Review: "Lizzie"

Chloë Sevigny and Kristen Stewart are beautiful women with tired eyes. In “Lizzie,” their characters seem to be sleepwalking through life, addled and awry, as if dreamers hoping desperately to awake from a nightmare.

You may have heard that this is a movie about famed axe murderess Lizzie Borden. What you may not know (I didn’t) is that Borden was acquitted of killing her father and stepmother, returned to her hometown and lived out the rest of her days there. Think about that.

In this fictional (?) version of events, director Craig William Macneill and screenwriter Bryce Kass focus on the romantic relationship between Lizzie (Sevigny) and the family maid, Bridget Sullivan (Stewart). A 1984 novel had supposed a lesbian affair between the two and the discovery of the tryst as the trigger for the murders. (The film’s credits curiously do not attribute the book.)

Here Andrew Borden (Jamey Sheridan) is the true villain, a dictatorial patriarch who treats Lizzie and her sister, Emma (Kim Dickens), as chattel, embarrassing old maids who continually defy and vex him. He also takes liberties with Bridget in her attic bedroom at night, as an Irish immigrant in 1892 Massachusetts was treated as little more than an indentured servant.

The first half of the movie plays out as a tortured romance, while the second half is a whodunit as we witness the consequences of the crime and flashbacks to the actual killings.

I found the scenes between the two actresses more interesting than the crime-and-punishment stuff. They resist the magnetic attraction toward each other, captives of their time and place that looked upon such love as blasphemy, not to mention the yawning class distinction between them.

It’s a compelling dance, as they struggle against their feelings and drown in the anxiety created by denying them.

The Bordens were not a happy clan. Wealthy but emotionally distant, Andrew had remarried a few years after his wife’s death. The daughters remained aloof to their stepmother, Abby (Fiona Shaw). Lizzie refuses to call her mother, though she sticks up for her stepdaughter against the worst of her husband’s cruelties.

To wit: At one point, Andrew is enraged after Lizzie steals and pawns some jewelry, and exacts his revenge by beheading all of her beloved pigeons, one by one. Then he orders Bridget to roast them up for dinner. It’s quote a gothic horror scene.

Once the elder Bordens are dead, the movie loses quite a bit of steam. I think it would have been more interesting to keep the matter of Lizzie’s guilt tucked away from this story, concentrating on why she might have been tempted to do such a thing, and how the case became one of America’s first murder media sensations.

Still, we must consider the movie made rather than the one we wish for.

“Lizzie” is at times compelling and other times listless, a look back at a grisly bit of history that has become a gag, and tries to flesh out the human lives involved. It may not be true, but this is as good an explanation as any for hacking people up with a hatchet.

Video review: "Dallas Buyers club"

Has any actor ever squandered his career with better efficiency than Matthew McConaughey, then reclaimed it with such a superior run of movies? The former star of “Failure to Launch” has had one terrific role after another as of late, capped off by an Oscar-nominated performance in “Dallas Buyers Club.”

He plays Ron Woodruff, a real-life Texas playboy who in 1985 discovered he was carrying the HIV virus. In a time and a place where that meant automatic ostracism from his crowd of good-ole-boy buddies, Ron became a pioneer in smuggling non-legalized drugs into the U.S. to help a clientele of mostly homosexual and transgender men cling to life.

McConaughey and co-star Jared Leto, who plays a transvestite hooker, Rayon, who becomes Ron’s partner in crime, both starved themselves to the point of emaciation for their roles. There’s no vanity in these transformations, however, as the actors barely even resemble themselves.

Ron and Rayon become unlikely friends, a relationship at first based on convenience but eventually on trust and genuine warmth.

One of the beauties of the film is that director Jean-Marc Vallée and screenwriters Craig Borten and Melisa Wallack never go for the easy emotional outpouring. Ron starts the movie as a hateful, reckless bigot, and by the end he’s only changed by a few turns of the screw. But in learning to do for others, he finds a messy sort of grace.

 “Dallas Buyers Club” is a terrific, somber and enlightening look at a period in history where people forced to the margins of society had to look out for each other -- by any means necessary.
Alas, video extras are rather scant, with only a few deleted scenes and a making-of featurette.

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Review: "Dallas Buyers Club"

Ron Woodruff doesn’t look like a hero. He doesn’t sound like one, either, and in fact does a whole lot of irresponsible and even hateful stuff. When we first meet him it’s apparent he’s particularly not fond of gay people, using the f-word freely -- though this wasn’t really unusual in Texas in 1985, when the AIDs epidemic had finally rolled out into mainstream consciousness.

Yet Ron, for all his many, many faults, did something that was downright heroic. He smuggled in drugs for HIV-positive patients that had not yet been approved by the FDA, saving countless lives. He did it to save his own skin and make money, so it’s not unfair to call him a drug smuggler -- of non-legalized (as opposed to illegal) pharmaceuticals.

The movie about his story, “Dallas Buyers Club,” is easily one of the best of the year, a touching story that never slides into self-indulgence and pap.

But let’s get back to how Ron looks, because it’s a sight. And that means talking about the appearance of Matthew McConaughey, who portrays Ron. The actor, whom it would be fair to say glided for years based on his good looks, has lost so much weight, he’s beyond thin. He’s downright frightening to look at.

All of McConaughey’s movie-star vanity is gone here. His face has caved in, those prominent cheekbones standing out like a pair of lonely buttes on the wide Texas plains. The rippling arms and legs have become withered twigs, the sculpted abs fallen in on themselves. He makes the scrawny guy in those old Charles Atlas muscle ads seem well-fed.

“As wiry as an ocotillo,” a reporter once described Ron, referring to the scraggly desert plant. That’s about right. He walks around with a foot of extra belt hanging off his jeans from being cinched ever further.

Ron, though, thinks he’s indestructible. The first image director Jean-Marc Vallée shows us is Ron, an itinerant bullrider, having sex with two women in the cages next to the rodeo while another rider is horribly mangled. He also drinks, does a lot of drugs, and is basically a disaster waiting to happen.

When he’s injured on the job as an electrician, Ron can’t believe it when the doctors tell him he’s tested HIV-positive. Not even when they tell him his T-cell count, normally between 500 and 1,500, is seven. “Frankly, we’re surprised you’re even alive,” the doc says.

Given 30 days to live, Ron goes through the stages of grief at lightspeed. Rejected by his roughneck buddies, who cannot gather how anyone but a homosexual could contract the disease, he tries to get into a drug trial for AZT. A compassionate doctor (Jennifer Garner) tries unsuccessfully to help him, but he scores some through the black market, though the drug only seems to make him weaker.

Arriving on the doorstep of a quack former doctor in Mexico (Griffin Dunne), Ron learns that there are other drugs available to effectively treat symptoms of HIV/AIDS -- they just haven’t been approved by the FDA. After recovering with the help of this medicine, he makes it his mission to smuggle these into America and make a killing off keeping others alive.

Since his market is (at this stage of the disease) almost entirely gay men, Ron finds that a homophobic, foul-mouthed cowboy like himself has troubles making inroads to this clientele. So he enlists the aid of Rayon, a transvestite prostitute played by Jared Leto.

Leto and McConaughey both deserve Oscar nominations for their performances, especially after witnessing the slow dance toward trust and understanding their two characters undertake. Leto, starved almost to the same proportions as McConaughey, is like a warped latter-day version of Norma Desmond, the fallen star from “Sunset Boulevard.” Rayon desperately clings to the belief she deserves better than what she’s gotten out of life, both her body and her circumstance, and it gives her a sort of vainglorious grace.

Eventually the feds arrive to shut down the party, as they did with dozens of other “buyers clubs” that sprung up around the country in the mid-1980s to sell non-approved HIV medicine. (The scam to get around FDA rules was that the drugs were free, as long as you buy a “membership” in the club.) The movie bogs down a little here, as screenwriters Craig Borten and Melisa Wallack focus too much on the legal shenanigans.

Mostly, “Dallas Buyers Club” is a showcase for the long-dormant talents of Matthew McConaughey, who broke onto the Hollywood scene as “the next Paul Newman,” then lost his way with conceited roles in movies dreamed up by accountants rather than artists. Based on this extraordinary film and “Mud,” he’s ready to shoulder that heavy mantle again.