After he wakes and serves a stint in prison, he's paroled only to find his father has died and Emma was killed by White. Hell-bent on revenge, Coughlin forms an unholy alliance with Italian crime boss Maso Pescatore (Remo Girone) to take over the booze operation in the Tampa enclave of Ybor City and cut White out of the picture. Heading to Tampa with his buddy Dion Bartolo (Chris Messina), Coughlin teams with Cuban gangster Esteban Suarez (singer Miguel, under his full name Miguel J. Pimentel) and falls for his sister and partner Graciella (Zoe Saldana). Coughlin has to deal with all sorts of pressure, from stern police chief Figgis (Chris Cooper) cordially warning him to stay in his territory and they won't have any trouble, to the local chapter of the KKK, led by Figgis' idiot brother-in-law R.D. Pruitt (Matthew Maher), who wants a 60% cut of the business since Joe's club caters to Cubans and blacks and because he's hooked up with Graciella. LIVE BY NIGHT also finds time for a subplot about Figgis' wholesome daughter Loretta (Elle Fanning) heading off to Hollywood to be a movie star but instead falling into drugs and prostitution. She then returns to Ybor City to become a fire-and-brimstone preacher warning the townsfolk about the dangers of gambling and "the demon rum," which stonewalls Pescatore's plans for Coughlin to build a casino.
There's also double-crosses against Coughlin by the increasingly greedy Pescatore, who wants his moron son Digger (Max Casella) to take over the Ybor City operation, a sudden reappearance by a character presumed dead for no discernible reason, and about four endings before the credits finally roll. People are introduced and things happen so quickly and at times randomly that it's sometimes difficult to process who's who and how they figure into the story. LIVE BY NIGHT is always nice to look at and Affleck has an undeniable flair with set pieces (including an intense early card game stick-up that he does in a single take), but it's lacking everywhere else. He tries to cover it up with all the narration, but the seams don't take long to show. Affleck's performance is curiously bland throughout, never seeming like a 1920s gangster but always like a modern actor playing gangster dress-up (and for a smart guy, Coughlin is pretty brazenly stupid about being seen in public with Emma). Graciella's character arc makes no sense, bemoaning her husband's (yeah, she and Coughlin get married offscreen and then it's casually mentioned several scenes later) dangerous career, seemingly forgetting that they met because she's a partner in a major Cuban crime organization. Gleeson and Miller have nothing to do, and Cooper's character never makes consistent sense from scene to scene. Veteran Italian character actor Girone (in his first American film in a career going back to 1974) and an outstanding Fanning fare best, even if her Loretta ends up being another underdeveloped plot tangent that briefly turns the film into an Eli Sunday sermon from THERE WILL BE BLOOD. Affleck tries to go for a MILLER'S CROSSING feel, but ends up with a rushed, lesser BOARDWALK EMPIRE, and his own lackluster performance never inspires you to care much about Coughlin. By the third or fourth ending, the relaxed pace starts to lend a second-tier Clint Eastwood feeling to the proceedings, further demonstrating the uneven tone of the entire project. LIVE BY NIGHT might've had potential, and perhaps a longer director's cut would help, but in the end, it's a formulaic, cliche-laden misfire from Affleck.
THE REVENANT (US/Hong Kong/Taiwan - 2015) Directed by Alejandro G. Inarritu. Written by Mark L. Smith and Alejandro G. Inarritu. Cast: Leonardo DiCaprio, Tom Hardy, Domhnall Gleeson, Will Poulter, Forrest Goodluck, Paul Anderson, Lukas Haas, Kristoffer Joner, Joshua Burge, Arthur Redcloud, Duane Edward, Brendan Fletcher, Melaw Nakehk'o, Fabrice Adde, Grace Dove. (R, 156 mins) Following his Oscar-winning BIRDMAN, Mexican filmmaker Alejandro G. Inarritu (AMORES PERROS) goes full Werner Herzog-meets-Terrence Malick with the unflinchingly brutal and extremely visceral revenge saga THE REVENANT. Based in part on a 2002 novel by Michael Punke, a fictionalized chronicle of famed 19th century trapper/explorer Hugh Glass, THE REVENANT is a semi-remake of the 1971 film MAN IN THE WILDERNESS, where "Zach Bass" was portrayed by Richard Harris during his post-MAN CALLED HORSE period of rugged, violent outdoor adventures. Inarritu constructs THE REVENANT as an homage chiefly to Herzog--with its location shooting in distant and difficult terrains of Canada and Argentina, relying on natural lighting and benefiting from the director's refusal to use greenscreen--but also to Malick, with its long takes of vast wilderness and nature shots with voiceover as Glass, played here by Leonardo DiCaprio, reflects and drifts in and out of consciousness. Exposed to the elements and turning in the most physically demanding performance of his career, DiCaprio is up to the challenges of what's essentially Inarritu's period-setting take on a muddy, bloody, snowy, and slushy survivalist thriller, and while there's a lot of contemplative, dreamlike artistry to establish cineaste cred and to draw comparisons to Malick's THE NEW WORLD, it's also get plenty of harrowing action and a strong narrative to make it accessible to mainstream audiences.
According to legend, Glass was hired as a guide for a group of trappers and frontiersman exploring the vast Louisiana Purchase area in 1823, and after being mauled by a bear, two men in the expedition were left behind to bury Glass when he died. The two men left him to die, taking his guns and equipment with them. Glass survived and traveled 200 miles with serious injuries and on a broken leg, crawling almost the entire way, to find the men and retrieve his belongings. Inarritu and co-writer Mark L. Smith (who's scripted mostly horror movies like VACANCY, Joe Dante's THE HOLE, and the upcoming American remake of MARTYRS) stick to that same basic story, but add a human element to Glass' quest for vengeance in the form of Hawk (Forrest Goodluck), his half-Indian teenage son with his late Pawnee wife. Glass is hired as a guide by a military exploration outfit headed by Capt. Henry (Domhnall Gleeson), who's brought along various mercenary frontiersman and fur trappers who make their living selling pelts. Over 30 of the 40 men in the expedition are killed in a battle with a ferocious Ree tribe, which forces the survivors to send their boat downriver as a decoy and travel the long journey back to the camp on foot if they have any chance of survival. Henry places his trust in Glass, who brought Hawk along, the two knowing the area better than anyone else. That doesn't settle well with Fitzgerald (Tom Hardy), an unscrupulous trapper and scalping survivor more concerned with his take on the pelt sales than with everyone's safety. The bigoted Fitzgerald also doesn't like having "half-breed" Hawk along and openly taunts Glass about his dead wife and questions his loyalty to white men. After Glass is viciously mauled by a bear and clings to life, Henry takes all but two of the men back to camp, leaving Fitzgerald and young, inexperienced Bridger (Will Poulter) behind with Hawk to bury Glass when he eventually dies, with orders to bring Hawk back with them to the camp. While Bridger is getting water from the river and Hawk is elsewhere, Fitzgerald convinces Glass to allow him to put him out of his misery, and as he's suffocating him, Hawk returns and attacks Fitzgerald. Fitzgerald barely tries to explain the circumstances, instead quickly opting to stab the boy to death as an immobile Glass watches helplessly. Disposing of the body and lying to the returning Bridger about the Ree tribe being nearby, Fitzgerald half-buries Glass alive and intimidates Bridger into going along with it.
Of course, Glass survives, a revenant returning from the "dead," so to speak. With open, festering wounds covering his body, he slowly regains his strength on his arduous journey back to Henry's camp to make Fitzgerald pay, facing the incredibly harsh elements, a group of French trappers who have abducted a young Ree woman (Melaw Nakahk'o), and the enraged Ree tribe led by Hikuc (Arthur Redcloud), the young woman's Chief father who will stop at nothing to find her. Inarritu channels Herzog's AGUIRRE: THE WRATH OF GOD and FITZCARRALDO in his depiction of Glass' single-minded pursuit (also, to an extent, Nicolas Winding Refn's brilliant 2011 minimalist Viking saga VALHALLA RISING). Glass' obsessive quest for revenge gives him strength and is as blood-soaked as any splatter film, with hacked off limbs, bleeding wounds, bitten-off appendages, scalpings, castration, and Glass using gun powder to cauterize a neck wound. The stunning cinematography by frequent Malick collaborator Emmanuel Lubezki (often utilizing the kind of long takes reminiscent of his work on Alfonso Cuaron's CHILDREN OF MEN), Ryuichi Sakamoto's score, and the intricately detailed production design by the great Jack Fisk (an Oscar-nominee for Paul Thomas Anderson's THERE WILL BE BLOOD and another go-to guy for Malick) combine with Inarritu's vision to create an incredibly rough and unforgiving landscape that vividly captures the merciless nature and the arduous toil of frontier life. Glass' contemplations of his late wife and his thoughts as he traverses the land of the living and the dead in fittingly mythic death-and-rebirth fashion often play as voiceover (and sometimes subtitled, as he speaks Pawnee) and are pretty blatant in their Malick worship, but THE REVENANT is a perfectly-balanced fusion of the arthouse and the commercial. A constantly grunting, wheezing DiCaprio, aided by some gruesomely realistic wound makeup, throws himself into the role with such a committed fervor that it's easy to overlook how great Hardy is here as well, playing one of the most despicably self-serving bastards to come down the pike in some time. In the end, it's little more than a high-end revenge story, but done with artistry and ambition by a genuine auteur at the top of his game.
Directed by Martin Scorsese. Written by Terence Winter. Cast: Leonardo DiCaprio, Jonah Hill, Matthew McConaughey, Margot Robbie, Kyle Chandler, Jean Dujardin, Rob Reiner, Jon Bernthal, Jon Favreau, Cristin Milioti, Shea Whigham, Joanna Lumley, Ethan Suplee, Jake Hoffman, P.J. Byrne, Kenneth Choi, Brian Sacca, Henry Zabrowski, Robert Clohessy, Christine Ebersole, Fran Lebowitz, Bo Dietl. (R, 180 mins)
Right on the heels of David O. Russell's de facto Martin Scorsese tribute AMERICAN HUSTLE comes the real thing, and while Scorsese, arguably American cinema's greatest living filmmaker, doesn't break any new ground here, there's nothing quite like watching a master do what he does best. Yes, THE WOLF OF WALL STREET finds Scorsese going back to the GOODFELLAS and CASINO well with his trademark relentless pacing, the precision editing skills of the great Thelma Schoonmaker (who hasn't worked on every Scorsese film but has been his partner-in-crime for the better part of 45 years, going back to his 1968 feature debut WHO'S THAT KNOCKING AT MY DOOR?), the breaking of the fourth wall with the protagonist directly addressing the audience, and a killer song selection propelling the action. In telling the story of convicted Wall Street investment broker Jordan Belfort (Leonardo DiCaprio) in the same manner he did with Ray Liotta's Henry Hill in GOODFELLAS and Robert De Niro's Sam "Ace" Rothstein in CASINO, Scorsese is squarely in "give the fans what they want" mode. Yes, it's familiar, but nobody does it like Scorsese and there's something about this particular manner of storytelling and the way he manages it that makes it pure, unabashed cinema at its most electrifying. There's a palpable, kinetic energy to this film and in its expert assembly that makes three hours fly by and a convoluted storyline coherent. Jaded cynics might accuse Scorsese of spinning his wheels, but he's 71 and has nothing left to prove. He's earned it. You won't find a bolder, more free-wheelingly insane, and just flat-out entertaining film in theaters right now. There's only one Scorsese, even he's said he might only have one, maybe two films left in him. So just enjoy it. We'll lose something irreplaceable when he's gone.
On the day he's hired at a prestigious Wall Street firm in 1987, Belfort is advised by his boss Mark Hanna (Matthew McConaughey) to jerk off at least twice a day and do plenty of coke if he wants to make it in the stock market. Recently married to Teresa (Cristin Milioti) and coming from a strong blue-collar background, Belfort makes some headway but the firm goes under in the Black Monday crash. Starting over at a cut-rate penny stock outfit in a strip mall, Belfort quickly establishes himself and with some guys from his neighborhood--whose sales experience is mainly confined to weed--creates a new firm called Stratton Oakmont. Belfort's right hand is the odd Donnie Azoff (Jonah Hill), a socially inept, frequently boorish individual who married his cousin and quits his job to join Belfort after seeing his car and a $72,000 pay stub. Roping in investors with blue-chip stocks and then conning them on the bullshit penny stocks which provide 50% commission, Belfort and his Stratton Oakmont underlings rapidly grow obscenely wealthy and prone to every over-the-top indulgence imaginable: a day at the office is tantamount to an id-driven bacchanal, with booze, cocaine, Quaaludes, prostitution, public sex, orgies, etc. By now a hopeless drug and sex addict, Belfort leaves the plain Teresa for the stunning Naomi (Margot Robbie), but his hunger for excess only grows, including S&M sessions with a dominatrix who inserts a lit candle up his ass. As the money keeps rolling in, Stratton Oakmont catches the attention of FBI agent Denham (Kyle Chandler) as Scorsese takes the film into an extended "last half hour of GOODFELLAS" territory when Belfort has to come up with convoluted schemes to get his money into a Swiss bank and keep the Feds off his back.
Anyone who knows Belfort's story (which inspired the 2000 film BOILER ROOM) is already aware that he was ultimately convicted of fraud and stock market manipulation and got a reduced sentence after he turned informant on his co-conspirators. He's since become an infomercial guru and motivational speaker. Even with the structural familiarity, Scorsese takes somewhat of a different approach to THE WOLF OF WALL STREET. Until Belfort's irrational behavior becomes violent near the end and the film turns deadly serious, the first 150 or so minutes are primarily conceived as a broad comedy. The sexual escapades of Belfort and his crew are almost CALIGULA-esque in their excess and depravity (Scorsese had to make some cuts to avoid an NC-17), and the drug episodes--the Lemmon 714 sequence is one of the most hilarious set pieces of 2013--almost take the film into the grotesquely comic territory of FEAR AND LOATHING IN LAS VEGAS, with some marvelously-executed physical acting by DiCaprio and Hill. In his fifth film with Scorsese, DiCaprio has never been better. While a good chunk of the film is played for often uncomfortable laughs in situations that are prone to going overboard, DiCaprio is given space to show the charisma that Belfort possessed amid his frequent atrocities. Belfort is an asshole and Scorsese shows that, but he's an asshole that people are drawn to, and even though success unleashes a monster, sometimes that decent blue collar kid shows up. DiCaprio explores this dichotomy in a terrific scene where he's about to leave the film as part of his plea deal and he singles out one broker--a single mom who was behind on her rent when she was hired--and speaks from the heart about how he gave her a salary advance because he believed in her.
But those meaningful, pensive moments are few and far between. Like its subject, THE WOLF OF WALL STREET is all about unabashed debauchery. It's profane, outrageous, raunchy, and gloriously offensive, whether Donnie's talking about the possibility of mentally-challenged children with his cousin/wife, saying if they had a "retard," he'd just take the child for a drive to the woods and just "set it free," or one stockbroker's inappropriate reaction to seeing Naomi for the first time ("I'd let her give me AIDS"). Scorsese and screenwriter Terence Winter (BOARDWALK EMPIRE) give the story space to develop and do a great job of keeping it contained even as its absurdity goes off the charts. Most other filmmakers would've had to whittle it down and still would've lost control, and a director with less clout would've been told to trim the Lemmon 714 section and probably the airplane orgy and probably the scene of DiCaprio and Hill double-teaming a hooker and definitely the scene of a prosthetic-penis-sporting Hill masturbating in a Quaalude-induced stupor. It's the kind of film where you're laughing even though you're appalled. Anchored by a career-best DiCaprio performance and a stellar supporting cast where everyone gets at least one memorable moment to shine (Rob Reiner, as Jordan's dad, losing his shit over getting a phone call during THE EQUALIZER; every time you see P.J. Byrne as Belfort's buddy Rugrat, with his "piece of shit hairpiece"; and a meeting between Belfort and Denham on Belfort's obnoxiously large yacht with its own helipad, where DiCaprio and Chandler do a brilliant job of showing both men psychologically wearing on one another), THE WOLF OF WALL STREET is almost like comfort food for Scorsese-philes. You've seen a lot of it before, but Scorsese is smart enough to not mess with success and doesn't fix what isn't broken. This is just great showmanship by a legend who may no longer have the drive and hunger of his MEAN STREETS youth, but he's still at the top of his game.
Written and directed by Quentin Tarantino. Cast: Jamie Foxx, Christoph Waltz, Leonardo DiCaprio, Samuel L. Jackson, Kerry Washington, Don Johnson, Dennis Christopher, Walton Goggins, Laura Cayouette, David Steen, Dana Gourrier, Nichole Galicia, James Remar, James Russo, Russ Tamblyn, Amber Tamblyn, Don Stroud, Tom Wopat, Bruce Dern, M.C. Gainey, Cooper Huckabee, Doc Duhame, Jonah Hill, Lee Horsley, Ted Neeley, Zoe Bell, Michael Bowen, Tom Savini, Robert Carradine, Michael Parks, John Jarratt, Quentin Tarantino, and with the friendly participation of Franco Nero. (R, 165 mins)
Perhaps cognizant of the fact that the likelihood of lightning striking twice with another reinvention of cinema along the lines of 1994's PULP FICTION is slim, Quentin Tarantino has spent the last 15 years content with being a mad scientist DJ of sorts, fusing various genres and making each new film an homage to the cult cinema of his past. JACKIE BROWN (1997) was his love letter to Blaxploitation; the two-part KILL BILL (2003/2004) his tribute to martial-arts films; DEATH PROOF (2007) his '70s drive-in/car chase throwback; and INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS (2009) his spin on WWII movies. DJANGO UNCHAINED is Tarantino's take on spaghetti westerns, namely Sergio Corbucci's DJANGO (1966), but reimagined as a pre-Civil War slavery/revenge saga. Like most Tarantino films after JACKIE BROWN (maybe his most restrained, disciplined film and one that just gets better with each passing year), DJANGO UNCHAINED is guilty of unabashed self-indulgence on the part of its creator, but it's filled with such inspired enthusiasm, crackling dialogue, and a heart-on-its-sleeve love of movies that its appeal--so long as you can get by the splatter and the constant barrage of racial slurs--is positively infectious. Tarantino's films of late aren't perfect and one could argue that there's some regression from the surprising maturity of JACKIE BROWN. But really, if he just kept trying to top PULP FICTION, he'd fail miserably. Films like BASTERDS and DJANGO UNCHAINED may not be reinventing the wheel (though they may try to reinvent history), but there's no denying that they're distinctly Tarantino and couldn't have been made with the same wit, style, and passion by any other director. Flaws and indulgences aside, DJANGO UNCHAINED is a captivatingly unhinged, over-the-top blast.
In 1858 Texas, Django (Jamie Foxx) is a slave purchased by German dentist/bounty hunter Dr. King Schultz (Christoph Waltz). Schultz is after the fugitive trio of Brittle brothers, and it's been brought to his attention that Django knows what they look like. So, the doctor offers Django a deal: travel with him as a "valet," and point out the Brittles, and receive a third of the reward money along with his freedom. The two make such a great team that the deal blossoms into a partnership and a friendship, and Schultz offers to help Django find his wife Broomhilda (Kerry Washington), whose whereabouts are unknown after the two were split up by a vengeful plantation owner (Bruce Dern) when they attempted to escape. After doing some research, Schultz discovers that Broomhilda was sold to Calvin Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio), the flamboyant owner of the plantation Candieland. Posing as a pair of slavers interested in purchasing slaves for "Mandingo fighting," Schultz and Django arrive at Candieland to rescue Broomhilda, but face an unexpected obstacle in elderly house slave Stephen (Samuel L. Jackson).
Tarantino's gift for the verbose is on full display here, and, as in BASTERDS, it's Waltz who benefits the most, even though he's playing a good guy here--probably the moral center of the film--who's capable of shocking violence. Schultz's mentor/student relationship with Django recalls Lee Van Cleef and Clint Eastwood, respectively, in Sergio Leone's FOR A FEW DOLLARS MORE (1965). The pair make a memorable team and are given strong support by the villainous turns of DiCaprio and Jackson. Candie is the easily identifiable villain and DiCaprio relishes the chance to play such a pompously sneering scumbag, but Candie is frequently acting under the manipulative machinations of Jackson's Stephen, who arguably emerges as the film's true antagonist. One of the most diabolical representations of the "Uncle Tom" stereotype ever presented, Stephen's self-loathing of his race and his alternately pragmatic, humiliating, and malicious eagerness to constantly be in the good graces of the rich and powerful Candie makes him one of the most complex characters in all of Tarantino's films. It's a difficult role that Jackson essays very well while still dropping "motherfucker"'s as only Samuel L. Jackson can.
The supporting cast is filled with recognizable faces and Tarantino B-movie favorites, some of whom have little more than walk-ons. Original Django Franco Nero has a brief conversation with Foxx's Django ("The D is silent," Foxx says after introducing himself. "I know," Nero replies), and it's great to see guys like Dern, Don Stroud, Russ Tamblyn, Tom Wopat, and Lee Horsley again, however briefly. Going back to John Travolta in PULP FICTION, Robert Forster in JACKIE BROWN, and David Carradine in KILL BILL, Tarantino always seems to give a forgotten actor another shot, and here it's BREAKING AWAY (1979) star Dennis Christopher in a showy supporting role as Candie's weasally lawyer. Jonah Hill turns up as a doofus KKK member for apparently no other reason than Tarantino wanted to put him somewhere. The KKK bit and a later sequence with Tarantino attempting an Australian accent as a slave trading employee with Michael Parks and John Jarratt (two of the director's apparently 10,000 favorite actors) are probably the two most egregious examples of things that should've been cut and could've brought the running time down to something more reasonable than a bloated 165 minutes, especially with Parks/Jarratt/Tarantino sequence coming after a jaw-dropping, splatter-filled shootout (all glorious squibs! No CGI!) that paints the walls of Candieland bright red and would've made Sam Peckinpah hard.
Continuing his trend of anachronistic music cues (like David Bowie's CAT PEOPLE theme turning up in BASTERDS), Tarantino expectedly utilizes vintage Italian western themes by Luis Bacalov, Ennio Morricone, and Riz Ortolani, but also songs by Rick Ross, James Brown & 2Pac, and even Jim Croce, and the effect, while jarring, actually works. DJANGO UNCHAINED is an insane, freewheeling mash-up of cult movie/spaghetti western/exploitation madness that could only be a Quentin Tarantino film. He may not have another game-changer like PULP FICTION in him, but he really doesn't need one. There's nobody who does what Tarantino does with such unbridled glee and on such a grand scale. DJANGO UNCHAINED isn't his best film, but like most of his work (except for that dreadful first half of DEATH PROOF), it will likely prove to be an endlessly rewatchable one, and that'll do just fine.
