Video review: "The Age of Adaline"

A bit of romantic trifle with a science fiction twist, “The Age of Adaline” is most hurt by its main star, and most helped by a late-arriving supporting player.

Blake Lively isn’t given enough to do by the script, which posits her as a San Francisco woman whose strange, electrified car crash in 1929 prevents her from aging any more. She wanders through time, trading identities every decade or so to prevent suspicion, her only permanent connection being her daughter, who today has become an old lady played by Ellen Burstyn.

Still, Lively’s performance is drab and emotionally unaffecting. She becomes a Zelig-like figure, someone who shows up everywhere but leaves little trace of their passing.

Adaline has been careful to avoid romantic entanglements for obvious reasons, but now a new beau (Michiel Huisman) has wandered into her life and knocked over some emotional furniture. Soon they’re an item and making long-term plans together – longer, perhaps, than he knows.

It’s a pretty straightforward story, with some flat, dry narration to make things even duller than they might already be.

Then Harrison Ford turns up about halfway through the movie as Adaline’s boyfriend’s dad, and suddenly the movie takes off. Ford, not exactly known as an overly emotive actor, shows us all kinds of vulnerability and doubt that we don’t usually see from cinema’s most reliable heroic everyman.

I won’t give away the details of what transpires, other than to say some old painful memories are dredged up.

Despite the slow start and the underwhelming protagonist, “The Age of Adaline” eventually finds its footing.

Director Lee Toland Krieger provides a feature-length commentary for the special features, which are the same for both DVD and Blu-ray editions. There are also deleted scenes and three featurettes: “A Love Story for the Ages,” “Style Throughout the Ages” and “Discovering Young Harrison Ford: Anthony Ingruber, An Online Sensation.”

Note: Ingruber gained notoriety for his YouTube impressions of Ford and other famous actors, which eventually led to this gig. He is indeed eerily reminiscent of a 1970s Harrison Ford.

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Review: "The Age of Adaline"

"The Age of Adaline" is a movie with a little going for it.

It wants to be a lush romantic tale with a science fiction twist -- beautiful young woman suffers a strange accident and remains young and beautiful forever. Like Dorian Gray and Orlando, Adaline Bowman wanders the decades, eschewing love but eventually drawn into entanglements that inevitably end with pain.

Emotionally, though, it's a remarkably staid film, with neither lead actress Blake Lively or the story providing much in the way to cause our hearts to go pitter-patter.

Until, that is, Harrison Ford shows up in the second half and almost rescues the picture with his raw, naked vulnerability.

Which, I'm aware, is a strange thing to say. Whatever else you think of Ford's thespian skills -- I happen to believe he's been gravely underestimated over his four decades of acting -- he's never been known as a particularly emotive performer. Gruff, hard everymen who occasionally let their veneer slip is more his line.

So to see him stripped bare, stammering with eyes that seem just on the edge of tears, is quite a thing to experience.

The rest of the film picks up on his tragic energy, and concludes with a great deal more emotional momentum, even if the plot is a bit predictable. It's like the movie suddenly remembers to get out of its own way.

Lively plays Adaline, born to a wealthy San Francisco family in 1908. She led a pretty normal life, we're told -- the strangely flat, precise narration is a pure bust -- until the age of 29. During a rare California snowstorm, her car crashed into an icy river, where she went into hypothermia and was then revived by an electrical current from lightning.

All this caused her DNA to undergo "electron compression" and ... actually, don't bother trying to figure out the science-y gobbledy gook; it all just means that she stopped aging. She soldiered on with her life, raising her daughter, until it became clear that she could no longer fool others with talk of miracle Parisian face creams to explain her unaging appearance.

Adaline went on the lam, taking up a new identity and existence every 10 years. And never let her guard down, we learn, except once.

Flash to 2015. Adaline, now going by the name Jenny, celebrates her 107th birthday with her daughter, Flemming (Ellen Burstyn), who is now quite elderly, and her only confidante. She's preparing to spend her next decade on a farm in Oregon, until she runs into an effusive man named Ellis, played by Dutch actor Michiel Huisman, who pronounces his name as "Alice."

He isn't a particularly interesting or engaging character. He's that tiresome cinematic canard, the charming guy who got fabulously rich at a young age but doesn't make a big deal out of it because, y'know, it's just money.

(Axiom: the only people who say they don't care about money are those who already have gobs and gobs of it.)

Ellis/Alice woos Adaline/Jenny with a fierce urgency bordering on creepiness. She eventually succumbs, of course, because otherwise there wouldn't be a movie. They go on a trip to celebrate the 40th anniversary of his parents, played by Ford and Kathy Baker ... and there I'll have to stop, to prevent giving away too much.

It may seem an odd comparison, but this movie reminded me in some ways of "Funny People." That 2009 Judd Apatow comedy started out very strong, but then about halfway through we stumbled upon a new character and storyline that knocked the whole movie off its rails.

"The Age of Adaline" is the opposite: it wanders the wilderness for nearly an hour, then Harrison Ford rides in like a white knight. Neither film winds up a total success, but it's better to gain vigor than watch it dissipate.

Review: "Saving Mr. Banks"

Hollywood loves to tell stories about itself, and here’s a movie from Walt Disney Pictures about the making of one of its own iconic films, and starring Walt himself. Or rather, co-starring Tom Hanks as Walt Disney, a supporting role for the main character of author P.L. Travers, played by Emma Thompson.

The tale is quite simple: the irascible, guarded Mrs. Travers – don’t you dare call her Miss – doesn’t want to sell her novel “Mary Poppins” to Disney and see it turned into a piece of puffy fantasy. But she needs the money, and agrees to come out to California to collaborate with the film’s production team, while Old Walt works his twinkly charm to convince her to sign over the book rights.

The movie is essentially one long dance between Travers and Disney, with the two struggling mightily to understand a person so extravagantly different from themselves. Of course, we know how it all turned out.

(Or, at least we think we do. The film ends with the pair more or less making their peace over their very different conceptions for “Mary Poppins,” but in fact she so reviled what Disney did with her work that she forbade any further adaptations of her books.)

I really wanted to like this movie, but it held so very few surprises for me. We know early on from the flashbacks to Travers’ Australian childhood that she adored her sweet, alcoholic wastrel father (Colin Farrell) and used him as the basis for the father figure, Mr. Banks, in “Mary Poppins.” So it’s all a matter of Disney learning enough about her to puzzle out the truth.

The scene where he finally confronts her about her fears is splendidly acted by Hanks and Thompson, but flat as dry toast. It’s never a good thing when the audience is three steps ahead of the characters.

The early section is mostly about Travers playing the fish-out-of-water role, peevishly negotiating the Hollywood scene. She’s disruptive and contemptuous, treating everyone she meets quite shabbily, especially Disney’s underlings. She even dismisses the songs written for the film by the legendary Sherman Brothers (B.J. Novak and Jason Schwartzman), and regards some animated critters as vile interlopers.

Bradley Whitford turns up as screenwriter Don DaGradi, Kathy Baker is a tough studio exec and Rachel Griffiths plays Travers’ aunt. Paul Giamatti brightens things up as her appointed chauffeur, an obstinately cheerful man who serves absolutely no purpose in the story, but we just like having him around.

Since we’re discussing a film about the creative process, let me tell you a little bit about mine. I prefer to see one movie at a time, write the review within the next 24 hours, more or less be absorbed in that experience, and move on to the next. The crush of late-year screenings made that impossible, and quite frankly, I’m having trouble recalling “Saving Mr. Banks” very well. It’s only been a few days since I’ve seen it, but mentally it’s already slipping through my fingers like sand.

The best movies, and sometimes even the worst, stick with you because they make a strong impression that lingers. There are films I’ve seen only a single time many years ago that I can evoke with great clarity, both the movie itself and how I reacted to it at the time.

I’m afraid “Saving Mr. Banks” is already floating away like Poppins herself, she to her next nanny job and me the next movie review. I just wish there had been a spoonful of magic while we journeyed together.

Reeling Backward: "Street Smart" (1987)

Morgan Freeman has had one of the greatest film careers in cinematic history, in my opinion, and perhaps the most amazing thing about it is that it didn't take off until he was 50 years old.

He had supporting parts in mainstream movies, including 1984's "Teachers" with Nick Nolte, but in 1987 most people knew Freeman as a cast member on "The Electric Company" during the 1970s, playing a variety of urban caricatures helping to educate little kiddies: "Top to bottom, left to right, reading stuff is outta sight!"

"Street Smart" did not make any lasting impression on audiences, other than Freeman's amazing turn as Leo Smalls Jr., aka Fast Black, a chillingly unscrupulous pimp and killer. It earned him the first of five Oscar nominations -- he eventually won for "Million Dollar Baby" -- and he soon found himself cast in leading roles in "Driving Miss Daisy," "Lean on Me," "Se7en" and "The Shawshank Redemption," not to mention supporting turns in high-profile films like "Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves," "Glory," "Unforgiven" and more.

Such was the pinnacle of Freeman's reputation by the 1990s that when he was cast as the U.S. President in "Deep Impact," it caused little stir to see a black man in the role -- a full decade before a real-life African-American would be elected to that post. By the 2000s, when producers needed somebody to convincingly play God Himself in "Bruce Almighty" and its sequel, I doubt if any name other than Freeman's even came up.

"Street Smart" is in some ways analogous to "Girl, Interrupted." It was the pet project of an established star who wanted to use the material to showcase their more serious side, but another largely unknown performer stole the show and would eventually leave them in the dust. Just as Anjelina Jolie's career has soared while Winona Ryder's crashed, Freeman's took flight right as Christopher Reeve, having recently hung up Superman's cape, saw his falling to earth.

(Indeed, according to Reeve's own account, the studio only agreed to finance the low-budget "Street Smart" in exchange for him signing on to do the fourth, unmemorable Man of Steel flick.)

Freeman is terrific as Fast Black, charismatic and chatty one minute and threatening to kill or maim the next. He wears a coiffed Afro, flashy clothes, a gold tooth and has long, sharp white fingernails that give him an almost supernatural look -- abetted by what appears to be eyeliner, which makes Freeman's steely gaze electrifying.

He's so damn good, in fact, that whenever he's not on camera, the movie drags and heaves, like a glacier crumbling under its own inertia. Based on his sixth-place billing in the credits, however -- after such luminaries as Jay Patterson and Andre Gregory -- it's clear the studio wasn't expecting him to be such a mesmerizing presence.

Reeve plays Jonathan Fisher, a nondescript name for a nondescript man. A well-heeled magazine writer for the fictional New York Journal, he's desperate to get ahead. The patrician editor (Gregory) doesn't like any of his story ideas, so he pitches him a left-field notion about an insider's view of a New York pimp, which grabs more attention.

Unfortunately, the preppy-dressing Jonathan doesn't have much luck getting anyone to talk to him from the Big Apple's seedier side. In desperation, he makes up a character and a story to go with it. The editor runs the piece on the cover, it makes a big splash, Jonathan becomes a celebrity and even gets a side gig doing an investigative TV segment, dubbed "Street Smart."

Things get complicated when a D.A. prosecuting Fast Black for murder becomes convinced that Jonathan based the story on him, and demands his notes as evidence. Fast Black's lawyer cleverly embraces the ploy, realizing the case will turn into a First Amendment crisis and remove the focus from his client. The pimp and the writer even buddy up to one another -- which lends Jonathan a way to satisfy his boss' demand to meet the subject of the story at a fancy cocktail party.

Tagging along, and eventually getting into the middle, is Punchy (Kathy Baker), one of Fast Black's top call girls, who connects the two of them together. Other than Freeman, Baker is the only other actor with any real presence in the film, a mix of small-town innocence and streetwise allure.

My biggest problem with the movie is that director Jerry Schatzberg and screenwriter David Freeman don't delve very deeply into Jonathan's anguish and guilt. I know I'm biased given my own journalistic background, but there should be more focus on the way his lies keep piling up atop each other. As with Stephen Glass, Jayson Blair, Jonah Lehrer, Janet Cooke and other fabulists, their dreamed-up stories are exposed in the end.

For Jonathan, it should feel like the walls are closing in on him, as he dreads the day his fabrications are revealed and his career is ended. Instead, the story focuses on the threat of Fast Black, who wants him to create fake notes that exonerate him. Their budding friendship soon turns into one of victim and victimizer -- a challenge to stage convincingly, given Reeve's imposing 6-foot-4 build.

Jonathan has one brief conversation with his girlfriend (Mimi Rogers) in which he discusses the ramifications of concocting a story and then lying repeatedly about it.

"How do you feel about this?" she asks.
"I'm amazed that I got away with it. And I'm ashamed that I got away with it. What the hell, back in business, right?"

Not exactly Dostoevsky-esque torments of the soul, that.

In fact, the story ends with Fast Black dead, the lieutenant who had been fooled by Jonathan into killing him in jail, Punchy murdered and mutilated -- and Jonathan still on the streets, doing his TV reports.

We can thank "Street Smart" for helping put Morgan Freeman on the big stage. Considered in of itself, though, it's a film of little consequence.

2 stars out of four

Video review: "Take Shelter"

A lot of people are squawking about Michael Fassbender ("Shame") and Leonardo DiCaprio ("J. Edgar") failing to receive Oscar nominations for Best Actor, as widely expected among the Hollywood cognoscenti. For my money, the guy who really got cheated was Michael Shannon, whose creepy-yet-charismatic turn in "Take Shelter" earned a lot of critical praise -- but few ticket sales for this little-seen drama.

Shannon plays Curtis, a blue-collar Ohio family man who starts seeing strange apocalyptic visions -- birds flying into vortexes, threatening storm patterns, even indistinct human forms trying to break into the house and get his daughter (Tova Stewart) and wife (Jessica Chastain, filmdom's Miss Everywhere for 2011).

Curtis' own mother had a schizophrenic breakdown when she was about the age he is now, so his first thoughts are that he's cracking up. He seeks counseling at the free clinic and reads books about mental illness.

But nothing can stop his strange impulses -- especially about the old storm shelter buried in his backyard, which Curtis begins transforming into a veritable fortress. He mortgages the house and leverages himself to the hilt in an attempt to slay the white whale only he can see.

It's an extraordinary bit of acting by Shannon, whose face always seems on the verge of melting into a swirl of emotions. "Take Shelter" is a harrowing portrait of Midwest normalcy disrupted by dark daydreams.

Video extras are pretty good. Director Jeff Nichols supplies a feature-length commentary track, and for once the lead actor joins him. I think these commentaries are always better when more than one person is involved, and even better when representatives of both the crew and cast take part.

There is also a behind-the-scenes featurette, Q&A with Shannon and co-star Shea Whigham, and a few deleted scenes.

Movie: 3 stars out of four
Extras: 3 stars

Review: "Take Shelter"

Dark portents are rising, but only one man can see them. "Take Shelter" is a story of foreboding and madness, as the sky literally seems to close around Curtis, an average blue-collar family man from Ohio.

Clouds roil in over the fields in strange, disturbing twists and formations. Birds fly in vexing patterns with no rhyme or reason, as if they're trying to form their own organic cyclone. When things really get bad, Curtis sees indistinct human shapes through his windows, pawing at him and his family.

The fact that these visions happen both in Curtis' dreams and his waking life make them even more troubling. This is the story of a man who comes not to trust his own mind, and how losing that groundedness of mental integrity causes him to become unstuck from his wife, child, job and community.

Curtis is played by character actor Michael Shannon, known for twitchy supporting roles in mainstream films, including his Oscar-nominated turn as a mentally fractured man in "Revolutionary Road."

There's something about Shannon's looming height and malleable features that makes him a natural fit for playing tortured souls. He tends to keep a straight face that is always on the verge of plunging into a well of emotion. I cannot countenance the notion of a Michael Shannon romantic comedy.

It's an entirely new experience to see him taking the sort of character who would normally populate the background of a star vehicle and giving him his own movie. Shannon is equal to the task, drawing a portrait of a man who is self-aware about what is happening to him, but cannot turn away from the visions.

As time goes on and the dreams grow worse -- threatening his daughter, Hannah (Tova Stewart) -- Curtis takes action. He puts his beloved dog, which he dreamed tore his arm apart, in a pen.

Curtis avoids self-denial about his predicament. He checks out books on mental illness from the library and sees his doctor for some sleeping pills. His mother (Kathy Baker) was taken away from him by schizophrenia when she was the same age Curtis is now, so it's clear this descent into mental illness is something he has long feared and guarded against.

Things really grow strange when he decides to expand the old storm shelter in his back yard into a veritable underground fortress, borrowing money they don't have from the bank to do it.

It's notable that in none of Curtis' visions does his wife Samantha appear. That is, until...

Samantha is played by Jessica Chastain, who's had a major career birth over the last year in "The Debt," "Tree of Life," "The Help" and other films. She plays Samantha as more than just the good wife role, as a loving woman who is there for her husband and wants to do everything to help him, but makes it clear there are lines that cannot be crossed. At one point she insists they go to a Lions Club oyster fry dinner, simply because they need to do something normal.

Writer/director Jeff Nichols paints an authentic portrait of Midwest normalcy disrupted by extraordinary circumstances. He wisely puts his focus and his camera tightly on his actors, and keeps it there.

At just over two hours the movie lingers a little too much here and there, and suffers bouts of predictability. The fact that Hannah is deaf and needs cochlear implants paid for by Curtis' health insurance sets up a countdown for inevitable problems on the job.

"Take Shelter" is sometimes predictable, that is, until the very end, which suggests things that seem to come out of left field, until you recall hints that have been dropped along the way. I think this ending weakens the film, which is less concerned with the twists and turns of plot than how a man deals with the whole world crashing in on him, exposing his weaknesses.

3 stars out of four

Review: "Machine Gun Preacher"

"Machine Gun Preacher" is one of those stories that if it wasn't based on reality, few people would buy it.

Gerard Butler plays Sam Childers, a biker hoodlum who goes straight after discovering Jesus, and builds a church across the street from his house for sinners like himself. This would be enough for most movies, but for "Preacher" it's a mere jumping-off point: Sam goes to Uganda, is repulsed by the bloody civil war spilling over there from Sudan, and dedicates his life to establishing and protecting an orphanage.

But Sam is no pacifist "lamb of God" type of preacher -- he believes the Lord wants not sheep, but wolves with teeth who can fight the evildoers. The film's title is not just hyperbole: Sam gets into frequent firefights, and mows down more bad guys than the first couple of Rambo flicks.

Director Marc Forster ("Finding Neverland") and screenwriter (and Indianapolis native) Jason Keller curiously do not focus too much on the right or wrong of this American bringing the fight to the rebels, who kill wantonly and kidnap children to fight for them as enslaved soldiers. It's more an interior exploration of Sam, and the toll a life of such fierce commitment to a cause takes on his family and psyche.

The bad guys are referred to as simply the LRA, but after a bit of Googling I discover that stands for Lord's Resistance Army. It turns out the Sudanese rebels, led by self-described mystic Joseph Kony, are Christians who follow an apocalyptic form of the religion based on a particularly harsh (mis)interpretation of the Ten Commandments.

This would make for an interesting dichotomy, the two holy men each fighting for their version of the Bible. Forster and Keller briefly flirt with this direction, personified by a female doctor who points out that Kony started out much as Sam did, professing to save the members of his flock from the depravity of the other side.

But as soon as "Machine Gun Preacher" looks like it's going to tackle some tough issues, and really put its protagonist under a microscope, it pulls back and settles for familiar tropes, such as Sam's wife (Michelle Monaghan) calling to complain that he never spends time with his family, they're running out of money, etc.
Not 30 minutes earlier, she was telling Sam to suck it up after the rebels burned down the orphanage, calling it a test from God and to just build it all over again.

Michael Shannon adds a few notes as Donnie, Sam's former running buddy who can't shake off the lure of drugs and crime as easily as Sam did. But his character flits in and out of the story in a seemingly arbitrary way.

Butler is a fiery presence as Sam, and some of the scenes where he witnesses the atrocities of war -- one woman is brought in to the clinic with her lips hacked off, for having talked back to rebel soldiers -- have a genuine visceral punch.

But for much of the time, "Machine Gun Preacher" is curiously flat and wandering. It seems to think that by simply presenting the reality of a colorful man, you don't need to do anything else.

2 stars out of four