For the week of May 25th, Universal Studios Home Entertainment is bringing Leigh Whannell's masterful Invisible Man reboot to Blu-ray. About two-thirds through the film, it hit me: between this and his terrific little shocker Upgrade, Whannell is making movies that could have been released in the 1940s and '50s. If Upgrade uses a sci-fi actioner to smuggle in film noir tropes that owe more to Scarlet Street or Act of Violence than to RoboCop, then The Invisible Man, too, takes inspiration from the Hollywood of yesteryear. In its broad strokes, this is a classic women's picture. We have a vulnerable, nervy heroine (the great Elizabeth Moss) hardened by the crucible of society's indifference/oppression towards her gender. The titular character occasionally resorts to violence (including a gory killing that I - wait for it! - didn't see coming), but mostly he's content to torment Moss the same way Charles Boyer went after Ingrid Bergman in Gaslight, by systematically destabilizing her connection to friends and family alike (personified by a very good Aldis Hodge and a great Storm Reid). Like Olivia de Havilland in The Snake Pit, a good chunk of The Invisible Man takes place in a mental institution. As for the film's diabolical ending, Moss gains her freedom but loses her soul in a manner that would make Mildred Pierce nod in sympathy. Just as a performer, Moss has the same fragile-yet-savage intensity that Bette Davis brought to Now, Voyager or Jezebel. It's those eyes, which can flash from devastated to demonic in an instant. Suffice to say, I like this Leigh Whannell much more than the guy who wrote Saw and Insidious. Leaning into Old Hollywood has helped him tap into something vital for the first time in his career. For all its thrills, for all its Blumhouse-approved twists and turns, The Invisible Man gets at something ugly and churning about the battle between the sexes: namely, that the game is rigged, that the stakes are weighted, that women find themselves guilty until proven innocent. It is no accident that Moss finds herself constantly trying - and failing - to convince people to believe her despite overwhelming evidence in her favor. The Invisible Man might be the first essential movie of the #metoo era.
In his Blu-ray review, Martin Liebman wrote that "it is thanks to Moss' inwardly expressive and outwardly terrified work as Cecilia that it all comes together so well…Her journey is powerful even as the narrative surrounding her story is simple. Moss emotes a tangible sense of fear and panic which becomes a tangible need for resolution, partly driven by psychological necessity and partly by a justified thirst for revenge. She builds a resoluteness to see the situation through, even as her life is all but upended, and seemingly permanently at that. In support, Whannell builds first-class atmosphere, works in several legitimate scares, and introduces a few quality twists to keep the suspense rolling and the film proper flowing with purpose and immersion. It may not be a classic but it's certainly a quality film in every way. Well done."
Speaking of essential, Shout Factory has entered the UHD world with its 4K edition of the Oscar-winning The Deer Hunter. Director Michael Cimino's Vietnam-era epic remains as controversial a Best Picture winner as you could imagine. During the film's initial release, critics were divided on whether or not the film represented a subtly jingoistic portrayal of the Vietnam War, an argument that the notorious Russian roulette scenes only served to heighten (basically, there's little historical evidence that North Vietnamese troops forced American POWs to play Russian roulette). And then, not two years later, Cimino released his revisionist Western Heaven's Gate, which sprawled so far out of Cimino's control and cost so much money that it ended up killing a movie studio and tarnishing everything Cimino had made or would make (it's the movie as allegorical albatross). Heaven's Gate has undergone a just critical reappraisal of late (it's imperfect and overlong, yes, but there are sequences as powerful as anything in American cinema); here's hoping the 4K Blu-ray helps to do likewise for The Deer Hunter. For all its flaws, it maintains a hypnotic pull. Part of that has to do with our current cultural moment. Contemporary epic filmmaking often uses CGI as the sole metric of its ambition, whereas The Deer Hunter has an overwhelming sense of tactile gravity. When Cimino spends money, be it recreating the horrors of Vietnam or staging a massive wedding in what feels like real time, he's paying for space, for physical scope, for mythic grandeur. There are moments here that attain operatic intensity - I'm thinking of the almost impressionistic steel mill opening, or the setpiece that follows Robert De Niro's taciturn hunter as he stalks a deer through the mountains. When you factor in the film's size with its somewhat elastic approach to realism, you start to align it more closely with films like Titanic 3D or Gladiator 4K: movies that use history as a passageway to the mythic. Where the film is more variable is in the performances. De Niro and Christopher Walken are like a contrast in opposites. Walken maintains his nervy charm and breaks our hearts, but De Niro is much less comfortable playing a noble figurehead. John Savage does great work even as the film all-but-abandons him in the second half; his loss is Meryl Streep's gain, who elevates a thinly written character to the level of great tragedy. I've also always been partial to George Dzundza's kind bar owner - he underplays and is all the more effective for it, unlike John Cazale's angrily one-note scold (God love Cazale, but this is the least of his five screen roles). Still, that inconsistency among the actors is understandable and almost expected. When you're aiming for the transcendent, you can't help but lose the individual along the way.
Also from Shout Factory comes two unsung gems starring Ethan Hawke: the idiosyncratic WWII drama A Midnight Clear and the diamond-hard neo-noir Before the Devil Knows You're Dead. A Midnight Clear was the second film from teen star-turned-director Keith Gordon, and like Gordon's first film (his underrated Chocolate War adaptation), A Midnight Clear wears its literary origins proudly. Author William Wharton (who also wrote Birdy) penned a war story like no other: in telling the story of an Allied platoon who manage to convince a nearby German encampment to put down their weapons and celebrate Christmas, Wharton constructs a world that's allegorical, absurd, horrifying. You can't imagine someone capturing his delicately wrought tone, yet Gordon does so on a budget, no less (he has Utah double for the Ardennes Forest). He invests in the right places: despite its modest scope, A Midnight Clear has an incredible cast, beginning with Hawke and running through Gary Sinise, Peter Berg, Arye Gross, Kevin Dillon, John C. McGinley, and a heartbreaking Frank Whaley, and Gordon gets these people to do some of their best work. We're so invested in these people that he's able to make the same pivot Wharton does - this is the rare war saga that's really an elegy. By contrast, Before the Devil Knows You're Dead is just a mean little potboiler, albeit one done up with class and intelligence. This was the last film from legendary filmmaker Sidney Lumet. He made it when he was eighty-three-years-old, but he conducts the proceedings with the same intensity and focus that he brought to Dog Day Afternoon and Network. What we're looking at here is a heist movie: in thrall to a gorgeous wife (Marisa Tomei, who's unclothed for like 40% of her screen time) and a crippling heroin addiction, Philip Seymour Hoffman's well-to-do schemer convinces his sweet-but-dim brother (Ethan Hawke) to rob their parents' jewelry store. Hoffman figures that since they're family, they know the store better than anyone, and so they'll make sure no one gets hurt, right? To say things go south would be an understatement, and as Lumet turns the screws on his characters, the movie starts moving into ever-more lurid depths. Maybe too lurid: if I've any complaint about the film, it's that things get so nasty by the end, and I'm not sure the movie fully owns its darkness (it want to be like The Grifters meets King Lear). But even when the movie jumps the rails, Lumet's command of the medium is total. And his actors! More and more, I find myself recalling the little grace notes to their performances. Hoffman's stoned, tragic grace in a high-rise heroin den (and these scenes now have unintended power given Hoffman's 2014 overdose). Michael Shannon's cheerful contempt. Hawke's wry kindness. Even Tomei surprises - she's less a sex object than a decent person who's grown accustomed to subsisting off her looks. As with Keith Gordon and A Midnight Clear, Lumet knows that a great actor is worth all the special effects in the world.
And one of the year's most exciting home-media releases is Criterion's Scorsese Shorts compilation. It's exactly what it sounds like - five short films spanning the first fifteen years of the legendary auteur's career - and as such ranks as essential content for any cinephile. However, just the time frame of these features elevates the set above mere reference material. We get to span the full extent of his creative development. As such, these aren't cast-offs. They're creative timestamps that chart his growth into maybe the greatest living American filmmaker. Scorsese made the first of the bunch -1963's What's a Nice Girl Like You Doing in a Place Like This? - when he was at NYU, and that feels fitting: this is very much a student film, from its sophomoric approach to human psychology (it's about a struggling writer who becomes obsessed with a strange photo for...reasons) to its hyperkinetic storytelling approach. But it also might be the greatest student film ever made. Scorsese transcends his glib surfaces through sheer force of will. You watch him race through playful voiceovers, jump cuts, slow-motion, animation, improvised dolly moves, freeze-frames, shifting camera stocks - basically every show-offy move cinema had cultivated from D.W. Griffith through the French New Wave - and you realize that Scorsese's directorial confidence had emerged pretty much fully formed. And one year later, Scorsese closed the gap even further with his next student effort, It's Not Just You, Murray!. Without losing any of his previous film's playfulness, Scorsese gives us an epic in miniature about a wealthy braggart (Ira Rubin) who takes us through his very fraught life story. Rubin addresses us directly like Henry Hill in GoodFellas; his early beginnings as a bootlegger and his love of theater recall both Boardwalk Empire and Gangs of New York. Furthermore, the fraught triangle between Murray, his wife (Andrea Martin), and his best friend Joe (Sam De Fazio) plays out like a bite-sized version of the Ginger-Ace-Nicky dynamic in Casino. Still, the centerpiece of the under-fifteen-minute features is 1967's horrifying The Big Shave. It is six minutes long. It unfolds in one location - a bathroom - and has one character, a young man (Peter Bernuth) who goes about the business of shaving his face. Yet it has the power of a nightmare. Not only does it debut Scorsese's mastery of onscreen bloodletting, but it foregrounds the great theme of his career: the antihero who just can't stop hurting himself. And Scorsese maintains this focus through the next two "shorts" (rather, hour-long documentaries). 1974's Italianamerican lets him turn the focus on himself in the most personal way imaginable. Scorsese films his parents Catherine and Charles as they have dinner and putter around their apartment, opining on the nature of the world. This might sound mundane, but it has the same flinty power as his family drama Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore, which also premiered the same year. Scorsese's mother is a fascinating figure, all low-key bluster and contradictions. Those same descriptors could apply to Steven Prince, the subject of American Boy, which Scorsese released just six months after his great 1978 concert film The Last Waltz. Scorsese had met Prince shortly before working on Taxi Driver (Prince plays the gun dealer Travis encounters), and by 1978, Scorsese had grown increasingly enmeshed in drug culture (partly because of Hollywood; partly because of his relationship with The Band's Robbie Robertson). American Boy acts as the nexus point. It's a showcase for Prince, a drug addict and raconteur who tells one outrageous story after another (including one about reviving an O.D.'ed woman that Quentin Tarantino lifted outright for Pulp Fiction), but it also gives you a glimpse into some of Scorsese's extracurricular indiscretions. The whole film captures the exact sensation of hanging out all night with your most disreputable friends and getting into more trouble than you'd like to admit. It's a small masterpiece. So are the rest of these.