Note Worthy: MARIA, BETTER MAN,A COMPLETE UNKNOWN

Musical biopics tend to work better when they’re working a thesis about the performer in question. It’s certainly preferable to a dutiful recounting of their life story that’s somehow less entertaining than finding the original concert footage and reading their Wikipedia page. In the case of Pablo Larraín’s Maria, the thesis about opera singer Maria Callas is somehow the same as the ones in his dreamy, subjective approaches to Jackie Kennedy in Jackie and Princess Diana in Spencer. The read on each figure is: look, how beautiful, how troubled, how resilient, how tragic. Fair enough. I happen to like those movies’ cramped opulence and grainy wooziness and temporal limits as acting showcases on a pedestal of swirling style. This one’s more of the same. It has Angelina Jolie lip-syncing to Callas’ diamond-cutting voice crackling with lyrical vibrato and tearful tremulousness. The film takes place largely in the singer’s final weeks as she struggles to regain her voice, seemingly wanting to sing more than live. There are also some flashbacks to a moment in her career during which she’s romanced by Aristotle Onassis. (An appearance by JFK hints at a Larraín biopic cinematic universe.) This funeral march uses Jolie’s contradictory qualities as well as any of her best non-Tomb Raider performances—Girl, Interrupted’s mental patient, By the Sea’s troubled wife, Maleficent’s wounded witch. She’s a stunning statuesque figure wielding sturdy charisma and steady fragility. The movie never quite fully activates an interesting narrative around Maria, but it consistently provides a beautiful look—Ed Lachman bringing faded cool colors in shooting a finely upholstered production design—and an enveloping mood. There are worse ways to spend a couple hours than hanging out with a movie star in lovely images that let one contemplate opera music.

An even more obvious thesis biopic is Better Man, an authorized recounting of Brit-pop’s bad boy Robbie Williams’ career so far. He came from a troubled family to join a 90’s boy band, and then go solo. It’s a typical arc from foundational childhood pain to fluke sudden success to sex, drugs, and gossip columns. What makes it atypical is the fact that he’s played here by a CG monkey in a musical that uses Williams’ songs to explain his emotional states. Who’d have thought, watching the recent motion-capture performances in the terrific recent Planet of the Apes films of the past decade, that one day the technology would be put to use for a metaphor of pop stardom? That it nearly works—sustaining its meager insight and mild visual interest for nearly the entirety of a feature length effort—is credit to director Michael Gracey. He gives it plenty of amped-up pizzazz in musical sequences with lots of extras, zippy editing, and fancy camera work. The best is a number stunningly done in a single stitched-together take that flows unblinkingly through multiple vehicles, buildings, and streets as talented dancers (and one animated monkey) hoof it with the right razzle-dazzle. Following up his fun debut feature The Greatest Showman, Gracey’s becoming the go-to guy for fantastical musicals that are more “inspired by” than factual accountings of a real person’s life. This one, though oddly more true, is not as good, because it’s bogged down in so many of the usual rise-fall-rise cliches and dreary dramatic scenes where dialogue expresses what the dancing could do and had done. Gracey’s strength, however, remains his emotional shorthand, which hits all the harder for flying so quickly it outraces its obviousness. It’s just more unevenly deployed here. And there’s only so much novelty to the monkey metaphor before it all feels overfamiliar again. It remains so purely metaphorical, with his simian appearance never acknowledged as real by anyone on screen, that it stretches its insight—he feels like a wild animal, or a trained zoo act—quite thinly. But Robbie Williams made some catchy pop songs, and there’s real earnest wildness here that keeps it from being entirely tiresome. If nothing else, looking at this monkey in all these standard biopic scenes certainly makes the sex part of sex and drugs weirder to contemplate.

A thesis about Bob Dylan in James Mangold’s A Complete Unknown is that he’s ultimately unknowable, which could be a cheap trick to wiggle out of telling us anything about the man, but in practice makes his trickster inscrutability itself too vivid to ignore. All the best Dylan movies—Todd Haynes’ kaleidoscopic re-castings in I’m Not There, the self-contradictory interviews of classic verité doc Don’t Look Back—realize this. He’s both completely earnest and totally joking, a brilliant, purposeful writer and a persuasive crafter of public persona. Somehow he’s simultaneously earnestly artful and an impish improviser. He’s deliberately cultivating a mystique, and sometimes just a jerk. Either way he’s a poet and a genius and this movie is more about how people react to him than anything else. And then it pushes back with his own confusion about who others want him to be. That’s nice tension finely dramatized. The sturdy meat-and-potatoes Hollywood craft of this new film quite effectively communicates why people responded so strongly to his work, and why some would feel a sense of betrayal when he went electric. The movie ends with that divisive moment in his career, but begins with his arrival in the New York City folk music scene of the early 1960s, and follows his rise to fame before concluding with him trading his acoustic guitar for that electric one. Mangold, who also co-wrote with frequent Scorsese co-writer Jay Cocks, brings a fine sense of pacing and placing to the events, and fills the picture with loving recreations of the sights and sounds of the time, including tons of satisfying musical performances. It helps us understand how Dylan hit big, and returns to these old classics some of the shock of the new. We see him through the eyes of: folksy singer Pete Seeger (Edward Norton), who takes him under his wing; sweet college activist Sylvie (Elle Fanning), who falls in love with him; sharp, ambitious Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro), who’s as much a collaborator and competitor as love interest; and various other music industry types who try to pin him down from managers and programmers to Johnny Cash (Boyd Holbrook). (That means Mangold, whose Cash picture Walk the Line was two decades ago, also has a biopic universe at play.) Dylan himself is played by Timothée Chalamet in a proficient impersonation that also always seems like Chalamet putting on an act. Maybe that’s the point. So is Bob.

Story Telling: ASTEROID CITY

Asteroid City is something of a skeleton key for Wes Anderson’s approach to filmmaking. It consistently tells you the whole picture is artifice all the way down—and surfaces genuine emotion on the regular anyway. That’s the Wes Anderson way. He’s always doing that—using his dollhouse designs, symmetrical blocking, picture-book precision, handcrafted effects, nesting-doll framing devices, play with aspect ratio, and deadpan witty dialogue to dig deeply into ideas and emotions that hit all the harder for having been approached slyly and indirectly. An audience can be dazzled by the parade of delights he seemingly unfolds with great whimsy, only to realize the subtleties and nuances of the earnest, deliberate intentionality behind his grand designs. Detractors who misinterpret his methods as shallow affectation or meme-worthy ticks or airless style betray only their own lack of depth.

For in a Wes Anderson movie, the apparent limits are what instead allow limitless capacity for deep contemplation. He presents us perfectly designed jewel box settings and finds his characters’ melancholies radiating, uncontainable, as they, and we, are forced to confront the messiness of art, science, family, religion, sex, violence, and everything that makes life. After his Grand Budapest Hotel found bittersweet endings in its screwball capers and romantic nostalgias cut short memorialized by a writer’s work and The French Dispatch an anthology of aesthetic reveries in a funereal tribute for a magazine editor—both pictures as political and elegiac as they are surface fizz—this new film foregrounds its form and telling even further. In so doing, it also furthers Anderson’s commitment to exploring the power of storytelling—not as a pat inspirational cliche, but as the vital stuff of human existence.

Of course a playful movie so deeply and delightfully engaged in ideas about how we explain ourselves to ourselves, and how our senses of identity and purpose are constructed, would be self-conscious as it searches for deep meaning. The movie opens on a host (Bryan Cranston) telling us we are about to watch a rehearsal for a play. In boxy black-and-white framing with theatrical lighting, we see an author (Edward Norton) at a typewriter, and the large cast assembled, and the rigging and stagehands and fakery in the wings. And then, as the story-within-that-story begins, it transforms into widescreen color full of its own artificial tricks—matte paintings, miniatures, stop-motion, and a small town where every window and door is its own proscenium arch. Here, at Asteroid City in 1955, a quaint nothing town in what’s cheerfully described as “the middle of the California, Nevada, Arizona desert,” we find a troop of Space Cadets with parents and a teacher along for a Star Gazing meetup around an ancient asteroid. The tiny motor lodge with individual cabins, next to a gas station and across from an observatory, is just another stage on which life can play out its little eccentricities.

At the center is grief, with a sad photographer father (Jason Schwartzman) telling his nerdy teen son and three cute little daughters that their mother has died. Their grandfather (Tom Hanks) is going to meet them there and drive them home, a necessity because the car just died, too. C’est la vie. It’s building a picture of a world where, no matter how much we seek to quantify and contain, people die, machines break, and the universe never loses its capacity for surprise. A mechanic (Matt Dillon) confidently tells the family that there are only two possibilities for what’s wrong with the car, only to quickly run into trouble and declare that the problem is “a third thing.” (Late in the picture, a character will matter-of-factly comment on a makeshift invention: “Everything’s connected, but nothing’s working.) More than once, a character asked “why” will respond with “It’s unclear.” And as we track back into the black-and-white world for expressionistic reenactments of the dramaturgical process, one actor will admit to not understanding his character or even the play itself. His director tells him, simply, “keep telling the story,” a phrase of advice that radiates back down into the fictions-within-fictions, and back up to us, too.

The look and tone is a fine blend of mid-century influences—Western-themed architecture and vintage technologies and designs and non-stop cowboy folk songs wafting over the town’s radios—and reflexively playful about the kinds of melodramas, both abstract and overheated, that a mid-50s writer might conjure. Knowledgeable audiences might clock the relation to the sandy sunlit widescreen staging of John Sturges’ Bad Day at Black Rock or the Technicolor small-town anxieties in Vincente Minnelli’s Some Came Running, not to mention Thornton Wilder and Samuel Beckett and Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller and so on. (The town also has a roadrunner who chirps “meep meep,” a fine cartoon wink to foreshadow and top off the drama’s impending dusting of sci-fi elements.) And yet, for all this meta-text, we’re seeing a television special inside reenactments inside a rehearsal inside a production about a fictional town populated by dreamers and actors and schemers and scientists, every layer lost in losses and daydreams, grief and preoccupations. Perhaps an ecstatic peak of all this is when a kid performs a song, and as his classmates and teacher join in the dance, we see they’re being watched on a closed-circuit television. It’s all performances within performances.

Anderson keeps these meta-fictions spinning as an expertly choreographed and brilliantly staged nesting doll of fakery. It layers the colorful whimsy of its central story—the Star Gazers and the locals are soon trapped in town by a bizarre series of events, Close Encounters by way of Buñuel—in fictions and their tellings. It allows the movie to access both the charms of its simply plotted southwestern magical realism and its characters’ aching emotional issues, and the dizzying effort the telling. It gets at fiction itself—stories we’re told and stories we tell—and how we can get lost in it by giving ourselves over to what’s real truth within them—even kitsch, even obscure artful gestures, even when we’re unsure but “keep telling the story.” The film finds all kinds of rituals—religious sentiments, scientific methods, philosophical musings, method acting exercises, military orders, keynote addresses, backstage gossip—and notices with great melancholic empathy we’re all looking for, or clinging to, something that’ll explain our place in the vast mysteries of the universe. We need to find ourselves in the right story.

Although many of Anderson’s prior pictures allow the audience to get totally carried along in a compelling narrative and invested in characters in his controlled style, here he utilizes the grinning delights of his aesthetics of geometrical camera movements and perpendicular staging to make us always aware we’re sitting on the fourth wall. (There are even fleeting eye-contacts with the camera.) And here’s the magic: I still cared, deeply, about the characters at even the deepest levels of the fictions. There are beautiful moments of performance and writing that suddenly bring tears to the eyes with their emotional honesty. Anderson’s ability to suggest with the subtlest shifts and swiftest shimmers of interiority, whole lives behind the eyes, deep wells of regrets and confusion, longing and yearning flowers beautifully. I know I’m watching an actor playing an actor playing a character—the movie reminds us constantly—and yet, suddenly, I’m drawn in by his grief, or her confusion, or his confusion. An actress (Scarlett Johansson) in the story-within-the-story asks to run lines with a new friend and suddenly those lines (a mere half-glimpsed excerpt of another story) are somehow moving, too. It’s marvelous, the entire movie constantly making hairpin shifts between cold cerebral conceit and warm sentiment—committing fully to both and serving the thoughtfulness of each equally. The whole movie is this magic trick only a master filmmaker could pull off. It’s deeply poignant and intelligently articulated, a heady blend of heart and mind. It’s a director delivering a disquisition on his style and its intended effects, that also lands those effects with the very best of them. We’re so lucky to have Wes Anderson telling us these stories as only he can.

Guess Who: GLASS ONION

Glass Onion isn’t exactly a sequel to Knives Out. It’s simply another complicated case for its sole returning character to puzzle through. Good thing detective Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig) is such great company, oozing Southern charm and confidence, while behaving an enlightened, affable gentleman who can slip right into any social context. He somehow stands out and blends in, the better to be underestimated as he gathers clues. And good thing, too, that writer-director Rian Johnson knows a thing or two about constructing a sequel that zigs when you’d expect it to zag, and ends up satisfying even more for giving you what you didn’t know you’d like to see. This one is a larger film, trading the first’s bickering family clad in cute sweaters, holed up in a cozy New England house while all their grievances tumble out, for a palatial mansion, with enormous sunny sets on a private Greek island filled with rich friends hanging around in sunglasses and beachwear. If Knives Out had an autumnal Thanksgiving vibe, Glass Onion is pure summer vacation.

It finds Blanc invited to a murder mystery party. He’s the ringer, and stranger, in a group of obscenely wealthy friends—a satirical send-up of every contemporary societal ill. There’s the host: an out-of-touch, and out-of-his-mind, tech bazillionaire (Edward Norton). And there are the guests: a hypocritical politician (Kathryn Hahn), a private-sector scientist-for-hire (Leslie Odom, Jr.), an alt-right YouTuber (Dave Bautista) and his girlfriend (Madelyn Cline), a ditzy model-turned-mogul (Kate Hudson) and her assistant (Jessica Henwick), and a former business partner who may be out for revenge (Janelle Monáe). It’s pretty easy to believe one of them will actually be murdered, and that they’ll all be so greedy and stupid that it might give Blanc quite a challenge. Johnson gives us a long, glittery, rambling opening hour that provides introductions to all of the characters and their dynamics. Invitations are delivered. The group assembles in Greece for the boat ride to the island. (Set during the first COVID summer, the way they wear their masks upon arrival is a big clue about their personalities.) They settle in for their first night in the mansion—a massive high-tech structure with dozens of rooms and topped with a gargantuan glass onion. The camera often pulls back to sweep around in bright establishing shots and drink it in, the sets and the setting providing a gleaming backdrop for the scheming. And throughout, Johnson, by taking his time, makes these political cartoons into bantering people we can size up and keep in mind as believable variables at play as the plot unfolds.

By the time the screenplay springs its surprises, doubling back on itself and deliberately filling in gaps I hadn’t paused to realize were left open, the film reveals it is awfully clever in a way that never stops paying out. There’s plenty of enjoyment on the surface of the movie, but when the setup reveals its full intentionality, there’s an added layer of rewards for the attentive viewer. This is a charmer of a mystery that you could practically chart on graph paper as its various setups converge with supremely satisfying reveals and conclusions. There’s an airtight clockwork construction at play, with each gear of plotting and character and humor turning at just the right time to click into place for crowd-pleasing punchlines and payoffs. Johnson’s a filmmaker with a great sense of genre play. See his straight-faced high-school noir Brick, or pretzel-logic time-travel thriller Looper, or his vivid, moving Star Wars episode. Here he’s totally at home, and clearly having fun, constructing these crafty mystery plots. They twist and turn, dangle detours and dole out tricks of perspective, but they always play fair with the audience. You can keep up with the logic, and by the end see the details close in with a pleasing snap. (It’s the dialogue and editing that does all the crackling and popping.) There’s evident delight in the construction, and that extends to the ensemble’s winning commitment to throwing themselves into the proceedings with wit and verve, too.

This has been a busy year for the whodunit movie. We got Greg Mottola’s shaggy, appealing Confess, Fletch. There was Kenneth Branagh’s opulent, excessive, and over-acted adaptation of Agatha Christie’s Death on the Nile; that has its velvety 70mm melodrama pleasures. We got a quaint and cozy little jewel box of a Christie homage, See How They Run; that’s a cute, winking meta-movie about a fictionalized murder mystery around the stage production of Christie’s The Mousetrap. (That movie actually brings Christie onstage, as if to say it was Agatha All Along.) But Glass Onion is head-and-shoulders above the rest. Rather than falling into homage or dutiful resuscitation of old tales, it’s the real deal itself. It’s built for maximum audience pleasure, and is quite pleased with itself, too. It’s formula without being formulaic. We return to these stories, not to be shocked and appalled or grossed out, but to take the mental exercise. Maybe it’s the cozy comfort of knowing, though the film may start with a dead body, it’ll end with a murderer revealed, and something like justice doled out.

Food Poisoning: SAUSAGE PARTY

The sheer number of CG animated movies about anthropomorphized animals and objects, from Pixar on down to their lowliest imitators, leaves an opening ripe for parody. Enter Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg (co-writers on the likes of Pineapple Express and This is the End) with the idea to go hard-R on the Pixar formula. In Sausage Party they imagine the world of a grocery store from a food’s-eye view. The cartoon products sing an Alan Menken song about how much they wish to get purchased and live forever with their gods (us) in the Great Beyond. Little do they know certain death and digestion await. It’s a funny idea, and mostly follows through to its logical conclusions. But in pitching the humor they go too high and too low, reveling in an allegorical approach that’s a cockeyed consideration of religion and mortality, and in a nonstop barrage of four-letter words and innuendoes. The manic pace hammers away nuance with glee, and the execution grows thin, repetitive, and one-note awfully quickly.

It starts with the idea that the store is split up into its own little countries, each aisle organized around racial and cultural stereotypes of their respective cuisines. The only thing that brings them all together is worship of the shoppers. But when a hot dog (Seth Rogen) gets a hint about the truth of what sits beyond the sliding doors, he’s desperate to get proof and bring a nihilistic, hedonistic brand of atheism back to his brethren. He and his hot dog bun lover (Kristen Wiig) get lost in a tragic shopping cart accident shot like the opening of Saving Private Ryan, with a ripped open ramen cup trying to stuff his noodles back in, a jar of peanut butter weeping over spilled jam, and a banana with its face slowly peeling off. That’s a fun bit of inspiration, but the movie grows repetitively insulting as it winds its way through nonstop ethnic jokes. The hot dog and his bun-to-be, who are waiting until after purchase to get together (there’s no buns- or sausage-related innuendo that goes unspoken), wander through the store looking to get back to their aisle. Each stop on the way brings them into contact with an endlessly condescending parade of stereotypes and racial humor.

The Mexican foods (including a lesbian taco voiced by Salma Hayek) drink all day and follow secret tunnels to better lives. The Chinese foods speak in exaggerated rolling Ls and Rs. The German food wants to eliminate all the juice. The Middle Eastern lavash (David Krumholtz) feuds with a bagel (Edward Norton doing a Woody Allen impression) he thinks is unfairly settling in his aisle. The fruits are lilting lispers. The grits (Craig Robinson) is a blaxploitation gangster. The firewater (Bill Hader) is a Native American whose every appearance is signaled with an eagle’s cry. It’s a pileup of the worst kinds of tiring wink-wink racism and prejudice in pursuit of anti-racism and cross-demographic understanding. It’s so wearing, asked to laugh again and again at this sort of thing as the movie demands to feel like it’s okay because it reaches the right conclusions. Rogen and Goldberg (writing with The Night Before’s Kyle Hunter and Ariel Shaffir) want to make a filthy adult comedy that parodies the style of the CG kids’ movie while still having a clear moral message. In other words, it’s an adults-only kids’ movie, and every bit as juvenile, wrongheaded, and infantilizing as that sounds.

The movie remains on a fairly obvious level, relying on the shock value of hearing cartoon characters swear, get violent, and express sexual urges. (Anyone who thinks that’s a new idea should talk to Ralph Bakshi.) The thing is, the writers have imagined a funny world and have an interesting perspective. They have plenty of smile-worthy puns that go down easy. Why insist on such a barrage of cynical cheap shots? Other distasteful ingredients include swipes at the disabled (consider the plight of a deformed sausage (Michael Cera) whose only soul mate can be a smushed bun) and a scene in which a feminine hygiene product (Nick Kroll) sexually assaults a juice box. (You read that correctly. That happens.) Sausage Party crosses the line, not because it wants to make an R-rated animated movie, but because it allows itself license to push further than it should with such touchy material. That it’s sometimes funny, and tethered to a surreal premise, doesn’t alleviate its uglier impulses.

Directing this perverse sledgehammer to propriety are veterans of CG family films Conrad Vernon (of a variety of DreamWorks features like Madagascar 3) and Greg Tiernan (of Thomas the Tank Engine products). They clearly relish cooking up the movie’s crass and disgusting surprises, but it’s also clearly done on the cheap. The character designs are all slightly off, not just the ugly food, but the stiff and wobbly humans lumbering over them as well. The sets and locations appear Saturday-morning simple and crude. It’s just not quite right every step of the way, in every way. It has a fine setup and some truly jaw-dropping final moments staggeringly inappropriate and in many ways inexplicable, but at least relatively non-toxic – a massive pansexual free-for-all followed by a surprising smashing of the fourth wall – compared to what comes before. But by that point the movie’s been such an obvious, overdetermined, obnoxious slog, it’s hard to cook up much interest.

An Actor on the Verge: BIRDMAN OR (THE UNEXPECTED VIRTUE OF IGNORANCE)

At the corner of anxious depression and artistic frustration is Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance), an emotionally and physically claustrophobic backstage comedy of sorts. It stars Michael Keaton as an actor on the verge of a nervous breakdown. He plays Riggan Thomson, an actor whose stardom peaked two decades ago with his role as Birdman in a series of superhero movies and now sees his mental state rapidly deteriorating as his passion project comeback – writing, directing, and starring in a Broadway play based on a Carver story – nears opening night. If the first part of the conceit sounds a lot like Keaton, who two decades ago left the Batman series and is now in what’s being touted as a “comeback role,” lets hope his psyche’s in a better state.

The film floats through lengthy Steadicam takes from master cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki edited to look (nearly) like one long fluid shot. Hardly novel, Hitchcock made one film look like one shot all the way back in 1948 with Rope. But it’s a trick so few attempt that it retains an impressive power. It’s transfixing, sliding through rehearsals and previews with smart elisions of time as the camera roams in and around this New York theater on the week leading up to the opening night. As characters zip in and out of scenes with expertly timed dialogue and blocking, I sometimes sat back from the proceedings, simply enjoying the logistical satisfaction of so many moving parts coming together. It’s a little better than a gimmick, effectively trapping the audience in the film’s headspace with no down time. The pressure is high. The walls are closing in.

Keaton, one of our finest actors when it comes to exploring the wilds between id and ego, does a terrific job holding down the increasingly mad center of the film. His character is a pitiable narcissist who has bitten off more than he can chew. He’s doing this to be relevant, to be loved, and to make art, definitely in that order. He’s frazzled, overwhelmed by the multitasking asked of a multi-hyphenate, his only solace talking to the voice hallucinating inside his head egging him on for better or usually worse. Surrounding him is a fine collection of showbiz types. There’s the exasperated producer (Zack Galifianakis), the leading ladies (Naomi Watts and Andrea Riseborough), the preening Method actor (Edward Norton), the ex-wife (Amy Ryan), a critic (Lindsay Duncan), and stagehands (including Merrit Wever). Best is Emma Stone as Keaton’s ex-addict daughter working as his assistant, a non-showbiz voice in rooms of people rapidly disappearing up their own egos.

The parts are performed with great precision, words spat out in rapid-fire monologues and tense dialogues that harmonize with the all-drum-solo score from Antonio Sanchez. Together they’re an endless clanging keeping the entire experience off balance and driving forward. The cast is free of the usual shot/reverse shot coverage, allowing them greater control over the rhythms and pauses, the psychological space as well as the physical. They create a world of people symbiotically clinging to each other as both a career move and an artistic expression, acting out their interpersonal dramas in the wings and dressing rooms before sublimating those energies into performances on stage. Their banter is as crisp and funny as it is painful, and the laughs start to choke off the more desperately the sweat appears. Narcissism and insecurity make a potent mix, one the film is unrelenting in conjuring.

At first it appears tonally different and a stylistic outlier in Iñárritu’s oeuvre. It’s lighter, more fluid, and about a feeling of emotional constipation and professional frustration that, though deeply felt and important to the characters, pales in severity to the violence and misery on display in his Very Serious Dramas Amores Perros, 21 Grams, and Babel. I appreciated those film’s miserabilist impulses, but he hit a wall with the dire Biutiful, luxuriating in signifiers of importance without much more to say with them. So on the one hand, Birdman’s relative lightness on its feet is a much-needed artistic rejuvenation. On the other, it’s as deeply pessimistic as anything he’s made. It loathes, thinking artists are egomaniacs, Hollywood is hollow, critics are lazy, and audiences are stupid at worst, gullible at best. The core of rage in Keaton’s performance, playing a character who feels most upset that after all this effort he may not receive affection for it, plays off this omnidirectional frustration that assumes the worst out of everyone.

Birdman’s bravura cinematography is also a reflection of this cramped, thematically repetitive expression, as pressure mounts and the play stumbles on its way to opening night, the drums clanging, the camera ceaselessly swirling, the cast executing their tightly choreographed blocking. It plays on the surface pleasures of the backstage drama, threading it with humor sometimes so dark it borders on gallows. By the end, it’s miserable. Still, it’s hard to look away from such a high wire act on the last nerve’s edge tension between comedy and tragedy. You get the sense Riggan’s entire existence depends on this play going well. And given his, and the film’s, tendency to assume the worst, the outcome looks bleak, indeed.

A Story Told in a Twilight: THE GRAND BUDAPEST HOTEL

The Grand Budapest Hotel is a caper perched between the World Wars. Writer-director Wes Anderson (inspired by the writings of Austrian author Stefan Zweig) creates an abstracted Old World caught as it is disappearing, a colorful fantasy Europe that’s poisoned by drab fascist forces and left forever changed. In true Anderson fashion, he’s designed his fictional European country (Zubrowka, he names it) as a candy-colored dollhouse of meticulous design. At the center is The Grand Budapest Hotel of the title. It’s a wondrous creation, a massive structure nestled in the Alps where it looks for all the world like a hotel Rankin and Bass characters might’ve passed on their way to the North Pole. Its exterior is a pale pink, floors stacked like a cheerfully, elaborately frosted wedding cake. Inside, a lushly carpeted and handsomely furnished labyrinth of luxuries wraps around itself in a square that forces guests and employees alike to walk in crisp geometric patterns. At this Hotel, a caper is hatched, a war encroaches, then years later a writer is inspired. Still later, that writer’s work lives on, calling us back into its melancholic past.

Layers upon layers, the film is a memory inside a book inside a movie. As it begins, a young woman opens a book and begins to read. The author (Tom Wilkinson) appears to us in his office, ready to recount the time he first heard the story his book relays. We see The Author as a Young Man (Jude Law) at the Grand Budapest in the late 1960s, now a cavernous, sparsely populated space not too far removed from The Shining territory, albeit without the supernatural elements. The author meets a lonely old man (F. Murray Abraham) who invites the author to hear the story of how he became the owner of the hotel. Intrigued, the author agrees. And so back once more into the past we go, to the 1930s, when the Grand Budapest was at its peak. For each time period, Anderson designates a different aspect ratio, boxy Academy Ratio 30s stretch into anamorphic late-60s, before growing shallow and simple in 16x9 present day. It’s as mischievous as it is exact, moving through time with clear visual orientation.

The film spends the bulk of its time in the 1930s. We meet Monsieur Gustave H. (Ralph Fiennes), a supercilious dandy who manages the Grand Budapest Hotel with a suave charm and a composed pompous sincerity. His new lobby boy (Tony Revolori) tells of the man’s peccadilloes, namely wooing the little old ladies that visit the hotel. These early passages operate with a dizzying fizz, whiffs of the Lubitsch touch generating much sophisticated posturing and door-slamming farce. Anderson here, working with deep focus lenses and finely calibrated tragicomic performances, has the giddy architectural design of Lubitsch’s silents and the bubbly urbane wit of his talkies. The boy and his boss move through a world of color as vivid as in any Powell/Pressburger film, helping the Grand Budapest’s guests in any way they can. Fiennes and Revolori’s performances are nicely synchronized, the former a fatuous perfectionist, the latter a wide-eyed innocent whose deadpan acceptance in the face of disbelief and disaster balances it out.

Through briskly delivered dialogue and a lovely score by Alexandre Desplat, the metronome is set perfectly for a caper that’s about to erupt, escalating in suspense and incident at an engaging tempo. As the plot gets underway, one of Gustave’s very rich elderly lovers (Tilda Swinton, beneath a generous application of makeup) has died. At the reading of the will, all her most distant acquaintances arrive, shocked to hear that the hotel manager has been left her most valuable painting. While her lawyer (Jeff Goldblum) assures her son (Adrian Brody) that this late-arriving addendum must be authenticated, Gustave and his lobby boy abscond with the painting and take off for the Grand Budapest. Soon, the woman’s son’s thug (Willem Dafoe), a missing butler (Mathieu Amalric), a fascist Inspector (Edward Norton), a scowling prisoner (Harvey Keitel), a sweet baker (Saoirse Ronan), the leader of a team of concierges (Bill Murray), and more get pulled into a scampering plot involving locating, hiding, or aiding and abetting the movement of this most desirable painting.

All the while, the threat of violence looms large. Soldiers brutishly ask travelers for papers. Guards are stabbed to death. A pet meets a gory end. Fingers are misplaced. The film is crisply playful in unspooling its brisk and wry heist plot, loving in its evocation of period-appropriate cinematic touchstones, from the aforementioned Lubitsch and Powell/Pressburger to a mountain cable car right out of Carol Reed’s Night Train to Munich. It’s affectionately constructed, miniatures adding whimsy that somehow doesn’t distract from the real menace in the action.  Nonchalant gore, periodic splashes of vibrant red and matters of life and death in an otherwise charmingly pastel, idealized Old World Europe maintains reality as an inescapable intrusion. No matter the perfectly constructed melancholy nostalgia, the violence of greed and war are an inevitable erosion of this ideal.

The fizzy sophistication of loose permissiveness as signified by Gustave’s unflappable reign of pleasure in the Grand Budapest grows frazzled and tossed as he’s thrown, by his plotting and by the march of time, into danger and exile, on the run from dark intimations of violence and despair. Though, like a typical Wes Anderson protagonist, he projects confidence, even when circumstances are at their most dire. He thinks he’ll get by because that’s all he’s ever planned on. He carries himself with great sense of purpose, even when stumbling into situations deteriorating rapidly, falling into doom, or at least humiliation. The entire oddball ensemble has characters similarly driven towards their goals, a perfect set of traits for people in a story of careful caper construction. When the cogs fall into place and the wheels make their final turn, interlocking every variable, it’s most satisfying, indeed.

For Anderson, film is an artifice, but his style is never an affectation. His pictorial beauty (again with his usual cinematographer Robert Yeoman), visual wit, symmetric blocking, high angle shots, laconic profundities, dead-pan peculiarities, 90-degree whip pans, finicky fonts, cutaway gags, witty repartee, and editorial precision (this time with editor Barney Pilling) add up to an intensely personal and deeply felt playfulness. He comes by his style honestly, carefully, a magic blend of planning and happenstance. It’s all too easy to imagine making a mockery of such meticulousness, but all Anderson parodies miss the depth roiling within the rich and lovingly assembled surfaces. Here is a film that’s on one level a lark, with its bouncy caper, funny lines, and familiar faces. Crescendos of tension and suspense build into action sequences of tremendous delight and dips of apprehension. But underneath sits the darkness.

Here he creates a world of colorful eccentricity soon to be snuffed out, or at least irreparably damaged, by the marching armies at the border. After it all, the Grand Budapest remains, but the world it represents can only be accessed through stories. Layers upon layers of storytelling, of artifice, are not arbitrary comic filigrees or distancing effects. Here the tragedies of the past linger with overwhelming melancholy as we back out of our main story, to the old man who at one point stops his tale to wipe back tears, to the young woman who cherishes the book in which it was immortalized, to the audience as the lights come up and the credits roll. The Grand Budapest Hotel is a totally enveloping aesthetic pleasure, funny and exciting, sharp and sad, so very moving, so completely transporting.

Bourne to Run: THE BOURNE LEGACY

The biggest question I had going into The Bourne Legacy was “What happens to a series when it’s no longer about what it’s about?” Doug Liman’s The Bourne Identity and the sequels – Supremacy and Ultimatum – from Paul Greengrass star Matt Damon as Jason Bourne, an amnesiac spy who, in order to solve the mystery his identity, has to stay one step ahead of shadowy United States operatives bent on taking him out to prevent that very discovery. It’s a series of dizzyingly complicated character-driven spy thrillers that together form a rare hugely satisfying trilogy. They’re three films that snap together with excellent resonance and airtight plotting all the way through. They are my favorite action movies of the past decade. It was so complete a trilogy of films that Damon didn’t want to come back for a fourth. Greengrass didn’t either. He quipped that it should be called “Bourne Redundancy.” But there was money to be made from the lucrative franchise so here we are.

No longer about Jason Bourne’s search for identity, Legacy nonetheless maintains consistency with the prior trilogy by not only retaining supporting actors like Joan Allen, Scott Glenn, Albert Finney and David Strathairn in small roles, but also bringing in one of the series’ scripter Tony Gilroy (on the heels of his two great directorial outings Michael Clayton and Duplicity) to write and direct. Without Damon’s Bourne, this film focuses on a new character, Aaron Cross, a secret agent in a similar secret program. He’s played by Jeremy Renner. (After Mission: Impossible 4 and The Avengers, this marks the third time he's been brought in to boost a franchise's ranks). The plot of this film starts parallel to the action of The Bourne Ultimatum. While Jason Bourne is doing what he does there, Cross is off in the Alaskan wilderness on a training exercise. When the masterminds of this whole national-security conspiracy panic, they decide to eliminate this particular program, swooping in to kill their field assets before the whole experiment is revealed to the public.

Of course, Cross avoids death and sets off to find answers. Back in the program’s headquarters, while the familiar suits are on Bourne-related business, new characters played by Edward Norton, Stacy Keach, Donna Murphy and Corey Stoll fret in dark, tense control rooms, staring at monitors and flipping through classified documents. They’re trying to stay one step ahead of the agents they’re trying to dispose of. Cross sidesteps them and finds himself aiding and aided by a government scientist (Rachel Weisz) who is also targeted in this bloody cover-up. Soon they’re racing together on an intercontinental escape from the people they once worked for. This is familiar Bourne material with a clever, skillful protagonist moving through fake passports and running from all kinds of armed security, while the real villains sit drumming their fingers impatiently in tense conference rooms and in front of glowing screens.

Although in the grand scheme of all that’s come before, this is merely a feature-length footnote in an epilogue, time will tell if this is a spin-off, a reboot, a one-off, or a cause for Jason Bourne to come out of hiding in a future sequel and bring it all full circle. I don’t know what to hope for, myself, since Ultimatum finished off his story so spectacularly. It’d be difficult to top. But anyways, we’re talking Bourne Legacy here. It’s a tense film filled with lengthy scenes of grim exposition and quick bursts of well-staged action. Gilroy ditches Greengrass’s shaky-cam style for something moderately more stately with effective tension-gathering cinematography from the great Robert Elswit. At the very least, together they manage to create a car chase sequence that’s a more than adequate addition to this franchise’s hallmark area of excellence. They also keep the chilly spy-versus-spy feeling of it all nice and cool.

Renner gives a fine performance as a troubled betrayed operative and Weisz is more than ready to work as his rattled counterpart. They’re fine action movie actors, but it’s hard for the story to not feel a little thin. They’re cogs more than characters. Because the earlier films had a MacGuffin that tied intimately into the character’s inner dilemma – Bourne was searching for his history, his true identity, after all – it’s a little disappointing to find that Gilroy has put in its place a more literal object to retrieve. Aaron Cross and his scientist ally are on the lookout for a little pill that his phase of the top-secret project was forcing agents to take. Without it, Cross will be debilitated or something. It doesn’t really matter what the pill will do; all that matters is that it’s important enough to keep the plot moving. Which also happens to be the movie’s main reason for existence. It keeps the Bourne franchise going. And if that has to happen, it sure could be a lot worse than just a fun, if inconsequential, action thriller, even though the franchise has set a much higher bar for itself.

Goodbye, Children: MOONRISE KINGDOM

During the summer of 1965, on a small island of the coast of Maine, a 12-year-old boy (Jared Gilman) slips away from summer camp to meet up with his secret pen pal, a 12-year-old girl (Kara Hayward) who lives with her family on the other side of the island. The boy and the girl, friendless and lonely, figure themselves romantic adventurers, meant to head off on their own and care for each other in the wilds of this island. He has learned much about surviving in the woods from his camp days. He proudly wears a coonskin cap and plans out their hike with itemized checklists and carefully studied maps stuffed in his bag amongst his compass and air rifle. She has learned much about adventure from library books about brave girls going off on their own to become magical heroines. She packed as many as she could fit in her suitcase, along with her favorite record, a portable battery-powered record player, a pair of left-handed scissors, and her pet cat.

These items reveal that their excursion originates from a particular childhood understanding of running away, but the new feelings stirring inside them, of curiosity, attachment, caring and, yes, perhaps even love, feel so strong and immediate. In self-confident, yet halting ways these kids begin to see their adventure writ larger and more passionately on their hearts. The boy is an orphan and the girl is emotionally troubled and from an eccentric family. To them, this is not just an attempt to flee lives they find inadequate and have a fun time together. They’re fleeing into their fantasies and the merging of their imaginations becomes not just a woodsy adventure or a lovely camping experience, but a grand romance with two budding lovers on the run. The boy’s peppy scout leader (Edward Norton, with a gee-whiz wholesome exterior) has marshaled his remaining campers and joined forces with the island’s sole police officer (Bruce Willis, bespectacled and business-like) to track down the runaways. The girl’s family – three small brothers, a worried mother (Frances McDormand, tightly-wound) and a slow-boiling depressive father (Bill Murray, looking through sad, tired eyes) – join in on the search as well, which is rather patient, considering the circumstances.

This is Moonrise Kingdom, the new film from the distinctive and consistent Wes Anderson who takes this opportunity to populate one of his terrifically realized dollhouse worlds to make a film with a simple, sweet, and emotionally open surface, and a beautiful, moving emotional complexity underneath. Unlike his earlier films like The Royal Tenenbaums and The Darjeeling Limited, which are in large part about people trying desperately in various neurotic ways to prevent the collapse of familial relationships, this is a film that locates its concerns directly on the border between generations, finding a little community trying to work together, a ragtag collection of flawed adults and precocious children out to find two of their own. (The group picks up small, funny roles for Bob Balaban, Tilda Swinton, Jason Schwartzman, and Harvey Keitel as it goes along.) It’s a situation in which adults might realize how childish they behave, in which children try on identities they imagine belong to more mature perspectives. Finding the humor inherent within, Anderson (who wrote the script with Roman Coppola) balances scenes of arch dialogue matter-of-factly stated and cartoonish delight elaborately staged – like a treehouse perched at the very top of a tall tree in a scout camp run with a regimented, militaristic structure – with scenes of striking emotional honesty and clarity.

This is a film full of delicate scenes, tenderly acted by Gilman and Hayward, the young leads. This is their first film and Anderson has helped them create such confidently, wonderfully drawn characters, located so precariously on the edge of childhood, but not quite ready to tip over into full-blown adolescence. Each of these kids has moments where they look straight-ahead into the camera in tight close-up and reveal such deep feelings, which only adds to their soft kindness and moments of adorable precociousness. Their relationship – love, or something like it – develops with an emotional truth that is often (unfairly) not associated with Anderson’s exacting mastery over the formal elements of filmmaking. Torn between the worlds of childhood imagination and problems of adulthood, these two troubled kids run away to the woods where the privacy of shared solitude allows them to become who they think they are, deep down inside. Here is a film world of real innocence and real potential danger. This is a film with a profound respect for childhood and the perspectives and feelings of the young. Music swells and the camera moves for big moments of emotionality; to the young, any event sufficiently impactful is worthy of a personal epic. After all, the young couple first met the year before at a local church’s production of Benjamin Britten’s Noah’s ark opera, an appropriately ornate dramatic backdrop to spark puppy love. Their escape feels ripped out of the movies and informed by the adventures in the books they cart with them and the sophistication they think find in totems of adulthood (like French pop music or a pipe).

This is not a fussy film despite Anderson’s typically mannered approach and meticulous art design, which here makes the New England island setting appear to have leapt right out of a charming, slightly yellowed, mid-century storybook, a delicate world of children’s imagination nestled just-so in the midst of rugged natural terrain. The dollhouse qualities of the sets, props, and costumes are placed in a context of forest and bodies of water. The camera glides, finds stillness, and even shakes from time to time as Anderson puts delicate fantasy – heightened, but not fantastical – and relaxed farce right up against quiet scenes of intergenerational emotional connection. This is a sweet, sad comedy about comically confident children and comically flawed grown ups. Selflessly acted, but no less richly evocative, the adults in the cast allow deadpan ease to mask roiling turmoil, to blend so effortlessly with their young costars, who let turmoil settle in like they’re discovering it for the first time. The ensemble moves through the simple plot like a finely tuned orchestra, each striking different notes at different times, blending to become a whole moving experience.

Moonrise Kingdom is a deeply romantic film about change, about moving into adolescence, about the doubts, uncertainty, depression, and confusion that can follow into adulthood where such feelings can settle, creating miscommunications and dissatisfactions. It’s such an evocative portrayal of this collision of moods and sensations in a film that’s at once so contained, taking place over the course of only a few days on a small island, and yet filled with so many whimsical flourishes of Anderson’s imagination that it feels like a rich world, wonderfully, carefully designed. It’s a film full of liminal moments shot through with a potent melancholy of childhood’s end and the growing knowledge that adults have within them a deep sadness and uncertainty. Passions and interests seize the soul with intensity and then pass like an especially violent storm. And from the devastation comes new and unexpectedly fruitful growth.