Review: "By the Sea"

I’m going to go out on a limb and say that “By the Sea” will not be everyone’s slice of pie. Set in the 1970s, it’s a throwback to a style of filmmaking from that same era we don’t see much anymore: contemplative, personal, forthrightly erotic, at times wandering and hazy, at times mesmerizing.

I’ve long made it a point not to read other reviews or articles about a movie before I’ve written my own, but couldn’t avoid a growing and nasty wave of commentary about this film. Much of this seems to owe to it starring Hollywood supercouple Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, and that it was written and directed by the latter (who is credited, perhaps tellingly, as Angelina Jolie Pitt).

They haven’t made a movie together since “Mr. & Mrs. Smith,” when of course Pitt was married to somebody else. It seems eons ago, but it was just 10 years. Since then they’ve wed, had a gaggle of children (adopted and natural), gone through a major medical scare for her, seen their careers bounce high and low.

Now in his 50s, he’s become choosier about his film projects, and she’s starred in fewer and fewer, preferring the space behind the camera. “By the Sea” is Jolie Pitt’s third film as a director, the first in which she also acted, and her best.

There’s not much to the story. The Bertrands, husband and wife, are motoring along the French coastline. They find a nice place with a gorgeous view of a rocky bay, and stop for a while. Their linger becomes a wallow, as he tries to use the setting as inspiration for his writing, and she seems to have little reason to exist beyond embodying resentment.

The Bertrands are not happy people. Married 14 years, they’re engaged in a wary pas de deux through the “second stage of life.” Roland mostly drinks and takes notes at the local café, but the sheet of paper in his typewriter remains obstinately unchanged. Vanessa (Ness) hangs around the hotel balcony, spying on sunbathers, occasionally going shopping in town while wearing an enormous hat and sunglasses, Audrey Hepburn-like.

They act like celebrities hiding out, and indeed he was once a noted novelist and she was a famous performer (the venue is vague). Money does not seem to be a problem, as they wear expensive clothes, buy their suppers, smoke cigarettes and drink, drink, drink.

A colleague commented after the screening that this is the sort of movie “Liz & Dick” -- meaning Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton -- might’ve made a half-century ago, and the comparison is apt. Like their earlier counterparts, Brad and Angelina are world-famous figures who seem bored and bothered by their status, and are looking to use this movie to comment upon and distance themselves from their public personas. Ness is an object of curiosity to most everyone she encounters, but she prefers to remain remote and aloof.

Things happen, slowly. Roland befriends the older bartender (Niels Arestrup) and tries to squeeze every considerable ounce of wisdom out of him -- both for his book and the sake of his marriage.

A younger couple on their honeymoon (Mélanie Laurent and Melvil Poupaud) moves into the suite next door, and Ness begins spying on them through a forgotten pipe. Meanwhile, she and Roland are virtually asexual. He soon joins her in voyeurism, simply to have something they can share.

“By the Sea” is an amazingly beautiful movie; Pitt and Jolie Pitt have never looked more gorgeous. It’s a very observational film, keying on little details like the way Ness always tosses her sunglasses onto the table, and he always rights them so the glass doesn’t get scratched. We watch a red-shirted fisherman row his tiny boat out of the mouth of the bay and back every day, but never meet him. There are fleshy flashes of thoughts that bound around inside Ness’ head, but it’s torment rather than desire that makes her vibrate.

This is the sort of movie that isn’t really “about” anything, other than the question of whether Roland and Ness make it as a married couple, or not. At times their situation seems dire, later hopeful, then less so. Their disillusion, carefully staked out in their days spent apart, is challenged in ways unexpected. This movie is less about the what than the how.

Some people are ready to dismiss “By the Sea” as an old-school vanity project, but I think that’s missing the point. People -- especially those who’ve spent their lives pretending to be somebody else -- often understand others better than they do themselves. Here are a pair of stars behaving like nobodies, and having a swell time acting miserable.

Video review: "War Horse"

"War Horse" got an Academy Award nomination for Best Picture -- plus five other nods -- but little real love. Box office receipts were respectable but hardly stratospheric. The film won virtually none of the various awards for which it was nominated.

The best way to describe the reception given to "War Horse" was one of respectful indifference.

While hardly one of Steven Spielberg's best directorial efforts, "War Horse" certainly deserves better than the miserly regard it's been afforded. It's a lush family drama, sad but redemptive, the sort of ambitious old-fashioned movie-making not seen in great quantities for at least half a century.

As a bonus, the musical score, by constant Spielberg companion John Williams, is one of his best in years.

The star of the story is Joey, a brilliantly fast and spirited horse from England who becomes the object of affection for a variety of people leading up to and during World War I. At first he's the ward of Albert (Jeremy Irvine), a poor farm boy, but then Joey is conscripted into the British cavalry.

As the years roll by and the horrors mount up, Joey's fortunes change as often as the landscape, from rolling French countryside to the nightmarish labyrinth of trench warfare.

Even though the film lacks anything resembling suspense, it's still a fantastically emotional ride.

Video extras are good, though there's a wide chasm between the single-disc DVD edition and the top-of-the-line Blu-ray/DVD combo.

The DVD comes with a single featurette, "War Horse: The Look," which concentrates on how Spielberg and his crew achieved the suffused, painterly look of the film.

Upgrade to the two-disc Blu-ray/DVD combo, and you add two more features. There's a making-of documentary featuring Spielberg and all the cast, and a featurette about the making of the movie from the perspective of an extra.

Go for the four-disc package, and there are four more featurettes. "A Filmmaking Journey" concentrates on Spielberg's artistic journey making the movie. Another focuses on producer and longtime Spielberg collaborator Kathleen Kennedy, including her personal on-set photographs. Two more featurettes focus on editing and scoring, and sound effects.

Movie: B-plus
Extras: B

Review: "War Horse"

For a male weepie, "War Horse" doesn't shy away from what it is. Most such films hide behind a veneer of sports or other manly pursuits in spinning a tale that is designed to reduce every guy watching it to sobs.

But Steven Spielberg's new drama has all the ingredients: fathers and sons struggling to relate, brothers caught up in conflict, soldiers trading kindness amidst the bloodletting, gentle grandfathers and, especially, boys and their beloved animals.

Tears, commence being expertly jerked.

(This is not to imply that women won't weep at it -- I'm sure they will, in bucketfuls. It's just this is the rare weepie specially designed to stimulate Y-chromosome tear ducts.)

What "War Horse" does not have is a romantic component, and for that I am grateful. It's so tiresome to sit through Hollywood movies that seem to throw in a love interest for no reason at all other than brazen demographic appeal (see "Captain America: The First Avenger" for an especially egregious example).

Despite its nearly 2½-hour run time, the movie does not dally unnecessarily, on pitching unneeded woo or anything else.

The titular horse is Joey, the finest thoroughbred in all of England, who was bought for a princely sum by a broken-down old drunk of a farmer (Peter Mullan). Alas, as a result of shelling out 30 guineas for the dappled colt, the farmer does not have the money to pay his sniveling landlord (David Thewlis), who desired the horse for himself.

Of course, wiry thoroughbreds are not terribly useful for plowing fields, but the farmer's headstrong son Albert (Jeremy Irvine) insists he can train Joey to pull a tiller. This sets off the first of many great love affairs, with Joey the perpetual object of affection.

World War I arrives, and Joey is sold off to the British cavalry, breaking Albert's heart. Luckily, the lieutenant who purchases the horse to be his personal mount (Tom Hiddleston) is fine and upstanding, and promises to honor Joey with the same affection Albert did.

Alas, many things go awry during wartime. Over the next four years, Joey finds himself changing masters frequently, with prospects that rise and fall with the capricious whims of war.

For a time he is under the charge of a kindly teenage German soldier (David Kross) and his underage brother. Later, he comes into the embracing arms of a young French girl (Celine Buckens) and her wise, nurturing grandfather (Niels Arestrup).

But Joey also gets conscripted into toting massive cannons, a duty where most horses only last a month or two before collapsing and receiving a merciful bullet. And he becomes trapped in the horrors of the trench war -- a nightmarish landscape of mud, barbed wire and blood.

Based on the novel by Michael Morpurgo, the screenplay by Lee Hall and Richard Curtis -- which also draws inspiration from the Broadway play that won a raft of Tony awards earlier this year -- hits all the expected beats. But despite these rarely arriving without much surprise (one knows exactly how the film will end the entire way), they still hold a rapturous emotional pull -- assisted by John Williams' stirring score of lush strings.

Visually, "War Horse" is quite arresting. Spielberg and his longtime cinematographer, Janusz Kaminski, intentionally strike an audacious note, composing scenes of suffused color and almost painterly beauty. The effect is theatrical, with the artifice of the visuals drawing the movie out of the grim reality of war and into something like fairy tale lightness.

Because, ultimately, "War Horse" is a children's movie, or something very much like it. It appeals more to the senses and the heart than the mind. Eventually, one has to choose whether to submit to its blatant, wonderfully sad manipulations. I'm glad I did.

3.5 stars out of four

Review: "Sarah's Key"

I never tire of films about World War II, especially when they're as good and emotionally affecting as "Sarah's Key," a French drama starring English actress Kristen Scott Thomas.

Perhaps younger generations see movies like this -- which still turn up quite often year in local cinemas, even seven decades after the war's end -- and think, "Not again." Perhaps even those old enough to have lived through those dark times grow tired of seeing them portrayed from yet another light. But I think, and hope, not.

The Second World War was the most pivotal event in the history of mankind, bar none. Conquerors like Alexander the Great and Genghis Khan rode momentary tides of power that left the landscape and people much as they had been.

World War II created and destroyed countries, shifted the balance of world power across the Atlantic Ocean, and ushered in a technological age wherein humans harnessed the power to totally and permanently annihilate each other.

And, if one man had had his way -- abetted by millions who agreed or went along out of fear -- an entire race of people would have been exterminated.

The saga of the Jewish journey gets a new twist in "Sarah's Key," which uses the Vel' d'Hiv Roundup as a prism for a historical story set in the past and present. The roundup is a stain on the proud legacy of Occupied France in which nearly 14,000 French Jews were arrested and taken to a bicycle stadium, where conditions made the Superdome after Hurricane Katrina look like a weekend resort.

The execrable event was ordered by the Nazis but carried out by French authorities. Many of those arrested were eventually sent to concentration camps for extermination.

Scott Thomas plays Julia Jarmond, an American journalist who's been living in France for a quarter-century. She's researching Vel' d'Hiv Roundup for a magazine story, and stumbles across a very personal connection to the tragedy. At first afraid to confront the truth, she soon becomes obsessed with nailing it down.

Her search becomes a quest to learn the fate of Sarah Starzynski, a young girl whose family was among those arrested. When the police came knocking Sarah, thinking she was saving her little brother's life, tucked him inside a hidden closet in their apartment, locking him in with her key and promising to return.

Of course, they were not allowed to return for days, which soon turned into weeks, leaving little doubt about the young Starzynski lad's fate. But this becomes Sarah's own quest, guarding the ornamental key through many adversities, to learn the truth for herself.

This mirrors Julia's own journey of discovery, which she senses must end in disappointment -- both personally and professionally -- and yet she cannot let go of the chimera's tail she has grasped.

Scott Thomas is her usual solid self, with her beautiful, wan face a canvas of colliding emotions and thoughts. Her French is -- to my untrained ear -- superlative, though her (supposedly) Brooklyn accent is, shall we say, more aspirational than operational.

Mélusine Mayance is a revelation as young Sarah, who finds the resolve to carry on even when separated from her parents, or even any real hope for her family's survival. I also very much enjoyed the performance by Niels Arestrup as a farmer who finds a bedraggled Sarah at his doorstep, and makes a choice that changes both their lives in ways neither could have imagined.

"Sarah's Key" was directed by Gilles Paquet-Brenner, who co-wrote the screenplay with Serge Joncour based on the novel by Tatiana De Rosnay. They keep the mood and tone of the film in a perfect balance between the joy of discovery in letting the narrative unspool, and the tragic nature of what is to be found.

The reason WWII remains such a fertile source of movies, both based on fact and fiction, is that there are millions of stories like Sarah's waiting, needing to be told.

3.5 stars out of four

Review: "A Prophet"

"A Prophet," a big winner at Cannes and a Best Foreign Language Film nominee, is unlike an American prison drama. It's rambling and episodic, and some viewers may find their mind wandering. But it's got a great, authentic energy as it provides a roving-eye view of life in a rough French prison.

When he first arrives, Malik El Djebena (Tahar Rahim) is a callow 19-year-old punk who finds himself pushed and pulled between Italian gangsters and Muslim toughs. By the end of this 2½-hour journey, he's got his hands on the puppet strings.

It's almost like watching a latter-day Michael Corleone transform himself into a hardened killer in a walled-off multicultural landscape of shifting loyalties and deadly intrigue.

Throughout, Malik remains something of a cipher. We never learn what crime earned him a six-year prison sentence. Or why he has a web of scars on his face and torso. During his arrival interview, a guard asks him about his religion, ethnicity, dietary needs, etc. Malik's response is a noncommittal shrug that he's "nothing special."

But because he speaks Arabic as well as French, he's recruited by the Corsican mob to assassinate Reyeb (Hichem Yacoubi), an Arab who's slated to testify at an upcoming trial. Threatened with being killed or become a murderer, Malik goes along with the plot, with horridly bloody consequences.

But then a strange thing happens: Reyeb starts appearing to Malik in visions, befriending him and counseling him what to do in the increasingly complex game of cat and mouse being played for high stakes behind bars.

Malik also meets a Muslim prisoner, Ryad (Adel Bencherif), learns more about his culture and feels drawn to his newfound brethren. But the Arabs reject him as a tool of the Corsicans, while the Corsicans treat him more like a servant than a comrade.

Niels Arestrup gives a terrific performance as Cesar Luciani, the silver-haired leader of the Corsicans. Although he's old, tubby and physically vulnerable, Cesar rules the prisoners and prison guards alike through a combination of charisma and intimidation.

Cesar initially treats Malik as just another disposable pawn, but over time he comes to trust the younger man, even seeing a little of himself in Malik. After a few years, Malik becomes eligible for single-day releases, which he uses to carry out errands for Cesar -- and do a little side business for himself building up a drug ring both inside and outside the prison walls.

This is where director and co-writer Jacques Audiard goes a bit astray. These outside jaunts begin to blur into each other, always seeming to end with a gun to Malik's head, as Cesar has once again put him in danger without any prior warning. It's no surprise that his fear for the crime boss begins to subside.

Despite the wildly different subject matter, "A Prophet" has a similar texture to another French film, "The Class" -- also nominated for an Oscar, one year earlier. It seems less like a story that's being staged for our benefit than a real-life encounter we just happen to be witnessing.

So there's no convenient story arcs or tidy plot resolutions. The very unevenness of the film is also what bestows its gritty power.

3.5 stars