Review: "Human Capital"

"Human Capital" is a tale of leverage -- the invisible lines of influence and control we all have exerted upon us by others, and in turn use to manipulate people to our ends. It's a story of weaklings and bullies, lovers and enemies, and how quickly these roles can shift.

In an unnamed New York City wealthy suburb, two families are loosely joined by their children. Liev Schreiber is Drew, a middle-aged real estate broker looking for a piece of the better life. His teen daughter, Shannon (Maya Hawke), is dating Jamie (Fred Hechinger), the son of a major hedge fund tycoon. As the story opens, Drew offers to drop Shannon off at her boyfriend's house, but he has ulterior motives.

Peter Sarsgaard plays Quint Manning, the other father, with a pitch-perfect mix of arrogance and dismissive contempt. He invites Drew to play tennis with him, and he already seems to know it's a set-up to ask about investing in his hot new venture. It's a casual sort of neighborly corruption.

To Quint, everything and every person has a price tag on them.

Drew borrows the $300,000 to get in on the hedge fund (at the lowest "friends and family" entry) and falsifies his financial paperwork. Meanwhile, his younger wife Ronnie (Betty Gabriel), an idealistic therapist, has just learned she is pregnant. Drew, who used to have a problem with gambling, embraces the possibilities while pushing down the fear about the consequences -- especially when the deal starts to go south.

An accident on the road happens -- a car sideswipes a cyclist in the middle of the night, then drives on. Who was driving? What happened to the man on the bicycle? Will anyone be held to account in this world where seemingly sings go punished?

The story, based on the novel by Stephen Amidon and adapted by Oren Moverman, keeps shifting perspectives and gears on us. We think it'll be Drew's story, but then the movie rewinds and we see some of the same things from another point of view, and then another. It all builds to a confrontation that is inevitable but still remains surprising.

Director Marc Meyers ("My Friend Dahmer") keeps the pieces of the puzzle constantly moving, introducing new ones and setting aside others we thought would be pivotal. The novel was previously adapted into an Italian movie of the same name.

Marisa Tomei plays Carrie, Quint's wife and Jamie's mother, a kept woman who enjoys her immense privilege. Drew first spots her through a window in the opening scene, and we suspect they might have a romantic liaison. But their first meeting is awkward and off-putting, and seems to close the door on that.

Carrie has an idea to buy and restore a magnificent cinema in the nearby city, and Quint is content to indulge his wife's latest whim. She forms a board and sets about with the project, and dallies with her hand-picked artistic director (Paul Sparks), a professor who is as mesmerized by her as Quint is with his money.

The story turns again to Shannon, who mutually splits with Jamie while maintaining the pretense of their continued relationship in order to appease their parents. She is intrigued by Ian (an excellent Alex Wolff), one of Ronnie's patients who is a minor local celebrity for his drug-dealing. Shannon takes up with the dour young man, at first to fracture her goody-goody image but then for deeper reasons.

Ian tells her upfront that he is a broken person, and even seductively vows that he will never love her. But we'll see.

Things go from there. Even with its "Roshomon"-like structure, "Human Capital" is less interested in the twists of the storyline than the impact they have on the very human figures caught in the web of intrigue.

The cast is pretty uniformly terrific, with Hawke and Wolff standing out in particular. Their star-crossed relationship is the beating heart of the movie, the real romance hiding behind a fake one.

We all tell lies, and are lied to. It's one thing to betray another but quite another to be dishonest with yourself. Here's a tense, observant film that explores the authenticity of our own hearts.

Review: "Patriots Day"

The Boston Marathon bombing was less than four years ago, but already it seems a deeply embedded piece of our national lore, like a piece of shrapnel in our collective soul. Two Chechen brothers with radical Islamist sympathies planted a pair of improvised bombs along the race route, killing three people, including a child, and injuring hundreds of others.

The sight of Boylston Street spattered with blood and limbs is not something any of us should soon forget -- or want to.

“Patriots Day” is a painstaking recreation of that fateful day, from the early morning hours leading up to the attack to the time the Tsarnaev brothers were captured and killed. It takes the form of a police procedural, following parallel paths of the domestic terrorists and the army of law enforcement chasing them.

Director Peter Berg, who co-wrote the script with Matt Cook and Joshua Zetumer, based on the book “Boston Strong” by Casey Sherman and Dave Wedge, has delivered an unrelentingly grim film that somehow leaves us with a sense of hope and community. It takes pains not to depict the perpetrators as soulless vessels, the victims as mere statistics or the cops as faceless automatons.

There are many powerful images and moments that will linger for me. Such as a young bride waking up after the blast, seeing that both her and her husband’s legs have been torn to pieces, and choosing to bind up his wounds before her own. Or a father, his body similarly shredded, trying to prevent a rescue worker from whisking his toddler son to safety.

Mark Wahlberg, John Goodman, Kevin Bacon and J. K. Simmons play the main roles as police officers on the chase, and are all resolute and effective. Wahlberg plays Boston Police Sergeant Tommy Saunders, while John Goodman is Police Commissioner Ed Davis. Bacon plays the FBI guy, Richard DesLauriers, brought in to lead the investigation, and Simmons is Jeffrey Pugliese, the sergeant in nearby Watertown who become involved when the chase led to his sleepy burg.

It’s a fine and realistic portrait of dedicated men with strong personalities trying to do an important job, and occasionally getting into beefs with each other. The feds-versus-locals is a common theme in crime stories, and we also get to see how politics plays into events like these, with Michael Beach as Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick, pushing for more information to be released to the public.

Alex Wolff and Themo Melikidze play Tsarnaev brothers, Dzhokhar and Tamerlan. It’s essentially an abusive relationship, with the older married Tamerlan constantly bullying his 19-year-old brother, a seemingly normal college student who’d probably be spending his days smoking weed and cutting classes if not for his radicalized sibling’s harassment.

Like the best historical reenactments, I learned things about a wildly publicized event that I hadn’t previously known. Like the Tsarnaevs kidnapping a young Chinese-American businessman (Jimmy O. Yang) and forcing him to ride around with them in his brand-new SUV for hours. Or the assassination of an MIT cop sitting in his vehicle. Or the extent of the firefight they engaged in with Watertown cops, complete with pipe bombs and vehicles rocketed into the air.

Wahlberg is the biggest star in the movie, but there’s no real main character in this ensemble cast. His police sergeant is an amalgam of several different officers, which I might normally find objectionable but I think works narratively here.

This way the audience can experience a continuous face from the scene of the bombing to the behind-the-scenes forensic investigation that quickly pinpointed the Tsarnaevs to the actual manhunt. He serves as the locus of the story, a source of constancy amid a tumult of faces and details.

His character has a bum knee that he aggravates right before the marathon, so he spends the whole movie hobbling around. The fact that he’s already wounded on the outside gives him a connection to the victims we comprehend at a visceral level.

“Patriots Day” is a hard movie to watch, but ultimately an extremely rewarding one. It’s only at their worst that people show us their best.