For the week of April 16th, Steven Spielberg's newspaper drama The Post arrives on Blu-ray. The film sounds two false notes almost immediately: 1) Spielberg is working in the 1.85:1 frame, and while he's used this format well before (the boxy compositions of both Schindler's List and Saving Private Ryan are pretty much unimpeachable), he should only shoot talky historical dramas in 2.35:1 scope (case in point: Lincoln and Bridge of Spies, which gain so much verve through Spielberg and Janusz Kaminski's handling of the widescreen format); and 2) he drops "Green River" by Creedence Clearwater Revival during a Vietnam War sequence. I guess I should be thankful Spielberg didn't use "Fortunate Son" or "For What It's Worth," but we still feel like we've seen this movie before. This sensation carries through the rest of The Post, which plays like All the President's Men minus the excitement. The story of how the Washington Post got its hands on the Pentagon Papers in 1971 and agonized over how to cover it doesn't seem like great drama (basically, it's a bunch of people in a room arguing over when to press the "On" button on the printing press), but if anyone could do it, it's Steven Spielberg. Lest we forget, he took two dry civics lessons - Lincoln and Bridge of Spies - and turned them into virtuosic examinations of how difficult it is to maintain one's principles in an unprincipled world. And when The Post is working, it taps into the same energy powering those early features. There's a twenty-minute stretch in the middle of the movie, where Tom Hanks's Ben Bradlee and his Post reporters begin combing through thousands of Pentagon documents, that's as engaging as anything Spielberg has ever done. The problem is, The Post is just as likely to veer off into a diatribe about unfair gender practices in the workplace (personified by Meryl Streep's tremulous Kat Graham) or the necessity for a free press or the dangers of an unrestrained executive branch. When it does, that energy just leeches away. In its place, we get John Williams' boringly sentimental score and slow zooms on impassioned actors as they monologue away. Lincoln and Bridge of Spies were also prone to long speeches, but Tony Kushner and the Coen Brothers, respectively, provided the words to those earlier features, so the dialogue was like candy. Liz Hannah and Josh Singer's Post draft rarely rises above "functional exposition" in its linguistic qualities. I have so little patience for how logy the proceedings feel, or how Spielberg wastes the criminally overqualified cast. Only Tom Hanks, Meryl Streep, and Bob Odenkirk get anything of value, and only Odenkirk makes the most of it. He's phenomenal (you want an All the President's Men-style procedural that just watches him work), whereas Streep delivers the same yearly honey-baked ham she's been serving since Mamma Mia, and Hanks coasts on his charm, and nothing more. Everyone else is just there for background, whether it's Tracy Letts or Jesse Plemons or Zach Woods or David Cross or Bruce Greenwood or Sarah Paulson or Bradley Whitford or Matthew Rhys or Pat Healy or Alison Brie or Michael Stuhlbarg or Carrie Coon. Somehow, though, all that is less objectionable than the clunky inserts of actual Nixon recordings (the audio is chilling, but Spielberg ruins it by cutting to a wildly gesticulating and ridiculous Nixon proxy) or the horrible ending, which makes Minority Report's flawed denouement look like a work of staggering genius. Let's just say that Spielberg ends on the Post's other big 1970's investigation, but in a manner that suggests Spielberg wants to create an MCU-type shared universe for the Politico crowd. A rare misfire from an American icon, but a misfire all the same.
Far better a '70s-set docudrama is Paul Schrader's beyond-unnerving biopic Auto Focus. At first glance, the story of Bob Crane (Greg Kinnear, in the greatest performance he will ever give) hardly seems worth more than a cursory, ironic glance: to the public, Crane was safe and affable, headlining the popular sitcom Hogan's Heroes as well as a series of tired family comedies (Disney's Superdad is probably the best known of the bunch). And the first act of Auto Focus reflects this bubbly veneer - Schrader even has DPs Jeffrey Greeley and Fred Murphy mimic the flat, overly bright sitcom aesthetic when he's shooting Crane's rise to stardom and his relationship with first wife Anne (a perfectly cast Rita Wilson). Lest we forget, though, that Schrader also wrote Taxi Driver, a film that shares far more in common with Auto Focus than we might think. Both pictures traffic in obsession. For Travis Bickle, that's violence, and for Crane, it's sex, which comes so much easier to him once he gets famous. If you're familiar with Crane's work, then I can't fully articulate the cognitive dissonance of watching Smiling Bob Hogan dispassionately watching the video playback of himself in an orgy, or showing off the new cosmetic "enhancements" he's made to his genitals. What a fearless turn on Kinnear's part. He reminds me of Harrison Ford and The Mosquito Coast, in that you can sense both men flayed themselves emotionally for roles that audiences roundly rejected. Still, Auto Focus works best as a twisted relationship drama once Crane meets electronics nut John Carpenter (a) a chilling Willem Dafoe and b) not that John Carpenter). The two feed off the other's worst instincts, with Crane using his status to belittle the far weaker Carpenter (particularly once Crane's career begins to stall), ultimately leading to...well, not for nothing does Schrader take inspiration from Robert Graysmith's true-crime novel The Murder of Bob Crane. But as with Taxi Driver, Schrader isn't interested in pat conclusions or easy answers. He thrives off Crane's unnerving, myriad contradictions. One of the great movies of the early Aughts.
Apparently, Film Twitter wants to fêteThe Commuter director Jaume Collet-Serra as some kind of trash auteur. I don't see it; while I love his stylish House of Wax remake, everything else he's made has barely risen above the level of risible trash, with his Liam Neeson ventures (Unknown, Non-Stop, Run All Night) the least of a bad batch. So it's saying something that, for the most part, I rather enjoyed The Commuter (which Lionsgate is releasing this week), which finds Collet-Serra doing his best Paul W.S. Anderson doing his best David Fincher doing his best Alfred Hitchcock with this thriller about a recently laid-off insurance agent (Neeson, because nothing says "aging pencil-pusher" like Neeson's terrifying frame) who meets a mysterious woman (Vera Farmiga, slumming gloriously in her two scenes) on his commuter train and becomes her unwitting pawn to help find and kill one of the other passengers. Admittedly, the film's confined locale (minus some expositional setup at the beginning and end, we're on the train for the entire movie) and its propensity to waste talented young ingénues (Non-Stop reduced Academy Award-winner Lupita Nyong'o to a perplexingly useless cameo; The Commuter does likewise to Black Panther and Lady Macbeth's breakout stars Leticia Wright and Florence Pugh, respectively) recall the airplane-set Non-Stop, except the Strangers on a Train-with-a-head-injury dramatics work better here. Other than the boring introduction that establishes Neeson as a loving-but-beleaguered family man (you can sense Collet-Serra's own impatience with this setup; he and editor Nicolas de Toth have artlessly hacked it down to the barest essentials), The Commuter never flags. Collet-Serra brings in the great DP Paul Cameron (Man on Fire, Collateral), who keeps the camera zooming back and forth throughout the train, most notably in a stellar single-take fight scene where Neeson combats an axe-wielding killer using only his brawn and a left-handed electric guitar. That left-handed detail is actually a key plot point, and is emblematic of the film's nutty energy. So much is so silly, but since Collet-Serra has five or six crazier ideas coming, we never have that much time to linger and criticize. It helps that his leading man retains admirable conviction against a plot this dumb. Only Neeson could make this material work. He both grounds the proceedings (watching his character lament his firing as a sixty-year-old man with little in the way of future career opportunities proved more affecting than I expected) AND acts as the film's biggest ironic gag (at times, his trademark intensity seems like self-parody). Admittedly, The Commuter works best when the train is moving; the big third-act derailment (which all the trailers spoiled) opens the film up to some frustrating lapses (I'm still a little confused on the matter, but I think Neeson almost lets the villain do something horrible before the big fight scene) and one of the most egregious "Law of Economy of Characters" reveals I've seen in a while. Still, it's hard to hate a movie that literally casts a red-haired man as the biggest "red herring" on the train, or that conflates the two most moving scenes from Spartacus and Spider-Man 2 for its own big hero moment. A fun Sunday afternoon diversion.
In his Blu-ray review, Jeffrey Kauffman noted that "it's almost pointless to document the gaping plot holes running rampant throughout The Commuter, because whether or not this film works for any given viewer is going depend almost totally on whether the viewer simply doesn't care about those gaping plot holes. The film careens through a number of elements (including a suspected kidnapping of Michael's wife, played by a sadly underutilized Elizabeth McGovern), until it ends with a series of deadly showdowns that include a number of hand to hand combat scenes, as well as a train derailment and other mayhem. When another supporting character turns out to be the lynchpin around which everything revolves, eye rolling may ultimately turn into remote control throwing, or some similar sign of audience frustration. Despite a plot that almost invites disparagement, The Commuter at least has a certain claustrophobic style, one emphasized by Collet- Serra and cinematographer Paul Cameron with some really nicely done interior shots (a brief supplement adorning this Blu-ray release shows the exclusive rig that was constructed for some of these shots). And Neeson of course is appropriately intense as yet another character with a seemingly perfect 'particular set of skills.' It's unfortunate that those skills are put in service of such a ludicrous journey."
Finally, Criterion is releasing the Academy Award-winning screwball comedy The Awful Truth. Released in 1937, the film has a reputation as one of the era's most madcap ventures; you'd have to go to Bringing Up Baby to try and match the chaos on display here, as a frustrated couple (Cary Grant and Irene Dunne) split up with each other because of suspected infidelities and then fall back in love as they're pursuing relationships with other people (Ralph Bellamy and Joyce Compton). A lot works here: Grant is his usual charming self, Dunne escapes much of the casual misogyny subjected upon the screwball heroine, and Bellamy damn near steals the picture as one of the greatest Baxters in all cinema history. Plus, McCarey was old hat at these kinds of elegant farces, and he keeps the proceedings humming along at a tight ninety minutes. However, I've never been able to connect with The Awful Truth to the same degree that I do Bringing Up Baby or Arsenic and Old Lace. For all its energy, it's not terribly distinctive outside the performances, and I kept flashing to the films of Preston Sturges: pictures like Sullivan's Travels and The Palm Beach Story are more structurally wonky, but they cover similar territory with a far more unpredictable spirit. Part of me thinks that McCarey might agree with me. When he picked up the Best Director Oscar for The Awful Truth, he famously quipped, "Thanks, but you've given it for the wrong film." McCarey was referring to Make Way for Tomorrow (which also came out the same year), and while that film traffics in heartbreaking melodramatics far removed from The Awful Truth's blithe gags, its very substance proves more nourishing; The Awful Truth lacks even a borderline emotional grounding. Cary Grant got the mixture just right with his newspaper farce His Girl Friday, and come to think of it, so did McCarey when he made Duck Soup in 1933. Age is a hell of a thing when it comes to movies, and much as I hate to admit it, The Awful Truth just hasn't aged that well.
Svet Atanasov wrote that the film "just make[s] it painfully obvious how low Hollywood has fallen over the years and really lost the ability to produce material that can be genuinely funny and witty at the same time. It is probably the perfect antidote for anyone that has recently been unfortunate to endure any of the many unfunny rude-and-crude disasters that are frequently passed for comedies at theaters across the nation. The difference in terms of quality of content and acting really could not be any more drastic. Old but reputable reports suggest that McCarey and the actors did a lot of improvising throughout the entire shoot, which makes the end result even more impressive because the exchanges are very sharp and the social remarks impeccably timed. Also, there are a couple of sequences where the charming puppy, Mr. Smith, does some absolutely astonishing tricks that make it almost impossible to believe that the required synchronization was spontaneous. It is beautiful to watch."