A teen copes with disabled parents

   What happens when the intellectually gifted child of intellectually disabled parents must adjust to adolescence?

    Wildflower attempts to answer that question by focusing on the life of Bea (Kiernan Shipka), a high school senior who’s understandably fearful about leaving her parents untended. 

    Oddly and perhaps needlessly the movie opens with Bea hospitalized in a coma from which she offers intermittent narration of a story that unfolds mostly in flashback.

    Director Matt Smuckler presumably wanted to create suspense about how Bea arrived in her unconscious state. We’ll eventually learn.

    Bea’s parents (Samantha Hyde and Dash Mihok) are presented as big-hearted, loving devotees of Jesus, who express their faith without  self-consciousness. 

   Hyde’s Sharon was born with her disability; Mihok’s Derek, the more capable of the two, suffered brain damage when, as a child, he was hit by a drunk driver. 

   Jean Smart (as Sharon’s mother) and Jacki Weaver (as Derek’s mom) are a bit underutilized as bickering in-laws. 

   As the proceedings advance, Smuckler increasingly focuses on Bea’s adolescence: relationships with her first boyfriend (Charlie Plummer) and her best friend (Kannon Omachi), another outlier.

    The more the story concentrates on Bea, the more it flirts with teen-movie cliche. A snooty high school girl must receive her comeuppance. Bea excels at track. Bumps arise on the romance road.

   The main question: Should Bea apply to colleges or remain home to care for her parents?

  Not much is done to flesh out the character roster. Reid Scott plays the over-protective husband of Bea’s equally over-protective sister (Alexandra Daddario). An inquisitive social worker (Erika Alexander) doesn’t add a lot.

 Unfortunately, the story tilts away from some of its richest potential. The movie might have benefited from showing us more about how Sharon and Derek struggle to live as they wish.

   Wildflower eventually gets serious but this might be a case in which a mix of comedy and drama sometimes cheats one at the expense of the other.

      

Too embattled to wallow in grief

Viola Davis leads a strong cast in Widows, a caper movie with plenty of cynical undertow.

In Widows, director Steve McQueen flirts with high-concept formula but never allows it to overwhelm the movie's gritty undertow.

Written by McQueen (Hunger, Shame, and 12 Years A Slave) and Gillian Flynn (Gone Girl), Widows wraps pungent characterizations around a caper-film spine. If the plot strains at times, a fine cast and McQueen's scaldingly cynical view of life in Chicago keep the proceedings percolating.

Viola Davis stars as Veronica Rawlings, a woman whose criminal husband (Liam Neeson) dies in the film's barreling, violent prologue. Neeson's Harry and four colleagues are the in the midst of a robbery when they're killed.

Harry leaves Veronica with a pile of trouble. A local gangster (Brian Tyree Henry) claims that Harry owed him $2 million. He's holding Veronica responsible for the debt.

Henry's Jamal Manning also wants to shift to a new kind of crime. He's running for alderman because he believes it's time that he had the opportunity to dip his crust of bread into the municipal gravy that the Irish too long have sopped up. Manning's brother (Daniel Kaluuya) serves as his happily brutal enforcer.

In a related plot thread, Colin Farrell plays Jack Mulligan, the incumbent who's running against Manning. Mulligan is the son of a corrupt former Chicago alderman (Robert Duvall) with a sour disposition and a strong commitment to holding political turf his family has dominated for years.

So how is Veronica going to pay off Harry's debt? As it turns out, Harry left Veronica plans for a major heist that could yield as much as $5 million. Because all of Harry's henchmen were killed in the movie's explosive opening, it falls to Veronica to gather the surviving widows into an impromptu gang, pull off the heist, settle Harry's debt and divide the remaining spoils.

Everyone in Veronica's crew suffers from need. Linda (Michelle Rodriguez) signs on because she's lost her store to rapacious creditors. Alice (Elizabeth Debicki) is one step away from becoming a full-time escort, saved only by the largess of a wealthy financier (Lukas Haas) who makes her his mistress. Amanda (Carrie Coon) has been left with an infant.

Jacki Weaver shows up as Alice's unapologetically sleazy mother, and Cynthia Erivo adds last-minute energy as a woman recruited to drive the getaway car.

A women's perspective gives the movie's crime and political theater a considerable boost. Think of Widows as feminism without speeches, a genre piece featuring female characters with real agency.

It's hardly surprising that Davis proves impressively steely as a woman who misses her husband's tender embraces but proves tough enough to lead her cronies through dangerous terrain. Displaying iron-willed resolve, Veronica takes charge of her gang of widows, no easy task with this group of independent-minded women.

Widows has enough on its mind to keep from becoming one more helping of multiplex fodder. McQueen wisely lets Davis lead the way as a widow who shouldn't be messed with -- even in a world in which felons and politicians often are indistinguishable.*

*I want to reiterate that I welcome comments, particularly those that expand our knowledge about particular films or films in general. But -- and this is the point of this footnote -- I don't publish anonymous comments. Over the years, I've found that many readers have worthwhile things to say and should in no way be reluctant to take credit for their comments. So, sign your name and chime in.

He made the world's worst film

James Franco directs a comedy about the making of The Room, an awful movie about a comedy that has developed a cult following.

All through the preview screening of The Disaster Artist, I found myself looking for James Franco's face, a strange preoccupation because Franco's in nearly every frame of the movie. We catch glimpses of what we know as Franco's face but he's mostly unrecognizable as Tommy Wiseau, a wannabe film director who made The Room, a movie so awful it has acquired cult status among those who enjoy unadulterated badness.

Often shown at midnight, The Room probably is best appreciated in the company of audiences who feel liberated to hoot and holler at the screen. In real life, Wiseau frequently attends screenings of his movie, which has been called the worst movie ever made.

I don't know if The Disaster Artist will rock your world, but I do know that I laughed at the comic touches that Franco, who also directed, brings to the subject of dismal failure.

As is the case with most good comedies, Franco and his fellow actors play things straight. Wiseau had no idea that he was making a bad movie; in fact, he seems to have had a wholehearted belief in the quality and importance of his effort.

In dead-on fashion, Franco replicates scenes from The Room as the production is being filmed. He also replicates Wiseau's shoulder-length hair and odd manner of speaking; his accent has a marble-mouthed, eastern European flavor. Wiseau says he's from New Orleans.

Given the outrageousness of the subject, there's no need for Franco to veer from straightforward narration in a screenplay that has been adapted from a book written by Greg Sestero, another wannabe actor who traveled to Hollywood with Wiseau to pursue fame, fortune and a career in movies.

Sestero (Dave Franco) met Wiseau in 1968 when both were attending a San Francisco acting class. Sestero saw Tommy do a balls-to-the-wall, completely insane version of a Stanley Kowalski speech from A Streetcar Named Desire. He was impressed by Tommy's willingness to go "raw."

No one knows where Wiseau got the money to support himself and Sestero in LA or how he financed a movie that he believed would put him on the map. A deluded Wiseau also says that his work has a Shakespearean quality, a comparison that, to say the least, represents a stretch.

The Room, the picture Wiseau's making, centers on Johnny (played by Wiseau) and includes some ridiculous sex scenes which Franco shows us as he chronicles the shooting of the movie with an actress (Ari Gaynor), a script supervisor (Seth Rogen) and a small crew.

Jacki Weaver appears as one of the film's actresses, a woman who claims that even a day on the set of the world's worst movie beats a day of longing to act.

It's impossible to make a movie like The Disaster Artist without a bit of condescension toward the movie's woeful cast of characters. We laugh at them precisely because it's so obvious that Wiseau's project is doomed from the start. Nothing would (or could) redeem it.

Franco fully immerses in Tommy's life, presenting it with the same cockeyed seriousness with which Wiseau seems to have lived it. Wiseau released The Room in 2003 and claimed that he always intended it to be funny.

I'm not sure what Wiseau really had in mind, but unlike a lot of other would-be comedies, Franco's rendition of this real-life story actually is funny.

Watching Wiseau try to throw a football, for example, presents a moment so void of athleticism, it's close to astonishing. And that's the whole joke in a nutshell. From the outset, it's clear that nothing about The Room will succeed, yet -- to the amazement of everyone involved -- Wiseau persists.

And, no, you don't have to have seen The Room to go along for this enjoyably nutty ride.

'Equals' adds up to boredom

Welcome to another dystopian future. Although it surely wasn't intended, director Drake Doremus' Equals goes a long way toward providing an effective cure for insomnia. A deeply boring romance between two characters who live in a futuristic society where emotions are suppressed for the good of something called "the Collective," Equals suffers from a pervasive lack of verve. In the movie's world, people aren't supposed to touch. Humans still propagate, but conception has been turned into a chore. Not everyone in this society has managed to stamp out feeling, though. Some have been diagnosed with SOS (Switched On Syndrome). Most SOS people eventually are eliminated, but a few pretend to abide by The Collective's norms. They're called "hiders." Nicholas Hoult plays a diagnosed victim of SOS who falls for a "hider" portrayed by Kristen Stewart. Let's just say that their love affair plumbs new depths of listlessness. Guy Pearce and Jacki Weaver offer minimal support as two additional "hiders," those who fake the numbed-out look that their society requires. Doremus floods the screen with whites (interiors and clothing), a choice that only adds to the monotony. Some end-of-picture suspense ignites a small spark, but, by then, it's too late. Rigor mortis already has set in.

A Philly-based romance to love

Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence create some of the year's best chemistry in Silver Linings Playbook.

Movies don't have to be perfect to be loved. It's a good thing, too, or we might never love anything that reached the big screen. Because it's a romantic comedy that spits in formula's eye, because it's built around winning performances and because it successfully mixes humor with a bit of edgy drama, Silver Linings Playbook deserves a big hunk of audience love.

From the movie's opening, it's clear that we've never seen Bradley Cooper (of Hangover fame) in this kind of role. In an early image, we see Cooper's Pat Solitano talking to himself. As the movie progresses, it becomes increasingly clear that Pat has lots of high-speed conversations bouncing around his head.

Pat, we also discover, is about to be released from a mental institution. He's in the up-cycle of a bipolar affliction, and somehow has convinced himself that he's going to find the silver lining in every cloud that has or ever will hang over him.

Pat was sent to the institution as part of a plea bargaining deal. Eight months earlier, he arrived home to find his English-teacher wife in the shower with a history teacher. Pat, a substitute history teacher, lost control and nearly beat the man to death.

Director David O. Russell's character-rich comedy distinguishes itself by throwing away both the romcom and mental-illness-drama play books as it encounters life's absurdities and celebrates its saving graces.

Pat's mother (Jacki Weaver) picks him up at the institution, and brings him home. Pat's father (Robert De Niro) is appropriately concerned about his emotionally tipsy son, a guy who's liable to erupt in anger when he hears Stevie Wonder's My Cherie Amour, the song he and his wife chose for their wedding.

Obsessively determined, Pat has one goal. He wants to win back his wife Nikki (Brea Bee), a task made more difficult by the restraining order that she has taken out against him.

I know. It may not sound like it, but Silver Linings Playbook is most assuredly a comedy, although it sometimes pushes the definition to a breaking point.

Hopes for Pat's recovery don't look particularly promising because he refuses to take his meds and because he's not entirely convinced that he needs to do anything more than stay positive.

He's also not keenly self-aware, which may explain why Pat jogs through his neighborhood in sweats covered by a plastic garbage bag. It has something to do with trying to lose more weight. Nikki thought he was getting too flabby. But a garbage bag?

As part of his battle plan, Pat goes on a reading jag: He tries to devour every book on the syllabus his English-teaching wife uses. He retreats to his attic room and reads Hemingway's Farewell to Arms. But rather than being moved by the book's powerfully sad ending, he's outraged. He wakes his parents at four in the morning to rant about the fact that Hemingway couldn't bring himself to write a happy ending for his story about love and war.

For Pat, nothing feels more urgent than whatever emotion he happens to be experiencing, whatever thought pops into his head. He's locked inside himself.

Based on a novel by Matthew Quick, the screenplay has more in mind than chronicling Pat's dissent into mental illness. At a dinner with old friends (John Ortiz and Julia Stiles), Pat meets his match, a young neighborhood woman (Jennifer Lawrence) with a slutty reputation and a penchant for honesty. For a while, it looks as if the screenplay is going to pit one against the other in a contest to see who's crazier, Lawrence's widowed Tiffany or Cooper's tightly wound Pat.

It takes an adventurous director such as Russell (Flirting with Disaster, Three Kings and The Fighter) to keep a movie such as Silver Linings Playbook from blowing up in its own face.

Russell doesn't shy away from some of the drama that's bound to be produced in a situation involving mental illness. The police are frequent visitors to the Solitano household. But he also has a firm grip on the comedy that's lodged in the Solitano family dynamic, and he gives the story an ample helping of Philly soul.

The story also introduces us to Pat's therapist (Anupam Kher); his older brother (Shea Whigham) and a variety of others; Chris Tucker plays a friend Pat meets during his eight month stint in the mental ward.

But the movie's beating heart belongs to Cooper and Lawrence, who create some of the year's most interesting chemistry.

Cooper never has been better; and Lawrence proves herself a sexy force of nature as a woman who (in my old neighborhood) would have been said to "have a real mouth on her."

De Niro excels as a compulsive and extremely superstitious Philadelphia Eagles' fan and part-time bookmaker; Weaver (familiar from Animal Kingdom) is fine as his long-suffering wife, a woman who generally tries to see things through the silver linings that her son says he hopes to find.

When I tell you that Silver Linings Playbook builds toward a dance contest (no, I'm not kidding), your guard rightly should go up. Trust me. This is not a typical, end-of-movie contest, and Silver Linings Playbook is no run-of-the-mill romcom.

You may find reason to carp about Silver Linings Playbook, but remember what I said at the outset: Love -- as Pat and Tiffany amply demonstrate -- is far from perfect. Still, there'd be a lot fewer movies, if we didn't believe that it beats the hell out of the next best thing.