LOVE & MERCY

(Bill Pohlad, 2014)

The urge to explain a person is the downfall of so many biopics, and Love & Mercy cannot avoid this flaw. People are complex and contradictory, and not everything can be explained by a few flashbacks. But some cinema has decided that they can, they must, they will, and so at the start of the third act here, we have a "brave" scene where we see Brian Wilson (John Cusack) in bed, and then Pohlad tries to take us on a tour of his brain. There are jump cuts, loads of trick editing, as we see a mix of memories, ideas, music, and fantasies all colliding. This is pop-psychology at its most basic and reductive,  which attempts to explore what is "wrong" with Wilson and instead serves to caricature and over-simplify him.
Thankfully, much of the rest of the film is more sensitive and interesting. It tells parallel stories of Wilson at the peak of his powers in 1965-67, when he created Pet Sounds and Good Vibrations, after a panic attack on an airplane led him to quite touring with the Beach Boys. He is played in these scenes by Paul Dano, who is terrific, emphasising his childlike qualities and his melancholy with equal commitment and skill. These passages have the added bonus of using the sweet sweet music Wilson created in the '60s as their soundtrack, and probably the most enjoyable scenes in the film are those depicting him "playing the studio", directing session musicians to create his pop symphonies. As the film progresses these scenes darken as Wilson's mental problems begin, exacerbated by his drug use.
There are a few nice through-lines here: Wilson's attachment to abusive, controlling male figures is shown through his relationships with his father Murray, cousin and bandmate Mike Love, and finally with the Psychiatrist who became a sort of svengali for him, Eugene Landy (Paul Giamatti).
But the heart of the story is his new relationship with Melinda (Elizabeth Banks) in the 1980s. She discovers just how monstrous Landy is and sets about releasing Wilson from his control, falling in love with this vulnerable man child and conflicted by how difficult his circumstances are.
Cusack and Banks have chemistry, and she is underrated as a dramatic actress, beautiful in a sunny, real way, her warmth and intelligence are always evident onscreen, and it is understandable that Wilson would be so instantly smitten. Cusack plays this older, damaged Wilson as a frightened, desperate shell, and allows a spark of life back into his eyes with the discovery of this woman.
Pohlad's direction is pedestrian, the script a little by-numbers, but the actors and that music carry it.

12 YEARS A SLAVE

(Steve McQueen, 2013)

McQueen's first two features - the exceptional Hunger and Shame - both still had the scent of the gallery lingering around them. The director's past as an artist, responsible for installations, was evident in the precision and control and self-consciousness of the effects he brought to bear on his work in cinema. That was no bad thing when applied with his intelligence and sensitivity.
12 Years a Slave is different, however. Adapted by John Ridley from the memoir of Solomon Northrup, it is a raw, intimate story of suffering, torture and survival. And McQueen's approach is leavened somewhat, perhaps, by his own desire to transmit this story beyond the arthouse sector, which embraced his first work, and right into multiplexes.
So his style is toned down somewhat. Though still recognisably a Steve McQueen film, there are fewer extended takes, fewer ostentatiously frozen breathtaking compositions. The filmmaking is, generally speaking, more conventional.
But that is enough - this is a great story, brilliantly told.
Solomon (Chiwetel Ejiofor) is a free man living in Saratoga, New York in the 1840s. He works as a musician and lives happily with his wife and two children in a nice house. He is respected in the local community, hos race seemingly not an issue in the liberal North. And then he is tricked by two men who offer him work, and awakens after a night of heavy drinking in Washington DC to find himself chained and imprisoned. He has been sold into slavery, and after being savagely beaten and humiliated, he is transported downriver to New Orleans, where he is sold to a plantation owner for $1000. Over the years he encounters vicious overseers (Paul Dano), benevolent masters (Benedict Cumberbatch) before winding up in the possession of Epps (Michael Fassbinder). Epps is a terrifying cotton plantation owner, sexually obsessed with his slave Patsy (Lupita Nyong'o) and driven to "break" difficult slaves like Solomon, whose slave name is "Platt". His wife (Sarah Poulson) is just as dangerous in her quiet way, and Solomon endures years of fear and terror on the plantation.
This story plays out like a horror movie in certain passages, so grimly violent and frightening it is. There are scenes of shocking cruelty and utter degradation, and yet the hardest moments to watch are those which depict yet another layer of Solomon's identity and hope fall away at a fresh horror. The moral force of McQueen and Ridley's vision compensate for how brutal much of this material is, however. The subject matter earns the violence. The subject matter demands it.
It also demands some recognition of the complexity of the issue, even as it's moral position stands obvious and unquestionable. That is there in the character played by Alfre Woodard, regarded as the Mistress of a nearby plantation, though really a slave, and in the arguments solomon has with other slaves on various issues.
As Solomon, Ejiofor is lovely; soulful eyes always burning bright with a lust to survive, with his own belief in who he is cutting through. The rest of the cast are as good, with Fassbender particularly fearsome as Epps, Poulson a haunted presence as his wife, while Nyong'o is stunning as Patsey.
This being a Steve McQueen film, it looks beautiful (fine Sean Bobbitt cinematography) and Hans Zimmer's unusual score - much of it drowned in industrial noises - is also impressive. But it is McQueen who inserts much of what makes 12 Years a Slave special into the film, and he who should ultimately take all the plaudits.

RUBY SPARKS

(Jonathan Dayton, Valerie Faris, 2012)

Its a likeable film, Ruby Sparks. It has a great, impressively starry cast, it's directed with an energetic freshness and a nice sense of Los Angeles, it has a soundtrack filled with French language pop classics by Plastic Bertrand and Sylvie Vartan, and it makes something interesting from its premise.
That premise is quite high-concept. Calvin (Paul Dano) is a twentysomething novelist who became massively successful with his first book, published while he was still in his teens. Now, years later, he finds writing difficult, finds relationships more difficult, and lives in a beautiful house in the hills above L.A. with his dog Scotty, seeing few people beyond his Psychiatrist (Elliot Gould) and his brother Harry (Chris Messina). His loneliness is nicely evoked in the first act, in the way he talks to Scotty, the way he comports himself at a book event, the way he avoids his brother's questions. Following a simple writing task assigned by his shrink, he writes about a literal dream girl and finds himself enraptured by her. And then, incredibly, she appears, flesh and blood, in his house. Her name is Ruby (Zoe Kazan), and she is another in that recentish strain of "Manic Pixie Dream Girls" who have started to appear like nervous tics in indie romcoms.
The difference here is that Kazan (who wrote the script) and the directors Dayton and Faris know that this is what Ruby is, and they fully intend to interrogate this odd screen stereotype.
This is first signalled by Harry's response on reading Calvin's manuscript: "You don't know jack shit about women." he says, pointing out that girls like Ruby don't exist in the real world, that people are complicated, that women are mysterious creatures.
Ruby Sparks then functions along two parallel lines. One is a straight indie romcom; somewhat twee, nothing we havent seen before, with scenes of young love and passion, with pop music and exciting, colourful visuals. The other is far darker and more interesting, taking on the male gaze and relationships in general. Calvin idealises Ruby and is disappointed by her. He vows not to write/invent her anymore, but once their relationship begins to drift, he cannot resist the urge to fix them (by fixing her).
This is all an obvious metaphor for any relationship, but it works because the treatment of the fantastic elements of the story is so straight-faced, because the cast is so good, and because the pain, when it comes, seems quite real, quite true.
Dano makes Calvin a complex individual, whose lonely vulnerability in the first act is thrown into a slightly different light as we learn more about him, his control freak tendencies, his lack of interest in others. Kazan's Ruby is a typically annoying Manic Pixie Dream Girl early on, but her later articulation of sadness, emptiness and rage gives both the film and character another dimension. But it is the supporting cast who really lift the material; Messina is always good, in everything, and he is the most believably human person in the film, warm, funny, amazed. Annette Bening, Antonio Banderas, Gould and Steve Coogan all do great work too.
The whole thing is a mite predictable and the ending seems slightly out-of-keeping with what has gone before, but overall this is an enjoyable, surprisingly honest look at love and relationships, told through an interesting mix of fantasy and comedy.

LOOPER

(Rian Johnson, 2012) With his third film, writer-director Johnson goes up a gear or two. Looper is a tremendously assured science fiction thriller; original, clever and brilliantly made, it surpasses most of this years crop of Hollywood genre cinema, and most of any years, to be honest. The first act is a zippy half hour, dense with incident and wittily slipping in tons of exposition without too much pain. In voiceover, Joe (Joseph Gordon Levitt) explains that, in this near future world, he is a "Looper", an assassin who kills people sent back from the future by the mob. He goes alone to a field, armed with a blunderbuss, at the appointed time, and he waits. A figure suddenly appears, hooded, and Joe shoots them dead, takes the silver bars strapped to their back as payment, and disposes of the body. Time travel has not been invented yet, but it is already influencing the course of his life. That worsens when he is confronted with an older version of himself (Bruce Willis) who has come back specifically to find the younger version of a future crimelord - the legendary Rainmaker - to kill him as a child. Future Joe's presence in the past/present sends both Joes on the run from Abe (Jeff Daniels) each trying to survive and guarantee their own future as they see it. That first half hour establishes this future world as a gritty, degraded version of our own. Vagrants fill the streets, cars run on battered solar panels stuck to their bonnets and roofs, and law and order seems largely negligible. This is all subtly portrayed with detail and texture, and the action kicks in with a jolt of pace. Johnson skilfully does all this without ever sacrificing his characters - there are few cyphers here, with even Paul Dano as Joe's doomed friend Seth and Piper Perabo as his favoured prostitute given telling little grace notes in their scenes. Jeff Daniels, meanwhile, reunited with Gordon Levitt after their excellent work together in the underrated The Lookout, is quietly scary but almost likeable as Abe, a mobster from the future who prefers words to violence. The film changes gear thereafter, settling in at an isolated farmhouse where a young woman (Emily Blunt, nicely combining strength with fragility) is determined to protect her young son and Joe awaits his final showdown with his older self. Their storyline provides a contrasting emotional strand to that of Willis, clinging to his memories of a dead wife while young Joe's actions mess with his mind. Johnson keeps the potentially complex time travel paradox plotting clear though never less than fascinating, and concentrates on his characters and the issues of choice and free will they face, without ever stinting on spectacle. His plotting is nifty and intelligent in its consistent ability to deliver surprises that seem, in retrospect, to be the only way things could have gone, and his direction is stylish but filled with strong, clean storytelling. There is also a quite appealing strain of nastiness working its way through this story. The sort of gee-whiz ideas common in time travel stories are given a bloodthirsty spin. A Looper returned from the future is captured through his younger self when mobsters begin to amputate body parts and he finds himself suddenly lacking fingers, a nose, legs. The fact that ten percent of the population has some low-level telekinesis means that when we encounter a character with a high-level version of the power, more or less the first thing Johnson has him do is explode somebody. The brutality with which everybodytreats vagrants feels convincingly frank and only adds to the coarse, damaged texture of this world. Perhaps most impressive is the use of Willis here. For the first time in years, a film has made interesting use of his onscreen persona - he was always one action hero with a little more to him - and specific appeal, and he responds with a fine performance. He and Gordon Levitt - who is equally good - have a single, brilliant scene where they talk things over in a diner, the tensions and strain between them bubbling over in some sharply scripted dialogue. Not quite the transcendent masterpiece some have claimed, then, but Looper is still great, utterly satisfying genre filmmaking which marks the newfound maturity of a young American auteur.