Old Magic:FANTASTIC BEASTS: THE SECRETS OF DUMBLEDORE

I basically liked Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore, but I feel a defensive crouch is necessary to broach the topic. Need I rehearse the litany of complaints the Fantastic Beasts movies have received? Many say they’re shapeless, strangely paced, full of narrative dead ends and inscrutable motivations. I agree. They have little of the sprightly British boarding school structure of the Harry Potters to which they are ostensibly prequels. Certainly true. The big villain of these pictures has accidentally been a revolving door of casting—a misjudged twist gimmick in the first, and off-screen allegations after the second, resulting in three different actors across three films. Irritating. And their creator, J.K. Rowling, has eroded the goodwill she got from writing an instant-classic work of children’s literature by spending most of her public statements of late transmitting bigoted anti-trans messages. Frustrating would be an understatement. (One hopes that, generations hence, that’ll be biographical detail and not active annoyance.) I can’t defend that, or any of the above, and I won’t. But I’ve had more of a good time than not sitting in the world these movies create. There’s the sheer pleasure of its fantasy gewgaws and the sturdy craftsmanship of its many collaborators, and, gee, even the story starts to threaten to get somewhere interesting.

While the early movies felt like so much stage-setting, this one actually starts to take off. Maybe it’s because Rowling’s screenplay was given a co-writing assist from Steve Kloves, who so smartly adapted the original novels into the wonderful films they became. Here the evil Grindelwald, fresh from committing his Crimes in the last one, continues gathering his forces to fight against tolerance of muggles. (Maybe they’ll get there in the next one. If there is a next one.) The wizard supremacist hopes to exploit weaknesses in the electoral system of worldwide magic high council or something. Only Professor Dumbledore (Jude Law) and his trusty zoologist buddy Newt (Eddie Redmayne), with some allies new (Jessica Williams) and old (Callum Turner, Dan Fogler), can sniff out a way to stop him. Maybe. They hope. It’s a little confusing, deliberately so to confound Grindlewald’s ability to see the future, a convenient excuse. ((The funniest confusion has to be a long sequences near the beginning in which Dumbledore explains why he can’t do something, then he proceeds to do it in the finale, and, when questioned, basically shrugs.) But the actors are swanning about the elaborate bits with appropriate sprightliness. They seem to know what they’re doing. There’s a lot of globe-hopping, creature-admiring, spell-casting zipping around—from an underground German torture pit with a multi-limbed critter’s tentacles stabbing out of the dark, to a mountaintop village erupting with enchanted obstacles. It’s all in service of trying to prevent a sclerotic bureaucracy from accidentally, through a combination of cowardice and corruption, letting an egotistical fascistic cult leader take over their democratic norms. When one wizard pontificates about “the peaceful transfer of power” and dithers over charging Grindlewald for his crimes, the allegory is pretty clear.

Along the way, I most admired the work of Wizarding World vets. A franchise is so much more than one person, after all. This one remains an extended victory lap for people who brought Potter to such vivid life, and as such has constant reminders of the craft that made it so appealing. Director David Yates has a patient eye for the fantasy filigrees and takes all the murmuring about hidden secrets and wizard politics very seriously. I don’t always follow it, but it clearly means something to someone, and plays like it could. When we see the Berlin Ministry of Magic with its brutalist structures and severe members, or a Bhutan temple decked out in enormous flags on rope bridges and towering staircases for an international magic election, there’s fun to the peeks into new corners of this world beyond Hogwarts. (Once more, brief stops at the old school renew its status as one of the great created locations of moviemaking.) Yates marshals the returning behind-the-camera talent to their usual high standard. This is a series with an admirable consistency of style, look, and feel. Production design from Stuart Craig gives each location, new and old, the requisite sumptuous detail—spinning with both old-fashioned appeal with its early-20th-century setting and the neat floating flourishes of magic life. The costumes from Colleen Atwood are neat, too—crisp and cool, flowing and vintage, for muggles and wizards alike. The lush orchestral score from James Newton Howard swells and fanfares with its own invention as it teases around John Williams’ iconic themes sparingly. It’s all of a piece with a fun, familiar world. Sometimes that’s enough.

Word Crimes:THE TRIAL OF THE CHICAGO 7 and BEING THE RICARDOS

An Aaron Sorkin screenplay comes in one of two modes: too much, and way too much. I love the former, but the latter can clang and grate and scrape across my patience. He’s such a wordy, witty writer, capable of soaring rhetoric and juicy monologues. His ear for embedding characterization in the pithiest of comebacks and most garrulous walk-and-talks is a good match for his interest in high-wire halls-of-power and behind-the-scenes tensions. His characters are often people with inflated egos or self-important positions of influence. He must understand them so well because he’s one of them. When he’s on, he’s one of our best. The too-muchness of his writing makes a perfect match for material. His The Social Network, so sharply perceptive about Facebook’s founding conflicts, balanced with beautifully clinical David Fincher direction, remains one of the finest scripts in recent memory. But when he’s off—taking his tendencies to overwrite his subtext until it spills out as just plain text like in howlingly clunky tone-deaf attempts like media-matters dramas The Newsroom or Studio 60—it curdles fast. When you’re an artist who thrives when high on your own supply, it’s easy to get way too much out of each moment.

Take last year’s The Trial of the Chicago 7. It’s based on the real circus of a court case following protests at the 1968 Democratic Convention that were violently broken up by a bludgeoning police presence. A group of leading leftist activists were targeted by the newly elected Nixon administration to make an example of them. The judge ended up a loony attention seeker who made all kinds of questionable decisions—like ordering Bobby Seale, a leader in the Black Panthers, bound and gagged—while the defendants, many previously unknown to each other, often used the massive press interest in their plight as a soapbox on which to make important points about the state of the country. (They also used it as an excuse to poke prankish fun at the authorities who were in the process of overreaching.) Sorkin sees in this case good reason to comment on our present right-wing lunacies and various social movements protesting them. But he puts too much spin on the ball in each sequence. Characters are practically explaining this connection to us as monologues and jostling debates are carried out with musty pseudo-historical perspective.

Not helping matters, the flat staging from Sorkin as director tends to undercut the few good moments he’s written.With Trial he somehow can’t pull off the courtroom sparring he crafted so well as screenwriter for A Few Good Men's "you can't handle the truth," or the Social Network depositions. Here it’s self-consciously, and badly, theatrical, with a host of fine actors in full showy character mode (Sacha Baron Cohen, Jeremy Strong, Eddie Redmayne, Michael Keaton, Frank Langella, John Carroll Lynch, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) chewing over flashy phrasing as the camera pushes plainly and shafts of light falls simply and dramatically. One wonders what a better visual sense would’ve shaped out of these lumpy scenes. But then I recall how Sorkin’s shaping of the pages pushes the real events toward big fake movie climaxes that are somehow flatter and less surprising than the actual events. Just when he builds up a head of self-righteous steam and winds up a character to let them go, it rings the falsest. The best scenes are the smallest, and the simplest, where an old pro like Keaton can underplay the overwritten and end up, on balance, just fine. Strangely, for a writer prized for his verbal pyrotechnics, the court sequences are somehow less outrageous and dramatic and hilarious and suspenseful than the actual court transcripts. Those have been used as the basis for a fine animated documentary from a dozen years back—Brett Morgen’s Chicago 10—and are available for free online. Those are the better way to experience the trial.

With that in mind, one might think the new Sorkin picture, a behind-the-scenes of I Love Lucy in a moment of high-stakes drama, would pale in comparison to simply watching the still-brilliant original episodes of the classic sitcom. Of course it does. But that’s where I was pleasantly surprised to be wrong that it wouldn’t be fun enough on its own terms. I was quite taken with Being the Ricardos for playing up the ways in which it stacks up historical conflicts into one stuffed week. Lucille Ball is accused of being a communist (which she was, once) at the heights of the Red Scare. Desi Arnaz is tagged as a philanderer (which he was) at one of many periods of peak tabloid power. And, if the sponsors or the network don’t pull the plug for either or both of those scandals, the power couple behind the program are determined to use Lucy’s real life pregnancy for her character, too. (One suit bristles at the idea that it’ll make viewers think about…you know…how that happened. They sleep in twin beds, he reminds.) That Sorkin’s invention places these tricky moments all in the same short period of time—the structure is all showbiz hustle, as the movie starts with a table read and ends with a taping—gives the movie a pressure cooker of competing interests. His script weaves in and out of the various conflicts and keeps the ensemble a plate-spinning act of worries and wants. It successfully cross-breeds the let’s-put-on-a-show zippiness with an earnest grappling with the people behind-the-scenes and What It All Meant.

Sorkin’s brand of pushy cleverness fits a great cast of actors playing performers and other creative types. Here Nicole Kidman becomes a Lucy who’s ambitious, steely, hugely talented, and knows what she wants. She is clearly in charge of the show, and really won’t back down from insisting being a Communist used to be considered a valid option for supporting the workers of the country. Javier Bardem plays Desi as a chipper man constantly tending to his ego, but with real love for Lucy. (He also doesn’t suffer fools, such as one well-meaning producer who tries to convince him he’s the “I” who “Loves Lucy” and therefore the top-billed title character.) His Cuban roots make him a bit more uncomfortable with her politics. (There Sorkin tries a smidge too much for phony both-sides balance.) The main couple is, as on the show, surrounded by a sharp-tongued supporting cast. Nina Arianda’s Ethel and J.K. Simmons’ Fred are great inhabitations with sly side-eyed commentary on, challenges to, and support for the main pair. And the show’s crew features Tony Hale, Alia Shawkat, Jake Lacy, Clark Gregg and more hustle through the stages, wardrobe department, and writing rooms. It’s a fine feat that mixes the sort of clever darting dialogue and blunt force messaging that a great cast can sell if Sorkin serves it up well.

There’s a kind of gleaming soft-focus romanticism to its approach, a weren’t-the-olden-days-grand? gloss to the sometimes-reductive smushing of so much social upheaval and conflict into one heavy week. (It spackles it over, somewhat, by having fake documentary talking heads from actors playing older versions of the writers’ room act as a Greek chorus of sorts.) And the writing sometimes tries too hard to make the ideas fit our modern context. Would Lucy really have accused someone of “Gaslighting” her? Nonetheless, it’s has the kind of fizz and pop that’s pleasing to the ear and flies by in a flash. Sorkin’s direction stays out of his writing’s way, and has a fine eye for the difference between on- and off-stage antics. I found it a satisfying and entertaining look at making a show in a time with an actual blacklist bouncing entertainers out of the business for their politics, when sexual mores were tamped down and repressed and not to be discussed, and when women and people of color weren’t to be treated as equals on or behind the screens. And yet, through making one of the greatest television comedies (who doesn’t know the chocolate factory sequence?), here’s a couple that manages to push on the edges of those societal constraints at a time when it could’ve resulted in a show going off the air. Now that’s cancel culture.

High Hopes: WILD ROSE and THE AERONAUTS

The year 2019 turned out to be a big one for British director Tom Harper. Previously best known on these shores, if at all, for 2015’s perfectly agreeable modern Hammer horror effort The Woman in Black: Angel of Death, his output this year encompasses two major prestige efforts. At least, that’s how their American distributors have positioned them. The films themselves wear their prestige qualities lightly, and, though they hail from dependably Oscar-y sub-genres and have the glossy handsome look of respectability about them, there’s a generosity of tone and humanity of spirit that enlivens what could be predictable, and makes imminently watchable works. The more successful of the two was this past summer’s small sleeper hit Wild Rose, a film about a scrappy Scottish woman (Jessie Buckley) and her quixotic dream to be a big American country star. It may seem an improbable dream, especially once you see she’s a single mom just out of prison with two kids waiting for her with her mother (Julie Walters). Immediately, a cynical viewer might start slotting the potential storyline into a conventional mode. If she can’t make steps toward her goal, we’re looking at kitchen-sink social realism. If she can, we’re looking at a sentimental rags-to-riches. But Nicole Taylor’s sharp and entertaining screenplay is wiser than that, imbued with a sense of specificity and heart that never steps wrong. It has both heartbreak and hardship, every success hard-won, every setback painfully felt. The result is a movie as warm and wise and true as the best country story songs. Buckley plays the lead as determined, optimistic yet realistic, sparkling and spunky and, yes, a helluva country singer. (The music is wall-to-wall and excellent.) We can see her dream should become true, even if others can’t. She’s charming and talented, but only a half-step ahead of sadness or despair. She’s falling behind fast — bills to pay, kids to raise, an ankle monitor that limits her ability to take advantage of a fluke of good fortune, let alone take a gig. That her mother sternly advises her to give up feels as kind as it is cruel; but so, too, is her wealthy employer (Sophie Okonedo) as she advises her to go for it. There’s no easy answer. Here’s a movie that is an unusually warm and clear-eyed look at what so often becomes behind-the-music cliche or pat blindly-follow-your-dreams foolishness. It understands with poignant, matter-of-fact clarity how difficult in can be to accept a lucky break and turn it into something bigger when you’re starting from a place of such disadvantage. The quotidian struggle, the painful mistakes, and the missed opportunities make the glimpses of success all the more powerfully bittersweet in a movie this vibrant and full of life. It earns every ounce of its uplift.

Harper’s other film of the year, opening just in time for the holidays, is the shallower and yet more visually striking The Aeronauts. It’s a based-on-a-true-story period picture whose commitment to the true story ends with the fact that there was an important hot air balloon experiment in 1862 England. The film really is as simple as it sounds: a pilot (Felicity Jones) and a weather scientist (Eddie Redmayne) want to see how high they can take a hot air balloon. It goes up really high, which, as you might expect for the first time such a thing has happened, gives them all kinds of wonderful views and terrifying complications. It gets cold. There are storm clouds. And how does one land this thing? This is the full extent of the film’s present-tense action, with the characters’ backstories filled in with studious flashbacks that pad out the runtime and give some emotional scaffolding to the awe-struck imperiled figures adrift in the skies. With such a thin story structure, Harper is free to demonstrate a true This is Cinerama or even L'arrivée d'un train level of simple visual power. It’s a case of a wow, look at that thing go! conception executed well, expertly realized and utterly convincing in its blend of practical and computer effects. When on the ground, George Steel’s cinematography has fine, overfamiliar, burnished period piece style, shot in scope with all the finest frippery of mid-1800’s detail in the costuming and production design. But get it up in the air, and the frame opens to full IMAX height, conjuring the most vertiginous filmmaking this side of Zemeckis’ skyscraper tightrope The Walk as they lean over the edge or, worse still, climb up the rigging. It thus builds great tension out of the mere height of the thing, gaping in wonder as the balloon passes through clouds or drifts above a town, or gripping tight as the characters must scramble around the balloon. Because Jones and Redmayne are capable at playing charm and vulnerability, it’s always evident that they’re one wrong decision away from plummeting and they do enough to make one hope not to see such a thing. They hold their own against the immense backdrop of this spectacular view. From such a simple idea comes a movie that’s captivating enough, capable of reminding one that a relatively simple story’s ability to be told on a scale of this enormity is one of the reasons we go out to the movies.

Monster Hunt: FANTASTIC BEASTS AND WHERE TO FIND THEM

A screenplay is quite a different creature than a novel, and it’s usually interesting to see an author attempt to bridge the gap. In the case of J.K. Rowling, the creative and commercial lure of her Harry Potter world has led her to trade books for scripts as she attempts to expand the fantasy in new directions. She goes back in time for a prequel (of sorts) in Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, which leaves behind a contemporary Hogwarts for a Roaring Twenties’ New York City. Instead of the castle in the countryside where a British boarding school narrative provided both structure and boundless whimsical visuals in which a hero’s journey could patiently develop, here she finds a bustling retro-urban America. It shares with her earlier stories a magical community hiding in plain sight, with many of the same delights: goblins and house elves and wizards and all the processes and politics thereof existing behind a magical barrier, mostly unbothered by the concerns of muggles. They’re about to find the boundaries transgressed, when well-meaning but bumbling zoologist wizard Newt Scamander arrives with a suitcase full of magical critters that get loose, threatening to wreak havoc and expose their community.

So it’s both a new world and an old one, with fresh sights and peoples and times to explore while maintaining some slight sense of comforting familiar continuity with the terrific film adaptations of Rowling’s Potters. It’s a difficult task, especially for a writer whose drive to endlessly add imaginative filigrees on her work is reflected in her books’ page counts and her years of additional hints and factoids since the series’ conclusion. I certainly don’t begrudge her desire to live in the world she created and tell us more about it. The problem is with time and space. A movie simply can’t expand and explain as much as she’s attempting here, especially when it leaves her two biggest writerly assets – overflowing incident and whimsical detail – foreshortened. The result is a story that’s at once incredibly simple and worldbuilding that’s bewilderingly complicated. Sure, it’s a spin-off. But it’s also starting over. Rowling is stuck in the in-between space. Beasts is too beholden to what came before to break out and be its own thing, but too different to drift off much affection for the Potter story.

Scamander (Eddie Redmayne, playing up a sheepish introversion as an unusually passive presence for this sort of big phantasmagoric production) arrives uncharacterized in a world we know little about. As the movie, directed by Potter alum David Yates, slowly pulls its character through a tour of magical New York we pick up bits and pieces about stateside wizard tics and troubles. Here the Ministry of Magic is the Magical Congress of the United States of America (or MACUSA) hidden Platform 9¾ style in the Woolworth Building. They’ve banned magical creatures and have a strict no-muggle-fraternizing policy, so they’re quite taken aback when Scamander not only loses his suitcase of creatures but has accidentally left it with a normal man (Dan Fogler). A low-level MACUSA agent (Katherine Waterson) tries to keep a lid on the situation, enlisting her mind-reading sister (Alison Sudol) in assisting Scamander and his new muggle pal’s fetch quest for fantastic beasts of all shapes and sizes hiding out in a gleaming digital backlot period piece metropolis.

This is the simple part of the story, with Scamander anchoring a creature feature that finds its drive in a man determined to stop the beasts by saving them and understanding them instead of merely defeating and capturing them. There’s not much in the way of momentum or urgency to the task, as Rowling’s script has an unhurried amble. We spend long sequences simply looking at a CG menagerie, disappearing into his roomy suitcase zoo to look at googly-eyed monsters and ethereal mammals, or watching a bulbous glowing rhinoceros charging or an invisible monkey scampering. My favorite was a kleptomaniac platypus – he had the most personality of these fantasy animals – but a feathery dragon snake that shrinks or expands to fill available space is a runner up for its clever Miyazaki-like design. Still, it adds up to a whole lot of footage of actors looking with all the convincing awe they can muster at computer animation, punctuated by a lackadaisical, gently amusing bantering relationship between the underwritten leads. (To the extent they have personality it’s in whatever the performers are able to squeeze in between set pieces and exposition.)

Underneath this lighthearted, simple adventure with thin characters and slight sights simmers great, evocative tension and complicated conflicts. There’s brewing anti-witch conspiracy led by a wild-eyed zealot (Samantha Morton), whose adopted son (Ezra Miller) is torn between living up to her ideology or helping an authoritarian wizard detective (Colin Farrell). This rich, gripping side story is so fascinating I wished it were the center of the movie instead of a terrific subplot. It becomes the picture’s most fascinating addition to Rowling’s lore, growing into a possession tale arising out of twisted self-loathing, and with snaky tendrils into crooked politics as a slimy tycoon (Jon Voight) casts about for a scapegoat to fuel his electoral ambitions. That all this sits side-by-side with a sightseeing jaunt through capering creature hunts makes for a struggle with striking a tone. Even as the storylines converge, it feels like too much is held back or unspoken for fear of running out of material for proposed future sequels.

For this is a movie that’s intended to be the jumping off point for a new series, and as such falls into the trap of keeping its options open. There’s charm in the lovely, unusual grace notes – expressive slow motion, subtle (to the point of nearly undetectable) emotional tremors, soft humor, delicate slapstick. It’s not the typical blockbuster. It has personality, eccentricity in its construction while still beholden to the beats expected of studio spectacle, including the now inevitable huge CG cloud of muck throbbing in the sky for a finale. Yates, with many of the same crew members who so handsomely designed and decorated the Potters, dutifully conjures Rowling’s imagination, but in this case it can’t help but feel a little hesitant, a two-hour promise of more to come. If this flowers into a fresh new franchise, it’ll look in retrospect like a passable setup. For now, it’s merely a footnote, an afterthought to a far more satisfying story.

Spaced Out: JUPITER ASCENDING

Jupiter Ascending is an all-you-can-eat sci-fi smorgasbord. Writer-directors Andy and Lana Wachowski provide a generous spread filled with way more than one person, or, as it turns out, one film could possible devour in one sitting. It’s a big goofy space opera serving non-stop silly names, strange creatures, intergalactic scheming, gobbledygook jargon, majestic CGI vistas, swooshing spaceships, and laser guns that go pew-pew-kaZAAp, all wrapped up in an impenetrably convoluted mythos. Unlike the Wachowski’s Matrix trilogy, which invited a casual view deeper and deeper down a nutso rabbit hole, this offering is crazy from the jump. They’ve gotten so far into their worldbuilding they’ve forgotten to leave an entry point for the rest of us. I don’t mean to give off the impression that I hated it. On the contrary, I admired its idiosyncrasies, but only to a point. I felt perpetually on the outside looking in.

At least the view’s nice. It has spectacular production design, from spaceships that look like sea-creatures with throne-room interiors, to massive steam-punk factories nestled in gas giants, whirring robots, ornate gowns, glowing gewgaws and weird alien thingamabobs from gravity boots to memory wipes and high-tech paperwork. It has a sweeping Michael Giacchino score in full pa-rum-pa-pum-pum epic swelling mode, immersive bleeping and rumbling soundscapes, and a bevy of hilarious camp voices. So it looks and sounds like a great pulp space adventure. But for all its whiz-bang flash and sizzle, as clean and shiny as anything the Wachowski’s have made, it’s chintzy on a human scale, with ridiculous characters, hazy motivations, and an overcomplicated story that’s at once too much and too little. It’s both overstuffed and thinly repetitive.

What, exactly, is supposed to be happening amidst the shimmery sci-fi frippery on display? Well, you see, there’s this cleaning lady (Mila Kunis) who, after the movie's weirdly scattered and confused false starts, agrees to sell her eggs to help her illegal immigrant family. Strange place to start, but the movie doesn't seem to care. It’s just a place where she can be attacked by evil alien bounty hunters and saved at the last minute by a dashing space guy, Channing Tatum with elvish ears and a wolfish grin. He eventually takes her to space, where three wealthy warring alien siblings (Eddie Redmayne, Tuppence Middleton, and Douglas Booth) each want her captured for their individual purposes. Turns out she’s a reincarnation of their mother, a matriarch in a race of practically ageless aliens who seeded the Earth with human DNA millennia ago and are ready to collect their harvest.

They want to trick Kunis into giving up the rights to Earth, since their mother left her eventual reincarnation that very planet in her will. Make sense? It takes more than an hour to introduce all these stakes, as we head to each evil sibling one at a time in episodic encounters, each more dangerous than the last. Allegiances shift, strange creatures and rituals appear, and elaborate background is filled in, like learning Tatum is an animal-human hybrid – part dog, part man – with a complicated sketchy past. Elsewhere we see a part-bee man named Stinger (Sean Bean), armies of winged dinosaur things in trench coats, and a man-sized pilot with the face of an elephant. (When given an order, he trumpets with determination.) It’s fun, but exhausting keeping up with the free-floating oddities that never seem to connect with any real purpose. They’re laid out in earnestly campy detail, so at least some of the giggles these concepts provoke are intentional delight.

It should be a simple story of empowerment, with Kunis as a special person who discovers her alien gifts and ascends to a place of power in the galaxy while interacting with weird beasties and strange beings. Instead, she flails and falls through busy CGI spectacle, bounced helplessly from one elaborate plot point to the next. Those who erroneously claim the Star Wars prequels are only about trade routes won’t be happy to find that Jupiter Ascending is literally only a fight over the deed to Earth. Now, granted, it has energetic action, vials of youth serum, warring factions of creature-people, and nods towards usual Wachowski themes of destiny, reincarnation, conspiracies, redemption, consumption, and rampaging capitalism. And the actors are up for the mood of the thing, with Kunis and Tatum going totally sincere, and others like Redmayne going batty with affected whispery high-pitch mumbling and stiff movements.

But with only the barest rooting interest in any character’s plight, it’s hard to care about the serious craziness on screen. It’s a film of incredible sights put to use muddling through the political machinations of a galactic oligarchy, half-hearted self-actualization, and a totally unbelievable romantic subplot. Throughout, obvious apocalyptic stakes are weirdly downplayed, the main narrative and emotional thrusts drifting away. I appreciated the Wachowskis’ commitment to loony concepts. Keep in mind I think Speed Racer is their best work. But they didn’t crack this narrative open in any compelling way. There’s a fun movie hidden somewhere in Jupiter Ascending's confusion of dropped plot lines and ridiculous implications, but they didn’t quite find it. Perhaps it’s no surprise to find buried with this mess a cameo from Terry Gilliam, the patron saint auteur of fantasy follies. This movie may not work, but it’s the kind of distinctive, eccentric, personal failure I find hard to dismiss entirely.

A Brief History of Hawking: THE THEORY OF EVERYTHING

Stephen Hawking, the great theoretical physicist, has contributed mightily to our understanding of the universe. Through his academic work on black holes, the Big Bang Theory and the history of time, and his bestselling books on the subjects, his name has become shorthand for scientific progress and the power of the human mind. Surely, he belongs on the public imagination’s shortlist of notable scientists with Galileo, Newton, Darwin, and Einstein. That he’s done all this from the confines of a wheelchair, a form of ALS having left him able to write and speak only with the assistance of a custom computer that digitizes his thoughts one click at a time, is nothing short of extraordinary. His theories are important, his life impressive.

But when it comes to making a movie out of his life, director James Marsh and screenwriter Anthony McCarten have made his story into the same fawning biopic we’d see about any Great Man. It shows his early promise in brisk, energetic moments, falls into his tragic setbacks, then watches in sentimental pride his eventual standing-ovation worthy triumphs. All the while, his supportive wife is by his side, even though understandable difficulties cause their marriage to drift apart. The Theory of Everything is any and every biopic, sturdy and uncomplicated, even in its subjects’ darkest moments. It’s not interested in pushing too hard. It’s all about playing it safe and glossy, comfortable.

The film’s a straightforward retelling of Hawking’s life and work, complete with recreations of several key anecdotes that’ll be recognizable to anyone familiar with A Brief History of Time, either his book or Errol Morris’ documentary based on it. Our story begins in the 1960s, when Hawking (Eddie Redmayne) was a smart student hard at work on his PhD at Cambridge. He was on the rowing team, rode his bike across campus, and generally had a good time while impressing everyone with his intimidating intellect. What startled his peers most was how easily his work came to him. At an off-campus party he meets Jane (Felicity Jones), who will become the most important person in his life. They’re a fine pair, he, a man of science and math, and she, a woman of art and religion.

Marsh and McCarten draw out these opposites as Redmayne and Jones fill in the charm that brought the couple together. The film makes the most out of this central relationship, making it far more about the Hawkings’ relationship than about his work. We’re left knowing only that he’s brilliant and popular, but with a more in-depth understanding of the compassion he was shown that enabled him to continue his work. He’s diagnosed with ALS before he’s finished with his Doctorate, before he and Jane get married. It’s a slow decline, losing feeling and muscle in all his limbs bit by bit. First he’s limping, then leaning on canes. Eventually, he can only move his lips and eyes, barely making a sound but for the computer that arrives in his life when his thoughts threaten to remain trapped in his mind.

It is through the vibrant young man’s slow arrival as the Hawking we’ve long known that Redmayne’s acting shines. If a biopic is going to get just one variable exactly right, it might as well be the lead performance. Here, the charming redhead you might remember from Les Miserables delivers an uncanny inhabitation, somewhere beyond imitation, of an intelligent man wrestling with the pain and fear of losing physical abilities. By the time he sits in the wheelchair, crumpled and limp, he does more with his curled upper lip and bright eyes than some actors manage with their whole bodies. He’s everything the movie should be, precise in his charting of the disease’s progression, moving in the resilience of Hawking’s intellect in the face of a diagnosis that even a decade earlier would’ve left him forever locked in.

Marsh, whose other biopic (of sorts) Man on Wire played around with form as much as Theory of Everything plays it safe, populates the film with some of the finest character actors in England, from David Thewlis and Emily Watson to Charlie Cox and Simon McBurney. There’s period flavor in every corner with convincing production design. Bruno Delhomme’s cinematography is handsome and gauzy. The problem is that it’s all in service of a film so rote, going through the biopic motions instead of digging into what makes Hawking’s life so compelling. There’s little care taken to flesh out his theories or personality beyond surface level anecdotal evidence. And then it expects us to cry on command with one of its treacly music cues or misty-eyed crane shots. Instead of matching the level of technical command and unsentimental pathos of Redmayne’s performance, it’s loaded up with the dullest gloss. It’s well made, but conventional and, acting aside, feels awfully hollow.

Hear the People Sing: LES MISÉRABLES

It took long enough to get Les Misérables on the big screen, at least when you’re talking about Claude-Michel Schönberg and Alain Boublil’s beloved long-running (nearly 30 years) stage musical based on the hefty Victor Hugo novel. I’ll leave the comparisons of stage to screen to those who have actually encountered this production before, but as one whose first exposure to the musical comes through this film, I must say that, despite some reservations I’ll definitely mention, the film works. I can see why so many have such strong feelings about the source material. This is a sturdy, often stirring Hollywood musical of the kind that won’t win over any reluctant naysayers or those unlikely to either accept or ignore director Tom Hooper’s tendency to shoot everything in wide angle close-ups, but is sure to satisfy some of us who roll our eyes whenever Carol Reed’s altogether delightfully square literary musical Oliver! turns up in lists of Oscar “mistakes.”

If nothing else, Tom Hooper (who rode his last film, the even squarer The King’s Speech, to Oscar glory) has adapted Les Misérables in a way that’s determinedly earnest. It’s the kind of movie where characters are constantly having their lives turned upside down by momentous emotion and revelations happen in the blink of an eye. One glance and you’re the most in love you’ve ever been with a girl you just met. Receive one kind gesture and a criminal is instantly a better man, or an authority figure is instantly conflicted about his duty. Hooper underplays some of this quite nicely, but that will bury motivations from time to time. (There are a few character moments that left me lost.) Had the film been under the direction of a flashier, more competent visual stylist, there might have been an embrace of some of the more swoony elements in a way that could have led to greater clarity. Still, Hooper has been handed strong material and he’s smart enough not to mess it up.

The story, set in the mid-1800s, starts with Jean Valjean (Hugh Jackman), a prisoner who skips out on parole and, with inspiration from a kind priest, decides to start a new life as an honorable man. Too bad, then, that after several years of successful remaking, the policeman long in pursuit, Javert (Russell Crowe), eventually catches up.  This story crosses paths with Fantine (Anne Hathaway), who is tragically unemployed and sickly, barely able to provide the money she needs to send to her very young daughter Cosette (Isabelle Allen), who has been left at a boarding house run by a couple of careless cons (Helena Bonham Carter and Sacha Baron Cohen). Valjean promises Fantine that he’ll find the girl and make sure she’s taken care of. He does, but one step ahead of Javert, he and the girl flee. He starts over yet again. 

The plot picks up years later in Paris, where the frustrated public, among them idealistic students Marius and Éponine (Eddie Redmayne and Samantha Barks), plan a revolution. All of the other characters are in the general vicinity of the conflict as well, leading to Marius glimpsing Cosette (now grown into Amanda Seyfried) and deciding that he’s in love. Good thing she decides in the same instant that she loves him too, no matter how protective her adopted father is. And we haven’t even gotten to the revolution yet! This is a tragedy and a romance with an epic historical sweep that finds along the way menace and kindness, humor and heartbreak, romance and retribution. There’s lots of plot packed into a quick (relatively speaking, I suppose) two-and-a-half hours, leading to some moments where I was intellectually moved by the proceedings without getting my heart involved. There’s just no downtime here as we hurry from peak to peak and I felt a bit of a burden to fill in the gaps myself. And yet, this is sometimes powerful, always hardworking storytelling that soars on the back of memorable sung-through melodies and motifs.

Rarely stopping to catch a breath, the characters sing their hearts out. Hooper has one or two good ideas on how to capture the performances. First, there’s the live singing. Unlike most movie musicals, which record the vocal performances separately, leaving the actors room to maneuver through the scenes and dances without worrying about hitting all the right notes while filming, Hooper captured the singing right then and there on set. This results in many stirring moments of musical cinema in which characters are raw and emotive in ways that sound spontaneous. You can hear characters straining at times, warbling away from big notes when a swell of emotion chokes them up, weeping through swallowed notes or swelling with prideful energy. The singing is undoubtedly rough around the edges at times, but the cast does a fine job nonetheless. I was surprised how moved I was by Jackman’s clipped, half-swallowed bubbling in his most dramatic moments.

Hooper’s second good idea helps the cast’s singing as well. When the constantly swirling melodies part to let a character step forward and sing a solo soliloquy, his restless camera stops to capture the song in steady shots that keep the performance in close frames that regard the emotion that plays out with the notes. These moments could have failed a weaker cast, but here they are simple and effective. When Banks sings of unrequited love in “On My Own,” when Redmayne mourns in “Empty Chairs At Empty Tables,” and when Jackman sings his epiphany in “Valjean’s Soliloquy,” the effect is a rather lovely work of cinematic theatricality, putting us not just front row, but on the stage for a terrific feat of musical acting. The clear standout sequence of this kind is Hathaway’s astonishing performance of what has to be the musical’s most well known number, the heartbreaking “I Dreamed a Dream.” It plays out in more or less one shot, each note a twist of the knife in this character’s sad trajectory.

Though the film feels so big with production design that feels like heightened grubby realism and soaring music that helps fill the frames with operatic emotions, Hooper’s closeness occasionally makes the whole thing feel small and cramped. (You wouldn’t really want to sit on the stage to watch the show now, would you?) He’s not a particularly visual director and when he’s called upon to manage a small group number – “At the End of the Day,” say, or especially with “Master of the House” – the shots don’t add up. When it comes to matching rousing unison and harmonies with nimble visual compositions to match, he’s not up to the task. Here he breaks with his old-fashioned material and old-fashioned approach for the sake of a misguided method of keeping editing choppy and shots close and ill framed. There’s a sense that he’s trying to stay away from precisely the bigness and exaggeration that makes the best movie musicals work so well. It doesn’t work for the material here, but it’s something that one can learn to overlook if determined to ride the emotion underlying it all.

After all, there’s a great story here, or at least so I gather. Some of the rushed storytelling left me scratching my head and the pacing in the final half hour or so goes strangely slack, but the broad strokes of pain, romance, and tragic revolution resonate well. The performers sell each and every big moment, a great cast, singing memorable, endlessly hummable tunes. Less a great movie, more a movie in which you can find greatness, Les Misérables is never better than when its director can get out of his own way. 

Candle in Wind: MY WEEK WITH MARILYN

My Week with Marilyn is a lead balloon of a film that so desperately wants to float it’s pathetic. Because director Simon Curtis has the whole endeavor covered in a gloss of prestige – good actors in a based-on-a-true-story period piece about famous people – this is the kind of movie that can be snuck into awards’ season and be essentially taken seriously, whether it deserves it or not. And in this case, the answer is definitely not. If it weren’t a film about Marilyn Monroe (with supporting characters Laurence Olivier, Arthur Miller, and Vivien Leigh, among others) this would be a film entirely undeserving of attention given the dull plotting and total lack of emotional curiosity.

Michelle Williams is one of our finest actresses, but the role of Marilyn Monroe works against the very qualities that make Williams so good. Monroe was her own spotlight. She glowed on screen. Her greatest asset as a screen presence was her very presence. Physical, sensual, she seemed to be both desire incarnate and a total innocent. She was a dumb blonde who was in on the joke. There was some there there, despite appearances.

Williams, on the other hand, has an intense interiority and a sharp intelligence to her acting choices that she uses to draw in sympathy. She’s pretty, to be sure, but she doesn’t use her looks to prop up a persona or win over an audience with easy charm. Her characters aren’t in on any jokes; they’re often struggling to survive. There can be a convincing desperation to the way Williams adapts her physicality to her characters’ struggles. This isn’t to say that Williams is inherently a better actress than Monroe was, nor is she worse. (Though it’s hard to imagine Monroe fitting in a role as complex as the one’s Williams has played in the likes of Blue Valentine and Wendy and Lucy.) It’s simply to say that Monroe and Williams are screen presences who use their bodies to inherently different purposes.

Still, it could have worked. Williams summons up a good enough impression. She does best with the off-screen material where Monroe finds herself completely removed from the spotlight and can drop a bit of her persona. It invites sympathy in a glimmer of the ways Williams is so good at doing just that in other, better films. The problem is the way so much of the film is given over to that persona in a fairly unsympathetic way. It’s a film that pays lip service to her troubles – with marriages, with her career, with pills – but never really seems interested in letting us know her. It neither recreates nor problematizes Monroe’s legend. It’s a film that’s content to gaze at her with mostly unquestioning reverence and a condescending attitude that treats her as a poor thing that needs rescuing.

It’s all a matter of point of view, really. The film, despite being all about Monroe, is on the literal plot level a coming-of-age story about a determined young chap, Colin (Eddie Redmayne), who wants to work in the movies. The lad gets a job as the third assistant to Laurence Olivier (Kenneth Branagh) who is in the process of gearing up to direct and star in a film opposite Monroe. Over the course of filming, Colin gets an up close (and occasionally a rather intimate) look at the stars’ struggles. He even thinks she’s falling in love with him. She’s certainly flirty enough to lead him to that conclusion. But what is clear is that he loves her. The first scene is the then unemployed Colin watching Monroe in a film. The camera finds him sitting mouth agape in the cinema, staring dumbstruck at the screen. From that first scene all the way to the end, this is a film standing aside, simply regarding Monroe. Adrian Hodges's script wants to have a light comedic touch that also reveals the darker underside to the woman’s life. It just never comes together in such a manner to allow that to happen. It struck me as miscalculated every step of the way.