Review: "Hotel Mumbai"

One of the most lamentable thing about terrorist tragedies is the tendency to forget about them, especially when they happen outside our normal sphere of attention. The average American can tell you a lot about 9/11 or the Boston Marathon bombing, but things like the 2008 attacks in Mumbai recede from memory with lamentable haste.

Director Anthony Maras, who co-wrote the script with John Collee, has recreated the event with generous measures of empathy, tension and insight. We watch the attacks, which took place in multiple places across the teeming Indian city, through the prism of perhaps the highest profile one: the glorious Taj Hotel.

The cast of Indians and a few Westerners is led by Dev Patel, playing Arjun, a humble member of the wait staff. Their model of service is an ambitious one: “Guest is God” is their motto. Anupam Kher plays the head chef, Hemant Oberoi, who acts as not just the de facto leader of the staff but keeper of the sacred flame.

The untold story of Hotel Mumbai, as the Taj was colloquially known, is that nearly as many employees were killed as guests because they chose to stay and protect their charges instead of escaping to safety. Despite being shot up, bombed and set ablaze, the hotel was reopened for business barely three weeks after the attack.

Armie Hammer and Nazanin Boniadi play David and Zahra, a married couple caught up in the incident. He is an American architect and she is a Muslim woman, and they have brought with them their baby son and British nanny, Sally (Tilda Cobham-Hervey).

It’s interesting to watch them arrive and take up residence in their lavish penthouse, since the staff might presume the two Westerners are the parents and the brown woman is their servant. But discretion is the byword at the Taj.

Jason Isaacs plays Vasili, a piggish Russian oligarch who casually sifts through photographs of his potential female escorts for that evening in the hotel restaurant, loudly inquiring over the phone about their physical attributes. He shows his mettle when things turn bloody, though, including some quaint chivalry expressed toward Zahra.

The attackers are depicted as young, deluded Muslims who have been conned by “Brother Bull” to carry out this despicable act in the name of jihad. He remains in constant contact via headset phone -- from a safe distance, of course -- ordering the men to kill all Indians, take Westerners hostage and, when the time comes, sacrifice their own lives.

The perpetrators are essentially naïve peasants, astounded by the opulence of Mumbai’s upper crust and indoctrinated to see it as wealth stolen from the just.

Amandeep Singh and Suhail Nayyar play the two most prominent terrorists. What’s most disturbing is not their acts, but the casual way they carry them out, almost like farmers sorting out the stock for slaughter. When one calls his father, we’re astonished at how he pours out his love for his family yet does not hesitate an instant to brutalize the Taj residents.

“Hotel Mumbai” is a celebration of the human spirit, but not a blindly obtuse one. It recognizes that evil is nearly always something we ascribe to others, even as people carry out the most dastardly acts as proof of virtue. Those who believe they are victims are most likely to pass along the mantle.

Review: "Fury"

One of my favorite things to do as a critic is to point people to great movies they’ve probably never heard of. Case in point: “End of Watch,” which was in and out of theaters so fast in 2012 you probably missed it even if you didn’t blink.

Writer/director David Ayer’s next film, the Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle “Sabotage,” similarly disappeared without a trace. I’m hoping that won’t be the case with his latest, “Fury,” a World War II action/drama starring Brad Pitt that mostly takes place inside a single Sherman tank.

Fair notice: this a grim, dark movie about the dank corners hidden away inside men’s souls. It makes “Saving Private Ryan” seem like a lullaby.

The battle scenes are gruesome, and what happens when the shooting stops is often even more troubling. American soldiers are portrayed not as decent men who sometimes commit evil deeds in the heat of combat, but killing machines who only want to murder the Germans before the krauts murder them.

What a pitiable world Ayers has drawn for us. Unlike most WWII movies that are set when the Nazis still have the upper hand, here it’s April 1945 and the Germans are offering their stiffest resistance before the collapse they know is inevitable.

The soldiers are all scarred, grimy beasts; the German landscape is an open wound, ripped and gasping; the detritus of war lies all around, smoking armored hulks like prehistoric behemoths brought low. It’s not so much that death and carnage are everywhere, but everywhere is death and carnage.

To wit: when the fresh young recruit, Norman (Logan Lerman), is assigned to the crew of the “Fury,” the battered tank that has survived many battles, his first duty is to clean out the bloody mess left by his predecessor. While doing so, he finds part of the man’s face, perfectly intact, staring at him.

So again I say: not for the squeamish, this.

Pitt has a stout, merciless role as Don, aka “Wardaddy,” the sergeant who commands the Fury. His face done up with scars and hair chopped in a deliberately unattractive fop with shaved sides, Don is sure-handed and unrelenting with the enemy, and the same with his crew. He’ll let them bicker and bitch, but when it’s time for them to perform he will brook no hesitation.

When Norman fails to spot and kill a German soldier with an anti-tank gun, and absolutely horrific results ensue, Don makes personally sure that the lad will not flinch next time, using brutal but effective means. He’ll let the Neanderthal gunner, Grady (Jon Bernthal), indulge his base instincts, but only up to a point.

Don takes a softer hand with Bible, a thoughtful young man played thoughtfully by Shia LaBeouf, and Gordo (Michael Peña), the rock-solid tank driver. The sergeant has promised all his men he will keep them alive, but their latest mission will test that pledge.

The Fury is assigned to a platoon of five tanks to guard a crossroads against a force of fresh German troops, who are threatening the advancing division’s supply line. If they fail, the entire Allied advance will ground to a halt and the war could last months longer.

Ayer shows an expert hand for the battle scenes, keeping the focus on the men inside the Fury while giving a pulse-jumping view of the action outside. Tracer bullets and ordnance flash at the screen like lasers, lending the proceedings an eerie stuck-out-of-time feeling. An encounter with a technologically superior Panzer Tiger is especially effective.

The movie works better as a war picture than a character piece. We never quite get all the way inside the heads of the characters, so their peril doesn’t carry as much emotional freight as you’d expect. And a scene inside the apartment of a German woman and her cousin goes in many different directions at once, like a grenade, rather than focused, like a sniper’s bullet.

Still, this is one depiction of war destined to linger in our memory. At times this movie almost seems like a pugnacious middle finger to the classic war epics, in which disparate men come together for a violent but altruistic cause. “Fury” crushes the notion of the nobility of war under its grinding, pitiless treads.