Racing against a deadly fire

After the release of United 93 in 2006, there was little doubt that director Paul Greengrass knew how to create vivid, suspenseful movies based on real events. With The Lost Bus, Greengrass tells another reality-based  story, this one about a daring rescue that took place during the 2018 California Camp Fire which resulted in 85 deaths and caused massive destruction in the town of Paradise. Matthew McConaughey stars as Kevin McKay, a beleaguered school bus driver who's going through a bad patch. His 15-year-old son (McConaughey's real-life son Levi) maintains a sullen distance from his divorced father. Kevin’s mom (McConaughey's real-life other Kay McCabe McConaughey) is ill. Kevin struggles to get by financially and  often finds himself an odds with his boss (Ashlie Atkinson). But let's cut to the chase: Personal issues aside, the movie quickly pits Kevin against the raging fire. When panicky evacuation begins, Kevin agrees to transport a classroom full of elementary school children and their teacher (America Ferrera) to a safe place. Ferrera and McConaughey deal with upset children, gridlocked traffic, encroaching flames, and the prospect of failure — which will be lethal. The real stars of the movie are the special and digital effects team that create the terrifying fire. The Lost Bus isn't the deepest of dramas, and Greengrass doesn't spend much time on the electrical company that was held responsible for the blaze. But Greengrass and his team know how to hold attention. At its best, The Lost Bus tells a harrowing story of behavior under extreme stress.

Tom Hanks anchors an episodic Western

     Set in Texas during the years immediately following the Civil War, News Of the World takes place against a backdrop of lingering southern bitterness. In this often-ugly world, law can be an afterthought, bigotry often surfaces and a lone traveler never moves escapes danger.

    Who better to navigate such treacherous territory than Tom Hanks, an actor whose even keel and unshakable sanity seem geared to surviving all manner of trials? Having worked together on Captain Phillips, Hanks reunites with director Paul Greengrass for what might the year’s most diligently assembled movie.

    As was the case with George Clooney in Midnight Sky, Hanks spends most of the movie in the company of a girl (Helena Zengel). Zengel’s Johanna has been living with the Kiowa people after they murdered her parents on their small homestead. 

    A bit of a wild child, Johanna speaks no English and barely remembers the German settlers who had been her family.

    The movie's title stems from the unusual job that Hanks's character performs. Captain Jefferson Kyle Kidd travels from one town to the next where he reads selections from the nation's newspapers.

    Kidd says that he hopes his readings provide a bit of uplift to hard-working folks who have no time for reading newspapers.

    The movie's point is made explicit in the lives of both Kidd and the girl he's trying to reunite with her last remaining kinfolk. Each must come to grips with a painful past. Kidd saw the horrors of war up close and lost his wife to cholera during the fighting. Johanna must remember her life before being taken by the Kiowa.

    Working with cinematographer Dariusz Wolski, Greeengrass creates a vision of a west that includes lonely open spaces and cramped towns with interiors lit by oil lamps. The disruptions of war have created a pervasive sense of rootlessness.

    A peaceable soul, Kidd has had his fill of fighting. That doesn't mean that he won't use his rifle to stave off thuggish attackers led by a former Confederate soldier (Michael Angelo Covino) who wants to buy Johanna for less than honorable reasons. He's also shaken by the sight of a black man hanging from a tree, a victim of post-war racism.

    Hanks, who stands as one of the last of cinema's beacons of decency, doesn't have to do much here. Bearded and warn, he's playing a character who clearly will overcome his reluctance and become Johanna's savior. For her part, Johanna proves resourceful enough to help when the travelers are under threat.

   The story unfolds episodically. Early on, Kidd tries to persuade a couple (Ray McKinnon and Mare Winningham) to look after the girl. That doesn't work out. It's not until he meets the owner of a Dallas hotel (Elizabeth Marvel) that he's able to talk with Johanna. Marvel's Mrs. Gannet speaks the Kiowa language.

    The movie's darkest moment arrives when Kidd and his companion meet a group of rogues who slaughter buffalo under the leadership of an obviously evil man named Farley (Thomas Francis Murphy). In what might be intended as political commentary about certain politicians who insist that all news about them be laudatory, Farley wants Kidd to confine his reading to self-serving testimonials from the local paper.

   Eventually, Kidd finds himself in San Antonio where he meets with a friend (Bill Camp) from his pre-war life. He also visits his wife's grave and Hanks conveys the poignancy of a deeply sorrowful man.

    These days, Westerns can be minefields for filmmakers when it comes to issues involving race and the treatment of Native Americans. News of the World seems neither revisionist in its outlook nor is the movie committed to the genre's most insistent cliches; it has the feel of a kind of middle-ground effort.

    When a director tells a story consisting of serially realized  episodes, it's not easy to maintain a constant sense of vitality and for all its attempts at authenticity, News of the World can lose chapter-to-chapter momentum, an oddity for Greengrass whose movies (notably Bloody Sunday, United 93 and the Bourne movies) typically thrive on speed and pulse.

     News of the World is another kind of effort, one that relies on Hanks to stake out solid ground as Kidd tries to save Johanna  and re-establish himself as what you may want to regard as the Walter Cronkite of the Old West. 

     With Hanks at the movie's center, the idea almost seems plausible.

Mass murder in Norway and its aftermath

22 July is director Paul Greengrass's latest movie about a catastrophic event.

With interruptions for several Bourne movies, director Paul Greengrass has become one of cinema's ablest chroniclers of catastrophe, creating a filmography that includes Bloody Sunday (2002), United 93 (2006), and Captain Phillips (2013), films that dealt with political upheaval, violence or outright terror.

This year brings us Greengrass's 22 July, an examination of the 2011 attack in which 77 Norwegians, most of them teenagers, were murdered by a white nationalist who claimed to be a soldier in the battle to save Europe from what he viewed as liberal elitist multiculturalism. The murderer resented the presence of Muslim immigrants in his country.

Eight of the victims were killed by an explosion outside a government building; 69 of them were murdered while attending a Labor Party youth camp on the island of Utoya, picked off as the killer freely roamed the campgrounds. No helicopter was available to drop police into the bloody fray.

Filming in English with a Scandinavian cast, Greengrass begins with the day of the mass murders. Soon-to-be murderer Anders Behring Breivik (chillingly played by Anders Danielsen Lie) disguises himself as a policeman to carry out his lethal rampage. After setting off an explosion in Oslo, Breivik proceeded to Utoya. He gained access to a ferry from the mainland by claiming he had been sent to secure the island for young people already alarmed by shocking news of the Oslo explosion.

Greengrass vividly presents Breivik's murders within roughly the first half hour of a film that runs for an overly long 143 minutes. 22 July then turns into a drama that deals mostly with the aftermath of the shootings, an intermittently effective catalog of the painful consequences that included Breivik's trial.

Greengrass recreates the chaotic atmosphere surrounding the shootings, but simplifies the story by concentrating on Breivik, the conflicted attorney who defended him (Jon Oigarden) and a young survivor (Jonas Strand Gravli), a horribly wounded 17-year-old whose grueling recovery is rendered with agonizing detail.

Arrogance allowed Breivik to cast himself as a hero; he imagined himself a vanguard figure in what he believed would be a war to restore white supremacy in Europe. After terrorizing the kids on Utoya, he surrendered to police without a fight.

Greengrass presents a mini portrait of a man so certain of himself that he has the gall to complain to the police that they're not tending to a cut he sustained during the shooting. A flying skull fragment from one of his victims injured a finger. The murderer needed a small bandage; his victims weren't so lucky.

Despite Lie's compelling performance, there isn't a whole lot to understand about Breivik or his deluded sense of superiority.

As a legal drama, 22 July hinges on Breivik's decision to scrap an insanity defense that would have replaced a prison sentence with confinement to a mental institution. Breivik insists on having his day in court so that he can control his own narrative. He wants a platform to present himself as a warrior of the far-right.

I confess to wondering exactly why this horrific story needed to be rehashed on screen. It is, of course, a cautionary tale about the toxicity of racist resentment and paranoia. I also speculated that Greengrass may have wanted us to remember this particular atrocity before it washes from our cultural memory bank, swept away by the stream of additional shootings that since have grabbed headlines.

Perhaps Greengrass would have come closer had he been able to pull a stronger statement from this fractured, combustible and often disturbing movie.

'Captain Phillips' shows Hanks at his best

A tense depiction of the hijacking of a cargo ship.

Tom Hanks plays Captain Richard Phillips, the title character, in the latest thriller from director Paul Greengrass (Bloody Sunday, United 93 and a couple of frenetic Bourne movies). Greengrass has a well-deserved reputation for presenting real-life dramas in a kinetic, dizzying style that can be energizing or off-putting, depending on your ability to tolerate quick edits and tipsy camera work.

In Captain Phillips, Greengrass churns up plenty of gut-wrenching tension, but expresses it within a framework that allows for a decent amount of emotional and moral weight. And unlike many thrillers, this one avoids the kind of flag-waving cliches that could have turned it into another muscle-flexing drama, an overly robust look at a cargo ship that's taken over by a quartet of Somali pirates.

With Hanks in the lead role, there's no doubt about where our rooting interest lies, but Greengrass' rendition of this true 2009 story also shows the desperate humanity of the Somali pirates, hijackers who never entirely master the inherent messiness of a trade run by warlords who tend to observe from afar.

Working from a script by Billy Ray, Greengrass certainly doesn't condone hijacking, but he's clearly aware that a hijacking can take on a life of its own, trapping the hijackers as well as those whom they wish to victimize.

After some brief introductory material, Greengrass gets down to the business at hand, a fraught confrontation between Phillips and his chief captor, a Somali pirate named Muse, played by newcomer Barkhad Abdi with an uncompromising blend of desperation and ferocity. Abdi enhances our understanding of a man who believes he has no other option but to make a big-money play. Muse is misguided enough to say -- with a bit of serious, I think -- that he'll be able to use his ill-gotten money to move to the U.S.

This kind of fantasy can seem ridiculous to American viewers, but if you've traveled in materially deprived parts of the so-called developing world, you may have encountered young people who see the U.S. as a giant ATM, where cash is readily available to everyone. A tiny minority of these youngsters might not imagine that asking for $10 million from a U.S. company to ransom hostages could be in any way preposterous. By some estimates, annual per capita income in Somalia is around $600.

Making sparing use of a New England accent, Hanks doesn't try to turn Phillips into a blockbuster-style hero. As captain of the Maersk Alabama, Phillips works to protect his crew, but he's a civilian in a situation that ultimately calls for a military response. That response, complete with war ships and Navy SEALS, arrives toward the end of the film, and allows Greengrass to put pedal to the metal in terms of action.

By that time, Phillips has been taken prisoner in a lifeboat that looks like a space module created by a country with no budget for technology. Inside the cramped, overheated yellow lifeboat, we begin to see heightened dissension among the four hijackers, one of whom is a still a teen-ager.

When Phillips tells the kid that he has no business being involved in something as dangerous as high-seas piracy, he's not just working the young man. He's serious. The youthful hijacker may not grasp the full meaning of Phillips' remark, but it's clear that the kid is scared and out of his depth when it comes to this level of violence.

That's a clue about what makes Captain Phillips tick. It's an action movie that wants to bring believable humanity into a situation in which just about everyone's destined to lose something.

Nothing embodies this spirit of devastation more than the movie's final scene. The way Hanks handles the movie's conclusion is so stunningly realistic that it lifts Captain Phillips above the military triumphalism that could have marked a lesser movie. I don't think Hanks ever has worked this close to the emotional bone before.

And when you think about the military power that was required to save Phillips from four scrawny pirates with automatic weapons and big-money dreams, you can't help but feel the sickness of the pressure-cooker world in which too much of the planet lives.

Note: I've been traveling and out-of-touch with the movie scene for nearly three weeks. This review of Captain Phillips is part of my catch-up effort.