For the week of March 13th, Paramount Home Media Distribution is bringing director Denzel Washington's Academy Award-winning Fences to Blu-ray. Playwright August Wilson's original drama stands as one of the contemporary theater's crowning achievements - one could, if one wanted, make the case for it as the twentieth century's greatest American play (it's a close race between it, Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman, and David Mamet's Glengarry Glen Ross) - and it makes sense that Washington would be the person to bring it to the big screen. After all, in 2009 Washington headlined the play's much-lauded stage revival (which won Tonys for Best Play Revival, Best Actor, and Best Actress), and his volcanic stage presence went a long way towards reintroducing audiences to the elemental, devastating power of Wilson's text. To Washington's credit, his film version is often most successful when it hews to what made that earlier stage iteration so good. Wilson does such an expert job of crafting complex characters through nuanced human interactions that Washington the director mostly just stays out of the text's way and lets the words do the work. We learn so much about proud, doomed garbageman Troy Maxson (Washington) just by watching him talk, whether he's shooting the bull with best friend Bono (Stephen McKinley Henderson) or engaged in domestic warfare against his wife Rose (Viola Davis) and son Cory (the relatively inexperienced but very engaging Jovan Adepo). You just don't need fancy aesthetic filigrees when this material is this good, and particularly when it's coming out of the mouths of Henderson and Davis. Henderson's part can seem the most thankless on the page, but the actor brings such weight to it that Bono lingers even when he's not on-screen; in Henderson's hands, Bono starts out as the Greek Chorus before slowly emerging as the heart of the film. And if he's the heart, Davis is the soul. This is one of the most revelatory film performances from this most revelatory of actors. Even if you were lucky enough to see the revival, Davis has completely recalibrated Rose from the inside out. Davis knows the power of a close-up or a well-timed reaction shot, and she builds Rose's character from the sidelines of the picture before dominating its center. If her late-film outburst at Troy doesn't go down as her finest hour, it's only because Davis is capable of topping even the loftiest of heights. However, I'm afraid Washington's Fences isn't the definitive Fences, largely due to his own work as Troy. Minus his work on the melodramatic-but-effective Flight, Washington has largely been phoning it in with one middling action programmer after another - has he ever given a lazier performance than his Magnificent Seven hero? - and on the surface, he seems more engaged as Troy than he has in a long while. It's certainly a committed effort, full of actorly flourishes and bombast, but it rings hollow, and I think I know why. For all the work we see on film, very little of it is new: Washington is just delivering the same performance that he gave on stage, and so there are no new discoveries, no insights to glean. Furthermore, what he did in the theater does not work on camera (it's just too big, too loud, too much), and I'm a little surprised that this most charismatic and charming of movie stars didn't know how to retrofit his work for film. Ultimately, it's a really lazy job in its own right, but it's pitched at just the right decibel levels so viewers will think otherwise.
Martin Liebman wrote that the film "tells the story of an imperfect man living in an imperfect world that has beaten him down and stripped away his will, or ability, to get back up. He puts on an outward façade of knowledge and of confidence gained from his trials and, occasionally, finds the humor in it all, but this is the story of personal deterioration, fear, and an inability to accept all of the good that life's dealt him at the same time. As the film, and as time, progresses, Troy sinks deeper into negativity, holding onto past wrongs while making new mistakes along the way. His friends warn him, his children are scared of him, and his wife grows ever distant despite her best efforts to remain a rock at his side. Troy challenges death itself - he fears it, but knows it looms - literally as he screams from his window on a particularly dark night and metaphorically as his personal barriers increase in size and number. It's a fascinating, if not heartbreaking and emotionally challenging, story. It's remarkably well done, too, insightful and honest, real and relatable, dissolving artificial barriers of time and place and telling a story of life, family, triumphs, tragedies, and self-made destruction that will resonate long after it ends. The film's stage production roots are evident throughout. There are only two primary locations - a postage-stamp sized backyard and a few home interiors - that stage the bulk of the drama, which comes almost completely from conversation and a few character-defining and -evolving actions that result from conversation. The film's opening twenty minutes are remarkable. It's in many ways representative of what the entire film has on offer - sharp dialogue and natural execution thereof - but it's also, in some ways, dissimilar from what the rest of the movie holds. The open is buoyant and cheerful, hinting at Troy's demons but it's only after, as other characters are introduced and his history, flaws, mistakes, and character are fully revealed, that the film takes on its full dramatic shape. Yet no matter the dramatic challenges, the movie proves wildly successful in shaping it with flawless performances all around that elevate the material considerably and bring it the human depth and discovery it deserves. The film grows increasingly hard to watch for its ever-darkening themes, but its entirety is a pleasure considering its remarkable performances and deeply-rooted themes."
Still, I'll acknowledge that, while flawed, Fences is certainly a respectful and watchable piece of work. I cannot attribute those same adjectives to Warner Home Entertainment's terrible melodrama Collateral Beauty. Collateral Beauty is one of those movies where, from the jump, the opening conceit is so improbable that you're unwilling to suspend the necessary disbelief. Will Smith plays a successful ad executive whose daughter's death has left him reeling in the face of a cruel, and sure, that premise sounds like common movie fodder, except Allan Loeb's genuinely stupid script pivots to a tale of corporate espionage wherein Smith's partners (Michael Peña, Kate Winslet, and Edward Norton, all of whom must have either massive gambling debts or crippling self-loathing explaining their presence in this POS) hire three actors (the similarly slumming Helen Mirren, Jacob Latimore, and Keira Knightley) to pretend to be the living embodiments of Death, Time, and Love, befriend Smith, and convince him they're these mystical beings so that Smith will appear crazy and his partners can wrest away his control of the company. I want you to read that setup again because at no point does it make sense - I've seen the movie, and I still feel like I've been dosed with something. Still, I'd understand it if Collateral Beauty wanted to be a inane-yet-cynical drama. What I cannot fathom is its painfully earnest desire to also tug on the heartstrings, as these three actors end up teaching Smith and his scheming partners Valuable Lessons On How To Appreciate Every Day. The whiplash you get from the about-face requires medical care. It'd be like if after you learned the Wizard was just a plucky conman in The Wizard of Oz, we had a post-credits scene intimating that no, he actually was a honest-to-God wizard. The whole affair culminates in a final reveal so misguided that it almost merits a viewing for Bad Movie Fans, and I say "almost" because I can't quite justify suffering through the tedium that proceedings Said Misguided Lunacy. I just don't know what it is with Will Smith. The man is one of the most charismatic moviestars alive - he remains one of the only unapologetically wonderful elements in the otherwise execrable Suicide Squad - but so rarely does pick projects that make the best use of his talents. You have to question the motives of anyone who turns down the title role in Quentin Tarantino's brilliant Django Unchained but is willing to suffer a jellyfish-based death in the embarrassing Seven Pounds, and I think Collateral Beauty is even worse, given that it forces Smith to tamp down his natural charm and magnetism. Like virtually everyone else in this overqualified cast (only Moonlight's Naomie Harris escapes this thing with any of her dignity intact, which is no small achievement, given the idiotic plot twist involving her character in the third act), Smith just seems glum and underwhelmed in the face of the contrivances at hand. Who knows? Maybe he's just as aware that he's in a real dog. One can only hope.
Thankfully, you can catch one of 2016's very best features: Sony's release of Elle is as bitter and provocative a palette cleanser as one could imagine. In his first full-length feature since 2006's alternatively sexy-horrifying WWII drama Black Book, the great Paul Verhoeven offers a character study of Michèle Leblanc (Academy Award-nominee Isabelle Huppert), a successful career woman trying to process her savage rape at the hands of a masked assailant. If you're a fan of Verhoeven's other films, you initially might be surprised with how he handles this delicate material. Gone are the glistening, blockbuster-friendly surfaces of his Basic Instinct or Starship Troopers; Verhoeven and DP Stéphane Fontaine opt instead for the handheld grit of a French neorealist film, approximating something more in line with a film from Jacques Audiard (Fontaine's most frequent collaborator) than from the guy who brought Showgirls to the big screen. However, we realize all too quickly that the vérité aesthetic is, in and of itself, a feint, a way of mollifying what might be the single kinkiest and most disturbing picture that Verhoeven has ever made. From the opening credits, the disconnect between the paired-down aesthetic and the genuinely shocking plot twists keeps us off-balance. We begin smack dab in the middle of Michèle's rape (literally: after the opening title the first thing we hear is the sexual assault in process), which Verhoeven returns to in flashbacks and dream sequences throughout the film. It's a brutal act, but what Verhoeven gooses us with more than the violence or nudity is Michèle's almost complete lack of affect in the immediate aftermath. She calmly cleans up her house and takes a shower, and then it's off to work - nearly forty minutes pass before she discloses what has happened, and even then it's with the tossed-off reserve of someone miffed by the mediocre service at a restaurant. To some extent, Verhoeven is making a comment about what it means to be a woman in the 21st Century, how you've got to be 1000X tougher than a man to even stand a chance at survival. We get the sense that Michèle is normally this unflappable; she's a hard-ass video-game developer in a field that mostly consists of misogynist and/or leering male counterparts, and she provides the only rigid structure for her milquetoast ex-husband (Charles Berling) and her manchild son (Jonas Bloquet). Without her stern presence, you get the sense that everyone else's life would fall apart. But Verhoeven is just as interested in the things about Michèle that don't make sense, and here's where Elle reveals itself as a full-fledged Paul Verhoeven masterpiece. See, Michèle has some...baggage, and more than that, I should not say, except it becomes increasingly difficult to see her as a victim, thanks to Huppert's career-best performance. It's that wonderful, confounding Mona Lisa smile of hers: we can never be quite sure what Michèle's motivations are at even the most extreme moments, and so we'll follow her into places that make our stomachs turn. A great, disquieting movie.
Finally, Shout Select is offering special editions of the 1984 genre favorites Firestarter and Red Dawn. Perhaps I'm courting controversy here, but as Stephen King adaptations go, Firestarter falls well near the bottom of the barrel. It's one of those properties where I respect the ambition far more than the execution. The tale of a preteen pyrokinetic (Drew Barrymore) and her telekinetic father (David Keith) trying to outrace a shadowy government agency (personified by George C. Scott's ruthless operative) that wants to turn the two into programmed assassins, Firestarter bounces back and forth between road movie, father-daughter melodrama, and political conspiracy thriller, with just enough horror elements (people kinda die horribly at Barrymore's hand) to keep things unpredictable, and in a manner that strongly reflects the recent father-child genre-hopping seen in last year's great Midnight Special and this year's hit Logan. Here's the problem, though, in a nutshell: Logan and Midnight Special are very good, and Firestarter is very bad. The then-nine-year-old Barrymore is too lightweight a presence to anchor what is often a violent thriller, but I'll take her incongruous presence over Keith's nonentity or Scott's scenery-chewing lunatic any day. Worst of all is director Mark Lester at the helm. Rather than embracing or elevating this pulp, Lester plods along in a straight, workmanlike manner, so we're bored by the time he turns the finale into a Carrie redo. However, I am loath to levy all the blame at the cast and crew. Even if original director John Carpenter (how's that for a what if?) hadn't stepped out, Lester would still have to contend with Stephen King's source material, which is, along with The Tommyknockers and Dreamcatcher, one of the least essential titles in the King canon. As King himself might say, cocaine's a hell of a drug, and sometimes the side effect is something like Firestarter. Just as crazy but far more accomplished is John Milius's cult classic Red Dawn, which is also receiving a Shout Select bump. Never one to shy away from bold political stereotyping, Milius' war actioner imagines a United States overrun by a Russian-Cuban Communist insurgency, and the teenage resistance (led by Patrick Swayze, Charlie Sheen, Lea Thompson, C. Thomas Howell, and Jennifer Grey) that emerges to take back the country. As premises go, this one is simple, stupid, and almost frighteningly jingoistic. It is also a hell of a lot of fun. I can't tell if Milius takes this nonsense seriously or if his tongue is firmly in cheek - how are we supposed to parse the hilarious/thrilling opening sequence, where a befuddled high-school teacher pauses his class to confront the Communist soldiers parachuting down just outside his window, only to be gunned down in front of his students for his efforts? - but he keeps the proceedings so fast and exciting that worrying about the tone quickly becomes beside the point. Even his Brat-Pack-Goes-to-War cast ends up working in this context, since of course teenagers and young adults possess the necessary blind idealism to confront a major world superpower, right? Red Dawn was fun in 1984, and it's just as pleasurable now, politics be dammed.