For the week of November 7th, Disney/Buena Vista Home Entertainment is bringing the first season of Netflix's hit Daredevil to Blu-ray. This dark superhero drama helped solidify the importance of Marvel's television division in a big way; sure, Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. got the bigger rollout, but Daredevil a) connected with viewers and b) reestablished the titular character as a viable creative force. One cannot overstate that latter characteristic, given the P.R. damage Daredevil suffered in the wake of Mark Steven Johnson and Ben Affleck's 2003 comic adaptation. Ironically, Netflix's Daredevil succeeded, in large part, by focusing on another important figure in the Daredevil universe: fearsome NYC crime lord Wilson Fisk (Vincent D'Onofrio). In the series canon, Fisk becomes Daredevil's iconic enemy The Kingpin, but Season 1 finds Fisk as he begins to establish his stranglehold over Hell's Kitchen, and as with all origin stories, what we discover is the character's fundamental humanity. Fisk does some horrible things over the course of the season (including a car-door beating that you can't unsee), but D'Onofrio never lets us forget the wounded soul behind the menace. Here's a person who, in the season's best episode, we see imprisoned in a lifetime of abuse and neglect, so he responds by building up his own defenses in the most brutal way possible. That's the key to Fisk, I think - in his mind, everything he does is for the most altruistic purposes. He wants to keep New Yorkers from feeling the same pain he did, except he's too damaged to see the human cost he accrues on a daily basis. It's a great performance, and considering I've barely mentioned the main character of the show, it should be clear how much he overtakes the narrative. And frankly, that's not a bad thing. Everything else about the show is fine, whether it's Charlie Cox's tortured Daredevil or Elden Henson's Joss Whedon-esque sidekick Foggy, and sometimes the fight scenes achieve something more than that (the single-take hallway brawl is a stunner). But D'Onofrio is exceptional. Here's hoping for more of him in Season Three.
Warner and New Line are offering a series set of Brett Ratner's Rush Hour Trilogy. It's become very much in vogue to trash these action-comedies; whether you want to bash the way the Jackie Chan-Chris Tucker shtick calcifies over two increasingly labored sequels, or the uncomfortable cultural politics at work throughout, or Ratner's inability to evolve as anything more than a peddler of glossy studio entertainments, you can pretty much pick your critical poison. However, two facts remain. 1) While I might have trouble with Rush Hours 2 & 3, even I can't deny the professionalism on display. At their most uninspired, the Rush Hours work as passable Sunday afternoon adventures. 2) If we're talking about the buddy-comedy genre, the first Rush Hour might be as good as The Nice Guys or the first Lethal Weapon. And like those films, it's the central partnership that elevates the picture. Rush Hour's main narrative might be perfunctory - an LAPD cop (Tucker) has to team up with a Hong Kong detective (Chan) after the daughter of the Chinese consulate's daughter goes missing in Los Angeles - but ultimately, it's just a delivery system to throw Tucker and Chan together. There was a time when Tucker was one of the freshest, most unpredictable comic minds around, and he does a great job of adhering to the film's PG-13 dynamic without dulling his edge (I'm reminded of the similar magic Jack Black pulled off in Richard Linklater's great School of Rock). Plus, just because Tucker is playing the comic wild card (dancing like Michael Jackson after kicking off a fiery explosion is kinda his thing) doesn't mean he's ineffectual as a cop: his...unorthodox street connections (sharing certain recreational habits with criminals before they became, say, medically legal) help advance the search for the consulate's daughter. And Chan plays off him so beautifully. Let's face it - the stunts that Chan performs here aren't a third as stunning as anything in his Hong Kong career, but we don't care because he's such a lovely, understated foil for Tucker. He goes quiet when Tucker goes loud, scoring more laughs through his Keaton-esque impassivity. These two men sell the hell out of a lot of rote formula, including an obligatory "mismatched partners learn to respect one another" ending that feels earned and honest and genuine. Just because Rush Hour helped kick off a new set of clichés doesn't mean they were always clichés.
From Lionsgate comes the period drama Indignation. Based on Philip Roth's acclaimed 2008, Indignation follows the emotional awakening of young Marcus (Logan Lerman) as he struggles to adapt to college life in 1950s America. Marcus is already subject to the casual anti-Semitism of the culture, but Roth and writer/director James Schamus are far more interested in conveying his struggles through his relationships with two figures: his school's conservative dean (Tracy Letts) and a beguiling young woman (Sarah Gadon) whose sexual interest in Marcus proves more unsettling than his own social awakening. My biggest issue with Indignation may be, in fact, its restraint. Now, Schamus is being faithful to Roth. Unlike Robert Benton's stale film adaptation of Roth's The Human Stain, Schamus isn't tamping down Roth's exhilarating/disturbing creative passions; on the page, the slim Indignation has the spare intensity of a fable, and Schamus maintains that quality, particularly in a blistering, twenty-minute argument between Lerman and Letts that unfolds like a great one-act play. But there's a difference between restraint and sedate, and much of the time, Indignation struggles to move past that latter option. I suspect that it might be Schamus' relative inexperience. While he's already achieved a measure of success as a producer and screenwriter (of The Ice Storm, Ride with the Devil, and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, among others), Schamus makes his full-length directorial debut here, and you can sense his control, his need to get it right. Nothing's out of place, and that's the problem - even his old creative partner Ang Lee would have taken some risks (albeit calculated ones), and I wonder how Lee might have sublimated these characters' deep repression and yearning into something more cinematically palpable. Still, despite the film's sterility, it grabs you: maybe the best compliment I can offer is that I haven't been able to stop thinking about Indignation in the months since I first saw it.
"The film...begins with a typical Rothian device of an all knowing narrator describing the vagaries of chance which bring individuals to their death, narration which accompanies a scene in the Korean War where it appears a Korean soldier meets his fate. A brief vignette before that opening sequence has introduced an elderly woman in a retirement home, seemingly in contemporary times, and the fact that this scene documents the distribution of various pills to the residents may suggest (at least subliminally) one of Roth's central theses in many of his works—the attempts by whatever powers that be to regiment the lives of everyday people... Schamus therefore comes to his directorial duties perhaps better prepared than other supposed neophytes, and he invests Indignation with both a really authentic feel for time and place, but also a superb understanding of Roth's often quixotic and conflicted characters. While Gadon's Olivia is perhaps a bit of a cipher, one whose sudden outbursts of florid language don't always ring true (Roth's facility with language can make for a difficult translation into film dialogue), Lerman's Marcus, the soul of the film, is particularly well conceived and realized. The supporting cast is also aces, and I wouldn't be surprised to see theater icon Letts among the Best Supporting Actor nominees when next year's Academy Award contenders are announced."
Finally, Sony Pictures Home Entertainment has a new, restored edition of Martin Scorsese's 1976 classic Taxi Driver. One can (and probably should) make the case for Scorsese as the Great American Director; no one has plumbed the moral, spiritual, and historical depths of the American character as viscerally as Scorsese has, so it's saying something that in a career of masterpieces and near-masterpieces, Taxi Driver might be his finest feature. If nothing else, it's certainly his scariest. Scorsese's title character, Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro, in what might be his career-best performance), roams the streets of New York at night, unable to sleep, unable to process his misanthropy towards the city dwellers. Scorsese has always been the most subjective of American filmmakers, and that trait brings us unbearably close to Travis - we're in the driver's seat to his racism, sexual dysfunction, and barely repressed violence, with almost no objective distance from his mania (I say "almost" because we do get a few cutaways to a very young Albert Brooks, improvising his way through the film's most overtly comedic scenes, and as nice as it is to relieve the tension, these beats do detract from the film's raw impact). Furthermore, given that Travis lacks the emotional register capable of dealing with his problems, his responses to the world evince a primal disconnect. Travis falls hard for a pretty campaign worker (Cybil Shepherd); he takes her on a date to a porno movie. She dumps him; he buys a whole bunch of guns and starts fantasizing about killing the candidate she's working for. He meets a teenaged prostitute (Jodie Foster, in a heartbreakingly natural turn); he decides to "liberate" her from her profession in the most brutal way possible. Now, that description makes Taxi Driver seem more plot-driven than it actually is. Much of the film unfolds in the in-between moments: Travis trying (and failing) to connect with his fellow cab drivers (personified by an affably useless Peter Boyle), Travis watching American Bandstand with an almost psychotic remove, Travis' horrifying conversation with an unhinged fare (Scorsese himself, stealing the film in one scene), or, more iconically, his mirror conversation with himself, his "Well, I'm the only one here" ironically encapsulating his complete and total isolation. But Scorsese never lessens the pressure, giving Travis' build to violence the inescapable progression of a nightmare. The imagery in the last ten minutes still retains an awful, gruesome power that's pretty much unequalled in all of American cinema. Cinema exists for movies like Taxi Driver.