For the week of January 11th, Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment is bringing Ridley Scott's The Martian to Blu-ray. Scott's had a rough go of it in recent years; while I enjoyed his esoteric, hateful morality play The Counselor, you have to struggle to find good things about Exodus: Gods and Kings or Robin Hood, and the less said about Prometheus, the better. Not so with The Martian: this wonderful sci-fi adventure is Scott's most purely enjoyable film since 2007's American Gangster. At its core, The Martian is a full-length version of that scene in Apollo 13 where Mission Control tries to engineer a quick solution to make a square air-filter cartridge fit into a cylindrical port, and I mean that as a compliment. Of the thousand ways to mine drama from the story of a Mars astronaut (a perfectly cast Matt Damon) accidentally marooned on the Red Planet, Scott and his screenwriter Drew Goddard (of Cabin in the Woods fame) follow the same grounded approach as Andy Weir's source material, focusing on all the issues that their hero and NASA (personified by the likes of Chiwetel Ejiofor, Jeff Daniels, Mackenzie Davis, Sean Bean, Kristen Wiig, Benedict Wong, and a scene-stealing Donald Glover) must tackle in real-time. At times, we're looking at catastrophic system failures, whether it's an airlock breach or a hydrogen-based explosion, but more often than not Damon's Mark Watney faces less sexy indignities, like using his own waste to grow food or figuring out how to field-strip a landing rover of all but its most essential components. Thanks to Scott's muscular, kinetic direction, these smaller challenges become just as suspenseful as any Michael Bay scale adventure - Scott and DP Dariusz Wolski employ a barrage of digital cameras (some large, some GoPros-sized) to put us as close to Mark's predicament as possible - even when relying, in large part, on hard science and ground-level pragmatics. Only the big finale resorts to action-movie heroics, but Goddard's script is smart enough to find the inherent comedy in some of Mark's big Hail-Mary attempts. That last bit is The Martian's biggest surprise - it is very, very funny. Goddard cut his teeth writing for Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and his dialogue has that series' same kind of wiseass élan. Glover might as well be playing a character from Community (my biggest complaint is that he isn't in the movie more), and for all his heroism, Damon's character remains a perpetual goofball (although Damon is so good that we realize much of his ironic front masks real panic and self-doubt). To his credit, Scott allows the humor to breathe, with little of the self-seriousness that's plagued, oh, every movie he's ever made. For all the drama that Watney faces (and The Martian is a real nail-biter), it's a real kick and, in its own wry, confident way, one of the two best sci-fi properties Scott has ever helmed.
Jeffrey Kauffman noted that "what works surprisingly well in this adaptation is the rather freewheeling humor that's often on display, something that in some cases is attributable to the macho bravado of Watney, but which also tends to unfold as Mark and his Ares III crewmates get back in touch with each other. Less felicitous comedy is had courtesy of some of the NASA scenes, where Wiig's mugging is sometimes shoehorned into the proceedings. One way or the other, this is a resolutely different tone than that which typically informs these grandiose science fiction epics, and may seem at least intermittently odd to some viewers. Damon does exceptional work here, in what amounts to a solo performance for long if not exclusive swaths of the film. The probably overstuffed supporting cast often doesn't have a whale of a lot to work with, but most performers manage to create quickly accessible and relatively believable characters. The film version eschews much in the way of backstory, though, simply offering many of the large array of supporting personnel as types or even plot conveniences utilized to move things along. Director Ridley Scott is certainly no stranger to larger than life cinematic exploits, and he marshals his forces here extremely well, delivering a well paced and exciting adventure despite the film's well over two hour running time."
Less impressive a depiction of the auteur theory in practice is Woody Allen's latest trifle, Irrational Man. Ever since his bitter 1997 comedy Deconstructing Harry, Allen has been remixing thematic content from previous films, and Irrational Man is, like Match Point, another riff on his 1989 masterwork Crimes and Misdemeanors. That film, as per its title, took inspiration from Dostoyevsky's examination of how the intellectual mind can rationalize an act of violence, and so it goes here, too, with the story of Abe Lucas (Joaquin Phoenix), a deeply unhappy college professor who becomes fixated on the idea that one strategic murder can better his whole community. It's fertile material, to be sure (plus, you can't say it hasn't worked for Woody in the past), and Phoenix seems a perfect leading man for this kind of emotionally wrought protagonist. However, Irrational Man stands as yet another of Woody's late-period features that a) could have benefitted from a few more drafts or b) might have been better off never leaving the "idea" stage. For all the natural intrigue of the premise, the film itself flits between half-cooked ideas. On one hand, it really wants to outline the moral compromises made during and around a violent action, and Phoenix's wrenching, unsympathetic turn certainly speaks to that objective (try as he might, he can't not do method). On the other hand, it also wants to be a typical Woody farce, with Abe torn between the affections of another professor (Parker Posey) and an impressionable young student (Emma Stone), and this section is so mannered and shticky that we can't buy the serious stuff. Phoenix will plumb further into despair...and then Stone will pop in like a refugee from a Cameron Crowe dramedy, and the movie just groans. It's not like either side is bad (and Posey is quite wonderful as Abe's sometimes paramour - she deserves to play the lead in a full-on Allen comedy), but they never jell together. Look, Woody's certainly capable of churning out award-quality work in the last ten years - 2011's Midnight in Paris remains one of his most charming features - and you've got to give it to the guy for having such a prodigious film output in his twilight years. That said, I can respect his efforts while bemoaning the quality of the films themselves, and Irrational Man is a stark reminder of why it's so hard to be a Woody Allen fan these days. The movie is so unformed, it practically doesn't exist.
This week also allows for the release of BBC's Sherlock: The Abominable Bride Christmas special; the ninety-minute program recently aired on PBS, but for those who missed it, it's a good way to get reacquainted with the popular British mystery series. What made those earlier episodes of Sherlock so enjoyable was 1) the chemistry between Benedict Cumberbatch's near-sociopathic Sherlock Holmes and Martin Freeman's stalwart Dr. Watson as well as 2) the skill with which showrunners Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss updated the Holmes-Watson dynamic for the twenty-first century; making Holmes a slave to technology and social media could have functioned as a shallow modernization conceit, but they (and Cumberbatch) understand the fundamentals of the Holmes character so well that the update feels just about perfect. That's why news of this special came as such a surprise: early stills and reports revealed that The Abominable Bride would relocate the leads to nineteenth-century England. Would it be some sort of magic? A shift in the temporal framework of the universe (or maybe an opportunity to try a crossover with Moffat's Doctor Who)? Would this new story even be canonical to the TV series? The problem is, the answers are mostly exactly what one would expect, whereas peak Sherlock confounds us by delivering the unexpected. Spoilers to follow. Yes, we're in the nineteenth century, but only through the most banal of explanations - 2016 Sherlock is having a drug-induced vision that filters an old case through a vintage prism in order to help him puzzle out if Moriarty (Andrew Scott) is actually dead in the present-day and if he plans on re-emerging. As such, this Christmas special is about as low-stakes as they get. The majority of the action, as it were, takes place in Sherlock's head over a really brief (in the 2016 timeline) period of time. The major players don't advance much, we don't learn much, and nobody changes, which wouldn't be a big problem (this is a TV show, after all, and the medium thrives off stasis) were it not for the fact that since the beginning of its run, Sherlock has delighted in teasing out the humanity in its enigmatic protagonist. Certainly the hallucination conceit affords the possibility for character growth - theoretically, we could learn a lot about Sherlock from plumbing the inner recesses of his mind - except what we get isn't particularly revelatory. It turns out that when all is said and done, Sherlock is an egomaniac who thinks he's better than everyone else. Who'da thunk it? To be fair, the rapport between Cumberbatch and Freeman is as sparkling as ever, but they're in the thrall of what feels like glorified fan service. Here's hoping Season Four is better than this...
Finally, the Criterion Collection is offering a new HD version of Wim Wenders' The American Friend. Made during Wenders' most creatively fecund period (the 1970s), this film finds the director marrying his love of the Road Movie to a literary adaptation, and not just of any novel, but a sequel: Patricia Highsmith's Ripley's Game. The book details another period in the long, strange trip of professional forger and occasional murderer Tom Ripley, the early stages of which unfold both on the page as well as in Rene Clément's Purple Noon and Anthony Minghella's Talented Mr. Ripley film adaptations; in both Ripley's Game and The American Friend, an older Tom Ripley (played in the film by Dennis Hopper) becomes disturbingly involved in the life of a terminally ill young man (Bruno Ganz) who unwittingly slights Ripley. But while those other films (and Highsmith's source material) emphasize the Ripley adventures as almost-Hitchcockian exercises in intrigue and deceit, The American Friend adopts a far less calculated and far more ambiguous approach to this genre narrative. In a sense, the key to understanding what Wenders is after lies in the new, blandly threatening title: "The American Friend" is both vague and specific, and that dichotomy lies at the core of Hopper's Tom Ripley. For all his facility at lying and killing people, Ripley remains mired in ennui, almost to the point of inaction - it takes a long time for Ripley to do anything of note, and Hopper gives the character a nervous, twitchy energy (and I'll credit his acting and not whatever drugs might have been coursing through his system) that is most pronounced when he's adrift, floating from New York to Germany or recording his thoughts on a pool table on which no one seems to play. His is an in-between world, one of overcast skies and neon haze, and it's no small irony that Ganz's dying man has more verve and spirit than the comparatively well Ripley. Wenders creates a parasitic quality between the two men that seems backwards - the walking corpse emboldens the lifeforce. It's a strange dynamic, to be sure, but then again so much of The American Friend is strange. It's a caper that downplays the mayhem (only one scene on a train has much in the way of action - if you're looking for the pure-thriller version of this same material, check out Liliana Cavani and John Malkovich's Ripley's Game from 2002), that's just as fascinated by the presence of cult-film legends Nicholas Ray (who directed Rebel Without a Cause) and Sam Fuller (of The Naked Kiss fame) in small-but-key roles. Ultimately, The American Friend is more interesting to ponder than it is to watch. The tension is so slack here (especially when compared to other Ripley adaptations) that the film barely qualifies as a thriller. But as an exploration of Wenders' dominant cinematic obsessions, The American Friend merits less unqualified praise. Just as in Paris, Texas or Don't Come Knocking, his alienated protagonists wander through their respective contemporary landscapes, musing on the world and the nature of existence. They move through bars and blown-out fluorescents and gleaming cityscapes and barren highways, only here, every now and then, they also kill one another, too.
In his Blu-ray review, Svet Atanasov wrote that "Highsmith's novel, however, is really used only as a foundation in this film. Everything else is a product of Wenders' imagination - the characterizations, the unique structure of the narrative, the bold visual style (cinematographer Robby Müller lit large parts of the film with fluorescent lights that make it look really unusual). This, it seems, is the primary reason why people either enthusiastically embrace the film or dismiss it as an unconvincing experiment. This reviewer thinks that The American Friend fits perfectly in Wenders' body of work. It sees life as a journey in which people constantly try to find the right path that will lead them to a place where they will feel happy and their existence will make sense. Of course, in Wenders' films they rarely get there. They struggle, make mistakes and get caught up in strange situations while visiting even stranger places. In The American Friend, Jonathan is just another loner who tries to sort out his life but becomes involved with the wrong people."