When a mom tries to be a detective

Hilary Swank is 49 years old. Jack Reynor is 31. That means if Hilary Swank is going to be believable playing  Reynor's mom, she would have had to given birth to him when she was 18. Possible of course, but Swank doesn't exactly look like the mom of a 31-year- old police officer, which is what Reynor plays in The Good Mother. Confused about the relationship at first, I adjusted. But was it worth the bother? A misfire of a thriller, The Good Mother tells the story of Swank's Marissa, an upstate New York journalist who tries to solve the murder of her younger son, a troubled kid who seems to have gotten lost in the drug trade. Turns out the late son's girlfriend (Olivia Cooke) is pregnant with a baby that will be Marissa's grandchild. It's always a bad idea for reporters to play cop, especially if the reporter happens to be drinking too much, which is the case with Marissa.  That doesn't stop Marissa from joining forces with Cooke's Paige as they try to find the killer. Director Miles Joris-Peyrafitte takes a down-and-dirty approach to Albany, the city where this dime-a-dozen drama occurs. But atmospherics can't mask an increasingly unbelievable story that, at one point, finds Marissa racing through the streets carrying a baby in a car seat. Not the best way to trail someone. Might as well ask someone to play football while pushing a stroller. The movie's central mystery remains murky, even after a big reveal, and The Good Mother joins the ranks of darkly hued thrillers that vanish into their own gloom. 

Fatale: A shiny surface with pulp beneath

 

     It always starts with infidelity.

    An otherwise successful man veers from the straight-and-narrow by sleeping with an alluring woman who seems free of any moral constraints. Of course, it’s an illusion and his slip will lead to catastrophic consequences.

    Fatale — which stars Hilary Swank and Michael Ealy— presents itself as an unashamed piece of pulp entertainment that bends itself out of shape trying to add new wrinkles to a Fatal Attraction formula. 

     Ealy portrays Derrick Taylor, a  highly successful sports agent and partner in a super-profitable company. Swank’s Valerie Quinlan, the movie’s femme fatale, is a detective.

    I won’t say more other than to tell you that Derrick winds up as the suspect in a double murder that introduces more infidelities and betrayals into an already strained plot.

    Director Deon Taylor takes full advantage of the upscale aspirations of his characters. Derrick's home proves magazine-worthy and even Valerie's downtown loft seems stylish and desirable. 

    Put another way, just about everyone in the movie seems to have lost touch with the meaning of the words “middle class.” 

    At the same time, the screenplay by David Loughery imagines that the nouveau-riche sports agents — who happen to be black — can’t entirely escape motivations that push them into dangerous territory.

    Whatever the movie has to say about race comes across as inadvertent as Fatale tries to score with a mixture of glitz and voyeurism to which it applies dabs of violence and motivation.

    Mike Colter appears as Derrick's partner, a businessman who's eager to sell the firm, and Damaris Lewis appears as Derrick's beautiful wife. Neither actor gets much chance to stand-out.

    Danny Pino portrays a corrupt councilman who once was married to Valerie and now has custody of their daughter.

    Swank gives Valerie just enough suggestions of sanity to create some doubt about her motivations but formula demands that her character yield to the required extremes. 

    The rest of the cast serves the story but Fatale winds up as another helping of glamorized nonsense that shows little interest in anything more than its own glossy surface.

A family deals with Alzheimer's

Hilary Swank leads a strong cast in the drama What They Had.

There's no faulting the acting in writer/director Elizabeth Chomko's What They Had, a story about the impact of Alzheimer's on a family already dealing with typical issues of generational conflict and parental approval.

Hilary Swank portrays Bridget, a woman who travels with her teenage daughter (Taissa Farmiga) from California to Chicago when her brother (Michael Shannon) asks for help.

Shannon's Nicky, who remained in Chicago, has cared for his mother (Blythe Danner) and father (Robert Forster) but he's reached the end of his rope. Danner's Ruth has wandered off in her nightgown on a cold Chicago night and the family is frantic about the harm that might befall her. The drama centers on what to do about Ruth, a once-competent woman who's increasingly removed from reality and who soon turns up unharmed.

Forster's Bert resists putting his wife in memory care, even if he can live a nearby assisted living facility that would allow him to visit at will. He refuses to let go of his marriage and insists that he's perfectly capable of taking care of Danner's Ruth by himself.

Shannon gets a much-needed opportunity to play a normal guy -- albeit one who's struggling with and frustrated by difficult problems. Shannon's Nicky owns a bar that's not doing as well as he'd hoped. He's constantly battling with his father. Dad berates Nicky for not finishing college and becoming a bartender. It means nothing to Dad that his son owns the bar.

Forster, in fine form, plays an ardent Catholic, a down-to-earth guy who believes in marriage as an "until-death-do-us-part" proposition? Bert isn't one for nuance, but he's never treated like an idiot. Forster keeps him real and helps us understand that Bert can't reconcile his memories of better days with the situation in which he now finds himself.

Swank's Bridget seems conflicted about nearly everything: her role as a mother, her daughter's refusal to enroll in college and her relationship with the husband (a briefly seen Josh Lucas) she left in LA.

It's hardly a surprise to say that the always impressive Shannon gives a strong performance, but he does. He captures Nicky’s genuine concern and snide humor, as well as his fury.

Danner plays a wife and mother convincingly addled by her medical condition, yet still showing traces of a woman who's able to laugh at herself.

Not every moment in What They Had rang true to me. Bridget's listless marriage, for example, receives too little attention to make it a convincing part of the story. But the movie never feels less than fully lived-in by a cast that couldn't be any better.

Driven crazy by the West

Tommy Lee Jones and Hilary Swank play an eccentric duet.

Relying on eccentric performances, sparse landscapes and occasional comic flourishes, Tommy Lee Jones returns to directing with The Homesman, a drama with insanity at its core -- literally.

As a knockabout and claim jumper, Jones's George Briggs joins with Hillary Swank's Mary Bee Cuddy to escort three women from the Nebraska territory to Iowa. The three women, we soon learn, are insane, having been made that way either by their husbands or by the severe deprivations of a desolate frontier.

In what amounts to a not-so-cute meet, Mary Bee and Briggs hook up after she saves him from hanging. In return, he agrees to accompany her on her eastward journey and to obey any order she might give.

Swank gives the story its sense of flinty determination. Early on, Mary Bee makes a down-to-earth marriage proposal to a dopey cowboy. She offers children, land and shared work. Nope, says the cowboy. She's too plain looking and too damn bossy.

No surprise, then, that Mary Bee volunteers to take the women eastward -- from the windswept Nebraska territory to the more hospitable embrace of Iowa. Back East, the women (Sonja Richter, Grace Gummer and Miranda Otto) just might restore their lost souls -- or at least put themselves out of harm's way.

Those who've seen Jones's directorial debut -- Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada -- won't be surprised to learn that his second movie displays a taste for imagery that's as unsettling as the barren landscapes over which Briggs and Mary Bee carry their wounded charges. A pair of mules hauls this misbegotten trio of mad women in a wagon that looks like a portable jail.

A couple of early shots evoke the iconic west of John Ford, but Jones's characters never achieve the archetypical shine that Ford gave his characters. If John Wayne was like a mighty oak, Jones seems like a gnarled root that protrudes from the ground, twisting and turning but never really finding the nourishment of the sun.

In some ways, Homesman -- which was adapted from a novel by Glendon Swarthout -- is less a western than an indictment of the West as uncharted territory where greed, lawlessness and squalor easily can trump virtue, but where some kind of primal energies still survive.

The movie, of course, looks at the role of women in the West: The women in this movie aren't the kind to keep the home fires burning; they've been burned by the home fires and turned into damaged goods.

The movie contains a twist you probably won't see coming, and, at times, Jones comes close to trying our collective patience. A little giddyap in the pacing might have helped, along with a little less self-conscious, frontier eccentricity.

But Jones hits some hauntingly strange notes in a movie that takes its own sweet time serving up a pill that's not meant to go down easily.

There's plenty of 'Conviction' in this one

Hilary Swank and Sam Rockwell have convictions.

Some levels of persistence defy explanation.

That’s pretty much what I concluded after watching Conviction, the story of Betty Anne Waters, a Massachusetts woman who worked to save her brother from a life in prison. Blessed with a first-rate cast led by Hilary Swank, director Tony Goldwyn takes a stirring look at a case that would have flown under the radar had it not been for Waters' heroic efforts.

A waitress by trade, Waters put herself through college and then law school just so she could appeal her brother’s murder conviction. Ultimately, she brought her brother’s case to the attention of Barry Scheck’s Innocence Project, a group that specializes in fighting for the release of prisoners through the use of DNA evidence, a technique that didn’t exist when Kenny Waters was found guilty.

Swank’s performance, aided by a pitch perfect Massachusetts accent, captures the determination it took for Waters to stay a course that lasted 18 years, and she receives able assistance from a strong supporting cast. Sam Rockwell portrays Waters' brother Kenny, a Massachusetts guy who had plenty of rumbles with local police before he found himself on trial for a brutal murder. Rockwell conveys both Kenny’s volatility and his charm. Kenny appalled those around him with sudden displays of temper, but quickly appeased them with bursts of goofy humor.

Minnie Driver plays Betty Anne’s supportive best friend, a fellow lawyer. She's good, too, but Juliette Lewis has an eye-opening turn as a woman whose testimony helped convict Kenny. Toward the end of the movie, Lewis has a scene that may well catapult her into Oscar consideration in the supporting actress category.

No faulting the rest of the cast, either. Melissa Leo hits all the right notes as the police officer who pushed for Kenny’s arrest, and Peter Gallagher handles the role of DNA maven Barry Scheck with the easy pragmatism of an attorney who's been around the legal block more than a few times.
Conviction mostly focuses on Waters' legal struggles, but it does attempt to deal with the domestic turmoil that resulted from her commitment to her brother. Waters' marriage deteriorated, and, at one point, her two sons chose to live with their father.
For all its acting prowess and the presence of an undeniably strong story, Conviction isn't flawless. The movie ultimately is built for inspiration, and Goldwyn has said that Conviction can be viewed as a love story between brother and sister. He’s certainly not wrong, but his movie might have benefited from a little more outrage at the injustices experienced by those whose lack of resources binds them to a legal system that too easily can ignore them.

I guess the rest of this review contains SPOILERS, so read on at your peril.
Goldwyn, who visited Denver along with Waters, defends a decision that he made regarding Kenny's fate. The movie ends without telling us that six months after his release from prison, Kenny died as a result of injuries sustained during a fall. Test audiences evidently felt that such knowledge deflated the movie, and Goldwyn ultimately concluded that the story's major themes had little to do with Kenny's death.
It seems to me, though, that acknowledgement of Kenny's fate could have strengthened the case for making prompt use of DNA evidence. The innocent should not be languishing in our prisons, especially when the technology exists to exonerate them. Kenny was robbed of 18 years of his life. His death only magnifies the injustice he suffered.

Waters is too strong a woman to allow the cruel irony of her brother's demise to tie her in knots. “The last six months were the happiest in Kenny’s life,” she says.

Spend five minutes with Waters and you'll know that she's the real deal. She still works at the bar depicted in the movie; she’s not full of herself, and she's instantly likable, an ordinary woman who accomplished something extraordinary.
If you want to know the definition of the phrase “I’ve got your back,” you need look no further than Waters and the movie that introduces her to the world at large.
Sure I've got my quibbles with Conviction, but it's well worth seeing.