ALLIED (US/China - 2016) Directed by Robert Zemeckis. Written by Steven Knight. Cast: Brad Pitt, Marion Cotillard, Jared Harris, Simon McBurney, Lizzy Caplan, August Diehl, Matthew Goode, Daniel Betts, Camille Cottin, Charlotte Hope, Thierry Fremont, Anton Lesser. (R, 124 mins) A defiantly old-fashioned throwback to glamorous star vehicles of yesteryear--except when it makes jarring modern concessions in terms of profanity and sexual content--ALLIED is an entertaining if occasionally implausible WWII espionage thriller that's equal parts wartime programmer and Alfred Hitchcock. In 1942, Canadian intelligence officer Max Vatan (Brad Pitt) parachutes into the French Moroccan desert for a covert mission in Casablanca, which gives you a good idea of what vibes ALLIED gives off in its early-going and throughout its superior first half. His assignment is to pose as a French phosphate engineer and team with Resistance leader Marianne Beausejour (Marion Cotillard), who fled France after she was the sole survivor of a massacre on a compromised outfit. Once she tutors him in making his Quebecois accent sound more Parisian, they're to go undercover as a married couple and blend in with other Nazi sympathizers, with the goal being the assassination of the German ambassador at an upcoming swanky dinner party. Their pretend marriage blossoming into real love during an afternoon desert sandstorm, Max and Marianne relocate to London and marry upon the completion of their mission, settling down into a domesticated existence with a newborn daughter, with family man Max taking a less dangerous office job at British military HQ.
That changes when his superior officer and friend Frank Heslop (Jared Harris) calls him in for a meeting with a high-ranking SOE official (the always sinister Simon McBurney). They have evidence that Marianne Beausejour was killed in 1941 and that the woman Max married is an impostor and a Nazi spy. He's to run a "blue-dye test" in which he gets a phone call, jots down some false intelligence info, then waits to see if decoders pick it up a few days later among their decryptions of German transmissions. If they do, then they know she's a spy and Max is to execute her immediately or be hanged for treason. Of course, Max refuses to believe their allegations and sets out to prove her innocence, even if it means disobeying direct orders and putting his own life at risk.
The script by Steven Knight (EASTERN PROMISES, LOCKE, PEAKY BLINDERS) does a nice job of refusing to pull punches and go for predictable, implausible twists in the name of pleasing the crowd. It's uncompromising in ways that movies for adults used to be, and it's one of the more effective ways that director Robert Zemeckis (BACK TO THE FUTURE, FORREST GUMP) establishes a vividly old-school mindset throughout the film. Going back to the groundbreaking WHO FRAMED ROGER RABBIT, Zemeckis has been a pioneer in the advancement of visual effects, As demonstrated in films like FORREST GUMP and THE WALK, and in his several motion-capture animated works like THE POLAR EXPRESS and BEOWULF, the one-time Steven Spielberg protege is obviously an advocate of digital filmmaking and CGI, and, for better or worse, they're used extensively throughout ALLIED. The recreations of Casablanca and London are generally well done on a visual level, though it rarely feels like anything but a greenscreen, which is a similar degree of artifice you'd see on a 1940's Hollywood set, but just lacks the organic feel (or maybe it's just me), and the CGI sandstorm leaves a lot to be desired. Cotillard is tasked with most of the dramatic heavy lifting even though Pitt gets more of a focus by way of Max's extensive investigating. But there's just something distractingly off about the appearance of the 52-year-old Pitt. Sporting some visible thick makeup under his eyes to wipe away the years required to play a character who's probably 20 years younger, his face almost seems airbrushed, like Milla Jovovich in the third RESIDENT EVIL movie. The resulting CGI sandblasting make him look waxy smooth and disturbingly artificial, almost like a CGI'd Brad Pitt being motion-captured by Andy Serkis. His closeups are enough to take you out of the movie, which is otherwise engrossing (the assassination sequence is top-notch) even if a bit silly at times, such as the perfect family picnic about 20 feet away from a downed German plane whose wreckage is still smoldering.
What would seem like holiday Oscar bait was only given a limited run by the perpetually cash-strapped Weinstein Company, who put all their awards season focus on THE HATEFUL EIGHT and CAROL and only rolled out the latest version of MACBETH on VOD and 108 screens at its widest release. A grim, muddy, and bloody take on the Shakespeare play by SNOWTOWN MURDERS director Justin Kurzel, MACBETH is a proper telling in terms of time period and most of the text ("Double double toil and trouble" is never invoked), but highly influenced by the likes of BRAVEHEART, VALHALLA RISING, and GAME OF THRONES. At times boasting the production design and garish lighting of a horror film, Kurzel's MACBETH has Michael Fassbender in the title role, a leader in the army of King Duncan (David Thewlis). Macbeth and Banquo (Paddy Considine) encounter four witches on a fog-enshrined battlefield, speaking of a prophecy in which Macbeth is made king. Macbeth's ambitious wife Lady Macbeth (Marion Cotillard) goads him into killing King Duncan in order to make the prophecy come true, leading to more murder, madness, guilt, and their ultimate downfall. Viscerally brutal but not quite as blood-splattered as Roman Polanski's essential 1971 MACBETH, probably the best big-screen version of the play (there's also Orson Welles' 1948 version), Kurzel's MACBETH is grand and epic in scope, visually stunning and not at all ornate and stagy like many interpretations. Fassbender and Cotillard are excellent, and they get fine support from Thewlis, Considine, Sean Harris as Macduff, Elizabeth Debicki as Lady Macduff, and Jack Reynor as Malcolm. It doesn't supplant Polanski's take, but it more than holds its own. Kurzel, Fassbender, and Cotillard worked together again on the big-budget video game adaptation ASSASSIN'S CREED, due out later this year. (R, 113 mins)
VICTORIA
(Germany - 2015)
There's an admittedly impressive technical achievement on the part of VICTORIA, a German film shot in one uninterrupted 134-minute take that director Sebastian Schipper, cinematographer Sturla Brandth Groven, and the cast pulled off on their third attempt. But after watching VICTORIA and asking yourself "How did they do it?," it's very likely you're next question will be "What the hell for?" A crime thriller where the crime takes place off-camera and the thrills are non-existent, VICTORIA opens in a Gaspar Noe-like strobe-lit club where the title character (Laia Costa), a young Spanish woman living in Berlin, meets a crew of nice enough guys and hangs out with them on a nearby rooftop. She clicks with one, Sonne (Frederick Lau), but an hour later, she ends up being the getaway driver for a hastily-planned robbery they're forced into by gangster Andi (veteran German character actor Andre Hennicke), a former prison acquaintance of Sonne's buddy Boxer (Franz Rogowski). After things predictably go south, Victoria and Sonne find themselves on the run as the cops close in on the area. VICTORIA takes place over a few blocks and Schipper keeps sending his characters in circles as the film plays out in real time and in one take. There's an undeniable accomplishment in the way Schipper coordinated everything in a limited area of real location shooting, but by the end, it doesn't feel like much more than an unedited rough cut of Roger Avary's KILLING ZOE. Because the camera has to follow the characters as they go from one location to another, it's an hour before the robbery even comes up as a subject, and Schipper mainly lets his actors riff and improvise in both German and English, with a couple of flubbed lines and one recovered gaffe where Costa takes a wrong turn during the getaway and Lau, Rogowski, and the other actors in the car start freaking out and telling her to turn the car around, but successfully stay in character the whole time. It shows a commitment by the cast, but to what end? There's absolutely nothing here but the gimmick, and the film's 81% rating (as of this writing) on Rotten Tomatoes is an indicator that critics seem to be praising the technical accomplishment rather than the movie itself. It's not an interesting story when told in this fashion (and it would probably run a leaner, tighter, and much more reasonable 85 or so minutes if told conventionally), the actors aren't really all that great at improv, and whatever appeal Costa establishes as Victoria immediately vanishes when she goes along with such a stupid plan and agrees to get into a car with some guys she met outside a club less than an hour ago, for no other reason than that's what Schipper needs her to do. Intruiging in theory but a deadening endurance test in practice, it's easy to respect the amount of work that went into making VICTORIA (watch Costa's climactic hotel room breakdown, complete with real snot!), but is that supposed to automatically make it a good movie? (Unrated, 138 mins, also streaming on Netflix)
THE TRIBE
(France/Ukraine/Netherlands - 2014; US release 2015)
In its own way as much of a stunt as VICTORIA, Myroslav Slaboshpytskiy's THE TRIBE is the kind of expectedly grim Eastern European miseryfest that film festival audiences love so much. But be assured, THE TRIBE isn't fucking around when it comes to complete commercial inaccessibility: Slaboshpytskiy shot the film with non-professional actors, all deaf-mute and using Ukrainian sign language with no subtitles, translations or voice-overs. The very concept sounds like a parody of experimental cinema, but Slaboshpytskiy and his neophyte actors manage to tell a story in purely visual and expressive terms, and while specifics may be lost in the non-translation, it's not hard to get the general idea of what's going on. But what's going on isn't something that should've taken over two hours to tell, and in a way that makes the work of Ulrich Seidl look like Garry Marshall. We don't eve know their names until the end credits, but THE TRIBE centers on Sergei (Grigoriy Fesenko), a new kid at a Ukraine boarding school for the deaf and mute. He quickly falls in with a group of powerful students who put him through the requisite hazing rituals before inducting him into their crime ring that's overseen by the hulking woodshop teacher (Alexander Panivan). Sergei is put in charge of transporting two female students that the school-based criminal outfit is pimping out at dive motels and truck stops, and he ends up developing feelings for one of them, Anya (Yana Novikova). The story arc is predictable, with Sergei going full MONA LISA to rescue Anya from her abusive situation. Sloboshpitsky uses a lot of long takes that are reminiscent of VICTORIA, but the film is generally structured in a standard linear fashion using familiar cutting and editing. Boasting a few scattered scenes of explicit sex, THE TRIBE gets more harrowing and brutal as it goes along, with an abortion scene that's difficult to watch and a finale that's memorable, to say the least. It's an unusual film and one that keeps hearing audiences at a distance by design, but it's just pointlessly overlong and there's too many stretches where things get repetitive to the point of oppression. (Unrated, 132 mins)
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.
Directed by Guillaume Canet. Written by Guillaume Canet and James Gray. Cast: Clive Owen, Billy Crudup, Marion Cotillard, James Caan, Mila Kunis, Zoe Saldana, Matthias Schoenaerts, Lili Taylor, Noah Emmerich, John Ventimiglia, Domenick Lombardozzi, Yul Vazquez, Richard Petrocelli, Jamie Hector, Eve Hewson, Griffin Dunne, Olek Krupa. (R, 129 mins)
Since his 1994 debut LITTLE ODESSA, writer/director James Gray's films have always felt out of place with contemporary cinema. Initially lumped in with the post-RESERVOIR DOGS, Tarantino indie scene, the not-prolific Gray has established himself as more of a Sidney Lumet disciple with his gritty, character-driven, low-key NYC period pieces that frequently involve cops, criminals, and the blurred lines that separate them (most notably his underrated 2007 gem WE OWN THE NIGHT, set in the late '80s with connected club owner Joaquin Phoenix taking on his Russian mob friends after they shoot his cop brother Mark Wahlberg). BLOOD TIES seems like the movie Gray's wanted to make for the last 20 years, but alas, he only co-wrote it, as TELL NO ONE director Guillaume Canet fashions this French production as a loving throwback to the tough, hard-edged NYC cinema of the 1970s. It's a triumph of production design and visual detail as Canet and the crew flawlessly recreate 1970s Brooklyn, augmented by subtle examples of seamless, non-intrusive CGI done right. If only as much attention had been paid to the script.
A remake of Jacques Maillot's 2008 film LES LIENS DU SANG (RIVALS), which was set in 1979 Paris, BLOOD TIES opens in 1974 Brooklyn (with a bloody, brain-splattering shootout accompanied by the Ace Frehley version of "New York Groove," which wasn't recorded until 1978 but let's not nitpick because it's a terrific scene) and offers the old standby of the just-paroled con (Clive Owen as Chris) trying to stay straight. He's constantly butting heads with his resentful brother, NYPD cop Frank (Billy Crudup in the role Canet himself played in RIVALS), who gets him a job at a garage where he meets and falls for cashier Natalie (Mila Kunis), while trying to connect with his two kids and dealing with his bitter, hooker ex Monica (Marion Cotillard). Meanwhile, Frank has arrested low-level mook Scarfo (BULLHEAD's Matthias Schoenaerts), who owns a van that's been tied to a rash of robberies. Scarfo claims he's innocent and the whole thing is a set-up by a vengeful Frank, who used to be involved with his wife Vanessa (Zoe Saldana). As Chris struggles to stay afloat after a potential deal to open a snack stand with his ex-con buddy Mike (Domenick Lombardozzi) falls apart, he eventually accepts a job from mob-connected bar owner Fabio (Yul Vazquez) to rub out three rivals with the Famous Last Words caveat "I just wanna get back on my feet...I'm not gonna make a habit of this." Of course, one job leads to another and as the cops continue to keep an eye on Chris, who buys Natalie a beautiful engagement ring and is suddenly able to afford an expensive new TV for their ailing father (James Caan), Frank starts getting heat from his boss (Noah Emmerich) and the NYPD brass starts questioning his loyalty.
Released in Europe last year at 144 minutes, BLOOD TIES has been cut by 15 minutes for its dump-job of a US release (28 screens and VOD). Whether distributor Lionsgate made these edits with or without Canet's involvement is unknown, but at least in this incarnation, it feels rushed and incomplete. It aspires to be an epic, sprawling crime saga, but it suffers from an awfully choppy opening half-hour and a finale that feels too abrupt, and as a result, the film jumps all over the place and feels like a series of vignettes rather than a cohesive whole. What exactly is Chris? It's explained that he was in prison for a revenge killing when his girlfriend--presumably Monica--was raped and he offed the attacker. But once out, he becomes a hit man and later, out of nowhere, he's suddenly a pimp. The film takes place over a few months from late 1974 into early 1975 but the time element never feels right. Too much goes down in such a short amount of time. Also, there's numerous instances where people are congregated in a scene and behaving as if their last scene together didn't happen. There's one glaring instance of two scenes that seem to be out of order when Frank kicks temporary roommate Chris out of his apartment, and in the very next scene, Frank is outraged and storms out of the room when he's told by an NYPD honcho that unless he tells Chris to move out, he'll have to turn in his gun and badge. The large supporting cast gets little to do: Caan has a big, emotional speech that feels shoehorned in, and Cotillard and Schoenaerts finally get their own plot threads going around 100 minutes into the movie, as if the filmmakers suddenly remembered they were in it.
Is this something unique to the US cut or was this a problem in the European version as well? Even if the flow and the rhythm of the story are improved by those missing 15 minutes, it won't eliminate the predictable story elements and the cliched execution. How many times have we seen the ex-con sucked back into "the life"? How many times have we seen brothers on opposite sides of the law clash only to have the familial bonds reunite them? It's a great song, but at what point do we stage an intervention for a filmmaker who makes the conscious, straight-faced decision to use the Velvet Underground's "Heroin" for a scene where a junkie falls off the wagon and hits bottom? Canet indulges in some heavy Scorsese worship throughout BLOOD TIES, and it's fun early on when he shows Chris watching Monica walk away in slo-mo to Lee Moses' "Bad Girl" or late in the film when he's fleeing the cops and speeding from place to place like Ray Liotta's coke-addled Henry Hill in GOODFELLAS. Scorsese-worship can be a blast--David O. Russell's AMERICAN HUSTLE is recent proof of that--but someone needs to tell Canet that you can't have the camera slowly move in on the pensive visage of Clive Owen to the opening guitar riff of Cream's "Sunshine of Your Love" nearly 25 years after GOODFELLAS and expect to be taken seriously.
BLOOD TIES is a mess, but it's a beautiful mess, and the performances of Owen and Crudup (looking a lot like a younger Harvey Keitel here) are top-notch. Canet aims high and sometimes hits the mark (there's a kinetic energy to the opening shootout, and one late phone call between Chris and Frank has a gut-wrenching moment of clarity for both of them), and even with its copious cliches, there's a very good film trying to break out of the merely OK one in which it's trapped. It's pretty obvious that Gray was a gun-for-hire on this one, probably brought on to ensure that the dialogue had a genuine NYC feel to it instead of sounding awkwardly translated from French. Gray's films don't lean this heavily on cliches and convention, whereas Canet is a movie buff with an obvious affinity for 1970s crime flicks and wanted to make one of his own. That's great, and he certainly succeeded on a visual level and got the right attitude from his actors--this is a rare-for-these-days example of a 1970s-set film not looking like a bunch of out-of-their element, in-over-their-heads actors playing ironic hipster dress-up against a gaudy digital greenscreen--but the script just doesn't hold up its end of the deal.
