Butter (JimField Smith, 2012)

Butter is an unfunny, arrogant satire that tries to skewer the Midwest but exists so far outside the realm of reality that it says more about the ignorance of its makers than its targets. This is a film written with such hyperbole that the actors conflict with the roles they play by virtue of being human beings, bringing a basic sense of human decency to such wafer-thin stereotypes. Occasionally, it gets a laugh in spite of itself, but Butter is so condescending and superior that it mainly just made me feel angry at those who thought it was clever enough to fund.

My full review is up now at Spectrum Culture.

The Invention of Lying

Ricky Gervais' first major feature as writer, director and star works with an interesting premise, but the man who created arguably the landmark television program of the decade proves sadly tame when handed a film-sized budget. Together with newcomer Matthew Robinson, he never delivers on his notion of a world where people cannot lie. However, Gervais brings his sense of naturalistic comedy and affecting sentimentality to The Invention of Lying, buoying what in anyone else's hands would have been an abysmal failure.

Gervais plays Mark Bellison, a low-ranking screenwriter for the company Lecture Films. Like the other writers, his scripts are simply condensations of historical events, not performed but recited on-screen by readers. In a world where people can't lie, Mark has it rough: fat, middle-aged and underpaid, his co-workers openly profess their disgust and women ignore him in droves. A friend sets him up on a date with the gorgeous Anna (Jennifer Garner), whom he charms with his humor but has no hope of attracting.

Just as he finds himself out of a job and facing eviction, Mark manages to tell the world's first lie. It's so unprecedented that he can walk into a bank and request whatever amount of money he wants and the tellers assume that, when he overdraws, the computers are simply malfunctioning. After all, whatever he asks for must be in his account. Suddenly, the most pathetic slob in the world has potentially limitless power.

Interestingly, however, Gervais keeps the film subdued, which works both to its credit and detriment. Upon fully realizing what he's now capable of, Mark immediately attempts to pick up a lady for quick sex, but he stops when he understands that what he does qualifies as rape. An American production of the same film would have followed through this bit as a joke, never pausing to let the severity of the situation sink in, but for Gervais to direct the gag into a sober revelation proves that the comedian brings layers and intelligence to his writing. Of course, other aspects of Mark's evolution are fully humorous; he returns to Lecture Films having "discovered" a long lost historical parchment recounting alien visits and interstellar romance. This document even prophesies that Mark will discover it one day and put his antagonistic secretary (Tina Fey) and rival (Rob Lowe) to shame.

About halfway through the film, though, the film splinters into two wildly different movies that never reconcile into a cohesive whole. Now armed with what basically amounts to a superpower, he doubles his efforts to win Anna. It's disappointing that Gervais would steer his premise into rom-com territory, given that no part of a pitch of this movie would suggest it should go down this route. Unwilling to use his gift to dupe Anna into sleeping with him, Mark instead relies on his new-found lateral thinking to charm her. Anna is an underwritten character, constantly sticking to her matter-of-fact desire for genetically ideal children even as she clearly falls for this dope, but Garner makes her work out of sheer charisma: she has one of the most expressive faces in the biz, and she can say entire chunks of dialogue simply with her doe eyes or a lip twitch. The subplot feels too much like Gervais wanted to ease into mainstream, made-for-Americans filmmaking, but anyone who's watched the finale of either The Office or Extras knows his gift for earned emotional payoffs, and at times the romantic aspect of the film is genuinely moving though it stays firmly within stifling genre restrictions.

The other aspect of the film is deeper, darker, funnier and probably would have been the sole focus of Gervais' script had it been part of a television series or a film he never expected to get much attention outside of Britain. The people of this world do not believe in an afterlife, so Mark's mother speaks on her deathbed about her fear of ceasing to exist. To calm her, Mark tearfully spins a vision of heaven to ease him mom's passing. Word gets out, and suddenly people across the world look to Mark for his knowledge of what happens after death. As formulaic and tepid as the subplot involving Mark and Anna is, Gervais makes up for it by openly postulating that religion could only come about through lies. The scenes involving Mark's creation of religion are wickedly satiric, particularly when Mark must endure an exasperating Q&A in response to his commandments.

Elements of these two subplots overlap in places but never in ways more substantive than setup for each other, resulting in meandering stretches in the second half that drag the film. Gervais assembled a cast that rivals all of his acquisitions for Extras combined, including Jonah Hill, Louis C.K., even the great Christopher Guest, but he never does anything with them. Their appearances, even the meatier parts like C.K.'s or Lowe's, feel more like name-recognition cameos than performances. There's also a tenuous logic to the film's premise: people can't lie, yes, but many offer up their true feelings without being asked for it. Gervais, a naturalistic writer and sharp observer of humanity in his television projects, opted for the safe route here -- his next film, Cemetery Junction, reunites him with writing partner Stephen Merchant and sounds from released information like something far more in line with what we know of Gervais' humor -- and as a result it disappoints. Yet Gervais, never trained as an actor, has such a natural presence on-screen and such a real yet inimitable method of delivery that he makes the thing not only watchable but often fun, even outside the raucous first half hour and the biting religious segments. Plus, there's something admirable about a mainstream film that, in a time when a -- according to reports from the Toronto Film Festival -- tame biopic of Charles Darwin can't find a distributor because of controversy, deals with evolution as if it was a fact. Well, a fact that everyone accepts, anyway.

Catch and Release

One of the strangest genre offshoots in film is the "moving on" subset of romantic comedy, in which the protagonist, having endured an unspeakable loss, must find love again while reconciling their guilt over moving on with life. Well, I say "strange:" learning to love again is a natural occurrence in the real world. But its depiction in film typically leaves me scratching my head. All too often, the protagonist finds love within months, and not just a steady relationship but love every bit as true as the one that was lost. Kevin Smith's Jersey Girl was a nice exception, advancing the story nearly a decade before trying to foist another relationship on the widower, but even then that time-jump served as an ellipsis for all that grieving.

Susannah Grant's Catch and Release might set the record for the shortest period of mourning ever put in one of these films. Gray (Jennifer Garner) mingles with the crowd at her fiancé Grady's funeral, internally monologuing about how much she hates having to deal with people at a time like this. This opening scene tells you everything that's about to go wrong with the film: Grant, the Oscar-nominated writer of Erin Brokovich, makes her directorial debut here, but she's clearly a writer first and foremost. The monologue only retreads what Garner quite capable conveys in silence on screen, drawing out what might have been an affecting moment into a clunky, repetitive bore. Oh, and the funeral just so happens to be on the day they were meant to be married, because apparently real life doesn't quite suck enough. Gray lives with Grady's roommates and friends, Dennis (Sam Jaeger), Grady's business partner; and Sam (Kevin Smith), an armchair philosopher who recites nuggets of wisdom gleaned not from books, but from the boxes of the herbal tea that he sells.

Also in the house is Fritz (Timothy Olyphant), Grady's other business partner and friend. Fritz immediately grates Gray, hooking up with a caterer at the funeral and even sleeping in Grady's bed. Gray doesn't understand why Fritz even stuck around after the funeral, until she notices that her fiancé sent $3,000 to an undisclosed recipient once a month and that some woman is leaving messages on his cell phone. Piecing together the evidence, as well as Fritz's worried attempts at misdirection, Gray realizes that her husband had an affair and that, according to Colorado law, all of Grady's money could potentially go to this woman's young child.

It's some weighty setup that might have worked had the film been about not canonizing the dead, but instead Grant uses this revelation as a justification of Gray's sudden and inexplicable attraction to Fritz, going from crippling grief to making out with a new dude within the week. And even if Fritz wasn't staying with the gang solely to run damage control for his dead friend, he lacks chemistry, with Gray or any other character, and instead suggests that a pretty face is all you need when you're dealing with death and betrayal.

Likewise, Jaeger and Garner fail to light up the screen. Jaeger's Dennis harbors his own feelings for Gray, but he spends so much time simply being forlorn around her that, as she hops into someone else's arms at an alarming rate, he seems to be more shaken up than the widow. Garner, who has a natural charm, is never given sufficient slack to roam with her character and to find her own voice, instead serving as a puppet for Grant's forced lines.

That lack of natural delivery is what leads me to believe that Grant, not the actors, deserves the blame for the stilted nature of the dialogue. Case in point: Kevin Smith, who put his own spin on his lines because he felt that he couldn't deliver what was on the page convincingly. Smith got away with it because he blamed the changes on his insecurity as an actor, yet his "colloquializing" of the dialogue makes him far and away the most interesting character of the film. For someone primarily known for appearing on-screen as a silent character who only pipes up to deliver a moment of alacrity to a conflicted soul, Smith brings his natural, conversational wit to the role and owns it: he's funny, warm, charming, lovable, sincere and -- in one moment that frankly should have come later in the film than it did -- heartbreaking. He's so good that everyone who appears in the scene with him gets a personality boost: Dennis becomes a great straight man, Gray gets out the emotion that for some reason she never properly exhibits elsewhere and Fritz, well, Fritz doesn't suck as much life out of the thing as he does without Kevin. The best, most touching, most realistic relationships in the whole film actually are Sam's interactions with Grady's lover and toddler.

But not even Smith can buoy this leaden, self-important snore-fest, a film that rushes the lives of its characters along yet still takes nearly two hours to reach its conclusion. That contrast between narrative length and running length leaves Catch and Release an interminable mess, a basket of cliché right down to its title, which becomes maddeningly punnish when we learn how much the characters like to fly fish. If you must watch it, do so to see Kevin Smith prove he could have a fun second career as an actor -- or maybe third; he does write comics now and then -- and for Juliette Lewis' off-kilter massage therapist, but bring a pillow for the rest of it.

Juno

When I first saw Juno last January, I walked out of the theater knowing I'd seen a great movie, but I couldn't quite say why. I watched it again on DVD and felt the same way, still inexplicably in love with the film. Now, after a third time, I've truly sat down and concentrated, and I've at last come up with an answer that is so absurdly simple I should probably start using safety scissors because I can't trust myself anymore: Juno, to me, is a great movie because it makes me happy, 100%, smiling into the wind, bounce-in-your-step happy. It is so thoroughly deceptive in its depth that I realize know I wanted Diablo Cody to win an Oscar for her screenplay without even understanding why she so completely deserved it.

The film of course deals with the titular Juno, a 16-year old who seems to have spent all 16 of those years fashioning herself into an independent person. To all those who dismiss the film out of hand as Cody's attempt to "sound like a real teenager:" you don't get it. Juno speaks the way she does because she wants to be individualistic; it's her own personal ironic statement to the world. Yet these speech patterns only show her immaturity, so at the start of the film her dialogue overflows with the stuff. Over the course of the film, she slowly drops her speaking styles, and it's one of the many ways Cody shows her character growing up without once calling attention to itself.

Ellen Page plays Juno about as perfectly as a person could. She manages to act far beyond her years while playing someone younger than her, an uneasy balance that could have gone awry, but doesn't. That juxtaposition makes Juno such a singular and great character; she has the intelligence of someone far older, but lacks the actual wisdom needed to put it to good use. Page has established herself as an actress to watch, but she sets the bar so high with Juno I don't know if she'll ever top it.

Also turning in his best work is Michael Cera. It's easy to dismiss Bleeker as yet another awkward little geek à la all his other roles, but just watch him in his first real scene, when Juno tells him she's pregnant. He doesn't explode like Seth Rogen's character did in Knocked Up, nor does he break down. Hell, he doesn't even demand a paternity test. He knows the baby is his, and when you look into Cera's eyes you can practically feel his stomach jump. Then he accepts the news, and whatever decision Juno makes, and in an instant you know these two are a perfect couple; Bleeker doesn't hide behind stylized speeches and quirkiness, but he's every bit as strong, yet unsure, as Juno.

Juno makes an appointment to get an abortion, but before she can enter she runs into a classmate, Su-Chin, a lone protestor who spouts off some parroted talking points before catching Juno off guard with the claim that her unborn child "has fingernails." Juno enters to face a dismissive clerk and, as she fills out the forms, she notices all the scratching and tapping the other people in the room are doing with their fingernails and has an epiphany: she can't abort the baby, but she can give it to adoption. Some may read into this as a pro-life statement, but I see it as pro-choice; after all, one of the choices is to keep the baby, and this is Juno's decision.

Page and Cera alone are enough to support the film, but Cody and Reitman found an outstanding supporting cast who all bring their own originality to the part. Now, if Juno's speech didn't turn off haters, her parents' reaction to her pregnancy sealed the deal. Mac and Bren, Juno's father and stepmom, are played by J.K. Simmons and Allison Janney, which alone makes them worth watching. But when they accept Juno's news with understandable shock, but without anger, it draws a very clear line in the sand. For me, it fits into Cody's depiction of maturity; Juno took the news with the fear befitting a child, but before the conversation evens ends they've decided to support their daughter.

The other supporting actors play as important a role as Juno's dad and stepmom. Juno searches through a local paper that has ads for couples looking to adopt, and she settles on Mark (Jason Bateman) and Vanessa (Jennifer Garner), a yuppie couple who live in a suburban condo. Mac takes Juno to meet them, and there's a not-so-subtle yet never overstated feeling of the class gap between the two pairs. Vanessa is overjoyed that she will finally be a mother and treats Juno almost like the pregnant Virgin Mary. She wants nothing more than to be a mom, but cannot conceive one of her own; she says with infinite longing that Juno's her friends say Juno's in the toughest stage of the pregnancy and Juno, still acting childish (especially now that she's "solved the problem"), casually responds with "at least you don't have to carry this thing." Jennifer Garner deserved an award just for the flash of immeasurable pain on her face when she hears the line. The agreement is signed, and everything seems to have worked out.

However, Mark gives off a vibe from the start that he's not as thrilled to be a parent as his wife. Juno takes an immediate shine to Mark because he's a commercial composer who used to play in a rock band. There's a disturbing subtext to Mark, but really Bateman plays a role not dissimilar to Bill Murray's in Rushmore: like Herman Blume, Mark seems himself in the young protagonist, and the knowledge of how he turned out leads him to an existential crisis. When Juno finally wises up to how pathetic he really is, and it inspires her own maturation.

Vanessa and Mark form counterpoints for Juno's story and give the pregnancy an endpoint, but this is ultimately a story of a little girl growing up. At the start she masks her fear and adolescence behind her speech patterns and detached demeanor, but she lets out her true emotions in one brief moment early on when she admits "I don't really know who I am." In a bitter voice-over, she mentions her mother, who moved to Arizona after the divorce and sends her daughter a cactus every Valentine's Day. There's a lot of pain masked in Juno's sarcastic remarks, and her feelings of abandonment very likely led her to keep the child, even if she's giving it up for adoption.

As Mark and Vanessa's relationship hits a strain due to Mark's fear of growing up, so too does the relationship between Juno and Bleeker. I mentioned earlier than Cera played within his typecast but offered up something more, but that was only the beginning. At one stage Juno tells Bleeker that she's missing class for an ultrasound, and Bleeker begins to ask "Can I -" and catches himself, replacing it with "Should I come?" Bleeker, though afraid, handles the situation more maturely than anyone else in the film. Later, when Juno is at her peak of self-denial, calls her on her crap and, though he never explodes and never gets mean, the effect is absolutely devastating.

I feel perhaps I'm underselling the comedy of this film in favor of the brilliant drama, but then the drama is what sets it apart. However, it is, quite often, extremely funny. When Juno and Bleeker go to science class, their lab partners are also a couple, and they're in the midst of squabbling over the immaturity of the boy, who cheated on the girl after drinking a few comically weak alcoholic beverages. This scene is funny, but it also shows just how different Bleeker and Juno are, mainly thanks to Bleeker's tenderness. But my favorite gag was the running discussion about the term "sexually active" that continues to make me laugh.

Ultimately, the film is Cody's way of telling kids that they don't know everything. Most adults are quick to point it out, but they do so in a condescending manner, and usually to end an argument before they might actually have to think. But Cody is different; she never condescends because she respects the intelligence of teenagers, and she's never cruel in her lesson. Instead, she gently shows teens that they are only just beginning to truly live, and that life can be full of surprises. Juno, Bleeker, Vanessa and Mark may go through rough times, but we learn something about ourselves and about life by the end of it, and it makes me smile the more I think about it. Haters be damned: I wish there were more films as honest and heartwarming as this.