Looper (Rian Johnson, 2012)

Rian Johnson's Looper takes great pains to head off any in-depth discussion of the paradoxes and metaphysical nightmares associated with time travel narratives. This is true even when the protagonist, the hired killer Joe (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) has a conversation with his 30-years-older self (Bruce Willis). "We'll be here all day, making diagrams with straws," Old Joe says to Young Joe by way of warning. After a while, Looper largely lets its genre trappings fall to the wayside, leaving behind its references to over-mined sci-fi classics and newer hits. "The movies you're copying are copying other movies," Young Joe's boss, Abe (Jeff Daniels), says of the young man's wardrobe, but it could also be seen as a chiding the director takes to heart for his film.

Take time travel out of the scenario, though, and even the denser, more classically sci-fi first act of the film could still run under the same circular title. Young Joe's life moves in endless repetitions. As a hired gun employed by future mobsters looking to dispose of their enemies in the past (where bodies are harder to track, especially if they technically do not exist), Joe's life follows a set pattern. Be at the right place on-time, blast the target when it suddenly appears, collect his money and go party. Joe saves most of his money for the early retirement people in his line of work receive, but as Johnson's montage of Joe's routine speeds up under the influence of the cleaner's drug use and dispassion, it becomes evident that retirement may prove more debilitating for him than his profession. Not that he will get to find out, however, when his final target, himself, manages to overpower his younger self and threatens to create a whole new timeline. Imagine how weird this would be if the director didn't try so hard to avoid time talk.

Johnson has built a name for himself as a visually dynamic shooter, and his stylistic flourishes are certainly welcome among the more impersonal, incomprehensible mega-blockbusters. In an early scene, he amps up the sensory experience with a sudden camera stutter and explosion of volume when Joe drops drugs into his eye and blinks. The camera is then set a-reeling, the spartan visual setup accompanying the pulpy, mercifully terse expositional introduction giving way to swooning, arcing movements around the decayed urban shell of 2042 Omaha. The best and most disturbing play on the time-travel angle involves the fate of Joe's friend and colleague, Seth (Paul Dano), who helps set everything in motion by failing to kill his own future self and revealing to Joe how horrifying the punishment for this failure is. He does not even see the worst of it, which the audience gets to view via the future self, whose escape attempt is thwarted when his extremities start slowly, terrifyingly disappearing as his past self is brutally changed. Editing maintains a consistent sense of clarity and flow, never using the time-travel story as an excuse to confound. This is true even of the shots that blend the alternate timelines of the two Joes and the memories the older one has and wishes to protect as his younger self's path is drastically altered by his refusal to die according to plan.

The one memory Old Joe treasures most also acts as his motive for carrying out a mission to alter the future by dealing with a monster in its infancy. Without going too far into this sudden story development, suffice to say it readily recalls The Terminator, down to a shot of a gun-toting Willis kicking in a residential door and stalking inside that comes right out of James Cameron's film. This change of pace introduces a deep moral element into the film to fill the gaps where, in other films, more time-travel play might go. Teased as a warped action film, Looper instead devotes its time to the morality of killing an innocent before it can grow into a mass-murderer, and whether such actions work or merely exacerbate the problem.

Where the film stumbles is in its middle passage, after Old Joe's mission has been made clear but before he realizes which of his small list of targets is the person he wants to terminate. Trading the rotted city for open fields, Looper abruptly, and by the admission of its maker, looks to Witness as a key inspiration. But where Peter Weir's film maintained the overall level of tension by altering its source from corrupted cops hunting one of their own to the friction between the honest, modern cop and the Amish community in which he hides. Looper only sporadically transfers over its own suspense, but it also places that tension into a vessel that clangs against the time-travel story with a whole other issue that throws off the film's momentum. This shifted focus on mutation, though somewhat grounded in brief sights of low-powered telekinesis being used by arrogant showboats in the city, is never meshed credibly with the rest of the story and comes off as tacked-on rather than fluid.

Nevertheless, Johnson manages to spin even this awkward addition into a positive, using it to probe questions of the impermanence of the future and the question of whether love can be as powerful a method of saving lives as a disposal of evil. Emily Blunt makes a powerful impression as the rural mother who takes in Young Joe and could expose him to that which Old Joe wishes to eradicate. Her performance is all the more so affecting because she never makes clear whether her care is sufficient to alter the future. But then, Looper does not suggest that only one person's love can hold back the darkness, nor does evil exist in a vacuum. If the film's middle act lags, it almost makes up for it with the ending, in which an evil is attacked, but perhaps not the one you would think. The final act is motivated by love, but then so is much of the horrific content of the film, from Old Joe's vendetta to the emotional instability of the figure who could grow up to be a tyrant. Because of this, Looper does not leave the audience with a tidy, thrilling high but a morally unsure, emotionally devastating conclusion. If nothing else, it shows a willingness to try to be something other than "awesome," which has weighed down so many summer films in recent years.

Moonrise Kingdom (Wes Anderson, 2012)

Incorporating many elements of Wes Anderson's previous films, Moonrise Kingdom might be seen, even approvingly, as the director going through the motions. It has the childhood focus of Rushmore, the dollhouse intricacy of The Royal Tenenbaums, the paradoxical criminal innocence of Bottle Rocket, the outdoor adventurousness of The Darjeeling Limited, even the documentarian angle of The Life Aquatic. To be sure, Anderson's latest instantly betrays its maker, the camera tracking and panning through an ornate, rigidly compartmentalized island home and its aloof, eerily formal child inhabitants. Set on the fictional New England island of New Penzance, this house and its surrounding locale suggest one of the director's most arch removes from the world around him, a self-contained universe of stunted genius and vague but overwhelming regret.

But these same shots also display a rough quality not even evident in the director's first film. Shot on 16mm, Moonrise Kingdom's thick grain serves two main purposes. First, it aesthetically matches the film's retro 1965 setting, casting Anderson's usual world of bright, sunny yellows in dimmer, fossilizing amber and making the buildings, which look like a model village from a contemporary train set built 1:1 scale, seem lived in and worn. Second, it adds a primal, visceral edge wholly foreign to Anderson's canon, a reflection of the emotional immediacy he attains with the movie's tale of young love in open opposition to the calcified bitterness that defines so many of Anderson's frustrated, self-imprisoning characters.

The aforementioned house belongs to the Bishop family, headed by Walt (Bill Murray) and Laura (Frances McDormand), two lawyers who tend to speak to each other as if they just approached the bench. One of their children is Suzy (Kara Hayward), a 12-year-old who spends her days standing atop the lighthouse tower rising from the home scanning the area with her binoculars. Like most of Anderson's characters, she is rigid and impassive, but a clear restlessness distinguishes her from her sedentary family. Meanwhile, on the other end of the island, the director introduces a Khaki Scout camp with similar formalism and remove. His camera glides over a makeshift fort and its attendant militaristic hierarchy as Scoutmaster Randy Ward (Ed Norton) walks through morning inspections and sits down for breakfast. Resembling a grown-up Max Fischer, Ward has tamed nature into a reflection of the bourgeois comfort seen back at the Bishop house. This is not a place where boys are molded into men through discipline and the elements but merely a vacation. It may be for that reason as much as burning first love that one child, Sam Shakusky (Jared Gilman), leaves a letter of resignation and cuts a hole in his tent he papers over as if in a prison escape film.

Sam and Suzy meet up in a field and head out for a new life together. Sam, an orphan who's bounced around foster homes, exists outside Anderson's cloistered societies and is therefore the most liberated character in Wes Anderson's work. Just look at what he brings for their trip compared to Suzy. He packs for utility, packing the material they'll need to get by outdoors; naïve as his plan is, at least he brought the things necessary to make his dream a reality. The only extraneous item he includes are some wildflowers he picked as a bouquet for his belle. Suzy, on the other hand, packs only items of leisure: a suitcase filled with books, a record player she nicked from her brother, and even her cat, for whom she also brought a box filled with tins of food. As with the brothers of The Darjeeling Limited, Suzy wants to leave without sacrificing anything, but Sam, who never belonged to the exaggerated social cage of Anderson's world, has no trouble breaking from it. At one point, Suzy talks of how she hates her family and wishes she was an orphan because all her favorite literary characters are orphans and, to her, more special. With considerable composure, Sam replies, "I love you, but you don't know what you're talking about."

In a canon riddled with comedies of manners, Moonrise Kingdom may be the director's most mannered precisely because order breaks down so thoroughly. This is true even of the grown-ups: the adult Bishops, Randy, and local police captain Sharp (Bruce Willis, doing some fine character work for the first time in ages) are all hilarious in their buttoned-down realms. But even they are flabbergasted when juxtaposed against other adult forces who make them question their behavior, such as the flippantly Dickensian foster parents who "regret" to inform the grown-ups at the other end of the phone line that they cannot invite Sam back, or the equally casual way Social Services (Tilda Swinton) recommends shock therapy for the child. Back out in the wilderness, Sam and Suzy get into confrontations with the other scouts that resemble Badlands crossed with Lord of the Flies, darkly funny violence both preserving and disrupting the way of things.

The introduction of something approaching chaos also aids the drama.There's a level of tension here absent in the director's other work, a sense of danger and risk that makes Sam and Suzy's story not merely engaging but gripping. Even the soundtrack contributes to this sense of young restlessness, Alexandre Desplat's primitive but driving score of lilting but agitated plucked strings and chiming flutes weaving around classical pieces common to children's music education, such as Schubert, Benjamin Britten and Les Carnivaux des Animaux. Hank Williams fills out Anderson's pop culture quota, adding a tinge of blunt, remorseful poetry that speaks both to the yearning of the kids and the broken dreams of the adults. Best and most revealing of all, though, is a scene in which the young lovers listen to Françoise Hardy's "Le Temps de l'Amour," a pre-Mod tune driven by pared down guitar and Hardy's ethereal, beckoning monotone. These two are so young they won't even be of age for the coming youth revolution, but their erratic, uninhibited dancing only makes them more ahead of their time.

Anderson's detractors accuse him of embracing the naïve, stunted, "twee" sensibilities of his characters, and they'll have more fodder than usual with Moonrise Kingdom. But this wondrous childhood perspective is alien even to Rushmore; that movie's protagonist didn't realize he was clamoring to remain in the responsibility-free zone of youth because he fancied himself wise and mature, while the kids here openly prioritize their immediate, passionate feelings over the cold dissatisfaction of their elders. Yet no Anderson film puts forward such clear insights into rich humanity. When a dog dies in the absurdist crossfire of Sam and Suzy's confrontation with the rest of Sam's scout troop, Suzy asks, "Was he a good dog?" "Who's to say?" replies Sam with almost philosophical reverence, "But he didn't deserve to die." Elsewhere, a scene between Murray and McDonald lying in those separated twin beds that represent completed marital duty is devastating in its gentle evocation of love as something that can be slowly supplanted by social responsibility.

The imagery of Noah's flood factors heavily into the film, from a lavish church production in which seemingly every child in America has been recruited to represent every animal on the ark to a storm that weighs over the film's second half. The story of the flood is one of horrific destruction, but also rebirth and a fresh start, and Moonrise Kingdom concludes with a well-considered but optimistic view of good coming from bad, and of a cycle restarting with enough variations to make possible a wildly different, more positive outcome. Anderson's films end with his characters finally seeing themselves as they are and possibly bettering themselves, no mean feat considering the solipsistic narcissism of their worldviews. Moonrise Kingdom is his first film to suggest a better tomorrow for everyone.

Brian De Palma: The Bonfire of the Vanities

Brian De Palma may be perennially mistreated by a Hollywood that doesn't fully understand where he's coming from, yet I don't know of many directors who have been given so many chances to lose his backers' money. By this stage in his own career, John Carpenter had been all but finished by an industry tiring of his diminishing returns, but De Palma was on just on the cusp of being a validated mainstream filmmaker despite his box office receipts: he'd been given a glamorous gangster picture and a moralizing war film, both of which he infused with his own film-school geekdom even as he demonstrated an ability to play by Hollywood's rules. Having established himself as the '70s film-school leftover best-suited to the decade he'd already mocked with Scarface and Body Double, he finally had his chance to climb to the top.

The Bonfire of the Vanities is the apex of the director's late-'80s rise to prominence within the industry, and damn near the nadir of his career. To be clear, it is not as awful as legend would have you believe, or at least, it isn't to me as I've yet to read Tom Wolfe's source novel. I have actually come across some people who not only defend this film but say they prefer it to the book. If that is true, Wolfe's novel must be a real piece of shit. For even without the knowledge of the book's full contents, De Palma's fiasco feels so incomplete and haphazard it's a wonder the director only realized the problems in retrospect.

If Wolfe's roman à clef was meant to be a detailed account of '80s New York in all its schismatic glory, highlighting the split between the budding Wall Street aristocracy and the terror of crack-ridden streets below the high-rise apartments, De Palma's film paints broad strokes of weak satire. No, that's not right; the film only softens one side of the dichotomy between wealthy, oblivious whites and impoverished minorities. Which side gets it easier in the eyes of majority-baiting Hollywood? Oh, take a wild guess.

Tom Hanks, not yet moved beyond his lighthearted comic image, plays Sherman McCoy, a Wall Street investor who makes millions by the minute and enjoys living the life of luxury. Hanks, only a few years out from his dramatic breakthroughs in Philadelphia and Forrest Gump, occasionally flashes an edge that he could have brought to the fore had the screenplay wanted him to truly delve into the seedier aspects of a Wall Street player. Instead, the film uses Hanks' comic charm, portraying him as out-of-touch but not particularly loathsome in any capacity, despite his general celebration of his garish lifestyle and infidelity with a Southern gold digger named Maria (Melanie Griffith). Even when the two accidentally drive into a crime-ridden area of South Bronx and run over one of two black men who accost them, the film does its best to absolve Sherman while placing any blame for the racist and classist attitudes brought up in the hit-and-run squarely on the shoulders of Maria, caricatured out of human recognition into a whining harpy.

This simplified satire might have worked had the same humanizing effect been given to the other half of the film's overview of New York. Instead, poor Sherman, in the wrong place at the wrong time, runs into the undiluted fury of the poor and minority bloc of the city, their grandiose anger exposing hypocrisies and self-defeating extremism while the privileged enjoy a charmed interpretation of white-collar oblivion. The caricature of Al Sharpton, Reverend Bacon, borders on the racist, with De Palma's low-angle shots of bulging eyes and flaring nostrils nearly framing actor John Hancock in minstrel poses.

Bacon rails against the notion of the unidentified driver of a Mercedes getting away with the cops' indifference, rightly noting that they wouldn't just drop the case if some black driver had run over a middle-class white family. But like Sharpton or Jesse Jackson, Bacon is as much a self-promoter as he is a civic crusader, and he clearly plays up for the cameras to make himself the focal point of the manipulated outrage. But he's successful, and soon he's got Weiss (F. Murray Abraham), the D.A. looking to for a way to win the minority vote after prosecuting minorities overwhelmingly, quaking in his suit. Abraham removed his name from the billing over a contract dispute, but part of me wonders if he did so after reflecting on his performance. If Hancock must make out the leaders of the black community to be nothing more than charlatans looking to crucify a white devil to maintain their stats, Abraham plays Weiss as a flagrant Jewish stereotype, greedily hunting power and also looking for a way to get one up over on the WASPs. When Bacon accuses him of letting the wealthy white go unpunished, Weiss frets over being seen as a "hymie racist pig," then muses aloud how the Italians, Irish and WASPs will love to see him squirm.

Obviously, this is satire, but it's paper-thin, and De Palma inserts nothing to offset the racist view of the city's minorities being wholly self-serving. Instead of flecking human beings with ironies and contradictions, he presents two-dimensional caricatures with comedy that isn't funny enough to absolve the troubling simplicity of their ethnic identities. Pointing out the class blindness that affects the underclass is a perfectly valid criticism, but here the blacks and Latinos come off as nothing more than a mob looking for a white scapegoat. And even when De Palma finally gets down to going after the elites—presenting them as entertained by Sherman's connection to such a pedestrian crime like Roman nobles approvingly watching enslaved gladiators torn to ribbons—he still lets Sherman almost completely off the hook. At the ridiculous trial that closes the film (presided over a black judge instead of the book's Jewish one so as to make Sherman's acquittal seem victorious rather than proof of the system stacked against non-whites), poor, frail Sherman is framed against a screaming, hissing, even singing (hymns, natch) crowd of the poor and pigmentally varied. Whether the De Palma meant it or not, and the swelling, unironic strings that accompany the verdict suggest at least someone did, the audience is meant to root for McCoy to get off Scot-free.

This is all bad enough, but various other additions weigh down the film in subtler ways. The film nearly approaches cleverness when Sherman attends a performance of Don Giovanni and clearly sees himself in the character, a point De Palma then drives him with a sledgehammer, ruining the one good part of the film. Bruce Willis, foisted upon De Palma and a noted pain on-set, plays the alcoholic reporter Peter Fallow, who desperately launches the hit-and-run case to give himself a popular story to justify the paychecks he drinks every day. Whatever role Fallow played in Wolfe's novel, he has no reason to exist here, and De Palma must resort to a framing device that awkwardly inserts him into the movie so Willis can deliver stiff voiceovers in that noncommittal drone of his.

The Bonfire of the Vanities is so clumsy that even the moments of pure De Palma fail to add some life into the film. A swirling overhead shot of Sherman and a coworker is an ingenious touch that makes great use of the striking floor design, but it only goes to show how little time the director spends in Sherman's corporate world. A split-screen between Bacon's self-aggrandizing harangues and a changing right image first showing an amused Fallow looking on then a nervous Weiss watching on TV feels like someone trying to ape De Palma with no regard for composition or juxtaposition. Even the elaborate, wildly entertaining tracking shot that opens the film, following Fallow as he arrives for a speaking engagement through the underground of a complex past admirers and pack reporters, fails to maintain its power when placed in context with the rest of the movie. When the film soon moves completely away from Fallow for an hour, the shot, maybe even Fallow's entire presence in the film, seems a self-serving addition.

After filming completed and The Bonfire of the Vanities went out to a critical and commercial savaging, De Palma finally admitted his error, even letting Julie Salamon come in and write a tell-all on the film's troubled production. I want to read that book as much as Wolfe's source novel: even a basic summary suggests studio tampering, uncooperative stars and wasteful expenditures. But hell, all of that is visible on the screen. It is stunning that a filmmaker as radical (aesthetically and politically) could make a film so firmly reactionary in its ultimate absolution of the luxury class—compare the subverted race roles of the "Be Black, Baby" segment of Hi, Mom! to the clearly demarcated racial cartoons drawn here. Almost as unforgivable, it's one of the director's dullest films. Even the "punchline"-lacking Untouchables (to take a page from Pauline Kael) felt more alive than this.

The only good thing I can say about The Bonfire of the Vanities is that it sports simply one of the greatest shots to ever appear in a De Palma film, a perfectly, almost freakishly timed shot of a Concorde jet landing at sunset as the landing strip aligns perfectly with the descending orb. It is a stunning, arduously planned moment, and it's the best indication of how much better the film might have been had De Palma and his crew been given a better cast and screenplay. From what I can tell, a more accurate representation of Wolfe's novel might have been right up De Palma's alley; he would have delighted in tearing everything apart. Instead, he made by far his most reactionary film, a lighthearted spoof of the upper class and a vicious portrayal of the poor and disenfranchised. Had De Palma not made his mea culpa later, I might have thought he did this on purpose; his other big Hollywood spectacle, The Untouchables, is also conservative. But even the wide berth I give to De Palma's irony has its limits, and if The Bonfire of the Vanities was meant to be as bad as it is, well, mission accomplished.