Review: "The Drop"

"The Drop" is an intriguing, atypical movie. It starts out with a lot of disparate characters and story elements, some of them related, much of it not. Over time they gradually float towards each other, each piece locking into place in a way that might not have seemed obvious at first.

The experience of watching it is like stumbling upon a disassembled pocket watch, and then witnessing the little gears and springs drag themselves, with almost gravitational pull, into a cohesive whole again. The actual process of putting itself back together can be a bit tedious at times, but at some point everything clicks together.

This is another film based on the writings of Dennis Lehane, who also penned the screenplay. Movies based on his work have been up ("Gone Baby Gone"), down ("Shutter Island") and vastly overhyped ("Mystic River"). Here is a film that seems to contain the Lehane mythos boiled down to its inky essence. The story happens almost entirely inside one seedy bar, and the few frozen city blocks around it.

Tom Hardy plays Bob Saganowsky, who sloshes drinks at Cousin Marv's Bar. Bob speaks in a clinched little croak, almost whiny; he isn't terribly bright and is passive almost to the point of transparency. There are rough types who come into the bar, and some try to get a rise out of Bob, but they leave unsatisfied, because it's like kicking a sweet puppy who only comes back for more.
He is, in short, a mook.

Cousin Marv is mostly a figurehead these days, an aging hulk who barely moves from his corner table. His name's on the bar, and he used to run a little action on the side -- he was, he says, somebody who made people sit up when he walked in. But he got pushed by some tougher Chechen mobsters, and flinched, and now it's their bar and he just runs it.

James Gandolfini could play controlled rage better than just about anybody, so Marv is a fitting final screen role for him.

The title comes from the process of picking one bar at random to be the place where all the gambling and other dirty money winds up for the night -- "the safe for the entire city." It soon becomes clear that somebody's looking to hit Marv's the night it's the drop, and Bob gets caught up in the tide of events.

One night Bob is walking home from work and comes across a bloodied puppy dumped in a trash can. The woman who lives there, a waitress named Nadia (Noomi Rapace), helps him patch the dog up, but insists Bob adopt him as his own. He blanches at first, but finally takes on the little pitbull, whom he dubs Rocco. This is, for him, a major addition to his tiny universe, which essentially consists of just the bar and keeping up his dead parents' tidy brownstone.

Accepting the responsibility of the dog changes something in Bob ... or does it? Hardy's performance is one poker face behind another, so we're never quite sure what's going on the other side of that lunkhead mien. Dribs and drabs of information leak out to suggest there's more there. He and Nadia start seeing more of each other, hesitatingly -- it's like two wounded animals sniffing the other's wounds.

Other characters' orbits intersect with that of the bar. There's a perpetually smiling police detective (John Ortiz) who sees Bob at the same church every morning, and wonders why he never takes communion. He starts investigating a stick-up at the bar, and then noses into old crimes that have become part of the neighborhood lore.

There's Eric Deeds (an imposing Matthias Schoenaerts), a hustler with a past connected to Nadia. He casts a baleful eye at Bob for seemingly mysterious reasons, stopping by the bar or his house, claiming Rocco is actually his dog, and dropping idle threats. (Somehow, he makes an umbrella seem weapon-like.)

And then we have the Chechen boss, Chovka, chillingly played by Michael Aronov. He expects Marv and Bob to recover the money stolen during the robbery. You can see the wheels turn in Bob's head, slowly, and in Marv's head, slightly less slowly -- if they could find the money, wouldn't that imply they were in on the job?

Director Michaël R. Roskam takes his time -- too much, really -- building up the suspense, but the plot of "The Drop" eventually gets there.

Video review: "Enough Said"

James Gandolfini may have not been most people's notion for a romantic lead, with looks like an ex-jock gone to pot and wallowing in anger. But the late actor showed just how much charisma he harbored in his balding, paunchy body in "Enough Said," an affecting romantic-drama from writer/director Nicole Holofcener.

The film stars Julia Louis-Dreyfus as Eva, a 50-ish masseuse who's divorced, single and has a teen daughter about to leave for college. At a party she meets Albert (Gandolfini), who's in a very similar life situation. They have a date that turns into a tenuous relationship, which seems to be going fine until a strange coincidence throws them off.

Eva learns that her new friend (Catherine Keener), who constantly bad-mouths her ex-husband, used to be married to Albert. So the horrible guy she's been hearing about is actually her new beau.

Logic says that shouldn't really make a difference, but in Holofcener's carefully observant story, it most certainly does. The film understands how lonely, damaged people react when letting their guard down for a new relationship.

The actors acquit themselves wonderfully, including the textured supporting performances by Toni Collette, Tracey Fairaway, Eve Hewson and Tavi Gevinson. One of the nice things about Holofcener's movies is that she populates them with fleshy, believable characters.

Easily of the year's best indie films, "Enough Said" falls into the "don't-miss" category.

Alas, video extras are sorely lacking. The DVD comes with only the theatrical trailer and a few promotional featurettes. Upgrade to the Blu-ray edition and you get a "Second Takes" feature.

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Review: "Enough Said"

Love is rarely like it is in the movies, except for “Enough Said,” an observant new comedy-drama from writer/director Nicole Holofcener. It stars Julia Louis-Dreyfus and James Gandolfini as middle-aged divorced parents who enter into a tentative little romantic dance. Their relationship is both awkward and magical, and very authentically adult in its ups-and-downs, and side-to-sides.

No incongruous meet-cute, no breathless protestations of affection or other tropes of cinematic romance. Just a funny, faithful look at the real ways in which older, damaged people struggle with being single.

Holofcener has made a career exploring the inner lives of women, while navigating between hefty topics like the way women are afflicted by insecurity (“Lovely & Amazing”) and economic envy/superiority (“Friends with Money,” “Please Give”). I’ve always enjoyed the fact that her female characters are full-blooded and complicated, and her films deal with all their relationships – friends, parents, co-workers – rather than being obsessed with just the romantic ones.

Louis-Dreyfus plays Eva, a massage therapist with a precocious daughter who’s about to go off to college, which is freaking out the parent way more than the child. While at a dinner party she’s introduced to Albert (Gandolfini), an acerbic-but-warm guy. They hardly hit it off, each joking there’s no one at the party they’re attracted to, but nonetheless they go out on a first date that goes well enough.

Albert isn’t really Eva’s idea of a hottie – bald, a step past paunchy, grizzled and gray. The fact that Eva gives him a chance says something about Eva, and the fact Holofcener would cast the late Gandolfini as a romantic lead says something about her. Eva is willing to embrace a man who is a far throw from her ideal, which is a tacit recognition of her own imperfections.

Their courtship is a portrait of defensiveness that gradually gives way to a deepening bond. Too old to be coy, more wary than hopeful, they slowly let their guards done enough to fall in love.

Then Holofcener throws us a clever twist. The same night she met Albert, she also picked up a new client: Marianne (Catherine Keener), a successful poet. After a few massages they start to bond as friends, talking about their children, dating and divorces. Marianne repeatedly dumps on her ex-husband as an unambitious loser who’s too fat, and lousy in bed to boot.

Then Eva realizes that Albert is Marianne’s ex-husband. So this awful guy she’s been hearing about is actually her new boyfriend.

This sets off a strange love/hate triangle. Eva adores Marianne and Albert, but the fact they despise each other ends up poisoning the way she treats her new boyfriend. She starts making little quips about his undisciplined eating habits and inability to whisper. “Why do I feel like I just spent the evening with my ex-wife?” Albert asks after one acrimonious night out.

Gandolfini, Keener and Louis-Dreyfus both give layered, terrific performances. Ditto for Toni Collette as Eva’s friend, a married woman vexed by her husband and her maid. I also adored the three young actresses playing the daughters and a best friend -- Tracey Fairaway, Eve Hewson and Tavi Gevinson.

Eventually things come to a head, but they don’t go down in a predictable, sitcom-y sort of way. Albert’s reaction in particular is notable for its understated, genuine feel.

“Enough Said” is a funny, sad and heart-warming experience – much like actual, messy family lives. It’s a great catch.

Review: "Zero Dark Thirty"

"Zero Dark Thirty" plays out like a TV crime procedural with a bigger budget and loftier aspirations. It almost has the tone of a documentary film, depicting the decade-long hunt for Osama bin Laden with little prejudice or embellishment.

What we end up with is something boasting an almost journalistic feel, portraying American national security personnel not as we'd to think they would be, but as they actually are. Which is to say: focused, fallible, and capable of both amazing heroism and gut-churning brutality.

Director Kathryn Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal started to make a movie about the early search for bin Laden after 9/11, but then the terrorist leader was assassinated by U.S. troops in 2011, acting on information painstakingly gathered by the CIA. They quickly retooled to bring a more comprehensive tale, culminating in the high-tension raid on the compound in Pakistan where bin Laden had been living for several years.

I was very impressed with the attention to detail in "Zero Dark Thirty," and its lessons about the sort of warfare our country wages in the 21st century. It's one based not on nuclear missiles or big metal hardware, but tiny slivers of data gathered from thousands of sources. The challenge is less like finding a needle in a haystack than reassembling a mirror smashed into a million shards, without knowing the shape it had before being broken.

The film is not as emotionally engaging as I'd wished. Jessica Chastain does yeoman's work in portraying Maya, the one CIA investigator who does nothing for a decade but hunt bin Laden. The character has no internal motivations or external life beyond getting her man. It's not surprising that Maya is a composite of several real figures, since she has no real identity beyond her mission.

The story skips around in time and place, the first half depicting the early clues to bin Laden's disappearance from Afghanistan, taking us up to 2004. Then the trail goes cold, and the film picks up again four years later, when Maya stumbles across evidence of a high-level bin Laden courier who most of the other intelligence forces believe is already dead. She proves he's alive, and follows him straight to that dusty Pakistani compound.

In fictional movies about spycraft, the agents shown searching for evidence are also the ones who go out into the field and nab the bad guys. Here, it's clearly revealed that the snoops stay mostly behind their desks and have an uneasy relationship with the troops on the front lines. At one point, Maya has to practically beg a field commander to set up a surveillance net on the courier.

In the film's most controversial section, which is right at the beginning, a CIA interrogator named Dan (Jason Clarke, in a chilling performance) is shown employing "enhanced" methods against detainees, including waterboarding.

For a film that was accused of being controversial before it even finished production, "Zero Dark Thirty" is steadfastly neutral on the subject of torture. The interrogations are clearly depicted as brutal and dehumanizing, and it's hard to watch Americans carrying out these sorts of depraved actions. But the movie is also quite clear in showing how the information obtained in this way was critical to identifying the courier who led us to bin Laden.

Bigelow and Boal do not go in for big ethical quandaries and principled dilemmas, though. Maya, who is present but does not partake in the brutality, is repulsed by it but also does not hesitate to make use of the fruits it produces.

"Zero Dark Thirty" is an effective and expertly made film, but a more character-driven story would've added some flesh to the bones of a great, true story.

3.5 stars out of four

Review: "Not Fade Away"

There's a moment of unintentional hilarity in "Not Fade Away," the semi-autobiographical account by "Sopranos" creator David Chase about his yearning to break into the music business during the 1960s.

The main character, Douglas, a stand-in for Chase himself, has been dragged to the cinema by his artistically inclined girlfriend. Astute film lovers will recognize the main feature as Michelangelo Antonioni's "Blow-Up," one of the most seminal films of the era. But Douglas is clearly not impressed -- he wonders why there isn't a musical score telling him when to feel happy or sad.

"Nothing ever happens in this movie," he complains.

Turns out, nothing much ever happened with Chase's rock 'n' roll aspirations, either. And the film he wrote and directed about those times and tribulations is desperately short on narrative momentum, too.

Granted, movies like this are more about mood and character than gobs of storytelling. But after awhile we feel like "Not Fade Away" is just as excuse to play a lot of really cool music and set a bunch of good-looking young actors in the foreground to pout and fret in time to the tunes.

This downbeat drama is unfocused and languid, almost to the point of being inert.

Douglas (John Magaro) is the drummer who's content to stay in the background, until the one night the cocky lead singer Eugene (Jack Huston) is out sick and he's forced to step behind the microphone, and finds out he's a more soulful crooner than anyone knew. Wells (Will Brill), the lead guitarist and somewhat loopy creative driving force, backs Douglas' move to headliner, which leads to predictable sparks amongst the group.

Things play out from late 1963, shortly after the assassination of John F. Kennedy, up to 1968 or '69. The boys are all New Jersey sons of immigrants who change superficially as the music scene does, graduating from bowl haircuts and Cuban-heeled boots to long hippie locks and bell-bottoms. They drink booze, smoke a lot of weed and get into moderate amounts of trouble.

The older generation frowns disapprovingly at their kids' commotions, led by James Gandolfini as Doug's dad. The character as written by Chase is more an archetype than a person, the sort of man who works hard, scrounges and worries, and continually seethes when his efforts aren't rewarded with success.

"Nobody gave the Italians anything when we had nothing," one of his buddies complains, summing up their generation's lament.

Supporting characters are wafer-thin. Doug's mother (Molly Price) is a shrieking harridan whose only method of control over her family is threatening suicide. Kid sister Evelyn (Meg Guzulescu) is the narrator and eyes and ears of the audience.

Perhaps the character who best encapsulates this film's problems is Doug's erstwhile girlfriend Grace Dietz (Bella Heathcote). It's a classic popular-girl-chooses-nobody scenario, and while we never really understand what Doug sees in her beyond her delicate beauty, the audience gains even lesser insight into what she cherishes about him.

The band plays some gigs, wanders apart and back together again, seems to get close to signing a record deal with a big-label honcho (Brad Garrett), but circumstances intervene with more obstacles and delays.

It's notable that the band this movie is ostensibly about never gains a permanent name. Maybe that's appropriate, since "Don't Fade Away" seems more like a concept for a film than a coherent story.

1.5 stars out of four

Bonus video review: "Welcome to the Rileys"

A cursory plot summary of "Welcome to the Rileys" -- middle-aged Indianapolis couple tries to turn around a teen stripper in New Orleans -- doesn't do justice to this understated character study. A little gem of a film, "Rileys" boasts a trifecta of solid performances from James Gandolfini, Kristen Stewart and Melissa Leo.

The story sounds ridiculous -- hokey, even. But all three actors inhabit their roles with such an unstudied validity that we don't for a moment think of them as movie characters behaving for the camera.

Gandolfini plays Doug Riley, a plumbing wholesaler in his early 50s who's just going through the motions. He and his wife Lois (Leo) lost their teen daughter in a car crash nearly a decade ago, and have essentially placed their lives on hold since.

I loved all the subtle little details Gandolfini puts into Doug -- the way he unconsciously hikes up his belt over his ample belly, or braces a hand on the roof of his car when climbing in or out. A guy whose indulgences run to poker on Thursdays and late-night waffle runs, Doug isn't the sort to engage in a lot of introspection.

(If I had to pick a nit, I'd point out that the light syrup of twang Gandolfini drizzles over his accent is more Tennessee than Hoosier.)

If Doug has fault lines on the inside, then Lois' are easier to see. She has not even left the house in the ensuing years since her child's death -- when Doug goes away on rare business trips, a neighbor brings their newspaper in from the curb. Her daughter's room remains made up as tidily as Lois keeps her blonde hairdo.

In New Orleans for a convention, Doug ducks into a strip joint to escape the monotony of cocktails and glad-handing, and there he runs into Mallory (Stewart) -- which may or may not be her real name. Mallory says she's 22, looks a lot younger, and tries to trick Doug into buying a trick.

Before long Doug is crashing at her run-down house, and calling Lois to tell her may not be back anytime soon. Without ever being able to put his feelings into words, it's clear that Doug sees Mallory as a stand-in for the daughter he lost.

He starts fixing up her grubby home, in unspoken hopes that it'll help her clean up her life, too. Then Lois, who knows that her hermetically sealed grief has pushed her husband away, makes a bold move of her own.

I'm personally of the opinion that those "Twilight" movies have been a net burden to Stewart's career. Watching her textured work here, in which she shows us Mallory's carefully constructed walls of defensiveness, it's hard to imagine this is the same actress moping around with vampires.

They also do a good job of giving Stewart a skeezy look, with dark-rimmed eyes and flesh that seems perpetually bruised.

Director Jake Scott, working from an original script by Ken Hixon, doesn't aim for any big theatrical moments or dramaturgical contortions. Rather, the filmmakers and actors carefully construct a tidy little world that feels authentic and true.

3.5 stars out of four

Review: Where the Wild Things Are"

"Where the Wild Things Are" is one of the best movies I've seen at evoking what it's like to be a small child: the anger, the stubbornness, the neediness and the absolute, unlimited joy. Whether it's actually a movie for kids is another matter.

In adapting the iconic 1963 children's book by Maurice Sendak, director Spike Jonze undertakes his greatest flight of fancy -- and that's saying something for the filmmaker behind the loopy, distorted realities of "Being John Malkovich" and "Adaptation."

In adapting the story for film (along with fellow screenwriter Dave Eggers), Jonze necessarily had to use Sendak's book, which measures just a few dozen words, as a mere jumping-off point.

The book had the barest sketch of a plot: A boy Max is put to bed without supper for misbehaving, and his room turns into a jungle with an ocean that he sails across to an island filled with scary "wild things." He declares himself king of the beasts, and after a night filled with a "wild rumpus," he grows homesick and returns from whence he came.

In Jonze's version, the island of monsters becomes a playground where Max (a smashing Max Records) can hash out his problems, like anger (mostly at his parents' separation) and loneliness. The wild things -- visually distinctive but nameless in the book -- take on separate aspects of the boy's personality or emotions.

The monsters are a revelation, closely mirroring Sendak's illustrations while boasting an earthy, grubby immediacy. They were created by puppeteers from Jim Henson's company wearing giant suits. The faces were supposed to be mechanical, but Jonze replaced them with computer-generated animation after principal photography -- a wise move, based on how incredibly expressive the results are.

At first glance, it might seem that Carol (voiced by James Gandolfini) and KW (Lauren Ambrose) are supposed to represent Max's parents, with an unspoken hostility lying between them, fueled by KW's leaving the group to hang out with other island denizens.

But the wild things are just children, or at least behave like one. They represent the way children think and feel. At first hesitant around the strange boy in the wolf suit who claims to have special powers, they embrace him as their king. But soon, hostility and animosity creep in, and some cliques are formed.

I would not have thought Gandolfini, with his gravelly tough guy rasp, would make a very good voice actor, but he turns Carol into an intriguing figure, at times petulant and resentful, and other times gregarious and generous of spirit.

When Carol tells the boy, "You are the owner of this world," we feel his heart leap at the paternal tone. But after a terrible act of violence -- which may frighten younger audience members -- KW likens Carol's misbehavior to Max's: "He only makes it harder ... and it's hard enough already."

I could go on and on about this movie. "Where the Wild Things Are" is a very personal experience, less about an audience than a one-on-one connection between the film and each viewer. Because the wild things, partly good and partly bad, are inside every one of us. The child must discover them in order to grow up enough to master them.

3.5 stars