Movie Monster

Right before the lights went down and Contagion got underway, my buddy asked if this was a bad movie for us to be sharing popcorn at; and for the first few minutes, my answer was a withering “Uh-huh….” Steven Soderbergh lingers a few extra seconds on a much-fingered bowl of peanuts at a bar in Kowloon, on a metal pole on a Tokyo commuter train, on derelict cell phones passed like dinner plates—the way filmmakers draw our attention to seemingly mundane objects in a mystery: giving us a heads up on clues. But then come jaundiced faces, overused Kleenexes, the ghastly coughs that emanate from the hollows of people’s souls. And cue convulsions! It may have been like buying a Range Rover on the way home from An Inconvenient Truth, but I finished the popcorn anyway.

Contagion isn’t a mystery exactly. This study of a viral pandemic, the attempts to contain it, and the effect that has on modern society has the pull of an omnibus disaster thriller, the substance of a technical manual, and the form of an objet d’art: Imagine Richard A. Clarke recruiting for a war game at an Oscar afterparty, and hiring Annie Leibovitz to document it in a photo spread. Who but Soderbergh—except, maybe, a resurrected Robert Altman, after having received his doctorate in public health in heaven—could’ve pulled this off? (And don’t let’s forget the screenwriter, Scott Z. Burns, whose name has the ring of an over-the-counter ointment.) Soderbergh has carved a special place for himself in the canon, harboring an admirable fascination with the way things work and a polystylistic urge to slink under the seat of his director’s chair: a combo that has inevitably drawn him to the style and subject of bureaucracy. In their last go, The Informant! (2009), he and Burns made Matt Damon into a monkey wrench, the embodiment of human error in the space where Russell Crowe in The Insider once fit snugly; but despite his best efforts, Soderbergh seemed too close to his subject for his posture of ironic distance, and the satire got sticky. Apart from Dachau, AIDS, and the Trail of Tears, this is about as far from comedy as he could get; so the barrier between his audience and his obsessions is as thin in Contagion as a microscope slide.

But that doesn’t mean he and his team aren’t up to their old film-school tricks. If they had role models, they were probably Michael Mann (without the heavy muscularity) or, more likely, that fleet fox David Fincher (without the underlying aggression). (Cliff Martinez, who composed the electrified score, tweaks Trent Reznor down to the last decibel.) The editor, Stephen Mirrione, cuts with a headlock on woozy continuity and benefits from Soderbergh’s jarring use of static shots—an endowment, perhaps, from the late Sidney Lumet. The chromed contrasts in his imagery—this director hides behind his own camera and photographs under an assumed name—are enough to get your optic nerve hungover. It’s as if the action was reflecting off a glass skyscraper. What an odd place to spot one of the most beautiful-looking films of the year: a mantle ceded despite the angles—voyeuristic and belligerently imbalanced, crowded yet chillingly still. Composition and montage go it alone; Eisenstein would’ve been proud.

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Even if I didn’t expect it, I should have: Our hirsute cousins are more compelling, and, generally speaking, more convincingly embodied than we are in Rise of the Planet of the Apes. I should’ve also anticipated its tendentious way of getting from Point A to Point Ape. An hour and a half waiting period between being a lower primate and becoming superhuman may seem like a brisk evolution to a Darwinian; but if you’re clocking in behind The Tree of Life, which breezed past eons in a fraction of that time, you know you’re in trouble. It’s not that this prequel is dull, exactly; for kids who haven’t seen the original Planet of the Apes (1968) or its sequels there may actually be some suspense. For most of us, however, the filmmakers had to take a different tack—they had to put us on the side of the underdogs by making their enemies (i.e., human beings) despicable. The genetically enhanced ape Caesar (a digital species-swap of Andy “Gollum” Serkis) who has suckled the milk of human kindness out of Will Rodman (James Franco)—a scientist who’s raised him to be something between a person and a pet—gets picked up by animal control and thrown into a zoo. A simian Shawshank, really. This passage sinks nearly to the level of PETA propaganda; Tom “Draco Malfoy” Felton (strapped with the ludicrous—and inappropriately heroic—name of Dodge Landon) is far from wizardly as the zookeeper / prison guard who uses an electronic cattle prod as his not-so-magic wand. He’s such a sadistic nitwit that the monkeys seem to outsmart him from the get-go; when they steal eugenic serum from Rodman’s lab, to escape and conquer the world, it’s an almost superfluous twist.

If the mad-scientist tragic inevitability doesn’t hook you as much as Shakespeare’s sometimes does, then maybe you’ll be sated by the way the insurgents break free of their monkey bars. The movie is sly only when it winks at its audience by nodding at its progenitor; but when one of the zookeepers sees Charlton Heston playing Moses on TV, it’s a genuinely clever joke. Caesar—the name really does flummox the historical allusion—doesn’t part the sea, but he does aim a fire hose at Dodge, who’s compromised by his own weapon of choice. The director, Rupert Wyatt, is inhumanly square when trucking purely in live-action (even Franco, stiff as a squiggle in 127 Hours and Howl, carries rigidity like a contagion); but he seems to have stored his imagination on a Mac hard drive. With Serkis as their ringleader, the motion-capture actors would’ve been impressive even without the state-of-the-art trimmings, covered extensively elsewhere; performers playing humans are rarely tasked with such gestural acting, and there’s certainly some kudos due to the techies who helped make their individuation possible. Predictably, the police called in to corner the apes on the Golden Gate Bridge are foolhardy, and their weapons technology is easily outmatched by the physical strength of their adversaries, and their cunning. (As well as by a convenient cumulus of Bay Area mist, and a little unconvincing writing: Since when are gorillas bullet-proof?) There are, however, two instances which, if they’d been sustained, might’ve made for a really stylish blockbuster: 1.) A shot of newspaper boys and joggers looking up at the palm-tree canopy when leaves start to fall unseasonably, and see the apes advancing; 2.) The sound of the apes trampling their way to Rodman’s slick corporate laboratory. The latter, a very simple special effect, might have been used to better advantage as a leitmotif for the apes’ rising action.

The plot has its own built-in simple special effect: its by-now familiar apocalyptic chic is compounded with a horrifying reversal of fortunes. If the only edge we humans have is our technical ingenuity—whether in the form of imagination or opposable thumbs—and we lose that to those species closer to nature who, by implication, we’ve mistreated, well—basically we’re screwed. There’s something primally unnerving about seeing a police cruiser wiped out by some refugees from the zoo—thwarting our so-called superiority with the very primitive bars we’ve caged them with. (It may be PETA propaganda, but they may have a point….) At the same time, however, this doomsday scenario puts us at a safe distance; to put it in the demotic: We’ve got 99 problems, but a baboon ain’t one. The prospect of nuclear war was the subtext back in ’68—it’s by no means incidental that Rod Serling, who’d already strolled through that territory many times before on The Twilight Zone, was one of that film’s writers. Nowadays, with our hopped up end-times expectations distended to the point of abstraction, it seems perverse that at our entertainments (not just our art and literature) we can sit back, relax, and take comfort in a mercifully quick bloodbath that leads to our everlasting oblivion. (If I had a crack team of researchers at my disposal—or at least a Netflix account—I’d love to see how much more often the world has ended in the past five-to-10 years of filmmaking than it did in the five-to-10 years prior.) I may be taking liberties with this movie’s climax, which makes it about as much a prequel to Contagion as it is to Planet of the Apes. But, even without subscribing whole-heartedly to the inevitability of man’s impending demise, I’m unsettled by the notion that we’ve become like terminal cancer patients envying gunshot-wound victims for the suddenness of their destruction.

Was it Charles Schulz who said that happiness is a fuzzy sweater? In the opening scene of Our Idiot Brother, set at a farmer’s market either in the thick of autumn or the clammy armpit of spring, Ned (Paul Rudd) wears a woolly Huxtable hand-me-down like his second skin—third, if you count the tie-dyed shirt straying from beneath it. Elsewhere, he comes equipped with candy-striped wife-beater and plastic neon sunglasses. (Most adults who put on such raiments are too old to rock the look, but this slob passed the cut-off decades ago.) Rudd, in his normal, clean-shaven state, looks like a narcoleptic Ferris Bueller; but with Ned’s Christlike beard accreting on his chin like a bird’s nest on a branch, the actor slumps even further into dreamland. A late-model Holy Fool, Ned takes the man-child to its allegorical extreme; and his sisters and ex and siblings-in-law are refinements of distinct and psychologically precise N.Y.C. types. This is a Europeanized comedy: delicately urbane yet almost abstract.

Dramatically, the movie is shaped like a farce, though Ned commutes between sisters’ couches rather than lovers’ boudoirs. At that farmer’s market, the hippie is goaded into selling weed to a uniformed cop who cruelly preys on Ned’s sympathetic nature. After his release from a four-month stint in prison, he’s given the boot by a crunchy girlfriend who acts like her war-widow’s forbearance has been pushed to inhuman limits. Kathryn Hahn is as physically and vocally right in this self-imposed bumpkin’s dreds as a strung-out louse, and it’s easy to ascertain how such a ball-buster could’ve snookered a sap like Ned: She spins her self-interest as self-sacrifice. For his part, Ned’s as mendacious as George Washington, and assumes as much from everyone else; but he isn’t fluent in subtext, the official language of New York neurosis. So each sister puts him up and then—her hypocrisies exposed and exploded—kicks him out, only to see the error of her ways. This device could get preachy or sentimental; and this raw material could be rearranged into something like Chance Gardener Goes to Portlandia. Fortunately, the writers (David Schisgall and Evgenia Peretz) and director (Jesse Peretz) don’t push too hard from either side.

For some people, the expectancy integral to this mode of storytelling may feel more like predictability; the subplots are somewhat too self-contained, curbing the potential for a bigger, more brazen meltdown; and when Ned ends up behind bars a second time, his self-pity seems incongruous with the loafer we’ve come to love. But Our Idiot Brother has got its milieu down pat. This is the newly gentrified New York, above the city scrum, where the art-inclined natives are terribly open and yet can never really say what’s on their mind. This cesspool of urges jonesing to break the surface is a counterpoint to iddy Ned the way that laid-back Los Angeles was contrapuntal in Greenberg—although Greenberg erred in saying that he was in the only place where adults dressed like children, as evinced by Ned and his sister’s (Zooey Deschanel, all wide eyes and jangling nerves) girlfriend (Rashida Jones). She’s a lawyer who—despite being one of the most mature characters in the picture—wears nerdcore glasses in an ensemble that’s stuffed many an adolescent boy in a locker. (Jones’s gamy grin when she proposes to kidnap Ned’s mutt is a movie highlight: spot-on Brooklyn puckishness.) Another sister, Emily Mortimer, and her hubby, Steve Coogan, play sententious members of the parenting-blog bourgeois. He’s a phony; she isn’t. When she asks him if he’s cheating on her with his documentary’s subject—which he is—he hops out of bed, puts on his shoes, and says, with insolent pomposity, that he doesn’t want to get angry in front of their child. He’s a male Hahn.

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Pauline Kael wrote that the film version of To Kill a Mockingbird, produced in 1962 and set in Alabama during the 1930s, was in “part Hollywood self-congratulation for its enlightened racial attitudes.” And now we have The Help, based on a 2009 best-seller set in Jackson, Miss., circa 1962, “honoring white viewers for not being horrible racists.” Times may change, but the way people want to feel about themselves doesn’t; and there must be a name for the fallacy which makes people believe that, if they’d been around way back when, they’d certainly have been progressives. People often take one of their most important tools—hindsight—for granted, so it’s easy to mistake our forebears for buffoons, because they hadn’t the benefit of our education, and lived at a time when things that are now considered grotesque were accepted social norms. The movie is about the mistreatment of black maids at the hands of white housewives, and I do not mean to suggest that I am defending the reactionary attitudes of the latter. (One of the wives proposes, as her signature cause, a law enforcing that maids relieve themselves outside, rather than sully the indoor bathrooms. “Separate but equal,” the partisan parrots.) But my point is that nobody now—on the record, at least—approves of such positions, and so the people who once held them can be made to seem like random aberrations when they were, in fact, often swimming the mainstream. Just like the movie is.

Taken on its own—as a dog-days entertainment, co-produced by Chris Columbus, meant to cool off audience apprehensions like a paper fan—The Help is okay. The graceful Viola Davis and sprightly Octavia Spencer have been justly praised; eager Emma Stone, as the privileged, frizzy-haired Skeeter—an Ole Miss grad who wants to kickstart her journalistic career by chronicling the maids’ discontents anonymously, in a book—looks too much like someone who could be in line behind you at Starbucks in 2011; Allison Janney, as her ailing Southern-belle mother, is made up in one scene to look like Jackie-O gone Wacko Jacko; Jessica Chastain is good comic relief; Bryce Dallas Howard—playing Hilly, the outhouse proponent—is basically made into one of the Heathers; and so on. The color is chipper-chipper and the story (adapted by the director, Tate Taylor) resorts to such melodramatic devices as bawling babies and delayed climaxes. (The revelation about Skeeter’s mammy—Cicely Tyson—struck me as particularly unconvincing and overwrought.) There’s a poop joke out of Bridesmaids thrown into the mix, and it’s meant to be taken as a symbol of liberation. And, no, not liberation from bowels—sorry, couldn’t resist.

In sum, The Help is feel-good popular entertainment that plays by the Hollywood rules; and, given what it is, I cannot fault it for that. It isn’t, in itself, offensive: It’s neither opportunistic about race relations, like Precious, nor as illuminating on the subject as Night Catches Us or Talk to Me. Regarding its worth, most critics have already covered the bases, ranging from the dubious convention that black history must be seen through a white lens to the worthy point that the film, when it deals with the maids’ testimony, does honorably offer up a perspective that we rarely have the pleasure of hearing. But the movie reminded me of something Christopher Hitchens once said about how it’s now conventional thinking to see the Civil Rights movement as a noble moment in U.S. history, but how conventionalism “may mask for people how noble it really was.” That is to say, we all celebrate Martin Luther King, Jr.’s, birthday—but do we really understand what exactly he was up against and why? The Help doesn’t, and probably doesn’t want to. If it did, we might have come out with more understanding of how the system put maids at its mercy or why it was important to their conventional-minded employers that it stay that way. (The “banality of evil” may be a cliché, but it’s one of very few that Hollywood rarely dares to touch.) Whether the effect is direct or not, simplified histories like this one pollute the well of memory, and allow neo-Birchites like Glenn Beck to pontificate with King’s words—even if a person like Beck probably would’ve been no more King’s ally than Hilly.

If you can accept the pretense that Steve Carell would be married to Julianne Moore; that law-student Emma Stone is pre-engaged to Josh Groban (pretty awesome casting, actually); that Moore would cheat on Carell with Kevin Bacon; that that dissolves their marriage; that said marriage would produce a mind-numbingly precocious son, that species of old-soul soccer player native only to Hollywood; that the militantly square suburban-dad tatterdemalion would sip vodka-cranberries at the same swanky club as Ryan Gosling, a lothario so fresh-to-death that a mortician couldn’t improve on his corpse; that Gosling, who probably studied under the Most Interesting Man in the World from those beer commercials, would take it upon himself to mentor the soon-to-be-suede-clad Carell in the ways of the metrosexual, which I pegged as a dying breed; that the 13-year-old son would stage a public reading of The Scarlet Letter to capture his 17-year-old babysitter’s heart; that Carell would randomly hook up with Marisa Tomei, who’s quite funny as said son’s recovering-alcoholic teacher; that, after his first attempt at conjugal reconquista fails, rain starts to fall and Carell says “this is such a cliché”; that Stone is apparently the one girl “substantial” enough to rebuff Gosling and thus turns out to be his Soul Mate; that Gosling solicits Carell’s help to kindle a Meaningful Relationship; that, with no apparent occupation other than picking up chicks by the skewer, Gosling isn’t a serial killer or the record-holder for most S.T.D.’s per capita; and that—God, I won’t even stoop to recapping the way the filmmakers tie the subplots together—then you’ll probably accept the proposition that Crazy, Stupid, Love is a well-made rom-com, and that it’s so refreshing to see a movie for grown-ups amid a summerful of kiddie crap—just like, as a matter of fact, The Kids Are All Right was at this time last summer.

If you can’t accept that run-on pretense, then you’ll probably find the movie contemptible. Or maybe you’ll find it, like I did, to be a high-end sitcom that looks like a vodka ad and sounds like what your Carellian dad approves of as current and hip. It’s Captain America for the sonnet set, sure; but as harmless as a sunny day spent poolside.