For the week of May 2nd, Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment is bringing David O. Russell's family dramedy Joy to Blu-ray. The third collaboration between filmmaker David O. Russell and actress Jennifer Lawrence (after Silver Linings Playbook and American Hustle), Joy presents a heavily fictionalized take on the life of Joy Mangano, the QVC star who made her fortune on such inventions as the Miracle Mop and the Huggable Hangers. You might expect Joy to focus on the creative process, and it does, to a degree, but Russell is more interested in the personal hurdles blocking Lawrence's Joy on the way to success, including her catastrophically unstable home life (vide Robert De Niro as her monstrously needy father and Virginia Madsen as her agoraphobic mother), her sweet-but-unambitious ex-husband (Édgar Ramírez), and the various swindlers and vultures looking to steal her glory. That said, I don't understand what's going on with this film. It looks like a David O. Russell movie; DP Linus Sandgren brings the same free-flowing, controlled spontaneity he lent American Hustle (albeit in a boxier 1.85:1 frame as opposed to American Hustle's 2.39:1 widescreen). It sounds like a David O. Russell movie - the arguments that Joy spirals into and out of with her beyond-dysfunctional family seem like Noo Yawk-inflected outtakes from The Fighter. And it features many returning stars from the David O. Russell Company, with Silver Linings Playbook and American Hustle veterans Lawrence De Niro, and Bradley Cooper (who shows up for a small-but-crucial appearance as a QVC executive). Yet at its best, Joy plays like the work of a committed-but-not-terribly talented David O. Russell impersonator: all the notes are there, but the pitch and volume are all wrong. Outside of Lawrence's charismatic lead performance (but as with Silver Linings Playbook, she's still way too young for the part), nothing about the movie connects. The family arguments are too shrill (on one hand, I guess I should be thankful that De Niro only exerts any effort anymore when he's working for Russell, but on the other, man, is he obnoxious here), the drama feels muted (especially when you compare Joy to American Hustle or the comparatively light-weight Silver Linings Playbook), and the movie ends just when it starts getting interesting. Joy is at its best and most exciting when its title character is trying to negotiate the waters of sudden fame and media exposure, but Russell relegates that material to the third act when it should comprise the entire movie. That said, I have a theory, and it's one that justifies (if not fully absolves) the mess on display here. Beginning with The Fighter in 2010, Russell has been increasingly reliant on finding the end result during the editing process. He creates chaos on the set and then discovers the narrative, and in fairness, it's that freewheeling approach that gives his works their unpredictable spark. However, the amount of Russell's editors has increased by one on every post-Fighter picture. Pamela Martin edited The Fighter, but then Jay Cassidy and Crispin Struthers handled Silver Linings Playbook, only to be joined by Alan Baumgarten on American Hustle, with Cassidy, Baumgarten, and Russell newbies Tom Cross & Christopher Tellefsen reporting for duty (and setting Russell's number-of-editors-record at four) during Joy's post-production. Certainly using many editors can offer filmmakers a variety of choices and perspectives, but as anyone familiar with Terrence Malick's later work can attest, the lack of a clear editorial vision can obfuscate the slightest semblance of narrative coherence. That latter condition plagues Joy more than anything else. Even when individual scenes work (and many do) they never add up to anything significant, and you see the movie straining to match tonally different styles - it's a kitchen-sink drama! it's a stylized melodrama! it's a show-business comedy - along the same narrative through-line, and dollars to donuts says that Russell lost sight of the movie in editing (the irony is, there might be a good movie there somewhere, buried amongst all the footage Russell shoots). I think he's in the same place he was right after he released 2004's I Heart Huckabees, and he needs to do the same thing that righted his commercial course as he did back after the disastrous reception of that underrated comedy: stop, take a breath, and simplify. At a certain point, controlled chaos is still chaos.
This week also hosts a number of catalog titles, the most notable of which is another Fox release: the 1996 box-office smash Independence Day. In the annals of blockbuster cinema, Independence Day merits special attention. If Jaws and Star Wars helped define the genre, then Independence Day made it an event. Given the film's title and subject matter, perhaps its impact was inevitable, but I'm convinced that Independence Day had a little more going for it, that its quality (really!) was responsible for cementing the idea that a movie-release date could be as grandiose as any national holiday. The setup might look like a mix of sci-fi serials and grand-scale disaster movies - we follow a large, diverse group of survivors reeling from a global alien attack - but the execution still feels fresh, thanks to (and I can't believe I'm writing this) director Roland Emmerich's masterful control of tone. By my count, Emmerich has tried to work the same magic at least three more times, to ever-diminishing results (Godzilla, The Day After Tomorrow, and 2012), but here he nails this ineffable mix of deeply silly and deeply stirring in a way that is never less than wholly satisfying. On one end of the spectrum: Randy Quaid's alien abductee-turned-alcoholic crop-duster-turned-hero fighter pilot. On the other: Bill Pullman's charismatically square President, who takes the film's biggest potential groaner (a rally-the-troops-at-the-last-minute speech) and makes it seem more iconic than the Gettysburg Freakin' Address. And somewhere in the middle: Jeff Goldblum and Will Smith's resident tech expert and ace pilot, respectively, both of whom know exactly how to walk between the tonal poles Emmerich is using. In some ways, this is the most Goldblum-y of all the great Jeff Goldblum performances (his rapport with Judd Hirsch's mensch-y dad is one or two degrees away from being a full-fledged Portlandia sketch), yet it's his very tics and quirks that make him such an engaging performer, so we end up taking him seriously on the front line of the human resistance. Smith, by comparison, needs no help in seeming like an action hero - lest we forget, Bad Boys had already demolished his goofball Fresh Prince image two years before Independence Day - which means he's a great anchor for the many Top Gun-lite dogfights, but his Steven Hiller is not a stone-faced badass. Smith and Goldblum spend the whole movie unofficially competing for the best one-liners, and when they become an unlikely buddy pairing in the third act, the movie kicks into another gear: we could watch a whole movie of the two riffing in the face of certain death (apparently, both actors improvised much of their dialogue during the scenes where they commandeer an alien craft, and the movie is better for it). It's that focus on character that also puts Independence Day in the same caliber as Jaws and Star Wars. Unlike most multi-million-dollar blockbusters, which force actors into unremarkable types, Independence Day traffics in character, whether we're talking about anyone I've mentioned above or the two dozen-or-so other important characters surrounding them, and that emphasis on people makes all the difference. Sure, the action scenes are exciting, and yeah, it's fun to watch Emmerich and co-writer/producer Dean Devlin's jukebox approach to homaging other important action-sci-fi touchstones (off the top of my head: Top Gun, The War of the Worlds, The Poseidon Adventure, Alien, and The Right Stuff are very important to this one). But at the day, we kinda care about the people running and blasting their way through the blockbuster fodder. Would that more grand-scale spectacle take that into consideration.
From Warner Archive comes Mike Nichols' landmark directorial debut Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? This 1966 adaptation of Edward Albee's Tony-Award winner didn't just announce this arrival of a major filmmaker; it also demolished the last vestiges of the Production Code. Since the 1930s, the Production Code had been the arbiter of what was moral and "decent" enough to make it on-screen, yet here was Virginia Woolf, a charged, sexually explicit (for 1966) drama that turned an otherwise mundane party that a frustrated college professor (Richard Burton) and his wife (Elizabeth Taylor) host for a new biology instructor (George Segal), and his timid spouse (Sandy Dennis) into a fierce psychological tête-à-tête. Today, much of this content would be acceptable on prime-time television - here's a play where characters use their constant drunkenness as an excuse to highlight the others' physical and mental shortcomings or to crassly entertain the idea of "wife-swapping" - but considering that the social climate of the mid-1960s was still locked into certain 1950s stereotypes of normalcy, this frankness would have had the cultural impact of an atomic bomb. Still, if all Virginia Woolf had were shock value, it would be The Moon Is Blue - provocative, but ultimately meaningless. For all its humor and daring, Albee's play has the force of great drama. Ultimately, it's a tragedy about two people - Burton and Taylor's George and Martha - who are trying to brutalize one another into deeper love. Sure, they're damaged and broken, but the more they snipe and lie and torment each other, the more we see how desperate they are to connect to each other, that their provocations aim to smash their respective veneers of dissolution and regret. In that regard, Burton and Taylor are practically typecast. Their on-again, off-again relationship was one of Hollywood's most fraught and fascination celebrity unions, and Nichols gives them a space to examine their own insecurities and issues while assaying the heart of George and Martha - Taylor, in particular, gives a bold, vanity-free performance that is as remarkable for its shrillness as it is for its human tenderness. Burton and Taylor dominate the screen so much that Segal and Dennis barely register; they certainly serve their purpose as the unwittingly spectators to George and Martha's showdown, but I'm not quite sure either one deserved the Oscar nominations they received (or, in Dennis' case, the Best Supporting Actress Oscar she won). No, if anyone deserves standout mention, it's Nichols, who at thirty-five directs with the confidence of an old master. He manages such a tonal balancing act - that we can go from something as raucous as the roadhouse sequence to the painful stillness of the last scene is nothing short of miraculous. With Virginia Woolf, he announced himself as a major filmmaker, and he spent the rest of his career bearing out that fact.
Michael Reuben wrote that Burton and Taylor "deliver career-best performances. Burton speaks George's literate dialogue with naturalistic ease, free of the thespian mannerisms on which he would fall back later in his career, as his own drinking sapped his gifts. Taylor's Martha was (and remains) a revelation. Gaining thirty pounds, aging herself with hair and makeup, and shedding every trace of the glamorous movie star who dominated the era's gossip columns, the actress conveys Martha's anger, her cruelty and her desperate need for love with an emotional transparency that is both terrifying and painful. When George accuses her of being a monster, Martha famously replies: "I'm loud and I'm vulgar, and I wear the pants in the house because somebody's got to, but I am not a monster. I'm not!" - and Taylor's delivery is so fraught that she conveys both Martha's furious denial and her frightened suspicion that a monster is exactly what she's become (Nichols has said that, no matter how good Taylor's performance seemed on the set, when he saw it on film, it was ten times better)."
Finally, Warner Home Entertainment is offering a double feature from their favorite son Clint Eastwood: the 1984 buddy-cop actioner City Heat and the 1999 thriller True Crime. Both aren't top-tier Eastwood, but they do have their pleasures, particularly True Crime. True Crime is inveterate melodrama - Eastwood plays a boozy, disgraced journalist (is there any other kind in B-movie thrillers?) who races to exonerate Isaiah Washington's saintly, wrongly accused death-row inmate (again, is there any other kind in B-movies?) with only hours to spare - but like Space Cowboys or Firefox, Eastwood is often more fun when he's lending his considerable talents to weightless pulp. You never sense him straining for effort, and he's content to let the story mechanics and character details take precedence over any prestige cred. What separates True Crime from, say, his boring, predictable serial-killer drama Blood Work (which is so low-key as to be declared legally dead) is that you can tell Eastwood's having fun; he loves playing the rake-in-need-of-redemption, and better still, he loves sparring with the likes of Washington, Mary McCormick, Frances Fisher, Diane Venora, Bernard Hill, Lisa Gay Hamilton, and - most of all - the ever-snarky Denis Leary & James Woods. By that logic, City Heat should be more enjoyable than it is - his co-star Burt Reynolds was at the height of his magnetism, and theoretically, Reynolds' wiseass insouciance should spark off Eastwood's deadpan implacability. However, the movie is mostly a wash, a rote caper about two mismatched lawmen looking to battle the gangsters in control of Prohibition-era Kansas City. However, the movie never gels. It started out as a farce for director Blake Edwards, then got a little darker (but not too much so - think something on par with George Roy Hill's great The Sting) once Richard Benjamin took over, and then the presence of action veterans like Eastwood and Reynolds brought in the requisite action beats, but none of these elements work that well together. It certainly looks good, and Eastwood is really charming (he seems as confident and relaxed as he's ever been, especially when compared to all the flailing around him), but chalk this one up in the misfire category. Ultimately, City Heat is mostly of note for being the film that began Reynolds' slow, unfortunate box-office decline. Much as Reynolds of late likes to blame his Cosmopolitan centerfold spread for torpedoing his career, he posed for Cosmo in 1972 - he'd yet to appear in massive hits like The Longest Yard and Smokey and the Bandit that were responsible for making him the biggest star in the world. No, it was City Heat that did it: Reynolds suffered a terrible on-set injury during production and became dependent on painkillers as a result, and it took him a long time to regain any sort of equilibrium. And now you know the rest of the story.
Of True Crime, Michael Reuben had a different opinion, noting that it's "the kind of film where a reporter can walk into a room filled with books, papers and bric-a-brac, and the obscure but essential scrap of information he needs just happens to be on a notepad sitting on the floor in plain view. A well-crafted thriller can skate by on such shortcuts when the story is hurtling forward at top speed, but True Crime has been paced as a character study rather than a thriller. It spends an inordinate amount of time with Everett, his work conflicts, and his family troubles, to the point where the film seems more interested in redeeming the reporter (if that's at all possible) than in averting a miscarriage of justice." Reuben was even less kind to City Heat, writing that "time has not been kind to this self-conscious mix of buddy cop comedy and gangster drama, which wobbles uncertainly between parody and period evocation. Modern CGI fests are routinely criticized for bombarding the senses with excess commotion to compensate for dramatic inertia, but City Heat confirms that it was possible to accomplish the same thing without a single computer in sight."