For the week of February 22nd, Universal Studios Home Entertainment is releasing Tom McCarthy's acclaimed docudrama Spotlight on Blu-ray. Prior to this film, McCarthy the filmmaker was better known for crafting intimate human dramedies like Win Win or The Visitor (the less said about his beyond-misguided The Cobbler, the better), but Spotlight brought him a whole new level of exposure. Since its lauded showcase at the Toronto Film Festival, Spotlight has parlayed its critical plaudits into numerous year-end accolades, including six Oscar nominations (for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay, Best Film Editing, Best Supporting Actor, and Best Supporting Actress). What's nice is that McCarthy hasn't really modulated his quiet, well observed approach to moviemaking at all - in relaying the story of how four Boston Globe journalists (Michael Keaton, Mark Ruffalo, Rachel McAdams, and Brian d'Arcy James) broke a city-wide molestation scandal within the Catholic Church, McCarthy eschews big moments and high drama for what critic Manny Farber might have called "termite art." The focus is on procedure rather than spectacle; McCarthy burrows into the team's efforts at getting the truth, hoping that we'll find compelling the accretion of data, and we do. For one, the move downplays the inherent seediness of the church's indiscretions. While McCarthy doesn't cheapen the genuine violation that many Boston-era children faced (McCarthy intercuts two interviews detailing horrific molestation incidents - one conducted by Ruffalo's fiery truth-seeker, the other conducted by McAdams' dogged journeyman - to heartbreaking effect), the heart of the film lies with his reporters, who try to do their best even when pushing back against Boston's ingrained tribal attitudes towards the role of the Catholic Church. As such, Spotlight feels like a true ensemble piece. Sure, Ruffalo and McAdams might have picked up the big acting nods, but they're no more important that Keaton's principled Spotlight editor, Liev Schreiber's new head editor (and Boston outsider), or Stanley Tucci's eccentric lawyer (okay, maybe Tucci steals more scenes than his cohorts, but that's just his style). The picture is a very sober, accomplished piece of work, and one that certainly wouldn't disgrace the Academy if it went home a big winner on the 28th. But the Best Film of the Year? That, I'm not so sure. In a lot of ways, Spotlight reminds me of something like The King's Speech in that its restraint and relative lack of filmmaking brio ultimately never engage past an intellectual level. As engaging as Spotlight is, it's hard to work up much passion for it, especially when placed next to more immediately absorbing Oscar nominees like Mad Max: Fury Road or Bridge of Spies. Heck, even in the annals of great newspaper dramas, Spotlight ranks at that B+/A- tier: you watch Alan J. Pakula's All the President's Men or David Fincher's Zodiac, and you'll get a sense of newspaper procedurals that also never want for cinematic virtuosity. Spotlight, by comparison, is like a very good HBO movie. Nothing wrong with that. Nothing at all.
In his Blu-ray review, Martin Liebman wrote that the film's "dramatic integrity is never sacrificed in light of its difficult subject, nor is its watchability ever interrupted by a less-than-honest approach. The film manages a delicate balance between tedium of the investigative process, the challenge of absorbing and sorting through the scandal's details, and holding not a traditional 'entertainment value' but rather a connection with the audience that engages and absorbs the viewer rather than simply presents the story in all of its raw ugliness. Those are virtues that come thanks to every award for which the movie was nominated. It's thanks to the engaging screenplay that elevates the material above procedure, that paints the characters vividly, that ensures a flow of core story building highlight segments and a more personal response to the evolving narrative, as experienced both through the characters' eyes and the audience's experiences alongside them. It's thanks to a cast that doesn't simply repeat lines in costume but that approaches the material as if it means something to them, as if they understand not simply what they're saying and doing but why they are saying and doing it. The sense of personal connection, absorption into the investigation, team camaraderie, and legitimate acting skill in recreating the people they portray - not simply a basic look or cadence but a tangible emotional resonance and involvement - is astounding. That's thanks to editing that keeps it fresh and flowing, provocative and personal, watchable and engrossing. And it's thanks to a director whose skill may not be obvious in visual manipulations and machinations but who frames the story with a simple precision that only displays the heavy lifting, not carries any of the burden it need not heft."
From Pixar and Walt Disney Home Entertainment comes the animated adventure The Good Dinosaur. For what it is, The Good Dinosaur works - it's a silly, inconsequential tale that presupposes, maybe an asteroid didn't wipe out the dinosaurs? The decision allows director Peter Sohn and his screenwriter Meg LeFauve to construct a buddy-comedy, of sorts, between a meek Apatosaurus (Raymond Ochoa) and a feral caveboy (Jack Bright) as they try to survive on a prehistoric Planet Earth. The dynamic between dinosaur and man is predictably heartwarming, and the Pixar team works its usual digital magic: The Good Dinosaur is one of the studio's most visually stunning features, presenting one gorgeous widescreen image after another (see this, if you can, on the biggest screen possible). Plus, Sohn and LeFauve hit one genuinely inspired note - the dinosaurs are all far more human than the preverbal cavepeople, a decision that allows for terrific vocal turns from the likes of Jeffrey Wright, Frances McDormand, Anna Paquin, Steve Zahn, and especially Sam Elliott, who gets to play the most Sam Elliott of all Tyrannosauruses. However, outside the visual design, nothing about The Good Dinosaur resonates that deeply, which is surprising, considering Pixar was working on the picture for over six years. At various points in the film's development, different producers, directors, and writers were hired and fired; a new vocal cast re-recorded over the efforts of the original cast (which included people like John Lithgow, Neil Patrick Harris, and Bill Hader); and the whole narrative was rewritten and reshot. You can sense glimmers of the rocky pre-production/production issues in the film's relative leanness, the way The Good Dinosaur hustles past key character and story beats (many of which now seem lifted directly from The Land Before Time) so we might not notice the loose ends. It certainly seems silly to suggest Pixar is on anything resembling a downward spiral. After all, this is the same studio that, less than a year ago, released the masterful Inside Out, which remains one of Pixar's finest hours. But not too long ago, the Pixar imprimatur was as reliable an assurance of quality as, I dunno, the placement of "A Wes Anderson Film" before the titles, and films like The Good Dinosaur or Monsters University or Brave chip away, if only a little, at that otherwise unassailable reputation. The Good Dinosaur works in the moment, but you always notice the seams, see it working a little too hard.
Martin Liebman wrote that the film "offers an interesting contextualization that depicts the dinosaurs as more human-like than the human who features in the movie. Spot never speaks, he scuffles about on all fours, favors his nose as much as his eyes, and lives more on instinct than reason, though he certainly shows a broader emotional range than the character's otherwise animalistic qualities would suggest. That not only gives the movie a fun topsy-turvy look at the world but it also helps to reinforce core themes that center around the ideas of family, friendship, shared experiences, responsibility, understanding, and forgiveness, and the cruder ways of the world like life, death, and all of the external challenges that define that journey. And the film doesn't sugarcoat much of any of it, either. It pushes emotional boundaries particularly hard, and some of its perilous action scenes could be defined as 'scary,' but the film's ability to contextualize it all in the relationship - the way the characters see and experience the world, even with their disparate backgrounds but shared experiences a- is what makes it work so well, all the while remaining bright and colorful and fun enough for the kids."
Warner Archive has two essential titles this week: the Bogie-and-Bacall thrillers The Big Sleep and Key Largo. Well, make that one essential and one mostly essential; Key Largo, while a lot of fun, is the lesser of the two. It's got a lot going for it: Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall give committed, intense performances (and all the better to compete with the likes of Lionel Barrymore and Edward G. Robinson, both of whom practically devour the scenery); John Huston contributes some predictably taut direction, and the ending remains impressively tough and fatalistic (although not as out-and-out despairing as the one capping Huston's 1950 masterpiece The Asphalt Jungle). However, Key Largo never quite loses its inherent staginess (it's an adaptation of Maxwell Anderson's 1939 play of the same name and feels it, even though it's a hair more cinematic than the 1936 Bogart-Bette Davis vehicle The Petrified Forest), both in some hokey studio work and in some of the Acting in the supporting cast (Claire Trevor, I'm looking at you), and so it never stands near the best Bogart-Huston collaborations (The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, this is not). Still, if you're a fan of any of the aforementioned names, you've probably seen Key Largo more times than you've had hot meals. And then there's The Big Sleep. Director Howard Hawks's supremely confident adaptation of Raymond Chandler's iconic novel stars Bogart as Philip Marlowe, a laconic P.I. whose investigation into the wild younger daughter (Martha Vickers) of dying millionaire General Sternwood (Charles Waldron) throws him into an L.A. crime saga that includes teenage nymphomaniacs, trigger-happy gunsels, jaded assassins, gambling kingpins, and pornographers galore, not to mention the sultry advances of Sternwood's eldest daughter Vivian (Bacall). That last point is more prominent if we're talking about the 1946 re-issue; Hawks first delivered a cut in 1945 that was more faithful to Chandler's text, which mostly cast Bogart and Bacall's characters as adversaries, except the studio wanted something else to capitalize on the pair's To Have and Have Not dynamic, so they ordered Hawks to downplay their animosity and accentuate their genuine sexual chemistry. The downside: the reshot/additional material made an already-incomprehensible story all the more opaque (Chandler famously didn't know who was responsible for one murder in his own novel), with vital connective tissue ditched in favor of Bogart-Bacall banter. The upside: Said Banter is so good that the lapses in coherence just don't matter. Screenwriters William Faulkner, Leigh Brackett, and Jules Furthman give these scenes screwball flair, generating one zinger of a line after another (this is one of the most quotable film noirs ever made), and Bogart and Bacall do the rest, their palpable flirtations (the sparks of which also ignited off-screen, if you catch my drift) turning a fun-but-rote mystery into something resembling a witty comedy of manners. The Blu-ray preserves the 1946 version and the 1945 version, and together, they make for a fascinating study in contrasts.
Finally, the Criterion Collection is giving a new HD upgrade to Mike Nichols' landmark film The Graduate. It is not hyperbole to state that The Graduate changed the face of American comedy; if the premise - young college graduate Benjamin Braddock (Dustin Hoffman, in a legitimately starmaking performance) becomes sexually involved with Mrs. Robinson (Anne Bancroft, stunning), the lonely wife of one of his parents' best friends - seems like the stuff of simple sex farce, Nichols' execution is anything but. Nichols lets much of the action, as it were, play out in stunning long takes, with Robert Surtees' widescreen camera lending the proceedings visual elegance and scope. And then there's Sam O'Steen's editing: discordant, free-associative, as comfortable in montage as in more deliberate passages. When you combine all those elements alongside Simon and Garfunkel's still iconic songs, you end up with a picture that memorializes the 1960s even as it's rewriting and advancing the nature of film grammar. I mean, how many comedies are this technically well made? Manhattan? Birdman? Shaun of the Dead. The list is not long. Still, as important as The Graduate is, I can't help but find it more than a little dated. Not in its music or filmmaking: those two elements are just as bracing now as they were in 1967. Rather, our sympathies don't necessarily fall with Benjamin. Ben was a precursor for the 1960s counter-culture - upper-class, intelligent, and wholly disaffected from society - and he seemed genuinely transgressive in his attempts to strive for something else. But in 2016, not only is that type of character far more commonplace (thank you Johns Cheever and Updike, thank you Don Draper, thank you Peggy Lee), but also it's also less interesting in this Nichols-Hoffman-Henry iteration. I'm reminded of Roger Ebert's 1997 review where he "s[aw] Benjamin not as an admirable rebel, but as a self-centered creep whose put-downs of adults are tiresome." It's easy to forget that after the film's brilliant opening act (Nichols' finest hour as a director runs from Benjamin's arrival back home through Mrs. Robinson's aborted first seduction attempt), Benjamin spends much of his time antagonizing Elaine in ways that aren't funny or insightful (his pursuit of her at her Northern California college feels like the setup for a Roman Polanski thriller), and at the expense of Bancroft's fascinating Mrs. Robinson, who enters the film as its most intriguing character and leaves it a cartoonish shrew. A worthwhile film, to be sure. But the commentary with Mike Nichols and Steven Soderbergh is better.
In his Blu-ray review, Svet Atanasov wrote that the film "is a groundbreaking American film that has the identity of a French New Wave film. It is structured as a casual comedy about a young man who becomes involved with an older woman and then falls in love with her daughter, but it is actually a deadly serious film about a society with outdated and compromised values and morals. Director Nichols could not have selected a better actor to play the young and claustrophobic Ben - Hoffman is absolutely superb as the graduate. He looks remarkably ordinary, unpolished and naive. He wants to be different but does not know how - and the only way to figure out how is by befriending someone older than him who belongs to the world that terrifies him...At the time [1967] large-scale anti-war protests and race riots are held in big cities all across America. A year later, French students begin rioting in Paris, the Soviet Army invades the former Czechoslovakia and puts an end to the Prague Spring, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert Kennedy are assassinated - the world is changing. There is something new, something different in the air, and Ben, the young man in The Graduate who symbolizes an entire generation of Americans, senses it."