Yet another teen-ager saving the world

Divergent-Tattoos

The similarities between The Divergent Trilogy and The Hunger Games trilogy are impossible to ignore, so let’s get them out of the way. Both are about preternaturally capable teen-aged girls who help lead rebellions in dystopian futures, and both have been turned into big budget tent-pole movies with starry casts and critics-anointed leads. The Hunger Games has Oscar-winner Jennifer Lawrence playing warrior and heroic symbol Katniss Everdeen, while Golden Globe-nominee Shailene Woodley plays Tris, a brilliant and brave girl who diverges from the strict eugenic caste system, in Divergent. In both, there’s romance with a hunky fellow, a heaping dose of political intrigue, and some cool technology on which a lot of the plot points hinge. Both have training montages, big action scenes, lamentable deaths of good people, and some nasty villains. The Hunger Games books have a more complex and believable mythology, however, and both of the movies are better than Divergent is – which is not to say that I wasn’t entertained.

In the world of Divergent, everyone who has survived a horrible, global war now lives in Chicago, which is surrounded by a massive wall and where the population has been divided into five factions: Abnegation, who are selfless civil servants; Amity, who the peaceful, hippy famers; Candor, who are honest lawyers; Dauntless, who are the brave soldiers and police officers; and Erudite, who are the scholars and intellectuals. At age 16, you are given a hallucinogenic aptitude test that tells you which faction you should join, and 95% end up in the faction of their parents, either because the test told them so or they choose to remain. But you must join a faction; the Factionless become homeless and live on the street. There are those for whom the test doesn’t work. They show abilities and behaviors that indicate multiple factions. They are “divergent,” and their existence threatens social order. Usually, once they are discovered, they’re killed.

Beatrice (Woodley) was born into Abnegation, of which her father (Tony Goldwyn) is a leader and her mother (Ashley Judd) a dutiful supporter. When Beatrice and her brother Caleb (Ansel Elgort) go for their test, the tester (Maggie Q) nervously tells Beatrice she is divergent but must never tell anyone. At the choosing ceremony, everyone expects Beatrice and her brother to go to Abnegation, but she chooses Dauntless and her brother goes to Erudite, which is run by a coldly scheming Jeanine (Kate Winslet). Beatrice leaves with the others from Dauntless, who like to run everywhere, climb things, and jump without knowing if they’ll survive. She renames herself Tris, befriends other initiates (including Zoe Kravitz as Cristina), and while training, makes an enemy of her dastardly trainer Eric (Jai Courtney) while falling in love with her other trainer, the serious and smoldering Four (Theo James). Meanwhile, Jeanine is up to something, conspiring with Dauntless’s leaders to overthrow Abnegation’s rule.

Woodley is a spectacularly gifted actress (if not as charismatic as Jennifer Lawrence) and she makes the movie better than it should be. Her chemistry with James is the best thing in the film, and her righteous indignation and almost foolish courage are great propellers of the mostly character driven plot. Nevertheless, despite showing great talent in other movies and TV shows, Judd, Goldwyn, Kravitz, Q, and Courtney give off little heat. And Winslet, one of the world’s great actresses, says evil things but just doesn’t have the temperament to chew the scenery the way a sci-fi villain needs to. Most of the faults in the film are in overly schematic story, but director Neil Burger provides little urgency and even less grit. In the moment of Tris’s greatest tragedy, I was impressed with Woodley, but I didn’t feel the emotions I was supposed to feel. The film keeps your attention and has enjoyable, if clichéd, scenes and sequences. But you may forget about it after you leave the theater.

Divergent
Directed by Neil Burger
Written by Evan Daugherty and Vanessa Taylor
Starring Shailene Woodley, Theo James, and Kate Winslet
Rated PG-13

 

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Nostalgia and intrigue at the Grand Budapest Hotel

I struggled to start writing this review because I wanted to communicate as powerfully, as effectively as possible how much I loved Wes Anderson’s eighth feature film The Grand Budapest Hotel. Luckily, I don’t have the same degree of difficulty when I write a review as Wes Anderson has when he makes a movie. He can’t start with a character – or himself – saying, “I am making a bittersweet comedy about love and honor.” However, Anderson does do something similar: He begins in the near present day with a writer (Tom Wilkinson) describing how he found the story he’s about to tell. It’s a common misperception, he tells us, that writers are constantly creating new characters, new scenes, new plots. Rather, when you become a writer of some note, people tell you their stories.

Suddenly, it’s 1965, and the writer is now played by Jude Law, and he’s spending a vacation in the Grand Budapest Hotel, a once sparkling and ornate playground of the rich and famous of the fictional nation of Zubrowka in Eastern Europe, now a mostly deserted, very Sovietly decorated shell of its former self. It is there, while soaking in the dilapidated baths, where he meets to hotel’s mysterious, aging owner, Mr. Zero Moustafa (F. Murray Abraham), who proceeds to tell the writer over dinner how he came to own the hotel, and we’re transported back to 1932.

The hotel is now in its heyday, packed with suited dignitaries and their bejeweled wives, and the regimented staff is legion; over all of it presides the hotel’s slightly foppish and nearly over-competent concierge M. Gustave, played by a miraculous, David Niven-inspired Ralph Fiennes. Gustave is not only devoted to his hotel, but also to the numerous lonely older women who frequent it, and his favorite is Madame Desgoffe-und-Taxis (Tilda Swinton), an 84-year-old countess who adores Gustave. As she leaves the hotel, she is convinced she will never return, and Gustave assures her she will. She asks him to light a candle at the nearby cathedral, and after she leaves, he tells the closest lobby boy to do it.

This boy is Zero (Tony Revolori), who has just started work at the hotel. Gustave takes the boy under his wing, training him like a stern, loving uncle. When the countess dies, Zero accompanies Gustave to the reading of the will, when it turns out Gustave will inherit a priceless paining, Boy With Apple. The countess’s dastardly son Dmitri (Adrian Brody) is livid, demands that this never happen, but with Zero’s encouragement and help, Gustave steals the painting and returns to the hotel.

Dmitri decides to frame Gustave for the countess’s murder, and the rest of the film follows Gustave through prison, escape, and, as he and Zero try to clear Gustave’s name, travels around Zubrowka, chased by the army and its leader Henckels (Ed Norton) as well as Dmitri’s violent stooge Jopling (Willem Dafoe). Along the way, they’re helped by numerous minor characters including Zero’s girlfriend (Saoirse Ronan), Gustave’s cellmates (including one played by Harvey Keitel), the countess’s butler (Mathieu Amalric), and a network of concierges (Bill Murray, Owen Wilson, and Bob Balaban). As with every Anderson character, the actors are directed to such mannered behaviors as to be almost abstracted; they archly speak as if they have hopped out of a Roald Dahl or JD Salinger story, and they move like gorgeously drawn cartoon characters, sharply and exaggerated, influenced by slapstick and mime.

The result is the opposite of natural or subtle, but Anderson’s direction, of actors and art and photography, communicates the themes and emotions – the sadness of nostalgia and growing up, the power of loyalty and courage – with something approaching grace. It’s hard to say whether The Grand Budapest Hotel is Anderson’s best movie, but it may be his first truly adult film, despite it being, at its heart, about a teen-aged boy.

The Grand Budapest Hotel

Written and Directed by Wes Anderson
Starring Ralph Fiennes, Tony Revolori, F. Murray Abraham
Inexplicably rated R

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