25th Hour (Spike Lee, 2002)

I continue to love Spike Lee's 25th Hour, one of his most shamelessly white elephant features (topped only by Miracle at St. Anna and, more positively, Malcolm X) but also one of his most affecting. Buoyed by a stellar cast, 25th Hour manages to walk its tightrope between an intimate portrayal of the crippling fear of consequence and a vaster portrait of its application to the September 11 attacks. The final, desperate fantasy alone rates among the best and most bravura work Lee has ever done.

My full review is up at Spectrum Culture.

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.

Kingdom of Heaven (Ridley Scott, 2005)

I've been meaning to write a defense of the director's cut of Ridley Scott's Kingdom of Heaven (one of my favorite movies of the Aughts), for some time now, so I knew what to choose for my latest Criminally Underrated piece for Spectrum Culture. The theatrical cut is an admittedly mediocre movie, stressing Gladiator-esque action in an attempt to cash in on Lord of the Rings. The director's cut, however, belongs with films like Munich and Gangs of New York as some of the finest American filmmaking to seriously address the War on Terror and the modern context of endless infighting, wrongheaded wars and relativist righteousness, typically through the prism of the past. All three films (even Gangs, which concerns the American Civil War, not ages-old Middle Eastern conflicts) suggest a cyclical movement of violence from outside forces that creates seemingly endless fighting that eventually tears apart people from the inside. Kingdom of Heaven takes (even) more liberties with history than the other two, but its fundamental position, that peace, however tenuous and short-lived, is preferable to senseless war, is delivered with a nuance I've sadly come not to expect from Scott.

My full piece is up at Spectrum Culture.

Leaves of Grass

A stuttering mash-up of drama and stoner comedy, Tim Blake Nelson's Leaves of Grass plays as a cross between the podunk classicism of O Brother, Where Art Thou? and the spiritual vacuum-cum-autobiography of Midwestern Jewry of A Serious Man. Bill Kincaid (Edward Norton), philosophy professor at Brown and, soon, Harvard, teaches his students about the illusion of control and centered balance in life just before his own life proves his point. Identical twin Brady lures his brother back to their redneck home in Oklahoma by faking his death, only to trap the poor educator in a hare-brained scheme to get out of trouble with a major pot dealer in the Tulsa region (Richard Dreyfuss, who continues to look as if he's pissed off even to keep getting work).

Coenesque in conception but not execution, Leaves of Grass attempts to build a twisted comedy of errors as well as a philosophical treatise on issues of God, free will and fate, but it cannot reconcile its stiff gear shifts between moods and the fatal gaps in momentum that derail it constantly. Where A Serious Man built a thriller-like sense of dread from its comic severity and mounting sense of spiritual despair, Leaves of Grass attempts to do the same in reverse, saddling a conventional narrative with so much extra weight that the bridge collapses. Norton shines as the two brothers, giving a performance reminiscent of Nicolas Cage's in Adaptation, in that even when the brothers groom themselves to look alike for Brady's plan, you can instantly tell which brother is which without Norton uttering a word. A strong supporting cast buoys him, from the always-transfixing Keri Russell as the poetry-lovin' catfish wrangler who steal Bill's heart to Steve Earle as a half-joking rival dealer sour for being edged out by Brady's superior product (though less ambitious than his professorial brother, Brady supposedly has the higher IQ and used it to grow hyper-quality weed via hydroponics).

Nelson here falls back on his theatrical training, never making anything particularly cinematic. With the exception of scenes in cars, everything in the film looks as if it could have been a set design, even outdoor shots. A subplot involving a skittish, broken orthodontist (Josh Pais) works neither as comedy nor dramatic thread, and a lovesick coed who hounds an uncomfortable Bill with poems in Latin and threatens his potential promotion to Harvard might have worked as a tendril of the man's mounting pressures had all of the young woman's scenes not played out in tedious predictability. Of course she starts undressing in Bill's office, and if you think that door isn't going to be opened at the worst time, then you made an odd choice for what is clearly the first film you have ever seen. Only rarely does anyone not project past the nonexistent proscenium, such as a tender, believable moment when Bill drunkenly hits on Russell's Janet in that awkward manner that suggests he's not only rusty at picking up chicks but is interested in more than sex.

Nelson appears to have a chip on his shoulder about growing up in Tulsa and looking like a redneck while trying to prove himself as a learned literature freak and Shakespearean thespian -- a frustration with which I can empathize. That makes Whitman his ideal conduit, the poet's original cover for his own Leaves of Grass displaying merely his rugged portrait that belied the beauty within, but Nelson gets caught up in the plot over the mood. A shaggy dog jokes only works if you can control the audience's interest, setting up the joke for so long that the crowd loses interest only to climb back on board when the monologue continues and people commit to hearing the end of it. Nelson doesn't have the Coens' ability to string along an audience, and the punchline is less a dark, anti-climatic punch than a mere caesura that, like the end of a verse in Walt Whitman's rule-breaking poetry, indicates that the proceedings are over simply because the characters stop speaking.

Still, it's got a goofy charm at times. For all its flaws, stop-starts and misjudged laughs, Leaves of Grass certainly doesn't make me think of a host of other films to compare it to, save for the Coen brothers, and they're not bad role models when it comes to anti-comedy. Nelson was supposedly the only person to have actually read Homer's The Odyssey during the production of O Brother, Where Art Thou?, and he strives for a greater respect of the arts in his vision of that fine line that separates suburbia from rural backwoods in states with few cities. Besides, how many stoner movies are structured as treatises on Socratic dialogue?