The Yards (James Gray, 2000)

James Gray's The Yards is, like everything else he's made in his sadly infrequent career, a bold mix of classical, Fordian technique and Cassavetian acting whose alchemical properties transcend the clash of sensibilities into something simultaneously raw and operatic. Uniformly excellent acting never plays the material as merely symbolic, even if its view of corruption as a fixture of post-industrial commerce certainly offers its share of commentary. Its ending works because of its deflation, a true abstention from a system that offers no good option and therefore makes a simple act of quitting a kind of victory in its admission of defeat.

My full article is up at Movie Mezzanine.

Prometheus (Ridley Scott, 2012)

[Warning: contains spoilers]

The mythological and philosophical ideas co-writer Damon Lindelof shoehorns into Prometheus are intriguing ones, at least in theory. It also helps if you have never read the work of H.P. Lovecraft, seen Mission to Mars or understood 2001: A Space Odyssey. Prometheus is the cynical variant of the latter two works and a diluted take on the extreme nihilism of the former. In the bleakness of Prometheus' suppositions about humanity's origins is also a crushing limitation set by Lindelof's deficiencies of imagination. This film suggests a despairingly predestined meaning of human life, but also a grand plan more or less identical—in concept and messy, insane execution—as the Weyland-Yutani Corporation that hangs over the Alien franchise and, in pre-merger iteration, this prequel as a spectre of the all-too-human military industrial complex.

This could have been fodder for savage cosmic comedy, one that actually could play off the Promethean myth referenced, obviously, by the title. Prometheus' great crime was in giving man the power of a god, in giving mortals the chance at equaling, and perhaps bettering, immortals. The great thing about Greek mythology is how repulsive the gods are. They are belligerent, venal, venereal, and vain to the point of incest—for who else is worthy of a supreme being than something with that being's bloodline? They are deities unworthy of worship other than as a means of staving off death in their thoughtless rampages. If Lindelof ever went any deeper into his mythological fetish than merely connecting a web of references in dense but ultimately facile subtext, he might have truly reflected the nature of the gods Prometheus rebelled against and made something wonderfully deconstructive. That would require a willingness to treat the material with any kind of earnestness or thought, however, and Prometheus is instead one of the most tediously ponderous blockbusters in years even as it also routinely fails to invest its ideas with any severity.

Young Adult (Jason Reitman, 2011)

Jason Reitman's and Diablo Cody's Juno showed a self-consciously "quirky" high-school girl growing up quickly to deal with an adult problem, her cloyingly quirky lingo falling by the wayside as she matured into an empathetic, responsible person. Young Adult depicts the inverse of that story, of the prom queen who never outgrew that period of her life where she was some form of royalty, her preserved physical beauty akin to Dorian Gray's aesthetic mask. Soulless and resolutely conceited, Mavis Gary (Charlize Theron) is a profoundly unlikable character, a vile creature who despises anyone kind enough to spare her pity and insists on remolding the scariness of the real world back into the teenage years she ruled. Some may blanch at Mavis' sheer mean-spiritedness and unbending attitude, but whom do we see more in real life: the Junos who can quickly adapt and mature, or the Mavises?

Theron plays Mavis as if using the part as a screen test for her upcoming turn as the evil queen in Snow White and the Hunstman. She peers at the world with narrowed, confrontational eyes, perpetually disgusted by the normalcy of adult life but unable to see that she's encased herself in amber. Living in a high-rise tower in Minneapolis, Mavis ghostwrites young adult fiction that allows her to hang onto her perversely stretched youth, and her friend drips steel-melting acid as she sarcastically reassures Mavis that she's completely moved beyond the one-horse town she talks about incessantly. That fixation on her glory days compounds when her old flame sends her a birth announcement, inexplicably prompting a decision to return to her hometown to win him back. Cody and Reitman sell it like the starting point of a romantic comedy, but as Mavis obsessively replays Teenage Fanclub's "The Concept" from a mixtape that ex- made her in high school on the way home, her drive resembles Travis Bickle heading for the pimp instead of the usual chasing a lover at the airport. Reitman even zooms into the innards of the cassette, the meticulous overview of its parts visualizing just how completely Mavis has crawled inside her teenage shell to hide from adulthood.

That gutting of traditional romantic comedy mechanics extends through the whole film, which never fails to present Mavis' dream of breaking up the happy marriage of her beloved Buddy (Patrick Wilson) as predatory, not affectionate. As a director, Reitman wisely stays out of Cody's way, but he films everything in harsh, revealing terms, casting unwelcome light on the wrinkles forming on Theron's face to the dirty trackpad of her clearly well-used Macbook. Even wretchedly obvious shots that disdainfully linger on chains like Staples and KFC work by conveying Mavis' stuck-up, hypocritical POV, the immaturity of this film school-grade "commentary" reflecting a character, not the director. Rather than throwing an arm around a lazily superior audience to coddle them, the film practically sets itself against the crowd by mocking such holier-than-thou distaste of mass culture as childish.

And if that doesn't set you on edge, Mavis takes back over after this early montage to seize control of the rest of the movie, and her actions continuously the viewer's patience with her sheer nastiness. Greeting Mavis back in Mercury is not Buddy but Matt Freehauf (Patton Oswalt), a doughy nerd who was left crippled by a homophobic beating in high school. But Matt's bitterness soon crowds out any instant sympathy, and he proves as unable to move beyond his past as Mavis. Oswalt brings some of his buried aggression from Big Fan to the part, forming Matt into a mound of impotent fury so hell-bent on feeling sorry for himself that he even hates other disabled people for stealing attention from him. Oswalt essentially plays Mavis' unheeded conscience, but Matt is so unpleasant in his own right that his warnings about leaving Buddy seem to stem more from practical worry than moral concern. The comedian gets most of the film's outright punchlines, but he delivers them with an edge; when Mavis airily explains what a zombie is, Matt snaps, "I'm a fat geek, I know what a zombie is." On paper, that joke reads as mere banter, but Oswalt reads it as if barely keeping his temper in check, anxious to keep check of that myopic grasp on pop culture that constitutes the only territory he knows and controls.

Mavis and Matt make a hell of a misanthropic double act, sniping at everyone within eyesight, including each other. Both receive so much pity from those around them that the brutal takedowns they lob between them are perhaps the first honest assessments they've ever heard of themselves. Matt, who knows he would have no shot with someone like Mavis even at his best, can taunt her for failing book series and her emotional cocoon. Mavis, so unconcerned with hurting someone's feelings, can harangue Matt for being so unapproachable because of his personality, not his disability. (And as a YA writer, she naturally uses hacky, clichéd lines that play on his crutch to do so.)

But not even these confrontations can shake something loose in either character, and Young Adult routinely sets up the usual plot points designed to offer some kind of breakthrough—a drunken kiss, the aforementioned exchange of critical evaluations, even an almost painfully sad scene of shared grief—only to collapse back into self-delusion. I winced all during a party scene near the end, waiting for the explosion that had to come, which it did, albeit in a wholly unexpected manner that managed to sidestep the easy way out but revealed a clarifying piece of information that does nothing to alter one's opinion of Mavis.

This is not easy stuff, and even those who typically have no problem with unsympathetic characters have responded viscerally to the film's unrepentant pessimism. But Cody is no mere nihilist, and Young Adult is filled with good people living contented lives. But they are not the stars, and their lives are not glorious and remarkable in the way they need to be to counteract the two principal players, who view such prosaic happiness as beneath them yet can attain nothing better. One of my notes for Young Adult said it was a better horror film than Jennifer's Body, but upon further reflection, I cannot call it such because it all feels too real and unexaggerated. Some people will never learn, so close-minded that nothing will penetrate years of self-deception and insecurity manifested as perverse haughtiness. Those who dismiss Cody as someone writing what she thinks is teen slang have already had two demonstrations of her criticism of youth and all its inexperience and arrogance. If Young Adult cannot convince them of her rejection of such self-involved attitudes, then perhaps Mavis and Matt aren't the only ones clouded by shallow prejudices.

The Road

Few directors so completely match the content of an adapted work like John Hillcoat does The Road. Cormac McCarthy's post-apocalyptic novel was barren and visceral, so stark its sentence structure was basic and terse. Hillcoat, director of the 2005 arid Western The Proposition, fit the source material like a glove. Indeed, for a while, this depiction of a world gone to hell displays a match made in heaven.

You'd be forgiven for thinking that Hillcoat shot the movie in black-and-white: even the desaturated tones of WWII epics Saving Private Ryan and Band of Brothers look like Almodóvar films compared to this. As with the novel, the film never tells the audience what happened to the world, merely moving through the aftermath of its near-destruction; it's a world stripped of all greenery, where "each day is more gray than the one before." In this world, time and place have no meaning, where the characters have no names because they no longer matter in a world with so few remaining creatures that mere existence makes one unique enough not to require a title.

The Man (Viggo Mortensen) decides to take his son, The Boy (Kodi Smit-McPhee), from their home somewhere in the middle of the East Coast to the Southeast in the hope of escaping the bitter cold and for another reason quickly revealed in the novel but reserved here until right at the end for maximum emotional impact. Mortensen is just as right for his role in front of the camera as Hillcoat is behind it: he perfectly balances the fortitude and deteriorating strength and resolve of The Man. You feel safe with him, despite his palpable desperation and his ever-shrinking frame. Few people could project a cold sanity through the unkempt and oily beard he sports, but Mortensen has an odd charisma about him that radiates authority. Smit-McPhee also makes an impression as The Boy, just as frightened and childish in a world that impossibly demands instant maturation as the literary iteration. The Boy must also, though, reflect some of that maturity, and Smit-McPhee got the part specifically because those who chose him saw a wisdom beyond his years. I don't know that I quite agree with that assessment, but he certainly has a perceptibility about him that's more relevant to the part than wisdom, as the most "egregious" display of his childishness is his innocence and ability to still see the good in the world.

Where McCarthy's novel maintained a constant tension broken by a few desperately necessary reprieves, The Road moves in spurts: it's bleak, it's bleak, it's kind of happy, it's bleak again. Flashbacks, used sparingly in the novel to provide only the most basic link to a normal past, give extra time to The Wife (Charlize Theron, who actually bears a striking physical resemblance to Smit-McPhee). Hillcoat overuses these glimpses to the past, breaking the flow and atmosphere of the grisly present. As such, Hillcoat's film, working from Joe Penhall's script, contains peaks and troughs where McCarthy's was one long crescendo.

Some of these disjointed moments work, such as a dusty can of Coca-Cola that has retained enough of its red hue to break the near-monochrome around it to stand as a beacon to the two starving travelers. This moment is more deeply felt than the later discovery of an abandoned shelter loaded with food, such a triumphant bit in the novel but bizarrely blasé here. In the film's most memorable segment, Man and Boy happen upon an old, dying man (Robert Duvall, if you can recognize him) and, in this version, not only give him a precious can of food but invite him for dinner; in the light of the fire, his cataract-clouded eyes and grimy, withered face are more terrible than the host of horror occasionally paraded on-screen for shock effect. He seems a dying god when he morbidly responds, "Foolish to ask for luxuries in times like these" when Man asks if he wishes for death.

Perhaps The Road suffered the weight of rising expectations, what with its long delays, the quality of the source material (not McCarthy's best by a long shot, but a damn gripping read nonetheless), and the rapturous reception of the previous McCarthy adaptation No Country for Old Men. If you let yourself slip into Hillcoat's appropriately ascetic nightmare, The Road genuinely works; but all the moments he inserted to break our concentration keep us from simply playing ball with the picture. It could have been much worse I suppose, though that isn't really a point in its favor; ultimately, Hillcoat, Mortensen and Smit-McPhee do an excellent job of keeping our attention when they're working together, but those too-frequent pauses grind the film down to a level just above average even without unfairly comparing it to the source material, much less the Coens' magnificent take on No Country. Still, as much as I might complain about Hollywood's lack of originality, the thought of more McCarthy adaptations is too delicious a prospect to refuse.