For the week of March 20th, Warner Home Entertainment is bringing Ben Affleck's gangster drama Live by Night to Blu-ray. This film should have been a slam dunk for the Academy Award-winning filmmaker: hot off his acclaimed docudrama Argo, Affleck is returning to the Boston-crime milieu that made his The Town and Gone Baby Gone so bracing. Heck, both Live by Night and Gone Baby Gone share similar creative DNA: they both began their existence as novels from the great crime author Dennis Lehane. Yet in almost every regard, Live by Night feels like a major whiff for Affleck, and I'm wondering how he let this project get so out of control. One of the best things about Lehane's original novel is its sprawl. None of what transpires narratively - young war veteran Joe Coughlin (Affleck) tries to reintegrate back into post-WWI America and ends up falling ever deeper into a life of crime - is all that surprising, so Lehane compensates by luxuriating in the details, the way it must have felt to be alive and in danger during Prohibition. Affleck's film, however, hustles along to the detriment of both plot and character. As beautiful an artifact as it is to look at (and make no mistake: this is Affleck's most visually sophisticated picture, with gorgeous cinematography from Academy Award-winning DP Robert Richardson), Live by Night makes some narrative leaps that unmoor and distance us (like, how quickly Affleck whisks us from Boston to Florida) from most of the large, talented supporting cast (people like Brendan Gleeson, Elle Fanning, Sienna Miller, and especially Chris Messina make vivid introductions and then get little else to do). Lehane's novel would have worked best as a miniseries - Affleck's movie feels like a trailer. Ultimately, I can't help but shake the suspicion that Affleck's vanity might have hamstrung this film. With the exception of Gone Baby Gone (still Affleck's finest film as a director, which might be saying something), Affleck has cast himself as his own leading man to diminishing results, and his Live by Night protagonist represents some horrible nadir. In terms of honoring Lehane's writing, he's all wrong - Affleck is easily twenty years too old to play this character, who Lehane writes as a younger, more corruptible lad. Rare is the case when you ask, "Was Zac Efron busy?" but he'd have brought the exact mix of naivety and ruthlessness that the part demands. Even worse, though, is the complete lack of intensity on Affleck's part. I've never seen Affleck looking as mopey and sullen as he does here. He's more engaging and light as MurderBat in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, and considering we spend far more time with Joe than with any other Live by Night character, his deathless reserve begins to grate on us far sooner than it should. A real misfire - if getting to make this movie meant selling his soul to the DCU, then Affleck gravely miscalculated.
The other big moviestar miscalculation of the week? Twentieth Century Fox's videogame adaptation Assassin's Creed. For an actor as talented as Michael Fassbender is, he certainly does seem to be gobbling up franchise possibilities with abandon. By my count, he's now headlining the new X-Men, Alien, and now Assassin's Creed pictures, and none of them are really worth his time. He's great in all of them - Fassbender brings a fiery intelligence to Magneto and his Creed characters, and his David in Prometheus is one of the few bright spots in that deeply misbegotten Alien prequel - but little about the movies surrounding Fassbender merit his inclusion. In a lot of ways, Assassin's Creed is the best of the bunch (after the great first hour of X-Men: First Class). The action scenes in the second half are exciting; the performances are more than serviceable for this kind of four-quadrant adventure; and the aesthetic texture has a graphic (as in graphic novel), distinctive allure. See, Fassbender brought along his Macbeth director Justin Kurzel, and whatever my faults with that film as a whole are (too grim, too bloody, too boring), it remains one of the most visually striking features that I've seen in a long time. If nothing else, the 4K version of Assassin's Creed should prove reference-quality material for that HD format. But the picture as a whole is so inert, and talented folks like Fassbender and Kurzel can't compensate. I blame the source material. The Assassin's Creed videogames are fun, but they hardly rank among the high-water marks of the medium, and they're given to frustrating narrative lapses. As much fun as it is to parkour around gorgeously designed digital versions of France or London or Spain or the Caribbean and murder bad guys, the Assassin's Creed franchise keeps getting in the way, interrupting the good stuff and forcing players to skulk around some boring techno-thriller where you trade in your wrist blades for tired clue investigations. And the movie replicates this format! We spend way too much time in the present-day with Fassbender's convicted murderer, waiting for the sci-fi exposition (which wastes the talents of Marion Cotillard and Jeremy Irons) to subside so that Fassbender's consciousness can get booted into fifteenth-century Spain, and we can get to the good stuff. Kurzel does a great job of staging the action once it gets going (imagine a period-set District B13 with knife fights, and you'll a good sense of how the fight scenes look), but the by-committee script keeps yanking us out, and so what could be a relentless, John Wick-esque actioner only proceeds in fits and starts. Look, I get it: Fassbender is doing his best work on the sidelines (Shame, 12 Years a Slave), and those movies don't pay the bills. I bet one Assassin's Creed paycheck finances four or five smaller indies, and for that alone, I guess I'm grateful. I just wish the movies themselves weren't such a slog. Fassbender, look at Tom Cruise or Hugh Jackman - both are proof you can headline a populist franchise (or two) that doesn't wear on the viewer.
From Arrow Films comes a special edition of Giuseppe Tornatore's 1988 masterwork Cinema Paradiso. This film merits comparison with a small circle of movies about movies (also included: François Truffaut's Day for Night and Stanley Donen's Singin' in the Rain) that have the power to reduced even the most jaded of cinephiles to blubbering emotions. In fact, Cinema Paradiso is so relentless in its pursuit of your tears that your rational brain may try to fight it. This is normal: Tornatore throws in every cliché he can think of, including an adorable movie-obsessed moppet (Salvatore Cascio), a wizened old projectionist (Phillippe Noiret), and a depiction of post-WWII-era Sicily that's practically dripping with honeyed nostalgia. And in later features, audiences would reject Tornatore's base sentimentality, as evinced from the reaction to his cloying 2000 melodrama Malèna. But film itself is a powerful totem, and when you watch Cascio staring at the screen like he's bearing witness to the face of God, your defenses (I'm speaking to you movie buffs out there) pretty much crumble. It's the most emotionally florid representation of what Pauline Kael meant when she said she lost it at the movies. Cinema Paradiso also merits consideration for unintentionally justifying film censorship. To wit: the two-hour version that won the 1989 Oscar for Best Foreign Film is a near-perfect creation, but it only represents about two-thirds of the story. See, when Tornatore sold the rights to Miramax, Harvey Weinstein cut almost an hour from the film, a decision that left the director lamenting the loss of his preferred cut. It's easy to sympathize with Tornatore, given Weinstein's legendary butchering of films by the likes of Milos Forman, Wong Kar Wai, Mike Leigh, Billy Bob Thornton, and Martin Scorsese, but when Tornatore's three-hour cut finally premiered in 2002, it made the Harvey Scissorhands edit look all the more sparkling. That longer version overloads on sentimentality and ruins what was a perfect ending in the reedit - we now get a lot of material with a grown-up version of our protagonist that is, at best, likeable but irrelevant and, at worst, the French-plantation-in-Apocalypse Now Redux-level grating. Something about a broken clock being right twice a day springs to mind...
Jeffrey Kauffman's Blu-ray review noted that "some of [the extended cut]…is frankly unnecessary, offering brief new vignettes surrounding how famous film director Salvatore Di Vita (Jacques Perrin as the adult Salvatore) is alerted to the fact that Alfredo (Philippe Noiret), the beloved projectionist at the movie house in the village where Salvatore grew up, has died. There's additional footage in the long flashback sequences detailing the initially kind of contentious relationship between the young Salvatore (an absolutely adorable Salvatore Cascio) and Alfredo, as well as even more information imparted about a starcrossed love affair the teenage Salvatore (Marco Leonardi) undertakes with village girl Elena (Agnese Nano). That in turn offers a rather extended set of sequences in 'contemporary' time where the adult Salvatore, having returned to Giancaldo, tries to reunite with Elena (played by Brigitte Fossey as an adult). The Director's Cut is a manifestly different experience than the shorter Theatrical Version, probably spending what some may feel is a bit too much time on somewhat extraneous data like Salvatore's love life, but never journeying that far from the shorter version's focus (no pun intended) on Salvatore's love of film."
Finally, the Criterion Collection is giving Hal Ashby's masterful satire Being There a feature-laden update. This film is, in many ways, a miracle. On the surface, it looks like a one-note joke, and one that the best of filmmakers would struggle to sustain over the course of its 130-minute runtime: we follow Chance (Peter Sellers), an illiterate, autistic gardener who unintentionally rises to the highest seats of American power as titans of industry/government mistake his quietly limited viewpoints for statements of great significance. First Chance is rejuvenating the lives of a sickly billionaire (the wonderful Melvyn Douglas, who won an Academy Award for his work here) and his unhappy wife (a very funny Shirley MacLaine), then he's helping the President (Jack Warden) fix the economy, and all without ever fully understanding the gravity of the events surrounding him. That's the whole movie, and I can't really fault viewers for finding it repetitive and more-than-a-little cold (I certainly did, once upon a time). Yet Ashby's mastery of tone proves even more vital to Being There's success than Peter Sellers' precise, exquisitely composed performance (there's none of Sellers' Pink Panther or Dr. Strangelove grotesques here. Ashby never quite conducts the proceedings in the expected fashion. The "normal" version might be more akin to Robert Zemeckis' Forrest Gump, which follows a Chance-like hero through American culture with all the virtuosic excesses of Cervantes' Don Quixote, but normal never suited Ashby - he was the same guy, after all, who made May-September relationships alternatively manic-touching in Harold and Maude and turned the sex farce of Shampoo into a parable for the fall of Richard Nixon. Ashby gives Being There a funereal pall - Caleb Deschanel's cinematography paints the screen in various hues of grey and brown - and never telegraphs the jokes. As such, Being There is often funny in the way Barry Lyndon, as Ashby's reserve stands in judgment of the characters on-screen, all of whom are so terrified of complexity that they immediately venerate someone like Chance because he fulfills their need for painful simplicity. But in time, we begin to see another, less ironic shade to Ashby's melancholy, that maybe Chance's unintentional wisdom is wisdom nonetheless, and that it carries somewhat celestial gravity. By the end, we've witnessed an inexplicable mix of condescension and reverence, and for the right crowd, it's bracing to view.
Svet Atanasov wrote that the film "can be deconstructed in a variety of different ways and it is loaded with so much symbolism that it is virtually guaranteed that your target would miss something rather important while analyzing it. All you have to do is call out its 'inexcusable' omission. But you can actually do a lot better than this. You can demand that the critic provides a clear and logical explanation of the film's final sequence. It is a brilliant trap and once the critic falls into it you can sit back, relax, and enjoy watching him self-destruct. Trust me, there is absolutely no way out of it...A big portion of the film is structured as a satire on socio-political values and the media in America. It basically promotes the idea that the country is ruled by an elite class of professional politicians and businessmen that has neutralized the media and transformed people into brainless consumers. Chance's accidental entry into the private bubble of the elitists is very much like Alice's arrival in Wonderland - suddenly a whole new reality emerges with completely different gravity laws. But this is where things gradually begin to change and the film casually veers off in a new direction. Indeed, the more Chance interacts with these people and the more they begin to appreciate his 'genius', the more it seems like there is an even bigger bubble in which no one actually has full control over anything. They imagine things and pretend to understand but are just as clueless as Chance is when he tries to answer their policy and management questions. So the revelation here is that while creating a lower class of brainless consumers the elitists have also permanently damaged themselves and created a closed system in which the only thing that everyone is fully aware of is the passing of time."