Argo (Ben Affleck, 2012)

As a claustrophobic, I got tremendous discomfort from Argo's crushed shots against throngs of hostile crowds packed so tightly that navigation looks impossible even for those not under the hostile suspicions of an entire nation. Spatial relationships mean nothing in these moments, as there is no real path to escape for the Americans stranded in Iran after the fall of the shah and the installation of Ayatollah Khomeini. After an animated prologue, Argo begins with a mob beating at the gates of the US embassy in Tehran until they storm the compound, and the fear of reprisal against Americans for their country's role in propping up the former regime pervades the film.

Those animated credits, however, hint at the other major element of Argo's construction. When the Iranians take the embassy's workers hostage, six Americans escape and hide out in the home of the Canadian ambassador, Ken Taylor (Victor Garber). Everyone knows they cannot stay there forever, but if Iranians find these Americans on the street, they will be executed as spies as fast as a kangaroo court will allow. The United States government cannot risk open involvement without provoking a war, so CIA exfiltration expert Tony Mendez (Ben Affleck) concocts an extraction plan so absurd that, as they say, it just might work. Mendez will travel to Iran as a Canadian filmmaker and pull the staffers out under the ruse of being his crew on a location shoot. As Lester Spiegel, the fading film legend who helps prop up this farce says, he went on suicide missions in the Army less dangerous than this idea.

That this producer is played by Alan Arkin, who played Yossarian (he of the endless suicide missions) in the film version of Catch-22, gives some indication of Argo's treatment of its Hollywood connection. That is one of the subtler jokes; elsewhere, goofs at Tinseltown's expense pepper the screenplay. When Mendez heads to Los Angeles to set up a fake production company to make the cover seem legit, he meets with Oscar-winning makeup artist John Chambers (John Goodman), who responds to the agent's request to come to Hollywood and behave like a big shot without actually doing anything with, "You'll fit right in." The script Mendez, Spiegel and Chambers settle on is itself such a laughable Star Wars ripoff that this harbinger of New Hollywood's creative death says as much about Argo's 1980 setting as the hostage crisis. Initially amusing, these in-jokes start to drag after a while, especially in a movie that takes great pains to make its star-studded cast appear that much more eye-popping. Every name actor in this movie is introduced with a half-second pause as if the movie were a classic sitcom and space were being set aside for studio applause to greet each star's entrance.

When Affleck returns to Iran and gets down to the mission, though, Argo continues Affleck's reinvention from a talented but overexposed and frequently miscast actor into a sturdy, dependable director capable of wringing great suspense from his genre fare. He uses more handheld camerawork and confusing editing in this movie than in the more formal (or at least just basic) Gone Baby Gone and The Town, but in this case it works. Affleck ably communicates the sudden fear of the staffers, most of whom do not speak the language of the country they are in. None of them has time to consider the irony of electing to build diplomatic relations with a country so beyond their ken that they cannot even speak to its inhabitants, but an inkling of "Should've learned Farsi when I had the chance" crosses the face of several when Mendez makes them walk through a bazar "scouting" as part of their story. The climax, which brings all the weaknesses in Mendez's already thin cover out into the open, is one of the best sequences of the year, a tightly assembled gem made all the more tense by Affleck slyly letting the audience just start to breathe a sigh of relief as the characters make it past one airport checkpoint before pushing the Americans into yet another examination. Much as Argo lets the slack out of its flow in Los Angeles, this sequence ties the whole film together with crowd-pleasing aplomb.

A crowd-pleaser is, at heart, all Argo really is, though it occasionally hints at something more. In one brief span, Argo could even be said to critique a mass-audience reaction, juxtaposing his many images of Muslim rage (as Newsweek calls it) with smaller-scale but no-less-mindless reprisals in America. A montage of what appears to be actual news footage from the time shows Americans holding patriotic displays, burning the Iranian flag as we earlier saw an Iranian do to Old Glory, even beating an Iranian-American who helplessly professes his non-affiliation with his ancestor's homeland before punches and kicks rain down on him. It's a well-delivered visual lesson, though perhaps not enough to offset how much Affleck mines the walls of screaming Iranians for visceral domestic terror. But I cannot portray the ability to hook a crowd—especially for a film that does not come with a built-in fanbase—as a lesser skill. Argo has been inaccurately described as a throwback to 1970s thrillers, but it is an understandable mistake given how alien such an ability feels to contemporary mainstream filmmaking.

Capsule Reviews: While the City Sleeps, Cracking Up, The Kid, Rock of Ages

While the City Sleeps (Fritz Lang, 1956)

Fritz Lang's underseen noir blends the yellowest of journalism with King Lear in a prescient, savage view of media feeding a public frenzy. A news empire is offered to three successors, with the new kingdom to be ruled by the one who can beat the cops to solving the identity of a serial killer infamous only from the organization's own salacious coverage. Lang's framing is more stripped down than some other efforts but no less immaculate: the newsroom of transparent but isolating glass and roaring presses speak to the capacity of journalism to reveal and obscure, and how a giant conglomerate can drown out the truth instead of exposing it. As much as the actual string of murders, the tension operates on simple office politics, in which the promise of a raise and a title change to move up the modern social ladder can bring out the basest, most primitive behavior. The characterization of the sexually confused killer is oh-so-standard, but Lang's ability to make high style out of even the most basic movements and mise-en-scène combines with the otherwise fantastic story for a great anti-journo noir. Grade: A-

Cracking Up (Jerry Lewis, 1983)

When Lewis' name credit flashes on the screen over one of the star's pratfalls with the added text, "Who else?" that may be because no one else would dream of making a slapstick movie in 1983. Hell, only Lewis would have been so bold as to make slapstick back in the '50s and '60s. That defiance informs all of Cracked Up, which nominally dives into a suicidal loser's headspace to give Lewis the chance to appear in various guises without any semblance of plot. Instead, it's just wall-to-wall gags, carefully composed yet anarchic in Tati fashion. Among the highlights: Zane Buzby's appearance as a waitress nasally droning out every item on the menu and its preparatory options until her incessant questions about what kind of dressing or how the steak should be cooked become their own circle of hell. Also great is a vignette on the world's cheapest airline that tops Airplane! for sheer invention, turning the economy class level into a Roman galley and "first class" into what appears to be a half-cleaned Mexican village set, complete with drunks, chickens and filthy hay. There's also the opening credits, a series of pratfalls on Teflon-coated floors and furniture that attempts a one-man version of the club-destroying climax of Playtime; even the titles are carefree, attributing the singing of the all-instrumental title track to Marcel Marceau and dropping the audio track completely when the composer is credited, as if he stopped to take an offscreen bow. Not every joke lands, but I'm not sure they're supposed to: the absurdly awful King Kong hand that reaches in to grab Lewis' psychiatrist (Herb Edelman) might as well be a giant middle finger for how much it dares the audience to hate it. Cracking Up joins a line of comic writer-director-star masterpieces that mourn modernity's effect on slapstick. But if Chaplin commiserated with Keaton in one final showstopper in Limelight and Tati actually got out ahead of modern times and preempted May '68 by giving Hulot and the rest of Playtime away in an act of comic socialism, Lewis is a product of the Reagan era he despises. It's as narcissistic as they come, but so freewheeling and shameless that it is no less an achievement as the other two works. Grade: A

The Kid (Charles Chaplin, 1921)

Chaplin's first feature looks a bit rough compared to the total control the genius would exert over his later works, yet that same rawness makes its emotional impact one of Chaplin's most visceral thrills. Aided by the kid vaudevillian Jackie Coogan, Chaplin's Tramp establishes world dominance with a blend of Dickensian squalor and wry comedy that showcases Chaplin's deftness with underplayed comedy, bombastic sentimentalist that he may be. The trade of warning and supplicant glances between the cop and Tramp alone are a masterclass in body acting. The climactic race across the rooftops after the abducted kid is, compared to more controlled mise-en-scène of later setpieces, not that technically impressive, but its immediacy and tension makes it one of the director's finest moments. Grade: B+

Rock of Ages (Adam Shankman, 2012)

An experiment designed to test the limits of camp, Rock of Ages scrubs the coke and dried blood off the nose of the '80s and rolls sleeves over its track marks to render a host of hair metal and MOR classics with Glee-esque covers. It's got caricatures galore, from the small-town girl lookin' to find fame in the city (Julianne Hough) to the even-more-ambitious meathead hiding a knack for genius songwriting (Diego Boneta). There's also conniving managers (Paul Giamatti), a political couple looking for a social scapegoat in rock (Bryan Cranston and Catherine Zeta-Jones), and an aged ex-hippie (Alec Baldwin) who, like Spinal Tap, has drifted through rock trends for decades and has no idea that this music, too shall pass. But the only person who makes any kind of impression is Tom Cruise, who, when one also thinks of his minor role in Tropic Thunder, seems to be setting some space aside to just absolutely go for whatever role he gets. His Stacee Jaxx is a watered-down Axl Rose, but Cruise plays his all-consuming egomania and rock-god isolation for all it's worth, even if it's not worth that much.

But for a movie that lets its actors go a bit crazy, the surroundings are frustratingly low-key. Ported over from the necessary limitations of the stage, the Whisky-A-Go-Go-esque venue doesn't really convey the sheer ludicrous scale of 1980s rock: the arenas packed to the rafters with shrieking fans; the too-bright gloss of the music and style, every party song its own sensorily overloaded hangover; and the Dionysian orgy of illicit substances and sex tamely alluded to here. Instead, the audience must suffer through toothless renditions of metal complete with uninspired choreography; ridiculous arrogance (a hip-hop boy band is paraded around as the nadir of commercial prefabricaton, as if so many hair metal acts weren't label slaves); one song that serves as a big, unfunny gay joke; and the insultingly sexist suggestion that the big-dreaming girl really wanted love, not fame. This is a movie where a stripper becomes a star and wears less clothes in the limelight than she did on the pole. I don't even understand who gets songwriting credits in this universe: these characters "write" covers, yet the master tracks for some songs are played as well. Does this mean all the bands being covered here exist in this universe but didn't write the songs sung by the characters? Or is Stacee Jaxx merely the world's most popular cover artist? And who cares? Grade: D

Drive (Nicholas Winding Refn, 2011)

[Note: this review is spoiler-free but I would still encourage those who haven't yet seen the film to go into it as cold as possible.]

Having proudly managed to seclude myself from practically anything related to Nicholas Winding Refn's Drive following its rapturous reception at Cannes, I found myself surprised by the extremity of the praise that filtered through my blinders. What particularly caught my eye was one rhetorical headline (I did not read the story in my anti-hype lockdown) that asked whether Refn and his star Ryan Gosling were the new Scorsese-De Niro, a comparison I found particularly odd since this is only their first collaboration. Having now seen Drive, however, I can almost see where that writer was coming from: Gosling represents a synthesis and an embodiment of the director's goals, thematic intent and emotional frequency. Refn's previous film, Valhalla Rising, was an abstract tone poem to masculine horror, the kind codified and even encouraged by chauvinistic, barbaric religious organization. Gosling introduces feminine contours to Refn's stylized but dimmed and rough side, though the sensitive actor with the gentle eyes displays an equal capacity for brutality here that places him on the tipping point between grace and savagery.

But then, maybe the invocation of Scorsese and De Niro was just that writer's way of getting in on the  referential action. Refn, who says he modeled Bronson on Kenneth Anger films (there's a reference here, too) and Valhalla Rising on Andrei Tarkovsky's Stalker, here unloads a dump-truck of stylistic homages, from early Michael Mann to stripped-down car movies like Two-Lane Blacktop and The Driver to an overt reference to Orson Welles' Mr. Arkadin. Hell, the most visible reference point, to my surprise, was that of Wong Kar-wai, particularly his devastating In the Mood for Love. For some, all these references will be a delight, a smorgasbord of retro cool gussied up further by the inexplicable (but fun) use of '80s synth music. For others, this is merely a sign of self-satisfied theft, a lazy repackaging of ideas. Either way, this fixation misses the true joy of Drive: watching Refn wring tension out nearly every moment, even doe-eyed, wistful stares of impossible love.

Drive's opening segment is the best I've seen in a film since the one-act play that launched Inglourious Basterds. With graceful and steady but desaturated and restless images, Refn shows the nameless Driver (Gosling) preparing and executing a job with formal fluidity. Economic editing and deliberate framing keeps our focus inside the Driver's car as he waits for the robbers who hired him to do their job. The sound design layers noises—a basketball game Driver listens to on the radio, the crackle of a police scanner, the blaring roar of an engine when Driver puts the pedal to the metal, etc.—to further ratchet up tension. Refn's judicious presentation extends to his handling of the car "chase," for want of a better word. It resembles more a game of hide-and-seek than some metal-screeching tear through city streets, with Driver losing one cop before stumbling into the searchlight of a chopper or stopping right in front of a patrol car. Refn understands suspense, and by inserting gulfs of space around a handful of thrilling, fast-edited punctuation marks, he generations enough tension and expectation to leave theater seats everywhere etched with the imprints of fingernails.

The rest of the film follows a similar approach to action, tightly handled, formalist bursts of blunt physicality amid an elegant but dark evocation of L.A.'s promises and pitfalls. The Driver is but the first stripped-down archetype. A few doors down from his apartment lives Irene (Carey Mulligan), whose perpetual cuteness is exacerbated by the young child she raises alone and given a faint sadness for the same reason. I say faint because Mulligan is, admittedly, the weak link of the film, never truly conveying much baggage beyond wisps of regret and the confusion caused by budding feelings for the Driver. Nevertheless, her cherubic giggle and empathetic face provide a nice contrast for Gosling's kind but vaguely troubled stares. If Gosling fills the shoes of the existentially bound hero, Mulligan plays her part as the woman who exists to complicate his feelings, but if she lacks any memorable presence, at least she awakens more humanity in the Driver than one can usually expect of such a taciturn protagonist, allowing him to project some form of humanity into a type stripped down to its most inhuman, objective elements, reconstructing a human being from a stereotype.

Other characters fare better with their archetypes. Oscar Isaac adds depth and conflict to Irene's fresh-out-of-prison husband that fills him with residual jealousy, fear, and genuine concern for his family. Bryan Cranston plays the Driver's mechanic and only friend (in a manner of speaking): Cranston handles the Driver's day and night jobs, getting him underpaid work as a stunt driver and gigs as a getaway man. Cranston's genial warmth, compounded by a sympathetic limp, make him so charming that when he confides to Irene that, as much as he idolizes the Driver's skills, he underpays the kid, she chuckles as if she's just been told a light anecdote. But Shannon's exploitation of the kid runs deeper, and soon he gets the kid caught up with the mob, visualized by the menace of Ron Perlman's gigantic head and steak-knife teeth and a revelatory, ingenious performance by Albert Brooks as a movie producer-cum-gangster.

Not even my self-imposed blackout could prevent hype for Brooks' performance from seeping through, and he lives up to the hype. With hair teetering on the boundary between tamed and wild and eyebrows that long ago went into Witness Protection, Brooks the brilliant, ironic comic looks like he doesn't have a funny bone in his body. He radiates such cold, horribly calm energy that when he fusses over the chopsticks with his Chinese order, one begins to fear he'll stab someone with them for not getting his order perfect. Though not as piercingly silent as Valhalla Rising, Drive still prefers to unfold with imagery instead of words, and Brooks seems to own most of the dialogue despite his handful of scenes, as if he lent out the remainder of the script to the rest of the cast. With interest, of course. Brooks doesn't overplay his hand, doesn't openly menace or even speechify despite how much chattier he is than the others. Refn's inspired casting brings out the cruel inverse of Brooks' deadpan style; as a comedian and filmmaker, Brooks follows premises to their ludicrous conclusions. He does the same here, only the endpoint is usually a corpse, which he views with exasperation. Both he and Perlman toy with the idea of Jews playing at being Italian mafiosos, but where Perlman growls about the discrimination, Brooks infuses the two ethnic types into something unwieldy and terrifying. Here is a man who will kill your whole family and make you feel guilty for taking up that 10 minutes of his time.

At some point, these separate lines begin to converge, elements of one plot bleeding into the other until everything is connected and you're not entirely sure how that came to be. As such, the film's distinct emotions of longing, fear and mounting anger crash together so each justifies and complicates the others. Refn and cinematographer Newton Thomas Sigel handle these conflicting yet unified emotions ably, moving dextrously between abstracted shots inside the Driver's car where the lights outside always blur and expand, grim, fluorescent underworlds, and the calming but tense arrangement of floral pastels on the walls of the apartment complex that communicate longing and tragedy so well Gosling likely could have acted off the wallpaper as well as he did Mulligan.

This collision of styles and moods also allows for Refn to explore the space between his stylistic influences; in particular, Drive feels like the missing link between Michael Mann's nihilistic debut, Thief, and his more optimistic view of the same twisting L.A. streets seen here with Collateral. As I watched Refn flex his stylistic muscles whilst standing on the shoulders of giants for greater visibility, I thought of how much he had in common with the other great imitator of modern cinema, Quentin Tarantino. Both indulge in their ultraviolence—Drive features gore so intense it punches through the barrier to absurdity, not unlike Taraninto—but both also have the ability to find fluidity and tension among their quotations and action. Tarantino's films feel more action-packed than they usually are thanks to his command of dialogue and and direction. Refn, on the other hand, likes to let silence do the talking, using his similar grasp of film technique to make the build-up to visions of unorthodox gore more grueling and unbearable than bashed brains or slashed flesh. Watching Refn pile all this together made for the most thrilling experience I've had at the movies this year, and to dismiss its inventive hodgepodge of styles as nothing more than pastiche strikes me as akin to saying green is but a mash-up of yellow and blue.

P.S. Special mention must go to Cliff Martinez's retro electronic score, perhaps the strongest argument one could have for something in this film surpassing its influences. Martinez, who already put out one engaging soundtrack this year with his work on Contagion, here mixes old-school New Wave synths with the greater nuance afforded by modern electronica. Clearly using the film work of Tangerine Dream as a jumping-off point, Martinez finds emotional contours and chilly suggestion that Tangerine Dream never came close to mining, even as he also beats them at their own game of skittish, digitized paranoia. Having never been a big fan of electronic scores (with a few exceptions, of course), I'm surprised to find that my favorite soundtracks of the last two years have both been synthesized works, and while Martinez's '80s throwback isn't as obviously compatible with its host film as Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross' Social Network score was, he nevertheless carries a great deal of the film's mood and never flags. The handful of synthpop songs peppered among the score are demonically catchy as well.

Contagion (Steven Soderbergh, 2011)

For about 45-50 minutes, Contagion had me ready to run home, duct-tape the seals of my house and never come into contact with a human being again. Steven Soderbergh's detached, "so this is how the world ends" direction and and crisp, clinical cinematography effectively built fear through a steady profession of paranoia escalating from backdoor, classified whispers over vague data to full-on societal panic. Soderbergh's classical style makes even his transcontinental montage intelligible, and his experiments with asynchronous sound and image separates the aesthetic from the action even more, giving it a paradoxically compelling flatness that reminded me of the purportedly meek delivery Jonathan Edwards gave to the fiery words of his "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God," a mild intellectual remove that only makes the impact that much more powerful.

Then, cracks started to form. Contagion boasts the largest, most geographically disconnected cast of any of his films since Traffic, a film that shares more than a few stylistic and structural traits with Contagion and even seems the thematic inverse of this movie. But like Traffic, Contagion spreads itself too thin, across too many people and too many locations without being reliant upon any of them. The emotional distance of such incessant cross-cutting gives way to a belated, almost arbitrary stab at sentimentality that burdens Soderbergh's film with calculated schmaltz that clashes garishly with the studious, medical examiner feel of the rest of the movie. Funnily enough, this is the rare film that actually suffers for its attempts at humanity.


Much more gripping is the methodical progression of the disease from the first seconds. Soderbergh does not even get past the opening black screen before the film without inserting the ragged cough of Beth Emhoff (Gwyneth Paltrow). When the image starts, we see Paltrow looking like hell, a decidedly unglamorous view of an A-lister that kicks off the eerie feel of the impersonality of a disease spread. Anyone susceptible, regardless of notoriety, can get sick, and this new strain works with horrific speed. In only a few minutes of screen time, not only is Beth dead but her young son, leaving her apparently immune husband, Mitch (Matt Damon), bewildered, quarantined for testing and inconsequential to the rapid spread of the virus as it hops continents in the span of hours.

Paltrow and Damon are merely the tip of the iceberg for Contagion's loaded all-star cast. Marion Cotillard, Laurence Fishburne, Kate Winslet, Bryan Cranston, Elliott Gould, John Hawkes and more fill the screen in various roles as members of the World Health Organization and the Centers for Disease Control monitor the outbreak and head out into the field to study and contain the outbreaks. Where did Soderbergh hold auditions, Spago? That so many would line up for a film that is truly about an invisible presence, making them secondary forces and pawns for the true "protagonist," is a testament to Soderbergh's drawing power, and for a time he keeps us guessing as to who will survive.

Soderbergh gave the Red digital camera a major demonstration in the form of his two-part Che, and he further demonstrates its range and clarity here. Che was a film of natural colors used to thematic effect, the bright sunlight of The Argentine and the overcast, muted tones of Guerrilla communicating the shifting dynamic of the separate revolutionary campaigns. Here, Soderbergh crafts a half-sick, half-sterile aesthetic of grimy artificial light captured in unflattering realism, clarifying every pore, every clammy hand and spittle flecked mouth until the extreme close-ups of human contact and pulled back shots of the isolation of the survivors ensures we feel equally uncomfortable in crowded areas of potential hosts and alone as society crumbles. Woozy camera movement and quick cuts to hands grasping bus poles or passing around food make the implications even more nauseating, while the icy blue pall that hangs over funereal shots of mass graves and tattered masses lining up for anything even suspected of being a cure emphasizes the distancing horror of death on an epic scale.

Also worth a mention is the electronic score from longtime Soderbergh collaborator Cliff Martinez. Not as dynamic as some recent electronic scores (say, the ones for The Social Network and Hanna), Martinez's soundtrack nevertheless proves a driving element of the film, particularly given the lack of true character propulsion. If repetitive, the score works well for finding the perfect aural balance of scuzzy, frantic buzz and quarantined sterility that fits both the clinical official response and growing sickness and collapse on the streets. The sound mix of many of Soderbergh's connecting montages rely almost exclusively on Martinez's cold burbles and hums, and they keep the movie going well after the visual juxtapositions start to grow thin.

But grow thin they do, and eventually the film tries to eke emotional responses out of characters heretofore represented as only as impersonal reactors to the spread of the disease. A subplot involving Jude Law as a firebrand blogger whose anti-Establishment crowing perhaps hides a keen willingness to exploit capitalism to the fullest seeks to show the profiteering and misinformation that befall and propel mass panics. However, as everyone in the cast is so cut off from one another that Law's effects are felt only in the background and the extent to which he makes things worse is never made clear. We're also made to care about Fishburne as the CDC director who makes an all-too-human mistake at a time when complete classification is necessary to keep the peace. Worst of all is Mitch's plotline, which not only saddles the poor man with the deaths of his wife and stepchild but deals with infidelity and adds the useless subplot of his surviving daughter, who regards the 21st century equivalent of the Black Death as, like, a total drag.

My wavering support nearly collapsed in the final half-hour, at which point plotlines began to sag and cease without any pretense at resolution, late-stage sentimental dross like Mitch's daughter pining for her boyfriend suddenly blossomed and a montage coda clarified that which did not truly require clarification. Furthermore, the initial vulnerability of the A-listers eventually gives way to a pat immortality that ensures as many famous people as possible stay on til the end. I still enjoyed Contagion; watching Soderbergh do his thing was more entertaining than most of this summer's offerings, and occasionally he found ways to ground his epic scope into something gripping. The end, however, turns a chilly take on a grimy genre film into a wannabe prestige picture with what I could swear was an environmentalist message the one time such a message just does not apply. In fairness, I can't think of any way that Contagion might have ended in wholly satisfactory fashion, but the perfunctory optimism of Hollywood undermines a daring, unsettling and initially unsparing view of humanity's mass reduction. In retrospect, the awkward late-film shift in tone is less surprising than anyone allowing the first hour and 20 minutes.

Breaking Bad — Season 3

[Warning: Contains spoilers for previous seasons]

The perpetual moral free-fall of Breaking Bad should not be as sustainable as it's proven to be. By the start of its third season, which begins only with the show's 20th episode, Breaking Bad has already traveled such dark territory the question arises whether it can keep going before slipping into absurdity. However, the program already had a built-in black comedy that underscored its drama, and somehow the greatest show currently on television only gets better as things continue to spiral.

When last we left Walter White, he'd come into his own as a meth manufacturer in time for inconsistencies in his lies to pile up until Skyler's suspension of disbelief snapped. But nothing compared to the shambles of Jesse's life, which hit rock bottom in such horrific fashion the look on Aaron Paul's face communicated a total, instantaneous collapse. With both protagonists coming apart at the seams, the plane collision that ended the season almost seems an afterthought.

The fallout from that crash hangs over the first few episodes, but as Walt says in an awkward attempt to console a gym full of disconcerted students, people move on, and soon the terrifying ordeal of showering shrapnel and body parts fades into memory as characters continue to deal with their own problems and have no time for thoughts of dead strangers. Walt's too busy trying to get the cat back into the bag with Skyler, who reveals how easy the truth was to figure out once she looked into Walt's alibis. Jesse, meanwhile, is shocked into sobriety by Jane's overdose, left wracked with guilt and confusion as to how to proceed.

The third season is filled with climaxes, with a number of episodes so brilliant that distinguishing highlights nearly becomes a futile exercise. Besides, the true joy of Breaking Bad lies in charting the continual, brilliant growth of its characters, all of whom remain some of the most fascinating people on television. Supporting characters make more of an impression than the leads of most shows: Giancarlo Esposito refines his dapper, hidden-in-plain-sight dealer Gus, continuing to be both appealing as an alternative to the psychotic, using dealers who made Walt's early exploits so terrifying but also a shrewd, calculating monster with a much more sophisticated and unpredictable evil. Esposito finds a way to be unsettling even at his most disarming, his friendly smiles as "Chicken Man" Mr. Fring as disturbing at times as his cold, hardened stare.


As Skyler, Anna Gunn has thus far played the supportive but slowly suspecting wife, always trying to hold her family together as Walt's disease throws everyone into emotional turmoil and his frequent absences only exacerbate things. Finally aware of the truth, however, Skyler must contend with more than ever. Rightfully seeking to distance herself and her family from Walt and the inevitable repercussions of his new profession, Skyler must now deal with the bewildered and even hostile reaction from the rest of the family, who perceive her call for divorce as sudden and unwarranted. But of course, she can't reveal why she's leaving Walt, not unless she wants to implicate everyone and further rip everything apart. Gunn's performance, though hard-edged, is heartbreaking: she has a caged look on her face at the start of the season, seeking to keep Walt away even as he calls her bluffs with arrogant scorn. Her eventual resignation to her husband's return is one of the moral low points of the show, and also one that reveals the depths to which Walt has sunk.

Her seeming trip off the deep end adds strain to Hank and Marie's relationship, hitting a rough patch as Hank tries to deal with his PTSD from the El Paso incident. Hank, erstwhile the biggest caricature on the show, at last starts to feel human, softening his bluster with fear. His aggressive pursuit of "Heisenberg" morphs from a stalling tactic to stay away from El Paso into an outlet for his demons, and Dean Norris' broken, quiet admission "I'm not the man I thought I was" following a disgusting and brutal vent of his anxiety and rage is shattering in a way the gorilla-like oaf could never have been only a season ago.

Of course, the primary focus of the series remains on Walt and Jesse, who undergo such startling changes throughout this season that a lesser crew of writers would almost certainly fail to make these growths organic and believable. Cranston channels Walt's filial concern into villainy, turning the good intentions a man trying to leave something behind for his family when he dies into self-righteous outrage that Skyler would not understand, forgive and even laud the efforts he's gone to in order to provide a nest egg. Cranston never gives voice to the demons eating at him, only once verbally hinting at what's going on inside him when he speaks vaguely of having to live with what he's done to help his family. But his every look conveys pain; it's easy to forget what a funny man Bryan Cranston is, and a few flashbacks scattered across the season of his early marriage and professional life show a carefree, joyful Walt so disconnected from the tortured, angry man in the present that those flashbacks almost seem like behind the scenes footage of the actor and not the character.

At last, however, Aaron Paul eclipses his co-star. Sober, Jesse cannot retreat into his meth haze to avoid confronting his life, and it soon becomes apparent that sobriety does not bring clarity. Well, apparent to everyone but Jesse. Jesse's sober look reveals the past brilliance of both makeup and Paul's performance: he looks hale and fresh-faced where he used to constantly be disheveled and bewildered. But he's still the same dumb, stunted kid he always was, but now he deals with grief he does not dull, leading him to, if anything, even crazier actions. He and Walt spar over cooking at the start of the season, but when Walt goes to bat for him and brings him into Gus' high-tech operation, Jesse soon finds ways to push his luck, getting ideas about dealing under Gus' nose and looking to settle old scores despite the clear conflict this raises with the organization.

Yet Paul never plays, has never played, Jesse as nothing more than a hopeless, self-centered screw-up. More than ever, he serves as the show's fluctuating, self-defeating but always striving moral core. Jesse's sense of right and wrong is so skewed by everything around him that not even the blatant common sense of not rocking the boat with the organization can penetrate the passion with which he throws himself behind an idea when it breaks through the fog of ambiguity hanging around him and the show. This is a bravura performance, more heartbreaking than ever but also more tangible for breaking out of his addiction to find more pedestrian hells.

I said earlier that watching these characters grow existed outside episodic distinction, but I do want to highlight two episodes in particular. The first, "One Minute," brings together the threads of the first half of the season in such a way that things are left in more turmoil in their wake. Featuring amazing, terrifying work from Norris and a mounting sense of foreboding, "One Minute" offers one crushing line after another and the first of several "holy shit" climaxes of the season. The other noteworthy episode is "Fly," directed by Rian Johnson, stylish maker of the excellent Brick. Simply one of the finest, oddest bottle episodes in recent television, "Fly" is everything a bottle episode should be: absurd, claustrophobic, revealing, summarizing and forward-looking. The tension of a sleep-deprived Walt dancing around his culpability in Jane's death is maddening, while the insane humor of his single-minded need to kill a fly in the meth lab offers all the mad comedy one expects from a location-limiting plot.

The little touches that make "Fly" such a delight reflect the intriguing minutiae of the series as a whole. I like that Walter Jr. is played by an actor who actually has cerebral palsy, as it allows everyone to mess with television conventions concerning the disabled by giving RJ Mitte the opportunity to sarcastically undercut every "I struggle every day so what's your excuse?" sermon given to various characters down in the dumps. The devilish grin on Mitte's face when he does so has an element of catharsis to it, a delight in skewering the role he and other disabled people have to watch able-bodied people romanticize. Bob Odenkirk continues to delight as the capable yet dopey lawyer Saul Goodman, his performance two-dimensional but so perfectly played you don't even need growth. Saul's money laundering schemes are farcical, but watching Odenkirk try to seriously pitch Walt on "investing" in laser tag is a riot; even Skyler can't bring herself to let this idiot handle the money she despises. There's also the recurring sight of Tuco's cousins, taciturn hitmen moving with methodical, unyielding carnage as they hunt down their relative's killer. Like many things in Breaking Bad, they're ridiculous, but they fit uncomfortably well within the wild world the show has conjured up out in the hot, noxious cloud of drug-ravaged Albuquerque.


When Walt started using the alias "Heisenberg," he slyly brought up the name of the scientist renowned for the principle that nothing under observation can be viewed truly as it is. As the show progresses, we see this principle effected in Walt: he thought he could just make enough meth to provide for his family, but the game shifted around his product, and now he's radically changed himself. Breaking Bad is like the expected rainstorm that arrives after someone rhetorically asks, "How could it get any worse?" Things always get worse in this show, but never just to be dramatic. Every lurch, no matter how sudden or off-balancing, is earned, and the show's third season marks yet more improvement for a show that, like The Wire before it, seems more and more a timeless classic even as it still airs.