Dead on arrival: Jonah Hex

A long time ago, in the days before plastic surgery, confederate super-solider Jonah Hex (Josh Brolin) sees his family roasted alive at the hands of the super-evil Quentin Turnbull (John Malkovich) before being left dangling from a cross with a nasty facial disfigurement that will make the consumption of beverages forever cumbersome. As the days pass Hex gets so close to expiry that even when the noble Crow Indians revive him he retains the ability to converse with the dead, a gruesome parlor trick that comes in handy in his new vocation as half-zombie bounty hunter. So Johan Hex is a supernatural western of sorts, based on the DC comic that I only remember because my uncle Ricky used to give me his copies after he’d read them, along with his old Sgt. Rocks. (Is it just me, or did only middle-aged bachelors buy all those war and western comics back in the 1980s?)

Jonah Hex was directed by the guy who brought us Horton Hears a Who. It was written by William Farmer and the guys behind the Crank franchise, which is only slightly more indicative as to what’s in store. Jonah Hex is about as dumb as the Crank movies, and it shares the Crank movies’ particular brand of exaggerated, cartoonish violence, yet it has nothing of the go-for-broke audacity or absurd digressions that arguably distinguish the Cranks somewhat from the rest of your sub-Guy Ritchie actioners. There’s not much going on in Jonah Hex, which results in its merciful brevity—it runs about an hour-twenty—yet also results in a paucity of characterization that renders the potentially colourful leads one-dimensional and shuttles those handy Crow Indians so far into the background as to make them crude functionaries, yet another variation on the “magical negro,” merely happy to help the white hero along his journey before dissolving back into the woods.

The score could be described as Metallica meets Morricone, though once having met they apparently have to say to one another. Even under rubber Brolin maintains charisma, yet he really has little to do other than grunt and take heaps of punishment. Malkovich has a new funny wig to add to his collection but otherwise is unremarkable in another payday villain role. Megan Fox plays the prostitute who apparently spends her free time at the rifle range and it’s true she has very nice legs. Her close-ups however are only one of many shots in the movie that seem digitally enhanced for absolutely no reason at all. At least Michael Fassbender has some fun as an inventively tattooed thug.

Imitation of Life: Synecdoche, New York

His body is doing strange things, any of which may cradle some indefinable kernel of death waiting to metastasize. He is attacked by his own sink. His wife is becoming distant, dissatisfied and resentful. He aspires toward some startling innovation for the stage, yet he’s directing Death of a Salesman at an amateur theatre for small town blue-hairs, the incongruently young actors and deluge of lighting cues being his meager concessions to formalist provocation. His lead actress and the sultry box office attendant both make advances, yet he’s too paralyzed and conflicted to respond. His daughter’s poo is green. As mystery ailments mount and relationships collapse, Caden Cotard (Philip Seymour Hoffman) develops an acute case of Sisyphus syndrome. Everything seems to bear down on him. So when out of the blue he becomes the unlikely recipient of a MacArthur “genius” grant, he does the only logical thing: he makes a play about everything. Or everything as can be conveyed through the very peculiar, very funny and very sad experiences of Caden Cotard. He lives in Schenectady, New York, but he’s about to move somewhere you won’t find on a map.

Synecdoche, New York is not as ambitious as Caden’s play. We can say this for the simple reason that the movie was finished—or, if you’d rather, abandoned—whereas the play stays in rehearsal for decades. But screenwriter Charlie Kaufman’s directorial debut is nonetheless mightily impressive, and, at the risk of sounding hyperbolic, it’s genuinely like nothing you’ve seen. It teems with metaphor, is sprawling in scope, dense with so many kinds of heartache and is playfully, boundlessly alive with the absurd. It should be far too much for any one movie to hold, but here it is nonetheless, running two hours, and fronted, all too appropriately, by one of the most imminently melancholic and corpulent actors working in interesting movies. Hoffman does Kaufman, thankfully. I’m not sure anyone else could.

After Philip K. Dick, who never made a movie but probably spawned more of them than any late-20th century American writer, Charlie Kaufman must surely be the most influential author of neurological disorder-driven storytelling in current pop culture. What other body of work, from Being John Malkovich to Adaptation to Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, has so directly, imaginatively and often perversely addressed the puzzle nature of identity? Selfhood is ever fluid, restless and delightfully insubordinate in Kaufman’s stories, diasporic in its tendencies, spreading out amidst the individual bearer’s surroundings until what you consider uniquely “you” is either infiltrated by another—or many others, if you happen to be John Malkovich—or appropriated by another, ie: the two Kaufmans of Adaptation. Bizarre as it may be, Synecdoche, New York is, in hindsight at least, the inevitable product of the Kaufman project thus far.

While the impossibility of lasting connection between people looms over the film, everything in it thematically connects to everything else. Caden’s wife (Catherine Keener), in a direct reversal of Caden’s attempt to create something massive, makes highly nuanced paintings the size of postage stamps, while his daughter grows up to be literally art-damaged, the confused victim of her parents’ reckless expression. Those closest to Caden exist in some permanent state of metaphor-manifest, most notably Hazel (Samantha Morton, especially wonderful), who, in one of the film’s most inspired conceits, lives in a house that’s perpetually on fire. Caden’s therapist (Hope Davis) writes books that literally speak directly to him. And all of this demands to be woven into Caden’s play. Countless actors are employed. Eventually new actors are hired to play the original actors, because the original actors become part of the story, even threatening to take it over. Vast sets are constructed to contain it all. The whole thing is finally infinite, Borgesian. It’s an attempt to generate authenticity through artifice, to address life through art until art is all that’s left. And perhaps this is why the ending’s so damned blue. The thrill of art is always in the making; the result finally just a eulogy for a process.

Changeling: the kid strays in the picture... as does the sense of purpose

Single mother Christine Collins comes home from work one day in the spring of 1931 to find her house empty and her little boy Walter vanished. The ensuing search yields nothing, the case is taken up by the press, continuing a trend of bad PR for the apparently ineffective LAPD. Then, months later, a boy abandoned in a truck stop in Indiana is identified as Walter. He’s scrubbed up and rushed back to Los Angeles and the arms of his long-suffering mother. But when the boy gets off the train, as the press snaps the celebratory photos, Christine tells Captain Jones, head of LAPD’s juvenile investigation unit, that they found the wrong boy. Jones tells her to take a second look, maybe the boy’s changed, maybe, he implies, Christine’s not quite right in the head, a side effect of so much worry and dread. Christine takes the boy home, is no more convinced than before, but LAPD, it seems, will have none of it. Case closed.

The set-up, verging on the surreal, is so wonderfully mysterious, yet something seems off. The wrong things are emphasized. Clues are conspicuously dropped. The misleadingly titled Changeling begins with Christine promising to follow a distinguished line of memorable movie characters—Simone Simon in Cat People, Mia Farrow in Rosemary’s Baby, Nicole Kidman in Birth, the entire cast of Invasion of the Body Snatchers—immersed in some tale of deep unease where no one will listen to reason and the condescending patriarchy bear down with the weight of our readiness to dismiss yet another hysterical woman. But this story, scripted by TV veteran J. Michael Straczynski, directed by Clint Eastwood, and starring that famed mother of five (and counting) Angelina Jolie, has another agenda altogether, one that will render Christine far less intriguing and far more akin to Erik Brokovich than to the heroine of any brooding tale of paranoia. It comes as a disappointment, but what can you do? It’s a true story.

So Christine becomes a crusader, and, while Jolie’s curls and big eyes look marvelous under a cloche, character development consequently evaporates in the heat of a great cause, namely, exposing levels of police corruption so appalling as to speculate collaboration with the worst criminals. The bad guys and really bad and the good guys really good, which is pretty hard to swallow when you’ve got one supremely pissed off John Malkovich playing the humourless pastor and radio personality who scoops Christine up in his flamboyant campaign to bring down LAPD. The history here is absolutely fascinating stuff and right up James Ellroy’s alley, involving a demented Canadian child killer, fiendish mental institutions trigger drunk with the EST treatments, death by hanging, and telephone operators on roller skates. But how to manage it all, how to bring out the movie in it? I’m not sure that Straczynski ever found a real focal point, or that Eastwood saw the meatier possibilities behind the script’s highly sellable mix of sordidness and triumph, Chinatown with a saintly protagonist and a happy ending. (Sort of.) Changeling is uneven, always essentially interesting, and terribly long. Some of the child performances are unspeakably bad. Most of the adults simply have only one note to play (to get an inkling of Jolie's, please see the accompanying photos, especially the first and last). It might have been much more, or, better yet, something completely different. Clint, 78 and on fire these days, is too busy to care much, I guess. Trailers for his next movie are already circulating. In fact I saw one pasted onto the top of Changeling.

Counter Intelligence: Burn After Reading probes deep into dumbness

Book-ended with zooms in and out of Washington from outer space and scenes in windowless rooms and hallways somewhere deep within CIA headquarters full of essentially hapless, incoherent, bumbling government employees casually making life and death decisions, Burn After Reading isn’t exactly what you might call satire. The ostentatious placement of the nest of American intelligence in what’s made to feel here like the centre of the universe might give us reason to panic if writer/directors Joel and Ethan Coen were very interested in learning something about how the CIA works, or even had anything to say about it, however broadly critical. But this isn’t that sort of movie, which may be all for the best. What we get instead is the Coens at their most disposable and slaphappy, a characteristic jumble of wacky characters, reversals, and milieus as you’d likely find in any feature film.

Like so much of what we encounter in Burn After Reading, Linda Litzke (Frances McDormand) feels like a creature of urban myth, the embodiment of a tabloid headline: LONELY SUBURBAN TRAINER SELL GOV’T SECRETS TO FUND NEW BODY, FACE. The lynchpin of this gleefully labyrinthine narrative, Linda’s failed attempts to cover her multi-tiered cosmetic surgery by credit card overdraft alone promises to be redeemed when her co-worker Chad Feldheimer (Brad Pitt) takes it upon himself to blackmail a recently fired CIA Balkans expert named Ozzie Cox (John Malkovich) after a disc containing what’s either Cox’s memoirs or financial data or both is accidentally left behind in Hardboides, the gym where Linda and Chad work and work out, a locale doubtlessly named in honour of the 1984 “sexy comedy.”

There’s actually some sexy comedy, or at least sex-related comedy, to be found in Burn After Reading as well, what with the twitchy, ever-smiling US Marshall and semi-discreet pussyhound Harry Pfarrer (George Clooney) banging both Cox’s humourless doctor wife (Tilda Swinton) and, eventually, Linda. Though he’s shooting his load left and right, he proudly declares more than once in the film that he’s never had to fire his weapon even once in over 20 years of service, an ominous detail made more ominous by other little details fussed over by the Coens, like the painting of a rifle hanging from the bathroom wall beside Harry as he fusses over his beard in the mirror. We are, naturally, just waiting for that gun to go off, and when it does things quickly turn—as they often do in Coen Brothers movie—from silly and perplexing to morbid and perverse.

You could say that Clooney’s gotten a bit of a raw deal with the Coens, starring in O Brother Where Art Thou?, Intolerable Cruelty and now this, not a one of them being amongst the finest films in the brothers’ prolific body of work. But Clooney’s uncanny knack for stylized comedy isn’t often utilized elsewhere, and hey, at least Burn After Reading is better than The Ladykillers. And as shallow as Harry is, at least he gives Clooney some diverting business to attend to—not a claim you could make about Ozzie, who only lets Malkovich, looking eerily rubbery and gray, blow a major gasket in scene after scene, or Chad, a character that’s largely about synthetic mock-necks, frosted tips and forwarding the plot in any way possible and probably not very well cast, though Pitt for all his limitations looks like he’s having some fun, especially when rocking the treadmill. McDormand, for her part, seems to always come closest to striking the best balance between emotional realism and utter mania.

But perhaps the bigger concern here is whether or not the Coens were even sure they were making a comedy. You could argue that several of the Coens’ movies are genre hybrids—though not as many as you’d think—but the problem isn’t whether or not we can identify the genre but whether or not we feel as though we should bother investing any feelings in the characters. For all the hi-jinx, the air of paranoia and intrigue peppered throughout the film—and soaking Carter Burwell’s deliberately boilerplate score—compels us to try and generate some deeper interest in Linda, Chad, Ozzie and Harry, or at least their high-stake plights, as does the numerous subplots of romance and longing, such as that between Linda and her lovestruck boss (Richard Jenkins). But whatever emotions are built up in the film’s first two-thirds make the abrupt, goof-off ending feel that much more like a slap in face for even caring. My advice would be not to bother caring, but still see the movie. It’s pretty slight, adds up to very little, but nonetheless features enough inspired non-sequiters to entertain.