Movie Monster

Toward the end of Tomas Alfredson’s film of John Le Carré’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, an elusive double-agent, who’s betrayed British state secrets to the Soviet Union for over 20 years, defends his decision to have done so on aesthetic grounds. And you can hardly blame the bloke, considering the portrait of early-’70s London that the director paints from the start. Let the Right One In, his Swedish sleeper hit, covered some of the same well-trod Transylvanian ground as Twilight, but was enveloped in the ghost-story fog of an adolescent daydream rather than the pulpy throes of paperback romance. Atmospherically, T2S2 doesn’t disappoint. It’s almost lusciously wretched: Sartorially, the establishment seems to have given in to the dressed-down 1960s rather than embraced it. Hair is longer and skirts are shorter, but the Swinging London façade of the Beatles and Blow-Up has all but corroded; it’s been reabsorbed into An Education-era tattiness like a mouse in Mountain Dew. Nowhere is the closing gap between generations more visually odious than among agents of the Mi6—referred to here as “the Circus”—who felt their oats fighting the Nazis, but have since lost their grain, and purpose, to their burlier American counterparts. The wall of their cramped conference room is brazed with burnt-orange acoustic tiles; at their Christmas party, they’re regaled with a chintzy disco cover of “La Mer.” Victoria’s Empire has gone to seed. And as fascinating—visually—as that is to behold, it undercuts one’s interest in the plot—as if the production designers were double-agents, too. Alfredson cites The Conformist as an influence; but Bertolucci rhapsodized Mussolini’s Italy, even its moral ugliness, whereas this look at pre-Thatcher England is drenched with boredom.

Le Carré’s hero is a veteran spy named George Smiley. The character is often described as anti-Bond; a paunchy, patient, middle-aged martinet, he’s more-than-anti-Lisbeth Slander. As embodied here by Gary Oldman, he’s been plucked from forced retirement to finish an internal-affairs investigation initiated by his now-deceased boss called Control (played, in flashbacks, by John Hurt—who looks ready to pull a coronary from his pocket at a moment’s notice). To say that the story is about Smiley unearthing the above-mentioned style-conscious mole is to untangle a corn maze and torture it into a straight line; but, at each twist and turn, this labyrinth is chocked full of mannered British gents pecking away at Bridget O’Connor and Peter Straughan’s dialogue as if it were their elevenses. The main problem confronting the filmmakers—more than paucity of action and density of plot—is the fact that most of the relationships between the characters are sketchy; by design, these Circus performers are less like acrobatic secret agents and more like nine-to-fivers who’ve been cubicle-neighbors for years but wouldn’t think to cast a glance at one another in the light of day. What may be meant as reserve comes across more as resignation—as if, with the depreciation in value of British national security, everything else has gone belly-up.

That includes the patchy narrative. If you’ll permit me a SPOILER ALERT, the issue of the double-agent’s identity is dramatically null: If more attention were directed at that character, it would be too obvious; but since there’s so little attention given to him (other than the big red flag that he’s played by Colin Firth), or our hero’s feelings of betrayal—since this mole has also burrowed into Smiley’s wife—the revelation comes at the cost of anything like suspense or emotional attachment. (The celebrated 1979 BBC-TV version, starring Sir Alec Guinness as Smiley, wasn’t immune to this, either; though, strangely enough, it made a richer sound when striking its psychosexual chords.) But even if, in terms of intrigue, Alfredson can’t beat, say, the first few episodes of Homeland, he can impart a sense of imperial longing that American audiences can connect with right now—in the way I think they connected with An Education. The irony, of course, is that members of the Homeland Security department—and those that have benefited financially from its de facto privatization—are among those least likely to feel the pinch. But anyone else who was ever once assured of our national top-dog status, and now has his doubts, might be advised to watch how Smiley, after a brandy or two, recounts meeting his Soviet adversary Karla at a time when the latter’s position was politically vulnerable. Oldman—whose bullfroggy jowls make him live up to his surname—pantomimes this interaction for a junior officer, going through a tired West-is-best spiel that sticks to the Red idealist like grease on a Teflon pan. (This is much more effectively handled than it was in the miniseries, which flashed back to Guinness interrogating Karla. But since Guinness played Obi-Wan Kenobi, and Patrick Stewart (the future Captain Picard) played Karla, and, on top of that, Oldman is telling this story to an agent played by Benedict Cumberbatch, who was just cast as the villain in the next Star Trek prequel—it’s enough to coldcock the space-time continuum.) Oldman says that he saw Smiley as someone coming from a position of “moral certainty,” which may explain why his impassive stare looks vaguely pompous whereas Guinness’s seemed slightly abashed. In short, Oldman’s frowny Smiley is the kind of Brit that Sid and Nancy fought to break free from. He’s a fine mascot for the film’s mood: There are so many secrets lurking behind these spies’ wrinkled poker faces; but all that their dedicated stoicism has amounted to is their birthrights being washed away. Call it a royal flush.

Slavoj Žižek once said that the goal of traditional psychoanalysis was to help patients overcome their internal prohibitions so that life could be freely enjoyed; but that “the problem today is that the commandment of the ruling ideologies is ‘enjoy.’” In other words, society now promotes what it used to require we repress. What happened in between was the 20th century. (For Philip Roth, who made a related point in American Pastoral, what happened was the ’60s.) As naughty as he seemed in his own time, and as nutso as he sometimes continues to seem in ours, Sigmund Freud was a 19th-century rationalist—an exorcist armed with Enlightenment thought and Victorian optimism. At the time, good and evil—man and beast—was considered a simple, separable binary; hence the no-strings-attached breakup of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. As the Freud played by Viggo Mortensen in A Dangerous Method makes clear to the Carl Jung played by Michael Fassbender, reason is the sole entrée to respectability; the scientific method, as exacting as the society that produced it, is required to housebreak the animal mind. A dangerous method is one that embraces the irrational, and this movie laments that embrace.

The director, David Cronenberg, admits that he hews closer to Freud than Jung; and the style of this film gives credence to the value of repression. As applied to some of his out-there cult classics, like Scanners (1981) and Videodrome (1983) and Crash (1996), his sterility seemed ludicrous—more daft, in my opinion, than profound. (Sterility and surrealism can be antipathetic, with results on par with psychedelic dentistry. However, they were paired together like merlot and brie in his adaptation of Naked Lunch (1991), and were sharply contrapuntal in his deconstructive A History of Violence (2005).) In terms of violence, his last film, Eastern Promises (2007), was anything but repressed; but in A Dangerous Method—which Christopher Hampton adapted from his play, The Talking Cure, as well as a book by John Kerr—violence looms on the horizon. Once the heroes have their falling out, it’s incorporated into their politely worded missives. Freud is guardian of the past, Jung the unwitting arbiter of the future. (As an index to the trouble to come, Jung has a vision presaging the First World War; and, as we are told in an afterword, he is the only central character to have survived the scourges of the 20th century and to have arrived, peacefully, at old age.) Even if there are a couple dramatic shortcomings—Jung, for instance, has already jumped from straight-laced to loose-cannon by his second meeting with Freud—there’s a compelling and lucidly told story hidden under these potentially stagey confabs like a female figure crammed into a wasp waist.

As always, there’s a woman involved. Sabina Spielrein (Keira Knightley) was another frontier psychiatrist, albeit one whose reputation has been buried under the avalanche of history. She’s the Mary Jane Watson in Jung’s origin story—though, rather than being the girl next door, she’s a girl in his psychiatric ward, in treatment for hysteria. In movies like Atonement and Never Let Me Go, Knightley’s high-strung hauteur has been used for bitchy ends, and maybe she’s been cast in so many period pieces because her bearing can put her at a remove from the audience. Here, she’s so high-strung that Kirsten Dunst in Melancholia looks as chill as a Phish Head. Her performance has gotten flack from some critics for being overwrought. In the grips of Spielrein’s supposedly incest-induced illness, the actress seems almost in a state of perpetual emesis; her teeth and eyeballs look like they’re about to be bowled over by whatever toxic thought is snowballing in her brain. But it didn’t seem like scene-stealing Oscar bait to me: She’s wildly physical but terribly introverted. Fassbender—one of those actors who’s appeared as promiscuously on the screen this last year as his nympho in Shame—first presents Jung as a stiff Swiss bourgeois. Pale-eyed, pasty, and afraid of his own impressionability, he’s the egghead archetype—too earnest to crack. His mentor from Austria, after their legendary 13-hour first conversation, is impressed enough to refer one of his own patients, Otto Gross (Vincent Cassel), to Jung. Cassel plays this mangy sexaholic as both resigned and self-impressed; he’s dunked the strictures of the polite society Freud holds so dear into the watery grave of Lake Zurich. This bohemian hedonism, simplistically but convincingly, induces Gross’s naïve shrink into giving it a go. He has an affair with Spielrein, to Freud’s disapproval. They become the Jung and the Restless.

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Every yuppie’s uncle has read and raved about Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo; but, having been burned by other such business-class classics as Angels and Demons, I couldn’t kick back the inertia enough to get past page five—especially since David Fincher, by directing the Hollywood version, seemed poised to render a time-consuming investment in the book practically nil. But I did get far enough to know why so many readers get sucked in: The prose can be shotgunned like a can of Bud Light. Or, better yet, a Red Bull. And Fincher, it turns out, does the equivalent in editing; every shot has been trimmed a few frames too early. The film is a two-and-a-half hour redo of the high-speed palaver at the start of The Social Network, when Jesse Eisenberg and Rooney Mara burned through eight pages of script faster than fascists at a Barnes & Noble. But, here, Fincher directs with the subtlety of a Tokyo subway pusher. And though I realize what’s being squeezed is Larsson’s massive Swedish meatball of a plot, I can’t help but feel a little groped. The director has perfected an immaculately clear style, and it’s used expertly when the heroine’s bag gets lifted and she reclaims it in a jiffy—as if she knew this maneuver by heart. But if ever a literary property begged for stutter edits, or the narrational info-graphics used in movies like Moneyball and A Beautiful Mind, or even the cheeky ingenuity of its own viral marketing campaign, it’s this one. What I’ve been too dismissive to know I’d missed, it seems, is the density of Larsson’s data: the details of an old family’s history, and all the dirt that keeps its tree nourished. So after the Bondian opening credits—in which a digitized likeness of Daniel Craig flounders about in a tar sinkhole while Karen O breathes some angry sex into a Trent Reznor redub of a Led Zeppelin standard—what follows is a graphic letdown. It’s an earful of fast talk.

Fincher has said that he wanted to make a “franchise movie for adults,” and that’s a noble ambition; but, at times, the film seems more like it’s part of an adult-movie franchise. All the intrigue surrounding right-wing political conspiracies (the thriller material concerns a family of reclusive industrialists, and the mysterious disappearance of one of their relatives, 40 years earlier) is a MacGuffin for the putative enigma that is Lisbeth Salander. She’s the ink-stained super-genius of the title—a bisexual bad girl who’s fluent in source code and dismal at small talk. I found her unflappable competence tiresome—more convenient than mysterious—but Mara grabs one’s attention like a teenage drama queen whose period is verging on an exclamation point; her flat voice eeks out low on the register, filtered through a pout, her tongue not enunciating at full capacity, as if it has recently been pierced—by a lawn dart. But Lisbeth’s rape-revenge number, whatever its original intentions, comes off as embarrassingly crude: Sucker Punch feminism, furnished by Ikea. Her vengeance is a perfectly designed s&m fantasy; it titillates one’s prurience and then rewards it in the form of righteousness—which is even more perverted. Lisbeth is what repressed older men must think punkish young women are like. However, I should give Larsson and his fans some credit; his readers must be more than grown-up Twihards. (Should we call ’em Dragoons?) The novel is the first in the Millenium trilogy, and must have been written long before its author’s death in 2004. Its idealism both harkens back to the 1990s—when the Internet was still the Wild West, before the likes of Google and Facebook arrived to tame it—and resonates with the Year of the Protester. For Larsson—an investigative journalist like his klutzy hero (Craig), who recruits Lisbeth as an assistant—the enemy was the “financial mafia”; and, in his vision, this ubiquitous cabal with unlimited means can be beaten by an anarchic outsider armed with technical knowhow and an appetite for justice. That alone may be compelling enough to get past page five for. I guess it’s about time.

The Descendants is an escape to the ordinary. Alexander Payne’s first feature since Sideways is also his second since leaving Nebraska; it proves afresh that you can take the director out of Omaha, but you can’t take Omaha out of the director. At least that’s the message encoded in the opening monologue—one I was happy to receive. His patently everymannish protagonist, Matt King, addresses the audience directly—in Payne’s patently novelistic fashion—and gripes that life for natives of the Aloha State isn’t all luaus and leis. Considering that he’s the great-grandson of a Hawaiian queen, Matt’s surname seems to be heralding yet another a regality that his demeanor does not. Despite those vestigial crumbs of chocolate-lava cake, and the fact that he’s played by George Clooney, he’s pretty darn vanilla: a middle-aged attorney, father of two, soon to be a widower, and even sooner to learn that he’s a cuckold. The first shot of the movie shows his wife on water-skis—skin tanned, hair sunned, smile divine. A motorboat’s purr echoes somewhere in the distance. That’s the last time we see her out of a vegetative state.

If she had specified that she be resuscitated, the film might’ve been about a future Schmidt. Matt calls himself the “backup parent”; his 10-year-old daughter Scottie (Amara Miller) bullies schoolmates for having premature pubic hairs (an unverified accusation); his suburban-Honolulu villa is a mess; and so is his 17-year-old daughter Alex (Shailene Woodley). Or at least she’s perceived to be more of a mess than most girls her age; it’s unclear whether being hauled off to boarding school was something Alex’s behavior warranted or whether it’s a sign of negligent parenting. Either way, she seems to be the wisest member of the family. Alex uses drugs to take the edge off the benign blandness that seems to emanate from her busy-body father, rather than from the idyllic archipelago. She uses drugs the way her mother was unfaithful. In About Schmidt, the melancholy of being clueless, and being too old to change that, was lyrically cogent; Schmidt played by the rules his entire life, and still couldn’t score a goal. Matt says that his father-in-law (Robert Forster), who looks like a living memorial—weathered enough to have fought in every war since the invention of gunpowder—has decked him now and then; and it’s easy to see how a rule-abiding softie like Matt could get on a hard-ass’ nerves. There’s something protean about him; he reeks of old affidavits and older coffee. Clooney gives a fine performance, but, beyond the expected range of feelings, Matt’s inscrutable—aloof to his own midlife crisis. He’s Ozzie Nelson struggling to get by in the alliterative age of Don Draper and Walter White. In the beautifully understated end, when the Kings flock around March of the Penguins on TV, it’s clear that they’ll spend more quality time together; but he looks like he’ll still push papers in his skull.

As the title implies, Payne—who adapted Kaui Hart Hemmings’s novel with Nat Faxon and Jim Rash—gives the theme of putting family first, as it were, a very macro view. The queen has other descendants, and not all of them are Kings; as a lawyer, Matt oversees the trust that contains her bequest in Kauai: seafront property that’s been pristine since the 1860s. Cousins like Beau Bridges’s beach-bum—a lifer in Margaritaville—show how little a drop of royalty can do for a bloodline; they want to do the expedient thing and sell each breathtaking acre of Granny’s dowry. Mainly, this is good as a mechanism for comedy: Matt seems to have cousins everywhere—the sort of family reunion one only expects at the reading of a will. But there’s also the unbidden gleam of Chekhov’s gun in this sitcommy set-up: You know which decision Matt’ll make from the moment the problem is introduced, and why. And since a woman with more direct Islander lineage condones of his keeping the land in the buff, and thus free from Rum Diary-esque real-estate swindles, there’s no P.C. unpleasantness about this essentially whitebread clan keeping Arcadia as their own. (I say this with all due deference to the screenwriters; their own inheritance seems to come with a few riders. A more P.C. solution, like donating the land to the Park Service, would’ve come off as phony.) Reverse Shot says that “The Descendants almost dares you to take it seriously,” and in such details as Alex’s paleolithic surfer-dude companion (Nick Krause), I was on the verge of selecting “truth” instead.

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Big airports have always fascinated me. Thousands of passengers zipline back and forth on any given day: maybe on business, maybe coming home, maybe for a layover—perhaps as a tourist or gadabout. It’s a model U.N., with representatives from every part of the world trying to get to every other, but few transients stop to swap anything bigger than small talk; everyone’s on a timetable, outpacing the road hogs with their strollers and canes, trying to avoid the here and now, save for the smart phones that seizure in their chinos, or the occasional burger at Johnny Rockets or impulse buy at Bose. It’s like being in limbo, especially at a major hub: You’re not really in a place, just a means to get to other places. Since the cachet had by passenger trains has long since lost its steam—at least in the United States—big airports have taken the cultural place of flagship train stations. But in terms of design, airports have never supplanted the ornamental old guard of railway terminals, which were calibrated to a slower-paced past—when the idea of travel inspired an awe worthy of marble balustrades and gargoyles.

Hugo, Martin Scorsese’s 3-D début, is Grand Central Station in the age of L.A.X. Take this for an opening shot: Starting amid the snowflakes, above the 24-karat twinkle of the City of Lights, Robert Richardson’s camera bears down on a train-station platform, perks up like a groundstroke, and glides parallel to the rush-hour hustle like a hawk piercing the locomotive steam. It’s a bravura use of technology: The extra depth lends a heightened tension to the people and luggage so narrowly averted; and yet the motion is deifically smooth: Like a 3-D-simulator ride at Universal Studios—or riding shotgun on God’s road test. I prefer the latter because the shot pairs grandiosity, and mammoth cinephilic self-consciousness, with a thwack of surprise. We’re aware of the trick, but still fall for it: as if in the sway of an illusionist who’s eroding our skepticism. Considering that this is a movie about magic, it makes sense that, after this first wave of his wand, the flashy Scorsese we all know and love virtually disappears.

For a film of its scale, Hugo is remarkably small in scope. And despite being a movie about thaumaturgy, there’s nothing in it that can be classified as fantasy: Orks and aliens need not apply. The idea of an orphan squatting at a Victorian-gothic railroad station in 1931—an invisible waif among inattentive masses at a gilded gateway to the world—matches these ironies like P.B. with J. Having lost his clocksmith father (Jude Law) to a fire, the title character (Asa Butterfield, with eyes blue enough to blind Yves Klein and a name that conjures images of Oz under a dusting of Land O’Lakes) became the ward of a krunky uncle who looks, and probably smells, like the carny who hocked the Elephant Man. When the uncle, in turn, clocks out, he bequeaths to Hugo a responsibility more consequential than the boy knows: to keep the clocks ticking at a Parisian gare—the rafters of which he calls home—like a renegade intern without college cred to recoup. If Hugo can dodge the station’s Dickensian inspector (Sacha Baron Cohen) artfully enough, he noshes on unguarded croissants, lifts tchotchkes and curios from the shop kept by mysterious Georges (Ben Kingsley)—he of the gloomy demeanor and bristly white chin—and tinkers with an equally enigmatic automaton that his dad didn’t live to fix. Georges gives Hugo a shoulder cold enough to melt Frosty, but his god-daughter Isabelle (Chloë Grace Moretz)—wearing a beret in 1931 but maybe Wayfarers in 2011—has a book-bred thirst for adventure too sharp to typify nerdiness. And Hugo’s totally crushing on her!

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