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The Zero Theorem overflows with boundary-pushing visual invention: a crucifix in which the head of Jesus has been replaced by a security camera, for example.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

Another Hollywood family grieves

It's not as bad you might think, but This is Where I Leave You is burdened by formula.

A mother (not Jewish) tells her four grown children that her departed husband (Jewish) made a final request: He wanted his family to sit shiva, the seven-day period of mourning that follows a Jewish death. During the period, the family receives guests who wish to pay condolences.

This is Where I Leave You uses a suburban shiva as a contrivance around which to string a strong comedy cast that's anchored by Jason Bateman and Tina Fey.

If you've seen the much-exposed trailer, you've got a pretty good idea about the movie's humor, which tends toward dismaying predictability.

And you certainly won't be surprised to learn that This is Where I Leave You eventually attempts to wring emotion out of the family's alternately awkward and combative encounters. The movie was directed by Shawn Levy (Date Night and Night at the Museum) from a screenplay by Jonathan Tropper, who adapted his own novel.

The story centers on Bateman's Judd Altman, a pleasant enough fellow who produces a radio talk show. Judd's life comes apart when he arrives home to find his wife (Abigail Spencer) in bed with his boss (Dax Shepard).

We are, of course, talking about an ultimate-bad-day scenario: Almost immediately after Judd's marriage and job go down the drain, he receives a phone call informing him of his father's death.

Judd, who becomes a kind of sitcom version of Job, heads home where he reunites with his mother (Jane Fonda) and siblings.

His older brother (Corey Stoll) runs the family's sporting goods store, and is manfully trying to perform his sexual duty with his wife (Kathryn Hahn). She's desperate to become pregnant.

Judd's sister Wendy (Fey) has a wavering marriage and two small children, one of whom has a fondness for using his potty in public, something the movie apparently regards as so hilarious, it must be repeated several times.

The irresponsible Altman brother (Adam Driver) shows up with an older woman (Connie Britton) in what's supposed to be his first serious relationship.

As the story unfolds, Judd reconnects with Penny (Rose Byrne), a woman who liked him in high school and who looms as a potential love interest. God forbid anyone in a Hollywood movie experience anything resembling lingering dejection and loneliness.

Timothy Olyphant turns up sporadically as one of Wendy's former boyfriends, a guy whose promising future hit the skids when he was brain damaged in an auto accident.

Not enough characters? Throw in Ben Schwartz as the local rabbi, a clergyman who the Altman brothers knew and tormented as a kid, and who now arrives to torment an audience.

The writing mixes sit-com style cleverness with heartfelt exchanges, creating scenes aimed at Hollywood's solid double; i.e., a blend of laughs and tears.

Apart from the fact that none of the siblings looks as if they've sprung from the same gene pool, the movie comes off as a formulaic attempt to be quirky.

Neither as painful as the trailer might lead you to believe nor as successful as it surely wanted to be, This is Where I Leave You feels like a movie that wanted to click in a big way, but put far too much effort into trying. It shows.

A young wife's vanishing act

Chastain and McAvoy strike impressive notes in The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby.

The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby: Them is a hybrid creation that results from making a two-hour feature out of two separate movies that ambitiously tried to observe a troubled marriage from the vantage points of both husband and wife.

This amalgamated production, which stars James McAvoy and Jessica Chastain, may not achieve greatness, but it's not without its virtues.

Chastain gives another deeply inhabited performance, this time playing a woman who's trying to shut down most of her feelings, and you certainly sense the high ambition in director Ned Benson's approach. He includes the work lives of the characters, as well as their relationships with parents and friends.

In this version, Benson proves a master of slow disclosure, gradually dispensing relevant information as we become more familiar with the characters. An estranged husband and wife are dealing with a tragic event that totally upended their marriage and just about everything else in their lives.

The movie moves back and forth between Eleanor (Chastain) and Conor (McAvoy). They open the movie in a scene set during their courtship. They're in a restaurant, and Conor lacks sufficient funds to pay the bill.

The adventurous Eleanor devises an escape route, bonding the couple with an illicit act that suggests the outlines of the relationship we'll get to known better as the story progresses.

After a suicide attempt, the shattered Eleanor moves in with her parents (Isabelle Huppert and William Hurt). A university professor, Hurt's character tries to help Eleanor, often to no avail.

Dad does, however, introduce her to a professor and former colleague (Viola Davis) who's teaching a course on identity formation, and who approaches life with a savvy, slightly cynical air that's a bit too unvaried to be totally convincing.

McAvoy's Conor, who's trying to keep a struggling bar and restaurant afloat, moves in with his father (Ciaran Hinds). In contrast to his son, Hinds' character operates a highly successful bar and restaurant, but seems stuck in his own brand of misery anyway.

Bill Hader plays Conor's pal and the chef at his restaurant, a guy who evidently has had a long-standing relationship with his buddy.

Eleanor Rigby (an avid Beatles fan, her father saddled her with the name) vanishes from Conor's life. Again and again, he tries to make contact with her.

At about two hours in length, the movie overstays its welcome, but I found it watchable, even when I felt as if I were observing actors trying to work out difficult issues in various challenging scene studies.

The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby makes you (at least it did me) eager to see Benson's two-film study of a marriage. Perhaps, then, its best parts -- and there are many -- would cohere in a more impressive way.

Kevin Smith gets his weird on

Director Kevin Smith's Tusk isn't much more than a stunt.

Watching Tusk, it's difficult not to think that Smith has crawled into the dark hole of Human Centipede territory. Supplementing gross-outs and physical mutilation with splashes of pseudo-philosophizing, Smith tells the story of Wallace Bryton (Justin Long), a podcaster who seems to delight in making fun of people.

Bryton and his on-air sidekick (Haley Joel Osment) call themselves members of the Not See party, a bad joke from a couple of guys who don't seem especially funny, but who consistently crack each other up.

Glib and self-satisfied, Bryton travels to Canada to interview a young man who sliced off his leg making a Kill Bill-style video that went viral on You Tube.

When Bryton arrives in Canada, he discovers that his Kill Bill subject has committed suicide. In the restroom of a bar, a dejected Bryton sees a letter tacked to a bulletin board, inviting all comers to visit a remote mansion to hear adventure stories.

Badly in need of a podcast subject, a curious Bryton answers the call.

The movie adopts horror movie overtones when Bryton meets Howard Howe (Michael Parks), an eloquent man who gives him drugged tea and employs surgical procedures to turn him into (wait for it) a walrus.

At first, it seems as if Howard is a self-appointed avenger for Bryton's cruelty. But that thread unravels, leaving us to wonder whether Smith has anything more in mind than shocks bolstered by occasional ramblings about whether humans are nothing more than sadistic animals.

Bryton's girlfriend (Genesis Rodriguez) and his partner (Osment) eventually begin a search for the vanished podcaster.

En route, they encounter an uncredited star, who plays a French-Canadian detective with a variable accent. (It's easy enough to figure out who's playing detective Guy Lapointe. Just search around a bit.)

Smith tries to temper the movie's macabre tendencies with a bit of humanizing end-of-picture emotion, but if you stick around for the final credits, you'll hear the director discussing a possible ending with a laughing colleague.*

They're both mightily amused in a smug way that undermines any emotion Smith might have achieved.

Say this, though: If Smith buckled down, he might have some serious horror chops.

*Smith reportedly conceived of Tusk after a podcast in which he and his producer Scott Mosier discussed an ad they'd seen in which a man offered free living space to anyone who'd agree to dress up as a walrus. Smith then asked his Twitter followers to vote on whether this crazy idea should be turned into a movie. The "yes" votes won. The ad evidently was a prank.

The fury of men behind bars

The accents may be difficult, but the message is clear.

By the time 19-year-old Eric Love arrives in an adult prison, he's already been schooled in brutality. Eric, the main figure in the hard-as-nails British movie Starred Up, has an explosive temper that leads him to acts of extreme violence. He's a young man who has had to spend most of his short life defending himself -- often in the most violent possible ways.

The term "starred up," by the way, refers to being sent to a maximum security prison at a tender age. That's a bit of British slang in a movie with accents so thick, you may find yourself wishing for subtitles. No matter. You'll get the gist.

At first impassive, Eric -- brilliantly played by Jack O'Connell in a shockingly physical performance -- quickly lets us know that he's defiant and uncontrollable. Eric also understands the dangerous environment into which he has been thrust. As soon as he reaches his cell, he makes a weapon out of his prison-issued toothbrush and razor.

We're not sure what landed Eric in jail, but whatever it was couldn't have been worth it. The prison is full of tough men and corrupted officials. Only a lone therapist (Rupert Friend) makes any attempt at rehabilitating lost souls. Friend's character believes that some prisoners can change and that Eric is young enough to be one of them.

Once director David Mackenzie and screenwriter Jonathan Asser establish the prison environment, they begin telling a story in which another prisoner tries to control Eric. He happens to be Eric's real father (Ben Mendelsohn), a man who's apparently serving a life sentence. Mendelsohn's Neville Love had little to do with raising his son, who grew up in institutional settings where he was abused.

Mendelsohn, who first came to international attention in the Australian film Animal Kingdom, displays the simmering frustration of a father who wants to protect his son, but who hardly knows the kid whose violent outbursts make you shudder.

In one of his super-tantrums, Eric bites into the crotch of a prison guard, and refuses to let go.

Two men seem to rule the prison. An indifferent warden (Sam Spruell) and a top con (Peter Ferinando). Together, they conspire to keep the lid on, sometimes succeeding, sometimes not.

We're thrown into this raging stew along with Eric, who gradually becomes the center of what might be described as the world's toughest coming-of-age story.

There's no sentiment in this hard-boiled world. But the more we see of this grim prison, the more we realize Mackenzie wants to pose fundamental questions about whether a man's humanity totally can be destroyed.

Starred Up tends to make us feel as caged as its prisoners: Put another way: I've seldom been so glad to see a gripping, admirable movie come to an end.

Hardy, Gandolfini carry 'The Drop'

The most powerful guys in The Drop , a tasty new crime movie set on the urban fringe, don't get much screen time. They're Chechen gangsters who have taken over gambling from Brooklyn thugs who used to be somebodies, but now are pretty much old news.

Cousin Marv's bar, where much of the story takes place, still bears Marv's name, and Marv still smokes incessantly at a corner desk, but everyone knows that Marv lost the neighborhood joint to Chechens who now use the place as one of their many drops for gambling money.

The bar's dingy, over-used look makes it seem as if you almost can smell the sour odor of cheap rye, and in a movie such as this, atmosphere counts.

Adapted by Dennis Lehane from his short story Animal Rescue, The Drop takes us into the lumpen world of low-level thugs, mob wannabes and at least one guy who's just plain crazy.

Directed by Michael R. Roskam, the Belgian director best known for the movie Bullhead, The Drop features strong performances from Tom Hardy and James Gandolfini.

Gandolfini plays Marv, and Hardy portrays Bob Saginowski, Marv's cousin, a bartender who doesn't come off as the brightest of lights. Bob works for Marv, and seems reasonably content with what appears to be a fairly meager lot.

The story begins when Bob finds a battered bull-terrier puppy in a garbage can. He rescues the dog, and later receives puppy-care advice from Nadia (Noomi Rapace), a woman who gradually warms up to Bob, who's not a pushy sort. She encourages him to name the puppy Rocco.

Because Bob may be getting played by some very dangerous people, you keep fretting about the dog's safety, and that gives the movie an extra layer of tension.

Lehane (Gone Baby, Gone and Mystic River) usually sets his stories in Boston, and I'm not sure what he gained by moving this one to Brooklyn.

But Lehane's plotting holds up, and the actors make us forgive dialogue that sometimes tries too hard to be ripe.

Hardy, the British actor last seen in Locke, is terrific when used correctly, and he's used to great effect here. It's impossible to look at him without thinking of Marlon Brando as Terry Malloy in On the Waterfront, but Hardy's not doing a Brando imitation. He's creating a character that's all his.

It's difficult to say just how good Hardy is without including a spoiler, so I'll say nothing more than it's best to reserve judgement about Hardy's shambling performance until the picture's done.

Familiar from the Swedish version of Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, Rapace works equally well as the tough but wary Nadia, and Gandolfini is superb as a guy whose authority has been reduced to worrying about the few free drinks that Bob occasionally dispenses.

Gandolfini's Bob has lost some of his spark, but seems just smart enough to make us worry. Marv lives with his sister (Ann Dowd).

Matthias Schoenaerts, who appeared in Bullhead, gives another notable performance. Schoenaerts plays a wild-card character, a psychopath who claims to be the dog's original owner.

Roskam, whose Bullhead dealt with cattle smuggling and the illegal hormone trade, does a solid job, laying on the right amount of grit and keeping the performances on track.

You'd think a Belgian director, a British actor and a Swedish actress might take some of the sting out of a grimy little U.S.-based crime movie, but a powerhouse cast turns this trickily plotted thriller into a lowlife fable that's steeped in just the right amount of sadness.

And, yes, some of that sadness stems from knowing that this was Gandolfini's last movie and wishing it weren't so.

A couple -- but not under the same roof

New York State now allows gay marriage, but there can be unanticipated consequences -- at least according to Love is Strange, a movie in which John Lithgow and Alfred Molina play a long-established Manhattan couple.

The movie begins when Molina's George and Lithgow's Ben marry after 39 years of living together. Their friends and relatives are overjoyed that the two finally can accomplish what they should long ago have been able to do.

But there's a downside. George works as a music teacher at a Catholic high school that can't abide gay marriage. The school had been willing to overlook George's sexual preferences, but now that he's tied the knot, policy demands that he be dismissed.

This sets up a situation in which the two men face economic pressures that force them to sell their apartment. They come up short on cash, unable to buy (or even rent) another place.

So George and Ben split up for what they hope is a temporary period. George moves in with two gay police officers whose lifestyle runs against his staid grain. His roommates like to party.

Ben takes up residency with a nephew (Darren Burrows) and his wife (Marisa Tomei). He's forced to share a room with the couple's teen-age son (Charlie Tahan), a kid who's none to happy about having a roommate. We feel for Geroge, no one past the age of 60 ever should have to spend a night in a bunk bed.

It seemed to me that on a purely practical level, Ben and George could have found a better solution to their problem. They're offered one living arrangement out of town, but can't abide the thought of leaving New York City.

In pushing the couple apart, director Ira Sachs creates a situation in which the movie's early joy increasingly turns to annoyance.

Ben, in particular, drives Tomei's character a little crazy. She works at home, and has difficulty abiding Ben's constant chatter. Understandably, Ben's teen-age bunkmate would like to have his room back.

Everyone in Love is Strange basically operates out of good will, but cramped living situations can tax anyone's patience.

Molina and Lithgow are entirely believable as a couple that long ago worked out the kinks in their relationship and -- if life were fair -- would be coasting comfortably toward the finish line. George still would be inspiring young people, and Ben would be continuing his career as a painter.

Sachs doesn't drown the story in sentiment, but can't entirely free the narrative of dull spots, as well as a bit of repetition.

Still, George and Ben are genuine enough to keep us interested, as evidenced by the fact that Ben's constant chattering not only taxes the nerves of his nephew's wife, but ours, as well.

In this case, that should be considered a compliment, an attempt to keep the movie from becoming nothing more than a lopsided plea for sympathy.

A super-provocative 'Wetlands'

A young woman revels in filth in this brash German import.

No point trying be circumspect about Wetlands, a gleefully provocative German film based on a notorious 2008 novel by Charlotte Roche. Let me be more specific: The movie's first important plot development arrives when 18-year-old Helen shaves her anus, cuts herself and lands in the hospital with a severe infection.

Once under medical supervision, Helen thinks about her life, her attraction to filth (literally), her best friend and various bodily aromas often regarded as unpleasant.

One supposes that Wetlands director David Wnendt wants to make you queasy here and there, but to do it with a punk freshness that runs against the story's often-perverse grain.

Moreover, Carla Juri, the actress who plays Helen, portrays a young woman who seems entirely shameless about her body, viewing it as a kind of malodorous collection of fluids (her term for one is "pussy mucous") that she not only accepts, but exalts in.

The presumption is that those of us who probably wouldn't think it's a good idea for two menstruating women to trade tampons are stuck with some rigidly prudish notion of what bodies really are.

Helen doesn't need to say it, but the movie seems to want to be a shriek against an increasingly Photoshopped world in which beauty and blemish are kept separate, as if by edict.

Helen, who provides the movie with its narration, begins by telling us that for as long as she can remember, she has had hemorrhoids. That explains why she's often shown picking at her rear-end.

I can't recall if Helen discussed diet. Probably not. But her vegetarian impulses include using a variety of vegetables for masturbatory purposes in scenes that may put you off the produce aisle for a bit.

For all its surface provocations -- and I haven't really given you many -- there's a story here.

Helen and her best friend Corinna (Marlen Kruse) engage in full-bore rebellion as Helen tries to reunite her divorced parents (Meret Becker and Axel Milberg).

Helen's behavior may be wild and even degenerate, but her motivations prove embarrassingly conventional.

While hospitalized, Helen develops a flirtatious relationship with her male nurse (Christoph Letkowski). He displays an extraordinary tolerance for her various penchants, which frequently blur the line between the movie's attempts to be bold and its tendency to be ... well ... disgusting.

There's no denying Wnendt's visual chops or his fondness for defying expectation with upbeat, lively pacing.

Juri also proves a force with which to be reckoned. And if it counts for anything, nothing in either Wnendt's or Juri's approach seems colored by self-reproach.

Still, I'm not sure that Wetlands adds up to anything more than a celebration of its attempts to be as wildly transgressive as possible. Why is the movie showing us all this stuff? Perhaps because it can.

It's Elvis! Er, not really

The Identical, a major helping of southern-fried corn, arrives so thickly battered with cliches you can hardly chew through it.

In a style that's as awkward as it is "old-fashioned," the movie tells a story about twins separated at birth. One of them is raised as a preacher's son. The other becomes a singing sensation and national heartthrob, who seems to be modeled on Elvis Presley.

Singer Blake Rayne, who plays both the preacher's son and the popular singer, can't do much with either role. He moves like Elvis, but has a thicker, less expressive face than the aforementioned Mr. Presley, who had a stillborn twin brother.

The Identical is the sort of movie that denotes the passage of time by adjusting externals, sometimes to the point of ridiculousness. When we arrive in the '60s, for example, the twins are given silly perms that make them look like shopping-mall Samsons.

The story begins in the 1930s when impoverishment forces a dirt-poor farmer in grimy overalls and his wife to give away one of their newborn twins to a better-heeled childless couple, a preacher and his wife (Ray Liotta and Naomi Judd).

Horribly miscast as a Baptist preacher, Liotta's character wants his grown son Ryan to enroll in a seminary. The young man, on the other hand, hears the call of his own dream, which is to sing and swivel in Elvis-like fashion, just like the brother he doesn't know he has.

Oddly, the non-celebrity brother, who takes up most of the screen time, doesn't seem overly curious about why the famous brother -- named Drexel -- looks exactly like him.

The movie piles improbability upon improbability as the non-famous twin struggles to find himself while the script struggles to locate even a mildly affecting line of dialogue.

The movie manages to become even dopier when Ryan finds work as a Drexel impersonator. He's so good at it, that he leaves girls screaming as if they were looking at the real thing.

Predictably, a frustrated Ryan eventually wants to stop being a facsimile and strike out on his own.

The movie seems to have some sort of half-realized religious agenda, some of it coming from Liotta and Judd's characters. At one point, Liotta's preacher-man takes an evangelical tilt, discoursing on the glories of the state of Israel while reminding his congregants that Jesus, after all, was Jewish.

Given what look like the movie's attempts to inject its brand of Christianity into a supposedly broad-based entertainment, I probably shouldn't have been surprised when Drexel turns up wearing a Miami-beach sized chai -- the Hebrew letter signifying life -- around his neck. We later find out the twins' biological mother was Jewish, which made me wonder whether Drexel had been raised on a diet of matzoh balls and grits.

The only reasons for seeing this film are to get an early start on your year's 10 worst list or if you're looking for the kind of laughs that come from a movie that seems to have no idea how ridiculous it can be.