For the week of February 5th, my favorite Blu-ray release is Sony's Only the Brave. I did not think director Joseph Kosinski had this kind of film in him. I enjoyed both Oblivion and TRON: Legacy, but more for their abundant visual excesses than anything else (TRON: Legacy, in particular, is so aesthetically stunning that I can sorta overlook its story or character deficiencies, which are legion). Yet his work here reminds me of early Steven Spielberg. People forget that as technically virtuosic as films like The Sugarland Express and Jaws are, Spielberg also adopts this loose, freewheeling approach to character that's equal parts Howard Hawks and Robert Altman. So it goes with Only the Brave, which, yes, lets Kosinski stage a number of terrifying blazes as he introduces us to the firefighting Granite Mountain Hotshots, all of whom still dominate the frame more than any pyrotechnic display. Kosinski cultivates an unforced naturalism to all the human interactions; every time we think Ken Nolan and Eric Warren Singer's script will take us down some soap-opera path, the film deftly avoids the potential for melodrama. Miles Teller's former junkie trying to make good is the best example - Teller underplays all his character's big addiction moments as well as his agonizing recovery, and the result is more, rather than less, impactful. Without resorting to clichés (we never see him relapse dramatically, and while he eventually forges a bond with his ex-girlfriend and their child, I love the way his ex regards Teller with this ever-present wariness), Teller creates this vivid picture of a screw-up just trying to keep his head down and make it through each day. So it goes, too, with Josh Brolin and Jennifer Connelly, who create the most naturalistic on-screen couple since Kyle Chandler and Connie Britton in Friday Night Lights, or especially Taylor Kitsch (speaking of Friday Night Lights), who steals the movie as a rake with untapped reservoirs of quiet decency. To Kosinski, these are real people, and his investment proves...well, do yourself a favor, and don't Wikipedia the Granite Mountain Hotshots. If you let what happens unfold at its own pace, I doubt you'll have a more overwhelming film experience. How good is Only the Brave? It lets Jeff Bridges trot out his Rooster Cogburn voice for the umpteenth time, and still he makes you cry. A real gem, and worthy of rediscovery.
In his Blu-ray review, Martin Liebman wrote that "whether one is familiar with the story or not, a sense of doom lingers over the movie, but so too does a sense of hope. The film focuses on two characters, one a veteran of the fire world who finds himself caught between commitment to his profession and the men he leads and an increasingly uncertain future at home with a wife who needs a commitment from him, to choose their love over everything else. The other focal point is a young man, directionless and recovering from addiction, who finds purpose and, gradually, acceptance in family, both with his newborn daughter and her mother as well as the friends and brothers he makes on the team. The film takes its time to construct, explore, and define these characters as men, with finesse, purpose, depth, and tangible realism. The intimate exploration of their lives and, more importantly, their hearts and spirits makes the fire-hot intensity of the film's third act burn all the hotter, hit all the harder, and mean so much more. The third act's perils are underscored by a gentle, almost calming, but at the same time foreboding score that rightly leaves the attention on the men rather than the developing action around, because if there is anything the movie is not, it's not an action film about fighting fires."
I wish I could say the same about Paramount and George Clooney's blackly comic noir Suburbicon. Maybe the highest praise I can offer is that despite all its problems, Suburbicon somehow remains hypnotically terrible. The ideal version of Suburbicon is mean and nasty, and you can see the bones of such a tale in the Coen Brothers' original screenplay: meet Gardiner Lodge (Matt Damon), a suburban schlub who orchestrates the murder of his wife (Julianne Moore) so he can be with her twin (Moore again, obviously) and is then wholly unprepared for the nightmare that follows, be it in the form of two brutal criminal operatives (Glenn Fleshler and Michael D. Cohen) or a fast-talking insurance investigator (Oscar Isaac, who steals what little of the movie is worth stealing). We're halfway to Fargo territory, and Suburbicon's 1950s setting also recalls the curdled Americana of the Coens' underrated The Man Who Wasn't There (if nothing else, I enjoyed seeing elements that the Coens have since cherry-picked from this script and placed in other movies, including the aforementioned two, The Big Lebowski, Burn After Reading, and Bad Santa). But Clooney can't leave well enough alone. You'll note the Suburbicon writing credit lists the Coen Brothers PLUS Clooney and his longtime writing-and-producing partner Grant Heslov. Barring the hubris of rewriting Joel and Ethan Coen, here's what went wrong: Clooney and Heslov took the Coens' work and then grafted on a thinly veiled look at William and Daisy Myers (here called the "Mayers"), the first black family to move into the heavily segregated community of Levittown, Pennsylvania. The Myers' story is important, and one richly deserving of cinematic treatment. But it fits alongside the Coens' pulpy mayhem about as well as you would expect it to, which is to say, not well at all. I think I get what Clooney is after - that this town is so racist its inhabitants are too busy antagonizing black people to notice Damon's very real crimes unfolding in the open (Clooney underlines and highlights this point by having Lodge beat someone to death in the middle of the street while everyone else is rioting in front of the Mayers) - except he bungles the jarring shifts from bloody farce to social realism. He's better at the latter (we ache watching the Mayers suffer one bigoted injustice after another), yet he cedes infinitely more screen time to Damon and Co. Neither Mr. or Mrs. Mayers (Leith Burke and Karimah Westbrook) gets a first name, and I'd be astounded if the two had a combined total of more than fifty lines of dialogue. Instead, we spend way too much time watching Lodge bumble his way through some ghastly misadventure, thus exposing another Clooney deficiency: as a director, he kinda sucks at screwball pacing. This cracked material only works at high-velocity, but like Clooney's molasses-paced Leatherheads, he directs his actors to perform at half-speed. Damon has a honey of a Coen Brothers speech (it's when he threatens his young son with boarding school) that moves so slowly it sucks the life out of you, and the violent denouement plods along until we've had far too much time to consider the implausibility of the situation. Only Isaac brings any kind of wit and fire - too bad the film betrays his work in the most unsatisfying fashion possible. What we're left with is well-meaning garbage, something that's less a movie than it is Clooney's own 2005 Best Supporting Actor speech come to sentient life. It's a smug mess. I found it fascinating.
Martin Liebman's Blu-ray review noted that "the film never quite gets to the point that the juxtaposition really works in any meaningful way, at least from an entertainment perspective. Much of the problem doesn't stem from the setting or the ideas but rather the dearth of engaging characters. The film never gives the viewer reason to invest in the characters, at least not beyond little Nicky, who is an innocent pawn in the middle of a larger danger, and to a lesser extent the Mayers family, never developed at all beyond skin color, standing in as nothing more than a three-person plot facilitator. That's a shame. Their world parallels Nicky's. Their world is slowly shattered by increasing hostility that turns from literal noise to literal, physical peril, much as Nicky's world turns upside down into crescendo of violence that ultimately leaves him cowering under his bed while, around the same time, the Mayers home is assaulted for no other reason than because its otherwise seemingly normal, pleasant inhabitants are of a different color of skin."
Shout Factory has been quietly re-releasing Studio Ghibli's backcatalog, and this week hosts two of the most interesting Ghibli titles: Isao Takahata's Pom Poko and Gorô Miyazaki's Tales from Earthsea, which loosely adapts the late Ursula Le Guin's Earthsea series. Pom Poko concerns itself with a group of tanuki (most accurately translated as "raccoon dogs"), a race of mythical creatures that can transform into anything they want. As the film begins, they are content to exist on the fringes of society, but mankind's encroaching ways force them to go on the offensive. Takahata conjures up some lovely images of the tanuki at work - and play - and long stretches play out like a more mischievous version of Miyazaki's classic My Neighbor Totoro. Yet the fun curdles, slowly but surely, as the tanuki end up resorting to ever more drastic actions in their efforts to preserve their community - in an ironic touch, many of these actions only divide the creatures into rival factions - and by its final moments, Pom Poko reveals itself to be just as political a work as Takahata's devastating Grave of the Fireflies. For some viewers, the shift into boldface moralizing might undercut what had, up to that point, been an expert fantasy. However, for Takahata, the message is the medium: repeat viewings reveal that he's done a canny, subtle job of weaving in anti-industrialization messages throughout the entire picture. As for Tales from Earthsea, some of the character work is great, particularly the good wizard Sparrowhawk (Timothy Dalton) and the immortality-seeking madman Cob (Willem Dafoe). Furthermore, Miyazaki (son of the great Hayao) has a keen visual eye that's slightly reminiscent of Howl's Moving Castle. His rendering of Le Guin's Earthsea is a windswept paradise that combines elements from medieval, Roman, and tribal cultures, and it makes for a striking background to set the film's many action-adventure setpieces (some of which have flying dragons). And that point stands indicative of Tales from Earthsea's biggest problem: it's not Princess Mononoke, and it really wants to be. You can sense Miyazaki and his team striving for that earlier film's near-perfect blend of magic and more violent realism, but they get the mix wrong, going so far as to alter major thematic beats from Le Guin's source material in order to accommodate an environmentalist message that's way too similar to Princess Mononoke's, and so the serious themes underwhelm while the violence feels overblown. Tales from Earthsea is still essential for Ghibli fans, but more as a key development step in the career of Goro Miyazaki, who would rebound with his lovely Borrowers adaptation The Secret World of Arrietty.
Speaking of animated features, Warner is bringing the DC Animated feature Batman: Gotham by Gaslight to Blu-ray this week. I've had a lot of trouble with DCA's more recent affairs - Batman and Harley Quinn is way too thin to satisfy dramatically, and the less said about the awful The Killing Joke, the better - but Gotham by Gaslight mostly works. I'd say it's got the luxury of good source material, but a) so did The Killing Joke, and we all know how well that turned out, and b) it makes enough deviations from the Brian Augustyn and Mike Mignola comic to feel like its own beast. What remains is the whole "Elseworlds" ethos, in this case taking Batman (voiced, and wonderfully, by Bruce Greenwood) and plunking him into a Victorian-era mystery. We're in the late 1880s, where Batman finds himself hunting a enemy far more depraved than a simple mugger: Jack the Ripper is slashing his way through Gotham, and his very presence suggests an insidious, wide-ranging conspiracy. Despite the presence of many familiar faces (Poison Ivy, Hugo Strange, Alfred, Harvey Dent, Jim and Barbara Gordon, and an extra abusive Bullock, the latter voiced by a very funny John DiMaggio), director Sam Liu lets this story unfold as a straightforward whodunit, and that approach works, particularly once Batman teams up with Selina Kyle (Jennifer Carpenter). They make for a spirited pairing, especially during the film's many action sequences. What keeps Gotham by Gaslight from reaching Flashpoint Paradox-classic status is twofold. For one, after all the buildup, it lands on a resolution that, while shocking (especially if you've read the Gotham by Gaslight comic), feels a bit too tidy. I'd liken the experience (somewhat) to how you'd feel if after almost four hours of paranoia and conspiracy theories, JFK ended with Jim Garrison blamed Kennedy's death on a drunk driver (thank you, Conrad Breen). But more importantly, DCA's house-style is becoming a real liability. At best, the animation is fine and nothing more; at worst, I've seen Saturday morning cartoons more lavishly designed than this. I understand the animation department isn't working with unlimited resources, but I'd appreciate a bit more of an effort to at least mimic the quality of the actual comics - on the page, Gotham by Gaslight has more texture and interest than almost anything here. Still, this is a good step, DCA. Keep 'em coming!