Stone (2010) – Just because you’re not doing wrong doesn’t mean you’re doing right…

Stone (2010) directed by John Curran stars Robert De Niro as Jack Mabry, Edward Norton as Gerald ”Stone” Creeson, Milla Jovovich as Lucetta Creeson, Frances Conroy as Madylyn Maybry and Peter Lewis as the Warden.

“The performances are strong throughout. De Niro’s disillusioned cynic, Norton’s morally ambiguous Stone, Jovovich who is cat-like in her disdain and focused sexual enjoyment, Conroy’s frumpy alcoholic and the various supporting cast like the bland priest who offers the sentiment “God works in mysterious ways” as an actual response to a crisis of faith. And in the end we are neatly brought back to that bee buzzing in the beginning. More than anything this is a tale about exercising integrity in the moment of choice. Just because you’re not doing wrong doesn’t mean you’re doing right. It gets my hearty recommendation for that and for the thoroughly enjoyable intricacy of the collective acting.”

You’ll find the rest of my slightly cryptic rambling at my home away from home Cinema Sentries here: Stone

Leaves of Grass (2009)

Leaves of Grass (2009) is one of those quirky juxtaposed jumbles that actually manages being funny, tragic, philosophical and charming at the same time. Writer/director/actor Tim Blake Nelson pulls off what is clearly a labour of love with a sensibility all his own.

The Ivy League professor Bill Kincaid (Edward Norton) goes home to Little Dixie, Oklahoma after having been informed that his twin brother Brady (Edward Norton) has been killed. It’s obvious that Bill really isn’t all that keen on the idea. He has worked hard at distancing himself from his humble beginnings and his complicated family and is on his way to a successful career with an offer to teach philosophy at Harvard. It turns out that Brady has gotten himself into trouble with a rival drug dealer. The twins Bill and Brady have chosen very different paths in life, as you might deduce from that alone.

Things get more involved from there on out. Bill and Brady’s mother, Daisy Kincaid, played by the lovely and talented Susan Sarandon, has checked herself into an old folks’ home, despite being far too young to go that route. It’s also obvious that Brady’s interest in perfecting his method for growing top quality weed (yes, that is the reference to grass here) has been inspired by his hippie mother. Brady’s best friend Bolger (Tim Blake Nelson) meets Bill at the airport and drives him back to Bill’s place via a local store where they get into an altercation with two local thugs. It’s not until they arrive at Brady’s place that Brady actually makes an appearance and it turns out that the rumours of his demise were greatly exaggerated. Brady needs Bill to guarantee that he has a solid alibi when he goes to confront the rival dealer Rug Rothbaum (Richard Dreyfuss).

The main crux of the story is all about home and family, and it is in those moments that it really shines, like the beautifully played scene between Daisy and Bill where you get to see what it was that drove Bill away from home in the first place. Underpinning it all there is a deeply philosophical strain, something that shows the blatant intelligence of the characters as well as the writing. The love interest for Bill is a local teacher/poet Janet (Keri Russel) who quotes Whitman while gutting a catfish. There’s a charming incongruity there, same as there is in the scene between Bolger and Brady where they discuss the existence of God, and Brady makes an analogy between the existence of a god and the concept of parallel lines that just run on and never touch.

“And man can’t create true parallel. It’s just more of a concept… Well that concept, that perfection, we know it exists and we think about it, but we can’t ever get there ourselves. I think that right there is God.” Brady tells his pothead best friend who he met in prison. It’s that kind of contrast that colours the whole movie.

There’s a clear acting challenge to playing your own twin, and even if it is an old device and it has been done before, it takes an extreme awareness just with little things like making it seem like you are actually interacting with your other, and Norton makes very intelligent choices throughout with things like body language and quirks of behaviour that actually makes a good enough conceit that the viewer isn’t constantly reminded of the technical side of how this is done, rather than letting the action unfold. There are enough similarities between the characters that you get reminded of their sameness as well as their difference, most notably in the obvious intelligence of them both.

There’s a dark undercurrent in the narrative, drugs and violence and a dysfunctional family dynamic, but all that serves a purpose and there’s deadpan humour to so much of the dialogue which flaunts an interest in philosophy and rhetoric that makes it difficult to pigeon-hole. I, for one, happen to like that. I like that there is pathos to the humour, a darkness underneath that gives contrast to the lighter things. There is, quite simply, a lot going on, and there is a body count worthy of a gangster movie and just desserts to deserving parties. The end result is something that feels more like a play in its aesthetic. It’s quirky and morally dubious, well acted and unpredictable in a good way. That’s more than enough for me.

Article first published as Movie Review: Leaves of Grass on Blogcritics.

Rounders – poker and morality

Rounders (1998) directed by John Dalh stars Matt Damon as Mike McDermott, Edward Norton as Worm, John Turturro as Joey Knish, Famke Janssen (Petra), John Malkovich (Teddy KGB), Martin Landau (Abe Petrovsky), Gretchen Mol (Jo).

This is ostensibly a story about playing cards, but more than that it is a morality play, weirdly enough. It all starts with a huge big loss. Mike sits down to play with Teddy KGB and loses everything he owns in one fell swoop. He decides that he’s done, he’s getting out. That means forsaking his dream of winning the world series of poker. He is studying law at the same time and now he’s reduced to driving a delivery truck on the night shift to get by instead.

Mike is a likeable guy. He’s got a pretty girlfriend, Jo, and a judge who really likes him, Abe Petrovsky, and friends who wish him well. He has a set of principles when it comes to playing cards that imply he can beat pretty much anyone by skill and he thinks he is going to be a lawyer. All that gets thrown out the window when his old friend Worm (Edward Norton) gets out of prison.

The second Worm walks out the prison gates all bets are off. Worm is a mechanic, which means he cheats any way he can, including dealing from the bottom of the deck. Mike is adamant about not playing anymore, but Worm sucks him back into the game with hardly any effort at all.

See, here’s the thing – Mike actually has it all. He has a pretty girl, good friends, a good career ahead of him, he has a sponsor/mentor and he has a clear path cut out. All of this means he won’t play poker anymore, but that is the price he is going to have to pay. Slowly, but surely, all that gets torn down through the machinations of his best friend Worm, who is basically a manipulative loser at best. Worm has none of those thing and judging from the voiceover he never has had them.

The voiceover (Matt Damon) works seamlessly in this setting. You don’t even question it, which I think is in part because the whole movie has a forties Noir feel to it. The style and the theme is perfect for it, as well as the general feel of the whole movie.

But, here’s the thing – at the end of the movie Mike has lost his girl, his potential career, his best friend and his money. He’s been beaten and mauled. And all this is a win in his book because he has the money to get in at the ground level of the poker world series with a theoretical chance of winning a million dollars. He insists that poker is about skill, not luck. He believes it is what he was “meant to do” and the advice given to him in convoluted form by Judge Abe Petrovsky seems to second that notion.

There are a lot of good things about this movie, like the stylishness of it, which is economical and spare, and the cast, which is solid and stellar. Norton is excellent as the weasel Worm and Malkovich goes bananas with the Russian accent. Landau plays the old hand like the old hand he is and Turturro is so calm and laid back that you want to poke him with a cattle prod just to see him twitch. Matt Damon is very strong as the all American guy with a huge brain. There are no interesting female characters in this, neither the overly sexualised Petra (Famke Jenssen) or the bland Jo (Gretchen Mol) make any kind of difference.

It has faults to mar its strong points too. Worm is the catalyst for Mike when it comes to getting him back in the game, but Worm’s own storyline has a very unsatisfactory resolution, which is to say no resolution at all. And Mike sort of rides off into the sunset, which is fine and in keeping with the narrative, but it seems to say that no matter how bright your future might seem you still have to follow your … well, I don’t think “heart” is the right word.

This guy, Mike, chooses a life of instability and loneliness and may very well end up like one of those pathetic losers that populate a movie like Ironweed or Barfly, and still manages to make it sound like the perfect happy ending. So, it’s a murky morals movie. I’m starting to feel that should be a genre all it’s own.

Mule

The Painted Veil – China and Orientalism

The Painted Veil (2006) directed by John Curran is based on a W. Somerset Maugham novel. It stars Edward Norton as the ambitious doctor Walter Fane, Naomi Watts as the socialite Kitty Fane, Liev Schreiber as Charlie Townsend, Toby Jones as Waddington and assorted other actors of Asian decent in various minor parts. I will explain why I put it like that in a little while, so stay with me here.

Now, I’m a fan of Edward Norton. I think he’s done some really first-rate work in his career, and that’s why I will let him get away with the slightly shady English accent here. Naomi Watts, same thing, really, she does a good job – the accent thing shouldn’t pose much of a problem for her. And then we’ve got the show-stealer Tony Jones who is really brilliant in the role of Waddington and the unusually suave performance of Liev Schreiber who I last saw as Sabretooth – so that at least shows that he’s got range.

Maugham’s stories are often quite subtle, they teeter between fine sarcasm and what can loosely be termed romance, though it’s never as simple as that. It’s also about class and appearances and what that does to the human heart. So here we have the passionate and taciturn doctor Fane who falls for a bored socialite and manages to get her to marry him. It’s obviously an infatuation on his part and a social necessity on hers. He takes her to Shanghai where she promptly has an affair with the cad Townsend. She gets caught out and is given an option – which is really no option at all. If she gets Townsend to agree to divorcing his wife and marrying her instead Fane won’t cause a scandal by citing adultery as the cause for the divorce. Townsend has never had any intention of divorcing his wife. Kitty is trapped and caught and forced to accompany her husband to a provincial Chinese town infested with cholera.

So far so good. All this is what you can expect in terms of keeping up appearances, holding on to archaic values and so on and so forth. Walter punishes Kitty by being cold, disinterested and in general acting like a jilted husband. The fact that they are deep into a foreign county surrounded by the dead and dying makes this little chamber drama more acute.

The scenery is stunning. The shooting locations are actually in Shanghai and the Chinese countryside – spectacular, fantastic, beautiful beyond belief. It’s all … awesome, in the original meaning of the word.

The Fanes are forced back on themselves in this desperate and desolate time and finally they break through to some kind of intimacy and Kitty realises she has to do something with herself – make herself useful in some way, so she involves herself with a local convent run by a hardcore old nun played masterfully by Dame Diana Rigg.

So – Where is the sting in all this honey?
Orientalism, in the good old-fashioned intellectual tradition of Edward Said. This is 1920s China, we’re talking communism, the Cultural Revolution. It strikes me as particularly clumsy that this movie makes no concessions, but sticks to the Maugham view – which is fine for Maugham, but not so much for 2006.

The sundry Chinese characters are treated pretty much like scenery – cute little singing orphans and the occasional mildly threatening young man in the street, the contentious, but obviously a bit stupid guard, the Chinese mistress and Colonel Yu (Anthony Wong) and all in all they’re really not given much space.

Colonel Yu get at least a few good lines in like “I think China belongs to the Chinese people, but the rest of the world seems to disagree.” Which does a little something, but it really does not go even a third of the way on how much richer the story would have been had we been given even a something more than just the British doctor and his ditzy wife swooping in to save the day when the whole cholera epidemic is the fault of the ignorant Chinese peasants burying their dead too close to the main water source and also superstitiously keeping their dead on lit de parade for three days instead of doing the wholesome thing and dumping their bodies at once.

I want to like this movie. I just can’t, despite the scenery, the acting and the pretty of it.

Mule

25th Hour

Spike Lee has directed this 2002 movie starring Edward Norton as Montgomery Brogan, Phillip Seymore Hoffman as Jacob Elinsky, Barry Pepper as Frank,  Rosario Dawson as Naturelle and Anna Paquin as Mary.

Spike Lee’s work has certain typical characteristics. He likes to hang around New York and make the city itself a player. That means we get a lot of exterior shots, which is nice and sets the scene beautifully. He also likes to take his time in a scene which delivers dialogue between two characters, giving their body language time to develop and focusing on the interaction. There is of course the obligatory rascist rant at some point, which is calculated to upset, no matter how much in context it might be.

This movie delivers all of that.

Norton’s character Monty goes through nothing less than a moral apotheosis. He has been dealing drugs since he was in high school and gets caught. There are a couple of things going on all at once with this story from a moral perspective. His friends blame themselves for not stopping him, Monty is uncertian as to who turned him in to the police, but suspects Naturelle, the girlfriend, his father blames himself because in the early days Monty has helped him pay off his debts and because he has a drinking problem.

Still, this is all good and fine, but Monty has made his own decisions and it is a difficult quagmire to navigate from a moral point of view. Actions have consequences and that’s about all you can say about this without getting in to some very dodgy territory.

Norton plays the penitent with all the skill I’ve come to expect of him. His entire body language is different, slouchy and laid back. He often portrays morally questionable characters, to say the least, but still manages to wrangle some sympathy for them which I find fascinating. Rosario Dawson as the girlfriend, Naturelle, is the picture of drop-dead gorgeousness all around, but still has depth as well. Brian Cox plays the elder Brogan with the bar and the drinking problem and there’s a whole story right there.

The action takes place in the last twenty-four hours before Monty is due to go to prison for a seven year stretch.

The action follows Monty throughout the day as he walks down memory lane, so we get treated to flash backs and flash forwards as well.

This is where things get interesting. After having followed Monty around for an entire day while he angsts and gets patted on the shoulder the movie takes a very sharp left turn.

As his father drives him to prison Monty gets convinced to run away and recreate himself instead. The movie becomes slightly dream like and abstract at this point. And that’s where I start to feel my forehead crinkle.

Every scenario painted by Monty’s friends and busines associates tells of how a pretty white boy like Monty’s not going to make it in prison and he believes them. Instead of taking his punishment – i.e. the consequences of his actions, he goes off to start a new life. His father names it “the life he was supposed to live”.

That is certainly questionable to say the least. And very dreamlike and idyllic.

It’s well worth watching and it will probably make most viewers foreheads crinkle up like mine did.

Mule

Primal Fear

Directed by Gregory Hoblit this 1996 court room drama stars Richard Gere, Laura Linney, Edward Norton and Frances McDormand.

Gere’s attorney Martin Vail is a vain bastard, that much is obvious right from the get go. He embodies all the characteristics of a lawyer when at the top of his game and obviously his goal here is to defend the innocent, or not so innocent, and look good whilst doing it. He has a conscience somewhere, but he is still basically an ambulance chaser.

When the news of a gory murder hits, Vail is first through the gate to get to defend the young suspect Aaron Stempler. Aaron comes across as sweet, shy and misguided. A young drifter who has been taken in by the local church and then subjected to Archbishop Rushman’s (Stanley Anderson) dubious attention. It turns out that the Archbishop has some interesting habits involving the young people supposedly in the church’s care.

So the altar boy murders a priest and then hides shivering and covered in blood by the railway tracks. The lawyer who normally meets events as a cynical tactician is blindsided by the suspect. Aaron seems to have a mean man in him called Roy. Aaron goes from sweet, stuttering and mild tempered confusion to alpha male in two seconds flat. Roy, the other personality, is the one who takes care of business. He protects Aaron. He killed the priest.

So the defense now switches from “there was a third man in the room” to “there was a third man in the room, but he lives in Aaron’s head”, which is a tricky thing to try and pull off.

This movie has been around for a while and I actually saw it back then and now happened to revisit it. This is Norton’s first big performance and he does pull it off in a way which with the twenty-twenty vision provided by hindsight you can say foreshadows his later performances. It is not particularily memorable movie for any other reason, though, more a basic staple of court room drama, and there has been quite a lot of that.

Strong, solid chracter performances, but not much else. Still very enjoyable in it’s basic bread and butter way.

Mule