Capsule Reviews: A Perfect Getaway, Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?, Marnie

A Perfect Getaway (David Twohy, 2009)

David Twohy's A Perfect Getaway is a lean, juicy thriller with a twist so good that not even an hour's worth of teasing it saps its effect. "Nothing bad ever happens in Hawaii, right?" says one character during the film's placid opening, though even then his voice betrays doubt, and Twohy's sweeping panoramas of lush forests and beaches communicate remoteness and isolation as much as postcard-ready beauty. Steady long takes let the murmurs of a double murder on a neighboring island sink into the frame visually, casting shadows on its small but dynamic cast of newlyweds and lovers who come to fear for their safety. The actors do their part too, with Steve Zahn's nervously darting eyes suggesting first humorous discomfort, then mounting dread, and Milla Jovovich getting the best opportunity outside one of her husband's films to show off her enigmatic poker face reactions. Perhaps best of all is Timothy Olyphant, almost endearingly arrogant as a "man in full" (as his girlfriend calls him) When the other shoe drops, Twohy's stately, patient direction obviously shifts into a higher gear, but this only shows off other facets of his skill. A chase through the forest is subtly propelled further by comic-panel-like screenwipes that elide over a few steps to give the sequence even more momentum. The final showdown manages to consolidate even the characters' relationships into its tense payoff. (A sidenote: stick with the streamlined theatrical version over the director's cut, which adds most of its extra time to a key flashback, nice and nasty in the original version but overlong in extended form).

Out of Sight

Out of Sight's opening sequence is one of the most delightfully witty heist scenes you'll ever see: a suave man dressed in business attire approaches the counter and charmingly tells the clerk that his partner, currently speaking to one of the managers as if opening an account, will shoot the man in the head if she makes one false move. The plan goes off without a hitch -- the robber knows not to take the bills at the bottom of the register, does his best to keep the clerk calm, and he walks out of the bank without anyone the wise. Then his getaway car doesn't start.

That's Out of Sight in a nutshell: a deftly cool comedy of errors, one whose characters have all the details in place save the most basic. Jack Foley (George Clooney) has been robbing banks since adolescence, so many he's lost count, and he views prison as more of a timeout than a punishment. Enlisting the help of two of his buddies -- well, maybe just one buddy and a mutual acquaintance -- Jack stages a break-out and ensures his success by ratting out another potential escapee to divert attention.

In his escape, he happens to meet U.S. Marshal Karen Sisco (Jennifer Lopez), who is stuffed into the trunk of her own car along with Foley while his accomplice Buddy (Ving Rhames) drives them to safety. Because this is a film, Karen and Jack develop an instant attraction to each other. Because this film is based on an Elmore Leonard novel, it is somehow brilliant.

Soderbergh captures Leonard's deft characterizations, witty dialogue and involving plot with aplomb: Clooney and Lopez have such believable sexual tension that your TV will probably give off static electricity when you're done watching the film. The dynamic between them, and the question of whether Sisco pursues Foley out of love or to take him down, creates a sexual tension rarely felt in your average, manufactured rom-com, a genre that, for all of Out of Sight's crime elements and Soderbergh's inventive camera trickery, seems to be the best fit for the film.

The rest of the cast excels with the material as well; Rhames then had numerous thug/crime boss roles under his belt, but here he serves as Jack's conscience, practically begging Foley to, just once, think before he acts but unfailing in his support for his friend. Only on a second viewing did I even recognize Albert Brooks as a millionaire we meet in a flashback of one of Foley's stints of prison, using his finances to ensure his safety, particularly from Don Cheadle's Snoopy Miller, a sadistic thug who milks the terrified white-collar criminal for all he can.

Steve Zahn shows up as Glenn, the accomplice nobody wants on his team but always knows just enough to justify his position in the crew. Zahn steals most of his scenes, because he's Steve Zahn; his goofy charm provides overt comic relief in a film already bouncing with cleverness, but he brings enough paranoia and self-awareness to the stoned fool to anchor him to the story. Perhaps my pro-Zahn bias influenced my perception of the character: I adore Steve Zahn, and he makes every film he graces with his presence just that much better. Hell, I even enjoyed the National Treasure movies because Justin Bartha's character reminded me of Steve Zahn.

Soderbergh does not simply rely on these killer performances to see him through to the end, however. With editor Anne V. Coates, who also photographed Lawrence of Arabia(!), Soderbergh enacts a creative rebirth after being largely cast aside through the early '90s. Shots end in freeze-frames and softly fade into the next one. As he would do in his future films, Soderbergh plays audio from some other shot under another; is the audio a memory? A dream? If so, whose memory or dream is it? The editing adds to the mystery of the relationship, so that when Jack and Karen meet in a bar, it's anyone's guess whether the scene will end with the two shagging, in a car returning Jack to prison, or with one character jolting out of bed sweating from that crazy dream they just had. Soderbergh further displays his off-kilter and often brilliant cinematic sensibilities by casting Michael Keaton as FBI Agent Ray Nicolette, the same role he played in Jackie Brown. I don't know if this is the only time that an actor has played the same role in two unlinked films made by separate directors, but there's something so exciting about the way Soderbergh makes cinema a part of his movies.

I can't find much to criticize about Out of Sight. It's dense and it folds back on itself more than once, but that only adds to the film's intrigue. It has all the wit and cheek of the Ocean's films without their narcissism, giving each character their foibles to balance out their first-impression personalities. The cast uniformly excels, and they look like they're having fun with the material without forgetting why they're there. But for all the bouncy quality of the actors and the wit that flows freely from their mouths, Out of Sight occasionally puts forward a moment of simple, effective truth. How many other heist films would allow their protagonist the clarity to ask of their plan, "Do you know anyone who did one last big score and then gone on to live the good life?"

Rescue Dawn

I don't know why I never saw Rescue Dawn in theaters. I've always enjoyed war films, but for whatever reason I missed out. Then when I got into Herzog's work, I put off renting this because I was afraid of something so commercial from such a visionary and iconoclastic director. Yet, as it so often does, curiosity got the better of me and I popped in a copy to watch Herzog sell out to the masses on the commercial and critical successes of his recent documentaries.

Instead, what I got was a wholly original and quintessentially Herzogian war film that manages to subvert both the war and the prison/escape genre, ridding them of nearly all of the contrivances and banalities and instead forging a story of simple survival. You can tell you're in for a special ride from the very beginning, when Herzog plays that famous stock footage of Agent Orange being dropped on villages, but slows it down and focuses in such a way that it seems...different somehow. More menacing.

A fictive expansion of Herzog's incredible and subtly moving documentary Little Dieter Needed to Fly, Rescue Dawn is indeed a dramatized version of the trials of Dieter Dengler, the first man to escape from a Viet Cong POW camp. Yet in many ways, this dramatization often feels more real than the actual documentary. No wonder, since Herzog made both; he's always blurred the line between fact and fiction in both his narrative work and his documentaries, and his attempt to fill in the cracks in Dieter's story he left out in deference to his fellow prisoners paints an utterly convincing portrait of men broken by captivity and one man's ability to rally them.

However, Herzog never glorifies their violence, as he never does. This is simply a story of a remarkable man's will to live and his unflinching belief in his adopted country (Dieter was born in Germany but joined the U.S. Air Force for citizenship and for a chance to fly). When he arrives in the POW camp, an Vietnamese officer who speaks fluent English tells him that if he signs a piece of anti-American propaganda condemning the U.S. for bombing Indochina. Dieter responds that he never wanted to go to war but refuses to attack the country that "gave [him his] wings," even in an anonymous piece of rhetoric.

Dieter is then thrown in with the other prisoners and tortured in a variety of ways that stress the terrifying ordeals without ever glamorizing the acts like so many gory films today. In the camp, he meets the other 5 prisoners, 2 of whom are also American. Jeremy Davies plays "Eugene from Eugene, Oregon," a frightfully emaciated man who's gone mad in captivity. When Dieter immediately begins planning an escape, Gene warns that he'll tell the guards, because he's bought into their false promises of impending release. Steve Zahn stretches his chops as Duane, who, like Gene, has been broken, but in differing ways.

The escape plan Dieter cooks up is rather ingenious and all the more intriguing because we know it's true. It's daring and precisely calculated and works even when it doesn't go according to plan. However, in a darkly ironic (and purely Herzogian) twist, escape is the easy part. When Dieter first arrived in the camp, he mocked the flimsy bamboo cells and boasted he'd escape that night. "Don't you get it?" replied Duane, "The prison's the jungle." The jungle, a recurring setting in Herzog's work, indeed becomes a labyrinthine and unconquerable foe in the film's second half as Dieter and Duane attempt to flee to...wherever, really.

Another director may have exploited the horrors the pair face in their trek through the wilderness, but Herzog presents it with the same cold detachment of the rest of the film. Bale really proves himself in these passages, sporting a look of pure determination as he implements his survival skills to make fire, camouflage, and find food.

Some complain that the final scene, in which Dieter is triumphantly reintroduced to his station, as overly patriotic. We live in cynical times, indeed. First of all, this actually happened, so calling it a Hollywood-style "happy ending" is ridiculous; and second, Dieter's pragmatic non-speech deflates the bombast his superiors try to place on the situation. Sure, it's more upbeat than the endings of Herzog's other work, but I fail to see why he has to completely change the outcome of Dieter Dengler's life just to adhere to the auteur theory.

Ultimately, the only flaws I spotted were in the beginning, in the sequence where Dieter flies and ultimately crashes his plane. Herzog has never used special effects before, and it shows. Also, the bit where Dieter stops to drink from a puddle, you know that when the camera tilts back up with him that he'll be surrounded. However, these are minor flaws in an otherwise stellar and original work.

If this is what Herzog looks by 'going Hollywood,' then I can't help but be excited. All those who might worry that he sold out have nothing to fear; Rescue Dawn is pure Herzog, and it belongs on the short list of great films about a war which has already been documented in a number of timeless classics.