To see or not to see? A critic's dilemma and two reviews: 'Ibelin' and "Lee'

 In the market where I work, two advance screenings sometimes happen simultaneously. This week's viewing dilemma arose when screenings The Wild Robot and Megalopolis were scheduled for the same evening. I chose Megalopolis because a Francis Ford Coppola opus seems a must for anyone who has been reviewing movies for nearly 40 years. Coppola invested $120 million of his own money in the movie and had been talking about it for decades. Never shy about out-sized ambition, Coppola's movie (reviewed on this blog) took precedence for me. Don't take that as any reflection on Wild Robot. As of this writing, Wild Robot boasted a 98 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes. I'll have to catch up with it.

  Now for the rest of the week: 

 

Ibelin, a documentary from director Benjamin Ree, surprised me. Generally, when cultural critics discuss gaming, they emphasize the way gaming can isolate young people and discourage personal communication. Ree presents an alternative view, telling the story of Mats Steen, a young Norwegian man who died of Duchenne muscular dystrophy at the age of 25.  Lonely in reality and increasingly debilitated, Steen sought refuge in the World of Warcraft, where he assumed the identity of Lord Ibelin Redmore. Steen's body may have betrayed him, but online, he became a muscular character with a well-developed sense of compassion. Ree ably depicts the gap between role-playing and reality. Better, though, he shows how the gulf can be bridged, how two worlds ("the virtual" and "the real," for want of better terms) can nourish each other. Using animation to depict Steen's Warcraft journey, bits from Steen's blog, and interviews, Ree creates a moving story about a young man who couldn't beat the odds, but who did something meaningful with the hand he was dealt: He affected the lives of others.

   

Then there's Lee, a movie about the great World War II photographer Lee Miller, played by Kate Winslet. Directed by Ellen Kuras, Lee tells the story of a woman who began her career as a model and fashion photographer for Vogue before convincing the editor of the magazine's British edition to turn her into a war correspondent. You'd think that by now, filmmakers would have tired of structuring films around interviews. Lee doesn't help itself by tying a chronologically presented story to an interview in which Lee answers questions from a character played by Josh O'Connor. The movie begins with Lee's pre-war days in France, where she spent time as part of an avant-garde circle that included the editor of Vogue Paris (Marion Cotillard). In France, she also met English painter Roland Penrose (Alexander Skarsgard) with whom she developed a long-term relationship. The heart of the movie involves Lee's struggle to gain access to the fighting and later, to German death camps, where she took a career-defining series of photographs. It wasn't easy for a woman to break into the war correspondent ranks. When the Brits refused to give Lee combat credentials, she used her American citizenship to access the fighting. On the French and German fronts, Lee traveled with another American photographer Andy Stamberg's David E. Scherman, who worked for Life magazine. Difficult either to pan or praise,  Lee sheds light on an important career, but a cumbersome structure weighs it down. Winslet goes all in on playing a tough, sexually uninhibited woman who refuses to be deterred, but the movie underlines its themes and feels stuck in a biopic ghetto where its story too often feels locked in the past.

His idea of funny many not be yours

 

     If you saw The Sparks Brothers, a documentary about the musical group created by Ron and Russell Mael, you may have been intrigued by the brothers’ art rock, cultish appeal -- not to mention their fascination with French cinema. The brothers wanted to make an art film and the documentary made you think they had the chops to do it -- albeit while adopting a witty sidelong perspective.

    Annette joins the Sparks Brothers (screenwriters and musical composers) with director Leos Carax (Les Amants du Pont-Neuf and Holy Motors) in what may amount to a wish-fulfilling project for the brothers.

     I wish I could say that Annette represents an unalloyed triumph but the film struck me as a curiosity full of memorably strange notes and a compelling performance by Adam Driver as Henry McHenry, an avant-garde comic who calls himself "The Ape of God."  

    Henry specializes in antagonizing audiences. Before a show, he dances in a hooded bathrobe in his dressing room, throwing punches at an imagery foe, evoking memories of Robert DeNiro in Raging Bull.

    I guess you'd call Annette a rock opera -- with nearly all of the dialogue sung to the driving rhythms of the Sparks Brothers, who appear briefly in the movie's opening scene. The beat, I'm afraid, proves more compelling than the lyrics.

   At its heart, Annette tells a story about lovers with clashing approaches to art and life. As is the case with many comics, McHenry talks about "killing" his audience. Ann (Marion Cotillard) talks about saving her audience. 

   An opera singer, Ann specializes in swooning death scenes and works with a loyal accompanist (Simon Helberg).

   We all know the cliche: Opposites attract: Henry and Ann soon find themselves in a relationship built around the musical number, We Love Each Other So Much, which takes an ironic turn as the story evolves.

    Henry, by far the dominant figure, and Ann begin their doomed marriage and Ann soon gives birth to baby Annette, represented by a wooden puppet with a strange, wide-eyed look that turns the child into an unsettling special effect.

    The careers of Henry and Ann begin to move in opposite directions. His starts to sink. Her's continues its rise. One night, she sees a newscast in six women accuse Henry of abusing them, never good news for any marriage.

    Baby Annette eventually takes over for her mother and begins a fabulous, if freakish singing career under her father's guidance.  She channels her mother's voice. 

      A story of love that kills and toxic ambition is supplemented by Carax's wildly creative approach to the movie's imagery, including a performance by baby Annette at the halftime of something the movie dubs the Hyper Bowl.

   Carax's first English-language movie, Annette takes 140 minutes to reach its conclusion -- too long, I think.   

   If you let it, though, this mix of creativity, morbidity, visual ranting, and anti-romance may make an impression, the kind that throws you off-kilter and leaves a sharp aftertaste.

    More than a movie, Annette is a wild eruption of creativity from voices (the Maels and Carax) so liberated they seem to have abandoned any form of self-censoring. 

    Annette is a difficult movie to leave behind after the end credits roll. But, hey, not every movie dealing with love needs to be sweet.

    

When ghosts have yet to die

Mathieu Amalric, Marion Cotillard and Charlotte Gainsbourg star in Ismael's Ghosts.

By most measures, French director Arnaud Desplechin’s Ismael’s Ghosts should be dismissed as hopelessly muddled, slightly pretentious and loaded with self-conscious time shifts that can confuse more than they clarify. But Desplechin’s movie, I think, deserves more nuanced consideration, particularly if you think of it as a rambling meditation about a filmmaker who’s battling ghosts of his past, one of which turns up in the form of a real person.

Desplechin begins his film as if it were a thriller about a spy named Ivan Dedalus, a film-within-a-film ploy that suggests Desplechin’s desire to turn Ismael's Ghosts into a kind of cinematic playground. Don’t become overly involved in this thriller because you’ll soon learn that you've entered the imagination of writer/director Ismael Vuillard (Mathieu Amalric), a director who's working on the screenplay for the movie we’ve been watching.

A second rank filmmaker, Vuillard never seems to have matched the work of his former father-in-law Henri Bloom (Laszlo Szabo), a director who’s not afraid to allow his ego to spill over into rudeness while insisting that his behavior constitutes an essential form of rebellion.

We also learn that Vuillard's former wife (Marion Cotillard) disappeared 21 years ago. She since has been declared dead but Vuillard can't abandon her memory.

The movie's set-up creates many boats for Desplechin to rock. Vuillard is the midst of a new relationship with Sylvia (Charlotte Gainsbourg) when a woman turns up claiming to be the long-lost Carlotta, the wife he can’t forget.

To add to the film’s already challenging density, we also learn that the spy in Vuillard’s movie is based on the life of his real brother, a man who has little respect for Vuillard.

All of this information slides into view without much concern for either chronological or even logical coherence.

But Desplechin isn’t attacking the formal conventions of cinema so much as he’s recreating Vuillard’s fevered world, rendered in rendered in alternating strokes of joy and desperation by Amalric, whose portrayal of Vuillard does little to glorify the role of the film director. In Amalric’s hands, Vuillard becomes a mess, a man who can annoy, amuse and even plunge — a little too willingly perhaps — into moments of existential despair.

As a woman who refuses to explain herself, Cotillard adds an aura of mystery and intrigue. Can Carlotta reinsert herself into Vuillard’s life? Will her sudden reappearance cause her father to die of shock? What to make of what Carlotta's claims that she was in a loveless marriage in India during the years in which she vanished from Paris?

Gainsbourg’s Sylvia, an astrophysicist by trade, might be the only character who isn’t overcome by waves of personal confusion.

Did I mention that the spy in Vuillard's movie (Louis Garrel) keeps turning up; snippets of thriller that Vuillard is making punctuate the blurry narrative.

I wouldn’t argue with those who find Ismael’s Ghosts stuffed to the point where it bursts any attempt at significance.

You also could tie yourself in knots trying to make something of Desplechin’s literary references, saddling characters with names that recall James Joyce — Bloom and Dedalus, for example. I took all this rarified name-dropping as little more than wry gamesmanship on Desplechin's part.

It helps not to take Ismael’s Ghosts too seriously. Desplechin may be poking fun at us, as well as at characters who get lost in the maze he creates. Of course, the movie frustrates but its confusions push Desplechin toward something vital, the way his characters respond to the disjointed absurdities with which he confronts them.

Marion Cotillard in 'Land of the Moon'

Marion Cotillard plays a woman longing for love and sex in From the Land of the Moon, a movie based on a 2006 novella by Milena Agus. Set mostly in Provence during the 1950s, the movie introduces three men into the life of Cotillard's Gabrielle. A high school teacher who loans Gabrielle a copy of Wuthering Heights becomes the first man on whom she has a crush. When that proves disastrous, Gabrielle's mother decides that her daughter ought to be married. Mom suggests that Gabrielle marry Jose (Alex Brendemuhl), a veteran of the Spanish Civil War who works on the family farm. Jose agrees even though Gabrielle has vowed never to love him -- and, at least in the beginning, never to have sex with him. The third unlucky chap is Andre Sauvage (Louis Garrel), a veteran of the Indochina war whom Gabrielle meets at a Swiss spa where she has been sent to recover from kidney stones, which the movie refers to -- presumably with metaphoric/psychological intent -- as "stones disease." Throughout, director Nicole Garcia offers suggestions that Gabrielle may be mad. Lush photography aside, everyone in From the Land of the Moon seems to be burdened by unfulfilled desires. Cotillard proves more than capable of playing a woman distracted and possessed by her own inner life. Cotillard dominates every image in which she appears (which is most of them), giving her character an air of troubled beauty; her performance is almost (but not quite) enough to carry From the Land of the Moon to success. A surprise late-picture twist fails to ring true and isn't all that surprising, anyway.

Logic murdered in 'Assassin's Creed'

Big name cast takes a shot at a movie version of a video game.

I suppose these days nothing should surprise us, but I must admit that I was taken aback to learn that Michael Fassbender, Marion Cotillard, Jeremy Irons, Charlotte Rampling and Brendan Gleeson all appear in Assassin's Creed, a movie derived from a video game about which I happily confess total ignorance.

Plotted to the max, Assassin's Creed revolves around a long-standing rivalry between The Assassins and The Knights Templar, opposing groups that vie for possession of the Apple of Eden, a gizmo that contains the genetic DNA code for free will.

Under the guise of promoting world peace, the Knights plan to use the apple to control mankind.

Divided between two time periods -- the present and 15th Century Spain -- the story begins by introducing us to Callum Lynch (Fassbender), a murderer sentenced to die by lethal injection. Lynch receives his punishment, but instead of drifting into oblivion, he mysteriously (perhaps even incomprehensibly) wakes up in a strange Spanish facility run by Abstergo Industries, which is presided over by Irons' Rikkin.

Rikkin's daughter Sofia (Cotillard) takes charge of connecting Lynch to a machine she invented. It causes him to explore his genetic roots by living as his 15th Century Assassin ancestor, Aguilar.

The Assassins, by the way, are an amoral group that pledges to use darkness to preserve the light. They'll protect the Apple of Eden by any means necessary.

And, yes, this is another movie that takes on conspiratorial airs, one more shadowy projection of the idea that somewhere unknown to us ordinary folks, the real drama unfolds.

There's a point to Cal's time travel: By becoming his 15th Century ancestor, Cal will be able to tell his industrial captors (a front for the Templars) where to find the coveted apple.

Forays into the past give director Justin Kurzel, who directed Fassbender and Cotillard in a screen version of Macbeth, an opportunity to pour on the action; the Spanish segments involve blurry battles in which the Assassins engage the Knights who are trying to wrest the apple from its owner at the time, Sultan Muhammad.

At this point, Cal acquires a female sidekick (Ariane Labed), who helps him kick butt. He also leaps off tall buildings, which -- I've read -- is a bow to the video game.

The movie's complicated conventions (often spelled out in mind-numbing expository dialogue) make it difficult to care what happens.

Some of Kurzel's imagery is strange enough to command interest, a gathering of 15th century clerics at which two Assassins are to be burned at the stake, for example. Moreover, Kurzel knows how to create menacing moods.

It occurred to me that the movie might be more fun as a cascading series of shadowy images, providing the actor's never opened their mouths.

The actors, however, do speak, treating the material as seriously as if they were doing Shakespeare, which -- come to think of it -- would have been a far better use of everyone's time.

A shortage of suspense cripples 'Allied'

Brad Pitt and Marion Cotillard can't create a searing war-torn romance.

Director Robert Zemeckis's spy-movie romance, Allied, gets many of its genre gestures right but shortchanges an essential ingredient: smart, sustained suspense.

Working from a screenplay by the usually spot-on Steven Knight (Dirty Pretty Things, Locke), Zemeckis creates a star-driven vehicle that relies on the charisma and attractiveness of Brad Pitt and Marion Cotillard.

That and lots of spiffy looking vintage cars of the 1940s.

This approach might have worked had Zemeckis not been saddled with two mismatched performances. Opting for restraint, Pitt comes off as detached and wooden. Cotillard shows more life, but the two actors are unable to create a duet that burns its way into Hollywood's pantheon of great romances.

Beginning in Casablanca (a bow to another movie about a war-torn romance), Allied throws Pitt's Max Vatan into contact with another undercover operative, Cotillard's Marianne Beausejour.

The two are supposed to pose as husband and wife so that they can attend a party at which a Nazi ambassador will be assassinated. So far, so good.

In a car in the desert -- in the middle of swirling sandstorm no less -- Max and Marianne have sex. What was supposed to be sham marriage turns real.

We expect trouble because the movie contains plenty of early dialogue in which Max warns about the dangers of emotional involvement in operations that require a high degree of focus.

The post-assassination story shifts to London, where Max and Marianne have taken up residence. A year after Casablanca, Marianne gives birth to a baby girl during a German blitz of London, perhaps setting a new standard for what it means to have a war baby.

Allied adds twists, but marches along without generating the requisite ripples of intrigue. I'd tell you more, but I'm going to avoid spoilers.

If you see Allied, think of what a director such as Alfred Hitchcock might have done with a similar scenario. Actually, you don't have to think about it: You can watch Hitchcock's Notorious.

Knight's screenplay offers little by way of supporting characters. Jared Harris plays Max's commanding officer; Simon McBurney portrays the aggressively insensitive intelligence offer; and Lizzy Caplan appears as Max's sister.

No fair telling more, but know that Allied's inability to spring to vivid life makes you wonder whether this kind of old-fashioned romance hasn't been milked dry.

Zemeckis (Flight and The Walk) is known for his ingenious use of special effects, but he might be off his game in this often low-key effort.

I can't say I believed a minute of Allied, but from its captivating opening shot (Pitt parachuting into the desert) to its misguided sentimental epilogue (I won't say more), the well-crafted Allied is dressed for a success it never really achieves.

A teeming helping of animated sci-fi

April and the Extraordinary World immerses us in a fully realized and often ominously animated world. Directors Christian Desmares and Franck Ekinci create an alternate universe in which the world runs on coal, and France and the US battle over this precious, but environmentally destructive resource. In this imaginary version of history -- spelled out in the movie's prologue -- the grim industrialized landscapes of Europe provide an intricately detailed backdrop for a young woman's adventure. April (Marion Cotillard) tries to continue the work of her scientist parents, a couple who disappears early on. April searches for a "universal serum" that will make living creatures invincible. The story unfolds in entertaining fashion, but even if you don't like sci-fi, you should be taken by the movie's rampant display of imagination, which includes a Parisian cityscape marked by two Eiffel Towers. You'll also find mutant dragons that have captured the world's scientists and a talking cat named Darwin. Never mind whether any of this makes sense; April and the Extraordinary World, based on the graphic novels of French master Jacques Tardi, has been slotted in the sci-fi sub-genre known as steampunk, but it's not necessary to classify this highly creative work to be swept up in its invention. The version I saw was in French with English subtitles.

Love that lands like a punch

Rust and Bone pulsates with life, romance and bare-knuckle boxing.

Director Jacques Audiard directs Rust and Bone, a romance between two people with bruised hearts, with refreshing boldness. Although some of the ingredients of Audiard's tale may sound familiar, they're given new life, thanks in part to the director's brash style and to a couple of vivid performances by actors playing two unlikely lovers.

Stephanie (Marion Cotillard) trains orca whales at Marineland, a seaside attraction in the town of Antibes on the Côte d'Azur. Alain (Mathias Schoenaerts), known as Ali, is a bare-knuckle fighter who meets Stephanie when he's working as a bouncer at The Annex, a rough Antibes nightclub.

Ali has a five-year-old son (Armand Verdure), but has no idea how to take care of the boy; he relies on his sister (Corinne Masiero) to tend to the child. It's clear that Ali is not trying to win any father-of-the-year awards. He plows from one situation to the next: head down, seldom looking too far into the future.

Into this already turbulent brew, Audiard adds a major shock: Stephanie loses both her legs when a whale jumps out of a pool during a performance. We begin to wonder whether Rust and Bone isn't going to settle into the rhythms of formula: Damaged beauty learns to live with her disability, perhaps with help of a back-street brawler.

It's just here that Audiard finds surprising success. He seems to understand that he's working with ingredients that could have inspired two separate movies, one about a woman's rehabilitation and another about a boxer finding his way back to his son. Instead of papering over differences, Audiard revels in the resultant collisions, allowing them to give the movie a sense of pulsating urgency.

Cotillard, whose legs were eliminated with skillful CGI work, creates a character who doesn't always react in expected ways. When she sees Ali fight for the first time, she smiles. She's a little thrilled by the violence -- and eventually, she takes over as Ali's manager, a role she assumes with confidence and pride.

The "romance" between Stephanie and Ali hardly has a hearts-and-flowers beginning. Ali, who never seems put off by his legless pal, sleeps with Stephanie after she tells him that she wonders if she still can have a sexual experience. He thinks she deserves a sex life, and offers his body in what appears to be part favor, part experiment.

Just because Ali sleeps with Stephanie doesn't mean that he's ready to curtail the rest of his sex life, which consists mostly of one-night stands that he conducts with near-aerobic zest.

Cotillard's acting prowess already is familiar to American audiences for her Oscar winning turn as Edith Piaf in La Vie en Rose or more recently for her work in The Black Knight Rises. Here, she makes a bitter beauty, a woman who's too strong to surrender control of her life.

Schoenaerts, who appeared in the hard-boiled Belgian movie Bullhead, is not nearly as well known to U.S. audiences, but he's perfectly cast. He tells Stephanie he fights for fun -- and he seems to mean it. His Ali is one of those characters who seems to operate totally in the present tense.

Best known for his landmark movie Prophet, Audiard allows the elements of his new movie to rub against one another in ways that can feel exciting. In a way, Rust and Bone is as much about bare-knuckle love as it is about bare-knuckle fighting.

Others have pointed out that, at heart, Rust and Bone is an old-fashioned movie. That's true, but it's to Audiard's credit that it seldom feels anything less than fresh.

'Dark Knight' rises to a fitting conclusion

Director Christopher Nolan keeps things dark and dangerous as he brings his Batman series to a startling conclusion.

The Dark Knight Rises might be the first summer blockbuster that could benefit from massive doses of Prozac. Darkly hued and mired in Bruce Wayne's Imax-sized funk, this Batman movie sets a ton of anarchic violence against a backdrop in which a masked villain takes aim at Gotham, destroying it in bits and pieces before his hoped for finale, a nuclear explosion that will send the place shrieking toward oblivion.

And if all that weren't enough, billionaire Wayne also takes a hit in the pocketbook; he goes broke during the course of a 164-minute movie that includes -- among what may be too many layers -- a bit of corporate intrigue.

For all of that, Dark Knight Rises has a riveting quality that's bolstered by an encompassing and masterfully created sense of dread. Director Christopher Nolan packs his movie with dark forebodings that create a feeling of what might happen when the center no longer holds and chaos begins to reign.

I'm still trying to figure out exactly what values Dark Knight Rises tries to uphold -- if any, but there's no denying that Nolan's movie is daring, strange and, in its best moments, startlingly extreme.

The opening parts of Nolan's third and final installment of the Dark Knight series reminds us that Wayne has become reclusive after being blamed for the death of district attorney Harvey Dent, a rogue lawyer who, since his death in the last movie, has been wrongly lionized by the citizens of Gotham. They view Dent as a heroic crime fighter.

Wayne's devoted butler Alfred (Michael Caine) suggests that his employer quit playing savior to a forlorn world and begin living a fulfilling normal life. Wayne, of course, isn't done with Batman, who resurfaces as dense clouds of doom begin forming over Gotham. The city has been targeted by terrorists.

Before Dark Knight Rises concludes, these terrorists will have attacked the Gotham Stock Exchange and a packed football stadium, and for much of the time, Batman won't be able to do a damn thing about it. About half way through the movie, he's captured, transported to arid climes and thrown into an imprisoning pit.

Put aside comic-book expectations. Dark Knight Rises would sooner rip out its tongue than plant it in its cheek. Even more than in the first two installments, Nolan strives to create an environment in which a battered world is about to be consumed by calamitous waves of terror.

Christian Bale retains his hard-won title as the most most intense and obsessive of all Batmen. During the course of the movie, Bale takes the kind of beating that makes you wonder whether he shouldn't follow these performances with long stints in an upscale sanitarium.

Only Anne Hathaway's Catwoman -- a.k.a. Selina Kyle -- hints at levity. Hathaway's sultry sarcasm shoots beams of light across cinematographer Wally Pfister's otherwise inky palette and provides a bit of contrast to Hans Zimmer's doom-struck score.

Some of the movie's characters are familiar: There's Caine's Alfred, of course. Morgan Freeman's Lucian Fox continues to provide Batman with his vehicular toys. Gary Oldman, as Gotham's police commissioner, adds to the seriousness.

Joining Hathaway on the newbie side of the ledger are Marion Cotillard (as Miranda Tate, a member of the Wayne Enterprises board); Joseph Gordon-Levitt (as a Gotham cop who still believes in Batman); and Tom Hardy (as Bane, the villain with a Darth Vader-like voice and a leather mask that's every bit as weird as Hannibal Lecter's.) (I thought it was me, but I've been reading that lots of people had difficulty understanding all of Bane's rumbling pronouncements.)

Nolan does a first-rate job with the action, which is chaotic but comprehensible. The special effects (all manner of destruction) are well conceived. They pass in hurried review as Nolan creates feverish swirls of action, commendably avoiding the cliche of The Big Moment, grand entrances for Batman, etc.

Perhaps to keep us unsettled, Nolan never gives this epic-sized movie a solid core, but focuses on an out-of-control society in which various forces contend for supremacy.

A haunting sense of fatalism undergirds Dark Knight Rises, and there's little to suggest that our battered species ever will run out of hideous villains. This time, the fiends aren't nearly as distinctive as a Batman nemesis such as the Joker, but as Bane, Hardy exudes so much frightening authority, you believe he could turn Batman into a loser.

In the end, it's not so much the action-oriented excitement that makes Dark Knight Rises so compelling; it's the tenacity with which Nolan clings to a forbidding vision in which nothing and no one ever feels truly safe.