For the week of October 22nd, Sony Home Entertainment is releasing Before Midnight on Blu-ray. The third of director Richard Linklater's Before... pictures, this acclaimed drama relates the continuing romantic journey of Jesse and Céline (Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy). Spoilers to follow: in 1995's Before Sunrise, the two forged an intense emotional bond after meeting by chance in Vienna; though they parted ways after just one day, their connection lingered, and nine years later (Linklater's 2004 feature Before Sunset), Jesse and Celine reunited in Paris, both slightly older...but not necessarily wiser. Before Midnight checks back in with them after another nine-year period, and the beauty of this latest installment is how Linklater, Hawke, and Delpy (all of whom wrote the picture's witty, digressive script) honor the spirit of the characters they created in 1995 while pushing the series in a stark and more uncompromising new direction. Jesse and Céline are still very much in love and have made a life with one other, but they're also over forty, and with age comes regrets that weigh heavily on their union. If Before Sunrise and Before Sunset functioned as frothy - if intellectually dense - romantic comedies, Before Midnight rings with the ghosts of Edward Albee and Harold Pinter as Jesse and Celine's vacation in Greece slowly devolves into a lacerating study of the challenges that can cripple a relationship. Linklater and his stars don't hit a false note. This is truthful, bracing filmmaking with an anthropological edge: the minute, detailed focus on age and the shifting quality of human affections in these three Before... movies merits comparison with François Truffaut's Adventures of Antoine Doinel and Michael Apted's Up series. Even if you aren't familiar with the first two features, Before Midnight is one of the year's best films.
Martin Liebman praised the film, highlighting that "There's something almost surreal about the way Before Midnight so effortlessly brings the Jesse-Céline relationship to life. While it's all predicated on the previous two films, the characters come across as so well established and authentic that the details of their past life emerge as this story takes shape, not just on the surface, which they do, but underneath, in the characters' tone, the way they look at one another, through their word selection, through all variety if mannerisms that reveal the history, present, and future direction of the relationship. Hawke and Delpy don't perform the characters. Rather, they inhabit them, transform them not so much into extraordinary characters but certainly extraordinarily realized characters. The film is comprised, primarily, of several lengthy dialogue stretches, the first in a car, the second around the table with a few friends, the third in a hotel room. There are some shorter connective scenes in between, but these three construct the bulk of the material. Rarely does a film capture such real life, such connective authenticity as this; those three segments are remarkable in how genuine they feel, how natural the dialogue flows, how finely tuned the performances seem. Before Midnight might be the most realistically believable movie in some time. It's an experience quite unlike most others to be sure."
Equally as good - in its own way - is Warner and New Line's supernatural thriller The Conjuring. In terms of subject matter, The Conjuring doesn't reinvent the wheel: if you're familiar with the Discovery Channel series A Haunting, you'll have a pretty good sense of how The Conjuring will play out. A struggling family (Ron Livingston, Lili Taylor, Shanley Caswell, Joey King, Hayley McFarland, Kyla Deaver, and Mackenzie Foy) moves into a haunted house; they find themselves pitted against an increasingly malevolent demonic force; and they turn to devout paranormal investigators Ed and Lorraine Warren (Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga) to help destroy the evil. However, why The Conjuring is so successful is that it tells this familiar story as well as anyone could tell it - Saw and Insidious director James Wan handles these clichés with genuine artistry and tact. You can count the number of jump scares in The Conjuring on one hand; Wan builds suspense slowly, using the movement and framing of his widescreen camera to unnerve viewers before anything overtly horrific has occurred. Furthermore, he lets his actors develop characters instead of just stand around and wait to die. Wilson and Farmiga are wonderful as the Warrens - tough, no-nonsense, compassionate (because of them, The Conjuring is also one of the rare movies that is respectful and accepting of religious faith without ever coming off as preachy) - and Taylor hasn't been this good since her work on Six Feet Under. By the time all hell breaks loose, the shocks register like seismic blasts because they disrupt the human drama at play. That last bit is the element most horror movies neglect, and it's the reason The Conjuring deserves a place alongside The Haunting or The Exorcist or The Innocents.
Kenneth Brown reflected on how "Wan doesn't simply set The Conjuring in 1971, he draws heavily upon the style, technique, and production design of early '70s cinema. The illusion of Wan's meticulously conceived period piece doesn't call attention to itself but rather evokes films of the era to immersive, if not absorbing ends. Shadows spread like fire. A hush settles over the Perrons' farmhouse. Visions of sinister forces bleed into reality. The unseen is celebrated while cheap tricks and tiresome gore are admonished. Simplicity reigns, and what a spine-chilling simplicity it is. It's much too easy to get lost in the stillness and ambience of it all, making the scares that much more startling and disturbing imagery that much more jarring. With little more than a white bed sheet and a dusty wooden chair, Wan stages one of the most unnerving and unforgettable possessions in horror movie history; a scene that could have drawn laughs if it weren't for the inch-by-inch suspense and impeccable pacing the director uses for the first hour and a half of the film to make the Perrons' terror so convincing and palpable. "
Following the success of his neo-noir Drive, director Nicolas Winding Refn could have pushed his idiosyncratic style to fit more commercial projects (a rumor had him linked to Warner Bros' long-gestating Wonder Woman project), but instead he made Only God Forgives, a gruesome, bizarre revenge drama set in Bangkok's criminal underworld. Like Drive, Only God Forgives casts Ryan Gosling as Refn's leading man, but there's nothing remotely seductive or attractive about the once-and-future Notebook star this time around; as a near-mute (I would be amazed if Gosling's character uttered more than 100 words of dialogue), possibly deranged, and sexually impotent fight promoter, Gosling finds himself tasked to avenge the death of his psychotic brother (Tom Burke) at the hands of a brutal Thai police officer (the magnetic Vithaya Pansringarm), but instead he...well, to paraphrase Jeremy Davies in Solaris, I could tell you what happens in Only God Forgives, but I don't know if that would actually tell you what happens. Refn dispenses with conventional plotting and character motivations in favor of a hot-house, visceral surrealism that would impress David Lynch and Alejandro Jodorowsky (it's no surprise, then, that Refn dedicates his film to the El Topo auteur). Gosling's character is more indecisive than Hamlet, and he spends his time fantasizing about being mutilated in awful ways. His foul-mouthed mother (Kristen Scott Thomas, shedding any residual glamour and refinement she had left over from The English Patient) uses her son's sexual dysfunctions to manipulate his actions. And Pansringarm's calm killer might actually be a deity. So it goes. To say that Only God Forgives isn't for everyone is an incredible understatement, but for those who can lock into its inscrutable madness - it's actually much more in line with Refn's avant-garde works like Bronson and Valhalla Rising, so if you liked those, you should appreciate this one - it provides an undeniably unique moviegoing experience.
When Martin Liebman wrestled withOnly God Forgives, he first felt that "the film would appear to falter because, unlike Drive, it feels a little too far to the extreme, lacking substance, character growth, and plot details. The narrative, as well as it's shaped by the focus on superficial elements, never feels thoroughly defined upon initial viewing. There are certainly hints and even larger, broader character narratives at play - Julian's choices and his relationships with the women in his life are particularly interesting, as is the cop who dishes his own brand of justice and violence and revenge through the film - but they're not so thoroughly explored as they might should be. Then again, this is unquestionably a film that demands multiple viewings, to see it several times with the secrets exposed, the end known, and the context more open from the beginning. There's simply too much good here for what amounts, on a first viewing, to a satisfying structure but lacking narrative. What does the film say through those reflexive character shots? What does the brutality say beyond the superficial? How do the karaoke scenes better define the movie? Only God Forgives certainly isn't a film to fully judge after a single viewing. Fortunately, it's good enough to watch several times even if only for its outward stylings, but there's much more depth here that will slowly reveal over time."
With Fox Searchlight's The Way Way Back, we switch gears from violent mayhem to a more gentle coming-of-age dramedy. In their directorial debut, Academy Award-winning screenwriters Nat Faxon and Jim Rash (The Descendants) use the comings and goings around a summer water-park as the backdrop for the battle of wills between lonely fourteen-year-old Duncan (Liam James) and his mother's obnoxious boyfriend Trent (Steve Carell, impressively unsympathetic). In its broad strokes, The Way Way Back is not unlike Greg Mottola's Adventureland, but Faxon and Rash give it a nice pulse of its own; The Way Way Back may be less hard edged, but it still understands how terrible adolescence can be, and James' understated, downtrodden performance as Duncan reflects that pain without reaching for effects. It's an effectively unshowy turn, and it balances out the more effusive work from the adult cast, which includes Toni Collette, Allison Janney, Maya Rudolph, and Sam Rockwell, who - as he is oft to do - handily steals the movie from his equally accomplished co-stars as the park's sardonic manager and Duncan's unlikely mentor.
Jeffrey Kauffman noted that "The Way Way Back may in fact be too uneventful for some viewers, but its leisurely pace and slowly developing interrelationships are beautifully handled and end up giving the film a really unexpected emotional resonance. Coming of age films frequently wallow in a kind of lachrymose bathos where small events are blown out of proportion and epochal ones are dealt with trivially. It's to co-writers and co-directors Nat Faxon and Jim Rash's credit that the tone of The Way Way Back is so spot on every step of the way. Many audience members will want to be joining Duncan (and his 'guest' - which you'll understand when you see the film) in that sanctuary at the back of the car by the time this small scale but hugely enjoyable film comes to a close."
Finally, we end the week with two selections from the Criterion Collection, The Uninvited and the John Cassavetes: Five Films boxset. Like The Conjuring, The Uninvited is a ghost story about how the sins of the past can rise up and hurt the present; in the film, musician Rick Fitzgerald (Ray Milland) and his sister Pamela (Ruth Hussey) move to an isolated house on the British shore, but their attempts to ingratiate themselves into the surrounding community - as well as Rick's budding romance with a troubled young woman (Gail Russell) - encounter resistance in the form of a destructive spirit. Director Lewis Allen, who also helmed the underrated Frank Sinatra thriller Suddenly, pitches The Uninvited right between horror film and melodrama: it's an interesting mix, as the soapier elements of Rick's love for Russell and his discoveries about the house's history turn into strange apparitions and and ghostly interactions whenever it gets dark. Allen helped set the template for the modern ghost story with this one, and it's easy to see why filmmakers like Martin Scorsese and Guillermo Del Toro have listed The Uninvited as one of their favorites. Del Toro, in particular, owes many of his obsessions to The Uninvited - The Uninvited deals in that part of the supernatural which lingers because of great sadness and pain, and Del Toro's fantastic characters in Pan's Labyrinth or The Devil's Backbone follow that same pattern.
With the John Cassavetes package, Criterion provides a survey of a true pioneer in the field of American independent cinema. Though he had found success as an actor in a number of commercial projects (Rosemary's Baby, The Dirty Dozen), John Cassavetes never contented himself with simple fame and fortune; as a filmmaker, he used the capital that acting gave him in order to further a series of gritty, intimate pictures that dealt with life on the raw, with subjects and emotions that Hollywood often found taboo. His Shadows, for instance, made race its sole concern: the picture looks dated today, but in 1959 it must have struck viewers as an all-too-current look at everyday realities and racial tensions. Nine years later, Cassavetes released Faces, which is still a remarkably even-handed and sober take on how familiarity and comfort can be just as damaging to a relationship as deception or infidelity. In his masterpiece, A Woman Under the Influence, Cassavetes dared to transform the agonies and imperfections of the middle-class American family into great tragedy, and his underrated The Killing of a Chinese Bookie offered the same weight to the struggles of Ben Gazzara's proud, deluded strip-club owner. The set's final feature, Opening Night, is both a showcase for Cassavetes' wife/leading lady Gena Rowlands and a prescient criticism of celebrity, and all the fears that arrive when aging tarnishes success. Cassavetes' films are difficult and often painful to watch, but they are also uncompromising, and they get at the divine madness behind being alive.
What Svet Atanasov says about A Woman Under the Influence could apply to all of Cassavetes' features: "The atmosphere is too tense, the pain and suffering too real not to be moved by them...This is the type of chaos that human suffering creates...There is zero sentimentality in the film. The reason why is because A Woman Under the Influence is a not a study of marriage and relationships, it is a slice of American reality. That's all. The chronology of Nick and Mabel's relationship isn't important; the beginning and the end are absolutely irrelevant. What matters is how they react to the events that affect their lives now, while the camera 'sees' them. When the camera stops filming it is not because their story has come to a conclusive end, it is because Cassavetes has simply captured the essence and rhythm of their lives."