An eccentric detective at West Point

 

A great cast can't save The Pale Blue Eye, a gloomy melodramatic story about a detective (Christian Bale) who investigates the murder of a cadet who was hanged before his heart was cut from his chest. Adapting his screenplay from a novel by Louis Bayard, director Scott Cooper delivers a chilly drama that brings a historical figure -- Edgar Allan Poe -- into a plot weighted with secrets. Poe (Harry Melling) did attend West Point, but the story is pure fiction. Bale's Augustus Landor invites Poe to join him in trying to solve a crime that has the Academy on edge. In addition to Bale, the movie casts Gillian Anderson and Toby Jones as a husband and wife whose son (Harry Lawtey) also attends West Point. Their daughter (Lucy Boynton) catches Poe's eye. Charlotte Gainsbourg portrays a waitress at a local pub who carries on an affair with Bale's Augustus Landor. Yes, that's Robert Duvall as an expert on witchcraft whom Landor consults. Suggestions of the paranormal waft through the wintery depictions of West Point, where Timothy Spall takes a turn as the school's embattled superintendent. A moody depiction of 19th-century life turns Cooper's movie into a mystery that's a bore or perhaps "chore" is the better word. The gothic environment Cooper creates is credibly somber but the drama feels freeze-dried.

A wealthy man loses interest in life

     In Sundown, Mexican director Michel Franco (Chronic and New Order) casts Tim Roth as a wealthy man adrift in Acapulco. Franco doesn't so much tell a story as create a mood dominated by the withdrawal of Roth's character from nearly all forms of engagement.

    The movie opens with Roth's Neil vacationing with a woman (Charlotte Gainsbourg) we take to be his wife. They're accompanied by two grown children (Albertine Kotting McMillan and Samuel Bottomley). Their kids?

    The feeling is one of languor.  Everyone eats and drinks. Neil floats in the pool at a posh hotel. Movement seems difficult, unnecessary — even superfluous. 

    Initially, we think that Roth and Gainsbourg are playing husband and wife, an impression Franco slowly overturns. Gainsbourg's Alice, we eventually learn, is Neil's sister. McMillan and Bottomley are playing his niece and nephew.

     The ease of a Mexican respite is shattered when Gainsbourg's Alice receives a phone call. Her mother has been rushed to the hospital. Alice orders everyone into emergency mode. They must pack for a quick return to London. 

      At the airport, Neil says that he's left his passport at the hotel and must return to retrieve it. He'll catch another flight. We suspect that he's lying. We're not wrong.

      Neil ignores what turns out to be a death in the family. He remains in Acapulco, checking into a downscale hotel, drinking copious amounts of beer, and beginning a sexual relationship with Berenice (Iazua Larios), a local woman who becomes involved with him. 

     But Franco has more in mind than sexual adventure. Violence occasionally erupts, notably when a man is shot on the beach a few feet from where Neil has parked his listless body. Another violent eruption will spring up later, this one involving someone closer to Neil.

      Fearing that her brother has gone off the deep end, Alice returns to Mexico, chastising him for failing to attend his mother's funeral and begging him to return to London. Both of them are heirs to a meat-slaughtering business that demands attention.

      To underscore the seriousness of the situation, Alice's visit is preceded by entreaties from the family's attorney (Henry Goodman). Neil shrugs it off. He doesn’t want the family money. He couldn’t care less about the business.

      It's not easy to make a movie about a man who has deadened himself to life, so much so that he doesn't seem fazed when he finds himself at the center of a lurid British tabloid story or slumped in a corner in a Mexican jail.

     Obviously, Neil harbors a secret that Franco withholds until the movie's end. 

      Roth's convincingly dispassionate portrayal doesn't encourage much by way of empathy. Franco purposefully keeps us outside of Neil’s experience. We're watching a man who has given up on just about everything.

      Yet, the movie has an insinuating lilt. Mexico’s mixture of heat, surf, violence, subsistence, street encounters, and the mismatched wealth of European vacationers leaves us wondering (in a good way) what Franco is trying to say about the value of Neil's life.

      Neil ventures away from the private beaches of privilege but he’s not looking for renewal. It's an odd achievement, but Roth has created a character who's willfully useless, a decaying relic of man from a world that Franco may view as doomed.

     Or maybe Neil's just a guy who has waited all his life for a reason not to pretend that he gives a damn.

      

     

When ghosts have yet to die

Mathieu Amalric, Marion Cotillard and Charlotte Gainsbourg star in Ismael's Ghosts.

By most measures, French director Arnaud Desplechin’s Ismael’s Ghosts should be dismissed as hopelessly muddled, slightly pretentious and loaded with self-conscious time shifts that can confuse more than they clarify. But Desplechin’s movie, I think, deserves more nuanced consideration, particularly if you think of it as a rambling meditation about a filmmaker who’s battling ghosts of his past, one of which turns up in the form of a real person.

Desplechin begins his film as if it were a thriller about a spy named Ivan Dedalus, a film-within-a-film ploy that suggests Desplechin’s desire to turn Ismael's Ghosts into a kind of cinematic playground. Don’t become overly involved in this thriller because you’ll soon learn that you've entered the imagination of writer/director Ismael Vuillard (Mathieu Amalric), a director who's working on the screenplay for the movie we’ve been watching.

A second rank filmmaker, Vuillard never seems to have matched the work of his former father-in-law Henri Bloom (Laszlo Szabo), a director who’s not afraid to allow his ego to spill over into rudeness while insisting that his behavior constitutes an essential form of rebellion.

We also learn that Vuillard's former wife (Marion Cotillard) disappeared 21 years ago. She since has been declared dead but Vuillard can't abandon her memory.

The movie's set-up creates many boats for Desplechin to rock. Vuillard is the midst of a new relationship with Sylvia (Charlotte Gainsbourg) when a woman turns up claiming to be the long-lost Carlotta, the wife he can’t forget.

To add to the film’s already challenging density, we also learn that the spy in Vuillard’s movie is based on the life of his real brother, a man who has little respect for Vuillard.

All of this information slides into view without much concern for either chronological or even logical coherence.

But Desplechin isn’t attacking the formal conventions of cinema so much as he’s recreating Vuillard’s fevered world, rendered in rendered in alternating strokes of joy and desperation by Amalric, whose portrayal of Vuillard does little to glorify the role of the film director. In Amalric’s hands, Vuillard becomes a mess, a man who can annoy, amuse and even plunge — a little too willingly perhaps — into moments of existential despair.

As a woman who refuses to explain herself, Cotillard adds an aura of mystery and intrigue. Can Carlotta reinsert herself into Vuillard’s life? Will her sudden reappearance cause her father to die of shock? What to make of what Carlotta's claims that she was in a loveless marriage in India during the years in which she vanished from Paris?

Gainsbourg’s Sylvia, an astrophysicist by trade, might be the only character who isn’t overcome by waves of personal confusion.

Did I mention that the spy in Vuillard's movie (Louis Garrel) keeps turning up; snippets of thriller that Vuillard is making punctuate the blurry narrative.

I wouldn’t argue with those who find Ismael’s Ghosts stuffed to the point where it bursts any attempt at significance.

You also could tie yourself in knots trying to make something of Desplechin’s literary references, saddling characters with names that recall James Joyce — Bloom and Dedalus, for example. I took all this rarified name-dropping as little more than wry gamesmanship on Desplechin's part.

It helps not to take Ismael’s Ghosts too seriously. Desplechin may be poking fun at us, as well as at characters who get lost in the maze he creates. Of course, the movie frustrates but its confusions push Desplechin toward something vital, the way his characters respond to the disjointed absurdities with which he confronts them.

A man who knows how to wheedle

Richard Gere takes a risk with Norman, a movie about a wannabe Jewish big shot. Surprisingly, it pays off.

Richard Gere seems to welcome risk. I say this based on movies such as Time out of Mind (2015) in which Gere played a mentally ill resident of the streets and also because of Norman: The Moderate Rise and Tragic Fall of a New York Fixer. In his latest movie, Gere -- an actor hardly known for ethnic portrayals -- plays Norman Oppenheimer, a persistent Jewish man of enormous aspiration and very little capital. Norman does, however, have one gift: He's nothing if not persistent. He can't be shamed or deterred.

By the conclusion of the movie, Norman has overreached in terms of a plot that involves the prime minister of Israel and a possible peace settlement in the Middle East. If you can forgive Israeli writer/director Joseph Cedar for such inflation, you'll find an amusing story about a man whose entire life seems to have been devoted to exaggerating his connections to the rich and powerful. Norman knows how to wheedle.

Joining Gere in what's presented with the frolicking spirit of a caper movie are Michael Sheen (as Norman's nephew); Steve Buscemi (as a rabbi whose congregation is desperate for funds), and Charlotte Gainsbourg (as an Israeli investigator).

Divided into acts separated by title cards, Norman buzzes along pleasantly as we're exposed to Norman's first hustle. He tries to wangle an invitation to an exclusive dinner by developing a relationship with an Israeli deputy minister (Lior Ashkenazi). The minister resists, but ultimately decides that there may be something genuine about Norman.

It also doesn't hurt that Norman, in an effort to impress the fellow, buys the deputy minister a pair of shoes that costs more than $1,000 or that the deputy minister regards Norman as someone who boosted his spirit during a low point in his career. Norman knows something about low points; his life seems to have been at a perpetual low point.

Norman wears the same camel-colored overcoat throughout the movie, doesn't seem to have a home, and conducts his business by ducking into quiet spots around Manhattan to make phone calls. He's always trying to worm his way into high-rolling company, and eventually does make the score he's dreamed of -- but even that gives him only a tenuous grip on the ladder of upward mobility.

Thanks to Gere, Norman shows moments of self-awareness that sometimes push him toward pathos, and there's something believable about Norman's desire to connect people -- even if he happens not to know the person to whom he promises an introduction.

Some of Cedar's scenes are over-stylized, but he gives his movie a tonic spirit, which (I think) means we're not supposed to take it too seriously. That's a good thing because Cedar's picture of New York's Jewish community, or at least its economic upper echelon, isn't entirely flattering.

I wouldn't have thought Gere could play a wannabe macher (Yiddish for someone who gets things done), but he's on target. For him, Norman was a risk worth taking.

Nymphomanic: Volume II, the punishment

Lars Von Trier continues the torment.

Not content with one sexually explicit movie, Danish director Lars von Trier has issued the provocatively titled Nymphomaniac in two volumes.

Volume 1 dealt with a nymphomaniacal woman (Charlotte Gainsbourg) who told her story to an older man (Stellan Skarsgard) who adopted an Olympian view of her sexual history.

Seen in flashbacks, the young Joe (played by Stacy Martin) learned to express her power through sex, a risky business to be sure.

Together both volumes total more than four hours, making Nymphomaniac a contender for the longest sex movie yet -- if, indeed, it's really about sex.

In Volume II, the adult Joe takes over the story, and von Trier more clearly marks his territory by pushing her toward punishing extremes.

What happens? Joe -- who has lost all sexual sensation -- submits to torment from a sadist (Jamie Bell) who ties her down and beats her up. In the process, Joe proves that she's a careless mom and renounces those who would judge her at a meeting of sex addicts.

She also sleeps with two black men who face each other naked in what looks like a duel of semi-erect penises.

Toward the end, Joe hooks up with an extortionist (Willem DaFoe) and acquires a wily protege (Mia Goth).

All this is recounted in flashbacks as Joe finishes telling Skarsgard's Seligman how she wound up bloodied in an alley, which is how he discovered her at the beginning of Volume I.

In Volume I, Von Trier punished some of the characters: He does so again, but this time, the torment extends to the audience.

The shock of explicitly presented sex having been depleted in the first volume, we're left to watch Gainsbourg's Joe demean herself, take a prideful stance toward her activities and ultimately commit one final act of self-assertion.

Whatever von Trier had to say seems to have been said in the first movie. Volume II doesn't add much, except for those who want to speculate about von Trier's aims with yet another movie that seems designed to provoke without explanation.

As for what motivates Joe: It may be nothing more than von Trier's desire to put her through a variety of degrading situations and then try to defend himself by glossing it all with a feminist veneer.

As my grandmother might have said, "Oy."

Lars Von Trier's sexual odyssey

Part I of a two-part film prompts a mixed reaction.

An older man discovers a woman lying in an alley. She's been badly beaten. He takes her home, puts her in his bed and begins nursing her back to some semblance of health and stability. She, in turn, tells him her story.

The set-up is nothing if not conventional, but when you know that I'm describing the opening of director Lars Van Trier's Nymphomaniac: Volume I, you'll understand that the movie has no intention of following a familiar arc.

As best as can be gleaned from Volume I -- reviewers have not yet had access to Volume II -- Von Trier has decided to explore female sexuality by pushing one woman's story to nymphomaniacal extremes.

We soon learn that Joe (Charlotte Gainsbourg), the bruised woman from the alley, has taken an aggressively pro-active approach to sex, taking up with what seems a never-ending stream of men. Joe's relationships are brought to us in a variety of flashbacks in which Stacy Martin plays Joe as a young woman.

This being Volume I, we're left to surmise what might have brought Joe to her moment of degradation in that damp back alley.

The screenplay makes Joe her harshest critic; her rescuer (Stellan Skarsgard) seems a man of infinite patience. He steadfastly refuses to judge Joe. Instead, he gives her quasi-philosophical pep talks as they sit around his monkishly spare apartment.

Skarsgard's Seligman rambles on about fishing and other matters. He loves Izaak Walton's The Compleat Angler, and tries to connect fly fishing to Joe's story.

This gives Von Trier an opportunity to create some beautiful fishing and stream imagery, which adds a sense of mystery, but doesn't exactly prove revelatory in terms of our understanding.

Principal among Joe's relationships is her intermittent connection with Jerome (Shia LaBeouf). As a girl, Joe asks Jerome to take her virginity. He obliges. She then runs into him at various times during the story.

Some of the movie has a near-comical tone. At one point, Joe and a girlfriend take a train ride. They compete over who can score the most conquests on the train.

Given her rampant sexual activities, it's hardly surprising that Joe becomes something of an expert on penises. Perhaps that's why Von Trier includes a series of shots of penises of varying types and description.

Is he suggesting that, for Joe, men have been reduced to this essential bit of equipment? Is he mocking male genitalia by calling attention to their strangeness when abstracted from the rest of the body?

We also learn about Joe's upbringing as the movie progresses. She tells us her mother was emotionally frigid. Her father (Christian Slater) seems to have been an understanding fellow who introduced his daughter to the wonders of nature. Von Trier punishes his apparent decency with a cruel death scene.

Von Trier also makes room for an appearance by Uma Thurman, who plays the wife of a misguided husband who believes that Joe's in love with him. Thurman's character arrives at Joe's apartment moments after her fleeing husband, who thinks he's about to move in.

To make matters even more bizarre, Thurman's character -- named in the credits as Mrs. H -- brings her two sons on her journey of revenge. How else to complete the humiliation of this poor sap, a man who apparently has misread everything about Joe?

Did Volume I leave me as eager for Volume II as I was for the next episode of Breaking Bad? Hardly. I'll certainly watch Part II, but I can't say I'd feel deprived if I didn't.

The movie's provocative title, its occasional obtuseness and its artful visual gestures may well create a mixed reaction for those who aren't entirely put off by the excessive nudity, sex and blunt language.

For me, though, the most shocking thing about Nymphomaniac, Volume I is that I didn't have a stronger reaction to it. Perhaps Volume II will light a stronger fire.

Von Trier hears the sweet call of doom

The provocative Danish director outdoes himself with a gloom-shrouded epic of annihilation.

Anyone familiar with the work of Danish director Lars von Trier knows he specializes in movies so bleak they hardly allow for even the slightest expression of faith in humanity.

After 1996's Breaking the Waves , von Trier became a regular on the festival circuit, sometimes connecting (Dogville) and sometimes missing the mark (Antichrist). Those, of course, are my assessments. Von Trier enthusiasts will have their own favorites, and nothing he does ever will please his many detractors.

Last May, von Trier may have bitten the festival hand that feeds him. He was barred from the Cannes Film Festival after making ridiculous comments about Hitler, Naziism and Albert Speer. He was attempting, I think, to position himself in the land of outrageous opinion. He also seemed to be making a joke, the humor of which eluded just about everyone who heard him. Von Trier clearly would be better off letting his movies speak for him.

And in his latest movie -- Melancholia -- the director speaks loudly and with no small amount of pomp, delivering a message steeped in romanticized doom. No slouch when it comes to pessimism, von Trier imagines not only the destruction of individual characters, but of the entire planet. He seems to think that this might not be such a bad thing. After all, life -- with its pointless rituals and stupid striving -- doesn't amount to much anyway.

Melancholia uses a kind of sci-fi backdrop to enlarge the scale of its inquiries. A planet 12 times the size of Earth is heading directly for our tiny planet. If this approaching planet -- bearing the metaphoric name Melancholia -- doesn't change course, it's a total wipeout for Earth and its creatures.

The opening of Melancholia boasts some of the most astonishing images of the year, sights on a par with the great work that Terrence Malick did in the cosmic segments of Tree of Life. Most of the von Trier's best imagery occurs in this prologue, a series of images that summarize the entire movie in graceful slow-motion, all to the strains of Wagner's prelude to Tristan and Isolde.

In the first half of Melancholia, von Trier takes us to the wedding of Justine (Kristen Dunst) and Michael (Alexander Skarsgard). The couple becomes late for their very elegant reception when their limo gets stuck in the forest. Watching a massive white limo trying to negotiate a tiny wooded road clues us to von Trier's comic sense of absurdity. What could be sillier than celebrating a new beginning as the cosmic wrecking ball approaches? Like the limo on that impossible road, it's a bad fit.

As is often the case, the director offers some stiff competition for the all-too-familiar irritations of his hand-held camera. The bride's mother (Charlotte Rampling) makes sneering comments about the futility of marriage. She's divorced from Justine's father (John Hurt), who drinks too much and seems to wallow in warm sentimentality. The bride's boss (Stellan Skarsgard) proves to be an obnoxious ad man who insists that Justine invent an advertising slogan before the reception concludes.

Justine's sister Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg) bravely tries to keep things going while her husband (Kiefer Sutherland), the sap who's paying for the nuptials, complains about the bride's irresponsibility. In conventional terms, he's absolutely right: At one point, the bride abandons the groom to make love to a stranger on the golf course surrounding the lavish estate where the wedding reception is being held.

That’s pretty much the pattern. The reception – punctuated by all manner of small social hostilities – takes place under the shadow of the irresistible doom to which Justine finds herself drawn. Justine has fallen under the spell of melancholia (with a small "m"). Try as she may, she can't make herself conform to what she probably sees as the frivolous demands of the wedding. (I guess she didn't trust her doomy instincts enough to forgo the whole thing in the first place.)

Dunst keeps the audience off guard as a deeply disturbed woman who's obviously suffering from powerful inner turmoil. Dunst gives one of those courageous, all-out performances that looks as if it probably left her spent.

Part II -- named for Claire -- involves the opposing ways in which the two sisters -- Justine and Claire -- cope with what they think will be the end of the world. Having had her erotic flirtation with death, Justine seems increasingly ready to consummate the affair. Beset by fear, anxiety and concern for her young son, Claire resists.

For his part, Sutherland's John attempts to reassure his wife and young son (Cameron Spurr) that the approach of the planet should be regarded as a scientific adventure, not a portend of doom. In a von Trier movie, he's a walking demonstration of the failure of rationality.

Unfortunately, the movie's second half slows down considerably. By the time von Trier's apocalyptic denouement arrives -- and I found myself rooting for it -- you'll either have yielded to Melancholia or you'll have headed for the exits. I was alternately entranced, bored and dubious.

It falls to Justine to sound what could be von Trier's motto: "All I know is life on earth is evil." I don't think even the obnoxious behavior of the wedding guests justifies such a sweeping conclusion, but von Trier never has been one for cinematic restraint, and his final images are as compelling as those that opened the movie.

I can't give this one a clear yes or no. If nothing about Melancholia sounds alluring, stay home. I wouldn't think of arguing you out of your easy chair. Otherwise, cue the Wagner, try to keep from smirking at the movie's more ridiculous parts, and, by all means, let the apocalypse rip.