Parents try to heal after a school shooting

 

     Two sets of parents meet in a plainly furnished room in an Episcopalian Church located in a small town. Because the talk is awkward and strained, we anticipate something uncomfortable will happen. 

     The movie eventually reveals that Jay (Jason Isaacs) and Gail (Martha Plimpton) are meeting with the parents (Reed Birney and Ann Dowd) of the teenager who killed their son in a school shooting that took place years before.

     The meeting has been arranged by a third party (Michelle N. Carter) to promote healing. It's apparent from the outset that the shooter's motivations never will be entirely clear. What’s not clear is what Jay and Gail hope to gain. What do they really want from Birney's Richard and Dowd's Linda?

     Richard and Linda seem to be fulfilling an obligation and none of the participants has a handle on how to behave. Who would?

    Extreme politeness masks angry feelings that gradually emerge and which, more than anything, demonstrate the impossibility of knowing the root causes of such violence: References to bullying, video games, guns, and ignored signals are made, but none seem satisfactory.

     Filmed in a church in Idaho, the movie locates its story in what might be considered a bedrock of American decency, a church where the choir rehearses and where a nervous church worker (Breeda Wool) sets out drinks and food, offering hospitality where none is needed.

    Although Mass could have been a play, director Fran Kranz wisely makes few attempts to open things up. He puts four people into a claustrophobic environment to which all of them are inexorably drawn. 

    Can the meeting result in any level of forgiveness? 

    The actors define four distinct characters. Isaacs's Jay tries to keep an even keel. Plimpton's Gail squirms and simmers. Birney plays a man who appears to be rational, perhaps overly so, and Dowd gives full expression to Linda's endless torment. 

   Of all the performances, Plimpton's hit me the hardest, but the entire cast does justice to four emotionally ruined parents whose pain never will abate but who, in deeply human fashion, try to understand the incomprehensible and free themselves from a bit of their agony.

When hope has all but vanished

Andrea Riseborough plays the title character in Nancy, a movie set on a landscape in which love has all but died.

In Nancy, a debut feature from director Christina Choe, all the characters have been made miserable by loss or neglect. Nancy -- the movie's title character -- lives with her demanding mother (Ann Dowd) in a rundown house in a nameless town. Mom's dying of Parkinson's and relies on Nancy to tend to her every need -- small and big acts that Mom accepts without ever showing a trace of gratitude.

Given the roles that Dowd typically plays, her appearance instantly triggers an expectation of bad things to come. Dowd's portrayal of Aunt Lydia in Handmaid's Tale stands as a brutal study of tyrannical conformity. In the recent Hereditary, she played a seemingly compassionate, grief-stricken woman, but -- with Dowd -- we've learned not to trust the surface.

Dowd isn't the main character in Nancy, but she helps to set the movie's bleak mood.

Andrea Riseborough portrays Nancy, a character who makes no effort to be likable or even comprehensible. Nancy invents stories about herself. At one point, she feigns a pregnancy as a means of consoling a grieving man (John Leguizamo) whose infant daughter died a while back.

Leguizamo's character asked to meet Nancy after reading a blog post she wrote. He has no ulterior motives; he only wants to talk to someone who might give him hope, someone with enough faith in life to bring a newborn into it. Even if well-intended at first, Nancy's deception becomes an act of cruelty.

When her mother dies of a stroke, Nancy sees an opening. She attempts to insinuate herself into the lives of a couple (J. Smith-Cameron and Steven Buscemi) who long ago lost a daughter to kidnappers. Having seen the couple discussing their lives in a recent TV interview, Nancy decides to contact them, claiming to be that long lost child.

What unfolds is an intimate exercise in acceptance and delusion, an exploration of grief and diminished hope conducted by a trio of highly skilled actors.

As a professor of literature, Smith-Cameron wants to believe in Nancy. Buscemi's Leo, a psychologist by trade, proves more skeptical, but never aggressively so. It's a pleasure to see Buscemi give a subdued performance as a man who has known pain but has struggled to keep his balance.

Leo orders a DNA test to determine whether Nancy's story is true. But the meat on this movie's bone has little to do with the results of that test. Choe's doesn't aim for pin-point specificity; she doesn't even bother to develop an entirely credible plot. We don't so much watch Nancy as we sink into the bleak lives of its severely damaged characters.

Choe doesn't spell things out; she gives us plenty of room to discover. As a result, Nancy turns out to be a small but troubling movie about the way hope can flicker in lives that have all but abandoned it. Is that flicker a saving grace or the cruelest of delusions? Could it possibly be both?

Death, love -- and a waste of time

A strong cast can't make anything credible out of weepy Collateral Beauty.

Burdened by a whopping contrivance, Collateral Beauty -- a movie that wants to talk about unbearable grief and the need for human connection -- resembles a luxury passenger liner that sinks soon after leaving the dock.

The luxury reference has to do with the presence of an A-list cast featuring Will Smith, Kate Winslet, Edward Norton, Helen Mirren and Keira Knightley. They're all fine actors, but Collateral Beauty blows the opportunity for great ensemble work by putting the cast into one credibility-challenging or maudlin scene after another.

The story might be viewed as a fable grounded in what may have been intended as a plausible reality, the world of New York advertising.

Smith plays Howard, a hot-shot advertising executive who loses his six-year-old daughter to a rare form of cancer. Mired in grief, Howard completely shuts down. Not surprisingly, his near-catatonic state threatens the life of the agency he founded with his partner (Norton).

The plot's big twist arrives when Norton and two of his colleagues (Winslet and Michael Pena) decide to hire a trio of actors (Mirren, Knightley and Jacob Latimore) to visit the dejected Howard as the embodiment of three abstractions: Death, Love and Time.

Why Death, Love and Time? In the movie's prologue, Howard tells his staff that these are the vital ingredients in selling products. Moreover, since the death of his daughter, Howard has been writing and mailing letters addressed to Death, Love and Time. The letters give voice to Howard's anger at the way all three have betrayed him.

Howard's colleagues have two objectives: They want to save Howard from his depression, and they also want to have him declared incompetent. They'll then be able to sell the company, of which Howard is the majority owner, to an eager buyer.

To achieve their goal, this trio of ad execs also hires a private investigator (Ann Dowd) to photograph Howard talking to Death, Love and Time; the execs then will have these figures digitally removed so that it looks as if Howard is ranting to himself.

When it's not focusing on Howard, the movie doles out other forms of pain. Winslet's character wonders whether she hasn't sacrificed the chance to have a family by spending too much time at the office. Pena's character deals with a recurrence of a long-dormant cancer, and Norton's Whit worries about fixing the screwed-up relationship he has with his young daughter. She won't talk to him because he cheated on her mom.

Putting all of these fine actors into one movie must have seemed like a casting bonanza to director David Frankel (Hope Springs and The Devil Wears Prada). Too bad Allan Loeb's screenplay doesn't play to the cast's strengths: It falls to young Latimore to give the movie's most (and perhaps only) compelling performance.

If all of these actors weren't enough, the movie adds Naomi Harris as a woman who leads a group of parents who've lost children.

The drama comes to a head on Christmas Eve making Collateral Beauty an offering for the season that's intended to mix laughs, tears and greeting card wisdom. Who knows? It might have worked had Frank Capra tried it during the 1930s.

Today, Collateral Damage looks precisely like what it is: a concept that never develops into a real or convincing movie.

'Captain Fantastic' and the 'Wilderpeople'

In a way, Captain Fantastic is something of a throwback, a movie that hinges on a slightly dated conflict between a father's fierce countercultural commitments and widely recognized mainstream proprieties.

Forget the title, Captain Fantastic has nothing to do with comic book heroism; it's the story of an intelligent survivalist (Viggo Mortensen) and his six children. Mortensen's Ben believes that, as a parent, he's obligated to remove his children from the corrupting influences of a society driven mad by soul-destroying capitalism.

Ben is so committed to his views that he has substituted the celebration of Noam Chomsky's birthday for Christmas. Yes, it's OK to laugh, but Ben believes in the moral necessity of his choices.

The always intelligent Mortensen, adept at suggesting more than scripts often contain, imbues Ben with edgy smarts and stern conviction. He can be loving and a bit scary.

The movie opens with a bloody coming-of-age ritual involving a hunt, but it quickly becomes clear that Ben isn't neglecting the intellectual side of his kids' growth: They're home-schooled in literature, science and philosophy, and are encouraged to defend any position they take.

Ben also subjects his brood to physical challenges that he calls "training." These exercises can include dangerous rock climbing expeditions and exhausting uphill runs.

It shouldn't be surprising that Ben's kids have unconventional names: Bodevan (George MacKay) is the oldest, a teen-ager who's beginning to wonder if he's missing something. Encouraged by his mother, Bodevan secretly has applied to some of the nation's most elite colleges.

As for the rest of the brood, I could tell you the kids who play the family, but instead I'll give you a few of the character names: Nai, Zaja, Vestry, Kielyr and Relian, a countercultural roll call if ever there were one.

Simply hanging around the forest with a bunch of kids might not be particularly interesting. Something major must happen, and it does. Mom, who's off being treated for severe depression, commits suicide.

Mom's parents (Frank Langella and Ann Dowd) blame Ben for ruining their daughter's life. They ban him from the funeral, the Christian burial Langella's Jack insists on. Mom, we learn, wanted to be cremated.

Urged on by his kids, Ben loads everyone into the rundown bus the family uses for transportation and attends the funeral.

En route, the family stops at the home of an aunt and uncle (Kathryn Hahn and Steve Zahn) who are understandably concerned about the way in which Ben raises his children.

Credit writer/director Matt Ross with setting up some amusing situations, most notably one in which Bodevan meets a girl at a campsite and decides that his first kiss provides sufficient reason to propose marriage.

The point, of course, is that these kids have little idea about how to operate in socially oriented situations.

Not all of Ben's judgments seem particularly smart. During a celebration of Noam Chomsky Day, Ben gives his six-year-old daughter a copy of The Joy of Sex. Why burden the kid with unnecessary inhibitions?

While traveling, Dad and the kids stage an operation in which they steal food from a supermarket. Ben has taught them that they're entitled to free food from a system that's designed to exploit them.

Not surprisingly, the family runs into a conflict with Langella's Jack, who wants to take custody of the kids. Jack believes that some of Ben's child-rearing methods are abusive. If you think about it, he has a point, but the movie doesn't take that point seriously enough.

Captain Fantastic remains watchable because of Mortensen, who convinced me that Ben was an ideologue, a tyrant with his kids (for their own good, of course) but also a loving father who eventually must decide whether he has the right to make some of the choices he's forced on his children.

To the extent that the movie leaves you to ponder what's really best for Ben's kids, it's a worthwhile and somewhat offbeat addition of this year's movie run.

But it's also true that the most interesting character in the movie only appears on screen in Ben's daydreams. Mom evidently developed strong reservations about the family's search for self-sufficiency. Perhaps because of his stubborn commitment to what he viewed as his high ideals, Dad couldn't hear her.

To me, the most convincing thing about Captain Fantastic was Mom's depression, which may not be what Ross most wanted anyone to take away from his movie.

A BETTER MOVIE ABOUT A KID IN THE WOODS

If you're looking for a quirkier and more entertaining movie about a kid who learns to be self-sufficient, you may want to try A Hunt for the Wilderpeople, a New Zealand-based story from director Taika Waititi. The thoroughly engaging Julian Dennison plays Ricky, a Maori kid who's been bounced from foster home to foster home until he lands with a couple (Sam Neill and Rachel House) with a home at the edge of the bush. House's Paula breaks through Ricky's emotional barriers, but Neill's Hec keeps the boy at gruff remove. The twist arrives when Paula, who've we've seen kill a wild boar armed only with a knife, suddenly dies. The newly widowed Hec wants to return the boy to the social services system, but Ricky has other ideas. Ricky runs away, and when Hec finds him, they both begin a months long trek through the bush that eventually attracts the attention of law enforcement, social services workers and the press. Waititi, who wrote the screenplay based on a book by Barry Crump, keeps us off guard throughout. Dennison plays an overweight kid who is not instantly engaging, but whose spunk and temperament quickly win us over. Unrecognizable behind a bushy beard, Neill perfectly balances Hec's curiosity about the boy, his reluctance to become emotionally involved and his outlier sensibilities. In all, A Hunt for the Wilderpeople emerges as one of summer's most refreshing entertainments.

Two very different teen stories

Anyone who regularly attends movies has more than a passing familiarity with adolescence, but Maidentrip -- a documentary about the round-the-world solo sailboat voyage made by 14-year-old Laura Dekker -- brings a new dimension to adolescent adventure. After Dekker and her father won a court battle aimed at stopping the youngster's journey, she set sail in her boat, Guppy. Director Jillian Schlesinger, working with footage that Decker took during her voyage, presents a somewhat fragmented chronicle of Decker's travels. To be fair, Dekker had plenty of other things on her mind during her 17-month-long journey besides recording her trip. Mostly, Dekker was isolated, but during her trip, she spent time with an older couple on their own sailing expedition. She also toured various ports in which she stopped for breaks. Of course, she sometimes was called upon to navigate treacherous waters. Would I allow a 14-year-old embark on such a voyage? No. I think 14 is too young to decide to risk one's life. Did I think that Schlesinger may have been a little too accepting of Dekker's mission? Yes. Was I caught up in the story, even though I already knew its outcome? You bet. The sheer audacity of Decker's achievement makes Maidentrip worth seeing.

Another kind of teen story

The movie Gimmme Shelter tells another kind of teen story. In it, Vanessa Hudgens, who worked against her High School Musical image in Spring Breakers, continues to chart grungy new territory. This time, Hudgens plays Agnes, an unruly 16-year-old who's pregnant and at odds with her drug-addicted and abusive mother (Rosario Dawson).

On the run, Agnes seeks out her biological father, a well-heeled stock broker played by Brendan Fraser, who seems entirely baffled about how to deal with the daughter he abandoned.

Fraser's character is now married to prim and proper Joanna (Stephanie Szostak), and has two additional children. Joanna has difficulty accepting Agnes, who goes by the nickname Apple.

Director Ron Krauss hasn't exactly made an overt piece of pro-life propaganda, but his movie suffers from a lack of character nuance and it certainly stacks the deck in favor of Apple having a baby.

Apple, who refuses to have an abortion despite Joanna's urging, eventually finds her way -- with help from a clergyman (James Earl Jones) -- to a home for pregnant teens. There, she gradually sheds her punk image and turns into a potential mom. Say goodbye to the nose and lip rings.

The shelter is run by Kathy (Ann Dowd), a Catholic woman whose pro-life position (thankfully) isn't over-emphasized.

Best part of the movie: A convincing Dowd (based on a real-life character) and the young women Apple meets at the shelter.

Hudgens' performance tends to be unmodulated, and at times, the movie sounds like an ad for the shleter. Some of the scenes -- particularly those involving Dawson -- are rendered in a harsh, bruising style that struck me as attempts to sell us on the movie's commitment to realism.

A better drama would have found room for scenes that amplified Apple's plight, possibly adding a real discussion between Apple and her father about the wayward 16-year-old's ability to be a competent parent. The movie also might have addressed questions about how Apple -- who seems intelligent but has no demonstrable skills -- intends to support her child. And the fact that Hudgens is 25 -- and doesn't look 16 -- makes it easier to accept the idea that she's ready for motherhood.

Although it isn't pedal-to-the-metal propaganda, Gimme Shelter didn't strike me as a movie that wants us to give any thought to alternatives for Apple.

Are people really this gullible?

A lengthy article at Courier-Journal.com changed my mind about Compliance, a movie that would seem far-fetched and contrived if it weren't based on real events.

Taking its cue from a vicious 2004 prank that took place at a McDonald's in Mount Washington, Ky.,  and from criminal episodes reported at  70 additional fast-food locations, Compliance becomes a morally complex look at human behavior that leaves you shaking your head in disbelief.

Director Craig Zobel, who also wrote the screenplay for Compliance, seems to have selected various parts of the story from several such incidents, but it's important to know that -- for the most part -- Compliance is more docudrama than fabrication.

Having said that, it should also be noted that Zobel has assembled his movie in a way that not only builds tension but challenges an audience.

Set at a fast-food outlet in Ohio, the movie establishes its milieu before getting down to business. A man claiming to be a policeman phones the manager (Ann Dowd), telling her that one of her employees (Dreama Walker) has been accused of stealing money from a woman's purse. We hear the voice of this policeman (Pat Healy) who mostly remains unseen.

At first, the call sounds reasonable enough. The policeman claims to want to quickly clear things up and move on. As the title suggests, the manager complies: She's in the middle of a busy Friday, and doesn't want any trouble. The supposed cop even knows the name of her regional manager and says he has discussed the matter with him.

As the movie progresses, the man on the phone  becomes more demanding, more demeaning and more sexual. Walker's Becky becomes the target of a variety of humiliations that are not easy to watch, so much so that the movie debuted to walk-outs at January's Sundance Film Festival.

Let me say this clearly: If you don't know what you're getting into, Compliance can be a rough ride. Consider yourself warned.

I'd say that Zobel has succeeded in directing in a way that's neither exploitative nor titillating, although much of what happens in Compliance certainly is alarming.

Before it's done, Compliance has become a study in the power of suggested authority and the gullibility and weakness of people who -- in forsaking common sense and their own moral standards -- participate in all manner of egregious behavior. The story is bizarre -- and all the more troubling because it's true.