For the week of February 17th, a number of recent Academy Award-nominees are hitting Blu-ray. First among these is Alejandro González Iñárritu's critically acclaimed Birdman, which has received nine Oscar nominations, including ones for Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Supporting Actor, Best Supporting Actress, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay, and Best Cinematography. It's that last one that ranks as Birdman's most viscerally involving feature. Legendary DP Emmanuel Lubezki won this award last year for his vertiginous, terrifying work on Alfonso Cuaron's Gravity, but his achievement here is even more staggering. Working with in conjunction with editors Douglas Crise and Stephen Mirrione and a team of digital technicians that includes The Avengers' Conrad V. Brink Jr., Lubezki and Iñárritu have created the illusion that the film unfolds in mostly one virtuoso camera take, which follows has-been Hollywood star Riggan Thomson (Michael Keaton) through two of the most difficult weeks of his life as he tries to mount a very public Broadway comeback, all the while triaging his own neuroses with those of his leading ladies (Naomi Watts and Andrea Riseborough), his very temperamental supporting actor (Edward Norton), and his recovering addict daughter (Emma Stone). As the camera snakes around a thrilling recreation of Manhattan's St. James Theatre, its movements seemingly untethered to space and time, the film achieves a live-wire quality comparable to that of live theater: even though we suspect digital trickery is afoot, we're still aware of the effort Lubezki and Iñárritu put their crew through (even with the cuts digitally hidden, it's clear most shots last in the five-to-fifteen-minute range). It's the perfect visual metaphor for the film's themes of fate and timing. If the screenplay matched the sublime focus of the camerawork and direction, Birdman would be one for the history books, but that's where the trouble starts. Ninety minutes of Birdman play like adrenalized Patty Chayefsky. The screenplay by Iñárritu, Nicolás Giacobone, Alexander Dinelaris, and Armando Bo is as subtle as a flying mallet - characters tend to yell speeches at one another about the nature of fame, theater, and aging - but it's punchy and well written (if floridly theatrical), and the work from the actors is so uniformly good (Keaton is getting a much deserved victory lap, but Norton is the real scene-stealer, playing a thinly veiled version of...well, himself) that we don't really care that we're being given a creative ethics sermon. But then Something Happens, and Birdman turns into a screed against the evils of critics and Blockbuster movies, and the whole thing goes off the rails. Whatever restraint the film was operating under goes out the window, and Iñárritu resorts to having symbols-made-flesh literally yell at us to condemn us for our viewing habits. It plays like sour grapes - Ratatouille handled similar themes with more nuance and grace - and it isn't helped by Iñárritu's decision to close the film on a note of magical realism that makes sense in the moment but violates certain aspects of perspective and structure the film prior has conditioned us to believe. Birdman is still a worthwhile endeavor, and even when it goes bonkers, it's still better than Iñárritu's 21 Grams, Babel, or Biutiful. Unlike those, this one actually has a sense of humor, and that levity goes a long way.
In his Blu-ray review, Jeffrey Kauffman wrote that "the magical realism, which in other hands probably would have come off as overly precious, is an integral part of this gambit, for it's inexplicable by design, short circuiting what is otherwise a fairly straightforward narrative of a Broadway play opening in disarray. Is Riggan specially powered, as seems to be hinted at rather vigorously in any number of sequences? Or is he simply just another massively deluded actor, as at least one sequence, where Riggan's 'flying' is shown to actually be a taxi ride, tends to portray? Iñárritu willfully shies away from any overt answers, a tendency which is nowhere more obvious than in the perplexing final scene, where Riggan's very existence (or at least survival) may be questioned by some. In a cinematic world rife with cookie cutter 'entertainments,' Birdman's completely unique if bizarre treatment of its subject matter is less like a breath of fresh air than a bracing, ice cold 'bucket challenge' dumped unceremoniously over the collective heads of both filmmakers and audience members alike. For a film this stuffed full of whimsy and intentional artifice, the grounding of the performances is just another reason to come away from the viewing experience slightly awestruck. Keaton doesn't just run through a gamut of emotions here, he can segue seamlessly from rage to humor at the veritable drop of a hat (or Birdman cowl). Stone, whose orbs seem to make her tailor made to have starred in Big Eyes, brings spunk and vulnerability to the role of Sam, a girl struggling with 'Daddy issues' and stints in rehab. While consigned largely to the sidelines, Naomi Watts and Andrea Riseborough have great moments as witnesses to the whirlwind (my own favorite lines in the film come courtesy of this pair, when Lesley questions why she doesn't have more self esteem, and Laura quite calmly answers, 'You're an actress'). Amy Ryan is also on hand briefly as Riggan's ex-wife, and brings a sweet naturalism to a somewhat underwritten role. And Edward Norton is simply perfect as an entitled, bratty actor who assumes he's the center of the known universe even if he suspects that he's only a bit player."
Still, Birdman's madcap, delirious pretensions are infinitely more preferable to the stultifying formula of Universal and James Marsh's The Theory of Everything. The Theory of Everything is the story of internationally renowned astrophysicist Stephen Hawking (Eddie Redmayne) and his first wife Jane Wilde (Felicity Jones), specifically how their idyllic union and courtside frays under his increasing physical limitations after he begins to suffer from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. That's right, Virginia - it's a biopic, and one that rarely deviates from the expected formula: famous historical figure at humble beginnings, famous historical figure meets his/her soul mate, famous historical figure rises to prominence, famous historical figure suffers debilitating physical or mental challenges, and famous historical figure rises above them. Cue lesson learned; roll credits. If it's not this one, it's My Left Foot or Coal Miner's Daughter or Gandhi or Chaplin or Malcolm X or A Beautiful Mind or Cinderella Man or The King's Speech or this year's fellow Academy Award-nominee The Imitation Game, and the genre is played out. There's a short hand here that's wearying, a reliance on not just the historical record but on our familiarity with how these pictures play out, and at best, The Theory of Everything is only above average. Redmayne certainly does yeoman's work as Hawking, especially once he begins his startling physical transformation, but he has the benefits of hours of reference footage of Hawking to help guide his performance. I'm more taken with Jones, whose Jane Wilde maintains a core of steel we're really not expecting. Other than that, this is a handsomely made, well-acted film, and I hope I never have to see it again; I've already seen it a hundred times too many. Naturally, it received five Academy Award nominations (including Best Actor and Actress and Best Picture) because the Academy members are sheep. Biopic them, and they will come.
Martin Liebman was far more complementary towards the film in his Blu-ray review, writing that "The Theory of Everything proves that life need not end when tragedy strikes, that from great difficulty can rise great success if one seizes the moment, rationalizes, prioritizes, and elevates will, focus, and desire above despair, regret, and surrender. As the film depicts Hawking in three stages - a fully functional young genius, a man struggling with the sudden change in his life, and finally a man fully made even under less than ideal conditions - it proves mildly heartbreaking yet impressively uplifting. It is in those moments in which Hawking gradually accepts and comes to realize, even without the ability to care for himself, to move on his own two feet, and even to articulate his words, that he is still who he was - his soul, for all intents and purposes, remains - that the story finds its strongest message of hope. Hawking's story rises above his intellect, his theories, even his sense of humor and shows that life is a sum of its parts rather than the full function of every one, that that which makes a man cannot be denied even when he is denied even some of the most basic faculties of life."
Far more enchanting, and the best of the three Oscars hopefuls mentioned here, is the Japanese entry for Best Animated Film, The Tale of The Princess Kaguya. The latest film from Studio Ghibli (working in conjunction with Universal Studios), The Tale of The Princess Kaguya is a spare, beautiful fable about a humble bamboo cutter (voiced in the English dub by James Caan) who finds a beautiful young girl (Chloë Grace Moretz) in a bamboo stalk and decides to raise her with his wife (Mary Steenburgen). There's a version of this story that's gentle and safe - a fish out of water comedy about what happens when normal people come into contact with the supernatural - but The Tale of The Princess Kaguya is anything but; its director is Isao Takahata, the filmmaker behindGrave of the Fireflies, My Neighbors the Yamadas, and the subtly wrenching Pom Poko, and all of these works cast a pragmatic eye towards the mythic. As the young girl - who the bamboo cutter names Princess Kaguya - comes of age, she begins to have a disquieting effect on those around her, driving her would-be suitors to acts of violence and aggression, and we realize that again, Takahata is up to something more insidious. As in Pom Poko, while he's willing to evince a belief in the divine, he does not excuse these higher powers from the same kinds of sin and corruption as mankind suffers from, nor does he underplay humanity's often upsetting response to such beings. Like the best children's stories, The Tale of The Princess Kaguya is a morality play that takes on more resonance the deeper we consider it. It's also one of the year's most visually stunning features. Takahata and his animators have adopted a delicate, watercolor style that looks like it's being painted on screen as we're watching it. There's something so expressionistic about it - if Monet or Matisse ever made an animated film, it might look like this one - and this understated aesthetic provides the perfect counter force for the weighty subject matter. One of the year's best films.
Kenneth Brown's Blu-ray review noted that "The Tale of the Princess Kaguya is a deliberately paced, meticulously faithful adaptation of 'The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter,' one of the oldest surviving works of Japanese literature. It doesn't apologize for its scope or scale, nor does it waver when its plotting becomes as densely packed as it is (arguably) overpopulated. The story does border on convoluted at times, no doubt. However, Takahata and co-writer Riko Sakaguchi maintain such a taut through-line that Kaguya's plight is nothing short of riveting, with the pressures of parental expectations and traditional gender and cultural assignments informing her development, maturation and, eventually, her empowerment, supernatural or otherwise. This isn't a tale with glass slippers, ballroom dances, love songs atop flying carpets, or charming princes who break spells with a kiss. From the outset, there's a nagging sense that all is not well between the universe and Kaguya; that her time with humans isn't meant to last. It's a sad, fleeting glimpse of happiness thwarted, of a destiny reluctantly accepted, of a life unfulfilled, written and animated with a delicate touch that's so bright and airy it seems at stark, brilliantly realized odds with the suffering of the princess's journey."
From Lionsgate and filmmaker Tommy Lee Jones comes the dark, idiosyncratic Western The Homesman. Westerns have always been in Jones' blood (besides starring in films like Lonesome Dove, The Missing, and the Coen Brothers' neo-Western masterpiece No Country for Old Men, Jones also directed and starred in the acclaimed oaters The Good Old Boys and The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada), and his newest directorial outing takes place in the Nebraska Territory of the 1850s. Jones plays the title character, a claim jumper constantly in trouble with the law, but as spirited as Jones is (he's always a pleasure to watch when he deigns to exert the necessary effort), the most important character is Hilary Swank's Mary Bee Cuddy, a frontierswoman struggling with the demands of the West. It's not the physical labor that gives her trouble - Cuddy is even more tough and capable than Jones' grizzled old rascal - but rather the societal norms; with all the eligible men in her community spurning Cuddy for being too plain, she falls into a profound depression, and Swank is heartbreakingly good in revealing the tiny but profound cracks in Cuddy's stoic façade – it's her most accomplished work as an actress since Million Dollar Baby. However, Cuddy sees an opportunity to break her sorrow by accompanying three "crazy" women (Grace Gummer, Miranda Otto, and Sonja Richter) to an assisted-care facility in Iowa, and to combat the pervasive challenges of the open plains, she ends up enlisting the help of Jones' George Briggs. Most of the film watches as the two negotiate the dangers of the Old West and their very different personalities, a narrative track that gives The Homesman the flavor of an Odd Couple-type buddy pairing: she's prim and brutally serious, and he's a drunken reprobate, and it's a great pleasure to watch Cuddy and Briggs slowly bond in conventional genre terms, until...something happens, and this entertaining-but-familiar Western shifts gears. This sudden tonal shift might be too much for viewers to bear - it might even be too much for the movie itself, which lurches into a mode of absurdist nihilism that wouldn't be out of place in a Cormac McCarthy novel like Outer Dark or Suttree (which isn't surprising, considering Jones' last film as a director was an adaptation of McCarthy's The Sunset Limited) - but to Jones' credit, he's making a strong political statement about the true nature of gender in the Old West, and he has the movie serve it, and not the other way around. Ultimately, this is a far stranger movie than even The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, but if you can tolerate its capacity for darkness and its distractingly star-studded cast (with the exception of Jones and Swank, most of the absurdly talented actors - Hailee Steinfeld, John Lithgow, James Spader, Tim Blake Nelson, William Fichtner, and Meryl Streep - pop up for a scene or two and are never seen again. Jones must be a hell of a poker player), The Homesman reveals something new and vital about the landscape of the American Western.
Jeffrey Kauffman wrote that "to call what transpires dark and unexpected may hardly suffice to really adequately convey the psychological traumas that Jones attempts to deal with in the film. There's an unrelenting aspect to The Homesman that initially may come on at least relatively benignly, but which soon gains surprising traction as the quintet of wounded souls makes their way eastward. The Homesman both exploits and confounds traditional western tropes. Jones and his cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto pay bleak homage to the wide open prairie, but the screenplay tends to tuck itself into various dark nooks and crannies of several claustrophobic psyches. The dialectic between external and internal realities is one of the film's most interesting aspects, and one which Jones attends to very smartly from a directorial standpoint. Still, The Homesman struggles at times to maintain a consistent tone. Part of this is due to the intentional gambit of doling out information about the three women in the back of the wagon in dribs and drabs, something that plays archly against what initially appears to be the more traditional burgeoning romantic aspect between Mary and Briggs. But in a startling relatively late development, the film takes a precarious left turn which at first is breathtaking but which then tends to become increasingly bizarre, even twee. Despite its odd third act, The Homesman is another major showcase for both Swank and Jones (the actor this time). Both deliver solid, nuanced performances in a film that veers precariously close to becoming a cartoon (maybe more of a graphic novel, given its dour ambience) at times. The supporting cast (which includes James Spader and Meryl Streep in a glorified cameo) is also fantastic, and the film is ultimately such an unusual tale delivered in such an unsparing manner that its hard not to be won over by its true grit."
Finally, Magnolia Pictures is releasing Steve James' documentary Life Itself this week. The film, which takes viewers through the life and career of Pulitzer Prize-winning film critic Roger Ebert, proves an uncommonly difficult picture to review. As an actual film, Life Itself doesn't rank alongside James' stone masterpieces Hoop Dreams and The Interrupters: those features found James burrowing into the corners of American culture (high-school basketball and inner-city gang violence) and mining them for insights equal parts disturbing and profound, while Life Itself falls on just this side of hagiography, offering an extremely generous tribute to the late critic that, at times, wouldn't be out of place on an awards ceremony's memorial reel. We hear much about Ebert from his friends and family, and while some of it helps give us a fuller understanding of Roger Ebert the Man (his alcoholism, his womanizing, his marriage to Chaz Hammel-Smith, which by all accounts brought him some much-needed spiritual grounding), much of the interview material finds people like Martin Scorsese and Werner Herzog expressing their admiration for such a staunch advocate of cinema. Plus, if you're at all familiar with Ebert's writing, you can't help but wonder if James' reverential treatment stems from the glowing critical support Ebert gave him over the years. And yet, as someone who wanted to be a critic specifically because of Roger Ebert, this imperfect, conventional tribute to the man still proves devastating. Part of its emotional power comes from James giving Ebert a voice again; after his thyroid cancer spread, Ebert had to have his lower jaw removed in 2006, but the film includes ample clips from Ebert during the heyday of Siskel & Ebert (his loving but deeply contentious relationship with Gene Siskel is one of Life Itself's highlights, particularly in the TV clips and outtakes that show the two men tearing into the other's opinions with glee) as well as narration from Stephen Stanton, who pulls off an uncanny act of mimicry - reading excerpts from Ebert's own memoir, Stanton captures the exact cadence and tone of Ebert's voice to such an impressive degree that the effect is less that of exposition and more of a psychic resurrection. Ebert feels alive again, even during the film's heartbreaking segments that follow Ebert through the last months of his life, a time when Ebert's zeal for James' project - and for film itself - began to falter under ever-greater physical indignities. For all the film's concessions to traditional documentary profiling, it never loses sight of the fact that, in life, pain and passion are inextricably linked.
Michael Reuben wrote that "It would be hard to overstate Ebert's impact on film viewing. Even people who never watched the original Sneak Previews with Siskel and Ebert, or any of its subsequent incarnations, or At the Movies with Ebert & Roeper, the reinvention of that show following Siskel's death in 1999, discuss films today in a style that Ebert was largely responsible for creating. New York-based Pauline Kael and Andrew Sarris were among the first American critics to treat cinema as a serious art form, but it was Ebert and his Chicago-based partners who truly embraced the populist nature of the movies, talking about them in an approachable manner and encouraging everyone to join the dialogue. An early adopter of home theater, an enthusiastic user of the internet and social media, Ebert believed that movies were a crucial medium for sharing all aspects of the human experience. The bigger the audience, the better...One of the best parts of Life Itself, especially for those who only know Ebert from his later career when he was well-established, is its account of his early years. Ebert was a talented and polished writer from an early age, publishing his own local newspaper as a teenager in Urbana, Illinois, editing The Daily Illini at the University of Illinois at Urbana, reporting for The News-Gazette of Champaign-Urbana, and eventually moving to Chicago, where he began working at the Sun-Times. It was the Sun-Times that first made him a film critic in 1967, and he remained stubbornly loyal to that institution through good times and bad, refusing lucrative offers from bigger names after he himself had become one of the biggest names in Chicago journalism."