Review: "The Hero"

There’s a scene in “The Hero” where Sam Elliott, as aging cowboy actor Lee Hayden, runs through lines for an audition. It’s for one of those generic big-budget spectacles, the sort of movie that could give Lee’s moribund career a life-changing boost.

And the dialogue is just complete garbage -- we’re talking Razzies awards territory here.

Yet Lee invests the lines with so much authority, such hard-wrung emotional intensity, that you’d swear he’d sauntered out of a shot from “Unforgiven.” His reading leaves the buddy running lines with him, and us, just floored.

You could say much the same about the whole of Elliott’s performance, which should be remembered as the zenith of a long and noble career.

Blessed with a voice like creased leather and a face straight out of a Ken Burns historical documentary -- that iron glare, haphazard angles and totemic mustache -- Elliott has spent decades playing cowpokes, deputies and other hard men who support the hero of the story with unflagging loyalty and, when necessary, sterner steps.

Now Elliott is the leading man, playing a sort-of version of himself, if maybe a few rungs down the ladder of fame.

Lee is a TV and film actor whose heyday faded half a lifetime ago. By his own reckoning he only ever made one movie worth a damn, from which this film takes its title. These days he mostly just smokes a lot of weed, hangs around with his former co-star/solitary friend/drug dealer, Jeremy (Nick Offerman), and waits for the phone to ring.

His only real gig is doing voiceovers, commercials for barbecue sauce and such – something the real-life Elliott knows a thing or two about as pitchman for trucks, beef and beer. In the opening scene, he is repeatedly prompted by the offscreen technician to do “just one more” take, ad nauseum.

It’s an apt metaphor for Lee’s career: stuck in a rut, but one he’d like to keep plying if anybody’d let him climb back in the saddle for real.

His agent, who clearly has bigger clients on his mind, drops one piece of news: a group called the Western Appreciation and Preservation Society would like to give him their lifetime achievement award. It’s just a bunch of oldsters who like wearing cowboy hats and throw themselves a party once a year, and Lee brushes it off.

He is long divorced from his wife, Valerie (Katharine Ross, who knows from Westerns), and barely has a relationship with his adult daughter, Lucy (Krysten Ritter). When he bumps into Charlotte (Laura Prepon), a cool, smart chick who’s about his kid’s age and makes goo-goo eyes at him, Lee’s first instinct is to become defensive about the preposterousness of it.

“Seventy,” Lee snarls when he finally goads her into asking his age, practically spitting out the addendum, “One!”

But they start to have a thing, and Lee decides he might as well go accept that award after all, especially if he can have a pretty thing on his arm. They drop some drugs beforehand to mellow out, stuff happens at the ceremony, and without going into it all, his phone starts to ring again.

There’s one other key piece of information: Lee has just learned he has a deadly form of cancer that is mostly going to put him six feet under before too long. He starts to experience dreams/flashbacks in which he is again the star of a Western, an existentialist jaunt in which old debts have piled up and a reckoning comes creeping.

It’s still stunning how a widebrim and six-shooter fit Elliott so well, less accoutrements than intrinsic parts of the man’s iconography.

Things go from there. Director Brett Haley, who previously worked with Elliott on “I’ll See You in My Dreams,” co-wrote the script with Marc Basch as a clear homage to the actor. It’s a look at a guy who’s been waiting his whole life for his fortune to change, and when it happens it’s at exactly the wrong time.

Sullen yet hopeful, with even a nugget or two of joy, “The Hero” isn’t a swan song to a type of actor whose day has passed, but a showcase for one very much in his prime.

Video review: "The Girl on the Train"

The most important aspect of a potboiler movie is that the pot has to keep boiling, gaining in intensity rather than losing it. “The Girl on the Train,” despite having some strong story elements and a very good performance by Emily Blunt, loses steam to the point the plot congeals.

Blunt plays Rachel, a woman who’s seemingly lost everything -- her career, her marriage, her sobriety, her hopes of having a baby. She spends her days in an alcoholic stupor, riding the train into the city for the job she lost a while ago. This allows her to glide past her old house, where her ex-husband (Justin Theroux) has remarried to the woman he was cheating on her with, and they’ve just had a gorgeous baby girl.

While she’s pummeling herself with this vision of what could have been, Rachel also becomes curious about another couple living a couple of doors down (Haley Bennett and Luke Evans), who tend to have a very, um… vigorous romantic life, which they engage in without apparent regard to the trains passing by their very unobstructed windows.

When this woman goes missing, Rachel becomes a prime suspect, since she had one of her frequent blackouts on that day and woke up confused and bloody (not hers). Nonetheless she undertakes her own amateur investigation, befriending the grieving husband and signing up for therapy sessions with their shrink.

Slowly, she starts to emerge from her self-induced fog -- just as the dangers grow to confront her.

Based on the novel by Paula Hawkins (unread by me), “The Girl on the Train” loses momentum as it goes rather than gaining it. Director Tate Taylor and screenwriter Erin Cressida Wilson give us their own mediocre version of “Gone Girl,” which accomplished almost everything this film does not.

It’s too bad Blunt’s haunting performance got wasted with such inept plotting.

Bonus features are pretty good. They include deleted and extended scenes, a couple of making-of documentaries and a feature-length commentary track with director Taylor.

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Film review: "The Girl on the Train"

“The Girl on the Train” feels like it wants to be the next “Gone Girl,” but it doesn’t quite have the same twisted pretzel of emotional anguish and expertly boiling plot. That film constantly raised the stakes, but this one often wanders in a self-medicating daze like its heroine.

Did I say heroine? The best-selling novel by Paula Hawkins actually has three, all of whom share the first-person perspective at points. Emily Blunt is the clear star here, so director Tate Taylor and screenwriter Erin Cressida Wilson take the curious route of telling the story through her eyes, then pulling aside to reveal stuff she couldn’t possibly have seen or known.

The result is a confused and confusing psycho-sexual thriller that plays like a “Roshomon” that wanders deep into a thicket of shifting perspectives it can’t sort out itself. Then it rescues things through conventional plot devices it dusted off from other movies.

The movie’s one saving grace is Blunt, who goes deep into her character of Rachel, who’s an utter mess. Her marriage cratered because of her alcoholism and their inability to have a baby – not to mention her husband Tom’s (Justin Theroux) philandering. Now he’s married to the woman he was cheating on her with, Anna (Rebecca Ferguson), and they’ve just had a gorgeous daughter.

They’re living in Rachel’s old house next to the rail line in Ardsley, a quiet upstate New York commuter town. Every day, Rachel takes the train into the big city, ostensibly for her job but also so she can spy on them and dissolve into a pool of resentment and self-pity. Constantly sipping from a CamelBak water bottle she’s secretly filled with clear booze, Rachel is perpetually stumbling around and experiencing blackouts.

She’s also become fixated on another woman who lives two doors down, Megan (Haley Bennett), a blonde goddess with a hunk of a husband, Scott (Luke Evans), whose amorous attentions toward her are fervent. (Jeez, buy some window shades, folks.)

But there’s more to each woman’s tale than meets the eye, and the strain becomes more intense when Megan goes missing. The cops (Allison Janney plays the chief detective) come sniffing around Rachel, who seems like a top suspect. She had a blackout that day and doesn’t remember much, but was seen chasing Megan and shouting insults at her. And Rachel woke up that night covered in blood.

Blunt really grunges herself up for the role – hollow eyes, ragged lips, tangled hair, even a bit of mustache. She dresses one step up from a bag lady and talks about the twin delusions of rage and envy she has toward the other women. “She’s what I lost. She’s everything I want to be,” she says.

At least early on, much of the appeal of “The Girl on the Train” is exploring such a broken character and contemplating the prospect that she may actually be guilty of some horrendous crime. Flashbacks show her being capable of violence, and even once stole into Anna’s house while she was asleep and carried the baby off into the back yard.

But things spin sideways. We’re introduced to a therapist (Edgar Ramirez) who was treating Megan and may be complicit. Rachel undertakes an amateur Nancy Drew act, befriending Scott and then signing up for her own sessions with the therapist. Just when it feels like the story should be building toward something, it just seems to devolve.

I won’t belabor the clunky maneuvers of the plot, other than to say you’ll probably figure out the true villain long before they’re revealed. It’s never a good thing when the audience reaches the final stop far ahead of the train.