Larry Crowne

Written at the time of the film's release...although...I still remember parts of it that delighted me, despite my half-hearted review at the time.

T. Hanks for the Mediocrity
or
My Big Fat Career Mistake

I'm sure the intentions were better (aren't they always?), possibly saying something about the displacement of late baby-boomers in the job market, and how "it's never too late to learn" belying the "old dogs/new tricks" canard. Maybe co-writer/director/acting lead Tom Hanks just wanted to make something hopeful and sunny in bad economic times...a flare in the night-sky...the proverbial single candle rather than curse the darkness.

Well, it's more like a candle in the wind, and this blows. Formulaic, with an implied "wah-wah" comedy goose at the end of every scene, Larry Crowne has a "made-for-TV" movie feel that gets under your skin like intravenous sand-paper.  Larry (Hanks) is in his early fifties, divorced, a twenty-year Navy vet working at a box-store, where he's received "Employee of the Month" fetes nine times.  He's one of those guys who owns everything he does, taking a certain pride in all aspects of his job, even picking up and disposing the stray trash he finds in the parking lot. The implication is already there: while the rest of the world goes on its self-absorbed way, Larry "cares." And that can't come to any good.

Called in for what he thinks is his tenth EOTM award, he is fired instead; corporate has crunched the numbers and sees him, as never having gone to college, as not being "advancement" material—he's already been passed over for promotions by duller, but degreed, employees. Adrift, Larry finds no work, and so goes to community college in his '50's, with similar outcasts (though dissimilar aspects) most younger, but without the team-player skills that Larry has acquired.

Teaching one of those classes—Speech 217—is Mercedes Tainot (Julia Roberts), bored, tired, unmotivated, with a dead-beat author-husband (the wonderful Bryan Cranston), who, like Larry at the beginning of the film, doesn't know she's in the process of transitioning, so cynical is her world-view. Her students are an odd collection of rabbits, that she's just trying to keep awake and inspire the one thing she can't seem to muster up—giving a rip. And Crowne is the oddest rabbit in the bunch. She glowers, as she sees him slowly change under the influence of younger students—particularly women, and particularly one student who has it in mind to completely "make-over" Larry to his puzzlement and the vexation of her boyfriend.

This area of the movie has more than its share of "wah-wah" moments, and as much fun as Roberts' slow-burn is (and she's great at it), they have the feel of sit-com situations that might be fun for the matinee crowd. It's there that the writing hand of Nia Vardalos, she of My Big Fat Greek Wedding, is the most evident. Hanks and his wife, Rita Wilson (who is also in this with a small, rather frightening part) were the ones who took Vardalos' one-woman show and shepherded the development of it into a Big Fat Success. The demographic for Larry Crowne skews a little bit to the same age, with the same toothless observational satire that never offends, even when it tries to be a little "naughty."  It's all for naught.

And yet. And yet...

Hanks and one of his co-studen...

WAIT A MINUTE! That's Rami Malik!

I had the opportunity once to tell a clerk who thought she was "too forward" approaching me in a store aisle: "Take it from an 'old guy:' never regret being delightful." That lesson applies here. Twenty-four hours after "grumping" my way through Larry Crowne, the saccharine had dissolved in my mind and the "good stuff" remained...Larry's unexpected, all-inclusive, concise and perfect final project in class that nicely ties a bow around the movie, a cast of great people getting to be charming (Cedric the Entertainer, Taraji P. Henson—she's a favorite of mine—Wilmer Valderrama—!!, George Takei—!!!, a little spitfire named Gugu Mbatha-Raw—late of "Dr. Who," MI-5, and "Undercovers"—that you just want to hug, and...almost too good to be true...the always-welcome, never-failing Pam Grier). The thing is...for as saccharine as the movie feels going down, it leaves a pretty good after-taste. One forgets just how much one might have suffered through it, and how unsufferable it can be, and is left remembering the good parts. Meaning that Larry Crowne is a similar experience to childbirth.

Not a ringing endorsement...but it could be worse. But, 12 years later, I still remember how good that final class project was. One may gripe. One may be cynical. But, delightful lasts.

Motherless Brooklyn

The Big "If"
or
Do You Have the First Inkling of How Power Works?

Listen. This won't do any good. You'll never understand me, but I'll try once and then give it up. When a man's partner is killed, he's supposed to do something. It makes no difference what you thought of him. He was your partner, and you're supposed to do something about it...and it happens we're in the detective business. Well, when one of your organization gets killed, it's...it's bad business to let the killer get away with it...bad all around, bad for every detective everywhere. 

Sam Spade, The Maltese Falcon

"Leave it alone or you'll make a mess." Gil Coney (Ethan Suplee) keeps telling his twitchy partner Lionel Essrog (Edward Norton) while they're waiting for a stake-out. They're providing back-up for the Chief Investigator for their detective agency, Frank Minna (Bruce Willis), and Lionel is starting to lose it. He keeps picking at his sweater and if he keeps doing it, it's going to unravel. He knows he shouldn't, he knows what will happen, and it's not that Lionel is dumb (which everybody thinks), it's just that he has Tourette's and unless he has a drink, or chews gum, or smokes dope, or has his mother rub his neck, he's kinda at the mercy of it. He's just a massive tic. And when he's waiting for something to go down, he's a mess. A blurting, shaking, quaking mess. Admittedly.

But, Minna trusts him. All the crew went through the war together, and it's Lionel that Minna trusts most. Because, yeah, he has Tourette's, but he's also a bit of a savant with a photographic memory. Lionel's good with details and when Minna goes over last minute instructions, he leaves with "Lionel's got it. Follow his lead." Of course, Lionel's got it; he's got it chapter and verse, and he'll be instrumental enough to listen in on the meeting, of which he knows nothing because Minna hasn't told anybody, but he will know everything by the end of it—he just won't understand why.

This being 1950's New York, Minna gives Lionel a phone booth to wait in and, once the older man's in place he calls Lionel and hides the phone in a drawer, so that Essrog can monitor the conversation in the room, and if Minna thinks something's going south, he'll make an innocuous "safe" remark for Lionel to hear in order to know where to take the next step—fight or flight.

It turns out to be a bit of both. Minna is taken by a couple of goons to another borough across one of New York's bridges—the goons in the car flash a badge and don't have to pay a toll—while Coney and Essrog struggle to keep them in sight. They catch up just in time to see the sight of Minna running to escape from his captors, but he can't outrun a bullet and he gets gunned down in an alleyway. It's a fast trip to an emergency room where Minna can only gasp out words with his last breath—"Brooklyn, she's in trouble now..."—before Essrog is escorted out...STAT.

Minna doesn't make it. And it shakes his detective agency to its core. There is a some business to take care of—tell the wife, re-arrange the org chart (if they had org charts)—but Essrog feels like they have to find out who killed Frank and to find that out, he wants to find out what he was working on. The others in the agency are all for it to a certain degree, but there's no money to be made finding out Frank's killing, so it's put on the back-burner, which means Essrog can handle it. All the other guys see Lionel as a handicap, but it was Minna who saw him as an asset.

And besides, Lionel has his hat now.

Edward Norton has wanted to make Motherless Brooklyn for a couple decades. Sure, he did. It's got a "tic-y" part, one of those ones that he excels at, even if he'd rather do something with less obvious "character." But, it's one of those detective stories that starts with a little thing, but mushrooms into the world of noir—even if so much of it is photographed in the clearest of New York daylight—where one realizes that the odds are stacked against because the fix is in and the fixers are too big and too powerful. You're lucky if you get out alive.

And where the evil is so big and so ever-present that you can only see it for the details and the anomalies. And Essrog is good at those. So, he picks at the threads of what Minna was doing, back-tracking and going forward which takes him from the highs and lows of New York, from gleaming City Hall Park to decaying Harlem and the strings that tie them together while tearing the city apart. "Leave it alone or you'll make a mess." But, Essrog can't leave it alone. He's wearing Minna's hat and his coat, and walking backwards in his footsteps, and slowly, but less than surely, he will be making them his own.

The original novel (by Jonathan Lethem) is set in contemporary times, but Norton, sets his screenplay in the 1950's and it's a good fit, taking advantage of the echoes in the detective movie boom, shadowed as it is with the era of film noir, the mainstream popularity of jazz as its soundtrack, amidst a back-drop of the post-war boom in building, an up-sweep in the economy, with the resulting gentrification and the fall-out of segregation inherent in it all. But, it's also in that valley between the increased presence of minorities in the war effort and the Civil Rights movement of the 1960's, where any progress their service might have engendered never materialized amid the same Jim Crow laws and racial covenants placed in the suddenly mushrooming suburbs.   

The time-shift fits the material like an old battered trench-coat and manages to keep it relevant even though relocating it to the past. It also manages to nestle comfortably in the distracted Eisenhower era, where social engineering could be accomplished over long periods of time in the name of progress where little attention would be payed to the changes, lest activists toss their wrenches into the gears.

If the movie reminds me of anything, it's the movie Chinatown, where the machinations of the powerful to manipulate society into protecting their plutocracy happens in broad daylight among the disenfranchised and the under-represented, and where subtle changes to infrastructure uproot lives and undermine neighborhoods and whole communities, turning urban planning into urban "plotting," designed to line pockets while society unravels. And that makes a mess—if not now then certainly for the future.

"The Future, Mr. "Gitts", the future!" Those are the words of Chinatown's Noah Cross (John Huston) when asked by Jake Gittes (Jack Nicholson) why it is that he does what he does, he being so rich and all. At least, he was thinking about the future. Motherless Brooklyn has its "big bad" just like Chinatown had its Noah Cross. It's in the character of a similarly biblically-named Moses Randolph (Alec Baldwin in a part that wasn't in the book, but is based on New York developer Robert Moses). Randolph is more of a short-time thinker, having a vision of his goal but myopic about the ultimate ramifications when it comes to human beings. His eye is on the ledger, the fiscal year, and the next election cycle and what can be done to cook the books. Where Cross wants a kind of immortality from his works, Randolph wants the power to do as he pleases in some Randian plutocracy, where he sees himself as the engine, rather than by the funds provided by people who actually fund it. They pay taxes. They have no power. And so, they can be dismissed. They don't matter. 

In fact, they're pests. "They're invisible. They don't exist." Not Government of the people by the people for the people. Government despite the people. And often, to spite the people.

"Do you have the first inkling of how power works? It means you can do anything." 

My, how that line resonates these days. It should resonate all the time, but people have short memories and the powerful depend on that to survive in a perpetual shell-game, playing the public like a cat-owner with a laser-pointer. And we chase the light, never suspecting we're being manipulated from on high, given new concerns, new enemies, new priorities that are turned on and off—like a laser pointer—when it suits the powerful.

If you think Randolph is a Trump stand-in (it's Alec Baldwin, right? "Duh!"), one should consider that his character builds bridges, not walls. But bridges are just as effective.

Motherless Brooklyn is a great meal of a movie, one of the kind that come out of left-field and is just so good that you wish it wouldn't end. I haven't mentioned 3/4 of the plot because it's one of those things you don't want to spoil, and that neglects great work by Willem Dafoe, Gugu Mbatha-Rawe, and Cherry Jones (as well as stellar production design by Beth Mickle and art direction by Michael Ahern). It's nearly perfect, with its only sin being it might be a bit "on the nose" when it reaches its resolution. But, it still manages to surprise, and gives Norton another one of those flashy performances he can sink his considerable acting chops into. That is has more than that with sub-texts both in the script and the imagery shows that he's come a long way as a director since his last film, 2000's Keeping the Faith.

Hope he doesn't wait so long to make another one.

A Wrinkle in Time (2018)

Our Father, Who Art in Hyperspace
or
Wrapping it Up in the Third Tesseract

Gosh, I think it's been a half-century since I read Madeleine L'Engle's "A Wrinkle in Time," which won the Newberry Prize (and that was the reason I read it). The particulars of the book have long passed on, but I remember how well she captured childhood angst and alienation—for an adult, she knew a lot about the trials of being a kid—and the introduction to the mind-blowing concept of a tesseract (which she described simply as a fourth dimensional space—if a square is two dimensions, a cube is its progression in three, then a tesseract is the fourth configuration). When I read it, it made absolute sense that, given a fourth dimension, a tesseract would be the way to cross space to other places, other dimensions. It was a matter of not-simple geometry and will. L'Engle made you believe...because if she knew what made you tick, she probably had a good handle on the Universe, as well.

Well, it's been 65 years since the book was published (after being rejected by all the major publishers), has never NOT been in print (owing to its popularity) and, in that time, we've seen space-time, warp-speed (Star Trek), "folding space" (Dune), "hyper-space" (Star Wars) and the ever-handy "wormhole" feature as short-cuts in space.

Disney's second attempt at making an adaptation of A Wrinkle in Time (after a 2003 Canadian adaptation that, when L'Engle was asked if it lived up to her expectations, famously said "I expected it to be a disaster and it didn't disappoint me.") has less of an "Afterschool Special" vibe and certainly creates a bigger canvas (when representing the Universe, after all). The cast of kids is great—with an especially high fist-pump for Deric McCabe of making the toughest character work as both Purpose and Antagonist, rather than "that annoying kid" who just complicates things—and lead Storm Reid as the hero on the hero's journey.

Meg Murry (Reid) is miserable. School is boring and unbearable. She's the oldest kid who has to "grow up a little early" because Dad's gone in the family dynamic. That "Dad" (Chris Pine) is a theoretical physicist who has been absent for four years—and nobody has any explanation why—is a big heart-shaped keyhole in Meg's psyche. All of her issues seem to stem from that empty space—her relation to her Mother (Gugu Mbatha-Raw), her reception at school (where his disappearance is a source of "Mean Girl" torture) and, basically, everything.

But, all that changes with the appearance of Mrs. Whatsit (Reese Witherspoon), a being whom her little brother Charles Wallace (McCabe) has befriended and she mentions a way of traversing time and dimensions called utilizing a tesseract, which Whatsit hints is behind what the elder Murry was studying and might well have created the situation of his disappearance. She is an astro-traveller, who, with Mrs. Who (Mindy Kaling), and Mrs. Which (Oprah Winfrey) help, Meg, Charles Wallace, and a tag-along sympathizer, Calvin (Levi Miller) on a quest to go and rescue Dad, and make the Universe and, thus, life better.

That's such a galaxy crunching scenario that it squeezes the story to white-dwarf proportions, but that is essentially that. It's Wizard of Oz, with cosmology replacing dream-states brought on by trauma, and Ava DuVernay's film of it basically takes the Oz scenario and expands on the "feel-good" aspects without dealing too much with the mechanics of how we got here in the first place. One gets the impression that everything is done by "wishing it were so" which is not exactly what L'Engle was going for (see, kids, don't get too carried away with your work wasn't exactly a theme of hers, but it seems essential to The Disney Version). The kids use Dad's work to essentially save him AND the work, validating it and him...and themselves in the process.

And that's what "gets" me about this Wrinkle in Time, as much as it struggles to "gee-whiz" me with color and imagination, pushing my buttons, but not engaging my mind, it fairly buries the world-expanding concepts it is supposed to celebrate. The movie makes the experience an internal one, not a possibilities-expanding one, and that's antithetical to the source-work. It's sure a spectacle, but it's one of those movies where (probably due to some studio dumbing-down, maybe?) things happen because you want them to happen with no limitations and no ground-rules, but is made glossy enough that it thinks it smears over the improbability and objections and resulting emptiness such processes invoke when there's nothing solid behind it.

Meg explains a tesseract—but it's not in the movie

The other thing about the movie that bugs me is that the kids are very down-to-Earth and respectable—they're deserving of something mind-blowing to happen to them—but the adults are not awe-inspiring, not in any sense, but merely curiously eccentric or (in the case of Oprah's Which) too deliberately "sagey," who do magic things that make everything work out better because that's what's to be expected. There's never a sense of real peril or real stakes, and with mentors who are less inspiring and more window-dressing.

I walked out underwhelmed, but secretly glad I'd read the book so many years ago because, frankly, the movie wouldn't have inspired me to read it.

One wants a Wrinkle in Time to invoke a sense of wonder, rather wondering what went wrong.

Miss Sloane

The Trump Card
or
"My God, Were You Born This Cynical?"

"Winning isn't everything. It's the only thing."

Vince Lombardi

When I think of that quote, I want to kick Vince Lombardi through the goal-posts.

That sentiment is exactly what's wrong with the country right now—the idea that it is best to win at all costs. And it's what Miss Sloane, the too-clever-by-half film about cut-throat lobbying tactics is all about.* Jessica Chastain plays a much-in-demand, but not-exactly-respected lobbyist for a firm that has a Senator for a client who's trying to head off a new gun registration law by creating a campaign to make women "comfortable with guns." Sloane thinks that idea's a hoot, and thinks the gun-lobby just wants to hire a female lobbyist to put a woman's face to the campaign, and so much so that she refuses to work on it, which causes her boss (Sam Waterston) to get all-cranky and threaten her with her job. Good thing she gets an offer from the lobbying group on the other side, so that she can stick it to her bosses with great brio and more than a little self-righteous verve.

When we first meet her, Sloane is being deposed by her lobbying firm's lawyer. She's been accused of bribery and illegal activities by a Senate sub-committee (led by John Lithgow's on-the-take Senator) and she's learning how to "take the fifth" without over-editorializing other than the standard requirements, so she doesn't dig herself any deeper than she already is. Well, good luck with that. Right off the bat, she's all too willing to tell her mouthpiece her philosophy of life: "Lobbying is about foresight and anticipating your opponents' moves and creating counter-strategies. The winner always plays one step ahead and plays their trump card just after the opponents play theirs." 

She knows her opponents only too well—she's worked for them and probably already given them her playbook for winning at all costs. Her opponents are not the gun-lobby, it is her very industry and its tactics that she's very adept at playing. She is cut-throat, take-no-prisoners, leave-no-one-alive tough in her work, feelings and principles be damned. And if she has to roll over a few people, even colleagues, to get the better hand, she will roll over them without batting an eye or mussing a single red hair out of place.

Or losing any sleep. That's a problem. Sloane pops pills to keep her energy up during the day, but she has a hard time sleeping at night. It's not angst, it's not guilt, it's pharmacology that keeps her awake, and those little white pills keep her going at the manic level the job requires, that allows you to start rebutting before your opponent can finish their sentence. The pills, taken with a healthy dose of ego, get her through the day.

Basically, Madelyn Elizabeth Sloane just wants to win. She doesn't think she should be working for the gun-lobby; she might win, but, in the long run, she's going to lose some of the prestige she's acquired. Plus, the amendment is designed to kill background checks, which Sloane believes in. So much so, she quits after getting an offer from a rival lobbying organization run by Mark Strong. She takes most of her team with her, except one loyal assistant (Allison Pill) who doesn't want to commit career-suicide. Once at the other firm, she immediately is the bull in the china shop, abrasively undercutting the firm's previous efforts and going on a new tangent. As she escalates, so does her firm's efforts under the guidance of her old boss (Michael Stuhlbarg, with three "jerk" roles in the last two months) to counter her moves and undercut her efforts.

Some may see this as a political film (and it's certainly in the wheelhouse), but, it's not about "the gun lobby"—arguments pro and con are tossed around as so much background noise for authenticity—and it certainly will make you think it is, although it is not very successful as one. But, truth is, it's a "sting" movie, where the audience is kept in the dark, much like Sloane's opponents, until she plays her "trump card." But, why she plays it thoroughly undercuts the character and negates the rest of the film. The main issue with the movie is, even after the card is played, there is no one to root for or feel sorry for—everybody is a good-for-nothing in a system so corrupt that the novelty isn't that people are doing anything illegal, it's that they're leaving evidence to that effect.  You don't have a "dog in the fight," except feeling that the movie is one.

It's good to see Chastain playing such a role. She's made her initial mark by playing sensitive and supportive Moms in some very good things and competent functionaries. But, it's great to see her in full Bette Davis-dither as she plays here, and as she did in 2014's A Most Violent Year. There's an "alienness" to Chastain that allows her to pull off things like this and Zero Dark Thirty, where you can believe that she's effective all the while being the "800 pound gorilla" in the room. She towers over everybody in the film, and it's a cast that doesn't have any slouches. 

But, even though the character is the driving force of the film's through-line, it isn't enough to pull off this rather weak exercise in hand-wringing. Trouble is, this type of film is better done as black-comedy—although I've yet to see an example that does it successfully other than In the Loop. You have to match the tone, by being as cold-blooded as the operatives, rather than have it over-boil with indignation. 

Perhaps the incoming presidential term will inspire something along those lines.

* No, it's not "about gun-control", as has been purported in reviews by internet writers who haven't seen it (self-proclaimed as in "I wouldn't spend any money on this lib-tard gun-control garbage"), or (evidently by what I've seen) invested in Spell-Check. It's about lobbying groups cutting ethical corners to "get their way" at all costs...for whatever reason...to the detriment of both sides. But, you have to "see" the movie in order to understand that. Unfortunately, in the "wild west" of the Internet, you don't have to know what you're talking about in order to make a comment...and, you can even brag about it to prove your passion as well as the depths of your ignorance.

Who said "Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and remove all doubt."?