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Weekly Watch: The Martian

/ JD Byrne / Leave a comment

It’s a fact of my modern life that I don’t see most of the movies I want to see when they hit theaters. Various factors conspire to keep me separated from these flicks for months, until they happen to slip through my sphere of influence. The minute The Martian came out, I wanted to see it. Ridley Scott adapts a DIY-publishing success sci-fi story for the big screen? Yes, please!

Alas, it came and went from theaters. It kind of slipped below my radar. I nearly paid way too much money to watch it while I was on the road last week, but fought the urge. Finally, a stroke of luck – it was on HBO last weekend. Hooray for my low tech ways!

Here’s the real problem with that kind of delay. It’s hard in the modern world to avoid opinions about a movie (or a book or album) when the first come out. It’s damned near impossible to do so for months afterward, particular when it’s nominated for some big awards and wins some others. I’m not talking about being ruined by spoilers. I’m just talking about how you can have certain expectations about something when you finally get around to see it.

So what of The Martian? Well, it didn’t live up to the hype.

Which is not to say it’s bad. In fact, it’s very well made, pleasing to look at, and has some good performances. It’s got a “rah rah, bring the boy back home” story that winds up into a feel good ending. That’s not a problem in and of itself, but it’s what leads up to it that doesn’t work so well.

Mark Watney, the main character, is a nice enough guy and the situation he’s put in really sucks. Not just stranded, but left for dead. He has considerable obstacles to overcome in order to survive and he . . . fairly easily overcomes them. At one point he says, about a problem, that he’s going to “science the shit” out of it. That attitude – every problem has a solution, take one at a time – is driven home back on Earth when Watney begins training the next generation of astronauts.

It’s a great motto and probably an excellent way to deal with real world problems. It doesn’t, however, bear any real dramatic weight. The bottom line – Watney’s too damned competent. Everything he tries works (until plot requires that it get destroyed) and, while we see him make some snarky comments about his situation, it never really seems to get to him. Even if all his schemes kept working, he’s still millions of miles from home and alone. We know what solitary confinement does to people – it ain’t pretty.

In this way, The Martian suffers considerably from comparison to the much smaller (and much less seen) Moon. Even before it gets to the issue of clones and whatnot, it paints a really effective picture of what being along on another planet(oid) would really be like. The struggle, as the kids say, is real.

But Watney’s isn’t. It’s not that I want to see the man suffer, but some struggle would have been nice. There’s no way a big-budget summer movie, rated PG13 and starring Matt Damon, is going to go all the way dark and have him die on the planet or commit suicide or something. But some hint that the vast expanse of time without human contact had some impact on his psyche would have been interesting. As it is, only his weight loss seems like an issue (and it’s light years away from what Christian Bale puts up with).

Writing this, I’m reminded of a post on the IMDB discussion board where someone asks “is this based on a true story?”. It’s not as dumb a question as it sounds, looking at it now. Real life can be many things, but it’s not often filled with the dramatic tension we expect in fiction. A true story of clever survival, rooted in the fact that it actually happened, has a pull to it that a fictional tale of similar stature just doesn’t. I read somewhere that the difference between fiction and real life is that fiction has to make sense. It has to have some drama to it, too.

Which is not to say The Martian sucked. It was a perfectly enjoyable way to spend a couple of hours, but it didn’t live up to my perhaps exaggerated expectations. It was fluff, but it was engaging fluff. There’s something to be said for that.

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Not Getting It Right Versus Getting It Wrong

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A little while back someone in one of the online writers’ forums I haunt asked about what, within our particular area of real life expertise, makes us throw up our hands when we see it in fiction. This was particularly in a sci-fi and fantasy context, so my own area of expertise – criminal law – doesn’t really come into play. But reading the discussion and thinking about the question made me realize there is a fine line in fiction between not getting something right and actually getting it wrong.

Exhibit A, since it’s right in my wheelhouse – Law & Order. I’m talking the mothership here, the one that effectively split its time between the courtroom and the police investigation. To put it bluntly, Law & Order very rarely actually got things right, but it didn’t very often actually get things wrong. The former is forgivable, understandable, and even to be encouraged in the interest of drama. The latter just makes me want to punch the TV.

An episode that was on the other day while I was knocking around the house provides great examples of each. “Charm City” is the first part of the first crossover between Law & Order and my favorite cop show of all time, Homicide: Life On the Street. A gas bomb attack in New York has ties to a similar attack years earlier in Baltimore, bringing Baltimore detectives to town to crack the case.

The eventual trial provides an example of the first situation – not getting it right, but in the understandable service of the narrative. Curtis testifies at trial and, among other things, tells the jury that a partial thumbprint was found at the crime scene and it matched the defendant. In no way would a detective testify about this in a real trial. That evidence would come in via an expert witness, probably from the state or city’s crime lab. But we’ve never seen a crime lab expert in this episode, so it’s a waste of narrative resources to introduce an entirely new character to pass on this single (uncontested) fact. Curtis is a main character, by contrast, so give it to him to carry. It’s not right, but it’s not all that wrong, either.

By contrast, earlier on is the kind of thing that Law & Order routinely does that makes me howl. The two New York detectives question the suspect, who gives up nothing. Their boss lets the Baltimore guys take a run at him. Homicide viewers knew that Pembleton’s great skill was extracting confessions in “the box,” and, he does, but only after the suspect says he “can’t talk about it.” Pembleton responds, “you mean you’re unable to talk about it, or you just don’t want to talk about it?”

The confession winds up getting suppressed because, in the Law & Order universe, “I can’t talk about it” is an invocation of the right to remain silent and the right to counsel. There’s even a good back and forth about how it doesn’t matter that such things will “fly” down in Baltimore. In truth, such things “fly” everywhere that Supreme Court precedent controls. Invocation of counsel, or the right to remain silent, has to be explicit before it keeps the cops from barreling on with their inquiries.

The ruling was, simply, TV-land bullshit, an attempt to throw an obstacle in the path of our heroes. This was getting it wrong, seriously wrong, more than just not getting it right. And, in the end, it didn’t really make a difference (the guy was convicted anyway, without much drama). The overly-defense friendly law is a staple on Law & Order, but it’s usually at least closer to getting it right than this.

In the end, does it really matter? No, because the vast majority of people watching Law & Order aren’t lawyers, much less criminal defense lawyers who might zero in on that kind of thing. For most viewers it’s just an obstacle for our heroes to overcome. That, after all, is why we’re watching. Which is why it’s important for “experts” to back off a little bit and give fiction some room to breathe. Everybody sing along:

 

Technical Brilliance Only Goes So Far

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A few weeks ago my wife and I finally saw Mad Max: Fury Road, the movie that’s risen to the rarified air of awards talk genre pictures seldom see. It’s got an Oscar nod for Best Picture, after all. Although I’m not a huge fan of the old Mad Max flicks, I’m a sci-fi fan, fond of dystopia. My wife’s a big action movie fan. So we’re definitely in what might be the target audience for something like this. Nonetheless, when it was done, we turned to each other and asked:

“Is that it?”

Not that it wasn’t cool. The movie looks gorgeous and George Miller deserves a lot of credit for doing some really insane stunt work using real vehicles and people instead of wallowing in CGI overload. Who wouldn’t want a flamethrower guitar? Or keytar, maybe? I’m a keyboard player, after all. And, yes, it was cool to see such overt feminist overtones in a movie that comes out of a very masculine tradition.

But is that enough?

The best explanation I’ve read as to why Fury Road deserves consideration as one of the best movies of 2015 is from this article by Amanda Marcotte over at Salon. Her argument seems to boil down to it being a great technical achievement:

“Mad Max” is more than just a really good movie. It’s also a wildly innovative movie, one that plays with the very idea of filmmaking itself. The director, George Miller, tore up the book on how to make a movie, taking huge risks in doing so, and ended up making the movie that people could not stop talking about this year.

 

“Mad Max” barely has a script. There was heavy storyboarding, but in terms of a traditional script for actors to work from, nope. Instead, they filmed for months in the desert, collecting 480 hours of footage (which is three weeks, if you watch non-stop), which was pounded and then refined into a coherent story in the editing bay, with Margaret Sixel, Miller’s wife, at the helm.

As a result, she argues, it’s an

artistic experiment toying with how to use the tools of film-making to tell a story in an entirely different way than we’re used to

that happens to be “fun” and “moving.”

Therein, I guess, lies the rub. I’ll give Fury Road the “fun” label – it certainly wasn’t an experience I wish I hadn’t had when it was over. But I don’t get “moving” from it and, in retrospect, can see where the fact that it “barely has a script” is perhaps a main reason why. It’s not the film is incoherent (which is a credit to the editing work), it just doesn’t make much sense.

The talk about Fury Road reminds me a little of the buzz last year around Boyhood. It, too, was a great movie making experiment, filmed over years in order to capture the main character aging into adulthood. However, I remember, amidst the plaudits, that some critics dared to suggest that, at the end of the day, the finished product wasn’t all that captivating. Still, the audacity of its making carried it a long way.

Technical achievement is worth celebrating, but it’s not the be all and end all of art. Progressive rock, more than most subgenres of popular music, values instrumental mastery – it lionizes people who can play. That being said, there’s still something to be said for avoiding the “too many notes” trap). A flurry of sound might be impressive, but is it interesting or moving? Not necessarily.

So it goes with literature. Clever wordplay and narrative structure that defies common sense can be daring experiments and produce new ways of telling stories. But at the end of the day, if the story itself doesn’t connect with readers, it’s a lot of flash that, in the end, doesn’t produce much heat.

Same thing with movies. Fury Road is, without a doubt, technically impressive. I just didn’t get a lot out of it beyond that. To be truly great, as so many think Fury Road is, demands more.

Weekly Watch: True Story

/ JD Byrne / 1 Comment

Truth, as they say, is stranger than fiction. It does not, however, necessarily make for a dramatic story, even if it’s an interesting one.

The true story behind True Story is plenty interesting. Mike Finkel was a reporter for the New York Times who had several big-deal pieces in the paper’s Sunday magazine. He pushes too far on one story, creating a composite central character for his narrative that doesn’t exist. As a result he’s fired and deported to the wilds of Montana (not deported – he actually lived there).

He’s trying to figure out how to get his life back when a reporter from Oregon calls about a murder suspect named Christian Longo. Wanted for killing his wife and three children, Longo flees to Mexico. What does this have to do with Finkel? When he’s arrested in Mexico, authorities learn that Longo has been posing as – Mike Finkel, reporter for the New York Times.

With that slenderest of connections (there’s no evidence Longo ever really did anything with Finkel’s identity, aside from get laid), Finkel heads to Oregon to meet the guy who pretended to be him. They wind up talking all through Longo’s trial. Their relationship is the heart of the movie.

Which is a shame, because it’s just not that interesting. For one thing, the movie largely consists of Finkel and Longo sitting across a table from each other talking. Some interesting topics are brought up, but nothing really lands all that hard. It comes across very staged, like it was once a stage play with only two characters that was adapted for the screen (which it wasn’t). It doesn’t help that the only other “main” character, Finkel’s then girlfriend (now wife), is given precious little to do, aside from a late confrontation with Longo where she is, hilariously, allowed to walk into a jail waiting room with a cell phone (cell phones are contraband in prisons).

That might have a potential to work, but it would need a better pair of sparring partners. Put bluntly, the version of Finkel in this movie is just a bad journalist. He’s entirely too naive about Longo and how he’s manipulating him. He doesn’t do any independent investigation of Longo’s alleged crime and doesn’t seem to care about whether he might be innocent or not. When the rug gets pulled out from underneath him, it’s less a shock and more like the inevitable result of his own foolishness, like when a puppy finally catches its tail and freaks itself the fuck out.

Outside of the conversations between Finkel and Longo, the movie exists in some kind of bizarre Neverland where the fact that Longo is on trial for capital murder is barely mentioned. There’s no mention of Longo’s lawyer and whether he or she approves of all these non-privileged conversations. In spite of the fact that inmate mail is routinely read and searched, nobody alerts the prosecution about Longo’s letters to Finkel. Then, once they do learn about it, they do nothing to get a hold of them.

This is another one of those situations where Finkel doesn’t seem like much of a journalist. When first confronted by a detective about his conversations and correspondence with Longo, he puts on a good front that suggests journalistic scruples are too important to allow him to cooperate with police. Then, once he realizes Longo is full of shit, he can’t run to them fast enough (even though they don’t want his stuff, in the end, for dubious reasons related to Finkel’s credibility). This is another potentially interesting issue that just never gets a full airing.

I may be griping about things that actually did (or didn’t) happen, so it seems a little shitty to possibly ding True Story for being too true. But as I said long ago, just because it’s real doesn’t mean it’s compelling drama. True Story may be all it claims to be, it just doesn’t add up to very much.

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Weekly Watch: Roxy: The Movie

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If there was a holy grail for Frank Zappa fans, it was this.

For several days in December 1973, Zappa and the Mothers as they existed at that time – a group some consider his best ever and included George Duke and Chester Thompson (the drummer one) – hit the stage at LA’s Roxy Theater for a set of shows where not only the sound but the pictures were all recorded. Thus Zappa’s explanation in the intro for “Penguin In Bondage” that he’s “circumlocuting” a particular topic “in order to get this text on television.” The shows served as the basis for Roxy and Elsewhere, a partly live album that many (including yours truly) consider Frank’s best.

But there was supposed to be a movie, too, filmic evidence of Zappa and crew at the height of the their powers. As it happens, it was doomed from the start:

Unbeknownst to anyone on the crew, the audio recording device suffered an internal malfunction within two minutes of the very first show. There was no way for anyone to know about it until the film had been shot, processed, and delivered to the editor. Since the production schedule was so short, they didn’t process any of the film until all of the shows were ‘in the can.’ When the editor went to align the picture and sound . . . it became apparent that the program stayed in sync for all of five seconds.

That’s from the liner notes from Roxy: The Movie, which has, for years, been just out of reach for Zappa fans. Now it’s has finally seen the light of day after being a tantalizing mirage for my entire lifetime. Is it worth the wait?

Yes and no. In all honesty, it would be impossible for the movie to live up to the expectations that decades have piled upon it.

For one thing, it’s not just a video document of Roxy and Elsewhere. If anything, it shows just how much of that album is studio work, versus live. That’s not a bad thing – Zappa never held closely to the distinction between “live” albums and “studio” albums (even his 1988 tour releases that preach about there being no overdubs have tracks cobbled together ex post from multiple sources). But it does lend the sense that something’s missing, that there’s a stripped down feeling to some of the material.

For another thing, Zappa being Zappa there are some things that just don’t work on the night and are much better elsewhere. Primarily that’s “Inca Roads,” which gets a low-energy lounge version here that pales beside the one recorded later in Helsinki (memorialized on You Can’t Do That On Stage Anymore, Volume 2). And the marvelous side-long suite from Roxy and Elsewhere feels truncated without “Village of the Sun” leading into the other two parts.

If that sounds awfully negative, it shouldn’t. This is still a great document of a Zappa concert with the man in his prime. He rules not just the stage but the entire venue, directing musicians and audience alike. You get to experience the entirety of “The Be-Bop Tango (Of the Old Jazzman’s Church)” in its entirety, complete with what can barely be referred to as “dancing.” And the other two parts of that side following “Village”? Brilliant. Napoleon Murphy Brock getting sexed up during “Dummy Up”? A little more disturbing!

Another thing that’s fascinating to watch is the multitude of percussion on display. The band for this gig had eight members (Frank included), of which three were full time bangers of things – Ruth Underwood, Chester Thompson, and Ralph Humphrey. Hell, Zappa even through in with the pounding at one point. What’s amazing is that by seeing who’s doing what, as opposed to just hearing the end product, you’re able to see how the parts play off one another and what they each bring to the table. So many times you see a band with two drummers and wonder what’s the point. Not so here.

So if you’re new to Zappa and coming to things with an open mind, that mind will be blown by Roxy: The Movie. It’s a document of man at the height of his powers, leading what’s considered to be one of his best collections of musicians, and having a hell of a good time to boot. That it can’t quite live up to what people like me had hoped it could be is on us, not Frank.

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Weekly Watch: The Force Awakens

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I’m a sci-fi/fantasy geek writer – you thought I was going to pass this one up?

Unless you’ve been under a rock for the past two years, you know that last week brought the rebirth of the Star Wars franchise with The Force Awakens, the biggest movie event in – well, in ever, I think (I’ve never stood in line for a movie in my 42 years, much less for a mid afternoon Saturday matinee). This was the first of a new trilogy, the first since Disney bought the franchise, and the first to be made without the input of George Lucas. Could it bear the weight fandom has put upon it?

Short answer – very much yes.

Longer answer . . . well, read on (trying to be as non-spoilery as possible).

The good news is that the scripted, penned by (among others) West Virginia native and Empire Strikes Back scribe Lawrence Kasdan is strong where it counts most, which is in the actual interaction of people (well, “beings,” I guess) on screen. Not only are the characters, be they new or old, given interesting things to say and do, but J.J. Abrams manages to do something that Lucas has lost all talent for – getting good performances out of actors. You care about what happens to the people on screen, which goes an awful long way.

The effects, as promised, harken back to the first trilogy rather than the “throw all the CGI things on screen!” approach of the prequels. In fact, it’s quite fun to see the sleek, modern interior of the First Order TIE fighters contrasted with the decidedly retro (dare I say analog?) controls of the Millennium Falcon. When there are battles (and there are!), they’re refreshingly gritty and small enough that we can keep track of what’s going on (there’s one scene in particular where the camera keeps ground action in frame while tracking what a particular pilot’s doing in the air – great stuff).

As for the overall story, it’s a bit of a letdown. If you’re a fan of the series – hell, even if you’ve only seen Star Wars itself, it will seem awfully familiar. It’s not a carbon copy, which is best seen in the contrast between the two characters who begin things on a backwater desert planet, Luke and Rey. Luke wants nothing more than to get his ass off Tatooine in the beginning of Star Wars. Rey, on the other hand, wants nothing more to hang around on Jakku. But the beats are largely the same and as things wind to the big finale, the voice of Peter Griffin might pop into your head.

That’s not entirely a bad thing. The big ask of The Force Awakens was to wash the stench out of our mouths from the prequels, as well as set up two more movies (at least). It succeeds in that, partly by reassuring fans that it’s going back to its roots, that everything’s in good hands. It’s not the greatest movie ever made. It’s not the best Star Wars movie ever made. But it’s damned good and makes me look forward to whatever comes next.

Merry Xmas, everybody – Star Wars is back!

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Weekly Watch: American Sniper

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I’ve said, for a long time, that all art is subjective. Beyond the fact that art impacts different people in different ways, that’s because different people bring different perspectives and experiences to art in the first place. Two people looking at the same artistic work (or reading it or listening to it) can come to very different opinions about it based on the individual lens through which they’re doing the viewing. In that sense, art can become a Rorschach test, saying more about the person reacting to it than the art itself. A good recent example of that was American Sniper.

It’s a fictionalized account of the life of Chris Kyle, credited as the most prolific sniper in American military history. He racked up that total during the Iraq war. Ironically, given that he made his reputation with a gun, Kyle’s life was ended by another veteran at a shooting range in 2013. I have no doubt that the perceptions and values I brought to the movie colored the way I saw it.

It’s an interesting, if muddled, film. After a quick flashback intro, it alternates between harrowing battle scenes based in Iraq (the last one, which involves an all engulfing sandstorm, is really impressive) and home front scenes in Texas that shows how much impact the experiences are having on Kyle. The problem is that it never commits to either venue. It’s neither an all out war movie, nor is it a deep examination of the problems faced when vets come home.

Nowhere is that more obvious than in the way it glosses over Kyle’s life once he left Iraq behind. I don’t mean his death – that’s not shown on screen. I mean his transformation from brooding, seriously messed up soldier to a loving father and husband who was putting his experiences to use helping other veterans. All that’s covered with such brevity that it might as well have been a musical montage.

As I said, American Sniper turned into a kind of Rorschach test, with reviews saying more about the person talking about it than the film itself. That was true whether it was a professional pundit or some random person popping up on the Internet.

On the pundit side, check out Matt Taibbi’s review. I like Taibbi and agree with him on a lot of things, but I have to wonder if he actually watched the moving before writing that. It’s much more about what it isn’t – a catalog of the sins of the Bush administration and the Iraq War – than what it is. Instead, it’s very personal story about one man in the middle of something bigger. In fact, the plot makes it a mano y mano battle between Kyle and his Iraqi counterpart suggesting (as the recent Sicario did for the drug war) that everything, even war, in the end, is personal.

If liberal pundits were quick to slam the film for its perceived politics, conservatives were quick to praise it for the same reasons – because they found their politics positively reflected in it. Personally, if I thought American Sniper was validation of my politics, I would be very frightened. But I come to it with my own baggage, right?

See what I mean about a Rorschach test?

And it goes beyond politics. Take, for instance, this discussion in IMDB about how Eastwood ruined a perfectly good “war movie” by having scenes with a “whining wife” in them. Ignoring the fact that Eastwood wasn’t interested in making a “war movie” or that movies with scenes of warfare in them can be about more than killing bad guys.

American Sniper isn’t unique in this, although the effect is amplified because it deals with recent history, politics, and overseas adventures that are still causing us all kinds of problems. It might have cut across that divide with a little more commitment to being one thing or the other.

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The Trouble Of Quantifying Art

/ JD Byrne / 3 Comments

It’s received wisdom that movies adapted from written material are, to steal a phrase from an excellent album by The Tangent, not as good as the book. I tend to agree with that wisdom, but there are some notable exceptions (Dangerous Liaisons, The Sweet Hereafter, LA Confidential). Is there some way we can tell, with math and numbers and stuff, which ones work better than others?

No. No there isn’t.

That doesn’t keep people from tying. Back when the last part of The Hunger Games film saga came out, stats guru Nate Silver purported to identify the 20 “most extreme cases” of film adaptations that failed to live up to the quality of their book source material. When I clicked the link I was actually hoping Silver might have broken out of his usual routine and embraced the ambiguous in the world.

Alas (footnotes omitted):

there are extreme cases where book-lover rage is justifiable. Which cases? I pulled the Metacritic critic ratings of the top 500 movies on IMDB tagged with the “based on novel” keyword. I then found the average user rating of the source novel for each film on Goodreads, a book rating and review site. In the end, there was complete data for 382 films and source novels.

The results are kind of fun to look at. Remember, Silver’s most interested in the divergence between good books and bad movies, and vice versa, so a great adaptation of a great novel kind of falls through the cracks. Still, who knew that Up in the Air was so much better a film than the novel? But that list points out some of the problems with Silver’s undertaking. Is it completely accurate to call Apocalypse Now an “adaptation” of Heart of Darkness, or is it simply inspired by it? And Dr. Strangelove, while it may have adapted the plot of Red Alert, it turned the ideas of it on their head, playing it as dark satire, rather than serious, suspenseful drama (it got that from Failsafe). The reverse list is a little easier to understand, for the reasons Silver mentions.

But the real problem isn’t in the particular results, it’s in the method. Mainly, Silver is comparing apples and oranges. He somewhat admits this in a footnote, when he admits that there isn’t a critic aggregator for books like there is for films in Rotten Tomatoes. But he falters in then assuming that there isn’t a like to like comparison he can make. IMDB also has user ratings, numbers generated by fans that are more like the Goodreads ratings than Metacritic averages.

The difference is important. Every few years you’ll see a think piece like this one about how film critics don’t appear to have much influence on what movies people go see. They routinely trash the kind of big summer popcorn movies that do billions of dollars in business. It doesn’t suggest that the critics are wrong or right, just that they have a different frame of reference than fans. A critic sometimes sees a dozen movies in a week, whether they appeal to her likes and dislikes or not. The typical movie goer, on the other hand, sees one or two and tends to pick stuff he thinks he’ll enjoy. So comparing book fans to movie fans would have been a baseline for a survey like this.

Another problem, that Silver doesn’t approach at all, is one of scale. Put simply, even really popular books are read by orders of magnitude fewer people than see adaptations of them. Going back to Up in the Air, how many people read that book? Yet it did more than $166 million dollars in box office. My thought is that book fans tend to be more passionate than movie fans, more invested in their favorites. Not to mention, if most of the people who see an adaptation never read the source material, how can they compare one to the other?

Ultimately, that’s all nitpicking. Trying to reduce art to numbers is a fool’s game. Fun to play sometimes, but ultimately like trying to light a cigarette in a hurricane.

UPDATE: Or, as James Poniewozik puts it in a New York Times write up of the best in television for 2015:

Art isn’t math.

Amen.

Weekly Watch: Sicario

/ JD Byrne / 1 Comment

The War on (Other People’s) Drugs has always been great fodder for Hollywood. There are good guys, there are bad guys, and the violent nature of the drug trade means there’s lots of opportunities for shootouts and car chases and all the other action movie stuff that Americans love. Rarely do these movies ask if there might be something pointless about the whole exercise.

Sicario has a lot of those trappings, but they’re seen through a smudged lens. There are bad guys, all right. There are good guys, but from early on the question of just how good they are is in play. And there are plenty of well played action sequences, including the most tense road trip ever that didn’t involve your in-laws.

But there’s something else going on in Sicario, largely because the main character, played by Emily Blunt, has so little to do with the bigger picture into which she’s swept. She’s a tactical specialist brought into an operation that doesn’t have anything to do with her specialty (hostage rescue). That leaves her with lots of time to question the legality and morality of the entire operation. She never really comes around, but gets beaten down by what she sees.

It’s an interesting narrative choice. A more traditional approach would have made Benicio del Toro’s character the protagonist, which would fit comfortably into the ever popular revenge fantasy niche (del Toro, by the way is fantastic – Oscar, here he comes). But that would make us root for him in a way that making Blunt the main character doesn’t allow. We look at what she does with the same kind of (hopefully) disgusted detachment.

That being said, what does Sicario say about the War on (Other People’s) Drugs itself? Two things, both of which aren’t likely to come through in your typical action flick.

For one, the film implies that the high minded ideals of the war are actually just cover for much more personal motives. The head of all this covert fun, Josh Brolin’s character, first tries to convince Blunt that his strategy is about luring a big cartel’s main man in the US to go to Mexico, to the big boss, since they don’t know where he is. Blunt’s objection that they don’t have jurisdiction in Mexico is waved away. Next, he tries to justify the op with a kind of drug-fueled real politik – that the actual problem is the expanding number of cartels shipping drugs to the US and that the solution is to make sure there are fewer of them that can, at least, be more easily controlled.

All this is, to put it politely (oh, spoiler alert!), bullshit. At its heart, the story Sicario tells is a revenge story. Del Toro’s character, who’s position in the governmental hierarchy is never nailed down, is in it to avenge the death of his wife and child. Thus, all the issues about violating another nation’s sovereignty and the scope of a particular agency’s authority are pushed aside for the most personal of motives.

The other thing that comes through comes as a result of some scenes in Juarez, Mexico, that follow a Mexican state police officer (an important distinction from the Mexican federal officers). His son plays soccer, which is just a detail about his home life until the very end. His mother takes him to a game, played on a bare dirt lot in Juarez, around which the sounds of gunfire rattle off every few moments. At first it’s unsettling, but everyone goes on with their lives.

The point, it seems to me, is that even after a great blow has been struck against the bad guys, the problem continues to exist. My theory has long been that the reason the War on (Other People’s) Drugs is destined to fail is because it’s actually a war on human desire, a desire to escape the shitty world around us. Sicario seems to agree that it’s ultimately fruitless, but on other grounds.

Either way, it’s refreshing to see a movie that, on the one hand, is set up to be the conventional good guy v. bad guy story, then turns out to ask deeper questions. Throw in lots of great performances and some really tense set pieces and Sicario is an excellent, if unsettling, piece of work.

Sicario

Weekly Watch: The Fifth Estate

/ JD Byrne / Leave a comment

The Fifth Estate desperately wants to be a movie about Julian Assange, the enigmatic founder and leader of Wikileaks. Problem is, it’s not really a movie about Assange. Instead, it’s really about Daniel Domscheit-Berg, who worked with Assange for a few years. It’s based on his book (along with one other) and he’s clearly the audience surrogate – the one who lets us in on the story.

But since The Fifth Estate wants to be a movie about somebody else, we don’t really learn enough about Berg to care about him or his motivations. It’s unclear why he hooked up with Assange (they knew each other when the movie’s timeline starts, although they were just meeting in person for the first time) and whether their eventual rupture was inevitable or the result of Assange really going over a bridge too far.

The biggest problem with this isn’t that Berg’s story might have been more interesting – maybe it isn’t – but that without a good anchor into the broader story of Wikileaks the person the film wants to be the center of attention, Assange, isn’t that interesting, either. Benedict Cumberbach (sp?) does pretty well with what little he’s got to work with, styling Assange as an aloof egomaniac with a messiah complex who may, nonetheless, be doing the right thing.

The shallowness of all this is evidenced via a running joke, in which Assange will relate some harrowing experience and then quip that’s why he has white hair. Late in the film Berg offers the real secret – he dyes it (no shit!) because that’s what the cult in which he grew up did. Assange has already told us about the cult, so this really isn’t anything new. What’s set up as some kind of big reveal – I thought, perhaps, Assange’s whole back story had been a lie cooked up to enhance his image – really isn’t. You shrug and move on, just as with the rest of the film.

It doesn’t help that most of the action takes place on computers and Hollywood hasn’t really figured out yet how to make that interesting. The great achievement of The Social Network was making a story about computers about people instead, so the (very brief) bits of actual computing we see mean something. Too many of the characters in The Fifth Estate spend too much time tapping out stuff on keyboards that we, the viewers, can’t even read (seriously – when the climax is happening it’s nearly impossible to figure what people are saying to each other). At one point it looks like, in an accommodation for dramatic purposes, that folks might read what they’re typing in a voiceover, but that only happens once. Somebody should have stuck with that instinct.

Amidst all that I suppose it’s no surprise that the central conflict, brought into sharp relief by the release of documents leaked by American soldier Bradley (now Chelsea) Manning, almost comes out of nowhere. While there are earlier cites to the Wikileaks policy of never editing or redacting the documents they release, nobody really questions this policy or how it might run up against conflicting concerns (say, the safety of innocent third parties) until it actually happens. Some better philosophical and political groundwork would have made that climax more powerful and dramatic.

In the end, there are a couple of better movies waiting to escape The Fifth Estate, one about Assange and one about Berg. It’s a shame the creative team behind The Fifth Estate didn’t have the material to make the first one or the desire to make the second one. Don’t take my word for it – Assange didn’t like it either.

FifthEstate