Suspicion overwhelms a psychiatrist

 

   Speaking fluent French, Jodie Foster plays an American-born psychiatrist embroiled in a mystery set in Paris, the city where she lives and works. Directed by Rebecca Zlotowski, A Private Life strikes many seductively smart notes as it follows Foster's Lilian Steiner, a character whose inner life becomes increasingly apparent to us -- if not always to her.

   Emotionally controlled and guarded, Lilian suspects that one of her patients (Virginie Efira) was murdered by her husband (Mathieu Amalric). Could Lilian's suspicions be a cover for her inability to listen carefully? Did she miss something vital about Efira's Paula, whose death was ruled a suicide?

     As she explores the possibility of foul play, Lilian begins an atypical journey — at least for her: She begins playing detective, eventually enlisting help from her ex-husband (Daniel Auteuil). Maybe the truth can't be discovered on a psychiatrist's couch.

    A well-paired Auteuil and Foster sometimes seem to be playing a farce, revealing themselves to be rank amateurs when it comes to solving crimes.

    It's not always easy to determine what Zlotowski has in mind as she mixes thriller tones, comedy, serious drama, and at times, absurdity. 

    At one point, for example, Lilian -- not a likely person to believe in reincarnation -- spins a wild fantasy about her grown son's former life as a Nazi supporter during World War II, an odd display of imagination considering that Lilian and all the members of her immediate family are Jewish. 

    Lilian's loss of control becomes apparent early. After learning of her patient's death, she begins to shed tears. She visits Auteuil's Gabriel; conveniently, he's an ophthalmologist. Gabriel's ability to help people see (literally) contrasts with Lilian’s ability to apply the same skill -- at least metaphorically.

    An encounter with a hypnotist (Sophie Guillemin) makes for a diverting scene. Lilian tries hypnotism to cure her of the involuntary tears that roll down her face. It’s inaccurate to call it “crying” because Lilian’s tears seem disconnected from any emotional state.

    Lilian learned about the hypnotist from an irate patient (Noam Morgensztern), who insists that he's wasted money on therapy after the hypnotist helped him stop smoking with one visit. So much for eight years of analysis, not the only swipe the movie takes at Freudian psychoanalysis.

    Working from a screenplay she co-wrote with Anne Berest and Gaelle Mace, Zlotowski adds an element that points to Lilian's ability to wall herself off from her patients. She records all her sessions on an outdated mini-disc system, allowing the discs to do the work of note-taking and perhaps dulling her attention.

    It's wonderful to see Auteuil (Manon of the Springs and Jean de Florette) as a devoted former husband who never totally lost his love for his wife. He creates a character who handles himself with wit and intelligence. Foster and Auteuil generate appealing chemistry as they flirt with the idea of renewing their characters' relationship. 

   A Private Life stands as a bit of an oddity, a film that's alternately involving, amusing, and, at times, confounding in its attempts to play in so many different registers. The movie's complexity can become a puzzle that feels unsolved, but Zlotowski, Foster, and a distinctive supporting cast create pieces that amuse, intrigue, and keep the story percolating.

Another foray into the punishing world of Gitmo

 

     The Mauritanian draws inspiration from a best-selling memoir by Mohamedou Ould Slahi, a man who spent 14 years imprisoned in the Guantanamo Bay detention camp. 

     Slahi was arrested in Mauritania in 2001. He had just returned from Germany, a country identified as a hotbed of Islamic radicalism. Earlier, Slahi had visited Afghanistan.

     At the time of Slahi's Afghanistan foray,  mujahideen fighters -- with US support -- were battling a communist government. Slahi also had been involved in a financial transaction involving a cousin who was part of the al Qaeda web.

     The Mauritanian clearly stands on Slahi's side, taking a highly critical view of the interrogation methods adopted during the George W. Bush, post 9/11 administration. Slahi, by the way, never was charged with a crime.

      Although he's depicted as considering himself safe from prosecution at the movie's outset,  Slahi awakens in Gitmo where he endures a Kafkaesque 14 years that included good guy/bad guy interrogation and torture. 

     After  enduring numerous bouts of torture, Slahi confessed.

     Enter Albuquerque-based attorney Nancy Hollander (Jodie Foster) who takes on Slahi's case as part of her pro bono work. She's assisted by Teri Duncan (Shailene Woodley), a younger attorney.

    Benedict Cumberbatch plays a Louisiana-born marine, the attorney who opposes Hollander's efforts but seems a decent enough fellow. 

    Religious and committed to his job, Cumberbatch's Lt. Col. Stuart Couch lost a pal on United Flight 175. He's enthusiastic about his work, but he's also portrayed as a man who believes in fair play. He doesn't want to be part of what might amount to a conspiratorial lynching.

     Foster opts for a performance consisting of tight, highly controlled gestures. An underutilized Woodley doesn't make much of an impression. 

     Not surprisingly, the movie's most vivid performance is given by Tahar Rahim, as Slahi, a man who doesn't immediately tell his lawyers about his confession for fear that he'll be tortured again.

     Director Kevin Macdonald (The Last King of Scotland) plays the story straight, turning the film into a legal procedural with highly unsettling scenes of Slahi's torture.

    Thanks to Slahi's Guantanamo Diary, lots of news reports, and documentaries, the material in The Mauritanian, though predictably disturbing, hardly feels revelatory. 

    At this point, The Mauritanian feels less like a compelling expose than a dutiful reminder that Guantanamo has produced stories that the US won't want to paste in its book of proud memories. 

    

    

Aiming at big targets -- and missing

George Clooney and Julia Roberts bring star power to Money Monster, a second rate critique of the media and the financial system.

The Money Monster is a situation in search of a movie -- and, I'm afraid, it's a search conducted in vain.

The movie's premise is known to anyone who's seen the trailer. A blustering cable TV financial maven is taken hostage while doing his show. The gunman, who takes over a studio at the fictional FNN network, straps a bomb-containing vest to TV loud mouth Lee Gates before voicing what the movie seems to view as a legitimate grievance.

The aggrieved gunman lost his life savings because he acted on a supposedly solid stock tip Gates gave his gullible audience.

When the stock tanks, the gunman decides that the system -- i.e., just about everything -- is rigged. He wants answers.

Well, here's one. A movie that's trying, among other things, to expose a lack of credibility in our brazen 24/7 media ought to be far more credible itself.

The Money Monster flirts with thriller and satirical elements without providing enough of either, and despite the presence of appealing stars George Clooney (as Gates) and Julia Roberts (as Patty Fenn, his producer), the movie shorts sells character development. There isn't much.

Gates is a self-congratulatory on-air clown whose show traffics in noisy gimmicks. Patty is all business, the savvy woman who presides over the TV circus in which Gates performs.

Clooney gives Gates the brash presence of an unashamed showman; Gates likes to don a gold top hat and open his business report with a song-and-dance number. Roberts' character speaks to Gates through an earpiece while he's being held hostage. She tries to keep him from making a fatal mistake.

The gunman (Jack O'Connell) becomes the movie's slightly demented everyman, a $14-and-hour delivery guy who has a girlfriend and a kid on the way. He sees no future for himself. He doesn't want his $60,000 investment back; he wants answers.

It's not always wise to judge a movie by its predecessors, but The Money Monster evokes memories of far better entertainments -- Network, Dog Day Afternoon and The Big Short among them.

Director Jodie Foster can't fuse the material into anything substantial. The Money Monster seldom rises far enough over-the-top to qualify as wildly inventive satire, and its thriller elements (a hostage is held, the police arrive, etc.) are routine.

The movie's less-than-suspenseful plot hinges on complicated business shenanigans involving Ibis Clear Capital, a financial company that claims that its rocketing stock -- the one Gates boldly recommended -- tanked because of a computer glitch, thereby losing a total of $800 million for its stockholders.

Credit the movie with introducing -- or at least popularizing -- a bit of jargon. Algorithms are referred to as "algos,'' and the guy who invented the algorithm that governs Ibis' dealings is called a "quant,'' as in "quantitative analyst."

I left the theater happy to know that I'll now be able to address all my problems by asking anyone who'll listen to help me "find the quant."

As bona fide movie stars, Clooney and Roberts keep The Money Monster watchable, but in this case, seeing definitely isn't believing.

You may not be able to take your eyes off Clooney and Roberts, but their magnetism mostly is wasted on a screenplay that dares to take place in real time, but seldom bothers to make what happens during that time seem believably real.

Strong start, then collapse for 'Elysium'

Elysium could have been so much more than it is.

Recently, I was riding my bicycle through one of the Denver area's more expensive neighborhoods, the kind in which once modest homes have been conquered by mini-mansions that probably are priced in multiples of millions. Who, I wondered, can afford to live in such places? What do the residents of these palaces do that enables them to take literally the old axiom that a man's home is his castle?

The growing divide between the rich and the rest of us is the basis for Elysium, a sci-fi spectacle from director Neill Blomkamp, who made waves with his gritty first feature, 2009's District 9.

Set in the late 21st century, Elysium imagines a time when the rude and scoffing multitudes live on devastated planet Earth. Those with major money have moved to Elysium, a giant, circular space station that orbits the Earth. Think of Elysium as the ultimate gated community, a refuge from hardship.

Elysium's residents live well, and have access to medical technology that can cure just about anything.

Of course, someone eventually was bound to crash the high-end party. Enter Matt Damon as Max, an Earth-bound factory drone who receives a massive dose of radiation at work. Max is given five days to live. The only way he can save himself is to sneak into Elysium, and avail himself of its life-saving technology, machines that look like CAT scans, but can diagnose and cure a person in one go-round.

Max's predicament brings him into contact with Spider (Wagner Moura), a criminal who knows how to smuggle folks into Elysium. Of course, there's a condition: Max can go to Elysium only if he agrees to a scheme in which he'll download data from the brain of a wealthy businessman (William Fichtner).

This requires Max to have a coding device of some sort implanted directly into his skull. Spider wants to use the data Max obtains to undermine the two-tier system that has separated humanity into two major groups -- the super-rich and everyone else.

On his initial visit to the hospital after he's radiated, Max reunites with Frey (Alice Braga)) a doctor who had been a childhood pal. As it turns out, the doctor has a terminally ill daughter (Emma Tremblay). Frey hopes that Max will take her child to Elysium, where she can be saved.

Blomkamp does a better job depicting an earthly dystopia than in showing Elysium's abundance, but he does outline the political structure of Elysium. The place has a president, but the real power lies with a ruthless security official (Jodie Foster).
I didn't keep precise track, but I'm guessing that for about an hour Elysium really clicks. At its best, the movie qualifies as an unusually smart helping of sci-fi, a convincing picture of an economically fractured future.

The visual environment (Max lives in a ravaged Los Angeles) is vividly imagined, and, in general, the special effects have top-of-the-line appeal.

Once the movie reaches Elysium, though, it starts to fall apart, sacrificing its intelligence for a more typical payload of futuristic gunplay and violent mayhem.

The performances are uniformly good, although Foster's character is so one-dimensional that she tends to come off as brittle, a woman with a close-cropped haircut and a disapproving look, as if an impudent journalist has dared to ask Foster about something she'd rather not discuss.

Damon does a good job as the sort of everyman who has special qualities of character and a bit of soul.

By its conclusion, Elysium leaves you disappointed and bemused; there's plenty of talent on display and enough obvious intelligence to have elevated the film had the obviously gifted Blomkamp -- who also wrote the screenplay -- been able to follow his best instincts to the finish line.

Two from the art-house side

FOSTER'S BIG RISK THAT DOESN'T PAY OFF. A man talks through a puppet, and we're supposed to take it seriously.

Jodie Foster seems to have taken a risky (and probably wrong) turn with her latest movie. Foster's The Beaver tells the story of a depressed toy company owner (Mel Gibson) who relates to others through a hand puppet -- a beaver that looks like a Sesame Street reject. Gibson gives a decent performance as a disturbed man who has lost interest in life. All possible Gibson jokes aside, the movie -- which casts Foster as the executive's wife and Anton Yelchin as his alienated teen-aged age son -- further taxes credibility when it tries to show that society is as nutty as Gibson's Walter Black. Walter starts addressing his employees through the puppet, which also becomes a major hit in the toy world. Of course, there's a crash. And, of course, the movie must get around to dealing with the serious issues it raises. And, of course, depression is no joking matter. That The Beaver is at all watchable attests to Foster's directorial skill and Gibson's acting, but they've both chosen material that -- almost by its nature -- is self-defeating.

A BEAUTIFUL LOOK AT LIFE IN CALABRIA. This magnificent movie can't be easily categorized.

Le Quatro Volte is an exceptional movie from director Michelangelo Frammartino, who stages some scenes but also uses real real people. Frammartino imposes his artistic will on his material in small, revealing doses, as he tells four stories: one about an old shepherd, another about a flock of goats, a third about the felling of a giant tree, and the fourth, a look at the creation of what appears to be a supply of charcoal for the winter. Frammartino is one of those directors who communicate more by telling less. He offers no narration to guide us through the various mysteries that he finds in and around a tiny village in Calabria. I thought a couple of Frammartino's touches were mildly corny, but -- in total -- Le Quatro Volte is a mini-masterpiece that no real film lover should miss.