Review: "Year by the Sea"

"Year by the Sea" is one of those little movies about seemingly small things that has big import. It stars Karen Allen as a woman who has spent the last 30 years being a wife and mother, and decides it's time to try something else.

For her, this involves separating from her husband and living in a ramshackle cottage on the shores of Cape Cod. A writer struggling to find something to write about, she meanders about for a bit before making some new connections, while reassessing her marriage and deciding what kind of life she wants to have going forward.

We are lucky to be seeing more films starring older women feeling the second blush of romance, as in "Paris Can Wait" earlier this year with Diane Lane. But "Year" is not so much about romantic love as finding new things in life to love.

The film was a labor of love by producer Laura Goodenow, who lives in Indianapolis and turned from journalism to creative ventures. Based on the best-selling memoir by Joan Anderson, the project got its initial funding from a Kickstarter. It's a testament to the notion that you don't need major studio backing or a Hollywood address to make movies.

Allen is sensitive and empathetic as Joan, who's become a rather passive person. Her husband, Robin (Michael Cristofer), is a businessman consumed by anger and resentment. He's close to retirement age and finds he is being transferred from Nyack to Witchita.

After one son gets married and the other moves out, Joan decides seemingly spontaneously to not join Robin in Kansas, and instead rent a cottage in a small fishing town, Sealway. This widens the split with Robin, who feels everyone is looking to put him out to pasture.

I became silent, Joan narrates, and he became stony.

The cottage is very remote -- as in, it's only accessible by a ride on a dinghy across the bay. Joan settles in and starts to explore the town and its denizens. Her first encounter is with another Joan (Celia Imrie), a free spirit who's as grounded as our Joan is adrift. This Joan has the self-knowledge our Joan lacks. She's married to a famous psychiatrist who's convalescing in a nursing home, uncommunicative but still emotionally attached.

Joan's other lifeline is her book agent, Liz (S. Epatha Merkerson), who calls and drops in to ask about when the next work is coming. (It's not.) She also takes a job in the shop of a kindly local fisherman, Cahoon (Yannick Bisson). He's married to Judy (Jane Hajduk), the town scold.

There's also a friendly shopkeep at the local store/diner (Monique Gabriela Curnen), whose boyfriend is controlling and belligerent. Plus the usual array of background characters, such as the old coot who lives off the generosity of people like Cahoon, who gives him unsold bait for his stew.

Things go from there, without much of a narrative thread other than Joan's gradual progression into a distinct person who does and thinks for herself. Robin swings in for a Christmastime visit, but old troubles remain much as they were. There's a suggestion of a spring/autumn attraction with Cahoon -- but as I said, "Year by the Sea" is about the totality of a woman rather than just her amorous attributes.

The movie was adapted and directed by Alexander Janko, a rookie behind the camera whose background is on the musical end of film -- a transition you don't often see. (Never, in my own experience.) He shows a steady hand with controlling the mood and pace of the film, which is deliberately languid and contemplative.

The performances from the cast are uniformly wonderful, especially Allen. Her lovely, naturally weathered face is a mask of yearning and sadness, counterbalanced with burgeoning joy. There is an unavoidable touch of Hallmark Channel-type sentimentality in the proceedings, unhelped by Janko's own musical score of piano trills and strings.

The cinematography by Bryan Papierskiis terrific, using the washed-out colors and natural wonders of Cape Cod, including abundant seals and other creatures, to great effect. In many ways the backdrop resembles the inner turmoil of Joan, who's watched the tide go out on her own life and is waiting for something else to replace what was there.

"Year by the Sea" is a movie that thinks, not one where stuff happens just to fill the running time.

Review: "American Made"

How much of “American Made” is true and how much is Hollywood hokum?

There’s certainly a healthy helping of the latter, as even a cursory glance at the life of pilot/smuggler/government informant Barry Seal shows. You could go into quibbles -- the movie shows him as married with small kids, but he was already long divorced (twice) when the events depicted commence.

The main departure, though, is showing the “gringo who always delivers” -- drugs, rifles, people, whatever -- as a pawn of the CIA who more or less fell backwards into a massive elicit transport operation. Everything I’ve been able to read in short order about Seal shows he’d already been a smuggler for years, and only went to the feds when he was facing major jail time, offering to be their stooge.

But this is a Tom Cruise star vehicle, not a historical docudrama. The film mostly reminded me of “Blow,” the 2001 film starring Johnny Depp as an unheralded key figure in bringing the South American drug trade to our shores. Seal has actually been depicted on film and television a number of times before, including by Dennis Hopper and Michael Paré.

Taken on its own, “American Made” is a fun, dizzy and convoluted movie that shows how deeply the U.S. government was involved in the mess south of its border in the late 1970s and early ‘80s, and indeed to what a large extent those problems we created, as the title suggests.

Cruise smiles and twinkles through it all, affecting a Louisiana drawl to intermittent effect. Director Doug Liman (“The Bourne Identity”) and screenwriter Gary Spinelli set out deliberately to portray Seal as a lovable scamp, when a harder edge is probably required. But aside from one brief foray I can recall, “Collateral,” outright villainy just isn’t in the Tom Cruise toolbag.

The net effect winds up feeling like “Goodfellas” Lite, with the Colombian Medellín Cartel swapped out for Italian gangsters.

The story opens in 1978 with Seal bored with his life as a TWA commercial pilot. (False: the airline had actually fired him six years earlier.) A mysterious young CIA agent, Schafer (Domhnall Gleeson), busts him for sneaking Cuban cigars into the country and offers to set him up with his own hangar and high-end plane.

His job: reconnaissance photos of Sandinistas and other Communist-backed insurgents. A cowboy at heart, Seal enjoys the daredevil flying and even getting shot at. But the money’s not so great, and when Jorge Ochoa (Alejandro Edda) and Pablo Escobar (Mauricio Mejia) offer to pay him $2,000 per kilo of cocaine he flies into America on the way back from his CIA missions, he has a hard time saying no.

Before long, Seal is running other pilots in and out of South and Central America on virtually a daily basis, picking up guns, trading them for dope, and dropping the drugs in the Louisiana delta. He sets up a network of front companies in tiny Mena, Ark., but still accumulates so much cash that he literally runs out of places to hide it, stuffing it in horse stalls or burying it out back of the house.

“I’ll rake it up tomorrow,” he says when his wife (Sarah Wright) tells him one of his stashes has been breached, cash blowing all around.

Jesse Plemons play the local sheriff paid to look the other way; Caleb Landry Jones is Seal’s idiot brother-in-law whose screw-ups start the downward spiral; Jayma Mays is the state attorney general who wants his head on a platter; Benito Martinez is the head of the DEA, who ratchets up Seal’s involvement straight to the White House.

“American Made” is a tragicomedy about our great nation, worried about getting mired in another Vietnam, creating a smaller version in our backyard. It’s so funny, it hurts.

Review: "Battle of the Sexes"

The match was a lark, a piffle, a silly spectacle, until it became something more. Likewise, the film version of the iconic 1973 tennis game between Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs is much weightier and more substantial than you’d think.

It shows the game itself, of course, featuring Emma Stone and Steve Carell as King and Riggs. If the volleying looks slow and wimpy compared to what you’d see today, it’s not because a pair of Hollywood actors couldn’t make a better show of it. Go watch tapes of the real match; the movie copies it pretty well. All sports got faster and stronger; Serena’d kill either one of them.

But “Battle of the Sexes” focuses more on the year leading up to the faceoff, giving it context within changes happening in the sport and society as a whole. Directed by “Little Miss Sunshine” team Valerie Faris and Jonathan Dayton, from a screenplay by Simon Beaufoy (“Slumdog Millionaire”), it’s also an astute character study of two people who were more alike than we’d think.

The early 1970s was the era of women “libbers,” Roe v. Wade, the first large wave of women entering the workforce and finding the traditional corridors of influence barred to them. Men liked the free love stuff, but wanted to keep the country clubs and the reins of power. Naturally, they resented people like King who had the audacity to demand that the male and female tennis champions be paid the same.

Carell looks pretty well like Riggs, with the help of some false teeth and a wig. Stone resembles King not at all, and even a pair of glasses and dark brown shag haircut fail to close the gap. But each manages to carve an authentic character out of the fog of history.

Stone’s King is at once headstrong and retiring, very self-aware and also self-effacing. She squares off with Jack Kramer (Bill Pullman), the smug head of the chief tennis association, and starts her own competing league for the top women players. Sarah Silverman plays Gladys Heldman, who provided the business savvy and sponsorship -- from Virginia Slims, because doesn’t smoking and tennis go great together?

But King is also staggered by her attraction to Marilyn Barnett (Andrea Riseborough), a hairdresser who eventually becomes her lover. This while she was married to Larry King (Austin Stowell), a former player who gave her unwavering support as a fellow athlete. The scene where he learns of their affair, but still tenderly applies ice packs to her knees with well-practiced efficiency, is sensitive to all three souls.

(The film fiddles with history here; King began to explore her attraction to women years earlier, and started the affair with Marilyn in 1971. And she was King’s secretary, aka employee, not a hairdresser. Years later she sued King for palimony, which resulted in her sexuality being publicly outed.)

Riggs is portrayed much as the world saw him: an over-the-hill former champ with a gambling addiction who was down on his luck and saw challenging the top women’s players of the day as a way to garner attention and money. With his own marriage to Priscilla (Elisabeth Shue) foundering, he used his gift of gab and natural showmanship to play up the King match, dubbing himself a “male chauvinist pig” and giving interviews about keeping women in the “bedroom or the kitchen,” stuff he may not have even half believed.

Largely forgotten today is that Riggs had already challenged and beaten the top-ranked female player of the day, Margaret Court (Jessica McNamee). Every film needs a villain, and Court is shoehorned into that role, sneering at King’s dalliance with full religious fervor. (This owes more to Court’s modern-day fight against same-sex marriage in her native Australia than anything she said or did at the time, methinks.)

Both Bobby Riggs and Billie Jean King are revealed as flesh-and-blood creatures who lived behind the headlines. They make for an interesting pair: the hustler and the heroine, the lobber and the libber. They put on a show for funsies, and people paid attention and not a few minds were changed a wee bit.

In real life, King remained friends with Riggs until the day he died, which was awfully chivalrous of her.

Review: "Victoria & Abdul"

“Victoria & Abdul” is one of those beautiful true stories that sounds too fantastical to have actually happened. Indeed, many people deliberately tried to hide the tale and succeeded in doing so, until the truth came out many decades after the principles were dead.

Directed by Stephen Frears from a screenplay by Lee Hall, it’s a tale of love and friendship between a powerful monarch and a lowly servant from across the globe. In a lot of ways, it reminds me of “Driving Miss Daisy,” in that it shows how people from different backgrounds and stations can grow very close without romantic love -- and how that sort of bond threatens other folks.

During the last 15 years of her life, Queen Victoria of England had an Indian Muslim man as her attendant. He waited upon her as a servant, but the relationship developed into friendship as he taught her about his homeland, of which she was the Empress, as well as the Urdu language. She called him “the Munshi,” or teacher.

The entire British court was scandalized by this, including her heir, the Prince of Wales, who worked actively to undermine the man, Abdul Karim. When his mother finally died, the Munshi and his family was essentially thrown out of the castle as soon as the funeral was over, and the new king ordered all photographs and correspondence between and Abdul and Victoria seized and burned.

Essentially, his legacy was swept clean from the history books.

It’s another powerhouse performance from Judi Dench as Victoria. It’s certainly a warts-and-all portrayal of the queen, showing her as an old, addled and bored woman who wears her royal mantle as a burden rather than a responsibility. Her entire life is an unceasing litany of dinners, presentations, signing of documents, etc. The crown is her cage.

There’s one terrific scene where Victoria recites all her own faults with stark honesty, showing a sharp mind and strong soul underneath the layers of time and the trappings of office. The longest-reigning English monarch (until the current one), Victoria is depicted as someone who has loss the zest for life, and regains it in her friendship with Abdul.

Played by Ali Fazal, Abdul is shown as a young, idealistic man plucked from obscurity and picked by fate for his role. A low-level clerk in a jail near Agra, he is selected to present a ceremonial coin to the empress simply because he is 1) tall, and 2) chose some carpets a functionary liked.  Fazal plays him as earnest, good-hearted and rather naïve.

He and another man, Mohammed, spend two months traveling by ship to England for a ceremony that lasts 30 seconds. Such was the state of the royal court, where tuxedos are considered daywear and each course of every meal is preceded by a trumpet blast. It’s an amazingly gorgeous film, with period sets and costumes to catch your breath.

Frears, Hall and their cast carefully craft the growing relationship between the pair, with hints of romantic passion that give way to a deeper connection. Shocked upon learning Abdul is married, she orders his wife and mother-in-law brought to live with them at court.

The cast is uniformly excellent, including Tim Pigott-Smith as the head of her majesty’s court; Eddie Izzard as the bombastic heir apparent; Michael Gambon as the befuddled prime minster; Paul Higgins as the pig-headed royal doctor; and Olivia Williams and Fenella Woolgar as the chief ladies-in-waiting.

Though some might dismiss the story as a historical footnote, “Victoria & Abdul” is a delightful look at the surprising things that bring us together, and the not so surprising things that drive us apart.

Reeling Backward: "L'Avventura" (1960)

"Believe me Anna, words are becoming less and less necessary, they create misunderstandings."
                             --Sandro 

If ever a film's themes could be summed up by a single line of dialogue, then this one does so splendidly for "L'Avventura," Michelangelo Antonioni's dreamy rumination on love lost and found.

The first of an unofficial trilogy from the Italian master, "L'Avventura" ("The Adventure") follows the search for a missing girl where no one truly wants her to be found. This includes the woman herself, and especially her fiance and best friend, who fall for each other during their quest to find her. The film has been criticized for its languid plotting, lack of narrative resolution and overall "artiness." At its first screening at Cannes, the film was roundly booed -- before going on to win the Jury Prize.

Watching the movie, we get a very distinct sense that what the characters do and say is less important than how they look and feel while doing or saying it.

It's fair to say that Antonioni and his ilk helped redefine the cinematic aesthetic to one more about existential contemplation than traditional conflict and action. Antonioni and co-screenwriters, Elio Bartolini and Tonino Guerra, peered under the modern advancements of the 20th century to find the discontent that lay like a thick layer of crud beneath a beautiful rug -- particularly how people relate to one another with sinking levels of empathy, or even basic humanity.

"Ennui" is the word that best sums up the mood of "L'Avventura," a sort of listless boredom that arrives from feeling trapped by circumstances and expectations.

Sandro, the male lead played by Gabriele Ferzetti, studied art and architecture but became a wealthy young(ish) man by performing estimates of other people's post-war construction projects. He owns a sporty convertible and a summer home on the coast, tokens of his status rather than things he covets. His fiancée, Anna (Lea Massari), at once misses him desperately while harboring a barely hidden revulsion for her intended. Sandro is absent for long business trips, but when he's back they tire of each other rather quickly after the fire of lovemaking has blown out.

Right before she mysteriously disappears off a remote island where they and other well-to-do couples have stopped for a bit of sun and fun, Anna tells Sandro that what she most wants is to be alone. He dismisses her fears about their impending marriage rather brusquely. When she turns up missing, Sandro undertakes a personal search for Anna more out of a sense of duty than with the enthusiasm of a heartbroken lover.

Tagging along is Anna's best friend, Claudia (Monica Vitta), who eventually becomes the film's real main character. Feeling out of place on the yacht among three couples, she gradually comes to the fore of the story as she and Sandro develop feelings for each other while conducting their "search."

I put that word in quotes because, after the authorities scour the island -- including divers plumbing the shores for a body -- no one really holds out hope that she'll eventually turn up. The only really solid lead is when a smuggler's ship is interdicted by the police, but it's soon clear the teenage petty criminals had nothing to do with Anna's disappearance. After all, what are we to believe: that Anna hailed a passing ship and climbed aboard without anyone else on the tiny atoll noticing?

The disappearance quickly fades from our minds as the brewing romance comes to a boil. We've gotten an idea that Claudia was attracted to Sandro even before they departed on the voyage, and that she holds a level of envy for Anna. She's got what Claudia hasn't: a rich boyfriend, a rich father to boot, nice clothes and few responsibilities. We never learn too much about Claudia's background -- or anyone's, really -- but the impression is she's a working girl enjoying her independence, though open to the idea of settling down.

Claudia makes a great show of protesting Sandro's advances, including one scene where she essentially throws him off a departing train. They later meet again, and this time the excitement of being pursued overcomes her judgement about keeping up appearances. When they eventually rejoin the other couples at a posh hotel, they check into the same suite without batting an eye.

Always, though, reminders of the real purpose that threw them together arrive, and it would seem their love must be doomed from the start. Perhaps it is, especially after Sandro, starved for sexual attention from Claudia, has a dalliance with an attention-seeking floozy (Dorothy De Poliolo).

But Antonioni's famous ending scene, in which each weeps tears at their inability to find and keep love, leaves us with at least the suggestion that they will keep trying to overcome that which keeps them apart.

I was struck watching the film how much observation there is of other couples. To a one, they all seem miserable together, more like prisoners sharing a shackle than the bonds of matrimony.

There is Corrado (James Addams), an older man who seems to spend most of his energies denigrating the actions and speech of his much-younger wife, Giulia (Dominique Blanchar). Corrado is a pinched man, physically and spiritually, who gains joy by denying it to others. Later, we will watch Giulia  dally with a 17-year-old boy right underneath Claudia's nose, and understand her motivations.

Then there is Patrizia (Esmeralda Ruspoli), who acts as something of maternal/guide role for Claudia, seeing what is happening between her and Sandro and offering her understanding and empathy how two people could end up in such a place, without condoning their scandalous affair. Patrizia's own marriage to Raimondo (Lelio Luttazzi) has the feel of a detente, a war that has grown cold and desolate. They have forgotten both the love and the hate they once had for each other.

When their search takes them to a small town, Sandro and Claudia come across a pharmacist and his new bride, who already seem well on their way to a lifetime of regret. The locals regard the searchers as glamorous strangers, celebrities even. (The search for Anna has stayed in the newspapers, due in part to Sandro's bribes to a reporter.) Indeed, when Claudia is briefly left alone in the street she attracts a small horde of men, milling about to ogle the beautiful alien.

(Sinister in tone, this scene takes on alarming notes seen through today's prism of awareness about sexual violence.)

Really the only positive glimpse of romance we encounter is a young pair who have just met on the train. Claudia watches with delight as they perform the intricate dance of the wooer and the wooed. The man insists he knows the girl through mutual acquaintances, she knows he is lying just to get her attention, and allows herself to be lied to.

The shooting of "L'Avventura" was famously arduous, both physically and financially. For weeks at a time the crew operated with no budget, sleeping on the island and even going short on food until a new production company could be found. Antonioni and Vitti were a romantic couple themselves in real life -- before, during and long after the shoot -- which must have complicated matters in a ways that beggar the imagination.

Yet this is undeniably one of the all-time most gorgeous pieces of cinema ever. The photography by Aldo Scavarda remains stunning in its multitudinous layers of gray -- thankfully well-preserved with a top-notch restoration and reissue some years back. In contrast to the hazy, meandering moods of the characters, the film has a crisp realism that veritably leaps off the screen.

Antonioni and Scavarda also make interesting use of Claudia's blonde nimbus of hair, especially in contrast to all the other dark-haired Italian women. It lends her the air of a fallen angel, wandering the land without true purpose or power.

My own feelings are mixed for "L'Avventura." Like "Citizen Kane," I recognize its greatness and appreciate its importance in the evolution of movies without necessarily embracing the experience of watching it. A story of people who are unmoored from themselves, unsure how they should feel or act, it often fails to engage us at an emotional level.

It's like a great masterpiece painting that we are told we must admire, so we do, while knowing in our hearts there are more meaningful pieces hanging on the wall nearby more amenable to our gaze.

Video review: "The Mummy"

More studios are now into the whole world-building thing, notably with the Marvel and DC comics cross-overs, where superheroes have solo films and then team up for group projects. The latest “universe” to hit the big screen is horror-based, as Universal Studio rounds up a bunch of its classic movie monsters and mixes them up.

In theory, I’m all for it. Dracula, the Wolfman, Invisible Man, Frankenstein, etc. having throw-downs in between teaming up? Sounds awesome. But in practice the enterprise is off to a shaky start.

First up is “The Mummy,” starring Tom Cruise in a film that borrows heavily from the Brendan Fraser/Rachel Weisz flicks that debuted almost two decades ago. (Well, technically “Dracula Untold” from 2014 was supposed to be the official start of DU, but the studio has since backed off of that owing to the film’s middling box office performance.)

Tossing an aging action star into what is essentially a remake doesn’t sound like a great idea, and Cruise does his level best as Nick, a soldier/scallywag who’s more interested in treasure hunting than doing his duty. He gets picked by Ahmanet (Sofia Boutella), the revived spirit of an Egyptian princess/sorceress, to be the vessel of the reincarnation of the death god, Set.

Their relationship is an energetic mix of smoochy/stabby, which triggered some recollections of past girlfriends.

Annabelle Wallis plays Jenny, an archeologist who teams up with Nick in between ardent prostrations of her attraction to him. Things move along with the usual assortment of big action spectacles and a liberal helping of CGI special effects. Russell Crowe turns up fairly late in the game as a certain doctor with… temper issues.

The movie’s fun at time, but terribly disjointed and half-baked. Marvel and DC spent years germinating their franchises, and based on this film the Dark Universe needs more time in the cooker.

Bonus features are quite good. There’s a feature-length audio commentary track with director Alex Kurtzman as well as actors Boutella, Wallis and Jake Johnson, with the obvious glaring omission of Cruise. He does appear in a 1-on-1 conversation with Kurtzman.

Additional extras include deleted and extended scenes, seven making-of featurettes and “Ahmanet Reborn Animated Graphic Novel,” with more about her descent into the monstrous underworld.

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"Mother!" and the Coat of Many Colors

I was finally able to catch up with "Mother!", Darren Aronofsky's ambitious new meditation on... something that has sharply divided critics and largely estranged audiences. Just a few thoughts.

All this is VERY spoiler-y. So desist if you desire to experience the film's surprises on your own.

First off, unlike many others I don't think giving a complete analysis of the movie necessarily gives everything away. It has not so much plot twists as a labyrinthine pit of meaning that grows more intense and more amorphous the deeper you go. Once you know it's a descent, it's just a matter of pondering where you're going to end up and what meanings you're going to take away from the journey.

And I think they are multitudinous. People have come forth with all sorts of interpretation of what the film "means," and I believe they're all right. Star Jennifer Lawrence herself has posited that her character is Mother Earth and her husband, called simply Him and played by Javier Bardem, is God. But it's clear this is Lawrence's opinion, not Aronofsky's.

I don't think the writer/director actually intended any single vision of "Mother!". It is literally all things to all people... and nothing to some, who will find it overly mysterious and arty. It's less a portrait or a parable than an impression, and we put as much of ourselves into the vision as the artist did.

Certainly there are plenty of religious themes. The interlopers barging in their secluded mansion, played by Ed Harris and Michelle Pfeiffer, never named but credited as Man and Woman, are representations of Adam and Eve. Him is tickled with their presence, especially Adam, while Mother is irked at any intrusion. Aren't I enough for you? she asks Him repeatedly. He responds with protestations of love, but there's always a "but."

Man and Woman's sons, who show up and immediately get into a fight that results in one's death, are obviously Cain and Abel in this telling. The crowds of people who show up after are the rest of mankind -- messy, violent, worshipful of Him's poetry. The outcome of Mother's pregnancy follows pretty obvious Christ parables.

But I think there are also a lot of themes about parenthood, and the chasm between male and female gender roles. These take place on a simple humanistic level, where the characters cease on some level being allegorical and are simply who they appear to be.

I also believe the film has a lot to say about the role of the artist in society, and their relationship to their fans/followers. These types of movies can quickly become tiresome, particularly in the prism of Hollywood -- 'Oh please, tell me more about your struggles with fame, adoration and all those millions of burdensome dollars.'

But Aronofsky lays out his tale without a lot of obvious egotism, showing how the creative process starts as a singular act and the work ends up becoming something that is shared and dissected and stolen. The artist gives and gives, and takes and takes. Like Charlie Kaufman's "Adaptation," "Mother!" is a Gordian knot that inextricably ties up the story being told and the role of the storyteller.

In a lot of ways, the movie is really about itself.