A look at America’s craziness

 

   One Battle After Another, director Paul Thomas Anderson's loose adaptation of Thomas Pynchon's 1990 Vineland, captures more of the novelist's feverish absurdity, incendiary comedy, and ragtag relevance than I would have thought possible. I don't think that was the case with Anderson's Inherent Vice (2014), another attempt at bringing Pynchon to the screen.

   In large part, One Battle After Another uses Pynchon as a springboard for an updated story that seems to sync with contemporary concerns about a badly fractured society that spins out one dizzying scenario after another.

   Wild and scattered, One Battle After Another takes a big dare. It's like a dinner brimming with side dishes and no main course. Don't take that as a failure but as an overriding observation about the incoherence of a time without a clear center. 

    A sprawling canvas allows Anderson to introduce a range of characters, some bordering on caricature. Looking like he's shedding the last vestiges of youth, Leonardo DiCaprio plays Bob Ferguson, a rebel who -- in his younger days  -- blew up buildings in cahoots with Perfidia (Teyana Taylor), a Black woman and bold provocateur who finds sexual kick in armed defiance. Wielding power turns her on.

    The revolutionaries -- dubbed French 75 -- rob banks and free captured immigrants, saving them from internment, deportation, or worse. In one scene, Black women rob a bank, stamping bold fury onto the screen.

    The insurrectionists are opposed by a militaristic government police force in which Sean Penn's Colonel Lockjaw serves as a chief field officer. Lockjaw's sexual desires push him into racist hypocrisy when he's aroused by Perfidia. His ramrod walk -- a rigid rooster's strut -- makes for an ongoing sight gag.

    The opening scenes offer an unsettling blur of incident without much context. Anderson leaves it to us to ride the roiling wave he creates.  The characters will become more defined when the film leaps ahead 16 years. Still active, the revolution seems to be sputtering. 

     Time remains fuzzy throughout. Characters use cell phones, but pay phones still can be found in the story's dystopian surroundings.

     After her fierce opening salvo, Perfidia disappears from the story; we learn that she was captured and saved herself by turning rat. She entered the Witness Protection Program but escaped. She hasn't been seen since. For his part, Bob has retreated to a remote rural area where he's raising Willa (Chase Infiniti), the assertive high-school-aged daughter he had with Perfidia.

     Bob lives in a marijuana-induced haze, but his paranoia seems reasonable; the military would like to find him. I won't say more about it, but doubts are raised about Willa's parenthood.

      To the extent that there's a plot, it kicks into second gear when Willa is captured. Bob gropes his way out of a drug-induced fog as he tries to rescue her.

       An emerging string of characters adds to the movie's encompassing weirdness. Among them are members of the bizarrely named Christmas Adventurer's Club, a highly selective fraternity of powerful white men who stand for racial purity. Lockjaw yearns to join their ranks.

      Benicio del Toro delivers a funny comic turn as a martial arts instructor who sides with the revolutionaries. He also shelters immigrants the government would like to expel.  

      The humor hinges on overstatement, broadly drawn characters, shaggy detail, and unconstrained lunacy. Always a bit confused, Ferguson spends most of the movie trying to evade capture while still wearing the tattered bathrobe in which he flees the police. To make matters worse, time and drugs have obliterated the passwords Bob needs to reconnect with his former revolutionary colleagues so that he can discover where they've taken Willa.

     Action augments the gunplay and tension. A climactic car chase over rolling hills has a stomach-dropping quality that Anderson sustains for several minutes, and just about everything in One Battle After Another benefits from Jonny Greenwood's edgy score.

     Is One Battle After Another intended as a cautionary tale about where our divided country might be heading? Some may see it that way, but I didn’t view the movie as a flashing red light. Rather, it struck me as a depiction of the febrile craziness of a moment in which nearly everything seems possessed by an over-blown sense of absurdity that’s ridiculous, dangerous, and resistant to comprehension

     Of course, it’s all too much, but that’s how things often feel.

An intriguing cab ride in New York

   If you've ever hopped into a New York City taxi, you might have encountered a particular type of driver, the guy who seems to know everything and wastes no time telling you so.

   Director Christy Hall capitalizes on a cabbie cliche in Daddio, a two-hander starring Sean Penn and Dakota Johnson. That's not to say, though, that the movie is dominated by cliches.

    As the movie's cab ride progresses from JFK to midtown Manhattan, Clark reveals his vulnerability, along with an ability to empathize with a passenger who seems to be facing a pivotal decision in her life.

   It's not always easy to believe that Johnson's

character, listed in the credits as Girlie, would reveal as much as she does, but the movie is based on the idea that it can be easier to be honest with strangers than with those who know us well. There's less at stake.

    For a two-character drama that's limited to the claustrophobic confines of a taxi, Daddio travels further than you'd expect.

     Daddio also reminds us of how good an actor Penn can be. He packs a lot into the character of Clark, revealing touches of misogyny, street savvy, humor, and even tenderness. By the end, it's clear that Clark knows he's not as smart as he pretends to be, even though he reads people pretty well after 20 years of dealing with strangers.

      And then there's Penn's face. As he ages, Penn convincingly suggests that Clark has spent too many long days behind the wheel. Life has required that he not only to collect fares but that he pay some himself.

    Returning from a trip to visit her half-sister in Oklahoma, Johnson's character initially exchanges banter with Clark, who correctly guesses that she's mired in an affair with a married man. He's only in it for sex, Clark insists.

     A third conversation, unheard by Clark, emerges in the background as Johnson's character exchanges texts with her horny lover. The texts demonstrate that Clark is right. The man can't wait to meet for sex. Short of that, he wants Johnson’s character to send him a risqué photo of herself to which he'll happily masturbate. 

     It takes time for Clark to let go of the reins that drive the conversation. At first, he talks about himself in ways that are intended to reveal the background from which he draws his conclusion. He’s been married three times; he’s had his share of sexual conquests. Take it from him: He understands what goes on between men and women.

     Eventually, walls topple and the two communicate honestly -- or at least as honestly as they can. Wisely Hall, who wrote the screenplay, doesn't overdo what such a short-lived bond can accomplish.

      Hall was lucky to find actors who could pull this off, and cinematographer Phedan Papamichael dispels the visual inertia that could have come from spending so much time inside a taxi.

     I don't want to oversell Daddio; at times, the story required the suspension of more disbelief than I was willing to surrender, but Johnson and Penn play a duet that makes it well worth tagging along for the ride.

     

'Licorice Pizza' is sliced thin

   

   Mostly known as a serious filmmaker, director Paul Thomas Anderson received major early notice for Boogie Nights, his immersion in the porn life. His most recent movie, Phantom Threads, was bracingly astringent. And then, of course, there's There Will Be Blood, no one's idea of a feel-good time at the movies.

    In Licorice Pizza, Anderson eases up, focusing on two characters who don’t often find their way into movies populated by teens. One of these characters is 25, more an emotional adolescent than a literal one.

   Cooper Hoffman, son of the late Phillip Seymour Hoffman, portrays Gary, a former child actor who's becoming an obsessive entrepreneur at the age of 15. Alana Haim, a rock musician in her non-screen life, appears as a young woman who’s adrift. 

    Haim's Alana catches Gray's eye at his high school. She's working as a photographer's assistant during a yearbook photoshoot. Alana knows Gary's too young for her but, as the movie develops, the duo forms a tie neither can set aside.

     Neither Hoffman nor Haim is endowed with movie-ready looks or the kind of gleaming smiles found in toothpaste ads. 

    Rail thin, Haim becomes a walking exclamation point, fitting for a young Encino woman who has more attitude than ambition. 

   Set on the fringes of Hollywood, the movie includes encounters with celebrities along the edges of Los Angeles'  celebrity culture. At one point, Alana meets Jack Holden (Sean Penn), a movie star whose ego apparently rides on a singular accomplishment, an action-oriented war movie.

   Holden puts Alana under his spell before trying a daring, alcohol-fueled stunt involving a motorcycle, a golf course, and a barn fire. He's goaded into this foolishness by a wild-eyed movie director (Tom Waits).

   Gary’s entrepreneurial bent finds him cashing in on a trend by opening a waterbed store which achieves a bit of success. During a delivery — one that takes place during a devastating fuel crisis — Gary encounters Jon Peters (Bradley Cooper), a hairdresser and producer.

   Looking like Warren Beatty’s understudy in the movie Shampoo, Cooper delivers the movie’s funniest performance. Peters stands as an angry, entitled slice of Hollywood ego.

    The visit to Peters' home also provides an opportunity for Anderson to stage a major set piece involving a delivery truck, reverse gear, and a diminishing supply of gasoline.

   Gary shows flair when it comes to sustaining a hustle. After waterbeds, he creates a pinball parlor. He’s like a Valley-bred Duddy Kravitz, the main character in director Ted Kotcheff’s 1974 adaptation of a Mordecai Richler novel, which I mention partly by way of reminding myself to rewatch that movie soon.

    Gary, by the way, lives with his mother (Mary Elizabeth Ellis), a low-level PR practitioner who plies her trade for Mikado, a Japanese restaurant run by a white businessman (John Michael Higgins) who speaks to his two successive Japanese wives in an offensively parodic accent. 

   The bit lands like a dropped dish in a quiet room.

    Like many movies about young people, Licorice Pizza's episodic approach can make it feel less than fully realized and only intermittently amusing.

     — Gary travels to New York to help promote a Lucille Ball-like movie called Under One Roof. He takes Alana as a chaperone because he’s underage and his mom is too busy to accompany him. Gary played one of 18 kids in the movie.

    — Alana takes a plunge into volunteerism as a worker for a local mayoral candidate and learns that idealism can disappoint.

    — Gary arranges a meeting between Alana and an agent (Harriet Sansom Harris),  an egregiously insensitive woman who evaluates prospective clients only in so far as they fit  stereotypes. 

   Licorice Pizza, by the way, derives from a chain of record stores popular in the area during the ‘70s. It's a fake-out of a title; no such stores appear in the movie. 

    I’m going on, I guess, so I might as well add an addendum to all of this: Anderson bends a well-worn genre in a movie notable for its idiosyncrasies and for giving Haim a showcase role she memorably inhabits.

    Take note: This is not a memory movie for Anderson, who was born in 1970. Gary reportedly is an avatar for Gary Goetzman, now a producer and co-founder of Tom Hanks's production company.

   Anderson remains an interesting director whose movies  usually merit attention. Licorice Pizza qualifies as a Paul Thomas Anderson movie that (thank goodness) doesn’t feel as if it's intended to be an artistic event.

    But as I watched, I couldn't develop much fondness for this portrait of life in the San Fernando Valley during the 1970s. 

   Maybe the movie is a bit of a waterbed itself; i.e., not as consequential as one might have hoped and, for all its eccentricities, still dedicated to the notion that youth remains endlessly worthy of exploration. 

   Maybe I just wasn’t in the mood for more kid’s stuff.

An uneventful life gets busy

Despite fine flourishes, this Walter Mitty doesn't quite fly.

In The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, Ben Stiller -- as director and star -- works hard to present an offbeat story about a timid man who finally learns to merge his vivid imagination with reality.

Early on, we learn that Walter's the opposite of the guy in Dos Equis commercial: He's the world's least interesting man. Walter's life is so uneventful that he can't think of a single thing to say about himself when he enrolls in eHarmony. He's an anonymous dullard.

I suppose that's the movie's challenge: How do you make an interesting movie about a boring guy?

Stiller's Walter Mitty shouldn't be seen as a remake of the 1947 movie starring Danny Kaye or a faithful adaptation of the 1939 James Thurber story in which Mitty first appeared. It's a new take on old material -- albeit not an entirely successful one.

At its best, Stiller's movie has a pleasingly fanciful quality. It also mixes humor (a jab at The Curious Case of Benjamin Button Button is particularly well-aimed) with a growing onslaught of action-oriented special effects.

For all that effort, the movie's best bits have less to with bold adventure than with smaller incidents. On an elevator in his New York office building, Mitty imagines that he insults his boss's beard, an unsightly affair that makes the man (Adam Scott) look like an incongruous mixture of American Gothic and Brooks Brothers.

The Secret Life of Walter Mitty takes place during the waning days of Life magazine, a publication to which Walter has devoted his career. He's in charge of cataloging and keeping track of the magazine's vast photo library.

As it turns out, Life has been taken over by a company that's intent on closing the publication. The final cover is to be a photograph taken by the legendary photographer Sean O'Connell (Sean Penn), a character who remains unseen until the film's final act.

O'Connell sends his negative to Life's New York's headquarters, but Mitty and his assistant (Adrian Martinez) lose track of it.

Under pressure from management, Mitty intensifies his search and ultimately takes a bold leap. He leaves New York and travels to the Iceland, the Himalayas and Afghanistan to find O'Connell, who makes a point of being unreachable.

To accept all this you have to forget that photography has gone digital and that toward its demise, Life magazine hardly occupied a pivotal position in American culture.

Before his departure from Manhattan, Mitty visits his mother (Shirley MacLaine) and his sister (Kathryn Hahn). He also tries to spark a relationship with a co-worker (Kristin Wiig) who has a young son, one of the few characters to whom Walter is able to relate.

To win the woman of his dreams, Mitty must chart a course of derring-do in which he sheds the cocoon of shyness that has been suffocating him most of his life.

Cinematographer Stuart Dryburgh tends to give Mitty a big-movie feel as Walter leaps from helicopters and engages in other exploits, but Walter Mitty never really hits its stride.

By the time, Walter hooks up with the elusive O'Connell we're ready for a finale that's a little more impactful than the one Stiller delivers in what begins to feel like an overly contrived attempt to marry whimsy and adventure. In truth, it's pretty much a shotgun wedding.

Stiller has directed before (Tropic Thunder, Zoolander, The Cable Guy and Reality Bites), and it's encouraging to watch him try to step off the beaten track. But this increasingly middling movie seems to have been aiming for a lot more than it's able to deliver.

Besides, in these CGI-dominated days, the average Walter Mitty doesn't need to overwork his imagination: All he has to is go to the movies and let Hollywood take care of the heavy lifting.

Heavy gunfire, but 'Gangster Squad' misses

A great cast can't salvage and over-stylized look at LA crime in the late 1940s.

Sitting through Gangster Squad is a bit like watching a bad Brian DePalma movie, maybe a low-grade version of The Untouchables. I felt cheated. If I'm going to watch bad De Palma, I'd prefer that it be directed by De Palma rather than by Ruben Fleischer , best known for 30 Minutes or Less and Zombieland.

Perhaps because he's dealing with so many familiar elements, Fleischer relies heavily on style to spiff up the story of a small squad of LA cops who use rogue methods to take down famed gangster Mickey Cohen. Gangster Squad, we're told at the outset, was inspired by a true story, but the movie's shamelessly enhanced dramatic oomph made me wonder whether inspiration hadn't trumped accuracy.

According to the movie, Cohen attained so much power in post-war LA that he threatened to take control of the city, a feat he accomplished by showering the police and select judges with equal amounts of bribery and threat. In defiance of the Chicago mob, Cohen also attempted to corner the market on all West Coast bookmaking. He might have succeeded, too, had it not been for the Gangster Squad, a group of LA cops who worked deep undercover, never receiving credit for their efforts.

In telling what could have been a rewardingly sleazy LA tale, Fleischer and screenwriter Will Beall put a lot of second-rate dialog in the mouths of many thinly drawn characters. The movie is so pulpy, the Tommy Gun blasts practically scream out for "blam! blam!" exclamation points.

If you've read anything about Gangster Squad, you already know that the movie was scheduled for earlier release, but was delayed because it once contained a shooting scene at the famed Grauman's Chinese Theatre. Not surprisingly, such a scene (now gone) seemed in poor taste after the Aurora multiplex shootings, although I wonder if it would have been in any better taste had that execrable bit of real-life violence never occurred.

Offensive levels of violence aside, Gangster Squad represents a significantly wasted opportunity, mostly because Fleischer has assembled an impressive cast.

A sneering Sean Penn plays Mickey Cohen. Josh Brolin leads the Gangster Squad of the title. He's joined by Ryan Gosling, Giovanni Ribisi, Michael Pena, Robert Patrick and Anthony Mackie, all of whom play cops recruited to put Cohen out of business.

That's a strong enough roster to make the movie's by-the-numbers script even more distressing. It's like asking a professional all-star team to play pick-up games in the park.

Emma Stone joins this heat-packing boys' club as Cohen's girlfriend, a woman who falls for Gosling's character, a jaded cop who doesn't sign up for the Gangster Squad until he sees an innocent shoe shine boy gunned down in the streets. Hey, even the most cynical cop has his standards.

The Gangster Squad is formed when the LA police chief (a bearish Nick Nolte) decides that the only way to topple Cohen is to fight fire with fire, an idea as unoriginal as the way I've just expressed it. Nolte's William Parker encourages his squad of renegades to step outside the law and wreak havoc on a Cohen empire built on profits from prostitution and gambling. Essentially, this means that they smash a lot of furniture, kick in doors and stuff like that. When they're about to shoot a bunch of bad guys, they say things such as "Light 'em up."

Fleischer seems to have encouraged over-the-top acting, particularly from Penn, who turns in one of his least interesting performances as the rapacious, sadistic Cohen. Fully embracing Cohen's darkest impulses, Penn makes the gangster seem so repulsive, you wonder why his own men don't bump him off.

There's no skimping on violence with the number of bullets almost matching the number of cliches in a script that scrambles film noir and western conceits while making a feeble attempt to raise an embarrassingly obvious moral question: Is it OK for cops to turn to savagery in pursuit of a good cause? Adjustment issues faced by World War II vets -- notably Brolin and Gosling's characters -- receive short, simplistic shrift.

Little about the dialog is subtle or nuanced, so the actors are forced to work awfully close to the surface. Brolin rages; Gosling does cool; Ribisi (as the 1940's-style techno geek) raises issues of conscience; Patrick acts as if he's just wandered in from the set of a B-western; Mackie remains calm under fire; and Pena is stuck in the tag-along role.

Fleischer may have wanted to make a movie in which everything comes across as pure and unadulterated -- a clash of boldly drawn big-screen archetypes. It mostly doesn't work, and Gangster Squad earns its stripes as the year's first disappointment. I suspect it won't be the last.

Sean Penn as an aging rock star

This Must Be the Place hits some wild notes, but never quite finds its niche.

An erstwhile rock star who goes by the name Cheyenne has taken up residence in Ireland. Darkly painted finger nails, red lipstick and tumbling Alice Cooper locks make it clear that Cheyenne clings to his renegade image, even though he no longer performs. In case he needed to seem even stranger, Cheyenne speaks with the fey lilt of a fatigued ingenue.

In playing Cheyenne, Sean Penn often extends his lower lip so that he can blow wayward strands of hair off his face, as if trying to puff away the image that has settled over him. As can be the case with faded performers, Cheyenne is unsure he ever deserved big-time recognition in the first place.

Cheyenne is the main character in the odd, sometimes arresting and often wayward movie, This Must Be the Place, and it's no surprise that he's played by Penn, a daring actor who isn't afraid to challenge himself. Penn incorporates the residue of Cheyenne's former excesses -- a typical trio of sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll -- into the character's every breadth, and gives This Must Be the Place its odd centerpiece.

Director Paulo Sorrentino, who co-wrote the screenplay with Umberto Contarello, doesn't seem to be worried about landing on stable turf. He puts the story in motion when Cheyenne visits the U.S. for his estranged father's funeral and then decides to make a road trip to search for the low-level Nazi guard who humiliated his father in Auschwitz.

This journey -- perhaps a way of connecting with the father he hasn't seen in 30 years -- brings Cheyenne into contact with a gruff Nazi hunter (Judd Hirsch), who tries to dissuade him from any mission of revenge. The man who haunted his father's memories hardly rates a tremor on the Nazi Richter scale, says Hirsch's character.

Disregarding such advice, the creatively spent Cheyenne takes to the road, encountering a series of people relevant to his search, including the Nazi's granddaughter (Kerry Condon). These characters turn up like clues scattered across isolated corners of the U.S., giving the movie the flavor of a typical American indie -- only charged with a sense of surrealism. Indie icon Harry Dean Stanton turns up at a restaurant where Cheyenne makes a stop, further establishing the movie's offbeat bona fides.

Now and again, Cheyenne calls the wife he has left in Dublin, a down-to-earth woman (Frances McDormand) who works as a firefighter in Dublin, the city where Cheyenne has built the mansion in which he lives a life that seems uneventful to the point of vacancy.

Sorrentino, who demonstrates undeniable visual skill, achieves a sense of weirdness without strain, even making room for a cameo from David Byrne, who plays himself, a still fertile musical talent whose stardom, unlike Cheyenne's, didn't lead to a dead-end.

If This Must Be the Place has a subject, it probably has something to do with the ways in which Cheyenne clings to adolescence, a sad man whose perpetual childhood may spring from futile efforts to win his father's love. Cheyenne has all the money he needs, but his life lacks purpose. Still, he's capable of disarming moments of honesty and insight.

It may not matter precisely what This Must Be The Place has in mind or that Cheyenne's confrontation with an aging Nazi is capped with an image of startling -- if self-conscious -- shame. To be honest, I'm not sure what really matters in a movie that wafts its way through 118, often-bizarre minutes, all the while leaning heavily on Penn's performance.

If you see This Must Be the Place, see it for the strange notes that Sorrentino hits in telling a story that tries to scrape the make-up off Cheyenne and return him to the human race.

Does it?

I'm not sure, but This Must Be the Place stands as one of the year's certifiable cinematic oddities.

A thriller built from real events

A family under duress in Fair Game.

In July of 2003, CIA agent Valerie Plame had her cover blown because of a complicated revenge plot hatched inside the Bush White House. Plame was outed in a column by the late Robert Novak, who said that he’d received his information from a couple of senior officials in the Bush administration.

Plame’s exposure – which endangered her and her contacts -- also happened to be against the law. It became a hot story for a time, and now has become the basis for Fair Game, a jittery Doug Limon thriller that casts Naomi Watts as Plame and Sean Penn as her husband, former ambassador Joseph Wilson.

Wilson had traveled to Niger on assignment for the CIA: He was asked to look for information about Iraq’s attempt to acquire materials used in making nuclear weapons. Wilson found no such evidence, but that didn’t stop certain factions within the Bush White House from pushing forward with a plan to invade Iraq, partly based on the assumption that Saddam Hussein possessed the now infamous weapons of mass destruction.

No need to reiterate the entire story, but some background is necessary before plunging into a review of Limon’s attempt to use Palme’s story as the basis for a movie that’s part thriller, part portrait of a strained marriage and part condemnation of the political maneuvering that allowed intelligence to be compromised for political purposes.

There’s no faulting Watts’ portrayal, which may constitute the best reason for seeing the movie. Watts’ plays a typical boomer mom. She’s overwhelmed by the demands of work, kids and marriage. The only difference between Plame and other suburban working wives is that she often leaves the country on sensitive and sometimes dangerous CIA missions in the Middle East.

Penn’s portrayal of Wilson proves slightly less successful, a portrait built on Wilson’s sense of self-importance and his justifiable outrage over what happened to his wife. Wilson seems the kind of guy you might not like, even if you thought he happened to be right.

When Plame and Wilson found themselves at the center of a turbulent news story, their marriage suffered. According to the movie, which is based on separate books written by Plame and Wilson, Plame was inclined to fly beneath the radar, even after her exposure. For his part, Wilson insisted on loud public protest at every turn.

Neither husband nor wife were entirely right. Limon (The Bourne Identity and Mr. and Mrs. Smith) wisely acknowledges the complexity of their situation, and his stylistic choices – frenetic hand-held camera work, for example – create the sense of anxiety that arises when people try to cope with fast-moving events over which they have little control.

Fast-paced and far from boring, Fair Game is nonetheless a bit unsatisfying, like being thrown into a whirling story that has difficulty settling down and which seems to end as quickly as it started. We’re left with the impression that we’ve watched a slick and avid gloss on events that had profound consequences for the nation and the world.

I felt that something more was needed, although I’m not entirely sure what.