Overtime (Matt Niehoff and Brian Cunningham, 2011)

Overtime starts as a vague Tarantino homage before turning into a silly pastiche of various clichés over the course of its 80 minutes. Ultra-low-budget, the movie has all the usual issues of a homemade film: bad sound, stiff acting and nonexistent effects. And yet, I kind of liked it; the movie is so off the wall ridiculous in its bounce from half-baked idea to half-baked idea that if it never adds up to more than (or even equal to) the sum of its parts, at least it has parts to be added.

My full review is up now at Movie Mezzanine.

Musketeer Mania

I've got not one but two (sadly not three) pieces on Musketeer movies freshly up on the Internet. One is a discussion between myself and the lovely Allison from NerdVampire on Peter Hyams' simultaneously underrated and very appropriately rated 2001 feature, The Musketeer. Wire fu meets swashbuckling in this gratingly scripted but finely lensed POS. Check out our discussion here.

The other is on the deliciously, ludicrously scripted and gorgeously lensed Paul W.S. Anderson feature, The Three Musketeers. I gave this a positive, if somewhat backhanded, review after its theatrical release last year, but the severity with which I now treat Anderson's talents can be directly traced back to my fondness for this sailpunk take on the novel, with its beautiful, vast interiors, coherent action, and even a sly bit of satire or two. My full review can be found at Spectrum Culture.

Albert Nobbs (Rodrigo Garcia, 2011)

Well, Albert Nobbs could have been worse, I guess. It could have been offensively opinionated about gender identity and made a play for a typical Hollywood lesson about understanding founded upon deep ignorance. Instead, it's just tedious and dramatically inert, with no suspense of Albert being found out and no passion behind his life goals. I can't imagine why Glenn Close should have been so enamored with this story as to have fought for three decades to bring it to the screen, nor how that length of time could have birthed so simplistic and half-formed a screenplay. I've already forgotten practically everything but Janet McTeer, who makes the film almost watchable every second she's on-screen.

My full review is up now at Spectrum Culture.

The Front Line (Jang Hun, 2011)

Jang Hun's The Front Line liberally takes from Saving Private Ryan, but then so does every modern war movie about a past conflict (and, often, a present one). Yet despite its own occasional bumps, I much prefer Jang's more idiosyncratic yet thematically consistent vision to Spielberg's sloppy hodgepodge of tropes. It captures the particular bitterness of civil war better than just about any work of film or television made about our own, and its flashes of quintessentially Korean cinematic oddness don't detract from the impact of the final moments. And the use of the contested hill itself as a messenger system between sides as each constantly wrests control of the area from the other is one of the most ingenious commentaries on the absurdity and waste of war.

My full review is up now at Spectrum Culture.

Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol (Brad Bird, 2011)

The trait that links all four Mission: Impossible movies, each helmed by a different director of wildly differing stylistic sensibilities, is a certain amount of incomprehensibility. De Palma's original, which has aged better than any of its successors, is a smorgasbord of that filmmaker's love of audience manipulation, leftist politics, and metacinematic pranksterism. John Woo's sequel is, if anything, even crazier, replacing the peevish joke structure of De Palma's satire with pure, free-form abandon. J.J. Abrams' installment significantly pared down the twists and turns of the franchise's plots, making for the most conventionally satisfying of the series, yet the one that leaves me the coldest.

Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol, the first live-action venture by animation superstar Brad Bird, is at once the most gargantuan, ridiculous of the movies and the most cogent entry, occasionally explained to the point of tedium. It makes for an uneven effort, one that comes alive every time Bird stages another setpiece and grinding to a halt when the holdover influence of Abrams' pedestrian hit weighs down every bit of dialogue. Happily, Bird, perhaps self-conscious about the expectations upon him, absolutely loads his movie with fantastically over-the-top sequences that make for perhaps the most popcorn-worthy of this franchise.

Opening with a delightfully bizarre sequence involving LOST's Josh Holloway, Ghost Protocol moves swiftly into a prison break in Russia that bails out our hero Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise). Though a bit stiffly presented at first, this setpiece encapsulates the best of the series: it's crazy to the point of comedy (both for its physical properties and the input of a surveilling Simon Pegg as Benji) yet suitably impressive in its staging. Once out, Ethan and his rescuers—Benji and Jane Carter (Paula Patton)—receive a mission to infiltrate the Kremlin, but in true Mission: Impossible fashion, everything soon goes haywire.

Ghost Protocol reveals itself to be a nuclear thriller, a decidedly old-fashioned plot with decidedly old-fashioned villains. Perhaps the dilapidated subject matter explains the recurring imagery of malfunctioning technology. Old gear shorts and fizzles, while even new gadgets fail when needed most. The conceit suggests Bird's awareness that this franchise is outdated. This is not a new realization; De Palma structured the first of these movies as an investigation of what a Cold War spy series would mean in the absence of the USSR. And now that Bond himself has undergone a makeover to cut the waffle, Bird's too-clever-by-half trick doesn't have much bite, and he comes to rely on it to the point that it becomes a crutch. Nevertheless, the director's playfulness toward the genre is a refreshing bit of self-awareness, albeit an unsurprising one from the man who gave us a superhero movie as sly as The Incredibles.

With this gleeful energy, Bird comes the closest to the spirit of De Palma's film, and he even carries over a few other traits of the first of the franchise's entries. De Palma assembled one of the strangest casts for an ostensible mainstream cash-in on a TV show, with actors of multiple nationalities and ethnicities breaking up the all-American, all-white tone of so much blockbuster cinema. Likewise, Bird stacks his cast with an oddball assortment of actors, putting a visibly aged but still-virile Cruise with the youthful but out-of-shape Pegg (at 41, he still looks as if he has baby fat), Patton, Midnight in Paris' Lea Seydoux, Slumdog Millionaire's Anil Kapoor (magnificently OTT, as ever), Michael Nyqvist from the Swedish Millennium films, and more. Considering that Hollywood's casting hasn't gotten much more diverse since De Palma's poked fun at it, Bird's lineup is one of the film's most entertaining aspects.

But the real reason to come to these things is the ludicrous setpieces, and Bird doesn't disappoint. The sequence where Hunt must scale some floors 1000 feet in the air in the Burj Dubai in minutes as everything goes wildly awry. I don't know what it is about this franchise and its vertiginous centerpieces, but this bit blows away the previous stunts. Seen on an IMAX screen, the camera's looks to the ground below create a queasy sense of fear, while the framing of Hunt's climb made me wonder "How did they DO that?" incessantly. Yet even better—to these eyes, anyway—was the sequence shortly thereafter, where Ethan chases his target through a swirling sandstorm that reduces visibility to mere inches and howls over the soundtrack to equally block out the audio. The chase is one of the most thrilling in recent memory, a rust-colored maelstrom that borders on the surreal for its many reversals, lost leads and resumed pursuits, and a frame that is always changing yet strangely static, given the constant blur caused by the sand. There are other delights, from a whacky Kremlin break-in to an even odder party crashing in India, but nothing matches that wild chase through obliterated Dubai streets.

Where the film loses me is in the need to back up all these wonderfully quirky, nonsensical pieces into some kind of coherent whole. The opening bits of Holloway and the prison break are great for how immediate and unexplained they are, and the drawn-out truth behind both takes away from their spontaneity and silliness. Both De Palma and Woo made even their explanations confusing as hell (though I'm not sure Woo did so intentionally), but Bird clarifies in a way that advertises his skill for making coherent narratives, a valuable talent but one misapplied here. Bird also picks up the baton from Abrams re: the simplistic use of romance and shattered love as a motivation. The threat hanging over Ethan's wife moved the third film, and Carter's rage over her lover's death prompts many of her actions, reducing her character to borderline sexist motivation as a woman incapable of behaving like a professional, elite spy after suffering an emotional gut-punch. Likewise, Jeremy Renner's character teases out a mystery that loses all of its force when he spills the beans, and even when his own interpretation of events is later reversed, Renner's whole subplot fails to add anything and saddles the excellent actor with too much arbitrary baggage. This is Screenwriting 101, and it adds all-too-easy foundations for a franchise that, again, works best when it is convoluted beyond all get-out.

Nevertheless, Ghost Protocol is a hell of a good show for an animation director looking to break into live action, demonstrating that the recent trend of live-action filmmakers moving into animation is not a one-way bridge. Bird's familiarity with boundless framing gives his action pieces an exuberance that makes their absurdities infectiously engaging. I understand that the complaint that everything makes too much sense is an odd one, and one I wouldn't apply anywhere else, but I did still feel nagged by certain pieces of exposition that felt all too common after the extraordinary creativity Bird brought to the project. But that imagination overpowers even the tiniest of quibbles, and Ghost Protocol is easily the finest of the series since De Palma tried to kill the franchise before it started with the first.

El Sicario, Room 164 (Gianfranco Rosi, 2011)

In an age where "FAKE!" greets even the most honest video, the almost-too-consistent dramatic ups and downs of this extended talking head about a reformed assassin for the Mexican drug cartel will certainly strain the credulity of some. And this is wholly leaving out the conclusion of the man's life story, which is so conveniently moralizing that it could play at schools and church groups (especially church groups). Nevertheless, the sicario's monologue is so enthralling as to make something compelling of 80 minutes of a masked man mostly sitting in a chair explaining himself. I know of at least one person who compared the man's confessional to Spalding Gray's ability to hook a crowd with just his speechifying, and that strikes me as more than apt.

My full review is up now at Spectrum Culture.

Capsule Reviews: Weekend, Tuesday After Christmas, Into the Abyss, Cave of Forgotten Dreams

Weekend (Andrew Haigh, 2011)

Occasionally a bit precious in its cinematography (one too many woozy shots and obvious visual cues), Andrew Haigh's Weekend is nevertheless a bold, beautiful film that uses the magnificent performances of its leads to confront cinematic complacency and limitations upon homosexuality. Glen (Chris New), the aggressive art student, is defiant about his sexuality in response to the heteronormative society around him, which he convincingly argues is more "in your face" than even the loudest queer. Russell, the shy one, still wrestles with his sexuality, and Tom Cullen captures the feeling of being the odd man out at a party (whether the stranger at a farewell bash or the one gay man among straights) better than just about anyone.

It's impossible to leave the sexuality of the characters out of discussion, as the tenor of their conversations and behavior with each other is informed by the social limitations imposed on homosexuals; by denying the naturalness of their expressions, the outside world makes their private chats more open and frank than heterosexual couples who've been together for years instead of hours. Cullen and New are so effortlessly natural with each other that not only are they believable as a couple, they are two of the few romantic screen pairings one could buy having a life-changing dalliance in just two days. Haigh still has some kinks to work out with his direction, but Weekend announces the arrival of one of the most nuanced, real makers of romance, and in this respect, the sexuality of the lovers in question couldn't matter less.

Tuesday, After Christmas (Radu Muntean, 2011)

If Weekend's naturalism quietly revolutionizes the indie romance, the elegant long-takes and flawless rapport of Tuesday, After Christmas' actors adds new textures to over-familiar adultery dramas. On paper, this film is as clichéd as it gets: a husband in a comfortable family unit risks it all for a fling with a younger, attractive woman. But Muntean and the actors craft realistic interactions—the married couple in the film are husband and wife in real life—that make Paul's quandary agonizing rather than perfunctory. In this modern age of decreasing average shot length, a film like Tuesday, After Christmas reminds us of the dramatic possibilities of simply holding a shot, which prolongs the perfectly ordinary conversations between characters to the point that one almost expects a bomb to go off. Why else would a shot be held so long over (seemingly) nothing? Muntean's long takes allow the actors to add tiny exchanges that make their relationships more real and therefore more meaningful, and the decision Paul must make by that post-Christmas Tuesday promises to be devastating regardless of what we eventually see him choose.

Into the Abyss (Werner Herzog, 2011)

Perhaps the most standard, TV-ready documentary Werner Herzog has ever made, and that includes his early work for German television (which are among his most poetic works). Yet if the film lacks Herzog's usual magic, it also makes for an above-average opinion piece that bluntly voices the director's views on capital punishment while still directly confronting the horror of the death row inmates' crimes. Herzog's use of archival footage and relatively straight interviewing style reveal he'd be a fairly successful "normal" documentarian. Still a major presence in his storytelling, Herzog nevertheless mostly steps back to let the interview subjects speak for themselves, only interjecting to push them on unexpected tangents that end up revealing more than the standard questions would have. Herzog captures the full ugliness of the situation—the two partners in crime blaming each other for the crime that got them incarcerated, the shame and rage the people connected to the perpetrators and victims feel—but it is precisely because he goes for the complete portrait of devastation that his adamant stance against the death penalty carries any weight. But if Herzog does not poeticize this subject, he nevertheless searches for the beauty and humanity in this dark tragedy, and he even finds vague whispers of hope littered among the bodies of the dead murdered by criminal and state alike.

Cave of Forgotten Dreams (Werner Herzog, 2011)

If Into the Abyss leaves out Herzog's style but still makes an impact, Cave of Forgotten Dreams showcases his ability to make poetry of reality but lacks the grounding element that keeps his best work from simply drifting aimlessly. Herzog's speculation of peoples past based on the cave art they left behind broaches ideas of the foundation of all artistic expression and, therefore, communication. But he fails to tie delicate play of light and simulated movement over the beautiful and miraculously preserved cave paintings to the grandiose free association that usually strikes metaphysical pay dirt. Occasionally, Herzog's tantalizing meditations, linking the caves to German Romanticism and Wagner, recall the best of the director's thin but evocative spoken thoughts. But given Herzog's interest in casting these surprisingly sophisticated paintings as not simply the beginning of art in general but proto-cinema itself, it's a shame that the film doesn't feel more resonant throughout.

A Dangerous Method (David Cronenberg, 2011)

David Cronenberg throws the audience for a loop from the start of A Dangerous Method. The stately opening credits, unfolding gracefully over close-ups of ink blotting the pages of correspondence, is so elegant that it cannot even be taken for a sort of proto-Rorschach test. It is as conventional and soft a commencement to a costume drama as credits can be. Then, Cronenberg cuts straight to a shot of Sabina Spielrein (Keira Knightley) shrieking, cackling and hissing against the glass, resembling less her usual, composed and corseted ladies than Jane Eyre's Bertha, the embodiment of the repressed female id. In an instant, the director pushes under the "proper" surface of the period drama to confront its twisted secrets. The fact that most of the film occurs in bright daylight is no coincidence; the monsters that eat at these characters are not creatures that come out in the night. They are in all of us at all times, whether they're visible or not.

Cronenberg's style has always been formal, but A Dangerous Method is so classically composed that a newcomer would never guess its maker had also directed such body horror classics as Videodrome and Crash. Yet by placing Sabina's "hysteria" upfront, the director clues us in on his basic aim: the film is merely the psychological root of his horror movies. As Knightley writhes around in mental agony, Cronenberg fully subsumes his tumorous grotesqueries fully into the mind, which can torment the body well enough without tumorous growths or other icky, hyperbolic infections. As Glenn Kenny rightly put it on Twitter shortly after the film's premiere, Sabina, and her sexuality, is the traditional monster in a typical Cronenberg film.

Taken to the Burghölzli clinic outside Zurich, Sabina is placed under the care of Carl Jung (Michael Fassbener), then the assistant to the hospital's director. Jung decides to treat Sabina with the "talking cure," a theory developed by Sigmund Freud but potentially never applied to a patient. Sabina's case will eventually bring Jung into contact with his idol and, for various reasons, help tear them apart. Their interaction, along with Jung's increasingly unethical relationship with Sabina, subtly brings out the theories of both psychiatrists, even as the director gradually reveals that the doctors themselves embody these same prototypical ideas about the workings of the human mind.

Viggo Mortensen plays Freud with such paternalism that he casts himself as the Oedipal father to be destroyed by Jung, something that the Austrian even voices aloud later in the film. Freud looks to Jung as a potential successor but urges the man to stop bringing "mysticism" into psychoanalysis just as the field is finally beginning to be accepted by the scientific community at large. But Freud's anti-religious streak has a clear personal impetus: he confides in Jung that the Jewish identity of the Viennese psychoanalysts will make the struggle to be taken seriously that much harder. A confused Jung asked why that would matter, to which Freud dryly responds, "That, if I may say so, is an exquisitely Protestant remark." Jung comes to resent what he perceives to be Freud's close-mindedness on this issue,  but Freud's little jab has a point. Not that the man can't be unreasonable: having to support a wife and six children on a modest income, Freud casts petty sideways glances at the wealth into which Jung married, tacitly sniping the opulent house and travel conditions the Swiss doctor enjoys.

Sabina's own mental state is more explicitly revealed through Knightley's performance. Her bony, angular frame is perfect for Spielrein's wracked, involuntarily self-punishment, her uncontrollable sex drive clashing with her virginity until it seems as if her body thrashes in such fits because that drive is looking for an alternate escape. (The blood of her broken hymen shown later in some ways seems like the remains of some felled mythical beast, or at the very least the opening of a release valve.) She exhibits the animus, the male within the female, when she takes the initiative in kissing Jung, and it's amusing that the progressive psychiatrist would take the all too traditionally male excuse of subsequently blaming her for "seducing" him. Later, Sabina finds herself directly and indirectly trapped between Jung and Freud when she becomes a psychiatrist in her own right and must write her own dissertation with the divergent theorists' views. Her heart favors Jung, but her head tends to side with Freud, who at one point conspiratorially tells the Russian Jewish Spielrein of Jung, "Put not your trust in Aryans," asking for her allegiance out of the same religious identity he buries in public.

Cronenberg uses split diopter lenses to crush characters against each other while still emphasizing distance. It makes Jung, Freud and Spielrein into each other's dualities, even their shoulder angels. It also has the effect of making every bit of dialogue resemble the setup for Jung's approach to Freud's talking cure with Sabina, in which he places the woman looking forward as he sits behind asking questions for minimal distraction. This turns every conversation into a therapy session, which somewhat resembles a Catholic confession, a wry twist given Freud's overt objection to religious influence in his scientific approach.

Long, generally static takes drag out these forms of therapy to excruciating lengths. When Sabina finally voices what it is that torments her, Cronenberg lingers on Knightley's face, horrified at herself for speaking aloud her demons. Indeed, it can be harder to watch her come clean about her sexual hangups than it is to see Seth Brundle catalog his own rotted-off body parts in The Fly; at times, Cronenberg moves in so close and refuses to cut for so long that my eyes darted every which way but toward the screen in sheer discomfort. But that's the point; Knightley, aghast at herself for revealing her kinks, is not so different from people today, who continue to hold such open conversation about sex taboo a century later. By breaking through the social barriers that cage her, Sabina is set on the path to recovery. As utterly agonizing as it can be, opening up can be healthy, and sometimes talking really can be a cure.

There are jokes sprinkled throughout A Dangerous Method—Freud in particular is wry and witty, and he is always seen with a cigar in hand or mouth—but the film has an air of quiet tragedy to it, the important breakthroughs made by Jung, Freud, even Spielrein (her dissertation on the links between sex and death almost certainly influenced some of the two men's later theories) nevertheless unable to fully overcome their fears and desires. Otto Gross (Vincent Cassel), the brief prodigy of Freud, advises Jung "Never repress anything," but as the closing text of the film reveals, he'll die penniless and hungry by the end of the decade. That places Otto at one extreme, and the totally inhibited Sabina of the film's beginning at the other. But the medium between the two, Freud's assertion of a necessary level of repression, is anything but a happy one. A Dangerous Method closes with Jung sitting in empty social comfort, paying a dear psychic price for that normalcy, the full extent of which is borne out with the revelation of his subsequent breakdown. We also learn that Freud had good reason to worry about his ethnic and religious identity, him being kicked out of Vienna in 1939 and Spielrein murdered by the SS in 1942. The sense of barely suppressed pain and sorrow that ends the film is only worsened by these intertitles, making for one of the most tragic of Cronenberg's films. But there is hope for the future: as Jung's expositional title card notes, the same nervous breakdown that incapacitates him during the First World War will only make him emerge a stronger psychiatrist. As he says to the equally troubled but accomplished psychoanalyst Sabina has become by the end, "Only the wounded physician heals."

War Horse (Steven Spielberg, 2011)

Like his other release this year, The Adventures of Tintin, Steven Spielberg's War Horse indulges in the best and worst of a particular facet of the director's talent. Tintin lacks a proper dramatic arc and works largely without any stakes, yet it showcases Spielberg's talent for choreographing dynamic, vast setpieces of eye-popping visual marvels. War Horse, the more low-key, Oscar-friendly picture, contains moments of such beauty as to border on the poetic, matching the most abstract and haunting shots of the director's canon. But it is also such a hand-holding, tedious affair as to display the most immature, irritating traits of Spielberg's storytelling. In other terms, if Tintin displays Spielberg at his most childlike, War Horse shows him at his most childish.

War Horse barely even gets started before it's in your face with forced wonder, opening on a young English farm boy, Albert (Jeremy Irvine), watching the birth of a foal with fascination. But the film moves through a quick series of shots that continue to convey Albert's instant love of this creature, even as the edits clearly hop over a significant portion of time. Within seconds of screen time, the foal grows into a yearling, but Albert has that same dopey look on his face. Does that mean he walked around like the village idiot for weeks, even months, gawping at a damn horse? And when Albert's lovable alcoholic father (Peter Mullan) buys the horse at an auction just to get one over his landlord, the lad is so overjoyed that the very real possibility his dad just made them homeless matters nothing next to owning "Joey," All the while, John Williams score insists you take a handkerchief, regardless of whether your eyes are wet. This is not the organic Spielberg who could masterfully manipulate an audience to genuine reaction; this is a battering ram methodically slamming against the portcullis until it can break through and shove the intended emotional response down everyone's throat.

A few treacly, minor triumphs categorize this first segment, as Albert trains Joey to plow in order to satisfy that landlord, played by David Thewlis in a one-note sneer he occasionally tries and fails to deepen. But even the small victory of plowing a rocky field Bought by a sweet, naïve captain (Tom Hiddleston) as his personal war steed, Joey gets steered into the battlefront, where the cruelty of WWI will wrench him constantly into new ownership and halt the film once more to let some other character give off a whiff of emotional heft before moving off again.

Spielberg excels at investing audience sympathy in non-human subjects. E.T. is equally as worthy of the audience's love and worry as Elliot, while David the robot is more recognizably human than any of A.I.'s actual homo sapiens. But as one can see by the initial focus on Albert over "Joey," the horse in War Horse is not really the star, merely the vehicle for dragging along the plot like that plow he must tug while still on the farm. If Spielberg innovates anything here, it is to at last make a non-human character as much of a blank canvas for projection as poorly written human ciphers. David and E.T. come with their own personalities, but Joey is just there, smoothing the narrative transitions between perspectives as the POV is handed off with the horse's reins. When Joey at all features front and center, it is either to get a laugh for his cheek or a tear for his hardship. Yet the only true subjugation of this poor creature is by the director, who puts Joey in precarious situations simply for the empty rush of concern the audience might feel for him.

Shot with a refreshing amount of color, War Horse moves so far away from the "realism" of so many Spielberg-Kaminski pairings that the director and cinematographer move into near-Technicolor levels of old Hollywood filmmaking. When the horse finally goes to war an hour into the film, Spielberg treats us to images that survey war with formal remove instead of handheld verisimilitude, and his shots are stunning. The sudden mounting of horses hidden in a wheat field, sending grains flying into the air like a blizzard as a cavalry materializes, is gorgeous, thrilling, but also tense. Likewise, Spielberg's method of eliding over the deaths in the resultant charge into machine guns, by showing now-riderless horses bounding past the gun placements, is oddly serene despite the horror of what it depicts. Furthermore, the shots of trench warfare manage to top even Stanley Kubrick's ability to evoke sheer, senseless carnage in Paths of Glory. The trenches are claustrophobic death pits clouded over by gunsmoke and rendered chaotic by constant bombardment, but no man's land makes these sweltering, overcrowded holes look like Xanadu. Crisscrossing webs of barbed wire become clotheslines for fallen soldiers, festering puddles of stagnant rainwater splashing god knows what bacteria on the few who wade through them without dying. War in War Horse despite its lack of desaturated film stock, the omission of blood, and the perfection of its craftsmanship, occasionally looks more hellish and insensible than battle in Saving Private Ryan.

But as much as the film might show off the director's clear mastery of classical filmmaking, it also reveals the oversimplifying limitations of that method of storytelling. Richard Curtis, who co-wrote the magnificent Blackadder Goes Forth (still my favorite work of fiction, humorous or otherwise, on WWI), helps pen a depressingly thin portrait of WWI-era Europe. The opening segment is a cut-out of prewar English life: Mullan looks more like an old comic-strip drunk than Captain Haddock himself, while Emily Watson makes Important Statements about everything from the folly of buying the horse to the heroism her husband hides from the world. (At all other times, she stands in front of the homestead as if she forgot what continent and time period she's in and is expecting Sherman to burn the farm to the ground any second.) Class, a key factor in the outbreak and strategies of the war, is here reduced to a few broad sketches, which might have been permissible if the story were really Joey's. But our beloved war horse is on the other side of the battlefield when the fleeting grasp at class commentary in the British trenches is made, making the half-hearted attempt at depth all the more meaningless.

The fatuous, hollow manipulation of so much of the film is all the more frustrating for the moments where everything comes together and Spielberg shows his talent for hooking an audience. After denying the Germans humanity in Saving Private Ryan, here they get to be as real as the Englishmen, which is not saying much, but still. A sequence of a young soldier using a captured Joey and another English cavalry horse to abduct his younger brother from going to the front lines, trading certain death for a merely probable one for going AWOL, is both stirring and bleak. And one scene in particular will go down as one of Spielberg's best moments: Joey finds himself ensnared by barbed wire in no man's land between German and British trenches, and a soldier from each side heads out in peace to help the beast. It's a beautiful, unforced exchange, the teasing conversation that the two men strike up more like the taunts of rival football fans than soldiers sworn to kill the other for king (or kaiser) and country. Highlighting the pointlessness of WWI without having to make any big speech, this scene finds real affirmation in the momentary ceasefire, a reminder that war is something "other people" declare, and that those sent to die in it often share more with the people shooting at them than the high command that keeps pushing them forward.

But even this magnificent scene is hobbled by a simperingly dumb visual gag of nervous Germans chucking their wire cutters over the top when the two exposed men ask for a second pair. Like that unnecessary extra scream in Jaws involving the severed head, this one shot shows Spielberg getting greedy, doing a disservice to his own greatness by trying too hard to get one more reaction out of the audience. And that is but the least egregious example of Spielberg's awkward, counterproductive attempts to elicit some form of response from the audience he used to know how to play like a symphony. In my review for Tintin, a mechanical but spectacular delight, I noted that Spielberg made his first film since Jurassic Park that made me feel unabashed, "How did he do that?" wonder. But War Horse aims to be more moving fare, which Spielberg has made more regularly in the second half of his career. Empire of the Sun, Schindler's List, A.I., and Munich all make for complicated and ambiguous dramas that find the doubt, even the incurable pain, in their subject matter. War Horse ends with the most contrived happy ending since everything magically turned out OK for the main family in War of the Worlds.

Spielberg has long been able to tell children's stories that set kids on the path to growing up, often in harsh terms. War Horse tours the audience through the horrors of the first War to End All Wars, only to dump us off unchanged at the end. Like the horse it pretends is the protagonist, the film has no understanding, no insight, into what it sees. Its most affecting moments seem to occur almost in spite of the movie as a whole, which routinely finds ways to maintain the audience's overall comfort level while milking them for sympathy. It's just a crying exercise, something to cleanse the body of toxins to send back out into the world, none the wiser but vaguely refreshed. There is merit in that kind of film, but War Horse wants to be so much more, to be so captivating and resonant from start to finish, that even its ephemeral pleasures must be considered a failure.

Capsule Reviews: Trespass, My Week With Marilyn, We Need to Talk About Kevin

Trespass (Joel Schumacher, 2011)

Having premiered at TIFF in September and come to DVD not two months later, Trespass couldn't possibly have been any good, but its badness is still striking. Shot with colors so artlessly exaggerated it looks merely as if someone adjusted the color balance rather than composed anything, Trespass wouldn't be interesting if it were lensed by Emmanuel Lubezki. A bog-standard house thriller with a simperingly moralistic message about family, the film proceeds with hilariously random flashbacks, endless narrative diversions, and hopelessly absurd dialogue. Nicole Kidman still can't get her emotions to match her starched facial expressions, while Nic Cage plays the fast-talking diamond dealer with his usual incoherent yelling. (I confess that his agonized cry of "You shit fucking animals!" is something of a highlight.) The film does improve (by which I mean becomes even worse) when someone socks Cage in the mouth and he speaks with a thick voice the rest of the film. But not even the delight of Cage at his worst can make up from Schumacher's clumsily overactive direction or the constant addition of conflicts thanks to useless reveals.

My Week With Marilyn (Simon Curtis, 2011)

When a film summarizes itself with its opening text scrawl, it has to work twice as hard to make the audience care for what is to come. But Simon Curtis' lazy sorta biopic doesn't have an ounce of insight in it, printing the legend and never engaging Monroe on any human level. We get a glossed-over view of her instability, with the brilliant Michelle Williams setting aside her command of elegantly controlled body language to offer up an Oscar-ready performance of big accents and aggressive acting. Kenneth Branagh, however, redeems much of the film's facile approach, giving his finest performance in years as a crotchety, thin-lipped Sir Laurence Olivier, looking for rejuvenation in co-starring with Monroe but discovering only his obsolescence in the process. But he can only overcome so much; Curtis even presents Monroe as an airhead in her private life, taking her to a giant library only to have her rush to a massive dollhouse to ooh and aah. By presenting her as naïve and simple behind closed doors, the director never truly delineates between the real woman and the ass-shaking, pose-striking, kiss-blowing sex symbol who turns on every time the press finds her.

We Need to Talk About Kevin (Lynne Ramsay, 2011)

We Need to Talk About Kevin has two strong factors in its favor. One is the direction of Lynne Ramsay, who relies on striking, even idiosyncratic visuals and her actors' body language to convey story and emotion while still being lucid enough to not only follow but predict (almost to the film's detriment). The other is Tilda Swinton, who captures the trauma and paranoia of being not merely the witness to but the ultimate target of her child's killing spree, not only scanning her memories to find out where it all went wrong but feeling the hot sting of hostile stares from the community that blames her for her son's rampage. Together, Ramsay and Swinton create a claustrophobic mood wracked with doubt, as even Eva begins to wonder if she truly is at fault.

Where the film falls down is in its handling of Kevin, who upends whatever nature vs. nature debates arise from some of Eva's memories by being so innately evil that comparisons to such films as The Omen and The Bad Seed have cropped up everywhere.. Every child hired to portray the child at various stages has dark, expressionless stares and absent humanity, which makes the occasional glimpse of a slapped hand or a cutting remark from Eva or a violent video game enthusiastically played seem like belated attempts to add a counterbalance. When young Kevin caustically responds to his mother's remark about matching a room to his personality with, "What personality?" he lets on more than he realizes. At times, the film displays the more nuanced tone of the visual assembly that makes Kevin almost compelling, but soon he's back to that lifeless look in his eyes, leaving me wanting more of these complex moments.

Nevertheless, Swinton is so good at finding depth in the only person ever simplified more than the child killer in such situations, and Ramsay's direction is often so compelling despite its occasional obviousness, that We Need to Talk About Kevin emerges one of the finer films of the year. When everything, or even just most things, click, it makes for a haunting study of survivor's guilt that even manages to find hints of redemption amid the bleakness of the red-soaked visuals and Johnny Greenwood's howling score.

Capsule Reviews: Submarine, The Iron Lady, I Melt With You

Submarine (Richard Ayoade, 2011)

Referencing The Catcher in the Rye with equal parts sincerity and irony, Submarine likewise moves so awkwardly between self-aware hipness and uncomfortable neediness that it never settles into anything other than an attempt to make some Welsh kitchen-sink version of a Wes Anderson film (think the cutting scene of The Royal Tenenbaums stretched to feature length). Ayoade, so effortlessly quick on The IT Crowd, languishes behind the camera, holding some potentially funny and/or insightful moment until it simply collapses. There's a lot of potential here, and I like that Craig Roberts' (a fine newcomer) character arc is paced with an exponential growth rather than a facile epiphany, but I was still left wanting more from this.

The Iron Lady (Phyllida Lloyd, 2011)

To say that The Iron Lady resembles a television movie is an insult to television. Incoherently assembled into a downright hysterical mélange of randomly ordered shots that turn the political career of one of the most controversial figures of modern international politics into a you-go-girl story of a gung-ho women sticking it to all those men who thought she couldn't do it. Not that I'm a supporter of Thatcher's in any respect, but to reduce her life to such shallow nonsense is laughable: upon arrival at Parliament as the only woman, she opens the female bathroom to find naught but a chair and an ironing board. And I haven't even broached the subject of its handling of Thatcher's dementia, which it uses so unsubtly as to generate compassion for the real Thatcher not for her deeds or motivations but merely out of disgust for this level of exploitation. Jim Broadbent plays her hallucinated, dead husband like Jacob Marley come to haunt Scrooge; well, that or he's Margaret Thatcher's peevish but affable Tyler Durden. As the entire film branches out from this addled present, perhaps that explains why the movie is so completely chaotic in its construction, but whatever the reason, I ended up feeling sorry that an old woman had been so crassly used for a film that combines the worst of The King's Speech and J. Edgar into one garish whole.

I Melt With You (Mark Pellington, 2011)

I Melt With You is a glibly nihilistic tour through a midlife crisis that really thinks it's saying something. Four friends meet up for a yearly drug vacation in a house on Big Sur's shoreline that looks as if it would cost more to rent for a week than most houses are to own, where they engage in brotastic antics edited with masculine zeal. But when a cruel twist after one too many Oxycontin orgies uncovers a 25-year-old pact that the men made in college, which they decide to honor because that is what grown men do. Pellington, a music video director, packs the film with great but horrifically misapplied tunes that he seems to prioritize over the actual narrative, which vaguely trundles about dealing with some unexplained past as the present becomes an increasingly incoherent hodgepodge of fatalistic statements. Its self-flagellating tone borders on the parodic, and every intended shock is but one more unintentional laugh. The men are bad enough, but I was perhaps most irritated by the waste of the always-excellent Carla Gugino as the world's most clueless police officer, who basically comes in just to vent the smell of unwashed dude yet gets bizarrely emotional over the fates of these idiotic, self-immolating strangers. An utter piece of trash from start to finish.

The Artist (Michel Hazanavicius, 2011)

Much as I desired some kind of return for silent filmmaking in the 21st century, Michel Hazanavicius' The Artist does not resemble a silent picture so much as a talkie with the audio track removed. Lacking all the propulsion of silent cinema, the capacity for rich visual storytelling that seemed fast ay any speed, The Artist lethargically moves through its pastiche. As a billet-doux, the film is sufficiently earnest to be charming, but it never displays any particular insight into the silent era, making even its homage thin.

But then, Hazanavicius' jumping-off point appears not to be the silents themselves so much as Singin' in the Rain, the 1952 masterpiece that also dealt with the change from silents to talkies. The Artist is the flip-side of that, not about the song-and-dance people who made up for the camera's loss of lyricism but those on the other side of the spectrum, unable to adapt to the new format. In a sense, the hero of The Artist is Lina Lamont, albeit more likable and earnest. But if Kelly and Donen's work was a sincere, if teasing, testament to the event that gave their own careers a boost, The Artist too often feels suffocatingly nostalgic in a lecturing way, even as it does not capture the tone the silents.

Opening at the premiere of the new George Valentin (Jean Dujardin) film, The Artist shows the final twilight hurrah of this Douglas Fairbanks-esque silent star, his picture playing to a packed house as laughs and cheers roar soundlessly from the crowd's throats. On- and off-screen, Valentin is a mug, his gigawatt smile powering all of Tinseltown and his multiple curtain calls but another chance to charm the crowd with physical tricks performed with his trusty dog, whom he clearly considers more of a co-star than the film's leading lady. Walking out of the theater, he bumps into a young woman, Peppy Miller (Bérénice Bejo), whose frame-halting looks get her on the cover of Variety, burying the actual review. Peppy takes the press to the studios, where she gets her way onto the set of George's new movie and begins a meteoric rise.

So far, so good. But when Hazanavicius jumps forward two years to 1929, George finds his world turned upside down. With talkies now the rage, the head of the studio (John Goodman) shuts down production of silents, but George refuses to accept this defeat. The actor suddenly becomes a director, bankrolling his own silent adventure movie, a garishly outdated affair even as seen during its construction. When George and his dog enter the theater on opening night, they increase the audience size by a third. One block over, the marquee that once bore George's name in massive letters now sports Peppy's fresh face as audiences flock to this new talkie bombshell. What had been a light, if still stodgy, love letter to silent cinema now becomes an embittered, morose tale of forgotten talent.

But not even this tone, which lasts up until the film's final few minutes, carries any real heft. Part of this isn't the director's fault: he's done a good enough job of capturing the general beats of silent melodrama that anyone can guess how the story will resolve. But the unimaginative framing, which shows off the sterling set design but does little to generate mood through the visuals, leaves this section, covering the second and nearly all of the third acts, hopelessly flat. For a silent feature, the characters often have to "voice" their feelings, even as the actors routinely demonstrate that they could do it all on their own if the camera pulled back and let them loose.

But what makes The Artist all the more frustrating are the instances where Hazanavicius clearly demonstrates a skill above mere competence. A scene of Peppy, the top half of her body obscured by a setpiece, engaging in a dance-off with George is an early highlight of pure elation, a simple but playful exchange between two people already flirting each other before even making eye contact. Likewise, an all-too-brief moment of Peppy gently, lovingly acting out her budding love for George with his empty suit jacket, threading one of her arms through a sleeve to make this ghost embrace her, is so well-performed, delicate and touching that its almost immediate interruption is the film's most painful seconds. And when all is well again and George gets his Hollywood ending at the end, the dance sequence between the two leads is so effervescent that it nearly excuses the entire hour that preceded it.

"If that's the future, you can have it!" George says of the encroaching talkies shortly before his fall, but it's hard to see what's even so different about those initial talkies that threatened an entire way of filmmaking and gave birth to an all-new one, given how uniform the movies within the movie are to the film itself. There is something genuinely exciting about a silent film being a hit with festival and limited-release crowds, not to mention heading the Oscar pack. But it would be even more thrilling if The Artist actually felt like a true silent, classic or modern, instead of a typical Oscar movie with a light twist.

Poetry (Lee Chang-dong, 2011)

Poetry, like Lee Chang-dong's previous Secret Sunshine, is suffused with cool blue, from the daytime sky to clothes to interior decorations. Not a single shot lacks this calming color, yet like Secret Sunshine, Poetry is a film of intense, devastating emotions and tragedies. Its very first scene drifts over from the idyll of children playing to a girl's corpse floating facedown in the river, and the story only becomes more wrenching from there. However, Lee does not use this juxtaposition of sunny visuals with dark narratives as an ironic counterpoint; his stories do not undermine the beauty of the world around them so much as make that beauty all the richer. Even in a world so besotted with ills, there is still unfathomable, almost spiritual grace and pulchritude.

More so than Secret Sunshine, Poetry stresses that point at every turn. The protagonist, Yang Mija (Yun Jeong-hee), lives on government welfare and the money she gets caring for an elderly man who cannot be but a few years older than her. From the moment we meet her, Mija displays a troubling forgetfulness of words, and when she goes to a clinic to get her arm checked, the doctor on-hand sends her to Seoul to have her head examined. Her own problems are bad enough, but certain revelations threaten to send the film into an abyss of pain. But Poetry is a film about perseverance, of passing through the terrible sights right in front of us to experience that glorious world around us. Naturally, art is the means of seeing the full picture, yet Lee does not use expression to simplistically ignore the reality it transcends.

Mija, a kind woman with preserved beauty, decides to keep her mind working by enrolling in a poetry class, where she reacts to the instructor's metaphorical instruction with an almost childlike literalism, interpreting his talk of poetic inspiration as a goal to be achieved rather than a state of mind. But she cannot probe deeper into the reality of being because her meekness causes her to sweetly but unmistakably retreat from the world. Not that she doesn't have good reason to: already dealing with her early-stage Alzheimer's, Mija must also contend with her unruly grandson, Wook, who runs with a rough crowd of five equally rude and terse boys. One day, the parents of those boys invite her to lunch, where they reveal the sickening fact that this silly gang had something to do with the aforementioned girl's suicide. The adult men look for some excuse, any excuse, to shift even some of the blame off their sons, and they have already set in motion a plan to buy off the girl's family to protect everyone's honor. Coerced into cooperating, Mija can only numbly agree, able to contain her sorrow and anger only by ignoring it where possible.

With a graceful, patient approach to pacing, Lee lets the poor woman languish for a while without losing the overall thread of the story. Still hunting inspiration as if buried treasure, she occasionally spouts poetic verse without realizing it. "But nouns are most important!" she says with a heartbreakingly mirthless laugh when a doctor officially diagnoses her dementia and says she will first forget basic nouns, yet that same hindrance allows Mija to circumnavigate the nominal in the manner of a true poet. However, these flashes are short-lived, the engine turning over but never quite starting. Here Lee makes his clearest commentary: her gasps of poetic license tend to come when she starts to approach her situation, not confronting her predicament but at least gearing up to do so. The men send her to plead with the girl's mother to accept their hush money, but when Mija meets the woman out in a field, she ends up waxing on apricots and flowers, saying beautiful things but never getting around to the reason why the two are talking. That fleeting capacity for art fades when she follows its loftiness away from the necessity of facing up to her real issues. Art may work as escapism, but it cannot do so for long. Indeed, it is not until the end, when Mija makes a sudden decision to truly resolve her grandson's situation that she can craft a poem that at once captures reality and breaks through it to deeper levels of truth.

Lee's direction similarly seeks a balance between an honest appraisal of the world—achieved through primarily static takes that run long enough to capture nuanced, realistic gestures and actions—and a more visually eloquent portrait, created with his gorgeous, singular use of hyperreal color. A shot of raindrops hitting a notebook is so perversely ordered in its chaos that it almost resembles animation, each drop blotting the naked page as if ink splattering. One briefly recurring scene places the members of the poetry class one by one at the head of room, each describing "the most beautiful moment" of his or her life. Notably, all of the stories are rooted in deep pain or hardship, be it an agonizing pregnancy and delivery or the small victory of a man who lived in a basement his whole life finally saving up enough to afford his own apartment. The point of this exercise is clear: to find an abstract inspiration from a concrete memory, to link the overcoming of pain with the overcoming of prosaic senses.

The film's coda is certainly a transcendance of the previously realistic events, an ambiguous, ethereal montage that suggests death and resurrection, or maybe even an alteration of reality through the power of art, the poet literally taking the place of the subject. Maybe the most haunting yet lyrical narrative break since the achingly heartwarming what-if? montage that closes 25th Hour, Poetry's final minutes show the clear hand of a novelist, willing to challenge the audience by setting aside narrative consistency so that the style becomes the theme. In a film comprising nothing but poignance, this conclusion is the most poetic and affirming statement of all.

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (David Fincher, 2011)

Stieg Larsson's The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is to sexism what Kathryn Stockett's The Help is to racism. Both work less as attempts to grapple with serious topics than shallow wish-fulfillment fantasies by those unaffected by the subject matter. For Stockett, a white woman, it was the harshness of the Jim Crow era as catalogued by an author stand-in so emphatically not racist that black people not only trust her but risk their lives to secure her book deal. For Larsson, who helplessly witnessed a gang rape as a teenager, it is Sweden's startling patterns of sexual abuse as catalogued by an author stand-in so emphatically not sexist that the avenging fury of violated Woman herself not only trusts him but screws him. Furthermore, as it was written while Larsson was in hiding over his reporting, the book also addresses his longstanding issues with toothless investigative journalism and Sweden's lingering extreme-right element.

Yet David Fincher's adaptation is not really about any of those things. Tossing out Larsson's self-righteousness entirely, the film also reduces protagonist Mikael Blomkvist's almost comically active sex life—it's amusing that the novel's version of Blomkvist gets laid as much as James Bond, and he's played here by the man himself, Daniel Craig. But Fincher even hacks out the questionable feminist empowerment of Lisbeth Salander, presenting her violence with a coldness that robs her vengeance of its bloodlust. Instead, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo acts as a retroactive bridge between several of Fincher's films: it links the religion-tinged carnage of Se7en with the analytical anti-whodunit of Zodiac, as well as that film's painstakingly slow-going, interpersonal analog with The Social Network's ultra-fast, beyond-humanity digital. If Larsson's The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is about the late author's preoccupations, then Fincher's is about his own.

This is evident from the opening credits, which recall the playfully dark titles of Se7en. A music video montage set to Trent Reznor's and Karen O's industrial version of "Immigrant Song," the blackened, fragmentary images not merely offering visual cues to the characters and plot (Lisbeth's various tattoos come to life, and misogynistic violence comes through with an image of a fist shattering a woman's face like a vase) but themes as well. USB cables swirl out like tentacles that ensnare the male and female figures, smashing them together, penetrating them, and suffocating them. The story concerns a decades-old murder that long preceded the digital age, but the constricting credits montage suggests that, now, the problem is not that a murder will go unsolved but that the tools that make such crimes nearly impossible to escape may kill us all.

Despite a healthy running time of 160 minutes, Fincher and writer Steve Zaillian streamline a great deal of the book's diversions. What they don't reduce is the dialogue. Everyone talks, talks, talks in this movie from the start to the stop, with hardly any shots letting Fincher's elegant direction and Jeff Cronenworth's crystal clear, hyperreal cinematography speak for themselves. Yet there's something about the staging of this endless speech that avoids mere exposition, or avoids the manner in which exposition typically operates. As with Zodiac, which obsessed over the solution to its case over the motive, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo does not care for the reasons for any given situation. We never learn why Blomkvist cared so much about the story that got him convicted of libel at the start, why the perpetrator behind the 40-year-old mystery Blomkvist is hired to solve truly does what he does, nor even why Lisbeth is so maladjusted. Even when Fincher and Zaillian toss out some kind of motive, it is but half of the equation—a whispered hint of the killer's childhood sexual brainwashing or Lisbeth's muttered admission of the action that got her placed under the care of the state—that avoids full explanation not out of ambiguity but indifference. It is enough merely to know what happened, especially as the question of Harriet Vanger's disappearance is so strange that the what is more interesting, more convoluted, and more surreal than the banal horrors that prompted it.

Fincher's direction matches this emotionally removed attention to detail, and despite the darkness of the film (literal and figurative), the director hasn't been this playful in some time. Insert close-ups tell the audience what each character is seeing without resorting to POV shots, adding to the info dump that Ignatiy Vishnevetsky so brilliantly educed in his own essay on the film. Vishnevetsky likewise sees Fincher's bypass of the "whys" for the "hows," but he goes one step further in describing how Fincher "foregrounds everything," constantly adding new data to the digital image. Montages intricately document every step of a sequence, whether is Lisbeth cooking Ramen or Mikael assembling a makeshift, even cinematic flipbook of static photographs that the camera moves in close to document in almost Godardian fashion.

This approach, of course, is embodied in Lisbeth, whose photographic memory, mathematical ability and hacking skills link her to The Social Network's Mark Zuckerberg (and, to a lesser extent, the similarly obsessive and bright Robert Graysmith in Zodiac) as much as the heavily implied Aspberger's syndrome that afflicts both. Rooney Mara, who stole Fincher's previous film in its first five minutes and absconded with it when she left the frame, makes it obvious why the director fought to cast her in this role. Like Zuckerberg, Lisbeth has everything figured out but people, which she places under her area of understanding by hacking into their personal devices and creating files of every action and transaction of their lives. Unable to read social cues and communication, she instead makes readable documents of people. In this way, she simplifies them, though I doubt even she could reduce herself to a brief synopsis.

Mara plays Lisbeth with the perfect mixture of frail vulnerability and uncontrollable rage. Nursing some unspoken hang-up, Lisbeth always averts her eyes in conversation, cagey and perpetually uncomfortable. Yet when she does raise her head, Mara's doe eyes blaze with such ferocity that even those who win her trust have reason to be afraid. Unlike Noomi Rapace's muscular frame, which suggested the ability to fight back, Mara's lithe musculature emphasizes the physical weakness that places Lisbeth in constant jeopardy, highlighted in her dealings with a sadistic, rapacious guardian, by far the film's most stomach-twisting moments. Her muffled shrieks of fear and anguish as he rapes her made me shake so badly I dropped my notebook, but that same delicacy gives her shows of strength and merciless payback their surprise, and I was nearly as troubled by her getting even with the disgusting Bjurman. The development of a sexual relationship between Lisbeth and Mikael in the book smacks of the aforementioned wish-fulfillment, but here Mara plays Lisbeth's sudden attraction with pure aggression and dominance, an assertion of strength and control to outpace her uncertain, confused feelings. It's still an incurable flaw held over from the novel, but Mara removes the ridiculous motivations Larsson put into the character's head, making her romance all the more impulsive and yet another event to be catalogued.

Pale and detached, Mara looks like death, especially with her bleached eyebrows, which make her face more skull-like and recall the hikimayu style as used in Japanese cinema, where it creates unsettling visages of demons and ghosts. God knows what's going on behind those eyes of hers; if the film is like Mikael, not trying to pry into anyone's subconscious, Mara's Lisbeth is so innately defensive that she still keeps her guard up just in case Fincher gets the urge to try her.

Where the book used the pair's discrepancies of technical know-how as a means of highlighting the ethical gap between Mikael's old-school journalist and Lisbeth's unrepentant hacking, Fincher simply focuses on the technological gap itself. Mikael, no stranger to poring over old documents and conducting interviews, does the legwork, talking to reluctant, even hostile, sources and using intuition to piece together clues into impressive new breakthroughs. But Lisbeth can perform equally admirable work in the time it takes for Google to return however many thousand results for a search term. In minutes, she progresses a case farther than it's ever gotten in 40 years. Fincher characterizes them by their fluidity in laptop usage: Lisbeth can clear an entire screen of snooping in a few keystrokes, while Mikael has to bumble around for agonizing seconds just trying to maximize the screen. In the book, Mikael's final-act acceptance of Lisbeth's illegally obtained files serves only to victoriously resolve an unnecessary bookend plot. Fincher, on the other hand, depicts Mikael's lapse of ethics for what it really is: a sign of the old way dying out after the completion of one last analog case, and a total ceding of authority to the new digital way of being. The director adds in cheeky reminders of our technologically driven lives: early on, everyone in the frame reaches for his cell phone when one rings, all of them instinctively ready to answer a call as if grabbing a gun for self-defense. On the frozen-over island where Mikael investigates Harriet Vanger's cold case, he spends much of his time, like the director in The Wind Will Carry Us, simply searching for reception, and it is that lack of signal, as opposed to the now-unthinkable prospect of people simply turning off their phones as in the novel, that leads to a the film's climactic, suspenseful showdown with the villain.

The deflation of Mikael's triumph goes hand in hand with the removal of visceral pleasure from any of the film's resolutions. Whether it's Lisbeth dealing a much-deserved but grisly comeuppance to Bjurman or the solving of the film's driving anti-mystery and subsequent confrontation with a killer (himself laughably normal and unremarkable, even putting on Enya to hang and gut a victim), The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo never ruminates on its actions. Everything is just more info to be logged and uploaded, objectively recorded with detached but expertly crafted direction by Fincher. Earlier I mentioned Godard, and the use of store-bought surveillance cameras and Web searches recalled Film Socialisme in the presentation of a world without secrets, where everything is documented and privacy is but a distant memory. Well, there is still one secret in this film, which might explain why the discovery of a serial rapist/murder almost comes with a sense of nostalgic wistfulness and regret.

Film Socialisme — First Thoughts

I had planned to hold off on seeing Jean-Luc Godard's latest feature until I had caught up with the director's filmography. However, my Godard retrospective got incredibly side-tracked, and my impatience got the better of me, even as I knew I should have waited. Having stalled out in Godard's mid-'70s period, I am unfamiliar with his subsequent "return" to cinema and the more poetic and autobiographical tone his work from the '90s-on purportedly evokes. As such, I was unprepared for the sheer beauty of Film Socialisme, as well as some of its more obscure touches, some of which, I'm told, have roots in the filmmaker's epic Histoire(s) du Cinéma while others appear to be things one simply must know about the director and the philosophies and personal information he's parsed out over the decades in interviews.

Ergo, this will be merely a preliminary assortment of thoughts, largely aided by the invaluable annotations of David Phelps, whose relatively brief but dense article is a necessary acknowledgment of the film's rich tapestry of allusions, which are impossible to sort out even with the fully translated subtitles. I know some will instantly reject the notion of having to read notes on a film to understand it, but I have no issue asking for help. I could not read Ulysses without the help of three consistent sources and scattered support for certain sections, so why should I be so arrogant as to dismiss Film Socialisme for not being "gettable" enough for me? (People can be quick to assert superiority over anything that exists outside their reach.) Phelps' annotations were a fantastic launchpad to figuring out some of the film's stranger moments, yet even without the benefit of Spark Notes—hell, even without the benefit of understood language—Godard's most recent feature is such a work of art that it mesmerized me from the start.

Split into three sections, Film Socialisme begins and ends with a tour of Mediterranean hotspots aboard a tacky cruise liner (is there any other kind?). Shot with breathtaking HD digital, the first section vividly captures the yellow, blue and occasionally red hues of the ship's deck, recalling the pop art infusions of Godard's mid-'60s color films. The people who roam the decks and cabins come from all over Europe, resulting in a dizzying collage of languages with nary but a broken, pidgin subtitling called "Navajo English" to help the audience. But then, the full translation doesn't help much more, as Godard clearly uses his non-actors as mouthpieces to voice his political and aesthetic concerns; besides, the use of other languages allows the filmmaker to engage in multilingual puns on the level of Joyce (at all times, this film offers reminders that Godard is to cinema what Joyce is to literature). Godard knows translation can never capture the textures and nuances of the original language, and the filmmaker's unsympathetic treatment of those confused enough without the Navajo impediment should recall Vladimir's warning to the audience in Pravda: "If you don't know Czech, you better learn it fast."

But if the first section casts the cruise ship as a microcosm of Europe, it also presents the setting as a parody of the continent's present and past: characters speak of great historical failings while Godard films the asinine activities the tourists use to amuse themselves. He especially likes to film scenes in the dance hall with something approximating a cell phone camera, resulting in heavily pixellated image that sounds like hell opening up as dance music blasts into a low-grade microphone. It looks, and sounds, like every quick bootleg on YouTube, and Godard holds these unbearably cacophonous shots so long that I began not only to process the commentary of bourgeois Europeans drowning out reality with white noise but simply to wonder if contemporary dance music is made intentionally abrasive to be accurately reflected by phone recordings.

The characters who do focus on serious matters, at least beyond merely namechecking past atrocities, search for the truth of the Moscow Gold, which Godard has re-imagined into a symbol of Europe's history from colonialism to the present. The gold is the closest thing the film has to a narrative motivation, with Palestinians, Russians, Mossad agents and others trying to uncover what happened to the Spanish reserves. The many ways in which that wealth has passed hands is manifested in the character of Goldberg, who has many names and alliances. Goldberg's Jewish name and clear association with money raises questions of anti-Semitism, but Godard's backstory for the man casts him first as a Nazi and later as a supporter of Algeria's FLN movement. Besides, I don't think I caught a single reference to Judaism or even Israel that wasn't matched with another visual or spoken comment on Palestine. One title card lays Hebrew over Arabic, and when Godard says Jews invented Hollywood, his preceding statement of Hollywood being the "Mecca of cinema" turns a casual piece of anti-Semitism into a juxtaposition he finds ironic. Likewise, given Godard's cinephilia, albeit a lapsed one, to say that the legendary producers and studio heads who built the town were Jewish does not inherently strike me as an insult. Goldberg himself certainly doesn't seem to be a bad man in any way, and his potential ethnic identity seems to speak more to the links of venality and betrayal that connect all peoples.

So, the opening third uses this constant overlap of nationalities, loyalties, languages, and past and present to stress, above all, the separations between the peoples of Europe. The second section, titled "Quo Vadis Europa," moves the "action" to a gas station in rural France, populated only by the Martin family and a handful of people who unsuccessfully attempt to interact with them. Yet the isolation proves ironic, the family, and particularly its children, resembling the tiny seed that may one day germinate into a mighty plant. Well, maybe not the whole family. One of the parents (or maybe both, or maybe neither) seems to be running for office, but it is the children who seem most poised for change. Then again, maybe they are the ones running for election.

The adolescent son, Lucien, is cantankerous and unformed: he violently conducts an imaginary orchestra while wearing an old CCCP T-shirt, mixing a vague understanding of art with a disastrous example of misapplied socialism but nevertheless a starting point away from the capitalism Godard hates. The teenage daughter, Florine, is more developed, and it is through her that Godard lays out a radical, confrontational, yet strangely poignant and hopeful view of the future. Flo haughtily commands chastises potentially paying customers who use the verb être ("to be"), admonishing them to use avoir ("to have") instead, believing the more active verb to be "better for France." She challenges her parents' views and asserts the need for more youth involvement. Asked what it is she wants, she responds with characteristically Godardian fragments that are nevertheless evocative and powerful: "To be 20 years old. To have reason. To maintain hope. To have rights where governments only have wrongs." This message is even more resonant upon reading Phelps' notes, which explain that the French New Wave was kicked off by a similar pronouncement by Charles Péguy in 1957.

Needless to say, this section is borderline infuriating with the Navajo titles, and I had to switch over full-time to a proper translation. Nevertheless, the section remains visually transgressive, with that saturated color more consistently calm than the use of multiple image qualities. Yet Godard still toys with the look, in one shot altering the color balance to such a radical degree that a banal shot of Lucien sitting on some stairs drawing becomes a fauvist painting of exploded yellows, turquoises and neon greens.

That shot reveals Lucien to be drawing on a Renoir painting, suggesting a liberation and redistribution of art itself that will be more forcibly referenced in the penultimate shot of the film, where an FBI anti-piracy warning fades to reveal a quote: "When the law is unjust, justice bypasses the law." The documentation of everything by people in this film, whether touristy snapshots or the TV crew frantically trying to interview the Martins, points to a world where everything is recorded (surveillance cameras and Google appear in the first section to also stress this), and Godard believes that the old forms of recording should be made equally accessible. This very film seems to have been uploaded to torrents almost immediately, if not with the director's consent then at least without his open disapproval. Godard actually donated €1,000 to the case of an alleged music thief recently, suggesting his support for the "liberation" of copyright.

By titling the work Film Socialisme, Godard seems to be mourning the passing of both, the former replaced by digital video of varying quality, the latter never having truly blossomed to deal with a world that still revolves around money. The apocalyptic howl of wind and waves on the cheap recording mics and the concluding montage of Europe's failings is expressly pessimistic, although, amusingly, the greatest tragedy may be the comparison of the Odessa steps sequence of Potemkin with a group of children standing on those same steps in the present saying they've never even heard of that film. The ignorance of artistic history thus joins with that of sociopolitical change. But to dismiss the film as some kind of old man's rant—which so many have done even as they obliviously cite the film's intoxicating visual beauty—is to misunderstand or outright ignore the clear display of fairness and even hope. The oblique approach to the movie, located somewhere in the nebula between essay and narrative film, may seem removed, even elegiac, but socialism, through the medium of film, can still right the wrongs, if both are applied correctly.

In separating out the stereo tracks into an aural dialectic, Godard returns to some of the more challenging aspects of the DVG, but his juxtapositions here make analytical debates out of rhetorical flourishes, and his willingness to leave in the mistakes (the jump cuts of yore now appear to be the buffering of today) and to even hand off his camera to others opens up untold possibilities I have only begun to examine. Godard's hyperintellectual, referential modernism is still on display, but the old-fashioned octogenarian nevertheless shows a curiosity for new technologies and means of communication. Hell, he even demonstrates his understanding of the Internet by making his very own cat video, one of many moments in the film so disarmingly funny that even the densest segments don't feel so self-serious. The endless punning in particular shall take me eons to sort through.

I will need to return again and again to Film Socialisme to truly unpack it, and I dare not write about it again until I've filled the gaps of knowledge in his filmography. But I was as excited and enthralled by Film Socialisme as any other masterpiece I saw this year, and its ability to make dialectic of the emotional states of weary surrender and renewed, more-powerful-than-ever optimism is one of the most intriguing, complex, potentially rewarding arguments Godard has ever mounted for art, politics, and the union of both.