Despair, comedy and Charlie Kaufman

     Charlie Kaufman's Synecdoche, New York (2008) baffled many, but it had real pain, insight, and Philip Seymour Hoffman as a theater director obsessed with creating a masterpiece. Kaufman's new film, I'm Thinking of Ending Things, displays some of the same existential fatigue that marked Synecdoche. Ditto for the director's 2015 animated feature, Anamolisa.  
    I mention the past to point out that Kaufman knows his way around misery and because he's at it again.
     Some movies never allow a theme to emerge from the slagheap of their narratives. That can't be said of I'm Thinking About Ending Things: This odd, sometimes haunting, sometimes funny, sometimes baffling movie allows many themes to marinate in its dreary brine.
     Among them: mortality, aging, relationships, and the malleability of time. 
     All of this unfolds in a deadpan style that mirrors the internal state of characters who, as the title suggests, are living lives in which happiness and contentment seem as inaccessible as far-off galaxies.
     The aroma of defeat wafts through nearly everything in I'm Thinking of Ending Things, much of which is staged in a car in which two people (Jessie Buckley and Jesse Plemons) travel through a snowstorm. The car's windshield wipers become a kind of metronome, marking the passing of each gray minute.
     Although it's barely relevant, I'm Thinking of Ending Things does have a plot. Buckley's character -- sometimes called Lucia and sometimes called Lucy -- accompanies Plemons' Jake on a trip to meet Jake's parents, who live on an isolated farm. 
     Even before they arrive at their destination, Lucy wonders why she's wasting her time on a relationship she's sure has no future. Jake is nice. Jake is intelligent. But he's not The One.
     As played by Plemons,  we’re ready to agree with Lucy’s assessment. Jake seems to have accepted the monotony of life on an even keel.
     Both characters are smart, though, and they're not shy about telling each other what they know.
     When Lucy and Jake arrive at the farmhouse, the movie begins its full ascent into weirdness, becoming what might be considered a comedy of despair.   
     Watching Lucy encounter Jake's mother (Toni Collette) and her father (a very strange David Thewlis) leads to the kind of deadpan humor that won't appeal to everyone but which made me laugh.
    Even before this, signs of weirdness emerge: We're talking dead frozen sheep, a story about pigs that were eaten by maggots and, other suggestions that unspeakable horror lurks in the farm's rural isolation.
    At his point, the movie -- which is based on a novel by Iain Reid -- seems as if it might be springing from Lucy's mind as she imagines what life with David (and the inevitable association with his parents) might be like: Grimly comic images pervade a howling snowstorm as Lucy sees Jake’s parents in more youthful stages and in their decrepitude.
    Eventually, Jake and Lucy return to the road. Although the snow has worsened, Jake insists on stopping for ice cream at Tulsey Town, a stand that's inexplicably open in the middle of nowhere in the middle of a blizzard. 
     The ride also includes a discussion of  John Cassavetes' A Woman Under the Influence with Lucy offering a strident takedown of the movie, which some will recognize as Pauline Kael's review of the movie with its particular concentration on the work of actress Gena Rowlands. 
     Is this parody? Is it a dig at reviewers? Is it a comment on the way opinion tends to be absorbed and regurgitated in ways that obliterate individual obligations to respond?
     The evening culminates when Jake decides that he wants to show Lucy his high school, a place where we've already seen images of a janitor mopping up the hallways, watching TV (a movie supposedly directed by Robert Zemeckis), and snippets from a student production of Oklahoma.
     Jake, by the way, is a fan of musicals and these final scenes include a lovely dance duet and a further blurring of identities. Is Jake the janitor at a different stage of his life?
       Throughout all of this, Kaufman insists on giving his movie a feeling in which strangeness has become ordinary; weirdness absent any shimmering sense of mystery.
        What to think? I found myself digesting the movie in pieces. Yes to this bit. No to that. Unsure about something else.  
       I'll get back to you on the way the movie seems to invite interpretation but does little to confirm whatever meaning (or meanings) we might wish to read into it.
       In its overall impact, I'm Thinking of Ending Things accumulates around us like steadily falling snow, leaving drifts of recollected moments from which we must dig ourselves out.
      Good luck and see you when the weather clears.

Bob's Cinema Diary: July 8 -- 'The Tobacconist' and 'Guest of Honor'

The Tobacconist

The late Bruno Ganz, the great German actor who played Adolf Hitler in the explosive Downfall, makes one of his last screen appearances in The Tobacconist, a movie in which he portrays Sigmund Freud during the psychiatrist's final days in pre-war Vienna. It’s unfortunate in a way that Freud isn’t the main character in a story that focuses on 17-year-old Franz (Simon Morze), a young man whose mother sends him to Vienna to become an apprentice to Otto (Johannes Krisch), a World War I veteran who owns a small neighborhood tobacco shop where Freud buys his newspapers and cigars. Initially interested mostly in losing his virginity, Franz is smitten by Anezka (Emma Drogunova), a woman who — when compared to the sexually inexperienced Franz — already is doing graduate work in the bedroom. Gradually, the story absorbs the gathering doom that precedes the Anschluss, Hitler’s annexation of Austria in 1938. Anti-Semitism and contempt for left-wing politics divide the city’s population as the independent-minded Otto heads for an inevitable run-in with the Gestapo. Otto doesn't discriminate; he sells to Jews and Communists. Director Nikolaus Leytner’s re-creation of pre-war Vienna sometimes feels as artificial as a stage set. Moreover,  the increasingly disturbing political climate that invades Franz’s dreams, which we see, becomes repetitive.  You also have to buy the notion that a young man from the German countryside would regard Freud as something of a mentor and that Freud would respond. But Ganz gives Freud the weary charm of a man who has lost the certitude of his earlier years as his whole world unravels. The Tobacconist sometimes stays a little too close to the surface, but the movie has just  enough weight to make it worth a look.

Guest of Honor

Atom Egoyan (The Sweet Hereafter, Ararat) has a knack for going his own way and the trend continues with the director’s latest, Guest of Honor. David Thewlis portrays Jim, a restaurant health inspector whose music-teacher daughter Veronica (Layla De Oliveira) willingly serves time in prison for a sexual offense with one of her teenage students.  The catch: She’s doing the time, but didn’t commit the crime. In a screenplay full of guilt and accusation, Guest of Honor touches on a long-ago affair that Thewlis’s character had with his daughter’s music teacher during the time when his wife was terminally ill. Thewlis never has had difficulty conveying the complexities of the characters he plays. But a muddled story and a framing device in which Veronica meets with the priest (Luke Wilson) who’s about to preside over her father’s funeral keep Guest of Honor from catching hold. Moving among various storylines and employing flashbacks, Egoyan never finds enough dramatic momentum and Veronica's encounter with a school bus driver (Rossif Sutherland) who’s obsessed with her takes an unlikely turn. Considering the rich emotional terrain at Egoyan's disposal, it's odd that the most interesting parts of the movie involve Jim’s restaurant inspections, which include a strange encounter with a couple that's preparing a meal in which rabbit will be the main course, preceded by a dish that may not whet your appetite: fried rabbit ears. Did I mention that Jim also takes care of his daughter's pet rabbit? Little about Guest of Honor made we want to subject any of this to further contemplation. If you do wish to give it additional thought  ... well ... that's what comment sections are for.

She fights for world peace

Gal Gadot and Chris Pine click in an enjoyable Wonder Woman.

It has epic scale, unforced humor, genuine star chemistry and, of course, a female main character. We're talking about Wonder Woman, an enjoyable new addition to the endless stream of comic-book movies that have seized the popular culture, holding it in a sometimes suffocating grip.

But Wonder Woman is a DC Comics movie with an important difference. Because Wonder Woman's main character can be naive about the nature of the humans she encounters, the movie freely can substitute innocence and conviction for hard-bitten cynicism.

In the hands of director Patty Jenkins (Monster), Wonder Woman introduces us to a character with roots in Greek mythology. From an island where Amazon warrior women train to the cratered battlefields of World War I, Wonder Woman makes it clear that Princess Diana, a.k.a. Wonder Woman, has but one objective: bringing peace to the world.

Early on, we learn that the Amazons have conflicting ideas about Diana's destiny. Diana's mother (Connie Nielsen) wants to protect her daughter from the violent life. Diana's aunt (Robin Wright) insists that the girl learn the arts of combat.

Scenes on the all-women island march to a mythic cadence that allows for introduction of the Amazon women's approach to life and for exploration of their relationship to the gods.

Life on the island mostly seems happy until the real world intrudes. A pilot crashes into the ocean off the island's coast. Diana, who has never seen a man before, rushes to the rescue. Pilot Steve Trevor (Chris Pine) is being chased by Germans who know that he's a spy who has stolen vital information from the German high command.

Diana eventually leaves her island paradise with Steve: She believes it is her duty to end the slaughter of World War I, something she plans to accomplish by slaying Ares, the god of war. Diana doesn't care that her plan may seem wacky to everyone else. Diana's view: Men only make war when they fall under the evil influence of Ares, rogue son of Zeus.

We know that Diana will be up to the task because we've already seen her spin in the air in captivating slo-mo. We also know that she has powers even she doesn't fully understand.

Jenkins has lots of fun with scenes in London where our super-heroine confronts the peculiar demands of life among ordinary humans. These include suggestions that Diana wear dresses rather than her regular outfit, which boasts a Wonder Woman tiara, a cape, an armored bustier and short shorts.

Diana also carries a shield, a sword and a glowing Lasso of Truth, not exactly routine accoutrements on the streets of London, circa 1918.

Steve rounds up a colorful crew to accompany Diana to the front. Steve's cohorts include a guy who knows how to work the angles in any situation (Said Taghmaoui), a Native American scout (Eugene Brave Rock) and a sharp-shooter (Ewen Bremner) with a lilting singing voice.

We also meet a British politician who says he wants to negotiate an armistice (David Thewlis) and a secretary (Lucy Davis) who works for Steve and adds plenty of spark.

Villainy arrives courtesy of German General Ludendorff (Danny Huston) and his hideous chemist colleague (Elena Anaya), a woman whose ability to develop lethal gasses has earned her an appropriate nickname: "Doctor Poison."

Gadot claims star status, handling the title-character with charm, sincerity, finesse and a look that exudes beauty and good health. It also doesn't hurt that she and Pine seem to have figured out the intricacies that make for good comic and romantic chemistry or that, at various times, Diana offers crowd-pleasing insistence on her total independence from male authority. It's something she takes for granted.

Those who crave action will find plenty of it: from the training grounds of Diana's island home to the trenches of World War I to a finale that's loaded with the clangor of the customary effects. Wouldn't it have been amazing had Diana, who speaks dozens of languages, been allowed to resolve the movie's problems with more brain than super-power brawn?

Oh well, what can we expect from a movie in which Diana lifts a tank and tosses it as if weighed little more than a Frisbee? Wonder Woman is, after all, a comic-book movie -- and it earns a place among the best of them.

The misery of an alienated puppet

Charlie Kaufman's Anomalisa makes the ordinary seem odd.

In Anomalisa, directors Charlie Kaufman and Duke Johnson immerse us in an environment so insistently ordinary, it almost becomes banal.

Almost everything about Anomalisa has the feel of dreary mundanity: an airplane's interior, the back seat of a taxi cab, a hotel room that's indistinguishable from thousands of other hotel rooms, and a hotel bar that's depressingly generic.

Enter Michael, an expert in customer service who has traveled from Los Angeles to Cincinnati to give a talk about how those who communicate with customers via the phone can improve their work. As the author of How May I Help You Help Them -- a bible in the field of customer relations -- Michael seems well-qualified for the job.

It doesn't take long before we realize that Michael is a spiritually exhausted British transplant. Mired in a marriage that no longer sparks his interest, Michael has a young son he'd rather not talk to when he calls home. His wife ignores his objections, and puts the boy on the phone. Rather desperately, he calls the kid "slugger."

Oops. I forgot something important. Did I mention that Michael is a puppet and that everything in Anomalisa results from stop-action animation that Kaufman and Johnson filmed with scale models? Michael (and the rest of the puppet characters) look as if they're wearing masks; visible seams make it appear as if their faces are composed of replaceable modular part.

More than half of Kaufman's achievement involves making puppets into credible characters. Puppetry gives the movie -- derived from a play that Kaufman wrote -- a strangely insulated air, as if everything we're watching has been hermetically sealed inside a diorama.

Kaufman's characters feel real and unreal at the same time, a feeling that's reinforced when the movie veers off into one of Michael's dreams.

No one should be surprised that Kaufman, who wrote Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Being John Malkovich and Adaptation and who directed Synecdoche, New York, includes touches that don't always add up, that he presents an explicit puppet sex scene (yes, it works) or that all the film's characters, aside from Michael (David Thewlis) and Lisa (Jennifer Jason Leigh), are voiced by Tom Noonan.

There's a point to that, I suppose. For Michael, everyone speaks in the same voice; the world has become one lengthy smorgasbord of undifferentiated boredom.

After a disastrous meeting with a former girlfriend, Michael discovers Lisa. He considers Lisa an anomaly; she seems alive in a way that can't be squelched either by the hotel's airless monotony or the existential mush of Michael's life. He concocts an exotic name for her, Anomalisa, part anomaly and part Lisa. Ergo, the movie's title.

Lisa has a scarred face, and she hides the scar by drooping her hair over it. She badly needs an affirming experience, but she's not defenseless. She seems able to handle a sexual encounter with Michael, even if it doesn't go beyond a one-night stand. She'll take what she can get.

In Lisa's world of lowered expectations, Michael qualifies as a celebrity. She's flattered by Michael's attentions, particularly when he chooses her over her traveling companion, a woman who's equally eager to sleep with this customer-relations genius.

For his part, Michael says he's fascinated by Lisa's voice, the only one in the movie that doesn't sound like every other voice. At one point, Lisa sings a song for Michael, "Girls Just Wanna Have Fun," and the moment hovers in a limbo between poignant and pathetic.

At other times, Michael seems ridiculously out-of-touch with reality. He stops at a shop that sells sex toys, a place recommended by a taxi driver who wrongly assumed that Michael was just another businessman looking for some on-the-road thrills.

Anomalisa serves up an odd mixture of the bland and the idiosyncratic, but what to make of it? Are we supposed to identify with Michael, abhor his selfishness or take him as a representative of some generalized male malaise?

I'm not sure, but Kaufman condemns Michael to the depressing existence of a man whose life is going nowhere and who seems to have succeeded only in spreading his misery.

Kaufman is a bona fide talent, but it's up to you to decide whether you want to become the company that Michael's misery loves.

Tom Hardy' is the stuff of 'Legend'

A rambling British gangster film has everything but a deeply affecting story.

You'd have to be a great actor to play twin brothers and never -- not once -- confuse an audience about who's who. Tom Hardy is one such actor, and in Legend, he manages a neat feat: He portrays both Ronnie and Reggie Kray, notorious British gangsters who took London by storm in the 1960s.

Director Brian Helgeland, who wrote the script for LA Confidential, can't quite turn Legend into a gangster classic, but his direction can be lively, and in Hardy, he has found an actor whose skills are sharp enough to play both brothers.

Consider the Krays as blunt instruments. They never seem capable of the kind of cunning found in a Michael Corleone. Their strong suit is their frightening physicality.

The story of the Krays was told before in director Peter Medak's 1990 film, The Krays. Helgeland freshens the tale by allowing Reggie Kray's wife Frances (Emily Browning) to narrate the story.

Frances is swept away by Reggie's brashness and rough charm. Inevitably, she pays a steep price for dancing a little too close to Reggie's fire.

Additionally, Helgeland populates the movie with a terrific cast of British character actors, many of whom speak with cockney accents that can reduce American ears to capturing only the gist of their conversations.

David Thewlis has a nice turn as Leslie Payne, the man who handles the Kray finances. Chazz Palminteri shows up as Angelo Bruno, an Italian mobster from the US who negotiates a deal with the Krays.

Christopher Eccleston stands out as Nipper Read, the lone representative of Scotland Yard who persists in hounding the Krays.

Still, it's Hardy (Mad Max: Fury Road, The Drop and Locke) who gives the film its kick.

Handsome and intermittently violent, Reggie becomes the more appealing of the brothers with his green Continental and lounge lizard suits.

An avowed and very public homosexual, Ron represents the psychopathic half of the Kray personality: Hardy gives Ron a demeanor that wavers between funny and frightening. Ron's muted-trumpet of a voice seems to emanate from a place that no voice should.

Helgeland's team recreates London of the '60s with style and verve: its clubs and music define a free-wheeling atmosphere in which the city's notables got a kick out of rubbing elbows with gangsters.

Although Helgeland clearly understands that such associations could be costly, he's unable to give the movie the kind of thematic weight that would have lifted Legend out the gangster ghetto.

Instead, Helgeland, who wrote the screenplay based on John Pearson's book, The Profession of Violence, falls into the trap of letting the story unfold as a series of ramshackle episodes, some steeped in Kray brutality.

At 122 minutes, Legend probably overstays its welcome, but behind Reggie and Ron, you'll find one of the best movie actors of our time bringing an explosive power to the screen -- or maybe that's two helpings of explosive power for the price of one movie.

A filmmaker's story continues

Director John Boorman's Queen and Country is a belated but agreeable follow-up to his 1987 Hope and Glory.

Near the beginning of John Boorman's Queen and Country -- a much-belated sequel to the director's 1987 Hope and Glory -- a young man watches as a small crew films the shooting of German soldier who's trying to cross a river, presumably on the run from Allied forces.

The movie ends with that same young man doing his own filming in the very same spot. Boorman's final image: A picture of what appears to be the young man's 16 mm Bolex camera, its winding crank dutifully turning before the credits roll.

These scenes take place on an island in the Thames in the town of Sheperton, home to a famous film studio, which explains why the German soldier met his doom in a river more associated with London than with his homeland.

Although Queen and Country can be viewed as a semi-autobiographical look at Boorman's life, little else about it directly involves filmmaking,.

Still, aspiring film students could do worse than spend a couple of hours with Boorman's film, which takes place during the 1950s as opposed to the war years chronicled in Hope and Glory.

The reason I suggest young filmmakers take a look has nothing to do with stylistic breakthroughs or insider insights. This story about a clever but callow young man can be seen as a necessary prelude to a filmmaking career.

At 18, Bill Rohan (Callum Turner) is on the verge of being drafted. Bill hopes to avoid conscription, but -- alas -- the fateful day arrives. He's drafted into the army.

The military that Bill discovers is quite different from the one that he probably fantasized about as a kid in London during the Blitz. Neither Bill nor any of his fellow recruits seem to take the army seriously, and Britain itself isn't under attack.

Bill finds his immediate supervisor, Sgt. Major Bradley (David Thewlis), to be small-minded and laughable. He's also at odds with another sergeant major (Brian F. O'Byrne), a career soldier who loathes conscripts and believes in the letter of military law.

Richard E. Grant appears as a major, who seems to regard military affairs as an intrusion into whatever passes for his life.

Bill and his best pal Percy (Caleb Landry Jones) aren't exactly living the warrior's life. They wind up teaching typing to other soldiers, a task which they find mildly risible, a sentiment most of their students share.

Of course, typing beats service in Korea, which is where those who get crosswise with the base leadership are sent.

Pat Shortt plays Pvt. Redmond, a soldier with a strong aversion to finding himself in Korea, where the weather is frost-bite cold and soldiers are getting shot.

Because Bill is a teen-ager, part of his evolution naturally turns to love. He falls for a beautiful, upper-class woman (Tamsin Egerton) he meets in the town where he's stationed. She likes him, but she's involved with someone else.

Percy is taken by a more attainable romantic target, a nurse played by Aimee-Ffion Edwards.

It's not necessary to have seen the first movie to appreciate this one. Queen and Country functions on its own, but it may mean more if you remember from Hope and Glory that Bill's mother (Sinead Cusack) didn't marry for love, that her husband (David Hayman) fought in the war, and that Bill's older sister Dawn (Vanessa Kirby) got pregnant during the war and married a Canadian. She returns to England while Bill's still away from home, and seems hellbent on trying to be uninhibited when he returns on leave.

So, back to what I said about Queen and Country being valuable for aspiring filmmakers.

It's just this: It takes a bit of living to become a good filmmaker, and that includes the kind of exposure to reality that Bill faces as he leaves home, presumably for the first time.

Before the movie's done, Bill begins to understand what made some of the soldiers he so disdains into the people they are. He realizes that not all love is requited. He learns important lessons about friendship and loyalty, and living with imperfection. He's a lot less smug.

I'm an admirer of Hope and Glory and of much of Boorman's career, which includes movies such as Point Blank (1967), Deliverance (1972), Zardoz (1974), Excalibur (1981), The Emerald Forest (1985) and The General (1998).

I wish I could say that Queen and Country was a masterpiece, a summary work by an 82-year-old filmmaker who has matched and even exceeded what he accomplished 28 years ago.

That's not the case. But if Queen and Country isn't a great movie, it's an agreeable one, a reminder that it's best if artists live a little before they think about unleashing themselves on the world.

A marriage full of challenges

Redmayne and Jones are terrific in this mature look at the marriage between Stephen Hawking and Jane Wilde.

The Theory of Everything -- a look at the 26-year marriage between physicist Stephen Hawking and Jane Wilde -- is based on Wilde's book, Travelling to Infinity: My Life with Stephen.

I begin there because those expecting a movie along the lines of Errol Morris' A Brief History of Time or a visual companion piece to any of Hawking's many bestsellers, probably will be disappointed.

Although the movie has taken the title of one of Hawking's books, it has less to do with theoretical physics than with a very untheoretical marriage that lasted quite a long time. Wilde knew that Hawking had contracted ALS (Lou Gehrig's disease) before she insisted on tying the knot.

When Wilde married Hawking in the 1960s, he had been given only a few years to live. He's now 72.

Director James Marsh (Man on Wire) makes a choice that opens his movie to a wider audience than those obsessed with cosmology.

Perhaps Marsh assumed, quite justifiably, that those who are deeply interested in questions such as whether time had a beginning would know where to look for more information. Hawking, by the way, changed his mind about that question during the course of his work.

Admittedly, The Theory of Everything might have been more interesting if Marsh had given us a bit more insight into Hawking's work, but the movie earns its stripes as an intriguing look at a difficult marriage, and it makes no attempt to canonize either Hawking or Wilde.

They remain human beings dealing with adversity, and if you bypass The Theory of Everything, you'll miss two of the year's finest performances: from Eddie Redmayne as Hawking and Felicity Jones as his wife.

We meet Hawking at Cambridge in 1963. He's the kind of annoyingly bright graduate student who easily impresses his professor (David Thewlis) by breezing through problems that drive other students crazy.

Redmayne gives a physically demanding performance that must have become more taxing the more he was called upon to mimic the disease that deformed Hawking's body, put him in a wheel chair and eventually took his voice.

Hawking speaks with a computer-generated voice that, by now, has become familiar to those who've seen him -- and who hasn't?

Redmayne not only captures Hawking's physical disabilities, he infuses his performance with intelligence and wit. A half-smile that may result from disease also serves as a kind of metaphor for a situation in which Hawking seems to realize that biology has dealt him an absurd hand.

Jones' performance is every bit as good. When we meet her, she's a young woman studying medieval Spanish literature. Unlike Hawking, she believes in God. It's almost as if she intends to will her marriage to succeed.

As the story unfolds, Jane's decency never wavers, but she also begins to feel the inevitable resentments of a woman whose sacrifices have been doubled: She's a caretaker both for Hawking and for the couple's three children.

Unlike most of us who are prone to complaint, Jane has earned her frustration.

When Jane joins a church choir, she meets choir master Jonathan (Charlie Cox), an incredibly understanding fellow who becomes part of the Hawking family. Increasingly, he provides Jane with much needed emotional support and, ultimately, with love.

Marsh takes a non-judgmental approach to both Hawking and Jane, allowing them to be themselves without the intervention of an authorial voice to tell us where they're doing well and where they may have gone wrong.

So, yes, I'd have preferred a little more science and a good deal more stylistic daring to match the boldness of Hawking's thought, but The Theory of Everything deserves credit for taking a mature look at the evolution of a most unusual marriage between two most unusual people.

And the mysteries of marriage, as even the dimmest of us must know, remain resistant to scientific analysis.

Things go topsy turvy in this asylum

A great cast tackles melodrama in Stonehearst Asylum.

Taking its cue from an Edgar Allan Poe story, Stonehearst Asylum makes literal use of an oft-posed question: What might happen if the inmates took over the asylum?

Although the movie's answer hardly qualifies as profound, its high-grade cast -- particularly Ben Kingsley, Michael Caine and David Thewlis -- seems to be having a good time with a Gothic tale set at the dawn of the 20th Century.

The movie wastes no time establishing a creepy atmosphere. Dr. Edward Newgate (Jim Sturgess) arrives at spooky Stonehearst Asylum to serve a residency as a staff psychiatrist, known in this movie as an "alienist."

Thrown off guard by caretaker Mickey Finn (Thewlis), Newgate is further flummoxed by the asylum's weirdly imperious superintendent, Dr. Silas Lamb (Kingsley).

Dr. Lamb believes that it's better to allow patients to follow their madness than to treat them abusively.

I doubt you'll be surprised when Dr. Newgate discovers that the patients have revolted and thrown the real staff into the asylum's dungeon.

The point: 19th century methods for treating the insane constituted a cruel and inhuman form of punishment. The staff, led by Caine's character, deserves to be punished.

That message plays second fiddle to the mixture of melodrama and macabre comedy that director Brad Anderson serves up -- with particular help from an acerbic and slightly unhinged Kingsley.

Also clear from the outset is Northgate's infatuation with a supposedly dangerous but beautiful patient (Kate Beckinsale), a hysteric who freezes when touched.

The movie's over-the-top and self-consciously melodramatic approach (cue the thunder!) works well enough, until final scenes engulf the screen in flames.

Warning: Caine's role is small. Same goes for Brendan Gleeson, who appears at the movie's beginning and at its end.

If you're looking for horror, look elsewhere: Stonehearst Asylum isn't particularly scary, but its production values are strong, and there's something to be said for watching a grade A cast take a bumpy journey through B-movie terrain.

On the mad road to meaninglessness

Terry Gilliam's latest abounds with creativity -- and chaos.
Let's call Terry Gilliam's The Zero Theorem a wildly ambitious and sometimes invigorating mess.

Only an imagination as fertile as Gilliam's could create a movie that playfully poses the biggest of questions: Is the entire universe heading for oblivion, thus rendering all human activity meaningless?

To aid in this out-sized inquiry, Gilliam concocts a dystopian world in which a man named Qohen (Christoph Waltz) receives an assignment from a character called Management (Matt Damon).

Qohen's job: to find a mathematical equation that proves that all life adds up to nothing -- or something like that.

Not surprisingly, the assignment drives poor Qohen batty as he encounters a variety of strangely colorful characters: his supervisor (David Thewlis), a woman (Melanie Thierry) sent by Management to arouse Qohen sexually, and a whip-smart teen-ager (Lucas Hedges), who happens to be Management's son.

At one point, the distressed Qohen engages in a form of therapy with a virtual therapist played by Tilda Swinton, unrecognizable in the recent Snowpiercer and almost as unrecognizable here.

Near the beginning, Qohen -- who refers to himself either as "we" or "us" -- requests permission to work at home: It seems he once received a phone call from someone purporting to explain the meaning of life, but the connection was lost. He's hoping the mystery caller will get back to him.

Ridiculous? Of course, but with Gilliam, it's not so much the story he tells that matters, but the world he creates.

Working from a screenplay by Pat Rushin, Gilliam drops characters into the middle of a tipsy world to see how they'll react.

This time, Gilliam creates a funky reality that mixes high tech gadgetry and low-tech grunge. Qohen lives in an abandoned, rotting church (think metaphorically), where he plies his trade in front of a large screen.

It's possible to see The Zero Theorem as an extension of Gilliam's work in the much-admired Brazil, although devotees of that movie may not find this one quite as appealing.

The Zero Theorem overflows with boundary-pushing visual invention: a crucifix in which the head of Jesus has been replaced by a security camera, for example.

Moreover, the actors are game for anything Gilliam throws at them, including some of the year's most preposterously amusing costumes from designer Carlo Poggioli.

The lack of a compelling story eventually takes its toll, but Zero Theorem is the kind of visual feast that Gilliam fans will tolerate better than those who haven't joined the club.

For those fans, even a Gilliam failure may be better than someone else's run-of-the-mill "success."

Great person, not a great movie

Bio-pic about a Nobel prize winner needed more interpretive spark.

The Lady is a big-screen biography of Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi, the Burmese leader who spent 15 years under house arrest for opposing her country's brutal military regime.

The movie also serves as a showcase for actress Michelle Yeoh , who gained international prominence when she appeared in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and who gives a carefully calibrated performance as a woman who sacrificed much to fight for Burma, now known as Mayanmar.

Aung San Suu Kyi's fate as a leader and icon may have been sealed in 1947 when her liberal-leaning father was assassinated on the eve of assuming the country's presidency. In the 1960s, Aung San Suu Kyi traveled to Britain, married an Oxford professor (David Thewlis) and had two sons.

Aung San Suu Kyi returned to Myanmar in 1988 to be with her dying mother, and stayed to fight for democracy. For most of her long confinement, Aung San Suu Kyi's husband and sons remained in England.

Director Luc Besson, who usually makes or produces stylish, propulsive action pictures (The Fifth Element) isn't exactly operating from a position of strength when it comes to a bio-pic with a heavy political overlay.

Besson and screenwriter Rebecca Frayn clearly admire Aung San Suu Kyi, as well they should. Absent from their picture, though, is a sense of incendiary passion about the subject, other than what was required to have chosen it in the first place.

Though consistently well-crafted, The Lady misses the greatness that Aung San Suu Kyi's story deserved. Focusing so much attention on the much-tested but enduring marriage between Aung San Suu Kyi and her professorial husband, Michael Aris, may have seemed a way to personalize a political story, but it also helped derail the movie's pursuit of larger and perhaps more significant purposes.

Aung San Suu Kyi, whose house arrest ended in 2010, recently took a seat in the Burmese Parliament, despite her severe (and totally justifiable) reservations about the country's new constitution, a document that dictates that a quarter of the parliament must come from the military. With or without a movie about her, Aung San Suu Kyi's fight continues.

'War Horse:' sentiment at full gallop

Steven Spielberg gives great spectacle in War Horse, but the sentimental notes may be sounded too loudly.

First, it was a book by Michael Morpurgo. Then it was a play by Nick Stafford, a theatrical showpiece that featured giant horse puppets. Now, it’s a movie by Steven Spielberg.

We’re talking about War Horse, a movie that makes maximum use of Spielberg’s talent for spectacle, as well as his penchant for pouring on the sentiment. I prefer the spectacle to the sentiment, but the mixture probably will result in one of the season’s most crowd-pleasing entertainments, a story held together by (as the title suggests) a horse.

How can you not feel sympathy for a horse that finds itself in the middle of some of the most horrific battles of World War I, at one point tangling himself in barbed wire on a scarred battlefield? It's one of the most agonizing sights you'll see this season, and Spielberg plays it for all it's worth.

Spielberg, of course, includes humans in his movie, as well, though none evokes as much emotion as the horse.

The story begins when Ted (Peter Mullan) outbids his landlord (David Thewlis) for a horse. Ted’s son (Jeremy Irvine) takes over care of the horse, which is more suited for running free than for the drudgery of farm work.

But Irvine’s Albert, who names the horse Joey, harnesses the horse’s energy and even proves that Joey can plow a rugged English field, an act of equine will that saves the family farm.

When war breaks out, Ted decides to sell Joey to the Army, and the movie becomes Spielberg’s foray into World War I. For his part, Albert pledges he will find Joey and return him to English pastures.

Once he becomes part of the military, Joey falls under the care of a strong but sensitive officer (Tom Hiddleston) – and the movie quickly breaks into episodic chunks, including a picture-slowing interlude in which Joey winds up in the care of a French grandfather (Niels Arestrup) and his granddaughter (Celine Buckens).

Of course, Albert eventually matures enough to join the British Army, which gives Spielberg a chance to show the kind of trench warfare that dominated that conflict. Spielberg and cinematographer Janusz Kaminski contrast the grim horror of war with the bucolic opening scenes, and there's no denying that some of the footage (horses pulling a huge cannon, for example) is both astonishing and sad.

And to make sure that we understand the humanity of both sides of the conflict, there's a scene that emphasizes the fact that the British soldiers and their German counterparts aren’t as different as they might believe themselves to be, the movie's can't-we-all-get-along moment. (Joey, it should be noted, falls into German hands at on point, and is pressed into service for the German army.)

Did I feel my heart strings being tugged at? Yes, but War Horse can seem so eager to connect with mainstream audiences that it loses some of its luster. There’s no denying Spielberg’s skill, but War Horse tries (too hard, I'd say) for the kind of epic grandeur that John Ford achieved when filming the American west.

War Horse boasts a dazzling display of craft; it's a horse-drawn tearjerker, the kind of old-fashioned movie that offers loads of big-screen reassurance no matter how harsh its content becomes. So I'm a little mixed on War Horse, which can be breathtakingly beautiful and ... well ... distressingly Spielbergian.