A tense look at one man's revenge

  Basing his movie on a true story, director Gus Van Sant returns to the 1970s with Dead Man's Wire, a movie about an aspiring entrepreneur who takes a mortgage company executive hostage. Tony Kiritsis (Bill Skarsgard) blames the mortgage company for crushing his chance to grab the brass ring. He wanted to develop a shopping center but defaulted on his loan.

  Some have seen Dead Man’s Wire as Van Sant’s ode to ordinary men whose ambitions are thwarted by those who hold the purse strings. Kiristis accuses the mortgage company of preventing him from signing prospective tenants.

   Whatever happened, one thing is clear: Dead Man’s Wire owes its success to the tension created by a device the kidnapper employs. 

  Kiritsis strings a wire around his captive’s neck, connecting it to the trigger of a 12-gauge shotgun. Errant movements or sudden jerks of the head will lead to the hostage’s death. For those moments when he can't keep his finger on the trigger, Kiritsis rigs a system that will do the job for him.

   Skarsgard plays the aggrieved Kiritsis as a “justice” seeker who's sometimes at war with his own decency. Kiritsis winds up taking his hostage to his apartment, where he treats him like a guest — albeit one who might not survive his visit. Kiritsis doesn’t seem to know whether to act like a host or a kidnapper.

    Early on, Kiritsis spells out his demands. He wants a public apology from the head of Indianapolis-based Meridian Mortgage (Al Pacino employing a Southern accent in a small role), $5 million in compensation for the profits he could have reaped, and immunity from any charges stemming from the kidnapping.

   For all his careful planning, Kiristis makes a major mistake at the outset. He didn't know Pacino's character, his original target, was vacationing in Florida. Kiristis had to settle for taking the man's son (an effective Dacre Montgomery).

    Pacino’s presence and the movie's premise have spawned comparisons to another hostage drama, Sidney Lumet’s brilliant Dog Day Afternoon (1977). For me, that's a stretch because Dog Day reflected a feverish cultural moment, revolving around a confused character whose motives were deeply personal. 

   Dead Man's Wire doesn't quite work as a broadside against capitalist greed or as a portrayal of a signature 70s moment . Kiristis didn't want to topple the system; he was keen to join it. Absent that, he wanted a payoff.

    A small supporting cast rounds out the tale. Colman Domingo serves up a sampling of '70s cool as a local DJ to whom Kiritsis looks for wisdom. Cary Elwes plays a local detective who tries to reason with Kiristis. The two have crossed paths before.

    Taken as a small, tautly strung story built around Skarsgard’s jittery performance, Dead Man’s Wire catches you up. Let’s call it a footnote of a movie that keeps you watching -- even if it doesn't prompt much by way of further consideration.

    

   

Diverse cast moves into 'House of Gucci'

  No swords, sandals or aliens can be found in director Ridley Scott's House of Gucci, a drama about the decline of the Gucci family and the murder of Maurizio Gucci, a crime engineered by his estranged wife. 

  The day after I saw the movie, the following headline appeared in Variety:"House of Gucci First Reactions Range From Absurdly Enjoyable to Bloated and Uneven Mess."

   Yes, I thought, that's it. Not one of those. All of them.

   The movie focuses more on internecine warfare among the Guccis than on Maurizio's murder. En route to the sensational 1995 crime -- for which the former Patrizia Reggiani was found guilty and served 18 years in an Italian prison -- the movie offers a sumptuous tour of the accouterments of Gucci wealth. 

   You'll also find an abundance of vividly incompatible performances given by a variety of actors speaking English in what amounts to a Babylon of variable Italian accents.  

    Sporting goggle-sized glasses, Adam Driver portrays the mild-mannered Maurizio Gucci, the man who was overwhelmed into marrying Patrizia, played in Scott's telling by Lady Gaga, who doesn’t shrink from the power of her considerable presence. 

   There's no universe in which I would have thought to cast Al Pacino and Jeremy Irons as brothers, but Scott pulls it off. 

    Irons portrays the thin-lipped, severely aristocratic Rodolfo Gucci, a man who rules over the company with his brother Aldo (Pacino), a portly exuberant man who looks as if he hasn’t denied himself many pleasures during his journey to great wealth.

   Scott brings lots of opera to the soundtrack. Why not? House of Gucci brims with oversized emotions, devious betrayals, and, finally, murder -- ingredients that fuel many operas.

   Gaga barges into the movie in much the same way as she barges into the Gucci family — willfully. She makes it clear that Patrizia easily could have overpowered the bookish Maurizio, rendered by Driver as an ineffectual young man who gradually accustoms himself to power and luxury.

    Of course, there's also Patrizia's swinging hips, generous cleavage, and pugnacious spirit.

And the rest of the cast .... 

 

 Unrecognizable after what must have been a gargantuan makeover, Jared Leto plays Aldo's son, a balding airhead of a man referred to by his father as "an idiot, but my idiot." Leto’s mumbled line readings are bizarre, amusing, and confounding. (Yes, that's Leto to the right, an actor who turns himself into a human special effect in  House of Gucci.)

   Salma Hayek signs on Pina, a psychic Patrizia discovers while watching TV and with whom she builds a relationship. Pina eventually helps Patrizia locate the assassins who will shoot Maurizio.

    Jack Huston appears as Domenico De Sole, a background figure who eventually moves forward to play a part in the financial drama in which the Guccis are expelled from their own empire.

   Truth be told, Scott -- working from a screenplay by Becky Johnston and Roberto Bentivegna -- doesn't do a great job with financial complications but the gist remains clear.

   At times, I wondered whether Scott was being serious or whether he was secretly gagging over high-fashion absurdity — its pretensions, its obsession with money, and its furious competitiveness.  

  At other times, I was sure that Scott was trying to be campy. 

  And at still other times, I thought he might be striving to create a great mercantile family drama.

  I settled on “all of the above.”  

 So here's my final word or two: From the start, House of Gucci, a lavish hunk of a movie, does its best not to succeed but manages to be entertaining anyway. Maybe someone should turn it into a real opera.

   And, then, there's Pacino's Aldo - vast of spirit, sloppily sentimental, and conniving. At times, I felt as if Pacino were about to swallow every scene that he's in -- and sometimes I wish he had.

    All I can say is set aside expectations and enjoy watching a director and his cast push, bully and insinuate themselves into a beautifully dressed world where trashy behavior and haute-couture pirouettes mingle and collide.

'The Irishman' -- stories from a hitman's past

Martin Scorsese, Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, and Joe Pesci have made an epic that reminds us how terrific all of them can be.

I wondered why, at the end of director Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman, I felt so sad. The movie concludes — and I don’t consider this a spoiler — with an aging union official, who’s also a hitman, contemplating his demise. Shouldn’t I have felt a sense of satisfaction that the inexorable flow of time was about to do to Frank Sheeran, a.k.a., The Irishman, what he had done to so many others?

The reason for the sadness, I think, is complex. It mixes love for the movies of my younger days with the arc of Frank's story. I'm unable to separate the two, so I'm not going to try.

Frank Sheeran first came to light in a 2004 book by Charles Brandt. Titled, I Heard You Paint Houses, the book included the claim that Frank killed Jimmy Hoffa, the Teamster boss who was revered by his membership. (Painting houses evidently is a mob euphemism for carrying out murders.)

For the record — and also in the movie — Frank also said he murdered Joey Gallo, a.k.a. Crazy Joe, a famous mob murder that took place in 1972 at Umberto’s Clam House in Manhattan's Little Italy.

In the movie, Robert De Niro portrays Frank and Al Pacino plays Hoffa. Frank’s closeness to Hoffa made the assassination possible. As someone who seldom seemed troubled by his work, Frank found himself in an uncomfortable position regarding Hoffa. He had to kill a man he admired and with whom he shared a common ethnic background.

Frank’s crime life began in earnest when he met Russell Bufalino (Joe Pesci), a soft-spoken guy who ran a crime family in Northeastern Pennsylvania. Bufalino took a liking to Frank and recommended him to Hoffa, who eventually made him a union official.

When Hoffa tried to reinstate himself as Teamster president after spending time in jail for jury tampering, the mob got tired of his bravado. They wanted him gone. Hoffa didn’t want to be gone. They decided to make him gone.

But the plot and its revelations about corruption, though carefully detailed in Steve Zaillian’s fine screenplay, aren’t at the heart of what makes The Irishman great.

To understand that, you need to understand that Scorsese, who'll be 77 when The Irishman begins its run on Netflix on Nov. 27, has returned to the gangster turf that spawned his signature work. Only this time, like his aging characters, he's moving at a slower pace. The Irishman runs for three hours and 20 minutes -- and, no, it never seemed too long to me.

In The Irishman, Scorsese seems to take less delight in the colorful way his characters speak and in the way their violence can spark a scene. A more deliberate pace takes the Scorsese's characters beyond amusement and, at times, even makes them seem a little pathetic.

The bulk of the action takes place in the 1950s and ‘60s, which enables Scorsese to use lots of period music. He begins with the Five Satins' In the Still of the Night for an opening that finds Frank old and friendless in a nursing home. He begins talking about his life. In The Still of the Night, the background singers chime in with a telling two-word refrain: "I remember. I remember."

As Frank remembers his life, dozens of characters come and go. Scorsese’s large cast includes Ray Romano, as Bill Buffalino, a Teamster attorney; Bobby Cannavale as a gangster Felix 'Skinny Razor' DiTullio; and an incendiary Stephen Graham, as Tony Provenzano, a New Jersey-based hot-head who challenged Hoffa’s Teamster leadership.

The connection to movies proves inescapable. It’s not only Frank who's dying: It’s a certain kind of gangster film; it’s the period in which De Niro, Pacino and later Pesci rose to prominence. The Irishman might be Scorsese’s goodbye to a part of his own big-screen life -- and maybe to his youth.

This is not to say that anyone in The Irishman plans to retreat from the screen. But I can’t imagine that they’ll ever make another film like The Irishman, an epic tale of corruption and color that reminds you that De Niro, who has been in a lot of questionable movies, still can be great, that Pacino’s flare and bombast can imbue a character with brute power, and that Pesci, the movie’s true revelation, can find a quiet resolve in himself, a sense of proportion that allows him to steal the movie. Bufalino asserts his power with a spirit bordering on resignation.

To allow his characters to appear youthful in early scenes, Scorsese employs a de-aging technique that can be a little disorienting, making the faces of his characters look slightly unreal at times. But somehow it works and the acting is so strong that the de-aging becomes part of the atmosphere Scorsese creates, one of estrangement and distance.

At one point, Bufalino and Frank drive across the country with their wives (Kathrine Narducci and Kate Arrington). They're en route to a wedding in Detroit, but the trip really is a cover for something more sinister. The drive crops up from time-to-time as Frank narrates a story full of vividly recalled memories that still feel anchored in the past.

I loved that sense of fading time about The Irishman, which also has plenty of the expected ingredients: violence, bloodshed, and the gangster grit that Scorsese’s moving cameras have been spreading across screens for years.

The Irishman may impress you as somber, particularly as the story nears its resolution. The feeling is reinforced throughout by Frank’s relationship with Peggy, one of his four daughters, played as an adult by Anna Paquin. She knows her father and rejects him. Forget the law. She's his judge.

Peggy and also time. Mobsters, union leaders, violent men, and blowhards are all subject to the same destiny. All of them eventually will die and be forgotten.

Frank doesn’t relish the idea. At one point, he talks to a priest. Frank is too honest to say he feels remorse. He says he feels nothing about the things he's done. One thing he does seem to feel — and De Niro’s performance reflects it — is a reluctance entirely to vanish. Frank wants his body housed in a vault because it strikes him as a little less final than burial or cremation.

It’s the last futile hope of a gangster, the idea that somehow he’ll be able to evade — if only by a shade — the one hitman that can’t be beaten.

'Hangman' chokes on bad dialogue

I don't make 10-worst lists anymore, mostly because I'd rather devote my end-of-the-year writing to movies that earned praise and did something to advance what I think of (perhaps naively) as cinema culture. If I did want to point to some of the year's worst movies, I'd have difficulty keeping Hangman off the list. A thriller that allows an exhausted looking Al Pacino to dredge out a southern accent, Hangman involves its entire cast (also included are Brittany Snow and Karl Urban) to founder. Another police procedural about cops trying to catch a serial killer, Hangman serves up reams of unimaginative dialogue and dull plot twists. Snow plays a New York Times reporter who returns to her southern hometown to do a story about what it's like to be a detective. She joins Urban's character as the stumbles through an investigation. The screenplay contrives to bring Pacino's Archer, a retired detective with a fondness for crossword puzzles, into the fray. Director Johnny Martin gets nothing out of his cast as this preposterous thriller lumbers toward obscurity. The title, by the way, derives form the killer, a fiend who uses the Hangman game in his crimes, adding a letter to each blank as he commits a new and grisly murder. If someone were to autopsy this dud, only three letters would be possible: DOA.

An aging rocker seeks redemption

Al Pacino stars as a singer who squandered his talent.

In 2005, a British musician named Steve Tilston learned that John Lennon had written him an encouraging letter. The catch: Tilston never received the letter, which was written in 1971 and sent to a rock magazine, where it apparently languished until it wound up in the hands of a collector.

The story instantly raised questions about how Tilston's life might have unfolded had he been able to read that letter when it was sent.

That mind-blowing incident inspired director Dan Fogelman's Danny Collins, the fictionalized story of a sell-out American musician (Al Pacino) who -- like his real-life counterpart -- learns too late that he once received a letter from Lennon urging him to pursue his own vision.

Never having seen the letter, Danny followed a commercial path. When we meet Danny, he has become a kind of show-business joke, a singer whose work appeals to aging boomers who implore him to repeat what amounts to a series of insipid hits, most notably a song entitled "Hey, Baby Doll."

When Danny's manager (Christopher Plummer) finds the letter and presents it to Danny as a birthday present, the singer's world is ... you'll pardon the expression ... rocked.

Danny suddenly realizes what he's known all along: He's wasted his life on trivial rock and wanton sex, much of it to the accompaniment of drugs and alcohol.

From an artistic point of view, Danny committed the worst of all sins: He betrayed his own talent.

Deep into his 60s, Danny decides that it's time for a change.

He drops a pre-arranged tour, junks his philandering young girlfriend, leaves his plush Los Angeles home and heads to New Jersey, where he checks into a Hilton hotel. He insists on having a baby grand piano delivered to his room so he can write the music he should have been creating all along.

Why New Jersey? Danny has a grown son (Bobby Cannavale) in New Jersey. He's never seen the young man, but Danny thinks it's time to set his personal life straight. To do this, Danny must overcome the justifiable resentments of a son he essentially abandoned.

Cannavale's Tom works construction. His wife (Jennifer Garner) is expecting the couple's second child. The first child, a daughter, suffers from ADHD, and touches Danny's heart. He wants to be a grandpa.

Danny's commitment to sobriety wavers with the ups and downs of his developing relationship with his son. He also tries to seduce the hotel's manager (Annette Bening), a prim woman who's smart enough not to fall for Danny's banter -- at least not at first.

Neither drippy enough to slop over into sentiment nor observant enough to be entirely convincing, Danny Collins hardly qualifies as the kind of movie in which you'd like to see Pacino.

Pacino makes it clear that Danny isn't the least bit deluded about the kind of figure he cuts. He's tired of being preposterous, but he's also addicted to the material success that a one-note career has given him.

Fogelman (Crazy, Stupid Love) doesn't always make obvious choices, although much of what transpires in Danny Collins feels contrived.

Watching Pacino has its rewards, but this story of a man seeking redemption in his golden years fails to provide either him or us with sufficient challenge.

Major actors, minor movie

No movie starring Al Pacino, Christopher Walken and Alan Arkin can be all bad -- and Stand Up Guys isn't.

Putting Christopher Walken, Al Pacino and Alan Arkin into the same movie raises a large amount of justifiable expectation. None of these veterans have worked together before, and it's reasonable to assume that the cumulative weight of their old-pro experience will deliver the big-screen goods.

Unfortunately, Stand Up Guys -- the story of aging mobsters forced to come to grips with their mortality -- only partially lives up to the promise suggested by its powerhouse cast.

As directed by Fisher Stevens, from a script by Noah Haidle, Stand Up Guys finds its best moments in the relationship between Pacino and Walken, as a couple of bottom-feeding hoods who inhabit the lower echelons of the criminal subculture.

Walken's Doc, who spends most of his time painting pictures of sunrises, refers to himself as a "retired" man. He lives in a modest apartment. His hell-raising days appear to be done. He's proud of the fact that he has cable. Hey, at a certain point, you take your pleasures where you find them.

A low-key drama begins when Pacino's Val (short for Valentine) is released from a 28-year stretch in prison. Val's the movie's most "stand-up" guy because he served his time without ratting out any of his cronies.

Walken's Doc meets Val upon his release. The two hug awkwardly, and the movie proceeds to chart the next 24 or so hours in the lives of these aging felons.

Looking to party after his long prison stint, Val visits a local brothel, only to discover that he's unable to function sexually. Doc proposes a Viagra solution -- which leads the two to break into a pharmacy.

Val has his "party," but even that has its downside. Having consumed too much Viagra, Val winds up at a hospital, where we meet a nurse (Julianna Margulies), who happens to be the daughter of another of their old partners in crime, a getaway driver named Hirsch.(Yes, the script definitely could have done without another joke about a guy whose erection lasts more than four hours.)

Hirsch, we learn, is languishing in a nursing home where he's suffering from emphysema.

To add some proverbial insult to the injury of age-related decline, a vicious mob boss known as Claphands (Mark Margolis)wants Val assassinated. The screenplay eventually gets around to telling us why Val has become a target, while making room for Val and Doc to rescue Arkin's Hirsch from the nursing home where he's pretty much relegated to sitting in his room.

Arkin's Hirsch gets an opportunity to ply his trade as the trio races from the cops and lands in a variety of other jams, not the least of which involves a naked woman (Vanessa Ferlito) they discover in the trunk of the car they've stolen. They become the woman's self-appointed protectors.

They also visit Doc's favorite restaurant where they're waited on by Doc's favorite waitress (Addison Timlin).

I wouldn't say that either Walken or Pacino is in peak form, but they work work well enough together -- with Walken playing the more restrained of the former hoodlums. Walken and Pacino keep the movie watchable, even though the story -- punctuated with well-selected '70s R&B -- doesn't generate much tension.

If you're inclined to think about what might have been accomplished with this kind of cast, Stand Up Guys may prove disappointing. If you're willing to settle for watching Pacino and Walken enact a bromance for seniors, you may be entertained enough to stave off regret. I was.

A few words with Fisher Stevens

Talk about a dream cast. To make Stand Up Guys, Fisher Stevens was able to cast Al Pacino, Christopher Walken and Alan Arkin in principal roles. Each of them plays an aging gangster at a point in life when mortality no longer seems like a distant threat. In an on-line chat with critics, the 49-year-old Stevens, who has acted in more than 85 projects and who has directed three features, talked about his movie, which is just now opening around the country.

Q: Were there any differences in how you approached the job of directing Pacino and Walken??
Stevens: Before we started shooting, I knew Al much better than Chris. I spent a bit more time going over the script at the beginning with him, so I felt more at ease directing Al at first. With Chris, I had to feel my way around at the beginning. But they both welcomed direction. Sometimes they would disagree with me, but ultimately, they would always try one take the way I wanted it.

Q: How difficult was it for you to get Walken and Pacino to agree to the roles each plays? Pacino's Val, a guy who just has been released from jail, is a bit more of a loose cannon than Walken's Doc, an aging gangster who seems to have done a better job coming to grips with his age.

Stevens: When I started the movie, Al and Chris told me that they had done a reading a few years earlier of a different version of the script. Al played Doc, Chris Played Val. When I called Chris to say I was directing the film, he expressed interest in playing Doc. He said that as he gets older, he enjoys playing grandfathers.
I went in a round-about way to try and get someone to play opposite Chris, not going to my friend Al Pacino, because I was told he wasn’t interested. I kept striking out until my phone rang one day. It was Al calling me after he had seen a Woody Allen documentary I had executive produced. He asked me to work on a documentary with him. I said, 'No, I want you to read Stand Up Guys again and consider being in it with me directing.' There was a long pause, and Al said, 'You’re directing?' I said, 'Yeah.' He read the screenplay, and said, 'Of course.' Four weeks later we were in pre-production.

Q: How did you decide on who would play Hirsch, the former crony and getaway driver who Doc and Val rescue from an old-age home?
Fisher: The first person I thought of for Hirsch was Alan Arkin. I had worked with him in the film Four Days in September 20 years ago. I guess because Chris and Al were already attached to the film, it peaked Arkin’s interest. Thank God he said yes. It was like a dream come true.

Q: Stand Up Guys is set in the present, but has the feel of an older film. What, if any, films were primary inspirations for Stand Up Guys?
Fisher: Many films from the 1970s including Dog Day Afternoon, Five Easy Pieces, Straight Time, and The Dirty Dozen. I loved the films of the '70s because they were about characters and not so much about big plot points and big set pieces. I made sure there were no cell phones, no computers, nothing very modern in Stand Up Guys except for the car that Pacino steals. Most of the clothes were vintage. The colors were muted. It was like time had forgotten this town and these people.

Q. Can you say a bit more about your approach to material that's both comic and serious?
Fisher: It was important to ground this entire script in reality. That was the only way for it to work. We rehearsed and had long discussions about keeping everything real, even when it comes to hyper-blown situations. Fortunately, I had the greatest actors in the world to work with, and they only know how to do things real. When it felt false, we did another take...It was incredible fun. Sometimes I would get lost just watching them act, and forget I was directing. It was also a lot of work, but I would gladly do it again.