War Horse (Steven Spielberg, 2011)

Like his other release this year, The Adventures of Tintin, Steven Spielberg's War Horse indulges in the best and worst of a particular facet of the director's talent. Tintin lacks a proper dramatic arc and works largely without any stakes, yet it showcases Spielberg's talent for choreographing dynamic, vast setpieces of eye-popping visual marvels. War Horse, the more low-key, Oscar-friendly picture, contains moments of such beauty as to border on the poetic, matching the most abstract and haunting shots of the director's canon. But it is also such a hand-holding, tedious affair as to display the most immature, irritating traits of Spielberg's storytelling. In other terms, if Tintin displays Spielberg at his most childlike, War Horse shows him at his most childish.

War Horse barely even gets started before it's in your face with forced wonder, opening on a young English farm boy, Albert (Jeremy Irvine), watching the birth of a foal with fascination. But the film moves through a quick series of shots that continue to convey Albert's instant love of this creature, even as the edits clearly hop over a significant portion of time. Within seconds of screen time, the foal grows into a yearling, but Albert has that same dopey look on his face. Does that mean he walked around like the village idiot for weeks, even months, gawping at a damn horse? And when Albert's lovable alcoholic father (Peter Mullan) buys the horse at an auction just to get one over his landlord, the lad is so overjoyed that the very real possibility his dad just made them homeless matters nothing next to owning "Joey," All the while, John Williams score insists you take a handkerchief, regardless of whether your eyes are wet. This is not the organic Spielberg who could masterfully manipulate an audience to genuine reaction; this is a battering ram methodically slamming against the portcullis until it can break through and shove the intended emotional response down everyone's throat.

Cemetery Junction

Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant, perhaps the most influential comedy writers of the new millennium, have crafted two of the most mature, deeply felt, perfectly paced television comedies in the medium's history. When it comes to the cinema, however, they have a frustratingly childlike view: something about the size of a theatrical screen in relation to that of a television that makes them feel as if they must project something bigger and broader. They both said they wanted a movie to be seen in a theater, not as a DVD, but that ignores the massive shift in the moviegoing consciousness that began when VCR prices dropped in the 80s and has exploded with the advent of the affordable home theater.

That desire to live up to the grander size of the films that inspired them softens the numerable pleasures of Cemetery Junction and turns what could have been a masterful evocation of the duo's extremely natural, extremely cringeworthy style into a modest success that proves entertaining but frustratingly out-of-reach.


And yet, I liked it. Gervais and Merchant's television series were explorations of their fears, of being trapped in a dead-end life (The Office) and of selling out all integrity for a hint of fame (Extras and aspects of The Office). Cemetery Junction traces those fears to their roots, in Gervais' childhood home in a working-class section of Reading. There, the women grow up to be housewives, and the men follow their fathers to the factory.

Terrified of this endless cycle, Freddie Taylor (Christian Cooke) surreptitiously sneaks to the nicer side of Reading to apply for a job at a life insurance company run by Mr. Kendrick (Ralph Fiennes), a man who grew up in the same area as Freddie but managed to fight his way up the ladder. Specifically, Freddie envies the man's wealth, and Mr. Kendrick looks grimly amused at the boy's pluck, a hint of flattery tempered by the suggestion that the man finally his deepest wish: to become a legend back home.

The rest of the film pits Freddie's attempts to step up to the first rung of the corporate ladder while his friends, Bruce (Tom Hughes) and Paul, aka Snork (Jack Doolan), try to prevent him from even climbing that high. They continue to drink all day, get into fights and, in Bruce's case, bed as many women as possible -- poor Snork just never can play his cards right with the ladies. Freddie's ambition is interpreted, somewhat correctly, as bourgeois affectation, and his buddies love to cut him down, asking why the jobs in Cemetery Junction aren't good enough for him.

If The Office launched cringe humor into the mainstream, Cemetery Junction dispense with the humor and keeps the discomfort. These characters have not yet lived enough to draw dark comedy from their lives, simply stewing in misery. Underneath Bruce's rakish self-confidence is a deep bitterness over being abandoned by his mother, which he blames on his dad for not "being a man" and killing the bloke who destroyed their family. Were Paul a twentysomething today and not 1973, he would certainly have been at Wernham Hogg or some company like it, desperately puffing out his flabby chest (complete with a tattoo of a bare-breasted vampire that looks as if it were drawn with a pencil) in a vain attempt to impress people who hate his jokes and everything else about him as well. Gervais and Merchant try too hard to give Paul all the David Brent-esque lines, but it is when he stops trying to be a jokester and actually acts serious that he is most unsettling.

Worst, and therefore best, of all is Mr. Kendrick, a rotted soul who vigorously pursued a way out of Cemetery Junction and now has nothing to enjoy. He traps his wife (Emily Watson) in their lavish prison, preventing her from following whatever dreams she may have had to ensure his dominance. At a trumped-up banquet the company holds each year, he can barely contain his contempt for others, and his half-hearted go at honoring a retiring employee who devoted his entire life to the company is one of the most savagely dark and heartbreaking moments in the Gervais-Merchant canon. Mike (Matthew Goode), the best salesman at the company and fiancé to the boss' daughter (Felicity Jones), follows in Kendrick's footsteps, conniving old pensioners out of their money and disregarding Julie's dreams of becoming a photographer. An early promo for the film featured Gervais with Merchant speaking directly to the audience with Fiennes between them. Naturally, the way they brought Fiennes into the conversation was through Schindler's List, asking "Lot of laughs making that film?" What's funny is that Fiennes essentially plays Kendrick as Amon Göth, ignoring that he's in a nostalgic, lightly comic drama.

The genius of Kendrick's incessant, endothermic attitude stands out even more when compared to some of the more misjudged elements of the film. Paul's one-liners are too offensive for their own sake, to the point that he becomes predictable and the filmmakers lose the element of surprise that made Brent's outbursts so wild that the laughter caught in the throat because you'd swallowed your tongue in shock. Back home, Freddie sits at the table with his family, including his dad (Gervais) and grandmother (Anne Reid), as the poor boy must endure the lazy stream of racism that trickles from his elders' mouths. It's certainly a true-to-life touch, but Gervais and Merch overplay their hand, turning what could have been a funny group into a tedious array of reactionary caricatures.

The entire movie is a tug-of-war inside each character between the desire to get as far away from Reading as possible and the awareness that wherever one goes, it will still be the same. One can see Julie's future in her mother -- Watson's eyes brilliantly convey a deep pain that she has learned to resist but has never gotten used to -- and Bruce's beleaguered father shares more with his son that Bruce knows. But it all feels so generic at times, livened only by fleeting moments, never even full scenes.

The manner in which the film can move from engaging to eye-rolling in an instant is best exemplified by that awful "winner's ball" Kendrick throws to make door-to-door insurance salesmen feel like major stockholders in a Fortune 500 company. Paul manages to get himself on-stage with the band to sing a rousing version of Slade's "Cum On Feel the Noize" that somehow wins over the conservative old businessmen and their wives in attendance. Then, to transition from this joyous break from reality, the film awkwardly slams back into squirm humor as Snork, high on the attention, relates an obscene joke he heard earlier. Gervais and Merchant have the ability to portray comedy from the abyss and to capture an optimistic sense of romance and joy. They've even combined the two, but that only works when they start in the darkness and gradually find their way to the light. Cemetery Junction wants to be light and gently anti-nostalgic, making its odd dips into cringe -- even the gags that work -- feel out of place.

The filmmakers said they based the idea of the film on the lyrics of the Bruce Springsteen song "Thunder Road," which goes a long way toward explaining the massive potential in the film and its shortcomings. Springsteen's songs, one of the purest rock songs ever written, captures an intangible through the power of suggestion: Cemetery Junction is too autobiographical, too narrowly defined, to have the same pull. Yet certain touches resonated with me, like the local police sergeant who has such a rapport with the local rascals that he'll enjoy a pint with them before they get so drunk he has to lock them up. Having convinced the BBC to let them direct their first project despite no prior experience, Gervais and Merchant have clearly grown visually since then, and the half-sepia, half-smoggy cinematography courtesy of Remi Adefarasin is both beautiful and compressing, finding a better mix between the appealing and the repellent than the writing. Overall, the sweetness of some of the performances and the occasional flashes of humor that won out barely won me over, but I found myself too often wishing the film had been less "Thunder Road" and more "Backstreets."

Punch-Drunk Love

Following the highly-lauded ensemble drama Magnolia, modern auteur Paul Thomas Anderson scaled things way back, offering up a surreal romantic comedy called Punch-Drunk Love. Reviews were mixed, which is just as well since I hated Magnolia so there was nowhere to go but up for me. In hindsight, Punch-Drunk Love, though wildly different in story and theme, firmly points towards the direction he would take with his masterpiece There Will Be Blood.

Adam Sandler reaches into the darker side that always came with his comedy and expands it into a full force as Barry Egan, an executive at a small company that makes novelties toiletries. He tends to avoid any lasting conversation and especially fears phone calls from his seven sisters, who torment him in that way that seems playful to them but never to the person being teased. We see him ably speaking to a potential client before he answers a phone call, but when he picks up the receiver and hears one of his sister's voices you can see something change in him immediately: he stutters, avoids simple questions and generally looks like a caged animal looking for an escape.

At the start of the film, Barry gets to work before anyone else to find a truck has dumped a harmonium out front. He runs and hides behind a wall as if afraid it will see him. A woman, Lena (Emily Watson), drives up and asks Barry if he would take her car keys and give them to the auto mechanic next door when they open. Later we learn that she set this up because she spotted a picture of Barry on one of his sister's desks at work. She seems to know about Barry's mental instability but is attracted to him anyway.

Barry's psychosis comes to the fore when he attends his sister's birthday party. He arrives at her house, opens the door hears his sister's laughing over an old story about how they teased him, tries to leave unnoticed, then opens the door to go back in. At the party, he tries to speak calmly but flubs words as his sisters open old wounds. Finally, he can take no more and kicks out the glass doors.

Lena eventually asks Barry on a date, and he nervously accepts. When they go to a restaurant, he mentions how he's buying up pudding cups to exploit a frequent flier miles giveaway (based on a true story). The two hit it off, until Lena brings up something Barry's sister told her about his childhood, and Barry excuses himself to the bathroom, which he promptly destroys. Of course he is thrown out of the restaurant, but Lena follows along as if nothing happened. I cannot say what Lena sees in Barry. Maybe it's the fact that she's an only child and envies someone who grew up surrounded by siblings, or perhaps she realizes that, because Barry grew up surrounded by his teasing sisters, he feels as lonely as she. Then again, maybe she just has latent S&M tendencies and loves Barry for his violent streak.

Barry feels something too, though he doesn't know how to act upon it. He's found someone who not only managed to see through that placid mask he presents to the world and understands his inner fury to be something more than "weirdness" as his sisters label it, but to love him anyway. When Lena heads to Hawaii, Barry drags his friend (Luis Guzman) along to all the grocery stores in town to clean out pudding cups, only to find that the company takes 6-8 weeks to process his claim for the flier miles. After a mild freak out, Barry just buys a damn ticket. It's a simple moment, but quietly hilarious and touching. The two meet on Waikiki Beach in the kind of perfect moment that normally would earn a groan, but works in a film that never lets on in what direction it's heading.

Early on, Barry calls a phone sex service though not, we sense, because he wants the actual service. He speaks to a woman who tries to stimulate him, but he sounds almost confused by the instructions she gives him, as if he doesn't know what to do. The next morning she calls back and tries to extort money from him, sending four "blond brothers" to strongarm him when he refuses. Barry gives up $500 in the hopes that they go away, but reconsiders later and demands his money back. Eventually he must face down the brothers as well as a Utah porn king (Philip Seymour Hoffman), both of which play out completely unexpectedly.

What links Punch-Drunk Love to There Will Be Blood is Anderson's bleak, unsettling direction. Where Daniel Plainview stood in the middle of a vast nothingness and somehow rose above it, Barry walks down the bright-lit aisles of a grocery store that look so bland compared to the man in the blue suit who travels among them, yet they swallow him whole. Later, when Barry goes to another store to get the cups he needs to get to Hawaii to see Lena, he stands above the aisles, a man now willing to join the world instead of hide within it. The film also calls to mind the surreality of Magnolia with its disorienting backgrounds and its bright color wash. After their first date, Barry takes Lena back to her place, and leaves. When he reaches the lobby, she calls him to invite him back for a kiss, resulting in an amusing bit where Barry roams back through the identical looking hallways before finally stumbling upon the right door.

Sandler's performance may seem like an anomaly for him, but there's always been a violent streak in his comedies: Happy Gilmore, Billy Madison, Big Daddy: all feature characters given to violent outbursts, but they're filtered through the ridiculous for humor. Though Barry is just as explosive, Sandler plays him with an isolation that lends itself to both frightening drama and pitch-black comedy.

Punch-Drunk Love isn't on the level of Anderson's two best films, Boogie Nights and There Will Be Blood, but it serves to bridge the two eras of his career while still being a thoroughly entertaining film in its own right. It's the best kind of film: one you don't see coming, and the excellent acting from the two main characters is excellent (PSH steals his scenes as well). It may be just a bit too "arty" in some places, and the harmonium adds little to the story, either literally or symbolically, but this is a surprisingly tender film wrapped in a terrifying black dramedy and a triumph from America's most promising young director.

Breaking the Waves

For whatever reason, the Dogme 95 movement has always seemed pretentious to me on paper. Actually, no, I know the reason, it's the rulebook the founders established with the group in order to promote intellectual growth in film. Known as the Vow of Chastity, it essentially enforced a strict verité approach even though it forbade any action like murders and guns. Maybe it's because I'm an American, but I think guns are an everyday aspect of life; besides, I have issues with someone calling a type of film verité if you're just reading out of a guide. However, if the Dogme 95 products contain more films like Lars von Trier's Breaking the Waves, I will gladly eat a mountain of crow.

In a small Calvinist community in Scotland, Bess (Emily Watson) gets engaged to an outsider who came through town working on an oil rig. Bess is devout in her faith; she cleans the church and even has two-way "conversations" with God in which she speaks for the Lord in a gruff, firm voice and for herself in a timid, childlike tone. Initially the community resists her marriage to Jan, but Bess is in love and her family reluctantly agrees. At the reception, one of Jan's rig buddies crushes a beer can to impress Bess' grandfather, who in turn breaks a glass of lemonade with his bare hands. Though a virgin, Bess is ready to be a good wife from the start, even offering herself to him before the reception.

Bess' best friend, her sister-in-law Dodo (Katrin Cartlidge), worries for her: she knows that Bess is childlike and naïve, and even confronts Jan to warn him not to corrupt his new bride. But we see that Jan is a good man, and we do no worry. After a honeymoon, he heads back to the oil rig to work, leaving Bess to deal with loneliness for the first time. When he comes back, he's been paralyzed by an accident. "Life should not always be preserved at all costs," warns one of the community's pragmatic doctors, but Bess will hear none of it. She's just glad her husband is alive.

Now incapable of making love, he encourages his wife to sleep with another man and tell him about the experience. Why? I am not sure, for we never learn. If I had to guess, I'd say he felt guilty that his wife, a virgin until their marriage, could only experience such carnal pleasures for a short time before she became saddled with a paralyzed husband. But the reason matters little, as Bess' obedience of her husband leads to the real crux of the story: a spiritual journey.

Bess, so torn by her religious upbringing, comes to view her husband's request as her duty to God: sleeping with other men will convince God that she loves her husband, and He in turn will heal Jan. Jan's condition instead worsens, and it drives Bess to near-madness. Soon she's so desperate that she rides out to a ship that even prostitutes avoid because of how rough the men treat them. These events lead to several big revelations and twists that make you think about the nature of God and spirituality, as well as the relationship between Jan and Bess.

von Trier forces us to ask ourselves one big question with the film: is Bess a sinner? Certainly the community thinks so. At the start of the film, we see how dogmatic her small town is: "We don't need bells in our church to worship God," Bess' grandfather growls to an inquisitive Jan. At a funeral, the priest actually calls the deceased a sinner and assures the congregation that the man currently resides in Hell. Women do not speak in the services, and any display of emotion is frowned upon. When the town eventually figures out that Bess is sleeping with other men, they cast her out, and the children who used to speak to her now throw stones. I can't imagine they know why they throw them, only that their parents have condemned her. But even in her darkest moments Bess remains spiritually pure even as she places herself in situations that are anything but innocent.

The film rests squarely on Emily Watson's shoulders, and she delivers an absolutely devastating performance. The more hopeless Bess' situation becomes the more Watson becomes unhinged. Yet the nature of her character keeps Watson from slipping into overacting or mugging; instead, she makes the whole thing strangely plausible. As we learn more about her character and what possibly motivates her, our sympathy deepens for this poor, tortured soul. Her story ends in tragedy, but the ending contains a sort of cosmic intervention that does not fix problems but gives us a sense of closure (it did take me a second to get, though).

von Trier noted that the film broke a number of Dogme 95 tenets: the director used sets instead of actual locations, set the film in the past, hints at extreme violence in one moment, and even uses CGI at one point. He even uses non-diegetic music with occasional irony: I got a kick out of hearing Deep Purple's "Child in Time" as it played over a port at sunset, when the water actually looks purple. All of this delights me. It tells me that von Trier was more concerned with making a good film than a "proper" one. And what a good film he made; Breaking the Waves is one of the most insightful films made about spirituality, and that may very well have to do with the fact that religion itself plays only a peripheral role; clerics stick to the "rules" as if that makes a good Christian, but this woman true faith confuses them. While they may not react as violently as the judges did in The Passion of Joan of Arc, we still see how myopic and misguided they are in the face of a true believer.