For the week of January 6th, Paramount Home Media Distribution is brining Richard Linklater's Boyhood to Blu-ray. One of 2014's most beloved films, Boyhood focuses on young Mason (Ellar Coltrane), a young kid who, along with his older sister Samantha (Lorelei Linklater, the director's daughter), navigates the perils of adolescence, not least of which are the complications resulting from his divorced parents (Ethan Hawke and Patricia Arquette). That's a simple setup, but the execution is anything but: Linklater shot bits and pieces of Boyhood over twelve years, thus allowing viewers to, in effect, watch these people grow up on-camera. Now, this conceit isn't as mind-blowing as some of Boyhood's biggest fans might have you think, and Linklater would be first to admit it. In the documentary genre, Michael Apted's Up Series has been documenting the lives of the same group of Britons since 1964, and as far as fiction goes, we've got François Truffaut's Adventures of Antoine Doinel, the five films of which follow the title character (played by Truffaut's long-time on-screen proxy Jean-Pierre Léaud) from troubled youth into unsettled middle-age. Heck, even Linklater has approached this cinematic device before in his Before... series, which checks back with Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy's garrulous lovers every nine or so years. But Boyhood's compression makes it unique since we get to register twelve years of changes in just under three hours, and in that regard, the picture feels unlike anything Linklater has ever made. He's quite literally documenting a life, and the scope accompanying such a task far exceeds the genial, ambling pleasures of his iconic Dazed and Confused or his hit comedy School of Rock; in addition to the constant physical changes that Mason and his family go through (and for all that has been written about watching Coltrane and Linklater grow up on camera, it's just as bracing to see Hawke and Arquette age from their early thirties into their mid-forties), Linklater uses a barrage of subtle details to cue us into the passing of time. He's one of the few directors to recognize the inherent value of pop culture, the way many of us measure our lives in Top 40 singles or movie releases, and so he lets us track Mason's development through a Coldplay song here, a Harry Potter book-release party there, an impassioned defense of The Dark Knight and Pineapple Express, all of which help time-stamp various sections of the film. For a certain generation of viewers, those cultural totems alone will be enough to endear them to Boyhood's world-view, yet Linklater's masterstroke is in how he manages to make this very specific experience seem eminently universal. Even if you don't know or care why Mason likes Bright Eyes, you still connect to his teenage ambivalence over finding a career path, or how his initial disinterest towards his mom's new husbands eventually blossoms into distrust once they start getting abusive. And it isn't just Mason - Linklater has always been one of the most generous of all American filmmakers, and his fullness of spirit means we get ample time to watch how time marinates Mason's whole family, with Hawke and Arquette scoring top marks. Hawke's absent father might be verging on a stereotype - he's the endearingly deadbeat dad whose maturity gene doesn't kick in until way late in life - but the way Hawke plays him is anything but routine, and his live-wire, improvisatory energy galvanizes Boyhood whenever he shows up. And Arquette is a quiet revelation as a woman who uses the fallout from some epically terrible relationships as battle armor, girding herself and her children a little more every time something goes wrong. She has a couple of moments near the end of the film that are quietly devastating, and it's a testament to how fully she embodies the weight of the years that these emotional depth charges land with the force they do. But that's the whole movie for you. It's an accumulation of moments, and together, they can take your breath away. This is a great movie.
In his Boyhood Blu-ray review, Martin Liebman writes that "the twelve-year shoot, then doesn't so much simplify the story but rather grounds it, makes it more tangible, more believable, even if there are moments here and there when it's not particularly clear exactly at what age Mason appears beyond a range the audience can dwindle down based on context clues and where the movie has taken him. Again, though, a proper timestamp would seem to lessen the impact of authenticity; the film rightly cares more for the journey rather than particular points on the road, even though it's often those random points where the film makes its biggest impacts. After watching the film - and Blu-ray makes this exercise ridiculously easy, fun, eye-opening, and mind-boggling - skip to a random point in the movie, turn the sound down, even, and just watch Mason doing whatever he's doing, just for a moment. Maybe he's lying on the grass, daydreaming about what awaits him. Perhaps he's clicking through something on an old iMac at his school. Perhaps he's learning about focus and diligence in the school's dark room. Maybe he's dipping chips in tasty queso with a beautiful girl at an Austin diner in the middle of the night. With the greater context in mind, the simple act of soaking in random bits and pieces will further one's appreciation of just how well the movie builds its character through every individual moment and how each moment further increases not so much the narrative power but rather the picture's unflinching dedication to constructing life through moving snapshots. This exercise is like finding an old photograph in the bottom of a drawer, flooding the viewer with memories not simply or even necessarily of the moment but also everything that came before and everything that has come after. Each and every instance adds up to one thing, the full individual, where every experience along the way means something greater than the moment. The echoes of the larger whole, even the most mundane of them, reinforces better than even the entire thing (given an initial viewing first) just how smart and precise a film this is, one that's almost effortlessly capable of capturing life even if it's a life filled with experiences that greatly differ from those that shape any given member of the audience."
From Universal Studios comes The Guest. This thriller centers on David Collins (Dan Stevens), a former soldier who returns home from the war in Afghanistan with a very specific mission: to look after the family (played by Leland Orser, Sheila Kelley, Brenden Meyer, and Maika Monroe) of fallen comrade Caleb Peterson. However, while David's presence initially acts as a boon for the still-grieving Peterson clan - particularly regarding David's alternatively supportive and brutal empowering of Meyer's bullied teen - revelations surrounding his involvement in the war shatter the peace he's found with the Petersons, and the whole thing ends in blood and tears. That setup probably reads as more conventional than The Guest actually is; the film has a genuinely wicked sense of humor (Stop-Loss, this is not) and a nicely fluid sense of genre expectations. First, it's a domestic drama. Then, it's a teen melodrama. Then, an understated romance. Then, a violent conspiracy thriller. Then, a tense actioner and, finally, a horror movie of sorts, as David's true nature emerges, and all these shifts might feel messy were it not for the film's three secret weapons: the writer-director pairing of Simon Barrett and Adam Wingard, and the performances from Monroe and Stevens. Barrett and Wingard's previous full-length feature was the slasher movie You're Next, and there they took a conventional horror premise - masked killers attack a family à la The Purge or The Strangers - and goosed it with a unique twist: what if Jason Bourne went up against a group of ruthless serial killers? They've returned to slasher-movie territory with The Guest, only now, their skewed genre mash-up invokes Friday the 13th if, say, you replaced Jason Voorhees with Captain America, and it's a credit to their breakneck sense of thrills and pacing that that combination works as satisfyingly as it does here. It helps, too, that Monroe is a Final Girl for the ages. As in the still-unreleased It Follows, something about her invokes a flintier, more wary Laurie Strode from Halloween, and when all hell starts breaking loose in the finale, she makes mostly sensible choices that don't reek of screenwriting manipulation. But it's Stevens who deserves the biggest boost from The Guest. For anyone familiar with him only as Matthew Crawley from Downton Abbey: you are in for a rude awakening. Not only is he rocking a pitch-perfect American accent and a newly chiseled physique (think Ryan Gosling in Crazy, Stupid, Love), but he's also so compellingly present in each of The Guest's tonal shifts, whether he's a charming protector, a taciturn badass, or a gleeful psychopath. You'd follow him anywhere, and if The Guest is any indication, he should have a very successful post-Downton Abbey career.
Kenneth Brown noted that "Stevens is a dead ringer for Captain America's Chris Evans, and the uncanny resemblance, paired with Stevens' aw-shucks apple-pie demeanor, works wonders. There are moments that you'll love David. Root for him. Cheer as he takes down bullies harassing Luke. Grin when he helps Spencer score a promotion (however twisted his methods). Feel a little tug on the ol' heartstrings as he eases Laura's pain. Overlook his flaws when he dispatches low-lifes and criminals around town. If he was toting a shield and wearing stars-n-stripes, you couldn't be blamed for wondering if Marvel had recast Nick Fury with The Wire's Lance Reddick. But any affection for David will never amount to a perfect love. In the recesses of your brain, you'll know something isn't quite right with David. You won't want to believe it at first, but you'll be haunted by the feeling that beneath all those good intentions and noble acts, there's a monster masquerading as everyone's favorite boy scout. And when that mask finally falls - when The Shape, The Terminator, Jason Bourne Gone Mad, The Real David Collins comes out to play - you won't really be all that surprised by the hell that breaks loose...Unfortunately, if The Guest never strikes you as a satire, or doesn't earn the laughs it's aiming for, there's not much else to the film to enjoy (other than Stevens' performance). Taken as a thriller, the school gymnasium endgame will seem ludicrous, tonally disjointed, and horribly out of place. Taken as a straight slasher film, the characters' various eccentricities will come off as the product of overacting or, worse, mediocre writing. Taken as a more traditional genre parody, a la Hot Fuzz or Shaun of the Dead, the gags will simultaneously be too narrow and too broad to succeed. Like You're Next, The Guest may be too clever for its own good. If you get what Wingard and Barrett are going for, you'll have a blast. If it doesn't click with your sensibilities, you'll come away wondering what all the fuss was about."
Also from Universal is the James Brown biopic Get on Up. The problem with most biopics is how they adhere to structural conventions - to paraphrase Brad Pitt from Neil Jordan's masterful Interview with the Vampire, most work "like David Copperfield...'I am born; I grew up'" - and one can certainly imagine a version of Brown's life story than unravels in the same predictable fashion. However, director Tate Taylor and writers Jez & John-Henry Butterworth (and, I'm assuming, editor Michael McCusker) break from convention in an interesting fashion: they scramble the timeline, giving us Brown in achronological chunks. We start with Brown (Chadwick Boseman) closer to the end of his life, but then we flash back to his heyday in the 1960s before going even further back to explore his troubled childhood and then jumping forward to the start of his career. The whole film moves like this, and the fractured chronology is one of the most interesting elements of Get on Up. Taylor and the Butterworth brothers create a fuller sense of memory, how thinking about one incident will trigger a recollection of another moment (and so on, and so on...) regardless of how the two memories fit together in a linear sense. The narrative rhythms here recall a watered-down version of the kind of elliptical editing in which the great Nicolas Roeg specialized (coincidentally - or maybe not - Roeg's old Performance collaborator Mick Jagger helped produced Get on Up, thus reinforcing the aesthetic decision). That said, Get on Up would be even more impressive if it also appropriated some of Roeg's daring with respect to content and tone. The story of James Brown is not one for the timid - here's a guy who grew up poor in a brothel and whose biggest musicals successes also accompanied all manners of criminal activities - yet Taylor gives it roughly the same pitch and intensity as his Academy Award-winning The Help. He takes a very R-rated life and softens it for PG-13, and while we get hints of reality's greater darkness (some references to Brown's drug problem; a few beats where his hair-trigger temper bubbles over too far), for the most part, this is a version of the James Brown tale you can take your grandparents to. It's a fundamental mismatch of subject matter and filmmaker - as great as Taylor is with actors (and this picture's got lots of nice work from the likes of Nelsan Ellis, Dan Aykroyd, Craig Robinson, Aunjanue Ellis, Lennie James, and his former Help collaborators Viola Davis and Octavia Spencer), he just can't give this story the rough edges it needs. At least he's canny enough to put so much of the film on Boseman, who makes this sanitized work almost essential viewing. Playing Brown as a young man through into his sixties, Boseman conveys all the knots and contradictions that made Brown so electrifying, and he helps restore a little bit of danger back into the picture. It's a great performance, and it deserves a better movie.
In addition, this week offers two films from the late, great Mike Nichols: Fox's Working Girl and Universal's Charlie Wilson's War. By this point in his career - 1988 and 2007, respectively - the filmmaker had abandoned the widescreen experimentalism that had made films like The Graduate and Carnal Knowledge so bracing, and in its place was a kind of gliding professionalism not dissimilar from the likes of Ernst Lubitsch and Billy Wilder. So it goes with these two features, which, at their best, are the kinds of bubbly social comedies that Hollywood prized itself on during its Golden Age. Of the two, Working Girl is probably the least consequential yet most successful overall; it's a flip, charming story about an ambitious secretary (Melanie Griffith) who, after her duplicitous boss (Sigourney Weaver) suffers a freak accident, begins charting her path to corporate fame and fortune. At the tail end of the 1980s, Working Girl probably seemed more culturally resonant than it does today - savvy female CEOs are a more constant reality in 21st century business, and so what was nakedly satirical and empowering in 1988 plays as almost quaint now. However, Nichols' edge for comedy hasn't dulled one bit, and Working Girl ranks as one of the 1980s most sheerly pleasurable farces. Best of all is his cast. A former master of improvisational humor, Nichols had an innate grasp of human behavior, and he used it to get consistently wonderful performances from his actors: Weaver plays her heel like an inspired mix of Margaret Dumont and Fred MacMurray in The Apartment, and Joan Cusack walks away with every scene she's given as Griffith's kooky best friend. You want to know how good Nichols was? He gets maybe the most loose and engaging performance out of Harrison Ford just as the once and future Indiana Jones was starting to calcify into logy recalcitrance - it's one of those rare roles where Ford actually seems like he's having a good time. But it's Griffith who owns Working Girl. This is the best performance she's ever given, a blend of sexy and brainy that recalls classic Marilyn Monroe or Judy Holliday, and try as she might, she's never been able to get that mix right since working with Nichols. The director had that special touch with performers, although to be fair, even he wasn't above losing his way during his late-period works.
Case in point: Charlie Wilson's War. In theory, the film looks like a can't-miss proposition. Working from an Aaron Sorkin script, Nichols turns the covert record of how the U.S. ended up supplying aid and weapons to what would become the Taliban into a buddy comedy of sorts, with the focus moving from international skullduggery to the relationship between cheerfully corrupt U.S. senator Charlie Wilson (Tom Hanks) and his misanthropic CIA contact Gust Avrakotos (Philip Seymour Hoffman). And for an hour or so, it feels like Charlie Wilson's War could become one of Nichols' finest features. Other than the underwhelming work from a miscast Julia Roberts (playing a Texas socialite with surprising political capital), Nichols is firing on all cylinders here, giving Sorkin's screwball-comedy-infused script the light touch it needs while providing ample play time for his actors (including Denis O'Hare, Ned Beatty, Emily Blunt, Amy Adams, and The Wire's Peter Gerety), not least of whom is Hoffman, who's just brilliant as Hanks' verbose, ever-pessimistic foil (he makes a meal out of every interaction, particularly this scene, a brutal verbal tête-à-tête with Mad Men's John Slattery that might be the single best thing Sorkin has ever written). Yet the movie starts to fall apart in its last half-hour as the chilling ramifications of Wilson and Avrakotos' dealings begin to take effect, and it's not because the decision to shift from comedy to tragedy is a poor one: without it, the film would have no greater weight. No, what falters is Nichols, who wraps up the action through a series of underwhelming montages that divert his attentions from Hanks and Seymour. What felt character-driven and human becomes painfully didactic, and while we can partially blame studio interference - Sorkin's original script was far more explicit in linking Wilson and Avrakotos to the attacks on 9/11, and Universal wanted to soften that blow - Nichols' instincts at feinting controversy deny us a more dramatically fulfilling conclusion with the film's protagonists. It's a shame that we're left with such disappointment in what would become his final film; still, the good stuff in Charlie Wilson's War is so good that it merits a viewing, if only to see some of Nichols at his best.