His computer’s voice is Her

Her 1

Two years ago, Apple introduced Siri, a program for their iPhones that acts like a personal assistant, complete with a female voice. You talk to it, it talks back, and the famous advertisements featured conversations between celebrities and Siri made her seem, well, intelligent. Anyone who has used Siri knows Siri isn’t as helpful as advertised and or all that smart, but in Her, Spike Jonze’s astonishing and moving masterpiece, the personal assistant program that Theodore Twombly (Joaquin Phoenix) buys on a lark is not just helpful and smart, but intuitive and, most importantly, emotional.

The surprisingly real artificial intelligence is a science fiction trope that has been mined many times, most profoundly in Blade Runner and AI, but usually these stories focus on the program’s development of sentience and the horrid consequences therein. Her, however, does something very different by exploring what happens when a human and an artificial intelligence fall in love.

Not far in the future, Theodore works at a company that produces handwritten letters for clients; Theodore writes love letters for couples, missives from parents to children, thank you notes. The irony is readily apparent: While he writes deeply and beautifully emotional words for others, Theodore is depressed, isolated, and not in touch with or much aware of his own emotions. He has recently split with his wife (Rooney Mara), with whom he had a tortured, angry relationship.

After a particularly sad failed blind date, he comes across a display for a new artificially intelligent personal assistant. After he installs it, a female voice emanates from his computer and introduces herself as Samantha, who is voiced by Scarlett Johansson. She doesn’t sound like Siri, but rather like a human woman who lives inside a computer or a phone. She is warm, funny, devoted to Theodore, and, surprising for a computer program, she has free will. They fall in love, and since Samantha is only a voice and has a life on the internet that Theodore cannot see, complications ensue.

The plot seemed almost silly when I first heard about it, but Spike Jonze’s script gives Theodore and Samantha such a complex, sweet, and difficult relationship, the odd conceit of the film is quickly subsumed by a profound romance. It also helps that Jonze has created such a complete world of the near future, a world as complete as those in Being John Malkovich and Where the Wild Things Are. The art direction, which focuses on pastels and soft postmodern architecture, is beautifully shot by the great cinematographer Hoyte Van Hoytema. It’s one of the most beautiful visions of the future I’ve seen on film.

As much as Her is about Spike Jonze’s genius, it is also a vehicle for Joaquin Phoenix’s incredible talents. After his intensely dark turn in The Master, seeing him as Theodore, who is sweet, sensitive, very much in love, and nearly heroic in his emotional journey, is a revelation. I always assumed that Phoenix’s characters would always be some shade of creepy; even his Johnny Cash was rather unnerving. But Theodore is the sort character Tom Hanks used to play. Phoenix, however, seems perfectly cast, even if it’s a surprising role. He is becoming the great actor of his generation.

Her
Written and Directed by Spike Jonze
Starring Joaquin Phoenix, Scarlett Johansson, and Amy Adams
Rated R
At your local multiplex

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The Westons are a hurricane

August Osage CountyIn 2008, Tracy Letts’s three-and-a-half hour comic tragedy August: Osage County won the Pulitzer Prize and the Tony Award for Best Play, and it was considered one of the theatrical events of the first decade of the century. Transforming the play into a film was a no-brainer, but whittling three-and-a-half hours to a more cinematically appropriate two and recasting box office draws is not a no-brainer; it’s hard. And for some reason, the great TV producer John Wells, who had never directed a film before and certainly not such a prestige picture, was picked to helm this process. I’m not sure if anyone could have successfully made the transition (except maybe Mike Nichols), but Wells was clearly overwhelmed by the task of working with Letts’s adaptation and a nearly pyrotechnic cast. The movie is a searing, funny potboiler, but if you’ve never seen the play (as I have not), it’s hard to imagine how this movie could have come from the great dramas of recent memory.

In the heat of August in Oklahoma, the poet patriarch of the Weston family Beverly (Sam Shepard) goes missing and his children and their spouses come to the house to help their cancer-ridden, drug-addled mother Violet (Meryl Streep). There are three daughters, bitter Barbara (Julia Roberts), who moved away with her husband Bill (Ewan McGregor); put-upon Ivy, who stayed (Julianne Nicholson); and seemingly shallow Karen (Juliet Lewis), who also left Oklahoma, but unlike Barbara was not missed. Violet’s loud, busy sister Mattie (Margo Martindale) and her kind, slow-spoken husband Charlie (Chris Cooper) also come, and eventually so does their son, the supposed loser Little Charles (Benedict Cumberbatch).

This is an angry, damaged, and extremely dysfunctional family, and after Beverly is found dead, the festering conflicts explode: Barbara and Bill are separated and everyone finds out; their daughter Jean (Abigail Breslin) is sullen and precocious; Ivy and Little Charles are having a secret affair; Karen had brought her fiancé, the caddish Steve (Dermot Mulroney); Mattie and Charlie are failing to hold it all together; Violet is angry at all of them, particularly Barbara and Beverly, and she has no filter, no control, a lot of cigarettes, Jackie O. sunglasses, and a fabulous wig.

As these characters tumble towards a series of rather astonishing, rather appalling, and narratively unearned climaxes, it’s easy to see why all of these actors signed up for the movie. Every role is juicy, full of dark emotions and caustic words, and they all seem to be having a good time. All except for Julianne Nicholson, who plays perhaps the only true tragic figure in the story, and her subtlety and control and perpetual sadness make her work quite remarkable up against, particularly, Roberts and Streep. Roberts does some of her best work at Barbara, even if it is as caustic as anything she’s ever done. Barbara is not happy woman.

This is not surprising considering her mother is Violet, who is part Cruella de Vil, part Martha from Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, part Mommie Dearest. While she was nominated for a Golden Globe, along with Roberts, Streep’s performance as Violet is one of her worst. She’s uncharacteristically unhinged, chewing up her children and the scenery, ranting and raving with much more energy than a dying sedative addict would have. With Violet as the heart of the film, Wells’s direction of Streep should have been much more restrained, believable. But instead, Streep is personified chaos. I can see the reasoning behind that choice, since the Westons are a hurricane.

August: Osage County
Directed by John Wells
Written by Tracy Letts
Starring Julia Roberts, Meryl Streep, and Margo Martindale
Rated R
At your local multiplex

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Amoral and offensive and disgusting

Wolf of Wall StreetA couple weeks ago, a woman named Christina McDowell published a scathing essay in LA Weekly attacking The Wolf of Wall Street, its director Martin Scorsese, and its star Leonardo DiCaprio. The movie, a three-hour orgiastic comedy about Wall Street con men, is based on actual events, and McDowell is the daughter of one of the men who was ruined by the film’s hero, Jordan Belfort. While reciting the litany of the horrible things that happened to her and her family because of Belfort and his ilk, McDowell writes that the film recklessly glamorizes criminals and degrades women.

When I first read her essay, I found it self-serving, full of nostalgia for her years as the daughter of the filthy and illegally rich, and, like so many similar essays written by people tangential to events in based-on-a-true-story movies (re: Dallas Buyers Club, Zero Dark Thirty, The Fifth Estate), more about her sadness than the veracity of the film. Whether or not the events in the film actually happened, and it seems, many of them did, McDowell is right about a few things. The Wolf of Wall Street is amoral and offensive and disgusting, which isn’t to say it’s not often very funny, occasionally brilliantly acted, or full of rich, inventive Scorsesian style.

The movie is based on the book of the same name written by Belfort and it tracks his rise and fall as an ethically impaired, drug addicted, pathologically narcissistic penny stock trader. According to several accounts, the film is pretty faithful to the Belfort’s book, but Belfort’s former best friend and business partner Donnie Porush has said that the book “is a distant relative of the truth, and the film is a distant relative of the book.” However, the FBI agent who followed Belfort for 10 years said that everything Belfort wrote was true. If even half of what happens on screen actually happened, it’s beggars belief. The criminal activity is clearly believable, since we accept it as a given that if you’ve made a killing on Wall Street, you’ve probably done something wrong.

We watch Belfort (DiCaprio at his smarmy best), Porush (renamed Azoff, and played by a revoltingly funny Jonah Hill), and their cronies become obscenely wealthy by doing all sorts of illegal things while buying stocks at low prices and selling them at artificially high prices. (What we don’t see: Their investors losing virtually of all their money.) And they spend as much time doing coke, Quaaludes, and prostitutes as they do cheating their clients. Belfort crashes cars, sinks boats, and treats both his first (Teresa, played by Cristin Milioti) and second (Naomi, played by Margot Robbie) wives like dirt, and sometimes worse than dirt.

It’s three hours of horrible people doing horrible things and saying “fuck” more times than in any other film made in the United States. Screenwriter Terence Winter writes almost all of it as comedy, and much of it is very, very funny. Some of it is great slapstick, some of it is great irony, but a great deal of it is funny only because laughter prevents you from being as horrified and as nauseated as you should be. Winter has claimed that he wrote Belfort as an unreliable narrator and that we’re not supposed to believe, like, or approve of him, but almost nothing that Scorsese does with filming Winter’s words gives the audience reason to doubt either Belfort’s stories or his charm. (And DiCaprio’s videotaped adulation of Belfort as “a shining example of the transformative qualities of ambition and hard work” makes it pretty clear how much he was suckered by Belfort’s charisma.)

Scorsese responded to the criticism of McDowell and others, claiming, “If anyone watches this movie, at the end of Wolf of Wall Street, they’re going to see that we’re not at all condoning this behavior.” At the end, Belfort is shown playing tennis while in prison and then, free and easy and smug, working as a motivational speaker. Nowhere are we told that he has paid barely any of the mandated $110 million in restitution. We never see one of his victims. We don’t even see the effects of Belfort’s rape and beating of Naomi. Like Belfort’s victims, the women in The Wolf of Wall Street are only there as plot devices and comic foils, to screw and leave behind.

The Wolf of Wall Street
Directed by Martin Scorsese
Written by Terence Winter
Starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Jonah Hill, and Margot Robbie
Rated R – very, very R
At your local multiplex

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My Seven Favorite Films of 2013

This post is also known as “The 2013 Golden Teddy Awards for Most Excellence in Film, Part 1.”

I don’t think the 2013 was much of a year for movies, since I spent a long, long time to find ten that I could unreservedly say I loved. And in the end I chose seven because the other three slots kept getting filled with movies that I had problems with even if I liked them. Most of those movies I liked because of one or two performances, or a performance and a script, or just the direction, and so on, but there were other things that bugged me a little too much. These seven are films for which everything comes together for me and I’ve found myself saying, “Oh, you have to see that.” Continue…

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Beautiful loser

Inside-Llewyn-Davis-featIn the early 1960s, many of the now-iconic folk singers earned their followings and made reputations in the smoky, cramped clubs in New York’s Greenwich Village. This is where you could hear Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, or Joni Mitchell, and be close enough to see the spittle on their lips. As history usually works, we only know the stories of the victors, and in this case, the Dylans and the Mitchells are who we imagine on those tiny stages as we sing along with their records. The failures, however, failed to become history and their voices, songs, and struggles have been swept into the sewers of memory. Some of them were just as deserving but for some reason didn’t connect with a massive audience or a smart record label. Or they just didn’t have the right personalities; narcissists, jerks, depressives drunks, all of the above. The Coen Brothers, among America’s great artists who have managed to embed themselves in history, have imagined one of those Greenwich Village figures who didn’t.

In the winter of 1961, Llewyn Davis (Oscar Isaac) is sleeping on the couches of the friends who aren’t angry with him, reeling from the suicide of his former singing partner and a furtive affair with his married friend Jean (Carey Mulligan). His solo album, titled Inside Llewyn Davis, is not selling at all, and his gigs aren’t paying. And then Jean tells Oscar that she’s pregnant and doesn’t know if it’s his or her husband Jim’s (Justin Timberlake), so she has to get an abortion. Oscar sets off the find the money for the procedure while also trying to get his career going, and this leads him to session work, wandering through the cold streets of Manhattan, and in a car on the way to snowy Chicago with hobbled, caustic jazz musician Roland Tuner (John Goodman) and his greaser valet Johnny Five (Garrett Hedlund). Throughout, Oscar carries, loses, and chases an orange tabby cat.

While this does sound like a lot of plot, the Coens don’t much believe in the traditional, tried-and-true structure of stories. Stuff happens, scenes move with drama and humor, but people don’t change in the movies they write.(Their adaptations, like No Country for Old Men and True Grit are different. About Inside Llewyn Davis’s lack of plot, Joel Coen said, “That concerned us at one point; that’s why we threw the cat in.” The cat doesn’t help, because it seems so symbolic that I kept trying to figure what it was symbolic of – and I never did.

llewyn-davis-cat-gifBut we are privy both to lines and images that get stuck in your head, and Inside Llewyn Davis has many: Oscar Isaacs holding the cat on the subway as it stares at the stations going by to Isaacs shuffling through the snow outside a Chicago bus station, from one of his hosts screaming at him about testicles to Cary Mulligan’s swearing tirades, from Adam Driver’s hilarious baritone noises on a song called “Please Mr. Kennedy” to John Goodman’s monologues, which are among the best the Coens have ever written. And the songs, produced by T. Bone Burnett and Marcus Momford, are wonderful, gorgeous and moving when they’re supposed to be, dated and silly when they’re supposed to be.

As is usual with the Coens, each performance is strong and idiosyncratic. After a decade of working mostly under the radar, Oscar Isaacs will now be recognized as a leading man; his Llewyn is funny, crass, desperate, and musically moving, if not terribly likeable. Mulligan’s role is small but loud and snide, and she’s great fun. Timberlake has little to do, but his naïve sweetness is a great counterpoint to Isaacs. Goodman’s barely alive Falstaffian monster is the best part of the movie, and I hope he is not forgotten at Oscar time. The film itself will be nominated for many, but as good as it is, Inside Llewyn Davis may end up lost in the stack of their better films. Not forgotten, but not iconic either.

Inside Llewyn Davis
Written and Directed by Joel & Ethan Coen
Starring Oscar Isaac, Carey Mulligan, and John Goodman
Rated R
Opens in San Diego December 20

 

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