The Boys in the Boat: A riveting historical sports saga

The Boys in the Boat (2023) • View trailer

Four stars (out of five). Rated PG-13, for occasional profanity

Available via: Movie theaters

By Derrick Bang

Some people have levels of strength, grit and determination that challenge credibility, and can only be called heroic.

 

That certainly was true of the 1936 University of Washington junior varsity rowing team, which became the subject of Daniel James Brown’s 2013 best-seller, on which this film is based. (The book also prompted a 2017 episode of PBS’ American Experience, “The Boys of ’36.”)

Director George Clooney clearly has a soft spot for period sports stories — his 2008 dramedy, Leatherheads, is seriously underrated — and he has a clear winner here. Although both book and film focus on scrappy Joe Rantz (played here by Callum Turner), scripter Mark L. Smith has narrowed the window to the 1935-36 academic year.

 

Clooney opens with a sweet prologue that echoes the similar “bookending” that Steven Spielberg employed in 1998’s Saving Private Ryan. We then flash back to the mid-1930s, with the United States mired in the Great Depression. 

 

Joe, on his own since age 14, finished high school and somehow managed to get enrolled at the University of Washington. He’s an attentive student, despite living in the remnants of a car, studying by the light of a lantern, and frequently going hungry. Employment has been spotty, and not quite enough to maintain tuition fees.

 

As this saga begins, he’s given a 14-day notice to pay the balance, or face expulsion.

 

Best friend Roger Morris (Sam Strike), equally poor and struggling, learns of potential salvation: obtaining a spot on the university rowing team, which would include food, lodging and enough money to handle tuition.

 

But Joe and Roger are hardly unique; they’re among literally hundreds of young men who show up for tryouts. Coach Al Ulbrickson (Joel Edgerton, note-perfect) and Assistant Coach Tom Bolles (James Wolk) calmly explain that the odds are heartbreaking; the one team opening has only eight spots, plus an alternate.

 

Edgerton masterfully handles Ulbrickson’s initial warning, as he catalogues the degree to which the human body simply wasn’t designed for the amount of punishment inflicted by this sport; it’s a superbly scripted speech, delivered with gently implacable emotion. 

 

Ulbrickson has his own share of troubles. His rowing teams have performed poorly during recent years, and their continuing losses to Cal (UC Berkeley’s) team are particularly galling. He’s given to understand that if things don’t improve, funding may be eliminated.

 

Thirteen Lives: Absolutely riveting

Thirteen Lives (2022) • View trailer

Five stars (out of five). Rated PG-13, for dramatic intensity and brief profanity

Available via: Amazon Prime

By Derrick Bang • Published in The Davis Enterprise, 8.5.22

Lightning does strike twice in the same spot.

 

Back in 1995, with Apollo 13, director Ron Howard achieved the impossible: He generated minute-by-minute, edge-of-the-seat suspense despite the fact that we knew, going in, what the outcome would be.

 

As the Thai Navy SEALs watch dubiously, British Cave Rescue Council divers Rick Stanton
(Viggo Mortensen, foreground left) and John Volanthen (Colin Farrell, foreground right)
begin their attempt to penetrate deep into the cave system, in order to determine if the
missing children are alive.

He has achieved the same with Thirteen Lives.

This was another “The whole world is watching” event, during late June and early July 2018. Social media shared updates in real time; eyes were glued to televised news feeds. Given what eventually went down, a big-screen drama was inevitable.

 

The result — in the hands of Howard and scripters William Nicholson and Don MacPherson — is must-see cinema.

 

(That said, this is not a film for claustrophobes.)

 

On June 23, following a playful afternoon scrimmage, 12 members of the “Wild Boars” Thai soccer team, ages 11 to 16, impulsively decide to visit the popular Tham Luang cave beneath Doi Nang Non, a mountain range bordering Thailand and Myanmar. Their assistant coach (played by James Teeradon Sahajak) insists on chaperoning. 

 

Back in their Chiang Rai province village, the team parents have gathered for one boy’s birthday party. When the team fails to show up on time, amid the drenching rain of an unexpectedly early monsoon, one lad — who opted out of the cave excursion — tells where they all went. As a body, everybody rushes to Tham Luang.

 

They find the boys’ parked bicycles at the cave entrance, but there’s no sign of anybody … and the water level inside the cave is rising rapidly.

 

What happens next ultimately involves roughly 100 government officials, 900 police officers, 2,000 soldiers and more than 10,000 volunteers from 18 countries, all of whom rapidly build what essentially becomes a bustling pop-up city outside the cave.

 

It’s barely organized chaos, but Howard has long excelled at finding the small moments and key individuals amid such bedlam; that’s where gripping drama resides. Nicholson and MacPherson’s script enhances the tension by delivering key dollops of information — such as the cave’s length — in small increments.

 

The film’s first audacious move comes when days pass, and the focus remains on the expanding rescue operation; we get no cut-aways to the boys and their coach, and we wonder: Are they even alive?

 

On top of which, as we learn more about the lengthy cave’s various zones, twists and turns — now mostly flooded — the situation seems dire. Hopeless. Impossible.

Gringo: South of the border fiasco

Gringo (2018) • View trailer 
Three stars. Rated R, for profanity, violence and sexual content
By Derrick Bang

If the rest of this film were as accomplished as David Oyelowo’s starring performance, it would be far more entertaining.

Who knew Oyelowo could be so adorable and laugh-out-loud hilarious? It’s quite a surprise from the actor who brought such dignity to memorable roles in A United Kingdom, Queen of Katwe and Selma (the latter playing no less than Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.).

Harold (David Oyelowo, left) grows increasingly suspicious when his bosses —
Richard (Joel Edgerton) and Elaine (Charlize Theron) — insist on joining him for what
should be a routine visit to their pharmaceutical company's Mexican manufacturing plant.

Clearly, true acting talent knows no genre boundaries.

Alas, Oyelowo is by far the best part of Gringo, which otherwise is a mess. Scripters Matthew Stone and Anthony Tambakis appear to be going for the uneasy blend of crime thriller and dark-dark-dark comedy that was pulled off so brilliantly by 1993’s True Romance, but that’s a hard act to duplicate. That film was scripted by Quentin Tarantino, and — frankly — Stone and Tambakis aren’t fit to clean the keys of his laptop.

The elements are in place here; Stone and Tambakis simply don’t know how to blend the ingredients into a suitably tasty final product. They badly misjudge some character development, overlook some obvious plot twists, and build to a resolution with at least one (perhaps two) deeply unsatisfying outcomes.

Nash Edgerton’s direction doesn’t help; his handling of the film’s tone is all over the map, and he lets co-star Charlize Theron get away with a truly dreadful performance (something I wasn’t aware she was capable of). Edgerton is a former stunt man and director of video shorts with only one prior big-screen feature to his credit — 2008’s so-so The Square — and I can’t help wondering if his presence here has less to do with having paid sufficient dues, and more to do with his relationship to better-known younger brother Joel Edgerton, who also co-stars in this uneven thriller.

In Hollywood, it truly does pay to have friends in high places.

The story is complicated, so get out your notebooks:

Harold Soyinka, an intelligent but naïvely loyal manager at the pharmaceuticals firm Promethium, is blindly unaware that his boss and (supposed) best friend, Richard Rusk (Edgerton), is a rapacious corporate shark who is cheerfully willing to screw anybody in service of further fattening his bank account. Indeed, Richard is screwing company co-owner Elaine Markinson (Theron), a jaw-droppingly crass, vulgar and profane bitch who casually employs sex as a weapon.

Theron’s initial scenes are a perfect example of Nash Edgerton’s poor direction. Her crude, bad-mannered put-downs and liberal F-bombs look and sound contrived, as if Theron isn’t comfortable delivering them, or doesn’t believe in her character ... or something. Whatever the reason, her performance is off-kilter, and remains so; the film never recovers from Elaine’s behavior.

Richard also is sleeping with Harold’s wife, Bonnie (a miscast and badly used Thandie Newton), because ... well, just because. Neither Bonnie nor this sidebar affair is well developed.

Red Sparrow: Flies high

Red Sparrow (2018) • View trailer 
Four stars. Rated R, for strong violence, torture, graphic nudity, profanity and sexual content
By Derrick Bang

Red Sparrow has the crisp, nefarious and extremely nasty verisimilitude of actual spycraft, and with good reason; it’s based on a 2013 novel by Jason Matthews, who spent 33 years with the CIA’s Directorate of Operations, where — as acknowledged in a 2015 New York Times interview — he recruited and managed foreign agents, “often in places where such activity was forbidden.”

Having endured a regimen of vile and debasing treatment while at a specialized spycraft
school, Dominika (Jennifer Lawrence) now feels nothing but contempt for her
Uncle Vanya (Matthias Schoenaerts), who she once naïvely assumed wanted
only the best for her.

Justin Haythe’s screenplay adaptation has the slow burn of a complex John Le Carré espionage thriller, which must please Matthews, a fan of both that author and Ian Fleming. Frankly, I’m astonished; Haythe has no obvious experience with spy thrillers, and is most recently known for junk such as The Lone Ranger and the execrable A Cure for Wellness. It’s nice to see this significantly more polished side.

Austrian director Francis Lawrence obviously has developed a rapport with star Jennifer Lawrence, having helmed her final three Hunger Games outings. Red Sparrow is far more serious stuff: a thoroughly absorbing saga of regret, duplicity and reprehensible manipulation, set in a clandestine zone of prickly, real-world geopolitics.

Matthews must be congratulating himself for prescience: Such scheming cloak-and-dagger stuff seems even more credible now, at a time when Russia’s destabilizing activities have become daily front-page news.

Lawrence stars as Dominika Egorova, a talented member of the Bolshoi Ballet, introduced as she takes the stage for a standard performance (if anything done by Bolshoi dancers can be considered “standard”). Francis Lawrence cross-cuts from these scenes to others involving the late-night exchange of information between deep-cover CIA operative Nate Nash (Joel Edgerton) and a mole buried deep within upper-level Russian security operations.

Both sequences go awry. Dominika suffers an on-stage accident that destroys her career — an early, horrifying example of this film’s willingness to shock — while Nate’s meeting is exposed by the chance arrival of Russian police officers.

For Dominika, it’s a shattering, end-of-the-world catastrophe, and not merely because she spent her entire childhood training to be a dancer. She’s the only child of an invalided single mother (Joely Richardson) to whom she is devoted, and whose care — and the reasonably nice apartment in which they live — have been funded by her Bolshoi career.

Salvation — if it can be termed thus — comes from Dominika’s Uncle Vanya (Matthias Schoenaerts), who has kept a protective gaze on his deceased brother’s family. But Vanya’s interest is far from benign; his “solution” to Dominika’s plight involves drawing her into his realm of spycraft, with the specific goal of molding his niece into a seductress able to corrupt Westerners into betraying their country.

Hardly a healthy attitude for an uncle to have about his only niece.

Black Mass: Nightmarish deal with the devil

Black Mass (2015) • View trailer 
Four stars. Rated R, for brutal violence, profanity, sexual candor and drug use
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 9.18.15

Lie down with dogs, get up with fleas.

The saga of gangster James “Whitey” Bulger was far from complete when Boston Globe reporters Gerard O’Neill and Dick Lehr — the former a Pulitzer winner, the latter a Pulitzer finalist — published their true-crime saga Black Mass in 2000. With his criminal empire having been crushed during the previous decade; Whitey already was six years a fugitive.

It may seem like a quiet meal, but the atmosphere is far from benign ... particularly when
mob enforcer Stephen Flemmi (Rory Cochrane, far left) decides that FBI agent John Morris
(David Harbour, far right) has insulted him. Suddenly, even Whitey Bulger (Johnny Depp,
center left) and fellow FBI agent John Connolly (Joel Edgerton) are sure what'll happen...

He remained on the run until June 22, 2011, when he was arrested quietly in Santa Monica, Calif. Two courtroom trials later, jaw-dropping for their sordid detail, Whitey — then 83 years old — was sentenced to two consecutive life terms (plus five years, for good measure). He’s now a permanent resident at a Florida federal penitentiary.

Whitey’s vicious career, and the scandalous FBI incompetence that allowed it to flourish, have been brought to the big screen by director Scott Cooper, whose two previous films — Crazy Heart and Out of the Furnace — demonstrated an impressive flair for character drama. Cooper doesn’t disappoint here either; armed with a taut and densely layered script adaptation by Mark Mallouk and Jez Butterworth, the director delivers a horrific portrait of unrestrained evil and corruption.

The film is anchored further by star Johnny Depp’s chilling depiction of Whitey: as far from the comic antics of Capt. Jack Sparrow as could possibly be imagined.

Depp obviously has an affinity for true crime, having previously played John Dillinger in director Michael Mann’s slick and sordid Public Enemies. Awful as Depp’s Dillinger was, though, a bit of the actor’s charm occasionally leaked around the edges, Mann and co-scripters Ronan Bennett and Ann Biderman perhaps trying to suggest a soupçon of “honor among thieves” camaraderie.

You won’t find any such quasi-ethical respite here; Depp’s Whitey is the stuff of nightmares, his tightly compressed lips and stone-cold stare as unnerving as his flat, detached manner of speaking. The only thing worse than Whitey’s reluctance to smile, is an occasion that does prompt a death’s-head grin: a certain signal of looming brutality.

Folks will talk about this performance for quite some time.

The Great Gatsby: Not mere hyperbole

The Great Gatsby (2013) • View trailer 
Four stars. Rating: PG-13, for sexual candor, violence and brief profanity
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 5.10.13

Teachers have been aggravated for generations, when Hollywood brings a classic novel to the big screen; too many lazy students then seek answers from the film, rather than reading the book.

The pomp and splash of a fancy nightclub cannot prevent Tom (Joel Edgerton, far
right) from noticing that his wife, Daisy (Carey Mulligan), is being wooed shamelessly
by Gatsby (Leonardo DiCaprio, far left). Nick (Tobey Maguire), growing accustomed to
the emotional chaos that inevitably erupts when in the company of his new friends,
adopts his favorite means of retreat: another stiff drink.

Well, here’s a twist: Director Baz Luhrmann’s vibrant, mesmerizing adaptation of The Great Gatsby likely will encourage people to buy and read F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel. Rarely has a movie so successfully breathed fresh excitement into a literary work which, no matter how well regarded by scholars, often is regarded as a yawn by readers.

It’s like struggling through Shakespeare’s prose on the printed page, absorbing very little along the way, and then seeing the play come to energetic life when staged with a cast of articulate and charismatic actors.

Yep, Luhrmann’s accomplishment is that impressive.

For openers, the film is a visual masterpiece; it’s literally breathtaking. (Cinematographer Simon Duggan, take a bow.) Never has 3-D cinematography been used so cleverly, or so successfully; the dimensionality opens up the narrative’s symbolic settings, thus lending greater emotional weight to the class-burdened archetypes represented by the five primary characters.

At the same time, Luhrmann and co-scripter Craig Pearce are impressively faithful to Fitzgerald’s original prose, at times bringing large chunks of text to life via the hyper-realism that Luhrmann employed so well in Moulin Rouge.

You’ll not soon forget production designer Catherine Martin’s grandiosely ghastly realization of Fitzgerald’s so-called “Valley of Ashes,” the desolate, begrimed region that separates the decadence of both New York City and the outlying aristocratic enclave of West Egg. (Fitzgerald was inspired by the hellish trash-burning zone along the road from Great Neck to Manhattan, the sole transit in an era before the Long Island Expressway or the Grand Central Parkway.)

Given Luhrmann’s sensibilities and visual pizzazz, it’s easy to imagine him particularly captivated by one element in Fitzgerald’s description of this site: the huge “eyes of Doctor T.J. Eckleburg” that stare out from the remnants of an oculist’s long-discarded billboard. Almost more than Gatsby’s palatial estate — also a spectacular setting — these giant eyes become one of the film’s driving images: the blank stare of an omniscient being who catalogues but does not interfere with the events that take place in the gas station located in a small settlement — not even a town — perched on one edge of this stygian, lung-fouling inferno.

Zero Dark Thirty: The ultimate manhunt

Zero Dark Thirty (2012) • View trailer
4.5 stars. Rating: R, for considerable violence, torture and profanity
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 1.11.13

Osama bin Laden was executed on May 2, 2011. Given the realities of Hollywood development time, production and post-production work, this film’s arrival in the waning days of 2012 is nothing short of remarkable.

When the SEAL mission finally comes together, Maya (Jessica Chastain) scarcely can
believe it. All her years of research, and of trying to persuade CIA superiors that she
really might have a lead on Osama bin Laden's location ... and now her work may
bear fruit. Or has she been pursuing a useless lead all this time?

That the result is this riveting, is icing on the cake.

It’s easy to understand why director Kathryn Bigelow and writer Mark Boal would select this project as a follow-up to their Oscar-laden triumph with 2009’s The Hurt Locker. Although lacking that film’s nail-biting intensity, Zero Dark Thirty carries the same suspenseful atmosphere of docu-drama verisimilitude. Given the topic, American audiences also can’t help experiencing more than a little cathartic exhilaration.

Unseemly or not, it’s hard to resist the impulse for an exultant “Hell, yeah!” as we hit the story’s payoff.

Despite the perception that fact-based, politics-laden “procedural thrillers” (for want of a better term) are box-office poison, we’ve recently been gifted with two crackling efforts: this one and Argo. Both manage the impressive feat of generating tension and building to exciting climaxes, despite our knowing the respective stories’ outcomes long before entering the theater.

That’s no small thing. Scripter William Goldman’s handling of 1976’s All the President’s Men remains the superlative template for depicting dull-as-dirt research work in a manner that becomes not just fascinating, but downright compelling; Boal obviously took its lessons to heart. Zero Dark Thirty spends a great deal of time watching a lone CIA analyst beat her head against a vague investigative wall, yet these efforts never seem dull or repetitive.

In part, that’s because we know the stakes involved from recent history, and we’re genuinely curious to learn more about what went into this impressively successful covert operation: how the key pieces of information were determined and then properly analyzed. And if Boal takes some dramatic license along the way, well, that’s fine; cinema places its own unique requirements on narrative flow, not the least of which is building our emotional involvement with these characters.

Which brings us to the best weapon in Bigelow’s capable filmmaking arsenal: star Jessica Chastain. As the CIA analyst in question, she drives this story with — by turns — calm intelligence and righteous fury. She’s never less than wholly persuasive, whether cycling grimly through surveillance footage or standing up to overly cautious superiors too concerned about their political reputations.

Even Chastain’s quiet moments are laden with emotional depth, when she sinks, exhausted, into the austere quarters that have become “home.” We understand that this woman has no true home: no family, no friends, no lovers. Nothing but The Mission.

The Odd Life of Timothy Green: A delicate bloom

The Odd Life of Timothy Green (2012) • View trailer
3.5 stars. Rating: PG, and needlessly, for mild (and fleeting) profanity
By Derrick Bang

Peter Hedges makes delightfully idiosyncratic films about socially awkward and mildly eccentric characters somewhat out of step with the real world: people not quite in synch with the rest of us, and unable to figure out how to bridge that divide.

Rather perplexed by the ivy-esque leaves that appear to be fastened
to the lower legs of the mysterious boy (Cameron "CJ" Adams) who
entered their lives as in answer to a prayer, Cindy (Jennifer Garner)
and Jim (Joel Edgerton, far right) bring the little guy to a horticulturist
(Lin-Manuel Miranda). He offer to clip off the leaves ... a suggestion
that we just know is misguided.

Hedges doesn’t work quickly; he came to our attention back in 1993, when he adapted his own novel, What’s Eating Gilbert Grape, for director Lasse Hallström. He followed that with adaptations of two books by other authors — Jane Hamilton’s A Map of the World and Nick Hornby’s About a Boy (the latter earning Hedges an Academy Award nomination) — before taking the director’s chair for his next project, 2003’s Pieces of April.

Aside from giving Katie Holmes her best role to date — and bringing co-star Patricia Clarkson an Oscar nomination for supporting actress — Pieces of April established Hedges as a writer/director with a fondness for wayward souls, and a solid sense of the way people interact with each other. His next project, the 2007 romantic comedy Dan in Real Life, remains my favorite Steve Carell film.

All of which brings us to the aptly titled The Odd Life of Timothy Green, a delicate, poignant little fantasy that I suspect will have trouble finding an audience during these noisy, action-oriented summer months. Timothy Green feels like a story that might have been spun by the Brothers Grimm, were they among us today; this is a fairy tale with a gentle message, and characters whose lives are changed by the intervention of a supernatural being straight out of wish-fulfillment dreams.

The story is credited to Ahmet Zappa, a low-profile actor making an intriguing writing debut; Hedges directed and supplied the script. The result is whimsical, charming and completely preposterous ... and that latter attribute is somewhat at odds with Hedges’ traditional strengths.

Because this narrative can’t possibly take place in our world, despite his insistence that it’s doing precisely that.

Cindy and Jim Green (Jennifer Garner and Joel Edgerton) live in the small town of Stanleyville, known as “the pencil capital of the world.” Unfortunately, the growing proliferation of computers, iPhones and the like have greatly diminished the demand for pencils, and plant employees keep expecting manager Franklin Crudstaff (Ron Livingston) to announce cutbacks and layoffs.