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.

'Hotel Mumbai' simulates a terrorist assault

In November 2008, terrorists attacked the Taj Mahal Palace & Tower Hotel in Mumbai, leaving 30 people dead before the invaders were gunned down. Hotel Mumbai tells that story in a vivid, gut-wrenching style, turning into a 2019 version of a disaster movie -- albeit one based on a real event. As the violence erupts, we meet a variety of people who are trying to save themselves and others, and, as is the case with such movies, we’re left to wonder who’s going to make it out of the besieged hotel alive. Nazanin Boniadi and Armie Hammer play a couple who has left their infant child in their room with a nanny (Tilda Cobham-Hervey) after heading to the hotel's lounge for a drink. Dev Patel portrays a Sikh waiter who almost gets dismissed for the day for wearing sandals instead of regulation footwear. Anumpam Kher appears as the head chef, a martinet in the kitchen but a man whose concern for the welfare of the hotel's guests takes on a new dimension as the movie progresses. Perhaps to further enhance the movie's international flavor, Jason Isaacs does duty as a Russian who regards the hotel as a sexual playground. Directed by Anthony Maras, Hotel Mumbai creates plenty of tension. The situation alone is enough to infuse the movie with a pulse-pounding drive. I'm certainly not the first to say this, but the comment seems unavoidable: Even a deftly made movie about a terror attack can leave you wondering exactly why you're putting yourself through what becomes a cinematic ordeal. Killing innocent people proves revolting, but do we need another helping of body-count cinema to remind us of that?

Vipers in the Soviet hierarchy

Laughs, terror, and dramatic punch mingle in The Death of Stalin.

I can’t think of another movie exactly like The Death of Stalin, which is part of the reason this movie feels so unsettlingly original. Best known for creating HBO’s Veep, director Armando Iannucci gives us a movie in which farcical, dramatic, and satirical elements bump into one another with collision force. If The Death of Stalin ultimately qualifies as a comedy, it's one that refuses to allow us to drop our guards.

If you want an indication of just how daring Iannucci has been, consider this: He has cast Steve Buscemi as Nikita Khrushchev. Now, if you were to make a list of actors who might play the table-pounding former head of the Soviet Union, I doubt whether Buscemi’s name would have crossed your mind.

As it turns out, Buscemi does an impressive job portraying an aide to Stalin who eventually rose to a top position in the post-Stalin Soviet Union. Buscemi's wily Khrushchev has a sardonic streak that makes it clear that he's not about to be out-maneuvered.

The movie begins when Stalin (Adrian McLoughlin) dies at the age of 74, after an evening of gathering his top staff to watch an American western, a ritual they've endured many times before. After his evening with cronies and alone in his room, Stalin drops to the floor. He has just read a note wishing him dead that was sent by a favored Soviet concert pianist (Olga Kurylenko).

Before Stalin expires, we learn that he keeps a list of those he plans to kill — usually for capricious reasons or perhaps for no reason at all. The head of Stalin’s secret police Lavrenti Beria (a frightening Simon Russell Beale) executed (pun intended) Stalin’s orders with a particularly perverse relish. Beria was feared — not only by ordinary folks but by those in Stalin’s inner circle.

Iannucci obtains fine work from the actors who play members of Stalin’s coterie, a group that has been cowed into ceaseless expressions of admiration.

Michael Palin appears as Vyacheslav Molotov, a major Bolshevik figure who unwittingly managed to find his way onto Stalin’s feared hit list. Jason Isaacs has a wonderfully robust turn as Georgy Zhukov, a swaggering Red Army officer with a major World War II record. Jeffrey Tambor appears as Georgy Malenkov, an indecisive “yes” man who succeeds Stalin and who, like a frightened dog, keeps sniffing the air to see if something dangerous might be approaching.

Based on graphic novels by Fabien Nury and Theirry Robin, the movie brims with scorching dialog as the vipers try to navigate the choppy waters of intrigue that begin to roil after Stalin’s death.

It’s never certain which of these men will emerge from the conspiratorial muck. Gradually, it becomes clear that Khrushchev might out-maneuver the rest of the group. He reacts against the worst of Stalin’s excesses, favoring a modicum of reform by freeing political prisoners and putting an end to the hated hit list.

The clash between Khrushchev and Beria takes the form of an epic piece of internecine warfare; Khrushchev's no saint, but Beria's barbarous cruelty and child molestation stand as the corrupted core of Stalin’s insidious regime.

At one point, Stalin’s flustered daughter (Andrea Riseborough) arrives to add an element of hysteria. She’s followed by the entry of Stalin’s massively deluded son (Rupert Friend).

I’ve seen quotes describing The Death of Stalin as hilarious. I didn’t find it hilarious, although much of it is funny.

More importantly, The Death of Stalin is marked by an acute trenchancy, a look at men attempting to fill a sudden power vacuum in ways that illustrate the darker side of their ambitions. It makes us laugh, yes, but this is one comedy that's deadly serious.

Much style, too little payoff

Gore Verbinski tries his hand at stylish horror in A Cure for Wellness.

Director Gore Verbinksi's three Pirates of the Caribbean movies demonstrated a rare flare for visually based comedy -- not just sight gags, but intricately designed sequences in which the gags dropped like pins in a bowling alley. Verbinski later entered the world of offbeat animation with Rango, a story about a chameleon who poses as a tough loner in a dizzyingly off-kilter version of the Wild West.

So, despite the fact that we're bobbing in the dull waters of a pre-Oscar lull, there was reason to hope that Verbinski's latest -- a highly stylized hunk of horror called A Cure for Wellness -- would be eccentric enough to merit attention.

No, I haven't forgotten Verbinski's version of The Lone Ranger, but who in Hollywood isn't entitled to a mega-mistake?

Those looking for intriguing imagery won't be disappointed by A Cure of Wellness, which makes the most of Bojan Bazelli's stunningly suggestive cinematography. But at two-and-half hours in length, this increasingly taxing thriller suggests more than it delivers and finally goes up in flames (literally) in what amounts to a bust of a payoff.

Cast in the movie's central role, Dane DeHaan, a veteran of HBO's In Treatment, makes you wonder whether he has the right stuff to carry a movie. DeHaan, who appears in nearly every scene, plays Lockhart, an ambitious but callow young executive with dubious ethical standards.

Early on, Lockhart receives an odd assignment; he's sent to a spa in the Swiss Alps to retrieve his company's CEO (Harry Groener), a man who refuses to return to the US to sign off on a pending and very lucrative merger. The CEO claims that he's seen the light, and no longer gives a damn about business.

Obviously, complications ensue for poor Lockhart. The spa's head doctor (Jason Isaacs) won't allow Lockhart to see the reclusive CEO, much less cart him off the premises. As the movie progresses, Isaacs' Volmer tries to convince Lockhart that he, too, is ill, and should avail himself of the doctor's wondrous cure.

Much effort has gone into showing the strangeness of the spa environment: With its eerie hallways, the place seems more like a mental institution than a retreat where the guests guzzle the local waters, traipse around in bathrobes and play croquet.

Lockhart also meets Hannah (Mia Goth), a strange young woman who seems to hold the key to the movie's central mystery -- which, as it turns out, is not nearly as unexpected as the filmmakers may have think.

Before reaching its overstated conclusion, Justin Haythe's screenplay has dabbled in a variety of twisted developments that include a horrific scene in a dental chair that recalls Dustin Hoffman's torment in Marathon Man, attacks by flesh-eating eels, an obsession with water, and a fairly major letdown at the end when Verbinski serves up heaving sprays of over-the-top expression.

Throughout, the movie spends time condemning the all-American tendency to sacrifice life for work, but the theme doesn't amount to much after an opening prologue in which a broker, working late at night in an empty Manhattan glass tower, keels over and dies of a heart attack.

About halfway through Verbniski's slow-moving dirge of a movie, I made a note to myself. "No matter how artful the setup (an it is plenty artful), a movie such as A Cure for Wellness depends on having one hell of a payoff. Sadly, it doesn't.