Movie Monster

Tim Burton’s misadventures in Wonderland are woefully miscalculated. Unlike Alice, who chased her dream down the rabbit-hole, the director seems to have stumbled into it. His Alice (Mia Wasikowska) is a hole in the screen—an A-hole, to be precise. In this conception of Lewis Carroll’s 19th-century whimsies, the ingenue has been aged to the brink of adulthood. She’s an ahead-of-her-time feminist (obvi!) corseted by Victorian England, and the twitty, orange-haired scion (Leo Bill) of her late father’s business associate expects her to be his bride. But she follows that wascally wabbit to Wonderland where, prophecy dictates, she’s to slay the Jabberwocky and save the kingdom. Alice, underwhelmed by the prospect, shrugs it off; she assumes she’s mired in an unusually heavy sleep, so she floats through the whacked-out scenery like a lucid dreamer awaiting her alarm clock. Following an undefined change of heart, she saves the Mad Hatter’s head (whole body played by Johnny Depp) from the oft-used chopping block of the Red Queen (whose head is Helena Bonham Carter’s and hair is Queen Elizabeth I’s). Alice rescues him dutifully, but continues to insist that he doesn’t exist. She may be liberated enough to ditch her bustle, but she wears her arid patrician heart on her sleeve.

The screenwriter, Linda Woolverton, cobbled together Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, but the hybrid hasn’t been plotted out; it’s a pastiche. One may not be sure why Alice is afraid to face a dragon that she thinks is imaginary, or whether the Red Queen’s vizier (Crispin Glover) recognizes Wonderland’s Most Wanted. (When he corners Alice in the corridor is he on to her or coming on to her?) Carroll didn’t let narrative get in the way of his paradoxes, which he structured like algorithms or derivatives—flawlessly meaningless. In this new Alice in Wonderland, paradoxes push the narrative forward. It moves full-steam ahead without having anywhere to go, even when a scene is worth loitering over. Burton maintains the suspense only sparingly—as when Alice sneaks about the cage of a toothy mongrel, prompting the gooiest cinematic lick since Gozu. But, on the whole, this movie would’ve flunked calculus—and its driving test, too.

In some ways, however, this adaptation is Wicked: The Mad Hatter has become Dorothy’s dimwitted Scarecrow. Even beneath a Lady Gaga pancake—and Mountain Dew-daubed irises the size of manholes—Depp grimaces better than anyone else in Hollywood. He gives the picture a much-needed emotional core. No longer burnished into terseness, as he was in Public Enemies, Depp is back in weirdo mode. He playfully backhands the Carroll-tinged dialogue, but his Hatter is a sad clown rather than a mad one—and Depp’s Chaplinesque proficiency makes Alice’s disregard all the more painful. Even in the original book, she wasn’t a particularly endearing character; she was the arbiter of the Age of Reason. But you can’t make her foil lovable if you don’t provide someone to love him. Dorothy’s teary departure from Oz might be a little mawkish for modern tastes, but when Alice says farewell to her friends, she may as well be flipping them the bird. In a coda as implausible as anything in Wonderland, she promptly rejects her beau, tells off the aristocracy, and woos her would-be father-in-law into making her a venture capitalist. She has all the P.R. charm of a Martha Stewart when she announces her intent to open trade routes to China. What will she trade? Let me guess—opium? Despite the ominous, oblong production design, a skirmish between Reds and Whites worthy of Tolkien and Eisenstein, and some snappy surrealist repartee, I was through with this looking-glass long before the brat set sail. If she only had a heart…

Recently, Burton’s imagination has fizzled when applied to the intellectual properties of others—even though Sleepy Hollow is a Halloween treat, and Batman Returns one of my franchise-film favorites. His Sweeney Todd was messy, too, and when Depp moonwalks in Alice, I flashed back to Charlie and the Chocolate Factory—a bad trip. Maybe, to me, a superheated mess like The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus is preferable because it was an iteration of the filmmaker’s mind; the squiggly story-line seemed to mean something to Terry Gilliam, even if the audience felt it was on the wrong side of his imaginarium. Where the Wild Things Are was a little sleepy—if not hollow; Spike Jonze clearly loved the material. His vernal warmth would’ve melted this icicle Alice. But Burton’s large-scale, Disney-financed perennial seems chilled by frantic labor and compromise. The mash-up will probably leave children feeling blue. It’s not the world-soul melancholy that the (somewhat creepily) death-aware Coraline left one with; Alice will merely jumble kids’ sympathies. Burton directs the way the White Queen (a surprisingly spunky—and surprisingly platinum—Anne Hathaway) concocts a magic elixir: with a pinch of underhanded wit, but as jittery as if there was a gun pointed at her head.

The style and manner of Shutter Island seems to leave the viewer with one of three reactions: a.) Exhaustion; b.) Elation; c.) Martin Scorsese, W.T.F.?! (The third option, admittedly, is not incompatible with the first two.) Where do I fall? Well, when I left the theater, neurons were firing like a blitzkrieg in my brain. During an ecstatic car ride home, which surprisingly did not inspire any patrol car lights to strobe in my wake, I was ready to drop such bombs as “brilliant” and “genius.” After a warm glass of milk, and a good night’s sleep, my opinion now verges on c.)—conditionally, that is—but b.) has not been completely displaced. Yet I think I have a good idea why so many reviewers have settled on a.).

A pair of U.S. Marshals—Teddy (Leonardo DiCaprio) and Chuck (Mark Ruffalo)—disembark a mist-shrouded ferry and set foot on Shutter Island, home of the Ashecliffe Hospital for the Criminally Insane, a maximum-security prison in the Massachusetts Bay. One of the inmates—whom the chief psychologist, Dr. Cawley (Ben Kingsley), refers to as “patients”—has gone missing. Rachel (Emily Mortimer) returns, inexplicably and without a scratch. As storm clouds converge on the island, Teddy becomes increasingly paranoid; its jagged shores are littorally inescapable. The authorities have ignored his; they’ve taken his gun, withheld paperwork, and worst of all, the whole shebang seems to be under the sway of a former Nazi (Max von Sydow). Another Rachel appears (a razor-sharp Patricia Clarkson); the House Un-American Activities Committee’s name is dropped (it’s the McCarthy era—1954); and Teddy suffers from migraines and oracular dreams: visions of his wife (Michelle Williams)—who was supposedly burnt to a crisp by an arsonist who happens to be committed on the island—alternate with the suffering children of Dachau, which Teddy helped liberate as a G.I.

This is a Gothic storm of a movie, and it’s awash with melodramatic touches and nods to old films noir. Yes, the Bernard Herrmannian horns honk at you like traffic in Midtown Manhattan; and, yes, the investigators wear fedoras; and Teddy’s subordinate calls him “Boss”; and the shrinks speak in slippery platitudes while wearing tweeds; and the inmates jump out of dark corners and give you the willies. But all these touches add to the dense, painterly texture of the film. According to A.O. Scott, Scorsese “forces you to study the threads on the rug he is preparing … to pull out from under you.” I didn’t feel “forced,” but found the rug perfectly sewn; each thread can be stitched back together. (It’s a rare pleasure to have thrillers like this exercise one’s mental needle.) Salon compares Shutter Island to a film by David Lynch—but Lynch’s meanings don’t conform to a logical structure; this can be reconstructed in a manner that is absolutely, pellucidly, meticulously sane. Is it a work of depth and subtlety? Not really. But does that mean that Scorsese is, as David Edelstein asserts, “farther from reality than his hero is”? Formal perfection is always a little supernatural. At any rate, I prefer this maniacal professionalism—Scrosese’s 40-year endeavor to blend opera with genre filmmaking—to that of A Serious Man, which was a snub to anyone who tried to parse the Coens’ threads.

In a film this dense and dynamic, consistency can be both miraculous and conservative. When Scott—whose evaluation is uncharacteristically tsk-tsk-tsky—calls Shutter Island “airless,” I can understand why: There isn’t much breathing room. He and Edelstein, critics whom I admire, fall into rubrics a.) and c.). I can only offer, without risk of being called a spoilsport, part of why I’m still sympathetic to b.). Scorsese is no stranger to madness; his work has always been deliriant, and his oeuvre is spiked with psychopaths. Taxi Driver is one of the best character studies ever financed by Hollywood, and one of the most vertiginous downward spirals. But while you’re watching it, you know that cabbie is a little bit loopy. Watching Shutter Island, you may start to wonder about yourself. The third-act revelation may not be entirely original, but I was so caught up in the cobwebs of rationalization that it had the bite of a spider. (Perhaps some willful gullibility is required for the venom to take effect.) Shutter Island doesn’t connect to societal upheaval the way Taxi Driver and Mean Streets did; or celebrity culture the way The King of Comedy did; or the Patriot Act the way The Departed did. But it might prompt you to examine your own susceptibility to delusion; it might induce you to think like a madman.

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According to Bad Blake, the fading country-and-Western star in Crazy Heart, a song is good if you think you’ve heard it before when you listen to it the first time. This philosophy seems to be shared by Scott Cooper, who wrote, produced, and directed this adaptation of Thomas Cobb’s novel. It’s less an aesthetic principle than a prescription for playing it safe; but there are certain tunes that play again and again, and the redemption of the down-and-out country crooner always hits that “truthful” note—perhaps because in honky-tonk, it’s never auto-tuned.

Bad—who, at 57, leaves his belt unbuckled and putters between gigs at bowling alleys in a ’78 Suburban—is about as “authentic” as they come. He’s a little testy about being outmoded by superstars like Tommy Sweet (Colin Farrell)—a former protégé—but Bad’s temper isn’t akin to his stage name. His anger at leaving four ex-wives and a son behind, and his obstinance about making a comeback—which would be a Sweet deal—boomerang at him in unlimited refills of bourbon and unending cartons of smokes. Everybody’s good to Bad but Bad. There’s only one real surprise in the plot—and it’s farfetched enough that it doesn’t feel quite earned—but the plot isn’t what critics and award-bearers have set their sights on.

Enter Jeff Bridges, who makes Bad look good. If Bridges isn’t as flamboyant as other actors of his generation (Pacino, Streep, De Niro, Hoffman, et al), it’s because he doesn’t enter his characters through their pores; he holds them tight, snuggles them—he’s a protective, sentimental actor in the best sense. And his innate combination of skill, generosity, gentleness, and humor is intensely ingratiating. (I’d love to see him as play villain—to see if his likability can be subverted.) Sentimentality can be physically demanding. Bad looks like a bristly yeti, but what country singer of his mold hasn’t grown a little mold? Bridges suggests a man who’s given in to the fungus. Poetry punches through fungus, and Bridges’s emotional range is poetic.

Maggie Gyllenhaal plays the small-time reporter who helps Bad see the light at the end of the bottle; she’s the one who finally scrapes the grime off Bad’s Chia head. The journalist says that she blushes easily because her capillaries are close to the skin. Everything this woman feels is close to her skin, and the movie overemphasizes her vulnerability. (In one scene, she breaks down after Bad composes lyrics on her bed. She feels unworthy of his talent, and mawkishly assumes that he’ll forget her.) And yet, Gyllenhaal’s eccentricity—her movements are sinuous, like a love-struck stoner’s—suggests that layers of complexity have been battered inward. Her effervescent performance gets at something that the movie itself doesn’t quite.

But, within its limited framework, Crazy Heart is a competent, likable film. There’s some zing to the dialogue, and—since T-Bone Burnett served as Bad’s lyricist—an air of authenticity about the score. (Bad’s repertoire indeed reminds me of music I’ve heard before—even Bridges’s sonorous voice.) Cooper doesn’t get as much out of the Southwestern landscapes as I might have liked; the bounteous mesas authorize natives like Bad to indulge in their freedom to self-destruct. But there’s at least one shot that’s been burned into my hippocampus: Bad, sharp and recumbent in the foreground, with the chintzy Christmas lights of a dive forming a blurry constellation behind him. It seems to capture the romance in the rundown, the fleeting perks of the peripatetic barfly. (Bad’s touring life is both Up in the Air in economy class and a domestication of The Wrestler.) Contrast this shot with one of Robert Duvall—as Bad’s loudmouth bartender/cheerleader/buddy—spouting off life-goes-on lyrics in a rowboat, as the camera pulls back, bestowing meaning from above. [Yawns.] But even if Cooper’s circulatory-system lunacy is hardly in evidence, he has a knack for bringing out the heart murmurs of others.

If the hair on my knuckles spiked, the muscles in my back contorted, and I let out a bloodcurdling howl during The Wolfman, it was probably just a yawn. Maybe my failure of intuition—and unwarranted heeding of publicity—had left me crabby. But shouldn’t the remake of a 1941 monster-movie classic indulge in just a little hearty, old-timey hokum? Anthony Hopkins, prancing around in a velvety bathrobe, makes for a glazed and grizzled ham, but the bread that makes the sandwich (Benicio del Toro and Emily Blunt) is disappointingly white. An apter epicurean metaphor involves fast food. If I’m vacationing in the English moors, circa Oscar Wilde, I won’t want to spend tea time at McDonalds. Heart-attack editing has become the McDonalds of horror films; it’s quick, ubiquitous, easy, and icky. The filmmakers here have gormandized it, and left us with some dry wolf droppings that tarnish the belle époque trim.

The Wolfman isn’t woefully incompetent or wake-up-drooling awful. I felt a tad impatient, yet never quite bored; Joe Johnston directs at a silver bullet’s pace. The lack of imagination, however, drowsed rather than roused me. This movie makes Daybreakers seem as innovative as Citizen Kane. I wasn’t expecting Young Frankenstein—or even Shaun of the Dead. But is Francis Ford Coppola’s Dracula too much to ask for?

In A Single Man, fantasy and reality blend—with more concord than the filmmakers perhaps intended. We’re once again in the An Education period—1962—though, this time, the British protagonist has swum across the pond, and then some, to Santa Monica. George (Colin Firth), a middle-aged professor of English, has only recently become single; his partner of 16 years, Jim (Matthew Goode—the fruity übermensch from Watchmen), has died in a car crash. The bulk of the film is set a few months later—on the day that George has designated as his last.

Until 40ish minutes had crawled by, I wondered if I was being engorged by a glossy fashion magazine; pages’ worth of glittering eyeballs and dishy male forms—slowed down so that the movement of each tendon was perceptible—lapped at me like an unwelcome tongue. Lest one prematurely exclaims “homophobe!,” allow me to qualify: What palled on me was not the movie’s blatant homoeroticism, but its sexualization of everything. If everything’s sexy, then nothing is. Jim and George shared something that transcends what a humorless nun might call “base desires” as she whacks a hiney with a ruler; this is evident in the dialogue, and through much of the later part of the picture. But when the pigtailed girl next door and a hound that resembles a pet that the couple once owned are given the same erotic charge that the shirtless members of a college tennis team get, the professor’s devotion to true-love-forever seems reduced to a hard-on for anything that crosses his path.

One might assume that the first-time director, Tom Ford—the quondam couturier—is interested less in capturing George’s emotions than he is accolades for artiness. But the direction of A Single Man isn’t flashy—or trashy—the way that it was for, say, Inglourious Basterds. When George makes his suicidal intentions apparent to the audience by cleaning both his pistol and safe-deposit box, the purple haze begins to clear. And when he decides to spend his last night drinking gin and tonics, puffing pink cigarettes, and grooving to Bossa nova with his old chum Charley (Julianne Moore), the movie hits its stride. She’s been waiting—to no avail—for her “poof” to switch teams; they fooled around when he was a free agent. Moore gives a wonderful slinky quality to this “available woman” who drinks too much alcohol and gets drunk on regret—another noxious solution. She brings out something in Firth that nobody else in the cast does: a spiky, peakish irony that usually lies dormant beneath his rigid, academic mask. She asks what his plans are for the weekend; he says it’s going to be quiet.

Firth gives a good, restrained performance; but, sometimes, the Moore, the merrier. In several of his scenes without her, such as those of him on campus, he too easily embodies that ennobling cliché of the rock-hard prig with a soft and gooey core. If it doesn’t belittle his pain, a sense of proportion can be appropriate. So, when straight-faced George labors to pinpoint the most Feng Shui way to blow his brains out, and gets anal about which way his corpse should be discovered, one can relax—things really aren’t as bathetic as George thinks.

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