Promised Land: Rock-solid advocacy cinema

Promised Land (2012) • View trailer
Four stars. Rating: R, for profanity
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 1.9.13


Matt Damon hasn’t written many scripts since 1997’s Good Will Hunting, his Academy Award-winning debut effort with Ben Affleck. His prudence is understandable; where does one go, from up?

Hoping to undo the doubts raised by a local farmer who warns that fracking is anything
but a safe means of obtaining "clean" natural gas, Steve Butler (Matt Damon) takes
the microphone during a McKinley town meeting. Unfortunately, his usual smooth
patter will fail him a bit here, leading to a divided community ... and displeasure on the
part of Steve's corporate bosses.

Good Will Hunting was directed by Gus Van Sant; no surprise, then, that they collaborated on Damon’s next script, 2002’s little-seen (with good cause) Gerry.

Perhaps chastened by that experience, Damon put his word processor in the closet for a decade, while crafting an impressive acting career as both action hero — the Bourne series — and overall international film star.

But writers never quit; telling stories is in their blood. No doubt Damon was waiting for just the right property, and he certainly got it with Promised Land. Once again under Van Sant’s capable guidance, this captivating drama gets its juice from well-crafted characters, tart dialogue, a solid ensemble cast and a hot-button scenario ripped from real-world headlines.

Damon shares scripting duties with John Krasinski, a rising film star making good on the promise he has shown for so many years, on television’s The Office. Krasinski isn’t known as a writer — unless once includes 2009’s best-forgotten Brief Interviews with Hideous Men — but he certainly rises to the occasion here. He and Damon have deftly adapted a story by Dave Eggers, who burst on the scene a few years ago, with scripts for Away We Go and Where the Wild Things Are.

Good screenplays get their power from many elements. It’s not enough to craft piquant one-liners; they must be true to a well constructed plot. (They also must be delivered well by actors who understand how to maximize the impact of crisply timed dialogue, and that’s where we credit Van Sant.) The characters themselves must be interesting, efficiently sketched and cleverly integrated with all the other players on stage. We must care about them, either as good guys or bad guys.

Most of all, they must change — mature, regress, whatever — as a result of what happens to them.

A tall order all around.

Factor in a desire to be relevant — to indict a topic of the day — and most writers fail to juggle all those fragile eggs.

Damon and Krasinski, in welcome contrast, never err. Even casual exchanges of dialogue have consequences; watch for the payoff on a passing reference to a little girl selling lemonade outside a high school gymnasium. Goodness, it could be argued that she carries the moral weight of the entire film. That is sharp scripting.

Lincoln: The greatness of a man

Lincoln (2012) • View trailer
Four stars. Rating: PG-13, for grim war violence, dramatic intensity and fleeting profanity
By Derrick Bang

Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln, fueled both by Tony Kushner’s lyrical screenplay and Daniel Day Lewis’ astonishing performance, may be one of the finest period dramas ever brought to the big screen.

A delegation from the Confederacy is en route with an offer of peace that could end
the four-year Civil War, but Lincoln (Daniel Day-Lewis, right) knows that if the Southern
states return to the union, all hope of passing the 13th Amendment will vanish. He
therefore plays a dangerous waiting game, despite the warning from Secretary of State
William Henry Seward (David Strathairn), who worries that any public hint of this delay
would blossom into a public relations nightmare.

It’s akin to time travel: Our 19th century United States comes to vibrant life, thanks to impeccable work by production designer Rick Carter (an Oscar winner for Avatar), costume designer Joanna Johnston and, most particularly, cinematographer Janusz Kaminski (Oscars for Schindler’s List and Saving Private Ryan). You can practically feel the dust, grit and coal smoke coming off the screen.

Kushner’s dense script demands — and receives — a massive cast, with scores of speaking parts. The role call is a Who’s Who of names we remember from history class, and the driving narrative often unfolds with the confrontational snap of TV’s West Wing.

And yet...

For all its authenticity and casting excellence, Spielberg’s 150-minute film is long, slow and occasionally ponderous. It’s also claustrophobic at times, with some dialogue exchanges seemingly designed for stage presentation (no surprise there, I guess, since Kushner is a Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright who “moonlights” in cinema).

The focus is narrow, as well. Although based in part on Doris Kearns Goodwin’s book, Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, Kushner concentrates exclusively on the events of January 1865, with a brief epilogue in April of that same year. The goal, during this climactic point of Lincoln’s presidential career: passing the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, in order to abolish slavery. Permanently.

The novel twist, which conflicts juicily with Lincoln’s generally accepted image: the degree to which he risked delaying the Civil War, already a four-year conflict that had claimed hundreds of thousands of young soldiers on both sides, in order to win passage of that amendment in the House of Representatives.

Water for Elephants: Medium-top melodrama

Water for Elephants (2011) • View trailer for Water for Elephants
3.5 stars (out of five). Rating: PG-13, for violence, dramatic intensity and mild sensuality
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 4.22.11


Acting flavors of the month shouldn't be allowed anywhere near prestige projects.

The newbie's presence inevitably affects atmosphere and tone, and sometimes story elements are modified — or compromised — according to this fresh young talent's strengths ... or limitations.

When August (Christoph Waltz, left) begins to suspect that his wife, Mariena
(Reese Witherspoon), and Jacob (Robert Pattinson) have become more than
troupe acquaintances, he orchestrates a cruel charade and orders them to
participate; we nervously eye this uncomfortable game, while also wondering
why the circus owner has insisted on the presence of Rosie, the company's
new elephant star.

Robert Pattinson's most visible problem is an acting range that stretches most of the way from A to B. He delivers tortured angst quite well, having had plenty of practice as the sparkly vampire love interest in the Twilight series. The trouble is, Pattinson's apparent takes on more cheerful emotions — happiness, satisfaction, love — still look very much like ... well, tortured angst.

He's therefore quite credible here while pining for Reese Witherspoon, or one of the most personable elephants ever captured on camera ... although it looks very much like the way he pines for Kristin Stewart's Bella, in the Twilight movies.

When things go his character's way in Water for Elephants, though ... well, it's difficult to tell the difference.

In a nutshell, both Witherspoon and supporting actor Christoph Waltz act circles around Pattinson. They're so far superior that he all but vanishes from the screen: rather awkward, given that his character is this story's protagonist. Heck, Mark Povinelli, in a minor role as a dwarf circus clown named Kinko, is more credible — and gives us a better sense of his character — than Pattinson.

In most other respects, director Francis Lawrence delivers a respectable adaptation of Sara Gruen's best-selling novel, thanks in great part to a thoughtful, well-constructed screenplay from Richard LaGravanese (who also adapted The Bridges of Madison County and The Horse Whisperer, among his numerous other credits). He has, of necessity, condensed many of the events from Gruen's dense Depression-era saga; he and Lawrence also have made the story far more viewer-friendly, toning down both the period squalor and often shocking animal cruelty, as befits a gentler PG-13 rating.

So while this film affords a reasonable glimpse of the hard-scrabble conditions found within a third-rated Depression-era traveling circus, the cruelty and sadism displayed by numerous characters in Gruen's book have been condensed into a single, supremely malevolent figure: Waltz's August, owner/manager of the Benzini Brothers Circus ("the most spec-ta-cu-lar show on Earth!").

But his introduction comes later. We first meet Jacob (Hal Holbrook) in the present day: an old-timer disgusted with life in a nursing home, who has wandered off to visit a nearby circus. Jacob winds up recounting his youthful days to an interested listener, and thus we're whisked back to the 1930s, as a polished and confident veterinary medicine student (now played by Pattinson) prepares to take the test that will confer his degree. But the exam is interrupted by a crisis: Jacob's two loving parents have been killed in a road accident. The young man subsequently learns that he's penniless, his parents having converted their house and business into cash, in order to fund their only child's education.

Bereft and adrift, Jacob hits the road, unable to return to the life and career that had been so carefully planned.

(One would think, given the nature of Jacob's devotion to his mother and father, that he'd honor their memory by taking the damn exam and hanging up his vet-med shingle. But then, of course, we wouldn't have a story...)

That Evening Sun: Simmering tension

That Evening Sun (2010) • View trailer for That Evening Sun
3.5 stars (out of five). Rating: PG-13, for battlefield violence and profanity
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 3.11.10
Buy DVD: That Evening Sun • Buy Blu-Ray: That Evening Sun [Blu-ray]


Some films get the bulk of their dramatic heft from the interactions between central characters; others take a subtler approach, building mood and atmosphere into a sort of cinematic tone poem that evokes an emotional response with a minimum of dialogue.

That Evening Sun is just such a film.

Abner Meecham (Hal Holbrook) is surprised to find his home occupied by a
woman (Carrie Preston) and her barely dressed daughter, Pamela (Mia
Wasikowska), but he has an even nastier jolt in store: the male presence in this
family, who turns out to be a much-despised acquaintance.

Although fueled by star Hal Holbrook's faultless performance as an octogenarian not about to go quietly into the good night, director/scripter Scott Teems — adapting William Gay's short story, "I Hate to See That Evening Sun Go Down" — isn't all that concerned with conventional storytelling.

Teems establishes place first: the dilapidated, financially distressed, suffocatingly hot purgatory of a tiny Tennessee community well on its way to becoming a ghost town. Not since 1981's Body Heat has the sweat-stained discomfort of oppressive humidity been so convincingly caught on camera; Teems and cinematographer Rodney Taylor have quite a talent for weaving random images — humming insects, sun-baked wood, shimmering roads — into a tapestry of weary discomfort.

The events detailed in this setting are more a random snapshot than a linear narrative with a fixed introduction and conclusion, and that's appropriate; Gay's prose has been compared to William Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor and Cormac McCarthy, for the way it sets a mood more than anything else. Indeed, Gay dedicated this short story to McCarthy.

Teems' film also is unsettling because of the way it works against our expectations; the few characters in this story aren't black and white, but more shades of gray.

One thing becomes clear, though, fairly quickly: Nobody is apt to wind up happy when these events play out.