'Joker: Folie a Deux' -- dread with music

 

   Director Todd Phillips' Joker (2019) plunged into the heart of the rot-infested Gotham, where Arthur Fleck became the Joker, a maniacal misfit whose life had turned into an agonized scream, sometimes disguised as hysterical laughter. The result was scary, haunting, and grim.

   To deliver a sequel, Phillips has made a bold choice.   Joker: Folie a Deux adds musical numbers as part of the soundtrack and as performances. The story also  brings Joker (Joaquin Phoenix) into contact with Lee (Lady Gaga), the character who, in other movies, will evolve into Harley Quinn. 

   If you want an alternate title for Folie a Deux, try Psychopath, the Musical.

   Phillips opens the movie in Arkham, a fortress-like prison for the criminally insane. Amid a population of bereft inmates, a skeletal Arthur awaits trial for murder -- six of them.

   In the film's early going, Arthur seems weirdly withdrawn, a canny strategy on Phoenix's part. Arthur's eerie detachment fits the dark mood established by Hildur Gudnadottir's pounding, ominous score, reprised from the first movie.

    The screenplay lays the groundwork for Arthur's trial. Arthur's lawyer (Catherine Keener) wants to employ an insanity defense. She'll argue that the vicious Joker lives inside poor Arthur's tormented psyche. Arthur doesn't connect to this alternate self and hardly remembers his murderous outbursts. Abused as a child, Arthur's a wimp who can't accept his fiendishness -- or so his lawyer says.

      Gotham's district attorney (Harry Lawtey) argues otherwise; he dismisses talk of Arthur's alternate personality as hooey.

    As a Joker fan, I was predisposed to appreciate the inventiveness Phillips might bring to this sequel, which punctuates the movie's encompassing bleakness with musical numbers that evoke memories of a bygone Hollywood era.

   Phillips pays homage to musicals when Arthur watches a scene from 1953's The Band Wagon featuring the song, That's Entertainment; a number that's later performed by Gaga to highlight a theme found in both movies: the exploitative tendency to bestow celebrity status on notorious criminals.

   Lee and Arthur meet in Arkham, where she's serving time for arson. Lee belongs to a musical club that's supposed to help broken inmates heal. A prison guard (Brendan Gleeson) arranges for Arthur to join the group. Not only is Lee a fan of the Joker, but she's a kindred spirit, a lover of chaos.

    The match may not be as fortuitous as it seems. Arthur thinks he's finally met a woman who can pierce the thick walls of his loneliness, the prison he lives in whether he's behind bars or not. The poor sap wants love; Lee craves thrills.

    Phoenix adds sorrowful undertones to Arthur's edgy unpredictability. Gaga, who delivers lovely vocals, turns Lee into a thrill-seeker looking for a playmate. 

    Phoenix sings in a reedy yet effective style that's applied to songs such as When You're Smiling, an anthem for the Joker whose face is plastered with a lipstick smeared rictus. At one point, he fantasizes about appearing on TV with Lee, giving Phoenix and Gaga an opportunity to perform a duet.

    A movie that opens with a mock Looney Tunes cartoon has no interest in settling for formula. Whatever you think of Folie a Deux, it's impossible to accuse Phillips of taking the easy way out.

     He also tries to give the movie some moral weight. Leigh Gill delivers a brief but affecting performance as Gary Puddles, a witness in Arthur's trial. Puddles testifies about the harrowing consequences faced by those who come into Arthur's orbit.

    Familiar themes -- turning violence into entertainment and the twisted narcissism that craves celebrity -- remain, but Phillips, who wrote the screenplay with Joker co-author Scott Silver, doesn't generate enough story to keep the movie from losing steam.

    Folie a Deux begins to peter out about three-quarters of the way through its two-hour and 18-minute running time. Courtroom scenes undercut the dread that festers during Arthur's imprisonment, and the film's ending ... well ... let's just say, the movie ends.

    Reservations aside, I want to conclude with an addendum. This edition of Joker may not entirely work, but it's daring, ambitious, and ungainly in crazy  ways. Phillips' bold choices don't all pay off, but they beat the fan-serving rehash that might have been.

     

Impressive battles mark 'Napoleon'

 At a time when arguments about authoritarianism have swamped much of the public discourse, it's easy to understand why director Ridley Scott was interested in bringing a story about Napoleon to the screen with the always nervy Joaquin Phoenix in the title role. 

 Phoenix remains one of Hollywood's most adventurous actors. In Napoleon, he creates a lumbering, dour general who became an emperor with a weakness, an over-reliance on his wife, Josephine (a sly Vanessa Kirby). 

  For Napoleon, Josephine functions like a good-luck charm. He needs her. He pines for her while doing his day job; i.e., conquering the world.

  Sex scenes between Napoleon and Josephine demonstrate his lack of subtlety and her lack of interest. Taking Josephine from behind, he approaches sex as if he were leading a charge on the battlefield. 

  Assertive and ambitious, Josephine shows only passing interest in fidelity. Not surprisingly, Napoleon isn't happy about his wife's digressions -- or much of anything else for that matter.

  Though never dwelled on, the movie finds time to make a joke about Napoleon's fabled lack of height, but mostly Napoleon is the boulder around which the rest of the movie flows. 

  The movie could have been called The Battles of Napoleon. Scott stages sweeping battle sequences that include Napoleon's triumph at Austerlitz and, of course, his downfall at Waterloo. 

    I'm no expert on 19th Century military maneuvers but Scott seems to be; he understands the tactics employed in each battle. In a stunning sequence on a lake during Austerlitz, canon balls crack the ice as bleeding soldier's sink into the freezing depths.

    Scott's mastery of scale makes us aware of how brutal, open-field warfare could be. During the course of Napoleon's epic career, about three million soldiers (French and otherwise) died on battlefields. 

    A note here: At a time when action sequences often degenerate into indecipherable blurs, Scott gives a master class in how they should be done. 

    The movie leaps through history as if it were in danger of evaporating. It's left to Phoenix to sketch Napoleon's character with scowls, exclamations that can sound anachronistic, and the establishment of a bulky presence.

    A leader at the Siege of Toulon, Napoleon rose out of France's post-revolutionary chaos to become a ruler who, in this rendering, seems more persistent than cunning. He was also legacy conscious. Distraught because Josephine couldn't provide him an heir to his throne, Napoleon divorced her; he quickly found a substitute who sired a son.

   It's indicative of both the film's focus and failings that few of the supporting characters in Scott's large cast are given much opportunity to standout. At times, the characters seem buried under churning hunks of French history, which slide by like chunks dislodged from a melting iceberg.

   Admirable in bits and pieces, some spectacular, Napoleon left me feeling as if I'd watched a slightly cynical historical recreation rather than a brilliant reinterpretation of history. And for all its attempts to remind us of old-fashioned epics, one can't help but be surprised that Napoleon doesn't make a deeper impression. 

    A four-hour version of the movie will be seen when it's released on Apple TV+. I'm eager to see it because even at two hours and 38 minutes, this one feels truncated. I couldn't help thinking that there must have been more to this conquering egotistical lout than Napoleon reveals.

     Unless Scott wanted to tell us that history sometimes can revolve around an oafish leader -- providing, of course, that he has an army at his disposal.

   

 

What to make of ‘Beau is Afraid?’

   
   

    Artificial trees rotate, changing colors during the production of a play that's being staged outdoors in what seems like an enchanted forest.

   In a decaying urban neighborhood, the streets teem with miscreants, one of whom makes a habit of running about naked before repeatedly stabbing random passersby.

   A psychiatrist asks his patient whether he has thought about killing his mother.

   An aggressively cheerful suburban couple cares for a man the wife ran over with her car, putting him up in a room belonging to their snarly teenage daughter.

    On first impression, these images defy connection, but they're all part of director Ari Aster's Beau Is Afraid, a three-hour mashup of styles, locations, and concerns held together -- more or less -- by the performance of Joaquin Phoenix.

    The always adventurous Phoenix portrays Beau, a character whose interior life may be the sole source of this darkly funny, highly inventive, and sometimes wearying movie.

   In fairness to Aster's outsized ambitions, it would be wrong  either to advise viewers to see or avoid a movie that, at least for me, sustained involvement and sometimes amusement for nearly two hours and 30 minutes of its running time.

    Fearful and anxious, Beau serves as a springboard from which Aster launches a parade of images, many startling, eerie, and impressive. 

     Aster (Hereditary and Midsommnar) mixes humor with horror as he unleashes a wild psychological storm, much of it revolving around Beau's mother issues.

     We meet Mom in flashbacks and in the film's final segment. Zoe Lister-Jones plays Beau's mom as younger woman, and Armen Nehapetian portrays Beau as a 13-year-old whose sexual development can't escape Mom's supervisory attentions.

     In a bravura performance, Patti LuPone turns up as Beau's adult mom. Throughout the movie, Beau tries to reach Washington state for his mother's funeral, a conceit that takes him from slum, to suburbia, to forest, to a dazzlingly home in Washington. 

     Once unleashed, LuPone, launches into tirades fueled by furious resentment about how much she's sacrificed for Beau, a character who seems to be stuck in a some indeterminate limbo.

     Beau Is Afraid is so packed with characters and set pieces that it's impossible to mention all of them without writing a review that would rival the movie in length. 

    Highlight performances include: 

    Nathan Lane and Amy Ryan as a suburban couple who lost a son during a war in Caracas, Venezuela. No, the imagined seems to have nothing to do with anything.

    Kylie Rogers keeps up with the weirdness as the daughter of this suburban couple, who also house an emotionally damaged veteran (Denis Menochet) in a trailer in their backyard.

    Parker Posey appears in a sex scene that's both thematically significant and starkly funny.

    A beautiful, haunting animation sequence qualifies as a kind of character in itself.

    Hints of other movies waft through the weirdness. Maybe it's me, but I felt traces of 2001: A Space Odyssey and The Wizard of Oz.

    It's impossible to discuss the movie's ending without spoilers. All I'll say is that Aster seems to arrive at three points at which the story might be over. I experienced a letdown each time I realized that wasn't the case. Aster had more to show -- if not to say.

    Does of all this work? It's a fair question but one that admits of no simple answer. Watching Beau Is Afraid, I sometimes wondered whether it might have made a dozen brilliant short films. I  also wondered whether David Lynch could have hit the same kind of notes in a more economical two hours. 

   And, yes,  the overworked and somewhat stale mother/son dynamic wore itself out.

   And yet ... 

   Time may reveal whether Aster's movie should be considered a fragmented work of genius or an incoherent oddity or something else entirely. 

   Whatever it is, Beau Is Afraid deserves not to be dismissed.

A little kid and some very big questions

    C'mon C'mon speaks its own language, a movie about questions that can't be answered and the man and boy who are stuck trying to deal with them.

    Director Mike Mills introduces us to Johnny (Joaquin Phoenix), a disheveled, preoccupied man who volunteers to help his sister (Gaby Hoffmann), a woman who's struggling to take care of her nine-year-old son (Woody Norman). Hoffmann's Viv also is trying to keep her bipolar husband (Scoot McNairy) from totally derailing during one of his crises.

   Mills (20th Century Women, Beginners) seems less interested in  mental illness than in how adults and children communicate. How does one talk to a nine year old who raises the subject of abortion and who wants to know why his uncle isn't married?

   Given its focus on the adult/child relationship, C'mon C'mon easily could have been overwhelmed by sentiment. It's not. Credit Phoenix who may be constitutionally unable to do warm and cuddly. He makes it clear that Johnny might be as lost as his nephew. 

    Throughout the film, Johnny can be seen working on what appears to be a radio project. He asks a diverse variety of children what they think the future will be like and records their answers. He also records his reactions to their answers.

    Shooting in black and white, Mills punctuates his story with unexpected views of the cities in which Johnny finds himself, principally Detroit, Los Angeles, New York, and New Orleans. 

    Johnny, who hasn't seen his nephew Jesse in more than a year because of a conflict with his sister, first meets the boy in Los Angeles, where the boy's harried mother faces numerous challenges. 

    Mom leaves Jesse in Johnny’s care when she travels to San Francisco to seek help for her husband. When Johnny has to return to New York for work, he proposes taking Jesse with him. 

   Viv initially resists but she has little choice but to allow Johnny to travel to New York where Jesse helps him record the natural sounds of the city. He's opening the boy to the larger world, but also maintaining a distance from Jesse. Johnny doesn't try to shape everything that Jesse encounters.

    Not surprisingly, Johnny must convince Jesse that he's safe with an uncle he hardly knows. To complicate matters, Jesse has ways of getting on adult nerves, launching ceaseless barrages of questions and observations.

    Mills places Johnny’s interviews with kids throughout the movie. He dedicates to "D-Man" Bryant, a nine year old who Johnny interviews and who later was killed. The kids are real and give the movie a documentary flavor.

   With unruly hair and a bit of a gut, Phoenix conveys the confusion of a man who seems to be turning to children to find answers that have eluded him, and in the end, the story gets under your skin with its  collection of awkward conversations, adult anxiety, and testing behaviors from a kid whose world has been shaken.

    The film owes much of its success to cinematographer Robbie Ryan, who gets close to the film's children without intruding on them. He creates a world that feels both naturalistic and unfamiliar, just the right laboratory for this kind of cinematic experiment.

    Norman gives one of those kid performances that makes you wonder how Mills obtained it. Jesse seems entirely unaffected -- even when he's being self-consciously shrewd. And like most kids, he can be both endearing and, yes, annoying.  Jesse has yet to learn the art of self-censorship.

   The brief encounter between Johnny and Jesse captures the kind of intimate breakthrough that's possible when crisis strikes and a great gap of vulnerability opens, presenting itself as a possible moment of  grace -- at least when viewed in retrospect.

Critics' Choice goes to 'Once Upon a Time'

Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood won four awards at the Critics Choice Association's 25 annual Critics' Choice Awards, the most of any 2020 nominee. In addition to best original screenplay, best-supporting actor and best production design, director Quentin Tarantino's movie took top honors for best picture.

As a member of the Broadcast Film Critics Association, I vote in the movie segment of the Critics' Choice awards, which also honor outstanding work in television.

In this compressed awards season, it's notable that the Critics' Choice Awards were given out on Sunday, the night before the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences was slated to announce 2020's Oscar nominees. Stay tuned.

Here, though, are this year's Critics' Choice winners:

BEST PICTURE
Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood

BEST ACTOR
Joaquin Phoenix – Joker

BEST ACTRESS
Renée Zellweger – Judy

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR
Brad Pitt – Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS
Laura Dern – Marriage Story

BEST DIRECTOR (TIE)
Bong Joon Ho – Parasite
Sam Mendes – 1917

BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY
Quentin Tarantino – Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood

BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY
Greta Gerwig – Little Women

BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY
Roger Deakins – 1917

BEST PRODUCTION DESIGN
Barbara Ling, Nancy Haigh – Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood

BEST EDITING
Lee Smith – 1917

BEST COSTUME DESIGN
Ruth E. Carter – Dolemite Is My Name

BEST HAIR AND MAKEUP
Bombshell (Lionsgate)

BEST VISUAL EFFECTS
Avengers: Endgame

BEST ANIMATED FEATURE
Toy Story 4

BEST YOUNG ACTOR/ACTRESS
Roman Griffin Davis -- Jo Jo Rabbit

BEST ACTION MOVIE
Avengers: Endgame

BEST COMEDY
Dolemite Is My Name

BEST SCI-FI OR HORROR MOVIE
Us

BEST FOREIGN LANGUAGE FILM
Parasite

BEST SONG (TIE)
Glasgow (No Place Like Home) – Wild Rose
I’m Gonna (Love Me Again) – Rocketman

BEST SCORE
Hildur Guðnadóttir – Joker

And, if you like numbers, here are totals for movies that won more than one award:

ONCE UPON A TIME … IN HOLLYWOOD - four
Best Picture
Best Supporting Actor – Brad Pitt
Best Original Screenplay – Quentin Tarantino
Best Production Design – Barbara Ling, Nancy Haigh

1917 – three awards
Best Director – Sam Mendes (Tie)
Best Cinematography – Roger Deakins
Best Editing – Lee Smith

AVENGERS: ENDGAME – two
Best Visual Effects
Best Action Movie

DOLEMITE IS MY NAME - two
Best Costume Design – Ruth E. Carter
Best Comedy

JOKER – two
Best Actor – Joaquin Phoenix
Best Score – Hildur Guðnadóttir

PARASITE -- two
Best Director – Bong Joon Ho (Tie)
Best Foreign Language Film

Phoenix gets behind the make-up in 'Joker'

Dark, violent and brooding. Is this a comic-book movie or a shrieking cry for help?

Set in a decaying, rot-infested Gotham City, the Joker attempts to show what happens when society’s “invisibles” are pushed to the breaking point. Kicking fanboy comic-book nostalgia to the curb, Joker brings us face-to-face with the madness that festers beneath the surface of a corrupted society. If Joker were to have a subtitle, it might be: Joker: Portrait of a Serial Killer.

But wait. Am I talking about Joker, the villain who Batman has been fighting for years and who previously has been played by Jack Nicholson and Heath Ledger and who now falls into the hands of Joaquin Phoenix? I am.

Joker, which marches to one of the year's most ominous drumbeats, was directed by Todd Phillips, whose resume includes such raucous comedies as Old School and the Hangover movies. Who knew that Phillips had this kind of haunting, violent and grime-encrusted effort in him?

But then Phillips never worked with Phoenix before and Phoenix, in many ways, is the movie — with everything else working to support the insanity, insecurity, and terror of an incomparable and frightening performance. I don't think it's stretching the point to say that Phoenix and Phillips have used comic book characters to create an anti-comic-book movie.

Having lost considerable weight to play the Joker — a.k.a., Arthur Fleck — Phoenix borders on the skeletal; he’s portraying a man who’s virtually disappearing. His occupation (clown for hire) puts him behind a mask that, at least initially, doesn’t liberate him but pushes him further into anonymity while also subjecting him to any number of cruel derisions.

Everything about Arthur screams misfit, including a disorder that causes him to burst into choking, maniacal fits of laughter that can appear indistinguishable from crying jags and which have no relation to anything that's happening to Arthur at the moment.

Mugged and severely beaten early on, Arthur is prey awaiting rebirth as predator. It’s not an easy transition for Arthur, who previously was institutionalized and who now lives with his mother (Frances Conroy) in a shabby Gotham apartment building, which he reaches by ascending a steep flight of punishing stairs.

Imprisoned in a child-like state, Arthur only escapes his loneliness when he’s violent. Arthur cares for his diminished mother, even washing her hair as he sits tubside over her nakedness. Hardly good preparation for developing mature relations with women.

I have no idea whether Phillips and Phoenix set out to make this kind of movie or whether it evolved as they began to work together. If the latter, they trusted their instincts and built everything around Phoenix's performance from Mark Friedberg's dystopian production design to Hildur Guðnadóttir’s musical score, which emerges from the screen like a moan, the sound of a soul being crushed.

Set in dingy apartments, dirty subway cars, and littered streets, Joker becomes a vivid, night-crawler of a movie in which its comic-book roots are only half-heartedly acknowledged, and perhaps didn't need to be there at all.

The movie introduces us to young Bruce Wayne, who, of course, will grow up to be Batman. Thomas Wayne (Brett Cullen) is an imperious tycoon with contempt for the masses he proposes to save by becoming the city's mayor. He calls them "clowns."

All of this produces a movie that’s compelling in ways that challenge convention while also drawing on the movie past, most notably Martin Scorsese’s King of Comedy. Not only has Robert De Niro, the star of King of Comedy, been cast as a talk-show host, but Arthur aspires to be a standup comedian, a pursuit for which he has no aptitude. He scrawls his idea of jokes into a notebook full of incoherent scribblings, hardly a manifesto.

Yet, when Arthur turns to violence — he shoots three drunken Wall Street types in a subway melee — his actions give rise to a social movement in which protesters don clown masks and shout down those who are rich enough to immunize themselves against the city’s rot.

The irony flows easily because Arthur has no interest in politics. He doesn’t want to change the social order; he wants to be seen, to bask in the limelight of an existence that's finally acknowledged and even celebrated. And, yes, Phoenix's performance also generates pity for this misbegotten figure.

Joker harbors one glaring false note. Arthur tries to form a relationship with a single mother (Zazie Beetz) whose attraction to Arthur challenges credibility. Arthur is too weird for this or any other relationship. Is Beetz's character's attraction to Arthur akin to the concern one might feel for an abused child? Whatever it is, it doesn’t ring true.

You probably know that Joker already has generated controversy. It won the top prize at the recently concluded Venice Film Festival but has been criticized for being too violent, for having the potential to cause violence and for encouraging facile enmity toward achievement and wealth.

On violence: Yes, the movie’s violent and, yes, it contains hints of brutal aggression toward its audience. It’s as if Phillips and Phoenix, with no small amount of defiance, want to challenge audiences to examine their love of villains and their taste for blood. They’re asking what happens if we strip away comic-book protections and show the real thing?

As a result, Joker brings its violence closer to us than most horror movies. Unlike in It Chapter Two, for example, evil isn’t something that recurs in 10-year intervals with supernatural assists; it’s lodged in the twisted psyche of the guy in the apartment next door. It's Taxi Driver's Travis Bickel reborn into a normless world.

Are the movie’s jabs at elitism and wealth justified or simplistic? Simplistic, of course, but don’t misunderstand. Joker isn’t a movie that's likely to inspire profound thoughts or discussions about its deeper meanings; it seems to want what its main character wants for himself, an inescapable and independent existence.

When Arthur fully emerges as Joker, he dances down those same steps that he climbed every day as he headed for his lonesome retreat. It’s a wild, uninhibited release of energy played against Gary Glitter's Rock and Roll, Part 2 -- and it's coming from a figure in clown make-up with a blood-red rictus drawn on his gaunt face.

That moment and others like it -- particularly when Phoenix incorporates dance into Joker's repertoire -- stand as unnerving bits of performance art: frightening, dangerous and eerie. It’s mad anarchy unleashed: terrifying and, in one harrowing moment, in charge. If that doesn't rattle you, I don't know what would.

A man lives a nightmare

Director Lynne Ramsay obtains a frightening performance from Joaquin Phoenix in You Were Never Really Here.

Director Lynne Ramsay never has been one to comprise the brutality and dark vision of the films she makes. It’s almost as if Ramsay (Ratcacher, Morvern Callar and We Need to Talk About Kevin) dreams her films, and Ramsay’s dreams tend to be nightmarish.

Adapted from a 2013 novella by Jonathan Ames, Ramsay’s You Were Never Really Here hangs a series of unnerving sequences on a conventional spine: A hit man accepts a mission in which he must save a teenage girl from a life of child prostitution. As is sometimes the case with dark fables, You Were Never Really Here shows no great interest either in by-the-book expressions of plot or character development.

Instead, Ramsay takes the viewer on a visual journey in which standard elements are more suggested than spelled out. Early on, we see an image of a man with a plastic bag over his head. Are we watching a murder? A suicide? Some weird act of erotic asphyxiation?

The answer: None of the above. Later, we learn that we've witnessed the re-enactment of a bizarre childhood ritual on the part of Joe, the movie’s strange and scary main character, rendered with brute physicality by Joaquin Phoenix. Phoenix seems to have enlarged himself to a point where we half wonder whether he has borrowed Gerard Depardieu’s body to play a bulky hitman who specializes in beating his prey with ball-peen hammers.

Hidden behind a thick beard, Phoenix turns the near silent Joe into the movie’s essential mystery. Using quickly inserted images, Ramsay lets us know that Joe was an abused child and a traumatized former Marine. Neither of those facts -- if that's what they can be called -- explains much about Joe, a character we’re presumably meant to accept as an existential expression of the ways in which brutality and a sense of righteousness can turn an individual psyche into a war zone.

Joe's profile hovers halfway between that of a serial killer and a fierce defender of abused girls.

Everything about Joe speaks of brooding obscurity. He lives with his aging mother (Judith Roberts) in a ratty apartment. He has no friends. He tries to smash the demons that feed on him, assaultive images that explode inside his head with the force of detonated grenades.

If you're looking for a social dimension, I suppose it’s possible to take Joe as a manifestation of the worst of a corrupted society, almost a socially induced mutation.

In that regard, Joe evokes memories of Taxi Driver’s Travis Bickle, and the movie’s story, like Scorsese's dark masterwork, also dips into the political life of New York City. A New York state senator (Alex Manette) who wants to run for governor hires Joe to rescue his 13-year-old daughter (Ekaterina Samsonov) from a ring of sex traffickers.

The movie’s conflation of politics and seamy degeneracy isn’t fully explored and the plot unfolds in somewhat muddled fashion. One presumes that little about You Were Never Really Here should be taken literally. Put another way, if you examine the developments in You Were Never Really Here, they don't always make sense. But Ramsay’s visual style sustains an atmosphere of suggested terror, punctuated by vivid imagery from cinematographer Tom Townsend.

An example: At one point, we see Joe underwater in the midst of a suicide attempt, floating silently toward oblivion.

There are also moments that challenge — perhaps too self-consciously — expectation and are meant to add splashes of weird humor. After a violent episode, Joe lies on the floor with one of his dying victims. They sing along to I’ve Never Been to Me, which happens to be playing on the radio.

In one of the movie’s most gripping sequences, security cameras record Joe going about his awful business, hammering away at anyone who has had the misfortune of seeing him at work.

Watching You Were Never Really Here, I couldn’t help marveling at the combination of daring and commitment it must have taken to make a film such as this, one that has little interest in reassuring an audience. If You Were Never Really Here is a nightmare, it’s one from which Ramsey doesn’t seem to want us to awaken.

She's greatly aided in her efforts by a score from Jonny Greenwood, perhaps the most innovate movie composer working today.

A nagging question, of course, arises: Why are we watching this? What edification can be drawn from this gleaming, alienated work? Ramsey, you should know, does not employ her considerable skills in the pursuit of visual pleasure; her aesthetics derive from trying to live inside the emotional worlds of her characters.

Let's say the jury is out on what all of this means. Maybe Ramsey has delivered a movie that’s more sketch than fully developed canvas, that she’s wandering in this territory without a map. I guess you could say that’s both courageous and crazy. And that description pretty much describes You Were Never Really Here for me -- at least until I see it again.

Woody's latest breaks little new ground

An unconvincing work about a depressed philosophy professor.

In his new movie Irrational Man, Woody Allen chews over existential and ethical questions that feel so familiar, they go down without much struggle. That's not a good thing for a movie that's trying to deal with disturbing moral questions.

Allen's movie toys with big ideas, but little in Irrational Man seems deeply felt. And the movie's intellectual life seems more like patina than a rich vein of dramatic ore.

A capable Joaquin Phoenix plays Abe Lucas, a dispirited philosophy professor and former political activist who has concluded that life is meaningless.

Newly arrived at fictional Braylin College in Rhode Island, Abe is regarded as brilliant but erratic, maybe even a little scary. He has a reputation as a womanizer, and doesn't seem to care about anything. He goes nowhere without a flask full of single-malt Scotch.

Allen does a decent job establishing an academic milieu that seems far removed from mundane realities, but doesn't seem to know what to do with the rest of his movie, which eventually arrives at a far-fetched turning point.

Abe springs to life only after he tries to plan the perfect murder.

Of course, there's also sex.

Seeing an opportunity to relieve her boredom, an unhappily married professor (Parker Posey) tries to drag Abe into the sack. Downtrodden and impotent, Abe can't initially oblige.

Abe also resists but ultimately succumbs to the earnest charms of one of his students (a lively and appealing Emma Stone). By the time Abe gives in to Jill, thoughts of murder have reinvigorated his dormant libido.

The supposedly fascinating Abe begins to take over Jill's life. She's smart, young and still-impressionable. She's also beginning to lose touch with her adoring boyfriend, a sincere college kid played by Jamie Blackley.

At various times, Allen makes us privy to Abe's thoughts. At other times, we listen to Jill's thoughts, not that either of them is all that interesting.

Particularly in the early going, Allen clutters the dialogue with talk about Kierkegaard and Kant. Maybe that's why the movie seems like a strange hybrid: part term paper, part thriller and part satire about academia.

The theme in Irrational Man -- the meaning of ethics in a meaningless and random universe -- was better handled by Allen in movies such as Crimes and Misdemeanors and Match Point.

I'd say Irrational Man improves on Allen's last outing, Magic in the Moonlight, which also cast Stone in a principal role, and Phoenix, Stone and Posey remain in good form throughout.

But for all its attempts to deal with weighty matters, Irrational Man comes off as slight. It's a minor addition to the expansive Allen catalog -- not to mention one that overuses Ramsey Lewis' rendition of The In Crowd.

The bottom line: Irrational Man isn't difficult to watch; it is, however, not always easy to believe.

Inherent confusion in 'Inherent Vice'

Paul Thomas Anderson tackles a Thomas Pynchon novel and ... well ... er ... that is ...

Director Paul Thomas Anderson has gone where no director has gone before; i.e., he has attempted to bring a novel by the reclusive Thomas Pynchon to the screen.

Those familiar with Pynchon's work immediately will understand why this is such an audacious endeavor on Anderson's part. Pynchon's novels aren't plot-driven, and frequently veer off into clouds of digression as he watches the social order break into bizarre fragments.

If a Pynchon novel doesn't always make sense in conventional terms, well, look around you. What really does?

When I was in college during the '60s, we were all devouring Pynchon's V., a debut novel that revolved around a character named Benny Profane.

Pynchon provided a counterweight to the formalized rigor of academic reading. We were smitten. We congratulated ourselves for getting "it," whatever "it" was.

In Inherent Vice, Anderson dips into Pynchon's 2009 neo-noir fantasy, an LA-based story that introduces us to a character named Doc Sportello (Joaquin Phoenix). Doc's 1970s life unfolds in a pot-induced haze that keeps him wandering through post-Manson, hippie detritus in a fictional town called Gordita Beach.

If the private eye was staple of 1940s Hollywood, he's reduced to blood-shot eye by Anderson, less a savvy guy with his own moral code than a bemused idler.

The movie opens when Sportello is visited by a former girlfriend, the elusive Shasta Fay Hepworth (Katherine Waterston). It seems Shasta Fay has become the lover of real-estate magnate Michael Z. Wolfmann (Eric Roberts).

Wolfmann has disappeared and Shasta Fay wants Sportello's help to locate him, presumably to save him from those who would put him in a sanitarium -- or something like that.

At this point, I'm going to let the ship that's carrying the Anderson/Pynchon plot sink. No more attempts to recount what can't be recounted. The plot is a blur of dodges, gestures and noir mimicry. Trying to follow it is a bit like getting lost in a new town without benefit of a map or GPS. You either panic and scream or you decide to enjoy the strange sights.

For me, these sights are embodied in the form of characters who enter the movie like figures from a pop-up book.

A sampling:

-- Sauncho Smilax (Benicio Del Toro). He's Sportello's lawyer, a guy who seems like a refugee from a Hunter Thompson story.

-- Lt. Detective Christian F. "Bigfoot" Bjornsen (Josh Brolin), an LA cop who specializes in civil rights violations.
-- Dr. Rudy Blatnoyd (Martin Short), a dentist who wears purple suits and heads a mysterious ring called Golden Fang.

-- Coy Harlingen (Owen Wilson), a saxophone player who's presumed to have died, but whose wife (Jena Malone) thinks he's still alive.

You can tell by the character names that Pynchon's universe is one of broad comedy carved with a satirist's knife.

I'm putting off my assessment for a bit because (as a matter of public service) I want to share with you the way that I watched the movie.

I tended to drift in and out of the various episodes. While each was unfolding, it held my attention, but as Anderson shifted from one bit to the next, I had difficulty remembering exactly where I'd been.

I enjoyed the music -- both Jonny Greenwood's score and the tunes selected by Anderson to accompany various segments. I chuckled. My mind wandered. I chuckled some more. My mind wandered some more.

When Reese Witherspoon showed up as Deputy DA Penny Kimball, I was amused to see her. She's one of Sportello's sexual companions and informed sources.

I felt a sense of alienated indifference as the characters exchanged information that seemed important to them, but left me shrugging.

The movie's narration -- delivered by Joanna Newsom as a character named Sortilege -- sometimes approaches Pynchon's eloquence, but doesn't necessarily clarify much of anything.

Two performances are of special note. Phoenix, who appeared in Anderson's The Master, brings stoned integrity and his own level of confusion to the role of Sportello.

He's best in scenes in which he squares off with Brolin's Bigfoot, a character who becomes a bold parody of a quintessentially starched Los Angeles detective. Bigfoot has a crew-cut and a fondness for phallus-shaped popsicles. Unashamedly brutal and a man of porcine appetites (he's always eating), Bigfoot stands as a kind of one-man satire of law enforcement at its worst.

Now, what to make of all this?

You can probably tell from the tone of this review that I'm not ready to rip into Anderson's movie. I hope you also can tell that it's an experience to which not everyone will take. The old adage -- it helps if you're stoned -- may be applicable here, an observation I offer not as an encouragement for pot smoking, but as a guidepost to the experience that awaits you.

I enjoyed some of the movie's asides, watching Bigfoot in a non-speaking role in Adam 12, for example. On top of everything else, the guy wants to be on TV. Martin Short made me smile, as did Sportello's visit to a massage parlor in the middle of nowhere.

I'm sure I'm leaving something out. The neo-Nazis who guard Wolfmann perhaps? I'm not sure it matters.

Was a time when I might have gotten more pleasure from this meander through a lost moment in the counterculture moors. I suppose in the end, Anderson didn't totally convince me that Pynchon's work should be brought to the screen, even with the help of the gifted cinematographer Robert Elswit who coats each scene with downside lacquer.

If you're an Anderson fan (and I mostly am), you probably owe it to yourself to give this one a try. If you're a Pynchon fan, you're already used to plots that leave you scratching your head.

Everyone else? I'd say that the movie unfolds as a series of digressions from ... well ... let's talk.

Did I feel hostility toward Inherent Vice? Not really.

Did I like it? Sometimes.

Was I bored by it? Occasionally.

Would I watch it again? Not immediately. Probably someday. Who knows?

A thought-provoking 'Her'

Director Spike Jonze's movie about love in the time of artificial intelligence.

Other people can be so much trouble, particularly those with whom we have intimate relationships. They can shatter the images we have of them. They sometimes leave unexpectedly -- or we do. And then what? Conflicts vanish only to be replaced by a sense of vacancy, an emptiness that feels encompassing and hollow.

It's that kind of loneliness that makes director Spike Jonze's Her so strangely affecting, a movie set in a near future in which person-to-person communication has become increasingly difficult.

So it seems for Theodore Twombley (Joaquin Phoenix), a man who earns his living writing intimate letters for others. He composes these letters on his computer. He then prints out versions that look "authentically" hand-written and puts them in the mail.

Theodore's like the ultimate greeting card. He expresses sentiments that elude those for whom he writes. He takes his work seriously. He's good at. His letters aren't trite.

Theodore -- let's continue to call him by his first name -- is an odd duck. He lives in Los Angeles and wears what seem to be the fashion of his times, pants worn high around the waste. He has a mustache, and resides in a sleek, sparsely furnished high-rise apartment where he plays holographic video games while city lights twinkle in the distance.

In early scenes, Theodore walks slowly. Each step seems a bit of an ordeal: Theodore's body understands what his mind may not yet comprehend. No new destination beckons. He's in the middle of getting divorced from his wife Catherine (Rooney Mara), a woman he has known since he was a child.

Jonze gradually turns Her into love story in which a dispirited Theodore falls for a woman with whom he shares a new intimacy. Her name is Samantha.

Did I say that Theodore falls in love with a woman? I need to amend that. Samantha (voice by Scarlett Johansson)is a computer operating system, the personalized representation of something called "OS1," which offers a breakthrough in artificial intelligence. Samantha is Seri on steroids, and she's capable of developing an evolving personality.

Smart, unflappable, flirtatious and sexy, Samantha turns Her into a romance, but one that, by definition, can't be fully consummated. In this case, the obvious problem probably needs stating: Theodore has a body: Samantha is pure, unrestricted consciousness.

At one point, Samantha tries to cope with the predicament by asking Theodore to have a sexual relationship with a willing surrogate (Portia Doubleday). Theodore can't handle the strangeness such an encounter requires, a bizarre sort of threesome in which Doubleday's character generously clears out her personality for Samantha.

It's not that Theodore never tries to have relationships with other humans. At one point, he goes on a date with an enormously appealing young woman (Olivia Wilde). They have a great time over dinner, but before the evening's over, Wilde's suddenly wary character sabotages any hope for continued connection.

Theodore also has a friendly relationship with a neighbor in his building (Amy Adams in another impressive performance, this time as a woman who designs video games).

Jonze emphasizes the isolation that stems -- at least in part -- from our increasing interaction with user-friendly machines, but Her never plays like a Luddite's diatribe against rapidly advancing technology.

Jonze offers us what seem like provisional realizations. A fundamental sense of consternation permeates everything: We no longer can be sure whether life is mostly defined by consciousness or flesh-and-blood physicality. And if machines develop consciousness do they represent a new species of being?

Her allows us to pose such questions for ourselves. The movie primarily works as a sweet, sad love story, as a deadpan look at where we might be headed and as a character study of a man living in a convenient but anonymous future.

Cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema and production designer K.K. Barrett combine to create a visual environment that's never threatening, the future as a kind of agony-free zone.

On camera almost every second, Phoenix's everyman performance reveals Theodore's deep vulnerability. He's responding to a voice and to how he imagines Samantha to be.

Johansson, whose voice blends chuckles, sexiness and intelligence, makes a totally convincing Samantha. Mara excels in a small role as Theodore's estranged, angry wife, and Adams adds rumpled charm as Theodore's neighbor.

Jonze's take on things seems strikingly original because he isn't attacking an ominous new system or exploiting the future to make a sweeping political statement about the present.>p>
He uses artificial intelligence as a springboard for examining what happens to relationships when one partner evolves beyond another. He wonders whether we really fall in love with others or with phantoms of our own making.

Technology or no, those questions likely will persist into the future. Credit Jonze with finding an artful, intriguing and pleasurable way of restating them.

The real master is behind the camera

Paul Thomas Anderson's latest is strange, compelling and uncommonly bold..

While watching Paul Thomas Anderson's The Master, one thought kept running through my mind: "I don't think I've ever seen anything quite like this." Visually stunning and filled with disquietude, The Master can be as staggering as it is demanding.

When I say that The Master brims with unease, I mean it as high praise. The composition of its images, its almost frightening insularity and the strangeness of its central performances are nothing short of mesmerizing.

The movie centers of two characters, a sailor cast adrift in society after World War II (Joaquin Phoenix) and the founder (Philip Seymour Hoffman) of a cult called The Cause, which claims to take adherents back through past lives as a means of helping them attain perfection.

Untamed, libidinous and violent, Phoenix's Freddie Quell becomes a kind of project for Hoffman's Lancaster Dodd, a test case for Dodd's therapeutic methods. Theirs is a complex relationship built on contradictory helpings of acceptance and scorn.

With his mouth twisted into a perpetual snarl and his shoulders hunched forward, Phoenix creates a character who suggests both menace and vulnerability. Hoffman's Dodd has an air of assumed grandeur. Dodd seems totally convinced of his own importance and singularly focused on his theories, which (as his son reveals in a moment of rebellious candor) the great man may be inventing on the fly.

Prone to violent, alcohol-fueled outbursts, Freddie may not be entirely likable, but Dodd isn't entirely dislikable, either. That's part of the way in which Anderson keeps us off guard.

War scarred and psychologically troubled, Freddie clearly needs help with destructive behavior that includes making potent alcoholic drinks out of any available substance, including paint thinner. For his part, Dodd can't seem to bring himself to kick poor Freddie to the curb.

Anderson slowly lets us know that Dodd is gathering followers, many of them wealthy people who eagerly submit to what he calls "processing." He drubs such followers with provocative questions, repeating each inquiry with willful insistence. Such "processing" is supposed to help people recall and recover from troubling life episodes, roadblocks on the path to perfection.

Anderson insists on keeping the thematic waters muddy, even when his images -- with help from cinematographer Mihai Malaimare Jr. -- are astonishingly vivid, many of them set to the startling rhythms of Jonny Greenwood's invigorating score.

The Master may bother some viewers because it poses unanswered question. Why is Freddie so troubled, for example? He ran away from love he found in his hometown of Lynn, Mass. He probably saw too much war. He claims to have had an incestuous relationship with an aunt. But we're never entirely certain about the forces that keep pushing Freddie into the darkest corners of his mind.

Dodd has been compared to Scientology Founder L. Ron Hubbard, but a movie about the roots of Scientology will have to wait. Anderson has created a haunting vision of the post-war 1950s. Meticulously appointed and yet never entirely realistic, The Master lives in a world fraught with unborn meanings and still-to-be-realized consequences.

Whatever you think of Dodd, you'll have to agree that he has no greater supporter than his wife, played with astringent force by a terrific Amy Adams. As Mrs. Dodd -- one in a succession of Mrs. Dodds -- Adams exhibits frightening levels of loyalty and determination. She's like the ideal corporate wife, well-mannered, attractive, maternal and totally committed to her husband's advancement, a true believer when it comes to The Cause.

Taken together, Phoenix, Hoffman and Adams give three of the year's most commanding performances.

After Anderson's last movie -- There Will Be Blood -- I had an e-mail exchange with a screenwriter who found the movie lacking because it had no third act. The same can be said of The Master. But Anderson is too skilled for us to assume that he doesn't know how to create a third act.

Absent a thunderous payoff, we're left to turn the movie over in our minds, tilling its rich soil as we search for seeds of meaning, wondering whether every image we've seen is meant to be taken literally. Some may be a product of Freddie's lurid imagination, for example.

Movies, of course, are meant to be experienced as much as pondered. And the experience of The Master can be unsettling and uncontainable, as overpowering of some of Anderson's extreme close-ups. If you're with The Master, it may make you feel as if you're standing on the edge of a cliff, fearful of the fall but unable to turn away. The Master can trouble as much as it intrigues, but it also stands as an uncommonly bold piece of cinema.

Joaquin's still here -- sort of

One picture's worth a ... well ... you know.

If the late and proudly reprobate Charles Bukowski had written about movie stars instead of down-and-out drunks, he might have created Joaquin Phoenix. Drugged, dissolute and looking as awful as any one can look on the sunny side of the dirt, Phoenix is the subject of I'm Still Here, Casey Affleck's "documentary" about a year in the life of a movie star who suddenly announced that he had abandoned acting to take up rapping.

The events following Phoenix's departure from Hollywood are chronicled in Affleck's movie, which some regard as a hoax on a par, say, with faking a decision to walk away from a lucrative and apparently rewarding acting career. It's possible - some even say likely - that I'm Still Here is an elaborate goof, a sneering reminder that we shouldn't presume to know anything about actors based on what we see of them on film.

Know this, though: It's hardly unusual for parts of documentaries to be staged. Even the most devoted of filmmakers can't be everywhere at once. The recreation of an important moment doesn't necessarily invalidate the truth of a documentary. Affleck, who appeared with the film at the Venice Film Festival, has denied that the movie is a hoax, an obligatory stance on his part whether the movie is truthful or not.

If I'm Still Here is all illusion, it's a well-created one. Affleck adopts a convincingly sloppy hand-held style that emphasizes fly-on-the-wall eavesdropping. He includes embarrassing footage of Phoenix that found its way onto You Tube, and, of course, he makes room for Phoenix's now legendary 2008 appearance on the Late Show With David Letterman. Phoenix showed up to promote Two Lovers - his supposed last movie - and wound up looking like an escapee from a mental institution: bearded, bedraggled and, dare we say, tormented by unseen demons.

"I'm sorry you couldn't be here tonight," concluded Letterman. A distraught Phoenix looked as if he'd just been waterboarded.

A plot line of sorts runs through I'm Still Here. Once he declares his rapping intentions, Phoenix tries to obtain an audience with Sean "Diddy" Combs. He ultimately meets Combs. Nothing seems to come of it. Combs doesn't blow him off, but he's not interested in paving Phoenix's way to hip-hop stardom, either.

So what about Phoenix's rapping abilities?

Let's say he's hardly on a par with any hip-hop heavyweights. This lack of ability either supports the idea that I'm Still Here is an elaborate joke or informs us that Phoenix is even more deluded than we think. He says he's sick of interpreting material others have written. Mostly, he's sick of playing the character called Joaquin Phoenix, a state of discontent that isn't likely to earn him much sympathy.

Say again? You're tired of being rich, famous and of having the opportunity to do highly creative work that has earned you two Oscar nominations and a ton of audience and critical acclaim in movies such as Gladiator and Walk the Line? How unfortunate.

Whatever else I'm Still Here might be, it's definitely not an exercise in image building.

During the course of the movie, Phoenix behaves like a man anxious to drive nails into his own coffin. He snorts coke, hires call girls and belittles his associates. He often rants incoherently. For all the world, he looks as if he's coming apart at the seams as he pursues a career that marks as ridiculous a leap as any he might have taken in assuming the identity of a fictional character. I'm Still Here is a vanity project thrown into reverse, its gears grinding loudly.

So what evidence supports the idea that the film is a fake? The fact that Affleck is Phoenix's brother-in-law makes it difficult to believe he'd allow Joaquin to appear this way. An end credit announcing that Phoenix and Affleck co-wrote the film raises additional questions. Affleck's directorial style -- lighting so dim you sometimes find yourself straining to see through the mush - makes you wonder if he's not pushing the gritty authenticity a little too hard.

An even better question: Should you spend money on a film that may or may not be real? Tough call. I'd say that I'm Still Here has roughly the same appeal as the proverbial car wreck you can't turn away from, and it ultimately raises questions about our ability to distinguish between reality and image - whether that image is of a talented, complex and ultra-intense Oscar nominee or an artist who looks as if he's on the verge of losing his mind.

Affleck makes us share in Phoenix's apparent descent. And, yes, I lean toward thinking that there's some core of ugly truth here, as well as a disturbing question: Joke or not, who in his right mind would want to present himself to the world this way?