Bridge of Spies: Riveting Cold War thriller

Bridge of Spies (2015) • View trailer 
Four stars. Rated PG-13, for war violence, dramatic intensity and fleeting profanity
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 10.16.15

Atticus Finch lives.

Harper Lee is known to have based the iconic hero of To Kill a Mockingbird on her own father, Alabama lawyer Amasa Coleman Lee, who — like the book’s character — represented unpopular defendants in a highly publicized (and politicized) trial.

As the trial that might send Rudolf Abel (Mark Rylance, left) to the gas chamber proceeds,
defense attorney James Donovan (Tom Hanks) is surprised to see his client remain so
calm. "Aren't you worried?" Donovan asks. Abel's response becomes the film's best
signature line.

How ironic, then, that at the same time Harper Lee was fine-tuning the novel that would make her famous, newspaper headlines across the United States pilloried the country’s most-hated lawyer, James Donovan, who had bravely accepted the assignment to defend captured Soviet spy Rudolf Abel.

I can’t help wondering if any of Donovan’s characteristics wandered into Lee’s depiction of Atticus.

Donovan’s name and historical significance have remained buried for decades, although Abel might ring a few bells. Sirens are likely to go off, however, when both men are linked to American pilot Francis Gary Powers, who was captured after his U-2 spy plane was blasted out of the sky during a photographic reconnaissance mission over the Soviet Union.

The interlinked saga involving Donovan, Abel and Powers has been resurrected and transformed into a thoughtful, fascinating and thoroughly absorbing period drama by director Steven Spielberg and scripters Matt Charman, Joel and Ethan Coen. It’s Cold War-era spyjinks right out of John Le Carre, except that these events actually took place: yet another reminder that truth can be far stranger than fiction.

(The film credits make no mention of Donovan’s well-received 1964 memoir, Strangers on a Bridge: The Case of Colonel Abel and Francis Gary Powers, which I find odd; it’s impossible to imagine that Charman and the Coen brothers didn’t read that book.)

Spielberg’s film is anchored by a commanding performance from Tom Hanks, who channels every dedicated and deeply honorable character ever played by Henry Fonda and James Stewart. At the same time, Hanks brings his own wry, subtle humor to this depiction of Donovan: a capable and hard-working family man caught up in events far beyond his imagining.

(Or so we’re led to believe. Given Donovan’s WWII service as General Counsel at the Office of Strategic Services, he may not have been as “ordinary” as this film suggests. But this portrayal makes for a better story.)

Crimson Peak: The pinnacle of failure

Crimson Peak (2015) • View trailer 
One star. Rated R, for profanity, sexual candor and gory violence
By Derrick Bang

When the mighty fall, they fall hard.

Steven Spielberg and 1941. Michael Cimino and Heaven’s Gate. George Lucas and Howard the Duck. Warren Beatty and Ishtar, Bruce Willis and Hudson Hawk, Kevin Costner and The Postman.

Even after the already strange Lucille (Jessica Chastain, left) starts behaving in a clearly
menacing manner, Edith (Mia Wasikowska) remains blandly complacent, like a lamb
awaiting slaughter. Obviously, this young woman was absent when common sense
was handed out!

And now, Guillermo del Toro and Crimson Peak.

The deliciously moody writer/director/producer’s career has proceeded smoothly along two parallel and somewhat related paths: extravagantly baroque, comic book-style action sagas, as with Pacific Rim and the two Hellboy entries; and splendidly eerie chillers, as with Mimic, The Devil’s Backbone and his Academy Award darling, Pan’s Labyrinth.

Even at their most outrageous — and Pacific Rim really stretched the credibility envelope — you could be certain of one thing: A Guillermo del Toro film wasn’t boring.

Until now.

Crimson Peak isn’t merely boring. It’s leaden, insufferably slow, wearily overblown, monotonous, humdrum and butt-numbingly, makes-you-want-to-scream dull.

At best, it’s a 25-minute Twilight Zone episode s-t-r-e-t-c-h-e-d into a plodding 119-minute trial by tedium. But even that comparison gives far too much credit to the sluggish script by del Toro and Matthew Robbins, which feels like an unholy love child spawned by Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights and Friday the 13th.

Yep. It’s that clumsy.

Star Mia Wasikowska has made a career, of late, playing tortured young heroines in period and/or “heightened reality” melodramas, from Madame Bovary and Stoker to, yes, the title character in Jane Eyre. I guess del Toro figured that she was the perfect choice to play this film’s Jane Austen-esque Edith Cushing, heroine of the director’s unabashed attempt to re-create the classic Gothic romances of Hollywood’s Golden Age.

With ghosts thrown in, of course. We are, after all, dealing with Guillermo del Toro.

And yes, Wasikowska certainly looks the part of the naïve and overwhelmed young “spinster” at the heart of this story, which echoes and even name-checks Austin, the Brontë sisters and films such as Rebecca and Great Expectations. But although production designer Tom Sanders and art director Brandt Gordon have a field day with their meticulous re-creation of 1901 New York, and particularly the vast gothic mansion in England’s remote hills, this is a classic case of being all dressed up with nowhere to go.

Because the storyline is pathetic in its stupidity, agape with glaring plot holes, and unable to remain consistent even within its own ludicrous premise. This is a classic example of the idiot plot, which is to say that the narrative lurches from one random contrivance to the next, only because each and every character behaves like a total idiot at all times.

He Named Me Malala: Girl on a mission

He Named Me Malala (2015) • View trailer 
Four stars. Rated PG-13, for grim images and dramatic intensity
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 10.9.15

The original plan, as envisioned by producers Walter Parkes and Laurie MacDonald, was to turn Malala Yousafzai’s saga into a big-screen drama.

Parkes and MacDonald had plenty of experience with such films, having shepherded (among others) Gladiator, The Kite Runner and Catch Me If You Can, the latter also based on a real-world individual whose exploits were larger than life.

During a visit to a rare African school that caters to girls, Malala Yousafzai asks her new
friends what they wish to do in life: become doctors, historians, lawyers? Her proud
father, Ziauddin, can be seen at the far right.

But a funny thing happened, when Parkes and MacDonald met Malala in Birmingham, England, where she and her family have moved for their safety.

“No actor could possibly portray Malala,” Parkes later admitted. “She’s just so singular.”

As a result, Parkes and MacDonald decided that a documentary approach would be a vastly superior means of allowing viewers to meet Malala on her own terms, and in her own environment. They turned to veteran documentarian Davis Guggenheim, well respected for the thoughtful, absorbing approach he has taken to earlier projects such as It Might Get Loud, Waiting for Superman and his Academy Award-winning An Inconvenient Truth.

Smart choice.

Malala Yousafzai is an amazing young woman; she’s also an endearing and captivating screen presence who is quite capable of telling her own story. At the same time, she’s a fascinating bottle of contradictions: at one moment a bubbly teenager clearly embarrassed by her girl-crushes on hunky cricket stars, and then — in the blink of an eye — a ferociously intelligent presence quite capable of delivering a powerful speech to the assembled body at the United Nations.

She’s Mother Teresa, Jane Goodall, Aung San Suu Kyi and Amelia Earhart, all rolled up into one precociously charismatic package. And to think: We almost lost her before learning about the work she’d already done in Pakistan’s Taliban-infested Swat Valley ... let alone the impact she continues to have after surviving a heinous assassination attempt.

Malala was 12 when she began writing an impressively detailed — and, of necessity, anonymous — blog for the BBC, expressing her very personal reaction as the initially welcomed Taliban disciples gradually revealed their true colors: banning music, television and any hint of Western culture; severely curtailing schooling for girls; and insisting that women remain shuttered in their own homes.

It didn’t stop there. When Taliban thugs began bombing police stations and schools, and naming “infidels” during much-feared radio broadcasts, Malala bravely abandoned her anonymity and began speaking out, highly visibly, in the international press. She was awarded Pakistan’s inaugural National Youth Peace Prize in 2011.

Shortly thereafter, the Taliban marked her for assassination.

Pan: Soaring adventure

Pan (2015) • View trailer 
3.5 stars. Rated PG, for fantasy action violence
By Derrick Bang

Old-style, kid-centric adventure films — those akin to Disney’s In Search of the Castaways or Richard Donner’s The Goonies — have become rare.

Today’s studio heads too frequently taint the formula with coarse humor and/or needlessly unpleasant violence, either (giving them the benefit of the doubt) in a misguided effort to court parents, or (more cynical, but more likely) to obtain the “tougher” PG-13 rating that generally does better business than a family-friendly PG.

Peter (Levi Miller, right) anticipates certain doom once he's forced off the ship's plank by
the dread Blackbeard (Hugh Jackman, in black). But although the boy doesn't yet know
it, he possesses a magic talent that will surprise everybody...

Which makes director Joe Wright’s Pan something of a minor miracle. It’s a throwback to kinder, gentler times, when young champions relied on pluck and resourcefulness, rather than sarcasm and potty humor. Scripter Jason Fuchs’ imaginative fantasy is a thrilling ride from start to finish: laden with stalwart heroes and opulently dastardly villains, wildly imaginative locales and a high-spirited adolescent hero who could have stepped from the pages of a Charles Dickens novel (with a detour that L. Frank Baum would have appreciated).

Fuchs’ story speculates on a question that might have occurred to young fans of Scottish novelist/playwright J.M. Barrie’s celebrated “boy who wouldn’t grow up.” It’s a tantalizing query: How did Peter Pan become himself?

Fuchs, making a respectable big-screen solo scripting debut, plays with elements of Barrie’s original mythos, while borrowing scenarios and character archetypes from other fantasy sources. The crazy-quilt result is a bit uneven at times, but Wright and editors William Hoy and Paul Tothill keep things moving so rapidly, that you’re not likely to mind.

The action begins at London’s bleak Lambeth Home for Boys, during the height of the WWII blitz, where 12-year-old Peter (Levi Miller, doing an excellent job in his feature debut) and his fellow youngsters are routinely terrorized by Mother Barnabas (Kathy Burke), the imperious and just-plain-mean nun who runs the place. Peter has long suspected that Mother Barnabas has been hoarding all the tasty food rations while forcing the children to subsist on gruel, but in truth her perfidy is much, much worse.

Aside from these suspicions regarding the orphanage provisions, the bigger issue concerns the ongoing — and unexplained — disappearances of a few boys each night. The answer to that question proves calamitous, when Peter is among those snatched the next time around. He finds himself on (of all things) a pirate ship floating high above, which “sails” air currents the way an ordinary vessel would navigate the seven seas.

Freeheld: Sentiment over substance

Freeheld (2015) • View trailer 
3.5 stars. Rated PG-13, for dramatic intensity, mild profanity and discreet sensuality
By Derrick Bang

It seems such a reasonable request.

You work a job for 23 years, building up a respectable pension, and then — tragically — a health crisis strikes. Death now will come much sooner, as opposed to the “later” we all hope for. One therefore assumes that you’d be allowed to assign your pension funds to any loved one of choice: spouse, parent, child. Why should it matter?

Having made the brave decision to "out" herself and publicly acknowledge her relationship,
Laurel (Jullianne Moore, left) happily completes and registers the paperwork so that she
and Stacie (Ellen Page) can become official "domestic partners."

It mattered in New Jersey in 2005 — one short decade ago — when the requested recipient was a “domestic partner.”

Freeheld, director Peter Sollett’s heartfelt adaptation of those events, is anchored by compelling and deeply nuanced performances from Julianne Moore and Ellen Page. Ron Nyswaner’s script deftly compresses the key events, while focusing on the touching interpersonal dynamic between the two principal characters.

The result is something in the way of social commentary and advocacy cinema: a narrative model with which Nyswaner is quite familiar, having been Oscar-nominated for his script to 1993’s AIDS drama, Philadelphia.

Moore, whose Hollywood career has been impressively varied, stars as Laurel Hester, a well-respected veteran of New Jersey’s Ocean County police force. She takes her job seriously, and — thanks to Moore’s carefully shaded performance — we detect a slight chip on Laurel’s shoulder, likely the hardened perseverance of a woman who has had to work twice as hard as her male colleagues, probably for half as much recognition.

It’s also clear that her private life is very private, her sexual preference having been concealed even from longtime partner Dane Wells (Michael Shannon). But Laurel isn’t a hermit. Most recently, while participating in a volleyball league across town, she meets the much younger Stacie Andree (Page), who confidently acts on what she perceives as a possible shared attraction.

Stacie isn’t wrong; the spark is genuine, even if Laurel takes awhile to lower a career’s worth of defenses. The embryonic relationship is sweet, although not without setbacks; Laurel finds it difficult to be as openly expressive as her new partner. That’d be the age difference, at least in part; Stacie belongs to a generation that doesn’t feel quite the same need to hide.

The Martian: Out-of-this-world suspense

The Martian (2015) • View trailer 
Four stars. Rated PG-13, for profanity and brief nudity
By Derrick Bang

The most impressive aspect of 1995’s Apollo 13 lay in the tension that director Ron Howard generated, despite our certain awareness of the film’s outcome.

After all, history had spoken: Everybody knew that the astronauts got back safely. So, since Howard couldn’t concoct any suspense from the what, he concentrated on the how ... as in, how in the world did they survive?

Having realized that his only hope for survival involves the long-term rationing of his
supplies — along with figuring out some what of "creating" more food and water — Mark
(Matt Damon) begins a careful record of his days on Mars.

There’s something enticingly absorbing about watching engineers work a particularly difficult problem. In the realm of fiction, this is why caper thrillers and the Mission: Impossible franchise remain so popular: We love to see unworkable puzzles solved via triumphant bursts of ingenuity.

No surprise, then, that director Ridley Scott’s handling of The Martian is 141 minutes of nail-biting anxiety. Andy Weir’s 2011 novel (which has its own amazing history) is a crackerjack sci-fi thriller to begin with, and Scott and scripter Drew Goddard have pumped it up with an engaging blend of quiet agitation and gallows humor.

Best of all, this is smart science-fiction: a rigorously technical narrative that we rarely get from a Hollywood factory that equates the genre with the zap-gun antics of Star Wars and Guardians of the Galaxy (which, let’s face it, are — at best — equal parts sci-fi and fantasy). In the literary realm, Weir’s book is regarded as “hard” science of the sort written by Isaac Asimov, Larry Niven and Kim Stanley Robinson.

Such stories are harder to bring to the big screen, because they don’t grant actors many opportunities for showboating or melodramatic interpersonal dynamics. But exceptions do exist — 2009’s Moon comes to mind — and if Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman can generate unease from plodding investigative journalism, then surely talented filmmakers can do the same with a clever sci-fi premise. Right?

Indeed. To give further credit where due, Scott has packed his film with an impressive cast, assigning strong actors to even the smallest of roles. Top marks go to star Matt Damon, who anchors most of the film with a compelling, deeply expressive, one-man performance on par with what we’ve seen from Tom Hanks (Cast Away) and Robert Redford (All Is Lost).

The story, then:

The time is an unspecified point in the near future, after NASA has successfully sent a six-person mission to Mars. The Ares 3 crew has established a good-sized working habitat within the Acidalia Planitia plain, and has spent some number of days collecting samples and conducting experiments.

Sicario: Bleak depiction of the failed war on drugs

Sicario (2015) • View trailer 
Four stars. Rated R, for strong violence, grisly images and profanity
By Derrick Bang

Mexico probably won’t think very highly of this film.

Indeed, a formal state department complaint wouldn’t be surprising.

When Kate (Emily Blunt) demands to know more about the increasingly complicated and
morally questionable government "mission" in which she has agreed to participate, she
gets only vague answers from Alejandro (Benicio Del Toro, left) and Matt (Josh Brolin).

But first-time writer Taylor Sheridan can’t be blamed for responding to the increasingly grim headlines that keep erupting south of the border, and it’s not as if any of the events depicted in this drama exaggerate reality. The truth probably remains worse.

And Taylor’s “needs must” notion of a possible U.S. response is more than tantalizing; it feels utterly reasonable. And, frankly, scary.

Better still, Taylor has found the perfect colleague in Canadian director Denis Villeneuve, who most recently mesmerized us with 2013’s scary kidnap drama, Prisoners. Villeneuve’s films aren’t merely suspenseful; they’re nervous-making to a degree that prompts disquieting nightmares for days (weeks?) to follow.

He applies the same touch to Sicario, a ripped-from-current-events drama that paints a discouraging portrait of the escalating narcotics border war between the United States and Mexico: a war that we’re clearly losing, as portions of Mexico slide ever closer to becoming failed states. Assuming they haven’t already failed.

We meet our protagonist, Arizona FBI agent and kidnap-response team leader Kate Macer (Emily Blunt), during a raid on an outwardly ordinary suburban home in an average American neighborhood. Kate, steadfast partner/friend Reggie Wayne (Daniel Kaluuya) and their colleagues encounter resistance and gunfire: an oddly protective response, given the apparently empty house.

But it isn’t empty, as Kate soon discovers. In fact, the residence — clandestinely owned by the leader of a Mexican drug cartel — is a shocking horror.

Back at base, Kate is surprised to find herself profiled by a pair of outsiders: Matt Graver (Josh Brolin), introduced as some sort of State Department task force leader; and a quiet, shadowy individual known only as Alejandro (Benicio Del Toro). Both offer Kate the opportunity to join them in a bold operation designed to “make a statement” and truly do something about a situation that continues to escalate beyond control.

Think carefully before answering, Kate’s boss (the always reliable Victor Garber) warns her. The unspoken implication: The operation might exceed jurisdictional boundaries.

No matter. Kate’s in.