For the week of January 4th, Lionsgate Home Entertainment is bringing Denis Villeneuve's Sicario. Prior to this picture, I'd found Villeneuve's work fascinating but uneven; both Incendies and Prisoners squandered riveting slow-burn buildups with didactic twist endings, while his Cronenberg-esque Enemy felt like a good short film spun out to ninety minutes. But Sicario has no such problems - here, Villeneuve is in full command of his cinematic gifts, offering a near-perfect marriage of social commentary and relentless thrills. Like The Counselor or the Coen Brothers' No Country for Old Men, Sicario directs its attentions to America's fractious drug war with Mexico: our entrance point is FBI agent Kate Macer (Emily Blunt), whose quick-thinking and operational command during an otherwise disastrous raid earn her a spot on a covert government task force charged with destabilizing the drug cartels south of the border. The problem is, the particulars of Kate's new position never cohere, and she finds herself trying to maintain her composure even when her mission grows increasingly brutal. For much of the movie, she's in the dark, and Villeneuve uses her confusion as a microcosm for the larger scope of the drug war. The drugs themselves aren't the problem - save for one brief shot, Villeneuve doesn't include any scenes of drugs or drug use (you heard that right - it's a movie about the drug war without any drugs) - but rather their impact on the local and global communities, with cartels indulging dispassionately in horrific violence and government peacemakers pushed to moral extremes in their attempts to staunch the blood flow. This conflict becomes both terrifying and exciting in Villeneuve's hands: Sicario has three or four crackerjack setpieces, from a showdown at the Mexican-American border to a nighttime assault in a border tunnel, and Roger Deakins' breathtaking cinematography (someone give this man an Oscar, and quick) gives these violent outbursts a harsh, jagged clarity. The more we look - and Deakins employs a variety of techniques to enhance our spatial coherence, from sharp digital photography (his post-magic-hour shots are stunning) to some chilling night-vision and thermal lensings - the harder it becomes to justify the horrors on display, and again we're in the same place as the protagonist. Kate (and her partner, played by a terrific Daniel Kaluuya) might try to preserve her internal compass, but her superior officers have no such compunctions, and it's in their moral allowances that Villeneuve reserves his strongest criticisms of the U.S. side of the drug showdown. Josh Brolin's government spook is as cavalier when quarterbacking non-jurisdictional ops as he is in his formal demeanor (the T-shirted-and-flip-flopped Brolin provides Sicario with some of its only levity, yet his glibness in the face of such misery and chaos somehow proves even more chilling), and while his "birddog" (Benicio del Toro) has a far graver sense of the drug war's human cost, he also keeps revealing a bottomless capacity for torture and brutality. Del Toro, as is his wont, complicates Sicario on a granular level (besides the thorny question of where his true allegiances lie, he keeps his emotional backstory close to the vest), and he makes for a chilling foil to Blunt's naivety, with the two acting as moral dialectics to one another. One of the year's best films.
In his Blu-ray review, Jeffrey Kauffman wrote that "it's not fair to describe in much detail what eventually ends up happening, other than to say that the 'real' reason behind the entire mission turns out to be somewhat more shaded than simply bringing a bad guy to justice. What Sicario depicts so viscerally is (as one of the supplements on this Blu-ray describes it) the 'machine' of both the drug trade and the law enforcement attempts to curtail it. Sicario has a number of outstanding sequences, but it tends to tip over into needless hyperbolism at times, including at least two different moments where Kate is reduced to traditional 'damsel in distress' material. Those potential missteps aside, the film routinely delivers some gut punches as it moves to its incredibly forceful climax, when [Del Toro's] tortured operative finally becomes the focal character and the final denouement is offered to the audience. In fact Sicario engages in a bit of bait and switch in a way, seeming to posit the film as Kate's story when really it's [Del Toro's] tale that ends up being the through line and the element which provides most of the film's disturbing emotional resonance."
From Sony Pictures Home Entertainment comes a far more lighthearted affair: the docudrama The Walk. Many of you may already be familiar with this story - if you've seen James Marsh's 2008 documentary Man On Wire, you already know the tale of Philippe Petit (played in The Walk by Joseph Gordon-Levitt), a high-wire performer who, in 1974, embarked on a daring mission to a) attach a tightrope wire between the two towers of the World Trade Center and then to b) perform feats of balance on Said Wire. However, while Petit ultimately succeeded in his goal (spoilers, I guess, for a forty-year-old historical event), he didn't capture his walk on film (only still photos exist). That's the big selling point of The Walk. During the film's last twenty-five minutes, director Robert Zemeckis meticulously recreates Petit's achievement in thrilling, nerve-shredding detail. I saw The Walk in IMAX 3D, and watching the third act in that particular format remains one of the great movie-going experiences of my life. Zemeckis has always had an affinity for digital trickery, and The Walk gives him the fullest opportunity to indulge in this love. Never for a second do we doubt the reality of Petit on the wire - from the creaking, windy sound-design to the flawless 3D effects work - and this sensation proves equal parts exhilarating and utterly frightening (if ever there was a film that could create vertigo in previously unaffected folks, it's this one). And that's the problem. The only way to see The Walk is in true IMAX 3D - you just won't get that chilling frisson of height and danger on anything less than a seventy-foot screen, so watching the Blu-ray on even a very large projection screen won't have anything close to the full immersive effect. Now, if the rest of the movie were better, you could at least enjoy the surrounding scaffolding independently of the compromised finale, but alas, the first ninety minutes is pretty much a mess. Zemeckis and his co-screenwriter Christopher Browne have structured Petit's rise to the top as a twee heist movie (we first see Gordon-Levitt's Petit perched on the Statue of Liberty talking directly to the camera, to give you an idea of how unbearably precious The Walk gets), filled with whimsy and wacky supporting characters and "charming" Gallic accents, all of which endeavor to make the wait to the ending all the more tiresome. With the exception of the ending, we already have the ideal version of this story: Marsh's documentary improves on everything that this one bungles (the earlier film is smarter, faster, more complex). If Zemeckis and Co. are smart, they'll start screening the ending only as some kind of total theater ride at Universal Studios. The rest is just noise.
Martin Liebman had a far more favorable take on the film, writing that "The towers have long since fallen but Zemeckis' film lovingly returns them to life in a fitting, heartfelt cinema experience that explores their majesty set against one man's determination to fulfill a dream. The film elicits all kinds of emotion - everything from deep sadness to overwhelming joy - in what can only be described as a movie as monumentally satisfying as the wire walk performance itself, capturing a spirit of accomplishment in the shadow of tragedy that will undoubtedly stand as tall as the towers as a loving tribute to not only fallen steel and concrete but man's persistence, the power of hope, and the joy of seeing a dream fulfilled... Zemeckis, one of the great movie magicians of his, or any, time, captures a spirit of humanity from the outset, a spirit that soars even above the death-defying heroics and awe-inspiring sight of the towers digitally recreated to astonishing perfection. The movie embraces life - its challenges, its ups, its downs, and the humanity that continually drives it forward through the best and worst of times - and that is its most impressive accomplishment and the true embodiment of its purpose in not only recreating Philippe Petit's acrobatic walk but demonstrating its power as a symbol of something that can never be destroyed: the triumph of the human spirit."
On the television front, HBO Home Entertainment is bringing True Detective: The Complete Second Season to Blu-ray. You certainly can't accuse showrunner Nic Pizzolatto of having no ambition; as critically and commercially successful as the first season of this limited series was (setting premium-cable viewing records, further popularizing the limited-series trend, adding to the runaway train that is the McConaissance), Pizzolatto made no attempt to emulate its style and scope for the sophomore season. If Season One was a dark buddy-cop procedural with Lovecraftian subtext, Season Two finds Pizzolatto aping James Ellroy. Like The Big Nowhere or L.A. Confidential, the new season is a sprawling tale of California crime and corruption, beginning with the murder of a city official and tracking its aftershocks through the West Coast, particularly with regard to the way the crime connects an antisocial police detective (Rachel McAdams), her corrupt partner (Colin Farrell), a tortured highway patrolman (Taylor Kitsch), and a gangster who's desperate to go straight (Vince Vaughn). Everything is bigger this time around: California instead of Louisiana, a massive government conspiracy instead of a serial killer, four movie-star leads instead of two. How unfortunate, then, that bigger isn't necessarily better. While True Detective: Season Two isn't the unmitigated disaster that critics and fans branded it throughout its summer airing - it's too watchable, with a season finale that, while clichéd, does a good job of tying up loose ends and satisfying the show's pulpy genre demands - it is a huge letdown, and a big part of its faults stems from Pizzolatto's lofty goals. As much as I admire his willingness to go big, the new story lacks the rigorous control that Season One evinced. It takes a long time (maybe six of the season's eight episodes) for the narrative to start generating any real intrigue (Episode Two feints at some deeper resonance with a shocking cliffhanger that Episode Three undoes almost immediately), and all the wheel-spinning (and there is a lot, from tangents concerning twenty-year crimes, shifty religious cults, high-end prostitution rings, and rampant child abuse, and all of this feels like little more than stalling tactics until the end) leaves the talented cast scrambling to make an impact. Farrell comes off best. Even though he's little more than Bud White-warmed-over, Farrell delivers such a charismatic, vanity-free turn that you're willing to follow him through all the familiar material. It helps, too, that he gets all the best lines - his welcome humor undercuts some of the show's self-importance. McAdams is just as physically persuasive (she gets a Chekhov's Knife moment early in the season that pays off to breathtaking effect), but Pizzolatto lets her down - he marginalizes her character in the home stretch just as we're starting to get really invested in her. Still, that's more that one can say for Kitsch, who tries valiantly - and fails, unfortunately - to overcome the thinness of his part (he's also the recipient of the season's most hackneyed, unbelievable plot beat), or for Vaughn, who skulks around with the same uninvolving monotone that we almost stop caring about him when his reformed criminal starts getting interesting near the climax. I get that he's trying to stretch here, but a little more of his typical motor-mouthed insouciance would have gone a long ways toward making his character more dynamic. With all those issues, you can't help but wonder about the question of authorial agency. Pizzolatto wrote every episode of Season One, yes, but he also had the brilliant Cary Fukunaga directing every episode, and Fukunaga gave the program such aural and aesthetic menace as to polish over some of the more unbelievable twists. By comparison, this season only has Pizzolatto guiding a revolving door of directors (Justin Lin and John Crowley helm two episodes apiece, with subsequent episodes directed by Janus Metz, Jeremy Podeswa, Miguel Sapochnik, and Daniel Attias), and you feel that lack of clear agency in every slack interaction or stumbling plot turn. Again, True Detective isn't terrible, but it isn't great, and great was something that Season One had in spades.
Finally, we end the week with another cable TV series, Starz's Flesh and Bone. The show focuses on talented-but-broken young ballerina Claire Robbins (newcomer Sarah Hay) as she tries to make it in the prestigious American Ballet Company, and it helps address a major shortcoming in genre filmmaking: there's not enough dancing on-screen. In particular, ballet has inherent suspense besides its obvious surface elegance, and anyone who's seen The Red Shoes, Black Swan, or ABC Family's underrated dramedy Bunheads can attest to the form's dramatic possibilities. It's so naturally compelling that you almost wish showrunner Moira Walley-Beckett would ease off the throttle a little in telling Claire's story. Walley-Beckett cut her teeth in the Breaking Bad writers' room, and she makes Claire as fascinating a flawed protagonist as Walter White is - as beautiful and gifted as Flesh and Bone's heroine is, she is profoundly disturbed, suffering though the after-effects of an epically dysfunctional family (personified through Josh Helman's revolting older brother) and the current demands of her brilliant, narcissistic company director (Ben Daniels, in a performance that toes the line between vérité and camp). Claire's attendant psychological hurdles would, on their own, be the stuff of great drama, but Walley-Beckett can't leave well enough alone, and she overstuffs the limited series' eight episodes with soapy, boundary-pushing taboos that take full advantage of Starz's permissive attitudes towards adult content. I'm talking coked-out former divas and life-threatening neurological conditions and rampant infidelities and graphic sex (gay and straight) and strip-club sojourns (my biggest knock against the show: the middle three episodes wallow in strip-club subculture to a degree that quickly crosses from "thematically significant" to "objectifying the female actresses") and magical homeless people (as good as Justified's Damon Herriman is, he's playing a cliché, through and through) and human-traffic slaves and ballet-loving mobsters. Never is this content anything less than addictively watchable (I burned through the show in less than a day, and the experience wasn't a chore), and it always looks great (Animal Kingdom and The Rover director David Michôd and True Detective cinematographer Adam Arkapaw set an often-stunning aesthetic template in the pilot), but it does get to be a little much, especially since the finale only handles Claire's story in a satisfying matter. Ultimately, though, the show works because of two elements: the intensity of the ballet milieu and the performances. Not only was Walley-Beckett a former ballerina herself, but most of her actors are professional ballet dancers, and they work to make the atmosphere far more persuasive than in Black Swan or The Red Shoes - the dances convey the visceral thrill of the art form's beauty and rigor (ironically, the ballet scenes are far more exciting than the strip-club dance scenes). And chief among these performers is Hay, who is a revelation in the lead. She's definitely not a first-time dramatic actor (to imply that distinction would suggest that what Hay brings to her various ballets isn't "acting"), but she's certainly new to the demands of long-form television storytelling, yet you wouldn't know it to look at her. For all intents and purposes, Flesh and Bone is her series - it's built around her character, full-stop - and she bring a genuine fearlessness to Claire's whiplash emotional trajectory. You get the sense that there's nothing Hay won't do, that there's no emotional-physical rubicon she won't cross, if it means getting to the truth of her character, and we don't dare look away. She grounds the show with something not dissimilar from Old Hollywood class. In the 1930s and 1940s, Hay would be working for William Wyler and Howard Hawks; are David O. Russell and Quentin Tarantino hiring today?
Martin Liebman's Blu-ray review noted that "this is easily the surprise TV hit and event of the year. It's a wonderfully detailed and organic picture of grit, determination, raw emotion, and high drama that make for a legitimately compelling program. Engaging from its opening minutes forward and never straying from its established world of cutthroat competition and take-no-prisoners approach to authentic storytelling, Flesh and Bone satisfies as one of the most gripping shows of 2015... The show's primary focus is the darker underbelly of deeply rooted ambition and cutthroat competition, both on the dance floor amongst the performers and as experienced through Paul's own determination to find success for his school, at any price. The show expertly, methodically, and captivatingly explores the emotional tolls that both success and failure - and everything in between - take on the dancers, their bodies most immediately noticeable but, more apropos to the story, their souls. There's a fantastic dichotomy at play, then, with the absolute grace and beauty of the dance on one side and the ugly behind-the-scenes realities of it on the other. Flesh and Bone is fascinating in its rawness and brutality, but at the same time it quickly builds and always maintains an approachability, at least for audiences prepared to travel down the dark path of personal sacrifice in the name of success."