Bob's Cinema Diary: 6/12/19 -- Amerian Woman and Halston

American Woman

Grating in the early going, Sienna Miller's performance as an abrasive single mom and grandmother trying to scrape by in a small Pennsylvania town eventually finds its rhythm. American Woman provides Miller with an opportunity to play a woman who faces a cascading series of problems. When we meet Miller's Deb Callahan, she's having an affair with a married man (Kentucker Audley and trying to be a mother to her daughter (Sky Ferreira), a 17-year-old who already has a child of her own. Constantly at odds with her family (an older sister played by Christina Hendricks and a disapproving mother Amy Madigan), Deb faces a life-changing tragedy. Her daughter vanishes. Fearing the worst, Deb blames Tyler (Alex Neustaedter), the irresponsible teen father of her daughter's child. The movie then leaps ahead -- eventually by at least a decade -- to find Deb trying to take care of her grandson (her daughter remains missing) and living with an abusive lout (Pat Healy) she must get out of her life. Deb eventually takes up with a younger man (Aaron Paul) who seems really to love her and who makes a fine surrogate father for her now-teenaged grandson. Director Jake Scott gives the cast plenty to work with, as the movie moves toward its inevitable conclusion: Deb's emergence as an independent woman. Miller's roller-coaster performance hits strong notes. Hendricks does well as a loving but sensible sister who's married to a man (Will Sasso) who provides the one thing that Deb's life always seems to lack: continuity. Nicely rendered moments of reconciliation have an impact, but overall American Woman suffers from an overload of woe. Moreover, its title suggests ambitions that never are quite fulfilled.

Halston

Director Frédéric Tcheng's documentary follows the career of a fabled fashion designer whose work dominated nearly three decades: from hot pants to evening dresses sculpted from a single piece of fabric. Halston benefits from the arc of the designer's high-profile life. Born Roy Halston Frowick, Halston turned himself into a single-named icon who made a remarkable ascent. He began as a hat designer at prestigious Bergdorf Goodman and eventually created a brand of his own. Making use of interviews and footage from the glam world Halston inhabited, Tcheng brings us into Halston's orbit, which includes models and celebrities such as Liza Minnelli. Every story of a remarkable ascendance needs a steep decline. Halston has a doozy. Late in his career, the designer decided to enter the world of mass-marketing, partnering with J.C. Penny to open the doors of fashion to ordinary women. Feeling abandoned, Halston's high-end followers began to desert him. A variety of corporate maneuvers followed and Halston's empire eventually crumbled. When he died of AIDS in 1990, he was 57. In the whirl of success, drugs, and achievement that Tcheng shows us, Halston remains something of a mystery, a galvanizing figure who never fully emerges. But if you're a sucker for a rise-and-fall story or you're interested in fashion, Halston won't disappoint.

A fine movie from Italy and two lesser movies as a disappointing summer draws to a close

For the most part, this has been a summer of discontents, to borrow (badly, I suppose) from Shakespeare.

The pleasures we have found at the movies have been mostly on the fringes, so it's probably entirely appropriate that Labor Day weekend, regarded as the conclusion of summer ever since the days when politicians put their white shoes back in the closet for another year, follows suit.

A DIRECTOR GRAPPLES WITH CRISIS ON AND OFF SET

In Mia Madre, Italian actress Margherita Buy plays a woman with plenty on her plate. Her character -- also named Margherita -- is directing a movie, dealing with her aging mother's decline, trying to be a good mother to her teen-age daughter, and seeking a break from her relationship with a needy lover. She's also trying to coax a performance out of an egotistical American actor (a funny John Turturro) who shows up to play the part of a beleaguered factory owner in a movie about labor/management conflict. Director Nanni Moretti appears in the movie as Margherita's brother, a reassuring man who holds together even when others are falling apart. Moretti (Dear Diary, We Have a Pope and The Son) follows Margherita as she rushes between her movie set and the hospital where her once highly competent mother (Giulia Lazzarini) is slipping ever deeper into the fog of dementia. As if all this weren't enough for a single movie, Moretti includes flashbacks, fantasies, and, in what seems to be a case of piling on, a flood that forces Margherita out of her apartment. Perhaps directing a movie and trying to balance an emotionally taxing personal life aren't entirely different enterprises. Both require the ability to function in the midst of apparent chaos and both require belief in the illusion that circumstances can be controlled.

A STRESSED OUT SOLDIER FINDS A CHALLENGING NEW JOB

Director Alice Winocour (Augustine) succeeds mostly in frustrating us with Disorder, a portentous thriller about a traumatized French soldier (Matthias Schoenaerts) who lands a temporary job guarding the family of a Lebanese businessman (Percy Kemp). When the ostentatiously wealthy tycoon leaves on business trip, Schoenaerts' Vincent is left to fight a series of invaders who are connected to a murky, arms-related plot in which the businessman's wife (Diane Kruger) and her young son (Zaid Errougui-Demonsant) are targeted. Sensible behavior (leaving the gated mansion that's under attack, for example) too often gives way to atmospherics as Schoenaerts and Kruger struggle with the screenplay's insistent vagueness. To me, their efforts went for naught. Winocour teases us into involvement without giving Disorder a satisfying enough payoff.

IS HE ACCIDENT PRONE OR IS SOMETHING ELSE AFOOT?

The 9th Life of Louis Drax begins as if it's going to be a seriously intriguing drama about a nine-year-old boy who spends much of the movie in a coma after he falls off a cliff. Rather than an examination of how people cope with tragedy, The 9th Life begins raising doubts about whether Louis (Aiden Longworth) is accident prone or the victim of sustained abuse. As director Alexandre Aja moves through a variety of flashbacks, we meet Louis' angry stepfather (Aaron Paul), a neurologist (Jamie Dornan) who wants to help the boy, and the boy's mother (Sarah Gadon). Dornan's character believes that it's possible to carry on mind-melding communication with people in deep comas. Additional complications arise when Dornan's character, who's married, begins to fall for Gadon's character. Rather than building on its strong premise, Max Minghella's screenplay -- based on a 2004 novel by Liz Jensen -- devolves into a strained and unsatisfying thriller that's intent on leading us down one more muddled path.

The terrors of long-distance warfare

Eye in The Sky brings ethnical issues into agonizing focus.

The day after I saw Eye saw Eye in The Sky, bombs went off at Brussels' main airport and in the city's subway. Although Eye in The Sky deals with fictional events in Nairobi and involves al-Shabaab terrorists who seem far removed from Europe, the movie raises issues that resound with disturbing urgency in a post-Paris, post-Brussels world.

It's also worth remembering that Nairobi has known its share of terror, including a devastating attack at the upscale Westgate Mall in 2013.

Eye in the Sky brims with questions: If it were possible to know about an impending terrorist attack or at least to suspect that one was more than likely, how much collateral damage would be tolerable to prevent it? And what if one of the people in the path of a devastating drone attack happened to be a nine-year-old girl with no connection to anyone's political agenda?

Most movies that directly tackle ethical issues melt into puddles of prosaically stated positions. But Eye in the Sky -- deftly directed by Gavin Hood (Tsotsi and Rendition) and sharply written by Guy Hibbert -- brings its issues to the fore without sacrificing much by way of dramatic credibility and tension.

The story takes place in several locations, notably Great Britain, the US and Kenya.

Early on, we meet Col. Katherine Powell (Helen Mirren), a British officer who operates out of London.

Once her mission shifts from capture to kill, Col. Powell becomes increasingly eager to get on with the job. She's a steely officer whose focus on the mission tends to obliterate all other concerns, so much so that she's willing to fudge here and there if it means taking out high-priority targets she's been pursuing for years.

Questions about the propriety of the attack are further complicated by the fact that one of the jihadists is an American citizen and two are British citizens. Under what circumstances can it be legally allowable for a country to kill its own citizens, even those participating in jihad?

Drone operations are conducted from Nevada, where a young officer (Aaron Paul) and a newly assigned co-pilot (Phoebe Fox) are charged with flying a drone over Nairobi. If there's an attack, Paul's Steve Watts will have to pull the trigger.

A conference room full of London officials must make the final decision about whether to fire a deadly Hellfire missile into a Nairobi neighborhood where the terrorists have gathered.

At this meeting, we meet a general played by the late Alan Rickman and a nervous group of civilian bureaucrats portrayed by Jeremy Northam, Richard McCabe and Monica Dolan.

Rickman's character upholds the military position. Among the others, no one wants to shoulder blame for a decision that could lead to a public relations disaster. Frequently, the characters insist on referring the matter "up," meaning they want someone of higher rank to take responsibility.

On the ground in Kenya, an operative (Barkhad Abdi) helps provide information. Abdi's character employs a battery operated camera embedded in a mechanical beetle to provide views from inside the house where the jihadists have gathered to prepare for a suicide bombing.

And that's yet another of the movie's concerns: The men and women who are conducting this mission see almost everything on screens. They're engaged in a brand of combat that operates at far remove from the scene of destruction.

But that doesn't mean that they aren't affected by what they're doing or that they're unaware of the many ironies that infiltrate their high-tech worlds.

I can't know Hood's every intention, but beneath all the bickering, politicking and worrying about who may get blamed for what, you'll find something else: The movie demonstrates that the people who make these terrible decisions don't take them lightly. They'll all have to live with the consequences of choices that seldom produce clear-cut results.

The movie's smart enough not to delude us: It reminds us that there are situations in which every option has an awful -- and perhaps even unbearable -- downside.

Taut and chastening, Eye in The Sky leaves you saddened and shaken.

Two from the indie side

FAMILY LIFE UNDER EXTREME DURESS

A widowed working-class father tries to raise two boys while coping (or failing to do so) with the death of his wife in Hellion, a drama set in Galveston, Texas. Dad (Aaron Paul) clearly lacks the skills to handle his sons, and the older boy (Josh Wiggins) is in the midst of a prolonged rebellion that lands him in trouble with the law. Director Kat Candler has hold of a strong subject, but her movie tends to dawdle as it searches for a way to bring its many issues to a dramatic boil. Wiggins' Jacob is a motocross enthusiast, but Hellion isn't really about a kid's fascination with motocross: It's a look at the impact of a father with lmiited parenting skills on his two sons, the younger of them played by Deke Garner. At one point, Garner's Wes is sent to live with his aunt (Juliette Lewis), a woman who believes that her brother-in-law is obviously deficient when it comes to assuming responsibility. Paul does a nice job portraying a man who as trouble admitting that he doesn't know how to control his sons, but who wants to keep custody of them. Wiggins, who provides the movie with its center, does a fine job portraying a basically decent kid whose future is uncertain. Eventually, atmosphere and situation must give way to drama. Unfortunately, Candler's high-powered finale doesn't quite ring true.

A LOW-STAKES TEEN MOVIE

In Ping Pong Summer, director Michael Tully makes a return trip to youth. Ping Pong Summer tells the story of Rad Miracle (Marcello Conte), a teen-ager who goes on a seashore vacation with his mother (Lea Thompson), father (John Hannah) and sneering sister (Helena May Seabrook). Early on, Rad encounters the local bully (Joseph McCaughtry), who also happens to be an ace at Ping Pong. That gvies the movie the opportunity to build toward a final face-off at the Ping Pong table between McCaughtry's Lyle and Rad. Although Rad's beginning to take an interest in girls, he can't bring himself to express his fondness a local beauty (Emmi Shockley), even though she seems to like him. Set during the 1980s, the mildly diverting Ping Pong Summer proceeds as if we all might share a fondess for the Maryland shore where the Miracle family takes its vacation. Predictably, the film introduces an oddball woman (Susan Sarandon) who lives next door to the Miracles and who we know from the start will play a role in Rad's inevitable march toward self-confidence.

Speed? Yes Everything else? No

I wasn't going to bother with Need for Speed until I realized the movie starred Aaron Paul, best known as Jesse Pinkman, the young man who made meth on TV's Breaking Bad.

Meth. Speed. I thought maybe Paul had found a new drug on which he could pin his career hopes.

OK, I'm kidding. I knew that Need for Speed was developed from a popular Electronic Arts video game, but I'm not kidding about Paul. I wanted to see what he could do on the big screen.

The answer: If Need for Speed is any indication (and I hope it isn't), not much.

Paul plays Tobey Marshall, a blue-collar guy from Mt. Kisco, New York. Thanks to a few contrivances Tobey joins with Julia (Imogen Poots) on a cross-country trip. The goal is for Tobey to reach San Fancisco so that he can compete in a high stakes race sponsored by a former racer named Monarch (Michael Keaton).

Guess what? It's not all about racing. Tobey wants to defeat his arch rival Dino (Dominic Cooper), the immoral rich guy responsible for the death of Tobey's best bud (Harrison Gilbertson).

Dino forces Gilbertson's Pete into a lethal crash during an early-picture race, but the wrongly accused Tobey spends two years in jail for the crime.

Joining Tobey on his four-wheeled adventures are his pals Benny (Scott Mescudi), Finn (Rami Malek) and Joe (Ramon Rodriguez).

When Finn leaves his day job, the movie adds some gratuitious nudity to the proceedings. Eager to rejoin his racing pals, Finn shocks his office mates by stripping off his clothes, baring his butt and returning to the world of vroom-and-zoom.

En route to San Francisco, Tobey and Julia are chased by cops and by other enemies who want to stop them.

And just in case you don't think cars are enough, the directors add a Cessna that serves as a traffic reporter for the speeding Tobey and, later, a couple of helicopters.

The action (yes, there's plenty) sometimes seems more like vehicular homicide than racing with overturned cars and fiery crashes that look as if no one possibly could survive them.

Nothing makes a great deal of sense here, and as shocking as it is to say, the movie makes the Fast & Furious films -- at least the better ones -- look like masterpieces.

Based on his work in Breaking Bad, I'm thinking there's more to Paul than Need for Speed allows him show. I hope I'm right.