One of 2013's most criminally overlooked films hits Blu-ray this week: the Coen Brothers' wonderful Inside Llewyn Davis. The film would make a great companion piece with the Coens' A Serious Man. Both films try to sketch the no-man's-land between human endurance and an indifferent universe; like A Serious Man's long-suffering physics professor Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg), folk singer Llewyn Davis (Oscar Isaac) wants nothing more than to succeed in a world that seems like it could care less about him. As Llewyn bounces from one gig to another in the Greenwich Village folk scene of the early 1960s, he faces an onslaught of injustice and failure. Much of this is unforgivingly bleak - Llewyn's failing artistic aspirations fall in line behind his minute-to-minute struggles to get out of the cold and find something to eat - which makes it all the more remarkable that, ultimately, the Coens are making a comedy. They have no nostalgia for the folk genre, the members of which come off as deluded (Justin Timberlake and Stark Sands' peppy nitwits), abrasive (Carey Mulligan's profanely aggressive singer), or both, in Llewyn's case. Better still are Llewyn's interactions with other facets of the '60s counterculture, from his continued leeching off the cluelessly "cultured" Gorfeins (Ethan Phillips and Robin Bartlett) to his mid-movie road trip with a crippled, bodily-function-obsessed jazz musician (John Goodman) and his near-mute valet (Garrett Hedlund, doing an inspired riff on both James Dean and On the Road's Dean Moriarty), and the Coens further underscore the absurdity of Llewyn's plight by paralleling his hardscrabble existence with the strangely epic journey of the Gorfeins' missing cat. Ultimately, though, the film rests on Isaac's heroically grumpy performance, who gets our sympathies without ever angling for them. He's got a cockeyed way of looking at misfortune, like he's been expecting it all along. And maybe that awareness is what leavens what might otherwise be the Coens indulging in another skillful slice of misanthropy. When Llewyn stumbles, it isn't simply because the universe is uncaring and cruel, as it is in A Serious Man or No Country for Old Men. At the end of the day, Llewyn is kind of a jerk, and he invites this misery on himself. The great thing about the movie? Llewyn knows this, too.
In his Blu-ray review, Martin Liebman called the film, "a morbidly fascinating watch on a dramatic level and a beautifully captivating watch on the artistic level. The Coen brothers' artistic vision, brought to life by Bruno Delbonnel's Oscar-nominated cinematography, reinforces the story's rather bleak human themes with a subdued palette and frequently dark, shady, or low-key visuals. The film feels both depressingly hopeless and technically gorgeous at the same time, a representation of the filmmakers' skill at finding a perfect visual harmony for a very imperfect world. The cast is equally excellent. Oscar Isaac shines in the title role, exploring the dark recesses of a hopeless life with incredible mastery of the character, his environment, his prospects, his musical talents, his ambitions, his precious few successes, and his too-numerous-to-count failures. Isaac's command of the character and understanding of the landscape - the physical landscape around him and the inner landscape that is the revolving door of tragedy in his life - is truly special, a performance that was unjustly passed over for an Oscar nomination."
From Fox Home Entertainment comes Out of the Furnace. This dark thriller is as gritty and bleak as its steel-town environs; mill worker Russell Baze (Christian Bale) is trying to make a better life for himself and his girlfriend (Zoe Saldana) in their economically depressed hometown, but a spate of bad luck and the self-destructive actions of his disturbed younger brother (Casey Affleck) force Russell to resort to extremes, particularly with regard to the manically unpredictable gangster (Woody Harrelson) taking an unhealthy interest in the Baze family. Director Scott Cooper's last film was the acclaimed drama Crazy Heart, and he pulled off a similar trick there: in Crazy Heart, Cooper gave what was, at heart, a fairly rote redemption story (one not dissimilar from Tender Mercies or Half Nelson) deeper shadings and resonance through his understated direction and his wonderful facility with actors. In Out of the Furnace's case, the film is little more than a high-toned revenge story - it's if The Deer Hunter turned into Rolling Thunder in its third act - but Cooper has such an unsparing eye for capturing the wasted beauty of his Pennsylvania landscapes that the conclusion's thriller mechanics feel elevated, almost elemental. The cast, too, does wonders lending credence to pulp. In addition to the supporting work from Forest Whitaker, Sam Shepard, and Willem Dafoe, Affleck gives one of his nerviest, most forceful performances ever as a man hoping that he can redeem himself through violence, the brutal consequences of which we're reminded of every time we see Harrelson's four-alarm psychopath - Harrelson is even more chilling here than in his iconic Natural Born Killers turn. But it's Bale's show all the way, and he is just phenomenal, as good as he was in his Academy Award-nominated American Hustle turn. The never-ending parade of mishaps and hardships dropped on Russell are so catastrophic that any other time, they might appear blackly comic (see: Inside Llewyn Davis, for example), yet Bale never lets you forget the gravity of his situation. He makes visceral the toll wrought on Russell's psyche, but he allows for a glimmer that maybe, just maybe, Russell can turn his fortunes around. It's remarkably restrained and subtle work, and it - like Out of the Furnace as a whole - deserved more attention.
Warner Home Entertainment is distributing Paramount's Hatari. Quentin Tarantino once said that one of his favorite types of movies was the "hangout film"; he was specifically referring to Howard Hawks' Western masterpiece Rio Bravo, but he could have just as easily been talking about Hatari. One of Hawks' last films, this genial adventure-comedy is a studied exercise in plotlessness. John Wayne stars as Sean Mercer, an animal trapper working for the zoos in East Africa, and…that's about it. There's some minor romantic intrigue when beautiful wildlife photographer Dallas (Elsa Martinelli) shows up and gets Mercer all flustered, and Bruce Cabot's marksman gets involved in a pretty nasty rhinoceros accident, but these moments are few and far between in this 157-minute picture. Mostly, Hawks is content to sit back and let his cast of trappers banter with one another: the biggest plot point, so to speak, involves the care and treatment of a baby elephant, which gets a lift from composer Henry Mancini's "Baby Elephant Walk" tune. In anyone else's hands, this might get very tiresome very fast, but Hawks' easy film mastery goes down smooth - it's lesser Hawks, but just like El Dorado or Rio Lobo, lesser Howard Hawks is better than a lot of first-tier efforts from other directors. It helps that Wayne and Martinelli are so charming (even if they are just playing a watered-down version of the Cary Grant-Jean Arthur courtship from Hawks' own Only Angels Have Wings), or that Hawks can rely on sly supporting work from the likes of Red Buttons, Hardy Kruger, Gerard Blain, Valentin de Vargas, and Michele Girardon. Best of all are the moments of visceral excitement when Wayne and his team get to work. Hawks always favored emphasizing steely professionalism in his movies, and Hatari makes a stunning example of this theme. Hawks presents the trapping scenes in thrilling long takes, placing his actors (or their stuntmen) in the same frame as real, live animals as they try to capture them. Forget trick shots or special effects – these moments offer up real danger, and it's no surprise that Steven Spielberg took a good look at them when planning his similarly staged dinosaur-roundup setpiece in The Lost World.
Michael Reuben wrote that "Hawks lures viewers into the film by opening with a rhino pursuit in which a member of the team is badly injured, and the shadow of that incident hangs over the movie. The Indian believes that rhinos are bad luck for them, given how Brandy's father died. By the end of the film, of course, the rhino curse will have been broken, though not without difficulty (some of which was unscripted and unanticipated, and the camera crew had the presence of mind to keep rolling). But the unifying thread of Hatari is the comically impossible, ever-deferred romance between Sean and Dallas, who, whenever they're on the verge of making contact, are always interrupted by some outlandish event. In the interim, Dallas gets thrown around the back of a jeep, terrorized by a big jungle cat (who turns out to be tame), initiated into the local Arusha tribe and drives Sean to distraction with her passion for adopting abandoned baby elephants…Hatari has two separate conclusions. The first is the successful rhino capture. The other is a wild pursuit of Dallas through the local town after she's run off distraught from an argument with Sean. Everyone is involved, including the baby elephants, and the sequence is pure screwball slapstick. It ends the way all romantic comedies do (except for the elephants)."
Finally, Criterion is streeting an HD upgrade of David Gordon Green's brilliant debut feature George Washington. Long before Green established himself as a skilled comedy director of raunchy, scatological farces like Pineapple Express, Eastbound & Down, The Sitter, and Your Highness, he crafted this exquisite coming-of-age story about three inseparable preteens (Candace Evanofski, Curtis Cotton III, and Donald Holden) undergoing growing pains over one lazy summer. Like Hatari, the actual plot is incidental, but Green and DP Tim Orr infuse their film with a dreamy, Cinemascope languor that simultaneously abstracts and intensifies the interactions of his young leads. As the three drift into an understated love triangle - and then, into situations more foreboding - they find themselves trying to negotiate between childhood ideals and the unforgiving nature of adulthood. There are so many ways this material could becomes shapeless or even (given the nature of the relationship between Evanofski, Cotton, and Holden) salacious, but Green never missteps tonally, and the performances by his leading actors (all of whom were nonprofessionals) are pitch-perfect. The result is a singular achievement – a modern fable with some of the earthy visual poetry of Terrence Malick. For all of Green's subsequent success as a crude jokester, he's never made a film with as much aesthetic or emotional power as George Washington.