For the week of February 29th, Warner Home Entertainment is bringing Creed to Blu-ray. As boxing movies go, this one is as conventional as they get: we've got an unproven-but-dogged underdog (Michael B. Jordan) looking to prove himself in the ring; his grizzled trainer (Sylvester Stallone) trying to curb the fighter's self-destructive impulses and nurture his raw potential; and the sensitive young woman (Tessa Thompson) who cares for the fighter emotionally while recoiling at some of the sport's more savage impulses. It's a formula as hardy as, well, the history of cinema, running through pictures like Wallace Beery's 1931 classic The Champ, John Avildsen and Clint Eastwood's Academy Award-winning melodramas Rocky and Million Dollar Baby, respectively, and even the recent Jake Gyllenhaal vehicle Southpaw. But what places Creed more on the Million Dollar Baby end of the equation rather than the Southpaw side is a clear, sure sense of human behavior and drama. Credit director/co-writer Ryan Coogler for this strength. His last film, the bruising docudrama Fruitvale Station (which also starred Jordan), proved an uncomfortably topical look at racial injustice in post 9-11 America, and while Creed is far more conventional - from top to toe, this film's a real crowd-pleaser - he isn't making the new film in a commercial vacuum. He gives the film's Philadelphia locales a lived-in, unfussy realism (all the city environments look like real places as opposed to studio backlots), and he's also quick to acknowledge the genuine social tensions powering his characters. Creed is a film of divides - of rich and poor, of young and old, and of black and white - and the formula seems much less treacly because it's grounded in human behavior. Jordan's fighter isn't just looking to make his fortune: he's actively trying to prove his value as a young black man in 2015 America, and his physical prowess proves to be only one facet of this goal. However, just as interesting is the film's canny reimagining of an iconic Hollywood franchise. Despite its focus on character, Creed is a sequel, through and through, the seventh in the Rocky series, with Stallone reprising his role as Rocky and Jordan playing the illegitimate son of Rocky's late frenemy Apollo Creed. In many ways, it's a straight remake of the 1976 Oscar favorite, only now Jordan is the hungry upstart and Stallone is the wise mentor (he's pretty much playing Mickey!), and their interplay yields a number of rousing fight sequences, not the least of which is a four-minute stunner that unfolds in one long, unbroken take. But part of the reason I can mention the Rocky connection this late in the review and not feel like I'm burying the lede is that for all its genre adherences, Creed also never feels anything but its own journey, one that appropriates the Rocky story for its own thrilling needs. As Adonis Creed, the intemperate, damaged Jordan interacts with the world in a far different manner than Stallone's soft-spoken Rocky, who also takes to the role of trainer with far more tenderness and grace than Mickey showed him. These actors get to play people rather than characters (Stallone, in particular, has never been this good before - how funny that his seventh time at bat with the character would result in his richest, deepest piece of screen acting), and we all benefit. In its own populist, mainstream way, a perfect movie.
Michael Reuben wrote that "Ryan Coogler wasn't even born when Sylvester Stallone first brought Rocky Balboa to the screen, but in Coogler's remarkable Creed, the sophomore writer/director and the aging superstar lock arms across four decades to remind audiences why Rocky has been a cherished icon since he first sprinted up the stone steps to Philadelphia's Museum of Art. At the time, Rocky wanted nothing more than to prove he wasn't 'just another bum from the neighborhood' by surviving twelve rounds in an exhibition boxing match with the world heavyweight champion. Having accomplished the goal, the underdog boxer kept proving his worth to himself and the world, but in Creed he faces a different challenge: that of passing the torch to a younger man in whom Rocky recognizes the same urgent desire to become a champion. That the young man happens to be the son of Rocky's former rival and friend, Apollo Creed, only adds to the sense of destiny knocking. Creed is pervaded by ghosts, and the spirit of Apollo Creed, who died in the ring in Rocky IV, is only the most obvious. The ghosts of Rocky's own past surround him, whether in pictures on the wall at Adrian's Restaurant, in posters of his former self at Mighty Mick's Boxing gym, or even the bronze statue at the top of the Rocky Steps, where tourists pose for photographs. Coogler floods the frame with such images, letting them work both as inspiration to the characters and as a reminder to the audience of the striving spirit that Rocky has represented for generations of viewers. Even as the erstwhile Italian Stallion battles age and ill health, his own past keeps calling him back into the fray. Resigned to having been beaten by time (the only contender, as he says, that is "undefeated"), the old man finds that his skills are still needed, but now in a different capacity, as a coach and father figure to the young fighter in whom he can see both himself and the opponent who first prodded the young Rocky to exceed his circumstances. Creed not only continues the Rocky franchise; it reinvents it with an emotional ferocity not seen since the original film. "
From Lionsgate and A24 comes the Academy Award-nominated drama Room. You'd be hard-pressed to find a 2015 release that could best this one in terms of sheer emotional impact. Director Lenny Abrahamson and screenwriter Emma Donoghue (adapting her own novel) have fashioned the saddest, most wrenching picture of the year, an account of young mother Joy (Brie Larson, who netted a Best Actress nomination) and her five-year-old son Jack (newcomer Jacob Tremblay, who also picked up a Best Supporting Actor nomination) as they try to survive imprisoned in a painfully small cell. Their story is inherently unsavory - at age seventeen, Joy was kidnapped by "Old Nick" (Deadwood's Sean Bridgers), whose frequent sexual abuses of Joy resulted in Jack's conception and birth - but Abrahamson and Donoghue favor restraint over seedy details. In many ways, Room is an action movie in the purest sense of that word. The filmmakers put a premium on strong physical gestures (the minutia of how Joy and Jack stay busy, the simultaneous tedium and horror of their daily routine) so that after only a few closely observed scenes, we grasp the full measure of their life indoors. Furthermore, we see the world from Jack's perspective, which means that whenever Old Nick arrives to violate the uneasy peace Joy has cultivated, we're spared the worst of the details. Still, even when we're literally in the closet with Jack, our sympathies never leave the tortured Joy, who gives Larson her best showcase yet as a leading actress. Larson is so good - moving and raw and unbelievably empathetic - that the film only falters when it shifts focus from her. Spoilers to follow: as harrowing as Jack and Joy's imprisonment is, Abrahamson and Donoghue are just as interested in what happens to the pair after they escape and have to readjust to the outside world. From this point on, it's Tremblay's movie. We process all the new discoveries of the "real world" through his largely untested eyes, and to his credit, he delivers one of the great child performances. But he's also fully a child, and as his on-screen doctor notes, "kids are plastic." All of Jack's confusion about the land outside Room is momentary, and he quickly learns to adapt to the greater scope and freedoms. Joy, however, can't rely on the ignorance of youth anymore. Her homecoming is fraught with misery, unsettled further by the media circus pouncing on her story, the tensions expressed towards (and by) her now-divorced parents (Jane Allen and a wasted William H. Macy), and the psychic unease of trying to reconcile the twenty-four-year-old woman she's become with the seventeen-year-old life she left behind. Joy isn't plastic, yet as emotionally open as Larson is in these scenes, it's right at this moment that Joy recedes into the background of the narrative. We only get fragments of her recovery process even though her struggle is so much more dramatically powerful than Jack's. It's hard to imagine that Abrahamson and Donoghue wanted to sugarcoat this story, considering how unflinching the film's first half is, so maybe it was just an imperfect perspective decision. Ultimately, though, I blame Larson. If she wasn't so good (between this, Short Term 12, and Trainwreck, she's turning into the finest actor of her generation), maybe we wouldn't care as much when Room moves away from her.
Universal Studios Home Entertainment's new release of Legend is one of the week's more frustrating titles, in that it's a mediocre film that absolutely merits your attention. Writer-director Brian Helgeland last brought the Jackie Robinson biopic 42 to the screen, and subject matter aside - 42 is about Robinson, while Legend revolves around the Kray Twins (both played by Tom Hardy), the infamous gangsters who ruled the London underworld in the 1960s - the new film evinces the same weaknesses and strengths as 42. Both films offer a romanticized, candy-colored look at the past that ultimately proves more distracting than engaging; Legend, for example, unfolds as a near-nonstop assault of shootings, stabbings, and beatings, yet we never process the true horror of it because Dick Pope's lensing looks like something from a 1960s Batman comic book. Furthermore, despite Helgeland's clear affinity for dramatizing the past, he can't help but slip into every biopic cliché at his disposal. 42 standardized Robinson's story to the point that we could have been watching Gandhi or Walk the Line or Malcolm X, and Legend adopts the same rise-fall template, which is an even worse fit here because we get no sense of details within the Krays' criminal network (Peter Medek's 1990 feature The Krays is far more calculating and chilling a depiction of the Krays "at work"). That's right: Legend even struggles to satisfy as a crime drama, and considering Helgeland is responsible for scripting two of the finest American crime films of the past twenty - L.A. Confidential and Man on Fire - the quality drop seems all the more precipitous. Still, just as Chadwick Boseman's starmaking performance as Jackie Robinson saved 42 from itself, so does Tom Hardy's dual performance as Reggie and Ronnie Kray justify much of Legend. Legend might be subpar, but no one told Hardy that - this is as revelatory a turn as his work in Bronson or The Drop. Through clear, direct performance choices, he makes Reggie and Ronnie completely distinct from one another, and that definition really lets Hardy play two fully formed characters instead of just one. Reggie's the heartthrob of the pair, and Hardy is so magnetic and charming that you realize what a loss it is that he only seems to specializing in playing the damaged and the grizzled: you watch Reggie seduce the world around him, and you can't help but think of Marlon Brando in On the Waterfront or A Streetcar Named Desire. Ronnie, by comparison, fits far more comfortably into Hardy's ever-growing gallery of rogues and monsters (he'd get along famously with Bane in The Dark Knight Rises or with Fitzgerald in The Revenant, provided they all didn't kill one another first), but Hardy's obvious affinity for the broken means that Ronnie never becomes a cartoon. It's certainly a broader performance - after all, Ronnie is an openly gay brute whose obvious psychological imbalances compound his love of violence - but no less human than Reggie, and Hardy makes sure we never forget the terrifying love that powers all Ronnie's actions. It would not be an understatement to suggest that Hardy is the whole show here, and for that reason alone, Legend merits a viewing.
Still, Legend is a better biopic than Universal's other 2015 biopic: the Academy Award-nominated The Danish Girl. At this point, I think the Academy has a Pavlovian response to anything director Tom Hooper makes: (Hooper + Socially Relevant Topic) X Promising Young Talents = Oscar Gold, apparently. Forget the fact that The Danish Girl is about as conventional and rote as the most stodgy of acclaimed biopics (this film would make for a soporific double-feature with Richard Attenborough's Cry Freedom), or that it isn't even the best film 2015 yielded about the transgender community: that would be Tangerine, which has the benefit of being funnier, formally inventive, and far more progressive/honest in its worldview (plus, Tangerine actually cast transgender actors in the leading roles. What a novel idea!). No, The Danish Girl doesn't work because it's just so tired. One can support the social agenda - the film falls squarely on the side of Eddie Redmayne's Einar Wegener, an artist whose work and life changes forever when he decides to undertake then-experimental sexual reassignment surgery - while nodding off during the actual movie. Hooper brings the same safe, plodding touch he brought to The King's Speech and Les Misérables (it's a movie about revolutionary emotional/physical changes that you could take your grandma to), a touch he then punctures through the bizarre, atonal application of his favorite stylistic tic, a wide fish-eye lens (that also often shuttles the actors either just off-center or at the extreme edge of the frame) that he borrowed from Stanley Kubrick without having the slightest conception of how or why such aesthetics worked for that cinematic master. I'm tired of people elevating this mainstream hack - if he were just cranking out made-for-TV fare for the BBC, I'd be far less offended, but Hooper is not a major filmmaker, Academy be dammed. Yet like Legend, The Danish Girl has one performance that makes it a must-see, although it isn't the performance you might expect. As Gerda, Alicia Vikander cements herself as one of the most exciting contemporary performers. Despite the title, in many ways, the film belongs to Vikander, who provides our conduit into Einar's transformation. We should be a little offended (yet another biopic about the socially oppressed told from the perspective of the far more fortunate) but Vikander is so emotionally open that to the extent that The Danish Girl works, it works because of her. We process Einar's fear and eventual transcendence through Gerda (a big fault of Redmayne's performance - he always keeps us at arm's length) even as Gerda makes palpable the dissolution of a more traditional romantic connection with the person she used to love. Between this and Ex Machina, Vikander had a breakthrough 2015. Now, if only The Danish Girl were better...