Capsule Reviews: Lockout, Fixed Bayonets!

Lockout (James Mather, Stephen St. Leger, 2012)

Filmed in oxidized green-grays, Lockout has an agreeably dingy look to it, something both exacerbated and subverted by the directorial style built on top of it. Wearing its "Like Escape from New York, but in space!" pitch on its sleeve, Lockout wrings a great deal of immaculately sloppy fun out of its well-worn material. Guy Pearce shines as Snow, a framed CIA agent whose trip to prison turns into a recruitment to save the president's daughter, taken hostage during a humanitarian trip to this cryogenic space jail gone horribly awry. Speaking solely in Plissken-esque, macabre quips, Pearce has a ball on his own. But that's nothing compared to his double act with Maggie Grace as the naïve but sharp daughter; Andreas brought up It Happened One Night and now I can't not think of that. I was hooked from its literally punchy opening.

Fixed Bayonets! (Samuel Fuller, 1951)

Released hot on the heels of Fuller's other 1951 Korean War film, the geographically compressed The Steel Helmet, Fixed Bayonets! expands the field of battle but retains its compatriot's focused character study. Its surveyed platoon, abandoned to cover the rear in the dead of bitter winter, lose themselves to psychological contemplation as the cold threatens them as much as the encroaching Chinese. Lest you think that the voiceovers turn the film into some kind of reverie, however, Fuller here nails down the pulp-prose-poetry visual style that would make him such a distinct filmmaker. Indeed, Fixed Bayonets! offers a host of striking, idiosyncratic shots and tics that say more than even the bluntest dialogue.

The tremble of the camera when a mortar round explodes, both prefiguring the rise of shaky cam visceral "realism" and transcending its inherent thrill ride with more static, observational framing. The almost religious procession of the rest of the regiment (complete with Gregorian-esque chant) as they leave their comrades behind. The cacophony of Chinese bugles calling troops to arms but also containing the mournful last notes of "Taps" to further rattle the Americans. The amusing, fraternal scene of the men in a circle rubbing their frostbitten feet together until one of the sergeant's good-natured ribbing turns to horror when he realizes the cold, numbed foot he grabbed is his own.* Most gripping is the scene of Corporal Denno going to save the other sergeant stranded in a minefield, his own cowardly desire not to have to lead in the man's stead ironically compelling him to bravery. Fuller wrings tension out of a series of close-ups of Denno's boots, twinkling with melted snow as if the shoes themselves are sweating in nervousness as he takes each ginger step forward. It's all gorgeous and harrowing, as aesthetically thrilling as it is morally grounded in the complexities of respect and regret for its characters.

*As Gene Evans' sergeant tells the others, "Only three things you gotta worry about the infantry: your rifle and your two feet." As the grandson of a vet whose feet never fully recovered from winters in Korea, this tossed-off line carried a lot of weight and understanding.

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.

The King's Speech

Though it features the sort of rousing, uplifting score one expects for a movie about an underdog overcoming an obstacle, the dominant sonic motif in Tom Hooper's The King's Speech is a light, choked gargle, the sound of the base of the tongue splashing around the back of the throat in tremulous preparation for a performance it would like nothing more than to not give. The tongue in question belongs to Albert Frederick Arthur George, the Duke of York and second in line of succession to the king of England, a man whose stammer might never had been an issue were he blessed with the good fortune to have been born before the popularization of radio.

The film opens in 1925, at the closing of the Empire Exhibition at Wembley. Albert's father, King George V (Michael Gambon), charges him with delivering the closing speech on radio, himself and the primary heir to the throne, Prince Edward, having already made their wireless debuts. As he arrives, his wife and their confidants reassure Albert that he will do wonderfully, but the look of fear in his eyes creates a tense mood before he even says a word. At last, aides send him in front of the microphone at the head of the stands, and all in the audience turn reverently to hear him. The pause is deafening, and when Albert finally speaks, the crackled stutters that escape his lips echo through the sound system, mocking him as the crowd maintains their respectful silence but look around uncomfortably in that way people need to make eye contact to share pain but must also avoid it at all costs to prevent an errant titter.

It's an excruciating moment, and as someone who does not stammer but has often felt the hot sting of apprehension -- no, pure, unrelenting terror -- at the simple notion of public speaking, the seemingly contradictory combination of agoraphobia and claustrophobia that creeps into the mise-en-scène rang painfully true. Of course, the damned thing about a stammer or any other display of anxiety is that, once aware that others have picked up on the trait, the sufferer can never right, spiraling further into a pit of self-revulsion and embarrassment that magnifies the first slip into a cascade of tics and halting pronunciation. The first scared pause, the dreaded "ums" and "likes," never come in one aberration. They only ever lead to more mistakes.

Humiliated by the experience, Albert tries a series of speech therapists, all of whom display a knowledge of medicine so arcane one expects them to break out leeches and suggest a blood-letting. As ashamed by the experiences of failing with countless doctors as the public performances themselves, Albert swears off speech therapy and banks on a public life held largely out of view as his father and elder brother can handle the speeches. But the king knows better. He realizes that an occasional appearance in procession with a regal wave will no longer do; with every household turning to radio for news, entertainment, and general social guidance, it is imperative that the royal family take advantage of the airwaves lest they become an inanimate relic alongside the other trinkets in their castles for fat American tourists to come marvel at year after year. "We've been reduced to the most vile and loathsome profession of all: actors," sighs the king with grim irony.

Behind Albert's back, his wife, Elizabeth (Helena Bonham Carter), finds a middle-class therapist, one Lionel Logue (Geoffrey Rush). Whatever danger this movie was in of being a stuffy period drama is obliterated by Rush's entrance, heralded by a toilet flush before that magnificent mass of a head enters the frame and, unaware of who Elizabeth really is, makes plain, frank chat with her. His puckish grin, mischievous bow tie (and since when has a bow tie been mischievous?) and quick wit disarm the somber proceedings instantly, though it's just as amusing to see his boyish looks blanch when his upfront candor is returned in kind and Elizabeth reveals her identity and that of her husband.

The scenes between Lionel and Albert -- or Bertie, as his family (and Lionel, to his extreme annoyance) call him -- play as a tug-of-war between stale, Academy-pleasing montage of uplift and determination and something fresher, more spontaneous. Lionel insists on a first-name basis to make his therapy work, and his direct manner so stuns the royal member used to even his closest advisers speaking to him with reverence and cowed expression that he starts answering back in spite of himself. Rush's humor is infectious; Bertie tells him about the other doctors who prescribed cigarettes to relax the lungs, to which Lionel replies, "They're idiots." "They're all knighted," replies Bertie smugly. "That makes it official, then," says Lionel with a wide grin.

Rush and Firth attain an instant chemistry that shows off each individually but also creates a certain hollowness when they're apart. Rush, with his giant, triangular face, is at once boyish and refined, his elocution and perfect diction clashing with his more laid-back attitude. He plays off Firth, who once again gives a fantastic performance. Like Tilda Swinton, Firth is seemingly incapable of giving anything less than a mesmerizing performance, and he's the sort of person who can oscillate between homely and strikingly beautiful depending on they compose themselves. Firth spends most of the film contorted in mental agony, squashing his throat into a makeshift double chin as if compressing a bellow, hoping to stoke the words out of his lungs. He looks uncomfortable with the very thought of existence, his eyes darting nervously even when secluded from the public eye.

Had Hooper the confidence to stay entirely with their interplay, The King's Speech might have deserved the fevered hype that has greeted its release. But he gets mired in the cliché of the genre. His edits border on the sporadic at times, eliding over the more intimate and affecting moments to get to necessary stopgaps in plot. Bound to tell the historical narrative, Hooper must devote time to Prince Edward, a feckless, irresolute cad governed by his emotions, all of which are petulant and self-centered. Casting Guy Pearce in the role makes all the Australian jokes lobbed at Lionel throughout the film that much more amusing, but not even Pearce can work with the weakling. Nothing exposes the ludicrous nature of the monarchy like Edward's ascension and ultimate abdication of the throne: he falls in love with an American woman working on her second divorce, and his passions lead him to propose marriage. As the head of the Church of England, the king could not marry a divorcée, and what's more, neither the characters nor the people behind the camera suggest his rashness comes from true love. And so, Edward drains the film's middle section, simply occupying time until he can at last drop out and let his younger brother assume the throne.

Furthermore, Hooper and writer David Seidler get stuck with the proposition of successfully building dramatic tension to the titular speech, delivered when Britain declared war on Germany. Though Lionel features prominently and the camera spends some time in his modest domicile, this is a film that essentially roots itself in the hermetically sealed world of the monarchy, a faded, anachronistic relic that effectually ended long before the Russian tsars and German emperors mentioned nervously as Albert and others ponder the fate of the dynasty. But this creates the issues of building social tension through the group of people most oblivious to popular malaise and the nuances of international relations. After all, this monarchy sent its subjects to die en masse in the previous Great War even though they, being of inbred "pure" stock, were related to the German nobility they were meant to be opposing. The film wouldn't work if it suddenly sprang WWII on the audience without tying Albert's story to the mounting international turbulence, but it also seems clumsy for the characters to mention him only in the most terse and suggestive way possible, as they do throughout the 30s before Albert becomes George VI. Only when war is at England's doorsteps do the references to "Herr Hitler" becomes anything less than thudding moments of forced relevance in an otherwise sharp script.

The film has its other flaws. For the note-perfect work from the main cast, some of the supporting parts, though played by heavyweights border on the laughable. Timothy Spall, my dear Timothy, puts in such a bad Churchill impersonation I kept waiting for, Monty Python-style, someone to walk in from behind the camera and say, "No, stop, this has gotten far too silly." Derek Jacobi plays the Archbishop of Canterbury, one of the more morally superior to hold the position, as an unctuous but snippy sycophant, wanting to be villainous without being able to twist the real man that far without snapping him from his base in reality. Long after Hooper's direction settles into its refined grace and settles the aesthetic issues near the start, these two drag down all of their scenes. Taken with some of the more obvious lines, these nagging issues too often distract from the keen, hilarious and moving double act shared by Rush and Firth and expertly moderated by Carter.

Yet if The King's Speech is ultimately unable to transcend the restrictive boundaries of its awards-baiting genre, it overcomes any disappointment by being so full of verve and energy that it at least stretches those confines to the breaking point. This is the kind of film made to show off its actors, but the main players are all so excellent that they would all deserve awards, were they given based on merit instead of marketing ability. Fortunately for the cast and crew, The King's Speech has enjoyed plenty of that as well. I do not think the term "Oscar-bait" necessarily connotes a bad film, but it does speak to the increasingly stale formula guaranteed to please the artistically conservative members of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences. What typically makes an Oscar-bait film unbearable is when it was clearly made to reap platitudes.

The King's Speech works because it cares for its characters and understands the symbolic but vital importance of George VI. A whole other movie could be made about the courage he and his wife displayed during the war, never leaving London even when a bomb went off at Buckingham Palace. The pauses he put into his speeches as he ensured each word came out clearly gave his voice a solemn gravity, and though his inspiration gets overlooked in favor of Churchill, George too played a key role in the war effort. Rush's Lionel looks compassionately but sternly upon his subject, aware that Albert could be a great man if he could only get over his fears. It is a testament to how well Rush goads Albert and how well Firth responds that, when the speech came at last, though I knew the ending, a tiny knot had formed in my stomach. Whatever else holds back the film, that effect was earned, and this break from the usual, priggish nature of period drama made The King's Speech an unexpected pleasure to watch.

Animal Kingdom

If the emotional range of crime family films stretches from the operatic types of The Godfather to the viscerally felt human beings of GoodFellas, Animal Kingdom strives to find the middle ground between the two. That's not an entirely fair assessment, I grant you, as David Michôd's film cares less for the crime than the characters, but then the same was true of those landmark entries in the genre as well. Unfortunately, if a medium between the conflicting styles exists -- unlikely, considering the mutually annihilating contradictions -- Michôd doesn't find it, and Animal Kingdom slogs along for two hours unable to find a clear direction.

It opens strikingly enough, as a zoned-out teenager, Joshua or "J" (James Frecheville) sits watching TV next to a passed-out woman. Only when paramedics arrive do we realize that she has overdosed on heroin, and subsequent detail reveals the woman was the lad's mother. It is a perfectly paced procession, culminating in the dead-eyed teen's transferal to the family his mother tried to protect him from for years. That a heroin addict would find her relatives too horrible for her child suggests something about what kind of people they are, but what choice does J have?

In retrospect, I can see the immediate downturn in the film from this measured opening in its credits sequence, filled with somber, dull sweeps over an engraved plate and still from bank surveillance footage as robbers hold them up. The Codys are a family of robbers and dealers, but Michôd never actually shows that side of the action. It's a perfectly valid artistic decision, of course, but when I reflected on the film, I found it amusing that the director teased the audience with a heist movie even as he honestly conveyed what the film would give the audience: organized crime filmed tediously.

As J gets used to living with his grandmother, he introduces us to the family (via a voiceover narration that is subsequently dropped from the film, which would be cause for snarky complaint were it not such a relief not to hear Frecheville's droning voice overlapping the soundtrack). The oldest son, Andrew a.k.a. Pope (Ben Mendelsohn), stays out of the picture at the beginning, busy planning his various crimes and hiding out from the police. At the Cody home are the middle child, Craig (Sullivan Stapleton), a unstable man who is willing to spend hours tailing a driver who flips him off just to terrify him; Darren (Luke Ford), the youngest son with only a few years on J; and Barry, a family friend who assists Pope in robberies and seems a fourth son at times. And presiding over them all is Janine (Jacki Weaver), a kindly matriarch whose loving attitude toward her children borders on incestuous. She does not say much for most of the film, but Weaver projects a cold authority behind her warmth. Where the matriarch in crime films is always aware of the actions of the men in her life but is ultimately removed from the action, she all but coordinates her children without outwardly doing so.

The first half hour moves swiftly, but apart from the initial introductions, Animal Kingdom makes no headway with its characters. Frecheville has clearly been instructed to play J as an emotionally stunted, blank teenager, but he makes for a poor cipher, and the story bounces off him like radar waves on a stealth bomber. We know to be horrified by his living conditions because the things that happen around him are despicable, but Frecheville is trapped by the role and cannot react to anything.

Every time this film starts to turn around and become something engaging -- particularly when police corruption factors into the hunt for the Cody family -- it stops just as quickly as it started. The cops close in at the half-hour mark and show a disturbing willingness to circumvent the right to a fair trial (to say the least), but the briefest of reprisals appears to back them off for another hour of screen time. Michôd seems to be trying to avoid falling into the unintentional romanticizing and cliché of the crime film, maintaining focus solely on the family and not their exploits or, unless one of the Codys is present, the police procedural work and corruption in the justice system. But no one fills the gaps left by these omissions, and I found myself wishing for a cliché just so I'd have something to hold onto. The mere absence of the usual does not automatically equate to insight, and for most of the film I felt as if I were looking at the molted shells of creatures who'd grown and moved on to some other film.

In fairness, the performances are uniformly excellent. Stapleton is a live wire, yet he may be the least unsettling person in the Cody household. Both Ford and Mendelsohn are quieter and more reserved on-screen, but they hide an intensity that could obliterate Darren, the middle child who has to act out to get noticed against the elder and the youngest sons. Mendelsohn, with his weak chin and unassuming physique, may not look like a dealer and a robber, but one shot of his eyes tells you all you need to know about the killer inside. Even Frecheville, stunted as he is in the restrictive part of J, holds his own with the other actors; later in the film, he manages to hold his own against Guy Pearce, who plays a detective who wants to save J from his life but also exploit him to bring down the family.

Pearce's involvement and the tug-of-war between his detective and J, who would just like to go back to the surrogate family he makes with his girlfriend, livens the film. With J poised to sell out his family to be rid of them, Michôd finally unleashes Weaver in all her power, and the results are transcendent. Already the focal point of attention with her subdued presence, Weaver's Janine morphs into a grandmotherly version of Lady Macbeth as police pressure constricts her sons. Her ability to mix open scheming, matronly charm and a veneer of false helplessness makes her the most terrifying character in the film, and her grim, spectral smile is beastly, as if a lioness baring her teeth when an outside force threatens her cubs.

But the turn comes too late, and Animal Kingdom switches into second gear long after it should have been in fifth. Too many elements never come together, from its cold, detached direction to the equally pedestrian electronic score that serves primarily to demonstrate to the skeptics how great and varied and textured other like scores have been recently (compare the nuance and perfectly timed fluctuations of, say, Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross' Social Network score to the unimaginative hum of Anthony Partos'). Some scenes verge on the embarrassing, as the lazily ironic use of Air Supply's "I'm All Out of Love" following a tragedy or a sort-of gangster version of the "You know how I know you're gay?" segment of Knocked Up that haphazardly occurs right after the audience gets introduced to Pope so we lack the investment in the character to get any laughs out of him. I've heard some say that the film is one of the most honest crime movies in years, but I found it too sterile, more realistic in aesthetic than a movie like GoodFellas but not nearly as real. Animal Kingdom fancies itself a character study, but it never studies its characters, and the individual elements of the film, some of which are exemplary, never coalesce, leaving an awkward, plodding mess.

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.