Higher Ground: between God and a hard place

This thing we’ve been calling the culture wars has in recent years aggregated at least one mighty bipartisan ethic: ambivalence is bad for you and your country; tolerance is a slippery slope; agnosticism is for wimps; which side are you on? (Just as an aside: How strange it feels to be posting this review so soon after learning of the death of God is Not Great author Christopher Hitchens.) Yet betweenness is a fundamental part of life; we are ever moving from one place or one absolute to another, most often learning the most we’ll ever learn while on route. Betweenness is what story is made of.

All this is just my way of contextualizing my strong feelings for the closing note struck by Higher Ground—something about which I feel no ambivalence at all. The directorial debut of Vera Farmiga, who also stars, is about living with religious values that remain fixed while one’s life remains insistently fluid. The movie is elegant, intelligent, sensual, and a little uneven—a few truly bum notes stand out against a predominantly careful and wise series of choices. But its closing moments sweep the central character up into a scene of un-showy yet immense bravery and still manage to leave us without firm resolution, and that absence is itself something meaningful.

Farmiga plays Corrine, who, having already conveyed a deep curiosity about Jesus as a child and having survived a potentially catastrophic accident with herself, her husband and her infant child miraculously intact, becomes in adult life a member of some radical New Testament community nestled somewhere in rural New York. Based on Carolyn S. Briggs’ memoir This Dark World, Higher Ground begins with extended scenes depicting key moments in Corrine’s youth before catching up with her in the present, a time of great tumult: Corrine’s best friend (Dagmara Dominczyk), a vivacious, raven-haired fellow believer who has no problem leading a fulfilling erotic existence under God, becomes terrifyingly, senselessly ill; Corrine’s fierce intellect becomes increasingly unsatisfied by the gender codes of her sect and the pastor whom she admires yet resents; and Corrine’s unhappiness with her marriage to her high school sweetheart Ethan (Joshua Leonard) is about to overwhelm her normally unbreakable composure.

Despite the repression, despite moments of alarming, sudden violence, there are no clearly marked villains in Higher Ground, and Corrine’s heroism is a quiet one, rooted mainly in her refusal to shut out the voices of desire or doubt or the longings of the spirit. Farmiga depicts the religious community with both affection and frustration, at times celebrating the camaraderie, at others reeling from its enforced naiveté. Her approach only goes astray in the few moments where she tries to slip fantasies into Corrine’s waking life, and the story itself only feels awkward in a few scenes dealing with Corrine’s immediate family, such as the one involving her sister and a big bag of blow. As for her work as an actor in Higher Ground, I can’t say that Farmiga ever gets it anything but right. Her lack of judgement as a director carried over into her performance, so we see Corrine fully surrendered to the ecstasies of worship, mothering and fighting for her dignity in equal parts. The last seven or eight years has found Farmiga emerging as an interesting actress under the direction of Minghella and Scorsese, but we may just be seeing her at her very best here, taking on both roles, and directing herself.

Gunnin' down a dream

Machine Gun Preacher attempts to tell the story of how real-life Pennsylvania hillbilly bad-ass Sam Childers got out of jail, became disgruntled by his former-stripper wife’s religious conversion—“bitch found Jesus,” as Sam puts it—and hit rick bottom. He bullied his family, hung out in bars where sleeves are frowned upon, robbed and assaulted some dealers, ingested buckets of drugs and alcohol, and stabbed a hitchhiker multiple times before tossing him out of his car. Then Sam himself finds Jesus, gets sober, turns suspiciously nice, gets into roofing, and builds his own church where folks listen to shitty music and Sam’s improvised sermons. Sam also goes to Uganda and Sudan, where he builds an orphanage in the middle of a war zone and occasionally takes up arms and wreaks bloody vengeance upon the Lord’s Resistance Army. He spends a fair amount of the film’s last third or so desperately trying to raise funds back home to buy a new truck for the orphanage, and I’m thinking, Dude, you could probably get some decent cash for a couple of those RPGs...

Not that that was the first such question I found myself asking while watching Machine Gun Preacher. The film, written by Jason Keller and directed by Marc Forster, who isn’t especially good with crafting spatially coherent action sequences—or, for that matter, spatially coherent garden parties—strains to impose a through-line on Childers’ larger-than-life endeavours but builds neither a strong narrative arc nor a persuasive study in unlikely redemption and radical altruism. Though presumably well-intentioned, the filmmakers—I refer not only to Keller and Forster but also executive producer/star Gerard Butler—seem stumped by the very questions that Childers’ thorny biography demands reckoned with, questions, for example, about the mightily messianic hubris involved in trying to clean up someone else’s civil war. Instead, the film offers a precariously sentimentalized depiction of child soldiers, a very thin portrait of what must be a near-impossible marriage, and eight varieties of bluster from Butler, including shaking, eye-bulging, and sweating. Childers is without a doubt one hell of a character. Probably too much of a character for this kind of plodding Hollywood treatment.

Rabbit Hole: Group therapy

Rabbit Hole begins eight months after affluent suburban New Yorkers Becca (Nicole Kidman, also the film’s producer) and Howie (Aaron Eckhart) lost their four-year-old Danny to a car accident, so the more flamboyant displays of grief have receded, and the couple is now entrenched in establishing a new status quo, grudgingly accepting, or at least pretending to accept, that life somehow goes on. Because the object of loss is already absent, our story, adapted by David Lindsay-Abaire from his own play, can focus more closely on the mid- to long-term effects of Danny’s death on his parents’ marriage. While Becca appears determined to assume control of the situation and coolly goes about redistributing Danny’s things, Howie gets up nights to watch home movies and resolves to continue with group therapy, even after Becca dismisses some fellow grieving parents’ attempt to find consolation in religious thinking (a scene that’s probably devastating for the couple on the receiving end, but is unnervingly amusing for the rest of us). Their sex life has evaporated and shows no sign or return, despite Howie’s plying of Becca with back rubs and Al Green. The question swiftly arises as to whether or not Becca and Howie’s relationship can endure such a catastrophic rupture.

Soon Becca is stalking a teenage boy (I initially thought, and sort of hoped, that it was because the boy looked like the teenaged version of Danny, but the truth is slightly less neurotic) while Howie enters into a precarious friendship with someone from group (Sandra Oh). These relationships, not extramarital exactly, but rather extra-domestic, seem designed to imbue both characters with intricate psychologies, and the performances, from Kidman especially, who’s always so good with these sorts of icy emotional renegades, are richly layered. Nonetheless, the writing leaves the couple in general, and Howie in particular, feeling more like sketches than full characters, their vagueness exacerbated by the film’s broadly conceived design elements, the almost uniformly drab grays and beiges of the couple’s clothing and home décor, or details like the art photos of empty cavities of buildings mounted on their otherwise sparely adorned living room walls.

Thankfully Rabbit Hole is festooned with a supporting cast who supply such colour and funk so as to set Becca and Howie’s ostentatiously muted realm into relief. Oh injects some terrific deadpan comedy, sometimes without saying a word—just catch the look on her face when, having smoked a bowl before group one night, she tries not to crack up over another man’s catalogue of miseries. It’s also nice to see Giancarlo Esposito turn up as the musical dad to Becca’s unborn niece, even if he barely gets to speak. But the biggest acting treat comes from Diane Wiest as Becca’s mom Nat, who so desperately wants to comfort her daughter but is most often pushed away. In her worn-out old sweaters, Nat clearly lives somewhere on the opposite end of the socioeconomic spectrum from Becca and Howie (not to mention from Gina, Wiest’s wonderful recurring character on HBO’s In Treatment) but Wiest wisely eschews from “playing” Nat’s class, just as director John Cameron Mitchell eschews from over-emphasizing it. Wiest instead relishes in Nat’s earthiness and middling ability to disguise her true emotions, even when she’s deliberately trying to keep potentially spiky moments cheerful, as in the scene where Becca’s sister Izzy is celebrating her birthday in a bowling alley and Becca gives her a fancy set of towels instead of something that might acknowledge Izzy’s advanced pregnancy. Even the way Wiest lets out this forced-excited little “Aw!” when the gift is unwrapped—like a little burp accidentally let loose in public—before suddenly retreating, provides her scenes in Rabbit Hole with such texture, warmth, and a welcome untidiness. It goes to show how sometimes the investments a film makes in its background can make so much richer all that passes in its foreground.

Das Kapital und die Komödie

The American present. Commercial pilots are living off food stamps or working in donut shops. A Pennsylvania private juvenile detention centre cuts a deal with the county and keeps kids locked up for months on end for talking back or smoking weed. Corporations take out secret life insurance policies on their employees making the corporation the sole beneficiary when the employee dies, while the family of the deceased spirals into debt trying to cover hospital and funeral expenses. Financial institutions ask for bailouts—you may have heard about this one—while suddenly laid-off workers can’t even get paid for their final shifts. How can such corruption be tolerated? Is there a single overwhelming force facilitating all these aberrations from the Western democratic ideal? Michael Moore has an answer, and it’s a whopper. Let’s just say Francis Fukuyama was soooo wrong.

Coming 20 years after Roger & Me, Moore’s celebrated debut as documentary filmmaker, Capitalism: A Love Story displays much of what makes Moore’s films powerful and enduring in their way. The dumpy, tirelessly muckraking son of a Flint, Michigan autoworker, Moore is the self-appointed spokesman for disgruntled blue collar America, not a theorist with a cushy university post but a resourceful and ambitious people-guy who seems to genuinely like talking to people. (Should they be willing to talk to him, which is not always the case.) What Moore has to say is impassioned, funny, highly entertaining, shamelessly tear-jerking, sometimes insightful, and not especially coherent. In its loosely related assembly of true stories of economic injustice, Capitalism is an engaging and compassionate cri de coeur. In its layman’s explication of certain mystifying financial trends and baffling feats of white collar crime, it goes some distance—a short, but still admirable distance—toward making issues of vital importance to everyone a little more accessible. In its attempts to diagnose the singular underlying cause behind all of these stories the film isn’t just an over-simplification but a confused and opportunistic reading of what ultimately feels like an ideological bogeyman. It’s funny. I’m fairly sure I’m on Moore’s side. I’m not sure I know what the hell he’s getting at.

The messiness of Moore’s argument is evident in his roping of everybody from Roosevelt to Obama to Wallace Shawn to Jesus into his back-up band. He actually gets a bunch of priests to say that capitalism is un-Christian!, which I guess might make sense if interpreted as a bald play on the spiritual conscience of the Christian Right—hardly a terribly Catholic bunch—though I have a hard time seeing them in line at the multiplex. When Moore finally gets around to ideological alternatives his discussion of socialism is equally vague and inclusive, offering no clear positive examples of other nations making a sustained go at it and mostly just falling back on championing labour unions. The examples he offers of average Americans overcoming economic injustice are truly inspiring, but they don’t actually show how capitalism in its essence is an inherent obstacle. Still, you should see the movie. You’ll have a good time with it and quite possibly learn something from the details. Just don’t expect to walk away with a thesis. The theorists were always better with those anyway.

Detrimental education: Whatever Works

Its title alone, the verbal equivalent of a shrug, evokes creative lethargy, and indeed the script was dug out of a desk drawer caked in 30 years of dust. But no one ever accused Woody Allen of trying to be up-to-date—not even Woody Allen. So if the stray signs of contemporary life spied in the margins of the Manhattan Chinatown locations are just about the only things that keep Whatever Works from feeling like 1979, well, the comic sensibility driving the film is of a considerably elder vintage anyway. And if we like Woody, we’re hardly bothered by his tending to the flame of old-old school humour accompanied by a soundtrack of even older records. “They really don’t write them like they used to,” says our protagonist Boris Yellnikoff. Though he has exclusive knowledge of his being watched by an audience and repeatedly breaks the fourth wall, Boris seems somehow oblivious to the fact the movie he lives inside of is being written very much like they used to.

So another old curmudgeon strikes up an unlikely but not inconceivable romance with a nubile innocent, the pair enacting a variation on Pygmalion in which the professor provides lessons not so much in sophistication as cynicism. Boris is a windbag, a stupendously voluble misanthrope, the self-described intellectual superior of the vast majority of the human race, a fact he’s able to confirm regularly by teaching chess to talentless children who, naturally, he chastises mercilessly. At one point, he suggests that all parents should send their kids to concentration camp. He’s a total prick and makes no bones about it. But he has his vulnerable side: he’s deeply paranoid and superstitious, a failed suicide attempt has left him with a permanent limp, and he has regular middle-of-the-night panic attacks. He's also one of the worst-dressed people in a movie full of people who dress really, really bad.

He’s also got some sort of a soft spot, however small, one massaged by Melodie St. Ann Celestine, an absurdly cheerful Southern elf who Boris grudgingly takes into his home. She talks like an endearing idiot, though we assume must have sort of edge to her given that she had the gumption to leave a stable home and starve it out in the Big Apple all alone with nothing more than the near-uniformly pink clothes on her back. And we know she must possess some sense of discretion when she comes home disappointed after hearing a concert by some band called Anal Sphincter. We might suspect Boris of lecherous intentions but he makes it perfectly clear that he’s uninterested in sex. How these two manage to connect seems to have more to do with desperation and sublime timing.

The casting of Larry David as Boris seems inspired, the star of Curb Your Enthusiasm being a garrulous ranter of singular ability. It’s no stretch whatsoever to imagine David in the role of resident Allen stand-in. But maybe that’s the problem. Had David been forced to stretch a little more he may have been better able to play stakes convincingly, thus making the comedy more urgent and, we hope, funnier. (A few choice moments really fly, but more of them fall flat.) And he may have been able to convey more of a sense of Boris’ inner life, the house of all those kooky contradictions that Allen loves to play with. Boris finally seems like he should really have just been played by Allen, who, no matter how droopy the material, can virtually always make us believe that he’s truly falling in love. Or at the very least, lust.

Rounding out the cast, Even Rachel Wood does a pretty remarkable job of giving Melodie some sort of journey of self-discovery, and if the guy she inevitably leaves Boris for is complete tool—he’s a handsome actor who lives on a houseboat and plays the flute for Christ’s sake—well, perhaps there’s some truth to that sort of match. Patricia Clarkson plays Melodie’s mom and Ed Begley Jr. plays her dad, and they too manage to breathe a little life into their corny types, ie: Jesus-lovin’ Southern conservatives that only need a sojourn in funky ol’ New York with frank atheists like Boris to realize how much richer life can actually be when you redefine yourselves as pseudo-cultured bohemians. But regardless of the cast’s efforts, the unmistakable thinness of these characters, each of them essentially background players in a one-man show, combined with the limits of the story’s dynamics, dependent as it is on cliché plot twists, renders Whatever Works into passable Woody, but hardly must-see. At least it makes an effort to be genuinely optimistic in the end, which is surely not the easiest thing for Woody Allen and, for that alone, I confess I left the theatre with my cockles a little warmer than when I entered.

Table manners: a good pool movie is hard to find, but Turn the River's not bad

There’s this moment in Turn the River (2007) where this guy who sells phony passports waits for a client in a pool hall, one of these gloomily slick looking joints where the proprietor actually brushes the tables, where everyone seems to be on the make, and amateurs don’t feel too welcome. Passport guy’s been waiting for a while, killing time shooting stick on his own, and once his client finally arrives he can’t keep himself from venting his sheer annoyance at the game, its tedium and unforgiving geometries. His client, who happens to be a lithe lady pool shark, someone so attuned to the game she actually sleeps on a pool table, tells him the reason he doesn’t like pool is simple: he sucks.

This moment struck me because, well, I suck. Okay, I can probably beat my grandma best two out of three, but basically I stink. Yet I love pool. Which means that I steer clear of halls like the one in Turn the River, sticking to musty dives where the sticks are warped and the tables shabby, booze-stained and uneven, where the jukebox is always in the way when you need to make that decisive shot and everyone’s too drunk to bother noticing how we bend all the rules just to stretch our buck as long as possible—that much more time to sip beer and listen to the happy snap-drawl of those chalk-smeared spheres rolling along the spot-lit green expanse. How, you might ask, can I enjoy something so much when I’m so bad at it? I don’t know, blame it on the movies maybe.

I probably saw The Color of Money (1986) on pay-TV a dozen times as a kid. I remember my astonishment, even then, at how much I actually kinda loved Tom Cruise, how perfect he seemed as the young hot shot, how elegant and infinitely more alluring Paul Newman’s Fast Eddie Felson was, the aging version of some other young hot shot from some movie of 25 years ago I’d never seen, and how Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, the woman with tenuous allegiances to both men, was the most intriguing of the three. But mostly I loved the atmosphere, that is, of the game as it played cinematically. And it’s a good thing I dug The Color of Money as much as I did back then, since, if you'll forgive the mixed metaphor, the field of pool movies would prove either barren or badly tilled in the subsequent 20 years.

I knew zilch about Turn the River, but it had Rip Torn, a friendly quote from critic David Edelstein on the case, and a rather fetching cover image of Famke Janssen confidently handling a cue stick. It’s the writing/directing debut of Chris Eigerman, a seasoned actor, which perhaps explains why he wanted to make what is essentially a character study in the New Hollywood vein, a movie about a loner who lives out of a truck, apparently owns maybe two outfits, has what we call “a past,” and does one thing really well: beat the pants off of cocky pricks, taking them for all they’ve got in merciless rounds of one pocket. Every character study is of course also a study of milieu, and Turn the River promises viewers a 92-minute plunge into those long-neglected pool halls.

Kaily (Janssen) is wearying of the hustling life. We know this because whenever some old acquaintance sees her again—like Torn’s crusty sage—they always tell her how she looks like shit. (I just kept thinking, “Dude, that’s Famke Janssen. She looks good.”) She’s got a plan to snatch her estranged preteen son (Jaymie Dornan, a great find, with a goofy, Tobey Maguire smile that catches you off guard) from his dad and head for Canada, exactly the sort of lame-brained plan that these loner antiheroes always seem to make, but hey, people do stupid stuff in real life, too. All she needs to do is build up some serious funds for those passports…

The movie’s not bad. It does indeed generate a pleasingly distinctive air, lurking along the peripheries of the tables, echoing those theatrical overhead lights in other interestingly stylized scenes, and even offering a colorful array of eccentric supporting characters to back up Janssen’s genuinely compelling, textured lead, like Kaily’s ex, a sad dad nakedly jealous of his own son, and Kaily's ex's mom, an overbearing Jesus freak. But the movie’s awkward, too, and doesn’t quite earn its tone, faux-urgency, or ending. That this is Eigerman’s first feature is fairly obvious to anyone with even a passing habit of nitpicking—did those same two extras just pass by three times in the last 30 seconds, walking in the same direction?—but what matters is that Eigerman seems to have decided on what kind of movie he wanted to make before he actually made it, failing to capitalize on what he actually had in the can. To narrow it down, I’d argue that the biggest single problem here is actually the music, which comes courtesy of Clogs and is perfectly interesting in itself, but steals all the potential humour—sorry, but sleeping on a pool table should be funny, guys—and the actual sense of studying this character, rather than just dunking her in a bath of generic indie moodiness. …Still, she looks just right craning her long body over those tables.

Didactic, sure, but not completely dumb: Traitor engages with the enemy

The brief prelude is set in Sudan, 1978, and conveys an essential bit of exposition: a child witnesses his father get blown to bits in a car bombing. As the camera holds on the child’s shocked face we transit to present-day Yemen, where the story proper begins and that child is now a man named Samir Horn (co-producer Don Cheadle) who, in a bold bit of dramatic irony, is now selling explosives to Islamic terrorists. What’s interesting in this is that Samir’s childhood trauma is actually mentioned in later scenes, which calls into question whether or not we needed to actually see the event, arguably one more spectacular and emotionally fraught moment in a movie stuffed with them. But like a lot of thrillers, Traitor is very much about seeming, the sort of film in which what we see and what we’re told demand to be distinguished, both for the sake of tension and to deepen our understanding of it’s message, because, make no mistake, Traitor is also very much a message-laden film.

The term “didactic” is almost always used as a pejorative, and needn’t always be the case. Like Hotel Rwanda, another film that found Cheadle portraying an African-born protagonist in a desperate, topical situation, Traitor, helmed by Jeffrey Nachmanoff, is decidedly mainstream, its approach to storytelling and directorial style being well-crafted boilerplate. But it’s also the sort of film, like Hotel Rwanda, that wouldn’t mean much if it didn’t have the capacity to reach the largest possible audience. Based on a story by Steve Martin—yep, that Steve Martin—it’s told largely from the perspective of Samir, a devout Muslim with extensive military experience and expertise in explosives, who gradually joins up with Islamic terrorists. He’s not the first terrorist to be ostensibly empathized in movies, but he is the most identifiable, embodied in a beloved, charismatic Hollywood actor.

Samir has a parallel character in G-man Roy Clayton (Guy Pearce), a noble Southerner whose daddy was a minister, who majored in Islamic studies and who can quote the Koran at the drop of a hat. More capable than his fellow feds because of his understanding of the enemy, he’s at once Samir’s nemesis and ally. He’s also crucial to ramming home Traitor’s appeals for greater tolerance in times of crisis, with dialogue about how ineffective racial profiling is or overwrought lines like “Seems every religion has more than one face.” Clayton’s role as explicator for fundamentalist Islam’s seeming psychopathology is compromised by the fact that Samir, through no fault of the superb Cheadle, of whom we can only blame for being so likable, never fully convinces as a man who truly believes that the slaughter of innocent people—okay, “infidels”—is a admirable way to advance the cause of his people. But Traitor, as sly in certain respects as it is unsubtle, finds its ways of dealing with this problem, and by the time we become distracted by such contradictions Nachmanoff has shifting into high gear genre dynamics, stacking up reversals and building suspense sufficiently to keep us engaged. In any case it held my interest long enough for me to appreciate its particular ideological stance, even while it’s getting shoved down my throat.

Breach and the delicious duplicity of Chris Cooper

He’s played a hard-ass retired US Colonel and ball-busting father choking with unfulfilled homosexual desires that yield murderous impulses. He’s played a hunter of rare plants, deeply unsavoury, a quintessential outsider, yet the secret lover of Meryl Streep. He’s played a candidate for the Colorado governorship, grammatically challenged, neo-conservative, seemingly modelled after Dubya. He’s got thin lips, fried egg eyes, and can easily embody the pappy who never hits you but wields the threat always. These facts beg the question: who is this Chris Cooper guy, and can we trust him?

Clearly, the answer is no, and that’s precisely why its difficult to imagine Breach working as marvellously as it does without Cooper. He can be anybody in a way that keeps audiences unnerved, thus he’s so damn good as Robert Hanssen, the FBI agent convicted of treason in 2001 for selling US secrets for $1.4 million, an expert on Russian intelligence for 25 years before becoming the biggest traitor in US history.

Our first glimpse has him clutching a rosary in church: an instant acknowledgement of culpability in a movie so loaded with suspicion. Hanssen’s a devoted Catholic who loves playing with the grandkids. He doesn’t like to see woman in pantsuits. “The world doesn’t need another Hilary Clinton,” he sighs. He also seems to have a fondness for porn, especially when his wife’s the star. It’s this little vice that allows the Feds to assign Eric O’Neil (Ryan Phillippe) to spy on Hanssen without knowing the reality of the charges against him, thus becoming close to this conservative but weirdly charismatic man.

This is dream material for director Billy Ray, who explored another real-life double life with equal panache in Shattered Glass, his film about the boy wonder journalist who wrote dozens of fraudulent pieces for The New Republic before getting caught. Ray and co-writers Adam Mazer and William Rotko build suspense with tremendous confidence considering we know how it’s going to end.

Cooper is Ray’s biggest coup, but Laura Linney, as the Fed leading the investigation, is just as good. She’s tough: the way she slides a pager across a table at O’Neil when she could have easily handed it to him; the way she rarely moves a superfluous muscle. Phillipe is doomed to being less impressive in such company, but he keeps his performance clean and convinces, crucially so in the scenes where we see him develop reverence for Hanssen (O’Neil, schooled by Jesuits, had a soft spot for Jesus people). 

Breach opened last year, the same week as Ghost Rider, and it sort of vanished without making much of a dent at the box office. In any case, without a major star at its centre or shit blowing up, it probably never had much of a chance, and it’s a shame. It’s a very satisfying thriller.