For the week of February 15th, Warner Home Entertainment is bringing the violent gangster drama Black Mass to Blu-ray. For a film that arrived with such buzz - it's a high-profile gangster movie! it's a high-profile gangster movie about notorious South Boston crime boss Whitey Bulger! it's a high-profile gangster movie about notorious South Boston crime boss Whitey Bulger that stars Johnny Depp, free from his improvisatory tics and Tim Burton-life debt! - it kinda sucks that the most praise I can afford is that Black Mass is just fine. Director Scott Cooper (helmer of Crazy Heart and Out of the Furnace, both of which are better than this one) keeps the story humming along at a reasonably entertaining clip. There are a number of very nice performances (although not from everyone, and especially not from the one person who matters most). And if you're at all a fan of B-movie gangster tales, you won't be bored. Here's the thing, though: Black Mass doesn't want to be a B-movie. From top to toe, it's got a A-list prestige aspirations; the degree to which Black Mass wants to be The Godfather or The Departed is staggering, but no one involved can seem to give Black Mass that epic scope it's chasing. Part of the problem is, admittedly, the subject matter. There is nothing noble about Bulger at all. He's a low-rent monster who ran roughshod over both local law enforcement and his economically depressed Southie environs, and he left a trail of bodies in his wake with little care for matters of guilt or innocence. Sure, The Departed also had to account for this same character liability - Scorsese's Oscar-winning favorite is loosely inspired on Bulger's criminal activities - but it leaned into Bulger's fundamental seediness. People forget how funny and insensitive that Best Picture-winner is, and Jack Nicholson's Bulger proxy is the most gleefully deranged part of the film. By comparison, Black Mass keeps us at an objective distance, so we never get a chance to either a) understand Bulger (Jez Butterworth and Mark Mallouk's script provides some rote psychologizing in the form of Bulger's dead son, but the moment happens so briefly we barely register it) or b) fully grasp the gravity of his depredations. And it isn't just Bulger the film is reticent to approach - not since John Carter have I seen a big-budget studio venture evince such agita over how to establish its narrative perspective. At first, we're seeing Bulger through the eyes of his brutal enforcer Kevin Weeks (Jesse Plemons) as Weeks turns state's evidence to the FBI, and this approach makes sense. Weeks knows where many of the bodies are buried, so to speak, and we're ready to follow him as he gains Bulger's admirations and violently rises up the ranks of his criminal organization. However, the film is just as willing to shift focus to Rory Cochrane and W. Earl Brown's criminal confederates, and that's even when factoring in the increasing importance of FBI agent John Connolly (Joel Edgerton), the morally corrupted lawman whose close association with Bulger helps to bring about both their downfalls. Of these perspectives, Connolly's has the most potential for rich drama. Edgerton is phenomenal as the weasley, glad-handing turncoat (his desperation to please the FBI and Bulger is palpable), but his narrative loses focus when subdivided among Black Mass's many subplots, from keeping track of Bulger's women (Dakota Johnson and Juno Temple, both very good), to checking in with his Senator brother Billy (Benedict Cumberbatch, flailing under obvious makeup and a terrible Bahh-stahn accent), to the various inadequacies of Connolly's FBI peers and superiors (Adam Scott, Kevin Bacon, David Harbour, and Corey Stoll: all great, all under-used). And then there's Depp. This gritty criminal milieu isn't new territory for the once-and-future Jack Sparrow (recall his beautifully understated turn in Donnie Brasco), but you wouldn't think it from his honey-baked-ham work here. Sure, he's at the mercy of a script that keeps us at arms length from Bulger, yet his attempts to compensate are so unconvincing that we never stop seeing Depp The Performer: I think he's slathered under as many prosthetics and distracting affectations as in Pirates of the Caribbean or Alice in Wonderland. Most of Black Mass is fine. Depp is terrible.
Michael Reuben was even more critical of the film, writing that the film "is a dud, a two-hour catalog of missed opportunities and poor filmmaking choices by director Scott Cooper...who succeeded to the director's chair after several more experienced hands left the project. Cooper substantially rewrote the script by Jez Butterworth and Mark Mallouk (who remain credited as writers), and he has said that he wanted to 'humanize' Bulger by exploring lesser known aspects of his life. In the process, though, he failed to provide an effective account of the criminal career that makes Bulger worthy of attention in the first place. Trying to tell multiple stories at once, Cooper tells none of them well...Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese knew enough to do the one thing that Cooper skips over, which is to depict their protagonist's criminal enterprises in a clear and comprehensible way. Henry Hill's narration takes us on a guided tour of New York's wise guy scene, and Casino provides a meticulous account of how Las Vegas makes money. The opening of The Godfather is a master class in conveying crucial information effectively and memorably, using nothing more than conversations at a wedding to trace the anatomy of a vast criminal organization. Black Mass has nothing equivalent, because Cooper makes no serious effort to explain what kind of operation Bulger oversaw or how it worked. It's as if the director expects the audience to supply that knowledge themselves, perhaps gleaned from other gangster films. Devoid of context, Bulger's crimes seem like nothing more than impulsive acts, less the machinations of a mastermind than the self-destructive eruptions characteristic of Joe Pesci's Tommy in GoodFellas. Indeed, one of Depp's most memorable scenes seems intentionally designed to echo Pesci's famous 'What's so funny about me?' intimidation, and the whole of Black Mass leaves the impression of Bulger as Tommy's Irish equivalent, with piercing blue eyes. Cooper is so busy trying to 'humanize' the thug that he loses sight of the master strategist. That character slips quietly away, much as Bulger himself slipped away in 1994 just ahead of an indictment."
The best biopic of the week, however, comes in the form of Universal Studios Home Entertainment's lightning-paced Steve Jobs. In theory, the film is the title. Loosely inspired by Walter Isaacson's bestselling biography, the picture centers on the legendary software engineer (played here by a terrific Michael Fassbender) responsible for at least a half dozen of the most significant advances in consumer technology. However, screenwriter Aaron Sorkin and director Danny Boyle (replacing David Fincher, Sorkin's old Social Network collaborator) are too interesting and idiosyncratic to mount a conventional "I was born, I grew up, I died" story of a Great Man, and they add by subtracting, ditching the broad expanses of Jobs's life and focusing only on three specific product launches: the 1984 Apple Macintosh, the 1988 NeXT Computer, and the 1998 iMac G3. Anyone familiar with Sorkin knows that this kind of backstage setup is right in his comfort zone, and I'm tempted to call the film Walk and Talk: The Movie. The West Wing mastermind keeps the tension razor-wire-taut through each forty-minute section, following Jobs as he tries to balance the respective launch proceedings (with as many technical and bureaucratic screw-ups as Sorkin can devise - there are times when you feel like you're watching a tech-savvy version of Noises Off or something) with his capricious artistic whims and the all-too human needs of best friend Steve Wozniak (a surprisingly credible Seth Rogen), human conscience Joanna Hoffman (Kate Winslet), Apple CEO/de facto father figure John Sculley (Jeff Daniels), beleagured programmer Andy Herzfeld (Michael Stuhlbarg), and Jobs's ex-girlfriend Chrisann Brennan (Katherine Waterston), who makes a point of forcing Jobs's paternal connection to her daughter Lisa (played at different ages by Makenzie Moss, Ripley Sobo, and Perla Haney-Jardine) just as all of these elements build to a fever pitch. Some have criticized Steve Jobs for playing fast and loose with the facts, and sure, what you're seeing is an impressionistic approach to a life rather than an approximation of the real thing. But Sorkin's after an emotional truth, and his approach to structure and character reflects Ingmar Bergman's great Wild Strawberries, which also flashes back and forth in the life of a prickly genius to mine nuances in how we view both memory and achievement, and how one always seems to tarnish the other. Every time we check in on Jobs, it's as if we're uploading his code into a different program, and the tension exists in seeing if time and pressure can do anything to hack into his terrifying, mercurial facade. Certainly Fassbender is old hat at playing these kind of opaque masterminds, and he does a more convincing job of inhabiting Jobs as the years pass. But Boyle, working at the top of his game (the picture is a return to form after this dispiriting neo-noir Trance), is the real star of the show, bringing his characteristic virtuosity to what might otherwise be a gripping-but-staging morality play. He shoots each section in a different aesthetic (16mm for 1984, 35mm for 1988, and HD for 1998), with Daniel Pemberton's rhythmic score and Elliott Graham's propulsive editing hurtling the story along. It's a triumph of directorial vision, and as ingenious a solution to the traditional biopic cliches as I've ever seen. In fact, Steve Jobs is so good that it's a shame the last five minutes ring flat; up to that point, I was ready to call the film the year's best, but Sorkin's always had an unfortunate affinity for the sentimental gesture (see the entirety of The Newsroom for proof), and he lets the film go soft, abandoning Jobs's knotty human complications for a series of maudlin father-daughter platitudes (that, plus some irritatingly cutesy references to the iPod). Boyle's typically kinetic approach to cinema also fails him at the end - as good as Boyle is, we needed the touch of a misanthrope like David Fincher here to drain some of the sap. For a movie that so valiantly resisted qualifying its brilliant, tortured protagonist, the ending jars because you can feel the filmmakers telling us exactly how to feel. Steve Jobs deserves better, and really, so do we.
In his Blu-ray review, Martin Liebman wrote that "Boyle has crafted each of the three acts to tonally represent the time, the themes, and the technological and personal progress alike. He shoots the opening in gritty 16mm, when the technology was bulky and imperfect but promising of greater things to come. It also reflects Jobs' more cantankerous and controlling attitude both around his co-workers and with his family. Boyle transitions to a more refined 35mm shoot in the film's middle stretch and transitions to digital in its last, a final segment in which the technology, though hopelessly antiquated today, offered cleaner aesthetics and a more approachable user interface. But it also represented a cleaner character, too, an individual whose public persona, working relationships, and personal life are all on the rebound, reflective of a more organized, understanding man, understanding not only of the world around him but, more importantly, of himself. He admits his flaws and discovers who he is. It's amazingly assembled and complimentary of the film's unique structure and astounding writing that so effortlessly compiles all of its story arcs. What's even more fascinating is how the movie constructs its character so close to his public persona yet so far away from it. Jobs was best known for his on-stage presentations - product introductions and 'one more thing' proclamations to adoring fans - but the film operates almost entirely behind that curtain, literally opening up the Steve Jobs few understood right against the backdrop of the Steve Jobs everyone knows. More, the film is dotted by several incredible performances. Michael Fassbender offers a career defining and remarkably transformative performance as Jobs, capturing not just a basic look but more importantly an essence of a man whose world is in a constant state of flux and whose ability to understand it all evolves from, literally, complicated algorithms that distance himself from his humanity to an appreciation and acknowledgement of life's smallest but most important treasures that remake him in the image of a man rather than the machines by which he's surrounded."
As part of its continuing mission to put the oeuvre of Charlie Chaplin on Blu-ray, the Criterion Collection is offering an HD upgrade for Chaplin's 1921 comedy The Kid. If The Gold Rush is Chaplin's most iconic film, The Great Dictator his most important, and Modern Times his most formally experimental, then The Kid is his most beloved picture, a short, sweet fable about the relationship between Chaplin's famed "Tramp" character and an orphaned little boy (The Addams Family's Jackie Coogan). For many, The Kid captures that mix of humor and pathos that Chaplin cultivated better than anything he'd ever done; after initially releasing a longer (sixty-eight minutes) version of the film in 1921, Chaplin later pared the runtime way down (to just over fifty minutes) in order to excise anything that didn't directly pertain to the Tramp-Kid dynamic. With all due respect towards Paulette Goddard, Virginia Cherrill, or Georgia Hale, Chaplin would never have a better scene partner than Coogan: he gives one of the great child performances, alternating seamlessly between funny and dramatic and forcing Chaplin to up his own game. A lot of the time, Chaplin's Tramp's act feels like forced whimsy, but we buy his deep affection for the kid, from their running scams among the dregs of the film's unknown city underworld (a mix between New York and London, albeit one concocted in California) to the misery The Tramp feels when the Kid goes missing. And for some, this genuine sentiment is key because the rest of the film isn't that funny. Chaplin does stage some nice gags in The Kid - the last-act dream sequence ranks with most of The Circus as Chaplin's funniest stuff - but minus some notable outliers, Chaplin was more interested in making viewers cry than he was in making them laugh (now Buster Keaton, on the other hand...Keaton was a relentless joke technician and arguably the more creatively uncompromising of the two silent clowns). That instinct to tug at the heartstrings goes double here, but we're more receptive since Chaplin and Coogan work so well together. There's good-manipulative, and then there's manipulative-manipulative. The Kid stands as the former.
Svet Atanasov wrote that "Chaplin's most personal and arguably his most beloved film, The Kid is the one and only of his films in which he has a formidable partner. Coogan and his mimicking are often as good, if not better, as Chaplin's. In The Kid, Chaplin blends comedy and drama to perfection. Many of the film's funniest scenes, such as the one where the Tramp challenges the representatives of the County Orphanage Asylum, are also its saddest ones. Additionally, there is something enormously poignant about the manner in which the Tramp and the kid communicate with each other; their emotions and feelings feel pure and real. "
Finally, HBO Home Entertainment is giving Lena Dunham and Judd Apatow's Girls: The Complete Fourth Season a Blu-ray showing. Since its premiere in 2012, Girls has distinguished itself as one of HBO's most controversial series; it's isn't so much the frank language or graphic sexual content (although both have helped make the series watercooler fodder) but rather the four main characters' unrelentingly solipsistic view of the world. Of the four, Zosia Mamet's Shoshanna is probably the least doomed (Shosh began the series like an upspeak-Valley Girl-wannabe and then matured into one of Girls's most rational, pragmatic characters), but then we're looking at a sliding scale of narcissism: do we grind our teeth more at Jemima Kirke's dangerously sociopathic Jessa, Alison Williams' deluded Disney Princess Marnie, or Dunham's perceptive-but-massively entitled Hannah? And Season Four certainly doesn't make that question any easier. Other than Shosh, who's stuck trying to balance a new love interest (a very appealing Jason Ritter) with the promise of an international career, the other three leads are in freefall. Jessa's addict-liar-party-girl continues to burn any and all bridges to genuine human connections, spending much of the season obsessing over a violently unlikable artist (Zachary Quinto); Marnie doubles down on her love for Ebon Moss-Bachrach's insufferable folk singer, with the two churning out some truly asinine music in the process; and Hannah immediately begins squandering the opportunities at her MFA program in Iowa because, mostly, she's convinced she's a better writer than anyone else she knows even though her creative output is spotty at best. In anyone else's hands, this parade of misery and self-satisfaction would be wholly unwatchable (and there are folks who would prefer physical torture to watching episodes of Girls), but you got to give credit to Dunham and Apatow - even when their characters grate, we can still appreciate the honesty of their situations (one glaring example: no substitute teacher at an upscale NYC high-school would be able to behave as Hannah does and still keep her job) and laugh at the human comedy of it all. In many ways, Girls is a strong rebuke to the world posited in programs like Sex and the City. While that Darren Star-created comedy found a certain degree of wish-fulfillment in the lives of its four leads, Girls removes the gloss and exposes all the ennui and regret. It's a savage criticism of the millennial generation. Points, too, for how generous the show ultimately is. For a show called Girls, Dunham and Apatow give equal opportunities to their adult and male characters, whether we're following the increasingly squirm-inducing exploits of Hannah's parents (Becky Ann Baker and Peter Scolari) or following the travails of Shosh's ex-boyfriend Ray (Alex Karpovsky) or Hannah's brilliantly odd on-again-off-again lover Adam (Adam Driver, whose time is limited on this series, I'd wager). For some, essential viewing. For others, beware.