For the week of March 18th, Sony Pictures is bringing David O. Russell's Academy Award-nominated crime dramedy American Hustle to Blu-ray. After its disappointing showing at the Oscars this month - ten nominations, zero wins - American Hustle seems primed to join the ranks of other also-rans like True Grit, Gangs of New York, The Turning Point, and The Color Purple, movies that couldn't live up to their pre-Oscar hype. Hopefully, though, time will be kind to this one. The picture plays like some adrenalized conglomeration of both GoodFellas and Russell's own Silver Linings Playbook: ostensibly, it's a docudrama about the ABSCAM sting the FBI ran in the 1970s to root out political corruption, but Russell is less concerned about the mechanics of the operation than he is about his protagonists' wild, shifting passions. American Hustle is an epic about personal yearning, whether it's a nervy FBI agent (Bradley Cooper, further demolishing his Hollywood pretty-boy image) desperate to prove his worth to both his superior officers and the women around him; a genial conman (Christian Bale, excellent as always) torn between family loyalties and his own professional skill; his beyond-demanding wife (Jennifer Lawrence, in a performance that bests her Academy Award-winning Silver Linings Playbook turn) whose rage and verbal dexterity masks deep emotional damage; his duplicitous sidekick (Amy Adams, giving the best performance of her career) who's losing her grasp on what a given mark wants versus what she wants; and the New Jersey major (Jeremy Renner, turning in work as good - if almost totally unheralded - as his Academy Award-nominated co-stars) who loves his town so much he's willing to break the law for it, and who becomes the unwitting focus of both Cooper and Bale's characters.
Is American Hustle the best film of the year? No - Russell's film is a little too soft, a little too inconsequential for its own good (those could called it "Scorsese-lite" are not incorrect, and it may be the first "big con" movie à la The Sting or Ocean's Eleven that treats its central grift as an afterthought cooked up by the heroes in the last twenty minutes). It's not even Russell's personal best; that would be either Three Kings or The Fighter, or I Heart Huckabees if you're in a transcendental frame-of-mind. What American Hustle has is virtuosic filmmaking and performances to spare, and one should not understate those qualities. Russell and DP Linus Sandgren create a fluid, restless visual aesthetic to match the improvisatory fire of the actors – in interviews, he talks of letting the actors motivate the story and not the other way around - and that feeling is paramount here. We care about this 1970s funhouse not because we care about the parameters of the different crimes: no, to some degree, we want all the characters to succeed (even Cooper's hyperkinetic FBI stooge), so palpable is Russell's affection for them.
In his Blu-ray review, Martin Liebman commented that "American Hustle expertly blends its superficial visuals and its core story themes. The film's harmony is perhaps its key focal point. The picture paints a believable and oftentimes lightly comical portrait of its era - the styles, the places, the things - but it smartly never emphasizes them, instead focusing on building everything else in them and around them, namely the characters that give shape and meaning and entertainment value to that world. Within that world, the picture traverses a fascinating juxtaposition, one that explores the con man's servitude, forced to operate on his own turf but not under his own rules. The result is both as expected and not at all as expected as the story blossoms out of control for all involved, as the characters maneuver through a rocky, dangerous path lined with humorous subtexts, interpersonal chaos, and mass inward and outward confusion and conflict, all while several people struggle to find their place in the world through material gain and romance, neither of which ultimately fall under their own control. The film is beautifully chaotic but at the same time steady and focused, a masterstroke of filmmaking that, even as it occasionally feels a bit bloated and self-indulgent after its brilliant opening act, maintains a rhythm, appeal, and novelty that sets it apart from most anything else out there."
From Disney Home Entertainment comes another docudrama: Saving Mr. Banks. Long before it opened last year, critics and pundits were predicting that this film would be the surprise darling of the Academy Awards. It looked like the stars had all aligned: a solid director (John Lee Hancock, of The Rookie and A Perfect World fame) getting his most high-profile shot yet, some iconic source material (the tumultuous making-of details behind Disney's own Mary Poppins) for its subject matter, and an incredible cast that includes Emma Thompson, Colin Farrell, Jason Schwartzman, B.J. Novak, Paul Giamatti, Bradley Whitford, Rachel Griffths, and Tom Hanks as Walt Disney himself. Yet despite the baseless prognostications, Saving Mr. Banks premiered to so-so reviews and only one Oscar nomination (for Thomas Newman's very Thomas Newman-sounding score), and it isn't hard to see what happened. The story of Mary Poppins' becoming is filled with juicy details - the personal hardships that author P.L. Travers (Thompson) used to create her "practically perfect" nanny were the same elements that made her deeply resistant to a film adaptation, leading Disney to use every facet of his not-inconsiderable charm to bluff, cajole, and seduce Travers into giving him the movie rights - that Saving Mr. Banks sanitizes in as aggressive a fashion as possible. Hancock and writers Kelly Marcel and Sue Smith reduce Travers' psychologically rough edges to a pat backstory involving her unpredictable father (Farrell, who gives Saving Mr. Banks what little grit it has), and they're far too content to turn the interplay between Travers and Disney into sitcom-ready sound bites instead of the intellectual battle of wills it really was (the movie teases viewers with what could have been, playing audio from Travers and Disney's far-more prickly script sessions during the end credits). If the film were more entertaining, these issues wouldn't matter so much, but it has no pulse. Hancock presents the narrative as a slightly more accomplished version of the kind of bland live-action fare produced for Disney during the '60s and '70s. One can't help if the studio's vested interest in protecting its own brand compromised the proceedings too much (and Hanks suggested as much in interviews last year where he talked about Disney executives' reluctance to let him depict Walt's well-known smoking habit), but Saving Mr. Banks' lukewarm performance suggests we'll never get to see a more truthful version of this story.
Kenneth Brown's Blu-ray review commented that "Saving Mr. Banks departs from the reality of the Disney/Travers battleground early and often. While it did take Walt Disney nearly two decades to obtain the rights to Travers' book (none of which we see in the film), and while she did indeed travel to Los Angeles and serve as a thorn in the side of the Mary Poppins production team (as depicted), Disney had already acquired the rights to her book. Travers was a hypercritical consultant with contractual script approval, yes... which Disney shrewdly trumped later with final cut powers. The enormous sway the author holds over the course of Saving Mr. Banks? Largely fiction. The threat of the production falling apart? Fiction. Travers' ultimately teary, cathartic reception of Mary Poppins at its Hollywood premiere? The good terms on which she and Walt Disney depart? A nice moment but, you guessed it, complete and total fiction. Travers hated the version of Mary Poppins that made it to theaters, and didn't hide her feelings. And if such fundamental components of Hancock, Marcel, and Smith's adaptation are so loosely inspired by true events, how are we to separate fact from fiction elsewhere? Suddenly the entire film is called into question, all for a little extra dramatic punch that, ironically, is undermined by the elusiveness of its historical accuracy."
Far more satisfying a Disney venture is the Academy Award-winning animated adventure Frozen, which deals with the relationship between sisters Anna and Elsa (Kristen Bell and the once-and-future Adele Nazeem, Idina Menzel), two princesses whose strained relationship curses their kingdom under a neverending winter. I've heard some describe Frozen as a return to classic Disney. I get it; the storytelling has the same kind of confidence as Mouse House classics like Beauty and the Beast or Pinocchio, and Academy Award-winning songwriters Robert Lopez and Kristen Anderson-Lopez help immeasurably to give the film the kind of "Broadway in Theaters" impression that the studio started cultivating with The Little Mermaid. That said, Frozen deviates from the classics in its handling of Anna and Elsa. You might expect Disney to make one of the sisters evil and one good (shades of Sleeping Beauty, perhaps), or else they'd need Jonathon Groff's handsome Kristoff to take point on defeating their enemies and reversing the curse (note: almost every Disney cartoon ever made). Most of the time, you'd be right, but Frozen flips the script. Anna and Elsa might struggle with their limitations and triumphs, but they're both never anything less than full-fledged Disney heroines, and ultimately, it is their faith in each other that brings them true happiness. For those reasons, Frozen feels quietly revolutionary, a step forward for the studio that's even more progressive than the one Pixar made with Brave.
Kenneth Brown noted that "Disney has been working to bring Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tale to the screen for more than seventy years - going back to Walt Disney himself, who passed away before cracking an adaptation of Andersen's seemingly uncrackable 'Snow Queen' - making the polish and precision of the 2013 animated musical that much more impressive. From script to animation, story to dialogue, and musical score to some of the best Disney songs in recent memory (one of which, the rousing, beautifully conceived 'Let It Go,' rightfully took home an Academy Award), Frozen is infinitely more than the sum of its parts or the ensemble of its heroes. It's the film Disney purists have been crying for, classicists have insisted the studio is incapable of producing without dear Uncle Walt at the helm, and fans of 'The Greats' have been clamoring for all these years. It also just so happens to be an ingeniously modern spin on a classic tale; one that finally, finally gives little girls princesses that aren't cursed to float around in weirdly misogynistic snow globes."
Finally, from the Weinstein Company and Anchor Bay comes the epic drama Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom. If anyone deserves a cinematic biopic à la Gandhi or Malcolm X, it's Nelson Mandela. The late South African president was equal parts inspiring and controversial, living a life of triumphs and challenges that spanned from apartheid's heyday in the 1940s to its dismantling in the late 1980s and early 1990s. And the one thing that Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom gets really right is casting the imposing and powerful Idris Elba to convey the strength and contradictions of Mandela himself; Elba has already proven himself on the small-screen through his iconic Luther and The Wire work, but as Mandela, he turns in a grand star performance that should have gotten far more attention from critics and audiences. The fault, however, lies not with Mandela or Elba but with writer William Nicholson (Gladiator) and director Justin Chadwick (The Other Boleyn Girl), both of whom distill Mandela's rich existence into a generic biopic template. In its predictability, it's like a Top 40 broadcast – Nicholson and Chadwick dutifully tick off boxes covering Mandela's formative years, his time as a firebrand political leader, his almost-thirty-year imprisonment, and then his tumultuous Presidency. The film is simultaneously overlong and rushed, with Chadwick throwing in as many key points as possible into this two-hour-and-twenty-minute feature without examining any one of them in greater detail. For anyone unfamiliar with Mandela, these details might be of interest, but the lack of real filmmaking passion or intrigue hamstrings the inherent drama in this story. Even though it had a far more limited focus, Clint Eastwood's underrated Invictus conveyed a better sense of both Mandela the man and the political icon. Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom is not that film, and here's hoping Elba gets another chance to show what he's capable of in a movie worth his efforts.
Martin Liebman thought much higher of the film, writing that "That tightrope march through Mandela's preference for peace but understanding of violence isn't reflected in the film's cadence. Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom moves at a rapid-fire pace through decades of history but never feels too terribly compact, though certainly it glosses over elements here and there in the name of maintaining a manageable runtime. The film's pacing helps solidify the urgency with which Mandela and his people fight, but at the same time it sufficiently captures the strain of his lengthy imprisonment that sees him outwardly age but maintain his inward spirit of determination for and dedication to his cause. Director Justin Chadwick...shapes the movie with a riveting blend of procedural biopic and historical drama pieces but invigorates the movie with that quickly marching cadence that builds tension and character both while plowing through Mandela's life highlights. The film capably entertains while it covers its historical grounds, stirring emotions but never becoming so detached as to dryly recount facts rather than sprinkle them with a life force that's largely given shape by actor Idris Elba's knockout performance. Indeed, the actor finds a soul within the character and a commanding screen presence that both set the performance apart. Elba's imposing physical stature lends a further feel of gravity to the character, and Elba maintains a stature of confidence in ideals and belief in purpose from start to finish. The performance is supported by quality aging makeup in the later stages but feels only like a formality; Elba inhabits the character with the sort of intimate understanding of outward stature and inward principles that define the best historical figure performances."