Leave No Trace: Compassionate character study

Leave No Trace (2018) • View trailer 
3.5 stars. Rated PG, for dramatic tension
By Derrick Bang

Some films are anchored by powerful storytelling, others by delicately shaded performances.

This is one of the latter.

Hoping to evade well-intentioned welfare agents — and police — who are determined to
enforce the structure of a "socially normal" life, Will (Ben Foster) and his daughter Tom
(Thomasin Harcourt McKenzie) seek a railroad car they can hop, in order to escape the city.

Leave No Trace is another quietly intimate drama from writer/director Debra Granik, best known for 2010’s Winter’s Bone (which, it must be remembered, “introduced” Jennifer Lawrence to the movie-going public). Although lacking that film’s atmosphere of dangerous intensity, Granik’s newest endeavor — also co-scripted with Anne Rosellini, and adapted from Peter Rock’s 2009 novel, My Abandonment — is no less compelling, with its thoughtfully sensitive depiction of people surviving on society’s margins.

Rock based his novel on a 2004 article in The Oregonian, published after a man and his adolescent daughter were discovered in Portland’s Forest Park, where they had spent four apparently content years in a homemade shelter. Local authorities, sharing conventional society’s wariness of such “fringe” behavior, attempted to “mainstream” the duo; the rational behind such a decision — and its aftermath — shaped both Rock’s book and Granik’s absorbing big-screen adaptation.

Her film can be viewed as a close cousin of 2016’s Captain Fantastic, with its depiction of a stubborn single father attempting to raise his six children under similarly off-the-grid circumstances. But Leave No Trace eschews the flamboyance of a patriarch as charismatic as Oscar-nominated Viggo Mortensen; the relationship here between Will (Ben Foster) and his teenage daughter Tom (Thomasin Harcourt McKenzie) is much gentler and understated.

The dynamic also is different. Despite her youth, Tom is equal parts peer and offspring. She’s able to challenge her father, albeit cautiously; he listens, sometimes acquiescing. Even so, he remains a taciturn closed book. If her questions cut too close to the bone, he turns them around.

“What’s your favorite color?” she impulsively asks, during what seems a mutually candid moment.

“What’s yours?” he replies, after a moment of silence.

The film’s captivating first act — beautifully lensed by cinematographer Michael McDonough — depicts what has become a daily survival routine, in this gorgeously carpeted forest setting: the search for edible vegetation; waterproofing repairs to their shelter; the gathering and shaving of wood, for fires over which to cook their meals; the application of clothing and additional blankets, as nighttime temperatures drop. Their adeptness at these many tasks bespeaks considerable experience, and we wonder precisely how much. Months? Years?

It’s not all work. They play chess, Will coaching his daughter in the game’s complexities. They read whatever books come to hand. Tom speaks well, is intelligent and reasonably well-rounded, given the circumstances. When they need basic supplies and provisions, they carefully depart the park and walk into the city, where Will has established a rather novel method of making money.

Their discipline, while shopping, is uncomplaining: an essential distinction between “want” and “need.”

Inferno: Flickers and dies

Inferno (2016) • View trailer 
Two stars. Rated PG-13, for action violence, dramatic intensity and brief profanity
By Derrick Bang

I’ve no idea why this series continues to be popular; each entry is sillier than the one before.

Dan Brown may be able to maintain reader credibility in a lengthy novel — Inferno runs a self-indulgent 609 pages — but director Ron Howard’s film adaptations are no more sensible than the old Perils of Pauline silent movie serial.

A series of arcane, art-related clues eventually lead Robert Langdon (Tom Hanks) and
Dr. Sienna Brooks (Felicity Jones) to the fabled "death mask" of Italian poet Dante
Alighieri. But what has this to do with a potential world-wide plague? And do we care?

David Koepp’s screenplay for Inferno reduces the plot to little more than a race-race-race against time, occasionally alleviated when famed university symbologist Robert Langdon (Tom Hanks) pauses for breath in order to solve another arcane riddle locked within a famed piece of artwork.

On top of which, attempting to make sense of the conspiracy-laden supporting characters is beyond the ability of mere mortals. “Duplicitous” doesn’t begin to cover the crosses, double-crosses and triple-crosses in this ludicrous plot, which quickly devolves into a tiresome guessing game.

Lessee ... first they’re all bad guys. Then some of the bad guys become good guys. Oh, wait, no; that one was bad all along. And that one was good. Until turning bad again.

All with poor Langdon caught in the middle.

It quickly becomes impossible to believe — or care about — any of these people. All we can do is wait for the murk to clear, accompanied by tediously complicated explanations, so matters can build to a staggeringly inept climax, and we can go home.

Brown may have sold all this meandering nonsense to his readers — full disclosure prompts acknowledging that I’m not among the faithful — but Koepp can’t begin to distill it into a two-hour film. We can’t help wondering, as loyalties finally become apparent in the third act, why Certain Parties didn’t simply ask for Langdon’s help, rather than concocting such an elaborate means of “forcing” his assistance.

What makes Howard’s Dan Brown adaptations even more exasperating is their insistence on taking such stuff and nonsense so seriously. Robert Langdon’s profession and expertise make him a close cousin to Harrison Ford’s Indiana Jones, but director Steven Spielberg wisely turns those chapter-play adventures into larkish thrill rides, with plenty of winking and nudging.

Brown’s style, on the other hand — reproduced here by Howard and Koepp — always collapses under the weight of its own pomposity.

Hell or High Water: Superlative crime saga

Hell or High Water (2016) • View trailer 
Five stars. Rated R, for strong violence, profanity and fleeting sexuality
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 8.19.16

Most films are lucky if they successfully deliver compelling drama or perceptive social commentary. Very few do both at the same time.

This is one of the rare ones.

After a bank robbery doesn't go quite according to plan, Toby (Chris Pine, left) and his
brother Tanner (Ben Foster) contemplate their next move. The options are limited, and
time is running out...

Hell or High Water is the finest contemporary drama thus far in a year that has produced few American films of substance. Director David Mackenzie and writer Taylor Sheridan (Sicario) deliver a taut crime thriller that’s also a shattering indictment of contemporary economic malaise, and the lingering havoc wrought by the 2007-8 subprime mortgage crisis.

The film is beautifully mounted and superbly acted by all four leads. Sheridan is equally adept at absorbing narrative and engaging character dynamics, along with having a great ear for the gently snarky banter that often bonds men who seem distant and crusty on the surface, but in fact deeply respect each other.

The resulting atmosphere is fascinating for its complexity: We don’t often encounter films that manage to be quite funny at times, while simultaneously enveloping us in an uneasy atmosphere of impending disaster. Grim portent hovers over these characters, like an ink-black thunderstorm visible on the horizon, and approaching inexorably.

In many ways, this film looks, sounds and feels like the Coen brothers’ No Country for Old Men; it certainly paints a similarly bleak portrait of the depressed regions of modern-day Texas. But that 2007 thriller depended (to a degree) on grotesques, in order to advance its story; you’ll find no monsters here, along the lines of Javier Bardem’s Anton Chigurh.

No, the protagonists in Hell or High Water are painfully familiar, and that’s what makes this saga so heartbreaking: We know these guys. They’re the ones who live in the dilapidated house down the street, with the unkempt yard and dead vehicle(s). They hang around too much because employment has been spotty, and they’re always scrambling to remain one bank payment ahead of foreclosure.

Sheridan sets his story in West Texas, where the distinction between honest men and reluctant outlaws has blurred beyond recognition. We meet brothers Toby (Chris Pine) and Tanner (Ben Foster), guns drawn and faces concealed by masks, as they rob a tiny branch of the Midland Bank, terrorizing the two lone employees in the process. The boys are careful, taking only loose, small-denomination bills and avoiding the bundled larger bills with the explosive dye packs.

They roar away in a battered sedan, Tanner exhilarated by the adrenaline rush, the quieter Toby chastened by what they’ve just done. Their getaway takes them past foreclosed homes, shuttered businesses and countless billboards advertising payday loans; cinematographer Giles Nuttgens gives these surroundings the stark, washed-out look of cheap paint peeled away by too many seasons of blazing hot sunlight.

Then, later that same morning, they do it again ... at another small-town branch of the Midland Bank.

The Finest Hours: Waterlogged

The Finest Hours (2016) • View trailer 
2.5 stars. Rated PG-13, for dramatic intensity
By Derrick Bang

I’ll never understand Hollywood.

The actual account of one brave Coast Guard crew’s mission to rescue survivors of the maimed T2 oil tanker SS Pendleton, undertaken during a raging nor’easter off the New England coast on Feb. 18, 1952, is the stuff of unbelievable legend: a saga of bravery, luck and utterly amazing persistence.

With Seaman Richard Livesey (Ben Foster, left) scanning into the darkness, Coast Guard
Boatswain's Mate First Class Bernie Webber (Chris Pine) struggles to control their small
rescue vessel amid a raging nor'easter, as they try to find the remnants of a
shattered tanker.

Give it to Disney, and it turns into an overcooked, eye-rolling, melodramatic mess.

Granted, the ocean-bound storm sequences are awesome and persuasive, the depiction of the crippled SS Pendleton — literally torn in half by the storm — grimly unsettling on all sorts of levels.

The problem is with character behavior and interpersonal dynamics, as concocted by scripters Scott Silver, Paul Tamasy and Eric Johnson. Rarely have so many people behaved so childishly, so stupidly, so TV soap opera-ishly.

And so bewilderingly.

For starters, it’s impossible to get a bead on our primary hero, Coast Guard Boatswain’s Mate First Class Bernie Webber (Chris Pine), who overplays a blend of shyness, uncertainty and self-censure to the point that he seems incapable of completing a sentence, let alone piloting a vessel. A failed previous mission apparently has left him riddled with guilt, but that scarcely explains the degree to which he’s belittled, teased and dismissed by both the local veteran fishermen, and his Coast Guard colleagues at the Chatham, Mass., Lifeboat Station.

Then there’s his feckless boss, Daniel Cuff (Eric Bana), assumed to be incompetent because his accent brands him as having come from “somewhere else.” The accusation likely has merit, because Bana plays the role with utter bewilderment, as if Cuff doesn’t even understand how to use the station equipment. We’re supposed to believe this?

But nobody can top the childish histrionics of Holliday Grainger’s Miriam, who frequently behaves like a 5-year-old having a temper tantrum. A confrontation between Miriam and Cuff is so howlingly awful, orchestrated so poorly by director Craig Gillespie, that it must be seen to be disbelieved.

We can’t really fault Grainger, who’s obviously limited to her scripted lines, and the “guidance” from Gillespie. Miriam nonetheless remains the worst “devoted gal left behind” that I’ve seen in many, many years.

Lone Survivor: Heartbreak ridge

Lone Survivor (2013) • View trailer 
Four stars. Rating: R, for strong war violence and pervasive profanity
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 1.10.14

Color me surprised: Peter Berg finally made another decent movie.

The actor-turned-writer/director scored an indisputable hit with 2004’s warm-hearted Friday Night Lights, a character-driven study of small-town Texas high school football; the film led to an equally well-received TV series that kept fans happy for three well-scripted seasons (with Berg supervising the entire run).

Having trekked to a vantage point where they can see their targeted enemy combatant,
the covert SEAL team — from left, Murphy (Taylor Kitsch), Marcus (Mark Wahlberg),
Axe (Ben Foster) and Dietz (Emile Hirsch) — contemplate their next move. Sadly,
that decision is about to be taken out of their hands.

On the big screen, though, Berg’s résumé didn’t merely stall; it nose-dived into overwrought wretched excess. The Kingdom (2007) was marred by unpleasantly vicious racism; Hancock (2008) did little but embarrass star Will Smith; and the less said about 2012’s laughably atrocious Battleship, the better.

That’s a rather sad and pathetic downward spiral.

I therefore held out very little hope for Lone Survivor, upon learning that Berg was directing and scripting from Marcus Luttrell’s gripping 2007 memoir ... which just goes to prove, once again, the folly of rash assumptions. This film deserves place of pride alongside A Bridge Too Far, Gallipoli, Black Hawk Down and other war dramas that honor the grit, bravery, indomitable will and almost superhuman resilience of overwhelmed, ground-based soldiers betrayed by circumstances beyond their control.

Lone Survivor isn’t merely stirring; it’s nail-bitingly tense and, ultimately, heartbreaking.

The story details a SEAL operation code-named Operation Red Wings, which in June 2005 sent four men into a mountainous region of Afghanistan; they were tasked with locating and killing Ahmad Shah, a Taliban sympathizer who had orchestrated the ambush of 20 Marines the previous week.

To say that everything went wrong would be an understatement. Radio communications were spotty at best, absent entirely when the subsequent crisis erupted. Worse yet, American intel seriously underestimated the size of Shah’s resident militia. When the dust had settled, as this film’s title warns us, only one man had survived ... and the fatalities had expanded to include far more than the initial SEAL team.

Berg, long a gung-ho champion of American warrior spirit, unveils this film’s credits against actual footage of formidable SEAL training sessions; our immediate takeaway is that these men will endure anything, battling far beyond “normal” levels of pain and punishment, in the pursuit of successfully completing a mission and returning home with their comrades.

It’s an impressive montage, and it certainly sets the mood for what is to come.

We meet our protagonists immediately prior to their mission, during a typical “waiting” period at Camp Ouellette, at Afghanistan’s Bagram Airfield. They cheerfully compete with each other, send e-mails to loved ones back home, make plans for the future. The day’s most significant event involves the “induction” of newbie SEAL Shane Patton (Alexander Ludwig, appropriately enthusiastic), a process that involves some mild hazing and considerable hoo-rah bonding.

Contraband: Slick, smarmy and suspenseful

Contraband (2012) • View trailer
3.5 stars. Rating: R, for violence, pervasive profanity and brief drug use
By Derrick Bang


Goodness, this is a sordid little piece.

Scandinavian crime thrillers have been on the rise of late, thanks in great part to the Stateside interest in Stieg Larsson’s Girl with the Dragon Tattoo trilogy and Henning Mankell’s Kurt Wallander series, the latter recently brought to these shores via actor Kenneth Branagh’s sterling TV adaptations.

Chris (Mark Wahlberg, left) thoroughly hates the idea of "rescuing" his stupid
brother-in-law by embarking on a fresh smuggling heist, but circumstances
have left him no other options. Fortunately, Chris has the underworld savvy
of best friend Sebastian (Ben Foster) to help grease the wheels.

Longtime readers of European thrillers are wondering what the heck took the rest of us so long, of course, since they’ve known about such writers since the arrival of Swedish novelists Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö, whose “Martin Beck” series generated some heat here in the 1960s and ’70s. The fourth book, The Laughing Policeman, was made into an American film vehicle for Walter Matthau in 1973; the adaptation was loose, but certainly engaging.

Icelandic novelists belong to this club as well, with Arnaldur Indriðason and Yrsa Sigurðardóttir leading the charge. All of which serves to introduce Contraband, an American adaptation of 2008’s Reykjavik-Rotterdam, which was Iceland’s official submission for the Academy Awards’ foreign language category in 2010.

This American remake’s pedigree is even more interesting. The Icelandic original, co-written by Indriðason and Óskar Jónasson (the latter also directed), starred Baltasar Kormákur as a former smuggler forced by circumstance to re-embrace his larcenous past; Mark Wahlberg has taken this role in the new version, which is directed by Kormákur.

I can’t think of any other cases where the star of a foreign film — rather than the director or writer — went on to direct an American remake.

Point being, Kormákur certainly understands the atmosphere required by this grim and thoroughly tawdry story. So does first-time scripter Aaron Guzikowski, a former New York ad agency employee who popped up on Hollywood’s radar a few years ago, thanks to a spec script that drew Wahlberg’s attention. And since Wahlberg also is one of the many producers attached to Contraband, we can deduce that he liked Guzikowski’s writing chops.

So do I. Contraband certainly won’t win any awards, but it delivers plenty of tension and a veritable rogue’s gallery of dodgy characters. These are all bad folks, in one form or another; the trick is to make at least one of them a “hero” who deserves our trust and sympathy. In that, Kormákur and Guzikowski succeed quite well, and Wahlberg inhabits that fellow quite credibly.

The Mechanic: Reasonably well tuned

The Mechanic (2011) • View trailer for The Mechanic
3.5 stars (out of five). Rating: R, for profanity, nudity, sexual content and relentless brutal violence
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 1.28.11


As William Goldman explained so well in his fascinating 1983 study of the Hollywood scene, Adventures in the Screen Trade, the presence of a star affects the core dynamic of a motion picture, while also influencing our expectations upon seeing it.

A movie fashioned for Brad Pitt will, of necessity, undergo serious changes if he leaves and subsequently is replaced by Hugh Grant. And our anticipation, when entering the theater – knowing what Grant is likely to bring to the project, as opposed to what Pitt would have brought – changes accordingly.

When a clockwork-smooth assignment suddenly goes sour, once again due to
clumsy behavior by Steve (Ben Foster, left), he and Bishop (Jason Statham)
are stranded on a hotel roof, with plenty of gun-toting thugs swiftly surrounding
their position. The only solution? Plenty of blood-spurting carnage, of course!

Charles Bronson hadn’t yet become a household name when he made The Mechanic back in 1972; that level of fame wouldn’t arrive until 1975’s Death Wish. If people recognized him at all, it was from long-running roles in television’s Have Gun, Will Travel and supporting performances in films such as The Great Escape and The Dirty Dozen. Even though Bronson was appearing in up to five Westerns and exploitation flicks per year, by the late 1960s, most weren’t doing anything for his mainstream cred.

The Mechanic, along with The Valachi Papers and one or two others, began to turn that around.

Tautly directed by Michael Winner, from a slick and intelligent script by Lewis John Carlino, The Mechanic proved a perfect fit for Bronson’s laconic bearing and weather-beaten features. And since Bronson wasn’t yet a star, and thus didn’t present viewers with any expectations, Carlino’s clever and well-calculated storyline could move in unpredictable directions.

Jason Statham, in great contrast, is a well-established action star. His films may not be top-drawer – indeed, sometimes are pretty bad (Crank 2, anybody?) – but he remains popular nonetheless. And fans know what to expect: plenty of mayhem, lots of martial arts-style beat-downs and plenty of ’tude.

Particularly the latter. Statham is cool. Way-cool, in the same way Steve McQueen was cool during his younger years.

So while Statham is a solid choice for director Simon West’s muscular remake/update of The Mechanic, the story’s essence has been altered, and quite seriously. We never knew what was coming from Bronson’s Arthur Bishop; he was utterly unpredictable. Statham, on the other hand, is completely predictable ... as is our suspicion of where this film will go, when it hits the third act.