A racing magnate faces a big test

 

   After his work in House of Gucci, you might have thought that Adam Driver wouldn't want to play any more Italians. One English-speaking Italian might be enough for any career.

 But here he is as Enzo Ferrari, the Italian sports car entrepreneur who suffers from the loss of a beloved 24-year-old son, neglects his wife (Penelope Cruz), and carries on a long-standing affair with a younger woman (Shailene Woodley) with whom he has another son.  

   And, then, there's racing.

   Ferrari affords director Michael Mann the opportunity to recreate the Mille Miglia, a grueling 1,500-kilometer race that gives the movie its most harrowing twist.

  The drivers in Ferrari reminded me of bullfighters -- proud, arrogant men who know they're risking their lives.

   Once a driver himself, Ferrari encourages his drivers not to waver at crucial points in a race, even when two cars are trying to make the same turn. He makes it seem as if their manhood is on the line.

   That's tough stuff, and as Driver plays him, Ferrari steels himself against paying an emotional price for any damage that might result from his single-minded commitment to winning. 

   Mann's movie unfolds during three months of 1957, a year in which Ferrari battled to save his company from bankruptcy while dealing with an embittered wife who had leverage over him. She owned half of his company.

  With another fine performance, Cruz creates a character who treats her wandering husband with simmering contempt that threatens boil into rage. No patsy, Cruz's Laura also wants to protect her stake in the company.  

   Ferrari eventually learns that he'll have to shed his speed-boutique mentality and sell a minimum of 400 cars per year to keep his company on the road. Since its founding in 1947,  Ferrari had been selling a few cars a year to well-heeled buyers.

    Lacking capital, Ferrari assays what he must risk to find big-time backing, at one point from Ford. Business and sport converge. To secure  financing, Ferrari also believes he must win the Mille Miglia.

    Mann (Collateral and The Insider) gained prominence with TV's Miami Vice. Early movies such as Thief  (1981) and Manhunter (1986) were small gems. Many count Mann's Heat (1995) among their favorite movies.

     Mann resists the temptation to over-stylize Ferrari, and in Driver, he finds an actor who communicates the torment beneath Ferrari's composed facade. Ferrari knows he has subordinated other elements in his life to his racing obsession.

     To his credit, Mann also shows a softer side Ferrari mostly keeps hidden. We see it in tender scenes between Ferrari and his young son, a boy Laura insists cannot inherit the Ferrari name until she dies, another source of contention.

    The racing sequences are exciting but Mann backs them up with plenty of off-the-track intrigue.

    More than a pure racing movie and less than a comprehensive bio-pic, Ferrari focuses on a man who’s trying to hold his life and company together. He and others pay a price for his efforts.

    Ferrari may hit an occasional bump, but Mann, now 80, knows where to find the dramatic fuel that keeps his movie  running.

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. 

    

    

Bob's Cinema Diary 4/17/20 -- The Booksellers and Endings, Beginnings

The Booksellers

The documentary Booksellers takes us into the world of antiquarian book dealing, a diminishing trade populated by people devoted to the hunt for books, as well as to the care and nurturing of their many collections of volumes. Although the movie eventually veers into the world of ephemera (paper collectibles such as obscure, at least to me, HipHop magazines) it's best when it sticks to the world of book collecting. D.W. Young directs a loosely focused introduction to a vanishing world that benefits mightily from the presence of Fran Lebowitz, a collector who tells a story about a now-vanished "used" bookstore where the owners were entirely indifferent to anything as mundane as a customer. We also hear from Susan Orlean (The Orchid Thief), an author who talks about cataloging her own collection of notebooks and research material. As readers increasingly turn to digital books, it's refreshing, nostalgic and a little sad to contemplate the day when the printed book becomes a high-priced curiosity. Maybe the best thing about The Booksellers involves the way it makes us feel. You may not want to shell out a fortune for a first edition of Melville's Moby Dick but you may find yourself looking for an easy chair where you can take a hardback off your shelf and spend the afternoon turning its pages.

Endings/Beginnings

The always watchable Shailene Woodley appears in nearly every frame of director Drake Doremus' Endings/Beginnings, a movie of increasingly diminishing rewards. Woodley portrays Daphne, a 30-something woman facing a dilemma. Daphne simultaneously falls for two men who happen to be friends: Jamie Dornan's Jack and Sebastian Stan's Frank. The movie begins when Daphne, who recently separated from her boyfriend, moves in with her sister (Lindsay Sloane). Daphne's mom (Wendie Malick), we soon learn, has had her own trouble with men. Unable to find employment in the non-profit art world, Daphne seems to float through life, finding herself attracted to both Jack, a novelist, and Frank, a free spirit who gets by on charm. An underexplored incident in the past helped create Daphne's lack of direction but doesn't add much by way of interest. Loose and relaxed in its approach, the movie creates the expectation that something memorable eventually will happen: It doesn't, not really. Woodley holds the screen but her character doesn't seem particularly deep. Don't blame Woodley or any of the other actors. Doremus and co-screenwriter Jardine Libaire's haven't created characters intriguing enough to keep the movie humming for all of its 110 minutes. Oh, and like just about everyone else in the movie, Woodley is asked to smoke a lot. Hope they all got hazardous duty pay.

Oliver Stone tackles Snowden's story

Joseph Gordon-Levitt's performance clicks, but Snowden doesn't reach powerhouse levels.

Oliver Stone's Snowden turns out to be a reasonably straightforward procedural about a young man who drank lots of patriotic Kool-Aid before learning that it gave him moral indigestion. We are, of course, talking about Edward Snowden, whose explosive 2013 leak of classified information exposed a mass NSA surveillance operation that included ordinary US citizens.

Now resident in Moscow, Snowden has become one more figure around which Americans can divide. Some view him as a hero who did his country a great public service. Others see him as a traitor.

By the end of Snowden, it's clear that Stone wants to place Snowden on the heroic side of the ledger, even including him in a final series of images.

Whatever you think of him, Snowden hardly projects the personality of a calculating villain intent on damaging his country, something we already learned from Citizenfour, director Laura Poitras's Academy Award winning documentary about how Snowden leaked his information to the press and, subsequently, to the world.

The talented Joseph Gordon-Levitt portrays Snowden as a one-and-done whistleblower; he captures Snowden's persistence and intelligence, and charts his course from an apparently conservative patriot to a man at odds with his own government.

In this version of the Snowden story, Zachary Quinto appears as single-minded Guardian reporter Glenn Greenwald; Tom Wilkinson breathes a bit more life into Ewan MacAskill, another Guardian journalist; and Mellisa Leo plays Poitras as a filmmaker who tries not to add to Snowden's already huge pile of problems.

For the most part, these characters remain underdeveloped, but Stone uses scenes in the Hong Kong hotel room where Snowden and the journalists were ensconced to punctuate a story that traces Snowden's development from a solider (he enlisted after 9/11, but was discharged after he both broke legs) to a rising star in the nation's intelligence apparatus.

Rhys Ifans brings suggestions of evil to the role of Corbin O'Brain, a fictional CIA character who hires Snowden. The young man's intelligence impresses O'Brain, partly because hje believes that the future of warfare isn't on battlefields but in rooms full of tech wizards who know how to hack and protect data.

A teleconferencing scene in which O'Brain confronts Snowden about a violation of CIA rules finds O'Brain towering over the young man on a huge screen, and, I'm afraid, serves as an example of Stone's fondness for overstatement, which he mostly keeps in check here -- unless, of course, you believe there could be more sides to the Snowden story.

Nicolas Cage shows up as a jaded CIA cryptographer Snowden meets during his training; Cage's character later reappears to add an exclamation point of approval to Snowden's decision to fight the power.

Perhaps to keep Snowden from turning into a vaguely fictionalized version of Poitras's documentary, Stone focuses much attention on the relationship between Snowden and girlfriend Lindsay Mills (Shailene Woodley).

Stone captures the tension that ripples through a relationship in which one of the partners (Snowden) never can talk about his day at the office.

The screenplay by Stone and Kieran Fitzgerald sometimes resorts to position-paper dialogue, and the movie lacks the dense intrigue of Stone's JFK or the undertow of rank corruption that filtered through Stone's Nixon.

I suppose that's another way of saying that a certain thinness keeps Snowden from feeling like a major statement about the ways in which the government may have violated the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution, which protects individual privacy.

The story often benefits from Stone's ability to create momentum, but if Stone wanted to shake us to the core about the perils of a government that's using security as a pretext to widen its control over us, I don't know that he gets the job done.

Perhaps Snowden isn't an epic enough character around which to build a powerhouse drama. As Snowden himself might attest, it's the debate he hoped to foster that matters, not him.

Improvement in the 'Divergent' series

Insurgent adds a bit of pep to the series' overall mediocrity.

There are at least two ways to look at Insurgent, the second installment in the planned four-movie Divergent series.

Taken on its own terms, this second chapter remains a disappointingly familiar helping of young adult sci-fi with a story built on a rigid caste system that divides what remains of the world's population into distinct personality groups -- the smart, the honest, the aggressive, etc.

Those stumbling into Insurgent with no prior knowledge will find a passable if not especially novel addition to a genre -- dystopian sci-fi -- that's best when it's a bit more brainy.

But if one allows for a little relativism, and places the movie in the context of a franchise with two more movies remaining, it's possible to argue that Insurgent marks an improvement over a far more tepid first installment.

With new director Robert Schwentke (Flightplan, RED and R.I.P.D.) taking over from Neil Burger, this second helping emphasizes action and special effects, some of which are truly dazzling.

In this edition, the evil Jeanine (Kate Winslet) wants to capture heroine Tris Prior (Shailene Woodley). A full-fledged divergent, Tris possess genes from all of the five personality types into which this futuristic society has been divided.

Tris also has the power to open a mysterious box that contains a message from the group that originally set up the factional system that's supposed to ensure that peace prevails.

Although the screenplay by Brian Duffield, Akiva Goldsman and Mark Bomback remains laden with jargon, Insurgent feels a bit freer and looser than its predecessor.

The movie opens with a quartet of rebels on the run. Tris, her boyfriend Four (Theo James), Chris's brother Caleb (Ansel Elgort) and Peter (Miles Teller) are all fleeing the evil regime.

Early on, the movie's quartet of refugees seeks sanctuary among the greenery and quietude to an Amity village, Amity being the faction dedicated to a total lack of conflict, as well as to what appears to be a grimly wholesome vegetarian diet.

The head of Amity (Octavia Spencer) eventually decrees that the interlopers must be expelled from the Amity Eden.

We quickly learn that Tris has become mired in guilt from the last movie. She blames herself for the loss of her parents, a bit of torment that provides Woodley with a chance to add psychological depth to a character who also struggles to contain her most violent impulses.

Bland in the first installment, James adds a bit of welcome color to his portrayal, but the characters in Insurgent hardly qualify as memorable.

Sporting a brunette dye job, Naomi Watts makes an appearance as Four's mother, a woman he neither trusts nor loves. Watts's Evelyn leads a group called Factionless, misfits who may become a necessary part of the alliance that's required to overthrow Winslet's Jeanine, as much the tyrannical ice princess as ever.

The story builds toward scenes in which the captured Tris is hooked up to a device that causes her to hallucinate and puts her character through the severest of tests.

I don't know precisely what to make of it, but Tris's torture prompts the movie's best visual accomplishments, including a vertiginous sequence in which Tris imagines that she must rescue her mother from a burning house that's uprooted and careering through the ruins of what's left of Chicago.

And, yes, this is another movie in which someone could have gotten rich by cornering the rubble market.

I can't imagine that anyone but devotees of Veronica Roth's trilogy of novels will be enthralled, but that group seems large enough to create a seasonal hit.

Roth's final novel, Allegiant, is scheduled to be broken into two films. Listen, cynicism comes easy for me, but this time, I choose to be optimistic.

Despite its obvious liabilities, the Divergent series at least seems to be trending positive.

Love and cancer in a YA package

Based on an extraordinarily popular young-adult novel, The Fault in Our Stars jerks tears -- without sacrificing intelligence.

Before a preview screening of the new movie The Fault in Our Stars, I noticed that each of the two people seated directly in front of me held a full box of tissues. It turns out they were mother and son.

The young man -- evidently brave enough to venture beyond Fault's predominantly female demographic -- had read the novel on which the movie is based. His mother hadn't. She'd been prepped, though, and was ready for the disturbingly sad parts of a teen romance about two kids with cancer.

I'd read about John Green's mega-bestseller, but hadn't read the book, so I let mother and her son serve as a kind of early warning system for me: I don't know if they each used an entire box of tissues, but they were smart to be ready.

The Fault in Our Stars is what my late mother's generation used to call a three-handkerchief movie, a description that needs no further elaboration.

But -- and it's a big but -- The Fault in Our Stars deserves credit for something it isn't; i.e., dumb and condescending.

Yes, these cancer suffers -- played by Ansel Elgort and Shailene Woodley -- are physically attractive. Yes, they're bright. And, yes, they seem to have been glamorized by director Josh Boone, who makes sure the love story powers the sometimes melancholy proceedings.

But The Fault in Our Stars earns the lump it puts in your throat, and it preserves what appear to be the more ambitious aims of Green's novel: Wondering about what happens after death (possibly nothing), maintaining a healthy skepticism about confessional behavior in a support group, acknowledging that there's no way around feeling some kinds of pain and admitting that we'll all be lucky if one or two people remember us when we're gone.

Woodley gives the movie its soul. Her character -- 16-year-old Hazel Grace Lancaster -- narrates the story, thus preserving some of the novel's tone and voice.

Woodley, who also appeared in Fault screenwriters' Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber's The Spectacular Now, brings intellignce and wit to Hazel Grace, who's learned not to be swept away by anyone's hollow bromides.

Elgort, who appeared with Woodley in Divergent, tends toward hunkiness: His character is less complex than Hazel Grace. His Augustus Waters is a former high school basketball star whose cancer cost him a leg, but who can seem far too good-spirited to be true.

Most of what transpires keeps close to teen realities - except possibly for a trip to Amsterdam engineered by Elgort's Augustus. The point of the travel: to visit Peter Van Houton (Willem Dafoe), the author of An Imperial Affliction, Hazel Grace's favorite novel.

Hazel Grace wants to ask deep questions about the ending of Van Houton's novel, but the author turns out to be a bitter drunk, a character who exists mostly to raise a cautionary point for young readers: Best not to confuse wisdom on the page with the character of the author.

Dafoe doesn't hold back when it comes to portraying Van Houton's cruelty, but the trip to Amsterdam makes room for other developments, including an unfortunate visit to the Anne Frank home, accompanied by voice-over readings from Frank's famous diary.

Frank died in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in 1945. She was 15. Bringing up Frank's story -- perhaps to amplify a point about embracing life amid abundant suffering -- seems too hard a tug at the heart strings, a needless exclamation point in a story that has plenty of its own emotional juice.

The story belongs to Woodley and Elgort, but the supporting cast adds flavor. Nat Wolff has a nice turn as August's friend Isaac, a teen-ager who has lost one eye to cancer and is about to lose another.

Laura Dern and Sam Trammel don't have a lot to do as Hazel Grace's parents, but the movie doesn't make buffoons out of them: They can't control a situation that's devastating for them.

Look, these cancer patients probably look a little too good for sick people, but one mustn't forget that The Fault in Our Stars makes no bones about being a Hollywood movie, and it will be seen by many who would shun a more aggressively realistic film.

Did the extended ending constitute a form of emotional piling on? Probably. Did I cry? No.

But here's the thing: I respect the tears of those who did -- and that's saying something.

'Divergent' has a derivative feel

Latest young adult sci-fi has limited payoff.

If we hadn't seen any of The Hunger Games movies, Divergent might have felt fresher, less like a medium-grade helping of dystopian sci-fi built around a young female character who learns to kick butt.

The fact that we have seen The Hunger Games may explain why Shailene Woodley, as the star of Divergent, sometimes seems to be standing in for Jennifer Lawrence, star of The Hunger Games.

It also may help us understand why a test that divides 16-year-olds into factions based on personality seems to be substituting for the lottery in Hunger Games.

You get the idea. It's difficult to watch Divergent, an adaptation of a 2011 novel by Veronica Roth, without making comparisons to The Hunger Games, the big-screen version of Suzanne Collins's 2008 novel.

Both books involve a rigidly divided society, a strong female main character and an oppressive social order. The stories, of course, are different, but on screen, Divergent has trouble staking out new turf.

To make matters worse, this first adaptation of Roth's trilogy of novels takes a long time reaching what feels like too paltry a payoff.
Set in a dystopian Chicago of the future, Divergent focuses on Beatrice Prior (Woodley), a young woman who has reached the age at which she must decide which of five factions she wants to join.

Youngsters are asked to choose one of five factions: Abnegation, Amity, Candor, Dauntless or Erudite, depending on whether they're judged to be self-sacrificing, friendly, honest, brave or smart.

A rare case, Beatrice doesn't fit into any category. That classifies her as a Divergent, someone who doesn't belong.

Instead of turning her in, Beatrice's tester (Maggie Q) tells her to pick a faction and do her best to fake it. Beatrice opts for Dauntless, the warrior faction that serves as the city's army and police force.

Beatrice's choice surprises her parents (Tony Goldwyn and Ashley Judd), well-meaning folks who are part of Abnegation. Once part of Dauntless, Beatrice takes the name Tris.

Beatrice's brother Caleb (Ansel Elgort) also raises eyebrows. He chooses Erudite, a faction that the Prior parents suspect is plotting to take over the city, all that's left after a war that devastated the rest of the country.

The Erudite faction is led by Jeanine Matthews (a blonde and icy Kate Winslet). Matthews tells young people to choose freely, but is so obviously authoritarian that there's little suspense about her character. We know from the start that she's to no damn good.

The movie focuses primarily on Beatrice's training to become a full-fledged member of Dauntless. She does this under the tutelage of the handsome Four (Theo James) and the mean-spirited Eric (Jai Courtney).

Setting all this up requires a fair amount of less-than-thrilling exposition. Although the early training sequences can be exciting, the three-stage development of Dauntless recruits doesn't generate enough episode-to-episode tension.

Most of the training seems to involve throwing recruits into sink-or-swim situations. We seldom see anyone receiving anything resembling instruction. The point may be to create a survival-of-the-fittest atmosphere, but it hardly seems the best way to develop future combatants.

Those who wash out of the Dauntless program, by the way, are relegated to living in the streets, part of the mass of folks who are factionless and, therefore, excluded from society's largess.

Woodley ably hints at Beatrice's delight in discovering her new aggressiveness and physicality, but isn't entirely convincing when she swings into action. James's character tends to be a trifle bland.

A prolonged finale is compromised by obvious dialogue about individual freedom and conformity that restates points director Neil Burger (Limitless) already has made.

Now that Divergent has broken the ground with this two-hour and 19-minute version, it's possible that the big-screen adaptations of the next two installments will be fleeter and deeper. Let's hope.

Finally, a worthy teen movie

Before The Spectacular Now, I wondered whether I'd ever want to see another film about adolescence, but director James Ponsoldt's addition to the genre qualifies as a remarkable achievement, a movie full of real feelings and real problems -- in short, a film about young people that refuses to pander.

Adapted from a novel by Tim Tharp, The Spectacular Now reflects Ponsoldt's desire to find a bit of truth in a genre that doesn't always value honesty.

Ponsoldt’s cast earns some of the credit. Miles Teller) plays Sutter, an underachieving kid who's flirting with alcoholism. Sutter lives with his mom (Jennifer Jason Leigh), works part-time at a men's clothing store, parties hard and seems committed to a philosophy he calls "living in the moment."

Immersion in the present is well and good, but it's pretty clear that Sutter might be on the verge of throwing his life away. College? No. A future? Why bother? We know that Sutter’s spectacular present eventually will give way to the mediocrity that often results from squandered potential. How long will it take before the flask Sutter carries ceases to be a sign of rebellion and becomes a badge of dishonor?

Sutter is smart, amusing and glib in ways that can seem off-putting at first, as if Teller has been instructed to do a Vince Vaughn imitation. Don't give up on the kid, though; as the story progresses, he reveals depths that go beyond the surface of his clever retorts. He begins to question his views, in part because he forms relationship with Aimee (Shailene Woodley), a classmate who's not at the center of high-school party life and who’s a bit more substantial than the girl (Brie Larson) who dumps Sutter in the movie's early going, although she's no ditz, either.

Aimee and Sutter meet in an early morning scene in which Sutter awakens on Aimee's lawn. Drunk as usual, he forgot where he left his car. An exchange develops: Sutter asks Aimee to help him learn geometry; he basically schools her in how to have a better time in high school.

Lurking in the background is Sutter's father (Kyle Chandler), a heavy drinker who Sutter hasn't seen in years. His mother won't even tell Sutter where his dad lives. When he learns his father's whereabouts from his sister (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), Sutter decides to visit. Dad, we soon learn, is a preview of coming attractions for what Sutter easily could become, an irresponsible jerk.

Spectacular Now provides Teller with a breakthrough role. Woodley -- familiar as George Clooney's teen-age daughter in The Descendants -- continues to impress.

Shot in Athens, Georgia -- where Ponsoldt grew up, The Spectacular Now is more than a good teen movie; it's a good movie, a look at characters we come to care about right up until the film's mildly ambiguous conclusion.