Pain & Gain (Michael Bay, 2013)

As an introductory statement of theme, Daniel Lugo’s (Mark Wahlberg) maxim “I believe in fitness” invokes “I believe in America” less than “I was born a poor black child.” An improbably charismatic bodybuilder who has internalized boilerplate self-motivating one-liners as Zen profundity, Daniel’s drive contrasts sharply with the limitations of his milieu, his can-do attitude employed only to surge recruitment for the gym where he works as he continues to collect a meager paycheck for his troubles.

Danny (and most of the other prominent characters given a voiceover) constantly references the pull of the American Dream, but he his ostensible commitment to hard work is merely a smokescreen for a shortcut to wealth in the form of a plan to kidnap and extort a particularly loathsome client, Victor Kershaw (Tony Shaloub). Victor mirrors Daniel’s physical achievements with financial ones, his boasts of assets triggering something primal in Daniel. One man’s dedication to honing his body as a sign of his discipline pulls in pathetic wages while a lanky, out-of-shape twerp sits back and enjoys the good life. As Daniel later tells Victor, he does not merely want want Victor wants, he wants Victor not to have it.

1989 Rewind: The Abyss

James Cameron's The Abyss plays like a mixture of his superb Aliens, Spielberg's fantastical Close Encounters of the Third Kind and the anti-war message of The Day the Earth Stood Still. It takes the dire warning of the latter, filters it through a fairly warm climax and then makes a gripping thriller out of it. That bizarre combination will likely forever confine it to the annals of cult classics instead of receiving the mainstream love of Cameron's Aliens and Terminator 2 (as well as some movie about a boat or some such), but The Abyss is a magnificent piece of science fiction that consolidates its various tones not perfectly, but better than you'd expect possible.

When a U.S. nuclear sub strikes an unknown object resting near the Cayman Trough, the Americans rush to recover the sub and its contents before Russians get to it and tear it apart for intelligence gathering. They decide that the quickest way to deal with things is to drop a Navy SEAL team onto a private business platform nearby to use as a base of operations. The platform workers, led by Virgil "Bud" Brigman (Ed Harris), initially refuse to place themselves in the way of anything approaching danger, until the military offers them all triple pay.

The SEAL crew is under the command of Lt. Coffey (Michael Biehn), who brings not only his squad but one of the underwater platform's designers, Lindsey Brigman (Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio), Bud's estranged wife. So, as divers set out to recover the sub as well as investigate the mysterious object that sank it, the Brigmans must argue over their relationship. Mercifully, Cameron has enough wit and enough severity to never let these moments lapse into either melodrama or farce.

Soon, the crews discover that a strange presence is floating around the area, incandescent lights that dart faster than any animal or machine could possibly move. No one can guess what its purpose is, but its proximity to seemingly everything that goes wrong in the rescue attempt leads some to fear it. Coffey, suffering from nerve disorders because of the dive, believes it to be a threat and sets about exterminating it over the safety of the others aboard the platform.

What is it about the ocean that make it claustrophobic? The only way you could find something more expansive would be to move into outer space altogether, yet it always seems to be so confining. Perhaps it's because seeing a person, or a group of people, holed up in a tiny pocket of the sea is a story of isolation. The dives through the twisted mire of the submarine wreckage carry with them that subtle threat of getting lost and never finding the way back to the platform, while shots within the platform clang with the hollow echoes of all that metal, which reflects the harsh lighting until you're always staring into blinding rays.

Three separate plots all provide nail-biting thrills: the submarine salvages offer up early dread, but it's when the platform takes heavy damage in a hurricane and floods that Cameron dials up the tension. The best part of Titanic was always that sense of doom as Leo and Kate tried to escape the sinking ship, but it's got nothing on the terror here. After all, they're already underwater: any breach is fatal. Later, Coffey goes completely mad in his illness and threatens to take the whole platform with him.

There isn't a particularly weak performance here -- the crews, as in Alien, act as you'd expect workers to act -- but the three leads are all exemplary. Biehn doesn't snap in his madness but instead shivers and huddles with himself, assured in the knowledge that everyone is out to get him. It's too easy to compare Lindsey to the great Ellen Ripley, but both are intelligent women who are every bit as capable as the boys (and might just have a lick more sense, to boot). But it's Harris, that superb character actor who never seems to let you down even if the films he's in do, who carries it all home. There is a scene, late in the film, in which he must revive his wife; when the defibrillator appears ineffective, he pounds her chest screaming "Fight! Fight! Fight!" until at last, voice ravaged, he desperately pleas in a hoarse, broken whisper. Supposedly Cameron made them do this scene so many times and with so much vigor that both actors turned against the director afterwards, and indeed it seems as though there is no acting involved on-screen. But that one moment stuck with me the first time I watched the movie and it moved me again this time.

I admit that I watched the director's cut of this film, which came out in 1993, possibly making this an invalid entry into the 1989 series. However, I'm still counting it because the theatrical cut is an unfinished film. Now, people say that about a lot of cuts when the director had to cut some scenes, but I mean this literally: the whole alien aspect of the film makes absolutely no sense in the original cut. Here, however, we see them as both peaceful diplomats and deadly harbingers. Their message is similar to Klaatu's: stop fighting, or be destroyed by forces we cannot possibly combat. The CG elements of these beasts are dated, yes, but they hardly look worse than those found in the watershed Terminator 2 (though obviously some of these were added after that film gave Cameron the clout to finish this one).

Where the theatrical cut tacked on an anti-climactic alien subplot to a damn good thriller, this version gives it the meat it needs to make its point: that the infighting and sadism that rises in these stranded SEALs and crewmen when circumstances bring out their base instincts must be controlled and suppressed, lest it consume us all. It's still not a snug fit, but at least it makes sense.

There's hardly a flaw to spot in the film: the leads are all superb, and the story, fleshed out in its director's cut, is gripping and -- in the end -- inspiring. Holding it all together is Cameron's wonderful direction, which makes great use of every object that appears in the frame. The diving scenes have an unsettling serenity to them, while the platform shots convey the shrinking confines of these people's minds. I suppose The Abyss is a bit like Coppola's The Conversation: sandwiched between two lauded classics, it inevitably got lost in the public consciousness. Also like The Conversation, it's every bit as good as those masterpieces that surround it.

A History of Violence

There's something deliciously ironic about David Croneneberg making a film about our collective obsession with violence. Cronenberg, who came to prominence in the '80s with hits like Videodrome and his remake of The Fly, has devoted his entire career to ultra-violent depictions of bodily functions and transformations. His most beloved films are caked in blood as gory exaggerations of boils, cancers, even sexual organs rip open the flesh of his poor characters to further whatever metaphor he's pushing this time. The thought of him breaking out a soapbox to tell us we need to spend less time watching the R-rated action extravaganzas is downright hilarious.

Nevertheless, some people deserve the benefit of the doubt, and Cronenberg certainly qualifies, so I decided to give the film a shot. Based on the graphic novel of the same name, A History of Violence charts the path of Tom Stall (Viggo Mortensen), who runs a diner in a small Indiana town. He's got a loving wife (Maria Bello) and two kids, and he lives in general contentment. Then one day two men walk into the diner at closing time. We know something will go wrong, because we saw them in an earlier scene, and they just look like the sort of people to cause trouble. When they pull out guns, Tom leaps over the counter and murders them both in seconds.

Tom is stunned by his actions, but the media quickly makes him into a hero, as witnesses remark how "amazing" he was in action. Tom looks forward to the whole thing blowing over, but then two more men come to the diner, this time in fancy suits. The leader, Fogarty, has deep scars on his face and calls Tom "Joey," insisting that the two knew each other in Philadelphia. Stall says that the man is mistaken but is clearly distressed. Before long, the man and his thugs show up at Tom's house and, well, watch for yourself.

The plot of A History of Violence is almost too-thin, especially coming from the man who took us on such dense, nigh-impenetrable journeys in the past. But its starkness is its strength: Cronenberg does not revel in blood but restricts it to horrific yet disturbingly satisfying outbursts. It's not exactly tense, but it is taut, and it keeps you riveted even though you can see every twist coming (thanks in no small part to the spoiler-ridden trailer that kept me from viewing this film for years). However, Cronenberg's aim here isn't simply going from A to B, leaving a trail of dead behind him. No, the director uses the rail-thin plot to examine our infatuation with violence and how our bloodlust perpetuates itself. Cronenberg does not spare any gory details -- I don't know what a head really looks like when it's just been blasted off with a shotgun, but I have an inclination now -- but these scenes do not feel gratuitous, instead forcing us to contemplate the consequences of our actions. If any scene could be construed as celebratory, Croenenberg does not allow the feeling to last for long.

Take the scene where Tom's teenage son Jack viciously beats a bully who has tormented him all year. It's shocking but also rewarding, and you can't help but feel a surge of glee as the timid kid finally stands up to the bully. Why is it that I felt somewhat euphoric in that scene, but cool and impassive when Jack first ignores the bully and responds to the kid's insults with some barbs of his own? Before I can mull it over, Cronenberg abruptly cuts to Tom lecturing his son about the futility of violence, only to harshly slap his son when the boy points the hypocrisy of a killer condemning a fistfight. That slap turns the vaguely triumphant mood chilly in an instant. Clearly, in this scene Tom represents the director: a man with a past in gore warning us about desensitization and the admiration of violence even as he fills the screen yet again with death and brutality.

Overall, the film is a successful depiction of how Darwinian evolution has instilled in us all a certain love of violence, but I wonder if the story of this tested family can so easily gloss over the very real problem of violence in our culture. Viggo and Ed Harris put in great work, symbols of rugged masculinity attempting to pull away from the violence inherent in that image but never able to break free. Bello's Edie starts strong as the more aggressive of the couple, but when the roles reverse she becomes almost inconsequential; does her husband's violence scare her, or kinda turn her on? Still, let's not even dwell on how William Hurt's four-minute stint of scenery-chewing garnered an Oscar nomination. A History of Violence is ultimately noteworthy for relaunching Cronenberg's commercial viability and a tonal shift to starker displays of brutality that would inform his superior Eastern Promises (also starring Mortensen), but it's still an interesting metaphor for our unsettling celebration of aggression. So interesting, in fact, that I feel I need to watch the film again, perhaps after revisiting Eastern Promises to size up the two. Who knows; there's a lot to love in this film, quite possibly more than I caught the first time.